But the king recoils at the thought. How can he receive a young and beautiful woman into his house without pain to himself and shame to her? He protests that it is unthinkable, and begs Heracles to take her elsewhere. She would be a constant reminder of his grief, and an insult to the memory of his wife. Until this moment he has hardly glanced at the silent figure by the hero’s side, except to notice that her rich vestments proclaim her young. But something in her appearance seizes his attention; and he proceeds, rapidly and in great agitation:
“_But, woman, thou, Whoso thou art, know that thy body’s stature Is as Alcestis, and thy form as hers. Ah me!—lead, for the Gods’ sake, from my sight This woman!—Take not my captivity captive. For as I look on her, methinks I see My wife. She stirs my heart with turmoil: fountains Of tears burst from mine eyes. O wretched I! Now taste I first this grief’s full bitterness._“[29]
It is Alcestis’ very self, won back from death as Apollo had promised; but with the awful silence of the tomb still upon her. Heracles places her hand in that of the reluctant and incredulous king, while he draws aside her veil:
“_Yea, guard her. Thou shalt call The child of Zeus one day a noble guest. Look on her, if in aught she seems to thee Like to thy wife. Step forth from grief to bliss._“[29]
From _The Life and Death of Jason_, by William Morris (Longmans).
From the _Alcestis_ of Euripides, translated by Dr. A. S. Way (Loeb Classical Library: London, Heinemann).
Only eighteen dramas are extant of the seventy-five which Euripides is known to have written. And an interesting small fact is that the two earliest of these surviving dramas are the _Alcestis_ and the _Medea_, produced respectively in 438 B.C. and 431 B.C. Each of the two has a woman for the protagonist, and both have love for their central theme. To that extent therefore they are similar, and represent certain clear features of Euripidean drama as a whole.
We have already noted the poet’s interest in womanhood: his keen and careful study of feminine character. He was no less occupied with the influence of love in human life; but on both themes he was clear-eyed and penetrative, aspiring always to the ‘white star of truth.’ Therefore we do not find in his drama a troop of faultless women, moving in an atmosphere of romantic glamour; nor a treatment of love which reveals only the more beautiful aspects of it. He seems to have been content to acknowledge, as for instance in the _Alcestis_ and the lost _Andromeda_, that life’s flowers do sometimes, given the right conditions, come to fair fruition. But he saw how often they are warped and blighted; and though he would not hide the grimmer facts, he was always careful to seek and show the cause of the aberration. Hence, though the truth of his presentation is sometimes merciless, and may have given colour to the contemporary gossip which called him a ‘woman-hater,’ one glance below the surface of his thought shows him to have been inspired by a nobler chivalry than that which is content to veil the facts of life in romantic illusion. So we find that although both the _Alcestis_ and the _Medea_ are preoccupied with the theme of love, there is a vivid contrast in the treatment of the theme, despite certain resemblances between the two dramas. It is true that both of the heroines are pre-eminent in devotion to the men with whom they are mated; and that the hero in each case moves on a plane from which he cannot reach the height of his wife’s spirit. But whilst on the one hand love takes possession of a gentle nature, and favoured by every circumstance of character and environment triumphs over death itself, in the case of Medea a wild soul spends itself recklessly for the object of its love, beats impotently against injustice, loses hold on sanity and sweet human ties, and is transformed into an avenging fury.