CHAPTER ONE
THE ATHENIAN HUSBAND
the loathly thing
That was Admetus late.
BROWNING,
Balaustion's Adventure.
THERE must be some significance in the fact that Euripides three earliest extant plays touch with understanding the problems of married life. In our unfortunate ignorance of the facts of the poet's own history it is idle to speculate in this regard, but it is notable that he had crossed the threshold of middle age when he wrote the Alcestis, while the Medea and the Hippolytus are set in the midst of those years which, in the course of human experience, are seldom free from painful adjustments. Common to all three plays is a husband, insensitive by age, convention, or selfishness to the finer feelings or deeper passion of a wife. This is not to deny that there is a wide literary difference between the two last-mentioned tragedies and what some would describe as the near-comedy of the Alcestis. The manner of presentation is undoubtedly different. Jason continues in crass folly until disaster overwhelms him. Theseus, too mature for fellowship with a youthful wife, leaves her to face in loneliness a problem which was of his creating. The licence of his own youth, an ill-matched marriage, and the jealousy of middle-age, are the ingredients of his catastrophe. In the Alcestis, as sometimes in life, ultimate disaster is averted. Admetus sees the light and wins back a vanished happiness.
It would appear that, over the decade in which these plays were produced, in those years before the deep preoccupations of the war deflected to some extent the course of his thinking, Euripides was intensely interested in such problems, and that,
quotations has sought to impose upon him.
His observation of life left him critical rather his own sex than the other.
It is a point for Euripides' realism that Jason, Theseus and Admetus are recognisable types. They lived in Athens, and for the drama’s sake were lifted from life and set in alien contexts of place and century. Admetus, who concerns us here, might be imagined a typical product of that male society which marked the Periclean age. It is quite probable that its women-folk were neither so ignorant nor so unimportant as some have supposed, but it is quite impossible to read the literature of the century, and to consider its views on love and sex-relationships, without being convinced that it was an erotically distorted age, an age of male precocity, bleak for what we know as chivalry, and one likely, in a modern view, among the least of its ill-effects, to feed the worst faults of paterfamilias. Euripides shows us as much when he mates the dull and selfish Admetus with Alcestis' finer clay, removes her from his life as if in answer to some Midas-prayer, breaks him in sorrow, and brings her untragically back again. It was a good story for the multitude who were developing a taste for happy endings. Like the Ion it was also a good story for the stolid and the orthodox, who would find in it all manner of illustration of some of their favourite moralities. For the few who saw or read the play with insight it was a subtle piece of satire on the ways of man— on the Athenian husband, in fine, so unappreciative of a woman's worth, so preoccupied with what Euripides was pleased to show were fragile worthless things.
It is important, in an estimate of Admetus' character, to make some attempt to assess the nature of the fault which brought him near to tragedy. Commentators almost unanimously agree that he was selfish and unimaginative, but not beyond redemption. 'He is a dull man,' writes W. N. Bates, deeply devoted to his wife, though he had accepted her sacrifice when she had made that offer.' 'He was selfish,' says Norwood,
'with a pathetic unconsciousness... a man of generous instincts "spoiled". He needed a salutary upheaval of his home; from afar he prophesies of Torvald Helmer."'
A. S. Way is the principle dissenter from this view. He regards many modern estimates of the play, Browning's included, as based wrongly and anachronistically on instincts inherited from our Teutonic forefathers, ideas which took form in the days of Medieval chivalry, and convictions begotten in us of the teachings of Christianity. 'Hence,' he writes, 'when we read of a husband who availed himself of a heaven-given opportunity of escaping death at the price of his wife's life, all our sympathies go out to the love, the unselfishness, the courage of the willing sacrifice, and the husband's conduct we find the meanest selfishness and the most unmanly cowardice.' Admetus, he proceeds to argue, was 'a noble character, for he displayed the highest social virtue recognised by a Greek-hospitality ....
He was right in respect to the motif and the incidents of the play:—A God put forth special exertions, taxed to the utmost his divine craft in outwitting the fates, in order to gain a conditional privilege for his earthly friend. That the man should thereupon decline to accept the boon would seem to the Greeks, not false delicacy merely but impiety?
It may be granted that this is an interpretation of the play which many Athenians might be likely to take home with them, but no amount of hospitality can make an ideal man of Admetus, 'and Euripides is at such pains to draw the rest of the king's character, his selfishness, his weakness, his egotism, that he could not have wished us to ignore the larger part of the picture.'
Euripides appears to leave deliberately obscure Way's point regarding Admetus' moral responsibility for the situation from which the drama springs. W. N. Bates, of recent writers, accepts the view that his privilege was an act of God, and beyond his alteration or control. Professor G. M. A. Grube, expressing a certain sympathy for this position, adds the valuable suggestion that it was the dynasty, and not merely a personal survival, which bulked large in the young monarch's mind. J. L. Myrest in an analysis of the play which it is impossible to overlook, also absolves Admetus.
'I submit then, he
concludes this portion of his argument, that a fair reading of the
text clears Admetus of the charge that by any act of his he has caused another person to die to save himself. The only questior at issue was whether, on that date, Admetus or someone els should die. That question could only be settled by the voluntary resolve of someone not Admetus. No one outside the family chose to take that resolve; and Admetus must therefore sure have died, had not Alcestis of her own motion, and against his entreaties, resolved that if it was a choice between husband's death and her own, it was better that she should go and that he should stay.