Hospitality and Friendship Theme Analysis

Hospitality and friendship, cherished virtues in classical Greek society, frame Euripides’s Alcestis. Protagonist Admetos is a genuinely hospitable man, even winning gods, like long-term guest Apollo, by his kindness. Though his generosity is justly celebrated, Admetos has a confused and self-defeating view of hospitality. This is made worse when, making a series of rash vows before his wife Alcestis’s deathbed, Admetos swears he will welcome no guests for a year. This vow creates unintended consequences which prove damaging to the friendship Admetos most needs in his time of grief. Through the illustration of a “bad guest”—Herakles—Euripides shows that hospitality exercised for its own sake risks undermining the very friendships it is meant to sustain.

Admetos undermines hospitality by accepting a guest on dishonest terms. When his newly arrived friend, Herakles, observes that Admetos is dressed in mourning, Admetos makes a tortured evasion, not wanting to upset his friend with news of Alcestis’s death and fulfill his rash vow of extended mourning. He pretends to be preemptively mourning his wife’s eventual death, and then, changing gears, claims that an acquaintance, a relative stranger, has died. Herakles turns to leave the house of mourning, not wanting to burden them with his visit (“This is a time for mourning, not entertaining friends. / You cannot do both at once.”), but Admetos prevails upon him to stay just to make himself feel better. Later, the chorus leader asks if Admetos is mad to have done this. “I have pain enough without the pain / of having my house called inhospitable and rude,” he defends himself. The chorus leader perceptively replies, “Your friend, you say. / Then why conceal your sorrow from your friend?” The chorus leader’s point is that Admetos is trying to have it both ways. He doesn’t want to be seen as inhospitable, but he’s not doing his friend the honor of letting him mourn with him, either—thus, in the end, he’s not really being hospitable at all.

Herakles’s comedic behavior demonstrates the effects of hospitality gone wrong. During Alcestis’s funeral, an off-key drinking song is sung in the background. Admetos’s servant complains to the audience that Herakles is “the worst damned / guest this house and I have ever seen.” Herakles—a “dull clod” of a guest who should have seen that Admetos was in mourning—barges in anyway, makes himself at home, and freely orders the servants around, enjoying his wine. His behavior demonstrates the negative consequences that hospitality can invite. In reality, Herakles has taken Admetos at his word that he isn’t in serious mourning and has made himself comfortable in Admetos’s home, the way a true friend would. But Herakles’s exaggerated drunkenness, and the servant’s annoyance at this “worst” of guests, underscores the point that Herakles has not been properly welcomed; he’s been deceived by his friend and thus not enabled to be a proper friend and guest. Regardless of Admetos’s intentions, this is the opposite of hospitality.

Though deceived, Herakles demonstrates true friendship by fixing the mess Admetos has created. When he learns that Alcestis is dead, Herakles instantly sobers and leaps into characteristic action: “Now, Herakles, / your great ordeal begins. / Come, o my tough spirit, you hard, enduring hands calloused with my many labors, / come and prove what man I am.” “Admetos’s love to me was great,” he adds, “and it deserves—and it will get—no ordinary kindness / in return.” Herakles’s immediate, determined reaction to fix things for his grieving friend shows that even wrongheaded, inordinate hospitality, when it’s founded on true friendship, deserves to be requited. Rather than dwelling on his friend’s deceit and faulty hospitality, Herakles takes the blame for his own breach of propriety and does what he’s equipped to do—take Death by surprise and wrestle Alcestis free of Death’s clutches.

Herakles not only heals his friend’s sorrow, he also guides Admetos back to a proper practice of hospitality—and, in so doing, restores their friendship. When Herakles enters with the veiled girl (Alcestis), he constructs a scene that both confronts Admetos and prepares for the restoration of their friendship. He does this by creating a need for hospitality, knowing his friend’s weakness: “As your friend, I thought I had the right / to stand beside you in your hour of need / and prove my loyalty. But you misled me; you deliberately concealed the truth” […] “It was wrong of you, Admetos, wrong, I tell you, / to treat a friend this way. But let it pass. / You have sorrows enough, old friend.” Herakles claims he “won” Alcestis as a prize in an athletic contest and asks Admetos to keep the girl in his home until Herakles returns for her after his errand in Thrace. Despite Admetos’s resistance, Herakles urges him to exercise hospitality in the right way: “make this woman welcome in your generous house. […] / The courtesy you show this girl / may serve you in your time of need.” When Herakles finally unites their hands, he tells Admetos, “you will know your kindness was not wasted / on the son of Zeus, your good friend and grateful guest.” Thus Admetos’s weakness—inordinate hospitality—is ultimately leveraged as a strength, as Herakles kindly presses his friend to welcome the person who has the greatest of all claims on his hospitality and friendship—his wife.

Ultimately, just as Admetos must develop a humbler attitude about his humanity and mortality, so he must develop a humbler attitude about friendship, too—especially, he must acknowledge that he needs friends. This humility, in turn, enables him to be more generous, on a more humane scale, than he’s shown before. In leading Admetos to this point, Herakles proves to be even wiser in friendship than he is formidable in defeating Death.