Heracles

The fourth Episode, which opens with the arrival of Iris and Madness, initiates the second movement of the play. While the first part of the play features Heracles coming home after a long absence and rescuing his family from destruction, the second part has Heracles kill his wife and children in a fit of madness. The second part of the play thus reverses everything that has been accomplished in the first part, with Heracles killing the family he just fought to save. In committing this horrific deed, Heracles becomes virtually a different person, assuming a duality that mirrors the larger duality of the play. When Heracles is driven mad, he is no longer the dutiful and loving figure who first arrived on stage in the second Episode:

Look: already, head writhing, he leaps the starting post;

Jumps and now stops; his eyeballs bulge, and pupils roll;

His breath comes heaving up, a bull about to charge!

And now he bellows up the horrid fates from hell

(Lines 867-70)

The goddess Madness vividly describes the symptoms of Heracles’s madness, turning him into something that is more animal (“a bull about to charge”) than human. Even after his sanity is restored, Heracles is changed. His heroism is gone, covered up by his shame and grief. In a sense, even his life is over: Heracles, having only recently triumphed over death by descending into the Underworld and returning to the world of the living, repeatedly identifies the onset of his madness with his death (Lines 1144; 1392). The Heracles of the first part of the play, having been cast down “in utter ruin” (Line 1305), is no more.

Despite this rupture, many of the central themes of the first part of the play are carried over into the second part, giving the impression of an overarching unity. The theme of courage and endurance, which is so important in the first Episodes, is reprised in the second part of the play, as Amphitryon and, later, Theseus encourage Heracles to bear his suffering with dignity. When Theseus tells Heracles that “This is courage in a man: / To beat unflinchingly what heaven sends” (Lines 1127-28), he echoes ideas that Amphitryon had expressed to Megara in the Prologue and the first Episode. It is this definition of courage as endurance and perseverance that ultimately triumphs when Heracles resolves to live on and thus to “prevail against death” (Line 1351).

Another theme that is reprised from the first part of the play is friendship. The nature of true friendship was explored in the first part of the play through the Chorus, who as true friends stood by Amphitryon and Heracles’s family in their dire situation even though they lacked the strength to help them. In the Exodus, however, the character of Theseus unites friendship and strength: Like the Chorus, he stands by his friend even in his misfortune, but unlike the Chorus, he has the strength to help him. It is Theseus who convinces Heracles to choose to live, and Theseus who gives him hope by promising to bring him to Athens and to purify him. Theseus has the strength to raise the great Heracles to his feet (literally as well as figuratively), and the two friends form “a yoke of love” (Line 1403) as they prepare to exit the stage.

The second part of the play also continues the exploration of the nature of the gods that had been initiated in the first part. Throughout the first scenes, Amphitryon repeatedly condemned Zeus for abandoning his son and his children. The absence of the gods from the first part of the play ends abruptly and jarringly in the second part, when two gods, Iris and Madness, appear on stage. Their appearance, however, is far from answering the prayers of the characters or providing a helping hand: these gods have come to ruin Heracles. The absentee gods of the first part thus become actively destructive and cruel in the second part. Their cruelty is filtered in the Exodus through the perspectives of Heracles and Theseus, who engage in a theological debate. Theseus, arguing that Heracles should endure what he has suffered, views the gods as fundamentally similar to human beings:

Fate exempts no man; all humans suffer,

And so the gods too, unless the poets lie.

Do not the gods commit adultery?

Have they not cast their fathers into chains,

In pursuit of power? Yet all the same,

Despite their crimes, they live upon Olympus.

How dare you then, mortal that you are,

To protest your fate, when the gods do not?

(Lines 1314-21)

Heracles’s response recalls the speculations of some of the philosophers of Euripides’s own day:

But I do not believe the gods commit

Adultery, or bind each other in chains.

I never did believe it; I never shall;

Nor that one god is tyrant of the rest.

If god is truly god, he is perfect,

Lacking nothing. Those are poets’ wretched lies.

(Lines 1341-46)

The theological debate breaks off and is never entirely resolved. On a certain level, though, Heracles’s belief in a “perfect” godhead is disproved by the behavior of the gods who have come onstage in the play, and it is difficult to believe that Heracles—who earlier represents his downfall as the direct result of Hera’s hatred—is actually convinced by his own arguments. Nonetheless, the play does raise these challenging questions about the nature of the gods, encouraging audiences and readers to reflect on some of their most established values.