[He goes with ALCESTIS into the house.]
CHORUS.
There be many shapes of mystery;
And many things God brings to be,
Past hope or fear.
And the end men looked for cometh not,
And a path is there where no man thought.
So hath it fallen here.
P. 3, Prologue. Asclepios (Latin Aesculapius),
son of Apollo, the hero-physician, by his miraculous
skill healed the dead. This transgressed the
divine law, so Zeus slew him. (The particular dead
man raised by him was Hippolytus, who came to life
in Italy under the name of Virbius, and was worshipped
with Artemis at Aricia.) Apollo in revenge, not presuming
to attack Zeus himself, killed the Cyclopes, and was
punished by being exiled from heaven and made servant
to a mortal. There are several such stories of
gods made servants to human beings.
P. 3, l. 12, Beguiling.]—See Preface.
In the original story he made them drunk with wine.
(Aesch. Eumenides, 728.) As the allusion would
doubtless be clear to the Greek audience, I have added
a mention of wine which is not in the Greek.
Libations to the Elder Gods, such as the Fates and
Eumenides, had to be “wineless.” Historically
this probably means that the worship dates from a
time before wine was used in Greece.
P. 4, l. 22, The stain of death must not come nigh
My radiance.]—Compare Artemis in the last
scene of the Hippolytus. The presence of
a dead body would be a pollution to Apollo, though
that of Thanatos (Death) himself seems not to be so.
It is rather Thanatos who is dazzled and blinded by
Apollo, like an owl or bat in the sunlight.
P. 5, l. 43, Rob me of my second prey.]—“You
first cheated me of Admetus, and now you cheat me
of his substitute.”
P. 6, l. 59, The rich would buy, etc.]—Here
and throughout this difficult little dialogue I follow
the readings of my own text in the Bibliotheca
Oxoniensis.
P. 7, l. 74, To lay upon her hair my sword.]—As
the sacrificing priest cut off a lock of hair from
the victim’s head before the actual sacrifice.
P. 8, l. 77, Chorus.]—The Chorus consists
of citizens, probably Elders, of the city of Pherae.
Dr. Verrall has rightly pointed out that there is
some general dissatisfaction in the town at Admetus’s
behaviour (l. 210 ff.). These citizens come to
mourn with Admetus out of old friendship, though they
do not altogether defend him.
The Chorus is very drastically broken up into so many
separate persons conversing with one another; the
treatment in the Rhesus is similar but even
bolder. See Rhesus, pp. 28-31, 37-42.
Cf. also the entrance-choruses of the Trojan Women
(pp. 19-23) and the Medea (pp. 10-13); and
ll. 872 ff., 889 ff., pp. 50, 51, below.
Instead of assigning the various lines definitely
to First, Second, Third Citizen, and so on, I have
put a “paragraphus” (—), the
ancient Greek sign for indicating a new speaker.
