But Pheres’ reply is pretty bracing too. I raised you to succeed me, he says. But I’m not obliged to die for you.19 Fathers don’t have to die for their sons. You delight in life, he adds: do you think your father doesn’t? And then he goes on to criticize Admetus for avoiding his due death, for allowing his wife to die in his place. You killed her, he says.20 The chorus try to get the men to stop arguing, but they are both unrepentant, and they continue to hurl insults at one another.
This intense debate at the heart of the play raises questions with no comfortable answers: what should we expect from our parents, our children, our spouses? Many of us might feel that we would willingly die for those we love, but perhaps, when it came to it, we would also cling to life, as both Pheres and Admetus have done. Would that make us selfish? Or just human?
The assumption underpinning Admetus’ argument is exactly the same as that which Orpheus offered in Ovid’s Metamorphoses when he persuaded Proserpina/Persephone to release Eurydice: she has died too young. It is not just the fact that their love has been sundered which is so awful, but that her life has been cut short unjustly. Would the story of these tragic lovers lose something if they were older? If they were newly married but in their eighties, would we feel the same sense of unfairness? There is something more poignant – isn’t there? – in the death of someone very young than in the death of someone very old: it’s harder to feel that it’s a tragedy when someone who has lived a rich, long life eventually dies, even if they are much loved and mourned. It is still a great sadness, but it’s not accompanied by the raging sense of unfairness we feel at the futility of a child or young adult dying.
We mourn differently in each case: when someone dies very young, we feel that they – and we – have been robbed of their potential. We see what should have been their future in glimpses when another young person passes milestones that our loved one never reached. When someone older dies, we feel deprived of experience, of both them and of the huge part they played in our own lives. If we’re very unlucky, this grief even sours or obscures the happiness of remembering them.
But Pheres also has a point, doesn’t he? You want to live: why wouldn’t I? We don’t get to impose death on the old, merely because we think they’ve had their go and now it’s our turn. How would Admetus feel if his young son had been offered the bargain by Apollo? Would he have stepped up to die so that his son could live? Or is a longer life expectancy more valuable than a shorter one only if you are the younger man in the equation?
I did promise you a happy ending, so here it is: Heracles arrives to stay with Admetus. There’s a brief confusion when he doesn’t know that Alcestis has died, because Admetus has ordered his slaves not to mention it. Finally, one of them gives it up and Heracles bounds into action. He hastens to Alcestis’ tomb and wrestles with Death, returning with a veiled, silent woman. After some resistance, Admetus accepts that his wife has been returned to him. That Heracles – who, we must remember, will be another surviving visitor to the Underworld, just like Orpheus – has brought back Alcestis. But she cannot speak for three days. She belongs to the gods of Hades until she undergoes a ritual purification.
So how might this story, of a woman who dies to save her husband’s life, influence the story of Eurydice? It is our first reference to the Underworld narrative, although she isn’t named. When Admetus is responding to Alcestis’ big speech （the one where she makes him promise he won’t remarry）， he builds to a climax of sorrow at her imminent loss. If I had the voice and the songs of Orpheus,21 he says, if I could charm Persephone and her husband, I would go down and seize you from Hades. And the guard dog wouldn’t hold me back, and nor would the ferryman, until I’d brought you into the light again. But I can’t do that, so I’ll be with you when I die.
It’s an interesting example for Admetus to choose, given that Orpheus is ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt to reclaim Eurydice. Presumably, even though this is the earliest version of the story that we can be sure of, Euripides’ audience would have been familiar with it from sources which are lost to us: Admetus does a recap of the important bits, but it sounds like he’s mentioning an example he thinks we’d all recognize, rather than telling us a story we haven’t heard before.
The play has a happy ending precisely because Heracles can do what Orpheus cannot: successfully retrieve a young woman from the greedy maw of Death. And surely that’s because Heracles isn’t trying to reclaim someone he loves. He seems to have feelings of warm friendship towards both Admetus and Alcestis, but she’s not his heart’s desire, in the way Eurydice is for Orpheus. Even if Heracles were not such a strongman （who can wrestle Death and come off the winner）， and even if he had been later setting out to chase after Alcestis （he catches her at her tomb rather than having to make an actual trip to the Underworld as he will in his final labour: the abduction of Cerberus）， he would still stand a better chance of reclaiming Alcestis than Orpheus does of reclaiming Eurydice. Imagine if Heracles had been ordered to walk out of the Underworld and not look back: he would have been fine. He doesn’t have the strength of emotion that Orpheus has, so he doesn’t have the destructive anxiety that accompanies it. He is a man who can stroll down to the Underworld to steal a novelty dog. This isn’t a hero who will be tormented by fear of loss.