Euripides: ‘Heracles’

 Heracles has gone off to Hades on his last labor and is presumed dead. The tyrant Lycus has overthrown the king of Thebes and plans to kill Heracles’ wife, Megara, and their three sons. Lycus might kill Heracles’ father, Amphitryon, although he’s too old to be a threat. It all seems hopeless. The family is awaiting the executioners.

 

Megara

So tell me now if you have a plan,

or if you have resigned yourself to death.

 

Amphitryon

My child, I find it hard in such case

to give advice offhand without thought.

We are weak, and weakness can only wait.

 

Megara

Wait for worse? Do you love life so much?

 

Amphitryon

I love it even now. I love its hopes.

 

Megara

And I. But hope is of things possible.

 

Later, Amphitryon, gets his wits about him and says:

 

To persevere, trusting what hopes he has,

is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

 

I think Euripides’ connection of hope with courage is marvelous. But I’m not sure I believe it, which is why I keep reading this play.

The play is in three parts, and this is the first. Heracles, mankind’s “greatest friend,” comes home and is dismayed by what he sees. People have forgotten what he’s done for humanity. Instead of taking care of his family members while he’s off laboring for the common good, they’ve abandoned them, fearful of a petty tyrant. Heracles says farewell to his labors and decides his attention should be with his family.

When Lycus and the executioners arrive, Heracles is waiting.

For a minute, all seems well with the world — villains vanquished, family reunited. But Iris, the female messenger of the gods, arrives with Madness in tow. Madness, also known as Frenzy and Lyssa, protests but must do her duty.

Heracles, thinking he’s in the house of Eurystheus, the man who set him on his thankless labors, starts killing. In his madness, Heracles thinks he’s killing Eurystheus’ wife and children. In fact, he’s killing his own.

When sanity returns, the question is what to do after you have suffered a catastrophe you can’t recover from. Fortunately, a friend arrives to keep Heracles company in his grief.

Heracles had rescued Theseus, king of Athens, from Hades. Theseus stands by Heracles when no one else will, and the two friends discuss the choice Heracles faces. The choice is suicide, which ends the unbearable suffering, or life. 

The courageous choice is to go on, even when you can’t fathom how that’s possible.

Most critics say the best lines in the play are here, in that discussion about what to do.

No one really believed that Heracles, a man of godlike power, was the son of Amphitryon, a mere man. People believed Zeus had crawled in bed and fathered Heracles. That enraged Zeus’ wife, Hera, and everyone believed that the jealous Hera set out to punish Heracles.

Heracles, alone, doesn’t believe the “poets’ lies” about the gods. If gods exist, they must be perfect, he says. The source of his suffering, the source of his grief, must be elsewhere.

It is an astonishing passage. The critics say the play has survived because of this remarkable dialog and the dramatic madness scene.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my honored guide to the tragedies, says he can’t imagine that many people have reread the first 500 lines of the play for pleasure.

I’m the contrarian. The lines quoted above may be in the weakest part of the play, but they haunt me. 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Heracles is on pp. 248-61. Heracles, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 43-115. The quotation is on p. 64.