HERACLES
and his discovery of that hope keeps step with his knowledge
of anguish. He survives by virtue of love, for love lies close to,
if it does not usurp, the instinct for survival. At the close of
the play we see Heracles assert the dignity of his grief against
the reproaches of a Theseus who, for all his generosity, is still
rooted in the old heroism and no longer understands. Having
claimed the dignity of his new courage, Heracles can without
weakness or loss of tragic stature make plain the wreck of his
life and his own dependent helplessness: strong but also
weak, in need and in love, a hero at every point.
Heracles comes through suffering, then, to occupy the
ground where Megara, Amphitryon, and the chorus stood
earlier. Their nobility provides a standard by which to measure
his heroism, first challenging it and then being surpassed by it.
But nothing in Heracles is diminished because Megara and
Amphitryon have set the example he must follow, and know
already what he must learn. Their very weakness has set them
close to necessity, while Heracles' arete has been so prodi-
giously developed toward physical strength that nothing short
of the greatest moral courage is required for him to survive his
necessity. He rises and keeps on rising to his sufferings with an
enormous range of spirit that in the end leaves even the un-
conventional Theseus far behind him. It is this ability to rise
that makes him great as much as the overwhelming anguish
of the necessity that confronts him. What counts in the end
is not the disparity between Heracles' courage and necessity
and the courage of the others, but the fact that they all—
Megara, Amphitryon, the chorus, and Heracles—meet on the
common ground of their condition and discover both courage
and hope in the community of weakness and love.
What, finally, are we to make of Hera and that crucial
speech of Heracles on the nature of the gods (11. 1340-46)?
That it was Hera who made Heracles mad was, as we have
seen, an essential part of Euripides' legendary material. But
the consequence of Heracles' speech is apparently to deny that
the actions of the gods could in fact be such as they are drama-
tized to be. Alternatively Heracles appears to deny the reality
of the experience out of which he makes the speech in the first
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