Euripides: ‘The Heracleidae’

 In myth, the goddess Hera hated Heracles, the son of her roaming husband, Zeus, by Alcmene, a princess of Mycenae.

By Hera’s machinations, Eurystheus, king of Argos, was given control of his cousin Heracles. Eurystheus ordered Heracles about, forcing him to do one labor after another.

After Heracles died, Eurystheus persecuted his children. Wherever they went, Eurystheus found them and bullied the local folks into denying a home to the refugees. Argos was the dominant Greek city in those days, and no one would stand up for the children. Finally, the refugees got to Athens.

The Athenian version of the myth is about the sacred responsibility to stand up for the weak and oppressed.

Euripides’ play starts with the two old people taking care of the kids. Iolaus was Heracles’ running buddy in the heroic past. But now he’s old. He’s almost a parody of an old man — a force only in his dreams.

When Eurystheus’ army shows up to take the refugees by force, Iolaus insists on putting on armor and joining the fight. He’s barely got the strength to stand up under all that weight.

While Iolaus is funny, Alcmene, Heracles’ old mother, is surprising. In myth, the Argives were defeated, and Eurystheus was killed in battle. In Euripides, the bully is captured and dragged before Alcmene, who shocks the Athenians by demanding they execute the prisoner on the spot.

As Ralph Gladstone, the translator of this play, said: “Euripides knew that brutality brutalizes; people who have been injured or abused too long become worse than their tormenters. …” It’s a recurring theme in Euripides. 

Before the battle, the Athenians consulted oracles, which decreed that a girl must be sacrificed for the just cause to prevail. Demophon, the young king of Athens, doesn’t think it should be his daughter. He doesn’t think he has the right to ask the Athenian citizens to sacrifice one of their daughters.

Who pays the price for standing up to a bully and protecting refugees, strangers, underdogs? The ethical debate spreads into the streets.

One of Heracles’ daughters — she’s unnamed in the play but is Macaria in mythology — volunteers to die. She lectures the adults on the role of women, the nature of duty and the art of dying with dignity. Here’s what she says about the afterlife:

 

Afterward: is there

An afterward? I hope not. If there’s then

No end to all our troubles, where do we

Go on from there — since death itself, they say,

Supplies the cure for everything that ails?

 

The best lines in the play, I think.

• Source: The Heracleidae, translated by Ralph Gladstone, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 110-55. The quotation is on p. 137.