47 pages 1 hour read

Euripides, William Arrowsmith

Alcestis

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Lines 1006-1063Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1006-1063 Summary

Exodos

Heracles enters with a veiled and silent woman. He reprimands Admetus for concealing from him the truth about Alcestis, saying that friends should be honest with each other. He then asks Admetus to take in the woman he has brought with him, whom he introduces as a slave that he won in an athletic competition he found taking place nearby. Admetus, after first justifying his earlier dishonesty, asks Heracles to leave the woman with somebody else: He is uncomfortable bringing a young woman into household so soon after his wife’s death. In the ensuing dialogue, Heracles seeks to convince Admetus that the passage of time—and a new woman—will soften his pain while Admetus insists that he must remain faithful to his deceased wife.

Finally, at Heracles’s continued insistence, Admetus agrees to take in the veiled woman. As Admetus reluctantly takes the woman’s hand, Heracles asks him to look at her and “see if she does not seem most like / your wife” (1121-22). Admetus, incredulous, asks Heracles if the woman is really Alcestis, and Heracles responds that she is. He went to Alcestis’s tomb and fought Death himself away from her. He then explains that Alcestis will remain mute for three days, at which point “her obligations to the gods who live below” (1145) will be fulfilled, and she will be able to live out the rest of her life with Admetus.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Mapes Dodge, George Darley, William Motherwell, George Eliot, John Milton, Clement Scott, George Arnold, Robert Browning, James Thomson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Ernest Henley, Denis Florence MacCarthy, William Cullen Bryant, John Sterling, John Clare, Izaak Walton, Matthew Arnold, James Whitcomb Riley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Jenner, William Gilmore Simms, Charles G.D. Roberts, Henry Timrod, William Cox Bennett, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, George MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Matthias Claudius, Alexander Hume, James Beattie, Thomas Gray, Craig Franklin, John Cunningham, Norman Rowland Gale, James Gates Percival, Joel Benton, Thomas Heywood, Richard Hovey, Anna Boynton Averill, Charles Sangster, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dora Hill Read Goodale, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Nashe, Henry Wotton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Howard Bryant, John G.C. Brainard, Thomas Campbell, Eduard Mörike, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, David Gray, William Cowper, W.B. Yeats, William Prescott Foster, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Thomas Carew, William Howitt, John B. Tabb, Jones Very, Henry Fielding, Barry Cornwall, Samuel Daniel, John Keats, Homer, George Francis Savage-Armstrong, John Leyden, Tomas Peter, Thomas Hood, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richard Watson Gilder, Ethelwyn Wetherald, William Wordsworth, Euripides, Joseph Blanco White, Edmund Clarence Stedman, G.W. Pettee, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Jones, John Chalkhill, Abraham Cowley, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lisle Bowles, Leanne Yau, Charles Harpur, Sonia, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Kingsley, Lord Byron, Ebenezer Elliott, Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Richard Henry Horne, Jason in Panama, Walter Scott, Hartley Coleridge, Duncan Campbell Scott, Alfred Tennyson, John Davies, Aristophanes, Charles G. Eastman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, William Browne, Robert Burns, Samuel Rogers, Ludwig H.C. Hölty, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Celia Laighton Thaxter
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