Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(54)

We mourn differently in each case: when someone dies very young, we feel that they – and we – have been robbed of their potential. We see what should have been their future in glimpses when another young person passes milestones that our loved one never reached. When someone older dies, we feel deprived of experience, of both them and of the huge part they played in our own lives. If we’re very unlucky, this grief even sours or obscures the happiness of remembering them.

But Pheres also has a point, doesn’t he? You want to live: why wouldn’t I? We don’t get to impose death on the old, merely because we think they’ve had their go and now it’s our turn. How would Admetus feel if his young son had been offered the bargain by Apollo? Would he have stepped up to die so that his son could live? Or is a longer life expectancy more valuable than a shorter one only if you are the younger man in the equation?

I did promise you a happy ending, so here it is: Heracles arrives to stay with Admetus. There’s a brief confusion when he doesn’t know that Alcestis has died, because Admetus has ordered his slaves not to mention it. Finally, one of them gives it up and Heracles bounds into action. He hastens to Alcestis’ tomb and wrestles with Death, returning with a veiled, silent woman. After some resistance, Admetus accepts that his wife has been returned to him. That Heracles – who, we must remember, will be another surviving visitor to the Underworld, just like Orpheus – has brought back Alcestis. But she cannot speak for three days. She belongs to the gods of Hades until she undergoes a ritual purification.

So how might this story, of a woman who dies to save her husband’s life, influence the story of Eurydice? It is our first reference to the Underworld narrative, although she isn’t named. When Admetus is responding to Alcestis’ big speech (the one where she makes him promise he won’t remarry), he builds to a climax of sorrow at her imminent loss. If I had the voice and the songs of Orpheus,21 he says, if I could charm Persephone and her husband, I would go down and seize you from Hades. And the guard dog wouldn’t hold me back, and nor would the ferryman, until I’d brought you into the light again. But I can’t do that, so I’ll be with you when I die.

It’s an interesting example for Admetus to choose, given that Orpheus is ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt to reclaim Eurydice. Presumably, even though this is the earliest version of the story that we can be sure of, Euripides’ audience would have been familiar with it from sources which are lost to us: Admetus does a recap of the important bits, but it sounds like he’s mentioning an example he thinks we’d all recognize, rather than telling us a story we haven’t heard before.

The play has a happy ending precisely because Heracles can do what Orpheus cannot: successfully retrieve a young woman from the greedy maw of Death. And surely that’s because Heracles isn’t trying to reclaim someone he loves. He seems to have feelings of warm friendship towards both Admetus and Alcestis, but she’s not his heart’s desire, in the way Eurydice is for Orpheus. Even if Heracles were not such a strongman (who can wrestle Death and come off the winner), and even if he had been later setting out to chase after Alcestis (he catches her at her tomb rather than having to make an actual trip to the Underworld as he will in his final labour: the abduction of Cerberus), he would still stand a better chance of reclaiming Alcestis than Orpheus does of reclaiming Eurydice. Imagine if Heracles had been ordered to walk out of the Underworld and not look back: he would have been fine. He doesn’t have the strength of emotion that Orpheus has, so he doesn’t have the destructive anxiety that accompanies it. He is a man who can stroll down to the Underworld to steal a novelty dog. This isn’t a hero who will be tormented by fear of loss.

And while we’re talking about heroes, we should note that, for at least some ancient Greeks, Alcestis is a greater hero than Orpheus. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Plato’s Symposium – written in the fourth century BCE – presents us with a debate among guests at a dinner party on the nature of eros – love. It’s a somewhat more philosophically rigorous depiction of this kind of night out than many of us have experienced, although Aristophanes does have to swap turns with another speaker because he has the hiccups. You can always rely on comedians.

The first speech is delivered by a man named Phaedrus, who says that one defining feature of love is that only lovers will give up their lives for one another,22 and that’s the case for women and men alike. The only example he needs, he says, is Alcestis, who alone was willing to die on her husband’s behalf, even though his father and mother were alive. Her devotion to her husband made his parents seem like strangers in comparison. Her behaviour was so impressive to men and gods alike that the gods gave her back to the living world. Whereas Orpheus, he adds, they sent packing. They only offered him a phasma, a ghost of his wife, because he was weak, as you might expect from a lyre player. He wasn’t brave enough to die for love, like Alcestis, but managed to enter Hades alive. For this, he was made to die at the hands of women . . .

What are we to make of this passage, aside from the obvious fact that Phaedrus is nursing a major grievance against lyre players? Firstly, that Plato has remembered the plot of Euripides’ play pretty well, considering he wrote the Symposium fifty years or more after Alcestis was first performed. Even more so when we think that Plato wasn’t born until a decade or so after the original performance. From this, we might conclude that there are still regular performances of Alcestis: it has turned out to be very popular. At the very least, Plato expects his readers to be familiar with the example. But he seems to have more than the casual familiarity of an audience-member for a play they have seen once. The argument Phaedrus makes is brief, but he has fully taken Admetus’ side in the debate between Pheres and his son. He has no criticism for Admetus’ apparent expectation that one of his parents might die in his stead, indeed he shares it. He has only praise for Alcestis and her heroic sacrifice, and offers no censure of Admetus for being willing to accept his wife’s death as a price worth paying for his own life.