Orpheus and Eurydice: a creative agony

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, 2017

Classica et Mediaevalia, 1985

Open Journal for Studies in History, 2022, 5(2), 41-50, 2022

Orpheus is one of the greatest historical contributions of the Thracians in European culture. He is much more than a talented poet and singer. He is a religious reformer, a priest and a Teacher, who transmits valuable knowledge to humanity. This study presents his life and influence on philosophers such as Pythagoras and Plato, the development of this influence during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and analyzes some Orphic tablets of eschatological nature. The roots of Orphic teachings are so deep, that some missionaries of the new Christian faith had to use the image of Orpheus in their desire to baptize pagans. Orpheus comes to walk the most difficult path-spreading the doctrine of salvation of the human soul, which remains one of the highest achievements of European culture and a hope for its humane future.

Origen’s exegesis of the Song of Songs, despite the praise it generally raised both in antiquity and in modern times, still awaits for deeper investigation as far as the literary project of the Alexandrian and its output are concerned. In this respect, it is difficult not only to exactly define the mutual relations between the Commentary and the Homilies on the Song of Songs, apart from the evident similarity of their themes, but more specifically to catch the particular nature of Origen’s interpretation at the first level of the biblical text against his well-known allegorism. Viewing the «littera» or «historia» of the Song as a theatrical piece, as especially shown in the Commentary, Origen delivers a dramatical interpretation which by its careful description of the successive scenes develops into a proper script for the stage. Though this explanation is meant to guide the reader to a further level of interpretation, the ‘letter’ cannot here be appreciated simply as the provisional step leading to the ‘spirit’, i.e. the spiritual intelligence of the Song which is in principle the only one permitted for Origen in this biblical love poetry. Instead of that, through the discourse engaged by the dramatic interpretation, on the one hand, there is an overlapping of both the ‘historical’ and the ‘spiritual’ explanation and, on the other hand, the dramatic exegesis also delivers a surplus of sense which is not totally subsumed in the spiritual interpretation. At moments the Song as ‘play’ seems therefore to gain in Origen’s perceptive reading a life of its own.

Litera: Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, 2023

First immortalised by Virgil in his fourth Georgic (ca. 39-30 BC), the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has captured the imaginations of artists for centuries. Conditioned by the age in which they were produced, many songs, plays, poems, and operas have been composed to honour this tragic love story. Among others, British playwright Zinnie Harris, in her 2017 play Meet Me at Dawn, draws her inspiration from this legendary love story. Defying the gender politics of the myth and the time, Harris reframes the characters in a more modern context and constructs both Orpheus and Eurydice as women. Whilst questioning what one would do if they were given another chance to be reunited with a beloved one who died suddenly, the play further explores the themes of bereavement, grief, and grieving by using the mythological love story as an allegorical scaffold. Drawing on Freud's model of bereavement and the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, this paper reflects on the embodiment of grief and grieving in the aftermath of a loss as manifested in Meet Me at Dawn arguing that it provides an exegesis of the validity of this particular model.

MA Dissertation - updated 2021, 2013

Although absent from early Archaic sources by the sixth century BCE Orpheus the poet had become synonymous with poetry and inspiration. This essay will examine the emergence of the myths of Orpheus in Archaic Greece with a view to understanding his place in society. This will entail the exploration of the relationship between poetry and the evolving role of the individual in Archaic society in order to clarify the context in which Orpheus came to prominence. By examining the changing role of the poet within society one can understand ways in which the evolution of Archaic society, including the development of the polis and what has been termed ‘the rise of the individual,’ may have influenced the creation and performance of poetry. These factors, together with the absorption of new cultural influences into Greek society and the development of new attitudes to the afterlife created the social context in which the Orpheus myths took form. This work will clarify the extent to which changing values found expression in the figure of Orpheus and the ways in which the elements of the myths reflected contemporary social concerns. Consideration will be given to claims of exotic influence made by modern scholars and the extent to which Orpheus’ mythology made him a suitable vehicle for the importation of exotic ideas such as reincarnation and metempsychosis and whether these myths expressed the concerns of a society increasingly preoccupied with the fate of the individual soul after death. Orpheus’ perceived otherness made him a liminal figure who crossed boundaries in transcending and uniting the divisions between the animal, human and divine worlds. This work will highlight ways in which the mythical Orpheus was essentially a construct of Archaic Greek society and reflected notions concerned with poetry, heroic identity and immortality inherent in this culture.

Lozanova-Stancheva, V. Thragic Orpheus. Orpheus On the Stage of the Old Attic Theater. – Bulletin ‘Heritage BG’ – Research Announcements, бр. 2, 14-16, 2022

The article offers an analysis of the information about the figure of Orpheus on the stage of the Old Attic theater in the 5 th century BC. They are systematized in several groups around the mythological motifs characterizing the Thracian musician: The magical power of Orpheus' word-song; Orpheus enchanting wild animals, which is closely associated with the myth of the Argonauts; the myth of the katabasis of Orpheus. In ancient times, magic was almost always negatively associated with the religious practices of someone else, a foreigner, the Other. It is a term that distinguishes these practices from the norm and a means of defining the Otherness embodied in the figure of Orpheus. Along this line, the reserved and even negative attitude towards Orphism and the related religious movement in classical Athens developed. These characteristics transform the figure of the Thracian into inconsistent, conflicting with the canons of good tragedy, defined by Aristotle in his Poetics, and explain why it appears on the stage of the Old Attic theater unsystematically and in associative terms.

The present book is closely related to that famous Pre-Socratic fragment about the bow and the lyre, where their “backstretched” or “retroflex” harmony (palmtonos harmonia) is said to depict the tense inner cohesion of a diverging unity. The same authority, Heraclitus of Ephesus, employs a Greek pun to show how in the bow itself, one of whose names is bios, both the name of life and the act of death coexist. Orpheus, as a mythical hero—indeed, one of the famed Argonauts—stands right at the centre of these junctions. So it is no wonder that this book shares in that harmonious tension: a tension rooted in the nature of the lyre and the bow, whose products may be piercing sounds or slaying arrows. Here, we have first a tension within the author, who is intoxicated with his theme and yet committed to carry out his exposition in a discursive and academic manner. We can almost feel his plight: having in mind the “tremendous contem ­ plation of the divine truth and beauty”, which would merit cither a bakchic outburst or a “supra-noetic metaphysical silence”, he is forcing himself to compose a “scientific” treatise. Having heard the music of O rpheus’ lyre, he is trying to convey as best as he can the unspeakable beauty of those notes in an all too earthly human language.

Imago musicae 31/32 (2021), pp. 7-47, 2021

The magical power of music, a topic already crystallized in Greek antiquity in the myth of Orpheus, was transmitted in the Arabo-Persian world through the tenth-century Rasa (Epistles) of the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) and other writings. The basic tenets of this doctrine of musical ethos are that the various musical modes affect the human psyche, and thus that a musician’s skillful manipulation of carefully chosen modes and corresponding melodic constructs can affect a listener’s mood, character, and even state of consciousness. At the center of the present essay stands the archetype of such magical musicianship within the literary space of the Persianate world, as manifest in the literary and visual personas of two different protagonists who belong to two different, albeit related works: Plato, from the early thirteenth-century Iskandarnama of Nizamı Ganjavı, and Aristotle, from the early seventeenth-century Resale i-musiqi of Darvısh ‘Alı Changı. In manuscript miniatures accompanying Plato’s magical acts, each of the illustrating artists expands the story’s range of meanings and possible interpretations, through specific music-iconographical choices showcasing a diverse and at times incongruous collection of musical objects and symbols. At the same time, in Aristotle’s legend, text and visual representation engage in a different relation, one that places the reader, rather than the visual artist at the center. This essay proposes that both artists and readers took advantage both of deftly deployed terminological ambivalence and of evoked mental schemas embedded in the literary text, and thus privileged certain options by contextually re-framing (historically or otherwise) said terminology and its corresponding organological or symbolic meanings.