# Back to Methuselah — Character guide

> Key figures in Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.

- [Eve](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/eve.md): Eve watches a fawn rot into worms and coins the word that will haunt her species: dead. Lonely enough to be flattered by a whispering snake in an amethyst hood, she is the restless, curious half of the first marriage, al
- [Adam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/adam.md): Adam scratches a living from the garden, fretting over Eve's safety and disgusted by the corpse she shows him. He is the cautious, literal partner—the one who buries what he cannot explain rather than asking what it migh
- [Lilith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/lilith.md): Lilith never strides onstage in the opening act, yet her shadow falls across every conversation about will, birth, and the power to dream things that never were. She is the older, wilder female principle—the one who woul
- [The Serpent](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/the_serpent.md): The Serpent slithers out of the johnswort in a magnificent amethyst hood, flattering Eve and licking her neck while whispering the vocabulary of mortality. She is the play's first artist and first philosopher, boasting t
- [Cain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/cain.md): Cain kicks aside the garden hurdle and arrives armed, oiled, and bristling, a self-assertive son who knows he is unforgiven. He defends killing Abel as the logical end of Abel's own inventions—blood, fire, the altar—and 
- [Abel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/abel.md): Adam and Eve's son, murdered by his brother Cain.
- [Franklyn Barnabas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/franklyn_barnabas.md): Franklyn Barnabas, brother of the biologist Conrad, hosts a country-house gathering where he argues that the Church, the state, and every human institution are stunted by the brevity of life. He confesses he left the pul
- [Conrad Barnabas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/conrad_barnabas.md): Conrad Barnabas is the tweed-clad, low-toned brother whose biological convictions collide with his brother Franklyn's clerical eloquence. He sends Savvy his latest book only to learn she has left every page uncut, a smal
- [Mr. Barnabas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/mr_barnabas.md): Mr. Barnabas moves through the brothers' orbit as a fond but prickly elder, defending his sons' reputations while guarding his own standing as the era's foremost authority on the duration of human life. When a newspaper 
- [Savvy Barnabas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/savvy_barnabas.md): Savvy Barnabas enters her father's study like weather, kissing Conrad, calling Haslam by his first name, and strolling to the hearthrug as if it were hers. Her unceremonious manners scandalize Franklyn, who mourns his mo
- [Haslam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/haslam.md): Haslam arrives at the Barnabas house an unwelcome guest, admits he was shoved into the Church by family convenience, and cheerfully concedes that if he had nine hundred years he would chuck the whole shop. His bird that 
- [Burge](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/burge.md): Burge appears in the play's futuristic frame as the President of the British Islands, a stout, silk-smocked figure who treats government as a series of pleasant evasions and delegates the boring duties to his Accountant 
- [Lubin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/lubin.md): Lubin moves through the political scenes as Burge's foil, less genial and more wary, the kind of man who asks what a grand idea will cost and who will pay for it. He is unconvinced by the brothers' talk of extended life 
- [Joyce Burge](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/joyce_burge.md): A prominent politician who interacts with the Barnabas circle.
- [Confucius](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/confucius.md): Confucius arrives in the final plays as a figure of immense reputation and uncertain doctrine, one of the great dead whose wisdom the living have inherited without ever testing it. His authority rests on maxims and tradi
- [The Elderly Gentleman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/the_elderly_gentleman.md): He comes to the future world as an emissary of standing, accustomed to being listened to, and is promptly assigned a nurse and forbidden to speak with fully adult natives lest he die of discouragement. His outrage is gen
- [The Veiled Woman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/the_veiled_woman.md): Veiled and robed, she passes behind the temple columns with a majesty that makes Napoleon stop in his tracks, then dismantles his Man of Destiny rhetoric without raising her voice. She is guardian, oracle, and something 
- [Martellus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/martellus.md): Martellus works in a world where art has outlived the passions that once drove it, shaping figures meant to represent what the long-lived have become rather than what they once desired. His exchanges with Pygmalion turn 
- [Pygmalion](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/pygmalion.md): Pygmalion shares Martellus's workshop and his century, and the two of them bicker like colleagues anywhere, except that the stakes are the self-image of a species that no longer dies on schedule. He is the more pliant of
- [Arjillax](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/arjillax.md): Arjillax moves among the administrators and guardians of the long-lived world, where authority is exercised through fields, rules, and quiet discouragement rather than through force. His concerns are procedural and terri
- [Charles Darwin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/back_to_methuselah_se/characters/charles_darwin.md): Shaw treats Darwin less as a man than as a cultural force: the thinker whose theory of natural selection swept through a British public that had ignored his grandfather Erasmus's subtler philosophy of will. Darwin's adva

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