Alcestis (538-610)

I will seek some other friendly hearth.

Never, O prince! Heaven forefend such dire disgrace!

A guest is a burden to sorrowing friends, if come he should.

The dead are dead. Come in.

To feast in a friend’s house of sorrow is shameful.

The guest chambers lie apart, whereto we will conduct thee.

Let me go; ten thousandfold shall be my thanks to thee.

Thou must not go to any other hearth. (To a Servant.) Go before, open the guest-rooms that face not these chambers, and bid my stewards see there is plenty of food; then shut the doors that lead into the courtyard; for ’tis not seemly that guests when at their meat

should hear the voice of weeping or be made sad. [Exit HERACLES.

What doest thou? With such calamity before thee, hast thou the heart, Admetus, to welcome visitors? What means this folly?

Well, and if I had driven him from my house and city when he came to be my guest, wouldst thou have praised me more?

No indeed! for my calamity would have been no whit less, while I should have been more churlish. And this would have been another woe to add to mine, that my house should be called no friend to guests. Yea, and I find him myself the best of hosts

whene’er to Argos’ thirsty land I come.

Why then didst thou conceal thy present misfortune, if, as thy own lips declare, it was a friend that came?

He would never have entered my house, had he known aught of my distress.

Maybe there are who think me but a fool for acting thus, and these will blame me; but my halls have never learnt to drive away or treat with scorn my guests.

Men of Pherae, kindly gathered here, lo! even now my servants are bearing the corpse with all its trappings shoulder-high to the funeral pyre for burial; do ye, as custom bids,

salute the dead on her last journey starting.