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These two Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid, shaped the Orpheus and Eurydice narrative, but they didn’t invent it. The earliest surviving certain mention of it is in Euripides’ play from 438 BCE, Alcestis.15 This unusual play is a tragedy with a happy ending, and tells the story of Alcestis, whose husband Admetus has won a favour from the god Apollo. When it comes to be time for Admetus to die, he can continue to live if, and only if, he can find another person to die in his stead. This is obviously a somewhat double-edged gift: who is likely to offer to die on your behalf? Someone who loves you more than life itself. Chances are, you might well feel the same way about them. In the months or years before the day on which the play is set （the action – as is usual with Greek tragedy – takes place on a single day）， Admetus has failed to find any volunteer, except one: his wife, Alcestis.
Now it is the day when Alcestis is due to die. Death appears as a character, coming to escort her down to the Underworld. But before he does, Alcestis delivers a heartfelt monologue on the future she wishes for Admetus and their small children. She tells him he must remember her sacrifice and not remarry: she does not want her offspring to be saddled with a vicious stepmother. This is an early outing for the trope of the wicked stepmother, but we might allow Alcestis her moment of grief: she is about to die, after all. Admetus readily agrees to the condition. He can hardly do anything else, when his wife is dying so that he may live. Alcestis then tells her children that they have heard their father’s words: he will not marry another woman.16
The whole scene is desperately sad: a young woman, a mother of children who sit with her as she prepares to die; a husband realizing the greatness of his wife’s sacrifice and offering his own sacrifice in return. We can see the terrible ramifications of the gift Apollo has given him. Quite understandably, Admetus did not want to die young （his father is still alive, so he’s a relatively young man）。 But by accepting Alcestis’ offer to die for him, he’s depriving his children of a loving mother, depriving himself of a loving wife. Not only that, but he doesn’t even have the prospect of a second wife, because he has just sworn to his dying first wife – in front of the chorus and his own children – that he will remain single after Alcestis’ death. We might rather intolerantly suggest he could have thought of all this a bit sooner than when his wife is sliding into unconsciousness before their children’s gaze. But Greek tragedy is full of people not realizing things until terrible consequences unfurl, so perhaps it is not entirely reasonable to expect greater foresight from Admetus. One of their children then speaks, but his mother is past hearing. With you leaving us, the child says, our house is destroyed. I promise this play does have a happy ending, although at this point it may not seem likely.
Admetus’ father, Pheres, soon arrives to pay his respects to his dead daughter-in-law and sympathize with his bereaved son. But Admetus greets him with fury, telling him he was not invited to Alcestis’ burial. We don’t need you now, he says: you should have sympathized when I was dying.17 In other words, Admetus must have been stricken with some terrible illness of which Alcestis offered to cure him by dying herself. This does – I think – make him a more sympathetic character. If he had simply accepted Alcestis’ death as the price worth paying to avoid some nebulous fate on some unspecified day, we might legitimately think he was not really worth Alcestis’ sacrifice. But we can surely all understand how a couple in love could get to this point, how a woman watching her beloved husband wasting away might feel that she would rather die herself. How a man in pain might agree. But there is a horribly arrogant tone to Admetus’ next reproach to his father. He didn’t just want sympathy as he was dying, he wanted sacrifice. Admetus is deeply aggrieved because his father did not volunteer to die, that Pheres left the difficult decision to Alcestis. I should be calling her father and mother, he says, bleakly.18 His argument continues: Pheres is old, he doesn’t have long left to live anyway. He’s already been king, he has a son who inherited the kingship, his legacy is complete. Well then, you’d better get yourself some other sons, he adds, to bury you when you die. Because I won’t. Old men complain about the long span of their lives, say they want to die. But none of them really wants to die: old age doesn’t weigh heavily on them at all.
Even the most ardent generation warrior might find Admetus’ views somewhat bracing. It’s one thing to feel that someone – a parent – should love you more than their own life, but it is quite another to demand it. Whatever sympathy we might have felt for Admetus as a grieving husband is swiftly retreating. What kind of man goes round demanding of his loved ones that they die so that he may live? A monstrously selfish one. And this in turn makes us question Alcestis’ sacrifice. Wouldn’t her children be better off with their selfless mother than their grasping father?