Where is he gone to bury her? where am I
To go and find her?
Servant. By the road that leads
Straight to Larissa, thou wilt see the tomb
Out of the suburb, a carved sepulchre."—(B.)
But as soon as Hercules extracts from the servant the real cause of the family grief, all levity departs from him. He is almost wroth with his friend for such overstrained delicacy, and hurries out to render him such "yeoman's service" as no one except the strongest of mankind can perform. Alcestis has been laid in her grave; the mourners have all come back to the palace; and Death, easy in his mind as to Apollo, and secure, as he deems himself, from interruption, is making ready for a ghoulish feast on her corpse. But he has reckoned without the guest. He finds himself in the dilemma of foregoing his prey or being strangled, and he permits his irresistible antagonist to restore the self-devoted wife to the arms of her disconsolate and even more astonished husband.[1]
With the instinct of a great artist, Euripides centralises the interest of the action in Alcestis alone; and in order to show how perfect the sacrifice is, he endows the victim with every noble, tender, and loving
- ↑ Never has rationalising of old-world stories made a bolder stride than in the case of this play. Late Greek writers ascribe the decease of Alcestis to her having nursed her husband through a fever. She takes it herself, and is laid out for dead, when a physician, sharper-sighted than the rest of the faculty at the time, discovers that the vital spark is not extinct, and cheats death of his foe by remedies unluckily not mentioned for the benefit of posterity.
