Alcestis

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Alcestis is a figure of Greek legend remembered for a single act: she agreed to die in the place of her husband, and was afterward brought back from the dead. In the myth she is the wife of Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly, to whom the god Apollo — repaying a debt of hospitality — had granted an unusual reprieve. Admetus might escape his appointed death if another would go down to the underworld in his stead. He asked his aged parents, who refused; only his young wife consented.

The story survives above all in the tragedy Alcestis by Euripides, staged at Athens in 438 BCE and the earliest of his plays to come down intact. It occupied the fourth place in his entry, the slot usually filled by the broadly comic satyr play, and its tone is correspondingly mixed: a death scene of real gravity followed by a near-farcical resolution. Heracles, arriving as a guest while the house is in mourning, learns what Admetus has hidden from him, goes out to the tomb, and wrestles Death itself to win the woman back. He returns her to her husband veiled and silent, and the play ends before she has spoken again.

What the myth turns on is the worth of one life weighed against another, and the strange bargain by which death can be deferred but not cancelled. Later readers fixed on the self-sacrifice rather than the rescue. In Plato’s Symposium, the speaker Phaedrus names Alcestis first among those whom love made willing to die, arguing that the gods honored her so highly precisely because she alone, with living parents at hand, chose to give her life — and granted her, almost uniquely, the return alive to earth they withheld from Orpheus, who came to fetch his wife but dared not die for her. The image proved durable: Alcestis became, in the moral vocabulary of antiquity and after, a byword for conjugal love and for the readiness to die for another.

Her return from the dead has invited comparison with other Greek stories of mortals recovered from the underworld, and, in later allegorical reading, with the broader pattern of descent and restoration that runs through the mystery cults and their imagery of death overcome. Such readings are interpretation laid over the text, not anything Euripides asserts; the play keeps its focus narrow, on a household, a promise, and the silence of a woman brought back across a threshold no one else would cross.

→ In the library: Plato — Symposium (Jowett, 1892)

→ Related: Endymion · Memnon · Athamas