nce. He came to make men 'sit up and
think.' He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung
them at the head of the world. He must stir and probe things to
the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the
perfection of his poetry. Admetus is to die, unless someone will
die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the
worst of all possible happenings. Alcestis his wife will die for
him; and he accepts her sacrifice. Now, that was the old saga;
and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right. Woman was an
inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that
Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point
plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in
Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into
the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt,
too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization. In
Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about
women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic
Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a
state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which,
indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past. These great
Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were
as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to
the Greece of their time--of historic times; they were, I think,
as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and
revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have
been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for
memory. I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to
get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the
Lodge--to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.--But
to return to the story of Alcestis:--

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a
symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I
do not quite see how. Sophocles would have been aware of nothing
wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course.
Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and
rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave
it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules
at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is
great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional
callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:--leave