EURIPIDES
place. For to say that "if god is truly god, then he is perfect, /
lacking nothing" is clearly to invalidate Hera's claim to divin-
ity, or to deny his own experience of Hera's hatred.
The sentiment is, to be sure, Euripidean, a familiar refusal
to believe the old legends which represent the gods as subject
to human passions, and a discountenance of the familiar fifth-
century notion that immoral conduct could be sanctioned by
an appeal to divine conduct as recounted in poetry. But merely
because the lines are Euripidean in thought, their effect for
the play should not be glozed away as mere inconsistencies or
as an undramatic intrusion of the dramatist in propria persona.
For to say that divine adultery, tyranny, and misconduct are
all "the wretched tales of poets" is a direct and unmistakable
challenge not only to the Hera of the play, but to the whole
Olympian system.
The consequences of Heracles' words for the play are, I
suggest, this: that the story of Hera's action as dramatized is
true enough, but the Hera who afflicts Heracles as she does
thereby renounces any claim to the kind of divinity which
Heracles asserts. This conclusion is, I think, supported by
Euripides' practice elsewhere and also by the language of the
play. Like the Hippolytus with Aphrodite and the Eacchae
with Dionysus, the Heracles does two things with Hera: it
first dramatizes the legend which contains her action as incred-
ible in a goddess,5 and then, having shown and asserted its
incredibility, it converts her into a hovering symbol of all the
unknown and unknowable forces which compel Heracles and
men to suffer tragically and without cause or sense. As Diony-
sus is a complex symbol for the forces of life, amoral and
necessitous, so Hera comprehends all the principles of peripety
and change and random necessity. She is not Hera, but
"Hera," a name given her for the want of a name, but loosely
what the Greeks meant by Tyche, the lady of necessity and
reversal. In asserting this "Hera" as the consequence of his
own speech, Heracles annihilates the old Olympian Hera as a
5. Cf. 11. 1307-10 where Heracles asks: "Who could offer prayers
to such a goddess? Jealous of Zeus for a mortal woman's sake, she
had destroyed Hellas' greatest friend, though he was guiltless.'7
502^