ABSTRACT
Many scholars regard Roman adaptations of the Greek myths as banalisations of their earlier counterparts. This paper looks at Virgil’s rendering of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Robert Graves regarded as ‘mythologically absurd’. Virgil embeds the myth within a story of his own contriving: a story about Aristaeus having lost his bees. In the course of his search for his lost bees, Aristaeus speaks first with his mother, and then with Proteus, who tells him the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as if it will help him to find his lost bees. The first part of Virgil’s adaptation involves a katábasis, a ‘descent’ from a social space into an imaginal space which corresponds to the depression into which he has fallen as a result of his loss and grief. Some refer to this space as the other. Psychoanalysts call it the unconscious. Jung saw it as a space in which inarticulate hunches and intuitions take shape and become conscious thoughts or feelings. Aristaeus cannot grasp why Proteus has told him the myth. It is left to his mother to interpret the myth for him.
Virgil was an Epicurean. This paper shows how he separates the myth from religious belief in order to reconsider it as an expression of human and psychological tendencies. It argues that this represents an extraordinary contribution to the understanding of myth. Instead of seeing myth as a reflection of a specific cultural moment, he sees myth as the expression of a pressing psychological challenge of which the subject has no inkling and which requires the help of an ‘other’ to interpret. In short, it suggests that Virgil has a claim to being the father of emphatically psychological readings of myth.
