HERACLES
And far from committing suicide, the Euripidean Heracles
discovers his greatest nobility in refusing to die and choosing
life. If, again in the older tradition, Heracles married Hebe
(i.e., youth) and so won everlasting life, in the Euripidean play
Hebe is present to the action as nothing more than an im-
possible anguished reminder of mortal necessity and the
haunting image of what in a universe not fatally flawed might
have been the reward of human virtue (cf. 637-72). Similarly,
the suppression of the deification motif sharpens the coura-
geous endurance of mankind under its necessities in contrast
with the happiness of the amoral gods. Deification is replaced
by the closest thing to Olympus this world can oEer—honored
asylum at Athens. For this reason Theseus is introduced as
the representative of Athenian humanity to rescue and annex
to Athens the greatest Dorian hero.
By deployment of his material Euripides has structured his
play into two parallel actions divided by a peripety whose pur-
pose is more to stress the break than to bridge it. If the
Heracles is broken, the dislocation is at least deliberate, and
as such it is clearly consistent with Euripides' practice else-
where: in the two actions of the Hecuba, the double plot of
the Hippolytus, the episodic Trojan Women or Phoenisscte,
the broken Andromache, and the dislocated Electra. But even
more violently than these plays the Heracles insists on the
irreparable rift in its structure and invites us by its great power
to discover what nonetheless makes it one play. It is right that
our perception of power in literature should lead us more
deeply into the order and disorder created or invoked.
Despite the fact that the first action is entirely free inven-
tion, it is important to see how conventional the treatment is.
In the shaping of the characters, in their attributes and mo-
tives, in the theology and received values to which the action
appeals, convention is everywhere visible. Character is essen-
escaped death, though he was dear to the lord Zeus, the son of
Cronus, but the common fate brought him down, and the grievous
wrath of Hera." In literature of the historical period this tradition has
almost everywhere been eclipsed by the deified Heracles, a version
which begins also with Homer (cf. Odyssey xi. 601 fL).