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 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. Then Alcestis who has been standing, supported by her women, sinks to the ground and with one last cry _to her children_ thrice repeated seems to faint away. Admetus in the name _of the children_ begs her not to forsake him ‘this is worse _for me_ than any death: on you we all depend—to live or die.’ Alcestis makes her final effort, and for the first time addresses her husband by name, but in the pathetic speech that follows, her last words are for her children, and it is plain that she is terribly afraid that Admetus will marry again and inflict a stepmother upon them. Admetus himself hesitates to give the promise, and it is one of the chorus who answers the dying wife. With Alcestis disappears the pathos of the play. The rest is ironical, a realistic criticism of the resurrection story and hardly concerns us. But the scene between Pheres and Admetus where the old father—the mother is prudently omitted from the action,—comes to convey his sympathy, is a beautiful illustration of Euripides’ insight into the weakness of the male character.