The setup for this story is a gift. Apollo, grateful for a year of decent treatment, arranged with the Fates that King Admetus of Thessaly could dodge his own death — provided someone else agreed to take it. Then the day arrives, and the myth does something I find genuinely unusual for its period. It stops being about the king. It spends an uncomfortably long time going round the room asking everybody, one at a time, whether they'd like to die. And it records their answers honestly. Almost nobody comes out of this well.
The Kingdom That Worked
For years after Apollo left, Thessaly did brilliantly. Peabody's line is that the memory of the god's service kept the country full of sunlight — where a god had worked, the people took heart to work too. Herds thrived. Travellers were looked after. A happy king and queen ran a happy kingdom. Then Admetus got sick, and kept getting worse, and no treatment touched it. When his people ran out of hope, somebody remembered the promise. The Fates would spare the king if another person would die instead. Simple. Surely, for a good ruler whose life the whole country depends on, a volunteer would step forward immediately. Nobody did.
The Part Nobody Expects
What follows is a short, brutal survey of human self-interest, and Euripides plays it for everything it's worth. His closest friends said they would gladly die for him in battle — which is a way of saying no while sounding heroic. They couldn't die in bed at home, they explained. Not like helpless old women. That would be humiliating. The wealthy had too much to live for. The poor, who owned nothing at all except being alive, couldn't bear to give up the only thing they had. It's the most sympathetic refusal in the list and also the most damning, because it means nobody at any level of society is going to do it.
And then his parents. Admetus's father Pheres and his mother were both elderly. Both had, at best, a handful of years left. Both had already lived complete lives. And both refused — and, in Euripides, were offended that anyone would even suggest it. Euripides gives Pheres a scene with his son that is one of the most vicious arguments in Greek drama. Admetus accuses his father of cowardice and says he's no son of his. Pheres fires back with a piece of logic that is impossible to answer: I gave you life. I owe you nothing further. I like being alive. So, apparently, do you — which is exactly why your wife is dead. He is entirely right, and the audience knows it, and it ruins Admetus.
Pheres fires back with a piece of logic that is impossible to answer: I gave you life. I owe you nothing further. He is entirely right, and the audience knows it.
Alcestis Volunteers
While all of this is happening, the three Fates are waiting with the shears, and they can't wait much longer. So the young queen stepped forward. Alcestis was not old and not tired of life. She had small children. She had, by every account, the best possible reasons to stay. She volunteered anyway, and the myth gives her no speech about glory — she was, Peabody says, sorrowful but resolute.
Then she did something that has always struck me as the most human detail in the story. She got herself ready. She said goodbye to her children and put them in her husband's care. She bathed and anointed her body. She dressed in her best clothes. She lay down deliberately, as if for a ceremony, and said goodbye to her household. And she faded in front of the king, Peabody writes, like daylight that has to go. Admetus had begged and argued and got nowhere. The Fates don't renegotiate.
She bathed, dressed in her best clothes, and lay down deliberately, as if for a ceremony. She faded like daylight that has to go.
Heracles at the Door
At exactly the wrong moment, Heracles turned up. He was passing through on his way to another labour and asked for a bed for the night. And here Admetus does the most Admetus thing imaginable: he takes him in, hosts him properly, and doesn't tell him what's happened, because turning away a guest would be a breach of hospitality and he cannot bring himself to do it. So Heracles ate and drank cheerfully in a house in mourning, and only found out from a servant who couldn't take it any more. He was appalled — at himself for celebrating in a house of grief, and at the situation. So he decided to fix it the only way he knew how.
He went and physically fought Death. Thanatos had already come up out of Hades and was leading the queen's spirit away from her chamber. Heracles stood in the doorway, put his arms round him, and wrestled. Peabody's explanation for how Heracles won is the best account of it I've read anywhere: Death is a visitor who comes and goes, and cannot stay long in the upper world, because its air is not for him. So as the struggle went on, his strength gave out. He let go of the queen and escaped back down into the dark, weak from the fight. And in the chamber upstairs, where the family were still weeping over her body, Alcestis breathed. Peabody's image — the breath stirred in her heart, like a waking bird — is the sort of line that justifies reading Victorian retellings.
What Euripides Actually Did With It
Peabody ends on the happy note, as a book for children should. Euripides is much less comfortable, and it's worth knowing what the original does. In the play, Heracles brings back a veiled woman and — without saying who she is — asks Admetus to look after her while he's away. Admetus refuses, repeatedly, because he has just sworn at his wife's deathbed never to take another woman into his house. Heracles pushes. Admetus resists, then buckles, and takes her hand. Then the veil comes off. He has just broken his promise to his dead wife, on stage, in front of everyone, seconds before finding out she's alive. It's a test he fails and gets rewarded for anyway, and Euripides leaves it hanging.
And then there's the ending. Alcestis stands there, restored — and she does not speak. Not one word. Heracles explains that she can't be spoken to for three days until she's been purified of her consecration to the underworld gods. The play closes with the husband celebrating and the wife silent. Critics have argued about that silence for two and a half thousand years. Ritual necessity? Or a playwright letting a woman decline, in the only way available to her, to say that everything is fine?
He has just broken his promise to his dead wife, on stage, in front of everyone, seconds before finding out she's alive. Euripides leaves it hanging.
What the Myth Is Really Asking
The obvious reading is the sacrificial one: Alcestis is the model of devotion, and generations of moralists have used her exactly that way. But look at what the story spends its time on. Not her decision — that takes a few lines. It spends its length on everyone else's refusal, and on what it does to Admetus to be alive on those terms. Because he doesn't get away with it. He's alive, and everyone at court knows why, and his own father has said it out loud in public. Euripides has him realise, far too late, that he has become the most wretched person present. The living have to keep living, in front of witnesses. So the question underneath the play isn't would you die for someone? It's the harder one: could you accept it if someone died for you? Alcestis is the only person in the story who behaves well, and she barely gets to speak. That's either a failure of the tradition or a very sharp comment on it, and I lean towards the second.
Sources and Afterlives
The essential text is Euripides, Alcestis (438 BCE) — the earliest surviving play of his we have. It was performed in the fourth slot normally reserved for a satyr play, which makes its genre permanently ambiguous. Tragedy with a happy ending, comedy with a corpse in it; the Greeks apparently weren't sure either. The myth also appears in Apollodorus and is referenced by Plato in the Symposium, where Phaedrus holds Alcestis up as proof that love makes people brave — and points out that the gods were so impressed they sent her back, which they did not do for Orpheus. Later versions worth knowing: Gluck's opera Alceste (1767), Rilke's poem "Alkestis" (1907), and T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949), which transplants the whole plot into a modern London drawing room and is a strange, good play.
