Alcestis

The ending of Euripides’s Alcestis subverts much of what has come before. Throughout the play, the inevitability of death has been a central theme, informing the interactions between various characters as well as a few of the Chorus’s songs. Yet the final scene of the play, which takes the form of a recognition scene, leads up to the revelation that Heracles has brought back Alcestis back to her husband, apparently successfully taking her away from Death. This recognition scene, a staple of many Greek tragedies, unfolds in stages. First, Heracles introduces the veiled woman with him as a slave he has won in a competition. Then, he asks Admetus to take in the veiled woman, even suggesting he marry her. Finally, Admetus recognizes the woman as Alcestis, and Heracles tells him of how he wrested her away from Death.

At first glance, the ending of Euripides’s Alcestis is a happy one, but it is also ambiguous. It is noteworthy, for example, that the Alcestis restored by Heracles is silent. Heracles explains this silence by saying that Alcestis will not be able to speak for three more days, until she has “washed away” (1146) her obligations to the gods of the Underworld. The resurrected Alcestis must also be silent for dramaturgical reasons: The structure of the play suggests that it was performed with only two speaking actors who shared the roles between themselves, and the actor that played Alcestis in the second episode would have been the same actor who played Heracles in the remainder of the play, meaning that Heracles and Alcestis could not have been on stage at the same time and that the Alcestis who shows up in the final scene would have been played by a silent extra.

Scholars have sometimes also been hesitant to take Heracles’s story about how he saved Alcestis at face value. For some, the Alcestis of the final scene is not the real Alcestis but either a kind of phantom or dummy or even a false Alcestis used by Heracles to deceive Admetus as punishment for lying to him. One early but still well-known interpretation, put forward by the British scholar Arthur Verrall, suggests that Alcestis did not die at all, and that Heracles simply brought her back from her grave after she regained consciousness, having been buried prematurely. Though these interpretations are not widely accepted, the silence of Alcestis in the final scene makes her unfamiliar even after she has been “recognized.”

Finally, the play forces us to ask whether the life Admetus and Alcestis will live can really be happy. After Alcestis died, Admetus wasted no time breaking the promises he made her as she was dying. He broke his promise to shun revelry and music from his house, for instance, when he entertained Heracles, but he also broke his promise not to bring another woman or wife into his house. If Heracles was testing Admetus’s loyalty to Alcestis in the exodos of the play, as some scholars have maintained, then Admetus failed. Can Alcestis now be content with her husband, or will she decide that she sacrificed her life for a man who did not deserve it?

These ambiguities are reflected and tied together in the final lines of the play, chanted by the Chorus as they exit the stage:

Many are the forms of what is divine.

Much that the gods achieve is surprise.

What we look for does not come to pass;

A god finds a way for what none foresaw.

Such was the end of this story (1159-63).

The ending of the play is indeed a “surprise,” regardless of how it is interpreted. These lines are also important because they are quintessentially Euripidean: These same lines—or a variation of them—conclude a few of Euripides’s surviving tragedies, including Medea and Helen. They remind us that human fortunes are always in flux, that we cannot anticipate what the gods will bring about, and that things are rarely as simple as they seem.