Admetus' Case

ADMETUS' CASE 1. The Alcestis was first performed in 438 as the fourth play in a tetralogy. No less a critic than Lessing thought that, for this reason, the play must be regarded as a satyr play rather than a tragedy, but, nowadays, most scholars will find that it has too little in common with lchneuta.e and Cydops and too much with full-blown tragedies to be at home in the category uaTVpLKOV. They therefore tend to describe it as a "pro-satyric play" 1 or a "tragi-comedy"2 - following the ancient hypothesis, where the play is called uarvpLKWTf.pov, on d~ xapav Kal. ~l'1ov~v Kara<TTpicfm 1rapa ro rpayLKov. This, however, would seem to be a way of having it both ways rather than an explanation of what motivated Euripides to write such a curious hybrid. We would pro bably be in a better position to solve the problem if we knew more about Phrynichus' satyr drama Alcestis, in which Apollo himself achieved his purpose by getting the Moirai drunk. 3 For now, I prefer to regard the play as a tragedy which Euripides made number four in his tetralogy because he had a reason to include some 'capers' or 'caprioles' - such as the grim Thanatos (who has no place of his own in Greek myth) and the hon uivant Heracles. I will return to the function of these 'satyric' elements in Section 5 below. I. I. A number of interpreters have attempted to solve the difficulties they had with Euripides' way of treating his subject matter either by denying that he made any attempt at psychological realism, 4 or by resorting to anachronistic 'psychologizing'. Wilamowitz, for instance, saw in Alcestis a frustrated woman, who, as a disappointed wife and responsible mother, has to make the sacrifice she took upon herself when she was Admetus' young, loving bride.5 Van Lennep6 advocated a quasi-Freudian view of Alcestis as being driven by ambition, and of Admetus as an infantile egoist. The main objection to this kind of approach is that it requires a great deal of hyper-interpretation and of filling in what is not expressly stated or even hinted at in the play, 1 Dale 1954, xviii. 2 Kitto 1966, 311 ff. 3 See Pohlenz 1930, 244 and Conacher 1967, 328. • Zurcher 1947. ' Griech. Trag. III, 187. A variation of this can be found in Pohlenz 1930: Alcestis, when she has to fulfil her vow, has in the meantime been given more responsibility. 6 1949, Introduction. Cf. Rosenmeyer 1963, 228. ADMETUS' CASE 49 and cannot be naturally conveyed by actors who have to operate within the limitations of Athenian stage conventions. 7 Between these two extremes, the approach of A.M. Dale seems eminently sensible: she rejects the search for 'psychological complexities' and the demand for a 'synthetic portrait', while fully acknowledging that one should have an eye for what Zurcher calls the 'dramatic effect', and she herself the 'rhetoric', of certain situations. In the terms of Aristotle: one acknowledges the primacy of the 1rpafis-, regards ~001roda (rather than 'psychology') as secondary, but certainly not lacking or unim portant, and reckons with a certain tension between short term rheto rical effectiveness and consistency of ~0os-. 1.2. It is fortunate that not just classicists but also a number of poets have occupied themselves with Alcestis. In an illuminating overview of their activities, Kurt von Fritz (1956) 8 has shown how their attempts at doing a better job than Euripides may enhance our understanding of Euripides' play. Apart from curiosities such as Morrison's attempt to breathe dra matic life into Verrall's apparently dead Alcestis,9 Euripides' fellow poets, all of them, tried to emphasize the romantic and idealizing features of the fairy tale. In order to enhance both the credibility of Alcestis' love for Admetus and the 'poetic justice' of the happy ending, they wanted to make Admetus more sympathetic than the one Euripi des created. Some tried to achieve this by turning him into a fatherly ruler with superhuman wisdom, who cannot be missed by his subjects, and therefore simply cannot refuse the sacrifice of his beloved wife. This enables the poet to make Admetus love Alcestis as much and as romantically as she loves him, and it will make the happy ending satisfy both moralists and sentimentalists. Others keep Admetus in the dark about Alcestis' vow until it has become irrevocable, thus putting him into a position in which he cannot but accept her offer, so that he deserves a happy ending almost more than his loving wife. Von Fritz interprets all these attempts at improving on Euripides' plot as misunderstandings. Euripides' intention would have been to strip the fairy tale of its romance by turning it into reality, because he wanted to show that a man who accepts his wife's 'death out of love' must be a sorry creature, and that her sacrifice is useless anyway 7 See Lesky 1963, 205 ff. 8 Cf. also Albini. 9 The Dream of Alcestis (New York 1950). .

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