Grief Lessons Four Plays by Euripides

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth—
we call it life. We know no other.

The underworld’s a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

How I wish like a bee I could gather you—

all my heartbreak for you into one teardrop.

What does Alkestis’ resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can't last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Aristotle may have been registering some such impression when he mysteriously labeled Euripides tragikoratos, “the most tragic” of the Greek poets. Who knows what Aristotle meant by tragikotatos—experts disagree—but here's what Beckett might have meant if he had said it:

Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of... having been born.