HERACLES
personal intrusion of the poet on having reached his sixtieth
year (when he would have been exempt from further military
service). On such a theory the date of the play would be 424-
423. Similarly, the disproportionate debate on the bow (11.
188 ff.) is interpreted as an overt reference to the Athenian
success at Sphakteria in 425—a victory due largely to bowmen
—or to the disastrous failure to employ archers in the hoplite
defeat at Delium in 424. The reference to Delian maidens (11.
687 ff.) is taken as a remembrance of the establishment of the
quinquennial Deliades in Athens in 425.
But no one of these suggestions, nor even their ensemble,
can be regarded as decisive. The strongest argument for a later
date is one given by stylistic and metrical tests, generally
rather accurate for Euripides. These tend to place the play in
the group of dramas which directly follow the Archidamian
War, or about 418-416.
It is my opinion that the metrical tests are supported in
their results by the general political tone of the play, with its
sharp emphasis upon factional strife and its concern with the
badge of true nobility. Further, the reconciliation between
Sparta and Athens which is suggested in Theseus' domiciling
of Heracles in Athens would seem to suggest (though it need
not) a period in which reconciliation between Athens and
Sparta was possible. Such reconciliation was a possibility only,
I believe, in the period between the close of the Archidamian
War in 421 and the aggressive anti-Spartan policy of Alci-
biades which culminated in the Athenian-Argive defeat at
Man tinea in 418. It is only against such a background as this,
when all major parties in the Peloponnesian War were at-
tempting abortive realignments, when peace must have ap-
peared to be at least a remote possibility to contemporaries,
that the lines of Megara (11. 474-79) can be made to yield
good sense. If so, the death of the children who embody the
peaceful hopes of a united Hellas (11. 135-37) must mean the
renewal of conflict. A renewal of conflict must have seemed
the certain consequence of Alcibiades' policies in 418, whereas
in the years just previous an alliance between Athens and
Sparta must have excited real hopes of an enduring peace.
3°5