To her any neglect to ensure due protection for the
children would be as unnatural as to refuse to die for her husband.
children would be as unnatural as to refuse to die for her husband.
Euripides - Alcestis
While he is still
refusing to admit the facts and beseeching her not to "desert" him, she in
a gentle but businesslike way makes him promise to take care of the
children and, above all things, not to marry again. She could not possibly
trust Admetus's choice. She is sure that the step-mother would be unkind
to the children. She might be a horror and beat them (l. 307). And when
Admetus has made a thrilling answer about eternal sorrow, and the
silencing of lyre and lute, and the statue who shall be his only bride,
Alcestis earnestly calls the attention of witnesses to the fact that he
has sworn not to marry again. She is not an artist like Admetus. There is
poetry in her, because poetry comes unconsciously out of deep feeling, but
there is no artistic eloquence. Her love, too, is quite different from
his. To him, his love for his wife and children is a beautiful thing, a
subject to speak and sing about as well as an emotion to feel. But her
love is hardly conscious. She does not talk about it at all. She is merely
wrapped up in the welfare of certain people, first her husband and then he
children. To a modern romantic reader her insistence that her husband
shall not marry again seems hardly delicate. But she does not think about
romance or delicacy.
To her any neglect to ensure due protection for the
children would be as unnatural as to refuse to die for her husband.
Indeed, Professor J. L. Myres has suggested that care for the children's
future is the guiding motive of her whole conduct. There was first the
danger of their being left fatherless, a dire calamity in the heroic age.
She could meet that danger by dying herself. Then followed the danger of a
stepmother. She meets that by making Admetus swear never to marry. In the
long run, I fancy, the effect of gracious loveliness which Alcestis
certainly makes is not so much due to any words of her own as to what the
Handmaid and the Serving Man say about her. In the final scene she is
silent; necessarily and rightly silent, for all tradition knows that those
new-risen from the dead must not speak. It will need a long _rite de
passage_ before she can freely commune with this world again. It is a
strange and daring scene between the three of them; the humbled and
broken-hearted husband; the triumphant Heracles, kindly and wise, yet
still touched by the mocking and blustrous atmosphere from which he
sprang; and the silent woman who has seen the other side of the grave.
It was always her way to know things but not to speak of them.
The other characters fall easily into their niches. We have only to
remember the old Satyric tradition and to look at them in the light of
their historical development. Heracles indeed, half-way on his road from
the roaring reveller of the Satyr-play to the suffering and erring
deliverer of tragedy, is a little foreign to our notions, but quite
intelligible and strangely attractive.
refusing to admit the facts and beseeching her not to "desert" him, she in
a gentle but businesslike way makes him promise to take care of the
children and, above all things, not to marry again. She could not possibly
trust Admetus's choice. She is sure that the step-mother would be unkind
to the children. She might be a horror and beat them (l. 307). And when
Admetus has made a thrilling answer about eternal sorrow, and the
silencing of lyre and lute, and the statue who shall be his only bride,
Alcestis earnestly calls the attention of witnesses to the fact that he
has sworn not to marry again. She is not an artist like Admetus. There is
poetry in her, because poetry comes unconsciously out of deep feeling, but
there is no artistic eloquence. Her love, too, is quite different from
his. To him, his love for his wife and children is a beautiful thing, a
subject to speak and sing about as well as an emotion to feel. But her
love is hardly conscious. She does not talk about it at all. She is merely
wrapped up in the welfare of certain people, first her husband and then he
children. To a modern romantic reader her insistence that her husband
shall not marry again seems hardly delicate. But she does not think about
romance or delicacy.
To her any neglect to ensure due protection for the
children would be as unnatural as to refuse to die for her husband.
Indeed, Professor J. L. Myres has suggested that care for the children's
future is the guiding motive of her whole conduct. There was first the
danger of their being left fatherless, a dire calamity in the heroic age.
She could meet that danger by dying herself. Then followed the danger of a
stepmother. She meets that by making Admetus swear never to marry. In the
long run, I fancy, the effect of gracious loveliness which Alcestis
certainly makes is not so much due to any words of her own as to what the
Handmaid and the Serving Man say about her. In the final scene she is
silent; necessarily and rightly silent, for all tradition knows that those
new-risen from the dead must not speak. It will need a long _rite de
passage_ before she can freely commune with this world again. It is a
strange and daring scene between the three of them; the humbled and
broken-hearted husband; the triumphant Heracles, kindly and wise, yet
still touched by the mocking and blustrous atmosphere from which he
sprang; and the silent woman who has seen the other side of the grave.
It was always her way to know things but not to speak of them.
The other characters fall easily into their niches. We have only to
remember the old Satyric tradition and to look at them in the light of
their historical development. Heracles indeed, half-way on his road from
the roaring reveller of the Satyr-play to the suffering and erring
deliverer of tragedy, is a little foreign to our notions, but quite
intelligible and strangely attractive.
