EURIPIDES
tially static, the action as a whole leached of any really tragic
movement. All the emotional stops of a melodramatic situa-
tion have been pulled: we move from the despair of the help-
less family to the sudden coming of the savior hero to the
triumphant final diapason of vindicated divine justice. The
characters are only lightly dubbed in, certainly no more so
than is necessary to maintain the illusion that these are real
people in a situation of unqualified peril. If the action is not
quite trite, it is at least customary and predictable, so pre-
dictable in fact that it might be regarded as a parody of a
standard tragic movement. Certainly no one familiar with
Euripides' practice can doubt that the comfortable theodicy
which closes the action has been written tongue-in-cheek or
is somehow surely riding for a fall. And insensibly the impres-
sion of purely tragic power in the second action, although
based on an analogous plot, undercuts the first action and
exposes its conventionality.
What is true of the first action as a whole is also true of the
Heracles of the first action. The traditional donnees which
compose his figure have for the most part been carefully pre-
served; if Heracles is not here the beefeater of comedy or the
ruddy sensualist of the Alcestis, he is recognizably the familiar
culture-hero of Dorian and Boeotian tradition: strong, coura-
geous, noble, self-sufficient, carrying on his back all the aristo-
cratic arete of the moralized tradition of Pindar. Thus the
grossnesses or cruelties or philandering which tradition some-
times ascribed to him (cf. again the Trachiniae) have been
stripped away. In domestic life he is a devoted son, a loyal
husband, and a fond father; in civil life he is the just king, the
enemy of hybris, the champion of the helpless, and the loyal
servant of the gods. His civilizing labors on behalf of mankind
are accepted as literal truths, and the curious ambiguity in
tradition which made Heracles the son of two fathers, Zeus
and Amphitryon, is maintained. His heroism is based upon his
strength and is essentially outward, but nonetheless valid, or at
least valid enough for the muted reality of the first action.
Against this background, the second action breaks with
tragic force and striking transformations, showing first the
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