English point of view, to get very drunk in the house of a gentleman who has treated you with marked courtesy seems an odd preparation for wrestling victoriously with the Angel of Death, an ancient Athenian would not have been displeased, For the satisfaction however of possible doubts, it may be said that beyond all question the ancient Athenians must have been far more displeased. Even to us, among whom (to our shame be it said) it is still widely held that drunkenness is in itself highly amusing, and always excusable (considering the temptation) unless very gross, even to us the behaviour of Heracles seems not easily pardonable. But the abuse of wine was not a popular vice among the Greeks; and they were not disposed to make light of it. They reserved the main benefit of their indulgence, as we ours, for the excesses to which they were addicted. A comic tale like Pickwick, in which the male characters, good and bad alike, are sopping and swilling daily and hourly throughout, would probably have been read by Aristophanes with the same sense of 'allowance for the ethics of the age', which we make in the case of the Lysistrata. An Athenian could of course, under suitable circumstances, enjoy the grotesqueness of a drunkard as well as of a glutton. For example, the figure of Heracles himself, in his character of 'strong man' and huge feeder, was familiarly so exhibited on the comic stage; but then he was exhibited as a grotesque, intentionally contemptible. But that will not help the Alcestis, where the question that arises is this, 'Can a man make himself tipsy, and this at a time and place specially unfit, without deserving contempt?' It is certain that an Athenian would have been not more but less likely than an Englishman to answer this question in the affirmative.
Before we part finally with Balaustion's encomiums upon Heracles, we should perhaps give a separate word to one of her ex parte judgments, which proceeds on an assumption not peculiar to Browning, but mistaken nevertheless and injurious to the play. We are invited by Balaustion more than once to contrast the bravery of Heracles, who 'held his life out in his hand for any man to take', with the cowardice of other persons, the Chorus and the servants, who did not save the much-praised Alcestis by taking her place as victim of the Fates, and thus
