Heracles

Heracles was possibly the most famous and prolific hero of ancient Greek mythology. As the son of Zeus, the king of the gods, and a mortal woman named Alcmene, Heracles was something more than a regular human being. Heracles was known for his incredible strength, which allowed him to perform great heroic deeds, including the well-known “twelve labors.” As the illegitimate product of one of Zeus’s adulterous affairs, however, Heracles was hated by Zeus’s divine queen Hera, who was constantly trying to ruin Heracles. Heracles was commonly said to have been welcomed to Olympus after he died, making him one of the few mortals of Greek mythology who was worshiped as a full-fledged god.

Euripides’s Heracles is a dramatization of a key Episode from the mythology of Heracles, in which Heracles, driven mad at the behest of his enemy Hera, massacres his wife and children. Euripides’ Heracles soon became the most important and familiar literary account of the madness of Heracles, and even in antiquity the play was adapted on a few occasions (for instance by the Roman tragedian Seneca, who authored a play titled Hercules Furens, or “Hercules Mad”). Heracles himself, and the many myths connected with him, was almost ubiquitous in ancient literature from the very earliest periods. He was mentioned with awe and respect in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He featured in an early “epyllion,” or mini-epic, known as the Shield of Heracles and attributed (erroneously) to Hesiod. He was the subject of long epics by poets such as Panyassis and Pisander, now unfortunately lost. He was celebrated by lyric poets such as Pindar. He was a character in tragedies, such as Sophocles’s Women of Trachis, and comedies, such as Aristophanes’s Frogs. Heracles remained a fixture of literature after Euripides too, featuring in the poetry of the Hellenistic period and eventually being adopted by the Romans as “Hercules.”

Though Euripides was neither the first nor the last to adapt the myth of the madness of Heracles, his version is innovative and idiosyncratic in several important ways. The role of Lycus and his conquest of Thebes, for instance, seems to have been largely invented by Euripides. Perhaps more notable, however, is the fact that Euripides’s version of the myth is something of a reversal of the more familiar version. In most sources, Heracles murders his family before performing his labors; possibly he is even forced to complete the labors to atone for murdering his family (see e.g., Apollodorus’ Library at 2.4.12). In Euripides’s play, Heracles kills his family only after he has completed his labors.

Other details found in more familiar versions of Heracles’s mythology are changed too. While Euripides’s Heracles kills his children and his wife, other sources (including Apollodorus) had Heracles kill only his children, while Megara escaped. One ancient Greek poem titled Megara, probably composed by Theocritus, has Megara narrating Heracles’s madness and murder of their children.

Even Heracles’s famous labors are transformed in the play. When the Chorus sings of Heracles’s deeds in the first stasimon, the list of labors departs from the “canonical” list in several ways. According to the Chorus of this play, Heracles’s twelve labors were as follows:

1. The Nemean Lion
2. [The Centaurs]
3. The Ceryneian Hind
4. The Mares of Diomedes
5. [Cycnus]
6. The Apples of the Hesperides
7. [Clearing the sea]
8. [Holding up the heavens]
9. The Amazons
10. The Hydra
11. Geryon
12. Cerberus

A few of these labors (shown in square brackets in the list above) are unique to Euripides’s play. Some of these new labors, such as Heracles’s battle with the Centaurs (#2) and his killing of Cycnus (#5), were known from an early date as exploits of Heracles but were not counted among the labors. Other labors, such as the clearing of the sea (#7), are not known from any other sources at all. In adding these new labors, Euripides omits a few of the labors that were included in canonical lists—namely, the Erymanthean Boar, the Augean Stables, the Stymphalian Birds, and the Cretan Bull. Euripides’s innovations here would have probably been quite conspicuous, since the list of Heracles’s twelve labors appears to have been fixed by the time Euripides composed his play in the late fifth century BCE; the more familiar list of labors is depicted in art by around 470 BCE, on the metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Euripides’s unique list of labors could have been designed to replace labors whose benefits were restricted to narrow locales with labors that benefited all of Greece. This way, Euripides’s Heracles becomes a more “Panhellenic” hero—a hero shared by all Greeks.