Admetus the Artist

Introduction

The most disturbing problem for readers of Alcestis is Admetus.  How are we to take seriously a man who first makes the rounds of his loved ones to ask them each in turn to die in his place and then accepts his wife's death for his own and at the last minute begs her not to forsake him? Even scholars who insist that his acceptance of his wife's sacrifice is outside the drama (an argument which I find disingenuous) and therefore irrelevant are troubled by his behavior.

Why is Admetus rewarded by having his wife restored to him? He is --it is said-- guilty of cowardice in the face of death; he betrays all his promises to his dead wife; he disowns his elderly father and mother and blames them for her death. Readers and critics who are indignant at Admetus' good fortune, unwittingly show a decidedly male bias; for they tend to forget that Admetus is not the only one rewarded at the end of the play. Alcestis has been presented as a young wife and mother who clearly valued her life, who found it rich and rewarding, who wanted to live and see her children grow up and marry and have children of their own. On the other hand, it is only fair to notice that Admetus' much bigger part in the play does justify his prominence in the interpretations.

What active part does Admetus play either in the disaster or in the "happy ending"? Does he remain throughout his stage life the kind of man (as A. M. Dale says) to whom "things happen"? It is more clear that he plays a part in the near tragedy because--whether he actively solicited his wife's death in his place, whether he had a choice once she accepted--he did do the unthinkable: he asked and expected other people to die for him, apparently thinking it was possible (modally) and acceptable (morally). His part in the happy ending is more subtle: his contribution lies in keeping his wife alive against all logic and even truth. For this failure either to tell the truth or to accept it he is much criticized both onstage and in the study.

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Admetus Reviewed

The kommos (the scene of lamentation between Admetus and the chorus, after the funeral) is Admetus' scene. Before that he had been a vague figure, overshadowed by his wife's heroism, his children's sorrow, his guest's bravery and bravado, his father's winning logic. But all along he has been bringing himself into sharper focus until finally he becomes the central figure in his life.

In the prologue he is called hosios (10) by Apollo: this is the only positive, particular, thing said about him there. Even his future role in the welcoming of the guest (Heracles) is put in the passive: the guest will be received into the house. In the actual scene of the reception of Heracles, we do see that Admetus plays a more active, insistent, almost forceful, part.

The chorus enters to sing of its loyalty to Admetus and of the futility of the situation. There is nowhere to go; nothing more that can be done; there is no hope. Our generic role as audience, to wait for something to happen, is making itself felt. The maid's speech prolongs the wait. Admetus' role is to be ineffectual, to have really nothing to do. He fills the void of his being with inane speech. In her concern to describe the perfect Alcestis, the maid servant generalizes him out of existence. We cannot see him present in her narrative. What is Admetus doing? The chorus wants him in the picture. The maid had left him out, because his carrying on, his general fecklessness (cf. 202) detracted from the perfection of the scene of Alcestis preparing for death that she was describing. His presence would have spoiled the epic analogies. [Alcestis seeing herself as the loving Andromache saying farewell to her loving husband (actually in the play not to her husband but to her marriage bed); Alcestis pretending to be Penelope, rejecting the opportunity of choosing a second husband had she gone on living]. But, yes, Admetus was there weeping, physically supporting his wife, beseeching her not to leave him, and in general asking for the impossible (201-203). Thanks to the chorus' loyalty (199-200) he is not forgotten and we have to adjust our mental picture of the scene in the interior of the house to include him. The chorus is interested in his actions and reactions, guiding the audience back from the more attractive figure of Alcestis.

It is Admetus' futile position that activates the chorus in the next stasimon, a temporally illogical song: they pray for help, for release, for a way out of this disaster and still they sing of Alcestis as if she is already dead. At the end of the song they must see her as she actually is now, in that state which the maid called both alive and dead. We and they are forced to face the unpleasant present. This is the hard part, accepting the physical reality of dying. This is the part, not heroic, but surely heartrending, that Admetus has been experiencing all along, all day, and probably for much longer than that (421). No wonder he cannot bring himself to accept the actual death. His wife has both been and not been for so long.

Alcestis, though in the shadowy transitional world of the dying, is vivid pictorially and ethically even before she appears on stage.

The perfect work of art described by the maid comes to life at Alcestis' entrance. Part of the wit of the piece is that Admetus will talk about a statue of his wife that he will have sculpted by the finest craftsmen which he in turn will try to bring to life in his dreams and which, ultimately, with the help of Heracles we all see come to life at the end of the drama.

Admetus is so vague until his iambic speech in the second episode that it is almost as if he were the one in the liminal space between life and death. And so he should be (according to the personified Death) and would be (had it not been for Apollo's intervention in arranging for a postponement of his demise if he could find a substitute). After the obligatory promise of fidelity to and praise of his wife, he begins to create himself, a self that is at first characterized through the significant details of his life and interests which he gives as he is denying himself his pleasures and later filled in by his almost Achillean pathetics.

Alcestis has just asked Admetus to pledge not to remarry. He is not content with such a bland request and goes to extremes in his promises of self-denial. (Passage # 1)

His bleak future (which is to start "right away") he now begins to map out. His grief will last until he dies. In fact his life will be one long rehearsal for his death. He will hate his parents. The house will be quiet, no company, no music, no glad sounds. But, no, Admetus is not satisfied with negative reminders of his loss. He will drain out some of the weight of his sorrows with the statue. Of course the statue will not leave him. It cannot--being lifeless--provide him much pleasure either ("a frigid delight" is what he calls it). He animates it in his next declaration. She--the statue come to life--will move back and forth in his dreams, becoming more actually his wife. A constant characteristic of dreams is the flitting (cf.355) of insubstantial shapes, and another is, as Admetus notices, the unpredictability of their duration (356). And thus, Admetus, having promised total sensual deprivation (line 347, "for you have taken the joy from my life" is the low point for himself and for her), begins to re-animate his world.

The deconstruction of Admetus shows us his parts. We see him most clearly when we see him denying everything that makes him himself. He promises to give up parties, music, all pleasures, and in their place there will be his living shrine to his wife, the statue, the dreams, his loneliness and misery. Her death has not robbed him of everything, for he sees himself having a more positive--if hopeless--role as Orpheus, the poet of her resurrection. This is a turning point in his self-image and in the speech. He is not Orpheus: he cannot bring her back to dwell with him in their home and to keep the house for him. In his mind, then, he reverses their statuses. She is asked to prepare a home for him in the realm of the dead, as if she were alive. He will come to join her, as if his life were a timeless death-like waiting or he a bride preparing to come to the home of the waiting husband.

The chorus in the next stasimon takes up a variety of the ideas expressed by both Alcestis and Admetus, most particularly, picturing her alive in the world of the dead. The finality of death is mixed with kinds of continuation, through "dwelling" in Hades and through praise of the heroic dead.

In his scene with Heracles, Admetus finally begins to play a central role in his life. He does something: he invites Heracles to be his guest and almost forces him to stay in his house. And he invents the alternative story about the "afterlife" of Alcestis.

Heracles has arrived, between labors, more or less out of the blue, but predicted by Apollo, just in time to miss the death of Alcestis and the laying out of her corpse. The chorus forgetting its role as mourners questions him. They announce the return of the king:

And here is the king of our land, himself Admetus coming out of the house ...

The characters in this passage are Admetus and Heracles:  (Passage # 2)

The line I translated "My wife ... It's a woman we were just now talking about" (my wife ... the woman we were talking about just now...)  is a wonderfully ambiguous line:  the same word, gune,  means both "woman" and "wife." The same confusion of generic woman and Admetus' wife will return at the end of the play.

Heracles asks if Alcestis has died, to which Admetus replies "there is a twofold story to tell of her (519)." "Well is she dead or alive?" Heracles asks. "She is and she is not" Admetus equivocates.

The instant the words are uttered, the double muthos in some sense is, or is becoming, true. The point of Admetus' long speech promising eternal fidelity (and more) to his wife is that she still is his wife. And in the Heracles scene she is still in his house (though "just dead in his house" as the chorus reminds him, 599-600). She is in transit between worlds so that the diplous muthos may make some (if only slight) ritual sense. Finally the almost sophistic equivocation makes the truth--what turns out to be the truth--possible.

What is accomplished in the first Heracles scene? In a manner of speaking, Admetus does become the Orpheus figure, the poet or creator he wished he could be. He has kept his wife alive, even resurrected her in Heracles' mind. He has substituted a generic female dependant for his wife's corpse, distancing his wife's death from himself and herself, and at the same time equating her death with her promise to die for him. He has thus begun to pave the way for her anonymous return and suggested a plot to Heracles. In his role as an intellectualized Orpheus, Admetus will not look directly at his resurrected wife until she is firmly in hand, though even then poor Admetus will use the wrong mythical hero to compare himself to (Perseus slaying the Gorgon). Most important Admetus' words in this scene have invented a second muthos that Alcestis is not dead.

Mostly he follows Heracles' lead, without any artistic direction, inventing his truths and half-truths according to words suggested to him by his friend, remaining the kind of man to whom things happen. Only in his insistence that Heracles be his guest, against the great man's protests and to the horror of the chorus, does he make his own character felt. But the chorus in spite of its earlier remonstrations follows Admetus' lead. It is they who make the connection between Heracles and Apollo. Both are guests of Admetus. Both, it will turn out, are saviors, Apollo in the chorus' Orphic cameo, Heracles in his own generic story (a lie that sounds a lot like the truth because it probably is a truth, just not the truth) of a rural athletic contest with horses or cattle and a woman as prizes. "A woman came with them." These words show Heracles' tact and artistic mastery of the situation. To fight for Alcestis and win her would have been unseemly. That is Admetus' part.

Alcestis is revealed three times. First, in the maid's long description, she is the busy housewife and mother, preparing for death, by doing what she ordinarily does, but with added significance. Then in propria persona she is the type of the dying sacrificial virgin (or the youthful warrior). Finally, brought back in the care of Heracles she is seen through Admetus' eyes as the veiled (and therefore unrecognized) woman, but clearly to him both an alluring and a disturbing figure. She is brought into focus ethically in the narrative and then more literally and dramatically. Admetus is less clearly delineated. He is the distraught and helpless husband until he becomes an incompetent but forceful host and householder. At the center of his stage life he is an enraged son, possibly angriest at his father because the old man claims if not to love his son at least to be better off with him than he would have been without him.

The Kommos

The kommos is Admetus' only scene alone (with the chorus, but without other actors).

A despondent Admetus returns from the funeral of his wife and is comforted by the chorus. (Passage # 3)

The chorus' role here is to offer generalizing consolations, further setting the stage for the anonymous return of Alcestis as the generic woman. We have been taken through Admetus' failed relationships as husband, parent, child, master, king and friend. In these outcries in the kommos and in his speech at the end of the scene, he too reviews them. He has learned a number of things in the play's time, as if he had started as a shell, the nameless (rich, heroic age, royal) man. It may be that his character is complete at the start of his story but it is revealed to us little by little. It may be that he does not change, for the time of a tragedy is so very short (and that of a pro-satyr play is even shorter) and the structure, too, is strictly limited to the end of one action and to whatever earlier or later events the playwright can introduce through reenactment or prophecy and narrative. But Admetus does come to realize that what he has been is inadequate. He is closed, inner-looking (self-centered rather than introverted) as far as his "personality" goes, outward looking in his relation to the house. He does become more open, less self-contained, and at the same time more drawn to the interior of the house.

His return from the tomb reveals these aspects of his growing self awareness and dependence on others. First he sees the result of his wife's death: the house is empty: she is not there at all. The house is like the house of Hades. Death has given Admetus' bride to Hades as her kurios (or guardian, the role that belongs to a woman's father and then her husband). His conventional despair is made only a little ironic by his plea "how might I die?" (864), a thing he had gone to preternatural lengths to avoid. In his second outcry, his admission that there is no greater evil than to lose a loyal wife (880) surely valorizes her life and death, but his wish that he had never married reduces her to an object in that it recognizes only the end of their marriage, the fading away and death, and not the time they had together nor the product of their union. The separation is complete. Even the children are wished away (882).

In the next stanza his self-pity reaches its most despairing, but it is not altogether negative. For he begins again the process of reunion. If only he could have been allowed to join her in the tomb then Hades would have the two most loyal souls together journeying to the other world (901-2). Admetus reinstates the importance of their being together in this way and underscores it in his words about the long time of his suffering and grief. In the last, the saddest song in his lament, Admetus faces the house and sees it as he did when he brought home his bride. He ends the kommos with his recollection of his entrance with his wife into their home for the first time, in words that emphasize their equality (esp. 919-921) and the marriage bed that is now empty. Each aspect of his present situation is matched by its opposite from his happier past: the black robes by the white; the howling lament by the marriage song; the empty bed by the soon to be filled marriage bed. Admetus first empties and then fills the house as he had done before. His despair, by putting Alcestis back in her place, by rehearsing the wedding, makes the remarriage that comes at the end possible.

In his more rational speech, he begins with his wife's vision of herself as happier than he (935-8 which may seem odd to us but is little more than a cliché to the Greeks) and ends with the logical conclusion of that vision applied to his own life (960-1, cf. 939-40): the conclusion that he is the one who should be dead. In between he pauses briefly to reiterate his father's view (939) which also leads to the same tragic conclusion, that he (and not his father) is the one who has lived beyond his time. In the play he has already seen what he projects as his future: others' affection for his wife, what others will say about him. His father has already said of him what he imagines an enemy saying. It is he who has defined his father as an enemy and entrapped him into saying the words an enemy would say. Even when he sees his wife's lot as happier--though in death--than his, he is seeing her as a moral subject, she is not just the generalized dead, but . Beginning at line 940, she is pictured in her own space, in the oikos. How will he enter it? Whom will he speak to? Who will speak to him? She addressed everyone and was addressed in turn. Loneliness will drive him out when he sees her empty bed and the chairs she used to sit in: though gone, she still populates the place. She is the one loved, the one missed, by his servants and children alike. Outside, others' marriages, Thessalian parties full of women will remind him of her. Surely this is the first time he would have noticed that women too, at least the wives of his fellow Thessalians, were in attendance. He is seeing from her point of view here and when he notices sordid and pathetic details within the house. Admetus is realizing his loss by seeing what she would see. He is reviewing her life, noticing certain things that he never noticed before because until this happened to him he was just the generic man, the mask of Admetus. Now he thinks of the people in her sphere, the wives of his friends, the children clinging to him (because she is no longer there), the servants whom he noticed before only to browbeat and probably beat. All have feelings -- but for her.  (Passage # 4)

The chorus follows with a general reflection that is almost a parody of the chorus meditating on the meaning of life and the inevitability of death.

Exodos

Heracles enters with a woman, heavily veiled like a bride. In the dialogue nearly everything is described for the audience. Heracles begins by scolding Admetus for hiding his loss.  (Passage # 5 )

Little by little Admetus sees this woman and little by little his words turn her into Alcestis. The grueling toil of Heracles saved her from the monster Death, but only the art of Admetus (inspired by his gratitude and love and possibly desire) can make her his wife and situate her again in the real world of the living, in the center of their oikos.

At first she is just a generic woman won in a contest (1020, 1024-32), a woman who will serve in the house (1024) and that is almost all she is to Admetus when he asks that she be taken away (1042). In fact at first Admetus ignores the woman and responds to Heracles' charges. But then he notices her. Any woman in the halls will remind him of his woes (1045-7). Then Admetus sees that she is young (1049-50): she is becoming more particular. But still he does not look directly at her: it is her clothing and adornment that indicate a young woman (1050). He had dreaded the young wives of his friends. Young men cannot be trusted around a young woman: Admetus is noticing the woman as a sexual object.

He begins to talk about his late wife and what he owes her (1058-61). Mentally he places the stranger woman in his house (1049) and as if she were the statue he had earlier planned to commission, he moves her about, finally settling her in his wife's bed (1055-6), a notion he rejects in shame and amazement. Her physique is like Alcestis' and he is in a muddle (1061-8). He is having difficulty separating the two women: this gune and his gune (the same trick he played on Heracles). He addresses her in hurt anger to tell her she is like his wife (1061). In seeing her he thinks he is seeing his wife, a pain even deeper than being reminded of her by her contemporaries. He rejects her again and only at 1108 does he reluctantly accept her, not yet as herself or for himself, but for his friend.

It is not until he touches her that the recognition is complete, taking her right hand looking at the face under the lifted veil (On the timing of the lifting of the veil see Halleran, 127.). It is an example of the magic of theatrical deception. At first Admetus sees only the costume. He must take the stranger by the hand, and see the face (that is, the mask) under the veil in order to know that it is really his wife: he accepts the woman as Alcestis; he accepts Alcestis as a person (1133-4). The real person under the costume and mask is doubtless not the actor who played Alcestis in her scene. She may be played by a speechless supernumerary, but she is Alcestis.

Alcestis' death had been her heroic fulfillment and had made the lives of all women more glorious. And it had made the life of one man unlivable. Her death is used to examine certain assumptions about relative values, including assumptions she herself had made. Her return to life has made Admetus a better man. He has learned from his loss. But surely it means something to her too. She can continue her perfect existence, enjoy the things that gave her pleasure, be present at her children's marriages, comfort her daughter when she gives birth. She can be the perfect wife the chorus had wished for at the end of the second stasimon and she can be alive. For in spite of the monostichic cliché, Admetus finds that it is better to marry a wife than to bury one. If the actor playing Alcestis lifts her veil in that coquettish gesture depicted on wedding vases, there would be little doubt that this is a happy ending, a new life, and a new marriage for both Alcestis and Admetus. (Passage # 6)

Admetus does not ever stop inventing ways to keep this from being a tragedy. From his appeal to his wife not to abandon him through his promise that she alone will always be his wife, his insistence that Heracles (though alone, without the companionship of his host) keep up the good name of the house, his denunciation of Pheres, to his rejection of the new woman, Admetus quells the spread of Alcestis' death into others' minds. Apollo had brought the element of fantasy into Admetus' life. Once shared it had turned his life into a nightmare.

Alcestis had made the crucial choice. She had been the author of her own perfection and had inspired in others the knowledge of her goodness and the desire to tell of it. Admetus becomes the poet or craftsman who makes her come alive by supplying the matter, the second muthos about her, the false story that she is alive. It is he who gives the individuating features and characteristics to the generic woman brought back by Heracles. It is he who remakes Alcestis and situates her in the home and in both their lives just before her return.