[In the following excerpt, Arrowsmith provides a modal analysis of the Alcestis.]

I

By general agreement the Alcestis is a spirited, puzzling, profound, and seriously light-hearted tragicomedy of human existence. But it is also, as I hope to show,¹ a peculiarly beautiful and coherent example of what, for want of a better word, I would call “modal” drama (as opposed to modern “psychological” drama or the drama of our own “theater of character”). Moreover, the beauty and the difficulty of the play—its mysterious elusiveness, its puzzling texture and unfamiliar form—can only be understood, I think, by grasping, in all its complicated richness, its peculiar thought and structure.

Among extant Greek plays, there is literally nothing like it.² For works of similar tone and structure, we must go to the late Shakespearean “comedies,” to The Winter's Tale or Pericles or The Tempest; or, in music, to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, with its miraculous blend of wit, pathos, and farce, its buffo Figaro and its semi-tragic Countess Almaviva. In composition, the Alcestis is remarkably executed; each succeeding scene unerringly articulates and inflects the controlling theme; even for Euripides (one of the most severely economical of dramatists, despite the censures of his critics), the concentration is extraordinary. So too is the shaping of the characters, each one, in his generically revealing way, embodying or at least illuminating the central idea—the process by which a man, instructed by the example of a woman's love and courage, at last comes into his own humanity, into his true human mode, and finally learns, through suffering, humiliation, and luck, to think recognizably “human (that is, mortal) thoughts.” It is an extraordinary achievement. But that achievement cannot, I think, be properly understood unless the play is seen and experienced in the modal terms that control its structure, tone, characters, and themes. The play is complex, but its complexity is organically coherent; superbly unified even in its mercurial shifts of pace and feeling, in its crisscrossed paradox and irony, it is all of a piece. What makes it so, I believe, is mode and modal concentration.

II

By “mode” I mean simply the generic states and phases of human (and other) existence, as they revealed themselves to the Greek mind and imagination. No ancient writer, of course, anywhere speaks of “modes” nor is there any ancient Greek word for “mode.” But it is a revealing modern notion that primitive cultures are “primitive” precisely to the degree that they are typically incapable of articulating assumptions that lie deeply ingrained in language and behavior. But this seems a dubious notion at best since the more coherent the culture is, the less perceptible its basic assumptions are likely to be to members of that culture.

Modern scholars of Greek drama have constantly pointed out that ancient tragedy aims at the archetypal and universal, and their grounds for so doing are, in essence, modal. Indeed “modal” analysis is really nothing more than an effort to work out, in ramifying detail, the dramatic and cultural implications of this “universalizing” tendency of Greek drama. It implies not only that ancient drama should not, and cannot, be understood in terms of modern ideas of character and psychology, but that the very aim of Greek drama is an account of human fate in a world where any order of “being” is defined by contrast with other modes of existence. Also implied is the corollary that modal aims will inevitably be trivialized by imposing modern notions. Thus, in sharp contrast to modern drama, the drama of the Greeks is masked; its characters make their appearances in ways which quite literally compel the audience to perceive and respond to them in a generic, not an individual, way. Further, the modal aim of ancient drama is reinforced, as we would surely expect, by the theatrical and rhetorical conventions of that theater.

A few examples. In both Greek and English the distinction between “mortal” (thnētos) and “immortal” (athanatos) is a modal distinction rooted in language. Men die by definition whereas gods qua immortals cannot die; their modes differ according to their subjection to, or exemption from, death. Man is modally unique, and his uniqueness is explicitly revealed by informing contrast with the gods (who live forever and know it) and the animals (who are mortal but are unaware of their mortality). Men suffer necessity (anankē) whether as death, political oppression, old age, suffering, sexuality, or slavery; the gods who impose, and often incarnate, human necessities seldom suffer them. In short, the modes of men and gods are defined by their vulnerability to anankē or limits generally. Necessity is the criterion which divides each “species” of existence from the other.

But between man and man there are also crucial differences of modal degree, since men differ in their powers and therefore in their value. There are slaves, peasants, nobles, and free men; cowards, men of courage, and heroes. The hero is always interesting to the Greek mind because he is a modal frontiersman; he confounds old modalities and redefines the boundaries between man and god. One thinks of Herakles and his superhuman labors, Asklepios with his partial conquest of death, Orpheus with his harrowing of Hades—or the bravery of Alcestis. Or perhaps an Achilles, the archetypal youth confronted with the necessity of an early death. Implicit, often explicit, everywhere in Greek literature is a great hierarchy of being which runs from absolute, untrammeled Olympian possibility at the top, to sheer, wretched subjection to total necessity at the bottom. To this hierarchy the Greeks thought it possible and natural—indeed, almost second nature—to assign men and events. No body of thought is so overwhelmingly pervaded by such emphasis upon modal distinctions; no other literature is so concentrated upon the effort, to clarify, realize, and “place” the modes of existence. The spectrum is, of course, usually aristocratic, but the aristocracy involved is basically not that of blood but of achievement and aretē.³

This uniquely Greek concentration on the modalities has been slighted simply because it is so overwhelmingly obvious that the temptation is strong to dismiss it as cultural rhetoric or mere linguistic habit. This would be a mistake. For it is this modal obsession, this passion for observing the modes of men and gods, that gives Greek thought and art their characteristic coherence and clarity. Any object seems always to imply another. Individuals and details alike have a cosmic resonance. Unless one has a sense for modal composition it is, I think, very difficult to understand Greek literature. Needless to say, possession of a modal sense does not mean that the Greeks were amateur philosophers; they were rather the enthusiastic heirs of a fairly coherent culture whose values were, until the late fifth century, exceptionally coherent. Everything in their environment conspired to make them modally aware. The ordinary Greek surely had no more notion that he habitually made modal distinctions than Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme realized that he had been speaking prose all his life. But their audience's sensitivity to modes seems to have been assumed by Greek artists and dramatists, and their works are addressed directly to that understanding, as even a cursory examination makes clear.

Man (thnētos) and god (athanatos) are modal words, as I pointed out before. Similarly, the real force of the Delphic command to “know oneself” is modal. It means not that introspective awareness of identity and motives which moderns call “knowledge,” but rather a recognition of one's place in the scheme of things: what it is to be a man, to possess a man's fate. The man who “knows himself” always knows one thing—his mortality. It is because he knows he is doomed that he will, in theory, act compassionately toward other men no less doomed than he. For this reason he avoids the dangerous adjectives, the epithets which belong to the gods—that blessed exemption from necessity that makes the Greek gods “happy,” “immortal” (and also amoral). Because the gods see everything sub specie aeternitatis, that perspective of theirs obliterates both meaning and morality; since they do not suffer (or do so only rarely), they are seldom compassionate (that is, “fellow sufferers”). Man, who views things temporally, is defined as a transient and a suffering being; necessity for him is a way of life. Therefore, if he recognizes his fate, he will think “mortal thoughts” (ta thnēta phronein), and these thoughts will invariably be the facts of his condition: his fatedness, his limits, his death, even his Aphrodite. What man is not, god is: a concentration of supreme power and intensity, and in this sense god imposes man's necessity upon him. If a man is wise and thinks mortal thoughts, he will yield to god; only a great hero, a great fool, a great criminal, or a very young man (that is, a man who does not know himself because of his youth) will resist god. Why? Because he is contemptuous of the modes (like a man of hybris), or ignorant of them (like a young man whose hybris is natural), or defiant of them (like a hero), or innocent of them (like Admetos).

Everywhere in Greek literature the modes are implied in a structure of events, as the metaphysical basis of character, or as the given morality of the situation. Most Greek art—certainly Homer, Pindar, Herodotos, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—is sustained modal meditation. The structure is often exactly designed so as to emphasize and intensify the modal distinctions between the characters; and just as the characters are defined in their own modes, so their modal differences define each other. Sophocles, for instance, constantly returns to stark, revealing contrasts between the hero (a person always ignorant of his modalities) and the sophron (or man of sophrosynē, the man who knows who he is). This, after all, is the difference between Oedipus and Kreon in the Oedipus Rex; between Chrysothemis and Elektra; between Antigone and Ismene; between Ajax and Odysseus. The pairing of these fated foils is addressed directly to an audience that feels situations modally. I stress feeling here because it seems important to realize that modal distinctions run deep. The Greek dramatist is not a philosopher, but a thinking artist whose sense of composition resembles that of his audience; modal perception, modal composition, are second nature.

Modal distinction, then, implies a hierarchy of value and being. The hierarchy differs, of course, according to the artist; each poet uses the same perceptual tools, makes similar modal distinctions, but inflects them in an individual way. But the work of art requires the reader to respond by placing men and events in an ordered relationship, each defining the other. The great modal example in Greek literature is, of course, Homer; all the others are variations on that great original. At the very top is god, sheer power, intense being; the quality “possessed by what is wonderful and unique,” the special radiance of the exceptional and prodigious. Thus in the Iliad unusual men and great events have a luminousness which declares their divinity; it is because they are exceptional that they are divine. Among their many other functions, Homer's gods are often functional descriptions of the modes of great men; a hero is a hero, not because he enjoys the favor of a god but because his aretē requires a god's presence to account for it. The aretē reveals divinity, almost summoning the gods. Achilles' courage is like Odysseus' mother-wit and Paris' looks, a charisma. Every power a being possesses is pertinent to his place along this great gamut of being, running from the omnipotence of Zeus to the undifferentiated powers of the great feudal barons of Olympos, down to the modest particularisms of the nymphs and lesser powers, to the god-aspiring aretē of the hero, to the routine world of ordinary mortals, to weak women, helpless children, and chattel slaves. Each order suffers the cumulative anankē of the orders above it in an ascending curve of freedom and power. The hierarchy changes, needless to say, with the social period; Euripides' Athens is not Homer's Troy. In this flexible hierarchy, the man of hybris is dangerous not only to himself and others but to the order whose stability his hybris threatens. Against hybris the saving attitude is sophrosynē, which is little more than a mastery of the modes, a skill of acceptance and self-knowledge according to who one is, his powers and circumstances, according to his mortality. Some possess that skill; some do not. Most learn it naturally, but great men, men of exceptional good fortune, learn it the hard way because their greatness dislikes learning a limit.

In sum, necessity is the essential criterion of mode. For just as men are, as a species, differentiated from the gods by the anankē of death, so they are generically distinguished from each other by status, wealth, sex, and age. Perhaps the most obvious fact of the Greek masking convention is that it enables the audience to detect, at a glance, the generic traits of a character at the same time that it prevents his full individuation. His whole character, in fact, is little more than the sum of the possibilities contained in his “modal” presentation. We observe, for instance, that Euripides' Pentheus is a boy; but he is also a king; these two salient facts then combine to produce a third, his spiritual intransigence and pathetic susceptibility to Dionysos; and these “traits” are then given depth by contrast with old Teiresias and Kadmos. Hippolytos' defiant arrogance is a function not only of divine affinity—his indenture to the goddess Artemis—but of his youth, a youth sharply contrasted to the humble old age of the Huntsman. In the Greek theater, these defining traits are starkly visual; in most cases they are stressed by contrast and foil. The mask states the essentials, tells us whether its wearer is young or old or middle-aged; youth or young man; girl or matron; slave or free; prosperous or unfortunate.⁴ These impressions are then amplified and “thickened” by language, plot, development of theme, and theatrical “blocking.” But the essential lines by which a character is first introduced are never disturbed or distorted by intrusion of idiosyncratic detail. It does not follow in the least that the psychology of the modal character is therefore wooden or “stereotyped.” Metaphysical or modal psychology may be unfamiliar, but it is no less rich and complex than any modern “individual” psychology.

The language of mode, the reader should note, is unmistakably and for obvious reasons the language of anankē. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for a modal interpretation of Greek literature is the astonishing coherence of the abundant idioms and vocabulary of necessity. Thus we everywhere have expressions of force and strength; persistent verbal images of pressure or constraint or binding, the well-developed vocabulary of authority, coercion, deference, and obligation. There are also the metaphors and symbols, often visual, of yoking, wrestling, etc. If the reader is attentive to these nuances of force (and if the translator does not obscure them), his attention will be drawn not only to the situations which such language naturally applies but to the theme which language and situation together develop. This saturation (no other word will quite do) of Greek tragedy (but also epic, lyric, and history) in the idiom of necessity and force is, in my judgment, the single most obvious (but quite unexplored) fact of Greek tragedy.

The language becomes more impressive if the reader keeps the presumable “blocking” constantly in mind. “Blocking”—that is, the way in which the characters move in theatrical space, in relation to each other—has received far too little scrutiny from modern scholars. However conjectural, a diagrammatic sense of the play's likely “blocking” is immensely instructive and often invaluable. The important thing is a simple awareness of theatrical space and the meaningful employment of this space. This is best achieved by asking ourselves where in the theater a given character, at any moment in the play, must have been; from what position, in what posture, he speaks; and in what relation to others. The suppliant posture, for instance, immediately reveals the relative power of two individuals; when the Chorus in Oedipus supplicate the hero, we see not only their dependence but Oedipus's exemption and apparent self-sufficiency. When Euripides' Hecuba and Polymnestor scramble around the orchestra on all fours, animalized by their sufferings, the dramatist is making a crucial modal point about human skills, how they are saved and how destroyed. So too when Sophocles' Philoktetes enters, we see in his taut, bent posture—held erect by the “godlike” bow, pulled down by the “devouring” animal foot—who he is and how it is with him, a man in crisis, capable of standing erect as a man or falling forever. So too, in Alcestis, Admetos' exemption is implicitly contrasted with the hand of death which literally, not merely metaphorically, pulls Alcestis down to Hades; later, when Herakles forces Admetos to take the veiled girl's hand, we are meant to glimpse the gulf that separates him from the earlier, self-sufficient Admetos.

Finally, there remain modal thought and psychology, the kind of perception and process by which character in Greek tragedy is perceived, shaped, and altered. The most convenient example is perhaps Aristotle, who (in Rhetoric 2, 12-15) gives a penetrating but schematic account of what I would not hesitate to call a modal phenomenology of human age and fortune. The entire section should be read, slowly and medatatively, but even a brief excerpt shows quite clearly the nature of “modal” thought and the distinctions on which it is based:

Let us now discuss the character of men in terms of their emotions, ages, and fortunes. … The ages are youth, the prime of life, and old age. By fortune I mean nobility, wealth, power, and their opposites, and, in general, good fortune and bad.

In character the young are full of desire, and capable of fulfilling their desires. Among bodily pleasures they chiefly obey those belonging to Aphrodite, uncontrollably so. Changeable and quickly surfeited, their desires are excessive but quickly cool; for their wills, like the sick man's hunger and thirst, are keen but not strong. They are passionate, quick to anger, and impulsive. … They are eager for honor, but more eager for victory; for youth wants superiority, and victory is a kind of superiority. And they desire both more than they desire money; they have no interest in money because they have not yet experienced need. … In character they are high-minded, not suspicious, because they have never seen much wickedness; trusting, because they have seldom been cheated; and hopeful, because the young are naturally as hot-blooded as those who have drunk too much wine. Besides, they have not yet encountered many failures. … They have exalted ideas because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned the power of necessity. Moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think they are equal to great things—and that means having exalted ideas. They would rather do noble deeds than useful ones; their lives are governed more by moral consideration than calculation; it is calculation that aims at the useful, but aretē aims at what is noble. … All their mistakes lie in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon's precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and they hate too much and the same with everything else. They think they know everything and confidently assert it; and this, in fact, is why they overdo everything. … But if they do wrong, it is because of hybris, not wickedness. …

Older men … have in most cases characters which are just the opposite. …

The type of character produced by wealth is visible for all to see. Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth makes them think they possess all good things; for wealth is a kind of standard of value for everything else, and so they imagine there is nothing money cannot buy. They are luxurious and ostentatious. …

In a word, the kind of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool. At the same time there is a difference between the character of old money and new money; the nouveaux riches have all the bad qualities of the type in an exaggerated form; that is, they have not been educated in the use of wealth. The wrongs they do are not caused by wickedness, but partly by hybris and partly by self-indulgence. …

III

Almost nobody, of course, has ever missed the central modal point of the play—that Admetos learns from Alcestis' death that each man must do his own dying, that death is the ultimate and most personal of facts. Our lives and deaths, moreover, are inseparably linked to those of others: the life Admetos wins by Alcestis' death is, without Alcestis, a life not worth living. No less important, but seldom noticed, is the complementary point on which the play pivots: that human beings do in point of fact die for others, that, like Admetos, we permit or compel others to do our dying for us. Self-sacrifice, the voluntary offering of one's life for others or another, has no other meaning, and such sacrifice is a theme which Euripides explores almost obsessively in play after play. The operating premise of the Alcestis—implicit in its folktale plot of a man who defers his own death by finding a surrogate—rests upon this simple fact, that individuals and societies constantly ask, and sometimes constrain (as in the case of war or collective expiation), others to do their dying for them. Whether these surrogates are scapegoats like Oedipus, or victims like Pentheus, or volunteers like Alcestis (or Iphigeneia, Makaria, and the others) is less important than the recurrent human situations such sacrifices dramatize. No man, as Admetos learns, can escape his personal death; but we only learn how to live and die from those who, by dying for others, teach us their value, and ours, and the value of life generally. Men are defined, modally defined, by death; only in the presence of death does life reveal its value. Those who reveal that value best are the heroes—those who, like Alcestis and Herakles, knowingly confront death on behalf of others. The hero, as Nietzsche knew, is the only justification of human life.

That modes are at issue in the themes and assumptions of the plot is self-evident; a play whose immediate subject is a man's schooling in mortality is modal by definition. That everything else in the play—the complex, ramifying structure; the shaping of the characters; the imagery, rhetoric, and logic—are also modal may be less immediately obvious. Certainly the dramatic assumption of the play, on which everything else turns, involves a modal suspension of the law of Necessity (anankē), and the ironic consequence of this suspension is to demonstrate precisely that Necessity cannot be suspended.

For a brief time, Euripides would have us believe, the Fates, thanks to Apollo's stratagem, have become drunk, which is to say that Necessity is still in force but temporarily inoperative. Yet the thematic purpose of this suspension is, ironically, to school Admetos in mortality, the supreme necessity. But no sooner has Admetos accepted death than Necessity is once again ironically suspended in order to permit the “resurrection” of Alcestis. Through the alternating rhythm of these enforcements and suspensions of Necessity, Euripides' play moves in such a way that fabulous, almost fairy-tale, events suddenly take on tragic reality, and tragedy in turn is abruptly metamorphosed into comic fable and parable. It is this rhythm which any reader of the play immediately feels in the pointed contrasting of opposed moods, that chiaroscuro of life and death, comedy and tragedy, that characterize the play. Thus elegiac or funeral scenes are suddenly, often savagely, enjambed with farcical or angry scenes, and this patterning and rhythm are immediately established in the agon of Apollo and Death: the bright savior god confronting the dark lord of the dead. This confrontation is then repeated in the scene in which Pheres and Admetos quarrel before the bier of the dead Alcestis, or in the scene of Herakles' drunken braying in the house of mourning:

There he was, roaring away over his supper …
and there we were, mourning for our mistress,
and what with the maids wailing and beating their breasts—
well, you've never heard such a bloody medley in all
your days. …

Because in the first scene Apollo tells us that Alcestis will be rescued from death, we are freed from suspense. Deliberately freed, I would argue, so that we can attend to the dramatist's “blocking” of his themes and characters, the metaphysical rhythm of his reversals, and the virtuosity of the play's formal development.

If the structure is clearly modal, so, I think, are the characters. Indeed, they are dramatically shaped in such a way that, once the shaping is perceived, their functional coherence becomes immediately apparent. What Euripides gives us, I suggest, is a circle of modally defined characters whose initial focus is Admetos. Apollo, Death, Alcestis, Herakles, Pheres, and even the Chorus are dramatically defined in such a way that they all illuminate Admetos and show him for what he is: a man without knowledge of the human modes, without the slightest ability to “think mortal thoughts”; a man of complete modal ignorance and innocence. How, after all, could it possibly be otherwise? Admetos is a king; a king whose wealth and good fortune are painted (at ll 679 ff.) [Line numbers refer to my English translation unless otherwise indicated.] in almost Croesus-like terms; whose life has been marked by total exemption from all circumscribing necessity (“Your luck had been good,” say the Chorus to Admetos. “High happiness and great wealth—both were yours. So when this sorrow struck so suddenly, it found you unprepared. Suffering was something you had never known before”.) He is a man who possesses a god for a slave, a demigod for friend, and a wife who is willing to die for him. How could such a man, so metaphysically “spoiled,” possibly think “mortal thoughts”? How could such a man accept death? Whatever the figure of Admetos may have meant or suggested in pre-Euripidean tradition, in this play he is represented, as so often in Greek literature and life, according to the meaning of his own name.⁵ He is Admetos (that is, a-dametos, the “untamed,” the “unmastered,” the “unbeaten”: the man unyoked, unbroken by Necessity). It is not an idle coincidence that the Chorus, at line 180, speak of the “dead” as “death-tamed” and “-broken” men (dmathentas), and, in the ode on Necessity, declare that anankē breaks or subdues (damadzei) even the iron of the Chalybes. Admetos, the unbroken man, the unsubdued, will be broken and subdued, forcibly subjected to anakē.

That we are intended to see Admetos' character and everything he does as deriving from modal ignorance is made clear, I think, in the remarkable foiling of the dramatis personae. We see who Admetos is through sharply schematized contrasts in the situations of all the others, including the gods. Thus Apollo, with his opening words, strikes a starkly modal note. He is that rare, indeed almost unique, thing, a god who has felt the hard stroke of Necessity:

House of Admetos, farewell.
Apollo takes his leave of you,
dear house … though it was here that I endured
what no god should be compelled to bear.
Here, with serfs and laborers, I ate the bread
of slavery …
                                                            … And so,
in punishment, Zeus doomed me,
a god, to this duress,
constraining me to be the bond-slave
of a death-bound man.(6)

The customary order is here reversed, the god occupying the place of the serf, and the mortal Admetos playing the god's master. This modal contrast is then repeated and amplified in the subsequent debate between Apollo and Death. Gods they may be, yet each has his fixed sphere; each is subject to limits he cannot cross. Death possesses the privilege of his office, and he insists that he shall not be denied his due or his prize. Thus his words to Apollo are exemplary modal wisdom: “You cannot have your way in everything you want.” True, Apollo finishes by having his way and cheating Death of his prize, but the dramatist's insistence that we should see that even gods have their limits throws Admetos' exemption into sharp relief. But such comparisons—god contrasted with god or mortal, mortal with mortal—are revealingly pervasive, inflecting what the characters say and do, indeed controlling their conception. They exist not as developed or rounded characters in the modern sense, but as masked embodiments of the play's dominant idea as that idea is worked out in the paired tales of Admetos and Alcestis.

Alcestis is initially defined according to the low value assigned to women in fifth-century Athenian society and also, presumably, in the traditional tale of Admetos. In the finale, of course, this low valuation is explicitly challenged and reversed. Her conventional value is low indeed, far below that of her husband; and it is with this conventional valuation that Euripides lulls his audience, deliberately working on its (complacent) expectations, and then startling it into perceiving the story, his story and Alcestis', with fresh eyes. In this respect, the modern reader should remember that Admetos' “egotism” and “selfishness” are simply a function of values he shares with the male audience—an audience which would have regarded Alcestis' sacrifice as both plausible and natural. But modally, Alcestis is characterized in terms of the necessity that is hers by virtue of her role as “wife.” She is, in the poetic vocabulary of Greek tragedy, a damar (i.e. “wife,” a word literally meaning “subdued” or “tamed”—derived, revealingly, from the same root as the name “Admetos”). Admetos, we understand, is her “lord and master”; as damar, she stands in the same relation to Admetos as does the serf-god Apollo. Around her therefore, especially in her relation to the constraining power of Death, cluster all the modal words of her condition and fate, which she feels as constraint, a weight, a force, a hand pulling her inexorably down.

Herakles also, for the sake of revealing contrast with Admetos, is presented in terms of his subjection to anankē. Like Apollo, he too is portrayed as the suffering servant, constrained by his own heroic “labors” and his “lord and master” Eurystheus. In large measure, this Euripidean Herakles is a conventional classical representation; but, conventional or not, the contrast with Admetos is revealing. The hero of exceptional strength the son of Zeus himself—surely Herakles, we think, might reasonably enjoy some degree of exemption from his fate. But no, he too is persistently cast as the very type of patient, toiling, resigned courage. When he first appears, the Chorus' query strikes a modal note (literally, they ask him, “To what wandering are you yoked?” …). The yoke which Herakles wears in his lifetime of labors links him closely to the serf-god Apollo and to Alcestis, yoked by marriage to Death. All in fact are yoked to anankē, and their collective bondage starkly sets off Admetos' modal exemption. In detail after detail Euripides drives his point home. Thus when the Chorus tells Herakles that the horses of Diomedes will not easily be broken, Herakles answers with something like “stoical” acceptance: “Fighting's what I do. / My labors are my life. I can't refuse.” Asked further questions about his labors, he replies: “There you have the story / of my labors and my life. It's a damned hard road / I'm doomed to travel, friend. Rough, uphill / all the way.” The contrast with Admetos, especially with the Admetos whose godlike hospitality and good fortune are hailed by the Chorus in the subsequent ode, could hardly be more schematic.

As for Pheres, it is he who, in the coarse, brutal vigor of his speech and his resentment of his overbearing son's behavior, first forces into the open the perception toward which the action has been driving. It is here, in this crucial scene (the father-son relationship was peculiarly important in ancient Greek life), that all the previous contrasts, the slow, persistent accumulation of modal detail, surface and erupt. Euripides' strategy here, as I suggested earlier, is to lull his audience with its own (mythical) expectations and then, savagely, to shatter the illusion. It is in this explosive scene between father and son that the traditionally “noble” Admetos is exposed for what he is: a man so modally inexperienced that he cannot assign anyone his just, human value. Timē (honor) and axia (worth, desert) are recurrent words in this play, and for obvious reasons. Because he is modally ignorant, Admetos is incapable of giving others their due, of valuing them according to their real worth. His values, one might say, are “out of phase”; he treats everybody in the play with quite indiscriminate confusion, making slaves of his wife, his father and mother,⁷ and treating Herakles with godlike hospitality but quite without the human candor of a friend (as Herakles later reminds him). Until the arrival of Pheres, however, Admetos' modal ignorance is only implicitly stated in the contrasts between himself and the others.

Boy,
who in god's name do you think you are?
Are you my master now, and I some poor, bought,
cringing Asiatic slave that you dare dress me down
like this? I am a free man, Thessalian born,
a prince of Thessaly. …
I raised you. I gave you life.
I am not obliged to die for you as well.

These are strong words in a violently strong speech. They are clearly meant to be strong. Indeed, the scene as a whole aims at outrage. Not because Euripides, as many of his critics would have it, is a sensationalist, interested in showing us a quarrel between two egotists for its own sake, but because the confrontation is crucial to his dramatic conception. In Pheres' words are concentrated all the passion and much of the dignity of ordinary, outraged commonsense. It is Pheres who first openly tells Admetos, with a Greek father's authority, who Admetos is: a modal maniac or simpleton who cannot distinguish between free men and slave, god and man; who does not know what human worth might be because he does not think “mortal thoughts” and who therefore has no human scale of value. We are not required to admire Pheres (indeed, he proves to be ignoble, but not until he has effectively stripped Admetos of all claim to aretē); and we cannot dismiss his words simply because they are angry or indecorous. They state, after all, the modal point of the play.

As Admetos stands to Pheres, so he stands to Alcestis and Herakles, ignorant of their true worth, incapable of assigning them the value they clearly assign to him. For it is not only from Apollo's testimony—that Admetos treated him well, as a god deserved to be treated—that we learn of Admetos' intrinsic worth. Alcestis' love, Herakles' friendship, and the Chorus's ambivalent admiration (see 718 ff.) all testify to it. Admetos is not a man of criminal, but innocent, hybris. He has a basic liberality of spirit, a child's natural generosity combined with a child's equally natural selfishness. Youth, good fortune, and exemption from all human necessity and need have left him humanly undeveloped, metaphysically “untamed.” All his traits of character, quite without exception, derive from his modal innocence and inexperience. “The fortunate man,” reads a Euripidean fragment, “must needs be wise.” It is precisely wisdom—wisdom as mortal skill—that Admetos does not have; and the lack makes him kindred to Euripides' Hippolytos or even Pentheus, whose “godlike” arrogance of youth—their modal ignorance—is their mortal ruin.

Admetos' famous “hospitality” should be understood, I think, as a direct function of his modal ignorance, not as the “redeeming trait” by virtue of which Alcestis is returned to him. The point is fundamental. Both Admetos and the play as a whole will inevitably be “psychologized” by their critics unless we recognize that these characters are not a collection of unconnected “traits” whose only artistic necessity derives from their usefulness to the plot. Ancient dramatic character is not shaped in this random, helter-skelter modern way; rather, everything derives from a central (modal) definition which radiates outward into individual conduct and speech; yet the individual traits inevitably reveal the shaping center from which they spring. A Greek character is in some very real sense a destiny. Admetos' hospitality, like his acceptance of Alcestis' sacrifice, and his rage against Pheres, is a function of his modal exemption; we should see it not as a peculiar, individuating fact but as a direct revelation of a deeper “modal” cause deriving from exemption. Those exempt from suffering and death are, in their “happiness,” unmistakably “godlike.” And Admetos' hospitality is a divine largesse, a largesse that cannot discriminate and that jumbles all the modes; a generosity matched only and exactly by the ignorance of value which could accept with something like the assurance of a “spoiled” child the offering of another's life. The typical man of hybris shows a wanton disregard for others and their human rights. But Admetos' disregard is neither callous nor wanton; he takes because he does not know the cost. And it is precisely the value and the cost that the play will teach him. Even in his hospitality he must learn a human scale, and so, at the end of the play, we find Herakles gently and ambiguously advising him:

… in the future treat your guests and those you love
as they deserve.(8)

Admetos is taught “mortal thoughts” by being made to suffer not one necessity, but two. In the kommos at lines 1174 ff. he comes to recognize with overwhelming conviction, I believe—that, in losing Alcestis, he has lost his own life. This is what he actually says on several occasions, and in the kommos his language is intense poetry, not dialogue. He speaks like a man of sorrows, and we cannot, simply in order to accommodate our modern notions of consistent character, deny his words the dignity of contrition. He is also humiliated, forced on two separate occasions to violate his promise to the dying Alcestis. The first violation occurs in Herakles' “drunken scene,” since Admetos had promised Alcestis that he would ban all festivity for the period of a year. The second occurs when Herakles forces Admetos to accept the veiled girl, even though his acceptance means taking a “new woman” into the house. If we are meant to observe the delicacy and punctilio of his scruples, his reluctance and emotional loyalty to Alcestis, we are also meant to note his weakness and his eventual surrender to his overbearing friend's insistence. If he does not quite break the letter of his promise to Alcestis, it is only because Herakles prevents him from doing so.⁹

The poet's purpose here is the subtle and difficult one of portraying a man torn by conflicting claims—the claims of his dead wife, the claims of his friend; the claims of honor and the claims of need. Unless we can perceive both the honor and the need displayed by Admetos and his desperate effort to cope honorably with these conflicting claims, the point of the play and the beauty of its finale cannot be understood. Above all, we must be prepared to accept the reality of Admetos' need. For it is his need that tells us of his new involvement in necessity and vividly shows him at last thinking “human thoughts.” In his effort to keep his word to Alcestis, to refuse the veiled girl, his honor and his weakness, his nobility and his ordinary need, are beautifully, tensely, balanced. Thus, while Herakles stands there, insistent in his stubborn silence, Admetos says:

As for this woman here,
I beg you, my lord, if you can somehow manage it,
please, take her somewhere else.
Give her to some friend who is not in mourning …
But please, please,
don't remind me of my loss. Seeing this woman here,
here in Alcestis' house, day in, day out,
would be more, much more, than I could bear.
I am crushed with sorrow as it is, Herakles.
Do not burden me with more.
Besides,
where in this house could a young girl stay?
I mean, she is young, I can see it, Herakles,
in her jewelry, in the style of clothes she wears.
How could she live here, surrounded by young men?
How could I protect her? Young men are lusty,
their desires not easily controlled.
                                                                                                    —Herakles,
it is you, your interests, I am thinking of.
What can I do? Put her in Alcestis' room?
Take her to Alcestis' bed? …
Herakles,
for god's sake, take this woman away,
out of my sight! I am weak now, do not make my weakness
worse. …

The leaps and ellipses here are revealing, clearly and economically depicting the passionate motions of Admetos' mind, as he stands there confronted by Herakles' silence and the eloquent presence of the girl who strangely resembles Alcestis. His feelings are all the more powerful because they so obviously derive from the conflicting claims he feels. He will, as his own words suggest, inevitably betray Alcestis (and Herakles), and he is transparently struggling with the foreknowledge of his own weakness, trying, as best he can, to remain loyal to those he loves, as his honor struggles with his need.

That this is Euripides' purpose here is confirmed by the famous “drunken speech” of Herakles. In the intoxicated hero's words, we are given a lively version of what might be called a drunkard's “modalities,” the ruddy credo of a man whose drunken wisdom echoes the poetic thought of Archilochos and Bacchylides. Everything Herakles says is addressed to the thematic point of the play; it accords completely with the modal knowledge that the play teaches Admetos. Drunkard's wisdom it may be, but it is all of a piece with the play. “C'mere, fella,” says Herakles to Admetos' scowling servant, “an' I'll let you in on a l'il secret. / Make a better man of you. / I mean, wise up: / we all gotta die.” And the schooling, the recitation of the play's moral themes, promptly follows:

You know what it'sh like to be a man?
I mean,
d'you really unnerstan' the human condishun, fren'?
.....Well, lissen, mister:
we all gotta die. An' that's a fact.
There's not a man alive who knows the odds on death.
Here today. Gone tomorrow.
Poof …
Well, that's my message. So what d'you say?
Cheer up and have a l'il drink. …
Live for the day. Today is ours.
Tomorrow's fate.
Hey,
an' there's somethin' else. Yup. Aphrodite.
Don't forget Aphrodite, fren'.
'Cause thass a good l'il goddess. …
I mean, we all gotta die. Right?
Well, that's why we all gotta think human thoughts,
and live while we can. …”

In short, the old contrapuntal themes of the play once again contrasted; the firm, polar music of the opposed necessities—death and life, darkness and light, Thanatos and Apollo, the necessity to accept death and the necessity of living. But in this speech the two themes are related, with the force of felt connection: it is only in the presence of death that life takes on value; the recognition of mortality leads directly to the celebration of life. In the words of the poet Archilochos, “Do not exult openly in victory, nor lie at home lamenting a defeat; but take pleasure in what is pleasant; do not yield overmuch to grief, and understand the rhythm that holds mankind in its bonds.” It is precisely this “rhythm-in-bonds” that Herakles' drunken speech asserts, and which Herakles will, as friend and moral instructor, impose upon Admetos in the person of the veiled girl, as a temptation and a prize. First comes the acceptance of death, then the acceptance of life (or Aphrodite) which is its “rhythmic” consequence. Carpe diem. Death is the starkest manifestation of anankē, and men are miserably mortal. Therefore live. Aphrodite, no less than Death, is stamped into a man's nature and defines him, as a contrapuntal part of the great music of Necessity. The man who accepts death must also accept what death implies. This is how men live, “rhythmed in their bonds.” Accept, accept; learn the modes by which you live.

This is the music of the play's finale, surely one of the most exquisitely constructed and controlled scenes in all Greek drama. Here we see Admetos tempted and “tamed” by Herakles in a scene of radiantly gentle and understanding friendship. Admetos had earlier implored Herakles not to tempt him or add to his burden of grief by making his weakness worse; now he adjures him not to leave the veiled girl and make him dishonor Alcestis' memory. Of his honor and loyalty to Alcestis, there can be no doubt, just as there can be no doubt of what he has come to recognize:

I lost myself when I lost her. Lost myself—
and so much more.

This is quickly followed by his strong assertion of Alcestis' worth (axia … sebein) and the loyalty such merit imposes on his honor:

Wherever Alcestis is, she deserves my honor.
I owe it to her.

Indebtedness means need; need implies dependence. In Admetos, the self-sufficient man, such need is especially revealing. Certainly these protestations should not be understood as rhetoric or mere exaggeration; they are felt, and felt with especial keenness in the context of Herakles' deft queries and sexual insinuations. Slowly, relentlessly, Herakles lures Admetos on, prodding him into more and more extravagant assertions of loyalty and love, but at the same time subtly tempting him with the veiled girl. His purpose is, of course, to involve Admetos in a public breach (or near-breach) of his word to Alcestis, to add weakness to his weakness in a demonstration of his final infidelity. It is all force majeure, beautifully complex modal psychology, whose goal is to school Admetos this time in still another anankē, his necessity to live. Its second purpose is friendly revenge—the loving but firmly playful and deliberate revenge of a man of aretē on his good friend. If Admetos lets Herakles make a fool of himself in a house of mourning, Herakles now humiliates Admetos by forcing him to welcome a new guest and, by so doing, to break the spirit, if not the letter, of his promise to Alcestis. Thus overbearing insistence and force are met with overbearing insistence and force; humiliation answers humiliation, deception answers deception; and godlike generosity repays divine largesse. It is very Greek, this precision of “poetic justice”: meticulous and pointed, measure for measure. Essential to the scene's power, as I suggested earlier, is the reader's understanding that Admetos is both scrupulously loyal and manifestly tempted. Indeed, it is an index of the dramatist's skill in this scene that loyalty and temptation, strength and weakness, are so delicately balanced and fused in Admetos that we literally cannot tell them apart; they have blended into a single, wholly credible, human figure.

This “temptation” (or comic “taming”) of Admetos reaches its climax when Herakles finally provokes Admetos to the point where he declares, in outraged loyalty and virtue:

She is dead.
But I would rather die than betray her love!

Once this is said, Herakles can, with quite disingenuous candor, say: “Nobly spoken, my good Admetos. Well, then, / make this woman welcome in your generous house.” He means, of course, that Admetos has been tested and proven a loyal friend (pistos philos), and noble too; that Herakles can safely entrust the veiled girl to a man of such nobility. And then, in some unmistakable way, having proven his loyalty to Alcestis—by reluctance, by yielding only to a kind of “moral” force—Admetos can rightly, warmly, and humanly weaken, surrendering to his overbearing friend and the necessity represented, as he obviously knows, in the veiled girl standing before him. At last, we see, Admetos thinks “human thoughts”—indeed, all too human thoughts—and this scene of his achieved humanity, his demonstration that he shares the real, right weakness of men and also a stubborn loyalty, is an exceptionally moving thing. Admetos' weakness, true, is ironically intensified, but his discovery of weakness is visibly the source of his human strength for the future. He accepts, as he once did not, the obligations of death and life. He is master of the modes he did not know before; he moves with the rhythm that “holds mankind in its bonds.” It is presumably in recognition of this acquired humanity that Herakles relents and reveals the dead Alcestis before Admetos can break his promise by making “a new woman” welcome in his house. There are those who say that Admetos will hear strong words from Alcestis when she is at last permitted to speak. If I am right, and Alcestis understands what she has seen and the change in Admetos, she will not say a word—or nothing more than Shakespeare's knowing Mariana said:

They say, best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad: so may my husband.

IV

Both Alcestis herself and Alcestis' silence are crucial to Euripides' design. Mariana, in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, must speak of her husband as she does since, until the fifth act, Shakespeare stresses Angelo's capacity for evil—the fallen, rather than the redeemable, Angelo. Then, in his “comic” resolution, Shakespeare deftly “corrects” his earlier emphasis by making Mariana's remarks suggest the richer possibilities of Angelo's one-sided humanity: “They say best men are moulded out of faults”: corruptio optimi pessima. Euripides, in sharp contrast, completes his schematic but modally rounded account of Admetos (his faults deriving from the same source as his virtues; then his contrition and redemption in decent remorse) before the appearance of Alcestis in the finale. It is the fact of Admetos' remorse and self-recognition earlier that makes Alcestis' silence dramatically right and necessary.¹⁰ Miraculously “resurrected,” she crowns Admetos' despair with “comic” happiness; by returning from death she “blesses” him. Nothing else—and certainly no speech—is needed. She has died to give him life—and death. What could she possibly say that her death and his remorse have not already said?

But Alcestis is also there on her own account. She is there to be seen, seen for the revelation she is, and which she brings with her, along with her power as a “blessèd spirit” (l. 1355, makaira daimōn) to bless others as she has already blessed Admetos, through the challenge and example of her aretē. In the nobility of her death, Alcestis wins what, to the Greek mind, all exceptional human action really aims at: the immortality of memory, of memory become myth. Great human action is exemplary and therefore potentially contagious in a culture which everywhere stresses emulation. In Alcestis' “resurrection” here, if the reader is truly attending, everything culminates. That is, at this point the story of Admetos and his “schooling” is suddenly transcended, as the play turns, not so much to Alcestis herself, as to the idea of aretē which, through her, animates the entire action, and which here reaches its final, visual revelation. Dramatically, the movement is crucial. What we get is not merely the happy, comic resolution, but the direct, personal epiphany of Alcestis as hero and daimōn—an epiphany clearly designed, in its actuality, in the poet's insistence that Alcestis is, against all doubts, miraculously alive, to reveal the divinity of human aretē. I stress the word “epiphany” (used of course in its proper religious, rather than its borrowed literary) sense.¹¹ This coda is, unmistakably, a revelation. And revelations, we need to remember, are literally “unveilings”: we see them, and the evidence of our eyes surpasses any words. So the revelation of Alcestis as hero appropriately crowns a play which tells, against men and exclusive male claims to aretē, of human courage revealed in a woman's action.

We moderns must, I suppose, take all this “metaphorically.” But Greeks of the classical and archaic period, with their veneration for exceptional human achievement, would, I think, have experienced this coda differently. They would have recognized in it, not metaphor but myth (which is to say, something more serious and true than ordinary or even symbolic reality). Death of course remains irreducibly death, and Alcestis, like her heroic predecessors, clearly goes, in person and in fact, “darkened into death.” But against that real physical extinction, the power of myth and memory are strong. So strong in fact that, though physically dead, Alcestis is also, in a very real sense, alive forever: “a blessed spirit,” “a shining on the lips of men.” In memory and gratitude, the great dead quicken and take on the undying honors of heroes; they become myth and so acquire eternal life. Against the nearly invincible modern notion that myth is a literary conceit or fiction, the reader must make an effort to see these things freshly, with Greek eyes; to understand how events happen in mythical time, uniquely and forever, and that “hero” is the name for real presence, venerable and abiding, that survives the death of the body. If we cannot recover that Greek feeling for heroism, we must at least be prepared to acknowledge its actuality for an ancient audience. Even at the very end of the fifth century, veneration for heroism was strong enough that Sophocles could address his Oedipus at Kolonos directly to that understanding. The hero dies; his spirit, his aretē, survive him, rich with meaning and sanction for the lives of men; blessing the land that had the wisdom to acknowledge him and make him welcome.

Alcestis' “resurrection” should, I am convinced, be understood in the same way. Euripides, as certain scholars have argued, may have been too skeptical to believe in “the nonsense of physical regeneration.” But the point surely is not bodily regeneration but the deathless presence of the hero, the permanance of heroic achievement. That Euripides did believe in the immortality of aretē seems to me quite beyond dispute; it is explicitly stated and also implied in the structure of plays like the Herakles and Hippolytos and in the poetic intensity with which he treats it here (above all in the choral “farewell” to Alcestis and, later, in the great ode on Necessity). And Euripides' intent here is, for me at least, strongly confirmed in a parallel passage in his older contemporary Simonides.¹² The pertinent passage is a brief verse epitaph for the fallen heroes of the Persian Wars:

These men crowned their country with glory
and were gathered into the darkness of death.
They died, but are not dead: their courage [aretē]
brings them back in glory from the world below.

Sentiments like these have been too much abused in our own time for us to regard them as anything more than patriotic hyperbole. And the poet may of course be taking advantage of popular belief for his own literary purposes. Against this we should bear in mind the veneration, bordering on religious awe, that Greeks generally felt for the fallen heroes of Salamis and Plataea, and the telling simplicity and sobriety of the poetic epitaph. In any case, what finally matters is the strength of the religious feelings to which the poem appeals, and on which its poetic validity depends. This in fact was how classical Greeks understood heroism—in the firm belief, however paradoxical it may seem to us, that the hero in some real sense survived his own death and achieved the permanence of myth as an exemplary and abiding presence.¹³ For my purposes here, that is enough.

Alcestis' resurrection as hero is clearly designed to be dramatically surprising, a stunning comic reversal (peripeteia) and coup de théàtre (all the more surprising if we take proper account of the male complacency reflected in the traditional handling of the story and presumably represented in the male audience). That reversal has been subtly and elaborately prepared. There are, first of all, the pervasive parallels between Alcestis and the great male culture-heroes who, like her, all confront death or in some sense give their lives for others; Orpheus, Asklepios, and Herakles. So too the obvious dramatic purpose of the “scene” between Admetos and Pheres is that they should disqualify each other as claimants to aretē and, by default, leave the dead Alcestis—meg' ariste—as the true “heroic” victor of the agon—a point tellingly made in the little valediction to Alcestis which closes the scene. Finally there is the ode to Necessity, strategically set just before Herakles' return with the veiled Alcestis.

Here, in this ode, the controlling themes and parallels all powerfully converge as the poet brings his “tragic” action to a close and shows us, unmistakably, how the “comic” finale is to be understood. At the same time, reinforcing the modal themes (and so preparing for the coming reversal, making it, by dint of contrast, more surprising), he declares, with full choral diapason, the iron law of Necessity and death—a bleak, irresistible force deaf to all human prayer and appeal. The chorus of old men—men who, unlike Admetos, have again and again felt the “relentless onset” of Anankē—tell that, try as they may, they can discover no remedy against Necessity. All human culture and wisdom are helpless against her; even the Orphic religions which saved men by taking them out of “the wheel of existence,” even the remedies of the sons of Asklepios. They endow Necessity with the power of divinity, but a divinity of absolute, pitiless inflexibility:

Mistress, Lady without mercy, I have felt
your stroke before. May you never come again!

As it spoke these words, the Chorus, we must reasonably assume, made the veneration or genuflection which the dread power it invokes as “mistress” or “majesty” (potnia) requires. Necessity may not heed men's prayers, but before that invincible power men must kneel.

Then, in the second strophe, the Chorus turn to Admetos, whom this dreaded “goddess” holds unbreakably in the “bondage of her hands.” “Bear it. Be brave” (tolma) advise the Chorus. Bear it because nothing avails. The dead do not return:

                                                                                                                                                      Great heroes
die. Even the sons of heaven fade, darkened
into death. …

And so it is with Alcestis. “In Alcestis,” say the Chorus, “you yoked yourself in marriage to the noblest of women”—meaning: “Then will you be less brave?” And with this the Chorus turn to Alcestis herself:

                              Do not let Alcestis' grave be numbered
among the ordinary dead. Make her grave a shrine;
honor it as men would honor gods—a holy place
beside the road where those who journey kneel and pray.
The traveler will see her grave and, turning off,
will say of her, “She gave her life to save another.
She is a blessed spirit [makaira daimōn] now, and so may also bless.”
In homage men will kneel before her grave and pray:
“Hail, Lady, mistress of mercy, by your bravery and love,
bless us and be gracious.”

And now, once again, we must imagine, the Chorus go down on their knees in homage, in one of the loveliest examples of visual correspondance in Greek drama. They kneel, seeing in Alcestis the only power that countervails against Death and Necessity—human aretē, human courage and love. And in so doing they explicitly, in their actions, add Alcestis' name to the great roster of those who, like Herakles, have confronted Death and bested it. To the audience, but above all to Admetos, Alcestis is revealed, against all male expectation, as a hero and peer of the great culture heroes of the past.

V

The Alcestis was first performed in 438 b.c. as the final play of a tetralogy consisting of The Cretan Women, Alkmaion in Psophis, and Telephos (none of which has survived). Euripides won second place. If the Cyclops and Rhesos are not, as some scholars suppose, early plays, then the Alcestis, written when the dramatist was in his forties, is the earliest play by Euripides we possess. It is also unique of its kind. Since it does not possess the requisite chorus of satyrs (as does the Cyclops), it cannot be called genuine “satyr-drama.” Yet it did occupy the place of the satyr-play which, in the dramatic festivals of Dionysos, traditionally rounded off a tragic trilogy (or trio of otherwise unconnected tragedies). And it also clearly displays some of those sportive and farcical characteristics (above all in Herakles' drunken speech and the happy resolution) which led one ancient critic to describe “satyr-drama” as “tragedy-at-play.” Hence it is customary now to call the Alcestis a “pro-satyric” play, although this tells us very little since we possess no other example of that genre (except perhaps the Orestes). In the circumstances it seems best to accept Professor Dale's judgment that the Alcestis possesses a greater range and variety of mood than any extant work by any of the three ancient tragedians, and that it would be foolish to press the definition of genre beyond that point. It may be that Euripides invented the genre or adapted a traditional form in a new way; but we simply do not know. What we do know is that the Alcestis is the first Western drama that can truly be called “tragicomic”; the first work in a genre that runs from this play to the Euripidean Ion, Iphigeneia at Tauris, and Helen, to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and the late “comedies,” to Chekhov and, finally, in our own time, to such Euripidean “imitations” as T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk.

VI

Like every recent translator of the Alcestis, I am deeply indebted to the work of the late A. M. Dale whose splendid Oxford text (and commentary) is, in my opinion, one of the very few editions of Euripides in which fine scholarship is guided and controlled by high literary intelligence. Certainly her edition is a milestone in the scholarship of this play, and, even in those instances when I have disagreed with her readings or interpretation, I have constantly found illumination and help in her work.

To my wife who made many valuable suggestions and who gently suffered through my theatrical viva voce renderings of successive drafts of each episode and chorus, I owe the charis which her patient support and many suggestions merit. To my colleague D. S. Carne-Ross I am grateful for criticism and advice. To my students at Boston University and Brooklyn College and elsewhere, who provided me with the intelligent responses of a captive audience, I am deeply grateful. Finally, to Ann Dargis who, with unfailing good cheer and diligence beyond the call of duty, typed, and constantly retyped, the manuscript, I owe a great debt of thanks.

Notes

1. For obvious reasons nothing more than a sketch is possible here. Demonstration and defense of what, in its aim and complexity, purports to be a coherent theory of Greek drama would require much lengthier treatment—in fact, a book. But a sketch, tentative and incomplete, may conceivably serve the reader's purpose (if not the scholar's requirements).

2. Presumably because it occupied, when first performed in 438 b.c., the position of a “satyr-play”; that is, rounded off a group of three tragedies. But since we know very little of “satyr-drama” (Euripides' Cyclops and a fragment of Sophocles' Searchers are the only extant examples of the genre—a quite insufficient sample), and the Alcestis is our only example of a “pro-satyric” play, it is impossible to describe or even identify the “genre.”

3. In range and suggestions, aretē is badly cramped by the prim English word “virtue.” Originally, aretē designated something like Latin virtus, i.e. “manliness” or “physical prowess.” Later it became the (quite untranslatable) term indicating the chief aristocratic virtues, ranging from “physical courage” to “excellence” to “moral courage”—that is, the qualities exhibited by an “excellent” man. Women might perhaps lay claim to aretē, but the word is essentially reserved to men. Euripides, in sharp contrast, stresses moral courage as against conventional aristocratic virtue, and clearly includes women among its rightful claimants.

4. For instance, according to our best authority on ancient masks, the lexicographer Pollux, a sallow (as opposed to a white) mask indicated that its wearer was “unfortunate or in love.” … Not all scholars, of course, believe that Pollux' account accurately represents fifth-century practice. But T. B. L. Webster has, in my opinion, made a convincing case and my remarks are based upon acceptance of his argument. Those interested should consult Webster's Greek Theatre Production, pp. 35-73, and his “Notes on Pollux' List of Tragic Masks” in Fetschrift für Andreas Rumpf, pp. 141-50.

5. Thus in Sophocles' Ajax we find Ajax punning on the meaning of his own name; so too Euripides' Medea and many others. The pun need not be explicit. Thus the meaning of Oedipus' name is visually evident in the hero's clubfoot; in the Messenger's speech of Euripides' Hippolytos, we hear how the hero was literally destroyed by his own horses and, in his dying, revealed the other (fatal) meaning of his name: (Hippolytos = “horse-destroyed”). In the Alcestis there is, admittedly, no explicit pun on Admetos' name, but the etymological sense could have been brought out at any moment simply by having the actor pronounce the name as “Adametos.” At line 416 of the Greek text the poet—deliberately, I think, in order to reveal the meaning of Admetos' name—enjambs it with the word anankē.

6. See Note on lines 1-16 in Alcestis, by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

7. Cf. Euripides, Frag. 29 (Nauck), where a character says: “May I never be a friend or associate of that man who, convinced of his own self-sufficiency, regards those dear to him (philous) [that is, his family and friends] as his slaves.”

8. See Note on lines 1472-3 in Alcestis, by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

9. The point would not be worth laboring if it were not in question. For a different—in my opinion, quite perversely “archaizing” and, to that degree, insensitive—reading of this scene and the play, cf. A. P. Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides' Plays of Mixed Reversal.

10. Unfortunately, neither Euripides' reticence nor Alcestis' silence have deterred critics from wordy speculations about what Alcestis will say when she is at last allowed to speak. “Surely Euripides meant us to be puzzled by Alcestis' strange silence,” writes one scholar (obviously lost in a labyrinth of his own design), “and to ask ourselves the insistent questions his ending poses. What, we want to know, will Alcestis say to Admetos after this latest betrayal? Has Admetos really learned anything at all” etc.” The very ability to ask such questions (suggesting a taste nourished on Galsworthy or Christopher Morley) indicates the degree to which naturalism and psychologizing have imposed themselves on Greek drama. Whether the Alcestis is “modal” or not, it deserves better than the trudging realism and cozy clichés of modern “domestic” drama which these questions suggest.

11. Comparison with Shakespeare is, again, revealing. At the close of The Winter's Tale Shakespeare “revives” the statue of the “dead” Hermione, makes her descend from her pedestal, and speak. The point is not, pace Kitto (Greek Tragedy, p. 320), that Euripides is “cleverer” than Shakespeare in keeping his heroine silent. Euripides is dramatizing the literal epiphany, as daimōn, of his heroine, whereas Shakespeare emphasizes the human warmth and reconciliation of a real “recognition scene” in order that an art that emulates nature may finally be transformed into miraculous nature.

12. The ascription to Simonides may be erroneous, but there is no good reason to question the date or authenticity of the “epitaph.” …

13. Perikles, for instance, is reported to have said that the Athenian dead in the Samian War were “immortal as gods” (Plut. Per.8, 5). See also the revealing remarks of Plato (Symposium 179 b-d) on Alcestis: “Only those who love are willing to die on behalf of others—not only men but women too—a fact which is amply demonstrated for us Greeks by Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias. For only she was willing to die for her husband, despite the fact that he had a father and mother; yet her love so surpassed theirs that they seemed by comparison to be unrelated to their own son and bound to him in name only. But her action seemed so splendid not only to men but to gods that, in recognition of her greatness of spirit, the gods granted what has been given to only the fewest among those who have acted heroically—that her soul should return from Hades. Thus even the gods especially honor aretē and devotion in the service of love. …” Finally, we should perhaps note the persistence of the Euripidean theme that, if the world were genuinely just and the gods truly cared for human aretē, goodness and heroism would be rewarded by rejuvenation and resurrection (cf. the “resurrection” of Iolaos in The Children of Herakles and the choral remarks of Herakles, ll. 655 ff.).