Orpheus and Eurydice

There were a number of cool references to a really great Greek myth in Episode 11 that I forgot about, namely the one about Orpheus and Eurydice. Remember this one? Orpheus, the celebrated poet-musician, heads down into Hades to retrieve his dead wife. He almost succeeds, being told that he can bring her back to life but that if he turns around to look while leading her out of Hades she will disappear back into the depths of the underworld. He gets right to the edge, right on the boundary, and has to look back of course, which ruins everything. What I forgot about this piece of Greek lore is what happened to old Orpheus afterwards. Apparently he was so grief-stricken by this second loss that he began to treat the Thracian women with contempt which really doesn’t work out so well for the guy. According to my annotations, the Thracians are so angered by his behavior that “they revenged themselves by tearing him to pieces in a Bacchanalian orgy.” And so it goes.