The Mask of Orpheus and Euridice fall in love and marry. Euridice later dies from a snake bite, and Orpheus consults the Oracle of the Dead, intending to follow her to the Underworld. Orpheus journeys to the Underworld through seventeen arches, each with a symbolic name. On his journey back, he believes Euridice is following him, but it is actually Persephone and the mime Euridice. Orpheus goes back for Euridice but realises she cannot follow him. Orpheus hangs himself. The act ends with Orpheus waking up, realising that his journey to the Underworld was a dream. The Seventeen Arches Each of the arches that
Greek mythology and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war. The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical "mythos"—and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius' "Argonautica", and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to Hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the "Homeric Hymn to Hermes", the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's "Theogony" is not only