By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the great tragic love stories from Greek mythology, the tale of the musician Orpheus and his wife Eurydice features love, death, poetry, and the afterlife.
But as with the tale of Echo and Narcissus, this is a doomed love story made more famous through Roman writers (Ovid, Virgil) than Greek originals. Before we analyse the meaning of the Orpheus myth, it might be worth summarising the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.