The love of one man for another appears with the heroes and immediately reaches its perfect expression. Only the heroes — and precisely because they were heroes — could have overcome what so far for the Greeks had been an insurmountable obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between erast
s and erómenos, lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to being painfully short and stifled by the strictest rules. The cruelest of these rules was that, while the lover was granted his swift and predatory pleasure, the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure at all but must submit himself to the other only reluctantly, in something like the way nineteenth-century wives were encouraged to submit to their husbands. And the lover could not look into the eyes of his beloved as he ravished him, so as to avoid embarrassment. The heroes swept all these rules aside. Their relationships were long lasting — only death could end them — and their love didn’t fade merely because the beloved grew hairs on his legs or because his skin, hardened by a life of adventure, lost its youthful smoothness. Thus the heroes achieved that most yearned for of states, in which the distinction between lover and beloved begins to blur. Between Orestes and Pylades, “it would have been difficult to say which of the two was the lover, since the lover’s tenderness found its reflection in the other’s face as in a mirror.” In the same way, these words from the Pseudo-Lucian hold up a late mirror to what was the most constant erotic wish of Greek men, and the most vain.
When it came to slaying monsters, the hero’s model was Apollo killing Python; when it came to making love to young boys it was Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus and Cyparissus, But there is an episode in the god’s life that hints at something even more arcane than those often fatal love affairs. It is the story of how Apollo became a servant to Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly. Of Admetus we know that he was handsome, that he was famous for his herds of cattle, that he loved sumptuous feasts, and that he possessed the gift of hospitality. So much and no more. But we know a great deal about what people did for him. Out of love for Admetus, Apollo was willing to pass as a hireling. For a long time, “inflamed by love for the young Admetus,” this proudest of gods became a mere herdsman, taking a provincial king’s cattle out to graze. In so doing, he left his shock of dazzling hair unkempt and even forsook his lyre, making music on nothing better than a reed pipe.
His sister Artemis blushed with shame. And out of love for Admetus, his Alcestis, the most beautiful of Pelias’s daughters, agreed to die like a stranger, unthreatened by anybody, taking the place of a hostage condemned to death. For love of Admetus, Apollo got the Fates drunk: it must have been the wildest party ever, although we know nothing about it except that it happened. In Plutarch’s vision of things, the Fates, those young girls whose beautiful arms spin the thread of every life on earth, were “the daughters of Ananke,” Necessity. And Necessity, as Euripides reminds us, having met her, “as he wandered among Muse and mountaintop,” without ever “discovering anything more powerful,” is the only power that has neither altars nor statues. Ananke is the only divinity who pays no heed to sacrifices. Her daughters can only be fooled by drunkenness. And very rarely does drink get the better of them. It was a hard task, but Apollo managed it, merely out of love for Admetus, because he wanted to delay the man’s death.
Apollo has an old feud with death. Zeus had forced him to become a servant — oh blessed servitude — to Admetus because Asclepius, son of Apollo and the faithless Coronis, had dared to bring a man back from the dead. Zeus shriveled Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and in revenge Apollo killed the Cyclopes who forged the thunderbolts. Zeus responded by planning a terrible punishment for Apollo. He had meant to hurl him down into Tartarus, and it was only when Leto, his old mistress, begged him not to that he decided to send the god to Thessaly, condemned to be a servant to Admetus. With Apollo’s other lovers, Hyacinthus for example, and Cyparissus, love had always ended in death. Accidents they may have been, and they caused him pain, but the fact was that Apollo himself had killed them. While playing with Hyacinthus, the god hurled a discus that shattered the boy’s skull. Cyparissus fled from Apollo’s advances and in desperation turned himself into a cypress. With Admetus the pattern was reversed. Apollo’s love was so great that in trying to snatch Admetus from death he himself again risked what for a god is the equivalent of death: exile. Yet another thing Apollo did out of love for Admetus, and perhaps it was the most momentous of all, was to accept payment from his beloved, like a pórnos, a merest prostitute, unprotected by any rights, a stranger in his own city, despised first and foremost by his own lovers. It was the first example ever of bonheur dans l’esclavage. That it should have been Apollo who submitted to it made the adventure all the more astounding.
Thus Apollo, lover par excellence, took his love to an extreme where no human after him could follow. Not only did he confound the roles of lover and beloved, as would Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, but he went so far as to become the prostitute of his beloved, and hence one of those beings, “considered the worst of all perverts,” in whose defense no one in Greece ever ventured to speak so much as a word. And, as servant to his beloved, he attempted to roll back the borders of death, something not even Zeus himself had dared interfere with, not even for his own son Sarpedon.
But who was Admetus? When he heard from Apollo that his death could be delayed if somebody else were ready to die in his place, Admetus began to make the rounds of friends and relations. He asked all of them if they were willing to take his place. No one would. So Admetus went to his two old parents, sure they would agree. But even they said no. Next it was the turn of his young and beautiful bride. And Alcestis said yes. The Greeks questioned whether woman was capable of philía in a man’s regard, capable that is of that friendship which grows out of love (“philía dià tòn érōta,” as Plato puts it), and which only men were supposed to experience. But Alcestis actually lifted philía to a higher plane by making the ultimate sacrifice. Even Plato was forced to admit that in comparison with Admetus’s wife, Orpheus “seems weak spirited, nothing more than a zither strummer,” because he went into the underworld alive in his search for Eurydice rather than simply agreeing to die, as Alcestis did, without any hope of return or salvation. True, Alcestis remains the only feminine example of philía the Greeks ever quote, but it is an awesome example. So much so that the gods themselves allowed Heracles to snatch her back just as the young woman was about to cross the calm waters of the lake of the dead. So Alcestis was brought back among the living, back to the grief-stricken Admetus. The king of Pherae had been saved on three occasions: by a god, by a woman, and by a hero. And all this merely because he had shown himself hospitable.
In this elusive, because supernatural, story, the point of maximum impenetrability is the object of love: Admetus. Euripides has Alcestis die onstage like a heroine out of Ibsen, and before dying she bares her heart to us. Ancient literature offers plenty of eloquent references to Apollo’s passion, although texts never connect his having been Admetus’s lover to his having been paid as the king’s servant. The two images of Apollo are always kept separate. Of Admetus we know only that he insulted his old father for refusing to die in his place. All else is obscure, no less so than the way gods are obscure to mortals. Only one character trait shines through the ancient texts: Admetus was hospitable.