HERACLES Tratlslated by William Arrowsmith • HERA C I.IlS ~ desperation a sudden and time-honored theodicy. The ~h eel turns, I N TRO D UCTION TO HERACLES and a violent irruption of the irrational smashes all theod1cy; then, m the last swing, both irrational and thcodicy arc alike undone in the hero's enormous leap to an illusion of order in divinity, an assertion THEHeracle s of Euripides is seldom assigned a high place in the which he maintains squarely in the teeth of his experience. The corpus of extant tragedy. If no one any longer quite accepts Swin­ savior who suddenly turns destroyer is in turn saved from self­ burne's description of the play as a "grotesque abortion," the destruction by the man he had earlier saved from Hades. The hero reason is less real disagreement than a habit ofr espect for the author, is reduced to his humanity as the condition of his heroism. Through­ supported by a cautious intuition of the play's extraordinary power. out the tragedy, gathering momentum by contrast, runs the rhythm Of caution there should be no question. However dislocated in of its minor terms: first despair, then hope, then again despair, and structure the Heracles may be, its dramatic power and technical finally an endurance deeper than either; age and youth, weakness virtuosity are unmistakable. W ith the possible exception of the and strength, both pairs resolved in the condition that makes them Bacchae, there is no play into which Euripides has put more of him­ one. Schematic, brilliant, savagely broken, the Heracles is a play ot self and his mature poetic skills than this one. In scene after scene one great power and. with the exception of the Orestes, the most violent senses that sureness of movement and precise control of passion structural tour-de-force in Greek tragedy. which come only w ith the dramatist's full mastery of his medium. It is this very dislocation, this virtuosity and violence in the play's One thinks first of the staggering brutality and shock which erupts structure, which more than anything else has injured its reputation in the madness scene, a brutality made all the more terrible by the and hindered reappraisal. Given Aristotelian standards of judgment tenderness which precedes it; or of the great dirge which celebrates (and Aristotle even today affects dramatic cr i ticis~ at a ~rofound the labors of Heracles, and then the confrontation of that ode with level), the play's dislocation could not but appear either pomtless or the hero's simple "Farewell, my labors"; or, again, of the exquisite gratuitous; for at almost every conceivable point the play is in flat ode in praise of youth and the service of the Muses, poetry tense contradiction to the principles of the Poetics. Thus Heracles has no with the full pressure of the poet's life behind it; and. last of all, that visible hamartia; if he falls, he falls for no flaw of his own nature or anguished exchange between Theseus and Heracles in which the failure ofj udgment, but as the innocent victim of divine brutality. hero, broken by his suffering, weak, reduced to his final humanity, And still worse, the play exhibits not at all that deep, necessitous comes on his greatest heroism, surely one of the most poignant codas propter hoc connection between its parts, which for Aristotle con­ in Greek tragedy. stituted the right structure of tragedy.' With almost one voice both Technically, at least, it is a brilliant performance, boldness of dra­ critics and scholars from Aristotle to the present have ,reported the matic stroke and vigor of invention everywhere visible, but p:~ r­ dislocation of the play as an insuperable blemish. The Heraclcs, they ticularly in the brisk counterpoint ofp cripeties on which the tragedy say, is "broken-backed,"• a tragedy that "falls so clearly into two turns, wheeling over and over as one action pivots to its opposite, parts that we cannot view it as a work of art."3 But in so saying, or, juxtaposed against a sudden illumination, is as suddenly shattered they report, I think, as much their own outraged Aristotclianism as and annulled. Through theme after theme, with perfect tact of the obvious facts of the play's structure. tempo and placing, the reversals crowd, taking each motif a further 1. l'ottics 1452•. 20. turn of the wheel. Thus the first action of the play, slow, conven­ 2. Gilbcn Murny, Crctlt S111Jits, p. Ill. tional, overwhelmed by the weakness of its characters, creates out of 3- Gilbert Norwood, Crttk TragtJy, p. 229. "44" • 45 • "EURIPIDES» « HERACLES » Beyond question the play falls starkly into two discrete but con­ Heracles were undertaken in penance for the murder of the chil­ tinuous actions, and between these two actions there is neither dren, Euripides has transposed the murders to the time just after causal necessity nor even probability: the second action follows but the completion of the labors, the height of Heracles' career. Because by no means arises out of the first. Through the close of the chorus Heracles at the very moment of his fall is at his greatest, the hideous­ which celebrates the slaying ofLycus ~ - 814), we have one complete ness of Hera's revenge is sharply underscored and its abrupt, tragic action as conventional in movement as it is in subject: a familiar senselessness stressed. T he dramatist, that is, has ordered his material tableau of suppliants, their cruel antagonist, an agon in which the in such a way as to achieve precisely that dislocation which the tormentor is slain by the savior, and a dosing hymn in praise of the play's structure exhibits. Nor is this all. Because Euripides has trans­ hero and the vindicated justice of the gods. This melodramatic posed the labors and the murders, he has been forced to invent a action is shattered by the appearance of Madness and Iris, and the new motive for the labors. This is the motive of filial piety: Heracles play, in violation of all probability, careens around to commence a undertook his labors in order to win back the country from which wholly new action. Utterly unexpected and without causal ground Amphitryon had been exiled for the murder of Electryon. Thus at in the first part of the play, the madness ofHeracles and the murder the same time that Euripides freely invents in order to fill the gap of his wife and children are simply set down in glaring contrast to caused by the original transposition, he also subtly humanizes his the preceding action. Against theodicy is put the hideous proof of hero in preparation for the conversion which is the heart of the divine injustice; against the greatness and piety and areti ofHeracles second action. in the first action is placed the terrible reward of heroism in the Tradition also told ofHeracles' suicide on Mt. Oeta (cf. Sophocles' second; against the asserted peace and calm and domestic tenderness Trachiniae) and how after death the hero was translated to heaven which closes the first action is set the utter annihilation of all moral and given everlasting youth in the person of Hebe. This entire saga order in the second. The result is a structure in which two apparently is suppressed in the Euripidean version, but the very fact of its sup­ autonomous actions are jammed savagely against each other in al­ pression informs the Heracles throughout, pointing up the direction most total contradiction, with no attempt to minimize or even of the action against what has been excluded. Thus Heracles, far modulate the profound formal rift. from being deified in Euripides, is humanized'1 as the condition of That rift is, of course, deliberate; nothing, in fact, has been his heroism. And far from committing suicide, the Euripidean omitted which might support the effect of total shock in this re­ Heracles discovers his greatest nobility in refusing to die and choos­ versal. Moreover, even a cursory review of the material which ing life. If, again in the older tradition, Heracles married Hebe (i.e., Euripides used for his tragedy shows how carefully that material youth) and so won everlasting life, in the Euripidean play Hebe is has been ordered to effect, rather than obviate, this dislocation of present to the action as nothing more than an impossible anguished structure. reminder of mortal necessity and the haunting image of what in a Old tradition told of Hera's persecution of Heracles because of universe not fatally flawed might have been the reward of human her jealousy of Zeus's amour with Heracles' mother, Alcmene. It 4· In the humaniza tion of Hcradcs, Euripides returns to the oldest of all extant also told how Herades, driven mad by Hera, slew his sons and would Ilcracles traditions. the llomcric, in which Hcraclcs too had to die. Cf. lliad xviii. also have killed his father, Amphitryon, had not Athene intervened 1 tj If.: "'Not even the great Hcraclcs escaped death, though he was dc:~r to the lord and knocked the raging hero unconscious with a stone. For the most Zeus, the son of Cronus, but the common f.11c brought him down, and the grievous wrath of Hera." In literature of the historical period this tradition has almost every­ part Euripides has retained these traditions, but with this great dif­ where been eclipsed by the deified Heraclcs, a version which begins also with Homer ference: whereas in the common tradition the great labors of (cf . Odyssey xi. 6o 1 If.). " 47 " c BURIPIDBS" u IIER!\CLES" virtue (c£ 63712).