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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Alcestis, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mortality and Happiness
Obligation, Limitations, and Fate
Hospitality and Friendship
Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
The play begins in Pherai, Thessaly, in the palace of Admetos, King of Thessaly. Apollo is just leaving Admetos’s house and turns to say goodbye. He calls it a “dear house,” even though he was compelled to “[eat] the bread of slavery” within its walls.
Apollo addresses the audience, explaining that his “slavery” was Zeus’s fault, not Admetos’s. Zeus killed Apollo’s son, Asklepios, with “fatal lightning.” Apollo retaliated by killing the Cyclopes who forged the lightning bolts. Therefore, Zeus “doomed” Apollo “to this duress, / constraining me to be the bond-slave / of a death-bound man.”
Apollo’s son Asklepios was known as a hero of medicine, killed by Zeus for his supposed hubris in restoring the sick to life. Asklepios’s actions would be seen as threatening the gods’ total power over mortality. So, Apollo’s backstory not only accounts for his servitude in Admetos’s house, it also introduces the theme of mortality that will figure prominently in the play.
Themes
Despite his “duress,” Apollo considers Admetos his friend. In addition to guarding the palace, Apollo even saved Admetos by outwitting the Fates who’d doomed him to an early death. Nobody else “bound to him by ties of love” agreed to die in Admetos’s place, not even his parents. Finally, his wife, Alcestis, agreed. She is dying right now. Apollo must leave the house so that death won’t pollute his divinity. He sees Death, “punctual as always,” approaching.
Admetos is introduced as a friendly and hospitable host. However, he also wishes to avoid death, even asking his loved ones to bear his doom in his place. Thus, his fear of mortality continues to be a prominent theme, and so does the significance of obligations—something to which Alcestis is more faithful, it’s suggested, than Admetos or his parents.
Themes
