*59 Lines 743–44 are rendered as they are printed by Jebb and Lloyd-Jones in his Loeb edition.
*60 Ismene, who left the stage at line 509 to perform the rites of the Furies.
*61 Antigone, still onstage.
*62 Creon is Antigone’s maternal uncle.
*63 Creon, descended from Cadmus (see note to line 221), is emphasizing his membership in the royal family. The actual king at the moment is Eteocles, son of Oedipus.
*64 Antigone (as at lines 33–34).
*65 There’s a gap in the text here. The supplement is Jebb’s.
*66 I.e. riding at full speed.
*67 Athens, personified here; so, too, with Thebes, in the next couple of lines.
*68 The Hill of Ares, site of an ancient Athenian court named after it. In Sophocles’ day, it had jurisdiction mostly in religious matters.
*69 Lines 954–55 are interpolated:
For anger has no other way of passing on
than death itself; no resentment stings the dead.
*70 Creon, at lines 945–46, had only alluded to the incestuous marriage.
*71 The Furies in the sacred grove.
*72 Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (following Housman) transpose lines 1028–33 from their position in the transmitted text, so that now they come between 1019 and 1020.
*73 On the Bay of Eleusis, where there was a temple to Apollo.
*74 Also on the Bay of Eleusis, about five miles north of the temple of Apollo just alluded to. A nocturnal torchlit procession from Athens to Eleusis took place every year during the Eleusinian Mysteries.
*75 Demeter and Persephone, whose reunion was celebrated in the Mysteries at Eleusis.
*76 Initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries took a sacred oath of secrecy administered by the Eumolpidae (“Descendants of Eumolpus”), hereditary priests of the cult.
*77 Usually assumed to be Mount Aigaleos, east of Oea (see next note).
*78 A rural district in Attica, west of Mount Aigaleos, between Eleusis and Colonus.
*79 Poseidon, son of Cronus and Rhea.
*80 Artemis, goddess of hunting.
*81 The language used here (and again at lines 1160, 1163, and 1166) strongly suggests the ritual of supplication. A stranger, lacking the rights of a citizen, appeals to the gods for protection and aid, and through them to the king or other authority in the land. He makes his prayer at the god’s altar and sits there until his request is granted.
*82 Theseus had interrupted his sacrifice to Poseidon in order to come to the aid of Oedipus, who was being threatened by Creon. See lines 887–90.
*83 See lines 374–81.
*84 That is, from the south.
*85 A mythical range of mountains in the far north, called by Alcman “the breast of black night.” Rhipai means “blasts” (of the north wind).
*86 Again (as at lines 315 and 318), the short line signals intense emotion.
*87 Literally, “he persuaded the city.” The verb often has the connotation “bribe,” even when, as here, the means of persuasion (money or the like) is not mentioned. The connotation is suggested by the prior assertion that Eteocles did not prevail “by argument”; that is, it wasn’t speech but something else that proved decisive. Using money to gain power is typical of tyrants.
*88 The Erinys alluded to at line 370.
*89 The next line, 1300, is interpolated:
and this, too, is how the soothsayers see it.
*90 The Peloponnesus.
*91 Not to be confused with Eteocles.
*92 Son of Atalanta and Milanion. Atalanta would marry only the suitor who could defeat her in a foot race. Many failed in the attempt until Milanion, diverting her with a golden apple, managed to win. Parthenopaeus, the son born of their union, owes his name to the fact that his mother stayed a virgin—a parthenos—until she lost that race. The next line, 1322, is interpolated, apparently to flesh out these allusions:
Atalanta, who bore her loyal child at last.
*93 See note to line 1298.
*94 Oedipus uses the second person dual pronoun, as if both his sons were present. He reverts, in the next line, to the singular, addressing Polynices alone.
*95 The Greek here is daimōn, which can mean “fate” as well as “divine power, god.”
*96 In Hesiod, the darkness beneath the earth; in mythology, the deepest part of Hades, here personified.
*97 The primeval goddesses in the grove, invoked in their capacity as Furies fulfilling a parental curse.
*98 Polynices’ request anticipates the action of Sophocles’ earlier play, Antigone.
*99 That brother and sister address each other by name in lines 1414–15 is a sign of their intimacy and, as such, another of the links Sophocles has forged between this play and Antigone (see previous note). A similar if less intense affection is felt in line 1, where Oedipus addresses Antigone by name, and in line 357, where he does the same for Ismene. His loathing of his sons keeps him from uttering their names, even in the third person.
*100 Literally, “child,” a term of endearment, repeated at 1431. See previous note.
*101 Line 1436 is interpolated:
when I’m dead, since you can’t help me in life.
*102 Oedipus is remembering the signs that would immediately precede his end. See lines 94–95.
*103 Evidently the Chorus still fear divine retribution for helping a man who has his father’s blood on his hands. See lines 220–36.
*104 Theseus, not yet arrived but on the way. “My son” (“child” in the Greek) is, again, a term of endearment. See note to line 1420.
*105 The Greek text of line 1492 is corrupt. I translate the second of the two possible emendations suggested by Lloyd-Jones and Wilson.
*106 The Thebans.
*107 Persephone.
*108 Persephone, queen of the dead.
*109 A lengthened form of the name Hades, husband of Persephone and lord of the dead.
*110 The Underworld is imagined as a plain here and again at lines 1577 and 1681 (both times in the plural).
*111 A reference to the Underworld river Styx, which must be crossed on the way to the abode of the dead.
*112 Persephone and her mother, Demeter. The Furies may also be meant.
*113 Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guards the entry to Hades.
*114 The souls of the recently dead.
*115 Evidently Death is meant, though elsewhere his parentage is different.
*116 King of the Lapithae in Thessaly. He was the bosom friend of Theseus, with whom he ventured into the Underworld. The exact nature of the pact between the two friends is unknown.
*117 Thoricus was a town and deme of Attica. The stone so called must have been familiar to the audience.
*118 The Hill of Demeter, Guardian of Tender Shoots, lay about a quarter of a mile north of the hill that gave Colonus its name (see note to line 60).
*119 Preparing a corpse for burial included bathing it and clothing it in white.
*120 Hades, as the Zeus of the Underworld.
*121 Theseus performs a proskynesis, literally a “kissing to.” It could involve prostrating oneself to kiss the earth, but that seems unlikely here, since the gesture salutes the gods above and the gods below simultaneously.
*122 See note to line 1562. The Underworld fields are almost personified here.
*123 Ismene should speak five lines here, as at the corresponding place in the strophe. Two lines of Greek text are missing.
*124 The next line is missing. It would have been shared between the two speakers, as in 1747, the corresponding line of the antistrophe.
*125 The phrasing suggests that in the missing line, Antigone had expressed again her determination to die now, leaving Ismene alone.
*126 The Chorus are reminding them of their rescue by Theseus.
*127 Theseus is referring to the mysterious “god” whose voice was heard summoning Oedipus to his end (lines 1623–29).
*128 Oath (Horkos) is a divine po
wer, personified here and elsewhere as the servant of Zeus, the ultimate guarantor of the sanctity of oaths. Oath breakers were punished in the Underworld by the Furies.
EURIPIDES
As his name (“son of the Euripus”) suggests, Euripides was said to have been born in 480, after Athens had been attacked by the Persians, and many Athenians fled across the Euripus strait onto the island of Euboea. After the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Salamis, his family returned to Athens. He began to compete in the dramatic competitions in 455, and he eventually wrote ninety-two dramas, of which eighteen are extant. He died in 405, a year before Athens was defeated by Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War.
Unfortunately, most of the other information that has come down to us about Euripides’ life appears to have been reconstructed imaginatively from comedy and from his own poetry. His ancient biographers inferred that he had studied with philosophers such as Anaxagoras and Socrates because characters in his dramas occasionally allude to their theories. Because Aristophanes, in his comedy the Frogs, portrayed Euripides praying to newfangled gods, his biographers claimed that he had been torn to shreds by hunting dogs (a death suitable for atheists, modeled on the death of Pentheus in Euripides’ own drama the Bacchae). Ancient speculation of this kind has led modern critics to suppose that in his dramas, Euripides sought to challenge traditional religion. But the gods in his dramas behave no differently from the gods in dramas by Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides does, however, manage to portray with great vividness the gods’ cruelty and lust for honors. His characterizations of mortals also are more realistic than those of the other surviving dramatic poets. In the Poetics, Aristotle quotes Sophocles as having said, “I wrote about men as they ought to be, but Euripides wrote about them as they are.”
In spite of what his ancient biographers said, in reality Euripides was highly regarded by audiences in his lifetime and for centuries afterward. Athenian prisoners in Sicily were said to have won their release because they could recite his poetry to their captors. Ten of his dramas were selected for reading in schools of rhetoric, as opposed to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles. The clarity of Euripides’ style contributed to his popularity, and his exciting plots appear to have been the inspiration for the complex narrative structures for Greek-language plays in the fourth century B.C. and the adventure novels that were popular in later antiquity.
INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ ALCESTIS
Athens in the second half of the fifth century B.C. was home to innovations of all kinds, and the Alcestis is one of its greatest innovations. It was staged by Euripides in the fourth position of the tragic tetralogy, the spot usually occupied by a bawdy, carnivalesque satyr play; yet it is a serious, emotionally intense drama that would not be out of place in one of the three earlier spots. Already at this early stage of his career—for the Alcestis, dating to 438 B.C., is probably his earliest surviving work—Euripides was bending the rules. It’s hard to find the right term to characterize his hybrid creation. Some call it a tragedy, others a tragicomedy; still others highlight its strangeness by calling it “pro-satyric” (“taking the place of a satyr play”), a category to which no other surviving Greek drama belongs.
Euripides chose a minor myth and an obscure royal house as the focus of his theatrical experiment. Admetus of Pherae and his wife, Alcestis, were hardly names to conjure with for ancient Athenians; Homer, the great treasury of plots from which the tragedians drew, mentions them only once (as the parents of a Greek warrior named Eumelus), and neither Aeschylus nor Sophocles explored their strange story (though an early playwright named Phrynichus apparently produced an Alcestis, now lost). A drinking song known to Euripides’ contemporaries spoke of the “story of Admetus” and the lesson it taught: be a friend to the brave and good, and avoid the company of cowards, for from cowards no benefit can be gained. That lesson is reassuringly straightforward, but Euripides’ version of the story yields no such simple insights. Indeed, it’s hard to say just who is good and who is cowardly in this most morally convoluted of surviving Greek dramas.
At the center of those convolutions stands the awful bargain that sets the plot in motion, the swap of one person’s life for that of another. Such a swap might seem unexceptional in the world of folklore (the world from which the story of Alcestis originally sprang), but Euripides here takes a long, hard look at what it would actually entail. Anyone seeking to make this swap would have to ask the unaskable; friends and family would, to that person, become mere pawns, tokens to be exchanged in the ultimate zero-sum game. Euripides refers only briefly, but pointedly, to the exhaustive search Admetus went through to find a surrogate, when even his father and mother declined his terrible request. Miraculously, his wife, the only member of his family bound to him by marital rather than blood ties, finally agreed to take his place, and thus our story begins.
Unlike earlier tragedians, Euripides was deeply interested in the marital bond. Most Greeks of his day looked upon marriage as a practical institution, a way to secure a family’s property or elevate its political position and, of course, produce heirs. But Euripides, in this play as well as in the Medea, Hippolytus, Helen, and other plays no longer extant, dealt with marriage (and other kinds of pair-bonding) in a way more familiar to modern readers, examining the complexities of intimacy and interdependence and, especially, the pain arising from betrayal. Moreover, Euripides took women seriously as partners in marriage, whose lives were in effect held hostage to their husbands, and his contemporary, the comic playwright Aristophanes, mocked him for it; such themes were felt to be beneath the high dignity of tragic drama. But it is this very shift in elevation, this interest in a domestic and personal realm far removed from the gods of Olympus, that made Euripidean theater immensely popular in its own time and enduringly compelling in ours.
Those gods are still present in the Alcestis, of course, but their distance from the stage action has increased as compared with the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Here Euripides makes use of a structure he would often use elsewhere, in which an Olympian deity delivers a prologue speech, setting the scene and forecasting what is about to happen, but then departs the stage. Apollo plays this framing role in the Alcestis, in a scene delightfully enlivened by a snappy exchange with the allegorical figure of Death; but once action commences on the human plane, Apollo is never seen again, and Euripides offers us few clues as to what Apollo, or his father, Zeus, are contriving. Instead it is Heracles, seen here in human form before his transformation into a god, who takes part in events and brings about a resolution of the crisis. This portrayal of Heracles, as a deeply carnal being interested in food, wine, and sex, might be seen as Euripides’ playful nod to the bawdy conventions of the satyr play—conventions he had otherwise demolished by putting on Alcestis in the fourth production slot.
Following this prologue scene, Euripides takes us into the bedroom of the royal palace of Pherae, where Alcestis, surrounded by husband, children, and worshipful servants, is breathing her last. The long scene shared between Alcestis and Admetus is unique in classical Greek theater, and not only because it depicts the only unambiguous onstage death in the surviving plays (in the Hippolytus, the title character could be alive, barely, at the close, and Sophocles’ Ajax might well have gone out of sight to commit suicide in the play named for him). The complexities of the couple’s unique situation are left implicit yet handled with great psychological insight, another hallmark of Euripidean technique. Alcestis bursts into lyric song as she enters, addressing the sun and sky; Admetus lamely tries to engage with her while speaking in more pedestrian iambic trimeters. Then Alcestis descends into trimeters, too, and addresses her husband in coldly pragmatic tones. Her aloofness contrasts sharply with his fervent, almost desperate efforts to hold on to her in her last moments, and with the extravagance of his vows of fidelity to her memory—vows that attest to the deep guilt he must feel at having requisitioned her death.
How is Admetus to be judged? Many of the
interpretive problems surrounding the play hinge on this crucial question. Euripides allows us to see Admetus first through Apollo’s eyes, as a pious man whose virtues merit rescue from death, but later through the eyes of Pheres, his father, to whom he appears a selfish coward and wife-killer. The disparity is not easy to resolve. The verbal battle between Admetus and Pheres is one of Euripides’ masterpieces: a scorching confrontation between two opposed perspectives, partaking of both the ethical complexities of a philosophic dialogue and the visceral energy of all-out intergenerational war. In few other literary works—Shakespeare’s King Lear is another—have the competing claims of the old and the young, and the hatreds that can fester between father and son, been explored with such merciless candor. For the audience, Admetus’ limitations, carefully kept out of view in his farewell to Alcestis and in the choral ode that follows, have become suddenly, and brutally, exposed, even if the man who exposes them, Pheres, is himself deeply flawed (indeed, Euripides seems to have constructed this scene partly to show that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree).
We know, from Apollo’s forecast, that redemption is coming for Admetus, and Euripides brings his xenia to the fore to allow him to earn that redemption. Xenia is a strict social code that, for the Greeks, mandated the kind treatment of strangers and travelers. Admetus has already shown this social virtue in his humane treatment of his “slave” Apollo, for which he was rewarded by the chance to swap lives. Now xenia prompts Admetus to insist on hosting Heracles and enabling his drunken revel, even while he manages his household’s rites of mourning over Alcestis. For this he will be rewarded a second time, more richly than before, when Heracles negates the swap and cheats Death of his prey.
Alcestis did not attract much attention in the ancient world. Later Greco-Roman writers largely ignored it, even those, such as Ovid and Seneca, who adapted other Euripidean stories to their own poetic purposes. Yet this short, untragic, anomalous play has generated a vast array of modern interpretations and adaptations. Critics disagree widely about its meanings, though all are impressed by its radical novelty. It is produced often for the modern stage, often to great acclaim, and has inspired operas by Handel and Gluck, a ballet by Martha Graham, and T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party, among other works. Even Shakespeare appears to have been influenced by it, judging by how The Winter’s Tale, with its closing restoration of a wife thought dead, parallels the return of Alcestis to Admetus at the end of Euripides’ play. Both playwrights, moreover, leave their heroines eerily silent as the curtain descends. But perhaps the apparent parallel is only the result of the impossibility of expressing, in both cases, all that the woman in question would have wanted to say.
The Greek Plays Page 53
