The Backward Glance

This is a short poem reflecting on the physician's commitment to abstain from killing. 

lence, a tear in the very fabric of the art he invented, a way through, a way back to something elemental (dare we say?) about poetry from which we have learned to be distracted.
In fifty-nine places in the course of almost ten thousand hexameters, the text of Vergil's Aeneid breaks off into nothingness, half-lines that yield to the blank page, where this generally fairly noisy poem falls suddenly silent, if only for a second or two. Many of these pauses seem so appropriate to their context, so eloquent in their speechlessness, that some readers have suggested that Vergil meant to leave them empty.
("Like an orator, he ended when he had made his point," oratorie finivit ubi vis argumenti constitua as the "Daniel Scholiast" puts it, commenting on the half-line at 4.361.) But most have connected them instead to assertions by Vergil's ancient biographers that he fell fatally ill before completing his revisions, that, when no one would bring his draft to his deathbed so that he could burn the imperfect poem, he left instructions forbidding its publication, but that his literary executors, under higher orders from Augustus, released the work without attempting to fill its lacunae. It is through one of these gaps, near the middle of book 9, that we must now descend.
At line 467, Vergil offers just two names in the genitive case and then stops: Euryali et Nisi, "Of Euryalus and Nisus ..." This half-line actually ends their story, which had begun almost three hundred lines earlier; it thus offers a kind of belated title: this was the tale of Euryalus and Nisus. Indeed, the entire episode, among Vergil's most daring and beautiful, has sometimes been thought to have begun as a separate work, perhaps a youthful epyllion later integrated, imperfectly, into the poet's magnum opus.
Euryali et Nisi in line 467 modifies capita in line 466thus, "the heads of Euryalus and Nisus." And since these are, in fact, the severed heads of the two lovers, mounted on pikes and paraded before their horrified Trojan comrades, the genitive may be said to assert, with grim irony, possession of what Nisus and Euryalus most emphatically possess no longer: Quin ipsa arrectis, visu miserabile, in hastis praefigunt capita et multo clamore sequuntur Euryali et Nisi.
Indeed, shouting all the way, they follow the very headsstuck (gruesome sight!) on spearsof Euryalus and Nisus.
Or to put things another way, the story ends by naming two people who no longer exist; this very final genitive is thus that of a Roman epitaph, Dis Manibus Euryali et Ms/, "to the sacred shades of Euryalus and Nisus." And the silence that follows is most chillingly that of the tomb.
But we have begun at the end; let us now review the whole story from the top. At the beginning of book 9, Aeneas is still far from the Trojan camp, seeking Italian allies. Turnus, advised of this absence by the goddess Iris, tries to draw the Trojans out of their camp for a fight, and when this fails, he sets fire to their ships, which, however, are transformed into sea-nymphs. Frustrated, Turnus and his troops retire to drink and game late into the night. The Trojans watch all from their ramparts; among them is Nisus, who guards the gate, in the company of his beloved Euryalus, "than whom no other follower of Aeneas was more beautiful." Nisus proposes to go in search of Aeneas; Euryalus insists on coming with him. The two present themselves as volunteers to the grateful Trojan commanders, who, showering them with tears and prizes, send them on their way.
Their way, however, will be no simple matter, despite Nisus' assurances that they had learned the lay of the land when they used to hunt there, and that "the correct path will not elude us as we make our way" (nee nos via fallit euntis). As the story of a journey gone awry, the episode resembles the entire poem, to say nothing of other epics. Indeed, epic tends to exploit in a particularly visible way what might well be called the most operative tension of narrative: that between the relentless forward march of the text itself, letter after letter, word after word, and the endless ways in which the story suspends or deforms that motion, through description, digression, detour. Without error, there can be no odyssey, and we are so conditioned to expect such wanderings that we know where this story is going as soon as Nisus promises not to get lost. What we don't expect, however, is just how lost we soon shall be.
Egressi superant fossas, "they left the camp and crossed the ditches ..." This margin surrounds the Trojan camp, but it also rings the text that follows, for as we already have seen, the episode will bring Nisus and Euryalusor at least their headsback to the edge of the very same gap. The pair's prior trajectory is at once bent: "and through the dark of night they seek the enemy camp," i.e., not Aeneas, since they will first wreak some havoc among their adversaries before proceeding on their mission. The distraction from their notional object immediately slows the story to a near halt, for just one line later, along with our heroes, we confront a scene so static that the poet seems to be claiming for his page a simultaneity proper instead to the visual arts (9.3 16-18): Scattered here and there (passim) they see bodies dissolved by wine and sleep and poured across the grass, and chariots drawn up on the bank, and men (viros) lying prone between reins and wheels, side by side (simul) with their weapons (arma), side by side with their wineskins.
Everything that should move is still: the chariot and its parts, the wine which has lent its liquidity to the bodies poured across the grass, and, as we can scarcely fail to notice, the prime movers of Vergil's epicarms and men.
Hac iter est, announces Nisus, something like "this is the way we need to go," and he instructs Euryalus to follow him and carefully guard their back, while he himself lays waste to what we have just seen. The pair literally hack their way through what follows, with Vergil describing the carnage they inflict in gruesome detail, until Nisus decides that they should move along, "for a way has been made through the enemy" (via facta per hostis). Donning their spoils, they re-sume their mission, but as they cross out of the enemy camp, a glint from the newly won helmet worn by Euryalus attracts the attention of an embassy en route from Latina. Challenged, Nisus and Euryalus plunge into the woods.
The woods, of course, could hardly be lacking from this storythe woods that bewitch all who enter into confusion, error, repetition, recursiveness. No one moves through the woods quickly, or in a straight line; something always happens here. But let us also rememberand the point is not unrelatedthat for ancient poets, the woods (silva in Latin, hulê in Greek) also figured the very stuff of literary production, the timber of which poems were made, including everything from subject "matter" to literary models to rough notes to the waxed wooden tablets on which most poets composed. It is in this regard no accident that a wood gathers around Orpheus, product of his song, but also source of the stories he tells. Enter the woods and you are in the poet's workshop.
Before allowing us to follow Nisus and Euryalus into the woods, Vergil briefly shifts point of view in order to delineate this wood from outside: "The mounted soldiers dash toward the paths they know well, this way, and this way, and they ring (coronant) all the exits with guards." This margin makes the wood into a kind of page within the page of the entire expedition (bordered, as we have seen, by the camp's ditches), as if we were zeroing in on something at the center of our focus but not yet legible. In we go! "The wood was one which bristled far and wide with thickets and black oaks, which dense brambles choked from every direction. Only here and there shone a path through secret byways. The shadowy canopy and hulking animals cause Euryalus to falter; fear leaves him confused him about where the paths lie." Nisus, unaware that Euryalus is no longer behind him, keeps going, but three lines later, Vergil halts him too in his tracks: stetit, "he came to a complete stop." And then comes the moment we have been waiting for: "... and in vain he looked back at his friend, who was gone" (et frustra absentent respexit amicum). A backward glance, a lossbut Nisus will go further than Orpheus, for he now attempts the impossible: to reverse the story's motion altogether (9.390-93).
"Unlucky Euryalus, where did I leave you behind? Along what path shall I follow (qua sequar)rewinding (revolvens) my whole twisted route, again, in reverse (rursus), through the deceptive forest?" And at once he searches out his footprints and closely follows them (legit), backwards (retro), winding his way (errat) through the silent thickets.
We pause to note just two things about this remarkable reversal. The first is the perversity of Nisus' question, quave sequar, "or by what way shall I follow ... ?" The object is notionally "y°u5" from the line before, but since Nisus has been the leader, this doesn't properly make sense. In fact, Nisus will follow instead his own footprintsin other words, he will follow himself. And one way or another, following yourself requires going backward. The second peculiarity is the sudden appearancetwice in these linesof the language of reading: r evolver e, Nisus will "rewind" his journey, like a papyrus roll, and legere, the actual verb for reading, a favorite of Vergil's to mean "to follow closely, step-by-step" -Nisus will "read" his own tracks.
Naturally, these will not lead him literally backward through the text. Instead, he finds himself at the edge of a glen, where he at last spies Euryalus, surrounded by enemy soldiers. Still under cover of the woods, Nisus begins to pick off his beloved's assailants with javelins, one by one. The solders are thrown into a temporary panic, but they then vow to answer the still unseen menace by unleashing their fury on Euryalus. "Me! Me! The author of this deed is here! Turn your weapons on me!" (Me, me, adsum qui fed, in me convertite ferrum . . . ) cries Nisus, emerging at last from the woods, a subject desperate to become an object. But it is too late for Euryalus (9.431-37): A sword, thrust with violent force, penetrates his ribs and bursts his pale chest. He doubles over in death; gore moves down his handsome limbs; and his collapsed neck reposes on his shoulders, just as a crimson flower, nicked by the plow, droops dying, or poppies bow their heads, their necks weak, under the weight of a random rain-shower.
These extraordinary lines, made at once more beautiful and more horrible by a sensuality that edges toward eroticism, seem to embody all we have seen so far: their emphasis on color makes poetry like painting; the oozing goreblood that does not flow as it shouldoffers a kind of emblem for this whole clotted narrative; Euryalus' body turns in on itself (volvitur), like a book that has wound its way to the end. But if Euryalus' journey is overas is that of Nisus, who, pierced by swords, hurls his own dying body onto his beloved's corpseours suddenly takes a new direction. Not this way, or that way, but back, and then down.
As ancient commentators did not fail to notice, Vergil's image of a flower nicked by the passing plow is borrowed from the famous eleventh poem by Catullus, describing a love that has withered. The poppy, by contrast, is pilfered from Homer (Iliad 8.306); the episode's center thus reflects its frame, for the nocturnal expedition of Nisus and Euryalus is a very free reworking of similar excursions in the Iliad, one by Odysseus and Diomedes in book 8, and another by the Trojan spy Dolon in book 10. Indeed, the entire episode is underpinned by literary precedents, and especially haunted by echoes are its woods.
One of these reverberations, however, sounds some very peculiar notes. Nisus' backward glance and subsequent backtrack through the woods reprise an analogous scene not in another work by another author but, instead, in the very same Aeneid's second book, where Aeneas tells Dido and her court the story of his escape from Troy. Having decided to abandon the burning city, Aeneas places his aged father on his shoulders, takes his son by the hand, and instructs his wife Creusa to follow at some distance. Safely outside the walls, he looks back, but she is missing (amissam respexi, 2.741). He plunges back into the wreckage, retracing his steps: et vestigia retro I observata sequor, almost the same words we have seen used of Nisus, et vestigia retro I observata legit (2.753-54, 9.392-93).
But if book 9 looks back at book 2, book 2 takes us even farther. Aeneas finds not Creusa but her ghost, who consoles him and commands him to flee. She concludes thus (2.789-94): "'And now, goodbye (iamque vale), and keep the love of the son we share.' When she had pronounced these words, she left me there, weeping, and wanting to say so much (multa volentem I dicer e), and receded into the insubstantial air (tenuisque récessif in auras). Thrice I tried there to wrap my arms around her neck; thrice the phantom, embraced in vain, eluded my grasp, like a gentle breeze, or a winged dream." But we have had this dream before, for the passage reproduces, at times word for word, the language of Eurydice's final parting from Orpheus in the fourth Géorgie: "And now, goodbye (iamque vale)' I am being carried, surrounded by massive night, stretchingohhh, no longer yoursmy palms toward you ..." She spoke thus, and then suddenly scattered and vanished from sight, like smoke dissolved in insubstantial air (ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenuis). Nor did she see him further, as he snatched at shadows to no avail, wanting to say so much (multa volentem dicer e).
And one thing more: Creusa as the name of Aeneas' wife is not attested before Vergil's own day; an earlier tradition, preserved by Pausanias and Ennius, knew her as Eurydice.
And so Euryalus is Creusa is Eurydice, and Nisus is Aeneas is Orpheus. We might be tempted to stop here, with this answer to the question posed at the beginning of our investigation: the Orphic look back is the backward glance of poetic imitation. (We might add that, in the later tradition of Latin commentaries on classical texts, respicere regularly means "to imitate.") But this answer does not really satisfy.
Why, first of all, should imitation mean loss? Is it not instead a kind of recovery and appropriation? Orpheus had gone to Hell to rescue Eurydice, but it is precisely his backward glance, let us remember, that sends her back. Furthermore, what, strictly speaking, did the first poet have to imitate, unless, like Vergil, he imitated himself?
The detail that much of Vergil's imitation here is directed not toward literary precedent but toward his own authorial past is not, in fact, irrelevant. It is sometimes forgotten that imitation belongs not only to the collégial ether of Helicon or Parnassus, but also to the decidedly more terrestrial atmosphere of the ancient classroom. Here the reworking of one's own writing joined other exercises of retractatio ("rehandling" or "remanagement") of a model, whether by using the same words to different effect or by using different words to tell the same story. Quintilian (Institutes of Oratory 10.5.9) explains: It is useful not only to paraphrase others' writings but also to remanage our own in a variety of ways (etiam nostra pluribus moais tractare), carefully choosing certain themes and rendering them in as many ways as possible, just as shape after shape is modeled, again and again, from the same wax. This teacher's simile of the sculpting of wax is especially aptindeed, is itself a kind of examplefor it reworks the very material in which such reworkings would take place, i.e., the wax of his student's tablets: "Erase, and rewrite the same story, in a different way.
" And this almost crude materiality is a reminder that literary imitation is only the tip of the iceberg of a vast array of literal regressions and recursions which writers are taught to pursue. Whether the matter at hand is a reworking of the sort just described or simply the revision of an unicum (retractare can be used to describe either), the author does not move in a straight line but rather is always doubling back. Indeed, Suetonius, in his Life of Vergil (22), reports that the poet was famous for his revisions of the Georgics: Cum Georgica scriberet, traditur cotidie meditatus mane plurimos versus dictare solitus ac per totum diem retractando ad paucissimos redigere, non absurde carmen se more ursae parère dicens et lambendo demum ef fingere.
Tradition has it that, when he was writing the Georgics, his daily practice was to dictate a large number of verses he had devised in the morning and then, by going back over them (retractando) all day long, to edit them down to just a few, saying, not entirely without reason, that he was giving birth to his poem as a bear does, licking it into shape only afterward.
It is impossible to know how much of this colorful portrait is true, but it does tell us how someone far closer to Vergil's world than we are was able to imagine him working. He rises as a bard, full of the god, as blind to the text as Homer was. But his singing is actually dictation, i.e., already a kind of writing (the one reserved for those writers lucky enough to have a secretary or scribe among their writing materials). And once the text is in the room, itand not the poetis the inevitable object of attention. Then the poet's real work begins, work imagined as physical, manual labor, described by a simile not unlike, but cruder than, Quintilian's, by which the reviser is like the mother bear who must (it once was widely believed) lick her cub, born almost formless, into shape. This materiality, in fact, seems to have infected the story's beginning, for the poet/bard does not simply exhale inspired verses: these already have been crafted, contemplated (méditât os) in the at least temporary fixity of his own mind, his own memory. Simply put, there is no point in the tenses of this sentence in which the text is as yet unborn; its creation has been entirely eclipsed by its being worked on.
Again we seem close to an answer: the poet's backward glance is that of revision. But this too falls short, for, from Orpheus to Nisus, we have been presented with scenes of incalculable loss. We can imagine revision to be so devastating only either by following Suetonius in his likely hyperbole, ex-aggerating just how much the author must discard (from plurimos to paucissimos), or by inflating the author's narcissism to the point that every cut, every cancellation is as excruciating as the sword-thrust that fells Euryalus. There are some poets for whom the latter may well be close to the truth, but it seems hard to believe of the Vergil who was prepared to burn the entire Aeneid for want of time to revise it. And more importantly, to see the backward glance as that of revision is to suppose that it always looks to produce change. There is, in fact, another kind of looking back, one which comes, instead, when there is no more work to be done.
We are only a few steps away from this other, more painful backward glance. But to take them, we are going to need some help from elsewhere. It comes to us from Orpheus' third look back in Latin literature. The first, as we have seen, is in Vergil, on the way up from Hell; the second is on the same slope, but in Ovid; the third is also in Ovid, but it takes place instead at the very end of the story. After devoting more than an entire book of the Metamorphosesand some of his most daring poetryto Orpheus, Ovid seems to ruin everything with a fatuous finale in which Orpheus, himself finally dead, at last rejoins his wife in the Underworld (11.64-66): hie modo coniunetis spatiantur passibus ambo, nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit Eurydicenque suam iam tu to respicit Orpheus.
Here at last the pair takes long walks at a shared pace. Sometimes she goes first and he follows, sometimes, out in front, he precedes, and at last Orpheus looks back, without risk, at his Eurydice.
The sentiment is as schmaltzy as that of Charles Dickens' alternate, happy ending to Great Expectations: "I saw no shadow of another parting from her ..." But equally excruciating is Ovid's word picture. There's Eurydice, on the left, and there's Orpheus, out front, on the right, leading her along, and this time, safely looking back. Actually, this is cleverer than it first seems, for Ovid has set us up for a play on the meaning of "follow." Eurydice in this last line "follows" Orpheus because she is behind him in the left-to-right movement of the line of writing, although, in a more ordinary sense, it is Orpheus who "follows" Eurydice, since Orpheus comes after Eurydicen. In fact, the ambiguity of "following" is general to any act of reading. As we move through a text, what follows in the sense of what comes next is what lies farther down the page, deeper into the book. But what follows in the sense of what lies in our wake is what we already have read. So too for the writer: what follows a poet, like a pied piper, or more to the point, like an Orpheus, whose music dragged people, beasts, plants, and rocks in his train, is that which has already been written, that which can now be read. And there it is, I would argue: the backward glance without which poetry cannot exist.
Let us briefly take the poet's point of view. At the end of every line, we are reassured that what we are making is poetry. We look back and say, that works, that's done. Writing, indeed, requires incessant review of what we have written: word by word, page by page, book by bookday by day, in Vergil's case. But it is the poetic line that most pointedly demands this reflection and embodies its resulting loss. The end of the line, the completion of the meter: it all comes together and, click, it's finished, it's gone. These words belong to the page now, and thence to its readers, and thus not to poetry as poiêsis, making, but to poetry as the afterlife of that making. To write is to lose; the poem is what is left when the poet looks backand moves on. "Und er gehorcht, indem er überschreitet" (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1.5).
Orpheus has almost reached the margin -Ovid actually uses this word, nee procul abfuerunt telluris margine summaeand is "anxious to see" the verse he has made, step by step, metrical foot by metrical foot. He longs to contemplate what he has taken out of himself and put down in wax. But like all mirrors, this reflection is alienating. Orpheus, like Narcissus, can love what he sees, but it is no longer his, or more accurately, it is no longer he. In other words, the backward glance is the name we should give to all moments, including these most elemental ones, when the poetcall him Orpheussuddenly becomes a reader of himself. Or to put it another way, it is at the ends of things, including the ends of lines, that poets become one of us, their readers. And it is thus in the unended, like the unfinished line into which we stumbled a little while ago, and which we mistook for a tomb, that we catch a glimpse of the poet who is still a living author, still, after all these centuries, unwilling to look back, to let go, to lose.
Two important implications of all this merit additional comment. A moment ago, in search of a more elemental answer, we rejected our own suggestion that the Orphic turn was that of allusion, i.e., a backward glance at literary precedent. Nevertheless, it can scarcely be a coincidence that Vergil enshrines what he has to say about looking backward in the complex intertextual (and intratextual) nest through which we have just traveled. Nor can it be chance that the myth at the bottom of these explorations is one whose ending, in which the poet is dismembered and his head and lyre thrown into a river, where they still produce music that echoes off the passing banks, has been seen since antiquity as emblematic of the reading that imitative writers must do, dissecting their models, only to reassemble the disiecti membra poetae into their own, new compositions. Surely, in fact, we can find in imitation an extension of the backward glance we have found on every page, a lavish and productive metaphor (like the Orpheus story itself) for the incessant retrospection that all writing, imitative or not, makes irresistible. Poets who imitate, in other words, are not writing as readers: rather, they are reading as writers, who always look back. And this realization should, perhaps, shake our confidence that imitation is primarily about the authority of the literary past or the learned play of an eventual readership, and lead us to consider it as first and foremost a reverie on the very page below the poet's nose.
The second implication, which regards Eurydice, requires a longer note.

THE ROMANCE OF THE PAGE
it is, of course, no accident that Eurydice is a woman; indeed, the entire myth can be read as a parable of her gender. Orpheus' is the second male gaze to be her undoing: the first was that of Aristaeus, who spies and chases her, until she steps on the snake that fatally bites her. She flees Aristaeus; she follows Orpheus: these are her two places in relation to the men who desire her. The story has her more (often) dead than alive; she is Other both as woman and as death, as womb and as tomb, as whence and as whither. She is not just one woman, but all; she begins the story as a wife but ends it as a mother, as Orpheus, on that narrow passage toward the light, looks back at the woman behind him. "Eurydice is the limit of what art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead," writes Maurice Blanchot in "The Gaze of Orpheus." But at least since H. D.'s angry "Eurydice," some have wondered aloud why the making of art should have to be over a woman's dead body: what was it that crossed my face with the light from yours and your glance? what was it you saw in my face? the light of your own face, the fire of your own presence?
Orpheus' ostensibly loving glance is only narcissism; shade or reflection, Eurydice does not really matter here, or rather, she is only matter: a corpse.
The feminist analysis we have only just begun is condemned, paradoxically, to replay the sexism of the myth itself, making Eurydice vanish yet again: first by revealing that woman is only a device here, and second by observing that she is not the only one possible. The latter point is already suggested by Eurydice's eventual replacement, in the Aeneid, by Euryalus. But it is clearer still in Ovid, who anticipates H.D.'s complaint by basing details of Orpheus' backward glance on his own earlier description of Narcissus, who ignored both girls and boys in preference for a lake. Woman is lucky, Ovid seems to say, when she finds herself the object of such reflection; otherwise she is, like Echo, entirely extraneous to male desire.
Iste ego sum, sighs Ovid's Narcissus, finally, to his lake (3.463): "That's me," to use freely colloquial English which captures the subject-object complexity of the Latin, where a demonstrative pronoun with a second-person force elides (isfego) with "I" to produce an impossibly ambiguous hybrid we can otherwise only translate as "the one you have there, I." Desire, even heterosexual desire, is always this disorienting in Ovid, already in his first erotic episode, in which Apollo pursues Daphne. God and nymph, male and female: they seem safely differentexcept that Ovid quietly compares Daphne to Diana, Apollo's twin sister (1.487).
Like so many objects of desire in Ovid, Daphne is transformed into a tree, and it is not hard to see such trees as figures for writing, either because of their leaves or because of their bark (liber), which ancient etymologists believed to have been one of the first surfaces on which humans wrote. Daphne, of course, becomes not just any tree but the laurel, which Apollo, god of poetry, decrees to be henceforth poetry's symbol and the poet's crown. Apollo who loves Daphne ends the story (and launches the rest of Ovid's poem) as the poet who loves poetry. To ask whether this latter narcissism is homosexual or heterosexual might seem strange, were the question not to resurface, even more insistently, in the case of Orpheus, poetry's other major patron.
Back on the surface of the earth after his second loss of Eurydice, Orpheus does two things. The first is to reject the love of women, turning instead to that of boys, an art he also teaches to his fellow . His second response is to sing, filling the rest of Ovid's tenth book with a fugue of stories that echo his own even as they transform it. Like Ovid himself, Orpheus begins with Apollo in love, this time with a boy, Cyparissus, who likewise will become a tree, though one which figures not poetry but death. (The cypress, in fact, is in Orpheus' audience, for his music uproots a whole forest, flora and fauna, that gathers around him to listen, rapt.) Actually, Ovid leaves us unsure whether it is Orpheus or the poet himself who is narrating here; Orpheus subsequently begins in earnest with a brief mention of the story of Jupiter and Ganymede, then a full telling of Apollo's love for Hyacinthus, whose gore the devastated god transforms into a flower on whose petals he inscribes the sounds of his grief. Terms shift a bit for Pygmalion, who like Orpheus scorns the love of women but loves instead a female statue of his own making (and which subsequently comes to life). Myrrha, next, falls in love with her own father, who is tricked into sleeping with her in the dark, where he gives her the nickname "daughter." Their union produces Adonis, whose androgynous beauty captures Venus, who foregoes her usual femininity in order to woo him. To her lover she herself tells (through Orpheus, who speaks in turn through Ovid) the story of the athletic Atalanta and her lover Hippomenes, who looks back at the woman he has defeated and won in a footrace. Gored by a boar, Adonis too becomes a flower, though the transformation takes "a full hour, but no more" (10.734-35), which is roughly how long Orpheus has been singing. With this, the poem is interrupted by the end of the roll, for the story's ending is deferred to the start of book 11, where Orpheus himself is at once interrupted by the angry maenads who will murder and dismember him for his misogyny.
Woman frames this collection, but her precise place within it is more elusive. It would be safer to say that these are stories of subjects and objects variously trapped in desire; here as elsewhere, Ovid uses gender as a ready marker of difference, but it is not his only tool, nor does he use it in a simple way. And more importantly, all differences and similarities in the Orphic ensemble are called to the service of the overarching question which the stories' emphasis on storytelling, art-making, and writing makes clear: Are the stories which I (Ovid, Orpheus, Venus) tell like me or unlike me? Is my poem an iste or an ego} The seemingly impossible answer is always: both. The bisexual poet writes an androgynous page, but his is only the beginning of the romance, for these desires mingle at once with another: that between writer and reader.
This, in fact, is precisely where we began, on the upward slope from Hell. Vergil has been telling all from Orpheus' point of view, but at the moment of Eurydice's disappearance he abruptly switches perspective: "and she did not see him after that, as he snatched in vain at shadows and wanted to say so much." Ovid, always ready to amplify, and keenly aware that, as an imitator, he is a reader here long before he is a writer, seems to transfer to Eurydice, at least in part, the grasping that Vergil gives to Orpheus, using a series of genderless participles whose referent is unclear: flexit amans óculos, et protinus ilia relapsa est, bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans nil nisi cedentes infelix adripit auras.
Loving, he bent his gaze, and at once she slid backward, and with outstretched arms, and struggling to be grasped and to grasp, she/he snatches at nothing but breezes that gave way.
At the center of all this a matched pair of infinitives, "to be grasped and to grasp," links these two figures even as it forever divides them -Ovid's most explicit look back at his own Narcissus, who "while seeking is sought" and "plunged his arms into the waters but did not clasp himself in them" (3.426-29). But the Orphic page is not simply a mirror. The story in which we have found a scene of writing ends, in both Vergil and Ovid, from Eurydice's point of view. It is thus the poet, not she, who finally vanishes "like smoke dissolved in insubstantial air," the poet whom we ourselves, in this exploration, have struggled to glimpse (if not to grasp). That Orpheus does not really care about Eurydice is not just a feminist complaint: it is also a readerly one. Our only consolation is that the poet too has known this loss. The Vergil who reads Vergilwhether by this we mean the author of the Aeneid who reads the Georgias, or the author of Aeneid 9 who reads Aeneid 2, or the Vergil who, anywhere, reads the line he has just completedis a Eurydice to his own departed Orpheus. And then as Ovid puts it, revolutaque rursus eodem est, "she turns round back where she started," and the poet, and the poem, start again. NOTES Throughout the above, by "page" I mean first and foremost that of the poet's writing tablet, though not to the exclusion of the papyrus-roll writing-column (likewise pagina in Latin, which designates any rectangular block of text) in which the poem would eventually appear.
For more on the Orpheus story through the ages, the following are good places to start: Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore 1989), including a comparative discussion (36-94) of the Vergilian and Ovidian versions; W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study in the Orphic Movement (London 1935); Gustaf Freden, Orpheus and the Goddess of Nature, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis 64.6 (1958); John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, ma 1970); Judith E. Bernstock, Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth -Century Art (Carbondale, il 199 ι).
Later tellings tend to emphasize Orpheus' moral failure. Already for the author of the pseudo-Vergilian Culex (293), the backward glance betrays a lack of sexual self-control: "Setting your sights on sweet kisses, you broke the gods' commands." Boethius briefly reviews the fatal moment and comments, "This tale applies to any of you who are trying to lead your mind to the daylight above, for anyone who, overcome, bends his glance toward the pit of Hell, loses whatever of value he is carrying with him, as he looks on those below" (Consolation of Philosophy 3.12.52-58).
The first scholar to explore the relationship between Nisus/Euryalus, Aeneas /Creusa, and Orpheus/Eurydice in Vergil seems to have been J. Heur-