But who is Admetus? Dazzled by Alcestis and Apollo, who loved him to the point of self-denial, we might choose to leave the object of their love in the shadows. But let’s stop awhile and take a good look at him: let’s scan the landscape and the names. And we shall discover that Admetus belongs to the shadows as of right.
The landscape is Thessaly, a land that “in olden times was a lake surrounded by mountains high as the sky itself” (one of them was Olympus); a land that preserved its familiarity with the deep waters which periodically burst forth to flood it from a hundred springs and rivers; a fertile country, yellow, rugged, with plenty of horses, cattle, witches. The presiding divinity is not the cool, transparent Athena but a great goddess who looms from the darkness, Pheraia. She holds a torch in each hand and is rarely mentioned. And this too is typical of the spirit of Thessaly, a land where divinity is closer to the primordial anonymity, where the gods rarely assume a human face, and where the Olympians are loath to descend. When a god does appear, he bursts forth, brusque and wild, like the horse Scapheus, whose mane leaps out from the rock split open by his own hooves. The horses that gallop around Thessaly are creatures of the deep, shooting out of the cracks in the ground, the cracks from which Poseidon’s wave rises to flood the plain. They are the dead, brilliantly white, brilliantly black. And Pheraia is a local name for Hecate, the night-roaming, underworld goddess who rends the dark with her torches. As a goddess, she is horse, bull, lioness, dog, but she is also she who appears on the back of bull, horse, or lion. A nurse to boys, a multiplier of cattle. In Thessaly she is Brimó, the strong one, who unites with Hermes, son of Ischys, also the strong one, the lover Coronis preferred to Apollo. And strength (alk
) also forms part of the name Alcestis. In the land of Thessaly, rather than as a person divinity presents itself as pure force. But Pheraia, says Hesychius’s dictionary, is also the “daughter [kórē] of Admetus.” Is it possible that before becoming a pair of provincial rulers, Alcestis and Admetus were already sitting side by side as sovereigns of the underworld?
Now the landscape yields up its secret. It is the luxuriant country of the dead, this Thessaly where Apollo must be slave for a “great year,” until the stars return to their original positions — that is, for nine years. Apollo’s stay in Thessaly is a time cycle in Hades. The fact that Zeus chose this place instead of Tartarus as a punishment for Apollo itself suggests that this is a land of death. The name Admetus means “indomitable.” And who is more indomitable than the lord of the dead? Now the few things we know about Admetus take on new meaning: who could be more hospitable than the king of the dead? His is the inn that closes its doors to no one, at no hour of the day or night. And no one has such numerous herds as the king of the dead. When Admetus invites friends and relations to die for him, he is scarcely doing anything unusuaclass="underline" it’s what he does all the time. And the reason Admetus fully expects others to substitute for him in death is now clear: he is the lord of death, he greets the arriving corpses, sorts them and spreads them out across his extensive domains.
Now we see how truly extreme Apollo’s love is, more so even than it had seemed: out of love, Apollo tries to save the king of the dead from death. Now the love of both Apollo and Alcestis reveals itself as thoroughly provocative: it is a love for the shadow that steals all away. From Alcestis we discover what the kóre, snatched by Hades while gathering narcissi, never told us: that the god of the invisible is not just an abductor but a lover too.
The texts have little to say about Apollo’s period of servitude because it would mean touching on matters best kept secret. About Heracles’ servitude under Omphale the poets chose to be ironic. But, when it came to Apollo’s under Admetus, no one wanted to risk it. All that remains is the exemplum of a love so great as to compensate for any amount of shame and suffering. According to Apollonius Rhodius, after killing the Cyclopes, Apollo was punished by being sent not to Thessaly but to the Hyperboreans in the far North. There he wept tears of amber, even though a god cannot weep. But what really put the story out of bounds was not just the scandalous suffering (and scandalously servile passion) of the “pure god in flight from the heavens.” There was something else behind it. An ancient prophecy, the secret of Prometheus: the prediction that Zeus would one day see his throne usurped, by his most luminous son.
Apollo often plays around the borders of death. But Zeus is watching from on high. He knows that, if ignored, his son’s game will bring about the advent of a new age, the collapse of the Olympian order. Within the secret that lies behind this, and it’s a secret rarely even alluded to, Apollo is to Zeus what Zeus had been to Kronos. And the place where the powers of the two gods always collide is death. Even beneath the sun of the dead, among the herds of Thessaly, Apollo doesn’t forget his challenge to his father and chooses to snatch, if only for a short while, his indomitable beloved, Admetus, from that moment when “the established day does him violence.” The never-mentioned dispute between father and son is left forever unsettled at that point.
The admirable asymmetry on which the Athenian man’s love for the younger boy is based is described in minute detail by that surveyor of all matters erotic, Plato. The entire metaphysics of love is concentrated in the gesture with which the beloved grants his grace (cháris) to the lover. This gesture, still echoed in the Italian expression concedere le proprie grazie, and again in the passionate intertwining drawn tight by the French verb agréer (and derivations: agréments, agréable, and so on), is the very core of erotic drama and mystery. How should we think of it? How achieve it? For the Barbarians it is something to condemn; for the more lascivious Greeks and those incapable of expressing themselves, such as the Spartans or the Boeotians, it is simply something enjoyable, and as such obligatory: to give way to a lover becomes a state directive. But as ever the Athenians are a little more complicated and multifarious (poikíloi) than their neighbors, even when it comes to “the law of love.” They are not so impudent as to speak of a “grace” that actually turns out to be an obligation. What could they come up with, then, to achieve the beloved’s grace, without ever being sure of it? The word.
As warriors besieging a fortress will try one ruse after another to have that object so long before their eyes fall at last into their hands, so the Athenian lover engages in a war of words, surrounds his beloved with arguments that hem him in like soldiers. And the things he says are not just crude gallantries but the first blazing precursors of what one day, using a Greek word without remembering its origin, will be called metaphysics. The notion that thought derives from erotic dialogue is, for the great Athenians, true in the most straightforward, literal sense. Indeed, that link between a body to be captured like a fortress and the flight of metaphysics is, for Plato, the very image of eros. The rest of the world are mere Barbarians who simply don’t understand, or other Greeks with no talent for language, in other words, suffering from “mental sloth.” They too are excluded from that finest of wars, which is the war of love.