HERACLES
conquering hero, the kallinikos, reduced to tears, helpless, de-
pendent, and in love, stripped of that outward strength which
until now had exempted him from normal human necessity,
and discovering both his common ground with men and a new
internalized moral courage. This Heracles is not merely untra-
ditional; he is almost inconceivable in traditional perspective,
and he is tragic where the earlier Heracles was merely noble.
The point to be insisted upon here is the distance at every
point between the two actions. We have here moved a whole
world away from the simple virtues and theodicy of the first
action, as the new role and courage of the hero undercut every-
thing the play has created up to now. The world of the given,
the reality of "things as they are said to be," withers and is
replaced, not by a mere contradiction, but by a new tragic
myth invoking new values and grounded in a sterner reality.
What audience, especially a Greek one, could have recognized
in that broken, almost domestic, Heracles fighting back his
tears, the familiar and austere culture-hero of received tra-
dition?
We have, then, two savagely different actions, one conven-
tional and the other set in a world where tradition is dumb
and conduct uncharted, placed harshly in contrast. The
peripety which separates them is the dramatist's means of
expressing symbolically the fatal disorder of the moral uni-
verse, and also the device by which the heroism of the second
action is forced up, through an utter transformation of as-
sumed reality. The whole play exhibits, as though on two
plateaus, a conversion of reality. A story or legend derived
from received beliefs—the world of myth and the corpus of
"things as they are said to be"—is suddenly in all of its parts,
terms, characters, and the values it invokes converted under
dramatic pressure to another phase of reality. What we get is
something like a dramatic mutation of received reality, and
the leap the play makes between the phases or plateaus of its
two realities is meant to correspond in force and vividness and
apparent unpredictability to mutations in the physical world.
It is this violence in the conversion of reality that explains the
wrenching dislocation of Euripidean drama from an Aris-
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