as he lectures the sad attendant on the joys of life, the conflict of selfishness between Admetus and his father (for as such the Greeks understood it), and the insistence of Heracles that his sorrowing host shall receive the veiled lady into his mourning house, are probably owing to the place of the Alcestis as fourth in the representation, in other words, as substitute for a satyric drama. We may suppose that the audience required not only a melodrama, but some room for laughter after the witnessing of three solemn tragedies.
This comparatively early play (438 B.C.) came out with the Cretan Women, the Alcmæon, and the Telephus, of which the last was sufficiently remarkable to excite Aristophanes' constant ridicule, on account of its ragged and suffering hero. The whole group obtained second prize, Sophocles being first. To us the mixture of comic and vulgar life with profoundly tragic scenes is peculiarly interesting in a Greek play. This combination appears in the very prologue, in which Apollo tells us how Admetus "having tested and gone through all his friends, his aged father, and the mother who bore him," can find no other substitute except his wife.
The chorus is throughout a sympathetic spectator of the action, and the choral odes are highly poetical and beautifully constructed, as well as strictly to the point. Thus even in the ode supposed to express the poet's mind (vv. 962 sqq.)—ἔγω διὰ Μούσας καὶ μετάρσιος ᾖξα—the learning alluded to by the chorus is that Thracian learning, which was naturally accessible to Thessalians, where the scene is laid. There is a remarkable external resemblance between the concluding scene, and that of the Winter's Tale, which has not escaped the commentators. Still closer is the parallel in the old Indian epic, the Mâha-Bhârata, where Sâvitri, like Alcestis, rescues her husband from the power of Yama, the lord of the nether world. These are of course accidental resemblances; the conscious reproductions have been innumerable, for no subject
