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EuripidesHeracles
Fiction | Play | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Madness and Reason
Madness and reason are naturally prominent motifs throughout Euripides’s Heracles, a play whose alternative title is often given as “Heracles Mad” or “The Madness of Heracles.” The play culminates in the madness of Heracles and the subsequent restoration of his sanity. The motifs of madness and reason, which develop the play’s exploration of the themes of perseverance in the face of suffering and the role of the gods in human life, pervade much of the play, perhaps from the very beginning. Some scholars have even argued that Heracles exhibits the “seeds” of madness before Hera drives him to kill his family, although scholars today generally dismiss this idea.
In Euripides’s Heracles, human beings are represented as basically reasonable, and this relates to how they view the world and construct their values such as courage, heroism, duty, and so on. Even the murderous and tyrannical usurper Lycus is far from being irrational, for even though his values do not align with those of the play’s central characters, his policies do exhibit a carefully calculated and reasoned understanding of realpolitik. When Heracles first comes on stage, he too is at least outwardly in command of his reason, exhibiting a normal and stable sense of his own heroism balanced by a sense of duty to his family.
Madness is presented as the antithesis of reason. Since human beings are essentially reasonable, madness in the play is a rupture or departure from the self. Thus, when Heracles goes mad, he is described as having “changed” (Line 931), essentially becoming a different person or something entirely different from a person. Heracles’s madness bifurcates his identity/character, splitting him into a dual figure, one who exists in one form when sane and in another form when he is mad. This psychological dualism created by madness echoes the larger dualism of the play, with its two distinct parts.
It is significant, moreover, that Heracles’s madness, when it does come, is externalized. In the play, madness is allegorized or personified in the form of the goddess Madness. At least on the surface, Heracles’s madness is not psychological but something that is imposed upon him as a punishment by the gods. The idea of madness as something external rather than internal, even something that comes from the gods, was very prevalent in ancient Greece and ancient Greek literature, with analogues in Homer and the writings of Plato. Euripides’s Heracles—which can be read as the tragedian’s most sustained study of madness—seems to take a similar approach. This, at least, is the interpretation adopted by most scholars today, though many earlier scholars have assumed a different approach, interpreting the play as an allegory of an internal, psychological phenomenon.
Family and Lineage
Another motif that runs throughout the play is the motif of family and lineage. Almost all the characters of the play define themselves through their ancestry. Amphitryon, for instance, introduces himself in the beginning of the play as the man who shared his wife with Zeus, something in which he actually takes pride:
What mortal lives who has not heard this name—
Amphitryon of Argos, who shared his wife
With Zeus? I am he: son of Alcaeus
Perseus’ son, and father of Heracles.
(Lines 1-4)
Lycus, similarly, bases his identity and his actions on his lineage, using his descent from Lycus and Dirce to lay claim to the throne of Thebes. Megara’s decision to die nobly is explicitly informed by her consciousness of her noble and exalted ancestry.
The motif of family and lineage is taken up with special emphasis by Heracles as his character explores the themes of suffering, heroism, and the nature of the gods. After his madness, Heracles struggles with his own lineage, which is at once mortal and divine. Heracles is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, but he is also, in a sense, the son of Amphitryon, Alcmene’s mortal husband. After he kills his wife and children, Heracles comes to see his origins, his lineage, as the cause of his troubles, with Hera resolving to destroy him because he is the illegitimate son of her husband Zeus:
When a house is built on poor foundations,
Then its descendants are the heirs of grief.
Then Zeus—whoever Zeus may be—begot me
For Hera’s hatred.
(Lines 1261-64)
In other words, Heracles comes to believe that his fate has been determined by his lineage, something over which he has no control. In much the same way the fates of the play’s other characters have also been determined by their lineage: Lycus becomes Heracles’s rival through his descent from a rival Theban royal line, and this rivalry becomes his demise; Megara and Heracles’s children are targeted by Hera because of their relationship to Heracles, her enemy. Though Heracles recognizes the power his lineage holds over him, he is able to choose at the end of the play to disassociate himself from this lineage, denying his descent from Zeus (and by extension, his divinity) to embrace his humanity instead.
Friendship
The motif of friendship runs throughout the play. Early on, Amphitryon criticizes those who “prove no friends at all” (Line 55) by failing to help those who are in need of them, and throughout the play he and others level further attacks against Thebes, Greece (Hellas), and even the gods for abandoning Heracles and his family. With its exploration of themes such as duty and heroism, the play highlights the importance of good friends.
In the end, it is friendship that saves Heracles when Theseus encourages him to endure his suffering and to seek redemption. Theseus in particular is marked out as an ideal friend: He is loyal, but also strong enough to provide help. He is thus juxtaposed not only with false friends who abandon those who depend on them but also with friends who are true but “powerless to help” (Line 56), such as the Chorus. The final lines of the play return to the idea of friendship as the most important thing for human beings: “The man who would prefer great wealth or strength / More than love, more than friends, is diseased of soul” (Lines 1425-26).
Strength and Weakness
Throughout the play, the motifs of strength and weakness also complement many of the central themes, such as perseverance in the face of suffering and the meaning of heroism. These motifs are often intertwined with the motif of friendship, especially in the juxtaposition—introduced repeatedly by Amphitryon and the Chorus—between bad friends who do not help even though they have the strength to do so and good friends who do what they can even though they are weak. The Chorus and Amphitryon fall into the latter category: They are too old and weak to help Heracles’s children, as they lament on multiple occasions. Amphitryon, for instance, characterizes himself as
a weak old man,
Nothing more now than a jawing of words,
Forsaken by that strength I used to have,
Left only with this trembling husk of age.
(Lines 228-31)
The Chorus, similarly, long for youth and deprecate their old age as “ugly / Murderous” (Lines 649-50). While weakness is a great evil, strength can be a great thing when used virtuously, as shown by Heracles’s rescue of his family.
However, weakness and strength are not necessarily justly apportioned. Often, the evil are strong while the good are weak. For the Chorus, such imbalance is an indictment of the wisdom and justice of the gods:
If the gods were wise and understood men,
Second youth would be their gift,
To seal the virtue of a man.
And so the good would run their course
From death back to the light again.
But evil men should live their lap,
One single life, and run no more.
(Lines 655-61)
Ultimately, though, Heracles’s fate shows that even the strong can be rendered powerless, sometimes by precisely what made them strong. Strength is transient and subject to the whims of the gods and, ultimately, fate. In the end, nobody—not even a god—is stronger than fate. In a way, this is the lesson of the play, in which even a character like Heracles can do nothing but persevere and endure his fate.
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