A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman Read Free Book Online Page A

command, which they perceived as the word of god telling them what to do. Love makes such mischief that the idea of mortals causing it by themselves seemed impossible. Homer doesn’t explore the psychology of love, as Greek lyric poets would later. Told from the outside, with the keen eye of an observer, Homer’s love stories conquer hardship and distance and end happily. We know that King Menelaus had a young wife named Helen, and that when she was kidnapped the king fought a war to get her back. But we don’t know much about the couple’s feelings for each other. It was Christopher Marlowe, in seventeenth-century England, who claimed that beautiful Helen had a “face that launched a thousand ships.” Was the Trojan War fought for the love of a woman, or because a king’s private property had been stolen?
    ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
    The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice better illustrates the depths of a man’s love for a woman. Orpheus was the son of Apollo and the muse Calliope (“she of the fair voice,” the muse of epic song), who gave birth to him alongside the river Hebrus in the land of Thrace. His father was mortal, a Thracian prince. The Thracians were known throughout Greece as masterful musicians, and Orpheus was regarded as the most gifted of the Thracians. When he played the lyre and sang, he became psychokinetic, and nothing could resist him, not people, not animals or plants, not inanimate objects. His music entered all forms of matter at the level of atom and cell, which he could rearrange, changing the course of rivers, moving rocks and trees, taming wild animals. His song could make the sun leap up as it vanished, and coat the hilltops with a mist of pearls. An Argonaut in his youth, he set the measure for the oars, and saved his comrades from the fatal music of the Sirens. When they sang their eerie, mesmerizing song, the oarsmen rowed to them and a rock-festooned coast. But Orpheus played an antidote to the narcotic call, a song of such piercing clarity that it shook the men alert, giving them a chance to regain their wits and row to safety.
    We do not know how he came to meet Eurydice, or any of the details of their courtship, though he is bound to have wooed her with song. She was a “nymph,” one of the young maidens who lived in the forests and caves, free spirits in wildest nature, children of the earth. The nymphs hunted with Diana, feasted with Dionysus, and spent time with mortals, whom they sometimes wed. But Orpheus and Eurydice had little chance to enjoy their marriage. Soon after the wedding, Eurydice was walking across a meadow when she encountered the lecherous Aristaios (one of Apollo’s sons), who pounced on her. She managed to pull free and run away, but she was so addled by his attack that she didn’t see a snake sleeping in the sun in her path. Before she could stop herself, she stepped on the snake’s tail, and it spun around and bit her on the ankle, killing her. Hours later, Orpheus found her lying dead in the field. Bludgeoned by grief, he resolved to go down into the subterranean realm of death to find his bride and bring her back. He’d heard a rumor that a cave at Tainaron led down to the Underworld, and so he went there, carrying his lyre. This was a fearsome journey he planned, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his beloved, and he knew his music was a pacifying weapon of great power, which nothing on earth could resist. He reasoned
With my song
I will charm Demeter’s daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.
    As he journeyed deeper and deeper into the cave, he played the sweetest, saddest song, music forged on the anvil of his heart. The cave spirits took pity on him and left him unharmed. A tearful Charon ferried him readily across the River Styx. Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog with hair of snakes that guarded the gates of the Underworld, lay down and let him pass. With