"No. There is nothing more." - Alcestis' parting words to her husband Admentus in Euripides's play Alcestis.
What would have happened if the Eurydice, condemned to death, picked up a lyre and sung her own song, celebrating her beauty and lust for life? What if the Eurydice with "youth and a little beauty" was as persistent and convincing as Orpheus?
Would the bards and the historians then, have sung of her as the innocuous maiden unjustly wronged? Perhaps it would have simply added to the tradition of familiar incomprehensibility so often attributed to the Woman across culture.
Can it be for the melody cascading down Eurydice's lyre to be interpreted as the wails of a mere mortal woman who was condemned to death twice because she wasn't penitent or innocuous enough?
It could thus be said that it is solely Orpheus's privilege, a product of the Classical Greek patriarchy, and the Masculine voice singing about Eurydice's trials, tribulations, and fatalistic deaths and that help him assert and spurr the notions of empathy, mourning and deification of his loss of the beloved.
Pina Bausch - Orpheus and Eurydice - Paris Opera Ballet 2018
The theme of a promiscuous woman unleashing scourge and death upon her family is a popular trope of "reap as you sow" synonymous with both popular and classical literature. Euripides' Phaedra would bring sadness and separation in Theseus' court because she couldn't control her desire for her stepson, Hippolytus. On the other hand, Alcestis avoids a similar tragedy by agreeing to a greater one - to die her husband's death. The court mourns with her and countless people join her funeral procession. Yet this outpour of love and admiration cannot be imagined for those living women who refused to die soon to be deified, but lived long enough to become a scourge.
The "Orphic song", according to critics, therefore, is a mourning for the dead woman performed by the surviving male members of her family. The absent woman becomes the venerated woman and the void she leaves alongside silence is filled by paeans sung in her praise by men but never from her perspective.
After Heracles fights death to resurrect Alcestis, he brings back a woman condemned to silence, who nods, walks and sleeps but can sing of her own experiences neither in the land of the dead nor in that of the living. Alcestis' abiding silence and the gaping hollowness in her tale makes her the living and yet lifeless woman revered and loved by her family.
Hercules and Aclestis by Ferdinand victor Eugene Delacroix, 1862 CE.
After all, the only good woman is the dead woman.
"Life is not really life but a catastrophe"- Euripides, Alcestis.
