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The mother who did mind was regarded as a difficult person, but whether she minded or not, decision lay with the father---as we see in Terence's play, The Self Tormentor. There the wife says to her husband, 'You remember, don't you, when I was pregnant, you told me emphatically that if the child should be a girl you would refuse to rear it.' The[126] child proved to be a girl, and so without further question it was got rid of. Male children were more valuable, and unless the circumstances of their birth were exceptional, as in the case of Paris and dipus, they were not often exposed.

There is this further point: what differentiates killing from murder is the question of risk. You kill, you do not murder, when you risk your own life. A soldier is not a murderer, and in sport a fox-hunter is a man of different type from a pigeon shooter. Now the Athenian women were not Amazons, but they fought a battle no less dangerous. 'They say of us,' cries Medea, 'that we live a life free from danger within doors, while men are fighting like heroes with the spear. But men are fools. Rather would I stand three times in the battle line of shields than bear one child.' A mother had already risked her life in bringing a child to birth; is she not far more justified than the father in ending that child's life, if such be her will? Moreover, children are the pledges of marriage, the securities given for a business arrangement. Is it right that the party who wilfully breaks the compact should retain possession of the securities?

Such I believe are some of the questions that Euripides meant to suggest. It is no answer to them to say that it is an unnatural crime for a mother to kill her children, for it is equally unnatural[127] and criminal for a father, and yet ancient fathers killed their children without compunction and without blame.

The Medea then is realistic and little else: the Alcestis, the first in time of Euripides' plays, is a blend of style, and demands a fuller treatment.

There are no villains in the Alcestis, and there are no heroes. There is one heroic character, but her heroism is of so common a type that it usually passes unnoticed. The three men, Admetus, Pheres and Heracles, in varying degrees are animated by the strongest of all male motives, self-preservation. Alcestis lacks their sound common-sense; she is guided by passion, by the strongest of all female passions and that which comes nearest to the divine, the maternal passion of self-sacrifice. She has given life once, she is prepared to give it again.

It is commonly assumed---and even Verrall tacitly allows this to go unchallenged---that Alcestis 'is in love with' Admetus, and Admetus 'is in love with' Alcestis. The affection which, happily for us, may usually be expected to exist between husband and wife, is taken for granted in the very different conditions of Euripides' time.

Now, as we have seen, this is a cardinal error. Mutual affection and esteem did not reign in an ordinary Athenian household. Husband and wife were[128] usually indifferent one to another, and even this indifference was an improvement upon the Ionian relationship when husband and wife were often natural enemies.

That a wife should give up her life out of love for her husband is a state of things so agreeable to the natural man that it is, perhaps, not surprising if the language of the play has never been too closely examined.

Alcestis' motive is not love for her husband, but love for her children. Euripides, following schylus, knew that maternal love is a far stronger force than conjugal affection, even when the latter exists. The mother and the children---on them he spends all the resources of his unrivalled pathos---the husband is a mark for his bitterest irony. It is because Alcestis does not wish her children to be left fatherless that she consents to death.

The position of the widow---as indeed, is implied in our language by the form of the word---is definitely worse than that of the widower. The orphan in ancient times was the fatherless child, and the position of the chief's son whose father died in his childhood was particularly unenviable. It is described in two of the most pathetic passages in Greek literature, by Andromache in the twenty-second book of the Iliad and by Tecmessa, in the most Euripidean of all the plays of Sophocles, the[129] Ajax. Under the old tribal system, a chief's power depended very largely on personal ascendency, so that old men like Laertes and Pheres found it expedient to retire in favour of their grown-up son. A small boy like Eumelus could not have maintained his father's position, and his father's death would probably have meant considerable danger to his life. All this in Euripides' time was a commonplace and needed no emphasis. He prefers, indeed, to deal with the reverse picture---the sorrows of the motherless children and especially of the motherless girl; for the pathos of the sacrifice is partly this. It is for the sake of the boy and his future position in life, and not so much for the girl, that the mother dies.

Let us now examine the play itself. Admetus, chief of Pher, has been told by his medicine man that he is a very bad life: that, indeed, he cannot hope to live much longer---three months, perhaps; six months, say, at the most. But he has been a generous benefactor to the profession, and in particular has rendered some quite exceptional services to the arch-physician, Apollo himself. Accordingly a special provision is made in his case. If he can get some one of his own family to transfer to him their vitality, the operation may be feasible. The problem is, to find the man---or woman---for his family is very small. Admetus goes to his father and his[130] mother, but both, even his mother, refuse; for, as we shall see, Admetus is not a very sympathetic character, or likely to arouse the spirit of self-sacrifice even in a mother's heart. Finally he asks his young wife, the mother of his two little children, and she consents.

At this point the play opens. Admetus believes what he is told; Alcestis believes what she is told: the sixth month is ending and she is marked out for death. So Death appears, and the burlesque dialogue between Death and the Doctor, Thanatos and Apollo, forms the prologue, where the arch-physician, who can cure all diseases but one, is confronted by that One himself. But the prologue and the entrance of the chorus need not detain us. The first intimate details about Alcestis are given by the servant woman in her long speech to the chorus, and it will be noticed that in the picture of the household which she draws for them the central point is the marriage bed. Twice already has Alcestis risked her life upon that bed, and now another sacrifice has to be made. A childless woman might refuse. Her husband demands her life, and she must give it for the sake of the children whom on that bed she has borne. It is of her children that Alcestis thinks: for them she prays: she has no petition to make on her husband's behalf. In all the narrative, indeed, the husband scarcely appears. The[131] chorus---of men---notice the omission and enquire of him, and this is the answer they get:

'Oh, yes he is weeping as he holds the woman he loves, his bed-fellow, in both arms. He is begging her not to abandon him: he wants what he cannot have.'

The chorus then burst into a lament which is interrupted by the appearance of Alcestis and her husband outside the house. The following scene is an extreme example of that combination of pathos and irony from which Euripides never shrinks. The lamentation of Alcestis, expressed in lyrics of the purest quality, is answered at regular intervals by Admetus in iambic couplets where style and thought alike are cruelly commonplace.