Where Admetus Lucks Out

Alcestis by Euripides
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have spent very little time studying Greek tragedy. It's been probably 45 years since I had a class that required it--and that was the last time I read any of it. I know about as much about Greek tragedy as your average--well, maybe a step up from that--nerdy college freshman. But my self-assigned reading includes plays, and I'm running out of Shakespeare/Marlowe/Jonson/Dryden/Moliere plays that I can find (cheaply). So I decided to take a shot at Euripides on my own.

Also, Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my two or three favorite writers, has sometimes made a case for still reading Greek literature. So I'm partly motivated by shame.

Anyway, this was good.

The end

Well, to expand, I found it pretty enjoyable to read, even the weird strophe/antistrophe stuff that used to give me fits. I just pretend it's a musical and imagine somebody singing those lines, and it all makes sense. The play is not too long; there aren't so many characters that it's hard to keep track of them; the plot is pretty tight (they really believed in that); and [spoilers!] there's a fricking happy ending. What? That's perfect for me. I hate "So everybody died sad" stories with a white-hot heat--and this ain't that.

I kinda hated the MMC Admetus. Apollo liked him and worked him a deal with the Fates where he could get someone else to die in his place. Everyone said no except his sweet wife--and he said cool, you die for me. So when she dies at the start of the play, he's not mad at himself. He's mad at his parents, who he thinks should have sacrificed their lives for him. Nobody else seems to be blaming him, though Admetus finally realizes how he looks.

"Look at the cheap coward," he says, "alive and well,/ who ran away from death--/so small he got his wife to die instead./ Do you call that a man?/ He execrates his parents but could not die himself."

Yeah, dude, it's horrible. It's really, really bad. And the idea of dying for someone, or letting someone die for you, is explored in the play in a way I found pretty useful. There are so many takes on it by the end that I'm not sure what a member of the audience back in those times would have thought. Yes, Admetus is a great man, but his wife was the best of women. Maybe she was awesome for doing what she did; maybe he was awful for letting her. (My opinion.) It's not like he's developing the cure for cancer and just needed a little more time. He just wanted to keep living.

He lucks out when Hercules comes to visit then saves the day by mugging Death and rescuing Alcestis. Sure, it's an unlikely, Deus ex machina-adjacent device--but the whole story is based on impossible mythological nonsense, so... I'm good with it. I like a happy ending.

I find myself encouraged to go on reading old Greek plays that are still new to me. There's a bunch, so no problem there.

4 stars.

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