Alcestis

ALCESTIS, the most beautiful of Pelias’s daughters, was asked in marriage by many kings and princes. Not wishing to endanger his political position by refusing any of them, and yet clearly unable to satisfy more than one, Pelias let it be known that he would marry Alcestis to the man who could yoke a wild boar and a lion to his chariot and drive them around the race-course. At this, Admetus King of Pherae summoned Apollo, whom Zeus had bound to him for one year as a herdsman, and asked: ‘Have I treated you with the respect due to your godhead? ‘You have indeed,’ Apollo assented, ‘and I have shown my gratitude by making all your ewes drop twins.’ ‘As a final favour, then,’ pleaded Admetus, ‘pray help me to win Alcestis, by enabling me to fulfill Pelias’s conditions.’ ‘I shall be pleased to do so,’ replied Apollo. Heracles lent him a hand with the taming of the wild beasts  presently Admetus was driving his chariot around the race-course Iolcus, drawn by this savage team.

b. It is not known why Admetus omitted the customary sacrifice to Artemis before marrying Alcestis, but the goddess was quick enough to punish him. When, flushed with wine, anointed with essences, garlanded with flowers, he entered the bridal chamber that night, he recoiled in horror. No lovely naked bride awaited him on the marriage couch, but a tangled knot of hissing serpents. Admetus ran shouting for Apollo, who kindly intervened with Artemis on his behalf. The neglected sacrifice having been offered at once, all was well, Apollo even obtaining Artemis’s promise that, when the day of Admetus’ death came, he should be spared on condition that a member of his family died voluntarily for love of him.
c. This fatal day came sooner than Admetus expected. Hermes flied into the palace one morning and summoned him to Tartarus. General consternation prevailed; but Apollo gained a little time for Admetus by making the Three Fates drunk, and thus delayed the fatal scission of his life’s thread. Admetus ran in haste to his old parents, clasped their knees, and begged each of them in turn to surrender him the butt-end of existence. Both roundly refused, saying that they still derived much enjoyment from life, and that he should be content with his appointed lot, like everyone else.
d. Then, for love of Admetus, Alcestis took poison and her ghost descended to Tartarus; but Persephone considered it an evil thing that a wife should die instead of a husband. ‘Back with you to the upper air!’ she cried.
e. Some tell the tale differently. They say that Hades came in person to fetch Admetus and that, when he fled, Alcestis volunteered to take his place; but Heracles arrived unexpectedly with a new wild-oily, club, and rescued her.

1. The yoking of a lion and a wild boar to the same chariot is the theme of a Theban myth, where the original meaning has been equally obscured. Lion and boar were the animal symbols given to the first and second halves of the Sacred Year, respectively-they  constantly occur, in opposition, on Etruscan vases-and the oracle seems to have proposed a peaceful settlement of the traditional rivalry between the sacred king and his tanist. This was that the kingdom should be divided in halves, and that they should reign concurrently, as Proetus and Acrisius eventually did at Argos, rather than keep it entire, and rule alternately- as Polyneices and Eteocles did at Thebes. A fruit of the race-course in a chariot was a proof of royalty.
2. Artemis was hostile to monogamic marriage because she belonged to the pre-Hellenic cult in which women mated promiscuously outside their own clans; so the Hellenes  propitiated her with wedding sacrifices, carrying torches of the chaste hawthorn in her honour. The patriarchal practice of suttee, attested here and in the myths of Evadne and Polyxena,  grew from the Indo-European custom which forbade widows to remarry; once this ban was relaxed, suttee became less attractive.

3. In the first version of this myth, Persephone refused Alcestis’s sacrifice-Persephone represents the matriarchal point of view. In the second version, Heracles forbade it, and was chosen as the instrument of Zeus’s will, that is to say of patriarchal ethics, on the ground that he once harrowed Hell and rescued Theseus. Wild-olive served in Greece to expel evil influences; as the birch did in Italy and northern Europe.