Euripides' Alcestis is a strange duck. The tragedian's earliest surviving drama, it is quite accessible to a non-specialist audience, whether on page or stage, with its central love story, heart-rending death scene and boisterous drunken revel. Its climactic question, whether Admetus will keep his promise to his dead wife, does not require extensive knowledge of Greek morals or theatrical conventions. Yet to the scholar of tragedy, Alcestis confounds any straightforward reception. The more we get to know it, the more insoluble questions it raises. What is the significance of its placement as the fourth play in Euripides' tetralogy of 438, in place of a satyr play? Why does Alcestis remain silent at the end? What does it mean that Admetus plans to have a statue of Alcestis made, to be his bedmate? The volume under review comes from the series Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. Although it is largely organised around the play's plot-line and literary themes, S. unifies the book by keeping a handful of important contexts before the reader's eye, namely genre, performance and socio-political contexts. The result is a fine general-audience introduction to one of Euripides' trickiest plays.
The first of the four chapters is entitled ‘438 and All That’, a reference to the year of Alcestis’s production. Despite the seeming nod to chronology, the chapter generally eschews discussion of historical context. The primary focus, instead, is on how the performance context shaped audience reception. On the question of genre, S. examines whether the audience would have known in advance that Alcestis, though a fourth play in a tetralogy, was not a satyr play. He partly endorses C.W. Marshall's controversial argument that Euripides removed satyrs from the fourth tetralogy position as a protest against legislated restrictions on dramatic satire (CJ 95 [2000], 229–38). Regarding performance conventions, S. describes the orchestra and stage performance spaces. He argues for a raised stage and a mostly but not completely impermeable separation of actors’ space and chorus space.Footnote 1 He also suggests that, although Alcestis can be played by two actors, a three-actor company is more likely since the same tetralogy's Telephus almost certainly had three actors and it is ‘more practical’ to divide up all the roles that one of the actors would otherwise have to play.
The second chapter, ‘The Action of the Play’, traces the plot development and describes the contents of the choral songs. S. continues his focus on production. As if writing for potential directors, he explains stage movements, both those implied by the text and those recorded in scholia, and he hypothesises how costumes appeared, with comparanda from the visual arts where appropriate. He pays attention to the play's various metres, indicating their impact on each scene but not belabouring their technical aspects. He glosses what technical vocabulary he does need (e.g. prologue, strophe, eccyclêma) and several important Greek words from the text (aristê, aidôs). He highlights the unique aspects of the performance, including the possibly surprise entrance of a non-satyr chorus, the non-violent onstage death of Alcestis, the son's lament and the chorus's temporary departure. Major themes that could be explicated along with the plot (e.g. hospitality) are left to the next chapter.
The latter two chapters are the heart of the book. The third chapter, ‘Themes of the Play’, locates Alcestis' themes in the broader trends of Euripidean scholarship that describe the playwright's ‘delight in testing boundaries and confounding categories’ (p. 31). Identified themes include: the house and door; husband and wife; parents and children; xenia, philia and charis; life and death; lament; fame and infamy; doubles and opposites; Alcestis' statue; and marriage, remarriage and silence. S. keeps his eye on his concerns for genre, space and performance conventions. The chapter's greatest strength, though, lies in S.'s insightful readings of individual passages, which he explains clearly for readers without Greek. To take just one example, in his discussion of xenia, S. notes Apollo's use of xenos in line 6 and his double use of hosios to describe both himself and Admetus in line 10. S. explains why many translators ‘shy away from’ using the English adjective ‘holy’ to refer to both the god and the man, but remarks, ‘however translated, it implies that both were capable of and did recognize a mutual sense of sacred obligation’ (p. 41). S.'s reader is invited to reflect both upon the startling use of hosios in the play and on English writers' unwillingness or inability to reproduce Euripides’ astonishing turn of phrase. S.'s penchant for introducing interpretations without closure extends to his discussion of grander themes. Thus, in addressing the issues of Alcestis' silence in the final scene (pp. 61–6), S. briefly opens up questions regarding the ethical dimensions of Admetus’ admittance of Alcestis into the house, but then concentrates on questions about the social significance of marriage, questions that are underrepresented in the scholarship.
S. rarely engages directly in scholarly debate, but when he does it is purposeful. In the section on ‘fame and infamy’ (pp. 50–6), S. interrogates Goldhill's reading of how the City Dionysia's pre-dramatic ceremonies use praise to reinforce civic ideology (Goldhill in Nothing to Do with Dionysus?, edd. J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin [1990], pp. 97–129). Following Griffith and others, he expresses doubt that the ceremonies reflected an ideology as ‘monophonic’ as Goldhill would have it. He brings in Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon (the response to Demosthenes’ On the Crown, the main source for some of the ceremonies) to suggest that the polis did not exercise full control over the ceremonies’ encomiastic messages, and he reminds readers that the ceremonies also contained opportunity for blame. With such multiplicity of voices in the background, plays had the opportunity either to transgress or to reinforce the ceremonies’ meanings. S. thus argues that Alcestis constructs the death of a parent and the orphaning of children against the background of the ceremonies’ parade of war orphans. As the war orphans are entrusted to the polis, so Alcestis – in a gender reversal – entrusts her children to Admetus as head of the oikos. ‘The royal oikos’, therefore, ‘functions as a metonym for the city’ (p. 55). S.'s argument is clear, convincing and central to his understanding of the play's socio-political meanings.
The final chapter, ‘Afterlives of an Afterlife’, traces the play's (and myth's) reception from antiquity to the twentieth century. The chapter is impressively detailed and thorough, not at all an afterthought to a historicist reading of the play.Footnote 2 It naturally highlights dramatic arts, from Accius to Gluck's opera Alceste to Thornton Wilder's Alcestiad and Ted Hughes's Alcestis, but S. does not neglect other literary artists, especially Chaucer and T.S. Eliot, nor the visual arts, particularly pagan and Christian Roman sarcophagi. The focus is firmly on the history of the story's transmission and reception, but S. also emphasises how each receiving age expressed its own needs with and through the tale. The courage and heroism of Alcestis herself can be seen to fluctuate alongside the changing fortunes of the alternately cowardly and exculpable Admetus.
The book concludes with a timeline, glossary and well-chosen, mostly Anglophone, suggestions for further reading.
