453'It is the wrath of some god that harasses you; 454you are paying for a great crime: it is pitiable Orpheus who stirs up these punishments against you, by no means as you deserve, unless the fates oppose, and rages bitterly for his stolen wife. 457She indeed, while she fled you headlong along the river, a girl doomed to die, did not see at her feet a monstrous water-snake guarding the banks in the deep grass. 460But the band of Dryads, her companions, filled the mountain-tops with their cry; 461the heights of Rhodope wept, and lofty Pangaea, and the warlike land of Rhesus, and the Getae and Hebrus and Attic Orithyia.
464He himself, soothing his love-sick heart with the hollow lyre, sang of you, sweet wife, of you alone with himself on the lonely shore, of you as day came, of you as it departed. 467He entered even the jaws of Taenarus, the deep gateway of Dis, and the grove dark with black dread, and approached the shades and their fearful king and hearts that do not know how to soften at human prayers. 471But stirred by his song, from the lowest abodes of Erebus came the thin shades and phantoms of those who lack the light, as many as the thousands of birds that hide among the leaves when evening or a winter rain drives them from the mountains: mothers and men and the bodies of great-hearted heroes done with life, boys and unwed girls, and young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes; around them the black mud and unsightly reeds of Cocytus and the unlovely marsh with its sluggish water bind them, and Styx, flowing between nine times, confines them.
481Why, the very halls of Death and inmost Tartarus were spellbound, and the Furies with dark-blue snakes twined in their hair, and Cerberus held his three mouths agape, and the wheel of Ixion stood still in the wind. 485And now, retracing his steps, he had escaped every mishap; 486and Eurydice, given back, was coming to the upper air, following behind (for Proserpina had laid down this condition), when a sudden madness seized the unwary lover, one to be forgiven indeed, if the shades knew how to forgive. 490He stopped, and on his Eurydice, now at the very edge of the light, forgetful, alas! 491and overcome in mind, he looked back.
491There all his labour was poured away, and the pact of the pitiless tyrant broken, and three times a crash was heard over the pools of Avernus.