SOURCE: Conacher, D. J. Introduction to Alcestis, by Euripides, translated and edited by D. J. Conacher, pp. 29-55. Wiltshire, England: Aris & Phillips Ltd, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Conacher provides background on the Alcestis, explores the question of whether it should be considered a satyr-play, and analyzes its themes and structure.]

I. ANCIENT INFORMATION

Our information concerning the date and other features of the production of the Alcestis is drawn from the second “Hypothesis” to our play …. A “Hypothesis”, in this context, refers to a notice, dating back to the time of the Alexandrian editing of Greek tragedies (and, possibly, sometimes earlier), which was prefixed in our MSS to most of the extant plays, and provided what was to be understood as the basis of the play concerned. Some Hypotheses, such as the first one (attributed to Dicaearchus) to the Alcestis, give only a bare outline either of the plot of the play or of the legend on which it is based; others, such as the second Hypothesis (attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium) to the Alcestis, contain as well information drawn from the original didascaliae (or production records) including names of tetralogies and their authors, dates, and victories in the Athenian tragic festivals.

We learn from this second Hypothesis that the Alcestis was produced in 438 b.c. as the fourth play in a tetralogy of which the first three plays (now lost) were The Cretan Women, Alcmaeon in Psophis, and Telephus, and that this entry was placed second to Sophocles' entry (names of the Sophoclean plays are not supplied) in the competition. Enough is known of the mythical material on which these lost plays of the Euripidean tetralogy were based to relieve us of any attempt to find a common thread between them, or between them and the Alcestis. (Not even the element of novelty, of exploitation of legends outside the usual canon of tragic myth, by which Wilamowitz has characterized many of Euripides' earlier plays,¹ is shared by all the plays of this tetralogy; while this description applies to The Cretan Women and to some degree to the Alcestis, despite Phrynichus' prior treatment of the legend, the legends concerning Alcmaeon and Telephus are both mentioned by Aristotle as among the few on which the best tragedies have been founded).²

We are also told, in this same Hypothesis, that the Alcestis, which, at 438 b.c., is the earliest extant play of Euripides, was “the seventeenth” play composed by him. The anomaly involved in this information (for the tragic entries were presented in tetralogies and the Alcestis was said to be fourth in its tetralogy) is best explained as a failure, on the part of the author of the Hypothesis, to take into account three plays (possible satyr-plays) which had been lost by the time that this Notice was composed.³

The interesting information in this Hypothesis that the Alcestis, though not, as we know, a satyr-play, was performed in the usual position of the satyr-play is rendered the more significant by the description in the same Hypothesis of the play's ending as kômikôteran (“tending toward the comic”) and (in what may be a later addition to the same Hypothesis) of the whole play as saturikôteron (“rather like a satyr-play”) because, unlike Tragedy, the change of fortune is to joy and pleasure. All this has led many critics (rightly or wrongly) to regard the Alcestis as, uniquely among extant tragedies, “pro-satyric”, i.e., as not only standing in place of a satyr-play but also retaining at least some of its characteristics. Just what is involved, in critics' minds, in this description and to what degree the description is justified by the tone and structure of the Alcestis will be considered later ….

II. THE MYTH AND ITS ADAPTATION

In an attempt to judge the nature and purpose of Euripides' treatment of the myths of Admetus and Alcestis, let us set down the bare events as Euripides gives them, together with what we know of this material from other sources.

Apollo tells us in the prologue of the Alcestis that he had enabled King Admetus to postpone his impending death by persuading the Fates to let Admetus off if he could find someone willing to die in his place; this sacrifice Alcestis, wife of Admetus, has accepted after both his parents had refused it, and now the appointed day for Alcestis' death is at hand. Apollo explains as follows his own involvement with Admetus: furious at the death of his son Asclepius, slain by Zeus' thunderbolt, Apollo had in turn slain the Cyclopes (makers of thunderbolts) and for punishment had been enslaved for a period to the mortal Admetus; it was during this sojourn that the threat to Admetus' life occurred and Apollo intervened, in gratitude for his human master's piety towards him.

After this monologue, Death appears, to begin his fell office. After further unsuccessful attempts to dissuade him, Apollo prophesies that Heracles (identified by description rather than by name) will wrest Alcestis by force from Death. In the course of the play, Alcestis dies, but not before her husband has promised her, in gratitude, a life of celibacy for himself and of cheerless mourning for himself and his house. During the funeral arrangements, Heracles visits Admetus' palace and, unaware of the situation, is hospitably entertained by Admetus. When he learns of his host's dissimulation, he rewards it by overcoming Death in an off-stage wrestling match and restoring Alcestis to Admetus.

Even at first glance, a certain cleavage, a certain basic lack of congruity, appears between different elements in this myth. On the one hand, we have an Olympian, Apollo, and his relations with a human hero, King Admetus; on the other hand, we have Death, a creature of folk-tale, carrying off the King's wife who is, in turn, rescued by a sort of superman, Heracles. The only connection which Apollo has with the action of the play itself is that he first arranges the “privilege” of the substitute death; after a brief attempt to put off Death, Apollo leaves the scene for good, and the final overcoming of death is effected in a manner quite alien to the mythical world which Apollo inhabits.

This initial impression of cleavage increases greatly when we look at the mythological tradition relevant to the play. There is evidence of early accounts of Apollo's bondage to Admetus (e.g., a passing reference in Homer, signs of a fuller account in the Hesiodic catalogue)⁴ but no actual mention, before tragedy, of Alcestis' self-sacrifice. This does not, of course, mean that the Alcestis legend did not exist before then, but it may indicate that it was not always attached to the Apollo-Admetus story and that, consequently, it was not always a part of the main mythical tradition. The only known treatment of the Alcestis theme itself before Euripides is that of Phrynichus' Alcestis⁵ of which we have only one actual quotation:

He constrains the fearless, limb-driven [?] (limb-mastered [?]) body.

(frg. 2)

This fragment is usually taken, though with no certainty, to refer to the wrestling match between Heracles and Death. It is possible that Aeschylus' reference (Eumenides, 723-28) to Apollo's persuasion of the Moirai, by drink, to spare men's lives, and the Euripidean Apollo's casual reference to his tricking of the Fates (Alcestis, 12), may be allusions to Phrynichus' treatment of the theme. (If so, one is tempted to think Phrynichus' Alcestis must have been a satyr-play.) Apart from this, all we know of the lost play is that Death appeared in it carrying a sword for the ritual cutting of Alcestis' hair (frg. 3).

The Hesiodic account seems to have been concerned entirely with the background of Apollo's bondage to Admetus: Apollo's jealous vengeance, with Artemis' help, on his beloved and unfaithful Coronis; his saving of Asclepius, his son by Coronis; Zeus' blasting of Asclepius for raising men from the dead; Apollo's reprisals against the Cyclopes (the makers of Zeus' thunderbolts) and his subsequent enslavement to Admetus in punishment. Only the last of these details is factually relevant to Euripides' plot, though there is a certain thematic overlap in the roles of Asclepius and Heracles.

Among the post-Classical accounts of the Apollo-Admetus-Alcestis myths, that of Apollodorus is of the greatest interest. Here it is worth noting that the myth ending with Apollo's enslavement to Admetus is told separately from the Admetus-Alcestis legend.⁶ The former follows very closely the main lines of the early (“Hesiodic”) version, while the Admetus-Alcestis legend differs in several respects from Euripides' version. The latter account runs as follows:

When Admetus reigned over Pherae, Apollo served him as his thrall, while Admetus wooed Alcestis, daughter of Pelias. Now Pelias had promised to give his daughter to him who should yoke a lion and a boar to a car, and Apollo yoked them and gave them to Admetus, who brought them to Pelias and so obtained Alcestis. But in offering a sacrifice at his marriage, he forgot to sacrifice to Artemis; therefore when he opened the marriage chamber, he found it full of coiled snakes. Apollo bade him appease the goddess and obtained as a favour of the Fates that, when Admetus should be about to die, he might be released from death if someone should choose voluntarily to die for him. And when the day of his death came neither his father nor his mother would die for him, but Alcestis died in his stead. But the Maiden [Persephone] sent her up again, or, as some say, Hercules fought with Hades [and brought her up to him]. [The last clause is omitted in the MSS.]

Here the most interesting differences from the Euripidean version are: the role of Artemis and the alternative explanations of the restoration of Alcestis. The anger of Artemis perhaps explains the “imminent death” mentioned as threatening Admetus in Euripides' versions (Alc. 13), though there seems to be an interesting hint of a non sequitur in Apollodorus between the “appeasing of Artemis” and the favour obtained from the Fates. The peaceful version of Alcestis' return to life is, of course, the one more favourable to the gods of mythology (one should note, by the way, that Hades has been substituted for Death even in the other version) and it is this version too which Plato follows (Symposium 179b 5 ff.), when he tells us that the gods returned Alcestis of their own accord in admiration of her deed. Robert suggests that Plato himself may have invented this milder version; however this may be, we may accept his view that the more violent version is the older one.⁷

It seems clear from all that has been said that the myth leading to the enslavement of Apollo to Admetus and the myth involving Alcestis' “substitute” death for Admetus were originally of quite separate and indeed fundamentally different origins. The former belongs to the anthropomorphic and essentially literary tradition of Olympian mythology; the latter, with its bargains and struggles with the monster Death, that pathetically simple incarnation of human fears, suggests the primitive, superstitious and infinitely more urgent preoccupations of folk-tale—until, of course, it becomes softened by late and artificial mythologizing. Indeed it is not until Hyginus (Fab. 49 and 51), in the second century a.d., and Zenobius (1. 18) that we find a continuous narrative starting from the myths of Apollo and Asclepius and ending with the death and restoration of Alcestis. Despite all contrary indications, Wilamowitz, followed by Ebeling, Séchan, Méridier and others, argues that the consecutive treatment found in the late writers goes back to the “canonical” formulation of the Hesiodic catalogue, which he also claims to be the source of the two accounts in Apollodorus; this view has been rightly rejected by Professor A. Lesky and Miss A. M. Dale.⁸

In default of evidence establishing the literary ancestry of the Alcestis theme prior to Greek tragedy, let us turn to the “arguments from probability” by which Robert, Lesky and others assert that the core of our story belongs to popular folk-tale rather than to literary tradition. The most ambitious attempt to establish the actual folk-tale kernel of the Alcestis myth has been made by Lesky who, after discussing the relation of popular to literary mythology in general, outlines three European folk tales, preserved in German, Greek and Armenian folk songs, which contain elements of the basic situation in the Alcestis.⁹ Stripping these songs of their individual developments and variations, Lesky reduces the story to what he considers to be its simplest and oldest form: On the wedding day of a King, Death comes for the bridegroom; Death is willing to accept a substitute, but both the King's parents refuse the sacrifice; finally, the young bride intervenes and follows Death to save the life of her beloved.¹⁰

Lesky lists several variations and developments: husband dies for doomed bride (manly German version as opposed to eastern expressions of female inferiority!); a physical struggle with Death as well as (originally instead of?) a substitute death, and so on. Whenever the physical struggle with Death is introduced, the husband himself is the challenger, and when, for one reason or another, he fails, his life is saved only by the self-sacrifice of his bride.

It is interesting to contrast the way in which this duplication of methods for dealing with Death is handled in Euripides' play. Here, one device is used to save the husband, the other, his self-sacrificing wife. Moreover, in our Alcestis, the dramatist further separates the two devices (and so uses them to better effect) by attaching one of them to the mythical, “divine” prologue (where Apollo tells of persuading the Fates to accept Alcestis as a substitute), while reserving the other for the “folk-tale” dénouement, where a hero struggles with the primitive figure of Death. Finally, in Euripides' version, the hero who struggles with Death is an outside agent, not, as in the folk songs, the husband himself. Thus, while both ways of foiling Death are presented, the husband engages in neither while gaining from both. Already we catch a glimpse of a whole new dimension, fraught with ironic possibilities, in the tragic adaptation of the legend.

How did such a folk tale come to be attached to the end of a myth dealing with the enslavement of Apollo? Nobody knows, of course, but there have been some interesting guesses. Carl Robert points to Euripides' own words at Alcestis 445 ff. (where the Chorus prophesies that the Queen's fame will be celebrated in song at Sparta at the time of the Carnean festival, as well as at Athens) and suggests that it was at the Carnea, which honoured Apollo, and at similar popular celebrations of Apollo at Athens, that the simple folk song got its poetic development.¹¹ However, this still does not explain why it became attached to the Apollo myth in the first place. Thessaly, a region much given to chthonian cults, was surely a congenial place for such a folk tale to be developed, and Admetus, to whom Apollo was enslaved, was a Thessalian king. Other scholars go farther in this matter and point to connections between Admetus and Haidês adamastos (“Hades the unconquerable”) and between “Admetus the hospitable” and Haidês poludegmôn, Haidês poluxenos!¹² There are other possible links between the Apollo myth and the Alcestis story; Asclepius, Apollo's son, is the hero who, foreshadowing Heracles' role in our play, raised men from the dead, and Apollo himself is of course the Olympian opponent par excellence of the chthonic powers. In this connection, Aeschylus' reference (Eumenides, 723 ff.) to Apollo's cheating of the Fates in Admetus' interest is most suggestive, for it is in the Eumenides that we have the greatest literary expression of this aspect of Apollo.

In Euripides' Alcestis, we have two interventions from “outside”, one by Apollo before the action of the play begins, and one by Heracles at its conclusion. Obviously, no one like Heracles was needed in the original folk tale: as we have seen, any Death-wrestling that was to be done was done by the husband himself. Nor does Heracles have any part in the Apollo myth. When did he come into the picture?

The possibility that Euripides himself first introduced the role of Heracles into the Alcestis myth has been raised by one or two scholars, most notably Ebeling, though his approach is very different from the one which we have been following.¹³ It is true that this suggestion contradicts the view (rather uncertainly based on Phrynichus, fr. 1) that Euripides followed Phrynichus' Alcestis in this matter. Ebeling's argument that Phrynichus' play could hardly have extended from Apollo's outwitting of the Fates (see Aeschylus, Eumenides 723-28) to the rescue of Alcestis by Heracles, seems weak. Euripides himself “covers” this much, if we include what Apollo tells us in the prologue—and not much more than this would be needed to explain the (quite hypothetical) reference to Phrynichus' play in Aeschylus' Eumenides. It sees preferable to point out that no opinion concerning the content of Phrynichus' Alcestis can really be based on a tiny fragment in which text, meaning, reference, and context are all uncertain.¹⁴

Ebeling's suggestion that the role of Heracles is Euripides' invention fits well with what he, in common with several recent critics, feels to be an important aspect of Euripides' treatment: the new kind of emphasis on the role of Admetus.¹⁵ It has not, perhaps, been generally recognized that this emphasis depends in large part on Heracles, for without the intrusion of that hero it would not have been easy to present the “restoration” of Alcestis as in some way related to the character and actions of Admetus. Indeed, without Heracles, very little in the way of decisive action would have been left for Admetus at all.

In the folk tale, no one ever wins the wrestling match with Death; nor would the somewhat sentimental “moral” ending which Plato chose have suited the sinister figure of Death in Euripides' piece. To achieve a happy ending within the chosen ethos of this play, a typically Euripidean rescuer must be imported—and in a pro-satyric play, what figure could be more suitable than Heracles? Throughout Euripides' work, we find him the most inventive of the dramatists, and the more remote his material, the more daring his innovations. The present device, the appearance of an unexpected rescuer from outside the immediate context of the legendary situation or (sometimes) of the poet's own plot, occurs in one form or another in the Medea, the Heracles, and the Andromache, and in at least two of these instances, the “intrusion” appears to have been a Euripidean innovation in the legend concerned. But whether Euripides was responsible for the actual introduction of Heracles into the Alcestis legend, or whether (as most critics believe) he adapted it from Phrynichus' play or from some earlier version, it seems likely that the particular motivation which Heracles' role is given in this play is Euripides' own development.¹⁶

III. THE PLAY AND ITS PROBLEMS

(I) GENRE AND TONE

The Alcestis is the only non-satyric play which we actually know (from the ancient hypothesis to which we have already referred)¹⁷ to have been produced as the fourth play in its tetralogy. The lengthy arguments among scholars whether, while lacking a satyr-chorus, it still preserved some features of the satyr-play, go back, as we have seen, to the author(s) of the same hypothesis. The point is not entirely academic, since, if some affinity can be found between the Alcestis and satyr-plays, the elements which seem to set the Alcestis off from the serious tragedies of Euripides need not induce us to place it, as Kitto has placed it (not very happily, in my opinion), among his so-called tragicomedies and melodramas. Moreover, if the term “pro-satyric” can be used of the Alcestis in a fairly significant sense, then it seems possible that Euripides wrote more plays of this kind. We have the names of only three complete tetralogies of Euripides (including that to which the Alcestis belongs), and a total of only eight of his plays (of which only the Cyclops is extant) are described anywhere in ancient sources as “satyric”. This is much less than a quarter of the total number of titles (probably seventy-five) which can be safely attributed to Euripides, and so it is a reasonable inference that several plays nowhere described as satyric (and of which we know little beyond their titles) may also have stood fourth in their tetralogies and been “pro-satyric” in one sense or another.¹⁸

Miss A. M. Dale, in her edition of the play, has given perhaps the fairest of recent assessments of the pro-satyric elements in the Alcestis. She speaks of the happy ending combined with “a curiously tart, almost bitter flavour”—which is just right for the Alcestis; of the presentation of Heracles as “discreetly reminiscent of the traditional burlesque of Heracles, the coarse glutton and drunkard who rouses himself to perform feats of strength against the local monster or bully”; of “the discomfiture of Death … who is not the majestic king throned in the underworld but the ogreish creature of popular fancy”. To these reminders of the satyr-play, we might add the barracking between Apollo and Death, the darkly comic irony, touched with ribaldry, of the concluding scene between Heracles, Admetus and the veiled Alcestis, and the element of theft and restoration, of death and resurrection, in the untimely visit and ultimate defeat of Death. And yet, in the end, Miss Dale plays it all down: the episode with Death is “passed over very lightly”; “the theme is satyric but not its treatment here; this is the adaptation of a satyric theme to tragedy”, and so on. Though she has herself given us most of the arguments for regarding the Alcestis as essentially pro-satyric (as opposed, say, to tragic and to romantic drama), she refuses us the conclusion. It is her insistence on taking the play seriously throughout its action which prevents Miss Dale from regarding it as essentially different from tragedy.¹⁹

It is at this point that Professor Kitto's observation concerning the nature of the Alcestis' plot provides a salutary correction: because the Alcestis is based on an impossibility, its action as a whole is deprived of tragic, or universal, reality, and so of serious tragic meaning.²⁰ A healthy young woman is “taken” by Death (himself featured as an ogre, a primitive projection of folk-tale imagination), because she chooses to substitute herself for her husband, who is actually due to die: a play which begins with a miracle can also end with one (as this play in fact does); in any case we cannot feel involved, in the way that tragedy requires, with Admetus' and Alcestis' sufferings, for their experiences, the very conditions under which they live, are not drawn from the stuff of life as we know it or can even imagine it to be.

However, while the Alcestis cannot, for the reasons which Kitto suggests, be regarded as a serious tragedy, it nevertheless deals with both human sufferings (death and bereavement) and ethical themes (hospitality and loyalty) of the kind which serious tragedy does so often treat. One critic has aptly suggested that in parallel with the “melodramatic” plot of the play, in which Admetus' hospitality to Heracles is rewarded by the happy ending of Alcestis' restoration, there is an “ironic” plot in which Admetus, in the very fulfillment of that hospitality which wins her back, actually betrays his own promises to the wife to whom he owes so much.²¹ “Concurrently”, this critic tells us, “the ironic plot offers an analysis and criticism of the attitudes and beliefs implied by the melodramatic plot and by the myth itself”. This is, I believe, a suggestion which we shall find very helpful in our analysis of the play.

(II) THEMES AND STRUCTURE

The virtue of hospitality, and the closely related idea of charis, “favour” (which always expects reciprocal favour), may be said to provide the ethical theme of our play. However, it is not only “hospitality” and “charis” which are treated with the ambiguous irony mentioned above. Admetus gains his life only by means of Alcestis' death: as we shall see, neither life nor death is ever mentioned in this play without some suggestion of its opposite. Finally, in addition to the “life/death” ambiguity, we find a similar ambiguity attending the ideas of “profit and loss” which the substitute death of a philos, or “loved one”, must inevitably entail. Admetus gains his life at the expense of Alcestis' loss of life; yet from the beginning of the play we shall find Admetus' “gain” questioned (by the Servant, for example) and before the play is over we find Admetus questioning it himself. Even, indeed especially, before the happy ending, Admetus finds reason to believe that Alcestis, by her death, has gained more than he has by his avoidance of death.

The counterpoint between hospitality and charis (both as “favour received” and “favour owed”) and the ambiguous treatments of “life” and “death”, “profit” and “loss”, reappear, with varying emphases, in every episode and nearly every choral ode of this most complex little play. … a preliminary survey may serve to indicate how their deployment informs the structure of the whole.

The first structural feature which we notice in the Alcestis is that the supernatural events occur at the beginning and end of the play, while the happenings within this frame, and the reactions of various characters to these happenings, are presented (for the most part) in fairly naturalistic, human terms.²² In the first (or Prologue) section of this frame, “the hospitality theme”, with its related theme of “charis” or “favour for favour”, is introduced in Apollo's opening speech: it is in gratitude for his pious treatment during his enforced stay at Admetus' domain that the god has made his deal with the Fates to postpone Admetus' imminent death. However, the greater part of the Prologue is concerned with Apollo's unsuccessful attempt to save the self-sacrificing Alcestis from death, here literally represented by the grim figure of Death. But just as Asclepius, Apollo's son, has been blasted by Zeus for resurrecting men from the dead, so too Apollo is powerless against Death. Apollo's withdrawal and prophecy about a hero who will accomplish what he, Olympian Apollo, cannot do, signals in advance that the play's resolution is to come from outside the world of traditional mythology. (This point is to be reinforced by various reminders from the Chorus that neither Zeus nor Anankê [Necessity] countenances resurrections from the dead.)²³

The first part of our play (after the Prologue) is concerned with the other side of Apollo's favour, the death of Alcestis, treated first in anticipation (by the Chorus and the Servant) and then (by Admetus and Alcestis herself) in actuality (77-434). (It is typical of the formal pattern of this play that each theme and motif is treated both in song, or occasionally in anapaestic chant, and in dramatic form [iambic verses, spoken by actors] though not always in the same order.)

The Chorus, in the first half of the Parodos, wonder whether Alcestis is still alive or already dead; in the second half, they remind us (in contradiction to Apollo's prophecy in the Prologue) that death is irremediable, since Zeus has outlawed all possible resurrections by blasting Asclepius.²⁴ The same ambiguity regarding Life and Death is briefly touched on in the first Episode: “You may speak of her as both living and dead”, is the Serving Woman's enigmatic answer to the Chorus' query. However, the main burden of the Serving-Woman's major speech (vv. 152-98) is the celebration of Alcestis as “the best of wives”. Her conclusion, “In escaping death he [Admetus] has earned so great a woe that some day he'll remember it all too well!” expresses the first of many doubts to be cast on Admetus' “gain” from the favour of Apollo.

In the scenes devoted to Alcestis' actual death, Alcestis “dies” first in song (in which she expresses the intensely private experience of being carried off in Charon's bark, 244 ff., 252 ff., etc.), and then in dramatic dialogue with Admetus, in which she again bids an expiring farewell to her family (371-91). In between these two passages, she delivers a brisk and well-considered speech to her husband and receives his equally long and more emotional reply. This conventional lack of realism would not have puzzled an ancient Greek audience as it does us, though Euripides sometimes exploits such formal conventions for his own particular purposes.²⁵ Thus, in the present instance, the play's ambiguous treatment of “life” and “death” is well served by this “sandwiching” between two presentations of a dying Alcestis and an Alcestis who is very much alive.

However, the main focus of the “death of Alcestis” scene is on the revival of the theme of charis: Admetus owes his life not only to Apollo's requital of the favour the King has done him but also to Alcestis' considerably greater favour in dying in his place. For this Alcestis, in turn, demands requital from Admetus—“never an equal favour (for there is nothing of more worth than life itself) but still a just one”: namely the promise that Admetus shall never marry a new wife to be step-mother over their children. To this promise the King adds, in an anguish of grief and of “obligation”, the further promises that there shall be no more entertainment in his once hospitable halls and that he will take a statue of Alcestis, “a chill delight”, to his widowed marriage-bed.

The second—and pivotal—movement in our play is marked by the entry of Heracles, the traditional “hearty guest” par excellence, a figure whose very presence embodies that conviviality which Admetus (as part of the charis due to Alcestis) has promised to forego. Once again, and with theatrical éclat, “the hospitality theme” is introduced, and with it a new sequence of obligation, both fruitful and destructive in its effect, which is to last until the final verse of the play has been uttered. Once again, also, these major themes of Hospitality and Charis are accompanied by the recurrent ambiguous motifs on which we have already commented. To persuade Heracles to enter his palace, despite the clear evidence of a bereavement, Admetus has to disguise Alcestis' death. “She both exists and no longer exists”, he replies, somewhat absurdly (521),²⁶ to Heracles' direct question on the matter and then seeks to explain this contradiction by saying that one who is doomed to die is as good as dead already (527). Bluff Heracles will have none of this nonsense. “Being alive and not being alive”, he insists (anticipating his later homily on “life and death”)²⁷ “are two quite different things”. When he still hesitates to enter a house of mourning (even though reassured that the deceased is othneios, “outside the family”), Admetus ends the argument with the (in the circumstances) rather startling assertion, “The dead are dead! so enter now my halls”. (541). So, too, in answer to the Chorus-Leader's shocked expostulation, Admetus explains his behavior by a quick calculation of “profit and loss”: “If I refused this guest, my troubles would not be less … and I would add another evil, the repute of an inhospitable house” (see 551-58). So much for his promise to Alcestis and the charis due to her. Ironically, the Chorus (now convinced) concludes this part of our play (569-605) by celebrating Admetus' hospitality to Apollo in such a way as to remind us of the rewards which that virtue has already brought him. For now, though in the present instance Admetus' “noble nature is carried to an extreme of guest-reverence” (600-1), the Chorus are confident that “the god-fearing man will, in the end, fare well”.²⁸

That Admetus' pious hospitality to Apollo has indeed “paid off”, the King's avoidance of his fated death would seem, at first, to indicate. However, with the arrival of Pheres we are given our first inkling that even this reckoning in Admetus' favour may prove inaccurate. Pheres has come to pay his respects at Alcestis' funeral and to congratulate his son (somewhat sardonically perhaps) on his escape from death. The resulting bitter confrontation (in which Admetus reviles his father for letting Alcestis make the sacrifice instead of himself—and is then answered in kind) will be considered later, in our discussion of the character of Admetus. In the present context, it is of interest mainly for a crucial point which Pheres makes in angry rebuttal of his son's contumely:

If you revile us [i.e., for not dying for you] you too will hear many revilements—and just ones—heaped upon yourself

(704-05).

To this, Pheres adds a parting shot as he leaves:

I'll go then. As for you, go and bury the one whose murderer you are. To her kinsmen you have still to pay the penalty.

(730-31)

It is significant that Admetus says nothing to refute these prophecies.²⁹ When he says to Pheres, “At least you'll die dishonoured!” (725), is he beginning to realize that this could also be his fate?

Thus, “the Pheres scene” introduces the first (and potentially tragic) resolution of the “profit or loss?” issue—a resolution which (as we shall see) is to involve a new recognition by Admetus of his true situation. Early in the play, we have heard the Serving-Woman remind us (152-98) that, in losing “the best of wives”, Admetus' self-saving bargain may not prove to be a profitable one. Now, from Pheres' tart warnings, Admetus is made aware that the opprobrium of society might be added to that bereavement which the Chorus, taking their cue from the Serving-Woman, have called “worthy of suicide”. (228). Both aspects of Admetus' survival (and of his awareness of them) are to be developed in the scene immediately preceding the final sombre choral ode. But sandwiched between these darker episodes (the “Pheres scene” and the return of Admetus to his lonely home) comes an almost slapstick, “pro-satyric” scene which is, in turn, to prepare us for the happy ending.

Just as the grimmer resolution of the “profit or loss?” motif begins in “the Pheres Scene”, so too the (happy) resolution of “the hospitality theme” begins in this second episode with Heracles. In this scene, the boisterous hero, tipsy from Admetus' hospitality, delivers a drunken homily to the scowling and mournful Servant on the meaning of life, its closeness to death, and on the necessity, for that reason, of being as alive and jolly as possible—for as long as one is alive (see vv. 773-802). The appropriateness of this last of the plays on the “life/death ambiguity” before the resurrection scene is, of course, lost on Heracles; nevertheless, it is this speech which, indirectly, triggers that exciting event. The grieving Servant, finally goaded beyond endurance, reveals to Heracles the enormity of his behaviour in a house that has lost its mistress. Heracles is shattered but will make amends. In gratitude for his host's long-suffering hospitality, he will wrestle with Death and restore Alcestis to her husband.

With the return of Admetus and the Chorus after the funeral of Alcestis, we reach the first, or “realistic”, climax of the play, the bitter resolution of the question “profit or loss?” which Admetus' escape from fate has repeatedly aroused. Consistently with the “alternations” we have noticed in this play, this new turn in the action is expressed first in song (or rather, in this instance, in a combination of chanting and song) and then in spoken verse, as Admetus sadly verifies both the expectations of the Serving-Woman and the grimmer prophecies of Pheres.

Oh bitter return! Oh bitter sight of my bereaved halls! … I envy the dead; I yearn for them … No longer do I rejoice to see the sun's rays, nor to walk upon the earth! (861-69, in part) What greater evil can befall a man than to lose a faithful wife?

(879-80)

Friends, I think my wife's fate happier than my own … With fair renown she has put an end to many woes. But I, who ought not to be living, who have escaped what was fated, will live a grievous life. At last, too late, I understand!

(935-40)

The expression arti manthanô (“Too late, I understand!”) suggests for a moment the pathei mathos (“learning through suffering”) of tragic realization. However, the poet skilfully (in view of the finale which we know is to come) has Admetus veer away from the tragic tone and emphasize, rather, the hedonistic calculation in which he has come off second best. Indeed, Admetus' view of his prospects at home (“dirty floors and wailing children”, 947-48) has a faintly sordid (if pathetic), rather than a tragic note. So, too, outside the home, the King fears the very taunts of cowardice (954-60) which Pheres has prophesied for him (705). “How, then”, he concludes, “is it more profitable for me to live, both faring evilly and hearing evil of myself?” (960-61)

The conclusion to this potentially tragic theme of the Alcestis is expressed in the final choral ode. In the parodos, we will remember, the Chorus have lamented that Death cannot be turned aside by prayers; now (in a sort of extended “ring composition”) they remind us that there is nothing stronger than Anankê (Necessity) who, alone among the gods, receives no sacrificial offerings. In the second strophe, these sad thoughts are applied to Alcestis and again there is a mournful reference to Asclepius (this time a veiled one, 989-90) who (we learned in the parodos) was slain for bringing men back from the dead. In the last antistrophe, however, Alcestis is offered a kind of immortality, one which is possible in the “real world”, as governed by Zeus and Necessity (the world with which true Tragedy deals). Her tomb is not to be considered like that of the other dead, since her fame and honour, like that of the gods, will live forever in song and story. This is a consolation in which Admetus cannot share.

With the third entry of Heracles, this time leading the veiled figure of Alcestis whom he has wrestled from the clutches of Death, we return to “the impossible world” of folk-tale—and to the happy fulfilment of “the hospitality theme”, as pious Admetus, true to the Chorus' expectations at vv. 604-05, receives his “just rewards”. Indeed, Heracles' persuasion of Admetus to shelter the veiled woman (whom he pretends to have won as a prize in an athletic contest) provides a sort of doublet of the first scene between these two, except that this time the hidden truth is that Alcestis is alive, not dead, and that it is Heracles the guest who knows the truth, while Admetus the host remains in ignorance. Once again Admetus is tempted, in the interests of his hospitable reputation, to do a favour for a guest at the expense of a favour which he has promised Alcestis, for it soon becomes clear (see vv. 1087 ff., cf. vv. 1056-60) that what Heracles is really offering Admetus is a substitute for, and a successor to, his “dead” wife. (Minor ironic echoes of the earlier scene appear also in various details in this final episode. Heracles' reference to Admetus' loss, as he had first misapprehended it, as thuraios [“outside the family”, 1014] reminds us of Admetus' willingness to speak of his dead wife as othneios [533], which bears a very similar literal sense; Heracles' present argument [1091] that Admetus' refusal to marry again will not help his dead wife reminds us of Admetus' own somewhat heartless declaration, “The dead are dead” [541], in his earlier persuasion of Heracles to enter his bereaved home.) Finally and inevitably (though not with the inevitability of Tragedy) Admetus succumbs to his fatal virtue of hospitality and reluctantly accepts the veiled woman just as Heracles seems prepared to accept defeat (see vv. 1105-08).

Once the issue is decided, comedy (or perhaps the pro-satyric tone) is allowed to take over. Heracles insists that Admetus himself, despite his reluctance, lead the woman into his halls. The King does so, with face averted “as if cutting off the Gorgon's head” (1118). And so, in the very act of betraying her again, Admetus gets his wife back. “Hospitable Admetus” has again been rewarded—as Heracles reminds him just before the moment of recognition:

Keep her now—and you will say
the son of Zeus is ever a noble guest!

(1119-20)

It was the virtue of hospitality, and Apollo's recognition of claims of charis, which saved Admetus' life for him—but at the expense of Alcestis' life. It was, once again, the virtue of hospitality which caused Admetus to entertain Heracles—but at the expense of one of his grateful (or “charis-induced”) promises to his dying wife. It is the gratitude of Heracles for Admetus' hospitality which, in turn, causes Alcestis to be saved from Death. And, finally, it is Admetus' hospitality which causes him to betray another “favour” promised to Alcestis, and, all unawares, to restore her to her home. This paradoxical treatment of the themes of charis and hospitality is surely too sharply edged with irony for us to accept the “naive” interpretation of the Alcestis as a simple morality play on “the reward of virtue”. And even apart from the sardonic effect caused by the cancellation of one piety through the fulfilment of another, it is hard to escape the poet's implication that only in the world of folk-tale, romance and fantasy can we expect such happy solutions to the grim realities of life.³⁰

It would, perhaps, be going too far to suggest that in the Alcestis Euripides is deriding the traditional virtues of gratitude and hospitality; he may however, be suggesting that the value of these traditional “virtues” is not absolute but depends on the circumstances of their fulfilment. Other plays of the poet have, to be sure, emphasized and in some cases demonstrated the relativity of ethical values traditionally thought by the Greeks to be absolute. One thinks, for example, of Phaedra's celebrated statement about the two kinds of aidos (that sense of shame, awe, reverence regarded as the most irreproachable of Greek attitudes to life,) “the one, not bad; the other, the bane of houses”, (Hippolytus 385-87).³¹ More to the point, in connection with the Alcestis, perhaps, are the treatments of the “virtue” of charis in the Helen and in the Hecuba. In the former play, Helen begs the priestess Theonoe not, from any misguided sense of loyalty, to reveal the presence of the shipwrecked Menelaus to her brother, the jealous Egyptian King. To do so, she insists, would be to purchase “base and unjust favours (charitas, 902)” in return. Yet later in the play, Helen herself, the virtuous wife bent on securing her own and her husband's escape, unjustly acquires favours from the Egyptian King in return for promised favours (her own person in marriage) which she has no intention of fulfilling. This almost virtuoso treatment of charis in the Helen³² is comic in tone but there are also treatments of charis in the Hecuba which recall, this time in tragic contexts, both the Alcestis, with its fulfillment of one favour owed at the expense of another, and the Helen, with its exploitation of false or base charis for an ulterior motive. Hecuba, seeking to save her daughter Polyxena from being sacrificed at Achilles' tomb, claims this favour from Odysseus, since she had once saved his life; wily Odysseus parries her claim by pleading Achilles' greater claim on Greek gratitude and the “long lasting favour” (charis) bestowed by tomb sacrifices (Hec. 309-20). Later in the play, Hecuba herself is reduced, by tragic circumstances, to exploiting base charis by seeking Agamemnon's help in return for the sexual favours of her daughter Cassandra (Hec. 824-32). One would not wish to overload the paradoxical treatment of the Alcestis' pieties nor to dull thereby the ironic bite, which is perhaps the chief impression left by the play. Nevertheless, the questions which the Alcestis raises seem too persistent, too close (for all its folk-tale escapism) to the realities, the basic loyalties of life, for us to dismiss them simply as witty exercises in sophistic cleverness.

(III) THE TREATMENT OF ADMETUS

If one is right in finding some suggestion of a serious ethical theme at least hinted at in the Alcestis, to what extent is its central character involved in it? To what degree is Admetus “characterized” in this play? In what sense, if any, are we justified in speaking of a near-tragedy, or a potential tragedy, of Admetus?

Miss Dale has described the central theme of the Alcestis as residing in “the too-late-knowledge” of Admetus:

It [the central theme] might be summed up in his [Admetus'] words: “now—now, when it is too late—I understand”.³³

This critic also speaks, with similar perceptiveness, of the play being “permeated by a sort of grave irony … the irony of human intentions measured against their outcome”.³⁴ By “human intentions” Dale means (as her subsequent sentences indicate) the intentions of Alcestis both to save her husband's life and to safeguard her children by having Admetus promise not to marry again; by “their outcome”, she means the “desert” of a life to which Alcestis has inadvertently condemned him due to the loneliness of his widowhood and the obloquy which will fall on him due to her self-sacrifice. (From this it will be clear that for Miss Dale neither the ironic theme nor its ethical overtones are nearly as extensive as we have suggested in the foregoing analysis of the play.)

In all of this, as well as in other aspects of the play's development, Miss Dale allows very little significance to attach to the sort of person Admetus is presented as being; indeed, apart from his hospitable nature, she argues that the poet is not interested in presenting the king as any particular sort of person at all:

Of the characters in this play, Alcestis, Herakles and Pheres stand out in much more definite outline than Admetus. … they have to be the sort of people they are or the action would not work. But for Admetus, this applies only to his regal hospitality, which affects only a small area of his part in the action. For the rest, … he is a person to whom things happen. … I do not believe that apart from the [piety] (10) Euripides had any particular interest in the sort of person Admetus was.³⁵

Now insofar as the Alcestis is primarily concerned with situations rather than with character, and with ironic reversals unexpected and unintended by the characters in the play, we may agree that the moral qualities of Admetus are not central to its theme. Nevertheless, the ironic effects of the play as we have described them depend, at least in some degree, on two features both of which are related to the character of Admetus. One of these is the King's sacrifice of personal loyalty, of the charis which he owes Alcestis (which Alcestis points out at 229), to the more social virtue of hospitality (from which, in turn, further charis redounds to Admetus, as Heracles indicates at 842 and 1101). The other is the King's miscalculation, prophesied by the Serving-Woman and finally admitted by himself, concerning the ultimate satisfaction to be gained by saving his own life at the expense of his wife's. Both of these features seem to tell us something about the kind of person Admetus is; even if the King's moral judgment is not our primary concern, there can be little doubt that much of what happens in the play happens as a result of his decisions and the priorities on which they are based—elements which, as Aristotle and Miss Dale would agree, form the very stuff of “character”.³⁶

Miss Dale, however, warns us against any such psychological inferences or value judgments about Admetus—and even against taking the speeches of Tragedy to be “primarily or consistently expressive of the natures [of the speakers]”. Instead, we are asked to ponder “two considerations, always very important to the Greek dramatists, the trend of the action and the rhetoric of the situation”. Such admonitions do indeed provide a useful corrective against the excesses of “psychological criticism”, which tends to treat the formally presented figures of Greek Tragedy as if they were characters in a nineteenth century novel. Nevertheless, the critic seems to carry her insistence on the poet's lack of interest in characterization (in any serious sense of the term) to an absurd degree when she claims that “the poet is as it were a kind of [professional speech writer] who promises to do his best for each of his clients in turn as the situations change and succeed one another”.³⁷ This view fails, I think, to do justice to various touches of unconscious, self-condemning irony in some of the King's speeches which we may accept as part of the theatrical effectiveness of the play without concluding that the action as a whole is primarily concerned with such matters as Admetus' moral enlightenment.

Two examples of such apparently sardonic touches on the poet's part may suffice to illustrate this point. During his scene with Alcestis (246-79) Admetus echoes his wife's lyrical descriptions of her approaching death with iambic appeals that she not betray him by dying (275) and with the (in the circumstances) paradoxical statement that, with Alcestis, dead, he would no longer truly exist (278). If we follow Miss Dale's approach, we must believe that the poet is simply providing Admetus with the lines which are conventionally appropriate for a husband grieving at the death-bed of his wife. Should we not say, rather, that Euripides is exploiting such conventional utterances with ironic effect in view of the fact that the lines are singularly inappropriate to the circumstances of, and reasons for, this particular death? So also, in the scene with Pheres, Admetus accuses his father of having caused Alcestis' death by his refusal to die instead of her. Then, disowning his own parents, he declares (666-68) that he will instead, be the gerotrophos (“the old age guardian”: normally a filial role) of the one who (by dying!) saved his life. It would seem perverse to ignore, in the interest of any theory about ancient dramaturgy, the obvious but effective irony here, at Admetus' expense. If the poet is to be regarded as Admetus' “expert logographos”, he has surely, in this instance, badly let him down.

In the Alcestis, then, we have a brilliant jeu d'esprit, a series of ironic variations on the themes of hospitality and charis, and on certain ambiguities which seem, in the circumstances, to surround them. We have seen, too, that the structure of the Alcestis is as tightly woven and perfectly controlled as we would expect from a play which depends so much on the precise timing of each new twist to be given to the theme. And when Admetus declares at the end, “I am indeed a happy man!”, we may well agree with him, while agreeing among ourselves that at least a part of “the dry mock” (as the tone of this play might well be described) is directed at the pious King himself.

(IV) SOME OTHER VIEWS

At least until recent times, the main interpretative arguments concerning the Alcestis have revolved around the “justification”, or otherwise, of Admetus. Several critics of the past generation (e.g., G. M. A. Grube and D. W. Lucas)³⁸ have tended to explain the King's acceptance of his wife's self-sacrifice by some form of the dynastic or “grand seigneur” argument earlier put forward by Wilamowitz and Séchan,³⁹ or by reference to the relatively inferior status of women in Admetus' time. Even commentators critical of Admetus' judgment in accepting Alcestis' sacrifice often tend to see him in an admirable light because of his celebrated hospitality. Thus the “virtue rewarded” interpretation of Admetus' final regaining of his wife through the deed of a grateful Heracles has been, and perhaps still is, the most popular view of the action as a whole: among earlier studies, see, for example, those of H. Ebeling, and D. M. Jones.⁴⁰ A variation of this view is provided by critics, such as Séchan and Grube, who take rather more interest in the “psychology” of Admetus than many more recent critics would allow; thus the King is thought, by these critics, to undergo a great emotional change, expressed in his lamentations after the funeral, as the action of the play proceeds.

Among recent critics, Anne Burnett gives, in both her studies of the Alcestis,⁴¹ the most unqualified defence of the “virtue rewarded” view of Admetus' actions and experiences in the play. At no point does Burnett allow any hint of Admetus' infidelity to his promises to Alcestis to mar praise for his justly rewarded hospitality to Heracles; indeed she suggests that this very hospitality coincides with his promise (not readily discoverable in the text) to continue to live, fulfilling his duty as a nobleman, as if his wife were still alive.⁴² With regard to Admetus' acceptance of his wife's sacrifice, Burnett suggests (rather puzzlingly, in view of vv. 705, 730, and especially 955-57) that the audience is discouraged from thinking about this matter at all.⁴³ In the second and more extensive of this critic's two studies, Admetus' “innocence” is expressed in more positive terms: treating the first part of the play as a form of “the sacrifice tragedy”, Burnett (without irony) assigns to Admetus the conventional role of “the one who tries to keep the sacrifice from taking place”.⁴⁴

Other recent critics have been less positive than Burnett about “the virtues of Admetus”. Dale, as we have seen, though recognizing Admetus' hospitable piety as his only notable characteristic, plays down the “moral issues” (especially with regard to the sacrifice) in the play.⁴⁵ C. R. Beye, on the other hand, emphasizes (as I have) Admetus' sacrifice of his mourning for Alcestis to his reputation for hospitality, though he reaches the somewhat surprising conclusion that the King ultimately resolves the conflict which these two powerful obligations provide.⁴⁶ Indeed, the element of betrayal in Admetus' hospitality to Heracles and in his ultimate acceptance of “the veiled woman” has been stressed by several other critics, notably Kurt von Fritz and, to a lesser degree, John R. Wilson in his Introduction to an interesting collection of essays on the Alcestis.⁴⁷ Despite Admetus' alleged unworthiness and the ironies involved in the play's dénouement, Wilson tends to accept the happy ending of the play at face value, since he finds that “in Alcestis the tone is tolerant and amused”, and that “Admetus is somewhat endearing in his incorrigible obtuseness”.⁴⁸

Von Fritz, on the other hand, takes Euripides' implicit criticisms of Admetus more seriously. Like Wesley Smith whom we have quoted earlier⁴⁹ he recognizes two levels of action in the play:

… just as Euripides starts out from a fairy tale, so he returns to it at the end, after he has shown in all the intervening parts of the play what happens to the tale when it is transposed into reality.⁵⁰

On the other hand, Von Fritz takes the ethical implications of the play more seriously than do other critics who have questioned the simplistic “virtue rewarded” interpretation of the play. He argues that the apparently happy ending is not, in effect, happy at all, since Alcestis and Admetus would not, after all that has happened, live happily ever after—and that the audience is meant to draw this conclusion. However, such speculations exô tou dramatos, “beyond the action of the play”, are not, perhaps, justified. It seems safer to rest content with observing (as several critics have done) the ironies involved in the two levels of the action. Euripides has let us see what Admetus might, in the circumstances, have reasonably been expected to suffer for his “choice”. Only in the never-never world of folk-tale can such miraculous rewards for his highly ambiguous “virtue” be expected, but then only in such a world could the original “life-saving” choice have been offered him.

(V) VISUAL ASPECTS OF THE ALCESTIS

While it is hazardous to try to visualize the various theatrical effects of an ancient Greek tragic production, we may perhaps venture to suggest some possibilities. Two features of the theme which we have already noted in these introductory comments particularly lend themselves to visual illustration: the ambiguous play on life and death and the emphasis on hospitality. It is the latter which makes the palace of Admetus (which provides the total scenic background), and goings and comings which revolve around the palace, so important to the stage action of the piece; so, too, it is the life/death ambiguity which makes significant the colour, or at least the degree of light and darkness, with which each of the major characters is, figuratively or literally, associated.

Apollo, the god of light, dressed perhaps in gold-coloured robe with matching mask, leaves Admetus' palace (where he has been so hospitably treated) as Death, black-robed (or possibly black-winged, if we accept Musgrave's emendation at v. 843), approaches and, after his altercation with Apollo, enters the palace to begin his symbolic possession of Alcestis. The Serving-Maid enters from the Palace (141), answers the Chorus' anxious inquiry (“Is the Queen alive or dead?”) and withdraws again into the Palace. Her movements in this brief episode anticipate the entry of Alcestis, supported by Admetus (244), for the Death-Scene, and the exit of Admetus with the corpse of Alcestis back into the palace.

The sudden, unannounced arrival of Heracles (476), (dressed, no doubt in his traditional lion-skin), jars with the pathos of the preceding Death-Scene, just as his entry into the palace at Admetus' insistence (546 ff.) jars with the mourning which Admetus has promised and just initiated. Yet it is the vigour of the hero and the hospitality which he receives which is, paradoxically, to redeem the catastrophe.

In the next episode, Admetus, presumably robed in black, comes out again from the Palace (606) to conduct Alcestis' funeral. Almost immediately, Pheres enters (614) from the right (coming from his own palace) and after the quarrel scene with Admetus departs (733) whence he has come, while Admetus, with the Chorus, departs in the opposite direction (740) leading the funeral procession. The scene is, for the moment, deserted, an unusual situation in Greek tragic performances, marking, perhaps, the lowest ebb of Alcestis' and Admetus' fortunes and the point at which the resolution of the various motifs in the play (the hospitality theme, the life and death ambiguity) will begin. The Servant enters from the palace (747) to speak the soliloquy complaining about Heracles, the guest intruding on mourning for Alcestis. When Heracles enters from the palace (773) and the Servant's complaints and revelations trigger the beginning of the dénouement, Heracles leaves (in the same direction as Admetus and the funeral have left) to rescue Alcestis from Death (860). The stage movements (by which, in a sense, the vicissitudes of the royal fortunes can be measured) end with the return of Admetus in despair to his empty palace (861) followed by the triumphant return of Heracles (possibly wreathed as a victor in the Games which he has allegedly won) with the veiled figure of Alcestis (1008). The final revelation and Admetus' announcement (1154-6) of celebrations (balancing his earlier proclamation [425 ff.] of state-wide mourning) provide a kômos-like ending to this pro-satyric play.

IV. THE TEXT

As far as the great majority of Euripidean plays is concerned, there are two main families of MSS. First, there are four annotated MSS (i.e., MSS complete with scholia) entitled MABV, representing the selection of ten plays made for use in schools about the second or third century a.d. These MSS of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though not copies of the same original, are derived ultimately from the same source. However, differences between these MSS vary from play to play and are of such a kind as to prevent any clear statement of the relations between them, let alone the creation of an archetype. Of these four, only B (Parisinus 2713) and V (Vaticanus 209) contain the Alcestis. O (Laurentianus 31. 10) and D (Laurentianus 31. 15), manuscripts of the late twelfth and of the fourteenth century, respectively, also contain the Alcestis. O, derived from the same source as B, is regularly reported in Diggle's apparatus … ; D, a mere copy of B, has for that reason been passed over.

The second family of manuscripts is derived from a Byzantine copy of not only the ten “select” plays but also of nine additional plays accidentally preserved from an ancient alphabetical collection of the total Euripidean corpus. Of the two MSS here concerned, L (Laurentianus 32.1) is more valuable than P (Palatinus gr. 287). It is generally agreed that the latter is derived from L; however, for this play (as for several others) P also provides readings from other sources and so is independently cited in the apparatus.⁵¹

With regard to any question of preference between the two manuscript traditions, one is inclined to agree with Dale's general conclusion that for the Alcestis neither class of MSS, BV or LP, is clearly superior to the other and that consequently each case where a difference appears or a doubt arises must be decided on its own merits.⁵²

In addition to the manuscripts already mentioned, the late XVth or early XVIth MS, Q (= Harleianus 5743), which has preserved vv. 1029-1163 of the Alcestis, has also been used in the preparation of Diggle's text.

As in the case of many Greek Tragedies, further assistance in the establishment of the text has been provided by the scholia (which often cite ancient variants differing from the readings of their own MSS) and from passages (normally called “Testimonia”) excerpted from the play by ancient authors and anthologists. For these, see the Apparatus Criticus and, for the Testimonia, the list conveniently provided in Dale's edition.⁵³

Notes

1. See U. von Wilamowitz, Analecta Euripidea (Berlin 1875) 172 ff., esp. p. 177. Cf. also H. E. Mierow, “Euripides' Artistic Development”, AJP 52 (1931) 339-50, which includes criticism of Wilamowitz's theory of evolution of Euripides' art.

2. See Aristotle, Poetics 1453 a 17-22. …

3. See Dale, Intro., v and xxxix.

4. There seems to be an oblique reference to Apollo's bondage to Admetus, son of Pheres, at Il. 2. 763-66; Homer's only reference to Alcestis with Admetus occurs in his naming of the parents of Eumelus at Il. 2. 713-15. For the Hesiodic references, see Hesiod, fragments 122-27 (Rzach = 59, 60, 42, 51, 54b, 54c Merkelbach and West) from the Ehoiai, or Catalogue of Famous Women. A scholium to Euripides, Alc. 1 (Hes. frg. 127 = 54c M and W) assures us that in the parts of the myth concerning Apollo's enslavement to Admetus, Euripides is following the common tale as told by Hesiod and Asclepiades. (The scholiast also adds several other ancient sources, including writers as early as Stesichorus and Pherecydes, for this part of the myth.)

5. See Nauck, TGF, p. 720.

6. See Apollodorus, Bibl. 3. 10. 3-4 and 1. 9. 15 respectively. The translation of the latter passage, quoted below, is that of Sir James Frazer, in the Loeb edition (London 1921).

7. Carl Robert, Thanatos (Berlin, 1879), 29-30.

8. See U. von Wilamowitz, Isyllos von Epidauros, Philol. Untersuchungen 9 (Berlin, 1886) 68 ff. and (on the alleged origins and significance of such popular religious poetry attributed to Hesiod) Griechische Tragoedien, III (Berlin, 1906) 7 ff., in Wilamowitz's introduction to Alkestis. Cf. also Méridier, 46-47 and (by way of contrast), Dale, ix. …

9. Lesky (1925). The German, Greek and Armenian folk-songs are outlined and discussed at pp. 20 ff., 27 ff., and 30 ff., respectively. Cf. also Christ-Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (Munich, 1912) I, 355-56, n. 1, where the folk-tale aspects of Euripides' Alcestis are also stressed.

10. This is a paraphrase of the summary in Lesky (1925), 41-42; cf. ibid., 36-41.

11. Robert, op. cit., 29.

12. For a sympathetic summary of such views see Séchan (1927), I, 490-514, especially 493-98 and references to Wilamowitz and Bloch there given.

13. See Ebeling, 65-85, especially 74-77. Cf. also Th. Bergk, Griechische Literaturgeschichte (Berlin 1889) III, 498, who believes that in Phrynichus' Alcestis, Alcestis' return was the gift of the gods of the Underworld.

14. On this fragment of Phrynichus, cf. Dale, xiii-xiv, and references there given.

15. See Ebeling, 65-66, 76-77.

16. The suggestion that Euripides introduced Heracles into the Alcestis story is, of course, highly conjectural. There is, however, no evidence in painting or sculpture to contradict the view that the theme of Alcestis' self-sacrifice made a relatively late entry into the main tradition of Greek mythology. According to J. A. Paton, “The Story of Alcestis in Ancient Literature and Myth”, AJA 4 (1900), 150-51, “The myth was not popular in early art and no unquestioned representations of it have survived.” J. D. Beazley, Etruscan Vase Paintings (Oxford 1947), 134, refers to but one uncertain representation of Alcestis on an Attic neck amphora (Louvre F60). The fourth century Etruscan representations of the Alcestis story do not include the figure of Heracles.

17. See above, 26.

18. For the view that other extant Euripidean plays besides the Alcestis (notably Helen and Iphigenia among the Taurians) may also have been pro-satyric, see Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, (Meisenheim am Glan 1980) 184 ff. Sutton makes the point that the two plays mentioned provide the elements of comic relief and of tragic subversion which he feels should be present in the pro-satyric Alcestis but which are, in his opinion, missing from it. However, on the basis of length alone, Helen and I.T. seem unlikely to have been ‘pro-satyric’ drama, if such a category can be thought to have existed.

19. See Dale, xviii-xxii, for the points cited in the above paragraph from her discussion. Not all critics have agreed concerning the success of the mingling of the comic (presumably “pro-satyric”) and serious elements in Alcestis. Among the older critics, Th. Bergk, Griechische Literaturgeschichte III (Berlin 1884) 498, praised the introduction of Heracles (which he regarded as a Euripidean innovation) as providing a hearty “Zwischenspiel” (“interlude”) with which to relieve the moving and pathetic element of the play. Méridier 50-51, while averring that Heracles supplies the only reminiscence of the satyr-play in Alcestis, finds that character stripped of his rowdier qualities in order to fit the play's tragic tone. Grube, 145-46, finds the mixture of the tragic and the comic unsuccessful in the Alcestis in that the two elements are kept too far apart (“There is nothing comic about either Admetus or Alcestis, there is nothing tragic about Heracles”) for them to operate together.

20. See Kitto, 315-16. For a more recent and perhaps subtler view of the Alcestis' comic elements than those considered above, see now B. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia, Studien zu komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragödie (Göttingen 1982) 130 ff. Seidensticker insists that the meaning and the aesthetic charm of Alcestis lie precisely in the fact that the same tale is treated as tragedy and comedy at the same time. Thus he finds that combination in no way synthetic but expressive of the ambiguous simultaneity of Tragi-Comedy and rejects the views (held by Kitto and to a degree by Wesley Smith [below, note 21]) that moments of tragic effect and intense emotional sympathy are rendered impossible by the folk-tale quality which, he finds, supplies its non-tragic elements (see especially pp. 135-35). For Seidensticker, the later comedies of Shakespeare supply the closest literary parallel to Alcestis and he suggests (p. 136) that Northrop Frye's definition of romantic comedy or “romance” in this connection is applicable, to a remarkable degree, to Alcestis (see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton 1957] 186 ff.). We may, I think, accept Seidensticker's account of the inseparability of the comic and tragic effects of our play without rejecting, as Seidensticker does, Kitto's insistence that the blend renders impossible, even at the more moving moments of the action, the kind of emotional response we reserve for tragedy.

21. See Wesley Smith, “The Ironic Structure in Alcestis”, Phoenix 14 (1960) 127-45; the quotation which follows in the text is from p. 127. On the ethical ideas involved in this and comparable Euripidean themes, see S. E. Scully, Philia and Charis in Euripidean Tragedy (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1973), esp. Chap. III, “Alcestis”. (Cf. also the summary in Dissertation Abstracts XXXVI, 1484 a-b.)

22. See my article, “Structural Aspects of Euripides' Alcestis”, in Greek Poetry and Philosophy, Studies in Honour of Leonard Woodbury (Chico, California, 1985), 73-81 (the present quotation is from p. 74) which also discusses other examples of Euripides' use of this “framing device.” (Parts of the following discussion of Alcestis' structure are adaptations and expansions of suggestions made in this article.) Cf. also Kurt von Fritz, Antike und moderne Tragödie (Berlin 1962) 312 ff., whose view of Euripides' use of this device in Alcestis is briefly discussed below ….

23. Rivier, 130-31, has remarked that Apollo's prophecy of a “happy ending” early in the play indicates the poet's concern (in keeping with the pro-satyric position of the play) not to yield, or have his audience yield, too much to the natural gravity and gloom of the situation.

    R. Hamilton, in “Prologue, Prophecy and Plot in Four Plays of Euripides”, AJP 99 (1978) 277-302, views Apollo's prophecy in a somewhat different light. He argues that, in Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and Alcestis, “the prediction [in the prologue] is altered, qualified, questioned or contradicted in the course of the play;” the resultant tension between the audience's expectations from the prologue and from the action, respectively, helps, it is alleged, “to articulate and unify the whole”. Hamilton's argument is interesting and ingenious but works less well for Alcestis than for his other examples in that the audience is never in this play led into serious doubt, despite the views expressed by the Chorus, concerning Apollo's “prologue prophecy”.

24. Rosenmeyer, 217 ff., has described the Chorus in this play as “the instrument which Euripides employs to dramatize man's reliance on the conventions” by which the ordinary human being can protect himself “against too keen an awareness of the weight of necessity.” This is a fair comment on many of the Chorus' more banal utterances (e.g., at 416 ff., which Rosenmeyer includes in his illustrations) but one which hardly does justice to passages such as the present one (at vv. 112 ff.) which help the poet's distinction between the real, or at least the traditional, world of tragic myth and the “impossibilities” indicated in the prologue and the exodos of the play.

25. This convention of employing first lyric and then dramatic expression to present two distinct aspects of a character's experience (or, sometimes, personality) has been discussed by several commentators in connection with this passage. See, for example, Rosenmeyer, 225; Rivier, 135, and his references to W. Schadewaldt, Monolog und Selbstgespräch (Berlin 1926) and W. Kranz, Stasimon (Berlin 1933). I have discussed Euripides' exploitation of this convention in this and other passages (e.g., at Med. 111 ff. and 214 ff., at Hipp. 199 ff. and 373 ff.) in Maia 24 (1972) 199-207.

26. See Note ad loc.

27. Cf. Heracles' speech at vv. 779-802.

28. See vv. 600-05 and Notes ad loc. Cf. also the Note on the ode as a whole.

29. Pheres' prophecies in these two passages, about what may be said about Admetus (and, in his reference to Alcestis' kinsmen, about what may be done to him), together with Admetus' own later expressions of concern (954-60) about what may be said of him, tend rather to refute the view held in one form or another by several scholars that in accordance with the attitudes of antiquity it would be quite acceptable, even expected, that the King should accept the sacrifice even of his wife for his life. Cf., for example, Séchan, 340-42, Grube 129-30, Lucas, 4. (Méridier, 52 also rebutted such “historical justifications” of Admetus' position by reference to these passages, i.e., to “le blame public” mentioned by Pheres and feared by Admetus.) Wilamowitz (1906) 88-93, earlier had also explained Admetus' attitude (and that of the Chorus) as being in accordance with the King's “Grandseigneur” view of his position. However Wilamowitz does make it clear that the Pheres scene shows Admetus for the first time that the matter may not always be seen from this point of view. (It should be noted also that Alcestis' own view of her situation at 284-6 [where she says that instead of dying for Admetus she might well, as his widow, have married another Thessalian prince] further rebuts the idea that the Queen is making a sacrifice expected of her).

30. A similar inference can, perhaps, be drawn from Euripides' treatment of Helen in his Helen. Only in a romantic fantasy can we accept a Helen who is a chaste and faithful “Penelope figure”, waiting patiently for Menelaus in Egypt where (in the dramatist's exploitation of Stesichorus' palinode) she has been spirited away by Hermes until the siege of Troy has been accomplished. Elsewhere, in more “credible” Euripidean plays (most notably by Hecuba in The Trojan Women), she is presented as quite the opposite of the faithful wife, pining for her husband.

31. For various views of what Phaedra (and Euripides) meant by “the other” aidos, see Barrett's note ad loc.; E. R. Dodds, “The Aidos of Phaedra and the Meaning of the Hippolytus”, CR 39 (1925) 102-04, and F. Solmsen, “Bad Shame and related Problems (Eur. Hipp. 380-88)”, Hermes 101 (1973) 420-25.

32. The word charis occurs ten times in the scenes between Theoclymenus, Helen, and Menelaus in the Helen. In the context mentioned above, see especially vv. 1234 ff., 1411 and 1420; cf. also my Euripidean Drama, 298-99 and Note 15.

33. Dale, xxii.

34. Ibid., xxv.

35. Ibid., xxvii. Though we shall venture some qualifications of this view there is no question that Miss Dale's treatment of characterization in the Alcestis, as well as of the theme of the play as a whole, provides a valuable corrective to the extreme psychological and moralistic treatments to which it has often been subjected in the past. (An egregious example of the latter approach may be found in the Introduction to Van Lennep's edition.) For a view of the presentation of Admetus which differs from Dale's and yet avoids the excesses of psychological interpretation, see Arrowsmith, Introduction, Part III. Arrowsmith speaks (p. 11) of the “complete modal ignorance and innocence” of Admetus as a man “untamed” (a-damatos) or unbroken by Necessity who will eventually be “forcibly subjected” to it, when he comes to realize what Alcestis' self-sacrifice for his life is to mean to him.

36. See Aristotle, Poetics 1449 b 36—1450 a 2. Cf. also Dale, “Character and Thought in Aristotle's Poetics”, Collected Papers, 45 ff. (Even apart from Admetus' presumed decision to accept Alcestis' sacrifice, which a purist might argue is outside the actual dramatic action, the King clearly expresses decisions in his speeches both with regard to his promises to Alcestis and with regard to his hospitality to Heracles and later to Heracles' “veiled woman”.)

37. See Dale, xxviii.

38. See Grube, 129-30; Lucas 4.

39. See above, note 29, for references to the views of Wilamowitz, Séchan, Grube, and Lucas on this point.

40. Ebeling, 76-81; D. M. Jones, 50-55. (Gilbert Murray [1913] 71-72, is one of the few among the past generation of critics to stress that Euripides clearly shows us the weakness in Admetus' character in accepting his wife's sacrifice.)

41. Anne Burnett, “The Virtues of Admetus”, CP 60 (1965) 240-55 and Catastrophe Survived, (Oxford 1971) Chap. II, 22-46.

42. Burnett (1971), 39.

43. Burnett (1965), 240-41.

44. Burnett (1971), 27.

45. See Dale, Intro. iv; ….

46. Beye, 118 ff.

47. Kurt von Fritz, Antike und Moderne Tragödie, 312 ff; Wilson, 4-5, 7-9. (Von Fritz's discussion of the Alcestis is translated in Wilson's collection, pp. 20 ff.)

48. Wilson, 9.

49. Cf. supra, p. 36 and Note 21.

50. Von Fritz, as translated in Wilson, 82.

51. See Diggle I (1984) xii-xiii; cf. Dale, xxx.

52. Dale, xxxi.

53. Ibid., xxxvi-xxxviii.

Select Bibliography

General Bibliography

General Studies and Handbooks (Greek Tragedy; Euripides)

A. M. Dale, Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969) (on many aspects of drama).

G. M. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (London, 1961) (handbook).

H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: a Literary Study (London, 1961).

D. W. Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford, 1968) (commentary).

A. Rivier, Essai sur le tragique d'Euripide (Paris, 1975).

L. Séchan, Etudes sur la tragédie grecque dans ses rapports avec la céramique (Paris, 1926).

Verse and Metre

A. M. Dale, The Lyric Metres of Greek Drama (Cambridge, 1968).

———. Metrical Analyses of Tragic Choruses, BICS Supplement 21.1 (1971); 21.2 (1981); 21.3 (1983) (index of Choruses in 21.3).

Selected Bibliography to Alcestis

I: Editions and Translations

Arrowsmith, William, Euripides, Alcestis. Translation with Notes and Glossary (New York & London, 1974).

Dale, A. M., Euripides, Alcestis, edited with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1954).

Lucas, D. W., The Alcestis of Euripides, translated with Introduction and Notes (London, 1951).

Méridier, Louis, Euripide I. (Collection Budé, Paris, 1923).

II: Monographs, Articles and Chapters in Books

Beye, C. R., “Alcestis and her Critics”, GRBS 2 (1959), 111-27.

Ebeling, Hermann L., “The Admetus of Euripides”, TAPA 29 (1898) 65-85.

Jones, D. M., “Euripides' Alcestis”, CR 62 (1948) 50-55.

Lesky, Albin, Alkestis, der Mythos und das Drama (Wien and Leipzig, 1925).

Rosenmeyer, T. G., The Masks of Greek Tragedy (Austin, 1963) “Alcestis' Character and Death”, 199-248.

Séchan, L., “Le Dévouement d'Alcéste”, Revue des cours et conférences 28 I (Feb. 1927), 490-514; II (May 1927), 329-53.

Wilson, J. R. (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Euripides' “Alcestis” (Englewood Cliffs, 1968).