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Hello and welcome to Natalie Haynes stands up for the classics.

For one season only involving me sitting down for the classics.

Other things that you might notice being slightly different, we've decided that for this series,

we wanted more escapism, less history, more myth.

And so instead of looking at characters from history, I'm looking at some of the best known characters from Greek myth.

Today I am standing up for, I say standing up for, I'm sitting down, I'm not going to lie to you.

Today I am sitting down for Eurydice. Euridacy is relatively well known to us, I think, in terms of her myth, because the story

of Orpheus and Eurydice has been retold so many times in so many different art forms.

The story of a man who loves his wife so much that when she dies prematurely, he follows her down to the underworld, to Hades itself,

to try and bring her back to life. He plays his liar to try and bribe the king and queen of the

underworld, Hades and Persephone, Preserpena, she's sometimes called by the Romans, to try and

persuade them that his love is so great they should give him back his wife.

A condition is placed on Orpheus that he may try to take Eurydice back to the world,

but she must follow behind him and he can't look back. He has to trust that she's following.

At the last moment, he does turn. He does look, and Eurydice disappears into Hades.

There's no record of Eurydus's name at all, I don't think, until the first century BCE in a pretty

obscure poem called The Lament for Bion. So it's a relatively new myth. There's no mention of Orpheus in two of our

earliest authors in Homer or Hesiod. There is no mention of the story of him having a wife of going

down to the underworld as far as I know until the 5th century BCE. That contrasts with things like

the story of the Trojan War, which we have from Homer, so sort of 8th century-ish BC.

And obviously that's telling a story of the Bronze Age, the 12th, 13th century BC.

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