Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Alcestis, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mortality and Happiness
Obligation, Limitations, and Fate
Hospitality and Friendship
Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
The chorus kneels to beseech the gods on Alcestis’s behalf. They also wonder how Admetos can live without her, the leader adding: “Not for love, / but something more than love, Alcestis dies for you today.” Then they notice Alcestis and Admetos emerging from the palace, accompanied by their children.
The chorus leader’s remark suggests that Alcestis’s death will have more far-reaching effects than a simple demonstration of a wife’s affection for her husband.
Themes
Alcestis speaks longingly of the sun’s light and the earth’s shelter. She can see Charon crossing the lake in his boat, calling impatiently to her. She begins to feel the pressure of an unseen hand forcing her down. She then sees “black eyes glowing” and “black wings beating” and realizes it is Death frowning over her. As Death closes in, Alcestis clutches her children and bids them goodbye. Admetos begs her to fight and remain, telling her, “your dying is my death.”
In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman who bears the dead across Acheron, a river in Hades. In contrast to Admetos’s dodging of his fate, Alcestis feels fate palpably in the pressure of the invisible hand, and she sees Death vividly. Admetos begins to perceive the effects of his avoidance of death and the extreme grief that losing Alcestis will bring to his family.
Themes
Alcestis summons the strength to make her final request. She tells Admetos, “I did not have to die [for you]. I could have chosen otherwise.” She points out that she could have “married any man in Thessaly” and ruled in Admetos’s stead. However, everyone, even Admetos’s elderly parents, refused to give up their lives for him. She concludes that “Some god has brought these things to pass. / Let it be.” She asks Admetos not to remarry, since a second wife would reign jealously over her children, especially her daughter.
Though she is now inescapably in the grip of Fate, Alcestis also points out that she made an explicit choice to die for Admetos. She could still have enjoyed a decent life after Admetos’s death. Instead, she chose to bear his own fate for him. She doesn’t dwell in bitterness, though, attributing her position to the gods’ will. However, she uses this moment to ask something of Admetos’s own loyalty.
Themes
Admetos solemnly vows that “no other woman will ever live with me again.” He further vows that he won’t just mourn for the customary year, but for the rest of his life. Finally, “those whose cowardice has caused your death, […] will have my hatred, always,” since, unlike Alcestis, they were not “loyal in love.” From now on, “all festivity” is banned from his home. He won’t even drink with friends or play his lute again. Admetos continues to grieve, wishing he had the song of Orpheus with which to “spell you back from death.” He begs Alcestis to wait for him in the underworld.
Admetos not only vows what Alcestis has asked, but goes beyond her request with a number of excessive vows in the emotion of the moment—essentially promising never to enjoy happiness again. In a way, these rash vows highlight Admetos’s resistance of boundaries; in submitting himself to one obligation—Alcestis’s request that he never remarry—he entangles himself in other, self-imposed obligations that will prove troublesome later. He also wishes he could be like Orpheus, the mythical poet who rescued his wife, Eurydice, from Hades.
Themes
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The chorus leader tells Admetos that he will “stand beside you now, as friends should stand / and we will mourn your wife together.” Alcestis formally commits her children to Admetos’s care, and, with a final goodbye, sinks onto a waiting litter and dies. As Admetos and the children crumple before her body in grief, the chorus leader tells the chorus and audience that the queen is dead. He tells Admetos, “All we can do with death / is bear it patiently.”
With his loyalty amidst grief, the chorus leader is a conspicuous example of friendship. He also fulfills the traditional role of the Greek chorus figure by exhorting Admetos to bear up bravely in the face of death.
Themes
Admetos asks the chorus to support him by singing in honor of Alcestis: “cry defiance to this hard and bitter god / whom nothing will appease but death.” He then proclaims to his subjects a year of public morning. The servants exit with Alcestis’s body, followed by Admetos and the children.
Admetos’s request for a song of “defiance” suggests that he is still chafing under the necessity of death, despite witnessing the loss of his wife.
Themes
