So good words, henceforth! If thou speak us ill,
Many and true an ill thing shalt thou hear!. . .
And dost not thou too, all for love of life
Carry out now, in place of thine, this corpse?. . .
Meanwhile woo many wives—the more will die!. . .
Die when thou wilt, thou wilt die infamous!
Thou buriest her whom thou didst murder first.
Such would have been the missiles which, worded or not, must have gone to the heart of Admetus with every flower flung by assembled Thessaly upon the bier of Alcestis. And that is why, at the very instant when she is declared to be dead, "the next need is to carry forth this corpse".
Here, at the pause in the action which follows the retirement of Pheres and departure of the convoy, it will be convenient to review our road. We set out to investigate certain detractions, on the face of them serious, which are commonly made from the praise of Euripides, and notably from that of the Alcestis. These detractions, we find, are not ill summed up in the epigrammatic phrase, pronouncing the poet a 'botcher', and meaning that in his works the single pieces, however smart or well-wrought, are merely tagged together; the scenes do not grow out of one another in the way of progress towards a common end, and do not contribute to any one sentiment which may be regarded as the outcome of the whole; sometimes on the contrary, as is the case of the Alcestis, there is between parts and whole a marked repugnance; a vital defect, as it is rightly thought, and killing to the merits which might be allowed in the details, if only they had belonged to another scheme. Now as regards the scenes which we have been considering, we have got some way, though at present only part of the way, towards disproving this charge. The first half of our play is at all events coherent within itself. The altercation between Admetus and Pheres is not dragged in 'to please a contentious and law-loving audience'; it was not written because the dramatist saw his way to play the pair smartly against one another, and was blind or indifferent to the effect which his damaged puppets
