Euripides Male Characters: Admetus and Friends | Edward Musgrave Blaiklock

The Male Characters of Euripides

Professor EM Blaiklock MA., Litt. D.

Continued:

Now it must be admitted that neither these statements nor their contrary are capable of proof. We cannot support with

boon on Admetus without foreseeing, in spite of Delphi, the adequate quotation either the view that Apollo imposed his disastrous position it was likely to produce, or the view that Admetus himself thoughtlessly but willingly accepted it, and worked thereby his own catastrophe. Dr J. T. Sheppard', in a reply to J. L. Myres, suggests an interpretation of the play which involves no taking of sides on this controversial point.

The relevant paragraph merits full quotation. 'Euripides, by bringing the story down to earth,l by making the characters human beings, with motives, prejudices and passions like those of his contemporaries, forces his audience to face the implications. ... If women can be like that, if a wife can die for her husband, will not the man, whose life she has purchased with her own, find all his notions, all his feelings about marriage and about women, revolutionised? It is through the devotion of Alcestis, and his gradual realisation that she means more to him than all external moralities, more than his prosperity, even more than life itself, that Admetus becomes human. Yet the play is more than a tract for husbands. ... It touches something universal which can still appeal to us who think, at any rate, that we have as a society absorbed the lessons about marriage and about women which were revolutionary novelties to Athens. The legend held that Admetus was peculiarly virtuous, and was rewarded by the gift of an extra span of life.

I think Euripides suggests that the morality which calls Admetus "happy", because his life is prolonged at the cost of another person's sacrifice, is superficial. He suggests that the person who sacrifices may be more fortunate than the beneficiary. Life, as Alcestis says, is esteemed more precious than anything else.

But before the play is done, Admetus knows there is something more precious than life, and that that something is indeed what alone makes life worth having.

16 As Rose puts it (Handbook of Greek Literature, footnote to p. 181), 'Supposing that the remarkable things in the myths and sagas did happen, how would the characters foel and act?' boon on Admetus without foreseeing, in spite of Delphi, the adequate quotation either the view that Apollo imposed his disastrous position it was likely to produce, or the view that Admetus himself thoughtlessly but willingly accepted it, and worked thereby his own catastrophe. Dr J. T. Sheppard', in a reply to J. L. Myres, suggests an interpretation of the play which involves no taking of sides on this controversial point.

The relevant paragraph merits full quotation. 'Euripides, by bringing the story down to earth,l by making the characters human beings, with motives, prejudices and passions like those of his contemporaries, forces his audience to face the im-plications. ... If women can be like that, if a wife can die for her husband, will not the man, whose life she has purchased with her own, find all his notions, all his feelings about marriage and about women, revolutionised? It is through the devotion of Alcestis, and his gradual realisation that she means more to him than all external moralities, more than his prosperity, even more than life itself, that Admetus becomes human. Yet the play is more than a tract for husbands. ... It touches something universal which can still appeal to us who think, at any rate, that we have as a society absorbed the lessons about marriage and about women which were revolutionary novelties to Athens. The legend held that Admetus was peculiarly virtuous, and was rewarded by the gift of an extra span of life.

I think Euripides suggests that the morality which calls Admetus

"happy", because his life is prolonged at the cost of another person's sacrifice, is superficial. He suggests that the person who sacrifices may be more fortunate than the beneficiary. Life, as Alcestis says, is esteemed more precious than anything else.

But before the play is done, Admetus knows there is something more precious than life, and that that something is indeed what alone makes life worth having.

To exempt Admetus, therefore, from responsibility for Alcestis' death does not destroy the main outline of his character as commonly apprehended. The tragic flaw which leads to catastrophe is always unrealised by the victim, and to deny that Admetus was to blame directly for Alcestis' sacrifice, neither transforms him into Way's blameless hero nor pillories Verrall's Apollo. The simple result is that Euripides' satire is thereby widened to include the society whose conventions, imposed upon individuals by that compulsion which a community exercises over the docile majority of its members, made many a fifth-century Admetus unappreciative of the virtues of the woman who lived in his house. That Apollo sponsored such false values is beside the point. He was in the legend used by the dramatist, and an excellent 'starter' for the drama.

The question, therefore, of Admetus' responsibility for what happened at some time before the opening of the play, is not relevant in a study of his character. The problem may be left in the obscurity in which Euripides may conceivably have intended it to remain. He has given us a vigorous enough picture to consider.

For the same reason Verrall need not detain us long. The theme of his famous essay, generally admitted nowadays to have been over-subtle, does not depend upon a certain view of Admetus' acts or character. It will be necessary to notice the allegation that Admetus, fearful of popular reaction, hastened the body of his wife to burial along the Larissa road, but there is little else in Verrall's interpretation to suggest that his view of the young king differed vitally from Browning's. Indeed he criticises Way's apologia with some shrewdness. It is for the demolishing, in the interests of his thesis, of Browning's presentation of Heracles that Verrall has most to say on the subject of characterisation, and Heracles is not, at the moment our chief concern.

To be continued…..