ALCESTIS

Above: This Roman fresco depicts Admetus (far left) being comforted by his wife, Alcestis, before she dies in his place.

Alcestis occupies an important position in Greek mythology as the paragon of the loyal wife, who volunteered to die in place of her husband, Admetus, and as a loving and devoted daughter, who refused to shed her father’s blood.

Alcestis, whose name means “might of the home,” was a daughter of Pelias, king of lolcus—the same Pelias who sent his nephew Jason to retrieve the Golden Fleece. The most famous version of her myth is retold in Alcestis, a play by Greek dramatist Euripides (c. 486—c. 406 BCE). Alcestis was the most beautiful of Pelias’s three daughters and received many offers of marriage from princes and kings. Pelias knew that an outright refusal of any of these powerful suitors might threaten his position, so he devised a task that a suitor had to complete before marrying his daughter. The challenge was to harness a wild boar and a lion to a chariot and ride it around a racetrack. These two animals were symbols of different halves of the year in ancient Greece. Their inclusion in the myth has been interpreted as representing the peaceful division of a kingdom through marriage.

King Admetus of Pherae had one advantage over Alcestis’s other suitors: his aid was the god Apollo, who was serving a punishment imposed on him by Zeus, whom he had angered. With Apollo’s help, Admetus completed Pelias’s task and married Alcestis. Before long, however, Admetus fell ill and seemed destined to die. Once again Apollo came to his aid. The god interceded with the three Fates, or Moirai—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—and persuaded them to spare Admetus’s life on the condition that someone else would die in his place. Admetus thought little of the implications of this arrangement and agreed to it at once. However, neither his friends nor his parents would countenance sacrificing their lives for him. Only Alcestis offered herself as the substitute. When Thanatos, god of death, arrived to take Alcestis away, he was thwarted by the Greek hero Heracles. Armed with a club made from a wild olive branch—a plant used in ancient Greece to cast out evil—Heracles forced Thanatos to surrender Alcestis to her husband, restoring her to life and happiness.