The Project Gutenberg EBook of Alcestis, by Euripides

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Title: Alcestis

Author: Euripides

Release Date: December 23, 2003 [EBook #10523]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ALCESTIS

OF

EURIPIDES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE

WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY

GILBERT MURRAY, LL D, D LITT, FBA

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

1915

INTRODUCTION

The _Alcestis_ would hardly confirm its author's right to be
acclaimed "the most tragic of the poets." It is doubtful whether one can
call it a tragedy at all. Yet it remains one of the most characteristic
and delightful of Euripidean dramas, as well as, by modern standards, the
most easily actable. And I notice that many judges who display nothing but
a fierce satisfaction in sending other plays of that author to the block
or the treadmill, show a certain human weakness in sentencing the gentle
daughter of Pelias.

The play has been interpreted in many different ways. There is the old
unsophisticated view, well set forth in Paley's preface of 1872. He
regards the _Alcestis_ simply as a triumph of pathos, especially of
"that peculiar sort of pathos which comes most home to us, with our views
and partialities for domestic life.... As for the characters, that of
Alcestis must be acknowledged to be pre-eminently beautiful. One could
almost imagine that Euripides had not yet conceived that bad opinion of
the sex which so many of the subsequent dramas exhibit.... But the rest
are hardly well-drawn, or, at least, pleasingly portrayed." "The poet
might perhaps, had he pleased, have exhibited Admetus in a more amiable
point of view."

This criticism is not very trenchant, but its weakness is due, I think,
more to timidity of statement than to lack of perception. Paley does see
that a character may be "well-drawn" without necessarily being "pleasing";
and even that he may be eminently pleasing as a part of the play while
very displeasing in himself. He sees that Euripides may have had his own
rea