Heracles

The second and third Episodes represent a sharp reversal in the trajectory of the play: Just as Megara and Amphitryon resign themselves to their fate, Heracles returns and rescues them by killing Lycus. Heracles’s speech and actions put on display his heroism, his arete. On one level, Heracles is—as always in Greek myth and literature—a brave and strong figure. Indeed, in Euripides’s play, Heracles has just come back from the Underworld, where he subdued Cerberus, Hades’ three-headed guard dog, by force. By returning alive from the land of the dead, Heracles proves himself stronger than death itself.

Heracles’s heroism hinges not only on his incredible—and literally death-defying—strength, but also on his sense of duty to his family. Heracles reproaches himself for putting his children’s lives in danger by leaving them to perform his labors:

Or is this bravery,

To do Eurystheus’ orders and contend

With lions and Hydras, and not to struggle

For my children’s lives? If so, from this time forth,

Call me no more “Heracles the victor.”

(Lines 578-82)

For Heracles, heroism and courage—themes that have been central throughout the play—mean fighting for one’s family. For this reason, he resolves to fight and kill Lycus. Heracles, perhaps surprisingly or uncharacteristically, is also comfortable with stealth. The more cunning aspect of Heracles’s heroism was already introduced in the first Episode, where Amphitryon defended at length his use of the bow at long-range (seen by Lycus as the mark of a coward). Heracles himself admits in the third Episode to have entered Thebes secretly, having received a premonition that there was danger afoot—a strategy that recalls trickster heroes such as Odysseus, who similarly returns home in disguise in Homer’s Odyssey to evade his enemies. Later, when Heracles kills Lycus, he does so by ambushing him—another act of cunning and stealth.

The themes of courage, heroism, duty, and justice are taken up by the Chorus too. The Chorus explores the contrasting binaries of hero and coward, justice and injustice, good and evil—oppositions that they see reflected in the difference between youth and old age. For the Chorus, youth and strength represent the good, while old age and weakness represent evil, with human beings’ descent into old age and weakness being interpreted as a kind of injustice on the part of the gods:

If the gods were wise and understood men,

second youth would be their gift,

to seal the virtue of a man.

(Lines 655-59)

Heracles, the paradigm of physical strength, thus becomes the paradigm of all things good, just, and heroic. However, there is an important dramatic irony contained in this conflation of attributes: the strong and heroic Heracles is about to perform a terrible evil when he kills his family with his own hand. Indeed, even as the Chorus celebrates Heracles’s rescue of his family, Iris and Madness enter to undo his heroic victory by awakening in Heracles a homicidal madness. There is a similar irony in the Chorus’ premature praise of gods who “raise the good and scourge the bad” (Line 773), for Euripides’ audience—familiar with the traditional myth—know that if the gods have saved Heracles’s family from Lycus, they have done so only so that they can die an even more terrible death at Heracles’s hands.