Lekythos (oil flask) depicting Orpheus being killed, at Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Introduction In the last part, we left Ovid's story with Orpheus being unable to rescue his wife and went back to Thrace (to Rhodopen and Haemus). Hereafter, we saw that he eschewed women but was interested in the love of boys (here, Orpheus is seen as an originator of the Greek practice of philopaideia). To illustrate this, Ovid continues book 10 with a bunch of myths about boys and men that were loved by the Gods: Ganymedes, Hyacinthus, Adonis among others. The nifty way he recounts it is with ekphrasis, a narrative technique where a poet incorpates stories within stories. In book 10, Ovid represents the singer Orpheus secluded in a grove where he (Orpheus) sings off those boys. There's even a further layer in that the story of Adonis contains the story of Atalanta, recounted by Aphrodite to Adonis. It is after this sequence of myths recounted by Orpheus, that the poet focusses on Orpheus...
