[In the following excerpt, Segal focuses on death and mourning in the Alcestis and contends that the play, despite its depiction of women's feelings, is a firmly patriarchal work.]

ALCESTIS AND THE PROCESS OF DYING

Despite the fantastic circumstances, Alcestis' death unfolds as a “normal” death of a woman in the house: gradual, anticipated, full of pain and also of unexpected family tensions. We observe the inevitable progression as Alcestis makes elaborate preparations; bids tearful farewells to husband, children, and servants; and reveals her most intense emotions before the marriage bed, the center of the woman's life (177-84). The play therefore allows us an extraordinary glimpse of how men and women in classical Athens might be expected to respond to a wife and mother's death in the house. The play begins with the divinities Apollo and Thanatos (Death), but as soon as they exit at line 76, we enter a fully human world and witness the emotional consequences of a death in the family: conflict, escape, denial, and feelings of loss and guilt. The play presents a veritable anthropology of death, a kind of miniature encyclopedia of attitudes and responses, from the heroic self-sacrifice of the wife, which is established at once as the touchstone against which all other reactions to death are measured (cf. 83-85), to the unthinking self-centeredness of the husband and the sense of helpless loss in the children.

The Greek tragedies, we should recall, are not only great works of art; they are also cultural texts, and they were presented before the entire citizenry of Athens at the state festivals. It is legitimate, therefore, to look at this play not just as an autonomous, self-reflective literary and linguistic construct but also as a dense symbolic representation of social behavior, reflective of a culture's way of dealing with a recurrent crisis in human life. We must still be aware of the filter of artistic representation: the play is concerned with telling its story in its own dramatic form, not with being a cultural document. But because Euripides gains much of his dramatic effect by playing his fabulous myth off against a fairly realistically depicted set of cultural practices and attitudes, we can observe how the latter are condensed into clearly defined literary topoi, or plot motifs, such as the lament scene, the commemorative ode, and the unexpected rescue.¹ Even in their abbreviated or stylized form, these motifs offer important clues to cultural attitudes.

Of this interaction of social representation and artistic specificity I offer two small examples from what otherwise might appear to be minor details. First, the grave. The lowering of the coffin into the grave is occasionally depicted on the vases used for funerary libations.² In the Alcestis this scene gains a special emphasis from Admetus' emotional gesture of throwing himself into the grave (albeit shown only in a brief retrospective moment [897-902]). But it also forms part of a gradual depiction of the place of burial from different perspectives and thereby reveals different attitudes and different degrees of emotional involvement in Alcestis' death. The Olympian god Apollo in the prologue does not mention the tomb at all (65-69). Heracles regards the tomb merely as the place of his struggle against Death, and he uses no adjective (845, 1142). The Servant, on the other hand, who has been remembering and grieving for his dead mistress, identifies the burial place to Heracles as the “polished tomb” outside the city gates, implying a conspicuous stone monument in a place of honor (836). But shortly after that, Admetus, returning from the funeral, describes this burial place merely as the “hollow grave” into which he would throw himself in his intense grief (898). The chorus, at the end, in its heroization of Alcestis, firmly denies that the “tomb of your wife” would be merely “the burial mound of the dead who have perished” … (995) but rather would be a place of quasi-divine honor (995-1005). Yet the motif becomes more than a means of depicting the responses to Alcestis' death, for Admetus' phrase in line 898, “hollow grave” (taphros koilê), as Richard Garner points out, echoes Homer's expression for Hector's grave in the Iliad and Sophocles' term for Ajax's in Ajax.³ And so it evokes all the complicated inversions of heroism in this play, implicitly equating Alcestis with the fallen Homeric warrior and, in a further twist of irony, validating the truth of the chorus's vision of a heroized Alcestis in its last ode (995-1005).

The second example concerns dress. The detail of the dress or ornament of the dead (kosmos) appear as part of the standard preparations for the burial as the Servant describes them to the inquiring chorus of Thessalian women at the play's beginning (149).⁴ Admetus' father, Pheres, enters bearing a kosmos, some “ornament” appropriate to the burial, a natural way to motivate his arrival at the funeral, from which he will be so harshly rebuffed. Then, near the very end of the play, the term recurs as Admetus describes the veiled woman whom Heracles has “won” and wants him to keep in his house. Though Admetus cannot see her face because of the veil, he infers that she is young because of “the adornment and dress” (1050). The clothing and jewelry that were put into the earth as the kosmos for the dead now emerge from the grave as the “fitting” adornment of an attractive “young” woman (prepei, 1050). Alcestis is not only brought back to life but given back the freshness of youth. Yet the double meaning of kosmos (grave ornament and part of female adornment in general) reminds us of the strangeness and ambiguity of the situation. What begins as a prosaic detail of the burial ritual thus becomes the center of two of the play's extraordinary moments surrounding the burial, the son's rejection of his father's presence, and, eventually, the total reversal from funeral to reunion and remarriage.

ORDINARY DEATH

It is striking how rarely Greek literature presents the process of natural death. Warriors die in battle in the epics or in violent circumstances in the tragedies. The Iliad recognizes virtually no other death than that in war.⁵ The Odyssey takes a wider view, for instance in the death of Odysseus' mother (not from illness, as she says, but from longing), but offers little detail (11.197-203). The peaceful death of King Polybus in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a foil to the violent consequences that this news has for Oedipus himself (941-70, especially 960ff.).

Why should “ordinary” death have so extensive and realistic a treatment in the Alcestis? I can only offer some speculations. First of all, the play was probably intended to substitute for the buffoonish satyr drama that each dramatist usually presented after his three tragedies.⁶ The experience of death can be made so vivid here because it is going to be overthrown by life. Euripides exploits a double fantasy of escaping death: having someone die in one's place and forcing Death to dislodge his victim. But the effectiveness of the surprise ending depends on our being immersed first in the atmosphere of dying and grieving.

Then, more generally, Euripides is constantly exploring issues of contemporary society by removing the heroic patina of the myths he has inherited. He does this, for example, with marriage in Medea and Andromache, with war and politics in Hecuba and Trojan Women, and with vengeance in Electra and Orestes. The story of Alcestis provides the opportunity to study death in a domestic setting in a similar vein. By placing an indefinite period between the mythical prologue, with Apollo's offer of a substitute victim, and her actual dying, Euripides creates a mood of brooding and anxiety as this house waits for death.⁷ By dividing into two—namely Admetus and Heracles—the man who receives the gift of a surrogate victim and the folktale hero who wrestles with Death, Euripides introduces an ironical view of Admetus that enables him to question some of the traditional gender divisions involved in death and dying. Finally, by introducing a long and painful scene of conflict between Admetus and his father, Pheres, Euripides places the situation of dying into the larger context of the extended household, or oikos. The introduction of Heracles creates still another set of conflicts: namely, between the duty to mourn and the obligation to receive outsiders under the traditional ties of xenia, guest-friendship, between aristocratic males of different cities.⁸

STAGES OF MOURNING

The work of Sigmund Freud (1917) and the more detailed studies of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1970) have shown that the experience of death, both by the dying person and by the survivors, is a process with a certain shape and continuity. The Greeks constructed their encounter with death in a similar way and marked the stages of mourning in highly ritualized forms.⁹ The Iliad depicts in detail how Achilles moves from shock and possibly suicidal grief at Patroclus' death to rage, violent “acting out,” eventual relinquishment of the body for the funeral, and some measure of reconciliation or acceptance when he ransoms Hector's body.¹⁰

Admetus undergoes a similar process; and, I want to suggest, it changes him, although many readers (myself included) will feel that it does not change him enough. To be more precise, the scenic action schematically represents an experience in which a series of events, although long recognized as inevitable, has an effect that Admetus, in his role as mourner, did not anticipate. This unpredictability in turn depicts—in the necessarily condensed, stylized form of Greek drama—the broader social fact that death involves a transitional passage for the survivor as well as for the deceased, a journey whose endpoint cannot be known in advance.

The notion that grieving and weeping hold a therapeutic benefit for the mourner is familiar as early as Homer and finds expression here too, as elsewhere in tragedy.¹¹ But the play suggests a more subtle form of this “therapy” by showing the changes in Admetus brought about by the actual process of living through the aftermath of Alcestis' death. His responses demonstrate that the grieving process cannot be circumscribed in the external act of a single moment, like making a statue of Alcestis for his bed (348-56), or in a simple external command to his subjects to wear mourning dress and refrain from music (425-31)—a command that Admetus, ironically, does not observe in his own house (cf. 747-72). Grieving, for Admetus, proves to be not the static, vaguely defined future state of a life without festivity (343-47) but rather an experience in time with a rhythm, intensity, and energy of its own.

Admetus' grieving, it must be added, starts out with a load of egotism and selfishness that is probably too heavy to be completely lifted by his experiences. In the same breath, for example, he promises lifelong mourning for his wife and continuing hatred of his mother and father (336-42). The latter sentiment was surely shocking to Euripides' contemporary audience (cf. Aristophanes' use of father beating in the Clouds); and this conflict within the family is never resolved within the limits of the play.¹² Nevertheless, Admetus does at least begin to enter the transitional crisis that the grieving process provokes. It is among the further ironies of the play that this whole process nears completion in the closing scene, only to be aborted by the miraculous happy ending. Thus Admetus, far from learning the lessons that this experience has begun to teach him (arti manthanô, 940), is encouraged to relapse into his initial selfishness and self-centeredness, once more betraying his wife to honor a guest-friend (1096ff.).

THE FATED DAY: TIME AND MORTALITY

The opening scenes draw their pathos from the approach of the “fated day” as the frame for the hopes and fears of the mortal characters who live in the precious and limited flow of ongoing time.¹³ Apollo has saved the house “up to this day” (9) and announces that the awaited end will come “on this day” (20). The chorus knows—we are not told how—that this is the fateful day (kurion êmar, 105); and the Servant echoes their words later for Alcestis' own recognition of the same moment (hêmeran tên kurian, 158). When Apollo, in the prologue, describes Death as “watching for this day on which she must die” (26), Euripides is invoking the epic and tragic mood of death's inexorability. Death greedily awaits the hour when he may seize his victim.

Death appears as the frozen moment of the “right now” (322) that Alcestis sees terminating the rhythmic succession of days, months, and years (320-22): “For I must die, and that woe is coming not tomorrow, nor the day after; but at once [autika] shall I be reckoned among those who no longer exist.”¹⁴ To Admetus, however, she holds out the promise that “time” (chronos) will “soften” his pain (380), a commonplace echoed, with multiple ironies, by Heracles in the last scene (1085).

The actual experience of dying is acted out by Alcestis in body, emotion, and ritual. Her death is a nosos, a disease, that follows a predictable course over time, just as the contemporary medical treatises of Hippocrates teach that it should. Early in the play Apollo refers to Alcestis' dying by the verb psuchorrhagein (19f.), “letting the soul break loose” at the final gasp. The Servant repeats the word in the first human account of her condition (143). In the same speech the Servant reports her as “wasting away and being extinguished by disease” (203) and “still breathing a little” (205). The chorus repeats the former phrase as it laments “this best of women, who is being extinguished by disease” (235f.).

However common in real life, this situation, as I noted earlier, is rare in tragedy. The opening scenes of the Hippolytus, presented a decade later, show us Phaedra's illness, but this is shrouded in mystery and is not quite a physical illness. Even in a play like Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, whose protagonist is old and infirm, the actual dying process is kept at a distance. In this miraculous end, in fact, the hero departs “without illness, in no pain” (1663f.). The dying of Euripides' Hippolytus and Sophocles' Heracles in the Trachinian Women are, of course, more drawn out, but these are still violent deaths, outside the house.

In Alcestis' case we are shown the physical weakness in her last moments as Admetus asks her to raise her head, and she answers that she would if she had the strength (388f.). “My eye in darkness becomes heavy,” she had said just before (385). Euripides exploits the pathos of the scene in the child's cry, “Look, look at her eye[s] and her stretched-out hands” (399). It is assumed that she will die surrounded by her family, even the small children, from whom nothing is hidden.¹⁵

“TAME DEATH”: ALCESTIS' PREPARATIONS

Despite her weakened condition, Alcestis makes the rounds of her house, “stands” before the altar of Hestia, the goddess of the domestic space of the household, and “goes to” all the other altars (162ff.). Prepared and accepting, she takes this final farewell of the ritual life of the house. Then, in her first onstage speech of the play, she makes practical provision for her children's future. She speaks of her death with matter-of-fact simplicity as she makes her last request (280-81): “Admetus, for you see how matters stand with me, I want to tell you what I wish before I die.”¹⁶

In the following lines she refers to her dying in the same direct, nonmetaphorical way (284f.). She uses metaphor only in the familiar expression, again reflective of the real situation, of “not looking on the light” (282). Closer to the end, she self-consciously marks the division between herself and the living: “You may speak of me as being nothing any longer” (387; cf. 320-22, 381). The stark “I exist no longer” (ouden eim' eti) is her final utterance before the last syllable, “farewell” (chair'), spoken, we may surmise, with a failing voice (cf. 385, 388f.).

Before this final moment, however, we see Alcestis moving from the ritual gestures of farewell as the final day arrives (158-95) to a moment of lonely horror in her visions of Charon, who seems to embody here the dread that death's approach arouses even in the most self-assured breast (252-64): “I see the two-oared boat in the marsh; the ferryman of corpses, Charon, with his hand on the pole, is already calling me: ‘Why do you delay? Hurry up! You are keeping me.’ Hastening me along with such remarks, he makes me hurry. … Someone is driving me, driving me on—don't you see?—to the hall of the dead, winged, glancing beneath his dark-eyed brows. What will you do? Let me go! Alas, utterly miserable that I am: this is the road on which I go forth.” Euripides makes us see the dying person's fear and existential isolation. Charon, or “someone,” is forcibly pushing her to join the mass of the dead, the nekues (253, 260).¹⁷

Alcestis' moment of terror stands out against the mythicized visions of death elsewhere in the play. The personified Death (Thanatos) whom Apollo meets in the prologue of Alcestis is a rather buffoonish, if determined, figure with whom he can banter in clever repartee. Thanatos carries a knife or sword, but he uses it to consecrate his victim to the underworld, not to cut flesh.¹⁸ Admetus briefly sketches an underworld landscape, with Pluto's dog, Cerberus, and Charon's boat (360f.), but only as a part of his unreal wish for Orpheus' magical voice. Late in the play Heracles, the closest of all the characters to the mythical world, describes Death as wearing a black robe (843) and wanting to drink the bloody offerings by the tomb (844f., 850f.). These are not pleasant features; yet this Death also has “ribs” that Heracles can squeeze with his brawny arms to make him surrender his victim (847-49). Alcestis, however, experiences a place of fearful separation and disorientation where Charon drives her brutally across the horrid marsh to the nameless nekues, the lifeless ones, on the other side (252-64).

Only gradually does she come to something like what Philippe Ariès calls “tame death,” acceptance and understanding as she reviews her decision to die (280-98) and arranges for her children's future (299ff.).¹⁹ Although she extracts Admetus' promise not to remarry, for the children's sake, she also consoles him by imagining a calmer future life, a time beyond this grief: “Time will soften you,” she says, in reply to his despairing cries (380ff., cf. 1085). The peaceful death follows soon after, with her farewells to the children and to Admetus (385-91).

Admetus' experience of death, like Alcestis', has a zigzag or spiral pattern rather than a strictly linear one. Throughout the play he moves between the contradictions of accepting and acquiescing in Alcestis' sacrifice and complaining that his life is now unlivable (cf. 274-78, 382, 386, 391; also the chorus in 228f. and 241). Even so, the new emptiness in his life becomes increasingly clear to him as he actually experiences the house in its bereavement (866ff., 912-25, 939ff.).²⁰ After moving between emotional cries and a calmer, more rational assessment, he gradually reaches a kind of clarity.²¹

He now has a more raw and realistic grasp of his changed situation, and the measure of the change is the difference between his flowery promise about the statue in the deathbed scene (348ff.) and his wish to throw himself into Alcestis' grave when he returns to the stage after the funeral (895ff.). Early in the play the Servant had told the inquiring chorus, “The funeral ornament is ready with which her husband will bury her” (149). The objective, ritual detail of the “husband” “burying [something] with” Alcestis (sunthapsei, 149) has now shifted to a very different emotional register as the husband wants, in effect, to bury himself with his wife (897-99):²² …

Why did you prevent me from throwing myself into the hollow grave of her tomb and from lying there in death with her, by far the best of women?

His intense emotionality here resembles the moments of profound suffering in more traditionally “serious” tragedies: Haemon's suicide and Creon's grief at the end of Antigone, Theseus' grief at the death of Phaedra.²³ It also evokes the intensity of female grief which leads to death with the spouse (sunthanein): such are the suicides of Euadne in the Suppliants of Euripides (however acted out on the stage) and of Deianeira in Sophocles' Trachiniae.²⁴

Admetus' speech of recognition near the end, “Now I understand” (935ff.), repeats much of the material in his lyrical cries of grief at his reentrance (especially 913-25); but he now has a firmer grasp of what Alcestis' death means (cf. 955ff.). The bed is truly “empty” (945), not filled by the “cold delight” of his floridly promised statue (348ff.). His image of the children at his knees lamenting over their mother's absence may be merely self-pity (947f.), but it also shows him more specifically and concretely aware of their suffering than he had seemed earlier (cf. 265, 388, 404f.). He now sees himself in the very role that Alcestis had occupied early in the play, in the scene pictured by the Servant inside the house (189-91). In fact, the combination of bed and children here, along with the close verbal echo between lines 196 and 950, suggests that he is now reliving that intense feeling of loss and desolation in the oikos that Alcestis experienced.²⁵ Perhaps we are even to think that he really is making good his deathbed promise to be a mother as well as a father to them in her absence (377f.).

In first welcoming Heracles within the house, Admetus essentially denies Alcestis' death. He claims that Alcestis is both living and dead and that the dead woman is an “outsider” in the house (517ff., 532ff.). On the one hand, he allows Heracles to believe that the death lies in the distant future (525f.); on the other, he artificially separates Alcestis from the blood relations of the house (she is the “outsider,” 532ff.). This removal of Alcestis' death in both time (“in the future”) and space (“outsider”) is the (emotionally) logical prelude to his partitioning the house between its mourning and feasting sections.²⁶ Although we need not interpret these scenes psychologically, his words and acts do, in fact, constitute a denial, which, as Kubler-Ross points out, is one of the early stages in the process of mourning.²⁷

In his last scenes with Heracles, however, Admetus is completely overcome by his grief and cannot hold back his tears (1064ff., 1079ff.). He can actually “taste the bitter grief” (1069, repeating the significant “now,” arti, from line 940, “Now I understand”).²⁸ He fully acknowledges the sorrow that he had concealed from his friend in the earlier scene—an emotional education parallel to the intellectual “understanding” of lines 935-61. He now recognizes how essential Alcestis had been for his basic identity, his view of himself and his life. She chose not to live in a house empty of her husband (287-89); he finds the house changed as he reenters it, and he is changed with it.

Although he now repeats many of the lamentations that he uttered just after Alcestis' death (328-434), the mood is different. When he says how hard it is for him to look upon this bereaved house (911-14), he brings together in a new way the motifs of sadness and revelry that had been shockingly combined before (760-72). Previously the simultaneity of mourning and feasting was merely the factual result of Admetus' welcoming Heracles into his afflicted house. Now he combines the antitheses not literally but as an emotional experience, in his own thoughts, as he juxtaposes the remembered joy of his wedding with his present sorrow (915-25). In this overlay of the present by the past, he places the “revelry” (kômos) of the marriage hymn beside the dirge; and the aural change has a visual equivalent in the juxtaposition of white robes with black (918, 922f.).²⁹ This past “revel” (kômos) of the wedding in line 918 recalls Admetus' promise—which he failed to keep—to put an end to revels in the house (343). It also recalls the feasting of Heracles (748ff.), which the Servant disgustedly labeled a “revel” (kômos, 804). Admetus has moved beyond the divisions in the house implied by those recent revels. In remembering the rites of marriage in the midst of the rites of mourning, he brings feasting and lamentation together in a more emotionally reflective, complex, and integrated way.

Just before Alcestis' death, Admetus made an elaborate promise that he would never remarry (328-42). At the end of the play, when he is still refusing Heracles' request that he take the nameless woman into the house, he encounters the more realistic demands of what it means to honor the marriage chamber. The terms of his refusal even recall Alcestis' sad and solemn rites of farewell at the beginning (cf. 181-88 and 1046f., 1059f.).³⁰ He now experiences the recognition that he cannot separate his role as king, friend, and dispenser of hospitality from his concerns as husband, father, and mourner of his wife.³¹ The figure whose arrival initially divided the house now restores it to health and wholeness. But before that restoration is complete, Admetus begins to accomplish the reintegration within himself, interiorizing at least some of Alcestis' responsibilities for its inner life (e.g., in recognizing the children's and the servants' suffering in lines 947-49). This being an ironical pro-satyric play, not a tragedy, however, all these developments are cut off and turned around. Admetus betrays his promises just at the moment when he seems to be fulfilling the tragic anagnorisis of learning through suffering.

MALE TEARS

Whether or not Admetus is any more likable at the play's end will probably continue to be a matter of controversy.³² Euripides could have let him refuse the woman first and then have him rewarded for his new firmness and understanding. Instead, he lets his hero fail the tests that Heracles' gift poses and so once more betray his commitment to Alcestis. Admetus' last speech reverses his earlier decree banning festivity in his kingdom and so recalls the intensity of his previous suffering.³³ His last two lines—the last iambic lines of the play—touch on a contradiction that he does not perceive: “For now we have changed to a way of life better than the previous; for I will not deny that I enjoy good fortune” … (1157f.). Yet it is precisely the loss of this good fortune that has effected the change. In fact, Admetus has also begun this “change to a better life” by continuing the old one, taking advantage of others' sacrifices and betraying his most solemn promises. On the other hand, this “good fortune” reminds us of the hospitality and generosity that won the god's favor and so made the situation possible in the first place. Euripides, like his hero, seems to have it both ways: he shows us a severely chastened Admetus and an Admetus who is rewarded, a second time, for putting the claims of hospitality first.

The extent of Admetus' resistance to Heracles' offer, however, is significant. It marks a change from the readiness with which he invited Heracles into his house in the previous scene (535ff.). There is still another change toward his guest-friend. Whereas Admetus previously concealed his emotions (540ff.), he now openly displays his tears (1064-69). In the first scene of lamentation, by Alcestis, as the Servant tells us, “all the coverlet of her bed was drenched with an eye-wetting flood of tears” … (183f.). The hyperbole, in the Aeschylean style (with only three words to line 184), depicts both the Servant's involvement and the emotional expressiveness permitted to women. Admetus here “laments” (klaei, 201), but nothing is said of tears. The exaggerated weeping of Alcestis in lines 183-84, however, emphasizes her courage shortly before, when, as the day of death arrives, she remains “without lamenting, without groan” (aklautos, astenaktos, 173). Like a heroic warrior too, she does not change color at the approaching woe (173f.). Are we then to view Admetus' tears, like his desire to throw himself into her tomb, as another reversal of gender roles?³⁴

To answer this question we must examine male weeping more broadly, especially in the fifth century. The subject has not received much attention, but this play and other supporting evidence suggest an attitude of hesitation, or at least ambivalence, about male weeping.³⁵ The most manly heroes do not weep, or do so only as the sign of overwhelming catastrophe and as a temporary lapse from their manliness. For a man to weep for himself is to risk feminization.³⁶

For the Greeks after Homer, even more sharply than for us, tears were a gendered category. Although men wept, tears were particularly characteristic of women. Women's “love of lamentation” and “love of tears” were a commonplace of Greek thought, often reiterated in tragedy.³⁷ Like all intense emotions, weeping was associated with the female and with irrationality, and thus required social regulation. According to Plutarch, Solon established for women's expression of grief (penthesi) a law that restrained its “disorderly and unbridled quality” (to atakton kai akolaston, Life of Solon 21.5). He also restrained “breast beating and lamentation” (thrênein) at burials; and Plutarch adds that even in his time the gunaikonomoi could punish those who indulged in “unmanly and womanly expressions of emotion in grieving.”³⁸ …

In Bacchylides' Fifth Ode (probably of 476 b.c.) Heracles is said to weep only once, in pity for Meleager's early death, when he hears the story from the shade in Hades (155-58).³⁹ At the end of Plato's Phaedo, Socrates dismisses the wailing women when he would accomplish his exemplary death of philosophical courage with his male companions, though the companions later prove less stalwart than their master and do weep. In the Republic, Plato objects to tragedy because it arouses strong emotions of grief in the audience; and for men to be seen thus by their peers is shameful; it is behavior appropriate to women, not men (Republic 10.603e-604e, cf. 3.387e-389e).

Amid the losses of the great plague of Athens that Plutarch relates in his Life of Pericles (36.8-9), Pericles did not give in to grief and thereby “betray his pride and his greatness of soul … nor was he seen weeping or mourning or present at the tomb of any of his kin,” until the death of his last surviving son. Only then, Plutarch continues, was Pericles unable to “endure” (enkarterein) or keep his “grandeur of soul” (to megalopsuchon); he was overcome by grief when he placed the wreath on his son's head “so that he broke out in wailing and shed abundance of tears, having never done any such thing in any other time of his life.” Plutarch regards this restraint, to be sure, as extraordinary, but he also treats it as the sign of Pericles' manly virtues of great-souledness and endurance.

One of tragedy's functions may well have been to display and demonstrate that women's proclivity to excess grief was every bit as bad as it was supposed to be. But, paradoxically, it simultaneously gave expression to that release of tears, including male tears, that the Greeks from Homer on regarded as a “pleasure.” Given the Athenian state's careful supervision and restriction of private lamentation at tombs and at funerals, it is even possible, as Nicole Loraux suggests, that the theater served as the area where this “pleasure in lament” could find its expression.⁴⁰ Such expression, however, bracketed by the festival occasion and the literary form, was marked as exceptional, as outside the limits of acceptable behavior.⁴¹ A fortiori, male weeping was also suspect. But tragedy can explore the exceptional situations where it is permissible, thereby both validating the norm and also providing the occasion for indulging in its relaxation, at least vicariously. A male audience could enjoy identifying with the cathartic release of tears without suffering the stigma of “womanliness.”

In tragedy, and especially in Euripides, male protagonists do weep over heavy misfortunes, their own or others', but the circumstances are usually extreme grief or frustration. Sophocles' Hyllus weeps when he sees the sufferings of his father (Trachiniae 795f.). Philoctetes weeps when he awakens on Lemnos and sees the Greek ships that abandoned him sailing away (Philoctetes 276-80); and Neoptolemus weeps over his father at Troy and over his loss of Achilles' arms (359f., 367f.). Polyneices sheds tears at the sight of his father's condition (Oedipus at Colonus 1250f., 1253-56), although Oedipus himself takes a bitterly ironical view of this weeping (1356-58). In Euripides, Hippolytus says that he is near or in tears at his father's decree of exile (Hippolytus 1070f., 1078f.). Ion weeps at the tale of his mother's sufferings (Ion 1369-73). Orestes sheds tears of joy at his reunion with his sister in Iphigeneia in Tauris (832f., 862); and in Orestes he weeps when he recovers from an attack of his madness (42-44). In the same play Menelaus weeps when he hears of the death of Agamemnon (367f.). In Phoenissae Polyneices weeps at his exile when he returns in secret to Thebes (366-68); and in the pathos-filled death scene of the two brothers Eteocles can address his mother only with his tears (1440f.). Finally, in Iphigeneia in Aulis Agamemnon weeps in private in the agony of his decision about the sacrifice of his daughter (39-41).

Although weeping over one's own troubles can be a sign of unmanly weakness, it is legitimate for men to weep in compassion for another's woes, although here too there are strong limits. Prometheus is ready to weep for Io but does not actually do so (Prometheus Vinctus 637-39). In Oedipus Tyrannus Oedipus weeps for his city's tribulations and later for his children (65f., 1485f.). In the first case, however, though Oedipus tells the priest that he shed tears over the suffering of his city, he does not weep onstage. In the second case, Creon calls for restraint (1515). In the Odyssey the entire Greek army can weep at Achilles' burial: “There you would not see any of the Argives without tears” (24.61f.). By contrast, in Euripides' Hecuba, for example, the old herald, Talthybius, can “wet his eye [with tears]” in pity at Polyxena's death (518-20), but the army only feels “pain” or “woe” (ponon, 572), with nothing said of tears. Polymestor weeps in compassion (so he claims) for Hecuba's sufferings (Hecuba 953-55), but these are the crocodile tears of a treacherous false friend. Menelaus tells how he responded with tears of pity when he saw his brother weeping, but these tears are not shed in the present moment (Iphigeneia in Aulis 476-79).

A large proportion of these male weepers, furthermore, are young and immature, and a significant proportion are old men: Creon at the end of Antigone (1261ff.) and Phoenissae (1310f.), Peleus in Andromache (1200-1220), Amphitryon in Heracles (528, 1113f., 1180f.), the old man in Euripides' Electra (500-502), Creusa's old servant in Ion (940, 967), Cadmus at the end of Bacchae (1372f.). As lamentation is a woman's task, male tears, as many of the passages above suggest, are a sign of weakness, defeat, and feminization. Both the vanquished Xerxes at the end of Aeschylus' Persians (1026-77) and the crushed Adrastus in Euripides' Suppliants (770-836) not only weep but join in an antiphonal lament with women (cf. Suppliants 201-23). Xerxes, however, is a defeated barbarian, regal though he is; and in the case of Adrastus, Theseus, exemplar of male nobility and generosity, will lead his friend out of this feminine lament and back to a manly discourse on war (837ff.).⁴²

The most unquestionably virile heroes of tragedy regard tears as a loss of masculinity. Tears would thus function as one of the female elements through which tragedy can explore the male's fear of feminization.⁴³ Tecmessa tells how unwonted were the cries of Ajax, for he considered such wailing to be the sign of a “base and heavy-hearted man” (Ajax 319f.). Shortly before, Ajax used the cliché about women's tears when he gruffly told Tecmessa not to weep (579f.). Similarly, in Trachiniae, Heracles, weeping in the agony of the robe's poison, feels himself unmanned by his tears, “for no one would ever say that he had seen this man ever doing such a thing before, but without lament I always held out in suffering. But now, alas, from [being] such, I am found out a woman” (1072-75, cf. 1070). It is part of Heracles' tragedy that this hero of masculine endurance confronts in himself the “feminine” condition of physical vulnerability and surrender to pain and lament (cf. also 1046ff., especially 1062ff.). Euripides' Heracles, similarly reduced, says he never thought he would weep (1353-57); and Theseus, leading him back to life, as it were, urges, “Enough of tears” (1394; cf. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1515).

In the Helen Menelaus weeps in frustration when he approaches the palace of Theoclymenus in a somewhat comic scene (455-57), but then he gains in heroic stature and refuses to shed tears to win Theonoe's pity (947-53). Turning to tears, he says, is “female” (thêlu), not the part of a man of “action” (drastêrios, 991f.). Orestes associates tears with lack of manhood (anandria, Orestes 1031f.). For King Agamemnon in the Iphigeneia in Aulis, weeping is for those of low birth (dusgeneia) and is not permitted to the gennaios (446-48). Though he envies common men such relief, he himself is “ashamed” of weeping (aidoumai, 451-53).

When men do give way to tears, it is often after a struggle to keep them back. When the Atreid kings hear the terrible prophecy in the Agamemnon, they strike their staffs on the ground and “cannot hold back the tears” (203f.). The Theban elders of the Antigone, pitying the heroine, “can no longer hold back the springs of tears” (802f.). Heracles enjoins his son to be “without tears or groans” when he makes the pyre, if he is truly the son of his manly father (Trachiniae 1199-1201). At the end of the play, he illustrates his own precept, reversing his earlier surrender to weeping, as he prepares to meet his end in firm, enduring silence (1259-63).⁴⁴

ADMETUS' TEARS: GENDER AND THE “UNIVERSALITY” OF DEATH

We can now return to Alcestis and consider the weeping of Admetus in the closing scenes. Through Admetus' prolonged display of grieving and weeping, Euripides explores the places where the rigid dichotomies of male and female behavior in this society collapse and where there is even an overlapping of male and female roles.⁴⁵ This blurring of gender roles increases the ironies surrounding Admetus and the ambiguities of his character.

When the Servant tells Heracles that the dead woman is Alcestis, the latter apostrophizes Admetus sympathetically, “O poor man, what a companion you lost” (824). Here the way is prepared for Heracles' role vis-à-vis Admetus in the last scene, the compassionate friend who stands by and offers comfort, permitting, even encouraging, the relief of tears.⁴⁶ In the scene with the Servant, Heracles goes on to recall how he noticed the “eye flowing with tears and the shorn head and the face” (826f.). Admetus on that occasion “persuaded” him otherwise, “saying that he was bringing to the tomb a remote family member, an outsider” (827f.). We cannot be sure whether the tearful eye here is Admetus' or the Servant's, and commentators are divided; but Heracles' exclamation in line 824 and the reference to Admetus' “persuading” him (827f.) make it more likely that the tears are in fact Admetus'. It is important, however, that this detail of his weeping is filtered through Heracles' observation and that Admetus is seen as resisting those tears, as his attempted persuasion of Heracles implies.

In the play's final scene that resistance has broken down. Face-to-face with Heracles and the veiled woman, Admetus speaks of his emotions and weeps copiously. Addressing the woman and remarking on her resemblance to Alcestis, he turns back (with characteristic egotism) to his own feelings: “She stirs up my heart, and from my eyes springs [of tears] have broken forth” (1066f.). Even these tears, however, do not come without resistance. At the beginning of the scene, when Heracles asks Admetus to take the woman in, he replies with a statement about his weeping (1045-48): “Do not remind me of my woes. Seeing this woman in the halls, I would not be able to be without tears [adakrus einai]. Do not add illness to me who am already ill, for I am weighted down enough with misfortune.” Admetus' resistance here is primarily to the emotional pain that this woman's presence would cause. Yet, given the context (a dialogue with Heracles) and the negative formulation (“I would not be able to be tearless”), he may be implying that these tears too should be resisted. This is the approved male attitude of holding out against tears, but it is a strength of which Admetus feels himself incapable.

Heracles not only acknowledges the need to weep but in fact sanctions it. He sees that Admetus cannot help himself and that he pays no attention to his friend's urging that he “endure.” “It is easier to give advice,” Admetus says, “than to endure [karterein], when you are the sufferer” (1078). Admetus here rejects the traditionally manly role of karteria in the face of suffering. Heracles points out, with his characteristic practicality, that “to lament forever” does no good. In the next exchange, however, Heracles seems to sanction tears for a lost beloved (1080f.): …

ADMETUS.
I myself also know this, but some desire [longing, erôs] leads [me] forth [exagei].
HERACLES.
[Yes,] for loving the one who died leads [forth] the tear.

Heracles' commonplaces in the following lines check Admetus' almost sentimental exaggerations about being “destroyed” and “dead” (1082-86). Even so, his compassionate presence allows Admetus to acknowledge the extent of his “desire” (whether for weeping or for Alcestis, or both).⁴⁷ Heracles' repetition of his friend's term “leads forth” (exagei, agei, 1080f.) now supports him in his emotional response. More restrained than Admetus, he uses the simpler form of the verb and speaks of “a tear” (dakru), not “springs” (pêgai) of tears (1068). Nevertheless, he virtually gives Admetus permission to weep.

The hyperbole of Admetus' “springs” of tears in line 1068 resembles that of Alcestis' “flood” of weeping in her bedchamber in the play's first extended account of lamentation (183f.). But she is in her bedchamber and in the interior space of the house, which belongs particularly to women. Admetus is standing outside the house, receiving a great hero fresh from a “contest” and a victory, and yet the “feminine” quality of copious weeping elicits no reproach, even from the manly Heracles. We may contrast the admonitions to stop weeping, in the analogous situations, at the end of the Tyrannus, the Heracles, and the Euripidean Suppliants.⁴⁸

Admetus' earlier lamentation takes place within his narrow domestic circle (199-202). It is quite another thing to show his tears to a peer from the exclusively male, public realm of action and heroic behavior, as he does at the end. Admetus, to be sure, is still in the house, or close to it, and not in the more public settings of Socrates or Pericles in the passages from Plato and Plutarch cited above⁴⁹ Yet the presence of Heracles, with his heroic mission (481ff.), his direct address to Admetus as “lord of the Thessalians” (510), and the anticipated reciprocity of guest-friendship in “thirsty Argos” (560), all introduce a degree of self-consciousness about the outside, male, political world.

The greeting between the two kings takes place, necessarily, in the more public area outside the house. “Do I find Admetus in the house?” Heracles asks on his entrance, and the chorus repeats “in the house” in their answer (en domoisi, 477-78). For the actual meeting Admetus comes “outside the house” in his role as “ruler of this land,” as the chorus announces: … (And in fact here is the lord of the land himself, Admetus, coming forth outside the house, 507). The greeting between the two men has something of the dignity of a state visit (509): …

ADMETUS.
Hail, O son of Zeus and (descendant) of Perseus' blood.
HERACLES.
Admetus, hail in turn, Thessalians' lord.

Euripides reinforces the reversals in Admetus' behavior by recalling earlier scenes. Most strikingly, Admetus (1043ff.) makes exactly the same arguments for not receiving the woman that Heracles had made for Admetus' not receiving him as guest (538ff. and 545ff.). His description of his “heavy misfortune” in line 1048 echoes his sympathetic address to his children in lines 404f., but now he is willing to share that personal loss with his guest-friend from outside, including the tears of lines 1047 and 1067f. His statement “Now I understand” (940), unsolicited and arising from a longer experience of loss, sounds less perfunctory and more radical than his acknowledgment of the chorus' remark about “necessity” (420f.): “I understand. This woe has come upon me suddenly. Knowing it, I have long since been worn down.”⁵⁰ The contrast between “now” (arti) in line 940 and “long since” (palai) in line 421 also suggests a new grasp of the length of time required really to “learn” about such a loss, although Admetus' “learning” is always clouded by self-pity.⁵¹

We do not, of course, see what Alcestis may have learned or how the experience of dying will color her future existence. The requirements of ritual (1143-46) and dramatic economy contribute to keeping her silent at the end.⁵² The play is called Alcestis, but its real center is probably Admetus, and the real concern is male rather than female experience. Alcestis is there as the object of loss but also as a problem: she displays and embodies a heroism that Admetus himself cannot reach. By shifting the focus gradually, but forcefully, from her experience in the house to Admetus and then to Heracles, Euripides moves from female to male emotions in the face of death. The male head of the household need not be a Heracles. In fact, he can weep before Heracles and even find support and consolation for these tears. His experiences become increasingly emotional and internal, not physical; understanding, rather than acting. To our even greater surprise, Euripides works an analogous transformation in the Greek hero of masculine energy par excellence. This Heracles not only vanquishes Death, the ultimate heroic exploit; he is also perceptive of his friend's feelings (cf. 826-28) and expresses compassion for the loss and sympathy for Admetus' need to weep (1081). He thereby enables his weaker comrade (and perhaps those in the audience who identify with him) to have both the tearful grief and the rescued bride.

However much the play seems to open up a space for the woman's experience of death and the woman's feelings, it returns us to the patriarchal world in which it has its origins. The dubieties of Admetus' character, with its attendant ironies and ambiguities, certainly allow for a reading subversive of aristocratic patriarchy. But the modern reader's response on these issues is likely to be very different from the ancient spectator's. This is a gap which ultimately we may not be able to bridge, but we can at least try to understand.

Although the experience of death by the survivors is an area where we probably share a great deal of common ground with the ancients, at least two major differences in cultural behavior emerge when we look at this play. First, the experience of normal, gradual, domestic death focuses on the woman, Indeed, the female character in fifth-century tragedy often serves as the field in which the male audience can act out its own emotions of grief, fear, anxiety about the body, or loss of emotional control.⁵³ Women may have fame or good repute (eukleia), like Phaedra in Hippolytus, but they do not have the honor (timê) of men (except, of course, in the extraordinary, hypothetical cases of an Antigone, an Electra, or an Alcestis);⁵⁴ and therefore it is legitimate for them to weep, fear, and become emotionally violent or irrational in ways that the ideals of sophrosunê, timê, and karteria make inhibiting for men. When Medea says that she would prefer to stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once (Medea 250f.), she is, of course, expressing a realistic concern of women; but she also reminds the men in the audience (and the audience may have been only men in the fifth century; certainly the judges were) that it is also frightening to stand in the line of battle.⁵⁵ In other words, the feminine persona can express, through female experience, emotions that would be dishonorable for a man to express openly.

Second, attitudes toward death depend to a great extent on how the society and the individual regard what comes after death. With the lack of a strong belief in personal immortality, the Greeks focus on the world of the living and so define life in terms of its contrasts with the inevitability of old age and death.⁵⁶ This does not necessarily result in more anxiety about death than a committed Platonist or a believing Christian might have; but it does, I think, produce a greater willingness than we would feel to recognize death as an inseparable part of life. A twentieth-century North American, for example, would probably be more inclined to define life in terms of health, happiness, and an anticipated span of years (within limits given by actuarial tables and medical prognosis), and less inclined to invoke so explicitly death's dark “necessity” as life's defining term. Sophocles' famous Ode on Man contains an implicit definition of man in terms of his domination over nature by intelligence (Antigone 332-75) but adds as an essential qualifying part of this definition, “From Hades alone he will bring no means of escape” (361f.).

For all the beauty of its language and the happy ending, the Alcestis still draws heavily on this language of tragic inevitability, the “necessity” (anankê) of the final ode (962ff.). In this perspective, which tragedy inherits from Homeric epic and which we see reflected in Sophocles' Ode on Man, death is the ultimate defining term of the human condition, male as well as female. It delimits the “portion” (the Homeric moira or aisa) that the Fates (Moirai) spin out for each of us at birth (cf. Odyssey 7.197f., 24.28f.). It separates us definitively from the gods, the “deathless ones” (athanatoi), and it makes us what we are: brotoi, mortales, beings subject to death. When Admetus regains his wife from death, it is after he has come to recognize, experientially, these conditions of mortality. Their future life together will run its course in the shadow of expected, normal death.⁵⁷

At this point the traditional humanist critic, his work completed, leans back in the comfortable gesture of celebrating universal humanity: male and female are once more joined together after each has experienced the bitterness of death. We have, however, learned to be a little suspicious of what “universality” may conceal. If we want to see male and female differences here bridged under the sign of common mortality, very well; but let us remember that only Alcestis has died, and she appears at the end still robed in the ominous silence of death (1144-46). She has had all the pain of dying; Admetus has had both the joy of lamentation and the joy of always looking on the light of the sun.⁵⁸

Notes

1. On Euripides' tendency to compose in terms of such more or less isolated motifs, see Seeck (1985) 157ff.

2. For the lowering of the coffin into the grave, see the Athenian black-figure loutrophoros by the Sappho-painter (Athens, Nat. Mus. 450): Kurtz and Boardman (1971) pl. 36; also Shapiro (1991) 634, with fig. 4.

3. Garner (1988) 64, citing Iliad 24.797, and Ajax 1165 and 1403. For still a further set of associations, see Seaford (1986) 57f., apropos of Deianeira's koila demnia in Sophocles, Trachiniae 901.

4. Compare the agalmata (adornments) that Hecuba places over the body of Astyanax in Trojan Women 1218-20.

5. See Loraux (1982) 32f. There are a few exceptions, e.g., Achilles' anticipation of Peleus' death from old age in Iliad 24; cf. also Andromache's lament over Hector in Iliad 24.743-45.

6. That Alcestis is a substitute for a satyr play is the consensus of modern scholars and probably the view of ancient scholars as well (Hypothesis II, ad fin.): see Lesky (1925) 84-86; Dale (1954) xviii ff.; Seidensticker (1982) 129ff., 137ff.; and Conacher (1984) 73f. Occasional arguments are proposed for its being a regular tragic offering; e.g., most recently by Riemer (1989), with a useful review of earlier scholarship, see pp. 1-5; see also Lesky (1983) 209; and Von Fritz (1962) 263f., 312-21.

7. See Lesky (1925) 55.

8. See Rosenmeyer (1963) 235f.

9. See, for example, Garland (1985) 13-20; Alexiou (1974) 4-10, 25-33; Danforth (1982) 35-56.

10. The concern of literary work with the mourning process is already well established in the Near Eastern epic tradition in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero's grief for Enkidu has many similarities with Achilles' for Patroclus. See, for example, Beye (1987) 36.

11. See Diano (1968) 245ff.; Pucci (1977) 168ff.

12. For Hesiod, “insulting with harsh words an aged parent on the woeful threshold of old age” stands beside adultery and crimes against orphaned children as sure to bring Zeus' anger and punishment (Works and Days 331f.). Thury (1988) 199-206 ingeniously tries to argue that an Athenian audience would have accepted Admetus' treatment of his father as part of his transference of his family loyalties to his wife, as a matter of generational conflict that would be readily understood, and as a reflection of a conflict between nomos and phusis. These elements, to be sure, may be mitigating factors, and Admetus' response to Pheres must be kept within the limits of acceptable behavior since he is clearly not a villain nor to be imagined as obviously in the wrong. On the other hand, it is an exaggeration to claim, as Thury does (p. 205), that Alcestis “practically demands from Admetus that he hate and reject his father.” Nothing in Alcestis' criticism in lines 290-92 justifies the extreme response of Admetus (toward both parents) in lines 338f., though these latter lines are understandable as part of the extreme emotionality of this speech. His gratuitous insult of Pheres in lines 636-39 and refusal of gêrotrophia and burial in 662-65 would also be disturbing, as the chorus's intervention at 673f. indicates. Thury (p. 202) overlooks this passage when she says that “Admetus' attitude is clearly not shocking to the chorus.” Nor is the legal situation so clearly on Admetus' side as Thury claims (pp. 199-201); see contra Lacey (1968) 116f.

13. For the “fated” or “pitiless” day of doom (aisimon êmar, morsimon êmar, nêlees êmar), see, e.g., Iliad 11.484, 11.587, 15.613, 21.100, 22.212; Odyssey 16.280. Cf. also the reflections on the coming “day” of Troy's destruction in Iliad 4.164, 6.448, 21.111, etc.; and the famous passage in Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 3.898f., on death as the “single hostile day” (una dies infesta) that takes away all of life's joys. For man as ephêmeros, the creature defined by the vicissitudes of the single day, see Fränkel (1946) passim; Wankel (1983) 129.

14. I adopt what I think is the most plausible meaning for line 321, where, despite the efforts of interpreters, the manuscripts' “to the third day of the month” gives no satisfactory sense. Diggle (1984) plausibly regards mênos as corrupt.

15. Compare the deathbed scene in Lucretius 3.466-69 of the family members gathered around the bed of the dying person.

16. For parallels to this last wish of the dying person, see Seeck (1985) 51ff.

17. For the “nameless dead,” see also Hesiod, Works and Days 154. The reality of Charon for the fifth-century imagination is indicated also in the depiction of this figure, with his bark, next to the tomb on the white-ground lekythoi of the late fifth century. On these vases, however, Charon is a rather mild human figure, not a terrifying ogre, and has none of the horrific aspect that so disturbs Alcestis here; see Shapiro (1991) 649-50, with fig. 21. The Charon of Aristophanes' Frogs 180-209 also has nothing particularly terrifying about him. Possibly the tragic context, even in a pro-satyric play, can allow the expression of anxieties that must be repressed in the objects used in cult. On the scene of Alcestis' vision of Charon, there are good remarks in Lesky (1925) 74ff.; Nielsen (1976) 96; Rosenmeyer (1963) 212 and 225; and Von Fritz (1962) 304.

18. “Murderous Hades,” against whom the chorus invokes Apollo later in the play (225), seems more ominous but gets no details. Hesiod describes a harsh Death, of “iron heart” and “pitiless breast,” but even he is not a figure of utter terror (Theogony 758-66). For the truly horrifying face of death, the demonic image of sheer terror, the Greeks use the female figure of Gorgo, the petrifying mask of death; see Ramnoux (1986) 50-54; Vernant (1985a) passim, and (1989) 117-29; Loraux and Kahn-Lyotard (1981). The threat of her appearance from the depths of Hades after the visions of heroes and heroines fills Odysseus with “green fear” and terminates his exploration of Hades (Odyssey 11.633-35). Seeck (1985) 32 suggests that the notion of Thanatos who consecrates the dying person to death may have been Euripides' own invention. On the traditional representations of Death, see Grillone (1974-75) 39f., with n. 1.

19. For the calm and acceptance of “tame death,” see Ariès (1982) chap. 1, especially 13-22.

20. See Burnett (1965), in E. Segal (1983) 266.

21. For this juxtaposition of intense emotion and logical argumentation, compare lines 380ff. with 420ff., and 895ff. with 935ff. See, in general, Rosenmeyer (1963) 225f.; and Seeck (1985) 40-44; both point out Greek drama's tendency to present different aspects of an emotional situation sequentially in separate scenes.

22. On the dramatic function of this kosmos (funerary ornament) in the play, see above.

23. Antigone 1240-43, 1306-11, 1328-33; Hippolytus 836-39. Cf. also Adrastus' wish that he “had died with” (sunthanein) the Seven who fell at Thebes (Euripides, Suppliants 769). The motif of togetherness in death later becomes a topos of funeral epigrams; see Lattimore (1942) 247-50.

24. Euripides, Suppliants 1007, 1040, 1063; Sophocles, Trachiniae 720. For further discussion, see Loraux (1985) 53-55. She notes too the “normally feminine” element in Admetus' wish to dwell with Alcestis in Hades and lie with her in the tomb (p. 110, n. 57).

25. Line 196: … (Such are the woes in the house of Admetus); line 950: … (Such are matters in the house).

26. It is perhaps interesting that Admetus gives no thought to the risk of pollution in admitting Heracles, particularly as Apollo mentions the miasma of death in the prologue (22f.). The remoter kinship that Admetus alleges for the deceased woman might be regarded as also lessening the risk of pollution, but this would not, of course, affect the real risk for Heracles. On the question of contracting pollution under such circumstances, see Parker (1983) 39ff.

27. See Kubler-Ross (1970) chap. 3.

28. Admetus' “late learning” has been much discussed; for good comments, see Conacher (1967) 336ff. From a different point of view, his self-abasement in this scene, particularly his feeling that he will now be disgraced, corresponds to the “disturbance of self-regard” in Freud's analysis of the “work of mourning”: Freud (1917) 244.

29. The intersection of funeral and wedding is a regular part of what Seaford (1987) calls the “tragic wedding,” but it usually applies to the bride-to-be. We may also compare Pindar's juxtaposition of the wedding song when Thetis married Peleus and the funeral and wailing (goos) at her son Achilles' death (Pythian 3.88-92 and 102-3). The scene of Alcestis (915-25) has other verbal links to the previous action. The contrast of marriage song and funeral wail, for example, is conveyed by the adjective antipalos in line 922, which suggests Heracles' “wrestling” (palê) at the end (1031; cf. Pindar, Olympian 8.71, Nemean 11.26, Isthmian 5.61). Thus this exclusively masculine activity is again brought into contact with the union of male and female in the act that founds a new household.

30. Cf. especially the motif of the coverlet, demnion, in lines 183, 186, and 1059.

31. Rosenmeyer (1963) 240f. has a good observation on this change but interprets it too narrowly in terms of guilt; see also Seidensticker (1982) 149.

32. For recent discussion of this endlessly debated subject, see Thury (1988) 198f. For the ironical reading, see, inter alia, Seidensticker (1982) 151. For the more positive view of the “test” of Admetus, see, e.g., Burnett (1971) 45f.; and Lloyd (1985) 129.

33. Cf. lines 1154-56 with 430-33 and 346f.

34. In line 377 Alcestis tells Admetus that he must be “the children's mother instead of me”; and in 646f. he tells Pheres that he considers her his “mother and father” both. Soon after, he calls his father's love of life unmanly (723), but Pheres exits with the same phrase, predicting vengeance from Alcestis' brother, Akastos, or else this latter is “no longer among men” (en andrasin, 732). Note too Heracles' introduction of himself by his matronymic in line 505, in contrast to lines 509, 1119f., and 1136f. The reversal of the usual gender divisions, with the man taking on the role of intense, highly emotional grief, is even more striking because of the heroic echoes, on which see above, note 3.

35. On vases depicting funeral scenes, male lament is, as one would expect, less frequent than female and more restrained. See Shapiro (1991) 646, 649, 652-53, who notes a general tendency toward restraint of emotion in the funerary art of the latter half of the fifth century.

36. Weeping for oneself is female behavior in Iliad 19.301f., where the captive women around Briseis ostensibly lament for Patroclus but actually weep for themselves. Even Homer's freely weeping Odysseus has to be careful about being seen weeping lest he seem to “float in tears” … as a result of too much wine (Odyssey 19.115-22).

37. Pollux 6.202, quoted by Loraux (1986) 45. Cf. Euripides, Medea 928. Plutarch, in his treatise on mourning, the Consolatio ad Apollonium, not only emphasizes that excessive weeping and grieving is “feminine,” “unmanly,” “weak,” and “ignoble” (e.g., 3.102D, 4.102E, 22.113A), but also in the last passage (22.113A) sets up a hierarchy of weakness in yielding to lamentation: “Women are more fond of mourning [philopenthesterai] than men, and barbarians more than Hellenes, and baser men than better; and of the barbarians themselves not the most noble [gennaiotatoi], Celts and Galatians and all those who by nature are full of a more manly spirit, but rather the Egyptians, Syrians, and Lydians, and all who resemble them.” On the general suspicion of women's tears and the danger of its excess, see Loraux (1990) 33ff., 39ff., 87-99. In Homer, of course, male weeping is quite common; see Monsacré (1984) 138-57, 186-201. There are even some explicit changes of gender, which seem to carry no stigma of feminization: Patroclus can weep like a little girl running after her mother (Iliad 16.6-11), and Odysseus can weep as bitterly as a captive woman who has lost her husband (Odyssey 8.521-31); but see above, n. 36.

38. Plutarch, Life of Solon 21, ad fin., on which see Loraux (1990) 39, with n. 49.

39. In an emotional passage of Pindar's Tenth Nemean, Polydeuces weeps “warm tears” over his dying brother, Castor, fatally wounded in battle. But the only spectator is Father Zeus, and the stress on the fraternal and paternal bonds makes this virtually a scene of grief among members of the household (Nemean 10.73-90).

40. See Loraux (1990) 21.

41. See Loraux (1990) 41: “L'idéal serait d'enfermer hermétiquement la douleur féminine a l'intérieure de la maison.”

42. See Loraux (1986) 48.

43. On the fear of feminization in tragedy, see Loraux (1981) and (1982) = (1989) 49ff., 148ff.; Zeitlin (1985a) 63ff., 76ff.

44. On Heracles' silence here, see C. Segal (1977) 136-38.

45. This effect is characteristic of tragedy in general but is perhaps carried furthest by Euripides. The Bacchae is perhaps the clearest example: see C. Segal (1982a) chap. 6, especially 189ff.; Zeitlin (1981) and (1985a) passim.

46. Cf. Menelaus in Iphigeneia in Aulis 476-78; also Euripides, frag. 119 Nauck. More commonly in tragedy, however, the male companion tries to lead his friend away from weeping.

47. The “desire” of Admetus here is primarily that for weeping, as the scholiast understood the passage. In addition to Aeschylus, Suppliants 79, cited by Dale (1954) in her excellent note ad loc. (following Monk), cf. Gorgias, Helen 9: … (much-weeping pity and grief-loving longing). On the other hand, the sexual longing is certainly implicit (see Beye [1974] ad loc.), particularly as the eyes are the focal point both for desire and for weeping. Thus Admetus cries out that Heracles' woman should be taken “from his eyes” in line 1064; and a few lines later he exclaims that the tears are flowing “from his eyes” (1067). The two verses have virtually the same line ending. …

48. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1515; Euripides, Heracles 1394, and Suppliants 769ff., 838ff.

49. Heracles in the Trachiniae, however, is still in a domestic context when he complains about the shame of being reduced to tears.

50. Note too the chorus's full-fledged ode on “Necessity” in lines 962-94.

51. Lines 912ff. and 941ff. also suggest a new understanding of the house, or oikos, especially by comparison with lines 882 and 734. Cf. also the slightly different meaning of Admetus' “I myself know too” (1080), where his own emotional need for tears opposes Heracles' advice on the fruitlessness of weeping.

52. For Alcestis' silence see, inter alia, Rosenmeyer (1963) 245; Bassi (1989) 27f.; and Riemer (1989) 100-103, who has a useful review of previous literature. For the ritual reasons, see Betts (1965) passim; and Parker (1983) 37, n. 17, and 329, n. 10.

53. See above, note 43.

54. Cf. Alcestis 434f.; also her “noble death” in line 292, with which we may compare Sophocles, Antigone 72 and 97. Cf. also Sophocles, Antigone 694-99, and Electra 973-85, 1082-89.

55. On the implicit parallelism felt between warfare and childbirth, see Loraux (1981) = (1989) 29-53. Women's presence in the theater at the Greater Dionysia remains uncertain. For the negative view, see Pickard-Cambridge (1968) 264f. Their presence in the fourth century seems more likely: see Dover (1972) 16f., who inclines to think that women may have been present at fifth-century performances, at least if accompanied by their husbands.

56. The chorus's pious hope that “good people” may have a better time of it in Hades in lines 744-46 may be a vague allusion to Orphic notions of the afterlife, like those expressed in Pindar's Second Olympian, especially as Orpheus is prominent elsewhere in the play. As Dale (1954) observes, however (ad 743), the wish is a modest one and may convey only a conventionally “gentle piety” and a mild hope that virtue somehow finds its reward. We should keep in mind, however, the appeal of the Eleusinian Mysteries, with their promise of a happier life (whatever the details) in the hereafter. More recent discoveries of “Orphic” or “Orphic-Dionysiac” texts relating to the afterlife suggest that alternative views of defeating “necessity” by mystic initiation may have been more common in the mid-fifth century than we have known; see Burkert (1987) 21ff.; Lloyd-Jones (1985) especially 254ff.; C. Segal (1990).

57. In line 52, Apollo's request from Thanatos implies the normal process of aging and hence the normal downward course of mortal life for Alcestis even after Thanatos releases her from the present day of death … (52). As Gregory (1979) 268f. observes, the return of Alcestis cancels out the extraordinary benefaction of Apollo and implies the restoration of life in this world to the terms of normal mortality. Everyone will now die on schedule.

58. Apollo defines the opening situation of the play as Admetus' not having “found anyone except his wife who wished to die in his place and no longer to look upon the light” (17f.). Contrast Admetus' loss of “joy” in looking at the light in his grief (868) with the reality of Alcestis' “no longer seeing the light” in death (269, 1139, 1146, etc.); cf. also 244f., 722.

Abbreviations

Allen: Allen, Thomas W., ed. Homeri Opera, vol. 5. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.

Austin: Austin, Colin, ed. Nova Fragmenta Euripidea in Papyris Reperta. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968.

Davies: Davies, Malcolm, ed. Poetarum Graecorum Melicorum Fragmenta, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Diels-Kranz: Diels, Hermann, and Walter Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed., 3 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1951-52.

LSJ: Liddell, H. G., Robert Scott, and H. S. Jones, eds. Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-40.

Merkelbach-West: Merkelbach, Rudolf, and M. L. West, eds. Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

Nauck: Nauck, Augustus, ed. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. 2d ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1889.

OCT: Oxford Classical Text(s).

Page: Page, D. L., ed. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Radt: Radt, Stefan, ed. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. 3, Aeschylus; vol. 4, Sophocles. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1985, 1977.

Snell-Maehler: Maehler, Hervicus, post B. Snell, ed. Pindari Carmina. Pars II, Fragmenta. 4th ed. Leipzig: Teubner, 1975.

West: West, M. L., ed. Iambi et Elegi Graeci. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971-72.