“Behold him living in his shame, a wretch who quailed at death himself, but of his coward heart gave up his wedded wife instead, and escaped from Hades; doth he deem himself a man after that?”

It is true also that his father taunts him contemptuously,

“Dost thou then speak of cowardice in me, thou craven heart!...  A clever scheme hast thou devised to stave off death forever, if thou canst persuade each new wife to die instead of thee.”

Yet Admetus is constantly assuring everyone of his undying attachment to his wife.  He holds her in his arms, imploring her not to leave him.  “If thou die,” he exclaims,

“I can no longer live; my life, my death, are in thy hands; thy love is what I worship....  Not a year only, but all my life will I mourn for thee....  In my bed thy figure shall be laid full length, by cunning artists fashioned; thereon will I throw myself and, folding my arms about thee, call upon thy name, and think I hold my dear wife in my embrace....  Take me, O take me, I beseech, with thee ’neath the earth;”

and so on, ad nauseam—­a sickening display of sentimentality, i.e., fond words belied by cowardly, selfish actions.

The father-in-law of Alcestis, in his indignation at his son’s impertinence and lack of filial pity, exclaims that what made Alcestis sacrifice herself was “want of sense;” which is quite true.  But in painting such a character, Euripides’s chief motive appears to have been to please his audience by enforcing a maxim which the Greeks shared with the Hindoos and barbarians that “a woman, though bestowed upon a worthless husband, must be content with him.”  These words are actually put by him into the mouth of Andromache in the play of that name.  Andromache, once the wife of the Trojan Hector, now the concubine of Achilles’s son, is made to declare to the Chorus that “it is not beauty but virtuous acts that win a husband’s heart;” whereupon she proceeds to spoil this fine maxim by explaining what the Greeks understood by “virtuous acts” in a wife—­namely, subordinating herself even to a “worthless husband.”  “Suppose,” she continues, “thou hadst wedded a prince of Thrace... where one lord shares his affections with a host of wives, would’st thou have slain them?  If so, thou would’st have set a stigma of insatiate lust on all our sex.”  And she proceeds to relate how she herself paid no heed in Troy to Hector’s amours with other women:  “Oft in days gone by I held thy bastard babes to my own breast, to spare thee any cause for grief.  By this course I bound my husband to me by virtue’s chains.”  To spare him annoyance, no matter how much his conduct might grieve her—­that was the Greek idea of conjugal devotion—­all on one side.  And how like the Hindoos, and Orientals, and barbarians in general, is the Greek seen to be in the remarks made by Hermione, the legitimate wife, to Andromache, the concubine—­accusing the latter of having by means of witchcraft made her barren and thus caused her husband to hate her.