Alcestis Part 14

P. 3, Prologue. Asclepios (Latin Aesculapius), son of Apollo, the hero-physician, by his miraculous skill healed the dead. This transgressed the divine law, so Zeus slew him. (The particular dead man raised by him was Hippolytus, who came to life in Italy under the name of Virbius, and was worshipped with Artemis at Aricia.) Apollo in revenge, not presuming to attack Zeus himself, killed the Cyclopes, and was punished by being exiled from heaven and made servant to a mortal. There are several such stories of G.o.ds made servants to human beings.

P. 3, l. 12, Beguiling.]--See Preface. In the original story he made them drunk with wine. (Aesch. _Eumenides_, 728.) As the allusion would doubtless be clear to the Greek audience, I have added a mention of wine which is not in the Greek. Libations to the Elder G.o.ds, such as the Fates and Eumenides, had to be "wineless." Historically this probably means that the worship dates from a time before wine was used in Greece.

P. 4, l. 22, The stain of death must not come nigh My radiance.]--Compare Artemis in the last scene of the _Hippolytus_. The presence of a dead body would be a pollution to Apollo, though that of Thanatos (Death) himself seems not to be so. It is rather Thanatos who is dazzled and blinded by Apollo, like an owl or bat in the sunlight.

P. 5, l. 43, Rob me of my second prey.]--"You first cheated me of Admetus, and now you cheat me of his subst.i.tute."

P. 6, l. 59, The rich would buy, etc.]--Here and throughout this difficult little dialogue I follow the readings of my own text in the _Bibliotheca Oxoniensis_.

P. 7, l. 74, To lay upon her hair my sword.]--As the sacrificing priest cut off a lock of hair from the victim's head before the actual sacrifice.

P. 8, l. 77, Chorus.]--The Chorus consists of citizens, probably Elders, of the city of Pherae. Dr. Verrall has rightly pointed out that there is some general dissatisfaction in the town at Admetus's behaviour (l. 210 ff.). These citizens come to mourn with Admetus out of old friendship, though they do not altogether defend him.

The Chorus is very drastically broken up into so many separate persons conversing with one another; the treatment in the _Rhesus_ is similar but even bolder. See _Rhesus_, pp. 28-31, 37-42. Cf. also the entrance-choruses of the _Trojan Women_ (pp. 19-23) and the _Medea_ (pp. 10-13); and ll. 872 ff., 889 ff., pp. 50, 51, below.

Instead of a.s.signing the various lines definitely to First, Second, Third Citizen, and so on, I have put a "paragraphus" (--), the ancient Greek sign for indicating a new speaker.

P. 8, l. 82, Pelias' daughter.]--_i.e._ Alcestis.

P. 8, l. 92, Paian.]--The Healer. The word survives chiefly as a cry for help and as an epithet or t.i.tle of Apollo or Asclepios. "Paian," Latin Paean, is also a cry of victory; but the relation of the two meanings is not quite made out. (p.r.o.nounce rather like "Pah-yan.") Cf. l. 220.

P. 9, l. 112, To wander o'er leagues of land.]--You could sometimes save a sick person by appealing to an oracle, such as that of Apollo in Lycia or of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan desert; but now no sacrifice will help. Only Asclepios, were he still on earth, might have helped us. (See on the Prologue.)

P. 12, l. 150, 'Fore G.o.d she dies high-hearted.]--What impresses the Elder is the calm and deliberate way in which Alcestis faces these preparations.

P. 12, l. 162, Before the Hearth-Fire.]--Hestia, the hearth-fire, was a G.o.ddess, the Latin Vesta, and is addressed as "Mother." It is characteristic in Alcestis to think chiefly about happy marriages for the children.

P. 12, l. 182, Happier perhaps, more true she cannot be.]--A famous line and open to parody. Cf. Aristophanes, _Knights_, 1251 ("Another wear this crown instead of me, Happier perhaps; worse thief he cannot be"). And see on l. 367 below.

P. 15, l. 228, Hearts have bled.]--People have committed suicide for less than this.

P. 16, l. 244, O Sun.]--Alcestis has come out to see the Sun and Sky for the last time and say good-bye to them. It is a rite or practice often mentioned in Greek poetry. Her beautiful wandering lines about Charon and his boat are the more natural because she is not dying from any disease but is being mysteriously drawn away by the Powers of Death.

P. 16, l. 252, A boat, two-oared.]--She sees Charon, the boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx.

P. 17, l. 259, Drawing, drawing.]--The creature whom she sees drawing her to "the palaces of the dead" is certainly not Charon, who had no wings, but was like an old boatman in a peasant's cap and sleeveless tunic; nor can he be Hades, the throned King to whose presence she must eventually go. Apparently, therefore, he must be Thanatos, whom we have just seen on the stage. He was evidently supposed to be invisible to ordinary human eyes.

P. 18, l. 280, Alcestis's speech.]--Great simplicity and sincerity are the keynotes of this fine speech. Alcestis does not make light of her sacrifice: she enjoyed her life and values it; she wishes one of the old people had died instead; she is very earnest that Admetus shall not marry again, chiefly for the children's sake, but possibly also from some little shadow of jealousy. A modern dramatist would express all this, if at all, by a scene or a series of scenes of conversation; Euripides always uses the long self-revealing speech. Observe how little romantic love there is in Alcestis, though Admetus is full of it. See Preface, pp. xiii, xiv.

Pp. 19, 20, l. 328 ff., Admetus's speech.]--If the last speech made us know Alcestis, this makes us know Admetus fully as well. At one time the beauty and pa.s.sion of it almost make us forget its ultimate hollowness; at another this hollowness almost makes us lose patience with its beautiful language. In this state of balance the touch of satire in l. 338 f. ("My mother I will know no more," etc.), and the fact that he speaks immediately after the complete sincerity of Alcestis, conspire to weigh down the scale against Admetus. There can be no doubt that he means, and means pa.s.sionately, all that he says. Only he could not quite manage to die when it was not strictly necessary.

P. 20, l. 355, If Orpheus' voice were mine.]--The bard and prophet, Orpheus, went down to the dead to win back his wife, Eurydice. Hades and Persephone, spell-bound by his music, granted his prayer that Eurydice should return to the light, on condition that he should go before her, harping, and should never look back to see if she was following. Just at the end of the journey he looked back, and she vanished. The story is told with overpowering beauty in Vergil's fourth Georgic.

P. 21, l. 367, Oh, not in death from thee Divided.]--Parodied in Aristophanes' _Archarnians_ 894, where it is addressed to an eel, and the second line ends "in a beet-root frica.s.see." See on l. 182.

P. 23, l. 393 ff., The Little Boy's speech.]--Cla.s.sical Greek sculpture and vase-painting tended to represent children not like children but like diminutive men; and something of the sort is true of Greek tragedy.

The stately tragic convention has in the main to be maintained; the child must speak a language suited for heroes, or at least for high poetry.

The quality of childishness has to be indicated by a word or so of child-language delicately admitted amid the stateliness. Here we have [Greek: maia], something like "mummy," at the beginning, and [Greek: neossos], "chicken" or "little bird," at the end. Otherwise most of the language is in the regular tragic diction, and some of it doubtless seems to us unsuitable for a child. If Milton had had to make a child speak in _Paradise Lost_, what sort of diction would he have given it?

The success or ill-success of such an attempt as this to combine the two styles, the heroic and the childlike, depends on questions of linguistic tact, and can hardly be judged with any confidence by foreigners. But I think we can see Euripides here, as in other places, reaching out at an effect which was really beyond the resources of his art, and attaining a result which, though clearly imperfect, is strangely moving. He gets great effects from the use of children in several tragedies, though he seldom lets them speak. They speak in the _Medea_, the _Andromache_, and _Suppliants_, and are mute figures in the _Trojan Women, Hecuba, Heracles_, and _Iphigenia in Aulis_. We may notice that where his children do speak, they speak only in lyrics, never in ordinary dialogue. This is very significant, and clearly right.

The breaking-down of the child seems to string Admetus to self-control again.

P. 25, l. 428, Ye chariot-lords.]--The plain of Thessaly was famous for its cavalry.

P. 25, l. 436 ff., Chorus.]--The "King black-browed" is, of course, Hades; the "grey hand at the helm and oar," Charon; the "Tears that Well," the more that spreads out from Acheron, the River of _Ache_ or Sorrows.

P. 25, l. 445 ff. Alcestis shall be celebrated--and no doubt worshipped-- at certain full-moon feasts in Athens and Sparta, especially at the Carneia, a great Spartan festival held at the full moon in the month Carneios (August-September). Who the ancient hero Carnos or Carneios was is not very clearly stated by the tradition; but at any rate he was killed, and the feast was meant to placate and perhaps to revive him.

Resurrection is apt to be a feature of both moon-G.o.ddesses and vegetation spirits.

P. 27, l. 476, Entrance of Heracles.]--Generally, in the tragic convention, each character that enters either announces himself or is announced by some one on the stage; but the figure of Heracles with his club and lion-skin was so well known that his ident.i.ty could be taken for granted. The Leader at once addresses him by name.

P. 27, l. 481, The Argive King.]--It was the doom of Heracles, from before his birth, to be the servant of a worser man. His master proved to be Eurystheus, King of Tiryns or Argos, who was his kinsman, and older by a day. See _Iliad_ T 95 ff. Note the heroic quality of Heracles's answer in l. 491. It does not occur to him to think of reward for himself.

P. 27, l. 483, Diomede of Thrace.]--This man, distinguished in legend from the Diomede of the _Iliad_, was a savage king who threw wayfarers to his man-eating horses. Such horses are not mere myths; horses have often been trained to fight with their teeth, like carnivora, for war purposes.

Diomedes was a son of Ares, the War-G.o.d or Slayer, as were the other wild tyrants mentioned just below, Lycaon, the Wolf-hero, and Cycnus, the Swan.

P. 30, l. 511, Right welcome were she: _i.e._ Joy.]--"Joy would be a strange visitor to me, but I know you mean kindly."

P. 30, l. 518 ff., Not thy wife? 'Tis not Alcestis?]--The rather elaborate misleading of Heracles, without any direct lie, depends partly on the fact that the Greek word [Greek: gynae]; means both "woman" and "wife."--The woman, not of kin with Admetus but much loved in the house, who has lived there since her father's death left her an orphan, is of course Alcestis, but Heracles, misled by Admetus's first answers, supposes it is some dependant to whom the King happens to be attached. He naturally proposes to go away, but, with much reluctance, allows himself to be over-persuaded by Admetus. He had other friends in Thessaly, but the next castle would probably be several miles off. The guest-chambers of the castle are apparently in a separate building with a connecting pa.s.sage.

As to Admetus's motive, we must remember that the entertaining of Heracles is a datum of the story in its simplest form. See Preface, pp. xiv, xv. In Euripides, Admetus is perhaps actuated by a mixture of motives, real kindness, pride in his ancestral hospitality, and a little vanity. He likes having the great Son of Zeus for a friend, and he has never yet turned any one from his doors.

Euripides pa.s.ses no distinct judgment on this act of Admetus. The Leader in the dialogue blames him ("Art thou mad?") and so does Heracles hereafter, p. 56. But the Chorus glorifies his deed in a very delightful lyric. Perhaps this indicates the judgment we are meant to pa.s.s upon it.

On the plane of common sense it was doubtless all wrong, but on that of imaginative poetry it was magnificent.

P. 35, 11. 569-605, Chorus.]--Apollo, worshipped as a shepherd G.o.d and a singer, harper, piper, etc. ("song-changer"), had been himself a stranger in this "House that loved the stranger": hence its great reward. Othrys is the end of the mountain range to the south of Pherae; Lake Boibes was just across the narrow end of the plain to the north-east, beyond it came Mt. Pelion and the steep harbourless coast. Up to the north-west the plain of Thessaly stretched far away towards the Molossian mountains. The wild beasts gathered round Apollo as they did round Orpheus ("There where Orpheus harped of old, And the trees awoke and knew him, And the wild things gathered to him, As he piped amid the broken Glens his music manifold."--_Bacchae_, p. 35).

P. 37, l. 614, Scene with Pheres.]--Pheres is in tradition the "eponymous hero" of Pherae, _i.e._ the mythical person who is supposed to have given his name to the town. It is only in this play that he has any particular character. The scene gives the reader a shock, but is a brilliant piece of satirical comedy, with a good deal of pathos in it, too. The line (691) [Greek: chaireis horon phos, patera d' ou chairein dokeis]; ("Thou lovest the light, thinkest thou thy father loves it not?") seems to me one of the most characteristic in Euripides. It has a peculiar mordant beauty in its absolutely simple language, and one cannot measure the intensity of feeling that may be behind it. Pheres shows great power of fight, yet one feels his age and physical weakness. See Preface, p.

xvi.

P. 40, l. 713 ff. The quick thrust and parry are sometimes hard to follow in reading, though in acting the sense would be plain enough. Admetus cries angrily, "Oh, live a longer life than Zeus!" "Is that a curse?" says Pheres; "are you cursing because n.o.body does you any harm?" (_i.e_.

since you clearly have nothing else to curse for). Admetus: "On the contrary I blessed you; I knew you were greedy of life." Pheres: "_I_ greedy? It is _you_, I believe, that Alcestis is dying for."

P. 42, l. 732. Acastus was Alcestis's brother, son of Pelias.

P. 43, l. 747. It is rare in Greek tragedy for the Chorus to leave the stage altogether in the middle of a play. But they do so, for example, in the _Ajax_ of Sophocles. Ajax is lost, and the Sailors who form the Chorus go out to look for him; when they are gone the scene is supposed to shift and Ajax enters alone, arranging his own death. This very effective scene of the revelling Heracles is to be explained, I think, by the Satyr-play tradition. See Preface.

P. 45, ll. 782-785. There are four lines rhyming in the Greek here; an odd and slightly drunken effect.

P. 46, l. 805 ff., A woman dead, of no one's kin: why grieve so much?]-- Heracles is somewhat "shameless," as a Greek would say; he had much more delicacy when he was sober.

P. 48, l. 837 ff. A fine speech, leaving one in doubt whether it is the outburst of a real hero or the vapouring of a half-drunken man. Just the effect intended. Electryon was a chieftain of Tiryns. His daughter, Alcmene, the Tirynthian _Kore_ or Earth-maiden, was beloved of Zeus, or, as others put it, was chosen by Zeus to be the mother of the Deliverer of mankind whom he was resolved to beget. She was married to Amphitryon of Thebes.

P. 49, l. 860 ff. If Heracles set out straight to the grave and Admetus with the procession was returning from the grave, how was it they did not meet? The answer is that Attic drama seldom asked such questions.

Pp. 49-54, ll. 861-961. This Threnos, or lamentation scene, seems to our minds a little long. We must remember (1) that a Tragedy _is_ a Threnos--a _Trauerspiel_--and, however much it develops in the direction of a mere entertainment, the Threnos-element is of primary importance. (2) This scene has two purposes to serve; first to ill.u.s.trate the helpless loneliness of Admetus when he returns to his empty house, and secondly the way in which remorse works in his mind, till in ll. 935-961 he makes public confession that he has done wrong. For both purposes one needs the illusion of a long lapse of time.