Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/458

422 when, without such, not only was travel perilous, but even commerce was difficult and precarious. The deserts of the man who thus served his country, and his countrymen individually, without regarding the cost to his own fortune and convenience, could not be overrated. Conjugal affection shrank into insignificance beside such a trait. Admetus is the supreme type of this class, a point which is emphasized by the fact that Apollo set the seal of Heaven's approval upon his peculiar excellence, by accepting, and so consecrating, his hospitality. It was his duty to his country (quite apart from his position as her king and protector), to neglect no means of prolonging his usefulness.

2. He was in the right in respect to the motif and incidents of the play:—A God put forth special exertions, taxed to the utmost his divine craft in outwitting the Fates, in order to gain a conditional privilege for his earthly friend. That the man should thereupon decline to accept the boon, would have seemed to the Greeks, not false delicacy merely, but impiety; just as it would have seemed to a Hebrew impious for Abraham to renounce the favour of God when it involved the sacrifice of his son. The acceptance of the condition was perhaps the easier, because the time of its fulfilment was indefinite, as we gather from ll. 524 and 526, where Herakles, while referring to Alcestis' pledge as a matter well known to him, yet has no idea that the time for its redemption has come. The compact once made, we may fairly infer that it was impossible to draw back from it: a mortal could not play fast and loose with the powers beneath, and "the Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts." Hence, though Admetus passionately cries to Alcestis to take him with her, he does not, he cannot, propose the impossible, to die instead of her. Again, it was part of the fitness of things that the less valuable life should be surrendered for the more valuable. To the Greeks of that time, the proper victim should have been the king's old father or mother. Pheres' conduct in valuing his own life before that of his son was in their eyes unnatural, unreasonable, and unpatriotic. He owed a paternal duty to his son: he had already enjoyed his share of life's pleasures; his life was no longer worth living, for the utter contempt for old age prevalent in Athens in those days, must have made its infirmities an unmitigated misfortune: and his life was now useless to the community. Hence his arguments in reply to Admetus' reproaches would appear as a tissue of selfishness and