object, to escape this horror in the only possible way, by interring his wife, with such ceremony or lack of ceremony as the case might admit, but anyhow instantly, before any one except his household and his chosen associates could know that she was dead. Whether even in the circumstances this was a wise thing to do, Euripides does not ask us to decide. We may think if we like, as I do, that it was rather a leap into the fire, and that, if things had not taken an unexpected turn, Admetus would soon have realised a little more 'truth'. Euripides only says and shows, that for a man such as the husband of Alcestis must have been, quicker to grasp relief than to imagine consequences, this was a natural thing to do. In showing this he has done all, as we shall find, that is required for his ultimate purpose.
The execution of the plan is for the moment almost perfectly successful, but not quite. If the procession had started, as it might have done but for the arrival of Heracles, at the time when Admetus, coming out ready dressed from the house, finds that innocent intervener at the door, it would have got comfortably away, and the king's sensibility would have escaped irritation. When Heracles is installed, he comes out again, and gives the word for setting forth. It is still impossible that his proceedings should be generally known. But unhappily there is one of his neighbours who can readily divine his feelings, inasmuch as in his own breast there is a faint reflexion of them, who has reason to anticipate his design, and even to approve it strongly, on the condition that he himself be not excluded from participation. At the first news that Alcestis is dead and her burial fixed for the present hour, Pheres the father hurries to the palace with his offering. Except Admetus, he is the only person who, having been in a position to save Alcestis if he had chosen, and being also liable to follow her corpse, has cause to think that on the whole the ceremony may as well be private, that is to say, speedy. His conscience is indeed much quieter than his son's, not only, as Browning says truly but with perhaps too exclusive an emphasis, from the more hardened selfishness of old age, but also because his share of reproach would be so much the lighter. It is Admetus, not Pheres, who has devolved upon another his own proper fate; and whatever
