The Story of Orpheus -- Virgil vs. Ovid (Hadestown 2/8, episode 31)

The Romans stand at a key moment in human civilization.  Starting with roots in Greece, they are looking back at the Trojan war, they are thinking about their gods.  They have founded the first university in the western tradition.  And they are modifying and inheriting a series of explanations for the world.

Where does the wind come from?  What controls the oceans, or causes lightning, or earthquakes?  Why do the seasons pass?

What is nature like?

Their answers, at least in part, involve the gods.  And they have been engaging those gods.  They have prayed to them, made sacrifices to them, asked them for favors.  And the gods, looking down, have picked their favorite champions, and intercede arbitrarily and for self-serving reasons in the affairs of humans.

But now, just before the birth of Jesus, there is a Roman poet who comes up with a totally different take.  In his story, there is a mortal, who will try an entirely different way to earning the favor of the gods.  

He will sing to them.  And this will open an entirely new way to look at the ancient Greek and Roman myths…and start a new way of thinking that will trace through history, to the earliest operas, and the fable of Robert Johnson playing for the devil at a crossroads, to Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown.

We’ll look back at that story today, on this episode of THM.

Transcript

Romans stand at a key moment in human civilization. Starting with roots in Greece, they are looking back at the Trojan War and they are thinking about their gods. They founded the first university in the Western tradition and they are modifying and inheriting a series of explanations about the world. Where does the wind come from? What controls the oceans or causes lightning or earthquakes? Why do the seasons pass? What is nature like? Their answers, at least in part, involve those gods. They have been engaging those gods. They've been praying to them, making sacrifices to them, and asking them for favors. And the gods, looking down, have picked their favorite champions and intercede arbitrarily and for self-serving reasons in the affairs of humans. But now, just before the birth of Jesus, there is a Roman poet who comes up with a totally different take. In his story, there is a mortal who will try an entirely different way of earning the favor of the gods. He will sing to them. And this will open an entirely new way to look at the ancient Greek and Roman myths and start a new way of thinking. It will trace through history to the earliest operas and the fable of Robert Johnson playing for the devil at a crossroads, and right on down to Anais Mitchell's 80s town. We'll look back on that story today in this episode of Theater History and Mysteries. I'm John Bruschke, and you are listening to Theater History and Mysteries, where I take on musical theater production, go into a deep dive on the questions it raises and the answers it provides. I hope that this approach will give a deeper understanding about the lessons that the musical has for theater and for life, and I will never miss an opportunity to pursue any mystery, bizarre coincidence, improbable event, or supernatural suggestion along the way, because, in the words of Dirk Gently, it is all connected. Okay, today we're going to talk about two different poets that came up with the original Orpheus story. We're going to get to know each of them. We are going to compare their different versions, and we're going to understand their literary choices through the music and the wisdom of contemporary satirist Weird Al Yankovic, and also through Kevin Bacon's masterwork, Footloose. How are we going to do that? Well, we got about another 45 minutes to figure that out. But before we do that, Here is the normal plea for help that has become all too common to start off these podcasts. I have poured my heart and soul into this podcast. I'm hoping this podcast scratches a particular itch for you. Like if you like musical theory and history and weird coincidences and ghost stories and those four things all overlap, you find yourself right in the middle of it. We are soulmates and your soulmate needs their help right now. If you get a chance to talk about this story at the stories at part parties in this podcast, or you find something interesting and you could dump it on your social media, or if you could comment about it and drop a link somewhere that would do more good than you could imagine. It's true. All podcasters say this. We all say it at the beginning of all of our episodes. That's because it's true and it's work. Now, if you want to give me a challenge, like say, Hey, John, I would go ahead and help you promote your podcast. We're putting it on my social media, but only if you can walk, say, 200 yards without looking back, I would meet that challenge. And if that's what it takes, let me know and I will do it. Or if he has couldn't, but by God, I would do that. If you are willing to meet me halfway, like maybe Eurydice was and tell me from the podcast enough with those tortured metaphors, I will just say, I'm delighted that you are listening to this and I could really use your help. This is our second episode that's going to take on Hadestown. The first two episodes in this series are going to get us some deep backstory on the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. That's the story, of course, that Mitchell inherited and had to deal with or got to deal with or took up as the passion for the heart of Hadestown. What is the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice? That's what we're going to talk about this time. Next time, we're going to talk about what Mitchell did with it. And, you know, that's got a bunch of fun stuff in it. Things I did not expect. Things like autism and pastoral psychology. I didn't even know that existed. But that's got a connection to what Anast Mitchell eventually did with Hadestown. Now, if you want to brush up on the Orpheus story, you might want to go back a tick. Here, we're just going to take it as read that you understand what the story is up until now, and you got the big beats of Roman history. But in case your memory doesn't last perfectly for two weeks, here are the key points. This is part of the story that everybody puts in the story. It's kind of the canon, the centerpiece of the Orpheus story. Eurydice dies. Orpheus, who who has divine music power, sings a song that warms Hades hard enough that Hades says he'll let Eurydice out of hell if Orpheus can lead her out without looking back. Orpheus almost gets there and he looks back at the last second and Eurydice goes back to hell and Orpheus wanders around playing sad music before he too dies. There are variations on that, which we are going to talk about a bunch today, but that's the core of the story. And then to put that in the appropriate timeline, this story is set in the era of the Trojan Wars. That's about 1300 BC. Homer writes about it first in about 750 BC. So just notice that's like 500 years after these events were supposed to happen that Homer starts writing about it. And then another couple of centuries pass. Alexander the Great is at his peak and he's unified Greece in about 320 to 330 BC. That's a rough timeline. I'm not going to pick apart all the various things, but that's kind of the peak of Alexander's reign. The big change happens in 146, about 150 years later, when Rome conquers Greece. Julius Caesar has his run in about 50 BCE, and he is eventually succeeded by Augustus, who rules from 27 BC to 14 AD. And then after Augustus passes, there are about another 200 years that are called Ax Romana, but that is where the Roman Empire is alive and thriving. Okay, that's a lot. So let's just recap the main beats. The Trojan War happens. Then Homer writes his first account of this 500 years later. And then after that, more centuries pass and Alexander the Great comes to his peak. Alexander passes. And then around 146, Rome conquers Greece. And I said he passes, but then he passes centuries, pass about two centuries go by. And then Rome eventually conquers Greece. Julius Caesar comes about in 50 BC. And then he is succeeded by the ruler Augustus. And just to, uh, summarize what we're going to talk about today or to presage what it is that we're going to get to today. The two poems that we're talking about were written in that first century BC. So it is Alexander is about 200 years in the past. So these poems are written about the time, the distance that Alexander is, that is equivalent to the distance we have to George Washington. So you still remember the guy. You kind of know what he was all about, but it is definitely in the past and it's not right in front of you. And then our two poets are writing in that first century where there is civil war. Julius Caesar has his big run and he is eventually succeeded by Augustus. Okay. Now, according to Cheryl Siegel, who I'll introduce a little more in a minute, there is a version of the story that comes before Virgil where the lovers are actually reunited. The author of that story is Euripides. It's like the rom-com version of the story, I guess the Roman rom-com version of this. That, however, is not the story that's revived and that's not the story in Hadestown. But let's just kind of Before I jump into what my two poets are, the two poets are that we now most strongly associate with the story, let's give Euripides his due. He wrote a version of it that had a happy ending, but history has not remembered that tale nearly as prominently as the other two. Our two poet stories take off in the Roman Empire around the first century AD. One comes right after the other. In fact, they overlap, their lives overlap for a couple of years. This is during the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus, but it is while Alexander is still in memory and Plato's Academy was shut down in 83 BC. So neither of our two poets studied there, but they had all the books that Plato and others at their disposal. So the stuff that would have been taught in Plato's Academy were still around in Greece. There just wasn't Plato's Academy for them to go and study at. So let's meet these two guys. at long last. Author number one is Virgil. He is born in 70 BCE and he dies in 19 BCE. So that's a longish life. It's 20 years before Jesus is born. He is a country kid. He lives in the rural areas, but he came in and he studied rhetoric in Rome. So quick shout out to rhetoric. That is my field. I've actually got a PhD in communication that would be called rhetoric. We trace our field all all the way back to Aristotle, who wrote a book called, conveniently enough, The Rhetoric. Now, if you're going to have democracy, you have to have rhetoric. If rhetoric is you try to solve your disputes, you try to make your arguments, you try to understand the world and come up with the various choices your society is going to make. And you're going to do that by debating different issues and hoping that that process of debate will lead you to the best question. But you got to have rhetoric, got to have people who know how to stand up and talk, people who can deliver a good speech. And that was a big deal to have under your belt in Rome. If you don't have that, you just kind of keep hacking each other up with swords. So if you're going to not solve all of your differences with violence, if you're going to solve them with your words, you are Fast on your way to having a democracy. And to do that, you have to have rhetoric. Virgil studied some rhetoric in Rome, but he was a scholar and a recluse. So he was kind of shy. He took no part in politics. He never married. He studied rhetoric, but he never really did very much of it. He was kind of the, if you think your classic shy poet, that is Virgil. There's a Roman civil war that ends with Augustus on top in about 31 BCE. And the poets generally hate this. That included Virgil and it also included his contemporary Horace. He doesn't like Augustus all that much. He's got some tension with them, but he's generally cool with Roman rule. His family lost their farm during the civil war and that had quite an impact on him. He wanted a restoration of the agricultural life in Italy and under Roman rule, that was all fine with him. He didn't like so much top-down stuff, but he was okay with the Roman empire in general. He just wanted more emphasis on rural life, agrarian life, which he felt had been kind of torn apart by the various civil wars. He would write three important books. There are three things that we remember Virgil for. One is the Georgics, which is where he got his Orpheus story. We'll get into that in some more depth. I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, but that to me is what it looks like. The Georgics, G-E-O-R-G-I-C-S. The second thing he did was write a book of poems called the Ecloges, E-C-L-O-G-U-E-S. And that included one poem that is called the Messianic. And more than one person points out that This comes really close to predicting the life of Jesus. So he's writing about 30, 40 years before Jesus is born, and he writes this poem that predicts there's going to be a Savior who comes along and launches peace. Here is Britannica's take on that poem, the Messianic. Quote, It is an elevated poem, prophesying in sonorous and mystic terms the birth of a child who will bring back the golden age. Bam! banish sin and restore peace. I'm going to step out of that quote now. That kind of sounds like Jesus, right? Think about every Christmas carol you've ever heard or every Christmas hymn, banishing sin, restoring peace. That kind of sounds like Jesus. I can see How people would draw the parallels, especially if you were a devout Christian. I'm going to go back into the quote. It was clearly written at a time when the clouds of civil war seemed to be lifting. It can be dated firmly to 4140 BCE, and it seems most likely that Virgil refers to an expected child of the triumvir Anthony and his wife Octavia, sister of Octavius. The Octavian triumvir means that there was a time where three different people were ruling Rome. One of those was Anthony. It was the triumvirate. And the members of that were the triumvirate. One of them was Anthony. Now, what's interesting is whether or not you're talking about Jesus or Augustus or the son of Anthony and Octavia, that prophecy is pretty right. If you're talking about the birth of Jesus, he is the Messiah that's supposed to bring peace to earth. But there were 200 years of Pax Romana that came about right around the time that Jesus was born. So there were 200 years of relative peace and prosperity in Rome, kind of like he had predicted. I'm going a little off the rails with this, but it is also true that Augustus does try to banish sin, or at least he's got a strong sense of trying to return morality to Rome. Ovid is not going to be okay with that, but Virgil is. So that thing about there's going to be a Messiah who comes along and banishes sin is definitely a theme that you would associate with the rule of Augustus. His third book is called the Aeneid. The Aeneid is the mythical founding of Rome, or at least the plot of the book is the mythical founding of Rome. An exiled Trojan prince founds Rome after the Trojan war in about the 12th century BCE. So if you are a Roman, you trace your nation's history back to that Trojan war. And I guess a little bit right after it, here is the Britannica talking about that book quote. The vision of Rome that the Aeneid expresses is a noble one, but the real greatness of the poem is due to Virgil's awareness of the private as well as the public aspects of human life, end quote. It is a landmark document for the entire nation of Rome and the Roman civilization that would be peaceful for 200 years and survive for centuries after that. And it came from the pen of Virgil. Now, interestingly, he worked on this book for 11 years and it was still not finished at the time of his death. So it had to be kind of wrapped together and packaged. So the Aeneid became, or was the, finally came together right as he passed. And there's an interesting story about that too. According to Britannica quote, The story goes that Virgil's dying wish was for his poem to be burned, but that this request was countermanded by the order of Augustus. Virgil was regarded by the Romans as their greatest poet. an estimation that subsequent generations have upheld. His fame rests chiefly upon the Aeneid, which tells the story of Rome's legendary founder and proclaims the Roman mission to civilize the world under divine guidance. The study of Virgil in the schools has lasted as long as Latin has been studied and practiced. Quote, that is quite an estimation for a poet. Imagine writing a poem that becomes that central to the nation you're living in and then continues to be relevant for centuries later. If you have read Dante's Divine Comedy or if you're just familiar with it, you might know that in that book, Dante, the author, comes up with a fictional trip into hell, of course, but the guy that he selects is Virgil, who leads him through it. Dante's alive between 1265 and 1321, so that is... 13 centuries after Virgil had passed, he was still central to the thinking of Dante, who was probably the greatest poet of his age. There's also a whole bunch of English authors, including Milton and Tennyson, and of course, Victor Hugo, who of course claimed that he met Virgil in a seance. But the bottom line is, he is considered the greatest poet of his time in the first century BC. He's a big wig, and he comes right before Ovid does. His impact lasts forever. centuries. That is poet number one, Virgil. Poet number two is Ovid. He's born in 43 BCE, so that's about 30 years after Virgil, in a town called Sulmo, S-U-L-M-O, He moved to Rome. He also studied rhetoric, but he wanted to write poetry and he did not want to give speeches. And he tried his hand at some minor administrative posts, like his dad was kind of pushing him out there. Like every, every dad of a poet is like, man, you went to college, try to do something practical, but it's just not going to work. If you have the heart of a poet, eventually Ovid returns to poetry. He is important for his technical prowess and for re-imagining some traditional myths. He wrote about love in the classical way all poets do, right? Are the poets concerned with love? Write about it. He was one of the first and one of the best. He himself was married three times. The third one stuck. And he was banished in 8CE to Thomas, just like Victor Hugo. I cannot tell you how much I was hoping that he got banished to the Isle of Jersey. As we have discussed in previous episodes and other musicals, a surprising number of musicals that are based on historical events or have great authors have passed through the Isle of Jersey. Hmm. But no, Thomas is a city on the Black Sea. It's about 1,800 miles from Jersey. It is on the same latitude, but 1,800 miles. There's nothing going on there that overlaps with other musicals, but it is definitely interesting that he gets banished. Now, we don't really know why he got banished. Maybe it involved an affair involving the emperor's granddaughter. There was definitely some kind of sexual scandal involving the emperor's granddaughter, and it's definitely true that some people got killed kicked out of the country for their involvement in it. And that also kind of happened at the time that he got banished. So there could be a connection there. All that, however, is circumstantial evidence. But whatever happened, He never returned. He lived on for nine more years, and then he finally died in 17 of the CE of the Common Era, 17 years after Jesus was born. He wrote his own autobiographical poem, and he named it Sorrow. This was a love poet who had his heart broken by being kicked out of the nation that he loved. The The book that he wrote was called the metamorphoses that is linked to Virgil's Aeneid. It is myths and stories, and they are written in verse. Let's go back to our friend, the encyclopedia Britannica that can help us understand how important that metamorphoses book was. Quote, No single work of literature has done more to transmit the riches of the Greek imagination to posterity. By 8 CE, the Metamorphoses was complete, not yet formally published, and it was at that moment when Ovid seemed securely placed on a pinnacle of successful achievement, he was banished to Tomas by the emperor. Augustus banned his works from the public libraries, but History has a way of making folly of the attempts to censor great works. The 12th and 13th centuries are called the Age of Ovid, and he was also enormously popular during the Renaissance. Let's go back to Britannica. Quote, the Metamorphoses in particular offered one of the most accessible and most attractive avenues to the riches of Greek mythology, but Ovid's chief appeal stems from the humanity of his writing, its gaiety, its sympathy, its its exuberance, its pictorial and sensuous quality, end quote. Take that, Emperor Augustus. You can try to censor things, but great poetry is going to survive your attempts to squelch it. I'm going to quickly reread a quote from a past episode. Quote, It is those things that have recommended him down the ages to the troubadours and the poets of courtly love, to Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang van Goot, and Edelweiss. Ezra Pound, end quote. Really, Ezra Pound? Every time I hear that name, I now want to make a yuck noise. I think we've already done that enough. But yeah, even Ezra Pound. But Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Goethe, those are some pretty influential authors that looked back to Ovid and said, that guy, that guy could really write. Okay, let us, before we move on to talking about their differences and what they have to say about Orpheus, notice the differences in what Augustus thinks about them. He's the emperor, and he forces Virgil to finish the Aeneid, even though Virgil wants it burned. And he banishes Ovid, even though Ovid basically wants to just stay there and keep writing. They're both fantastic poets who have work that will survive through centuries. And Augustus loves Virgil and he hates Ovid. Well, I have to, why is that? That is the first mystery we're going to have to solve. Now, Ovid came second is the other thing to notice about it. The first thing to notice before we move on, Augustus likes Virgil and he hates Ovid. The second thing to notice is that Ovid came second. He came after Virgil. They overlapped by a little bit, but Ovid was basically in his late teens when Virgil had passed away. So it was definitely a time where Virgil was the big shot. He was the big, important poet that was going on. And Ovid would come after him trying to establish his own poetic legacy. Okay, we have two great poets from the Roman era. They lived at almost the same time, and they have two very different versions of the Orpheus story. To help us navigate that, I am going to turn to Li Yanfen. Li Yanfen has work that is published in a journal from the College of Foreign Languages and Literature. That's the college that Li Yanfen works at. It is named Phantasmagoria. Foreign Language Studies. That's the name of the journal. It is published by National Changsha University, and it is in Taipei City, Taiwan. That is about all I know about Li Yanfen because most everything other than the text of the article itself that I was able to get my hands on is in traditional Chinese or Taiwanese Mandarin. Yanfen speaks Chinese, Taiwanese Mandarin, I think, but writes really well in English and is able to translate from the original Latin. That is three languages that Lee Yen-Fen is fluent in and is really deep on all of them. Just an impressive writer. I love reading that article. Okay. Now, Lee Yen-Fen is very sure that Ovid's work is a comedy. We'll get to that later. So we'll first talk about the differences between the book and then we'll talk about why Lee and Finn thinks that Ovid is a comedy. Now remember that Virgil died when Ovid was in his 20s and Ovid was very aware of Virgil and did not avoid comparisons. So Ovid's like, Virgil was a great poet and by God, I'm going to be a great poet. And it's fine if you want to compare my work to Virgil's work. And I will let Yen Phan walk us through the differences. For Virgil, the Orpheus story, just kind of the structure of it before we talk about the differences in plot. For Virgil, the Orpheus story is kind of a side quest for a bee story about a guy named Aristeas, who is a beekeeper. Virgil, remember, he is an agrarian. He came from the rural agricultural city, is very interested in bees and writes about them a lot. There is definitely some kind of bee movie joke here. I'm just going to leave it. I've worked on the wording. I can't come up with it. But it is definitely for Virgil. He's just talking about bees and agriculture. And then as that story is going along, boom, we talk about Orpheus. Ovid, by contrast, skips the bees completely. And he starts in his book 10. There's a bunch of, he's divided his master volume into 10 different books. The story starts in book 10, tells the first part of the story. Then there's a bit of an interlude and then they're reunited in death at the end of book 11. So, Those are two different structures to the way the plot is presented. For Virgil, it's a side quest and what he really wants to talk about, which is bees. And for Ovid, it is part of a running narrative, although there's a break in the plot. Okay, what are the differences? Difference number one, Vergil has an extended description of Eurydice's death, and Ovid doesn't dwell on it even at all, hardly at all. Vergil has an extended description of the descent to the underworld, so first they have to go to the underworld, or at least Orpheus has to get to the underworld to get to Eurydice. Ovid skips all that. For Vergil, the death and descent into hell are part of the tragedy, but Ovid skips it entirely. Difference number two, Ovid includes the actual speech to Hades and Virgil narrates it through a third person. This has the effect of making Orpheus much more full-fledged character in Ovid's telling of it. But it is notable that what's the big thing Orpheus does? And that is he uses his rhetoric and his music to convince Hades to let Eurydice out of hell. What does he say? Well, Ovid puts that in the words Orpheus and Virgil only as a Third party characters say, oh yeah, he gave the speech. That's another significant difference. We'll talk about that a little more toward the end. Difference number three, Virgil focuses on how bleak the underworld is. Ovid has a brief description of the effect of the music on the audience, but a much longer account that includes Sisyphus. Basically, as Orpheus is singing his song to Hades, everything in hell stops for a beat. And so that gives Ovid a chance to talk about everybody who's in hell and what are they doing. And of course, that includes Sisyphus, who has to keep pushing that rock uphill for all eternity. And the only break he ever gets for all eternity is when Orpheus sings the song that is so beautiful, everything stops. And Ovid dwells on that. And it's not part of what Virgil has to say. Difference number four. In Virgil, the Furies are amazed at the song, but in Ovid, they are moved to tears, and that Sisyphus bit, Lee and Fenn finds to be especially comic. So Sisyphus, he's pushing the rock up the hill, he gets to pause, and according to Lee and Fenn, If you speak Latin and you read that through and, you know, comedy is difficult to translate across languages very well. But according to Lee and Fenn, that Sisyphus thing is really funny if you're into both the original Virgil and you're good at reading Latin. Difference number four is that in Virgil, there's only a hint at the conditions that have to be satisfied for Eurydice to make a safe return. But Ovid spells it out exactly. And that, of course, the exact terms are you can't. look back. And that has some implications for how we understand the story. Difference number five, Ovid has a detailed description of the return to the upper world and Virgil does not. So Virgil talks a lot about what Orpheus has to do to get down into hell, but he doesn't really talk very much at all about how he gets out. But for Ovid, he doesn't really talk about the descent into hell, but he very much talks about the return to the surface. Difference number six is the explanation of that final mistake. And this is kind of crucial to the plot, right? What is the big turning point? Well, Orpheus looks back. Why does he do that? Virgil delays explaining the mistake in order to keep the reader in suspense. And I'm going to stop saying according to Lee and Fenn, but all this is according to Lee and Fenn, who I trust quite a bit. And he attributes it to he that is Virgil attributes it to dementia or fear, but it basically comes down to fate and the fallibility of man. What is, what do humans do while they fail? Or there is some predestined fate and they're just kind of following it. And he's overcoming dementia or madness or some kind of fury right in the moment. And so there's a divine plan at play and he's merely a pawn in it. And that's why he looks back in a moment and, of madness. But in Ovid, remember our lover poet, it is the love for Eurydice that makes him turn around and looks back. So for Virgil, Ophius is a victim of the designs of the gods. And for Ovid, Orpheus has an active role in his own mistake, and he is motivated by love. Difference number seven. What does Eurydice think about this? Well, Ovid and Virgil have exactly opposite accounts of Eurydice's reaction to the mistake. Virgil focuses on how dejected Eurydice is and mad at Orpheus and Cain. You're really lame or like, dude, I was in hell. We could both have gotten out of hell and you literally just had to take two more steps, but you didn't. You turned around, you look back. I can see why Eurydice would be mad. But Ovid says that she can't complain about anything because it was an act of love. What did she complain about except that she was loved? The fact that Orpheus is motivated by love is really all that matters and that Eurydice should understand that. Or if not, she might not understand it, but that is clearly what Ovid thinks is a redeeming motivation. Difference number eight, homosexuality. If you have not heard this before, it shocked me how prominent that theme is in this tale. In Virgil, Orpheus rejects love and marriage. So he's lost Eurydice. That does it for him. His head is eventually severed, which we'll talk about. And it keeps singing about Eurydice, but in Ovid, he transfers his affection to boys to become the first Thracian heteros. We'll talk about the implications of that, what it means, but here's what's going on. Eurydice's gone. Orpheus tried saving her and he failed. If he falls in love with another woman, that would be a betrayal of her. He can't fall in love and develop a significant relationship with another female, but he still has sexual desires. So he has sex with boys and becomes, therefore, the first Gracian pederast. And that is not subtle. It's not absent. That is central to what Ovid talks about. Virgil does not. But for Ovid, there is a long description, or an obvious conspicuous description of what becomes a Vorpheus and he becomes Ape Edoras. Difference number nine, Virgil only has three lines that talks about how Vorpheus was killed. So he has left hell, Eurydice is left behind him, and he encounters some women. The women get furious and rip him apart, like literally rip him apart, tear him limb from limb, beat him to death, desecrate his body and decapitate him. Now, Virgil describes that in three lines. Ovid spends 43 lines and makes it even more brutal. In Ovid's story, the music wards off the blows for a little while because Orpheus's big trick is he can always sing his way out of most situations. And for Ovid, this does more to highlight the difference between the musical charm and the women's violence. But he, being Ovid, spends a lot more time talking about how it was the women beat Orpheus down. to death. And finally, difference number 10. Ovid has Orpheus reunite with Eurydice in the underworld. That is, Orpheus eventually dies after getting ripped apart by the women. He now goes back to Hades and he is reunited with Eurydice. And here there are some very specific linguistic parallels that Ovid is using that makes it clear that he's referencing Virgil. And Lee and Finn thinks it's way funnier if you're deep into Virgil. When they are reunited, they walk side by side and Orpheus actually follows the lead of Eurydice and they can safely look at one another. And that's a big deal in Ovid because of course the big problem was Ovid Eurydice had to follow Orpheus. Orpheus couldn't look back. The gaze mattered a lot. Who was looking at who? And in Ovid's, it's almost a happy ending because the two of them can now kind of look at each other and maybe even gender equity because now instead of Eurydice just kind of walking behind Orpheus and her fate, depending on what he does, She is now taking the lead and they have now become almost equal or a form of equals so that they can get along with each other now that they're died. Okay. So to summarize, if there's a theme coming out of that, it is that for Lee and Fenn, Ovid is one big parody of Virgil. Okay. Those are the differences. And we're going to talk about some interpretations of that. But for Lee and Fenn, Ovid is a parody and it is funny. There is a different view and, For that, we're going to turn to Charles Siegel, who I mentioned briefly earlier, is from Brown University and wrote a book in 1972. So Lee and Fenn, it's really just about it being funny, but Charles Siegel has a slightly different interpretation. And so I'm going to put those side by side. We have two different poets telling two different stories. And what we make of those differences actually has at least two different interpretations, or at least two that I'm going to talk about. And the first one is Lee and Fenn's. And the second one is Charles Siegel's. According to Siegel, Ovid was intentionally trying to challenge Virgil's style and assert his own style, but in a very subtle way. And that's the whole point of Siegel's book. In previous commentary, that is, Siegel is saying there's other people, of course, who've written about Virgil throughout the centuries, but they did not seriously entertain the possibility that Ovid was deliberately trying to be anti-classical. And then Siegel says, that's what I'm going to look for. And he finds it. Boy, does he find it. He says that Ovid is openly challenging the self-importance of sacrifices and the devotion to the transcendent purposes that's in all the other Greek stories. In this way, he is similar to Horus. He advocates for privacy and autonomy and even the ability to be a shiftless mortal. He's like, go slacker, slacker power that human beings have the right. In fact, it's just as important for human beings to be lazy and stoic shiftless and just kind of pursuing their own desires and wants, not just following some great destiny. Ovid is called a poet intervalt, and his weapons are wit and irony, and he's fine with pursuing sexual and personal freedom and hedonism. A poet intervalt? In musical theater terms, we would say the poets are revolting. Here's the quote from Sigel, quote, and Ovid, quote, the individual voices his claims to privacy, autonomy, inactivity, and directionlessness. On this view, Ovid is a poet in revolt. The revolt is subtle and its weapons are wit and irony, but it is nonetheless real, as Augustus seems to have recognized when he exiled the poet to Ptolemy. As Leo Curran has recently written, Ovid recognized these. So this is a quote by a guy named Leo Curran inside the quote by Siegel, quote, fluidity, the breaking down of boundaries, the lack of restraint, the imminent potentiality of reversion to chaos, the uncontrollable variety of nature, the unruliness, human passion, sexual and personal freedom, and hedonism, end quote. So that is what Siegel thinks. Ovid is all about. That it's a celebration of hedonism. It's a revolt against the morality that was being propagated by Augustus. And I think it is basically the plot of Footloose. If you're looking for a metaphor that understands the difference between Virgil and Ovid, well, Virgil is kind of the John Lithgow character from Footloose. That's the dad and the reverend who wants order and regularity and a return to a pastoral peace with an emperorship empire-like structure superimposed over all of it. Music is fine. It just needs to sound like Amazing Grace or some other church hymn. You don't want to be out there and too hedonistic With all that crazy rock and roll. Ovid, on the other hand, is Kevin Bacon, and he wants to dance. But unfortunately, he lives in some place like Huntington Beach, where the city council has banned his books from the public library. I know I'm mixing my metaphors here, but really, it is the difference between the hymns that... John Lithgow wants and the rock and roll played by Kenny Loggins that Kevin Bacon wants. That's going to influence how they tell the Orpheus story. If you're Virgil, you're okay with the strict morality and structure of Roman life. You want to return to pastoral happiness. And if you are Ovid, you are a poet in revolt. You want to play a rock and roll. You want to dance. Okay, so that's kind of where we're at. That's my metaphor of how we should think about the difference between Virgil and Ovid. And this is going to matter because Anais Mitchell is going to have to pick between these two stories, maybe make her own. I'm eventually going to tell you that I think there are three great poets who have taken on this story. One is Virgil, one is Ovid, and one is Mitchell. But to understand what Mitchell's going to do, we're going to understand what these two do. Now, I will say before I go into the two different interpretations, there are some other interpretations. Lee and Fenn cites an author named Anderson who thinks that Ovid is definitely a parody of Virgil, although Anderson thinks that Virgil is better. And then Lee and Fenn quotes two other people named David West and D.E. Hill. They are both pro-Ovid, but neither of them discuss intertextuality. And finally, there is another pair of commentators named John Alvarez and Patricia Salzman Mitchell. They wrote in 2025. So that's hot off the press. And they published their work in a journal called classical world. Now, Alvarez is published posthumously. He worked at Montclair State University for 30 years and started the manuscript with Saltzman Mitchell, but then passed. Saltzman Mitchell also works in the classic department there. So they were colleagues. They started to work on it together. Alvarez passed. Saltzman Mitchell finished it. And according to them, quote, no version clearly has a happy ending, end quote. And then they cite an author named Edmonds, who in turn is citing an author named Heath. And boy, is that a long way to go to get to the conclusion that there's no version that clearly has a happy ending. They have to quote, they themselves are quoting an author named Edmonds who's quoting somebody else. else. Segal is about to give a happy ending, but let's also remember that Euripides did have a version that has a happy ending. I don't know that this is too significant, but that is an option available to Anais Mitchell. You could make it the Roman rom-com. You could make it just a happy ending. The lovers are separated. They come together and they're happy. That's out there. Segal's going to say it is. Euripides said that it was and Weirdly, Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell say there is no version of the happy ending, but I just think there is one. So that's, that's the first thing we're just going to set aside there. It is possible that to write a version of this that has a happy ending. But now we have Virgil qua John Lithgow and we have Ovid qua Kevin Bacon. And what do we make of that difference between the two? So our first interpretation comes from Lee and Fenn for whom Intertextuality is the key to understanding what Ovid is doing with Virgil. Boy, intertextuality, that's a $5 academic word. All that means is that if you're reading two texts side by side and one is a parody or making fun of the other, the second text is funnier when you see it playing off the first one. And this is where we Moon into the genius of Weird Al Yankovic. I'm going to play you two different music clips here. Here's the first one. This is Kurt Cobain barfing out the Nirvana classic Smells Like Teen Spirit. All right. That's what Nirvana does with it. This is Weird Al Yankovic making a parody of the song. All right. Is it funny just to belch into a microphone? Well, I guarantee you, and I can speak from experience on this, literally every garage band, and I mean like 100% of rock bands, have at some point while they're rehearsing had somebody belch into a microphone. Literally every garage band has ever done that. They do that right after they tell the joke about how their amplifiers go up to 11. That's just two things like Greek gods or whatever just compel people. GarageBand, so those two things. Is it funny just to belch into a microphone? Well, I gotta say, having heard it done more than one time, no, it's not inherently funny, but it's definitely funnier in Weird Al because you know what the original Grunchy Nirvana song sounded like, and that is intertextuality. The second thing is playing off the first, and it's what makes the second thing funny. Okay, so Lee and Fenn thinks that the intertextual nature of what Ovid is writing makes it funny. Here's some more reasons why Lee and Fenn thinks that it's funny. The quote is that Ovid invites the reader to consider classical bereavement myth from a cheerful perspective. And... Quote, yeah, what's more cheerful than a bereavement myth? And then also cites an author named Anderson who thinks that it's a parody. And as I mentioned above, Anderson picks Virgil and thinks Virgil is better. But Lee thinks that the speech to Hades is quote, a playful extension of Virgil's description of Orpheus's lamenting tongue after his death. And quote, remember, he's decapitated, but his head keeps singing. His tongue keeps making noise. And according to Li Fengyan, what Ovid is doing is playing off Virgil's description of how that happens. And that makes it funnier. In Virgil, the Furies are amazed, but in Ovid, they are moved to tears. And that Sisyphus bit is is especially comic. In Ovid, Orpheus transfers his affection to boys and becomes the first Thracian heterast. Lee says this is to show that Orpheus is resourceful and that it's a twist on the classic bereavement myth. Okay, we might as well talk about this now. Ooh, isn't that kind of gross? Like, Orpheus decides he's going to have sex with boys because he's lost your riddancey and that makes everything okay. There's no real description what the boys thought. I'm just going to say as far as understanding what Ovid is doing, evaluating the, what had happened in the, in the original story from the modern contemporary look at relationships between people power and people who are not in power is not inappropriate. Like there's something, something in there that we'd say, okay, I don't know what's going on there. That's definitely not okay now. And we, strongly suspect probably wasn't okay then either. But what Lee and Fenn's point is that this is designed to show that Orpheus is, it's funny, right? It makes Orpheus a more sympathetic character, at least in the mind of Ovid. That is why he picks the device. It was something from his culture. So whether or not we can say it's okay for Orpheus to to have transferred his affection to young boys, we can say that Ovid didn't see a problem with it and that he's trying to do it to make it funny. At least that's what Lee says and Lee speaks Latin and I don't, so I'm going to trust Lee Yen Fent. Okay. Ovid has Orpheus reunited with Eurydice in the underworld. Here, there is some very specific linguistic parallels that Ovid is using to make it funnier if you're deep into Virgil. And for Lee and Fenn, that seals the deal that this really is comedy. When they are reunited, they walk side by side and Orpheus follows the leader of Eurydice so they can safely look at each other. This also emphasizes that it's a comedy and lengthening the description of the women tearing apart Orpheus is also a knee slapper. Quote, inserted into a lengthy narration of the Sacconian women's persistent assault Ovid's exaggerated description of Orpheus's musical charm lightens the grimness of the Sacconian women's violence, thereby preparing the reader for the comic denouement of this account. End quote. Yen-Fen went too far, right? Right. Yen-Fen is saying, you know what makes this comedy? It's the sex with the boys. It's... It's, it's the fact that Sisyphus gets to stop for a split second. It is the, you know, but the real thing, the real knee slapper there is the way I give a gruesome account of Zirconian women ripping him apart after they beat him to death and decapitate him. That's, that's what makes it funny. That can't possibly be true, right? Gruesome accounts of butchery can't possibly serve a function in comic parody, right? Well, I return you once again to Weird Al Yankovic. And here is some of Weird Al Yankovic's work. In quote. In the song Party at the Leper Colony, he just lists gross things that happen to lepers. One of the lepers gets in a hot tub and they name him Stu. In the song Such a Groovy Guy, he jokes about tying up his romantic partner with dental floss and attaching electrodes to her brain to make her body spasm. But that's not as disturbing as this excerpt from the song Good Old Days when he describes his date as... At the homecoming dance, quote, these are weird Al Yankovic lyrics now. Then I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair and I left her in the desert all alone. Well, sometimes in my dreams, I can still hear her screams. I wonder if she ever made it home and quote, in his dreams. Big song, Albuquerque, which is 16 minutes long. The main character puts out a grease fire with his face and he cuts off the arms and legs of a co-worker with a chainsaw as part of some comedy that has to do with kind of a pun and taking it too literally. In the song, Good Old Days, he has this exchange with a kindly Mr. Fender, quote, He always treated me nice, gave me kindly advice. I don't know why I set fire to his place. Oh, I'll never forget the day I bashed in his head. Well, you should have seen the look on his face, end quote. And in Why Does This Always Happen? He stabs his boss in the face with a knife. But in the coup de grace, weird Al Yankovic at his most disturbing, he has this as the closing line from I Remember Larry. Okay. Ah, is gross, brutal descriptions of disturbing behavior. Can that be funny? Well, Lee and fan thinks it wasn't Ovid. And I got to say, I am not here to bash on Weird Al Yankovic. I consider Weird Al Yankovic a genius, a musical genius. If you've never heard the song nature trail to hell, do yourself a treat. Go to YouTube, fire it up there. It's just some interesting stuff going in that song musically. And it's also kind of clever lyrically because, you know, Weird Al Yankovic. Do I own the UHF movie? Two-star classic from Weird Al Yankovic. From sometime in the 1980s? Why, yes, I do. On the original VHS, did I see the Daniel Radcliffe movie that they just released within the last couple of years that was supposed to be better than the movie UHF? Why, yes, again, I did watch it. And no, it was not really better than UHF. Do I own every single weird Alec Yankovic album on CD? Yes, I do. And a whole bunch of them on cassette tape. I'm just saying, I am not talking about Weird Al Yankvick here to bash on him for being too gross. I'm saying that you can get kind of gross and it can still be pretty good parody. And that is a large part of the reason that I believe Li Yanfen. That ending where the lovers reunite after Orpheus dies is another thing that seals the deal for Li Yanfen. Quote, concluding with a critical backward glance now rendered harmless. Ovid successfully transforms the Virgilian tragedy into an Ovidian comedy and quote, okay, more $5 academic words. A Virgilian tragedy means that in Virgil, it's a tragedy. Ovidian comedy means that Ovid made it a comedy. That's the conclusion of Lee and Fenn. Okay. So in conclusion, interpretation of the differences. Number one is that Ovid is just being really, really funny. And part of that is parody. and that the comic effect is coming through even in the gross descriptions of dismemberment or the elaborate descriptions of hell. Yen Fen says it's funnier if If you read it in Latin and compare it to Virgil, that's enough for me. To quickly review, remember that Charles Signal thinks that Ovid is an open challenge to the self-importance of sacrifices and devotion to some transcendental purpose that is handed down by the gods. He advocates for private autonomy and even the ability to be kind of shiftless. For Virgil, it's a story of tragic passion where you can run afoul of the natural order and get crushed. Both Aristeas, who is in Virgil, and Orpheus, they pay a penalty for yielding to passion. They both fall in love with Eurydice, and they both get punished for it for Aristeas He loses his bees. That's a big deal to Aristeas. And then he spends a bunch of Virgil's poem trying to get him back or figure out what's going on. Virgil is the heir to the Greek tragic poets, but Ovid is different. In Ovid, the world does have a capricious and arbitrary divine powers out there that are at work, but the unfairness of it all greatly weakens the firmness of the moral order of that. And the classic Greek story says, You screw up if you're in a foul of the gods and it's your fault bad stuff happens to you. But in Ovid, by twisting that and making it so unfair, you're like, you know, it's not really Orpheus' fault all the way. And I will just note quickly, neither of them had this lifting of the cup to Orpheus. So this is something that is subtle. We'll talk about why that matters and what Mischel's choice is. But neither Virgil nor Ovid ends their poem by saying, Orpheus, that guy rocked. We have to celebrate his tragic story and what a hero for even trying. That is not something that either Virgil or Ovid have to say. Ovid emphasizes that it is not the tragic fear, but the strength of love that really drives what human beings do. And the homosexual adventures of Orpheus serve the structural function of linking what he's talking about to his next story that are of, about some flowers, some, uh, I'm going to say this wrong, but, cyparissis or the hyacinthesis. And those are two different types of flowers. He talks about them a lot and the homosexual thing that Orpheus engages in is plot relevant to getting to the, uh, to the flowers. He introduces realism, which is a correction to Virgil. Ovid omits Aristeas entirely making the death a total accident. And that eliminates the complex moral system of crime and retribution. If, uh, you know, if Aristeas is chasing her, if there's a love triangle, if, if that's going on, then there's some moral things to think about, but if it's just a tragedy, then all you gotta really talk about is love, which is what Ovid really wants. Um, Orpheus is not just a heroic bard who's got these supernatural powers, but he's a single mortal armed only with love and art, and those are what he confronts the gods with. For Ovid, the universality of death is transformed from an eternal law to a particular experience, to a specific person. There is death, and it's not just an eternal law. It's something that affects Orpheus in a particular way that he can articulate with his art and his music and do so in a way that he thinks other people, including the god Hades, is going to react to. The quote that is in Segal is this one, quote, all the world loves a lover, end quote. And for Ovid, the gods can be persuaded. Orpheus assumes that the world will be sensitive to love. And so his naive revelation of lover's weakness becomes irresistible. He, or Orpheus feels, I can go talk to Hades and Persephone and say, look, man, you got to sympathize with me. I am in love. And he thinks that's going to resonate with him, that that confession of love is something that has rhetorical power. Quote, Ovid's tale is exactly the opposite of Virgil's. He presents the triumph of imagination, emotionality, and interior life over external reality, end quote. In Virgil or Orpheus laments for like seven months as he wanders around singing sad songs that actually move nature. But in Ovid, he fasts for only seven days, which is a much more human thing to do and much like an imaginary story of a hero. It's something a human being would do. Ovid vindicates the power of love, but shows that can only be fulfilled in a world beyond our own. That happiness and love don't really work out in the real world as much. But for Ovid, that does make them unimportant. So putting it all together, Ovid's tale is one of love and art and politics and the Alexandrian worldview, not the view of Augustus. It's sort of a callback. Hey, remember when Alexander the Great was in power? We could have love. We could have art. We could have politics. We could have free expression of human desire. Augustus keeps enforcing this morality on it. Ovid's not happy with that. That, I think, Siegels will put some as a poet interval. Orpheus exemplifies the victory of love, but also the victory of art. And it is notable that he moves quickly to the story of Pygmalion. It goes from Orpheus to Pygmalion, who famously brings a statue to life. So Siegel views this as an intentional parallel between Orpheus's ability to make stones and trees move. And it's a metaphorical reflection on the creative power of art. Pygmalion can bring inanimate things to life with his art and his love. And Orpheus can do the same thing with his music. There is an author named Brooks Otis who is quoted by Siegel. And he says that he's comparing the Alexandrian worldview to that of Augustus. And the take-home point is that Ovid finds the fairy tale myths are more true to the real human condition than to the Augustine mythology. So he's like, yes, there are fairy tales where... truth and love and art can overcome reality. Maybe that is the actual human condition, not this. You got to subjugate yourself to the fate of the gods. Anyway, Ovid definitely saw a link between poetry and politics and Ovid is inserting a capacity for tenderness and devotion in a world of lust and violence. He ends with a quote from Brooks Otis, where Otis talking about Orpheus says that Orpheus is quote, the West's first champion of true morality. normal, and even conjugal love. And, quote, Orpheus isn't just like the original rock star. Orpheus is... the very first lover. There's a quote at the end of here that there's a quote at the end of Siegel that I think does a good job of bringing together everything he thinks about Ovid. Bear with me. I think this does a pretty good job of summarizing it. Quote, Ovid allies, love and art as the major creative forces in a world of arbitrary hours in Virgil's firmer and harder world order, love and art, though capable of miracles are also fantastic. potentially aberrant and destructive. For Virgil's Aristas, as for Virgil's Orpheus, as also for Virgil's Cordon and Gallus, his Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, love clouds the mind and leads to death and loss. Over against the refractory, potentially disruptive emotionality of the lover poet artist, Virgil sets the realm of productive work and the attitude of cooperation with and in subservience to nature's laws. Aristeas, the bees with their sexless life, Augustus, the conqueror and the restorer of order, the giver of laws. In Ovid's world, love, not law, is the measure of existence. Art and love, then fused as means towards reaching truth and bringing happiness into human life. In myths like those of Pygmalion and Orpheus, the poet Ovid himself finds his artistic life confirmed and his highest aspiration clarified. The creation of the possible out of the impossible, spirit out of matter, happy love, out of tragic death. Yet all this exists, after all, only in imagination, in the unreal world of fable. If Ovid's dissolution of a firm and demanding cosmic order frees the individual and his emotional life, it also exposes him to the violence of those emotions and to the arbitrary elemental forces, both divine and human, which are thus let loose in his world." And that is the second take. That is what Siegel has to say. about the difference between Virgil and Ovid. Okay, so as a super quick summary, we got two different poets, Virgil and Ovid. They have two very different stories about what happened to Orpheus. And they are two different interpretations of what those differences are. According to Lee and Fenn, Ovid is just one big parody, and you really have to read the original Latin to understand it, but it's just a funny book. And according to Peter Siegel, it's a little bit more than that. It is the elevation of poetry and art into politics and as a way of changing the world forever. Okay, how does all this relate to Ineos Mitchell and Hadestown? Well, oh my gosh, does she have a lot of source material to work through? Does she have some choices to make? I'm just going to start listening. It's going to take a minute or two, but just appreciate what you would have to work with if you were an A.S. Mitchell and you were going to sit down and write. Foundationally, you have to ask, are you going to go with Virgil or are you going to go with Ovid? And if you go with Ovid, is your story about hedonism and love or is it about something else? And if so, what do you do with all that homosexuality? Do you talk about him being an Argonaut from way back when? You also have to grapple about the relationship between between politics and art. If Siegel is right, the way you read Ovid is to say what Orpheus does is he takes his music and he transforms the world with it. Can music and art have an important change on politics in the way that society is structured? Well, Augustus sure thought so because he banished Ovid, the poet in revolt, before his ideas could catch on and become a challenge to the power of Augustus. Okay, what you have to work with, on the other hand, what is kind of a powerful thing is you've got the first subjective lover in literature, and you've got a guy with a song. You can take on the gods with it. What are you going to do with that? You've got the first lover and the first rock star, and you've got them in one big compelling character. What are you going to do with that character? That's a choice you have to make. And then that's only half the love story. The other half is Eurydice. Do you have more sympathy for Eurydice or for Orpheus? For Siegel, according to Siegel, Virgil has more sympathy for Eurydice and Ovid has more sympathy for Orpheus. How are you going to deal with that? And what do you even include about Orpheus? Do you talk about his death or not? Like that time where he gets his head cut off? You talk about his time as an Argonaut. You talk about his homosexuality. Do you talk about the cult that formed after his death? We talked about that in the last episode. There's an awful lot of stuff that is going on with Orpheus. How are you going to get him to just a story about Eurydice? Are you going to compare the marriage of Persephone to that of Eurydice? Now, the Persephone myth is, of course, she is abducted and maybe raped, probably raped. That's not a great way to start a marriage. For Eurydice, she is kind of in love. Well, she's all the way in love with but she might or might not also get pursued by the beekeeper. Either way, she gets bit by a snake and she gets killed, but her marriage might've been doomed anyway. We talked about that in the last episode too. I don't want to touch the way of shouting back to what we'd already talked about, but are you going to compare the marriage of Persephone? What happened to her to the marriage of Eurydice? They are. We're doing both of those, but are you going to talk about it? And you got to do something about the gods and the backstory. She'll make that choice with Hermes kind of standing in for all of the gods, but boy, there's a lot of backstory. Are you going to talk, go all the way back to Kronos? Hades is one of the three rulers. You're going to talk about Zeus. Are you going to talk about what Zeus did to intercede for Eurydice and Persephone? You got to do something with that. You got to figure out whether you're going to include Aristeas, the farmer. And if you're writing, I will say this, if you're writing, If you're writing something about the balance between humans and nature, including Aristeas, the farmer, the beekeeper, the guy who's interested in nature, that makes an interesting contrast with the poet Orpheus. And Alvarez and Saltzman Mitchell note that this might have something to do with the balance of the earth. They've made that connection explicit. And of course, neither of these poets lives to come to Orpheus. Ovid is a little closer to that. So are you going to stick with Virgil that's like, yeah, dude, screwed up, made a bad choice, the gods punished him. Are you going to be Ovid, which is like, eh, he might have screwed up, the gods are kind of mean, maybe we should be sympathetic to this guy. Are you going to go all the way and say we should celebrate Orpheus as the poet, as the guy whose music was so good it could change the world. And How is Eurydice going to die? Is she going to get bit by a snake? Both Virgil and Ovid thought that's how she died. Or are you going to go with something else? You could do anything because you're retelling the story. Or what are you going to do with the death of Eurydice? And of course, the big question, why does Orpheus turn around? And how does Eurydice react to that? Does he turn around because he's a screw-up? Because he's destined to do it? Because he goes mad? Because he's in love? Well, it is the apex of the story, right? It's the story's climax. Orpheus, turns around. Why does he do that? If you're going to tell the story of Orpheus, you have to have an answer to the question. Why is it that he turns around? We are going to talk in future episodes, both how Anais Mitchell answered that question and how other people have interpreted her answer to that question. And finally, the last big question is what is are you going to do to the music? And I know it's late in the game, but I'm going to introduce one more author. Yasmin Naiman in 2025. So also hot off the presses, just got published earlier this year. Yasmin is an undergrad at UMass Amherst and published, I'm presuming it is her work in the University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal. Now Yasmin makes the point that Orpheus is one of the very few Greek heroes who made it into Hades and made it back and serves as a testament to the supernatural power of music. Those are the two things that you notice about Orpheus. So you have the first lover, you got the first rock star, and the big deal is that according to a scholar named M. Owen Lee, you've got to put music in the mouth of your hero. So this is the quote that Yasmin puts in from M. Owen Lee, quote, Lee is accurate in his assertion. An adaptation of Orpheus simply cannot work unless he sings, end quote. But Virgil, of course, did not think that. Ovid definitely did. Yasmin thinks so. And so does M. Owen Lee. So what is Mitchell going to do with that? Is Mitchell going to put music in the mouth of the hero? And if so, what? And is that going to be central to the whole thing, working it out? We have hit the end. How is Mitchell going to handle all of this rich source material? Today, we have talked about The two different poets, where those poets come from, how they told the story differently, what choices those present to future storytellers. Mitchell's going to have to walk into all of that and figure out what her story is going to be. All right. That's what we're going to do in the next episode. So let's go to the table read. Let's sit in on the workshops and let's figure it all out on the next episode of Theater History and History.

Transcribed by https://www.uniscribe.co