EURIPIDES
which the tragedy turns, wheeling over and over as one action
pivots to its opposite, or, juxtaposed against a sudden illumina-
tion, is as suddenly shattered and annulled. Through theme
after theme, with perfect tact of tempo and placing, the re-
versals crowd, taking each motif a further turn of the wheel.
Thus the first action of the play, slow, conventional, over-
whelmed by the weakness of its characters, creates out of
desperation a sudden and time-honored theodicy. The wheel
turns, and a violent irruption of the irrational smashes all
theodicy; then, in the last swing, both irrational and theodicy
are alike undone in the hero's enormous leap to an illusion of
order in divinity, an assertion which he maintains squarely in
the teeth of his experience. The savior who suddenly turns
destroyer is in turn saved from self-destruction by the man he
had earlier saved from Hades. The hero is reduced to his hu-
manity as the condition of his heroism. Throughout the trag-
edy, gathering momentum by contrast, runs the rhythm of its
minor terms: first despair, then hope, then again despair, and
finally an endurance deeper than either; age and youth, weak-
ness and strength, both pairs resolved in the condition that
makes them one. Schematic, brilliant, savagely broken, the
Heracles is a play of great power and, with the exception of
the Orestes, the most violent structural tour-de-force in Greek
tragedy.
It is this very dislocation, this virtuosity and violence in the
play's structure, which more than anything else has injured its
reputation and hindered reappraisal. Given Aristotelian stand'
ards of judgment (and Aristotle even today affects dramatic
criticism at a profound level), the play's dislocation could not
but appear either pointless or gratuitous; for at almost every
conceivable point the play is in flat contradiction to the prin-
ciples of the Poetics. Thus Heracles has no visible hamartia;
if he falls, he falls for no flaw of his own nature or failure of
judgment, but as the innocent victim of divine brutality. And
still worse, the play exhibits not at all that deep, necessitous
propter hoc connection between its parts, which for Aristotle
constituted the right structure of tragedy.1 With almost one
i. Poetics 1452a. 20.
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