ADMETUS

My friends, I think that my wife's fortune
is luckier than mine although it does not look like it.
No grief will ever touch her now.
She is famous and her troubles are over.
And I who ought not to be alive have bypassed my fate and
will lead a miserable life. Just now I understand.
How will I endure to enter my house?
Whom will I speak to, who will speak to me
and make my entrance welcome? Where will I turn?
The emptiness inside will drive me out
when I see my wife's bed empty
and the chairs in which she used to sit and inside
the floors dirty and the children leaning against my knees
will weep for their mother, and the servants will mourn their mistress,
what a woman has died and gone from the house.
That is what it will be like at home.
But outside the marriages of the Thessalians will upset me
and parties full of women. For I will not hold up,
when I see the friends of my wife.
Anyone who is my enemy will say this:
look at him living in shame, when he did not dare to die,
but gave up his wife in his pusillanimity
and escaped Hades. And then does he look like a man?
And he hates his parents, though he was not willing to
die. In addition to my tragedy I will have that kind of
reputation. Why is it better for me to live, my friends,
when I will have a bad reputation and have done badly?