Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

1/ This was tough to read. The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s masterpiece, was first performed in 458 BC. Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BC, as the third part and the only one that survives of a four-part sequence, preceded by Laius and Oedipus (forming a tragic trilogy) and followed by a satyr play, The Sphinx. Seven Against Thebes is about the fight between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, which was not covered by Sophocles’s Theban plays. 

When Sophocles wrote about the same family, Antigone was from around 442–440 BBC, its prequel King Oedipus was around 429–427 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus (ca 407 BC) was written shortly before his death ca 406 BC. 

As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, when I first got into Greek tragedy, I had to adjust to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as they’re different, but in the plays before the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s concept of drama is even further away from ours that I don’t quite understand it. The play is static. Part of the play, when the chorus is wailing and lamenting, feels like an opera. Part of the play, when the messenger tells Eteocles about the enemies at the seven gates and paints a picture of each one, feels like an epic poem being performed to the audience. It is very odd. 

2/ I’m just going to poke at the play. 

“CHORUS […] The army has been let loose, it has left its camp! 

This great host of horses is pouring forward at the gallop! 

The dust I see in the air shows me it is so, 

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

struck by hooves, sends the noise right to my ears! 

It’s flying, it’s roaring like an irresistible 

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

“CHORUS […] I hear the rattle of chariots round the city! 

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

The air is going mad with the brandishing of spears!” 

The most interesting images are probably when the messenger describes the enemies. 

“SCOUT […] Tydeus is already growling near the Proetid […]. Teydeus, lusting madly for battle, is screaming like a snake hissing at midday…” 

He describes, he paints a picture of each enemy. What do the audience see? Do they see anything? 

“SCOUT […] I shuddered, I won’t deny it, to see [Hippomedon] brandish his great round threshing-floor of a shield. And it can’t have been a cheap artist who gave him that device on the shield, Typhon emitting dark smoke, the many-coloured sister of flame, from his fire-breathing lips; the round circle of the hollow-bellied shield is floored with coiling snakes. The man himself raised a great war cry; he is possessed by Ares, and he rages for a fight like a maenad, with a fearsome look in his eye…” 

I like the imagery, but all this stuff feels like an epic poem—there’s no drama as we know it, no conflict and tension—till Eteocles hears that his brother Polyneices is at the seventh gate and decides to fight him himself, and the chorus tells him not to do so. 

Aeschylus does raise something interesting, however. When Eteocles hears that Polyneices is at the seventh gate, he says: 

“Ah me, my father’s curse is now truly fulfilled!” 

The curse, presumably about the brothers killing each other for their cruel treatment of their father, would have been in Oedipus, which didn’t survive. But Eteocles’s remark is obviously nonsense—it’s nothing like the preordained fate from which Oedipus couldn’t escape—Eteocles is told that his brother is at the seventh gate—he makes the choice.   

“CHORUS […] And when they die in kindred slaughter, 

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

4/ The play ends oddly, almost going in a new direction with the herald announcing that Polyneices is not to be buried, and Antigone defying him (which is more or less the plot of Sophocles’s play). However, Kenneth McLeish writes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“Scholars say that Aeschylus wrote only the first four fifths of Seven Against Thebes as we have it. His contribution ends not with the resolution and catharsis, but with a brief report of the princes’ deaths, a reminder that ‘God’s knife is whetted still,’ and a chorus of desolation balancing the chorus of distress at the beginning. Later hands added the Antigone/ Ismene material we now possess – and they unfocused the meaning of the action, introducing a completely new strand (Antigone’s defiance of the council), without integrating it, and –because the quality of the verse is poor—reducing the impact of Aeschylus’ chorus […] How Aeschylus resolved the issues raised by the play and its predecessors in the sequence is now unguessable.” 

Heracles by Euripides

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides. 

This is how the play starts: amidst the chaos in Thebes, Lycus attacks the town, kills King Creon, and seizes the crown; as Creon’s daughter Megara is married to Heracles but Heracles has gone to the underworld for the final labour, perhaps to never return, Lycus decides to kill them all—Megara, their 3 sons, and Heracles’s father Amphitryon. 

“CHORUS […] My voice full of grief and mourning,

Like the sad chant of an aged swan;

A ghost of a man, voice with no substance.

Like a figure seen in a dream…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

About half of the play is Amphitryon, Megara, and the Theban elders (the chorus) lamenting their fate and praying for rescue from Heracles or the gods. Amphitryon begs Lycus to spare them, but Megara doesn’t do so. 

“MEGARA […] I love my children – naturally;

I gave them birth, and care from childhood; and to me

Dying is fearful. Yet I count it foolishness

To struggle with the inevitable. Since we must die,

Let us not die shrivelled in fire, a mockery

To our enemies, which to me is a worse thing than death.

We owe a debt of honour to our royal house.

[…] When the gods spread misfortune like a net, to try

To struggle out is folly more than bravery.

For what will be will be; no one can alter it.” 

She accepts it with poise and dignity. Reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hermione. 

There are lots of good passages in this play: 

“MEGARA […] You weep,

My pretty flowers! Then, like a brown-winged honey-bee,

From all your weeping I’ll distil one precious tear,

And shed it for you…” 

It is moving. 

“AMPHITRYON […] Time as he flies has no care to preserve our hopes;

He’s bent on his own business. Look at me: I once

Was great in action, drew all eyes upon me; now

In one day Fortune has snatched from me everything,

As the wind blows a feather to the sky; all lost.

Wealth, reputation – who holds them with certainty?” 

Euripides gets us to care about Megara and the children, and builds it up so that we all hope for Heracles to return in time and thwart Lycus’s plan to kill the family. And Heracles does return in time! He then kills Lycus. But no, the story takes a different turn as Isis, under the command of Hera, gives him a fit of madness and makes him kill his own wife and children in a frenzy, only because Hera is Zeus’s wife and has always hated Heracles for being Zeus’s son. It is horrific. The play reminds me of Aias (also known as Ajax) by Sophocles (which I think is a more perfect play), but what Hera does to Heracles is so much worse than what Athena does to Aias: Heracles kills his own wife and children! 

“HERACLES […] She has achieved her heart’s desire,

Toppling to earth, pedestal and all, the foremost man

Of Hellas. Who could pray to such a god? For spite

Towards Zeus, for jealousy of a woman’s bed, she hurls

To ruin his country’s saviour, innocent of wrong!” 

What kinds of gods are these? But it’s not only Hera—Euripides doesn’t seem particularly fond of Zeus either. 

“AMPHITRYON Zeus! I once thought you were my powerful friend. You shared

My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles.

All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful

Than you had seemed; and I, a man, put you, a god,

To shame. I’ve not betrayed the sons of Heracles.

You knew the way to steal into my bed, where none

Invited you, and lie with someone else’s wife;

But those bound to you by every tie you cannot save.

This is strange ignorance in a god; or else, maybe,

Your very nature lacks a sense of right and wrong.” 

Zeus never appears. Never intervenes. He’s even worse than Apollo in Ion. 

Amphitryon and Heracles are not the only ones chastising the gods either: 

“MEGARA […] How dark and devious are the ways of gods to men!”

Euripides goes further:

“HERACLES Divinity’s impervious

To human feeling. I defy divinity.” 

2/ The good thing about living in London is that when I’m fascinated by a period, such as ancient Greece at the moment, I can just go to the British Museum and look at the artworks and artefacts from that period. 

This is me with a vase depicting characters from the Oresteia: 

This is part of the collection about the Labours of Heracles: 

Addendum: My friend Himadri added: 

“You mention Hermione, but I think the parallel with The Winter’s Tale goes further. Heracles destroys his family in a fit of madness: the madness comes from the gods, but no reason is given. Similarly, there is no reason given for the madness of Leontes, who also destroys his family. And both Leontes and Heracles must live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt.
Shakespeare knew Heracles. He must have done.” 

Hecabe (or Hecuba) by Euripides

1/ Written ca 424 BC, it’s set around the same time as The Trojan Women, which was performed in 415 BC. Is it not interesting that Euripides, after about 10 years, returned to the character of Hecabe (also known as Hecuba)? 

Anyway, now that I know the story, that scene in Hamlet is going to carry more meaning (even if the Hecuba Shakespeare knew was not Euripides’s):  

“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,    

That he should weep for her?” 

2/ The play begins with the ghost of Polydorus. 

“HECABE […] O dazzling light of day, O murk of night,

Why am I roused and raptured

With haunting fears and phantoms?

O holy Earth, mother of dark-winged dreams,

Take back this frightful vision I have seen!” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

The ghost of the son appears before the mother and tells her about his murder—what does that make you think of?—I think of the ghost of the father telling the son about his murder and calling for revenge—Hamlet! 

3/ At first sight, it seems to be a messy play. Roughly, the first half is Hecabe learning the fate awaiting her daughter Polyxena and trying to save her, in vain; the second half is her discovering the death of her son Polydorus and taking revenge on the murderer, King Polymestor of Thrace. However, it is as though Hecabe takes out on Polymestor all her despair, all her hatred, all her anger at the Greeks. 

“HECABE I saved you, did I not? – and sent you back from Troy.

ODYSSEUS You did indeed; and here I am alive today.

HECABE Yet now you scheme these cowardly plots against me – you

Who by your own confession owe me your own life –

Repaying good with the worst evil in your power!

You are a low and loathsome breed, all you who grasp

At popular honours! who without a thought betray

Your friends, for one phrase that will gratify a mob!

Let me not know you!”

Owing his life to Hecabe, Odysseus now has her daughter sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. He betrays her. It’s not that different from what Polymestor does to her: 

“HECABE […] help me take revenge

On this most false and perjured friend, who without fear

Of powers below or powers above, has done a deed

Of blackest treachery! Many times he was my guest,

Sat at my table, was among my closest friends,

Was treated with all honour. Then he lays a plot,

And murders. Then, on top of murder, he denies

Even a grave, and throws my son into the sea!” 

That is also treachery. That is also betrayal. But Hecabe is powerless to do anything against Odysseus, to take revenge on the Greeks, so she destroys Polymestor in a brutal, horrific way. At least that’s how I read it. 

4/ Look at this line: 

“POLYMESTOR […] No monster like a woman breeds in land or sea;

And those who have most to do with women know it best.” 

That must be the bit Aristophanes references a few times in different plays. However, it would be absurd to call Euripides a misogynist when we can see his sympathy for women in plays such as Hecabe or The Trojan Women. He also gives Hecabe many great passages.  

“HECABE […] The strong ought not to use their strength

To do what is not right; when they are fortunate

They should not think Fortune will always favour them.

I once was fortunate, and now I am so no more;

One day has taken happiness, wealth, everything.

Then be my friend. Let awe, and pity, move your heart.” 

Reminds me of Measure for Measure. 

“HECABE […] How strange, that bad soil, if the gods send rain and sun,

Bears a rich crop, while good soil, starved of what it needs,

Is barren; but man’s nature is ingrained – the bad

Is never anything but bad, and the good man

Is good: misfortune cannot warp his character,

His goodness will endure.

Where lies the difference?

In heredity, or upbringing?” 

Hecabe is not simply a suffering woman, a woman to be pitied. Euripides gives her interesting lines, thought-provoking lines. 

“HECABE A free man? – There is no such thing! All men are slaves;

Some, slaves of money; some, of chance; others are forced,

Either by mass opinion, or the threatening law,

To act against their nature.” 

5/ I also like this: 

“CHORUS Strange how in human life opposites coincide;

How love and hate change with the laws men recognize,

Which can turn bitter foes to friends, old friends to foes.”

Perhaps I’m now more familiar with Euripides, but I would say I like Hecabe more than The Trojan Women. 

The Birds by Aristophanes

1/ The premise is simple: two Athenian men Peisetairus and Euelpides, fed up with the world in which they live, go to the land of the birds and set up a utopia in the sky called Cloudcuckooland. 

The Birds, performed in 414 BC, is the longest Aristophanes play that survives. 

2/ This is an interesting speech from the birds, addressing humans: 

“LEADER Listen, you mortals, you half-alive pests, 

you bundle of leaves, you clay, 

Race of shadows, wingless and weak 

suffering things of a day. 

You shades of a dream, poor mortals attend us, 

us the truly immortal. 

Us everlasting, ageless and always, 

us the only eternal…” 

That comes from the translation by Paul Roche. Here are the same lines as translated by Ian Johnston: 

“CHORUS LEADER Come now, you men out there, who live such dark, sad lives—

you’re frail, just like a race of leaves—you’re shaped from clay,

you tribes of insubstantial shadows without wings,

you creatures of a day, unhappy mortal men,

you figures from a dream, now turn your minds to us,

the eternal, deathless, air-borne, ageless birds,

whose wisdom never dies, so you may hear from us…” 

3/ Peisetairus doesn’t just reject the world of humans; he rejects gods. 

“PEISETAIRUS It follows then 

that if the birds were born before 

Mother Earth 

and before the gods, they are 

heirs of royalty.” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

He becomes a bird. 

“PEISETAIRUS But if they accept you as their god, as their Zeus, 

as their Mother Earth, their Poseidon, their Cronus, 

then let every blessing be theirs.” 

Peisetairus persuades the birds to take control of the sky and wage war against the gods: 

“PEISETAIRUS […] And just as we have to ask for visas from the Boeotians

when we want to visit Delphi, so will humans 

when they sacrifice to the gods have to get visas 

from you for the savory smell of fried bacon 

to reach heaven.” 

He rejects the gods and at the end becomes a god himself. That is quite blasphemous—no? I wonder what the audience thought. 

Wikipedia tells me The Birds has been much analysed. What is its meaning? Is it a satire? An allegory? Or escapist entertainment? I don’t know. But the main thing is that the play is funny, and full of funny lines. 

“SERVANT Not that. It’s simply that when my master 

turned into a hoopoe, he prayed 

that I should turn bird, too, 

so’s he’d still have a valet and a butler.” 

Or: 

“LEADER [to the audience] 

For sheer enjoyment nothing can beat 

putting on wings. 

If for instance one of you had 

a pair of the things 

And became hungry and terribly bored 

with a tragic play, 

He could simply up it from here 

and fly away…” 

On a side note, I wish we had some plays of the fourth and fifth greatest Greek tragedians, just to see the gap between Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and them (the same way we can’t fully appreciate how extraordinary Shakespeare was till we read his contemporaries). 

If you look on Wikipedia, you can see that the play is filled with references to places and writers and politicians and historical figures and mythical figures and other people. However, The Birds is not about a “current issue” in the way that The Clouds is. Some of the characters are recognisable types: fraud, father beater, inspector, informer, and so on. 

“METON I’ve come to survey the air for you 

and partition it into lots.” 

I do love it though when I get the reference:  

“PROMETHEUS […] That’s the reason I hurried here, to put you in the know. 

I always was a friend to man.

PEISETAIRUS Indeed, you are. Without you, we couldn’t even 

barbecue.” 

The play is funny from beginning to end—from Peisetairus and Euelpides’s conversation with the birds, to Peisetairus’s responses to the frauds and other annoying types trying to enter the kingdom, to his negotiations with the gods Poseidon, Heracles, and Triballus. He wants not only Zeus’s sceptre but also the princess (“who takes care of Zeus’s thunderbolts/ and other paraphernalia such as/ foreign affairs, law and order, harbor dues, the shipping plan,/ paymasters, jury fees, and vituperating dolts”): 

“HERACLES […] Are we going to go to war over a single woman?”  

That line must have tickled Aristophanes’s audience. 

The Birds has a light touch and joyful ending that I didn’t see in The Clouds. It’s fun. 

The Clouds by Aristophanes

1/ Strepsiades is an old farmer who runs into debt because of his son Pheidippides’s love of horses. Hearing about the Thinkery and the new thinkers, Strepsiades decides to send his son there to be trained to argue his way out of paying the money back. 

The head of the Thinkery is Socrates, a stand-in for the Sophists. My friend Tom (Wuthering Expectations) however told me “The Clouds has very little to do with the actual Socrates. Or anyway with Plato’s recurring character Socrates. The Aristophanes Socrates is more of, well, an influencer. A self-help influencer. We have those today!” 

For this play, I switched back and forth between the translations by Alan H. Sommerstein and Paul Roche. 

2/ There are some very funny bits at the beginning of the play. 

“FIRST PUPIL And see, here is a map of the entire world—look, there’s Athens. 

[…]

STREPSIADES […] But where is Sparta? 

FIRST PUPIL Oh… er?... Right here. 

STREPSIADES Far too close! Think again! Get it away from us!” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

That’s how I feel about France. 

“SOCRATES […] Do you have a good memory? 

STREPSIADES Yes and no. Very good if somebody owes me something—very bad if I owe it to someone else.” 

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein) 

Relatable. 

I also like it when someone from the Chorus speaks as Aristophanes: 

“LEADER [addressing the audience] 

[…] I thought that you an audience intelligent would be 

And also thought I’d never written a play so witty 

As this—and that is why I first produced it in this city. 

A lot of toil went into it—and yet my play retreated 

By vulgar works of vulgar men unworthily defeated.

For your sake I took all these pains, and this was all your gratitude!...” 

(translated by Sommerstein)

That reminds me of John Webster’s preface to The White Devil. 

The Clouds was a flop when first performed; the text we have is the revised version that was never produced. 

3/ My problem with The Clouds is that I didn’t find it particularly funny—in fact, it was quite tough to read. Part of it is probably that one should be more familiar with the Sophists, the same way Women at Thesmophoria Festival wouldn’t be very funny if one never read Euripides. But it’s not just that. The Clouds is thick with references to Greek mythology, contemporary figures, local incidents, trendy ideas, and so on—my translators kindly explain all the puns, all the parodies and references, but jokes are not particularly funny when you hear them explained, are they? 

This is the difference between The Alchemist (perhaps Ben Jonson’s comedies in general) and Shakespeare’s comedies: The Alchemist is thick with local and contemporary references that now mean nothing to us, Shakespeare’s plays are not. Shakespeare’s comedies still suffer to some extent, because of slang (now obsolete) and puns (if read in translation), but much of the comedy is in characters, situations, and witty dialogue rather than parody, satire, or references to contemporary issues. 

Compared to Lysistrata and Women at Thesmophoria Festival, The Clouds didn’t make me laugh all that much. It’s too sour, I think. 

Women at Thesmophoria Festival by Aristophanes

Also known as Thesmophoriazusae, this play was first performed in 411 BC, the same year as Lysistrata, another play about the battle of the sexes. 

I read the translation by Paul Roche. 

1/ Euripides is one of the main characters in the play: 

“EURIPIDES The women plan to do away with me today 

at the Thesmophoria. 

I speak ill of them, they say.

AGATHON How can we help you, then?

EURIPIDES In every possible way. 

If only you’d infiltrate among the women as a woman 

and speak up for me, you’d save my life 

because only you can represent me well.” 

That’s the premise. The play later has a scene in which the women complain about Euripides’s depiction of women in his plays—do they not notice the way he depicts men?—so the female-only festival of Thesmophoria is where they decide what to do with him.

We no longer have Agathon’s plays but it doesn’t matter, as Agathon refuses to help, so Euripides gets his relative Mnesilochus to dress up as a woman and infiltrate the women’s meeting. The poor man however is exposed, so Euripides rescues him by reenacting scenes from his own plays Helen and Andromeda—Andromeda and some other plays Aristophanes parodies don’t survive but Helen does—it’s a great pleasure to catch the references to not only Helen but also Hippolytus, Ion, and Alcestis. 

2/ Aristophanes is crude:  

“SERVANT For Agathon, our peerless poet, prepareth to—

MNESILOCHUS Get himself buggered.

SERVANT —to lay the keel of a vessel for drama. 

He bendeth the beams, and planeth the planks, 

Riveteth verse with phrase and symbol…” 

Imagine these lines in the tragedies of Aeschylus! Or Euripides! Reading other playwrights, especially the Greeks, makes me fully appreciate how unusual it is that Shakespeare mixes the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. 

Aristophanes also makes me realise how “clean” the plays of Molière are—this is not a complaint—Aristophanes is very funny and Women at Thesmophoria Festival is a light-hearted farce. 

3/ Like the Elizabethans, the ancient Greeks only had male actors playing all the roles, so Mnesilochus pretending to be a woman or even reenacting Helen reuniting with Menelaus is, when we think about it, not that different from what the Greeks were doing with the female roles in the tragedies. 

There is also another layer of comedy: when Cleisthenes appears and says there’s a spy at the meeting, the women all look at each other and try to find out which one is the man, but to Aristophanes’s audience, they were all men. 

4/ This makes me curious: 

“WREATH SELLER […] My husband died in Cyprus, leaving me with five small children whom I struggled to maintain by weaving wreaths of myrtle for the market and have kept them all alive—at least half and half. But now this fellow in his tragedies has made people believe that the gods don’t exist and my sales in consequence have halved…” 

Euripides tends to depict the gods as capricious and cruel; in some cases, such as Electra, he removes the gods except as deus ex machina at the end, Electra and Orestes themselves choose to kill Clytemnestra without an order or oracle from Apollo; so I’m quite curious about the Greeks’ reception of that. 

Another thing is that in The Bacchae, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to dress up as a woman to spy on the women, only for him to be brutally killed and torn limb from limb by the women in frenzy, including his own mother. I can’t help thinking if Euripides simply borrows the idea because “all this female frippery reveals/ to passersby the depths of your depravity”, or there is some deeper meaning that I have missed, considering that Women at Thesmophoria Festival has an appearance of Euripides as a character and Dionysus in his play is the god of drama. 

Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a play about war and sex

Now that I have read the greatest plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it’s natural to get to the comedian and fourth great playwright of ancient Greece: Aristophanes. According to my copy, Lysistrata was performed in 411 BC. 

1/ The premise is simple: there is a war dragging on between the Spartans and the Athenians, a war that doesn’t seem to stop, so Lysistrata decides to do something about it and holds a meeting with women from both sides. 

“LYSISTRATA All right, 

what we’re going to have to forgo is—penis.

ALL Oh no!”

Hahaha. A sex strike. 

The translation I read is by Paul Roche. The same lines in Alan H. Sommerstein’s prose translation are: 

“LYSISTRATA Very well then. We must renounce—sex. [Strong murmurs of approval, gestures of dissent, etc. Several of the company seem on the point of leaving.]…” 

Roche’s choice is funnier.  

2/ I first picked up The Acharnians, Aristophanes’s third play and the earliest among the ones that survive. It didn’t seem to go very well, so I switched to Lysistrata, one of his best plays. Compared to the tragedies, his plays are much harder to read, full of parody and references. 

In this play, Aristophanes mentions the whole trio. 

“LAMPITO What sort of oath are we going to swear?

LYSISTRATA What sort? One like Aeschylus’s, 

with the victim slaughtered over a shield.”

And: 

“LYSISTRATA Oh, what a low-down randy lot we are! 

No wonder we’re the subject of tragedies, 

like Poseidon and the Tub of Sophocles:

have fun with a god, then dump the brats.”

(That play doesn’t survive). 

“MEN’S LEADER Yes, I was fierce and that’s the way I dealt with this fellow. We camped before the gates in ranks of seventeen. And now will I simply stand and watch these brazen women, Enemies of Euripides and of heaven? Oh, I might as well wipe out the glories of Marathon.”

Now these references I enjoy, as I know the playwrights, but there are lots of references and jokes I don’t understand. 

“MEN’S LEADER Euripides got it right. “No beast’s so bloody as a woman,” he said.” 

Euripides appears as a character in 3 of Aristophanes’s 11 surviving plays, and is mentioned in some others—Aristophanes seems… obsessed? I have to read a few to see how weird it is. 

3/ Lysistrata is very funny. 

“LYSISTRATA I know, but some things are more pressing.

CALONICE Like what you’ve summoned us to hear? 

Well, I hope what’s pressing is something really big, 

Lysistrata dear.

LYSISTRATA It’s huge.

CALONICE And weighty?

LYSISTRATA God, it’s huge, and God, it’s weighty.

CALONICE Then why aren’t they all here?

LYSISTRATA Oh, it’s not that; if it were 

there’d be a stampede. No, 

it’s something that sticks in my mind hard as a shaft

and keeps me from sleeping, though I tease it and tease it 

night after night.

CALONICE By now the poor thing must be floppy.” 

Aristophanes is not above a cheap laugh, which is something he shares with Shakespeare.

But once in a while, he sneaks in a serious point: 

“LYSISTRATA […] when we are in our prime and ought to be enjoying life, 

we sleep alone because of the war. 

And I’m not just talking about 

us married ones. . . . It pains me even more 

to think of the young girls 

growing into lonely spinsters in their rooms.

MAGISTRATE Men grow old, too, don’t you know!

LYSISTRATA Hell’s bells! It’s not the same. 

When a man comes home, 

even if he’s old and gray, he can find a girl to marry in no time, 

but a woman enjoys a very short-lived prime, 

and once that’s gone, she won’t be wed by anyone. 

She mopes at home 

full of thwarted dreams.” 

He clearly does have sympathy for women, in such a male-dominated society. 

4/ The thing I like about Lysistrata is that the whole thing is ridiculous. 

“[SECOND WIFE runs out from the Acropolis.]

SECOND WIFE Heavens above! I forgot to shuck my flax 

when I left the house.

LYSISTRATA So you’re off to shuck your flax? Get back inside.

SECOND WIFE By Our Lady of Light, I’ll return in a trice. 

All I want is a little f . . . I mean, shucking.” 

Both the women and the men are horny, and going nuts. 

“HERALD That there’s a Spartan cipher rod.

CINESIAS I’ve got a Spartan cipher rod as well.”

The whole thing is ridiculous and everyone is absurd—but aren’t we all? We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. 

5/ One thing that particularly intrigues me is how this play was staged at the time. It seems more complicated than the tragedies, yes? There are more characters and the chorus is split in two, the men’s side and the women’s side. But I’m more curious about how they dealt with the female characters acting sexy in see-through dresses—consider that the actors were all male—and the men exposing their “Spartan cipher rods”—what did they do?

I guess we’ll never know.

The Bacchae by Euripides

The first thing I’m going to say is that The Bacchae is said to be Euripides’s greatest play. The second thing is that it’s a play that requires multiple readings and I haven’t got an adequate grasp of the play. 

But I’m going to write a blog post about it anyway. 

1/ This is a gruesome play. Ancient Greek tragedies are often bleak: son kills father and marries mother, wife kills husband then gets killed by their children, mother kills children, stepmother fancies stepson and falsely accuses him of rape and causes his death, husband lets wife die instead of him, etc. All disturbing stuff (what’s wrong with the Greeks?). And yet The Bacchae is still more horrible and horrifying.

Part of it is the plot itself: the god Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele, goes to Thebes to prove his power and punish the city, including his own aunts and his cousin Pentheus, for denying his divinity. All the women of the city run around in a frenzy caused by Dionysus, destroying all and ripping animals to shreds. 

“MESSENGER […] Great uddered kine then hadst thou seen 

Bellowing in sword-like hands that cleave and tear, 

A live steer riven asunder, and the air 

Tossed with rent ribs or limbs of cloven tread. 

And flesh upon the branches, and a red

Rain from the deep green pines. Yea, bulls of pride, 

Horns swift to rage, were fronted and aside 

Flung stumbling, by those multitudinous hands

Dragged pitilessly…” 

(translated by Gilbert Murray) 

Together with other crazed women, Agave tears apart the limbs of her own son Pentheus and holds his head as a trophy.

“CADMUS Thou bearest in thine arms an head—what head?

AGAVE (beginning to tremble, and not looking at what she carries) 

A lion’s—so they all said in the chase. 

CADMUS Turn to it now—’tis no longer toil—and gaze.

AGAVE Ah! What is this? What am I carrying here? 

CADMUS Look upon it full, till all be clear! 

AGAVE I see… most deadly pain! Oh, woe is me!” 

It is an unbearable scene. 

But The Bacchae is particularly gruesome and horrible because it makes us ask: what’s the point of all this? What are we to make of all this cruelty and violence? 

Kenneth McLeish for example says in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“How do mortals come to terms with the presence of God in their lives—particularly when God is, or seems to them to be, capricious, dangerous and uncompromising? In this play Dionysos demands submission in exchange for unimaginable ecstasy. But his cult, at least in human terms, is blood-crazed and outlandish.”

It is especially bizarre and disturbing when we consider that all these Greek plays were performed at the Dionysian Festival. 

2/ In a way, the play is about the war between two tyrants, but what can a mortal do against the power of a god? 

3/ Himadri pointed out: 

“Dionysus goes further, and persuades Pentheus – who had, at his first appearance, been so full of macho swagger – to dress as a woman, so he could blend in with the other members of the Dionysian cult. The reference here is clearly to Aristophanes’ play Women of Thesmophoria (a play in which Euripides himself appears as a character), in which a man dresses as a woman in order to infiltrate an all-female society; but where the effect there had been comic, here, it is grotesque. It is quite common for comedies to appropriate elements of tragic drama, and then to parody the tragic by depicting these borrowed elements in an absurd manner; but here, Euripides reverses the process: he borrows from a comedy to add to his tragedy an extra layer of horror. Pentheus, dressed absurdly as a woman, follows his own prurient inclinations towards his own grisly death. Dionysus merely helped facilitate the process.”

I didn’t know this, obviously, as I haven’t read Aristophanes. 

Both Tom (Wuthering Expectations blog) and Himadri (Argumentative Old Git blog) wrote about the meta-theatre aspect of the play. I can’t help noticing the parallels and contrasts between The Tempest, believed to be the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, and The Bacchae, Euripides’s last play and performed shortly after his death: Prospero and Dionysus start with a long speech explaining the past and their intentions; they are both akin to a playwright/ theatre director, moving things around, orchestrating the plot; but The Tempest is about reconciliation and seen as a farewell to the stage whereas The Bacchae is about the god of drama causing gruesome violence, in a cool, sociopathic way. 

“DIONYSUS Yet cravest thou such 

A sight as would much grieve thee?”

The same line, in John Davie’s translation, is “Would you really like to see what gives you pain?”. 

That’s an interesting question, is it not? Why do we watch awful things onstage (or onscreen)? 

I can’t say I understand Euripides’s play, but it’s gripping, powerful, and disturbing. 

The Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do

When I read Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights in England, or Spanish Golden Age playwrights such as Lope de Vega, I think Shakespeare’s light years ahead of them all. But I don’t think that way when reading the ancient Greeks—I think they’re great in a different way.

Shakespeare’s works may feel richer as he has the advantage of having more actors and mixes the tragic and the comic—not to mention that he can do both tragedy and comedy, and other genres—but the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are not any inferior to Shakespeare’s tragedies in terms of depth and tragic power. This is especially staggering when we consider that there’s a gap of 2000 years between them. 

More interestingly, the Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do. In King Oedipus by Sophocles for instance, the tension in the entire drama arises not because of what’s happening, but because of what has already happened. This is something I later see in Ibsen, but not in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays also don’t question human agency. 

The Electra plays remind me again that Shakespeare doesn’t seem to take any interest in the mother-daughter relationship. He very often explores the father-daughter relationship (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, etc) and depicts some fascinating mother-son relationships (Hamlet and Coriolanus); the only mother-daughter relationship I can think of is Lady Capulet and Juliet, which is not particularly developed, and if we stretch it a bit, the Countess and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, but they’re not actually mother and daughter. 

He also doesn’t take much interest in the subject of incest. In Pericles, it’s only a small part at the beginning of the story, not explored, and that’s a late play that Shakespeare co-wrote with another playwright. 

Now that I’ve read Hippolytus and other versions of the same myth, I’ve also realised that Shakespeare doesn’t write about women who make false rape allegations. We know he’s fascinated by jealousy and slander, and writes multiple times about women being falsely accused of cheating (Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale), but not about the other way around. 

Shakespeare also doesn’t adapt any of the classical plays. For his plays, he uses historical accounts, poems, Ovid, Chaucer, romances (such as Pandosto), and so on, but doesn’t rewrite or revisit any of the classical plays. Even if he didn’t know Greek, I believe there were Latin translations of the ancient Greek plays available. We don’t see him adapting the Roman plays either. 

This is fascinating stuff. 

Phèdre by Jean Racine and the Phaedra myth

1/ Wouldn’t you agree it’s a good idea that I, instead of going straight from Molière (1622–1673) to his contemporary Racine (1639–1699), read Racine’s greatest play now when I’m already acquainted with the versions by Euripides and Seneca (and they’re still fresh in my mind)? As with the Electra myth under the hands of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it’s fascinating to watch great artists play with the same material (which is very different from the mind-numbing tedium of Hollywood pumping out sequels and remakes for easy money). 

I read the translation by Robert Bruce Boswell, who uses the names Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus, Aricia, Oenone, Theramenes, etc. instead of Phèdre, Hippolyte, Thésée, Aricie, Œnone, Théramène, etc.

Starting from the same myth about Phaedra fancying her stepson Hippolytus, Euripides simplifies the plot, in which Theseus is simply away; Seneca complicates it, emphasising Phaedra’s background and the image of the bull, having Theseus go to the underworld to help a friend abduct Persephone, and mentioning that Theseus killed Hippolytus’s mother Antiope; Racine complicates the plot even more by creating the character of Aricia, daughter and sole survivor of the royal house supplanted by Theseus and the woman with whom Hippolytus has fallen in love. I guess the French wouldn’t buy a character who is indifferent to love and women. Racine also has Theseus rumoured to be dead, which is believed to lead to a rivalry for the throne between Phaedra’s son, Hippolytus, and Aricia, but which actually causes Phaedra to act on her feelings for Hippolytus and Hippolytus to confess his feelings to Aricia. That sounds more French. 

2/ Racine’s version is closer to Seneca’s in terms of plot. In both plays, the gods are mentioned but don’t appear. In both plays, Phaedra tells Hippolytus her feelings. In both plays, the rape accusation—the idea of attacking first—comes from the nurse. In both plays, Phaedra is alive as she falsely accuses Hippolytus (though Racine’s Phaedra only insinuates, the nurse is the one making the accusation). In both plays, Phaedra kills herself in front of Theseus after Hippolytus’s death. However, like Euripides, Racine has Theseus confronting Hippolytus and the son trying to defend himself. 

The central difference between Racine and Seneca, however, is that Seneca’s characters are all base and repulsive, whereas Racine’s characters are nobler and more sympathetic. Phaedra, or Phèdre, struggles against her own passion. 

“PHAEDRA […] I look’d, alternately turn’d pale and blush’d

To see him, and my soul grew all distraught;

A mist obscured my vision, and my voice

Falter’d, my blood ran cold, then burn’d like fire;

Venus I felt in all my fever’d frame,

Whose fury had so many of my race

Pursued. 

[…] I fled his presence everywhere, but found him--

O crowning horror!—in his father’s features.” 

And when she confesses her feelings to Hippolytus (or Hippolyte), not knowing about Aricia: 

“PHAEDRA […] I love. But think not

That at the moment when I love you most

I do not feel my guilt; no weak compliance

Has fed the poison that infects my brain.

The ill-starr’d object of celestial vengeance,

I am not so detestable to you

As to myself.” 

She only yields to Oenone’s persuasions when she—everyone—thinks Theseus is dead. Later she gets a bad conscience as she, following Oenone, smears Hippolytus’s name to save her own honour.  

Now look at her when she realises that he loves someone else. 

“PHAEDRA […] Ye gods, when, deaf to all my sighs and tears,

He arm’d his eye with scorn, his brow with threats,

I deem’d his heart, impregnable to love,

Was fortified ’gainst all my sex alike.

And yet another has prevail’d to tame

His pride, another has secured his favour.” 

How could anyone not pity her? 

“PHAEDRA […] Alas! full freedom had they

To see each other. Heav’n approved their sighs;

They loved without the consciousness of guilt;

And every morning’s sun for them shone clear,

While I, an outcast from the face of Nature,

Shunn’d the bright day, and sought to hide myself.”

She is nobler, and more psychologically complex than Seneca’s character. Her suffering is a mixture of shame and guilt and heartbreak. 

Like Euripides, Racine also gives a sense of nobility to Hippolytus and Theseus—something Seneca doesn’t do—Hippolytus’s death in Racine’s play is heartbreaking, as he previously decided to remain silent about Phaedra’s sexual advances because “Let us trust to Heav’n/ My vindication, for the gods are just.” The irony! 

3/ Aricia, Racine’s added character, is dull, barely alive. But the character of the nurse is the most interesting one in the three plays, because of the relationship between her and Phaedra. 

When Phaedra, at the beginning of the play, wants to kill herself, Oenone tries to dissuade her, saying that her suicide would offend the gods and be a betrayal of Theseus and her children. When that doesn’t work, she says: 

“OENONE […] Think how in my arms you lay

New born. For you, my country and my children

I have forsaken. Do you thus repay

My faithful service?” 

Racine develops their relationship further and emphasises her devotion: Oenone is the one who tells Phaedra to stay alive; she is the one who persuades her to speak to Hippolytus after Theseus’s supposed death; and she is the one who comes up with the rape accusation. And yet: 

“PHAEDRA […] What hast thou done? Why did your wicked mouth

With blackest lies slander his blameless life?

Perhaps you’ve slain him, and the impious pray’r

Of an unfeeling father has been answer’d.

No, not another word! Go, hateful monster […]. 

OENONE (alone) O gods! to serve her what have I not done?

This is the due reward that I have won.”

I’m not telling you what happens in the end, but Racine turns her into a tragic character. Unlike Seneca, he gets you to understand and have pity for all the characters, even when they do wicked things. 

This is a great play. 

Phaedra (or Hippolytus) by Seneca

1/ I have always been intrigued by Seneca’s influence on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights, so my curiosity about other versions of the Hippolytus/ Phaedra myth is a good excuse to pick up Seneca. Hence the big jump from Greece of the 5th century BC to Rome of the 1st century. 

Funnily enough (at least to me), the time gap between Sophocles or Euripides and Seneca is slightly bigger than that between Shakespeare and us. 

2/ Seneca’s Phaedra and Euripides’s Hippolytus are quite different, though if I’m not mistaken, Seneca’s play might be closer to the Greek myth and Euripides is the one making changes to the story.

In Seneca’s play, Phaedra is responsible for her own actions, lusting after her stepson and confessing to him her feelings—Seneca removes both Aphrodite and Artemis (here Venus and Diana) from the story—Hippolytus is still devoted to Diana and vowing chastity, but she doesn’t appear. 

The nurse is instead the voice of reason and morality and there’s a long scene in which she chastises Phaedra: 

“NURSE […] Why, my poor mistress, why are you resolved

To heap fresh infamy upon your house,

With sin worse than your mother’s? Wilful sin

Is a worse evil than unnatural passion;

That comes by fate, but sin comes from our nature.

You think, because your husband’s eyes are closed

To all this upper world, that you are free

To sin without fear?” 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

She is in the right, but in Seneca’s depiction she’s a tedious moralising character. One interesting bit is her denial of gods:  

“NURSE: That love is god

Is the vile fiction of unbridled lust

Which, for its licence, gives to lawless passion

The name of an imagined deity.

[…] Vain fancies

Conceived by crazy minds, they are all false!” 

An atheist in a play written in ancient Rome? 

The thing that saves her from being a two-dimensional character is that she’s the one to come up with the rape allegation: 

“NURSE Now all the evil is exposed. What then?

Shall resolution faint or fail? Not so.

We must prefer a counter charge against him,

Take up the case ourselves and prove him guilty

Of violation. Crime must cover crime.

The safest shield in danger is attack.

When the offence is private, who shall say

Which of us sinned and which was sinned against?” 

3/ The play is full of long speeches, full of rhetoric, which is clearly an influence on Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare. Just look at the scene between Phaedra’s nurse and Hippolytus for example. All rhetoric, which makes me realise that there’s not much of that in ancient Greek plays at all. 

“NURSE […] Why – if from our life

We banish Venus, who replenishes

And recreates our dwindling stock, the earth

Will soon become a desert, drear and ugly,

The sea a dead sea, where there are no fish,

The sky will have no birds, the woods no beasts,

The air will be a place where nothing moves

Except the passing winds…”

The nurse is persuading Hippolytus to leave his vows to Diana and “seize pleasure”, which makes me think of Shakespeare’s sonnets 1-17. 

Seneca expands on Hippolytus’s hostility towards women: 

“HIPPOLYTUS […] Mothers, defying nature’s law, destroyed

Their infants ere they lived. Stepmothers –

What can one say of them? – wild beasts

Have more compassion. Woman, say what you will,

Is the prime mover of all wickedness;

Expert in every evil art, woman

Lays siege to man; for her adulteries

Cities have burned, nation made war on nation,

Multitudes perished in the fall of kingdoms.” 

Not very likeable, is he? Euripides’s Hippolytus may be a bit irrational and self-righteous in his vows of chastity, but mostly comes across as indifferent to women and all the troubles that come with romance. Seneca’s Hippolytus is a misogynist. 

“HIPPOLYTUS I hate them all; I dread, I shun, I loathe them.

I choose – whether by reason, rage, or instinct –

I choose to hate them. Can you marry fire

To water? Can ships safely sail the quicksands?

Can Tethys make the sun rise in the west?

Can wild wolves smile on does? No more can I

Consent to have a tender thought for woman.”

Rhetoric. 

4/ Whereas Euripides creates a tragedy of three people (Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus), Seneca focuses on Phaedra, creating a scene of her offering herself to Hippolytus and getting rejected; removing the two scenes between Hippolytus and his father Theseus, including the one in which Theseus confronts Hippolytus and the accused tries to defend himself in vain; moving Phaedra’s suicide to the end, after Hippolytus’s awful death. In Euripides’s play, Phaedra’s suicide is about shame; in Seneca’s, about guilt. 

It is an interesting play. Some of you may prefer Seneca’s portrayal of Phaedra as a shameless, lustful, wicked woman, but all three characters are more unpleasant—if not downright repulsive—in his play, and I find Euripides’s play much more moving and tragic. 

Addendum: This is a good essay comparing treatment of character in the two plays. 

Hippolytus by Euripides [updated]

1/ I picked up the play thinking it’s about a woman desiring her stepson, which it is, but it’s also about a false rape accusation. 

The play begins with Aphrodite, feeling slighted and disrespected by Hippolytus, causing his stepmother Phaedra to fall in love with him. In this revised version of the play (the first of which only survives in fragments), Phaedra resists her desires but her nurse, seeing her despair, gets the secret out of her and tells Hippolytus (even a worse busybody than Emma Woodhouse). Repulsed by sexuality and even more by Phaedra’s passion for him, he gets angry and threatens to tell his father Theseus, only for her to hang herself and leave a note accusing Hippolytus of having raped her. Theseus banishes and curses his own son, despite Hippolytus’s protests, and in the end discovers the truth only too late. 

“HIPPOLYTUS Three lives by her one hand! ’Tis all clear now.” 

(translated by Gilbert Murray)

The play is not only about the titular character. If we look at Shakespeare’s plays, I think it would be fair to say that Hamlet is the tragedy of Hamlet; Macbeth is the tragedy of the Macbeths; King Lear is the tragedy of Lear (Gloucester only mirrors Lear); Othello is the tragedy of Othello (though you might also argue for Desdemona). But Hippolytus is the tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus and Theseus—all three are tragic characters—Euripides lets us see the downfall and suffering of all three. 

2/ This is another play about the cruelty of the gods. I had read some Greek mythology before but it was a long time ago—it’s rather curious to encounter the Greek gods when I’m only used to Buddha and the Christian God. 

The Greek gods have all the faults of human beings—they just have immortality, and power to mess with people’s lives—Aphrodite causes all this suffering, for what? But Artemis can’t stop her—all she can do is to take revenge on Aphrodite’s favourite—poor soul!  

3/ The nurse has some interesting lines: 

“NURSE […] Oh, pain were better than tending pain! 

For that were single, and this is twain, 

With grief of heart and labour of limb. 

Yet all man’s life is but ailing and dim, 

And rest upon earth comes never.” 

Is that why she wants to cause some drama? 

“NURSE […] And because thou lovest, wilt fall 

And die! And must all lovers die, then? All 

That are or shall be? A blithe law for them! 

[…] A straight and perfect life is not for man…”

She’s much more impulsive than Juliet’s nurse. 

Phaedra is a great tragic character: 

“PHAEDRA […] When the first stab came, and I knew I loved, 

I cast about how best to face mine ill. 

And the first thought that came, was to be still 

And hide the sickness.—For no trust there is 

In man’s tongue, that so well admonishes 

And counsels and betrays, and waxes fat  

With griefs of its own gathering!—After that 

I would my madness bravely bear, and try 

To conquer by mine own heart’s purity. 

My third mind, when these two availed me naught 

To quell love, was to die…” 

I’ve read that apparently in the earlier version of the play, Euripides depicts Phaedra as a lustful woman who shamelessly makes sexual advances at her stepson. Here instead is a tragic depiction of a woman who struggles against her own desires and suffers on her own; that she does the awful thing of falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape, out of shame and a wish to save her own honour and also out of anger, only makes her a more complex character, makes her more alive. 

4/ Hippolytus, at least at the beginning, is not a very likeable character: 

“HIPPOLYTUS O God, why hast Thou made this gleaming snare, 

Woman, to dog us on the happy earth? 

Was it Thy will to make Man, why his birth

Through Love and Woman? Could we not have rolled 

Our store of prayer and offerings, royal gold, 

Silver and weight of bronze before Thy feet, 

And bought of God new child-souls, as were meet 

For each man’s sacrifice, and dwelt in homes 

Free, where nor Love nor Woman goes and comes?” 

Not hard to see why Aphrodite dislikes him. Euripides however gets us to sympathise with Hippolytus in the two scenes with his father. 

“HIPPOLYTUS […] Oh, strange, false Curse! Was there some blood-stained head, 

Some father of my line, unpunished, 

Whose guilt lived in his kin, 

And passed, and slept, till after this long day 

In lights… Oh, why on me? Me, far away

And innocent of sin?

O words that cannot save! 

When will this breathing end in that last deep 

Pain that is painlessness? ’Tis sleep I crave. 

When wilt thou bring me sleep, 

Thou dark and midnight magic of the grave!” 

It is such a moving moment, as Theseus looks at his son in anguish, and anger at his own rashness, and the dying Hippolytus forgives his father. 

Structurally, Hippolytus is possibly the most perfect of Euripides’s plays, at least among the ones I’ve read. Now I’m also curious about the versions by Seneca and by Racine. 

Addendum: My friend Himadri wrote:

“In one way, we can view [the Greek gods] as personifications of human desires and impulses. Phaedra, a middle-aged woman, lusts after a younger man: that happens. Aphrodite is merely a personification of whatever inscrutable force it is that arouses the desire.

Euripides’ vision, it seems to me, is of humans driven to destruction by their own dark, inscrutable impulses. The gods seem to function as personifications of these impulses. And the gods - these impulses - are needlessly, inexplicably cruel.”

Alcestis by Euripides

1/ First, some context: my Penguin copy says that Alcestis is “the first surviving play by Euripides, but by this stage he was an experienced dramatist, seventeen years from his first competition.” 

More interestingly: 

“We happen to know, from a summary which precedes the play in our manuscripts, that the Alcestis was produced as the fourth of a tetralogy of plays, occupying the slot normally filled by the single ‘satyr-play’.” 

I read the prose translation by John Davie. 

2/ As I started this blog post, I thought I still struggled with Euripides, compared to Sophocles and Aeschylus. But as it happens, sometimes my mind changes as I write, and organise my thoughts—I’ve realised that Alcestis is an interesting and troubling play. 

The interesting thing about the play is that, as Euripides tackles the myth of Alcestis, he raises questions about what kind of man Admetus is that he’s happy to let his wife die in his place, and reproaches his parents for not offering to die so that he could live. 

“ALCESTIS […] And yet they betrayed you, the parents who gave you life, though they were of a good age to die and to save a son’s life—a glorious end to their days. […] We could then have gone on living, we two, for the rest of our years; you would not be grieving as now, a husband turned widower, a father with motherless children.” 

Alcestis chooses to sacrifice herself, but not without some bitterness.

“ADMETUS […] When it came to the test, you showed your true colours; I no longer regard myself as your son. What man on earth could match your cowardice? Though as old as you are, as close to life’s end, you lacked the will, the courage to die for your son, renouncing this privilege to the woman who lies here, whose blood is not ours!

[…] 

PHERES: […] I brought you into this world and raised you up to be the master of his house; I am under no obligation to die for you.” 

And he’s right. I wouldn’t expect my mum to volunteer to die in my place, why does Admetus expect so from his parents and condemn them when they don’t? 

After Alcestis’s death, he cries, he mourns, he talks about wanting to die himself, but still comes across as an egotist, worrying about “the kind of talk [he will] be subjected to.” Even when he cries about her loss, I don’t believe him:     

“ADMETUS […] The loneliness inside will drive me out, whenever I see our bed with no wife to share it and the chair she used to sit on and, throughout the house, the floor unswept.”  

Is that really Admetus mourning his wife’s death and realising the misery and pointlessness of life in her absence, or is that him regretting his promise to never marry anyone else? 

“ADMETUS […] Outside there will be Thessalian weddings and gatherings full of women to drive me indoors once more. I will not be able to bear the sight of them, my wife’s friends, all as young as her.” 

Heracles, pitying Alcestis and appreciating Admetus’s hospitality despite his grief, brings her back from the dead. In the final scene, he returns to the house with thanks and brings with him a veiled lady, asking Admetus to keep her safe till his return. Admetus says no: 

“ADMETUS […] Where would a young woman live in my house, anyway? She is young, as her clothes and jewellery indicate. Is she to live under the same roof as men, then? How will she keep her virginity if she consorts with young men? It is no easy thing, Heracles, to restrain a young man in his prime. It is your interests I am thinking of here. Or am I to admit her to my dead wife’s chamber and keep her there? How am I to allow her a place in that lady’s bed?”

Above is the translation by John Davie. Here is the same passage in Gilbert Murray’s translation: 

“ADMETUS […] Where in my castle could so young a maid

Be lodged—her veil and raiment show her young:

Here, in the men’s hall? I should fear some wrong.

’Tis not so easy, Prince, to keep controlled

My young men. And thy charge I fain would hold

Sacred.—If not, wouldst have me keep her in

The women’s chambers ... where my dead hath been?

How could I lay this woman where my bride

Once lay?” 

This is disturbing, is it not? Admetus says no multiple times, but the temptation is there—not long after his wife’s death—and then he yields. Fortunately for him, the veiled woman turns out to be Alcestis herself. 

3/ I find that my interpretation of the play is rather different from Kenneth McLeish’s: 

“The scene shows that Admetos has changed because of what has happened—that he has grown in moral stature and self-awareness and he is rewarded, against expectation, when his wife holds out her arms to him.” (A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama) 

There are probably different ways of performing the play. I myself don’t think Admetus changes—too little time has passed for us to know how well he would keep his word—the play is troubling. 

A few people on Twitter mentioned to me the parallels between Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale. Now I can see for myself: the similarities aren’t enough for me to think that Euripides influenced Shakespeare’s play. One important difference is that in the end, Leontes has been tested, he has been loyal to Hermione and lived in penance for 16 years, and the final scene is not about Hermione’s “resurrection” as it’s about her restoration to him; the restoration of Alcestis from the dead, to me, is a reward to her, not to Admetus.