Orpheus and Eurydice: The Man Who Entered the Underworld for Love

Tales of Myths and Legends · Sep 5, 2026 · 22m

Orpheus, the legendary musician associated with Thrace, enters the field of the dead after the loss of his wife. In the best-known ancient version, his music persuades the rulers below to permit Eurydice’s return—but only if he leads her upward without looking behind him.

Near the boundary of the living world, Orpheus turns. Eurydice disappears a second time.

But the famous backward glance is not found in the earliest surviving reference to Orpheus’s descent. Euripides, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Virgil, Ovid, Apollodorus, and Pausanias preserve strikingly different versions of what Orpheus…