24th
INTRODUCTION TO HERACLES
William Arrowsmith’s brilliant Introduction to his translation of Euripides’ Heracles was my psychic firewall for a number of decades. It’s been superseded by a work of Robert Grant’s which I’ve found to be more tractable; you never really can stand-down.
THE Heracles of Euripides is seldom assigned a high place in the corpus of extant tragedy. If no one any longer quite accepts Swinburne’s description of the play as a “grotesque abortion,” the reason is less real disagreement than a habit of respect for the author, supported by a cautious intuition of the play’s extraordinary power. Of caution there should be no question. However dislocated in structure the Heracles may be, its dramatic power and technical virtuosity are unmistakable. With the possible exception of the Bacchae, there is no play into which Euripides has put more of himself and his mature poetic skills than this one. In scene after scene one senses that sureness of movement and precise control of passion which come only with the dramatist’s full mastery of his medium. One thinks first of the staggering brutality and shock which erupts in the madness scene, a brutality made all the more terrible by the tenderness which precedes it; or of the great dirge which celebrates the labors of Heracles and then the confrontation of that ode with the hero’s simple “Farewell, my labors”; or, again, of the exquisite ode in praise of youth and the service of the Muses, poetry tense with the full pressure of the poet’s life behind it; and, last of all, that anguished exchange between Theseus and Heracles in which the hero, broken by his suffering, weak, reduced to his final humanity, comes on his greatest heroism, surely one of the most poignant codas in Greek tragedy.
Technically, at least, it is a brilliant performance, boldness of dramatic stroke and vigor of invention everywhere visible, but particularly in the brisk counterpoint of peripeties on which the tragedy turns, wheeling over and over as one action pivots to its opposite, or, juxtaposed against a sudden illumination, is as suddenly shattered and annulled. Through theme after theme, with perfect tact of tempo and placing, the reversals crowd, taking each motif a further turn of the wheel. Thus the first action of the play, slow, conventional, overwheln-led by the weakness of its characters, creates out of desperation a sudden and time-honored theodicy. The wheel turns, and a violent irruption of the irrational smashes all theodicy; then, in the last swing, both irrational and theodicy are alike undone in the hero’s enormous leap to an illusion of order in divinity, an assertion which he maintains squarely in the teeth of his experience. The savior who suddenly turns destroyer is in turn saved from self-destruction by the man he had earlier saved from Hades. The hero is reduced to his humanity as the condition of his heroism. Throughout the tragedy, gathering momentum by contrast, runs the rhythm of its minor terms: first despair, then hope, then again despair, and finally an endurance deeper than either; age and youth, weakness and strength, both pairs resolved in the condition that makes them one. Schematic, brilliant, savagely broken, the Heracles is a play of great power and, with the exception of the Orestes, the most violent structural tour-de-force in Greek tragedy.
It is this very dislocation, this virtuosity and violence in the play’s structure, which more than anything else has injured its reputation and hindered reappraisal. Given Aristotelian standards of judgment (and Aristotle even today affects dramatic criticism at a profound level), the play’s dislocation could not but appear either pointless or gratuitous; for at almost every conceivable point the play is in flat contradiction to the principles of the Poetics. Thus Heracles has no visible hamartia; if he falls, he falls for no flaw of his own nature or failure of judgment, but as the innocent victim of divine brutality. And still worse, the play exhibits not at all that deep, necessitous Propter hoc coiuiection between its parts, which for Aristotle constituted the right structure of tragedy. 1 With almost one voice both critics and scholars from Aristotle to the present have reported the dislocation of the play as an insuperable blemish. The Heracles, they say, is “brokenbacked,” 2 a tragedy that “falls so clearly into two parts that we cannot view it as a work of art.” 3 But in so saying, they report, I think, as much their own outraged Aristotelianism as the obvious facts of the play’s structure.
Beyond question the play falls starkly into two discrete but continuous actions, and between these two actions there is neither causalal necessity nor even probability: the second action follows but by no means arises out of the first. Through the close of the chorus which celebrates the slaying of Lycus (1. 814), we have one complete action as conventional in movement as it is in subject: a familiar tableau of suppliants, their cruel antagonist, an agon in which the tormentor is slain by the savior, and a closing hymn in praise of the hero and the vindicated justice of the gods. This melodramatic action is shattered by the appearance of Madness and Iris, and the play, in violation of all probability, careens around to commence a wholly new action. Utterly unexpected and without causal ground in the first part of the play, the madness of Heracles and the murder of his wife and children are simply set down in glaring contrast to the preceding action. Against tbeodicy is put the hideous proof of divine injustice; against the greatness and piety and arete of Heracles in the first action is placed the terrible reward of heroism in the second; against the asserted peace and calm and domestic tenderness which closes the first action is set the utter annihilation of all moral order in the second. The result is a structure in which two apparently autonomous actions are jammed savagely against each other in almost total contradiction, with no attempt to minimize or even modulate the profound formal rift.
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1. Poetics 14521. 20.
2. Gilbert Murray, Greek Studies, p. 112.
3. Gilbert Norwood, Greek Tragedy, p. 229.
That rift is, of course, deliberate; nothing, in fact, has been omitted which might support the effect of total shock in this reversal. Moreover, even a cursory review of the material which Euripides used for his tragedy shows how carefully that material has been ordered to effect, rather than obviate, this dislocation of structure.
Old tradition told of Hera’s persecution of Heracles because of her jealousy of Zeus’s amour with Heracles’ mother, Alcmene. It also told how Heracles, driven mad by Hera, slew his sons and would also have killed his father, Amphitryon, had not Athene intervened and knocked the raging hero unconscious with a stone. For the most part Euripides has retained these traditions, but with this great difference: whereas in the common tradition the great labors of Heracles were undertaken in penance for the murder of the children, Euripides has transposed the murders to the time just after the completion of the labors, the height of Heracles’ career. Because Heracles at the very moment of his fall is at his greatest, the hideousness of Hera’s revenge is sharply underscored and its abrupt, tragic senselessness stressed. The dramatist, that is, has ordered his material in such a way as to achieve precisely that dislocation which the play’s structure exhibits. Nor is this all. Because Euripides has the labors and the murders, he has been forced to invent a new motive for the labors. This is the motive of filial piety: Heracles undertook his labors in order to win back the country from which Amphitryon had been exiled for the murder of Electryon. Thus at the same time that Euripides freely invents in order to fill the gap caused by the original transposition, he also subtly humanizes his hero in preparation for the conversion which is the heart of the second action.
Tradition also told of Heracles’ suicide on Mt. Oeta (cf. Sophocles’ Trachiniae) and how after death the hero was translated to heaven and given everlasting youth in the person of Hebe. This entire saga is suppressed in the Euripidean version, but the very fact of its suppression informs the Heracles throughout, pointing up the direction of the action against what has been excluded. Thus Heracles, far from being deified in Euripides, is humanized 4 as the condition of his heroism. And far from committing suicide, the Euripidean Heracles discovers his greatest nobility in refusing to die and choosing life. If, again in the older tradition, Heracles married Hebe (i.e., youth) and so won everlasting life, in the Euripidean play Hebe is present to the action as nothing more than an impossible anguished reminder of mortal necessity and the haunting image of what in a universe not fatally flawed might have been the reward of human virtue (cf. 637-72). Similarly, the suppression of the deification motif sharpens the courageous endurance of mankind under its necessities in contrast with the* happiness of the amoral gods. Deification is replaced by the closest thing to Olympus this world can offer-honored asylum at Athens. For thig reason Theseus is introduced as the representative of Athenian humanity to rescue and annex to Athens the greatest Dorian hero.
By deployment of his material Euripides has structured his play into two parallel actions divided by a peripety whose purpose is more to stress the break than to bridge it. If the Heracles is broken, the dislocation is at least deliberate, and as such it is clearly consistent with Euripides’ practice elsewhere: in the two actions of the Hecuba, the double plot of the Hippolytus, the episodic Trojan Women or Phoenissae, the broken Andromache, and the dislocated Electra. But even more violently than these plays the Heracles insists on the irreparable rift in its structure and invites us by its great power to discover what nonetheless
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4. In the humanization of HeracIes, Euripides returns to the oldest of all extant Heracles traditions, the Homeric, in which Heracles too had to die. Cf. Iliad xviii. 115 ff.: “Not even the great Heracles escaped death, though he was dear to the lord Zeus, the son of Cronus, but the common fate brought him down, and the grievous wrath of Hera.” In literature of the historical period this tradition has almost everywhere been eclipsed by the deified Heracles, a version which begins also with Homer (cf. Odyssey id. 601 ff.).
makes it one play. It is right that our perception of power in literature should lead us more deeply into the order and disorder created or invoked.
Despite the fact that the first action is entirely free invention, it is important to see how conventional the treatment is. In the shaping of the characters, in their attributes and motives, in the theology and received values to which the action appeals, convention is everywhere visible. Character is essentially static, the action as a whole leached of any really tragic movement. All the emotional stops of a melodramatic situation have been pulled: we move from the despair of the helpless family to the sudden coming of the savior hero to the triumphant final diapason of vindicated divine justice. The characters are only lightly dubbed in, certainly no more so than is necessary to maintain the illusion that these are real people in a situation of unqualified peril. If the action is not quite trite, it is at least customary and predictable, so predictable in fact that it might be regarded as a parody of a standard tragic movement. Certainly no one familiar with Euripides’ practice can doubt that the comfortable theodicy which closes the action has been written tongue-in-cheek or is somehow surely riding for a fall. And insensibly the impression of purely tragic power in the second action, although based on an analogous plot, undercuts the first action and exposes its conventionality.
What is true of the first action as a whole is also true of the Heracles of the first action. The traditional données which compose his figure have for the most part been carefully preserved; if Heracles is not here the beefeater of comedy or the ruddy sensualist of the Alcestis, he is recognizably the familiar culture-hero of Dorian and Boeotian tradition: strong, courageous, noble, self-sufficient, carrying on his back all the aristocratic arete of the moralized tradition of Pindar. Thus the grossness or cruelties or philandering which tradition sometimes ascribed to him (cf. again the Trachiniae) have been stripped away. In domestic life he is a devoted son, a loyal husband, and a fond father; in civil life he is the just king, the enemy of hybris, the champion of the helpless, and the loyal servant of the gods. His civilizing labors on behalf of mankind are accepted as literal truths, and the curious ambiguity in tradition which made Heracles the son of two fathers, Zeus and Amphitryon, is maintained. His heroism is based upon his strength and is essentially outward, but nonetheless valid, or at least valid enough for the muted reality of the first action.
Against this background, the second action breaks with tragic force and striking transformations, showing first the conquering hero, the kallinikos, reduced to tears, helpless, dependent, and in love, stripped of that outward strength which until now had exempted him from normal human necessity, and discovering both his common ground with men and a new internalized moral courage. This Heracles is not merely untraditional; he is almost inconceivable in traditional perspective, and he is tragic where the earlier Heracles was merely noble. The point to be insisted upon here is the distance at every point between the two actions. We have here moved a whole world away from the simple virtues and theodicy of the first action, as the new role and courage of the hero undercut everything the play has created up to now. The world of the given, the reality of “things as they are said to be,” withers and is replaced, not by a mere contradiction, but by a new tragic myth invoking new values and grounded in a sterner reality. What audience, especially a Greek one, could have recognized in that broken, almost domestic, Heracles fighting back his tears, the familiar and austere culture-hero of received tradition?
We have, then, two savagely different actions, one conventional and the other set in a world where tradition is dumb and conduct uncharted, placed harshly in contrast. The peripety which separates them is the dramatist’s means of expressing symbolically the fatal disorder of the moral universe, and also the device by which the heroism of the second action is forced up, through an utter transformation of assumed reality. The whole play exhibits, as though- on two plateaus, a conversion of reality. A story or legend derived from received beliefs — the world of myth and the corpus of “things as they are said to be”—is suddenly in all of its parts, terms, characters, and the values it invokes converted under dramatic pressure to another phase of reality. What we get is something like a dramatic mutation of received reality, and the leap the play makes between the phases or plateaus of its two realities is meant to correspond in force and vividness and apparent unpredictability to mutations in the physical world. It is this violence in the conversion of reality that explains the wrenching dislocation of Euripidean drama from an Aristotelian point of view and the lack of apparent connection between the parts of the play. The play pivots on two seemingly incompatible realities, and if it insists on the greater reality of what has been created over what has been received, it does so, not by denying reality to receive reality, but by subtly displacing it in the transfiguration of its terms.
Thus, point for point in the Heracles, each of the terms— the qualities, situation, characters—that was appropriate to the Heracles of tradition is transformed and displaced. If in the first action both Zeus and Amphitryon are the fathers of Heracles, in the second action Amphitryon becomes Heracles’ “real” father, not by the fact of conception, but by the greater fact of love, philia. In the first action Heracles literally descended to a literal Hades; in the second action this literal descent is transfigured in the refusal to die and the courage which, under an intolerable necessity, perseveres. There is a hint, moreover, that the old Hades of the poets with its Cerberus, Sisyphus, and torments is transformed in the second part into the Hades within, here and now, internalized as Heracles himself declares, “And I am like Ixion, forever chained to a flying wheel.” So too the old labors appear to be replaced by the metaphorical sense of the imposed labors of human life and the cost of civilization, while the goddess Hera, who in legend made Heracles mad, passes almost insensibly into a hovering symbol of all those irrational and random necessities which the Greek and the play call Tyche, and which we limply translate as “Fortune” or “necessity.”
All of these conversions replace and dislodge the reality of the first action by transfiguring it at every point. The first action in the light of the second is neither false nor unreal, but inadequate. Through the force of contrast with its own conversion, it comes to seem obsolete, naive, or even humdrum, much as fresh conviction formed under peine forte et dure insensibly makes the conviction it replaces callow or jejune in comparison. Under the changed light of experience and the pattern it imposes, what was once taken for reality comes to seem illusion at best: true while held as true, but with widened experience, discovered inadequate. What we see is less the contradiction between the two opposed realities than the counterpointed relation of their development, the way in which, under the blow of suffering and insight, one reality is made to yield a further one, each geared to its appropriate experience. We begin with a familiar and conventional world, operating from familiar motives among accepted though outmoded values; by the time the play closes, characters, motives, and values have all been pushed to the very frontiers of reality.
But if in this context of conversion the conventional first action is undercut and dislodged by the tragic second action, the first action also helps to inform the second and to anticipate its discoveries. Thus Heracles’ desperation after his madness is paralleled by his family’s desperation in the first part; what they say and do there is meant to be applied with full force to his situation later. If courage for them lies in the nobility with which they accept the necessity of death, nobility for Heracles lies in the courage with which he accepts his life as his necessity, for, in Amphitryon’s words:
To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs [ll. 105-6].
If Amphitryon in the first action possesses a “useless” life (1. 42) by virtue of extreme old age and weakness, Heracles later comes to possess the same “useless” life (1. 1302), and so both meet on the grounds of their common condition. Similarly the chorus speaks of its own necessity, old age, as “a weight more heavy than Aetna’s rocks,/hiding in darkness/the light of my eyes” (11. 639-41); that same darkness, not as age but as grief, lies later on the eyes of Heracles (11. 1140, 1159, 1198, 1104-5, 1216, 1226 ff.), the dark night of his soul. And just as the chorus in the first action finds the hope of its life in poetry and perseveres in the Muses’ service, so Theseus uncovers Heracles to the sun and shows him the hope in philia which enables him to live. So too when Heracles, self-sufficient and independent, leads his children into the palace before his madness, he draws them behind him like little boats in tow (epholkidas); but at the end of the play Heracles, broken, in love and dependent, follows in Theseus’ wake to Athens like a little boat in tow (epholkides). The same implicit counterpoint between the two actions explains in part, I think, the unqualified villainy of Lycus. Balancing the corruption of human power and brutality (amathia) in him, comes the abuse of divine power in Hera—a far more heinous abuse, since divine cruelty is a fortiori worse than human brutality. Beyond this, I suspect, we are intended to see correspondence again in the physical death which Lycus meets at Heracles’ hands and the spiritual annihilation of Hera which is the consequence of Heracles’ great speech on the gods (11. 1340-46). But throughout the play, in metaphor, in contrast of whole scenes, in visual imagery, the two actions are paralleled at point after point. Below the level of the violent structural dislocation of the play runs a constant crisscross of reference, comment, and contrast throwing single words or themes into sharp relief in continuous qualification of the whole action. In the perception of this continuous conversion of the play’s terms lies the understanding of its movement and unity.
Point by point the deepest motive of the play is to bring Heracles to the place where he shares for the first time common ground with the others, all of whom, like him, are laid under the heavy yoke of necessity but lack that enormous physical strength which has hitherto exempted him. But if he must come to share that yoke with them, if he is reduced to his humanity as the condition of the only heroism that counts, he also comes to know for the first time that other, and redeeming, yoke of love, philia, which alone makes necessity endurable. For the Heracles is a play which imposes suffering upon men as their tragic condition, but it also discovers a courage equal to that necessity, a courage founded on love. We witness in the play a conversion of heroism whose model is Heracles, and the heart of that conversion lies in the hero’s passage in suffering from the outworn courage of outward physical strength to a new internal courage, without exemption now but with the addition of love and perseverance against an intolerable necessity.
Love is the hope, the elpis, which permits him to endure, and his discovery of that hope keeps step with his knowledge of anguish. He survives by virtue of love, for love lies close to, if it does not usurp, the instinct for survival. At the close of the play we see Heracles assert the dignity of his grief against the reproaches of a Theseus who, for all his generosity, is still rooted in the old heroism and no longer understands. Having claimed the dignity of his new courage, Heracles can without weakness or loss of tragic stature make plain the wreck of his life and his own dependent helplessness: strong but also weak, in need and in love, a hero at every point.
Heracles comes through suffering, then, to occupy the ground where Megara, Amphitryon, and the chorus stood earlier. Their nobility provides a standard by which to measure his heroism, first challenging it and then being surpassed by it. But nothing in Heracles is diminished because Megara and Amphitryon have set the example he must follow, and know already what he must learn. Their very weakness has set them close to necessity, while Heracles’ arete has been so prodigiously developed toward physical strength that nothing short of the greatest moral courage is required for him to survive his necessity. He rises and keeps on rising to his sufferings with an enormous range of spirit that in the end leaves even the unconventional Theseus far behind him. It is this ability to rise that makes him great as much as the overwhelming anguish of the necessity that confronts him. What counts in the end is not the disparity between Heracles’ courage and necessity and the courage of the others, but the fact that they all—Megara, Amphitryon, the chorus, and Heracles— meet on the common ground of their condition and discover both courage and hope in the community of weakness and love.
What, finally, are we to make of Hera and that crucial speech of Heracles on the nature of the gods (11. 1340-46)? That it was Hera who made Heracles mad was, as we have seen, an essential part of Euripides’ legendary material. But the consequence of Heracles’ speech is apparently to deny that the actions of the gods could in fact be such as they are dramatized to be. Alternatively Heracles appears to deny the reality of the experience out of which he makes the speech in the first place. For to say that “if god is truly god, then he is perfect,/lacking nothing” is clearly to invalidate Hera’s claim to divinity, or to deny his own experience of Hera’s hatred.
The sentiment is, to be sure, Euripidean, a familiar refusal to believe the old legends which represent the gods as subject to human passions, and a discountenance of the familiar fifth-century notion that immoral conduct could be sanctioned by an appeal to divine conduct as recounted in poetry. But merely because the lines are Euripidean in thought, their effect for the play should not be glozed away as mere inconsistencies or as an undramatic intrusion of the dramatist in propria persona. For to say that divine adultery, tyranny, and misconduct are all “the wretched tales of poets” is a direct and unmistakable challenge not only to the Hera of the play, but to the whole Olympian system.
The consequences of Heracles’ words for the play are, I suggest, this: that the story of Hera’s action as dramatized is true enough, but the Hera who afflicts Heracles as she does thereby renounces any claim to the kind of divinity which Heracles asserts. This conclusion is, I think, supported by Euripides’ practice elsewhere and also by the language of the play. like the Hippolytus with Aphrodite and the Bacchae with Dionysus, the Heracles does two things with Hera: it first dramatizes the legend which contains her action as incredible in a goddess, 5 and then, having shown and asserted its incredibility, it converts her into a hovering symbol of all the unknown and unknowable forces which compel Heracles and men to suffer tragically and without cause or sense. As Dionysus is a complex symbol for the forces of life, amoral and necessitous, so Hera comprehends all the principles of peripety and change and random necessity. She is not Hera, but “Hera,” a name given her for the want of a name, but loosely what the Greeks meant by Tyche, the lady of necessity and reversal. In asserting this “Hera” as the consequence of his own speech, Heracles annihilates the old Olympian Hera as a goddess, but also converts her into that demonic and terribly real power of his own necessity. The tragedy of Heracles is both true and real, but it is no longer the traditional story, nor is Heracles the same man, nor Hera the same goddess. And it is to confirm this conversion that Heracles a few lines later (1. 1357) concludes: “And now, I see, I must serve necessity (tyche).” So too in his last reference to Hera he hints at the conversion by significantly juxtaposing. both tyche and the name of Hera, claiming that “we all have been struck down by one tyche of Hera” (1. 1393).6 And, if this were not enough, the
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5.Cf. 11. 1307-10 where Heracles asks: “Who could offer prayers to such a goddess? Jealous of Zeus for a mortal woman’s sake, she has destroyed Hellas’ greatest friend, though he was guiltless.” 6. Cf. 11. 1314, 1349, 1396, as well as the signiftcant disjunction„ “mastered by Hera or by necessity” in Amphitryon’s speech at 1. 20.
play’s overwhelming preoccupation with peripety as theme and as dislocation in structure would confirm the conversion. This, I think, is what we should expect, that the conversion of the old legend of Heracles and his old nobility into a new myth should be accompanied by the conversion of his necessity as well. To alter his old heroism without also altering the source of his suffering would be to cripple the conversion at the crucial point. It would obscure, that is, the fact that Heracles, though broken by necessity, still wins the moral victory over the power that ruins him, earning for himself and men in a different sense the victory claimed by Amphitryon over Zeus earlier:
And I, mere man, am nobler than you, great god [I. 3421].
He claims a courage more than equal to his condition and can therefore claim the dignity of his grief.
Heracles is no Aristotelian hero, nor is the play an Aristotelian tragedy; yet the Heracles is a great tragedy and Heracles himself a great tragic hero. The gulf between Euripides and Aristotle on the issues here is a great and permanent one that deserves to be stressed. For Aristotle a tragic fall is grounded in a consistent and harmonious sense of man’s responsibility for his nature and his actions: when the hero falls, he falls for his own failure, and behind the rightness of his fall, working both pity and fear by the precise and relentness nature of its operations, stands the order which society and a god-informed world impose upon the individual. What the law requires the gods require too, and so the Aristotelian play portrays, like an image of human life, the individual suffering and torn between his nature and an objective world-order. In Euripides it is otherwise; here the suffering of the individual under his necessity may have no such rightness, or even none at all, as in the Heracles. The world-order of the gods as reflected in “things as they are said to be” is either incredible or an indictment of that order, and if it imposes necessities unjustly upon a man, the very courage with which he endures makes him tragic and gives him the moral victory over his own fate. Similarly with society: for society may be no less corrupt than the “gods” and as unjust in the necessities it imposes. Euripides, that is, preserves the disorder of actual experience, measuring its horror against the unrequited illusion of order which sustains human beings. His image of tragic humanity is earned less in the conflict between the individual’s nature and the necessities imposed by a higher order than in the conflict between the individual and his own internalized necessities. In the Heracles, at least, it is the very innocence of the hero which condemns the “gods” who make him mad; but because the gods are first rendered incredible and then transformed into a collective symbol for all the random, senseless operations of necessity in human life, the courage with which the hero meets his fate and asserts a moral order beyond his own experience is just as tragic and just as significant as that of Oedipus.
Date and Circumstances
The Heracles is undated, and no attempt to date the play to any one year can be regarded as wholly successful. The most favored date is one close to 424-423. It has been held that the heavy emphasis throughout the play upon old age in connection with military service, particularly the bitter first strophe of the second stasmion (11. 637 ff.), represents a direct personal intrusion of the poet on having reached his sixtieth year (when he would have been exempt from further military service). On such a theory the date of the play would be 424-423. Similarly, the disproportionate debate on the bow (11. 188 ff.) is interpreted as an overt reference to the Athenian success at Sphakteria in 425—a victory due largely to bowmen—or to the disastrous failure to employ archers in the hoplite defeat at Delium in 424. The reference to Delian maidens (11. 687 ff.) is taken as a remembrance of the establishment of the quiquennial Deliades in Athens in 425.
But no one of these suggestions, nor even their ensemble, can be regarded as decisive. The strongest argument for a later date is one given by stylistic and metrical tests, generally rather accurate for Euripides. These tend to place the play in the group of dramas which directly follow the Archidamian War, or about 418-416.
It is my opinion that the metrical tests are supported in their results by the general political tone of the play, with its sharp emphasis upon factional strife and its concern with the badge of true nobility. Further, the reconciliation between Sparta and Athens which is suggested in Theseus’ domiciling of Heracles in Athens would seem to suggest (though it need not) a period in which reconciliation between Athens and Sparta was possible. Such reconciliation was a possibility only, I believe, in the period between the close of the Archidamian War in 421 and the aggressive anti-Spartan policy of Alcibiades which culminated in the Athenian-Argive defeat at Mantinea in 418. It is only against such a background as this, when all major parties in the Peloponnesian War were attempting abortive realignments, when peace must have appeared to be at least a remote possibility to contemporaries, that the lines of Megara (11. 474-79) can be made to yield good sense. If so, the death of the children who embody the peaceful hopes of a united Hellas (11. 135-37) must mean the renewal of conflict. A renewal of conflict must have seemed the certain consequence of Alcibiades’ policies in 418, whereas in the years just previous an alliance between Athens and Sparta must have excited real hopes of an enduring peace.
Text
The basis of this translation is the Oxford text of Gilbert Murray, though it has often been supplemented by others,l
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1. L. 496: cf. D. S. Robertson, “Euripides, H.F. 497 ff.,” C. R. LU (1938), 50-51.
chiefly the brilliant edition of Leon Parmentier in the Budé series.2 Upon a few occasions I have also adopted the emendations proposed by Wilamowitz. The notes on the translation are not designed to indicate all departures from the Murray text (nor even to mark the numerous occasions on which I preferred the reading of the manuscripts over modern emendations),3 but to amplify variations or emendations whose use appeared to me to bear upon the interpretation of the whole play. Lines which are bracketed indicate probable interpolations.
2. L. 1241: “Then where it touches heaven, I shall strike.” I adopt here the emendation of Parmentier and read kai thenein for katthanein. Since Theseus at 1. 1246 asks Heracles what he will do and where his passion sweeps him, and Heracles replies in the following line that he will die, it seems plausible that katthanein here is a simple copyist’s mistake for the less familiar kai thenein. And, as Paimentier remarks, the line as emended pivots on a play with the word haptei in the preceding line (l. 1240). It is also more likely that Theseus in 1. 1242 would take thenein as a threat against the gods than he would the precise self-directed katthanein. See L. Parmentier, Revue de philologie, XLIV (1920). 161.
3. L. 1351: Enkartereso thanaton (“I shall prevail against death”). Thanaton is here the reading of the manuscripts and, to some degree, it is supported by the identical phrase at Andromache 1. 262 (though in each case the contextual meaning is different). Murray, following Wecklein and Wilamowitz, however, has altered thanaton to bioton (life).
So far as the quality of affirmation is concerned here, however, there is little difference between thanaton and bioton. Both imply the affirmative decision to bear necessity by living; clarity is unaffected by either reading. Though to prevail against life (in the sense of “persevering”) may be more forceful than to prevail against death (in the sense of resisting the temptation to die), it seems to me that the imagery of the play is decisive for thanaton. In Heracles’ words here, that is, we have the metaphorical (but also realistic) equivalent of the mythical descent to Hades and the conquest of death it signifies. Heracles has in his sufferings been to Hades and at deaths door; he now wrestles with his death as myth once imagined him as wrestling for Cerberus. And just as the chorus once (ll. 655 ff.) hoped that the noble man might receive a double life as a reward of arete, in this line we see the vindication of arete in the internalized eugeneia which conquers death.