HERACLES
goddess, but also converts her into that demonic and terribly
real power of his own necessity. The tragedy of Heracles is
both true and real, but it is no longer the traditional story,
nor is Heracles the same man, nor Hera the same goddess.
And it is to confirm this conversion that Heracles a few lines
later (1. 1357) concludes: "And now, I see, I must serve neces-
sity (tyche)" So too in his last reference to Hera he hints at
the conversion by significantly juxtaposing both tyche and the
name of Hera, claiming that "we all have been struck down
by one tyche of Hera" (1. 1393).° And, if this were not enough,
the play's overwhelming preoccupation with peripety as theme
and as dislocation in structure would confirm the conversion.
This, I think, is what we should expect, that the conversion
of the old legend of Heracles and his old nobility into a new
myth should be accompanied by the conversion of his ne-
cessity as well. To alter his old heroism without also altering
the source of his suffering would be to cripple the conversion
at the crucial point. It would obscure, that is, the fact that
Heracles, though broken by necessity, still wins the moral vic-
tory over the power that ruins him, earning for himself and
men in a different sense the victory claimed by Amphitryon
over Zeus earlier:
And I, mere man, am nobler than you, a great god [I. 342].
He claims a courage more than equal to his condition and can
therefore claim the dignity of his grief.
Heracles is no Aristotelian hero, nor is the play an Aris-
totelian tragedy; yet the Heracles is a great tragedy and
Heracles himself a great tragic hero. The gulf between Eu-
ripides and Aristotle on the issues here is a great and perma-
nent one that deserves to be stressed. For Aristotle a tragic
fall is grounded in a consistent and harmonious sense of man's
responsibility for his nature and his actions: when the hero
falls, he falls for his own failure, and behind the Tightness of
his fall, working both pity and fear by the precise and relent-
6. Cf. 11. 1314, 1349* 1396* as well as the significant disjunction,
"mastered by Hera or by necessity'* in Amphitryon's speech at 1. 20.
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