Most Greek myths about gods visiting mortals are tests. The god turns up in rags, someone treats them badly, and there's a punishment. This one is different, and it's one of my favourites in the whole collection, because Apollo isn't testing anyone. He's been sentenced. He genuinely has to do this job for a year, and the king he ends up working for turns out to be a decent enough man that the god leaves him a gift that will define the rest of his life — and very nearly cost him his wife.
Why Apollo Was Sentenced
The chain of events starts with Apollo's son Asclepius, the greatest physician who ever lived. Asclepius got so good at medicine that he began bringing the dead back, which upset the entire arrangement between the living world and the Underworld. Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt. Apollo couldn't strike back at Zeus. So he went after the Cyclopes instead — the smiths in Hephaestus's forge who manufacture Zeus's thunderbolts — and shot them with his arrows. This was, as Peabody drily notes, to the wrath of all the gods and especially Zeus, since the Cyclopes always make his thunderbolts, and make them well. Even a god couldn't do that without consequence. The sentence handed down was servitude: Apollo would go to earth and serve a mortal for a fixed term. Sources disagree on the length — one year in some, nine in others. Peabody shrugs at the discrepancy in a way I appreciate: in those days time passed quickly, and as for the gods, they took no heed of it.
The Stranger at the Palace
There was a king in Thessaly named Admetus, ruler of Pherae, and one day a stranger came to his palace asking for work. Nobody knew his name. He was extremely good-looking, and when they questioned him he said only that he had come from a position of high trust — which is technically true and beautifully evasive. They made him chief shepherd of the royal flocks.
The Best Year in the History of Thessaly
What follows is the quietest passage in Greek mythology and I think one of the loveliest. Every day the stranger drove the sheep down to the banks of the river Amphrysus and sat and watched them graze. Country people passing by would slow down to look at him, but nobody had the nerve to ask questions. They noticed things. He seemed to know medicine — he could cure almost any traveller's complaint with whatever weed happened to be growing nearby. He piped for hours in the sun. He was plain-spoken, but gave the impression of knowing a great deal more than he was saying. And when people wished him good weather he smiled, in a way they couldn't quite read. And then it stopped raining, more or less permanently. Summer seemed to arrive and decide to stay. The flocks came out whiter and finer than anyone had seen, drifting along the pasture like clouds on a clear sky. When the shepherd felt like singing, grasshoppers came in close and swans steered towards the bank to listen.
The countrymen would gather round to hear him tell stories — about killing the monster Python, about a king with donkey ears, about a girl called Daphne who turned into a laurel tree. Every single one of those stories is about Apollo. He was telling them his own biography, and none of them noticed. Eventually the king came down to listen, and Admetus, who had sailed with the Argonauts and seen some things, worked out immediately that this was not a shepherd. And here is the whole point of the story: he said nothing. He didn't kneel, didn't announce it to the court, didn't demand favours. He simply started treating his hired man with reverence and friendliness, and asked no questions. Peabody's phrase is that he behaved like a true king. The god, she says, was well pleased.
He was telling them his own biography — about Python, about a king with donkey ears, about Daphne — and none of them noticed.
The Lion and the Boar
Then Admetus fell in love. The woman was Alcestis, daughter of King Pelias, and her father had set a condition on her suitors that was designed to be impossible. He would only give her to the man who came to woo her in a chariot drawn by a lion and a wild boar, harnessed side by side. Admetus had no idea where to start.
The shepherd heard about it and, one fine morning, walked off and left the sheep. Nobody knew where he'd gone. The whole kingdom was thrown — Peabody says that if the sun had gone out, the people could not have been more dismayed, which is a very good joke for a children's book. The king went down to the river that evening wondering whether his shepherd had abandoned him at the worst possible moment. And there he was, coming back out of the woods, glorious as a sunset, leading a lion and a boar side by side as gently as two sheep. Admetus drove to the kingdom of Pelias the next morning and came home with Alcestis.
He came back out of the woods, glorious as a sunset, leading a lion and a boar as gently as two sheep. Admetus drove to Pelias the next morning and came home with Alcestis.
The Gift That Was a Trap
The year ran out almost immediately afterwards, and the shepherd came to say goodbye. His farewell speech does three things, and the third one matters enormously. First, a blessing: the flocks will prosper even after he's gone. Second, a promise that reads as a straightforward reward for the way Admetus behaved — because you can recognise the gods when they come to you disguised as travellers, happiness will never stay away from your house for long. Third, this: no man may live on earth forever, but I have obtained this one gift for you. When your last hour comes, if anyone is willing to meet it in your place, he shall die, and you shall live on.
Apollo has bargained with the Fates on behalf of a mortal, and got them to agree to a substitution clause. It sounds like the most generous gift in mythology. Read it again and it's an obligation with a hole in it — a promise that only pays out if someone else is prepared to die for you. Apollo doesn't say who. He probably doesn't know. But somebody, one day, is going to have to volunteer, and Admetus is going to have to be there while they do it.
What This Myth Is About
Underneath the charm, this is a story about xenia — the Greek code of guest-friendship, which was one of the load-bearing ideas of the whole culture. Xenia is the obligation between host and guest, and it was held to be under the personal protection of Zeus. Treat a stranger badly and you were not just being rude; you were committing an offence against the god. Half the disasters in Greek myth start with a breach of it — Paris stealing Helen from the house of a host who fed him, Polyphemus eating his visitors. Admetus gets it right in the hardest possible circumstance. He recognises a god, and instead of exploiting the relationship he protects the disguise. He gives the man dignity rather than deference. And the reward isn't gold. It's an exemption from death that will turn out to have a terrible price attached — which the next chapter of the story spends its entire length exploring.
Sources
The framework comes from Euripides, Alcestis (438 BCE), which opens with Apollo himself standing outside the palace explaining why he served there and what he arranged with the Fates. It's an unusually direct prologue. Apollodorus's Library and Hyginus give compact prose accounts. The lion-and-boar chariot appears in several sources with minor variations. Josephine Preston Peabody's Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (1897) gives this episode its own chapter, separate from Alcestis — which is unusual and, I think, a good decision, because it lets the pastoral year breathe before the tragedy starts.
