Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/457



the play of Alcestis is, of all the remains of the ancient classical drama, the most popular with modern readers, it is, beyond question, the most misunderstood. We bring to our estimate of it judgments based on instincts inherited from our Teutonic forefathers, ideas which took form in the days of medieval chivalry, and convictions begotten in us of the teachings of Christianity. Hence, when we read of a husband who availed himself of a heaven-given opportunity of escaping death at the price of his wife's life, all our sympathies go out to the love, the unselfishness, the courage, of the willing sacrifice, and in the husband's conduct we find the meanest selfishness and the most unmanly cowardice. The invectives of Pheres appear as a well-merited castigation, unanswerable in their withering force. The sorrow of Admetus seems hypocritical, and his lamentations hollow. Browning (Balaustion's Adventure) describes him as doing in the death-scene everything but the one right thing, which would have been to insist on revoking the compact. It is not enough to answer that Euripides had to make the best of a legend which he could not alter; we have to account for the fact that the legend, both in its original form and in Euripides' treatment of it, was regarded as redounding to Admetus' glory rather than to his shame. For it is certain that the modern view is diametrically opposed to that of the Athenian audience. In their eyes—1. Admetus was a noble character: 2. He was in the right in respect to the motif and incidents of the play: 3. He reaped the just reward of the good man.

1. Admetus was a noble character, for he displayed the highest social virtue recognised by a Greek—hospitality, the crowning height of unselfishness, as truly a part of patriotism in peace, as heroism was in war. The hospitable man embodied for them the virtues, not only of the modern philanthropist, but also those of the enlightened diplomatist: he established and maintained friendly relations with other states, gaining for his city allies, and for her people friends and protectors in foreign lands, and that in days