Agency and Poetic Voice of the Roman Alcestis

Advance booking is required for this hybrid seminar.

The mythical fabula of Alcestis, best known thanks to Euripides' tragedy, revolves around the act of self-sacrifice of the heroine, who offers herself as a victima vicaria to death so that her husband Admetus may continue to live. However, thanks to Heracles’ intervention, the drama concludes with a happy ending: the hero, having been hosted at Admetus’ palace despite his mourning, decides to reward his host and, after struggling with Death, manages to obtain the dead woman and return her to her husband. The Heraclean finale thus seems to set up an exchange of functions, whereby the heroine becomes the victim to be saved, while the heroic role shifts to Heracles. Differently, in Plato’s Symposium, it is Alcestis’ devotional action, rather than Admetus’ generosity, that leads to the happy ending by moving the infernal gods, who send the heroine back. In his pioneering investigation of the Sage von Alkestis, Albin Lesky concludes, however, that in the original ending neither heroes nor gods come to save the sacrificial victim, who dies without returning to life. By stylistically and narratologically analysing the poetic situation of the heroine's death in some texts from the Latin cultural space, our analysis returns to the problem of the ending, noting how the character of the Latin Alcestis, having by now acquired a solid ‘poetic memory’, seems to converse with her literary antecedents in order to correct or amplify her devotional perspective. Such a dimension finds a further echo in the Carmen de Alcestide and cento Alcesta, both ending with the heroine's death, that seems to restore the heroic-funerary prerogative of the devotional heroine.

Speaker Details:

Miriam Orfitelli is a PhD student in Latin Literature at the University of Salerno with a project on the myth of Alcestis in the Latin cultural space. She studied Philology, Literatures and Civilisations of the Ancient World at the University of Naples Federico II and Archaeology and Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale. She is also a member of the ‘Osservatorio sul romanzo contemporaneo’ at the University of Naples Federico II in the research group investigating lyric hybridity in the contemporary novel.