And while we’re talking about heroes, we should note that, for at least some ancient Greeks, Alcestis is a greater hero than Orpheus. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Plato’s Symposium – written in the fourth century BCE – presents us with a debate among guests at a dinner party on the nature of eros – love. It’s a somewhat more philosophically rigorous depiction of this kind of night out than many of us have experienced, although Aristophanes does have to swap turns with another speaker because he has the hiccups. You can always rely on comedians.
The first speech is delivered by a man named Phaedrus, who says that one defining feature of love is that only lovers will give up their lives for one another,22 and that’s the case for women and men alike. The only example he needs, he says, is Alcestis, who alone was willing to die on her husband’s behalf, even though his father and mother were alive. Her devotion to her husband made his parents seem like strangers in comparison. Her behaviour was so impressive to men and gods alike that the gods gave her back to the living world. Whereas Orpheus, he adds, they sent packing. They only offered him a phasma, a ghost of his wife, because he was weak, as you might expect from a lyre player. He wasn’t brave enough to die for love, like Alcestis, but managed to enter Hades alive. For this, he was made to die at the hands of women . . .
What are we to make of this passage, aside from the obvious fact that Phaedrus is nursing a major grievance against lyre players? Firstly, that Plato has remembered the plot of Euripides’ play pretty well, considering he wrote the Symposium fifty years or more after Alcestis was first performed. Even more so when we think that Plato wasn’t born until a decade or so after the original performance. From this, we might conclude that there are still regular performances of Alcestis: it has turned out to be very popular. At the very least, Plato expects his readers to be familiar with the example. But he seems to have more than the casual familiarity of an audience-member for a play they have seen once. The argument Phaedrus makes is brief, but he has fully taken Admetus’ side in the debate between Pheres and his son. He has no criticism for Admetus’ apparent expectation that one of his parents might die in his stead, indeed he shares it. He has only praise for Alcestis and her heroic sacrifice, and offers no censure of Admetus for being willing to accept his wife’s death as a price worth paying for his own life.
He is, however, perfectly happy to criticize Orpheus for the lesser calibre of his sacrifice. Phaedrus isn’t impressed with Orpheus’ musical skill, his ability to charm the shades of the Underworld, to exert the power of persuasion on Persephone and Hades. For Phaedrus, Orpheus is weak because he didn’t die for love.
Now this may reflect the prejudices of the author rather than the views of the character. Plato is wildly intolerant of many forms of artistic expression. Only the writing of philosophy is really acceptable in his view: other types of creativity are intrinsically suspicious. But it reveals an interesting attitude which we haven’t seen in our other sources: Orpheus’ problem is not that he loves Eurydice so much he can’t help but break the restriction and look back at her. His problem is that he doesn’t love her enough to have died of it. And so Orpheus is found wanting by the gods, just as much as by Phaedrus, at least as far as Plato tells it. He doesn’t deserve Eurydice, so he doesn’t get her. According to this version of their story, he never has a chance: the Eurydice this Orpheus sees is a mere ghost rather than a reclaimable woman.
Alcestis, of course, is not a ghost when she is returned to Admetus. But she is veiled and mute, so she has a somewhat ghostly quality. Even when Admetus can see her and accept that she has returned to him, he’s perplexed that she will not speak. It’s Heracles who tells him that she is still sacrosanct to the gods of the Underworld, and that she must remain silent for three days. This, of course, takes us beyond the temporal confines of the play.
In another playwright’s hands, we might assume that the author was simply not interested in Alcestis’ response, or that – as with so many male writers before and particularly after Euripides – the author didn’t think very much about women and so didn’t bother to write them any dialogue. But, as I’ve said elsewhere in this book （and will continue to say whenever the opportunity arises）， Euripides is one of the greatest writers of female voices in antiquity and, frankly, in the history of theatre. He is always interested in the perspectives of women, and there is little he enjoys more than giving them fantastic speeches to thrill, distress or horrify his audience. When Alcestis comes back, she raises a question that the play chooses not to answer. Is this what she wanted? She is the eponymous hero of the play, but has her heroic deed – dying for love – been overshadowed by Heracles’ heroic deed in wrestling with Death and winning? And, of course, in the days to come we might assume Admetus and Alcestis will be very happy together: given a second chance by the gods because of the power of her love and sacrifice. But surely there might be moments in the dark hours of the coming nights when Alcestis looks across at the sleeping form of her husband and wonders how much she can still love a man who so overtly cared more about himself than he cared about her. Alcestis has a happy ending compared to most tragedies, but perhaps that’s just because the play ends before the real tragedy has time to play out.