Shortly after their wedding, Orpheus's beloved bride Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. In his grief, Orpheus desperately ventures to the underworld to bargain with its gods to bring his wife back from death. The agreement is made, so long as Orpheus does not turn and look back at his wife at any time before both of them have completed their journey from the underworld and re-entered the world of the living. Consumed with his passion for Eurydice, he is unable to bear this, and looks back once. Eurydice then vanishes, and this time is lost to him forever.

The parallels to this tale in Revenge of the Sith are plain and probably deliberate on Lucas's part: the willing journey into the underworld to save a loved one from death; the inability to let go in turn actually assuring that loved one is lost to them. Orpheus is also one of the few figures in mythology to enter the underworld and successfully return, and Anakin's own eventual return from his descent is apparently an unheard-of occurrence.