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 sings that “hospitality is here,” recalling the welcome and generosity shown to Apollo during his stay. Now, with his wife so recently dead, Admetos again welcomes a guest: “his courtesy and grace exceed all human scale.” The chorus adds that “somehow I have faith, a growing hope / that for this noble, heaven-minded man, / all […] may still be well.”
Admetos enters, and Alcestis’s body is borne from the palace, ready for the funeral. Then, Pheres enters, dressed in mourning and carrying funeral gifts. He and Admetos face one another on opposite sides of the bier.
The coming scene between Admetos and Pheres—with the two men facing each other across Alcestis’s funeral bier—is known in Greek drama as an agon, or confrontation. It parallels a similar agon between Apollo and Death earlier.
Themes
Pheres praises Alcestis and offers his gifts, explaining that “We must honor her in death as she deserves; / she gave her life to let you keep the light.” She also spared Pheres from being deprived of his son during his last years. But Admetos angrily steps forward and intercepts the gifts. He tells his father that he has come uninvited, and that his help would have been welcome when Admetos had to die, but Pheres was nowhere to be found: “and now you have the gall to come here with your mock / sorrow and your hypocrisy of love!”
Pheres demonstrates fatherly loyalty to his late daughter-in-law. But Admetos pointedly disrupts the display of loyalty, suggesting his insufficient grasp of such family bonds. He accuses Pheres of being the one who has fallen short in his obligations.
Themes
Admetos continues to belittle his father’s cowardice, telling him “you let a woman / […] do your duty for you.” Pheres had nothing to lose, he claims, and yet he refused to repay Admetos’s loyalty to him by dying. He swears he won’t bury Pheres when he dies, and he formally disowns his parents.
There is a heavy irony in Admetos’s comment, since, of course, he “let a woman” fulfill his own duty. In the context of Greek culture, Admetos’s rejection of the basic filial duty to bury his parents is shocking.
Themes
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Pheres demands to know who Admetos thinks he is. Pheres is a prince of Thessaly and refuses to be bullied by an “arrogant boy.” He reminds his son that he raised him and gave him his house and kingdom; “I am not obliged to die for you as well.” He tells Admetos that he owes him nothing more: “Do your own dying. I’ll do mine.” Admetos is the true coward, having essentially “murdered” Alcestis. Surely Admetos will do the same again, Pheres charges—he’ll just “wheedle [his] latest wife” into dying for him the next time. Soon he leaves in anger, taking his rejected gifts.
Pheres calls out Admetos’s hypocrisy. He points out that he has done all that is incumbent upon a father and more; Admetos grossly misunderstands familial obligations if he thinks that Pheres must also die for him. Each person must face death alone—a truth Admetos has refused to accept. Pheres accuses Admetos of an entitled attitude that won’t learn, suggesting that he’ll keep trying to outrun death’s claim on him, no matter the cost to others.
Themes
