One of my favorite short narratives in all of Latin Literature is the Orpheus and Eurydice story in Vergil’s fourth Georgic. In my very early days as an undergraduate, when taking a Vergil course, I was given these lines from the Georgics and asked to produce a polished translation and commentary; I carefully and lovingly labored over this Latin text for weeks. A farmer named Aristaeus chases Eurydice through a field where she is bitten and killed by a serpent. Orpheus, in his intense grief, asks the ruler of the Underworld to allow him to bring his wife back to the living. However, by not following the only rule—not to look back at his wife on the journey up from Hades—he is unsuccessful.

Vergil also uses this as an etiological myth to explain the presence of bees. As a punishment for his indiscretion Aristaeus’s bee colony is destroyed and he is allowed to visit his mother and the other nymphs in their underwater lair to get advice on how to resurrect his hives. I vividly remember translating the part in which Aristaeus enters this watery, maternal realm—there were certain Latin words I keep thinking about and adjusting in my translation. My mother would call me every week and ask, “How are the bees coming along?” Although I had studied Latin in high school, I viewed translation as just another acquired skill, but it was due to this Vergil class and this short narrative I translated that made me decide to be a classicist.

Originally written in Latin and published in 29 B.C. Widely translated into English since the 17th Century, it can be read online here