Heracles is one of Euripides’ darkest plays. We are introduced to the mortal father of Heracles, Amphitryon, to his wife Megara, and to her children by the hero, all of whom are imperilled and have been abandoned by fair-weather friends. In their wretched state they have taken refuge at an altar: we recognize the recurring pattern of a suppliant drama (as in The Children of Heracles or Andromache; Helen’s situation at the opening of Helen is similar, though less fraught with danger). Where there is a suppliant, there is normally a rescuer; but the family of Heracles have virtually lost hope that their preserver will ever return from the land of the dead, where he has gone in order to fulfil one of his terrible labours for King Eurystheus. After several scenes of despondency advancing to despair, the play presents the return of Heracles, triumphant at the end of his labours, rescuing his family in the nick of time from the cruelty of the tyrant Lycus, whose very name means ‘wolf’. It seems that the family are reunited and that Heracles has proved the saviour of his father, wife and children. But at the peak of his good fortune, when all his cares seem to be at an end and the tyrant is slain, horror and madness ensue. This madness has been sent by the goddess Hera, through her agents Iris and Madness; under its influence Heracles kills his wife and children, destroying the palace in the process, and collapses into unconsciousness. The remainder of the play shows him regaining both consciousness and sanity, and confronting the full horror of what he has done. Can he even bear to go on living after this?
Before considering the closing scenes, we should consider how unusual this handling of the story is. There is good reason to think that Euripides has made considerable innovations in the mythological plot of Heracles, firstly in inventing the character of Lycus and the dilemma of the hero’s family, but more significantly in the overall chronology of his career. In most sources the killing of his children in a fit of madness comes earlier in his life: indeed, the labours are represented as a form of punishment or expiation for this atrocity. Here the sequence is reversed, so that the fortunes of Heracles and his household, having been at a low point when the play begins, rise to an apparently positive peak, and then are cast down once more to still greater disaster. The destruction which Lycus would have inflicted on Heracles’ kin is brought about by the hero himself.
No less startling is the structural technique of the drama. The play seems to have reached a satisfactory resolution, and the concern of the gods both for Heracles and for justice in the human world seems to have been vindicated. ‘Hail Justice!’ cry the chorus; ‘Hail the tide of fate that flows from heaven!… Tears of grief have turned to joy, this happy change has given birth to new songs’ (739, 765–7). Less than a hundred lines later they are singing a very different song. The turning-point of the play is reached when at line 815 the chorus cry aloud in fear and distress at the sudden appearance of the menacing figures of Iris and Madness. There have been no ominous forebodings, no doubts about Heracles’ future, since he returned as the saviour-figure of the play. Few other Greek tragedies involve such a markedly unexpected change in the course of events. It is also unusual in Euripides, though not unparalleled in earlier tragedy, for an epiphany to take place in mid-play: in most other cases the divine intervention is confined to the opening or, more relevantly, the close of the play. Here the structural anomaly emphasizes the disruption of Heracles’ mind and life; it also brings home to the audience with drastic force how little the expectation of divine justice is justified in the sombre world of this play.
The most impressive part of the play for many modern readers is the last four hundred lines, in which first Amphitryon helps Heracles to recognize what he has done (a scene of considerable psychological insight), and then the Athenian hero Theseus, a late arrival on the stage, proves himself a true friend by urging Heracles to live rather than freeing himself from humiliation and grief through suicide. This part of the play shows us human suffering rather than heroic prowess; the Heracles whom the chorus described with lyric enthusiasm earlier in the play, the hero who overcame the hydra and the Nemean lion, is now a weeping, broken figure. His final ‘labour’ has been the execution of his children (1279). Outraged at the conduct of the gods, he repudiates his divine father, Zeus, and accepts Amphitryon, whom according to the familiar legend Zeus had cuckolded, as his real father (1264–5). Just as Amphitryon represents the love of a real human father, Theseus in this play represents true human friendship as opposed to divine malignity and eventual indifference. There is a pro-Athenian aspect to this (as in other dramas, Theseus shows civilized values and Athens proves to be a refuge for the unfortunate), but we recognize a respect for human compassion and fellow-feeling which goes beyond patriotic motives.
At the close of the play Heracles departs to Athens. Euripides leaves it unsettled what will become of him. In the tradition familiar to all Greek audiences, Heracles eventually became a god and was reconciled with Hera, his old enemy, marrying the goddess Hebe, whose name signifies youth and vitality. This tradition goes back at least as far as Hesiod. There is no hint of future deification in this play, though a few critics have struggled to find some compensatory note of this kind. It is true that Theseus declares that in days to come, when Heracles has gone down to Hades, the Athenians will commemorate him with stone monuments, a reference to the honours paid by the Athens of historical times to Heracles as a hero or a god. But the poet deliberately confines this to the human sphere, and no divine message at the end is permitted to soften the austerity of the conclusion.
Many readers have found Heracles a shocking play, and so it is; many critics have found it bizarre, because of its peculiar construction and its apparent neglect of Aristotelian principles of cause and effect. There is no clear reason for Heracles’ suffering: occasional references suggest that we may supply Hera with her traditional motive of enmity to one of Zeus’ bastard offspring, but the motif is hardly emphasized. No act or deficiency of Heracles himself seems to account for his downfall. The oddity of the deus ex machina in the middle of the play, and the new direction of the plot once Theseus appears, have already been mentioned. On the whole it is now admitted that the play does not fully abide by Aristotelian principles (which of course were not formulated until well after Euripides’ death!), but that this does not mean the play is a failure. There are other forms of unity which can be traced in Heracles, including the recurring references to friendship, family ties and gratitude. There are also significant links between the imagery of the two halves of the play. A particularly powerful parallel is the comparison which is used in two places to describe one or more person’s dependency on another: the metaphor of a small boat attached to a larger vessel and being towed after it. Heracles uses the image fondly and protectingly, to describe his own family as he guides them within the house – to their deaths, as it turns out. The image is reused at the close of the play, by Heracles again, this time describing his own relationship to his preserver Theseus (1424, echoing 631). Theseus provides the protection that Heracles tried but failed to give his family. Such verbal devices do not produce orthodox unity, but they do illuminate the powerful reversal involved in Heracles’ catastrophic downfall.
Heracles is quite unlike the other tragedies contained in this volume: there is no room here for pleasant ironies and clever repartee. At the end of the play there is little sense of consolation: Theseus’ friendship is important, but there is not much he can do to dispel the grimness of Heracles’ experience. A comparison with the end of Hippolytus is apt: there too the cruelty of a god (Aphrodite) has brought grief and suffering, but there remains a small element of satisfaction for the audience, because Theseus and Hippolytus have spoken again and been reconciled before the latter’s death. Human feeling balances divine neglect. Both scenes are indebted to the sublime episode in the last book of the Iliad, in which Achilles and Priam eat together and share their sorrow, recognizing that it is a bond between them, and part of the human lot. Both epic and tragedy dramatize man and woman facing adversity: both focus not just on the nature of the suffering but on how the victims come to terms with it.