Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians

1. Alcestis

1 Alcestis The relationship of life and death seems to have been a recurrent preoccupation with Euripides. 'Who knows if life is really death," runs a fragment from the Polyidus (6,38 N2), "while death is viewed as life down below?" Two other fragments from lost plays echo similar sentiments.1 The topic was so closely identmed with Euripides that Aristophanes could parody it in the Frogs (1477-78) with a crescendo of improbable identities: 'Who knows if life is really death, breath brunch, and sleep a sheepskin?" Although we have no way of knowing how the theme of life as death was developed in the lost Polyidus, Phrixus, or Erechtheus, there canbe no doubt of its centrality to the Alcestis. Euripides constructs the Alcestis around a suspension of the normal operations of death, the better to demonstrate the advantages of the usual arrangement. In so doing he recasts a lesson from Homer for the uses of the democratic polis: if the Iliad assumes that mortality is a precondition for heroism, the Alcestis will teach that it is essential to ordinary existence as well. He also borrows a theme from Pindar and Bacchylides, transferring the adjuration to live for the day, so typical of the epinician genre, to a context that charges it with newly egalitarian meaning. The final choral ode of the Alcestis is a meditation on the necessity of death. There is nothing more powerful than Ananke, the members of the chorus affirm. Neither magic Orphic formulas nor herbal medicines-lithe drugs that Apollo gave to the sons of Asclepius" (97o-71)-have ever prevailed against it. These words are emphatic and seem to admit of no exception. At the same time they stand in contradiction both to the premise of the play-which is that Admetus, for one, has the power to evade his death if he can only find a substitute-and to the final episode, in which Admetus' proxy Alcestis is recovered from the underworld, and Death, or Necessity, seems doubly defeated. The inconsistency leads to the heart of this much-disputed play. For 20 Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians all its sharply observed psychological detail, the Alcestis is neither a character study nor the portrait of a marriage.2 For all its admixture of grotesquerie it is not a "pro-satyric" drama- a genre unmentioned by the ancients and devised by modern criticism to categorize this single play.3 Death and its relation to life are the true subjects of the drama- a tale set in the realm of a mythical Thessaly and played out in the private domain, but resonating against the political and social concerns of fIfth-century Athens. Since mortality is its subject, the play demands to be viewed in the context of the assumptions about death transmitted by epic and lyric poetry. It is impossible to overstate the influence on tragedy of the literary tradition, which was regularly evoked by the dramatists themselves in the form of quotation, allusion, or paraphrase, and which furnished them not only with plot material but with an entire worldview to be adopted or modifIed, rebuked or extolled.4 The critic seeking to identify the distinctive contribution of each dramatist is well advised to keep in mind the pervasive influence of tradition and to be on the alert, accordingly, not so much for novelty as for the selection, adaptation , or displacement of traditional motifs. The Necessity of Death By intuition and common understanding, death for the Greeks meant not only the end but also the opposite of life. Death was dark, unchanging , and eternal; life was luminous, mutable, and finite. The Greeks recognized mortality as the most fundamental of the constraints set on human beings. On the level of etymology it was what differentiated human beings from the gods: mortals (thnetoi, brotoi) were subject to extinction, while the gods (athanatoi, ambrotoi) could never die.5 On the level of experience, the fact that human existence was marked off by death was understood to have profound implications for the way mortals lived their lives. Mortality made demandsand offered opportunities-the undying gods could never know. A number of basic statements about mortality recur in the archaic texts. Death, it is said, is inevitable, irreversible, and unpredictable.6 These characteristics, familiar and obvious though they may seem, require constant iteration. They flicker in and out of human consciousness ; only in flashes is death apprehended as personal terminus. At [3.133.156.156] Project MUSE (2024...