You went back to what you knew so far removedFrom all that we went through

And I tread a troubled track, my odds are stackedI’ll go back to black

Amy Jade Winehouse, from Back to Black

Pino Blasone

On the Traces of Alcestis, between Eros and Thanatos

1 – Admetus and Alcestis listening to the Oracle (?), fresco detailfrom the Basilica of Herculaneum; National Archaeological Museum,

Naples

A Syndrome of Alcestis?

The first reference we meet to the myth of Alcestis is in the Iliad, book II, lines 711-715. It occurs in a concise and indirect way, as if this legend was well known and possiblyalready old when Homer’s poem – or, better, its passage here quoted – was composed:“Those who held Pherae by the Boebean lake, with Boebe, Glaphyrae, and the well builtcitadel of Iolcus, in eleven ships were led by Eumelus son of Admetus, whom thegoddesslike Alcestis, fairest of the daughters of Pelias, bore to him”. Supposedly a lateraddition to the original work, the pertinent part of the Iliad is the so called “Catalogue ofShips”, which lists the vessels employed in the expedition against Troy, together with acomplete report of the Achaean or allied peoples they had conveyed as armed contingents.Albeit somewhat boring to the reader, it is an interesting source of information for a scholar.

Almost the full tale had to be narrated in a section of a Hesiodic lost poem, the Eoeae.Thanks to far later Greek and Latin mythographers as Palaephatus, Apollodorus, Iginus,

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Fulgentius, we know that it had some fabulous antecedent facts and a few variants.Asclepius son of the god Apollo had been a physician so clever, as to grow able to revivehumans. Because of this hazard, Zeus struck him dead with his lightnings. As a vengeance,Apollo slew the Cyclopes, forgers of Zeus’ lightnings. The king of gods punished his sonApollo, by banishing and condemning him to serve a mortal master on earth. During thisperiod, Apollo was sheltered as a herdsman by Admetus, prince of Pherae in Thessaly. Theybecame so good friends, that the god was grateful to Admetus. He wished to marry Alcestis,daughter of Pelias. Yet the king of Iolcus had promised to give her to him alone, whosucceeded in joking wild beasts to a chariot. Apollo tamed a lion and a boar, and gaveAdmetus the vehicle to drive. Thus, he could achieve his goal. The wedding was celebrated.

Unfortunately, then Admetus forgot to sacrifice to Artemis, drawing upon himself thecurse of the revengeful goddess: he ought to die as soon as possible, when still younganyhow. This should have been a task for the Moires or Fates, deities charged with theordinary rule of human destinies. Again, Apollo took care of his friend. He offered the threeFates wine, something of whose effects they were likely inexperienced. It was easy to obtainfrom the drunk sisters a change in the formulation of the malediction, at least. The new kingof Pherae could avoid to lose his life, if only someone tendered his – or her – own on hisbehalf. All that was reported to the married couple in the response of an oracle, they rituallyconsulted after their marriage. When the fatal moment will come, no friend or other relativeof Admetus will accept to take his place except Alcestis, albeit young mother of two sons.

2 – Apulian red figure vase, detail with Alcestis and sons:Antikenmuseum, Basel, Switzerland; ca. 340 B.C.

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Earlier than with the great Euripides in 438, the folk tale – or, rather, its latest andmain development – began to be performed on Athens’ stage by the tragedian Phrynichus,lived between the 6th and the 5th century B.C. The little known of his Alcestis suggests thatit was a model for Euripides himself. The there adopted variant of the story included adeterminant intervention of Heracles, he also an old Admetus’ friend, since together theyhad participated in the expedition of the Argonauts. The famed strong hero succeeds in theimpossible deed of struggling against the daemon of death and rescuing the queen from hispower, in order to restore her to life and to her husband. Actually, such is the conclusion ofEuripides’ Alcestis. Not only its happy end but not few other details make it a tragicomedy,or a “satiric play” according to an ancient definition, even better than a tragedy. Yet sadder,a bit more realistic or pessimistic, narrative traditions survived until the late Latin literature.

In the dialogue Symposium written by the Greek Plato in 360 B.C., an exaltation oflove coincides with the praise of Alcestis: “Love will make men dare to die for theirbeloved-love alone; and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is amonument to all Hellas; for she was willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband,when no one else would, although he had a father and mother. But the tenderness of her loveso far exceeded theirs, that she made them seem to be strangers in blood to their own son,and in name only related to him. And so noble did this action of hers appear to the gods, aswell as to men, that among the many who have done virtuously she is one of the very few towhom, in admiration of her noble action, they granted the privilege of returning alive toearth. Such exceeding honour is paid by the gods to the devotion and virtue of love” (179b-d, trans. Benjamin Jowett). In this passage and further on, Heracles is not mentioned. Atmost, he may have been an instrument of benevolence of gods, face to Alcestis’ abnegation.

The version of the myth evoked by Plato is confirmed by the alternative given byApollodorus, in his Library, 15: “When the fatal day came, neither his father nor his motherwanted to die for Admetus, what Alcestis did. Yet Kore sent her back to earth or, accordingto others, Heracles fought with Hades in order to return her to Admetus”. Kore is none butPersephone, queen of the underworld. Hades is her husband, here evidently confused oridentified with Thanatos, the daemon of death. Indeed, a sadder variant is that which simplyends with Alcestis’ decease, what we can find in two Latin poems by unknown authors,respectively and approximately from the 4th and the 5th century A.D.: the so called AlcestisBarcinonensis and the Virgilian “cento” Alcesta. Much more a rationalising interpretation itsounds that by the late Hellenistic Plutarch, in his Erotikos dialogue, 761e: “As a medicalexpert, desirous of pleasing Admetus, Heracles is told to have intervened to save Alcestiswhile in a hopeless state”. Such seems to be an allusion to a mental disease of the woman,as if her death was a simulation even more dangerous and less curable than a physical one.

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3 – Details from the sarcophagi of Metilia Acteand Caius Iunius Euhodus, at the Vatican

Museums in Rome; and of Ulpia Cirilla, in theCastle of St. Aignan, France

Actually, the young Heracles had been a pupil of the mythic centaur and healerChiron. But what is baffling is a half insinuation about Alcestis. Which clues have we, inorder to interpret Plutarch’s interpretation? In Euripides’ play, while she is dying, Alcestis’description of her vision of the beyond is somewhat childish and delirious. In the last scenethe woman guided back to Admetus, whom he cannot recognize at first, is veiled and stillmute. She looks not yet capable of sharing her husband’s next joy, as if surviving a painful,hallucinated experience. Rather than an allegory of Thanatos himself, what Heracles had tofight was an anguish of death, which not even the mere force of love could prevail.Something akin to a cathartic action, in a complex case of dissociation of the personality.Euripides himself alludes to a mysterious Alcestis’ nosos, like a psychosomatic illness. Itmay be useful a glance at her past life, through those clefts which mythology itself opensinto a character as Alcestis, the Homeric “goddesslike and finest of the daughters of Pelias”,in order to verify if we happen to discern some a shade inside her noble and luminous soul.

Another rationalising explanation is that by the Greek Palaephatus, who wrote his OnUnbelievable Tales about in 330 B.C. Indeed, his rationalisation sounds not much less“unbelievable” than the myth itself, but is worthy for its focusing on a possible connectionbetween Alcestis’ behaviour and certain slips of her early youth. Then, the sorceress Medeahad been an insidious guess at the court of Iolcus, when the old king was in poor health. Shepersuaded his daughters of an odd expedient for restoring youth and good health of Pelias,

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by dismembering and boiling him in a magic filter. Of course, he did not re-emerge alivefrom the cauldron. The simple minded girls could be charged with parricide. Was Alcestisalready married at Pherae? In Euripides’ play, Admetus tells that she had been orphan offather (line 535). The Latin Ovid in the Metamorphoses and the Greek Diodorus Siculus inhis Historical Library, both claim that she could take no part in the misdeed, or did notagree about with her sisters. Yet Alcestis might have felt responsible for having done notenough, to warn or dissuade them. Had she wished the death of her despotic parent? To usemodern psychological terms, her fault complex was destined to increase, till the remorsegrew intolerable and a need for expiation was projected on her nearest relatives. In such asense, her self sacrifice on behalf of Admetus was the worst and the “best” occasion at once.

Love, Friendship and Pity

Although painted vases or house frescos on the subject are not lacking, severalremnant representations of the myth of Alcestis belong to ancient funerary art, in the formof tomb wall paintings or floor mosaics and reliefs on marble sarcophagi. Mostly, they datefrom the Roman imperial period (not by chance, in his Consolation to Apollonius Plutarchquoted Euripides’ Alcestis). In those cases, it is well comprehensible that certain scenes areprivileged above others. In few ones, there is a popular contamination with elements ofanalogue legends. For instance, in a fresco of the Via Latina Catacomb at Rome, excavatedin the 4th century and partially Christian, Heracles – or Hercules, in Latin – is figured whilereturning the veiled Alcestis to Admetus, and holding in leash a tamed Cerberus, the three-headed hell dog. This same conventional detail is found in a wall painting of the Janzur rocktomb in Lybia, datable between the 2nd and 3rd century C.E. The hero is following a ladyresembling Alcestis, out of the underworld. Also there we can see on his boat Charon, the“ferry-daemon” of the dead, what is part of a vision of the dying Alcestis in Euripides’ play.

4 – Alcestis and Heracles: detail from the monument of Iulia Ingenuaat Šempeter, Slovenia; and marble relief at the Museum of Cyrene,

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Libya

Flanking and menacing the central figures, the infernal daemons Charon and Thanatos– corresponding to the Etruscan Tuchulcha – appear on an amphora from Vulci too, today inthe National Library at Paris and representing a Farewell of Admetus and Alcestis before herdeparture for the realm of the dead. A floor mosaic in the Tomb of the Harvest at theNecropolis of Porto, near Rome, represents a scene of recognition, by Admetus, of Alcestisescorted by Heracles. In all of these samples the artistic expression is so naïve, sometimesapproximate, as to attest a diffuse reception of the myth like a fairy tale from classic age tolate antiquity. Nevertheless, certain moral effects had to be comforting and exorcising, faceto the mystery of death or the loss of a dear person, even with reference to the beliefs in anafterlife or the hope in some a kind of resurrection. Like Cerberus and Thanatos byHeracles, perhaps the anguish of death itself could be tamed or won over. The presence ofthat pagan legend in the iconography of a Christian catacomb shows it as compatible with aspiritual sensitiveness promoted by the new religion, though mainly in a metaphorical way.

We might even assert the contrary, in a dialectical way: particularly in the latheantiquity a growing demand for spirituality, with the related revival of myths like that ofAlcestis, fostered the rising of Christianity. As to Heracles, he is central not only in theabove paintings, but also in sculptures as two funeral reliefs portraying him with Alcestis,respectively at the Museum of Cyrene in Libya (5th c. B.C.) and on the monument of IuliaIngenua in a Roman necropolis at Šempeter (Slovenia, 3rd c. A.D.), despite the long timeelapsed between them. In the latter case, the marble panel is associated with another,representing the Good Shepherd. An importance of the representation of Heracles’ charactercan be explained as influenced by Euripides’ play, but also for in this legend his strength ismoral more than physical, even overshadowing the figure of his friend Admetus. In ourexistential resistance against death, not always love alone is enough. Sometimes, it may betoo exclusive. Yet love and amity, with an addition of pity, reliably may make us stronger.

Most probably, Neo-Pythagorean and Neo-Orphic eschatological doctrines somewhatinfluenced the reception of Alcestis’ story in late antiquity. Early artistic and allegoricalrepresentations of Jesus, the Saviour, were not only the evangelical Good Shepherd but alsothe musician Orpheus. Incidentally, Admetus, Heracles and Orpheus had been fellows in theexpedition of the Argonauts. An affinity between the two myths is evident. Already Plato inthe work above quoted confronted them, commenting that “among the many who have donevirtuously she is one of the very few to whom, in admiration of her noble action, they havegranted the privilege of returning alive to earth; such exceeding honour is paid by the godsto the devotion and virtue of love. But Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus, the harper, they sentempty away, and presented to him an apparition only of her whom he sought, but herselfthey would not give up, because he showed no spirit; he was only a harp-player, and didnot-dare like Alcestis to die for love, but was contriving how he might enter hades alive”.

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5 – Heracles leads, or brings, Alcestis out of the Underworld: thesame scene as imagined in a fresco at the Necropolis of Tyre,

Lebanon (ca. 150 A.D.), and by the French painter Joseph Franque(Museu de Belles Arts, Valencia, Spain; 1806)

In Euripides’ Alcestis, lines 357-362, Admetus hyperbolically exclaims to her: “If Ihad the voice and music of Orpheus, able to charm with my songs Demeter’s daughter orher husband [Persephone and Pluto/Hades], I would have gone down to fetch you from theunderworld. Neither Pluto’s watchdog nor Charon, the ferryman of souls standing at the oar,could have kept me from bringing you back alive to the light”. It is the earliest reference tothe Orphic myth, we have in the ancient literatures. At the verse 965-971 and elsewhere,indeed the female chorus of the tragedy manifest their sophistic scepticism about anymysteric and eschatologic ritual, or even any alleged medical research aiming atimmortality. Rather than a popular fatalism, that reflects Euripides’ rationalism: “Noremedy was found against Necessity, either written on Thracian tablets dictated by Orpheus’voice, or among those by which Apollo taught Asclepius’ disciples to heal suffering men”.

However, sure Heracles is not a magician. It is what he protests to an astonishedAdmetus, when the latter will dare inquire about (Alcestis, lines 1127-1128). Nor is he anidealist, pursuing a sort of Platonic love before Plato. Nay, if we did not know that thephilosopher wrote his Symposium after Euripides’ play, we might be tempted to see in itsome a satirical allusion to the Platonic conception. That is what Heracles himself, not yetaware of the mournful circumstances, implicitly clears with a servant of Admetus: “HonourAphrodite, the sweetest of deities to mortals, a beneficent goddess!” (lines 790-791). Justsince “human, all too human”, such a generous and loyal hero had to be very popular afterthe sensitive Orpheus and – obviously – before Christ, the humanized God. Yet now let usfocus back on Alcestis, a virtuous wife and noble mother devout to Hestia, the goddess of“home and hearth”. The moving scene of this domestic heroine as a mother while partingfrom her next orphan children began to be depicted on Greek vases in the 4 th century B.C.,but later, on Roman sarcophagi, this kind of composition assumed a more complex form.

The front of a sarcophagus offered sculptors a large surface, to display a syntheticnarration, without apparent solution of continuity. Generally dating between the 2nd and the3rd century C.E., we can mention a few relevant samples: that of Metilia Acte and hishusband Caius Iunius Euhodus, discovered at Ostia near Rome and preserved at the Vatican

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Museums; the sarcophagus of Ulpia Cirilla, currently at the Castle of St. Aignan in France; amarble coffin in the church of S. Maria delle Vigne at Genoa; a carved fragment in thePalazzo Rinuccini at Florence and a sarcophagus in the Villa Faustina at Cannes. Mostly inthese examples the central scene presents Alcestis on her deathbed, surrounded by herattendants and children: a boy and a girl (Eumelus and Perimele). What is surely inspired byEuripides’ play, though secondary details of the whole relief may vary. In particular, thedying fair lady is dressed in the sarcophagus of Metilia Acte, whereas bared in that of UlpiaCirilla; what might suggest, sometimes her features were a portrait of the ordering matron.

6 – Admetus, Heracles and Alcestis: floor mosaic in the Tomb of theHarvest at the Necropolis of Porto, in the area of Rome Fiumicino;

2nd-3rd century A.D.

In spite of certain recurrent standards, in all of those images there is not that passivity,which could be expected from a funerary art. On the contrary, an interaction with bothliterary sources and folk traditions makes them quite autonomous expressions of an activeimagery, changing with times and world-views. At last of this survey, let us have a look atnon funeral painting, such as on the walls of Pompeian mansions thanks to archaeologicalexcavations. In two frescos at the House of Holconius Rufus and at the House of theCryptoporticus, we can just discern scenes already seen, with well known characters:Alcestis, Heracles, Admetus, Hades, Charon... Yet two murals from the House of the TragicPoet and from the Basilica of Herculaneum, now at the Naples Archaeological Museum,show an episode only presupposed in Euripides’ play: Admetus and Alcestis listen to anoracle, announcing their destinies and the dramatic choice given them by Apollo. Likely,both works are reminiscent of a Hellenistic pictorial exemplar or reflect how the myth wasfreely performed by Latin pantomime actors. Anyway, they share a pensive message: notseldom the necessity of the fate may be a trick played by gods or, rather, by our own minds.

Almost a Musical Myth

Quoted by Priscian in his Institutiones grammaticae, only one line of an Alcestis byLucius Accius (170 – circa 86 B.C.) survives: cum striderat retracta rursus inferis (“Whenshe had shrieked while drawn back from the underworld”). We cannot know whether it wasan original tragedy, or an adapted Latin translation from Euripides. The content of thequotation seems to confirm a funeral reception of the Greek myth in the late Roman culture,

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at Priscian’s times. It is also true, Aulus Gellius (ca. 125 – after 180 A.D.) in his NoctesAtticae had reported his appreciation in listening to a reading of a poem Alcestis, composedby the archaic Latin erotic poet Laevius. Concerning this legend, it may be said that Erosand Thanatos, love and death, were two sides of one medal. Moreover, Christian apologistsand Church Fathers will evoke Alcestis’ vicissitudes as an example of conjugal and familydevotion, or in order to show a lack of power and benevolence in old pagan gods. In the 2nd

century, particularly the Greek apologist Athenagoras quotes from Euripides’ masterpiece.All these elements contributed to a survival of the myth along the Middle Ages, till its

revival in the late medieval and Renaissance periods. After the Italian poet and story-writerGiovanni Boccaccio, in England Geoffrey Chaucer makes Alcestis and Admetus queen andking of an ideal court of love. Under the ascendant of Venus/Aphrodite, the Greek heroine isassociated with the solar symbol of a daisy, which becomes “Alceste”’s flower. In thePrologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Goode Wimmen, a literary chivalrous tradition makes thecourtly love prevail over a mere family one. Nonetheless, later, a funerary component and amemorial inspiration will re-emerge in the Sonnet XXIII by John Milton: “Methought I sawmy late espoused saint/ Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave”. Such a dreamy vision“Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;/ Her face was veil’d”. What we may annotateis that either in one Christianised form, or in an early modern perspective, the mythmaintained an inmost, contrasting duplicity. Little or no room was left to a mediator asHeracles, despite a few attempts to interpret his figure as a premonition of the Christ. Thebackground struggle, fought between Eros and Thanatos, ran a risk to become a direct one.

7 – Heracles unveils Alcestis before Admetus, drawing by the Frenchpainter Antoine Coypel (1661-1722): Ashmolean Museum, Oxford;and etching by or after the German artist Franz Joseph Spiegler (?;

1691-1757): Private Collection

Also after modern translations from Euripides, Hercules’ – or “Alcides”’ – role will berecovered when our pathetic story will triumphantly enter the field of music and song, withthe new born lyric opera. Nay, we can affirm that Alcestis’ fable is closely connected withthe beginnings of this form of artistic expression. A singular precedent is L’Antigona delusada Alceste with music by Pietro Andrea Ziani and libretto by Aurelio Aureli, which was

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performed at Venice in 1660. There, the action is set in an allegorical Kingdom of Music, ofPoetry and Peace. Not without giving rise to any polemics, Alceste, ou Le triomphe d’Alcidewas first staged at the Paris Opéra in 1674, with music by Jean Baptiste Lully and librettoby Philippe Quinault. George Frideric Handel’s Admeto, King of Thessaly premiered atLondon in 1727 and was a critical and popular success; its Italian libretto was adapted froma text by Aurelio Aureli and Ortensio Mauro. Christoph Willibald Gluck composed anAlceste to an Italian libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, which was performed at Vienna in1767. Only this latest opera does not include a part for Hercules, whereas AntonSchweitzer’s Alkeste (Weimar, 1773), with a German libretto by Christoph Martin Wieland,reduces to three the number of main characters on the stage: Alcestis, Admetus, Heracles.

Although a subtle seduction of death in the character of Alcestis cannot be excluded,in our story undoubtedly the antagonist – manifest or not – is Thanatos, exceptionallyHades. By comparing with each other the versions of the myth varying through time, it ismore difficult to define who is the most representative as a positive, resolving character: thegod Apollo or the hero Heracles, the queen of the dead Persephone or the goddess of loveAphrodite. With few accessory exceptions in the antique iconography, instead Eros, the godof love, is never represented. We have to await the 19th century in England, and the Pre-Raphaelite revisitation of ancient and medieval legends, in order to see Alcestis flanked bythe winged god, especially in two artefacts by Edward Burne-Jones: Amor and Alcestis, astained glass panel in the Peterhouse College at Cambridge (1864), and the watercolourLove Bringing Alcestis Back from the Grave (Ashmoleum Museum, Oxford; 1863). Theyare so alike one to the other, that the latter looks a preparatory study for the former. This andother designs by Burne-Jones in the Birmingham Museum collection are explicitly inspiredby Chaucer’s Legend of Goode Wimmen, where the poet dreams of “Love” leading by thehand “Alceste”, at the head of a group of women worthy for having been faithful in love.

Actually, in a Pre-Raphaelite reception more than an ancient Thessalian one Alcestisresembles a late medieval lady. And other times she is depicted alone, such as in an oilpainting by Charles Fairfax Murray (Alcestis, Private Collection; 1874) or in Alcestis: APortrait Of Lady Donaldson by Frederick Sandys (Private Collection; 1877), or else in a tilepanel designed by Edward Coley Burne-Jones in 1861-1862 for a house of the artist JohnRoddam Spencer Stanhope at Cobham, Surrey. On it, we can read part of an inscription inLatin: Imago Alcestis reginae Thraciae (“Image of Alcestis, Queen of Thrace”). AncientGreeks employed that name to refer to all of the wild territory inhabited by Thracianbarbarians, laying north of Greece, particularly of the region of Thessaly. It could be soextensive, as to include central and northern Europe. In a broad sense, British Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets could be inclined to consider Alcestis’ myth as a northern evenmore than Mediterranean legend. Of course, it depends on what we mean with northerncharacteristics in the field of imagination. It is not only a matter of setting or of landscapes.

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8 – Louis Galloche, Hercule rendant Alceste à Admète: ÉcoleNationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; 1711

The acme of the interest of the Pre-Raphaelites in the figure and the story of Alcestiswas not an artwork, but the tale in verse The Love of Alcestis in the collection The EarthlyParadise, issued by William Morris in 1868 at London (preceded, in 1846, by Hercules,Pluto, Alcestis, Admetos in The Hellenics by Walter S. Landor, and followed, in 1871, by anAlcestis in the Lyrical Poems by Francis T. Palgrave). Ideally at least, Morris’ poem is amodern realisation of that, which Chaucer had never fully composed, since his Legend ofGoode Wimmen is unfinished and an anticipation of such a development can be read only inits Prologue in form of ballad. In reality, Morris re-elaborates the ancient literary sources ofwhich he can dispose, but striving to differentiate from Euripides’ narrative solution.Neither Heracles nor Persephone intervene to restore Alcestis to life any longer, and theintervention of the god of love itself is merely metaphorical, as we may infer from theseconclusive lines: “Alcestis’ fame/ Grew greater, and about her husband’s twined,/ Lived, inthe hearts of far-off men enshrined”. Rather, Morris’ version of the myth coincides with lateLatin ones as the Virgilian “cento” Alcesta and the “Alcestis of Barcelona”, though he couldnot yet know the latter, which will be discovered only in the second half of the 20th century.

Probably, Morris’ poem is the best literary expression of the Pre-Raphaelite poetics,which is a fictional nostalgia for times, when the account of events easily assumed fabledconnotations, but the substance of human feelings was truer than in modern ones.Nevertheless, it remains paradoxically modern: the effort is to make credible incredibledetails, revealing their transparent reality and preserving that existential truth at once. Onthe contrary, in Euripides’ Alcestis the device was to increase a mythic unreality, in order toobtain surreal and thoughtful effects in a tragicomic way. On the same line of WilliamMorris, in 1907 another quite long poem will be written by the Austrian Symbolist poetRainer Maria Rilke. His Alkestis is a narrative as well as a lyric masterpiece, one of the

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beginnings of contemporary poetry. There too, no Heracles or Persephone represent ahuman capacity in determining, or a divine benevolence in changing our destinies. Thefabulous, lovely atmosphere of Morris’ work turns into a sense of absurdity of the existence.

Furthermore, Rilke seems more impressed by ancient funerary art, what is transparentin his Duino Elegies, VIII, and in the Sonnets to Orpheus, I 10: “You, who never leave myheart for long,/ I salute you, antique sarcophagi,/ whom the carefree water of Roman times/flows through like a meandering song...” (trans. Howard A. Landman). The Alkestis is partof the New Poems. Like in the front relief of a sarcophagus, in it there is a concentration ofevents and a reduction of characters. All happens in one place and time, at the wedding feastof Alcestis and Admetus. “As in a dream”, the daemon of death appears in the midst of thebanquet claiming Admetus’ life, indifferent to his protests. Then, the bride alone accepts avicarious death, instead of the bridegroom. Unable to keep her and to hinder the abductor,“one more time he saw/ the girl’s face, for just a moment, turning toward him/ with a smilethat was as radiant as a hope/ and almost was a promise: to return/ from out of the abyss ofdeath, grown fully,/ to him, who was still alive...” (trans. Stephen Mitchell). It is quiteevident, for Rilke, Eros and Thanatos are almost interchangeable faces of one character.

9 – Charles Antoine Coypel, Hercules and Alcestis, or Herculeramène Alceste des enfers à son époux Admète: Musée de Grenoble,

France; 1750

A Modern Female Interpretation

Besides increasing archaeological interests, the success of Alcestis’ myth in themusical opera promoted a modern iconography on the theme, sometimes reconnecting to theancient one. Most represented scenes were those of a dying Alcestis, of Heracles bringingback her from the threshold of the underworld, of the same hero while returning Alcestis toAdmetus and when he recognizes her. To the first group they belong La Mort d’Alceste, oul’héroïsme de l’amour conjugal (Louvre Museum, Paris; 1785) and The Death of Alcestis

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(North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; 1794), both by the French Jean François PierrePeyron. The oil Death of Alcestis was painted by the Swiss paintress Angelica Kauffmann in1790 (Vorarlberger Landesmuseum, Bregenz, Austria). The German painter FriedrichHeinrich Füger completed his Alcestis gives her Life for Admetus in 1805 (Gemäldegalerieder Akademie der bildende Künste, Vienna). The Death of Alcestis is also the title given to adrawing by the British artist George Romney (1734-1802), now in a private collection. Allthese artworks share a remarkable Neoclassical imprint, which was typical of their times.

Although generally and in detail they are respectful of the scene, such as conceived byEuripides, often in the recurrent composition it prevails a rhetorical overtone characterizinga melodramatic theatralisation rather than corresponding to the spirit of the originaltragicomedy. It is also true, especially in a Roman imperial period the reception of the storywas filtered through the popularising and synthetic performing by the pantomimes. As to the“Alcestis of Barcelona” in particular, some scholars have guessed it was not an autonomouspoem but a libretto in verse for pantomime performances, a sort of ancient lyric opera.However, and obviously depending upon the different authors, not few details in theNeoclassic pictorial representations are very impressive. For instance, the image of theweeping sons of the married couple, with peculiar reference to Eumelus whom Euripideshad made speak. Together with the figure of their dying mother, let us remember the samepathetic detail, painted on Greek vases or carved in the reliefs of antique Roman sarcophagi.

Instead later, in the Victorian age and in a literary form, a bitter irony will not belacking about the figure of a grieving Admetus, particularly in the poem Alcestis to Admetusby Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (Poems CCX, London 1908). Here the tacit reference is toEuripides’ play again, where Alcestis asks Admetus to never marry after her death, and hepromises to order a statue of her as his only, memorial mate. According to the Englishpoetess, Alcestis so spoke: “Build over me no marble monument,/ To stand for ever highabove the throng;/ Weave not my name in any wreath of song,/ Hang up no picture of mylife’s event./ The lasting stone would mock thy brief lament/ Witness thy short affectionover long,/ The steadfast words thy changing passion wrong,/ The painted features cryʻRepent! Repent!’/ Live and forget me. Farewell! Better so,/ Than that I should be made thescorn of men,/ Who mark the pageantry of grief, the show/ Of feeling lighter than the wind,and then,/ With lifted eyebrows, smile and whisper ʻLo!/ A year is past, Admetus wedsagain!’”. This is a parody, but some an uncertainty was already in Euripides’ Alcestis, soaddressing her alcove: “You shall receive a woman maybe luckier, no more virtuous than I”.

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10 – Jean François Pierre Peyron, La Mort d’Alceste, ou l’héroïsmede l’amour conjugal, detail: Musée du Louvre, Paris; 1785

Not without any calculated risk of hyperbole, such a problematicity will fully surfacein another female interpretation, that of the Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar in her short pieceof 1942, Le mystère d’Alceste. This title itself recalls Euripides’ perception of an existentialreality more fortuitous than enigmatic, therefore easily contradictory with human feelingsand expectations, such as expressed by the chorus at the end of his Alcestis. Her charactercannot be an exception, what is a realistic and psychological aspect in Euripides’ dramaticart, where female characters are usually prominent. In a long preface, Yourcenar writes thather tragicomedy treats traditional themes as sacrifice and heroism “with neither avoidancenor objection”, willing simply and “piously modernize an ancient legend to render it, ifpossible, more immediately accessible”. Yet on this, almost like her model Euripides the“sophist”, she has to be taken not too seriously. Based on a virtual love triangle Alcestis-Admetus-Hercules, her version is the latest disenchantment of the alleged folk tale. Despitean edifying happy end, not even friendship is safe, since Admetus does not show himself toograteful to his old fellow for having rescued Alcestis from a supposed attempt at suicide.

In fact it is this Alcestis herself who speaks after her “resurrection”, unlike Euripides’one, and confesses to Hercules: “I did not sacrifice myself... I wished to die...”. Thus, shereveals her past uneasy and depressed condition. In Yourcenar’s drama, even the personifiedDeath becomes a female character, and she is often an invisible presence sneering inbackground, nearly an Alcestis’ alter ego. Latent but intuitable in Euripides’ play, adissociation of the personality grows here traumatic. More evidently, the rescue worked byHeracles assumes the connotation of a healing catharsis. Even more than back from hell orthe mystery of death, returning her soul to her body, he guides Alcestis out of the enigma ofher self and of a labyrinth of the psyche. Paradoxically nothing we know of a new Alcestisfrom Euripides and other ancient sources, but the indirect, vague hint at her in the Iliad by

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Homer. At least, Yourcenar lets her speak and somewhat explain to us, so distanced in time.All that may allow us to glimpse with critical eyes at the relevant iconography, as an

allegorical one. In a Greek convention, the word catabasis stood for descent to theunderworld. Metaphorically, in our case catabasis and catharsis are connected together. In aFreudian therapeutic conception, a cathartic process implies an active role of the patient,beside his therapist. And not seldom iconography is akin to a dream with open eyes, waitingfor being interpreted. Mostly, in antique pictures Heracles is figured while guiding Alcestisby hand, out of a fabled underworld. The only exception we remember is the abovementioned fresco of the Janzur tomb in Lybia. Curiously, there the scene is representedtwice, in different manners or moments: while the hero is carrying Alcestis, still inanimate,in his arms, and when he escorts her while walking. The former modality reflects a passiveattitude, we will find again in Romantic or Impressionist French paintings as Hercules andAlcestis by Eugène Delacroix (Phillips Collection, Washington; 1862) and an Alcestisrescued from the underworld, by Paul Cézanne (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; 1867).The latter looks so ambiguous, that some art critics think it rather represents the myth of theabduction of Persephone by Hades. Actually, such an underworld resembles a dark uncanny.

11 – Angelica Kauffmann, Death of Alcestis: VorarlbergerLandesmuseum, Bregenz, Austria; 1790

A feminist criticism has argued that Alcestis restored to life and led to Admetus, soveiled and quiet in the last scene of Euripides’ play, appears more an object than a realsubject. Before, she had been object, but also a subject of mourning. Afterward, apparentlyat least, she is a mere object of rescue and restoration. A justification advanced by Heracles,that she must respect a three days silence for ritual and purifying reasons – originally,catharsis meant “purification” –, is scarcely convincing or sounds like a mysteric pretext.What a residual homage has she to pay, to the deities of the dead? Which kind of deadlycontamination has she still to expiate? Alcestis had died, or presumed to die, while sofarewelling her husband: “None is he who dies. [...] I am nothing now”. More than a selfabnegation, what she passed through was a sort of annihilation. If she did not experience

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death, she did something like a sense of abjection from the living world and of regression toan undifferentiated self stage or reduction to aphasia (let us notice one analogy to the moreimpressive and definitive self blinding, by Sophocles’ Oedipus). Now it is as if her renewedself must learn, slowly, to speak again. She needs some time for remembering not so muchthe meaning of words, as rather the weight to give them in a narrow, self referential society.

In a Victorian age poem, Balaustion’s Adventure (1871; lines 630-637), the Britishpoet Robert Browning describes again, after Euripides, when Heracles unveils the stillincognito woman he introduced to the presence of Admetus. Thanks to Heracles’ insistencefinally moved to pity, the reluctant householder had agreed to shelter her for a while. In thetradition of comedy rather than of tragedy, it is the moment of the recognition: “There is notelling how the hero twitched/ The veil off: and there stood with such fixed eyes/ And suchslow smile, Alkestis’ silent self!/ It was the crowning grace of that great heart/ To keep backjoy; procrastinate the truth,/ Until the wife, who had made proof and found/ The husbandwanting, might essay once more,/ Hear, see, and feel him renovated now”. Browning adds apolitical apology: as an enlightened king, Admetus was so absorbed in his plan to rulebasing on amity, nearly an anticipation of democracy, as to neglect next friends and thebeloved one. In his defence, we can quote his own words, in Euripides’ original scene:“Eros draws me”. In a broad sense, it clearly includes love, friendship and pity, whereas asingle component could regress into a wider selfishness. Yet Browning’s best invention isAlcestis’ “slow smile”, we like to imagine as enigmatic as that of Mona Lisa by Leonardo.

Homely, Homelike, Homeless

Already in ancient myths and texts, the catabasis or trip to the underworld couldrepresent a sort of descent into the unconscious, not seldom with an initiatory mysteric aim.That is transparent in the fable of Amor and Psyche, in The Golden Ass by the LatinApuleius, where the Greek name of the heroine itself stands for “soul”. Unlike Psyche’s trip,in the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus’ attempt to rescue his beloved one isnotoriously unsuccessful. Thus, Eurydice’s descent was with no return. If we consider afemale kind of catabasis, we may deduce, Alcestis’ simulated or “real” death andresurrection renders her more similar to Psyche than to Eurydice. In an updatedpsychoanalytic way, her extraordinary experience resembles a cathartic immersion into theindividual or collective unconscious. What an image more consonant with it, than that of anunderworld? In the modern poem Alcestis by Maura Stanton, actually that experience isdescribed as a trip into the underworld. And, in an analogous composition by Kate Daniels,a bit more morbidly Alcestis herself owns to have been “afraid to grow frail and hysterical”.

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12 – Friedrich Heinrich Füger, Alcestis gives her Life for Admetus:Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildende Künste, Vienna; 1805

Somewhat influenced by Euripides according to the author himself, in 1950 the playThe Cocktail Party by Thomas S. Eliot interpreted the myth in a contemporarypsychological way. Yet a view like that may sound reductive, even when founded in a deepand complex ground as the unconscious. Do not let us forget, the background of our legendis not only mythic but also epic. Epics is an auroral form of historicisation. The story wastold as occurring between two more or less transfigured war events, such as the expeditionof the Argonauts and that against Troy. Let us listen to a prayer of the heroine to Hestia, inEuripides’ play: “Do not let my children, like me, die before time./ Let them be happy intheir fatherland/, till their life be full and the age content” (lines 167-169). Better than fromthe unconscious, these words spring from a lucid consciousness. Unfortunately, Homer tellsus, Alcestis’ apprehension was justified: her wish did not get fully fulfilled, if we meet againan adult Eumelus in arms on the beach before Troy. And Euripides’ pacifism emerges inother tragedies, as Hecuba or The Trojan Women. Whoever she was, those coordinates areenough to make Alcestis something more than a mythic character, and to suggest that herrenunciation to this same old world coincided with some a harsh disillusion about it.

In his book The Archipelago, in 1997 the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciaridedicated a chapter to comparing two mythic and tragic heroines: Antigone of Sophoclesand Alcestis. We may add Medea, of Euripides. The sorceress Medea was considered as anantonomastic foreigner and barbarian, extraneous not only to a Greek concept of honestwoman, but generally to that civilisation and mentality. The character of Antigone was sodevoted to her original family, as to assist her unlucky father/brother Oedipus and tosacrifice herself in order to bury her brother, against the prohibition of a tyrant. Yet she wasfated to be a sterile example, since her choice of rebellion deprived her of any possibleprocreation, what her name itself seems to forewarn according to a Greek etymology.Doubtless Alcestis, Cacciari infers, is the most consistent with the Hellenic ideal of womanas housekeeper and family mistress. Her moral force springs from a will of preservation ofher home, at the cost of a self sacrifice on behalf of the one able to make her family survive.

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Etymologically, is not her name consonant with “Alcides” or Heracles, the hero of strength?We dare observe, this argument well works for what concerns the Alcestis we well

know, before her return from the alleged realm of the dead or surroundings; a bit less, as tothe “open source” character, whom Euripides presents to us escorted by Heracles at the endof the play. Her veil, her silence or – according to Browning – her “slow smile”, do notensure she is the same minded woman as in the past. On the contrary, those clues seem tosignalize some a change, we cannot know but are let free to imagine in which direction. Toparaphrase Sigmund Freud or Martin Heidegger, her heimlich (“homely”) personality ispassed through a so un-heimlich experience, that we may suppose it has got somewhat lesshomelike than before, or that something already contradictory and urgent in it has now fullyemerged. In the 20th century until the beginning of the current one, some playwrightswondered about and strove to give a personal answer to the question. Not always the literaryresults do convince. They are interesting, at least: such as, in the U.S.A., a romanticrewriting by Carlota Montenegro in 1909 or a later weird version by Howard P. Lovecraft.Elsewhere, we have a Spanish Alceste. Tragicomedia en tres actos by Benito Pérez Galdós,in 1914; a post-war German Alkestis by Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, composed in 1950, andanother German Alkestis, “libretto” by Franz Fühmann, edited by Ingrid Prignitz in 1989.

13 – Eugène Delacroix, Hercules and Alcestis: Phillips Collection,Washington; 1862

Also The Alcestiad, or a Life in the Sun by the North-American Thornton N. Wilder isa tragicomedy in three acts, published in 1955. At the end of the play, Alcestis is a poor oldwoman, so different from the charming queen we met in Euripides’ representation or inHomer’s evocation. An usurper is on the throne of the town, and his young daughter has justdied. For Alcestis, this is an occasion for remembering as usual to old people, and fordrawing a lesson from her exceptional memories. Yet what she feels to tell the mourningfather is that his being touched by death will better enable him to understand the meaning oflife. This banal ending does not reflect so much a meanness of the woman, as rather theauthor’s scepticism about our capacity of human communication, against the appearances ofmodernity. In Alcesti di Samuele by the Italian Alberto Savinio (1948), the protagonist is theJewish Teresa Goerz, who commits suicide under the Nazi regime to spare her German

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husband an involvement in the consequences of the racist laws and persecution. In the story,a surreal detail is that the American president Roosevelt substitutes for the part of Heracles.

Unluckily, the spirit of F. D. Roosevelt cannot let return onto earth but a sort of ghostor avatar. Yet this is enough to reopen her eyes on a submissiveness of so many she hadknown, what was a necessary condition for the crimes of dictatorship. It is a movingmonologue, which Teresa/Alcestis pronounces: “The last voice I heard was that of sea. Allwas upside down. Then I sow myself. I was a tower with eyes all about, which were lights.Up here people love light. In it they find their affirmation. We cannot like light, because it isa negation of ourselves. Every light of myself, as a tower, was a memory. And everymemory was a sorrow. Little by little, that suffering began to abate, lights started to die outand remembrances to vanish. My tower darkened, until any light got extinguished. Yea,what I am now, it is a dark lighthouse”. More than delusion, her indifference grows somuch, that this homeless Alcestis wishes to die again at all. Rather than of a rebel Antigone,she has something of a foreign Medea, but one who had no intention to immolate her sons.

Savinio told that his “metaphysical” drama was inspired by a real episode, occurred inGermany at the times of the Second World War. Written and set in Italy shortly after theconflict (1949-1951), a single act Alcesti by Corrado Alvaro deals not only with the crisisand dissolution of a traditional middle class family, in an epoch of diffuse disorientation andinsecurity, but even with the alienation of the old home house they live in. Like in a 1999version of Euripides’ Alcestis by the American Ted Hughes, also the dangers of an aberranttechnology, divesting of humanity, are already impending in Alvaro’s play. Yet the most“homeless” Alcestis was still to come. It is Alcesti o La recita dell’esilio by another Italianauthor, Giovanni Raboni (“Alcestis, or The Performance of Exile”, 2002). During a politicalpersecution in an unspecified country, two men and the actress Sara, married to one of them,find a precarious refuge in an empty theatre. They are waiting for a boat conveying them toa safe land abroad, but in that boat there is free room for two persons only. After a troubleduncertainty about how resolving such a lethal rebus, Sara/Alcestis alone refuses to submit tothe forced choice and quits the stage. She will appear again at last, just veiled and mute likethe classical heroine, although it cannot be properly defined as a happy ending this time.

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14 – Paul Cézanne, Alcestis rescued from the Underworld (?):Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, U.K.; 1867

Not only in the modern drama, also in the North-American verse the theme of Alcestishas been frequent. A forward precedent is Admetus and Other Poems by Emma Lazarus,dedicated to the contemporary thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871. Lazarus’ effort is todifferentiate her perspective especially from William Morris’ one, as too nostalgic for thepast. The narrative poem Alcestis by Edwin A. Robinson is a dialogue between the heroineand Admetus, who cannot yet fully understand the mystery of her existence after hersurviving, and her as a survivor (1902). In 1960, the ballet Alcestis by Martha Graham wasinspired by Euripides, besides the long poem The Dream of Alcestis by Theodore Morrison(1950). More recent poets are to be mentioned, as Allen R. Grossman, Maura Stanton andKate Daniels. Sure the piece of poetry Alcestis, or Autumn: A Hymn by Grossman is notflattering with the figure of Admetus. Yet it delivers to us the bewildering image of anuneasy Alcestis: “Of all the women whom I know it is/ Alcestis I most passionately admire,/Who died for an unworthy man, being/ Sure that love was death/ And nothing more. [...]/Alcestis is my dream, who died forever/ And then rose – for three days mute and strange”(from the collection The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River, New York 1979).

An “Open Source” Archetype

We have seen in the Latin literature Accius, Laevius, far later the unidentified authorsof the Virgilian “cento” Alcesta or of the Alcestis Barcinonensis – alias Carmen de Alcestide–, they all wrote about our legend. Yet also the poets of the Roman classical period referredto it. Propertius’ Elegy IV 11 is evidently characterized with a relation of creative imitationwith Euripides’ play. Expressly, in Elegies II 6 the jealous poet compares his belovedCynthia with Alcestis and Penelope as examples of loyal, faithful wives. Unfortunately,such a comparison does not turn to Cynthia’s advantage... Juvenal will be more caustic inhis Satire II 6, about certain matrons contemporary with him, who looked more affectionate

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to their pets than to their husbands: Spectant subeuntem fata mariti/ Alcestim et, similis sipermutatio detur,/ morte uiri cupiant animam seruare catellae (“They watch Alcestisundergoing her husband’s fate. If they were granted a like liberty of exchange, rather wouldlet their bed-mates die, in order to save a puppy-bitch’s life”, lines 652-654). Neither ofthem is to be taken too seriously, though in different ways and for different reasons, but it ismanifest anyhow: for their readers, Alcestis had become a proverbial moralizing landmark.

More than once evoked by Ovid in his Tristia and in the Epistulae ex Ponto, his usageof the myth is a little less conventional, a bit more disconcerting. That was a time when hewas banished far away from Rome, because of motives he deemed cautious to not revealand which are never been well explained. Particularly the Epistle III 1 is in form of an openletter in verse, sent to his wife in Rome. Let us read the lines 105 and following: “Had youto redeem my death, a detestable idea,/ Alcestis, Admetus’ wife would be your model./You’d emulate Penelope if, by chaste deceit, you wished/ to be the bride misleadinginsistent suitors./ .../ But you don’t need to die, don’t need Penelope’s weaving./ It’sCaesar’s wife your lips need to pray to” (trans. A. S. Kline). Here too, Alcestis and Penelopeare associated together, as an exemplar dyad, but what Ovid is asking for recalls the formermore than the heroine of the Odyssey. It is the sacrifice of a shared humiliation: tosupplicate Livia, prince’s wife, to plead with him about a possible return of the poet to hishomeland. We have no reason to doubt that Ovid’s wife did it. For certain we know that,unlike the ancient king Admetus or Persephone queen of the dead, Caesar Augustus was notmoved to pity. In fact the famous love poet died as an exile, lonely in his inner “waste land”.

15 – Frederic Leighton, Hercules wrestling with Death for the Bodyof Alcestis, details: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, U.S.A.; 1869-

1871

All that drives us back, to consider the dialogic prologue of the Alcestis by Euripides,“the most tragic of poets” according to Aristotle in his Poetics. There, the god Apollo andThanatos contend for the life or death of Alcestis, disputing on such a dilemma in a wayechoing the debates of the sophists coeval with the Athenian dramatist. Paradoxically, wehave a subversive Apollo and a lawful Thanatos. His arguments may remind us of the

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severity of the first Roman emperor toward Ovid, but especially are terribly similar to thoseopposed by the tyrant Creon to Antigone in the homonymous tragedy by Sophocles.Whereas Creon defends the laws of an autocratic state, the daemon of death appeals to thosenecessary ones, which he has the task to make anyone respect, mortal or even immortal. Asformer avenger of Asclepius who dared to make human beings immortal, and later asdeceiver of the Moires for the purpose of delaying Admetus’ fate, Apollo already twice hadshown himself a deity rebellious to an universal order. Not so much otherwise, did Antigoneagainst that order imposed by an unjust and mean government. As to love, friendship andpity, obviously they were extraneous to Thanatos, but also to Creon and to rulers like him.

Step by step, Alcestis’ voluntary vicarious death or self sacrifice begins rather toappear an extreme protest action, against an unfair Fate but also a narrow conception ofdivinity, which was reflected in that of society and of family. A disguised criticism of theirfellow citizen Euripides did not escape Athenians’ awareness and attention. In particular, hiscontemporary comedy writer Aristophanes jokingly blamed him for his scarce religiosity,for attempting to subvert traditional principles and because in his works often gods’morality was shown to be not higher than that of virtuous heroes: for instance, Heracles,albeit some clownish traits in the Alcestis. In part, Aristophanes’ The Frogs is a parody ofEuripides’ play. There, neither Apollo nor Heracles but Dionysus wishes to bring back notAlcestis but Euripides himself from the dead. To find the path to the underworld, Dionysusseeks advice from the spirit of Heracles, long experienced of the matter. Unexpectedlythough, at the moment to rescue the fresh dead Euripides, instead of him the god of dramaticart prefers to take Aeschylus back for a while, as a more conservative and reliable tragedian.

Who is Alcestis at last, a conservative or a progressive figure? It depends upon whichsense we incline to grant her. The thesis of an open imaginative archetype is well expressedby Savinio, in his modern drama: “AUTHOR: ...Since prehistoric times, along not yethistoricised and later historicised millennia, just now we have an evidence that Alcestis isnot an individual figure; rather, a kind of specie. We knew Alcestis daughter of Pelias. Atpresent, we will meet with Alcestis... Does Lady’s father still live? GOERZ: No, he doesnot. AUTHOR: What was his name? GOERZ: Samuel. AUTHOR: All right, now we knowan Alcestis of Samuel...”. The efforts of the author to make the old and a new Alcestis tally,approximately at least, will fail. It is also true, the coherent endurance of an archetype isrooted in its capacity to renew adapting itself to epochal changes. It works like an interface,faced to the future as well as to the past. Yet there may be circumstances to which no“reasonable” archetype can be adjusted. We have to agree, in the late modernity they werenot lacking. Of course, we might try renouncing archetypes, at a risk to dispel our sharedinherited identity. Anyway, Savinio’s play ends with a vacant wall portrait frame: like anemergency door, through which Teresa/Alcestis has gone away again, this time for ever.

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16 – Edward C. Burne-Jones, Amor and Alcestis, stained glass panel:Peterhouse College, Cambridge, U.K.; 1864

Already in 1674, the French fabulist Charles Perrault issued a Critique de l’Opéra ouexamen de la tragédie intitulée Alceste ou le Triomphe d’Alcide (see here above). In thisessay an early modern reception of the archaic myth was compared with its Euripideandramatisation. Decidedly favourable to a modern interpretation, Perrault’s conclusions weresoon contested by the classicist dramatist Jean Racine, in his Préface d’Iphigénie. AndJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his farce Götter, Helden und Wieland (“Gods, Heroes, andWieland”, 1773), will call Euripides, Alcestis and Admetus themselves to judge nearly thesame question, against a contemporary “improved” German version by C. M. Wieland.Such a trial is imagined to happen in the underworld, in the form of a nightmare dreamed byWieland himself. Here, the arguments used by the opposing parties are not so important.Rather, it matters that the varying representation of Alcestis’ story was taken as a criterion,to value a distancing of modernity from antiquity in the Western civilisation. What means togive that the weight of a working cultural archetype, more than of a simple literary topos.

Even the half-serious charges of irreligiousness advanced by the ancient Aristophanessound today unjust, if referred to Euripides’ Alcestis. From a philosophical point of view,the whole “satiric play” seems mainly to express a human reaction against the tyranny of theFate, such as perceived by the ancients and, sometimes, also by the moderns. The irreverentridiculisation of such a conception – not seldom evoked by the chorus – is remarked bymeans of an alliance between gods and heroes, namely Apollo and Heracles, against it. Inthe prologue, the “hateful” detail of a daemon of death, who enjoys in ravishing youngrather than old lives, is a simply genial invention. It is a representation of the essence, and afoundation of the tragicomic itself. What ensuing from that is a more humanlike perceptionof divinity, there expressly represented by Apollo, as a will of preservation of life; by

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Hestia, as a force of affective cohesion and stability; by Aphrodite, as a not secondaryallegory of a vital Eros (and, at least in some antique pictures, by Hermes psychopompos, asthe repository of a hermetic sense). Above all the intuition of charity, as a synthesis of love,amity and pity, will justify the favourable reception of the myth in a Christian ambit too.

Such a mix of love, friendship and pity, is a residual irrationality, without which therational necessities of the existences and of the whole reality would make no sense. Anabsolute rationality would be a huge absurdity, so foreseeable or else arbitrary, as to besusceptible neither of free choices nor of actual possibilities to be understood. Slowly, whatwas quite clear in Euripides’ masterpiece comes out onto the foreground of the poemAlcestis by Edward Arlington Robinson. These are the nearly latest words pronounced byAlcestis to Admetus, in the inventive tradition of the Western literatures: “Why was it thatyou suffered for so long?/ Why could you not believe me – trust in me?/ Was I so strange asthat?/ We suffer when we do not understand;/ And you have suffered – you that love menow –/ Because you are a man… There is one thing/ No man can understand./ I would havegiven everything? – gone down/ To Tartarus – to silence? Was it that?/ I would have died? Iwould have let you live? –/ And was it very strange?” (in Captain Craig and Other Poems).

17 – Walter Crane, Alcestis and Amor, detail of wallpaperfrieze: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 1876

Love, as a Stranger

The scene of an altercation between Admetus and the aged Pheres, close to Alcestis’grave, is a revealing core in Euripides’ play. There, the former reproaches the latter for

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having refused to offer his own life in exchange for his son’s life, thus becomingresponsible for Alcestis’ death. To Pheres, it is easy to retort such an accusation uponAdmetus. The disputers look very wretched. And the speech grows so impetuous, that atfirst Admetus’ father commends Alcestis’ self abnegation; at last, he affirms that she wassomewhat crazy and, more sarcastically: “Do you think it is some Lydian/ or Phrygian slavebought for cash whom you are insulting?/ You forget I am a Thessalian and my father was/a Thessalian, legitimate and free born./ …/ That parents die for their children, it is not aGreek custom!” (lines 675-684). What we may infer is that, in the classical age at least, theHellenic mentality so much liked to show off a sensible reasonableness, that Alcestis’conduct could appear the fruit of a morbid or barbaric passion. To use an expression of E.A. Robinson, it was “very strange”. Nay, to see well, that put by Robinson’s Alcestis is themain question: “I would have died? I would have let you live? –/ And was it very strange?”.

Better than a sophistical one, it is a Socratic question, striving to probe into thesubstance of love. And the implicit answer is that, especially in order to oppose or balancean extraneousness and absurdity of death, it must take some a paradoxicality anddisproportion upon itself. Not seldom such a love may look like a stranger, a little crazy too,in our same old world. Each one from his selfish point of view, both Pheres and Admetusdeal with a complementary dialectic conception of the natural alternation of life and death.Although a cyclical perception of time is conventionally ascribed to womanly minds,Alcestis’ perspective results wider, a bit eccentric and supernatural. Even psychologicalcategories as the instinct of self-preservation and a sublimed desire get subordinate to ahigher aim. Rather, what involved is the ultimate essence of the Being: where, from theeverlasting challenge between Eros and Thanatos, “finally” love and life ought to prevail.More than a metaphysical vision, that is a historical evolving intuition of the Spirit, in a farcoming Hegelian sense. G. W. F. Hegel will consider Antigone as a meaningful icon of hisPhenomenology. We deem Alcestis not less worthy of a phenomenological emphasis alike.

Love is a stranger able to upset seeming necessities, opinable conventions and falseconsciences, also for in some a way human beings themselves are stranger on earth. What,in the classical tragic reflection, well recalls a celebrated hymn of the chorus in Sophocles’Antigone: “Of so many wonders, none stranger than man./ .../ Against death alone, he callsfor help in vain. From incurable maladies,/ he devised escapes./ Above all fancy’s dreamsfertile, his skill inclines him/ now to evil, now to good. When he respects his country’s lawsand justice,/ which swore on the gods to uphold, then he is honoured in his city./ He whogrows bold, turning to evil, has no city at all. Never may he share/ my hearth, nor know mymind, who works such deeds!” (verse 332-375). If Alcestis’ main field was her family,Antigone’s one was her town. Yet neither the former nor the latter have developed apeculiar skill instrument, such as Asclepius’ medicine or Orpheus’ music or else Penelope’sweaving and even Medea’s magic. Their arm is a tenacious, so scandalous love – even morethan for Euripides’ Phaedra –, that it runs a risk to exceed into abstraction or absurdity.

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18 – Alcestis’ portraits: Charles F. Murray, Alcestis; and EretriaPainter, Alcestis as a bride, detail from red-figure Attic vase of the

late 5th century (National Archaeological Museum, Athens)

By time, we will see an enlargement of the loving range, albeit more and moredeprived of strict erotic implications. Let us think of the evangelical parable of the GoodSamaritan. In a familiar, religious or ethnic sense, there the protagonist is a stranger. He wassuch, in the historical milieu of the Jewish society coeval with Jesus. Nonetheless, in theChristian message he is called to impersonate love to our neighbour, and to symbolize aneffort of conversion of alienness into otherness. He rescues from death not a relative or afriend at home, but an unknown guy on his way. Slowly, in our civilization the sapientialprecept “Know yourself” began to leave more room for a projection of the Other, at least asa necessary complement for the subsistence of the Self. In part, that widening was asubtraction from alienness. In the medieval Canticle of Creatures by St. Francis of Assisi,even Thanatos could become “Sister Death”, a sublimation of the Angel of Death alreadypresent in Hebrew and Islamic traditions. Is the Self a complex relation, among the Ego, theOther and the Alien? Such as revisited along centuries, Alcestis’ story might help to give ananswer to this question. Nor were like legends lacking in old exotic traditions, just as theIndian Savitri, who faced the God of Death in order to redeem her husband from the dead...

A few words more are to be spent about the charges of scarce morality, which somecritics or authors of the past formulated on Euripides’ play, particularly referring to cravencharacters as Admetus and his father Pheres. For instance Charles Perrault, Christoph M.Wieland and Vittorio Alfieri, they all deemed that Euripides’ drama could or should berevised and modernised. The Italian dramatist translated the Alcestis into Italian. He himselfcomposed in 1798 an Alceste seconda, marked by a neoclassical heroic ethics which soundsas a kind of lay but edifying and rhetorical moralism. Instead, Euripides’ attitude may seemeven realistic today, at least for in his play Thanatos himself – or itself – is represented as analien in this world. In the words of Apollo, his nature is “hostile to men, hateful to gods”

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(line 62). Thus, he is susceptible to derange human reactions and relations. If Alcestis is anexception, mainly it is because her love succeeds in being stranger than death. Her anguishwas not only of death in itself, but also some a fear that she could not be fully understood.

No wonder, Alcestis herself may look like a stranger in his own house. Probably it isnot fortuitous, she was the favourite heroine of Emma Lazarus, a Jewish pioneer of North-American literature, who called her country “Mother of all Exiles”. In her long poemAdmetus, the pessimism we can perceive in its British close antecedent, The Love of Alcestisby her correspondent W. Morris, turns into a cautious – we dare say “messianic” – hope. Ina quite romantic and utopian way, in the private of the Grecian queen as well as in ourpublic vicissitudes, love, life and – why not? – justice, shall finally overcome. Heracles“Alcides” returns to be their tireless, winning champion. Like him, during her lifetimeLazarus battled Russian czarist progroms and elsewhere discriminations concerning her co-religionists. Unlike the later victim Teresa/Alcestis in the Alcesti di Samuele by Savinio,what she could not foresee was the 20th century Holocaust, when Thanatos loses any naturalconnotation growing a historical civil failure. Through that, death and evil actually returnedto be which first denounced in Euripides’ works: a recurring eclipse of Reason and Being.

19 – Alcestis’ opera interpreters: a photo of the soprano Maria Callasin the Alceste by C. W. Gluck (Teatro della Scala, Milan 1954); andAlbert Edelfelt, Aino Ackté as Alcestis on the Banks of the Styx, Role

Portrait (Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki; 1902)

How did real strangers perceive Alcestis’ generous figure? An extraordinaryarchaeological document is the “Alcestis epitaph”, a damaged Greek inscription discoveredin 1943 at the ancient Hellenic colony of Odessos. Approximately the stele, now in theArchaeological Museum of Varna, is datable to the 2nd century A.D. There, we can read:“Come to the holy and pleasant Odessos, by much imploring its glorious Ionian inhabitants,

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upon me she bestowed a free life. Instead of me, now she has died but, like Alcestis, hasfame and praise. When she was twenty years old, in the loving arms of Hyacinth farewelledthe light, gaining this tomb”. Unfortunately, we can no longer read the name of the youngwoman, whose one Hyacinth was lover. What we may argue is that he had become afreedman thanks to her intercession, and that he ordered to compose and to inscribe thosefew sentences. Most likely he had been a foreigner, like those “Lydian or Phrygian slavesbought for cash” we have heard mentioned with scorn by Pheres in Euripides’ Alcestis.Albeit presumably a Grecian free born, Hyacinth’s beloved one had to be an immigrant too.So much, regret and love enabled an antique and cold marble, to tell and represent to us, thatwe may read already Euripides’ play as the prefiguration of a broad identitarian turmoil.

Also suggested by Alcestis’ myth, a very last and puzzling question might be: which isthe border, or the intimate connection, between an admirable sense of abnegation and asuspicious will of self annihilation? Reliably, it has to be close to the gap between averitable feeling of otherness, and one of extraneousness or indifference to all. Yet,especially in Euripides’ masterpiece, a novelty is that these two moods or states of mind arereversible. In the soul’s depths, there should be a ground where the catabasis may convertinto catharsis, when the awareness of a relativeness of our selves – let us rememberAlcestis’ words, “I am nothing now” (line 390) – generates a renewed relationship with theothers. The invention of the Greek playwright was that, on the stage, such an extreme canwell coincide with the moment when a tragedy turns into comedy. This tension is kept untilthe finale, when Admetus evokes the monstrous Medusa’s head or fears to see a deceitfulphantom, but the veiled maid is revealed to be just Alcestis. Even the charges of artisticincoherence, advanced by the same old critics, currently appear groundless. No otherEuripides’ work shows a so studied device, regarding its dramatic action. In no other play alatent subject is the theatre itself, as a chance of representing what could not be represented.

More banally than coherently, other poets preferred the tragedy to remain such, inorder to easily capture their audience’s immediate emotions. Let us listen to the gloomyconclusion of the Carmen de Alcestide or “Alcestis of Barcelona”, in the edition by LorenzoNosarti: Hora propinquabat lucem raptura puellae/ tardabatque manus rigor, omniacorripiebat;/ caeruleos ungues oculis moritura notabat/ algentisque pedes; fatali frigorepressa/ Admeti in gremio refugit fugientis imago./ Ut rediit sensus, Alcestis “Coniux,dulcissime coniux,”/ exclamat, “rapior; uenit, mors ultima uenit,/ infernusque deus claudetiam membra sopore” (“A fatal hour is near to taking away her daylight. Numbness starts toseize the body of the young woman, retarding every movement of her hands. She watchesher fingernails becoming blue. Her feet are freezing with the frost of death. Like a fleetingshadow, rather than a human, she seeks refuge in Admetus’ lap. As she feels her senses alertagain just for a while, then she cries out: ʻHusband, my sweetest love, death at last has comeand drags me away. Now, the slumber of the infernal god is closing in upon my limbs!’”).

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20 – Theatrical playbills, referring to recent performancesof Euripides’ Alcestis

Copyright pinoblasone@yahoo.com 2010

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21 – Mosaic in the Antakya Museum, Turkey, 2nd c.A.D. It was told to represent the tragic characters of

Iphigenia, her parents Clytemnestra and Agamemnon.In his lecture Une énigme enfin résolue: la fausse

Iphigénie d’Antioche était une Alceste (11th

International Colloquium on Ancient Mosaics, 2009,Bursa, Turkey), the scholar Jean-Pierre Darmon has

argued that “the image, being related to the dextrarumjunctio series and also to the series showing heroins

coming back from Hades, represents instead themoment when Alcestis, returning from death under

the protection of Persephone (Apollodorus, Bibl., I, 9,15) is to be united again with her former husband king

Admetus”. If this guess is right, and there are validclues about, we have to suppose one version more ofthe myth, where not Heracles but the queen of the

dead herself plays the role of Alcestis’ rescuer

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