Chapter 1 - Orpheus in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca

Summary

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.