Aristaeus, Orpheus, and Eurydice | Dickinson College Commentaries

Those who have read or know anything about the Georgics perhaps think immediately of its end, which culminates in a mythological tale, focusing on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and framed by a tale of Aristaeus, a son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene. In myth Aristaeus most often appears as a cross between Prometheus, Dionysos and Asclepius, a discoverer of technological skill that benefits humans, who has a special affinity for agricultural and prophetic pursuits. Yet, Vergil frames his story by recalling Homeric epic: like Achilles, Aristaeus petitions his nymph mother for divine assistance, which comes in the form of a prophecy from Proteus (just as Odysseus receives).

Aristaeus is not an exceptionally familiar character, and those reading Georgics 4 may be encountering him for the first time. Tales about him vary, and likely reflect multiple traditions—and perhaps multiple individuals—whose support of human endeavors by offering assistance with farming and herding, hunting, and threats of drought and extreme heat come to be subsumed under a single identity. The association of Aristaeus with beekeeping may have been an invention of Vergil’s, but, if so, it is consonant with his identity as a figure who travels the world, offering targeted assistance to farmers.

The Aristaeus story is a kind of tale often called an epyllion, that is, a little epic poem. An epyllion focuses on a mythological story, while often incorporating another myth or set of myths, which the poet places into conversation with each other. Like many of the other poetic forms that significantly influenced Vergil, the epyllion is a Hellenistic favorite, such as those composed by Moschus (Europa) and Callimachus (Hecale). The neoterics (“new poets”) of the Late Republic Rome found inspiration here as well, and we know of lost works (like Cinna’s Zmyrna and Calvus’s Io), as well as those that remain, like Catullus 64, where the mythic marriage of Peleus and Thetis frames another myth of love, Theseus’s abandonment of Ariadne. While Vergil’s epyllion does not stand alone, it does appear to be set apart—a mythic conclusion to a didactic work, which feels as though it could be separated from the whole.

Aristaeus, our beekeeper hero and “discoverer” of the bugonia, is given a back story that resonates with other themes in the Georgics. He is the son of divinities but not divine himself, making him a familiar figure in Greek myth, like Achilles, Theseus, and Heracles, among others. Yet, his exploits are not the slaying of monsters or battling an enemy, but rather bringing rains to fields in drought, propagating vines in far-flung lands, and teaching the skills of hunting. While his work is labor, just as we might think of Hercules’ own exploits, on the surface it appears a tamer sort, which aids humans in the practicalities of their everyday (peacetime) activities associated with maintaining society at its most basic level.

And yet, Aristaeus’s journey to visit his mother, to remedy the death of his bees, results in an unexpected and not entirely coherent revelation. Aristaeus attempted to rape Eurydice, bride of Orpheus, who suffered a fatal snakebite while attempting to flee him. As Christine Perkell has noted (70-71), though Aristaeus accidentally kills Eurydice (or is indirectly responsible for it), his rape attempt is a violent attack upon the natural world, revealing him to be not just an ally to humans, but also a threat. Although he traditionally is aligned with a bucolic, agricultural, and natural landscape, he is nevertheless also an agent of culture in its most violent masculine form, who exerts labor to control and exploit the natural world.

Within the frame of the Aristaeus story (the complaint of the loss of his bees, followed much later by the restoration of his hives), the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice appears, familiar in its most traditional outline. Orpheus travels to the Underworld after Eurydice’s untimely death. He charms the gods and inhabitants of the netherworld and is permitted to escort his wife back, but with the caveat that he must not look back at her until they have reached the upper world. Orpheus turns back having almost reached the summit, and so Eurydice falls back, lost to him. Orpheus attempts to regain her once again, returning to the Underworld, but he is unable to persuade the denizens a second time, and so returns to the upper world without Eurydice, determined to mourn her loss while he lives.

The choice to connect these myths appears to be Vergil’s, as best we can tell. Indeed, the Orpheus and Eurydice story is only given its familiar form here for the first time, though scattered earlier references suggest that Orpheus, as a living human, made his way to the Underworld and back. While we might assume that Vergil offers an account that would not deviate overly much from his readers’ expectations, it is impossible to know with any certainty.

What we can say is that Vergil here marries two figures—Aristaeus and Orpheus—who seem never to have been previously linked. In doing so, he crafts a tale that appears richly symbolic, but in ways that continue to be contested. The figure of Orpheus—a poet who has suffered a tragic loss, who regains the stability of the relationship but loses it again through his own fault, and who never recovers from it—may stand for Vergil himself, writing of a lost world in the aftermath of civil strife. Yet others see Vergil as Aristaeus, a man of a different kind of ars, who proves the benefit of skill and technology, in contrast to Orpheus, whose skill proves useless. Both tales are rich with thematic resonances: loss and nostalgia, reverence to and support from the divine, the value of ritual and need for atonement, the sympathy between humans and the world they inhabit. Appearing at the very end of book 44, Vergil surely encourages his readers to reflect on these theme—both their relationship to book 4, as well as their connections and implications for the Georgics as a whole.

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