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Alcestis
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Lines 238-605Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 238-475 Summary
Second Episode and Second Stasimon
The Chorus cries out in grief when they see that Alcestis is dying and meditates on the pain of losing a beloved spouse. Alcestis sings a final greeting, first to the sun and the light and then to her land and her home. Admetus, standing beside Alcestis, begs her not to leave him and asks the gods to spare her. But Alcestis can already see the gods of the Underworld beckoning to her: Charon, the ferryman of the dead, is urging her on with a hand on his oar while Hades glares at her from the darkness of his Underworld realm. Alcestis realizes that she must die now, but Admetus begs her to resist, telling her that “There would be nothing left of me if you died” (278).
Alcestis, switching from sung to spoken lines, now addresses Admetus in a calm and deliberate speech. She tells him that she must die now, having chosen to die for him. She rebukes Admetus’s parents, who refused to die for their son even though they were already old. Now, as “recompense” (299) for her sacrifice, Alcestis asks Admetus to swear that he will never remarry and give their children a stepmother who would inevitably treat them unkindly. She is especially concerned about her daughter, for while her son will always be supported by his father, she will not have a mother to care for her and arrange her marriage when she grows up.
Admetus responds in a fervent speech, assuring Alcestis that he will never remarry. He hates his parents for refusing to die for him and blames them for Alcestis’s death. Admetus further promises to “make an end / Of revelry and entertainment in my house” (342-43) in eternal mourning for Alcestis, and even declares that he will have a lifelike image of Alcestis built to keep in his room and hold in his arms. He tells Alcestis to wait for him in the Underworld, saying that when he dies, he will be buried beside her and that they will be together in death.
Supported by her servants, Alcestis enters with her husband Admetus and their two children. She is dying. She evocatively addresses the sunlight for the last time, already seeing the gods of the Underworld waiting for her in the darkness. Admetus begs Alcestis not to leave him and promises never to remarry. Alcestis tells Admetus to remember her sacrifice and leaves their children in his care; Then she dies. One of the children says a brief dirge over his dead mother. Admetus, with a heavy heart, commands his subjects to observe a year of mourning for Alcestis.
The Chorus announces that Alcestis is dead. The son of Alcestis and Admetus sings a short dirge for his mother, saying that he is too young to be orphaned from his mother and bewails the sufferings he and his sister will undergo. With his mother dead, he says, the house of Admetus is ruined. The servants carry Alcestis’s body into the house, followed by the children.
The Chorus tells Admetus to be strong, and Admetus responds in a speech in which he acknowledges that he knew what had to happen, even though that knowledge was difficult. Now, says Admetus, it is time to bury Alcestis. Admetus orders a full year of public mourning for Alcestis as a gesture of gratitude for Alcestis’s sacrifice. He then exits into his house.
The Chorus is left alone on stage to sing the second stasimon. They say goodbye to Alcestis and wish her happiness in the afterlife. They predict that poets and musicians will forever celebrate Alcestis and her noble example. They regret that they can do nothing to bring her back and praise her courage in dying for her husband when nobody else would do so. They criticize Admetus’s parents, who are already old, for refusing to die for their son; In contrast, Alcestis volunteered to die for her husband while still young. They hope that they will have the good fortune of finding a wife as virtuous as Alcestis, the kind of wife that “is given seldom to mortals” (474).
Lines 476-605 Summary
Third Episode and Third Stasimon
Heracles, the strongest of all mythical Greek heroes, enters and asks where he can find Admetus. The Chorus answers that Admetus is inside his home and asks Heracles what he is doing in Pherae. In the exchange that follows, Heracles reveals that he is traveling north, having been sent to capture the mares of Diomedes as one of his Labors. The Chorus warns him of the perils of his quest: Diomedes is a son of Ares, the god of war, and his mares feed on human flesh.
Admetus enters from the house and greets Heracles, who notices that his friend is dressed in mourning. Aware that Alcestis has agreed to die in Admetus’s place, Heracles asks if Alcestis has already been claimed by the gods of the Underworld. Admetus hides the truth and leads Heracles to believe that the woman who had died was not intimately connected to him or his family. Heracles expresses his condolences and says that he will stay with somebody else, but Admetus refuses to let him leave and orders a servant to take him to the guest quarters and see that he is entertained.
Admetus’s actions alarm the Chorus, and after Heracles is led inside, they rebuke Admetus for entertaining a guest while he is mourning his wife. But Admetus responds that it would have been wrong to turn away a friend and that “there would be one more misfortune added to those / I have, if my house is called unfriendly to its friends” (557-58). He needs to conceal the truth from Heracles, he says, because if he had told him that it was Alcestis who died, he never would have agreed to stay with him. He then exits into the house.
The Chorus sings the third stasimon. They recall Apollo’s stay with the pious Admetus, painting an idyllic scene of the god herding the king’s livestock while playing the lyre. Admetus’s treatment of Apollo and his hospitality has contributed to the fame of his house, and now Admetus has taken in a guest even though his wife has just died. They praise Admetus for his virtue and nobility:
The noble strain
Comes out, in respect for others.
All is there in the noble. I stand
In awe at his wisdom, and good hope has come again to my heart
That for this godly man the end will be good (600-605).
Lines 238-605 Analysis
In the second episode, Alcestis appears on stage for the first time. Alcestis has already been introduced through the lavish praises of the Chorus and the maid, but now she can speak for herself. Alcestis’s first words are a farewell to the light: “Sun, and light of the day, / O turning wheel of the sky, clouds that fly” (244-45). Here, light a symbol of life and is juxtaposed with darkness as a symbol of death. Alcestis already sees the gods of the Underworld. When Alcestis was written, there was no clear distinction in traditional Greek belief between a “paradise” for the good and a “hell” for the wicked, but the Underworld Alcestis sees is bleak. This scene highlights the theme of humans’ desire to live: Even Alcestis, who is ready to die for her husband, does not deny that she would rather live.
The second episode displays the relationship of Alcestis and Admetus. On more than one occasion, Admetus asks Alcestis not to abandon him though of course it is because of him that Alcestis is dying, a fact that Admetus sometimes seems hesitant to acknowledge. Even when he begins to regret his actions and miss his wife, Admetus never accepts responsibility for Alcestis’s death. The closest he comes is when he imagines, in the fourth episode, how others will hold him responsible for her death. Admetus makes grandiose promises to Alcestis, including that he will never remarry and that
The skillful hands of craftsmen shall be set to work
Making me an image of you to set in my room;
I’ll pay my devotions to it, hold it in my arms
And speak your name, and clasp it close against my heart,
And think I hold my wife again, though I do not,
Cold consolation, I know it, and yet even so
I might drain the weight of sorrow (348-354).
Some of Admetus’s promises to his dying wife, though, are patently impractical, and the speed with which Admetus will break some of these promises is almost comical. Notably, Admetus vows that he “shall make an end / of revelry and entertainment in my house” (342-43) after Alcestis dies, yet even before Alcestis is buried, he entertains Heracles with ample revelry when Heracles stops at his house.
Alcestis’s final requests to Admetus show her own preoccupations with her family and her legacy while highlighting how marriage and family were viewed in ancient Greece. Alcestis asks Admetus not to remarry because stepmothers are famously cruel to their stepchildren (a popular motif in myth and folklore). Alcestis is concerned above all for her daughter, who will be isolated without a mother to make sure she finds a good husband. While Alcestis worries at length about the future of her children, however, she is comparatively stoic. When Admetus tells her that he will be unable to live without her, for instance, Alcestis responds by saying simply that “Time will soften this” (381). Indeed, Alcestis repeatedly asks Admetus and those around her to remember her courage and virtue, and it seems likely that the motivation for her sacrifice comes from a desire to ensure a positive legacy as a paragon of wifely virtue rather than from any warm feelings for her husband. In this, Alcestis succeeds, and her death cements her reputation as an ideal wife. The Chorus even prays for a wife like Alcestis, distinguishing her from the average women, who were seen as a bane to men in the casually misogynistic fashion typical of ancient Greek literature:
May it only be mine to win
Such wedded love as hers from a wife; for this
Is given seldom to mortals; but were my wife such, I would have her
With me unhurt through my lifetime (473-75).
Like Alcestis, Admetus is also preoccupied with his reputation for virtue, as we see from his actions as well as from the Chorus’s third stasimon. Sometimes, Admetus’s pursuit of conventional virtues is excessive and potentially problematic. Admetus is so incorrigibly hospitable, for instance, that he insists on entertaining Heracles even while he is in mourning for Alcestis—an action so out of the norm that the Chorus bluntly asks Admetus if he is “crazy” (551) after he has Heracles shown to the guest quarters. Indeed, Admetus himself admits that he must lie to Heracles to convince him to stay with him. Moreover, in entertaining Heracles, Admetus breaks the promise he has made to the dying Alcestis when he said that his house would see no revelry after she died: Admetus is clearly a man determined to be virtuous, but he is also an effective illustration that when one always tries to do the right thing, they inevitably wind up falling short in some regard.
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