Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pheres.
The gallery
Sarcophagus of C. Junius Euhodus and Metilia Acte (Alcestis Sarcophagus)
Unknown, c. 161–170 AD
This Roman marble sarcophagus, found at Ostia in 1826 and now in the Museo Chiaramonti of the Vatican Museums, carries the fullest surviving cycle of the Alcestis myth — the tragedy that unfolds in the house of Pheres at Pherae. Across its front, Alcestis lies dying surrounded by her family while Admetus (Pheres' son, here given the portrait features of the tomb's owner Euhodus) grieves; at the right Heracles leads the rescued queen back from the underworld. Though the relief individualizes the couple rather than the aged grandfather, it stages the entire drama of Pheres' line: the king of Pherae built the city and the dynasty whose most famous episode — a wife dying in her husband's place after the father refused — this monument immortalizes.
Alcestis and Admetus Receiving the Oracle
Unknown, 45–79 AD
An ancient Roman wall painting from the Vesuvian cities (Herculaneum/Pompeii), now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (inv. 9027), showing Admetus and Alcestis as they receive the fatal oracle. Admetus, son of Pheres and heir to the throne of Pherae, learns that he must find someone willing to die in his place — the decree that drives the whole Alcestis story. The fresco fixes the moment from which Pheres' own role flows: in Euripides' play the aged Pheres, despite his years, refuses to surrender his life for his son, so it is Alcestis who steps forward. The painting is a key witness to how the saga of Pheres' house was kept alive in Roman domestic art.
The Death of Alcestis
Jean-François-Pierre Peyron, 1785
Commissioned by Louis XVI and exhibited at the Salon of 1785, this large Neoclassical canvas by Peyron hangs in the Louvre (INV 7175). It shows Alcestis expiring in the royal hall at Pherae as her husband Admetus and their children recoil in grief, the household gathered in mourning. The scene takes place in the very palace founded by Pheres and now ruled by his son, and dramatizes the choice forced by the father's refusal to die: with the old king having declined, Alcestis gives her life so Admetus may live. Peyron's painting helped revive Euripides' tragedy for an Enlightenment audience and stands as a touchstone of the late-eighteenth-century taste for noble self-sacrifice.