Vergil, Georgics 4.453 – 566 The facts are these:

Aristaeus lost all his bees. His mother, Cyrene, explains what happened.

Eurydice, fleeing Aristeus, happened upon an unseen snake.

Orpheus lamented her loss in song.

He descended to the Dead and softened their hearts with song.

Tartarus, the Eumenides, Cerberus, Ixion’s wheel: all stop at his song.

*[No deal or stipulation is mentioned at this point.]

Subita dementia cepit incautum amantem:
“Sudden negligence seized the careless lover.” (488)

The law, previously unstated, is violated.

Eurydice cries out, an “outburst of passionate reproach” (Mynors):

“What great madness, Orpheus, has thrown off now both you and me?”

She vanishes into thin air.

The ferryman of Orcus refuses to allow him a second passage.

Orpheus is at a loss.

7 months Orpheus tames tigers and trees with his song, like a nightingale.

Orpheus refuses female contact; he laments Eurydice’s loss without ceasing.

Maenads, followers of Bacchus, tear him apart and throw his head into the river.

The Hebrus river bears Orpheus’ head, still singing Eurydice, downstream (to Lesbos).

Orpheus and Eurydice can be appeased by bougonia.

Ovid, Metamorphoses10.1- 11.66.

Anderson: Ovid’s Orpheus is silly, vapid, self-pitying, rhetorical w/o real emotion, but capable of generating it.

Klodt: Ovid ostentatiously makes intertextual reference to Vergil, but simultaneously distances himself from him.

Recently wedded Eurydice dies of snakebite.

Orpheus laments “enough”, then goes to the Underworld.

Ovid writes the song by which Orpheus charmed the Dead.

The law is stated clearly: line 50 — legem … accipit Orpheus.

He violates the law in line 56: ne deficeret metuens avidusque videndi

“fearing that she was waning and desirous to look upon her”

In an instant she is gone. She makes no lament in this text.
Ovid asks, “What could she complain about but that she was loved?”

Norden observes Ovid’s “double corrective of his forebear [i.e. Vergil]”:

“Orpheus [the only witness] would have been unable to hear the pleadings Vergil put into her mouth (quis tantus furor … and vale!).

Bereft now a second time of his beloved, Orpheus sinks into a deep funk and sings incessantly.

He conjures up a whole grove of trees for shade.

The Cypress is among them, Cyparissus (Apollo’s friend) had been killed and metamorphosed.

Orpheus sings a long song about “boys loved by gods and girls gripped by destructive erotic fires”

Ganymede, loved by Zeus

Hyacinthus, loved by Apollo

Propoetidae — merely setting scene for Pygmalion?

Pygmalion — creates his ivory girl

Myrrha — a very long, sordid tale

Adonis — loved by Venus

Atalanta and Hippomenes — warning to Adonis

The women of the Cicones, a Thracian population, tires of Orpheus’ resistance and, as maenads, destroy Orpheus.

His decapitated head drifts down the Hebrus River to Lesbos, singing all the while.

Orpheus meets up with Eurydice in the Underworld and looks back safely at her (Eurydicen tuto respexit.)