ADMETUS
Alas! How bitter to me is that ferrying of which you speak! O my unhappy one, how we suffer!
ALCESTIS (chanting)
He drags me, he drags me away-
Do you not see?-
To the House of the Dead, The Winged One Glaring under dark brows, Hades!-What is it you do?
Set me free!-
What a path must I travel, O most hapless of women!
ADMETUS
O piteous to those that love you, above all to me and to these children who sorrow in this common grief!
ALCESTIS (chanting)
Loose me, Oh, loose me now;
Lay me down;
All strength is gone from my feet.
(She falls back in the throne.)
Hades draws near!
Dark night falls on my eyes, My children, my children, Never more, Oh, never more Shall your mother be yours!
O children, farewell, Live happy in the light of day!
ADMETUS (chanting)
Alas! I hear this unhappy speech, and for me it is worse than all death. Ah! By the Gods, do not abandon me! Ah! By our children, whom you leave motherless, take heart! If you die, I become as nothing; in you we have our life and death; we revere your love.
ALCESTIS (recovering herself)
Admetus, you see the things I suffer; and now before I die Imean to tell you what I wish.
To show you honour and-at the cost of my life-that you may still behold the light, I die; and yet I might have lived and wedded any in Thessaly I chose, and dwelt with happiness in a royal home. But, torn from you, I would not live with fatherless children, nor have Ihoarded up those gifts of youth in which I found delight. Yet he who begot you, she who brought you forth, abandoned you when it had been beautiful in them to die, beautiful to die with dignity to save their son! They had no child but you, no hope if you were dead that other children might be born to them. Thus I should have lived my life out, and you too, and you would not lament as now, made solitary from your wife, that you must rear our children motherless!
But these things are a God's doing and are thus.
Well! Do not forget this gift, for I shall ask-not a recompense, since nothing is more precious than life, but-only what is just, as you yourself will say, since if you have not lost your senses you must love these children no less than I. Let them be masters in my house;marry not again, and set a stepmother over them, a woman harsher than I, who in her jealousy will lift her hand against my children and yours. Ah! not this, let not this be, I entreat you! The new stepmother hates the first wife's children, the viper itself is not more cruel. The son indeed finds a strong rampart in his father-but you, my daughter, how shall you live your virgin life out in happiness? How will you fare with your father's new wife? Ah! Let her not cast evil report upon you and thus wreck your marriage in the height of your youth! You will have no mother, O my child, to give you in marriage, to comfort you in childbed when none is tenderer than a mother!