EURIPIDES
totelian point of view and the lack of apparent connection
between the parts of the play. The play pivots on two seem-
ingly incompatible realities, and if it insists on the greater
reality of what has been created over what has been received,
it does so, not by denying reality to received reality, but by
subtly displacing it in the transfiguration of its terms.
Thus, point for point in the Heracles, each of the terms
—the qualities, situation, characters—that was appropriate to
the Heracles of tradition is transformed and displaced. If in
the first action both Zeus and Amphitryon are the fathers of
Heracles, in the second action Amphitryon becomes Heracles'
"real" father, not by the fact of conception, but by the greater
fact of love, philia. In the first action Heracles literally de-
scended to a literal Hades; in the second action this literal
descent is transfigured in the refusal to die and the courage
which, under an intolerable necessity, perseveres. There is a
hint, moreover, that the old Hades of the poets with its
Cerberus, Sisyphus, and torments is transformed in the second
part into the Hades within, here and now, internalized as
Heracles himself declares, "And I am like Ixion, forever
chained to a flying wheel." So too the old labors appear to be
replaced by the metaphorical sense of the imposed labors of
human life and the cost of civilization, while the goddess
Hera, who in legend made Heracles mad, passes almost in-
sensibly into a hovering symbol of all those irrational and ran-
dom necessities which the Greek and the play call Tyche, and
which we limply translate as "Fortune" or "necessity."
All of these conversions replace and dislodge the reality of
the first action by transfiguring it at every point. The first ac-
tion in the light of the second is neither false nor unreal, but
inadequate. Through the force of contrast with its own con-
version, it comes to seem obsolete, naive, or even humdrum,
much as fresh conviction formed under peine forte et dure in-
sensibly makes the conviction it replaces callow or jejune in
comparison. Under the changed light of experience and the
pattern it imposes, what was once taken for reality comes to
seem illusion at best: true while held as true, but with wid-
ened experience, discovered inadequate. What we see is less
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