Part 14 (1/2)

P. 3, Prologue. Asclepios (Latin Aesculapius), son of Apollo, the hero-physician, by his miraculous skill healed the dead. This transgressed the divine law, so Zeus slew him. (The particular dead man raised by him was Hippolytus, who came to life in Italy under the name of Virbius, and was wors.h.i.+pped with Artemis at Aricia.) Apollo in revenge, not presuming to attack Zeus himself, killed the Cyclopes, and was punished by being exiled from heaven and made servant to a mortal. There are several such stories of G.o.ds made servants to human beings.

P. 3, l. 12, Beguiling.]--See Preface. In the original story he made them drunk with wine. (Aesch. _Eumenides_, 728.) As the allusion would doubtless be clear to the Greek audience, I have added a mention of wine which is not in the Greek. Libations to the Elder G.o.ds, such as the Fates and Eumenides, had to be ”wineless.” Historically this probably means that the wors.h.i.+p dates from a time before wine was used in Greece.

P. 4, l. 22, The stain of death must not come nigh My radiance.]--Compare Artemis in the last scene of the _Hippolytus_. The presence of a dead body would be a pollution to Apollo, though that of Thanatos (Death) himself seems not to be so. It is rather Thanatos who is dazzled and blinded by Apollo, like an owl or bat in the sunlight.

P. 5, l. 43, Rob me of my second prey.]--”You first cheated me of Admetus, and now you cheat me of his subst.i.tute.”

P. 6, l. 59, The rich would buy, etc.]--Here and throughout this difficult little dialogue I follow the readings of my own text in the _Bibliotheca Oxoniensis_.

P. 7, l. 74, To lay upon her hair my sword.]--As the sacrificing priest cut off a lock of hair from the victim's head before the actual sacrifice.

P. 8, l. 77, Chorus.]--The Chorus consists of citizens, probably Elders, of the city of Pherae. Dr. Verrall has rightly pointed out that there is some general dissatisfaction in the town at Admetus's behaviour (l. 210 ff.). These citizens come to mourn with Admetus out of old friends.h.i.+p, though they do not altogether defend him.

The Chorus is very drastically broken up into so many separate persons conversing with one another; the treatment in the _Rhesus_ is similar but even bolder. See _Rhesus_, pp. 28-31, 37-42. Cf. also the entrance-choruses of the _Trojan Women_ (pp. 19-23) and the _Medea_ (pp. 10-13); and ll. 872 ff., 889 ff., pp. 50, 51, below.

Instead of a.s.signing the various lines definitely to First, Second, Third Citizen, and so on, I have put a ”paragraphus” (--), the ancient Greek sign for indicating a new speaker.

P. 8, l. 82, Pelias' daughter.]--_i.e._ Alcestis.

P. 8, l. 92, Paian.]--The Healer. The word survives chiefly as a cry for help and as an epithet or t.i.tle of Apollo or Asclepios. ”Paian,” Latin Paean, is also a cry of victory; but the relation of the two meanings is not quite made out. (p.r.o.nounce rather like ”Pah-yan.”) Cf. l. 220.

P. 9, l. 112, To wander o'er leagues of land.]--You could sometimes save a sick person by appealing to an oracle, such as that of Apollo in Lycia or of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan desert; but now no sacrifice will help. Only Asclepios, were he still on earth, might have helped us. (See on the Prologue.)

P. 12, l. 150, 'Fore G.o.d she dies high-hearted.]--What impresses the Elder is the calm and deliberate way in which Alcestis faces these preparations.

P. 12, l. 162, Before the Hearth-Fire.]--Hestia, the hearth-fire, was a G.o.ddess, the Latin Vesta, and is addressed as ”Mother.” It is characteristic in Alcestis to think chiefly about happy marriages for the children.

P. 12, l. 182, Happier perhaps, more true she cannot be.]--A famous line and open to parody. Cf. Aristophanes, _Knights_, 1251 (”Another wear this crown instead of me, Happier perhaps; worse thief he cannot be”). And see on l. 367 below.

P. 15, l. 228, Hearts have bled.]--People have committed suicide for less than this.

P. 16, l. 244, O Sun.]--Alcestis has come out to see the Sun and Sky for the last time and say good-bye to them. It is a rite or practice often mentioned in Greek poetry. Her beautiful wandering lines about Charon and his boat are the more natural because she is not dying from any disease but is being mysteriously drawn away by the Powers of Death.

P. 16, l. 252, A boat, two-oared.]--She sees Charon, the boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx.

P. 17, l. 259, Drawing, drawing.]--The creature whom she sees drawing her to ”the palaces of the dead” is certainly not Charon, who had no wings, but was like an old boatman in a peasant's cap and sleeveless tunic; nor can he be Hades, the throned King to whose presence she must eventually go. Apparently, therefore, he must be Thanatos, whom we have just seen on the stage. He was evidently supposed to be invisible to ordinary human eyes.

P. 18, l. 280, Alcestis's speech.]--Great simplicity and sincerity are the keynotes of this fine speech. Alcestis does not make light of her sacrifice: she enjoyed her life and values it; she wishes one of the old people had died instead; she is very earnest that Admetus shall not marry again, chiefly for the children's sake, but possibly also from some little shadow of jealousy. A modern dramatist would express all this, if at all, by a scene or a series of scenes of conversation; Euripides always uses the long self-revealing speech. Observe how little romantic love there is in Alcestis, though Admetus is full of it. See Preface, pp. xiii, xiv.

Pp. 19, 20, l. 328 ff., Admetus's speech.]--If the last speech made us know Alcestis, this makes us know Admetus fully as well. At one time the beauty and pa.s.sion of it almost make us forget its ultimate hollowness; at another this hollowness almost makes us lose patience with its beautiful language. In this state of balance the touch of satire in l. 338 f. (”My mother I will know no more,” etc.), and the fact that he speaks immediately after the complete sincerity of Alcestis, conspire to weigh down the scale against Admetus. There can be no doubt that he means, and means pa.s.sionately, all that he says. Only he could not quite manage to die when it was not strictly necessary.

P. 20, l. 355, If Orpheus' voice were mine.]--The bard and prophet, Orpheus, went down to the dead to win back his wife, Eurydice. Hades and Persephone, spell-bound by his music, granted his prayer that Eurydice should return to the light, on condition that he should go before her, harping, and should never look back to see if she was following. Just at the end of the journey he looked back, and she vanished. The story is told with overpowering beauty in Vergil's fourth Georgic.

P. 21, l. 367, Oh, not in death from thee Divided.]--Parodied in Aristophanes' _Archarnians_ 894, where it is addressed to an eel, and the second line ends ”in a beet-root frica.s.see.” See on l. 182.

P. 23, l. 393 ff., The Little Boy's speech.]--Cla.s.sical Greek sculpture and vase-painting tended to represent children not like children but like diminutive men; and something of the sort is true of Greek tragedy.

The stately tragic convention has in the main to be maintained; the child must speak a language suited for heroes, or at least for high poetry.

The quality of childishness has to be indicated by a word or so of child-language delicately admitted amid the stateliness. Here we have [Greek: maia], something like ”mummy,” at the beginning, and [Greek: neossos], ”chicken” or ”little bird,” at the end. Otherwise most of the language is in the regular tragic diction, and some of it doubtless seems to us unsuitable for a child. If Milton had had to make a child speak in _Paradise Lost_, what sort of diction would he have given it?

The success or ill-success of such an attempt as this to combine the two styles, the heroic and the childlike, depends on questions of linguistic tact, and can hardly be judged with any confidence by foreigners. But I think we can see Euripides here, as in other places, reaching out at an effect which was really beyond the resources of his art, and attaining a result which, though clearly imperfect, is strangely moving. He gets great effects from the use of children in several tragedies, though he seldom lets them speak. They speak in the _Medea_, the _Andromache_, and _Suppliants_, and are mute figures in the _Trojan Women, Hecuba, Heracles_, and _Iphigenia in Aulis_. We may notice that where his children do speak, they speak only in lyrics, never in ordinary dialogue. This is very significant, and clearly right.