SOURCE: Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, "Bacchae and Ion: Tragedy and Religion," in The Masks of Tragedy: Essays on Six Greek Dramas, University of Texas Press, 1963, pp. 103-52.

[In the essay that follows, Rosenmeyer discusses the conversion of Admetus in Alcestis, which centers around the dramatic depiction of death in the play.]

In Homer's Iliad the uneasy truce which accompanies the duel between Menelaus and Paris is, after the disgraceful withdrawal of Paris, broken by Athena, who persuades a lesser Trojan, Pandarus, to shoot Menelaus (4.104, tr. Richmond Lattimore):

Straightway he unwrapped his bow, of the
  polished horn from
a running wild goat he himself had shot in
  the chest once,
lying in wait for the goat in a covert as it
  stepped down
from the rock, and hit it in the chest so it
  sprawled on the boulders.
The horns that grew from the goat's head
  were sixteen palms' length.

A bowyer working on the horn then bound
  them together,
smoothing them to a fair surface, and put
  on a golden string hook.
Pandaros strung his bow and put it in
  position, bracing it
against the ground …
      … and took out an arrow
feathered, and never shot before, transmitter
  of dark pain.
Swiftly he arranged the bitter arrow along
  the bowstring …
He drew, holding at once the grooves and
  the ox-hide bowstring
and brought the string against his nipple,
  iron to the bowstave.
But when he had pulled the great weapon
  till it made a circle,
the bow groaned, and the string sang high,
  and the arrow, sharp- pointed,
leapt away, furious, to fly through the
  throng before it.

Everything conspires to make the shot firm and true. That Athena, the instigator of the disturbance, then turns around and deflects the arrow from Menelaus is another matter. It merely proves that divine power transcends divine partisanship. If the goddess had not interfered with the direction of the missile, it would surely have found its intended mark. That is the impression created by the build-up of the shooting, and particularly by the prehistory of the bow itself. By tracing the various steps which went into the making of the bow, by dwelling on the size and strength of the animal and on the effort whereby it was made to render up its horns, Homer manages to convey to us that this is a superbow, an unerring instrument in the hands of any warrior, but particularly so in the hands of the man who had killed the goat and thus made the bow his own. A bought weapon, or a stolen one, is not likely to give the same kind of service. The quality of a thing, then, particularly of a thing used by a man, is regarded as a function of its history. How it came to be, what happened to it in its inception and afterward, is decisive in fixing its nature and its effectiveness.

The principle that in the area of physical things, status or efficacy is determined by origins, is well known to Greek writers. The many aetiological tales in Greek mythology, providing imaginary origins and histories for numerous segments of our experience, argue the same understanding. These stories show that the principle is not restricted to inanimate things, but operates also in the area of organic life. Indeed most of the tales are about animals or plants, answering such questions as: Why does the swallow not sing like other birds? or Why is the weasel more ingenious than other creatures? or Why does the heliotrope always turn its face to the sun? The character of an organism is, according to this method, explained by pointing to a past event. Men also are subject to aetiology. In Homer, as in most of the writers of his tradition, the prowess or cowardice of a fighter is presumed to be conditioned by his family background. If a man comes from good parentage he can be expected to prove himself a stalwart warrior; if his parents are undistinguished, the chances that the son will make a mark for himself are slim. This is, of course, a widespread assumption; in Greece it prevailed until the rebels of the classical period began to question it, but even then the natural preferences of the writers continued to favor the belief in inherited characteristics. Deviations from the rule were regarded with some uneasiness or, occasionally, with the excitement of a strange discovery, as in Pindar's Sixth Nemean, written for a family in which athletic skill was found to be handed from grandfather to grandson rather than from father to son. The poet is intrigued by the enormity of what the facts seem to indicate. But it is noteworthy that even here the athlete's talent is not thought of as a personal matter, but as a gift granted long ago in the family's past.

Now if it is true that the aetiological question—how did the thing come to be?—was a powerful guide in the Greek approach to the puzzles of individual life, to the riddles of physique, status, and achievement, one might plausibly expect to find the same outlook also in Greek analyses of human character and social behavior. If Helen is under the compulsion of Aphrodite, if Homer's Agamemnon betrays signs of what today might be diagnosed as a feeling of insecurity, or if Theophrastus' Grumbler is never satisfied with anything that happens to him, we wonder whether the reasons for their behavior might not be traced to their historical antecedents. Did something happen, either to them or to their parents or their parents' parents, which laid the foundation for the development of an excessive tendency to love, or doubt, or grumble?

Here and there in the Greek writings it may seem as if this approach was indeed taken, as if, that is, the principle of aetiology was explicitly applied to the analysis of conduct or character. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, for instance, Clytemnestra furnishes her own interpretation of why she is different from other wives. It all started, she tells us, when her husband sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. But it is significant that the argument is that of Clytemnestra herself, and not of the chorus, who alone qualify as a conveyer of the poet's critical comment. The chorus, in fact, make no allowance for characters. Their understanding of the world is lyrical; for them everything is a texture of events, of colorful units of life attracting and repelling one another and in the process creating complex patterns of meaningful association. The lyrical perspective is essentially descriptive; because of its extreme vulnerability to sensory stimuli it is incapable of analysis or explanation. But even Clytemnestra's argument is not so much an explanation as a rationalization. She recognizes the monstrousness of her deed, and looks for an excuse in the past. The wrath released by the killing of Iphigenia may explain an act, but it cannot be designed to explain the whole complex tissue of traits and tendencies which Aeschylus has embodied in Clytemnestra. In any case her retrospective explanation is the exception rather than the rule. In general those Greek authors who are interested in matters of the soul, in psyche and ethos, do not give us history. Instead of uncovering antecedents they draw a picture; instead of analyzing motivation they narrate; instead of providing an aetiology they list the symptoms.

The Greek writers were not familiar with psychoanalysis. More particularly, they had to do without the tidy terminology and the clinical orderliness of the Freudian school. But as we have seen, the aetiological principle was not foreign to them. It would be a mistake to suppose that they were not yet capable of analyzing men's actions in terms of events and influences in their earlier lives. The poet who tried to explain the deadly aim of Pandarus' bow by investigating the history of the bow could, if he wished, have explained the tormented career of Helen by pointing to an incident or a series of incidents dating back to her childhood in Sparta. That he did not do so has nothing to do with intellectual progress or the lack of it. It is simply that he was not interested in this kind of explanation, or in any other kind, when dealing with exceptional human characters. Great writers have an insight into the complexity of the psyche which allows them to create convincing characters and to set forth human relations of great intricacy. But they need not regard it as their concern to supply reasons for their creatures being the way they are.

Homer's characters are remarkably subtle, as everybody would agree. He is a connoisseur of individual modes of behavior, a shrewd practitioner of the art of psychology. So is Euripides, especially in the plays which do not end unhappily. Aristotle, in spite of his essay on the soul and his treatment of the emotions in the Rhetoric, does not have the sharp insight of the poets, perhaps because his science and his system get in the way of his very considerable sensitivity. Nor do all great poets necessarily have this insight. A writer like Faulkner often does not have it, or does not wish to communicate it, because his tragic figures are conceived as either automata or monsters. Restoration comedy does not have it because it deliberately puts on the stage men and women who are monomaniacs, hence false to the legacy of the complete man. Proust does not have it because his preoccupation with the past and with the sources of the present mortifies the instinct for the vitality of the present.

It is a commonplace of literary criticism that the meticulous registering of channels of motivation may run counter to the interests of psychological realism, if not of art. The great and most enduring portraits are often the least overtly analytic. Their creators leave it to the readers to take their cues from faint hints, or from the actions themselves, to establish the possible causes and motives to their own satisfaction, if they so wish. What made Hamlet the man he is in the drama may be an interesting speculation, but the question does not enter into the aesthetic response except peripherally. Especially on the stage an explicit plotting of motivation is likely to be disastrous in its effect. If a playwright were to give us the exact causes of an action in terms of the soul's evolution, he would risk reducing that action to the level of a standard mechanism. On the stage a character should be both singular and interesting; hence motivation must be either obscured or left entirely to our imagination. By concentrating on the evident patterns of behavior and response the playwright makes his characters more immediately and more generally appealing.

Modern interpreters usually frown on any attempt to emphasize psychological variety and finesse in a Greek play. In a recent admirable edition of the Alcestis we read: "So far from considering the Alcestis a full-length study of naivete, weakness, hysteria, egotism, character-development, and so forth, I do not believe that apart from the hosiotes [piety] Euripides had any particular interest in the sort of person Admetus was."¹ It is true that there are Greek dramas in which issues or lyric perceptions are more important than character delineation, and in which the personalities of the agents are so shaped and distorted as to answer to themes and objectives beyond themselves. I have already discussed some of them. But the existence of such dramas should not blind us to the fact that there are in the Greek repertory other plays which are nothing if not portrayals of interesting characters in action and interaction. If critics have lately been unwilling to concede this, their reluctance is perhaps due to a commendable reaction against the fashion of reading the plays as studies of case histories. Freudian interpretations of Shakespeare or of Aeschylus may have their use, but they start from so irrelevant a premise that they defy the basic intentions of the writers. Greek drama is not concerned with motivation; the question of why a particular character may be acting as he is carries us far away from the nucleus of the tragic business. But some Greek drama is very much concerned with character elaboration. It would be wrong to impair the tough fiber of Euripides' plan by translating his terms into professional jargon, or by filling in what he has chosen to leave uncharted. But to explore the richness of the vision, and the subtlety of the psychological perceptions, is very much to the advantage of an understanding of the play. It is no longer feasible to assume that a classical work of art is necessarily a monolithic sort of thing, unselfconscious, natural, in a state of paradise. We must acknowledge complexity and refraction where we find them, even in so simple a tale as that about Admetus and Alcestis.

ii

The catalyst which Euripides employs for the isolation of character is death. In our play death is the principal theme. This immediately raises two questions which are, in some indirect way, connected with each other. First, should a play about death be a tragedy? Second, should the treatment of death in a drama involve the use of symbolic devices or not? As for the latter, it is to be noted that the Greeks did not have a word for "symbol," and though Greek literary criticism does discuss such things as metaphor and simile, it generally regards them as stylistic techniques or mannerisms, as substitutions for the real thing, and not as self-validating formulations of a poetic reality. At the same time it is obvious that the poets knew the value of symbols. Medea's chariot, Pentheus' pine tree, the "Chalybian stranger" in the hands of Oedipus' sons are the kind of meaningful substances which the ancient critics do not take under advisement, but which nevertheless contribute, and must always have contributed, significantly to the aesthetic effect of the drama. The crimson tapestry in the Agamemnon is not merely an embellishment of royal proportions, but helps to shape the mood and the meaning of the action as only a visual symbol can. It is, therefore, legitimate to say that the poets did use symbols to put across their literary intentions.

In modern discussions of symbols, ritual is usually not very far behind. The obvious parallelism of myth and ritual has led some writers to regard all symbols as mental correlates of ritual patterns of behavior. In the play before us, Hercules goes off to fight Death at roughly the same time Alcestis is being put in the grave. The simultaneity of contest and sacrifice is too tempting to resist; it smacks of the rites of spring, of mortification and invigoration and in the end, jubilation. In the words of T. S. Eliot's Family Reunion:

Spring is an issue of blood
A season of sacrifice
And the wail of the new full tide
Returning the ghosts of the dead,
Those whom the winter drowned
Do not the ghosts of the drowned
Return to land in the spring?

To read the Alcestis as a symbolic representation of the death and rebirth of Nature is especially tempting because this type of interpretation has been proposed for much of Greek drama by an influential school of critics.

Yet, in the case of this play at any rate, the ritual interpretation is to be completely rejected. The characters of the Alcestis are not the dependent parts of a larger organism, they do not feel themselves to be members of a cosmos with which they must keep in tune and which in turn determines their fears and hopes. On the contrary, in spite of the myth of fate and death which informs the play, the chief characters are autonomous, undetermined, self-reliant men and women, in no way tied to the vegetative life around them. They are human, they are bourgeois; and the bourgeois life is insensitive to the workings of ritual patterns. It does not function as a knowing or unknowing participant in the periodic cosmic processes of expansion and contraction, of seasonal life and death. If Admetus and Alcestis and Pheres were participants in a drama of cosmic crisis, they could perhaps take some dubious comfort from their role. Even if they were not, as agents in the play, themselves aware of their ritual standing, the reader would remedy the lack and regard their actions as positive ministerings in a natural cause. But as Euripides conceives the King and his Queen, no such facile comfort is appropriate. They stand alone, without hope and without purpose, stripped of a sense of belonging, having surrendered their chance of ritual reconciliation. They are, in fact, modern men.

To come back to the second of our two questions, what means are available to literature of talking about death, Sappho says in one of her poems:

A great desire grips me to die and see
the dewy banks of lotus-covered Acheron.

Her formulation is twofold, first, colloquial speech, and then metaphor, specifically a metaphor taken from two different mythological sources, the story of the lotus-eaters, and the concept of the river separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Sappho uses the two formulations side by side, but they are of course alternatives; either would have been adequate, and both are equally natural, at least in the terms of Sappho's poetics. Why Sappho in this case chooses to reinforce the colloquial with the mythological or vice versa we cannot tell; the rest of the poem has not come down to us. The possibilities of the colloquial are severely limited, even in the supple Greek, whereas the range of mythology is, notably in this matter of death, almost unlimited. Death may be visualized as a person, as a winged messenger who along with his brother Sleep returns the Homeric hero Sarpedon to his grave in Lycia. Vase paintings have taught us that in this role Death is a handsome young man, a gentle guarantor of elegance and peace. Or again, Death may appear in the person of the fearsome Charon, him of the burning eye and the matted beard, whose unlovely visage stares at us from a number of Etruscan paintings. Or he may be experienced as Hades, the majestic inmovable ruler of the dead. Ancient writers greatly benefited from the variety of mythological formulations. Depending on the special objectives of the work at hand, they could pick this or that formula, or they could combine several for a particular effect. And they were always in a position to choose between the colloquial and the symbolic in the first place. In this respect the Greek authors may be said to have had an advantage over their modern colleagues. Homer even manages to present the maturing of Achilles by his use and nonuse of mythology; in the first book of the Iliad, when Achilles needs to control his passion, he is assisted by Athena, while in the last book of the work he is able to master a similar outbreak of anger without outside help.

But personification has its disadvantages. The concentration of an experience into the contours of a person, however august and brilliant, will usually be false to the abstractness or the mystery or the power of the experience. Personification works by subtraction, and a great deal that is important in the intangible that is personified, comes to be sacrificed on the altar of clarity and visual charm. Hence mythology offers complementary symbols of death, nonanthropomorphic symbols which may be adopted by themselves or used in combination with others. There are the images of the Odyssey, such as the vicious beasts Cerberus, Scylla, and Charybdis; or the lotus-eaters, or the clashing rocks. Death can be represented as a flock of vultures or Furies on the roof, door posts sweating blood, a palace tumbling to the ground, a curtain rent. Aeschylus' plays, as is well known, are full of such nonpersonal symbols of death.

One rule of writing which was well understood by the ancient authors is this: when symbols of death predominate in a work of literature, the physical happening of death must be kept in the background. That means that in drama, generally, heroes do not die on the stage. And this is true in the great majority of the plays that have come down to us. But it is not true of the Alcestis; the heroine's death takes place right on the stage. What is more, the physical death is so conspicuous that it becomes the pivot of the dramatic action. Consequently the scope for symbolic utterance is greatly minimized. To be sure, Euripides does make some use of the metaphorical material which I have mentioned, and the personification of Death becomes one of the subsidiary agents of the plot. Nevertheless, as I hope to show, the stress in the play is on realism, on the everyday formulation, on Sappho's "I wish to die" rather than on symbolic transformation. And there is a good reason for that. Death as an object of fear, as an ominous prospect, registers its most telling impression via symbols. So will death as a hoped-for release from suffering. But the question of the meaning of death, and especially the group of questions taken up in the Alcestis—how, and why, and with what results does a man face or not face death, and what does death mean to the living?—these questions must be asked in a setting that is immediate and colloquial. To dramatize the meaning of death, symbols are useless; it is behavior that counts.

The overcoming of death is a universal theme of folk literature. Of the Greek heroes, Hercules, Theseus, Pirithous, and Orpheus, among others, attempted to descend into the nether world and outwit Death. Each of them, with the exception of Hercules, either failed in his purpose or proved himself a rascal rather than a hero. The most rascally of them was Sisyphus, who tried to evade death by bidding his wife not to bury him after he had departed for the underworld. The result was that the powers of death could not claim him fully as their own. So he struck an agreement with the king of the dead to let him go back to the living for a day, in order to see to his proper burial. He reascended, tried to go back on the agreement by staying on among the living, and was finally fetched down again and punished.

The folk tale about Admetus and Alcestis on which Euripides modeled his play was very similar to this story about Sisyphus. Our play, like the folk tale, is concerned with death not as a dire prospect, but as a fact already experienced and known. As a prospect, death creates confusion and uncertainty, and induces us to turn our eyes away from human concerns to the mysteries of the universe. As a fact, it allows us to concentrate our attention on what it does to men. For both the protagonists, death is a fact. They are committed, even dedicated, to the fact. One has decided to run away from it, the other to clutch it to her heart. Both know the how and the that; the decision has been made, and all mystery has been stripped off. With the mystery gone, every thought and every act is bathed in the merciless light of simple acquaintance. Alcestis and Admetus are familiar with death; and that is why Euripides has introduced the personification, the Demon Death with his well-known traditional gestures and his brutal directness. It is true that, just before she dies, Alcestis shrinks from the irreversible step. Her horror at the vision of death introduces a note of strangeness and wonder, suggesting that perhaps things have been taken too much for granted. But this sense of uncertainty is short-lived. The mood of familiarity and colloquial simplicity which marks the other scenes is extraordinary even for Euripides, who, as we know from Aristophanes, prided himself on having freed tragedy from its shackles of symbolic ambiguity and rhetorical pomp. It would be fruitless in this play to look for elevated thematic images or significant vocabulary clusters. Even the choral songs, all except the Ode to Necessity (962) for whose Aeschylean color there is a special reason, have a minimum of pathos and lyric texture. The chorus is drawn straight into the middle of an action which is realistic, humane, unmysterious; from the very beginning, the choristers share in the conversational and unwondering mood of the drama.

But can there be a tragedy without wonder? The truth is, to answer the first of the two questions raised above, that the Alcestis is not a tragedy. Tragedy dramatizes men's emotions, their victories and defeats in the struggle for values and principles. Tragedy does not deal with the natural necessities such as eating and drinking or sleeping or dying. Because this is a play about death as a natural fact, its tone is light and its machinery derives from the happy optimism of the folk tale on which it draws. Dante's Commedia shows us that the natural order of the world requires a nontragic exposition. We may also remember the words of David when Bathsheba's child had died:

While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.

We know that Euripides did not conceive of his play as a tragedy even in the more neutral Greek sense of the word. This is clear from the fact that the Alcestis was performed as the last part of a tetralogy. We do not have the first three plays but we have the titles and we know what the plays were about. In all three of them Euripides seems to have emphasized the monstrosity of human instincts, the shabbiness of personal relations, and the impenetrability of the moral order. The subjects were depressing and even revolting, and one of the plays, the Telephus, came to be a by-word for the type of naturalism from which the Greeks on the whole shied away. There were, then, three statements of negation, or at best of painful disillusionment. At the end, in the position where ordinarily we should expect a satyr play, Euripides on this occasion put yet another drama dealing with men, and inglorious men at that. But the fourth play eventually turns out to voice a ringing "Yea," a vote of confidence calculated to compensate for the horrors which precede it. For in some peculiar way which we shall have to study, the sorry men and women of the Alcestis are also noble and perhaps even admirable. Apparently Euripides felt that a traditional satyr play, with the accent on amoral vitality and animal vigor, would have been less effective in counterbalancing the human futility of the first three plays than this lighthearted confrontation of natural necessity with the common feelings of fear and jealousy and love.

iii

The lightheartedness of much of the action, as of the antecedents, is unmistakable. It all started with Apollo, who served the Furies strong drink, "tricking and tripping them, like a professional" (33), to get Admetus off. This is part of the familiar tale; nevertheless the emphasis on drink at this early stage is significant. Drink is part of the structure of human necessities and temptations which lend themselves to comic treatment. Drink is predictable, it raises few questions, and it can be funny. Of all this Hercules will be the living proof, later in the play. In the Prologue on the stage, the language of the conversation between Apollo and Death shows that though they are gods they have nothing godly about them. They argue like business competitors. Fortunately for the conception of the play the word for "death" in Greek is masculine, hence the personification of death is male. If Death were female as she is in Latin and the Romance languages, no such robust negotiating at the conference table would have been possible. For an audience of men, the femininity of Death would endow her with mystic dimensions which the hopelessly masculine Death of the Alcestis does not possess. In his greeting to Death, Apollo gives us a taste of what is to be expected (26):

He's come on the dot of the hour!

The bourgeois quality of the remark, both complimentary and a little resentful at the fact that trains are running on time, sets the tone for what follows. This is a well-regulated world in which men know all the answers; occasionally they wish there were a few they did not know.

Death is surprised and suspicious at seeing Apollo. Apollo tries to allay his suspicions (38):

APOLLO: Fairness and persuasion are my tools.

DEATH: If so, what is the purpose of that bow? (points)

APOLLO: What bow? Oh, that! It's just a habit of mine to carry it.

DEATH: Ah! Just as you patronize the rich?

The joke about the bow is characteristic. The god carries the bow by the same unreflected necessity by which we eat and drink and sleep. We go through the motions without contemplating their meaning. When they are brought to our attention we are embarrassed, for we like to think of ourselves as living fully conscious and purposeful lives.

The negotiating starts in earnest (54):

APOLLO: A death is a death; why not accept another?

DEATH: No deal; I like to bag them young and green.

In the sequel, Death voices the suspicion that Apollo has been bribed, and condemns bribery with all the sham dignity of a public orator. A good democrat, he despises Apollo for being on the side of the rich. He lives by the letter of the law; Apollo, he suggests, tries to set himself above it. Apollo's position is indeed peculiar. He had arranged for the death of Alcestis; now he tries to rescind the arrangement. In the eyes of Death, Apollo is an incurably unrealistic humanitarian who fights the windmills of natural necessity, the despair of the practical law-abiding bureaucrats who have their feet on the ground and loathe sentimentality. Death does not pretend to be a free agent; he has his work cut out for him, for he is a servant of the nether gods. He does not control or understand, nor does he wish to; his job is to act. At first blush this would seem to put him on the same level as Hercules, that other slave who acts rather than reflects. But Hercules' servitude is that of a Stoic king; he is a man so attuned to the natural world that the choice of action and the exercise of what little freedom he has become as congenial to him as the ties which bind him to necessity. Death is a real slave, a clockwork machine which has renounced all freedom. He is a tool of necessity.

Is the humor of the scene between Apollo and Death appropriate to the plot of the Alcestis? A woman courts death, virtually commits suicide, because she feels she can help her husband by sacrificing herself. Her husband knows about her intention and does nothing to stop her because, through a deficiency in his imaginative powers, he thinks life to be the highest good. In the end, faced with the fact of her death, he comes to his senses. This is the plot of the Alcestis. It is by no means funny, nor is it outlandish or contrived. Stalinism and Hitlerism provided many occasions for its re-enactment, and some years back films about lifeboats with too many occupants in them were very popular. In the political experience of fifth-century Athens, also, the institution of the scapegoat was well enough known. Why, then, does Euripides present us with, for the most part, a genial fairy tale, rather than a bitter drama of conflict and betrayal? Because, for one thing, the fairy tale consolidates the impression of necessity. All great drama, as everyone would agree, needs to generate the feeling that the plot is exactly as it had to be, and could not have been otherwise. For the building of this assurance the fairy-tale formulation does exceedingly well. Furthermore, the fairy tale allows beauty to coexist along with violence and necessity. And third, the fairy tale makes it possible for Euripides to write his commedia. The theme itself is not funny; but the fable frame allows the modicum of humor and playfulness which the author wants for his major design, which is the exploration of human character and ordinary behavior in the face of the fact of death. Character, as we know from the end of the Symposium and from the Characters of Theophrastus, can be studied best in an atmosphere of pleasantry and gentle detachment. High seriousness and a preoccupation with unnerving issues do not favor the development of those minor but trenchant insights whereby character is anatomized and revealed.

The action is designed not to engage our fear or pity. The Prologue, through the mouth of Apollo, tells us what is going to happen. We know, and the gods know; only the actors do not realize that everything is going to come out all right, that Hercules will be the deus ex machina. Thus the plot comes to be insulated against our emotions; it turns into an object for amusement, and perhaps for reflection, but not for empathy. We admire what we see on the stage very much in the way we admire and applaud a clever orator. We recognize his subtlety, his ability to make things come alive in our imagination, the verisimilitude of his fictions. But we cannot possibly feel anxiety, much less horror, at the visions he conjures up. And just as the orator knows that we know, and allows this knowledge to color his speech, so also the speeches of the Alcestis have about them an air, however faint, of posing. It is as if the characters were at one and the same time trying to rouse our emotions and apologizing for doing just that. And yet this touch of mockery is so slight that most of the time we are not even conscious of it; certainly it never endangers the simplicity of the action, or the credibility of the main characters.

The Alcestis presents us with a rhetoric of death. But rhetoric does not exclude realism. Knowing as we do the conventions of the Greek theater we do not expect a photographic type of realism. The speech consists of polished trimeters, and the action proceeds with a swiftness which defies the snail's pace of life. But in a larger sense the play comes as close to a successful realism as a Greek drama can be. There is no villain, but there is no hero either. Everybody is decent and well-meaning within his lights even if motivated by his special interests and grudges. Even Pheres is kind enough to play the mourner for Alcestis, and while he does so he is not necessarily insincere. What the play does tell us is this, that people often make each other intensely unhappy by their virtues. According to Plato, each action releases one or more effects, and each of these effects becomes itself a cause which releases new effects, which are no longer controlled or calculated so far as the original cause is concerned. This errant cause, as Plato calls it, is chiefly responsible for the various dislocations in the life of the world, and ultimately for the existence of evil. Life is a nexus of ill-connected events.

Euripides likewise teaches that by their very virtues men may contribute to the wrong in this world. The only figures on the stage not caught up in the concatenation of human causes are Apollo, Death, and the unerrant Hercules. But though they are not enmeshed in the tissue of failure and error as the others are, they are themselves sufficiently naturalized not to disturb the effect of realism. The gruff, puritan, class-conscious Death, the guzzling but tempestuously generous Hercules, the ineffectual and bowridden but well-incentioned Apollo fit well into the scheme of things. The mythological apparatus is gauged to further the ends of psychological realism. At the same time the presence of the gods, and the fairy-tale base, prevent the realism from turning sour and becoming a naturalism of indignity and ugliness. And in the figure of Hercules, Euripides shows us a man who, whatever his shortcomings—and the servant thinks he is more beast than man—has the power to act without causing unhappiness, except to Death. If there is a hero it is Hercules; in spite of—or because of?—his patent lack of discretion and intellect, he is the only one who can cope with necessity without hurting either himself or others. Decency, necessity, and death: these are the elements out of which Euripides composes this gentle anatomy of the unheroic soul.

iv

How does an ordinary human being protect himself against too keen an awareness of the weight of necessity? How does he manage to save his self-respect in the face of predictability? By embracing the conventions, if we are to believe the Alcestis. Conventions are man-made, they give an illusion of human mastery, they afford a fixed point, a dignified rest in the toss of the errant cause. The instrument which Euripides employs to dramatize man's reliance on the conventions is, naturally, the chorus. Throughout the repertory of Greek drama the chorus has the role of affirming conventional morality and conventional perspectives in the face of heroic deviations from the norm. Often its conventionality appears to us more like triteness or stupidity. But its traditional stand provides an ever-present internal rectification of the heroic imbalance, a constant therapy of the heroic madness. In the Alcestis there are no heroes who deviate from the norm, there is no inkling of the grand madness or intransigence which we associate with the character of a Medea or an Ajax. Still, the chorus delivers its sermons. But now these pledges to convention do not have their usual counteractive force. Rather, they give us the essence of the chorus, and through them the essence of all men.

As soon as the choristers enter, they ask, in effect (79): "Are we to grieve or not? Somebody please tell us whether Alcestis has died or not!" For the people, it requires a ceremonial to cope with necessity. Their reaction to the fact of death is a matter of timing and ritual observance. Their mourning need not be any less heartfelt for being mechanized; but they guard well against its being spontaneous. The question of the chorus: What shall we do? is a nontragic distortion of the tragic dilemma expressed in the words: What am I to do? In the Alcestis, the question really means: What does etiquette require us to do? Or better: How soon may we fall back on the regulations of etiquette? This is how the comedy of manners reformulates the question of how one behaves in the presence of death. The men of the chorus make no bones about it—they would be more comfortable if the Queen were already dead. They would rather practice the ceremonial than wait for it. At the moment they are waiting for the conventional signs of mourning, for the groaning and lamenting and beating of hands on breasts (86). In their mind's eye they contemplate the vision of a beautifully appointed funeral, complete with bowl of water and curl of hair (96). They want Alcestis dead so they can go through the apotropaic motions of the ritual. But, being decent and generous, they are ashamed of their secret expectations; they catch themselves and sing (90):

Healer God, appear and soothe
the wave of disaster!

as if Apollo had anything to say in the matter. But then again, later, they turn to the servant girl and ask with an unhealthy but quite natural eagerness (146),

You're sure there is no hope she will be
 saved?

And again (150),

Her death will make her famous!

In the eyes of the chorus, at any rate, Alcestis' death is a fact, and they are impatient to get on with it.

Eventually, when the Queen has deigned to give up the ghost, they remark, quite literally (416):

You must, Admetus, try to bear this sorrow.
You're not the first, nor will you be the last,
to lose a worthy wife. After all, we must
all of us go at one time or another.

This reminds us of nothing so much as of the Marx Brothers in Room Service exclaiming pious inanities at a fictitious deathbed. Would the effect in Greek be similarly funny? Perhaps not; it is the traditional function of the chorus to express collective wisdom. What seems silly to us, appears in many instances to have been intended as a serious contribution to the soothing of distress. Yet I for one cannot see Euripides writing these lines without tongue in cheek. For the chorus to say to Admetus "We've all got to go!" is comical in any language. The chorus relies on its stable conventions to see them through the present unhappiness, and they wish to let others share in this protection. They do not seem to realize that their age-old comfort cannot possibly be a comfort to their king.

A second characteristic of the chorus spotlighted by Euripides is their strong sense of masculine prerogative. Apart from an initial reference (82) to "Alcestis, child of Pelias," the chorus refuses to consider the Queen in her own right, preferring to think of her as the wife of Admetus. At one point (220) they pray to Apollo to save Admetus from being hurt through her death. What matters is not her sacrifice but her husband's suffering (cf. 144, 199, 226, 241). Alcestis must die, that is her obligation and her fate; any feeling that may be provoked by this fate is to be poured into sympathy with the lonely survivor. It is his loss, not hers, which feeds the compassion of the chorus. In the eyes of the servant girl, on the other hand, it is Alcestis who merits the greater share of the grief; as for Admetus, he could have prevented the unhappiness (197):

If he had died, that would be all. But since
he ran from death, he'll have his torture
 with him always.

The chorus, manly and middle-aged, cannot appreciate the greatness of the Queen's decision or, later, the violence of her suffering; they can speak and feel only with other men. They are too old-fashioned to put themselves in the place of a woman, too simple to look at the situation from two points of view. As in the original folk tale, Alcestis is for them little more than a means to an end, a willing instrument to ensure the survival of the King. For the slave girl, Alcestis is a heroine, and Admetus a coward.

Euripides is playing fast and loose with traditional morality. Tyrtaeus, the spokesman of masculine virtue, had said: "The man who deserts his post will lead an outcast's life, and in the end he is going to die anyway; hence, face death, for so you will live gloriously, or earn glory in death." In our play this creed is, with but one significant change—eternal pain instead of eternal shame—enunciated by the slave girl, while the brave men of the chorus, loyal supporters and spiritual companions of the King, throw the dictates of heroism to the winds. They seem to think that the privileges of their sex and the continued survival of masculine power should cancel out the claims of manly courage and arete.

What kind of a person is this man who is willing to sacrifice his wife? First of all let us look at the tradition. An ancient drinking song advises as follows:

Friend, learn the rule of Admetus and keep
  distinguished company.
Keep away from the mob; there is no grace
 in them.

In the old songs, apparently, Admetus was the ideal aristocrat, gracious, class-conscious, cultured to his finger tips, the kind of prince whose self-righteousness is unshaken by irrelevant notions of charity or brotherly love. In the folk tale on which the play is based, his superior standing guaranteed him a hero's rank, and he achieved the hero's supreme authentication by, for a time, overcoming death. That his wife got lost in the shuffle was unfortunate and regrettable but justified by the results. He was invincible, and she was one of his means of defense. In retrospect the victor has a right to expend fortifications. The brilliance of his position induces us to regard the death of Alcestis a mere incident and to forget it.

In Euripides' play Admetus is still the gracious and refined gentleman, but though his royal power is great (588), his personal distance from his subjects is much reduced. Like most of Euripides' kings, he is actually a man of the people, more sensitive perhaps than the rest, but a little confused and not entirely happy in the elevated position in which fortune has placed him. More important, Euripides shifts the emphasis of the ancient tale; he concentrates less on the deed itself than on the implications and consequences of the deed. He asks the question: What happened to the wife, and could the King really stand by and see his wife die for him without a stir of embarrassment? It is as if a dramatist were to take up the story of Hansel and Gretel and ask: What precisely was the position of the witch? Did she suffer? Could the children who caused her death sleep the sleep of the innocent thereafter?

Because of the new light thrown on Alcestis, we are now made to see Admetus from a radically different angle. It is the servant girl who supplies us with the fresh perspective: Admetus is a fugitive from justice, with Apollo, the god of blue-blooded honor and refinement, aiding and abetting him to turn tail. Worse yet, Admetus implores his wife not to "betray" him. He uses the word on more than one occasion (e.g., 250, 275). The servant girl copies the usage in her report (201):

He weeps and clasps his lady in his arms
and begs her: "Don't betray me," …

Admetus falls back on the same word to characterize his parents' unwillingness to die for him (659). It is a military term, taken straight from the spiritual arsenal of Tyrtaeus and other writers of patriotic poetry. Strictly speaking, it is applicable only to Admetus himself and no one else. We wince to hear it used of one who is a very much better soldier than he. But as a piece of psychological portraiture it is perfect. Admetus has transferred his fate to the shoulders of Alcestis; she is about to die, there is nothing now he can do to head off the event, and he is beginning to resent this infraction of his freedom to will and act. At the peak of his frustration he persuades himself that she is dying of her own free choice, and that she rather than he is the one who could yet rectify the mistake. There is some justice in this. The whole dramatic treatment does conspire to make Alcestis appear a freer agent than her husband. Admetus expressed a wish, and the gods acted; Alcestis had no gods assisting her to facilitate or direct her choice. Hence Admetus blames Alcestis for not revoking her decision.

The absurdity and the violence of his entreaties suggest that he is not without his share of tenderness. A coarser man might have commiserated with the woman, and yet taken the situation in his stride. He is vulnerable, hence he suffers. Again and again he assures Alcestis of his love and his concern. When he says to her (277): "If you die, we [he includes the children] shall die too," he means what he says, however preposterous the sentiment. He treats his wife as an equal, as a cherished partner in life. He wished to escape death, and he allowed Alcestis to substitute for him. But all that, Euripides wisely saw to it, is part of the antecedents, part of the folk tale rather than the drama. The facts are fixed, the drama cannot change them, it can only study the consequences of the facts. Seen from this vantage point, the sorrow of Admetus is not an ignoble thing. When the chorus, prior to the actual death of Alcestis, pity Admetus and voice their fear (328) that his suffering might drive him to suicide, we are at first inclined to feel that their compassion is misdirected. But they are right; his suffering is intense, and he knows that death might well have been better than the prospect that is now before him.

His personal embarrassment is that he cannot translate wish or thought into action. His life is a prime example of the ordinary man's incapacity to live the life which Aristotle recommends, the life of choice and commitment, the heroic life. He recognizes the sordidness of his existence, but he cannot lift himself above it. We are tempted to look down on him, but we should know that the figure of Admetus is a mirror in which we may recognize ourselves. The image is not repulsive, but it leaves little scope for pride or moral satisfaction, in spite of the honesty with which Admetus comes in the end to admit his inadequacies. The Alcestis inspires little pity, and less fear, but, in spite of the humor, a humiliating sense of solidarity.

v

Admetus is the unheroic hero of the people, warm, passionate, quick to trust and love and hate. Alcestis, his wife and adversary, is an entirely different character. We learn that she is well beloved by her servants. Both the slave girl and the steward who waits on Hercules clearly prefer her to her husband, from whose tempers she has often protected them (770). Toward her inferiors, in public, she has always been kind and considerate. But what about her private personality? Of her innermost nature we learn next to nothing. By stipulating that the decision to die lies in the past, by making her death a fact rather than a matter for doubt and choice, Euripides has deprived himself of the opportunity, fully exploited in other plays, of exposing the psychological piquancy of a moment of resolution. We are not permitted a glimpse into her soul at a time when she is not yet sure of herself. There is some partial compensation for this lack in the scene when she beholds the angel of death and flinches from the vision. But the experience is clinical rather than something that touches the spirit, a momentary weakening of resolve rather than a grappling with the dilemma of life and death. On the whole, her mind is made up, and she exhibits the serene, not to say the chilly, composure of a woman sure and proud of her purpose.

Obviously Euripides is interested in setting up a significant contrast between a struggling, ineffectual Admetus and a stoically proud Alcestis. The servant describes how the Queen went through all the ritual procedures preliminary to death (173)

without a tear shed or a sigh, nor did
she blanch in contemplation of her fate.

Unlike her husband, Alcestis sets a remarkable example of the heroic posture of endurance. But while Admetus is a whole person, and has a consistent attitude of weakness toward death, Alcestis faces death on two planes, in public and privately. After she has gone through the premortuary rites with the gravity of a marble statue, she goes home to uncoil her stored-up passion. Through the eyes of the servant girl we gain admission to the spectacle of her domestic extravagancies. We watch as she flings herself on her bed, only to hurl herself from the bed to the floor, all the time sobbing out her story of bitterness and frustration. The story required that she offer herself in sacrifice, not that she do so with pleasure. She is a queen; true to her standing she inspires her public subjects with an image of tranquility and resolution. But in the quiet of her bedchamber she abandons the role her people expect her to play, and gives full vent to a benefactor's pique. Alcestis has naturally come to despise the man who caused her to commit herself. She must also repent the rashness which prompted her to give her promise, and to wish her promise undone. The strength which drove her to offer herself in the first place now asserts itself as an urge to live, a tenacity which curses the unreasonableness of what is demanded of her. Euripides has caught the mixture of competing passions in the heart of Alcestis wonderfully well. But the subtlest stroke is this, that her grief is witnessed only by the children and the domestics. To her husband she presents her stoical front. There is no doubt that her soul is breaking in two, as it is put in the Prologue (20, 143). But she is not going to give Admetus the satisfaction of meeting him on the common ground of human weakness and love of life.

I have referred to the play as embodying a rhetoric of death. Alcestis is death's chief rhetorician. To begin with, immediately upon her entrance, she intones an address to the Sun, the Clouds, and the Earth (244). As in the first utterance of Prometheus, the apostrophe to the cosmic powers marks her loneliness and her elevation. She is half-abstracted, and the presence of her husband means nothing to her. Then there follows a succession of two scenes whose order is to be explained as a Greek dramatic convention; first the exposition of her passions, in the form of an aria (252), then a set speech voicing her concurrent thoughts (280; cf. the same arrangement later for Admetus, 861, 935). First we behold Alcestis beside herself with the agonies of the vision of death; then abruptly she launches into a reasoned discourse on the meaning and implications of her action. A modern reader will perhaps find this sudden break neither realistic nor aesthetically satisfying. In fact, however, the two scenes are not to be understood as following one another in empirical sequence. They present two sides of one and the same experience which, because of the exigencies of literary formulation, have to be developed independently. Alcestis' response to the fact of death is at least two-fold: the prospect engages her passions and her anxiety, but also her reasoning powers. In life, the two modes of reaction are bound together and simultaneous; in writing, they have to be separated unless the author tries to recapture the unity by some surrealistic measures such as those used occasionally by Eugene O'Neill. The Greek method, sanctioned and appreciated, it appears, by the Greek audiences, was to savor each mode by itself, to feature the response of the passions first and the commentary of the intellect second. This is a distortion of what happens in "real life." But to the extent that it catches the total experience more fully than would an emphasis on one or the other of the two modes, the convention may be said to make for a higher kind of realism. Certainly this solution of the difficulty seems to adapt itself more easily to an essentially realistic design than do other devices that have been tried for catching the fullness of the soul's life on the stage. Further, there is the old belief that a person on the threshold of death has a clearer understanding of the truth than other men, and that a deathbed speech is likely to carry the marks of a pure intelligence. There are thus sufficient reasons why the very last utterance of the hero or heroine should be a specimen of rational speech.

At any rate, first Alcestis has her tug of war with Charon. I like to think that Charon actually appears on the stage. Both the folk tale associations of the play, and its position in lieu of a satyr play, would encourage the utilization of the grotesque. One may assume that the mask of Death in the Prologue was designed to clash extravagantly with the mask and costume of the virtuous Apollo. The vision of Charon should indeed be hair-raising. As he grabs the Queen, she fails to maintain her public pose of calm resolution; her protests against forcible abduction spring straight from a desperate heart. Her position is not enviable, but it is not without a touch of the ridiculous. Her frantic shouts "Let me go!" alternating between the singular and the plural imperative, make it appear that she is being pulled in opposite directions, with Charon at one end and her family and attendants at the other. For the moment, the family wins out and Charon retires. In reality, of course, it is not the family that prevails but the dramatic convention that requires her to follow up her moment of passion with a speech. Charon withdraws so that Alcestis can give her husband a piece of her mind.

It is a most unpleasant speech (280). She begins by asserting that she might have been a merry widow, that her youth and attractiveness had promised to realize her every claim to happiness, but that she had decided otherwise. She reminds him that his parents had failed to do their duty by him; insists that her children remain motherless after she is gone; and finally, asks Admetus to concede that he may well be proud of calling such a wife his own. These are the four main points of her speech. For Admetus they become the theses of a creed which promises to rule and almost ruin his life henceforth. With these points, developed with the deadening authority of a master lawyer, Alcestis attempts to make sure that Admetus will never be a happy man again. She wants him to forswear all enjoyment of life, she asks him to deny his parents, she desires the children to remain orphans and remember her always and damn their father always; she expects him to be overcome with a continual awareness of his loss and with a never-ceasing contrition. Her language is in character (300):

Permit me to ask a favor; not, of course,
one matching mine, what I have done for
 you,
for nothing is more precious than a life;
but still, you will admit, you owe a favor.

This is the speech of a regal, a self-possessed, a purposeful woman, a heroine, if you wish. Yet imagine a play in which Alcestis' last speech was noble, self-effacing, warm, happy in the consciousness of her sacrifice. Such things are not unknown, especially in the classicistic tradition. But neither Euripides nor anyone else in fifth-century Athens was interested in this sort of romantic sweetening. He did not intend to portray a noble woman finding fulfillment in the act of self-immolation. Christian charity, the bliss of martyrdom, the happiness of a woman dying for a cause, are not the kind of subjects which appealed to his analytic mind. This is an essay in character, not a flight of utopian spirits. Alcestis speaks as a woman cheated out of her rightful legacy as mother, wife, and queen. At the moment of her death she despises her husband and twists the knife in his wound. We find her speech cruel and vindictive, but we also sense that her cause is just.

Admetus' speech in answer to Alcestis' harsh testament is a plausible mixture of self-pity, bravado, resentment, and daydreaming (328). Briefly the points of his reply are as follows. He promises never to marry another woman (330); to hate his parents (338); to organize a public mourning and to maintain private grieving in perpetuity (343); to have a statue of Alcestis made, to honor and embrace (348); to have his children bury him beside her when he dies (365). What is more, he wishes he could descend into Hades and sing for her release (357). This catalogue of promises and wishes is an extraordinary thing, especially in the light of what is to follow. He says he will never remarry; the final scene of the play, when Hercules tries to force the veiled woman upon his attentions, is designed to demonstrate that Admetus had meant what he said. But the audience knows that his resolve is unnecessary and abortive, and the fervor with which he stresses the point may well arouse the suspicion that he protests too much. He promises to hate his parents; and yet, as we shall see later, the consummation of this hatred leads indirectly to the salvation of Admetus as a moral being. There will be perpetual public mourning; how can a king presume to mortgage the joys and affections of his subjects in payment for a personal debt? He would descend into the underworld and appeal to the king of the dead—with music, like Orpheus, not by force of muscle or character, in the way of Hercules! The children will put him beside her when he dies; when, or if? What is this mention of his own death in the hour when ostensibly he is surrendering his mortality? Is this his way of turning his back upon the agreement, or at least of making his own share in it easier to bear?

The crowning touch in this tissue of dreams and self-delusions is the provision for the statue (348):

A likeness of your̀ shape, made by the hand
of skillful artists, will be stretched on our
great bed, for me to kneel before and
 fondle.

"Stretched": Admetus chooses a word which in its specific corporeality denotes either the stiffness of death or the posture of sex. He cannot live without her; even in death her concrete body must continue to support him. His love and his feeling of guilt conspire to realize a fantasy which borders on the abnormal, not to raise the issue of good taste. But first, pedantically, let us ask whether the artists whom Admetus has in mind are stone masons or carvers in wood? The term used normally means "carpenter," but I suspect that he is thinking of a statue in marble, a cold substitute for a chillier reality. Admetus loves his wife. He senses, as he must, that there is little loyalty and less affection in the giving of the gift, but he is awed by the enormity of the offering, and the warmth of his love is not diminished in the hubbub of his conflicting responses. Hence the wish for the statue. Frigid as the conceit may appear to us, it should be read as an attempt to express his love in the most forceful terms available. The nature of the material is irrelevant—divine images may be made of stone or of wood—as are the exact qualifications of the artists. All that matters is Admetus' desire that Alcestis survive in some fashion or other. This use of a statue, as a memento and by way of deification, is found elsewhere in Greek mythology; Laodamia seems to have consoled herself with an image of her husband, Protesilaus, who died at Troy. Xenophon of Ephesus tells of an old fisherman who kept his mummified wife at his side, a scene intended to touch us, not to disgust. Likewise the notion of Admetus is designed to testify to his ardor, not to indicate a sickness. But it helps to round out the portrait of a desperate man.

After Alcestis and Admetus have both spoken, Alcestis appoints the children to be witnesses of her husband's promises (371):

Children, your ears are witnesses to this
pledge of your father's; not to wed again
and give you a second mother, but to honor me.

A social worker, Athenian or otherwise, would demur at this; we are free to assume that Eumelus grew up to be a juvenile delinquent. But by making the children watchdogs of their father, by implicating them in the sorry existence which she has mapped out for him, Alcestis gives us the full measure of her hardness. She has made the expected gesture; now she hits back at the person who is to benefit from it, and she does so by establishing a relation between father and children which is bound to lead to friction and disaster. If Euripides felt that he was faced with the danger that Alcestis might turn out to be the heroine who receives the sympathy of the audience, he has avoided that danger expertly. Admetus, the passive, contemplative man, plays the traditional role of women or choruses. Alcestis is active, or at any rate she is earning the fruits of her past action. Her singleness of purpose might easily distract our attention from the figure of Admetus; but it is he who chiefly interests Euripides, and around whom the play is principally written. So the author moves to prevent Alcestis from usurping the part of the central character. What he gives us is a sort of goddess, a woman who, publicly at least, is superior to the ordinary human emotions. Even so, he manages to make this goddess interesting and believable, because he endows her with the coldness of contained fury rather than the torpor of insensibility. Hers is the kind of impassioned frigidity which, though not so moving as the irresolution of Admetus, helps us to understand better the suffering through which he passes.

The final exchange is the climax of this interplay of energies. On the part of Alcestis, assurance, asperity, malice, contempt; on the part of Admetus, contrition, self-justification, regrets. Then Alcestis dies, and with the song of the child there is heard, for the first time, the voice of unadulterated grief. It is not a lifelike sorrow; musical sorrow never is, and in this case the terms of the grief are not childish.

Father, your marriage has turned out
stale and wasted!

is not the sort of thing a preadolescent would think up, no matter what the provocation (411). Prior to the fourth century, as we know especially from vase paintings, Greek art did not represent children as different in kind from adults. In drama, too, children speak the language of grown men in miniature. At the death of Alcestis, pure grief is voiced not so much by the child as through the child. The scholars who have studied Greek stage technique tell us that in all likelihood an aria such as this was sung by one of the adult actors, perhaps by the actor who played the part of Alcestis, now lying motionless on her bier behind the gesticulating child. The distress is mature; it is the quintessence of mourning felt or meant to be felt at the final sealing of the Queen's fate. But Euripides has it issue from the mouth of the child because all other characters on the stage are too rigidly caught up in their own interests and complexities to respond with the proper candor and simplicity.

This is especially true of Admetus. In spite of the depth and genuineness of his anguish he does not permit it to interfere with his duties as ex-husband and king. As he organizes the funeral cortege and announces the regulations for the official mourning (422), he takes refuge in the social conventions which make his sorrow bearable. Surprisingly it is the chorus that comes closest to echoing the unrefracted grief intoned by the child. But perhaps that is not so surprising after all. Now that Alcestis is dead the men can relax and play the role for which they had been preparing themselves, without thinking primarily, as they had hitherto, of the King's affliction or of the prerogatives of men. In a stately, ringing processional they turn, for the first time, to address Alcestis in her own right, in the second person, wishing her a happy sojourn among the dead, and promising her renown for many generations and in many cities of Greece. Even their blunt and naïve (473)

I wish I had a wife like that!

is to be taken as an expression of unreserved appreciation. There is no longer any need for the note of urgency which characterized their earlier utterances. Alcestis is dead, and they have nothing to lose by paying her the traditional honor of retrospective acclaim, or even by interpreting her death as a loss. Their feelings on this score are almost disinterested; but they are not, for all that, contrary to their best interests. For their massive eulogy helps to fix the event, and to establish Alcestis firmly in her grave. If it were up to them, the song seems to say, no Hercules would come and restore her to life and bring back the old uncertainty.

The funeral ode, then, is in the nature of a confirmation. In this capacity it also serves to terminate the first part of the play. What follows is the beginning of the reversal which in the end will undo everything that had seemed safe and irrevocable. Appropriately, therefore, in the final section of the ode, the chorus put aside their role as participants and turn, impersonally, to sum up some of the themes which dominate the first movement; the specious hope that Alcestis might be brought back from Hades, the gallant query of why the parents did not die instead, the regret at the prospect of the King's pledged celibacy. The emphasis on family tension, on deprivation and death, is compressed within a very few lines to epitomize once and for all the sense of inadequacy, of spiritual poverty which can now be recognized as the hallmark of the first movement. Alcestis has died; but her death has not produced the relief or the contentment which comes from mutual understanding and trust. The chorus may be moderately satisfied with the outcome; Admetus is not.

vi

In T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party the Stranger says to Edward:

Most of the time we take ourselves for
 granted,
As we have to, and live on a little
 knowledge
About ourselves as we were. Who are you
 now?
You don't know any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait.

Admetus has waited because he took himself for granted. But this cannot go on in the light of the new fact, the emptiness where formerly he could count on a life beside him. We expect the recoil. But before we come to the awakening of Admetus, Euripides transforms the whole mood of the action by the introduction of a new character. Again let me quote from the Cocktail Party.

Just when she'd arranged a cocktail party.
She'd gone when I came in, this afternoon.

Whereupon the unidentified guest says:

     This is an occasion.
May I take another drink?

Before very long we shall see Hercules take that drink. Now he arrives, and his fast-paced interview with the chorus completely cuts off our preoccupation with death and frustration. This is the start of something new, a breath of fresh air admitted into the dank prison house of blindness and inaction and, above all, of pretended purposefulness.

Hercules happens to pass by on his way to perform his eighth labor, the taming of the fierce horses of Diomedes. He has recently completed the seventh, the overcoming of the Cretan bull. He has no exalted view of his duty; unlike Admetus he does not regard his position in life as a basis for speculation and bargaining. As the slave of Eurystheus he has a certain job to do, and that is that. Though a servant, he faces death repeatedly, as Admetus, the master of Apollo, cannot. Hercules is content to risk death even in a matter which is of no concern to him. From the manner of his talk about the horses of Diomedes it is quite apparent that he has no interest in them either as adversaries or as commercial value. What is more, he has not been briefed about them. Admetus, homo contemplativus, has all the insight and acumen he needs to appraise his situation properly, but he tries to shut the knowledge out until it can no longer be blinked. Hercules, homo activus, is truly uninformed; he undertakes each labor as if it were a business requiring nothing more than mechanical action. His matter-offactness leaves no room for insights or fears or beliefs. The greatest hero of Greek fairy tales—and here Euripides once more has his fun with us—is not imaginative enough to believe in fairy tales. The man who is going to take the personal existence of Death seriously enough to wrestle with him and choke his windpipe, refuses to credit the existence of supernatural things. When the chorus suggest that it will not be easy to tame the horses of Diomedes, he replies tolerantly (493):

Surely they don't breathe fire from their
 nostrils?

Of course every child in the audience knew that that was precisely what the wild Thracian horses did do. Hercules just has a good laugh at the notion and goes about his business, pretending not to like it, (499),

Just my tough luck! I always get the worst
 breaks!

but eager enough to carry out the mission all the same. Hercules is not involved in the tragedy of inaction which plagues Admetus and his people. Nor is his role in life dependent on the support and comforts extended by fellow men. Admetus, even at the moment of his self-discovery and conversion, could not cope with his lot unless he knew himself to be a member of the group, sharing with them his anxieties and his dreams. Hercules stands alone; his simple strength and uncomplicated outlook operate best without the softening influence of human bonds. Nor again is he weighed down by conventions; being a successful man of action he has no need for them. He is in every way uninvolved. And the absence of involvement is dramatized visually through a break with the traditions of the Greek theater: his scene with the steward is played on an empty stage, with the chorus gone to attend the funeral.

Hercules is not entangled in the meshes of the errant cause; his cause is freedom, the freedom of spirit and freedom of action. Freedom is the theme of a drinking song which he bawls out, much to the pious horror of the steward. As corroborated in the speech which follows, the theme is pedestrian and untragic: Drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die (782). With the Herculean labors freshly engraved in our minds, there is considerable humor in the spectacle of the Stoic saint preaching the philosophy of Omar Khayyam. Surely he is the one man in the world who does not pursue a hedonistic career. And yet, the man of action easily turns into the clown; Hercules' freedom from involvement also places him beyond the restrictions of a meaningful commitment. He does not need to be sensitive or tactful or morally obligated; he stands by himself, above the claims of society. It is perhaps worth noting that Euripides is here engineering a clever scheme of deflection. In the literary tradition it is Admetus who was associated with the philosophy now offered by Hercules. A poem by Bacchylides, who lived a generation or so before Euripides, contains these lines:

    The lord Apollo
… spoke to the son of Pheres:
"You are mortal; hence you shall foster
two thoughts, that you will see no more
than the light of tomorrow's sun,
or that you will draw out and complete
a deep-treasured life of fifty years to come.
Then, do what is right and enjoy yourself;
that is the greatest of all profits."

In Euripides' version Admetus cannot take life so lightly; his friend Hercules can, and he can exemplify the finer qualities of Admetus to boot: warmth, generosity, tolerance.

Unlike the chorus, Hercules sees only kindness, not extravagance, in the fact that Admetus entertained him without informing him of the true conditions. In spite of his servile status he can admire a good act without envy or resentment (855):

He took me into his house, he did not drive
me away, despite the fierce weight of his
 sorrow;
he hid it, in his kindliness and with
his usual tact. Is there in Thessaly,
or Greece, a man more liberal than he?

Hercules is a man without bitterness, without aggressions; he has no privileges to safeguard, no fancied status to maintain. His eye is free and unclouded, his heart ready to be moved by the actions of his friends. He may be somewhat lacking in imagination, but his capacity to love and admire is unlimited.

Why does Admetus deceive Hercules? For one thing, to admit that Alcestis had died would have meant provoking awkward questions. Hercules knows of Alcestis' promise, but the accomplished fact would force him to regard Admetus in a different light. Hercules does not believe that she will die—he does not believe in fairy tales—and so Admetus feels himself safe from his contempt. To this extent Admetus' silence is selfish, a further token of his lack of fiber. The chorus are appalled at his silence, but for another reason. In their eyes, admitting Hercules into the house is a breach of the conventions, or rather the breach of one convention in the interest of another, and they doubt that the duty of hospitality could ever take precedence over the duty of mourning. But that is exactly what Admetus seems to feel; a true Thessalian, raised in the traditions of the frontier and the wide-open spaces, he regards the duty of entertaining a guest as canceling all other obligations.

But that is not all; in effect, Admetus is trying to take the easy way out. Upon Hercules' question whether his wife has died (518), he answers: she has, and she has not. The whole passage which follows is riddling, and Hercules has a point when he remarks: "You are talking mysteries!" Riddling is a kind of ritual; by reducing the status of Alcestis and his own lamentable part in the affair to the terms of a conundrum, Admetus hopes to be able to live with his guilt more easily. Hercules is less subtle, he has no taste for puzzles, and asks to be excused (544): "Let me go!" he says, using the words which Alcestis had used at the moment of her vision of Charon. Admetus allowed Alcestis to leave him; he cannot now allow Hercules to do likewise. Hospitality is easier to exercise than marital obligation. It is a beneficent convention, ordered to measure to help you forget the sting of personal defeat. Admetus craves to salvage what is left of his pride, by clinging to the embarrassed guest. The tenacity with which he presses him is an index of his desperation. It leads him to renounce even the last shred of his moral integrity (541):

The dead are dead; come, go into the
 house!

Coming from the delicate Admetus, this is indeed a callous pronouncement. He is attempting to escape, both from his own remorse and from the painful memory of his wife's last actions. But the escape into the role of host, even if momentarily effective, cannot last. The time must come when Admetus will recognize his delusion and struggle to rid himself of it.

At this point the chorus, apparently forgetful of their earlier criticism of Admetus' conduct, sing their second great choral ode, a hymn to hospitality (569), in rhythms usually reserved for the extolling of victorious kings or athletes. The ode, with its praise of Apollo—an earlier guest who should never have come in the first place, and who stayed too long when he did—is designed to create an impression of security and contentment. The language is pastoral; the emphasis is on peace, stability, simple pleasure, the happy life. The song starts with an address to the house, then turns to call upon Apollo, who is pictured, like Orpheus, attracting the animals with his lyre (thus adding to the number of the house guests), and settles down to describe the wealth and liberality of Admetus. These three—the house, Apollo, and Admetus—form a compound image in which the meaning of hospitality takes concrete shape. True hospitality is the willed expression of a life that is full, happy, relaxed. At least it should be that. But often it becomes a gadget employed to make it appear as if the life which occasions it were unimpaired. In our play, hospitality is the most impressive manifestation of the code which is the ordinary man's support in the stream of life, and which marks its practitioner as a civilized person. But there is no doubt that it is mainly for the weak. They are the hosts; the strong are guests.

Hospitality, Admetus briefly hopes, will allow him to find his moorings. But the record of the convention as it pertains to this tale does not leave much room for confidence. The hospitality tendered by Admetus to Apollo initiated the loss of Alcestis. Admetus entertains Hercules, wrongly in most peo-ple's eyes, but the faux pas starts her recovery. Finally Admetus tries to shake off his weakness and proposes to deny hospitality to the mystery woman, and almost loses his wife once more. Thus the code, in its conflict with genuine sorrow and genuine involvement, makes for some difficult situations. But nothing better can be expected from the slipshod tactics of the civilized man who lives by rules rather than by instinct. Once the manipulation of the code has been substituted for the life of courage and conviction, the control must slip from the hands of the agent.

vii

There is a man in the play whose instincts, it seems, are as simple and straightforward, though not so generous, as those of Hercules: Pheres. It is true that when he comes on the stage he has a perfectly respectable little speech, full of pious and acceptable sentiments. One might almost believe that he is not an interested party, and that the reports about him put out by Alcestis were not entirely accurate. But this impression is at once wiped out when we come to the last two lines of his opening remarks, where he reveals his real feelings with singular coarseness (627):

This is the sort of marriage that turns to
 profit;
otherwise marriage is not worth a straw.

The method is characteristically Euripidean; neither Aeschylus nor the pre-Euripidean Sophocles has it (though Homer does): a man betraying his secret thoughts in an unexpected final disclosure, an epigrammatic revelation of the self, as if the pretended sentiments got to be too burdensome for the speaker to maintain. His remark immediately puts us out of sympathy with him, and makes us accept the position of Admetus in the scene which follows with less revulsion than might otherwise have been the case. And yet we cannot help but admire the old man; unlike his son he has not talked himself into believing his own fictions. He can take or leave the code as it fits his purposes, his true instincts always being on hand to run their consistently unsentimental course.

Admetus, to be sure, behaves like a cad. He calls his father a coward (642, 717), apparently forgetting his own inglorious role. Taking a leaf from his father's book he addresses him in terms of law rather than affection, as if the relationship between father and son were little more than a legal contract which might be revoked at the signer's discretion. The effect of his inaction has been to destroy his judgment and to atrophy his humaneness; for a brief interval he dispenses with his gentlemanly ideals of kindness and good will. His father repays him in kind. From legalistic charges and countercharges—I disown you, I have a new father and mother! … What crime have I committed? Have I stolen from you?—the quarrel degenerates into a battle of insults, into the most vitriolic enactment of the war of generations in Greek drama. No punches are pulled as the young calls the old superannuated, and the old, with equal justification, sneers at the softness and the dishonesty of the young.

Pheres says that he has no understanding of the nature of Alcestis' sacrifice (728):

She's pure and blameless, yes; but does she
  have sense?

While Admetus decries his parents for the purpose of magnifying Alcestis, Pheres cannot see any point to her deed. He prides himself on being levelheaded, unromantic, unconfused; he does not mind being coarse in the bargain so long as the truth as he sees it comes out into the open. His coarseness is painful but it has a function. For it exercises on Admetus a peculiar spell which helps us to understand him further, and which eventually helps him to understand himself. Goaded by the memory of his wife's not-so-silent reproaches, angered by his father's brutal cynicism, the gentle Admetus turns savage and fanatical. The explosion is as terrible as it is unexpected. It must lead either to destruction or to catharsis. And this gives us a clue concerning the role of Pheres in the plot. His own character is drawn vividly enough; but his appearance in the play is due chiefly to the fact that Euripides is interested in the soul of Admetus, in the experience which a good man undergoes when faced with the fact of a loved one's death.

One barb which Pheres uses in his scolding is particularly sharp; he calls Admetus sophos—clever, or ingenious (699). Admetus is that. To say that you expect your parents to die for you is immorally clever; to consider such a statement natural, as Admetus in his violence does, is downright sophistical. But "cleverness" does not quite meet the situation, for Admetus is, at this stage, too confused to merit the tag. In reality his sophia is fantasy, self-delusion. A good son is made bad, his filial responses are distorted, by a good deed which put him to shame. The explosion helps to untwist the responses and to transmute the fantasy into a sophia proper, into an insight into his true self. Pheres functions as a kind of psychotherapist to assist Admetus in his recovery from the wound which Alcestis has dealt. That is not to say that Pheres thinks of himself as a healer; he is too old and too crude to think of anyone's welfare but his own. But he operates as one nonetheless. His refusal to participate in the fiction which his son has elaborated for himself shocks Admetus into first compounding and then surrendering his fantasy, into turning from delusion to knowledge. Pheres is little more than an instrument, a tool of conversion. After the scene between father and son, there is no further mention of Pheres; he has done the job he was designed to do. And when Admetus comes back from the funeral he is a different person.

Not so the chorus; they have changed very little, continuing to rely on their double props of convention and masculinity (892): it happens all the time, you are not the first one to lose a wife, and so forth. They do not understand the new single-mindedness of Admetus' grief, and on one occasion they offer a veiled criticism (903):

I had a kinsman
who lost a son, an only son;
his death was bitter
cause for tears. Nevertheless,
he bore the loss well, though childless now,
and graying of hair,
and closing in on the eve of life.

In other words: too much fuss over a dead wife. But Admetus can no longer, after the set-to with Pheres, take shelter in externalizing or ritualizing his guilt. He begins by addressing the house, once the symbol of fullness and contentment. Now he is reluctant to enter it because it reminds him of the emptiness in his life and the draining away of his own self (861):

Hated entrance way, hated sight
of an empty home! Where am I
to walk, where to stand? …
I have been ill-starred from birth.

Apollo has enriched the house, now he has impoverished it; and Admetus has begun to realize that he is not separate from the house; as the house goes, so goes he. He had been blind to believe that life, domestic and political—as the second choral ode shows, the house symbolizes both—could go on much as before; that, with Alcestis gone from his side, he could continue to exercise his function as father and king. The delusion is gone, and Admetus recognizes his guilt.

In his speech after the musical exchange which marks the second entry of the chorus, Admetus openly confesses himself at fault. He does so by using the only formulation then readily available to a man and citizen. He imagines outsiders and personal enemies pointing their fingers at him and whispering (955):

There goes the man who lives in shame,
 who did
not dare to die, who bought a coward's life
with his own wife's death …
who hates his parents for his own panic!

And the capping humiliation:

Is he a man?

The formulation is in terms of what anthropologists call shame rather than guilt; the language of guilt was not yet easily handled by Euripides or his audience. But the self-questioning of Admetus clearly is a pregnant dramatization of the dawning of guilt upon a soul in the process of conversion. "He has turned tail before Hades; is he a man?" Greek tragedy of the grand genre, the tragedy of Oedipus or Medea or Prometheus, does not allow for a learning from experience or a wisdom through suffering. But Greek melodrama, or tragicomedy, or the sort of drama we have here, occasionally does show us a hero who recognizes his faults and suffers for them and learns from them. Conversion is not a tragic business, it does not rouse the emotions of which Aristotle speaks. But for an author who is interested in character and character development, conversion is an eminently desirable theme. In the story of Admetus, Euripides gently guides us through the career of a man who, though initially self-deceived, proves his worth by permitting himself to be shocked into an admission of his cowardice. He now sees himself with the eyes of Pheres; and that is the beginning of his restoration to favor with the audience.

viii

Immediately after Admetus' condemnation of himself, the chorus sings a great ode to Fate or Necessity (962). It is a stately hymn, majestic and serious, with touches of Aeschylean grandeur unusual in the choral passages of Euripides. One may wonder how this announced submission to Necessity tallies with the obvious cancellation of necessity in the scene which is about to follow. It would obviously be a mistake to interpret the devout utterance of the chorus as documenting a philosophy which Euripides himself held and wished to broadcast. That is not the way in which the ancient dramatists proceed; in any case, being a dramatist Euripides would never accept a trust in the power of necessity as a pertinent philosophical creed. In his plays, even more than in those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, man is what he makes of himself, in spite of the unseen powers which rule beyond the scene of action. Hence the poignancy of Admetus' suffering; it would be uninteresting if Fate or Necessity was responsible for what happened to his soul.

Does the ode, then, tell us something of the beliefs of the chorus? Perhaps, for they are ordinary people, with ordinary and rather limited ideas, quick to grasp the simplest, most traditional formulation and to turn their backs on the prospect of personal responsibility. But if this were all, it would be awkward, to say the least. The play is almost over, and this is not the proper time to introduce new information about the inclinations of the chorus. As a matter of fact, the ode is not meant to add to our knowledge of character at all. The study of character has come to an end. The conversion has happened, the anatomy of the soul is complete, and Euripides must tackle the difficult task of bringing the play to a satisfactory ending. This is where the Hymn to Necessity comes in. With it the author accomplishes the revalidation of Admetus. The stress on Fate seems, but only seems, to diminish his culpability in retrospect. The scene which Euripides has just put on the stage, the conversion of Admetus, holds a danger. The danger is that the audience, who had to a certain extent shared in the delusion of the hero and the chorus, will now see him with his eyes, see him as a coward only. Psychological realism disenchants; the anatomy of an unheroic soul shows up a dynamic vacuum which may become intolerable. This will not do, either morally or aesthetically. Aesthetically the play can be concluded satisfactorily only if at the conclusion Admetus can once more be regarded with a modicum of respect and appreciation. Morally, our initial feelings about him were not so far wrong after all. He is a good man, a worthy man caught in circumstance, and his admission of guilt should, with the enlightened in the audience, enhance his ethical standing. That is why, by an act of artistic legerdemain, the audience is induced to focus on the government of Fate, thus to take Admetus back more willingly into the fold of their sympathy. As so often in Greek drama, the chorus is used to shape the feelings of the audience; under the guidance of the ode the spectators dispense with cold logic and submit themselves to the irrational demands of the play.

Toward the end of the Hymn to Necessity the chorus re-emphasize the deadness of Alcestis; they vow to extend to her almost divine honors. As before, there is in the song of the chorus a characteristic insistence on the fact of her admission to Hades. While Admetus asks (897), "Why could not I have died?" the chorus sings about the inescapable bonds of death which will keep Alcestis safely and beneficially underground (985, 992, 1002):

She died for her husband; now
she lives as a blessed goddess.
Hail, mistress, and give us your blessings!

The song of worship is also a binding charm.

Enter Hercules, with a veiled lady. The audience knows who she is, the actors do not; a masquerade. Hercules starts out with emphatic reproaches (1012): "You never told me!" This is surprising, for when he first found out, in his conversation with the steward, that Admetus had not been completely frank with him, his impulse was to admire Admetus for his thoughtfulness (855). Only now does he take stock of what was due him as a friend and guest. But now he is about to make Admetus happy again. Are his reproaches playful? Are they the result of his recent bout with Death, a working off of the strain on the nearest bystander? The latter would not be without precedent. In the Iliad heroes snarl at their closest friends and relatives for no other reason than that they are under pressure and must vent their strain where it will do the least harm. But whatever the psychological motivation—and perhaps none is needed now—Hercules' criticism is artistically useful. His air of discontent keeps Admetus off balance until it is time to show his hand in earnest. To secure the fullest effect of the happy ending which is to come, the long ascent from apparent displeasure to ultimate benefaction is the most satisfying.

Hercules proposes to leave the lady with Admetus; Admetus objects. Do his remonstrances give us the picture of a man who is tempted to break faith with his promises but shrinks back because he does not wish to be censured? True, this is the fear he voices, but again it is a matter of terminology rather than substance. he states in terms of shame what we would expect to see stated in terms of guilt. His question (1057), "What will the people say?" really means the same as, "How can I square such an act with my self-respect?" The man who says he fears the censure of the people and of the dead Alcestis is not an inhibited libertine or a prurient ascetic, but one who is no longer interested in women, and for whom even the duty of hospitality has lost its meaning. The author wants no further dissection of Admetus' character. The last scene is pure fairy tale, to finish the play satisfactorily. Realistic portraiture and clinical psychology are left far behind. Euripides has said what he wanted to say by the time the closing scene opens. The scene is not without its subtleties, of course—witness the silence of Alcestis—but its purpose is resolution rather than further exploration. True, Admetus shows signs of a reawakening capacity for enjoyment; he says to the woman (1062):

You have the same measuretnents as
 Alcestis.

True, Hercules and Admetus between them strike just the right note of courteous hesitation and gentle urgency. There is humor and there is irony. But there is no further interest in the consequences of the fact of death.

Why does Alcestis not move or speak? Hercules' explanation, perhaps not entirely satisfactory to all of us, has a substantial kernel of wisdom and truth. It is an explanation on the level of ritual, appealing to the instincts operative during a religious festival such as the Dionysian festival at which the play was performed. Alcestis is to be purified before she may speak; she must readjust herself to the ways of life before she can be trusted to participate in life once more. But for once the ritual reinforces the dramaturgy. Earlier in the play Alcestis had stood under the shadow of death. Now she returns, alive, and that is awkward in itself. For the plot she was needed to die, not to come back. She must come back so that Admetus will be happy, or at least so that we shall not worry about the future of the hero. But that is all; for the rest her dramatic appearance must be pruned to zero. A single word from her and we should be put in mind of the whole complex of frustration and inadequacy which the final scene is designed to make us forget.

The last scene, then, is as clear an indication as one may wish of Euripides' pervasive conviction that the stage is not to offer solutions to moral or psychological problems. It is the author's task, after presenting the conflicts and the suffering which constitute the plot proper, to terminate the drama with a close which is not philosophically meaningful but artistically and psychologically satisfying. Mostly he does this by creating a compelling illusion of having cut the knot, by employing a deus ex machina. Hercules is no such august divinity lowered from the skies, but his role as the restorer of Alcestis is analogous to the intervention of a god. But there is a difference between this kind of conclusion and the ending of a true tragedy. In the Medea or the Hippolytus or the Bacchae the coming of the god serves as a public avowal that the situation witnessed on the stage is insoluble by purely human standards. The deus ex machina underscores the hopelessness of the human predicament. In the Alcestis, on the other hand, the action had come to a proper end before Hercules returns. With the conversion of Admetus the air has been cleared, and human dignity and intelligence have been, if not vindicated, certainly salvaged from utter loss. Hercules does not come back to solve a difficulty or to supply a spurious answer; he returns to bring back Alcestis. After all, the Queen had been sent off to Hades only so that we could see what happened to her husband under the peculiar circumstances of her death. We have seen what happened; now that Admetus has shown the signs of a moral recovery, why not liberate both of them from the forced conditions required by the experiment? It would be wasteful to leave Alcestis in Hades now that Admetus will be a much better husband to her. The masquerade is long-drawn-out; Euripides wants the audience to enjoy the fun. The emphasis is on relaxation, on happiness and sport. The spirit of the exordium augurs well for the future of the reunited couple.

When Admetus is first told who the veiled lady is, he thinks he is dreaming (1127). But the restoration of Alcestis suggests that it is not the present but the past which was the dream. In retrospect the events of the play have a chimerical quality about them, not only because they derive from a fairy tale, but because matters which are usually covered up have been exposed with a nightmarish precision. Now Admetus is emerging from the dream; his slowness in realizing who the veiled stranger is, shows the difficulty he has in putting it all behind him. It takes some time for the head to be cleared. The dream had helped to rid him of an immoral fantasy; now, for the sake of the audience, the dream itself must be exorcised. But what does the dream mean? Here Artemidorus, a writer of the second century A.D. may be of some help, for he knew more about the dream images of the Greeks and their feelings about them than we shall ever know. Here are a few scattered passages from his book. "A wedding and a death have the same meaning, for the things that go with them are the same." "For the unmarried man to dream of death means that he will marry; for death equals a wedding. Both have the same events linked with them, namely, a procession of men and women and garlands and incense and myrrh and plate collection." "To dream that one descends into Hades and sees the things which are supposed to be in Hades, this has one meaning for those in good circumstances and another for the depressed. For the former, for those who live as they have chosen [and that disqualifies Admetus] the dream indicates bad circumstances and harm. For the others, those who are overcareful and worried and dejected, the dream foretells a release from these worries and cares; for the people in Hades are without cares and beyond all worrying."

Thus Artemidorus. To be sure, it is Alcestis who has descended into Hades, not Admetus. But the vision, the purifying fright, are his, and ours. The ending of the play suggests that henceforth he will be a better man, a more appreciative husband, a married man rather than an island to himself. And we share in the broadening of the perspective. The plot which Euripides has sketched for us, and the character of Admetus as he suffers and squirms and finally breaks free, have the sharply incised quality of a dream. It is, however, a benevolent dream which stops short of turning into unrelieved nightmare. There is nothing obsessive about the limpid naturalness of the action and the relations between Admetus and his household. The men and women in the play are not machines, nor are they monsters which are simply machines gone wild. They are the likely and, on the whole, likable characters of everyday life, forced to grapple with the natural necessities and trying hard to preserve their small portion of culture and dignity as they do so. In his entanglement with the fact of death Admetus takes on the outlines of Everyman. But not an Everyman stripped of all that does not bear on his entanglement. Rather an Everyman of flesh and blood, with the gestures and the foibles and the luxury of good will which makes him into one of Euripides' most successful characters, vastly more successful than the heroes and heroines of true tragedy, the outrageous Medeas and the tortured Pentheuses, who were of course never meant to be characters in quite the same sense. For a tragedy deals with issues or causes beyond the reach of ordinary men, issues that can be realized effectively only in the test-tube environment of extraordinary souls. Only a non-tragic drama such as the Alcestis may venture to undertake the study of character for its own sake. This does not mean supplying reasons, or tracing origins; behavior is not studied as a fruit of the past, but as a pattern interesting and authentic in itself. Admetus appeals to us not for what made him act as he acts, nor for what he hopes to accomplish—that would be the tragic dimension—but simply for the way he acts when confronted with a situation which, in spite of its fairytale base, is perfectly natural. A play of this type requires very little interpretation; all that the audience is asked to do is to listen to what the characters have to say, and recognize themselves in them. We can do no more, and no less.

Notes

¹ A. M. Dale (ed. and comm.), Euripides: Alcestis (Oxford, England, The Clarendon Press, 1954), p. xxvii.