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The Reception and
Performance of
Euripides’ Herakles
Reasoning Madness

KAT H L E E N R I L EY

1
 3
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Riley, Kathleen, 1974–
The reception and performance of Euripides Herakles : reasoning madness / Kathleen Riley.
p. cm. –– (Oxford classical monographs)
‘‘This book began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis’’––Pref.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–953448–7
1. Euripides. Heracles. 2. Heracles (Greek mythology) in literature.
3. Heracles (Greek mythology)—Drama. 4. Mental illness in literature. I. Title.
PA3985.R55 2008 882’.01—dc22 2008006540
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ISBN 978–0–19–953448–7

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Parentibus amicisque carissimis
Jean and Frank Riley
This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

This book began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis, and I would like
to thank the University of Sydney for awarding me the Cooper and
E. S. Wood Travelling Scholarships, which, supplemented by an ORS
(Overseas Research Students) Award from the British government,
substantially funded my three years in residence at Oxford.
I am greatly indebted to Fiona Macintosh for her clear-sighted,
meticulous, and stimulating supervision of my thesis, and, above all,
her friendship and support. Oliver Taplin and Lorna Hardwick
examined the thesis and made many valuable suggestions about
revising it for publication. I have also valued the comments made
on individual chapters by Edith Hall. For their advice and encour-
agement, my thanks to Stephen Harrison, Alastair Blanshard, Paula
and Brian Alprin, and Daniel Algie.
From the numerous libraries and collections I have consulted,
special thanks must go to the staV of the Taylor Institution Library
in Oxford for their courteous assistance, and Penelope Bulloch,
Librarian at Balliol College, for making available to me Robert
Browning’s manuscript of Aristophanes’ Apology.
My thanks to Gerry Foley for his lucid interpretation, and practical
demonstration, of key passages from Richard Strauss’s Elektra.
I am extremely grateful to Cathy Ludwig and David CoVey for
their generous help in rendering into clear English quotations from
German texts.
Most of all, I wish to thank my parents, Jean and Frank, for their
wise counsel and unfailing support during the writing of the thesis
and its subsequent revision, and for a lifetime’s love and inspiration.
K. R.

Extracts from Shirley Barlow’s translation of Euripides’ Herakles reproduced

by permission of Aris & Phillips from Euripides: Heracles, edited with an
Introduction, Translation, and Commentary by Shirley A. Barlow (Aris &
Phillips, 1996).
viii Preface
Extracts from John Fitch’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens rep-
rinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical
Library from Seneca: Tragedies I, Loeb Classical Library, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press), Copyright ß 2002 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College. The Loeb Classical Library 1 is a registered trademark
of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Translations of passages from other Greek and Latin texts are the auth-
or’s own.
 Contents

List of illustrations x

Introduction: reasoning madness and redeWning the hero 1

1. ‘No longer himself ’: the tragic fall of Euripides’ Herakles 14
2. ‘Let the monster be mine’: Seneca and the
internalization of imperial furor 51
3. A peculiar compound: Hercules as Renaissance man 92
4. ‘Even the earth is not room enough’: Herculean
selfhood on the Elizabethan stage 117
5. Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist: the nineteenth-century
damnatio of Euripides 150
6. The Browning version: Aristophanes’ Apology and
‘the perfect piece’ 182
7. The psychological hero: Herakles’ lost self and the
creation of Nervenkunst 207
8. Herakles’ apotheosis: the tragedy of Superman 252
9. The Herakles complex: a Senecan diagnosis of the
‘Family Annihilator’ 279
10. Creating a Herakles for our times: a montage of
modern madness 338
Appendix 1. Heraklean madness on the modern stage:
a chronology 358
Appendix 2. The Reading school play 366

Bibliography 368
Index 389
 List of illustrations

Fig. 1. Asteas, The Madness of Herakles, Paestan rf. calyx-krater

(350–325 bc). Museo del Prado. 47
Fig. 2. Alessandro Turchi, The Madness of Hercules (c.1620).
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich. 115
Fig. 3. Theatre programme for Herakles, Vienna, 1902. 223
Fig. 4. Herakles, Archibald MacLeish, Alexandria, VA, 2005. Deborah
Rinn Critzer (Mrs Hoadley) and Bruce Alan Rauscher
(Hoadley). Photo: Stan Barouh. 306
Fig. 5. Mister Heracles, Simon Armitage, Leeds 2001. Clare
McCarron (Megara) and Adrian Bower (Heracles).
Photo: Keith Pattison. 315
Fig. 6. Home Front, Daniel Algie, New York City 2006. Joseph
Jamrog (Arthur), H. Clark (Ted), and Fletcher
McTaggart (Harrison). Photo: Jonathan SlaV. 354
This page intentionally left blank
 O matter and impertinency mixed,
Reason in madness.
(King Lear, iv. vi. 170–1)
And this madness that links and divides time, that twists the
world into the ring of a single night, this madness so foreign to
the experience of its contemporaries, does it not transmit to
those able to receive it . . . those barely audible voices of classical
unreason, in which it is always a question of nothingness and
night, but amplifying them now to shrieks and frenzy?
(Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:
A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)
 Introduction
Reasoning madness and redeWning the hero

Tales of madness are unsettling. They have a strange and enduring power to
fascinate, amuse, and appal beyond the limits of their own historical mo-
ment. They seem to be tragicomedy itself: familiar, yet at the same time
uncannily removed from everyday experience; entertaining but profoundly
disturbing.1
One of the most unsettling tales of madness in Western literature is
Euripides’ Herakles, or Herakles Mainomenos (The Madness of Hera-
kles), Wrst produced shortly before 415 bc,2 in which, at the moment
of his greatest triumph, Greece’s most celebrated hero is struck down
by a supernaturally imposed madness and forced to murder his wife
and children. Antiquity recorded a tradition that Euripides was
prosecuted by the Athenian politician Cleon for staging at the Dio-
nysia the unseemly spectacle of Herakles descending into madness,
and for thus profaning the sacred civic festivities.3 The story is
probably apocryphal, but it does reveal an ancient discomfort with
this bloody and bewildering drama, a discomfort, moreover, that has
endured throughout the centuries. For Herakles remains one of the
least-familiar and least-performed plays in the Greek tragic canon. It

1 Salkeld (1993), 8.
2 Herakles Mainomenos, the title given in some MSS, was possibly meant to
distinguish this play from the Herakleidae (The Children of Herakles). No traditional
date for the Herakles has come down to us from the ancient scholars and external
evidence is problematic. The most reliable indicator is internal metrical evidence,
which suggests a production a little earlier than Troades of 415 bc (see Cropp and
Fick (1985), 5). See also Collard (1981), 2.
3 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, no. 2400 (vol. 24, 107–9), ll. 10–14.
2 Introduction
is only now, for the Wrst time, experiencing something of a universal
renaissance, having been adapted for the stage more times (and in a
wide variety of forms) in the last decade than in the whole of its
previous history (see Appendix 1). And even now it has almost the
status of a last taboo. But why should this be so? The play’s subject
matter is unquestionably shocking—madness, uxoricide, Wlicide—
but this alone cannot account for its relative neglect, its untouch-
ability. Blinding madness, involving impious crimes against philoi
(loved ones), is hardly an uncommon theme in Greek tragedy.
Euripides’ other plays on the subject include Medea and Bacchae,
both profoundly disturbing. However, these plays do not seem to
have unsettled audiences (or prospective adapters) in quite the same
way as Herakles, and they have certainly been performed with far
greater frequency, making more conspicuous incursions into the
popular consciousness. Why, then, is the demented, Wlicidal Herakles
an especially unsettling theatrical prospect? The answer lies in the
singularity of tragic Herakles.
Herakles is a hero whose ontological ambivalence makes him a
discomWting tragic anomaly. Euripides’ Herakles and Sophocles’
Trachiniae are the only extant Attic tragedies on the theme of suVer-
ing Herakles. Yet in Attic comedy and satyr-drama and in burlesque
Herakles featured regularly and prominently, a grotesque character of
phenomenal physical strength, prodigious appetites, and oaWsh de-
meanour. In Euripides’ tragicomic Alcestis he appears as the saviour
rather than the suVerer, and his more familiar comic persona as
bibulous bungler is still much in evidence. The notable imbalance
between comic and tragic representations of Herakles has been
partially explained by Victor Ehrenberg and more satisfactorily by
Michael Silk. Ehrenberg identiWes Herakles’ divinity as the chief
obstacle to the hero’s tragic portrayal: ‘The Heracles of comedy is
conWrmation of the fact that the hero’s fate was not tragic, unless it
became involved in human frailties and human crimes. Heracles,
whether hero or glutton, was always superhuman and therefore
essentially untragic.’4 Silk, however, believes the problem is not the
hero’s divinity, but his unique interstitial condition as theios anēr
(divine man) and Monoikos (lone dweller), which makes him the

4 Ehrenberg (1946), 146.

 Introduction 3
ultimate outsider and gives him a potentially dangerous complexity
as a subject for tragedy:
The reason why the tragedians avoid Heracles as suVering hero is that a
serious treatment of his suVerings means coming to terms with anomalous
status, with crossing the limits, with disturbing contradictions. If (to speak
in formulae) tragic-suVering man is man’s image of his own essential
condition, and if god is his projection of what he would, but dare not, aspire
to, and is, instead, a helpless prey to, then the enactment of tragic-suVering
god-man threatens to involve its audience in an existential inquisition of an
uncommonly powerful and painful kind. The pure god, pure hero, pure
buVoon, are safe subjects. The suVering Heracles, as a project for tragedy, is
exceptionally sensitive material, almost too disturbing, almost taboo. And
when tragedy does, eventually, dare to focus on this anomaly, disturbance is
conspicuous.5
Of the two surviving tragic portraits of Herakles, the Euripidean
portrait is the more complex and, therefore, the more ‘dangerous’.
Sophoclean Herakles suVers mightily, but he embodies an oversim-
pliWed and intractable heroism that is not far removed from his
untragic personae. In his behaviour and heroic temperament, he is
more godlike than human and, as a consequence, unreachable and
unappealing. By contrast, Euripidean Herakles has a speciWcally
human complexity and, by today’s standards, accessibility. He dis-
plays from the beginning an enlightened and atypical heroism, and,
before the arrival of Lyssa (Frenzy or Madness), is shown to be
mentally and morally sound. To watch the Herakles is, therefore, to
confront an impossible conundrum: how do we reconcile this image
of human greatness and innocence with the Xagrant injustice of the
gods and the inhuman nature of the hero’s mad crimes?
In June 2004, reXecting on ‘the current rash of Greek drama . . .
directly attributable to the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East’,6
Michael Billington, drama critic for the Guardian, posed the rhet-
orical question: ‘Where does our theatre instinctively turn in times of

5 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 7.

6 Michael Billington, ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’,
Guardian, 19 June 2004. The ‘current rash of Greek drama’ included productions of
Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis at the National Theatre, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and
Tender (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae) at the Young Vic, Euripides’ Ion at
the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, and Euripides Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse.
4 Introduction
crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to the Greeks.’7 Despite the
overall sparseness of its performance history, the Herakles is no
exception to this rule. Since the Wfth century bc interest in the play
has been intermittent, but has always surfaced in historically charged
circumstances (e.g. late Julio-Claudian Rome, Tudor England, Wn-
de-siècle Vienna, Cold War and post-9/11 America). Astonishingly,
given its infrequent staging, the Herakles has had an undeniable
impact on the history of ideas, proving an ideal text for people
wanting, or needing, to redeWne the concepts of ‘madness’ and
‘hero’. As an examination of heroism in crisis, a tragedy about the
greatest of heroes facing an abyss of despair but ultimately Wnding
redemption, it resonates powerfully with individuals and communi-
ties at historical and ethical crossroads. However, the impact of the
play has not always been a question of direct inspiration or obvious
appropriation. Very often it has penetrated the prevailing culture by
circuitous or subterranean means, although no less profoundly. The
list of writers who have adapted, or in other ways championed,
Euripides’ Herakles through the ages is a distinguished and sometimes
surprising one. In keeping with its dangerous complexity and strange
beauty, the play has consistently attracted rebels and visionaries to its
cause.
Duncan Salkeld has commented that to read tales of madness ‘is to
confront a variety of questions. Can the madness of the past be
interpreted in present-day categories of insanity? Should the concepts
of real and literary madness be distinguished? Does madness make
sense, and if so, what does it mean?’8 The primary interest of this
book lies in changing ideas of Heraklean madness, of its causes, its
consequences, and its therapy. Writers subsequent to Euripides have
tried to ‘reason’ or make sense of the madness, often in accordance
with contemporary thinking on mental illness. Diagnoses of
Herakles’ condition have included melancholy, epilepsy, hysteria,
manic depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and
have been informed by a range of theories from humoral pathology

7 Michael Billington, ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’,
Guardian, 19 June 2004.
8 Salkeld (1993), 8.
 Introduction 5
to psychoanalysis and beyond. But Euripides’ play is not only a
psychologically compelling dramatization of the irrational; it is also
a thought-provoking enquiry into the heroic. In addition to the
questions identiWed by Salkeld, interpreters of Herakles have had to
confront a further question: how are we to understand Herakles’
aretē (moral and heroic excellence) in the light of his insane behav-
iour? Attempts to reason the madness necessarily entail redeWning
Herakles’ heroism accordingly. This process of heroic redeWnition is
the second focus of my investigation.
Euripides himself emphasized a total absence of reason for the
madness. The structural Wssion, unparalleled central epiphany, and
highly unusual characterization of Herakles and Lyssa establish
psychological and ethical discontinuity between Herakles sane
and Herakles insane. The madness is senseless and intrusive, an
unpardonable mischief conceived by malevolent gods. Against divine
unreason, the rehabilitated Herakles emerges as a mature and
humanistic hero whose salvation is achieved through human philia
(love, friendship) and his own progressive spiritual resolve.
Euripides’ play is, of course, itself an adaptation of traditional
myth. As an adaptation it contains several innovations, not least of
which is to feature the madness and Wlicide as the climax of Herakles’
twelve labours (rather than the labours as atonement for the Wlicide).
The eVect of this is to emphasize further Herakles’ innocence and the
injustice of the gods, and to concentrate meaning and dramatic
tension in Herakles’ recovery from a disaster beyond reason. In
adaptations of Euripides’ text, however, the implications of his
chronological inversion of the Wlicide and labours have been very
diVerently perceived. Later writers generally see a causal link between
the violence of the labours and the domestic violence that immedi-
ately follows their completion. As a result, the rehabilitation of
Herakles, which is the most radical part of Euripides’ play, is made
secondary to the question of psychological causation in relation to
his explosive madness.
The Wrst writer to draw such a link between the labours and the
Wlicide, and so begin the process of reasoning Herakles’ madness, was
the Roman philosopher and tragedian Seneca. In his Hercules Furens
two levels of motivation are apparent, the divine/mythological and
6 Introduction
the human/psychological, with the emphasis on the latter. Seneca
internalizes Hercules’ furor, dispensing with the interventionist
mischief-makers Iris and Lyssa, and thereby obscuring the boundary
between sanity and insanity. He portrays Hercules throughout as a
megalomaniac and menacingly autarkic overreacher, whose madness
triggers a latent psychosis, and whose hallucinations merely
extrapolate his ‘rational’ aspirations. He thus restores the traditional
theodicy, which Euripides dismantled, and introduces to this
particular tale of madness both psychological and ethical coherence.
Hercules, as an idea or type, was an important and ubiquitous
presence in the art, literature, and philosophy of the Renaissance.
Although he was always primarily deWned as a warrior hero, a per-
former of civilizing feats, Renaissance Hercules was, in fact, a synthesis
and distillation of various classical traditions. His most popular and
pervasive incarnation was as Hercules in bivio (Hercules at the Cross-
roads), the triumphant hero of a Manichean struggle between Virtue
and Vice. As such he became omnia omnibus, happily appropriated
into civil humanism and Christian metaphysics alike. The Renaissance
conception of mad Hercules was very diVerent from this paragon of
virtus, reason, and restraint, but an equally composite and adaptable
creation. What is known as the ‘Hercules furens tradition’ is neither
exclusively Senecan nor essentially tragic. It is a wholesale description
applied to a group of overlapping traditions—philosophical, medical,
literary, and histrionic—whose ancient sources include Hippocrates,
Aristotle, Macrobius, Ovid, and, of course, Seneca. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries translations of Seneca’s Hercules Furens
appeared in England and on the Continent, helping to establish the
Herculean hero as a deWning presence in Renaissance drama. Seneca’s
psychologically and ethically challenging Hercules is an especially
discernible and inXuential presence in Elizabethan tragedy. Political
and cultural similarities between imperial Rome and Tudor England
ensured the responsiveness of Elizabethan playwrights to the Senecan
overreacher’s magnetism as well as his menace. Madness and tyranny
in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are frequently
construed in terms of Herculean furor, which, in turn, is rendered
synonymous with an apocalyptic sense of selfhood.
Following the Renaissance, mad Herakles eVectively disappeared
from the stage and the cultural consciousness, re-emerging only very
 Introduction 7
gradually after an interval of nearly 200 years. For much of the
nineteenth century Euripidean tragedy was either ignored or else
roundly condemned, and the fate of Herakles was to become
the preserve of a small but inXuential group of nonconformists. In
1818 Richard Valpy, the charismatic headmaster of Reading School,
staged, in ancient Greek, the only documented production of Hera-
kles in the nineteenth century. Later in the century the outspoken
classical historian J. P. MahaVy initiated an anti-Aristophanic defence
of Euripides, citing Herakles as ‘among the best of the poet’s works’;9
and his pupil, Oscar Wilde, expressed a special familiarity and
aYnity with the play, as well as a desire to edit it. The revolutionary
German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV began
work on a seminal edition of the text in the 1870s as part of his
historicist crusade; and Robert Browning made his translation of
Herakles in 1875 the pièce de résistance in a remarkable Euripidean
defence (Aristophanes’ Apology). Browning’s version makes no at-
tempt to reason Herakles’ madness. It is instead an extremely sym-
pathetic ampliWcation of Euripides’ own voice, reaYrming, as
opposed to redeWning, the play’s hero as redeemer and redeemed.
The Modernist reception of mad Herakles has two currents, one
psychological, the other philosophical. The Wrst represents the com-
bined theories of Wilamowitz, the critic Herman Bahr, and the
playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In his 1889 edition of the
Herakles, Wilamowitz proposed his ‘seeds of madness’ theory, por-
traying Euripides’ hero as a blood-crazed megalomaniac. In 1902 his
translation of the play was produced in Vienna and was the Wrst
modern revival of Euripides on the European stage. This production,
and in particular Bahr’s reaction to it, had a direct impact on the
creation of Nervenkunst (neurotic art). Bahr, focusing on line 931
(›
 PŒŁ Æe q, ‘he was no longer himself ’), believed the mad
Herakles to be a hero straight from the pages of Breuer and Freud,
symbolizing the terrifying potential in all human beings to lose
themselves, to become something ‘other’ than themselves. His read-
ing of line 931 formed the basis of the Wrst explicitly psychoanalytic
interpretation of Greek tragedy ever staged, Hofmannsthal’s electri-
fying Elektra of 1903. Meanwhile, other Modernist writers, namely

9 MahaVy (1879), 81.

8 Introduction
George Cabot Lodge, W. B. Yeats, and Frank Wedekind, conceived of
Herakles as the archetypal Nietzschean Superman, reasoning the
madness and murders as an inescapable precondition of self-divinity.
In the late twentieth century, Cold War fears of nuclear annihila-
tion and post-Vietnam awareness of combat trauma led to the
identiWcation in the heroic male psyche of what might be termed a
‘Herakles complex’. Consequently, the adaptations of Euripides’
Herakles by Archibald MacLeish (pub. 1967) and Simon Armitage
(pub. 2000) focused speciWcally on the Wlicide and its cultural im-
plications, and applied a Senecan and psychoanalytic reading to the
madness and to the Euripidean sequence of labours–Wlicide. MacLeish
draws a frightening analogy between Herakles Kallinikos (Glorious
Victor) and a Strangelovean scientist bent on dystopian perfection.
Armitage portrays a maverick military man, an intuitive berserker
lost in the maze of peacetime complexity. In each case the restless,
overachieving hero Wts the psychological proWle of what American
criminologists categorize as the ‘family annihilator’.
MacLeish and Armitage were the Wrst modern playwrights to
dramatize the Herakles complex. They were also instigators of the
current phase in the reception of Euripides’ Herakles, that of the
‘neo-Senecan Herakles’. Out of the escalating horrors of our post-
9/11 world, and in direct response to the Iraq War, several new stage
adaptations of Herakles have emerged. Apart from their record num-
ber, what is fascinating about these productions is that, although
they are consciously inspired by Euripides, they have been unconscio-
usly Senecanized, Wltered through a sense of despair that is supremely
Senecan and at the same time utterly contemporary. Perhaps more so
than at any other stage in his reception, the tragic Herakles of the
early twenty-Wrst century is symbolic of acute moral crisis. His loss of
self has become a metaphor for an entire civilization that has lost its
way. Like Seneca’s portrait of the irredeemably autarkic Hercules, it is
a metaphor tempered by little in the way of optimism. At the time of
writing, mad Herakles’ latest manifestation is as a deeply traumatized
war veteran in Daniel Algie’s powerful play Home Front. The unex-
pected death of this hero at the hands of the Theseus character, which
is portrayed as a type of mercy killing and a Wnal act of friendship,
exceeds Seneca in its cancellation of the redemptive might of Eur-
ipidean philia.
 Introduction 9
The present study has been undertaken at a time when reception
studies are becoming an increasingly valuable and respectable com-
ponent of mainstream classical scholarship. The need to validate the
place of reception within the discipline of classics has become less
critical than the need for rigorous discussion about reception theory
and methodology. One of the latest attempts to answer that need is
Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), edited by Charles Martin-
dale and Richard Thomas. The diversity of contributions to this
volume illustrates the current eclecticism of approach and lack of
orthodoxy characteristic of classical reception studies. However,
among pioneering deWnitions of classical reception and its purpose,
which have appeared in the last ten to Wfteen years, some areas of
reasonable consensus are apparent, most notably the idea that recep-
tion involves a dialogic or mutually illuminating discourse between
ancient and modern. Martindale’s original reception manifesto,
which appeared in 1993, held that ‘Meaning . . . is always realized at
the point of reception’,10 that ‘numerous unexplored insights into
ancient literature are locked up in imitations, translations, and so
forth’.11 Thirteen years later he restated this thesis in terms of a two-
way transmission of meaning: ‘reception involves the acknowledge-
ment that the past and present are always implicated in each other.’12
In 2003 Lorna Hardwick showed how reception studies ‘focus critical
attention back towards the ancient source and sometimes frame new
questions or retrieve aspects of the source which have been margin-
alized or forgotten. . . . Reception studies therefore participate in the
continuous dialogue between past and present.’13 The following year
Edith Hall, formulating a theory of performance reception, advo-
cated as ‘eminently sensible’ the notion ‘that our appreciation of the
original texts can be reWned by excavating their afterlife, what they
have ‘‘meant’’ in other cultures and epochs than those which origin-
ally produced them’.14 My approach to the reception of Euripides’
Herakles has been enlightened by much of this emergent theory,
which has then been reinforced at a very practical level in my
research.

10 Martindale (1993), 3.
11 Ibid. 7. 12 Martindale (2006), 1–13, at 12.
13 Hardwick (2003), 4. 14 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 54.
10 Introduction
In an essay on the complexities of Shakespeare’s relationship to,
and exploitation of, the classics, Colin Burrow raises an important
issue: ‘Misremembering and mishearing the classical tongues can be
as much a response to ‘‘the classics’’ as careful imitations and artful
echoes.’15 Martindale makes a similar point: ‘One value of reception
is to bring to consciousness the factors that may have contributed to
our responses to the texts of the past, factors of which we may well be
‘‘ignorant’’ but are not therefore ‘‘innocent’’.’16 The present study,
therefore, examines not only instances of explicit adaptation or
appropriation, but also, and sometimes more revealingly, instances
of implicit, mediated, or subterranean reception (such as the Eur-
ipidean and Heraklean essence of Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of
Sophocles’ Elektra), and even of what we might cautiously describe
as misappropriation (observable in the Wlicidal Herakles’ signiWcant
role in Lodge’s doctrine of self-divinity). My methodology then is
directed towards the discovery of both the intended and unintended
consequences of reception. Examples of the latter could be said to
include the recent phenomenon of neo-Senecanism in stage adapta-
tions of Euripides’ text.
As my title indicates, this study is also a performance history of
Euripides’ Herakles and is, therefore, concerned with how the play
has left its mark at crucial junctures of theatrical as well as cultural
history. ‘It is the dynamic relationship’, Hall explains, ‘between an-
cient text, performer, and his or her audience that above all distin-
guishes Performance Reception from the study of the ways in which
ancient texts have been received elsewhere.’17 With regard to a dis-
tinguishable methodology for the investigation of this branch of
reception, Fiona Macintosh states that ideally performance history
‘works extensively and intensively at the intersection between theatre
history, histories of classical scholarship and the history of ideas. . . .
For the performance historian, the need to be aware of the import-
ance of all these perspectives is imperative.’18 She also stresses the
need for performance history ‘to combine diachronic awareness with
synchronic depth together with formalist analysis of the texts in

15 Burrow (2004), 9–27, at 15. 16 Martindale (2006), 1–13, at 5.

17 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 52. 18 Macintosh (2007), chap. 19.
 Introduction 11
question’.19 With these principles in mind, my own practice has
involved close textual analysis within a framework of broad historical
contextualization. ‘Bigger-picture’ questions relating to social and
political developments, theatrical and literary movements, and the
education and professional lives of theatre practitioners have proved
as pertinent to my investigation of the impact of a performance as
questions surrounding the linguistic subtleties of a play and the
aesthetics of translation. In Hall’s estimation, the performance his-
torian is essentially a time-traveller with access to a unique conduit of
human history, generated by an art form whose consequences belie
its supposed ephemerality and exclusivity:
Watched in physical company with many other spectators, performance
oVers privileged access to mass ideology and collective taste and prejudice,
and it is as a source for such phenomena that it tends to be used by social
historians. But it simultaneously permits access to the private imaginative
worlds of the individual members of previous generations. Theatre happens,
and leaves its psychological records, precisely at the intersection of the
collective and the individual, the ‘ideological’ and the ‘subjective.’ Theatre
critics have, moreover, long been aware that there is something distinctive
about the immanent presence of live performance in the human memory.
Far from being an ephemeral art, which happens, comes to an end, and
vanishes without a trace, a compelling theatrical experience can leave a
much deeper impression on the memory even than the printed word or
painted image.20
‘Performance issues’, Hall reveals, ‘may often need to be addressed
in the negative—why was a play’s performance banned at a particular
time . . . or why were there no attempts to stage Aeschylus in the
seventeenth century, or Trojan Women in the nineteenth’.21 In
the case of Herakles, in addition to the larger issue of the play’s
relatively erratic stage history and untouchability, there is a need to
address the speciWc impediments to its performance and the lacunae
in its reception. For example, there is the question of tragic Herakles’
disappearance from the stage in the post-Renaissance period. There
is also the prevalent damnatio of Euripides in the nineteenth century,
which contributes both to the neglect and to the eventual rehabili-
tation of his tragedies.

19 Ibid. 20 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 68. 21 Ibid. 56.

12 Introduction
As Macintosh makes clear, there are ‘inherent problems with the
tools and the sources of performance reception—especially with
the review’, so that the ‘need for a wide range of contextual evidence
is paramount.’22 My approach to these problems, where possible, has
been to examine the performance aspects of a production in close
conjunction with the playscript (whether published or unpublished).
Occasionally my analysis has been informed by my Wrst-hand know-
ledge of a performance. More frequently I have utilized a variety of
primary sources, including posters, programmes, and visual or
printed evidence about translation and production values, perform-
ance space, set design, costume, and styles of acting. These primary
sources have been augmented by the use of reviews and interviews
(conducted by myself or in the media) with a producer, playwright,
or director. In examining instances of reception beyond the stage, my
research has encompassed a similarly wide range of primary sources.
I have, for example, been able to consult the original manuscript of
Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology at Balliol College, Oxford, and
make extensive use of Hermann Bahr’s diaries and correspondence.
The whole notion of adaptation, which the reception specialist
or performance historian must address, is often pejoratively con-
ceived. As Linda Hutcheon points out: ‘an adaptation is likely to be
greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the
‘‘original’’.’23 This negativity becomes inevitable when the criterion
of judgement is how ‘faithful’ an adaptation is to the original: ‘The
morally loaded discourse of Wdelity is based on the implied assump-
tion that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text. Adap-
tation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there
are manifestly many diVerent possible intentions behind the act of
adaptation.’24 Scholars of the ‘classical tradition’, the theoretical fore-
runner to classical reception studies, tended in their investigations
to use terms such as ‘inXuence’ and ‘legacy’, which in turn tended to
preserve the ancient text as a yardstick of value or a kind of Urtext
edition. Within these parameters the notion of adaptation is in danger
of being reduced to a matter of either imitation or degeneration.

22 Macintosh (2007). On the diYculty in using the theatrical review critically, see
Hardwick (2003), 53–4.
23 Hutcheon (2006), p. xii. 24 Hutcheon (2006), 7.
 Introduction 13
By contrast, as Hardwick notes: ‘The vocabulary of reception studies
has moved on from notions of ‘‘legacy’’ to include also the values and
practices of the present and future creativity of classical culture. The
key evaluative question both for the relationship with the past and for
the present, may well be ‘‘what diVerence was made?’’ ’ In my study of
the major receptions of Euripides’ Herakles up to the end of 2006,
I have been eager to demonstrate what I believe constitutes the play’s
Euripidean essence and how, at key moments in history, that essence
has been transformed, even to the point of occasional cancellation.
However, I do not see this transformative process as one of corruption
and decline, but rather as a culturally revealing evolution that
conWrms Euripides’ play as a ‘culturally active presence’.25 The Hera-
kles has inspired, and continues to inspire, widely diVering adapta-
tions of the hero and his madness, and as Shirley Barlow insists: ‘That
is as it should be with any great work of art. . . . The motivation for
Heracles’ madness will continue to be more complex than appears on
the surface. And that is hardly surprising when the causes of madness
in real life are so often puzzling and paradoxical. That theories so
diVerent . . . should arise in regard to the Heracles is not a slur on
Euripides, but rather a tribute to his depth.’26

25 Hardwick (2003), 112. 26 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 126.

 1
‘No longer himself ’: the tragic fall
of Euripides’ Herakles

‘Madness’, according to Ruth Padel, ‘is the perfect image of tragic

fall’,1 because of its daemonic power to eVect a sudden, comprehen-
sive reversal of fortune and identity, and because it operates outside
human control. In the light of this deWnition, there is no more perfect
image of tragic fall in dramatic literature than Euripides’ Herakles,
the glorious civilizer and saviour who, in a Wt of divinely inspired
madness, murders his wife and children.
At line 931 of Herakles the Messenger announces the moment of
the hero’s insane metamorphosis with the words ›
 PŒŁ Æe q
(‘he was no longer himself ’). His terse declaration encapsulates the
essence of Herakles’ tragic fall, which is not only a sudden and
comprehensive reversal, but an external, arbitrary imposition of
‘otherness’. Lyssa works from within Herakles, merging with his
being in a very literal and physical sense, but she is not an extension
or manifestation of his psychology. Instead, it is Herakles who
manifests Lyssa’s irresistible force and Hera’s implacable will. Hera-
kles becomes something alien; he is no longer himself. An English
translation of 931 cannot adequately reproduce its extraordinary
impact. With the Greek verse Euripides pithily initiates a series of
revolutionary assaults on conventional dramaturgy, morally ortho-
dox thinking, and audience expectations. As an immediate conse-
quence of Herakles’ loss of self, the anticipated Wnale to an Odyssean
nostos drama is brutally sabotaged; the chorus’s lyric invocation of
Herakles Alexikakos (averter of evil), in all his Pindaric splendour, is

1 Padel (1995), 241.

 ‘No longer himself ’ 15
horrifyingly travestied; and the traditional theodicy, with its attend-
ant consolations, is smashed. But these violations of structural and
moral unity are not simply acts of wanton theatrical destruction or
‘an extreme example of Euripidean shock tactics’.2 They constitute a
meaningful prelude to the most innovative aspect of Euripides’
treatment of the Herakles myth, namely his hero’s assertion of a
radical and enlightened humanism.

A N E S S E N T IA L D I S U N I T Y: T H E P RO B L E M
O F T H E P L AY ’ S S T RU C TU R E

The most obvious and critically rehearsed feature of the Herakles is

its singular structure, in particular ‘the brisk counterpoint of
peripeties on which the tragedy turns, wheeling over and over as
one action pivots to its opposite, or, juxtaposed, against a sudden
illumination, is as suddenly shattered and annulled’.3 At the begin-
ning of the play, while Herakles is in the underworld completing
his Wnal labour, his father Amphitryon, wife Megara, and three
sons are sentenced to death by the usurping tyrant Lycus. Herakles
arrives in time to save his family, but is at that moment struck by
madness and forced to murder his wife and children. Thus, the
play’s action is violently broken into two apparently discrete dra-
matic entities or movements: the Wrst is a familiar suppliant action,
a rescue story culminating in belated but convincing conWrmation
of Providence; the second is inaugurated by a sinister central
epiphany and cancels the moral order which the Wrst movement
restored.
Since the early nineteenth century critics have complained about
the lack of organic or causal unity between these two movements,4

2 Michelini (1987), 233. 3 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 45.

4 The leader of the 19th-century damnatio of Euripides, A. W. Schlegel (1846), 137
put the case against the Herakles plainly: ‘We have another example of two distinct
and separate actions in the same tragedy, the Mad Heracles. . . . The one action
follows, but by no means arises out of the other.’ For the Schlegelian Euripidesbild,
see below, Chap. 5.
16 ‘No longer himself ’
branding the eVect ‘episodic’, ‘diptychal’, and even ‘triptychal’.5 ‘[A]
shapeless and soulless abortion’,6 ‘broken-backed’,7 and ‘ram-
shackle’8 are among the more colourful and damning descriptions
of the play’s confronting structural violence. Such complaints issue
from an Aristotelian standard of tragic construction and focus on
Euripides’ undeniably un-Aristotelian use of peripeteia. In the Poet-
ics, Aristotle maintains that a successful plot relies on a logical
sequence of cause and eVect, wherein each incident is the result of
what has gone before. In a ‘simple’ (i.e. single or continuous) plot
an incident can, and ideally should, be unexpected, but never
accidental. Everything that happens must be directed by necessity
or probability:
H
b ±
ºH Łø ŒÆd
æ ø ƃ K
Ø
Ø
Ø Nd æØÆØ: ºªø

K
Ø
Ø
 FŁ K fiz a K
Ø
ØÆ  ¼ºººÆ h NŒe h I ªŒ r ÆØ:
ØÆFÆØ
b
ØFÆØ 
e b H Æºø
ØH
Ø ÆP; 
e
b H
IªÆŁH
Øa f 
ŒæØ · IªøÆÆ ªaæ
ØF ŒÆd
Ææa c
ÆØ

ÆæÆ e FŁ

ºº ŒØ
ØÆæØ IƪŒ ÆØ e KB: K
d

b P  ºÆ Kd
æ ø  Ø Iººa ŒÆd æH ŒÆd KºØH;
ÆFÆ
b ªÆØ ŒÆd  ºØÆ ½ŒÆd Aºº
‹Æ ªÆØ
Ææa c
Æ
Ø
¼ºººÆ· e ªaæ ŁÆıÆe oø Ø Aºº j N I
e F ÆP ı ŒÆd B
; K
d ήd H I
e  ÆFÆ ŁÆıÆØÆÆ
ŒE ‹Æ u
æ
K

 ÆÆØ ªªÆØ. (1451b–1452a)
Of simple plots and actions the worst are those which are episodic. I call a
plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes come after one another neither prob-
ably nor of necessity. Such pieces are composed by bad poets on their own
account, and by good poets for the sake of the actors; for, as they write for
competition and stretch a plot beyond its capacity, they are often compelled
to break the continuity. But this is bad work, since tragedy is an imitation
not only of a complete action but also of incidents inspiring fear and pity,
and this happens most of all when the incidents occur contrary to expect-
ation and yet follow as cause and eVect; for in this way the incidents will
cause more amazement than if they happened of themselves or by chance,
since even the most amazing coincidences are those which seem to have
happened as if on purpose.

5 Kitto (1961), 235 declared that the Herakles ‘falls into three distinct parts. . . . But
a play has no business to be a triptych’.
6 Swinburne (1889), 179.
7 Murray (1946), 112. 8 Norwood (1954), 46.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 17
The same rule applies to a ‘complex’ plot in which a change of
fortune ( ÆØ) coincides with a discovery (IƪæØØ) or
reversal (
æØ
ØÆ) or both:
ÆFÆ
b
E ªŁÆØ K ÆPB B ı ø F Łı; u KŒ H

檪ø ıÆØ j K I ªŒ j ŒÆa e NŒe ªªŁÆØ ÆFÆ·

ØÆæØ ªaæ
ºf e ªªŁÆØ 

Øa 
 j a 
. (1452a)
These things ought to arise from the actual structure of the plot, so that from
what has occurred earlier it follows that these things happen either by
necessity or according to probability; for what happens on account of these
things is very diVerent from what happens after these things.
Measured against this Aristotelian formula, the plot of the Herakles is
unsatisfactory because the central change which occurs—the mad-
ness—is not a necessary or probable outcome; it is not, for instance,
the corrective result of any visible 񒑒 (failure or error) or the
revelation of any latent psychological disturbance. In fact, the whole
concept of change in the play ‘is seen not as rhythmical and orderly
but as violent and capricious’.9
But not everyone has reacted to the Herakles with a sense of
‘outraged Aristotelianism’.10 Many commentators have approached
the alleged problem of the play’s structure by advancing positive
‘solutions’. These solutions can be divided into three main types.
The Wrst is an attempt to minimize the obvious dislocation of events
and unconnected juxtapositions by establishing a coherent and con-
tinuous thematic pattern reinforced by linguistic repetitions. Shep-
pard, for example, believes the key to the play’s overarching unity is
the recurrent motifs of friendship, strength, and wealth, explicitly
stated in the closing lines (1425–6) and variously embodied through-
out.11 The Herakles thus becomes a logical comparative exposition of
these values. Following on from Sheppard, Chalk argues for demon-
strable organic unity on the basis of ‘a further general concept—
Iæ’ and, more particularly, the architectonic question—‘What is
the place of human Iæ in the universe?’12 This question, he says, ‘is
more than a theme. It is the play: the inexplicable overthrow by

9 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 124. 10 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 45.

11 Sheppard (1916), 72–9. 12 Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 8.
18 ‘No longer himself ’
Hera of the conventional Iæ of Herakles followed by his recovery
of a further Iæ prompt and (tragically) answer precisely this
question.’13 Kamerbeek also advocates a unity of form which depends
on the recurrence of a number of themes and phrases in the play’s
two movements, such as the rare KºŒ
 simile used in Herakles’
two exit scenes (631 and 1424).14
The second type of solution, whose chief proponent was Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-MoellendorV,15 restores to the plot the Aristotelian prin-
ciples of necessity and probability, but removes the Aristotelian ideal
of unexpectedness. It achieves causal unity by locating in the Wrst
movement symptoms of mental imbalance, which preWgure the full-
blown madness of the second movement.16 To this end, Herakles’
early speeches and behaviour have been scrutinized for signs of
megalomania and intuitive bloodlust, or else the madness itself has
been diagnosed as epilepsy.17 But, as Kevin Lee argues, these theses of
psychological coherence ‘do violence to the text and/or turn the
tragedy into a complicated form of case-history’.18
A variation on this solution is Burnett’s notion that the madness is
morally, rather than psychologically, preWgured in the Wrst move-
ment. To establish causal unity, she propounds a theory of hamartia,
which includes Megara’s unnatural and untenable suppliancy and
‘arrogant agnosticism’,19 Amphitryon’s acquiescence in his daughter-
in-law’s ‘active unfaith’,20 and Herakles’ hubristic, albeit mostly pas-
sive, condition of grandeur:

When the opening scenes of the Heracles are compared to their natural foils
in other suppliant drama, aberrations and distortions appear that are easily a
match for those of the second half of the play. In fact, the two halves of the
play, equally deWant of the conventional forms, prove to have positive ethical
links that establish something very like a causal sequence between them.
Megara’s suppliant drama is an action purposely malformed so that it can
lead directly into the grotesque scenes that destroy her.21

13 Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 9. 14 Kamerbeek (1966), 1–16.

15 On Wilamowitz’s ‘seeds of madness’ theory and its inXuence, see below, Chap. 7.
16 For a more recent solution along these lines, see Ruck (1976), 53–75.
17 On Herakles as epileptic, see Blaiklock (1945), 48–63.
18 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 34.
19 Burnett (1971), 163. 20 Ibid. 162. 21 Ibid. 158–9.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 19
Burnett contends that the ‘true radicalism’ of this suppliant action
has been hitherto obscured,22 but the radicalism she deWnes pertains
to Megara’s scepticism and not to Euripides’ treatment of the heresy
expounded by Megara and personiWed by Herakles. For she later says,
in relation to the deaths of Megara and the children, that ‘the poet
has unobtrusively insisted that this fate was not only necessary to
heaven but freely chosen by those who have suVered it’.23 Thus her
own reading of the play, according to which Euripides is clearly
endorsing the traditional theodicy, undercuts her claim of radical-
ism. The claim of radicalism can only be upheld when we recognize
that Euripides is on the side of the heretics.
The third, and most persuasive, type of solution is to see reXected
in the uniquely bifurcated plot Herakles’ unique duality as ŁE Iæ
(divine man). Justina Gregory defends the play’s structural and
thematic unity by pointing to the motif of Herakles’ shared paternity,
which spans every episode, and to the accompanying ‘spiritual con-
tradiction involved in being simultaneously the son of Zeus and
Amphitryon’.24 Owing to the emphasis placed on this contradiction,
the madness assumes the function of an inevitable crisis, at the end of
which the hero has rejected Zeus and his divine inheritance and
embraced Amphitryon and his humanity. This function is further
explained by Silk, who insists that what appears arbitrary or contra-
dictory in the play is inherent in the myth itself, whereas Euripides’
plot develops in a way consistent with the demands of necessity:
‘[The] explosion—the madness—is presented as an arbitrary explo-
sion such as gods create, but also as a necessary explosion, necessary
in metaphysical terms as well as necessary on the level of character.
The combination of god and man is unstable and must be blown
apart to permit a new, simpler and comprehensible stability, whereby
Heracles becomes a suVering man in whom we can believe and to
whom we can relate.’25 According to this reading, the two separate
actions of the Herakles actually represent one continuous movement
towards humanity.

22 Ibid. 158. 23 Ibid. 172.

24 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 272. On Herakles’ double parentage, see also Furley
(1986), 102–13, at 106–7.
25 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 18.
20 ‘No longer himself ’
These solutions are ingenious, and sometimes cogent, but they
are all fundamentally thematic solutions to what has been invariably
diagnosed as a formal problem.26 In the pursuit of thematic unity,
the issue of actual formal disunity has been, perhaps too conveni-
ently, circumvented. Moreover, the general failure to engage directly
with this formal disunity has meant that the impact of the play in
performance has largely been ignored. Thematic, linguistic, ethical,
and psychological unity do not necessarily add up to structural
unity or to powerful theatre. In terms of the ideas it presents, the
Herakles is undoubtedly a coherent piece of drama, but this does
not mitigate the jarring juxtaposition of events and wrenching
transitions built into the plot, which are, I believe, central to the
play’s meaning.
On the page, and in performance, Euripides emphasizes contrast,
change, and reversal. Linguistically and visually he reinforces the
structural irrationalism.27 At 735 the chorus begin their celebration
of the joyful metabasis that is Herakles’ return and Lycus’ destruction
by exclaiming, ƺa ŒÆŒH (‘Disaster is reversed!’). Their very
diVerent reaction to the second major turning-point in the play, the
arrival of Iris and Lyssa, is similarly phrased, Æf e PıB
ƺ
Æø (‘In a moment a god has destroyed the [hero’s]
happiness’, 884). The repetition highlights the swiftness with which
fate has subverted one set of circumstances and emotions and re-
placed them with another. At 1015 the Messenger, concluding his
account of Herakles’ demented rampage, says of the hero, PŒ r
Æ
ŁH ‹Ø IŁºØæ (‘I do not know of any man more miser-
able’). As Galinsky notes, the word IŁºØæ derives from pŁºÆ
(labours),28 so that Herakles’ tragic fall is reXected in the changed
nature of his most famous feats. Likewise, at 1279 Herakles refers to
the murder of his children as his Wnal labour (e ºŁØ
)
and, at 1411, as his most diYcult (–
Æ Kº ø ŒEÆ H
 º

26 Cf. Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 115: ‘There have been attempts to gloss the
awkward structure by searches for over-arching thematic or linguistic unity which
have somehow still obviated the need to take into account too strongly the violent
wrenches of fortune which the plot reveals.’
27 On the meaning and aural impact of Euripides’ linguistic madness, see Kraus
(1998), 137–56.
28 Galinsky (1972), 62.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 21
ŒÆŒ , ‘All those labours I endured were less than this’). These allusions
to Herakles’ heroic past, within the context of his present abasement,
stress ‘the violence of change and its adverse eVects’.29
Euripides also emphasizes the violence of change by setting up
contrasting images in structurally parallel positions. As Amphitryon
enters the palace at 732–3, he tells the chorus how gladly he antici-
pates the retribution that now awaits his enemy Lycus:
Ø ªaæ 
a ŁfiŒø Icæ
KŁæe ø  H

æÆø
Œ.
It has a certain pleasure to see an enemy being killed and paying the penalty
for his actions.
The very next image the audience has of Amphitryon is at 1039–41,
where he emerges from the palace after witnessing not only the just
execution of his KŁæ, but also the senseless slaughter of his grand-
children:
›
 u Ø ZæØ ¼
æ ŒÆÆø
T
EÆ Œø
æı æfiø

d

ØŒæa
ØŒø XºıØ
æŁ ‹
.
Here the old man comes, treading a sad path with lagging steps, mourning
like a bird mourning the unXedged birth-pang of its young.
In the same way, at 636, Herakles enters the palace as unequivocally
the Kallinikos (Glorious Victor). At 1029, however, the ekkuklema
presents an image of Herakles in abject defeat—bound, weaponless,
and amechanos (helpless), his tragic fall complete.
Gregory claims that the unifying theme of dual fatherhood ‘helps
to soften the unexpectedness of the episode of madness’,30 and Bond,
singling out the question-and-answer contrast at 814–15,31 speaks of
the play as having ‘an essential unity’.32 Yet surely the dramatic point
being made is an essential ‘disunity’, a point which can be appreciated
only when we acknowledge, as Arrowsmith has done, that the structural

29 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 124. 30 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 261.

31 The question posed at 814 is whether justice still Wnds favour with the gods (N
e
ŒÆØ j ŁE  IæŒØ). It is answered at 815 by the sudden, chilling arrival of
Hera’s envoys.
32 Bond (1981), p. xx.
22 ‘No longer himself ’
Wssion is deliberate and dominant, and ought not to have superim-
posed on it a ‘softening’ rationale or cohesiveness:
Beyond question the play falls starkly into two discrete but continuous
actions, and between these two actions there is neither causal unity nor
even probability: the second action follows but by no means arises out of the
Wrst. . . . Against theodicy is put the hideous proof of divine injustice; against
the greatness and piety and arete of Heracles in the Wrst action is placed the
terrible reward of heroism in the second; against the asserted peace and calm
and domestic tenderness which closes the Wrst action is set the utter anni-
hilation of all moral order in the second. The result is a structure in which
two apparently autonomous actions are jammed savagely against each other
in almost total contradiction, with no attempt to minimize or even modu-
late the profound formal rift.
That rift is, of course, deliberate; nothing, in fact, has been omitted which
might support the eVect of total shock in this reversal. Moreover, even a
cursory review of the material which Euripides used for his tragedy shows
how carefully that material has been ordered to eVect, rather than obviate,
this dislocation of structure.33
As the three-pronged defence of structural unity outlined above
suggests, surprisingly few critics have happily accepted the fact ‘that
it is not possible to make the tragedy please Aristotle’,34 let alone
arrived at Arrowsmith’s or Lee’s conclusion that it is precisely ‘the
breaking of the rules which Euripides wants to dramatize. Any tidy
cause and eVect connection would be incompatible with the unique
form of disorder which underpins this play.’35 And, of those who
share this view, a good percentage have adopted a theory that,
dramatically speaking, is unsound. In an attempt to reconcile what
many consider the conventionality and feebleness of the play’s open-
ing scenes with the horriWc vigour of its later scenes, W. G. Arnott
declares the entire Wrst movement to be ‘Euripides’ mightiest red
herring’. In his estimation, the playwright has committed an act of
calculated theatrical incompetence in order to ‘turn the next 350
lines into a caustic series of savage shocks’.36 Michelini, who states
plainly that, far from possessing organic unity, the Herakles is actually
‘designed to be unintelligible’,37 subscribes to Arnott’s ‘red-herring’

33 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 46. 34 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 34.

35 Ibid. 35. 36 Arnott (1978), 1–24, at 11. 37 Michelini (1987), 232.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 23
theory. She deems the opening scenes ‘a decoy that betrays the
audience’s understanding of what they are to expect from a play,
even a play by Euripides’.38 ‘We are misled’, she continues, ‘by an
elaborate false front or dummy play, from which the real dramatic
action emerges startlingly, like a jack from its box.’39 Martin Cropp
similarly treats the Wrst part of Herakles as a dummy play. For him
the dummy is an Odyssean nostos play which prepares a false
climax and, accordingly, magniWes the ‘real’ climax: ‘Heracles . . . is
centred, with architectural precision and balance, on the process
of ruin, and thus gives equal weight to false expectation and
emergent reality. . . . The play’s discrete structure adds impact to the
emergence of the ‘‘real truth’’—though it may be felt that it does so at
the cost of some banality in the deployment of plot and ethos before
the crisis.’40
These ‘red-herring’ theorists are right to search for meaning in the
play’s structural dislocation, but they rely too heavily on the uncon-
vincing proposition that Euripides, a skilled dramatist, sacriWced one
half of the tragedy in order to heighten the impact of the other half.
Euripides often set up ‘false trails’ in his plays, exploiting received
myth and familiar dramatic conventions, and luring his audience
into precipitate forecasts and erroneous assumptions.41 However, for
Euripides to have contrived a counterfeit or throw-away plot of more
than 800 lines seems too prolonged and prodigal a theatrical tease, a
blasé and somewhat self-defeating sophistic stunt. His exploitation of
the unexpected in Herakles is far more purposeful than playful, and
nowhere in his structural design is there an element of the sacriWcial.
What, then, is the meaning of the play’s strategic disunity? It is not
that the Wrst action is ‘disposable’,42 merely an elaborate deception or
an existing false reality by which to intensify an emergent true reality.
Rather, as Arrowsmith asserts: ‘The play pivots on two seemingly
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 receive reality, but by subtly displacing it in the

38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 232–3.

40 Cropp (1986), 187–99, at 188–9.
41 On Euripides’ clever exploitation of the unexpected, see Arnott (1973), 49–64.
See also Raeburn (2000), 149–68.
42 Michelini (1987), 242.
24 ‘No longer himself ’
transWguration of its terms.’43 Euripides’ anomalous use of peripeteia
is symbolic of Herakles’ loss and subsequent transWguration of self.
The structural violence mirrors the fracturing of reason and myth by
madness, and underscores the irrationality and injustice of Hera’s
revenge. In short, a strategy of disunity is essential to Euripides’
ground-breaking externalization of Herakles’ madness and to his
even more ground-breaking humanization of Herakles’ heroism.

EXTERNALIZATION AND HUMANIZATION: THE

F I R S T M OV E M E N T ( 1 4 0 – 6 3 6 )

The most conclusive argument against the red-herring theory, and

the disposability of the opening scenes, is ‘the fact that an ample
portion of this red herring was not caught in the sea of myth, but was
of Euripides’ own concoction’.44 The version of the Herakles myth
which is presented in the Wrst movement of the play contains two
startling and pivotal innovations—the introduction of the usurper
Lycus and the placing of the labours before the murder of the
children.45 These innovations are proof that the opening scenes
have a positive purpose, that they are, in fact, our best guide to
interpreting the madness which follows. That purpose is to create a
sustained portrait of the hero’s sanity and innocence, and to deter-
mine that his tragic fall is the result of an isolated episode of madness,
which is, furthermore, externally initiated on an inadequate pretext.
For the Wrst 522 lines of the play Herakles ‘is omnipresent as a
topic of discussion if not actually in person’.46 By the time he enters,
the audience has been able to form a deWnite impression of the hero
from Amphitryon’s reply to Lycus’ slanders, from the Wrst stasimon
on the twelve labours, and, indeed, from the extreme set of circum-
stances dominating the play in Herakles’ absence. As Barlow states:

43 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 50.

44 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 36.
45 On Euripides’ innovative handling of the Herakles myth, see Bond (1981),
pp. xxviii–xxx.
46 Hall (2003), pp. vii–xli, at xxiii.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 25
‘The absence of Heracles is not merely the absence of an ordinary
man but of an almost superhuman hero of whom miracles in the past
have been expected. When he does not appear the despair is therefore
that much greater as is the joy when he does.’47 The dependence of
oikos and polis on Herakles as a strong, sound, and humane ruler is
the keynote of the Wrst movement. In the prologue Amphitryon sets
the scene of an imperilled royal household reduced to the indignity
of supplication, and a city diseased with civil war ( Ø FÆ,
34). He laments the want, revealed by his son’s prolonged absence, of
loyal and able-bodied philoi (55–6), a lament echoed by Megara
(84–5) and the chorus (252–74). At 217–26 he scornfully rebukes
Thebes and all of Greece for their ingratitude towards their benefactor
in failing to help the Heraclidae. The chorus, at 272–4, deplore the
sickness of the polis, which has led to the despotic seizure of power by
the vicious interloper Lycus:
P ªaæ s æE
ºØ
 Ø FÆ ŒÆd ŒÆŒE ıºÆØ·
P ª æ
 i b

 Kή.
The city is insane, corrupt with civil war and bad counsels. For unless it were
insane, it would never have had you as its ruler.
The phrase  Ø FÆ repeats Amphitryon’s charge at 34, but the
chorus bring an additional and graver charge of insanity against
Thebes (P ªaæ s æE).48 At 339 V. Amphitryon turns his bitter
reproaches on cuckolding Zeus, declaring:
f
 K b Pa ŒæØ M
ø ºE,
IººæØÆ ºŒæÆ
 P
e ºÆ,
fiØ
b f f PΠK
ÆÆØ ºı.
IÆŁ Ø r Ł; j
ŒÆØ PŒ ı.
(344–7)
You knew how to come secretly into my bed and take someone else’s
wife without being invited. Yet you do not know how to save those you
love. You are either an ignorant sort of god or else your nature is plain
unjust.

47 Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 117.

48 On the interrelated structures of the polis and the psyche, cf. Plato’s Republic 4. 435b.
26 ‘No longer himself ’
The cumulative eVect of these despairing complaints is to establish
Herakles as the sole potential saviour of oikos and polis,49 the one
source of Thebes’ moral and political health, and the only worthy
object of faithful supplication in a world of human inconstancy and
divine indiVerence.
As the agon between Lycus and Amphitryon proves, this image of
Herakles is not uncontested. The focus of the agon is Lycus’ allegation
that Herakles’ use of the bow is a cowardly alternative to the spear
and to the hoplite practice of close-quarter combat (158–64). Like
Juno’s prologue to Seneca’s Hercules Furens,50 Lycus’ case against
Herakles is, to some extent, automatically undermined by the
speaker’s obvious prejudice and bad character, but it cannot be
discounted. As Barlow indicates, ‘in its terseness and trenchancy it
is a powerful attack on the very heart of the Herakles myth’.51 The
charges brought by Lycus are indicative of certain challenges in the
Wfth century to traditional heroic values and of the deeply rooted
ambivalence of the Herakles myth.52 It is signiWcant, therefore, that
Euripides not only raises these diYcult issues, but deals directly with
them in Amphitryon’s counter-attack, which is a well-reasoned de-
fence of Herakles’ pragmatic courage:
Icæ ›
º
Fº KØ H ‹
ºø
ŁæÆÆ  ºª PŒ Ø fiH ÆØ
Ł Æ IFÆØ; Æ ø IºŒc ·
ŒÆd EØ ıÆŁEØ sØ c IªÆŁE
ÆPe ŁŒ
غfiÆ fiB H
ºÆ:
‹Ø
b Ø Eæ ıØ h;
£ b e ºfiH; ıæı Nf Id
¼ººØ e HÆ ÞÆØ c ŒÆŁÆE;
Œa
 Ig
ºı IÆØ

49 For the idea of the rightful king as the long-awaited saviour of oikos and polis,
cf. the Wgures of Odysseus in the Odyssey and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Choephoroe (esp.
ll. 115–16 and 138–9) and in Sophocles’ Electra (esp. ll. 160–4, 303–4, and 455–8).
On the important relationship between the aristocratic oikos and the polis, and
particularly the idea that a man’s competence as a leader in the public sphere should
be a reXection of his role as a good father and a responsible head of an oikos, see Hall
(1997), 93–126, at 104–5.
50 See below, Chap. 2.
51 Barlow (1996), 131.
52 On the ambivalence of Herakles in literature, see Silk (1985), 1–22, and in cult,
see Burkert (1985), 210.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 27
ıºE ›æHÆ P Æ ÆØ
e H  P

øØ E KÆØ;
K Pıº Œfiø
 K· F
 K  fi
e  ºØÆ;
æHÆ
ºı ŒÆŒH
fiØ e HÆ; c  Œ  ‰æØ.
(190–203)
A spearsman is the slave of his weapons and once his spear, his only defence, is
shattered he is not able to keep death from his body, and if those in the ranks
are not brave, then he himself dies by the cowardice of those near him. They
whose hand can aim the bow well have the one supreme advantage: if he
shoots a thousand arrows he still has others to rescue himself from death.
Standing at a distance he defends himself by striking at the enemy with
arrows unseen to their vision and he does not expose his body to his
opponents but is secure. This is the most sensible tactic in battle, to preserve
yourself and hurt your enemy without being dependent on chance.
Michelini, undermining somewhat her ‘red-herring’ position, main-
tains that this passage ‘has been treated as an egregious example of
Euripidean inconsequence, but is in fact an important part of the
portrait of Herakles as a modern and revisionist hero’.53 This is true
in that Herakles is here atypically portrayed as a thinking hero,
reliant more on expedient tactics than superior force. But what
seems more to the point is that Herakles the bowman is a mortal
hero, whose resourcefulness in battle is a demonstration of his
ordinary human vulnerability.54
A second reply to Lycus’ invective is the lengthy Wrst stasimon
(348–441) which, although it has the appearance of a romantic
ecphrasis, is just as radical, in its treatment of the Heraklean labours,
as Amphitryon’s vindication of Herakles as bowman. The ode is
a threnos (dirge) for the supposedly dead hero, but the tone is
eulogistic rather than mournful. Stylistically, and in its celebration
of Herakles as monster-slayer and civilizer, it owes much to Pindar.55
Euripides’ chronological innovation of placing the labours before the
madness and murders dismantles the image of labouring Herakles as

53 Michelini (1987), 244.

54 Cf. Iliad 18. 117–19: P
b ªaæ P
b   „æÆŒºB ª ŒBæÆ; j ‹
æ ºÆ
Œ ˜Ød ˚æøØ ¼ÆŒØ· j Iºº  Eæ K
Æ ŒÆd IæªÆº º  „æ.
55 On the ode’s metrical and linguistic borrowings from Pindar, see Bond (1981),
146 V. and Barlow (1996), 139 and 142–3.
28 ‘No longer himself ’
penitent and gloriWed drudge, and replaces it with an image of him
as righteous and altruistic champion. In the whole of the ode there is
no suggestion that Herakles performs the labours under duress and,
as Lee observes, ‘no sense of indulgence in violence for its own sake,
no aggrandizement of self in a context divorced from the good of
one’s family and friends’.56 Splendid physical feats though they may
be, the labours are commemorated here as supreme aYrmations
of moral excellence (ªÆø
 IæÆd
ø, ‘the virtues of noble
actions’, 357). The focus of the ode is threefold: the savagery of
the vanquished (364–5, 372–4, 377, 382–6, 391–3, 398, 416–17,
420), Herakles’ piety towards the gods (359–60, 378–9), and his
selXess service to humanity (391–3, 400–2, 416–17). Its purpose
within the play is to demonstrate that there is no moral connection
between the violence of the labours and the domestic violence which
follows.
As Gregory notes: ‘The scene of Heracles’ return oVers the audi-
ence its only glimpse of the hero before he is stricken by madness, its
only chance to test the reports of him against the actuality of his
presence.’57 Throughout this important scene the emphasis is again
on the lack of moral connection between Herakles’ heroic past and
his imminent collapse, as well as on the lack of psychological con-
tinuity. From the moment he arrives on stage, Herakles appears
rational and circumspect. His speech and behaviour betray no sign
of mental imbalance. In this respect he stands apart from two other
notable Euripidean madmen, the matricide Orestes and the doomed
voyeur Pentheus. Orestes’ hallucinatory visions of the Erinyes occur
early in the play and are clearly the manifestation of his tormented
sunesis or conscience (Orestes 396). Pentheus’ confusion is progres-
sive and his hallucinations intermittent (Bacchae 618 V., 624 V., 918–
20), and, although they are directed by Dionysus, ‘it is no less than
the suppressed traits of the subconscious which are laid bare as the
god takes possession’.58 Dionysus is simply able to exploit the young
king’s perceptible prurience and hypocrisy. In the case of both
Orestes and Dionysus the emphasis is on the internal causation and
inevitability of the madness.

56 Lee (1986), 23–8, at 26. 57 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 264.

58 Barlow (1996), 12.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 29
Euripides’ pointed humanization of Herakles in this homecoming
scene Xatly contradicts that part of Burnett’s hamartia theory which
suggests the hero has pretensions ‘to autonomy, knowledge and
grandeur that is exclusive of the gods’.59 Herakles does not assume
Olympian airs or boast of his conquest of Hades. All his concern is
centred on his family and, far from having any hubristic pretension
to autonomy, he stresses the importance of cooperative human
values (633–6) and accepts the sound advice of his father (606).
Herakles’ exclamation, ÆØæø
Ø (‘Goodbye to my labours!’,
575) reveals that he puts the welfare of his family before personal
kudos. Even the alleged bloodthirstiness of his vengeful threats
against Lycus and the treacherous Thebans (566–73) is a measure
of his love for his family and, therefore, not disproportionate to the
present situation. The Wnal image we have of Herakles before his
Wlicidal madness is of a gentle and loving father. It is an image in
stark contrast to the hero of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, who is a super-
man of profound personal failings. As a radical domestic portrait of
an awesome hero, it stands beside the brief, tender homecoming of
Hektor in Iliad 6 (466–74):
Ł æ Y
ŒÆd  Æ Zø Œ KÆ,
  , t ªÆØ Ø, ººª łıB ºÆb
æı 
ÆFÆØ, ŒÆd ŁŁ KH

ºø·
P ªaæ
æøe P
b ıø ºı.
p,
¥
 PŒ IØA , Iºº I
ÆØ

ºø
fiH
 Aºº· z
  K
d ıæF;
¼ø ºÆ ª 
 KºŒ
Æ æE,
ÆF
 S Kºø· ŒÆd ªaæ PŒ IÆÆØ
Łæ
ıÆ Œø.
(624–33)
Take courage and don’t cry any more. And you, my wife, take hold of
yourself, stop trembling and [children] let go of my clothes. I have no
wings and won’t try to escape from those I love. Why, look, they do not
let go but clutch my clothes all the more. Were you so much on a knife-edge?

59 Burnett (1971), 179.

30 ‘No longer himself ’
I shall take these children by the hand and draw them after me like a ship
with its little boats in tow. I don’t refuse to tend my children.

THE C EN TRAL EPIPHANY (815–73)

The most compelling textual and dramaturgical reasons for inter-

preting Herakles’ madness as a wholly external phenomenon are the
unusual central epiphany, which functions as a second prologue, and
the even more unusual characterization of Lyssa as a rational and
reluctant avenger. Bond notes that ‘Euripides seldom presents a
divine epiphany except in his prologues and epilogues, where the
gods are used to expound the past and the future in the manner
commended by Aristotle’60 (see Poetics 1454b2). What makes the
epiphany of Iris and Lyssa so remarkable is its unexpected occurrence
midway through the play.61 Moreover, these divinities are not merely
detached expositors of past and future events; they actively intervene
to invalidate the denouement of the Wrst movement and to drive the
action in an entirely new direction. The rare and explosive centrality
of their entrance62 is, in formal terms, proof positive that Herakles is
not mad at the outset. Critics who adopt the Wilamowitzian ‘seeds of
madness’ line miss an obvious and crucial dramatic point: if Euripi-
des had wanted to portray a megalomaniac or epileptic Herakles, he
would either have placed the divine epiphany in the prologue to the
Wrst half of the play or dispensed with these interventionist Wgures
altogether, thereby internalizing the madness and presenting it as the
logical culmination of a consistent moral and psychological progres-

60 Bond (1981), 279.

61 Cf. the midway appearances of Dionysus at Bacchae 604 (after he is heard oV-
stage at 576) and Athena at Rhesus 595. Neither entry has the explosive force of the
Iris–Lyssa epiphany. Dionysus may be a sinister Wgure, but he has been an established
central character from the play’s opening, and his reappearance at this point is not
greatly shocking, while Athena’s appearance to Odysseus and Diomedes is both
benign and undramatic. See Bond (1981), 279 and Barlow (1996), 160. For other
instances of deities appearing mid-action, see Barrett ap. Carden (1974), 184 f.
62 Iris and Lyssa appear suddenly on high above the skēnē (  
bæ
ø ›æH,
‘I see such an apparition above the palace’, 817). On the dramatic staging of this
epiphany, see Taplin (1977), 445.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 31
sion. By not preparing us for the midway arrival of Iris and Lyssa,
Euripides leaves us in no doubt about the illogicality and externality
of Herakles’ madness. Furthermore, while he may well have drawn on
clinical accounts of epilepsy and other maladies in his description of
Herakles’ mad symptoms,63 Euripides himself was a dramatist and,
therefore, ultimately concerned with the creation of powerful theatre
and not with psychological realism.
What follows the physical shock of this unique supernatural
intrusion is an exchange that is unparalleled in Greek tragedy. In
the Wrst place, neither Iris nor Lyssa appears anywhere else in the
extant tragic canon.64 More importantly, these divine delegates,
charged by Hera with the task of visiting madness upon Herakles,
quarrel heatedly about the justice of their commission.65 As Lee
points out, it is signiWcant that Hera herself does not appear and
that Euripides presents in her stead two deities of equal rank but
Wercely conXicting attitudes.66 Iris, traditionally the messenger of the
gods, has here the particularized function of Hera’s faithful and
unquestioning agent. She Wrmly identiWes herself with the interests
and motives of her mistress (ªfiH b e  „æÆ x K ÆPfiH º;
j  Łfi
b e K, ‘he may recognize the nature of Hera’s anger, and

63 On the similarities between Herakles 932–4 and Hippocrates’ De Morbo Sacro 7,

see below, Chap. 3.
64 Iris makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’ Birds (1199 V.), in conversation
with Peisthetaerus. The personiWed Lyssa appeared in Aeschylus’ lost play Xantriae
(fr. 169; see Lloyd-Jones (1957), ii. 435 V.), driving mad the maenads who destroy
Pentheus, and possibly in Toxotides (on the death of Actaeon). An Attic red-Wgured
vase of around 440 bc, depicting Aeschylus’ Toxotides, shows Lyssa with a dog’s head
protruding from the top of her own head, as she urges Actaeon’s hounds to kill their
master: see Trendall and Webster (1971), 62. There are no known vase depictions of
Lyssa and Herakles. For a discussion of the iconographic evidence for Lyssa, see
Kossatz-Deismann’s article in LIMC (1992), 6.1, 322–9. On the treatment of Lyssa in
tragedy, see Duchemin (1967), 130–9 and Padel (1992), 162–3. In Homer’s Iliad
ºÆ is used of martial rage (e.g. 9. 39), and its cognate epithet ºı
 of the
frantic activity of the hero in battle (13. 53). In tragedy ºÆ generally describes a
frenzy brought by the gods. It is used, for example, to describe Orestes’ madness in
Aeschylus’ Choephoroe (287).
65 Lee (1982), 44–53, at 44 remarks: ‘The only even remote parallel is the discus-
sion between Kratos and Hephaistos in Prometheus where the deities speak and act on
ground-level and are found not at a crucial turning-point in the middle of the play,
but at its beginning, when the disagreement of the speakers is a curtain-raiser to the
more signiWcant discord which pervades the drama.’
66 Ibid. 46–7.
32 ‘No longer himself ’
learn mine’, 840–1), and her part in the proceedings against Hera-
kles is to state Hera’s case and supervise the misbegotten hero’s
punishment:
e
 K
 I
æe
ÆÆ æÆ,
‹ ÆØ r ÆØ ˘e  `ºŒ  ¼
.
(825–6)
Our advance is on the household of one man who men say is Alcmene’s son
by Zeus.
j Łd b P
ÆF,
a Ła
 ÆØ ª ºÆ; c

Œ.
(841–2)
Otherwise the gods are worth nothing and men shall prevail, if Herakles
does not pay the penalty.
Lyssa, on the other hand, has a will of her own and, given her nocturnal
lineage, lupine etymology,67 and her very nature as the personiWcation of
frenzy, she exhibits an astounding capacity for reason and compassion.
She expresses unreservedly her loathing for her assignment and, paradox-
ically, provides the play’s most stalwart defence of Herakles’ innocence:
±cæ ‹
 PŒ ¼ h K
d Łd
h K ŁEØ; y   K

Ø
ı·
¼Æ
b æÆ ŒÆd Ł ºÆÆ IªæÆ
KæÆ ŁH I 
Øa
ØÆ Iø I
æH o
.
u P
ÆæÆØH ª ºÆ ıºFÆØ ŒÆŒÆ.
(849–54)
This man whose house you send me to, is not obscure on earth and among
the gods. He tames inaccessible land and the wild sea, he alone restored the
honours of the gods when they were threatening to fall at the hands of
wicked men. So I do not encourage you to plot any great wickedness.
Hera’s reasons for attacking her stepson, as conveyed by Iris, are
Herakles’ bastardy and the alleged threat to the gods’ supremacy
which his greatness poses. Bond, believing ‘Modern scholars are
perhaps over-inXuenced by the liberal attitudes to adultery, bastardy,
67 For ºÆ as ‘wolWsh rage’, see Lincoln (1991), 131–7.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 33
and revenge fashionable during the present century’,68 maintains
that ‘Hera’s conduct to [Herakles] cannot be termed capricious
or irrational’.69 Yet, in the context of the Iris–Lyssa debate, her
grounds for attack cannot but seem inadequate and illogical.
Iris succeeds only in exposing the nature of Hera’s º (840)
as purely vindictive. By contrast, Lyssa’s arguments in support of
Herakles are both reasonable and irrefutable, and they are given
added authority by the fact that Lyssa is so unexpected an advocate
of caution and clemency. It is with almost comic irony that
Iris castigates Lyssa for her unnaturally moderate stance and sage
counsel:
"æ. c f ıŁØ  Ł  „æÆ ŒIa ÆÆÆ.
¸ı. K e ºfiH KØ ø  Y Id F ŒÆŒF.
"æ. Pd øæE ª 
ł
Fæ   ˜Øe
Ææ.
(855–7)
iris. Don’t give advice about Hera’s schemes and mine.
lyssa. I want to guide your step towards good, not bad.
iris. Zeus’ wife did not send you down here to show moderation.
In the end Hera’s will prevails, and Lyssa sets about her repugnant
task vigorously and methodically:
r ª · h
 oø ŒÆØ ø º æ
h ªB Øe ŒæÆıF  r æ T
EÆ
ø
x  Kªg 
ØÆ
æÆFÆØ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı·
ŒÆd ŒÆÆææø ºÆŁæÆ ŒÆd
ı K
ƺH,
ΠI
ŒÆÆ
æH.
(861–5)
Then I shall run races into Herakles’ heart more forcefully than the ocean
groaning with breakers or than earthquake, or than the painful impact of the
thunderbolt. I shall shatter his house and bring it down upon him. But Wrst
I shall have made him kill his children.
The sharp contrast between Lyssa’s rational plea and frenzied inva-
sion, and between her initial deep reluctance and eventual business-
like destructiveness, makes the ensuing scene all the more disturbing
and ethically challenging, as it pinpoints chillingly the injustice of the
68 Bond (1981), p. xxv, n. 28. 69 Ibid., p. xxv.
34 ‘No longer himself ’
attack and the external causation of Herakles’ madness. Lyssa begins
the transformation of her victim while she is still visible on stage. At
867–70 she anticipates the Messenger’s account of Herakles’ physical
symptoms at 932 V., and the immediacy of her words conWrms that
the Messenger’s statement at 931, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, is to be taken
absolutely literally: Herakles will experience ‘a terrible intrusion of
the alien’.70

THE MADNESS (889–1015)

While Euripides purposely does not ‘reason’ or rationalize Herakles’

madness in psychological terms, he does provide a brilliantly invent-
ive and psychologically enthralling exposition of ‘reason in mad-
ness’,71 that is, ‘the mad logic of a mad person’.72 The madness
of Herakles, which is the playwright’s most concentrated study of
the condition, is dramatized, paradoxically, in an extremely well-
reasoned and orderly manner. Violence and chaos are choreographed
by Lyssa with expert precision; the senseless murders of Megara and
the children are recounted within the coherent structure of the
Messenger’s speech; and Herakles’ hallucinatory exploits, which ap-
pear to the bystanders as crazed and haphazard, are, in his mind, one
continuous and logical sequence of events.
At 836–7 Iris instructs Lyssa,

H ŒØæÆÆ j ºÆı ŒØ (‘set
his feet leaping, stir him up’), and at 871 Lyssa, resigned to her task,
cries out,  Æ  Kªg Aºº æø ŒÆd ŒÆÆıºø fiø (‘I shall
soon make you dance more wildly and I shall play upon you a pipe of
terror’). Herakles’ madness is thus to take the form of an ecstatic
Dionysian dance, arranged by Lyssa to the accompaniment of the
aulos.73 The verbs æø and ŒÆÆıºø have a violent transitive

70 Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 438. 71 King Lear, iv. vi. 171.

72 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 121.
73 On Euripides’ deployment in the mad scenes of ‘imagery’ of destructive
Dionysian music, see Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 434 V. For the more general
Dionysian terms of reference at the onset of Herakles’ madness, see Schlesier
(1993), 89–114, at 98; Zeitlin (1993), 147–82, at 150–1; Seaford (1994), 353–5; and
Kraus (1998), 137–56, at 151–6.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 35
force,74 which is diYcult to replicate in English.75 The sinister
musical metaphor is reinforced by the deliberate echo at 879,
æıŁ KÆºØ, following the emphatic juxtaposition of
ÆØ Ø ºÆØ at 878. As Lyssa leads Herakles in his wild dance
inside the palace, a short lyric dialogue between Amphitryon and the
chorus conjures up for the audience the murderous progress of the
dance and the hideously discordant strains of Lyssa’s maddening pipe:
$. ŒÆ æÆØ æıÆ ¼æ ı
ø
P æı ŒÆæØÆ Łæfiø.
`. Ng
Ø.
$.
æe Æ¥ Æ ; Pd A ˜ØıØ

æø K
d ÆØ ºØA.
< `:> ıªfiB; Œ ; KæA: <$:>
Ø 


Ø º K
ÆıºEÆØ.
ŒıƪE Œø
Øøª· h
 ¼ŒæÆÆ
ØØ
¸Æ ÆŒØ.76
`. ÆNÆE ŒÆŒH.
(889–98)
chorus. The dance begins but a dance without the accompaniment of
drums and one which is not given to the joy of Bromios’ thyrsus.
amphitryon [within]. Alas for my home!
chorus. A dance for blood and not with the pouring of libations of the
grape in honour of Dionysus.
<amphitryon> [within]. Escape children, be gone!
<chorus>. The tune being played on the pipe is truly murderous. He is
hunting his children down. Not without eVect will Madness run Bacchic
riot through the house.
amphitryon [within]. Oh, what suVerings!
This passage is rich in Bacchic ritual imagery, but the emphasis is on
the perversion of normally peaceful ceremonies: Herakles’ maenadic
ecstasis is ominously without the accompaniment of the typana;
the celebrant is transported not by the frenzied joy of Dionysus, but

74 Bond (1981), 294 notes that æø and ŒÆÆıºø are normally words of good
omen, which occur in pleasant contexts.
75 Robert Browning’s translation of 871, which retains this transitive force, is,
I believe, the most eVective. See below, Chap. 6.
76 ´ÆŒø is literally ‘to keep the feast of Bacchus’. It also has a causal meaning,
‘to inspire with frenzy’, and thus recalls 871 and 879. Cf. the transitive verb
K Œı at 966.
36 ‘No longer himself ’
by the lethal energy of Lyssa racing into his heart; in place of the usual
Dionysian libations (ºØA), he performs a human sphagiasmos
(sacriWce); and the festive aulos is played as an instrument of death.
The role of the chorus in this oV-stage Bacchic revelry is, as Wilson
observes, one of acoustic mimesis: ‘For the killings inside the house
have taken place in the space ‘‘Wlled’’ by their choral song—one
bacchic khoreia overlaying another, the metaphoric and the per-
formative interlacing and merging.’77 Of the essential paradox of
carefully choreographed chaos operative in this scene and, more
broadly, in the tragic representation of madness, Padel says: ‘Dance
images of madness express a central paradox, of unseen disorderly
inner movement, articulated and ordered within a composed, chor-
eographed performance. Madness is a non-dancelike ek [sic]: ex-
pressed through a genre that is itself a very highly wrought,
rehearsed dance.’78
A similar paradox is operative in the Messenger’s speech (922–
1015),79 which is a model of lucid and systematic reportage. Every
stage of the madness, from its Wrst physical symptoms through to its
violent climax and abrupt ending, is plotted retrospectively and by an
impartial witness, yet at the same time vividly and compellingly. In
this long description of Herakles’ loss of self and its tragic conse-
quences, no detail of action or reaction has been omitted. The
Messenger graphically re-creates the atmosphere in the palace at
the moment of Herakles’ deranged descent. At 950–2 the servants’
uneasy, ambivalent response to their master’s aberrant behaviour is
captured imaginatively and with acute psychological insight:

Ø
ºF
 O
Æ
E q ªºø  Ł ›F,
ŒÆ Ø 
 r
; ¼ºº N ¼ºº
æÆŒ·
—ÆØ
æe A

 j ÆÆØ;
AVected with a double emotion the servants began to laugh and tremble
both at once. They looked at one another and one of them said, ‘Is our
master playing a joke on us or is he mad?’
The inclusion of reported speech, especially the urgent, uncompre-
hending pleas of Herakles’ family (965–7, 975–6, 988–9), contributes
77 Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 437.
78 Padel (1995), 139.
79 This is the third-longest messenger speech in the Euripidean corpus.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 37
to the immediacy of the narration, while the snatches of Herakles’
delusional conversations (936–46, 982–3) are indicative of his insane
logic. The speech as a whole is a psychological and theatrical tour de
force, requiring an actor of exceptional versatility and control.
Another psychological tour de force, detailing reason in madness,
is Herakles’ hallucination, which is a sustained sequence of charac-
teristic Heraklean feats grimly contextualized. Burnett states that
Euripides ‘has been careful to give the hallucination a ghastly kinship
with reality, and so the will of the sane Heracles seems always present,
even as he commits his insane crime’.80 She believes the imagined
Mycenean murders are able to distract and dazzle Herakles ‘because
they are attractive to him’.81 Certainly the illusions of journeying,
feasting, and wrestling, and the very real killings, serve to parody
Herakles’ heroic career (cf. the ironic use of Herakles’ traditional
epithet, ŒÆººØŒ, at 961). But, contrary to Burnett, I believe the
poet has been careful to distinguish the will of the sane Herakles from
his insane crimes. This distinction has been recognized by Hartigan,
who says: ‘His madness is beyond his control, yet it acts through his
virtue—his strength—to achieve his ruin.’82 In other words, the
madness is ‘externally caused but internally activated’.83 Herakles
does not act independently of Lyssa; she exploits his heroic identity
and legitimate bia (force), forcing him to conduct an I
º

º (‘a war that was no war’, 1133)84 against ‘wholly irrelevant
and innocent victims’.85 There is nothing in Euripides’ portrait of the
sane hero to suggest that killing is attractive to him or that his normal
use of violence is excessive, which is why I dispute Barlow’s sugges-
tion that Euripides is ‘asking whether there is not a very Wne line
between murdering one’s enemies and murdering one’s own
friends’.86 This question has been foregrounded in recent adaptations

80 Burnett (1971), 171. 81 Ibid. 170.

82 Hartigan (1987), 126–35, at 128. 83 Ibid. 129.
84 Herakles fought a non-war against children and philoi. On this oxymoron, see
Bond (1981), 354.
85 Furley (1986), 102–13, at 102.
86 Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 123. Cf. Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 16–17: ‘The essential
diVerence between Lykos and Herakles—their motives for action—the killing of the
children does not cancel; but it does reveal what actions good and bad alike have in
common—violence. . . . With Herakles himself Euripides is careful not to comprom-
ise our impression of his goodness by saying deWnitely that he would kill his children
when sane; but he hints through the minor characters and through the veil of
38 ‘No longer himself ’
of the play, but there is little in the original text to substantiate a
negative reading of Herakles’ sane violence or, indeed, the discovery
of a causal link between his past and present murders.87 Like the
Bacchic dance and the Messenger’s speech, the hallucination involves
a paradox: Herakles’ actions are, in themselves, reasonable, but they
have been arbitrarily misplaced in an insane context.

T H E AWA K E N I N G A N D R E H A BI L I TAT I O N
OF HERAKLES (1089–428)

The Wnal episode of Herakles has two focal points: the hero’s anag-
nōrisis and his rehabilitation. At 1002–6 the Messenger reports that
Herakles’ murderous rampage was halted by Athena’s sudden inter-
vention:
Iºº qºŁ NŒ; ‰ ›æA KÆ
—ƺºa; ŒæÆ
Æı ª y K
d ºø ŒÆæ y,
Œ¼ææØł
æ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı,
‹ Ø ı ÆæªH ; ŒI o
88
ŒÆŁBŒ.

madness disturbingly enough to evoke an awareness that all Æ partakes of the
irrational element here embodied in the extreme form of madness.’
87 At 966–7 Amphitryon asks his son, h 
ı   K Œı ŒæH j R
¼æØ ŒÆØ; (‘Surely the blood of those you have just been killing has not made you
mad?’). Wilamowitz seized on these lines as proof of Herakles’ intuitive bloodlust and
as a means of rationalizing his insane murders (see below, Chap. 7). However, these
are the only lines in the play which draw a connection between the murder of Lycus
and the murder of Herakles’ children, and the possibility of such a connection has
already been unambiguously cancelled by the remarkable central epiphany. Fitzgerald
(1991), 85–95, at 91–2, speaks absurdly of the ‘apparent’ resort to an outside agency
to eVect Herakles’ catastrophe and of a direct link between the slaughter of Lycus and
the slaughter of Herakles’ children: ‘if Heracles’ values had been other than they have
been he may not have found himself in this situation. Certainly if his ‘‘morality’’ had
not been one that recommended the blind vengeance, that so deWnes his ‘‘heroic’’
identity, he may, or would, not have been able to do what he did. . . . The ‘‘madness
scene’’ expresses what is innate in [his] former self.’ This view completely ignores
Herakles’ consistent portrayal as IºŒÆŒ (averter of evil) and thus his dissociation
from the ‘amoral vindictiveness’ of Lycus.
88 On Euripides’ ironic use of the familiar idea of ‘sleep after toil’, and Herakles’
o
 PΠP
ÆÆ (‘unhappy sleep’, 1013), see Willink (1988), 86–97.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 39
But there appeared a phantom, or so it seemed to our eyes, Pallas, bran-
dishing her spear. y y . She hurled a stone at Herakles’ breast which
checked his murderous rage and reduced him to sleep.
From his enforced palliative sleep Herakles awakes a bound and
broken Wgure, remembering nothing of his mad deeds, but aware
that his mind has been aVected in some terrible way:
‰ <
 >  μ
øØ ŒÆd æH Ææ ªÆØ


øŒÆ
ØfiH.
(1091–2)
I was swamped somehow by a terrible confusion of mind.
Finding ropes around his chest and arms, his weapons scattered on
the ground, and corpses beside him, Herakles experiences an acute
and unfamiliar IÆÆ (helplessness, 1105) and
ªØÆ (perplex-
ity, 1107). He is conscious of the incongruity between the normal
living landscape of sky, earth, and sun (1090) and the ghastly vision
of death before him, but he can identify no trace of the infamous
inhabitants of Hades (1103–4) to conWrm his return to the infernal
regions. He is now in a solitary terrestrial hell.
It is Amphitryon who gradually and compassionately guides Hera-
kles out of his dusgnoia and towards his anguished anagnōrisis. The
powerful stichomythia between father and son at 1112–45 is the
prototype of the corresponding stichomythia at Bacchae 1264–1301
between Cadmus and Agave. In the later scene the father slowly
forces his daughter to cast oV her maenadic fury and to recognize
that the fresh quarry she is triumphantly brandishing is the head of
her son Pentheus. Devereux has termed the exchange between Cad-
mus and Agave a ‘psychotherapy scene’, which is ‘the natural conse-
quence of the basic outlook of a poet who had already dramatised a
clinically Xawless ‘‘supportive therapy’’ scene (Eur. HF 1089 V.)’.89 He
compares Cadmus as psychotherapist, and the ‘tactfully gradual
manner in which he leads Agave, step by step, back to a painful but
inescapable reality’,90 to Amphitryon, whose psychotherapeutic
method, at 1119–21, is to ascertain the stability of Herakles’ mind
before compelling him towards the grievous knowledge of his crimes.

89 Devereux (1970), 35–48, at 37. 90 Ibid. 41.

40 ‘No longer himself ’
DeWning Agave’s progression towards such knowledge, Devereux
says, ‘the doer, having recovered her sense of identity, must be
made to recognise also her deed’.91 In Herakles’ case, the doer, having
recognized the deed (1132), must be made to recognize also his
identity as its unwitting perpetrator. For Amphitryon, in the role of
psychotherapist, the most painful duty is to redirect his son’s horror
and vengeful anger away from a presumed enemy and onto Herakles
himself (1133–9).
Much has been written on the question of whether, in these post-
madness scenes, Herakles’ old heroism is rehabilitated or whether he
progresses to a fundamentally new type of heroism. Where one
stands on this question depends on how one interprets Herakles’
rejection of suicide, his decision to retain the weapons with which he
killed his loved ones, and his acceptance of Theseus’ philia.
Chalk, who discerns an intimate connection between philia and
aretē, believes Herakles recovers a new, complex aretē of which
friendly dependence and submission to fate are positive and active
ingredients. Another ingredient, he contends, is Herakles’ old bia
(symbolized by his bow and arrows), which is now tempered by his
new ‘understanding, induced by suVering, of the hateful implications
of action’.92 Directly refuting Chalk’s thesis, which he insists is based
on anachronistic ethical standards, Adkins can detect no new aretē in
the play’s Wnal scenes and, indeed, no aretē at all. Philia, he declares,
is, according to Wfth-century thinking, incompatible with aretē; the
only desirable condition for the agathos is one of autarkeia:
There is nothing whatever in the use of غÆ; º, غE, and Iæ to
suggest for a moment that Iæ, whose basic usage is in commending those
very qualities in a man which ensure his independence, self-suYciency, and
ability to protect his dependants, can be manifested by receiving beneWts
from a º. If we look at this play in terms of our values, we may see these
transactions [between Herakles and Theseus] in a quite diVerent light; but
we are concerned with the values of Euripides and his audience, and in this
case with those of the Greeks between Homer and Aristotle generally. . . .
Had Euripides wished to redeWne Iæ so radically as to render the IªÆŁ
one who received (deserved) beneWts rather than conferring them, he would
have had to do so explicitly and at length in order to make comprehensible

91 Devereux (1970), 35–48, at 43. 92 Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 14.

 ‘No longer himself ’ 41
to the audience a view unparalleled in Greek literature up to and including
Aristotle. Since he does not do so, we may conclude that, in portraying
Hercules as receiving beneWts from Theseus, he was not portraying Hercules
as manifesting any Iæ, traditional or new.93
But the incompatibility of philia and aretē is here maintained too
arbitrarily, and Euripides’ radical agenda too summarily dismissed.
The fact is that, already in the play’s Wrst and supposedly traditional
half, the poet has redeWned aretē in such a way as to stress its
relationship to philia, redeWning in the process the true agathos as a
true philos. In his pre-madness scenes, when he has unquestionably
the status of agathos and is possessed of unassailable aretē, Herakles is
never shown to be entirely self-suYcient or to advocate self-suY-
ciency as a virtue. On the contrary, he espouses the importance of
cooperative values and is seen to prize philia more highly than the
glory of his labours. Moreover, the philia that is intrinsic to his aretē
is not about conferring or receiving beneWts but is, rather, the
spontaneous expression of unconditional love. The same may be
said of Herakles’ expression of philia in his post-madness scenes,
particularly at 1265 (
ÆæÆ ªaæ Id ˘e ªFÆØ  Kª, ‘I con-
sider you as my father, not Zeus’) and 1401 (
Æ
ø æŁd
ÆE

‹
ø ø  K, ‘Now that I have lost my sons, I count you as my
son’). ‘Both these sentiments’, Barlow suggests, are ‘concerned with
spontaneous attitudes and not necessarily deeds.’94
Lee Wnds that Herakles’ crucial decision to endure life (KªŒÆæø
, 1351) is not made for positive reasons, that the beneWts of
Theseus’ friendship ‘are largely material and do not impinge on the
substance of Heracles’ fate’.95 Like Adkins, he overlooks the radicalism
of Euripidean philia. Theseus oVers Herakles a home in Athens,
puriWcation, wealth, and posthumous honours (1322–33), but the
philia he represents cannot be reduced to a matter of material beneWts
and reciprocity. What deWnes Theseus as philos is his genuine and
unqualiWed love for Herakles, encapsulated in his moving and
repeated dismissal of the notion of infectious pollution:

93 Adkins (1966), 193–219, at 216–17.

94 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 119. The verbs ªFÆØ and ø imply a mental state
or attitude.
95 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 42.
42 ‘No longer himself ’
 Ø
æø EæÆ ÆØ ;
‰ c   H  ºfi
æŁª ø;
P
b ºØ Ø  ª d
æ Ø ŒÆŒH:
(1218–20)
Why move your hand to warn me that you have a fear? Are you afraid that
your greetings might pollute me? I don’t care if I share your suVering.
¨.
ÆFÆØ·

ı
b Eæ 
æfi ºfiø:
˙æ: Iºº ÆxÆ c E KæøÆØ

ºØ:
¨: ŒÆ; 
ı 
· PŒ IÆÆØ:
(1398–1400)
Theseus. Enough. Give your hand to a friend who wants to help you.
Herakles. Be careful that the blood of my pollution does not wipe oV on
your clothes.
Theseus. Wipe away! As much as you like! I do not reject it.
Theseus’ love and loyalty make him a surrogate son to Herakles and
thus impinge signiWcantly on the substance of Herakles’ fate.
Lee also denies that Herakles progresses to a new type of heroism.
He takes particular issue with Arrowsmith’s ‘conversion of reality’
theory,96 stating that, by keeping his weapons, ‘the hero, far from
rejecting the old world of his labours, very deliberately clings to it’.97
Yet, Herakles’ decision to retain his weapons is not a reversion to an
old aretē, but a transWguration or deepening of what has already been
established as an atypical aretē. The bow and arrows may be symbolic
of the Heraklean labours, but, as Amphitryon’s defence of the bow at
190–203 demonstrated, they are also the symbols of a modern and
very human hero. Herakles’ decision at 1377–83 to keep his weapons
is the key passage in his rehabilitative process:
ºıªæÆd
b H
 ‹
ºø ŒØøÆØ:
IÆH ªaæ
æ ø 
 j ŁH,
L
ºıæa Ia
æ
 KæE 
·
 ˙E Œ x º ŒÆd
ÆæŁ · A Ø

96 See Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 50.

97 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 43. Cf. Fitzgerald (1991), 85–95, at 94: ‘The eventual
resumption of his armour suggests the possibility of the resumption eventually of his
former ‘‘self ’’.’ This inference is based on Fitzgerald’s glaring misconstruction of
Herakles’ ‘old’ morality as deWcient and blameworthy.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 43

ÆØ
Œı : r  Kªg 
 TºÆØ
Yø;   Œø; Iººa ªıøŁd ‹
ºø
f x  a Œ ººØ K
æÆ K  ¯ºº
Ø
KŁæE KÆıe 
ƺg ÆNæH Ł ø;
P ºØ
 
 ; IŁºø
b ø.
How painfully sweet it is to kiss them and how painful it is too to think of
the companionship of my weapons. I do not know whether to keep them or
to let them go. They will say as they brush against my side ‘It was with our
help you murdered your wife and children. In wearing us you wear the
killers of your sons.’ Am I to carry them about? What am I to say? Yet strip
me of the very weapons with which I did the most glorious exploits in
Greece and shall I not then die in submission at my enemies’ hands? I cannot
leave them behind, I must keep them, painful though it is.
The bow and arrows no longer symbolize the hero’s past labours;
apart from serving the practical purpose of self-defence, they will
symbolize a mature and complex aretē based on suVering and moral
strength.98 Their companionship will be a constant reminder to
Herakles of a deed which has rendered his previous life almost
meaningless. Far from clinging to the old world of his labours,
Herakles is confronting a brave new world of inWnitely greater
labours.
Critics who have argued for and against Herakles’ advancement to
a new type of heroism have generally had one thing in common—a
slightly simplistic reading of the nature of Herakles’ aretē in the play’s
Wrst half. Arrowsmith sees in the play ‘a conversion of heroism whose
model is Heracles, and the heart of that conversion lies in the hero’s
passage in suVering from the outworn courage of outward physical
strength to a new internal courage, without exemption now but with
the addition of love and perseverance against an intolerable neces-
sity’.99 Herakles’ ‘old’ heroism was certainly less complex, and by the
end of the play his aretē has acquired a greater internal dimension.

98 Dunn (1996), 123 believes Herakles keeps his weapons ‘for a purely negative
purpose, for self-defense’, which he insists ‘does little to deWne a hero and does not
deWne in a positive or constructive manner either old-fashioned, heroic virtues or
new, humanistic ones’. He therefore ignores both the context in which ll. 1382–4 are
spoken, especially the idea of ºıªæÆd ŒØøÆØ (1377), and the positive symbolic
signiWcance surrounding the weapons’ future practical employment.
99 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53.
44 ‘No longer himself ’
However, Arrowsmith overemphasizes the novelty of this dimension.
He describes the Herakles of the Wrst action as ‘the familiar culture-
hero of Dorian and Boeotian tradition: strong, courageous, noble,
self-suYcient’,100 but, as we have seen, even before his tragic fall
Herakles is portrayed as an atypical and technologically sophisticated
hero, who preaches the value of philia rather than self-suYciency.101
The conversion of heroism which occurs is not, therefore, a break
with Herakles’ former self, but a development or maturation of that
self.102 Barlow’s thesis is the nearest to this conclusion. ‘What
changes’, she says, ‘is not [Herakles’] innate aretê but his perspecti-
ve. . . . The play is partly about the transition from one order of
experience to another.’103 The turning-point, which enables this tran-
sition, is Herakles’ rejection of suicide, his movement away from a
physically heroic response towards a spiritually heroic response:
KªŒÆæø  (1351). These words constitute, in Barlow’s esti-
mation, ‘a calculated and positive decision’,104 and are demonstrative
of an aretē that, because of its progressiveness, is being held in pointed
contrast to the aretē of Sophocles’ suicidal Ajax.105
Herakles’ rehabilitation entails neither the annulment of an old
aretē nor the acquisition of a completely new aretē. It is the full,
agonizing realization of an already enlightened form of heroic exist-
ence. The truly novel element in Herakles’ post-madness aretē is
found in his deWnitive renunciation of the anthropomorphic gods

100 Arrowsmith (1956) 44–59, at 49.

101 Interestingly, Athenian male citizens swore their oaths of intra-household
philia by Herakles. In fact, the male-only Herakles cult at Athens centred on philia-
relationships in sub-military manifestations.
102 Foley (1985), 150 believes that at the end of the play the hero is ritually tamed
for the new civic order of Athens. We realize, she says, that it is only Athens and
Athenian tragedy which ‘can rescue Herakles from the ‘‘death’’ and anachronism with
which he is threatened in the earlier scenes and create an untraditional spritualized
hero equal to the mutability of life and valuable for the Athenian polis’. Foley makes
the important point that the traditional Herakles is an ambivalent or liminal Wgure in
need of some kind of recuperation for the modern democratic audience. However,
Euripides begins this recuperative process earlier than Foley and others maintain,
purging Herakles of much of his traditional ambivalence.
103 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 117.
104 Ibid. 112.
105 On Herakles’ rejection of suicide, see James (1969), 10–20, Yoshitake (1994),
135–53, and Romilly (2003), 285–94. Like Barlow, Romilly construes Herakles as an
anti-Ajax and argues that Euripides is presenting a new doctrine on suicide.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 45
(1341–6), and his own divinity (1265),106 and his substitution of a
transcendent humanism. The hero is eVectively ‘demythologised’.107
He protests against divine amoral indiVerence and proclaims the
irrelevancy of the gods to the life stretching before him, in which
only human endurance and human philia matter. The true radical-
ism of Herakles’ demythologized aretē and his new humanist phil-
osophy is best summed up by Ehrenberg:
The disharmony of a world in which a blind fate destroys good and great
men must be resolved into the harmony of human greatness and unselWsh
love between human beings. Euripides denies the right of mere individual-
ism,108 but he equally denies superhuman guidance and ordering. Man must
rely on himself and his fellow-men to build his world, proudly and cour-
ageously defying the blows of fate. In a new sense Protagoras’ sentence
becomes true: Man is the measure of all things. . . . The Euripidean man
Wnally triumphs over the Wercest onslaught of fate. . . . It is a new generation
and a new epoch in the history of the human mind, an epoch in which
human reason outgrows and overcomes, for a time at least, the faith in
superhuman forces and in the dark secrets of death and after-death. When
Herakles rejects suicide, he acts as a true creation of Euripides and of the age
of Enlightenment.109
Euripides’ Herakles is a play of strange beauty and brutality. As a
piece of theatre, it is immensely powerful and disturbing. It remains,
I believe, to this day the most radical and innovative treatment of
the madness of Herakles. When Seneca took Euripides’ plot as the
basis of his Hercules Furens in the mid-Wrst century ad, he began a
process of reasoning the madness and psychologizing the hero which
transformed the story’s Euripidean essence. Since then, with one or
two notable exceptions, translations or adaptations of Euripides’
text have never quite matched its revolutionary externalization of the
madness and humanization of the hero. But before the Hercules
Furens is examined in detail, it is worth noting the reception of
Herakles Mainomenos in antiquity outside of Euripides and Seneca.

106 See Silk (1985), 1–22, esp. 12 V. 107 Barlow (1996), 141.
108 Cf. Burnett’s notion (1971), 180 that Herakles’ humanist stance is based on
autarkeia and not philia: ‘The play does . . . in the end work a kind of restoration for
humanity, showing a form of self-salvation in which the chastened Heracles is
suYcient unto himself.’
109 Ehrenberg (1946), 163–5.
46 ‘No longer himself ’
A number of sources from the Hellenistic period indicate the
presence of mad Herakles in art, literature, and theatre. A poem of
125 lines, entitled ‘Megara’ and thought to belong to Theocritus
(c.300–260 bc), gives a picture of Herakles’ wife and mother
Alkmene at home in Tiryns while he is abroad undertaking his
labours. Megara laments the mad murder of her children at their
father’s hand, recalling vividly her frantic helplessness to save them:
f b Kªg
 KE Y
 OŁÆºEØ
ƺºı 
e
Ææ; e
 P
 ZÆæ XºıŁ ¼ººfiø:
P
 Ø
ı  I
Øe ŒÆºıØ IæBÆØ
æ ; K
d Kªªf IŒ ŒÆŒe q.
‰
 ZæØ
æÆØ K
d æØØ E
OººıØ; o ÆNe ZØ Ø 
Ø Æ
Ł Ø K
ıŒØEØ ŒÆŁØ· m
b ŒÆ ÆPf

øAÆØ Œº ıÆ  ºÆ ºØªf
ØÆ æ,
P
 ¼æ Ø ŒØØ K
ÆæŒÆØ· q ª æ ƒ ÆPfiB
p Y ªÆ  æ IغŒØ
ºæı·
S Kªg ÆNŒØÆ º ª ÆN ıÆ
ÆØØØ

Ø
 Œ Æ
ººe Kø.
(17–28)
Wretched I saw with my own eyes my children felled by their father’s hand,
and that no other has even dreamt of. And although they called out loudly,
their mother was powerless to help them, since the evil was near and
unconquerable. But just as a bird wails at her young ones perishing,
whom a dread serpent devours as they play like children in the thick shrubs,
and she, raving mother, Xies above them screeching piercingly, but then is
unable to protect her children, for she is greatly afraid to go nearer the
unsoothed monster; so I, unhappy mother, bewailing my beloved oVspring,
many times roamed wildly throughout the house with frenzied feet.
Of the thirty-eight plays attributed to Rhinthon of Syracuse
(c.323–285 bc), the inventor of hilarotragodia (burlesques of tragic
subjects, later known as fabulae Rhintonicae), nine titles are known,
but very meagre fragments (in Doric) survive. Almost all are
burlesques of Euripidean tragedies and among them is Herakles.
Euripides’ play itself was still being performed, as we know from the
Tegea inscription (SIG3 1080), which records the victories of a
Greek champion boxer (sometimes identiWed as Apollogenes) who
 ‘No longer himself ’ 47
was also a tragic actor:110 ‘At the Great Dionysia at Athens in Euripides’
Orestes. At the Delphic Soteria in the Herakles of Euripides111 and
the Antaios of Archestratos. At the Alexandrian Ptolemaia in men’s
boxing. At the Heraia in Euripides’ Herakles, and Euripides’ Archelaos.
At the Naia at Dodona in Euripides’ Archelaos and Chairemon’s
Achilles.’112
The madness of Herakles is the subject of a red-Wgured calyx-
krater from Paestum (350–325 bc), excavated in 1864 (Fig. 1). The
vase, which is signed by the artist Asteas, depicts a scene of indoor
mayhem: Herakles, the central Wgure, has broken up the furniture,
from which he has constructed a bonWre, and is about to dash one of
his children on the ground or hurl the child into the Xames, while a
distracted Megara tries to Xee through a door to the right. Watching
the scene from a loggia above are, from left to right, Mania (holding a
whip), Herakles’ nephew Iolaos, and Alkmene.113 Only here is the
instigator of Herakles’ madness identiWed as Mania rather than Lyssa,
which, together with the presence of Iolaos and Alkmene, would
strongly suggest that the vase represents not Euripides’ play but
rather a play inXuenced by Euripides.114
The accounts of Herakles’ madness by three late Hellenistic writers
also suggest a tradition independent of Euripides. Apollodorus of
Athens (b. c.180 bc), Nicolaus of Damascus (b. c.64 bc), and Dio-
dorus Siculus (who wrote c.60–30 bc) each place the madness before
the labours.115 Apollodorus, in his Bibliotheca, a study of Greek
heroic mythology, records that Herakles threw his own three sons
and two children of Iphicles into a Wre:
%a
b c
æe %ØÆ   ı ÆıfiH ŒÆa Bº  „æÆ ÆBÆØ; ŒÆd
  N
ı
ÆE
Æ; R KŒ %ª æÆ r ; N
Fæ KƺE ŒÆd H

110 See Sifakis (1967), 84.

111 On this boxer’s physical suitability for the role of Herakles, see Falkner (2002),
342–61, at 360, n. 61.
112 Translated in Csapo and Slater (1995), 200.
113 Cf. the scene represented here to the description by Philostratus (c.ad
160–245) of what is purportedly a painting in a Neapolitan collection depicting
Herakles’ mad murder and burning of his children (Imagines 2.23).
114 See Taplin (2007), no. 45.
115 Cf. the Euripidean chronology of the account given by Hyginus (Fabulae 31–2)
around the 2nd century ad.
48 ‘No longer himself ’

Fig. 1. Asteas, The Madness of Herakles, Paestan rf. calyx-krater (350–325

bc). Museo del Prado.

 "ØŒºı
·
Øe ŒÆÆ
ØŒ Æ ÆıF ıªc ŒÆŁÆæÆØ b 

e ¨
ı;

Ææƪ
b N ˜ºf
ıŁ ÆØ F ŁF
F ŒÆØŒØ. (2. 4. 12)
And after the battle against the Minyans it came to pass that he was driven mad
through the jealousy of Hera and threw his own children, whom he had by
Megara, and two children of Iphicles into the Wre; wherefore, having passed
sentence of banishment upon himself, he was puriWed by Thespius, and having
come to Delphi, he enquired of the god inwhat part of the world he should dwell.
 ‘No longer himself ’ 49
Both he and Nicolaus (F.Gr.Hist. 90 F 13) provide unembellished
narratives which imply, rather than state, that the labours were
atonement for the murders. Diodorus, however, includes a psycho-
logical explanation for the madness—Herakles’ depressed state of
mind on learning from the Delphic oracle that he must perform the
labours at Eurystheus’ command:
ø
b
æÆŁø › b  ˙æÆŒºB K
 N IŁıÆ P c ıFÆ·
  ªaæ fiH Æ
Øæfiø
ıºØ P
ÆH ¼Ø ŒæØ B N
Æ IæB; 
 fiH ˜Ød ŒÆd
Ææd c
ŁŁÆØ ŒÆd Iæ KÆ ŒÆd I
Æ: N

ººc s IÆÆ K


 ÆPF;  „æÆ b 
ł ÆPfiH ºÆ· ›

b fiB łıfiB
ıæH N ÆÆ K
. (Bibliotheca 4. 11. 1)
At this turn of events Herakles fell into no ordinary despondency; for he
judged that to be a slave to an inferior was in no way worthy of his own
valour, and yet it seemed inexpedient and impossible not to obey Zeus, who
was also his father. While he was thus greatly at a loss, Hera sent a frenzy
upon him; and in his vexation of soul he fell into a madness.
Evidence for the madness of Herakles in Roman art and literature
before Seneca is much scarcer. There does not seem to have been a
Republican tragedy on the subject. Of the twenty known titles by
Ennius (b. 239 bc), twelve are Euripidean, but the Herakles is not
among them. Hercules did, however, feature in at least two, and
possibly three, plays by Accius (b. 170 bc), who was acclaimed in
Seneca’s day the greatest of all Roman tragedians. The single frag-
ment of Accius’ Alcestis is from the Messenger’s account of Hercules’
rescue of Alcestis from Hades.116 Hercules has a speaking part in
Phinidae, appearing probably to restore the blinded sons of Phineus
to health and give them their father’s throne.117 Accius wrote a
Philoctetes, but it is not known whether Hercules featured at the
end of this version as a deus ex machina. There is also an unassigned
Accian fragment which is possibly from a passage telling how
Philoctetes witnessed the burning of Hercules on Mount Oeta.118
Hercules speaks the single fragment of Hesiona,119 one of the six
known tragic titles attributed to Naevius, and is likely to be the
eponymous hero of an anonymous tragedy which included the

116 See Warmington (1961), ii. 332. 117 Ibid. 520–2.

118 Ibid. 569. 119 Ibid. 118.
50 ‘No longer himself ’
character of Poeas.120 Despite this fragmentary and inconclusive
literary evidence, there is iconographic evidence to suggest that
Hercules was considered at Rome the quintessential tragic hero. The
tragic muse Melpomene was often portrayed at Rome with Herculean
accoutrements, including unmistakably Hercules’ famous club.
During the Empire mad Hercules (although probably not the Eur-
ipidean-Senecan hero) was a favourite role for both the amateur and
professional thespian. A Wrst-century epigram dedicated to the tragic
actor Apollophanes lists chief among his props Hercules’ club (Palatine
Anthology 11. 169). Suetonius records Nero’s preference for performing
publicly the part of mad Hercules (Nero 21. 3), a peculiarity he shared
with other emperors.121 Like Nero, the pioneering pantomimus Pylades,
who developed a high-Xown, passionate style of balletic interpretation
of tragic drama, could carry his impersonation of mad Hercules
to dangerous extremes (Macrobius, Saturnalia 2. 7. 16–17). In the
dialogue Nigrinus, Lucian (b. c.ad 120) criticizes those actors who

ºº ŒØ j  `ªÆ j ˚æ j ŒÆd  ˙æÆŒºı ÆPF

æø

Iغ, æı
Æ MØØ ŒÆd
Øe º
 ŒÆd ªÆ Œ
ØŒæe ŁªªÆØ ŒÆd Ne ŒÆd ªıÆØŒH
 ŒÆd B  ¯Œ  j —ºı

ºf Æ
Øæ. (11)
often when they have assumed the mask of Agamemnon or Creon or even
Herakles himself, clothed in cloth of gold, looking Werce and gaping wide,
speak in a voice that is small, thin, and eVeminate, and much too poor for
Hecuba or Polyxena.
As can be seen, evidence for the ancient transmission of the
Herakles Mainomenos story in antiquity, exclusive of Euripides and
Seneca, is widely scattered and does not ultimately contribute to a
coherent or conclusive understanding of how other ancients reasoned
the madness or redeWned Herakles’ heroism in the light of his mad
deeds. What it does indicate is that, in spite of the survival of alternate
traditions, it is Euripides’ version of the story that has had the greatest
impact on the future reception of Herakles Mainomenos, determining
the essential themes which all subsequent adaptations have addressed.

120 See Warmington (1961), ii. 610. 121 See below, Chap. 2.
 2
‘Let the monster be mine’: Seneca
and the internalization of imperial furor

The only other extant ancient play to feature the madness of Herakles
is that attributed to the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca,
the Younger (c.4 bc–ad 65), and entitled Hercules Furens. Seneca was
attracted in his youth by ascetic philosophy, becoming a vegetarian
and a disciple of Pythagorean teaching. However, his father’s counsel,
allied to his own considerable literary and political ambition, guided
him away from the enclosed life of an ethereal scholar and eventually
towards the worldly situation of amicus Principis and senator con-
sularis. Seneca’s dual career as the leading man of letters and most
inXuential statesman of his day spanned almost the entire Julio-
Claudian dynasty, and positioned him fatally at the very heart of an
implacable imperial machine.
Although now he is probably better known for his moral and
philosophical treatises, a group of ten tragedies has been assigned
by tradition to Senecan authorship. Of the ten, one (Octavia) is
certainly not by Seneca, and another (Hercules Oetaeus) is of dubious
authenticity. The text of the tragedies is preserved in two principal
groups of manuscripts. E (Codex Etruscus or Laurentianus), written
in the late eleventh century and housed in the Laurentian Library in
Florence, lacks Octavia and gives the other plays in the following
order: Hercules (¼HF), Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedi-
pus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules (¼HO). A, the ancestor of the
vulgate tradition, gives the order and titles as: Hercules Furens,
Thyestes, Thebais (¼Phoen.), Hippolytus, Oedipus, Troas, Medea,
52 ‘Let the monster be mine’
Agamemnon, Octavia, Hercules Oetaeus.1 Whatever their literary
liabilities and assets, and quite apart from their phenomenal and
extremely well-documented impact on Renaissance drama, Seneca’s
plays have an inherent historical value: ‘They stand, with the excep-
tion of a few fragments, as the sole surviving representatives of an
extensive Roman product in the tragic drama. They therefore serve as
the only connecting link between ancient and modern tragedy.’2 Nor,
as Edith Hall insists, does the eternal question of the plays’ ‘perform-
ability’, and the unlikelihood of full-blown theatrical productions,
detract from their status in performance history: ‘Texts which are
declaimed are also ‘‘performed’’; texts which are widely read inform
subsequent adaptations of the story they relate. Whatever form of
public exposure Senecan tragedy Wrst received, it was only the Wrst
step in a process intended to lead to their consumption by a widely
dispersed readership.’3 The importance of Seneca’s tragedies to sub-
sequent reception lies not in their performability or otherwise but in
their Romanization and politicization of familiar Greek antecedents.
The values, sensibilities, and imagery which pervade Senecan drama,
and the characters the playwright dissects, belong manifestly to
imperial Rome. Moreover, Seneca’s tragic Weltanschauung, the
moral and political frame of reference characteristic of his plays,
extends far beyond the physically circumscribed world of the Greek
polis to encompass the State and the Cosmos.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ABSOLUT E POWER

Hercules Furens is a particularly instructive example of Seneca’s

Romanization of Greek myth. Although certain stage directions, and
the fact that the madness is enacted on stage, probably denote the
inXuence of an intermediary Hercules-drama or dramas,4 the essentials
of the story are derived ultimately from Euripides’ Herakles. The hero

1 For detailed studies of the MS tradition see esp. Zwierlein (1983), 7–181; Tarrant
(1985), 23–87; Fitch (1987), 53–7; and Billerbeck (1999), 39–89.
2 Miller (1917), p. ix.
3 Hall (2005), 53–75, at 64. 4 See Fitch (1987), 45–7.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 53
returns from his twelfth labour, his triumph over the Underworld, to
discover Thebes in the hands of the tyrannical Lycus and his family
under sentence of death. He kills the usurper and is immediately
driven mad by his malevolent stepmother Juno. In his madness he
murders his wife and children, whom he has just rescued. On learning
of his crime, once sanity is restored, he resolves to commit suicide, but
is persuaded against this course of action and taken by Theseus to
Athens where he will receive puriWcation. But while Seneca’s primary
source is obvious, the play is, above all, a product of its time and of its
author’s personal experience and agenda.
Along with the rest of the Senecan tragic corpus, Hercules Furens is
distinctly post-classical in structure and style, not least in its con-
spicuous rhetoricity. The declamatory speeches, lengthy ecphrases,
and the dominant style of shock and hyperbole, which the modern
reader might reasonably consider tedious fustian, were, in fact,
characteristic of a generic tendency among Silver Latin poets and,
more importantly, as Boyle asserts, part of the wider contemporary
idiom:
Seneca’s astonishing fusion of spectacle, bombast, paradox, epigram, brevity,
plenitude, abstraction, grandeur, violence, disjunction, allusion, sensuous-
ness is no arbitrarily chosen mode; it is product of a baroque, post-classical
sensibility and grounded in the semiotic forms of contemporary Roman life.
It is index of an age: the age of fourth-style Roman painting, the baroque
in Roman architecture and sculpture, the ‘pointed’, declamatory style in
poetry. It was a spectacular, histrionic age. It was a world of grandiose,
almost strident aesthetics.5
Scattered throughout the text of Hercules Furens are also signiWcant
echoes of the Augustan writers, and important aspects of the char-
acterization of Juno and Hercules can be traced to the Virgilian-
Ovidian tradition.
Seneca’s most radical development of, or divergence from, his Attic
model is his reasoning of the madness of Hercules, his introduction of
the idea of psychological causation. Whereas Euripides’ meticulous
staging of the madness emphasizes at every phase the externality and
gratuitousness of the hero’s aZiction, Seneca internalizes the furor and

5 Boyle (1997), 18–19.

54 ‘Let the monster be mine’
consistently represents it as the inevitable outcome of an extreme
modus vitae and an ingenium unbalanced by megalomania and obses-
sion.6 This internalization has a historical and didactic basis, and is a
creative consequence of what Braden identiWes as Seneca’s ‘interest in
a certain kind of achievement psychology’,7 the psychology of real and
unlimited power.
In ways not dissimilar to Virgil’s Aeneid, Hercules Furens is a
critique of the ambivalent achievement of Empire. Virgil’s ambiva-
lence towards imperial achievement in general, and the ideological
basis of the Augustan principate in particular, becomes most appar-
ent in Book 12 of the Aeneid. Witness Aeneas’ pius furor8 throughout;
the double simile, at 521–8, which links the murderous exploits of
Aeneas and Turnus; and, above all, Aeneas’ ultimately vengeful kill-
ing of Turnus which reveals the unsettling disjunction between pietas
and humanitas.9 Seneca likewise exposes the private or human cost
of a public life dedicated to conquest and acquisition, as well as
the hazardously Wne frontier separating greatness from excess.

6 The locus classicus for Roman internalization of madness, in contrast to Greek

externalization, is Cicero’s rationalization in Pro Roscio Amerino (24. 66–7) of the
Erinyes as the ı
Ø, the tormented conscience, of the matricide Orestes: ‘mag-
nam vim, magnam necessitatem, magnam possidet religionem paternus maternus-
que sanguis; ex quo si qua macula concepta est, non modo elui non potest verum
usque eo permanat ad animum ut summus furor atque amentia consequatur. Nolite
enim putare, quem ad modum in fabulis saepenumero videtis, eos, qui aliquid impie
scelerateque commiserunt, agitari et perterreri Furiarum taedis ardentibus. Sua
quemque fraus et suus terror maxime vexat, suum quemque scelus agitat amentiaque
adWcit, suae malae cogitationes conscientiaeque animi terrent; hae sunt impiis adsi-
duae domesticaeque Furiae quae dies noctesque parentium poenas a consceleratissi-
mis Wliis repetant.’ (‘The blood of a father and mother has great power, great
compulsion, great sanctity; if any stain has been received from this, not only can it
not be washed away, but in fact it penetrates all the way to the heart, so that extreme
frenzy and madness follow. For do not think, as you oftentimes see in plays, that those
who have perpetrated some wicked and impious deed are disturbed and terriWed by
the Wery torches of the Furies. His own crime and his own dread plagues each one
above all else; his own wicked deed disquiets each one and madness attacks; his own
evil imaginings and the remorse of his heart terrify him. For the wicked these are the
unremitting and internal Furies, which, night and day, demand expiation for parents
from most depraved sons.’)
7 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 13.
8 See Mackie (1982), 190.
9 On the controversial ending of the Aeneid, and its moral and political
implications, see esp. Johnson (1965), 359–64; Burnell (1987), 186–200; Stahl
(1990), 174–211; and Galinsky (1994), 191–201.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 55
He exploits the ambivalence of the mythical Hercules (ŁE Iæ;
monster-slayer and Wlicide; altruistic civilizer and hubristic overrea-
cher) in creating an imperial Roman tragic hero of enormous but
divided potential. His Hercules is princeps and imperator, an exem-
plar of virtus and pietas, but also a victim of warring adfectus and
ungovernable ira, an ira that culminates in murderous furor.
As a product of the imperial system, and both a witness to and a
participant in its intrigues, cruelties, and corruption, Seneca was well
placed to examine closely the ambivalence and the underlying mania
of imperial achievement. Indeed, in his own character and conduct
he reXected the moral paradox of Empire. His extravagant sybaritic
lifestyle gravely compromised the Stoic precepts he taught; the naked
pragmatism of his dealings as a wealthy usurer10 and political so-
phisticate sat oddly with the idealized virtues fundamental to his
philosophy. Seneca recognized these and more egregious contradic-
tions in the individual rulers at whose command he proWted and
suVered. He knew from Wrst-hand experience the menacing caprice
to which men of absolute power, with a commensurate capacity for
good or evil, were prone. Born in the second half of the Augustan
principate, he reached maturity in the bloody reign of Tiberius,
narrowly escaped execution after arousing the jealous suspicions of
Caligula, and was exiled to Corsica by Claudius through the machin-
ations of the empress Messalina. He was recalled to Rome in 49 at the
behest of Agrippina, Claudius’ new consort, and entrusted with the
education of her son Domitius (Nero). On Nero’s accession in 54 he
exchanged the role of tutor for that of chief minister, and maintained
a seemingly unassailable position of inXuence until his fall from grace
in 62. In 65 he was compelled by his former protégé to commit
suicide for his alleged complicity in the failed Pisonian conspiracy.
His painfully protracted death, memorably recorded by Tacitus (Ann.
15. 63–4), was a prototype of Stoic courage and composure, redeem-
ing in some measure a life of ignoble contradictions. Boyle has
commented: ‘The declamatory themes of the schools—vengeance,
rage, power-lust, incest, hideous death, fortune’s savagery—were the
stuV of [Seneca’s] life. His literary response was twofold: the con-
solatory discourse of Stoic moral philosophy, reXected in his prose

10 See Tacitus, Annales 13. 42.

56 ‘Let the monster be mine’
works, and the tragedies, which articulate a world quite diVerent
from that of the dialogues and epistles.’11
Where, then, in the chronology of Seneca’s turbulent career does
Hercules Furens occur, and to what set of circumstances is it a
response? Reliable evidence for the absolute dating of Seneca’s tra-
gedies is scarce,12 but for the Hercules Furens we do at least have a
terminus ante quem of late 54, established by the fact that the play is
parodied in sections 7 and 12 of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii
(The GourdiWcation of the Divine Claudius),13 a ribald Menippean
satire on the emperor’s apotheosis, which almost certainly belongs to
November or December of 54.14 In this short work, Claudius arrives
in heaven and Jupiter instructs his henchman, the deiWed Hercules,
who has travelled the whole world over and encountered all possible
monsters, to Wnd out the stranger’s nationality. The Hercules of the
Apocolocyntosis is the familiar comic buVoon and braggart but, in
order to make himself terrifying to Claudius, he temporarily as-
sumes, in Menippean fashion, the exalted guise of a tragic actor
(‘tragicus Wt’). Accordingly, he conducts his interrogation of Claud-
ius in tragic iambics:
exprome propere, sede qua genitus cluas,
hoc ne peremptus stipite ad terram accidas;
haec clava reges saepe mactavit feros.
Quid nunc profatu vocis incerto sonas?
Quae patria, quae gens mobile eduxit caput?
Edissere. Equidem regna tergemini petens
longinqua regis, unde ab Hesperio mari
Inachiam ad urbem nobile advexi pecus,
vidi duobus imminens Xuviis iugum,
quod Phoebus ortu semper obverso videt,
ubi Rhodanus ingens amne praerapido Xuit,
Ararque dubitans, quo suos cursus agat,
tacitus quietis adluit ripas vadis.
Estne illa tellus spritus altrix tui?
(Apoc. 7)

11 Boyle (1997), 32.

12 Fitch (1981), 289–307 has attempted to establish a relative order of composition
from Seneca’s use of sense-pauses.
13 See Fitch (1987), 50–3. 14 See GriYn (1976), 129, n. 3.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 57
State quickly, what country hail’st thou from, lest slain by this bough thou
fall’st to earth; this club hath often slaughtered savage kings. Why mumble
now thy words in tones unclear? What land, what race bore that shaking
head? Speak out. Verily, when seeking the far-oV realms of the triple king,
whence I brought the noble herd from the Western sea to the city of Inachus,
I beheld a mountain crest looking down upon two rivers, which the
Sun regards right opposite each day he doth arise, where mighty Rhone
with rapid torrent Xows, and the Saone, in doubt where it should run,
noiselessly washes against the banks with silent shallows. Is this the land
that nursed thy soul?
This bravura piece of mock-tragic verse recalls in subject matter and
phraseology speciWc lines in Hercules Furens (e.g. 1296, 662 V., 762,
711–16, 680, 1108, 1127–30). Such reminiscences underline the con-
trast in Apocolocyntosis between the Xorid tragic register, which the
mock-heroic Hercules employs, and the ludicrous situation in which
he delivers his speech: Hercules is not confronting a fearsome monster
but the doddery and inWrm Claudius. Seneca’s burlesque of his tragic
Hercules (cf. mentis suae non est, ‘he is out of his mind’, Apoc. 7)
suggests not only the priority of Hercules Furens over Apocolocyntosis,
but also the chronological proximity of the two works. As Fitch
observes: ‘The ease with which Seneca adapts phrases from Hercules
Furens suggests that the tragedy was fresh in his mind and had either
been written, or at any rate presented in a recitatio, within a year or
two of 54.’15
The probability, therefore, is that the play was written at a period
when the character and actions of Nero were ‘the obsessive center of
[Seneca’s] life’.16 A further tenable inference is that Seneca conceived
it partly as a seasonable and salutary warning to the adolescent
imperial heir about the importance of moderate government and
self-restraint. In form and subject the lesson was well suited to his
pupil’s histrionic tastes. Nero’s fondness for performing in public is
legendary, and Suetonius tells us that ‘Mad Hercules’17 was a favour-
ite piece in the emperor’s tragic repertoire:

15 Fitch (1987), 53. 16 Stambler (1986), 35–8, at 38.

17 Fitch (1987), 49, n. 70 indicates: ‘One cannot tell whether the role of mad
Hercules enacted by Nero came from a tragedy, nor whether it predated Sen. HF.
Certainly it was not the role created by Seneca, as it required Hercules to be bound
with chains.’
58 ‘Let the monster be mine’
Inter cetera cantavit Canacen parturientem, Oresten matricidam, Oedipo-
dem excaecatum, Herculem insanum. In qua fabula fama est tirunculum
militem positum ad custodiam aditus, cum eum ornari ac vinciri catenis,
sicut argumentum postulabat, videret, accurrisse ferendae opis gratia. (Nero
21. 3)18
Among other parts he sang Canace in Labour, Orestes the Matricide,
Oedipus Blinded, and Mad Hercules. In which drama [Mad Hercules]
they say that a young recruit, posted to guard the entrance, when he saw
him Wtted out and bound with chains, as the theme required, hastened forth
to render assistance.
Nero’s identiWcation with Hercules did not end there. He had coins
minted inscribed with the legend ‘Herculi Augusto’, and sought
comparison with the hero’s superhuman strength by artfully staging
battles in imitation of the labours:
Destinaverat etiam, quia Apollinem cantu, Solem aurigando aequiperare
existimaretur, imitari et Herculis facta; praeparatumque leonem aiunt,
quem vel clava vel brachiorum nexibus in amphitheatri harena spectante
populo nudus elideret. (ibid. 53)
Because he was reckoned to rival Apollo in singing and the Sun in chariot-
driving, he had likewise determined to emulate the achievements of Hercu-
les; and they say that a lion had been prepared, which he could crush naked
in the arena of the amphitheatre, with the people looking on, either with a
club or by the clasping of his arms.
Herculean impersonation was an idiosyncrasy shared by other
Roman emperors and featured by historians as a metaphor for
megalomania and tyrannical excess.19 Dio reports that Caligula (ad
37–41) impersonated Hercules (and other deities) as a means of
demanding that he be worshipped on earth as a god and of giving
himself a pretext for his Olympian proXigacy:
ŒÆd H b læøÆ H
b Łe ÆPe Iƌƺø,
ØH Kæ:
Mı b ªaæ ŒÆd
ææ 
bæ ¼Łæø
 ŁÆØ, ŒÆd fiB &ºfi
ıªªªŁÆØ ŒÆd 
e B ˝Œ ÆFŁÆØ ºª, ˘  r ÆØ

18 See also Dio 63. 9. 4.

19 Herculean impersonation is not peculiar to Rome’s imperial rulers. As Blan-
shard points out in his biography of Hercules (2005, p.xvii), throughout history
‘there has been no end of candidates willing to cast themselves as the ‘‘new Hercules’’ ’.
Historical claimants to Hercules’ lion-skin include Alexander the Great, Charle-
magne, Cardinal Richelieu, Napoleon, and Mussolini.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 59
K
º , ŒÆd ŒÆa F ŒÆd ªıÆØd ¼ººÆØ 
ººÆE ŒÆd ÆE I
ºÆE
 ºØÆ ıEÆØ
æÆÆ, ŒÆd —Ø
H ÆsŁØ, ‹Ø F ŁÆº 
æ ı,    ˙æÆŒºÆ   ˜Øı    `
ººø  
¼ººı, P ‹Ø f ¼ææÆ Iººa ŒÆd a ŁºÆ, 
ξ. (Roman
History 59. 26. 5–6)
And when some called him a demigod and others a god, he fairly lost his
head. Indeed, even before this he had been demanding that he be regarded as
more than a human being, and was wont to claim that he had intercourse
with the Moon, that Victory put a crown upon him, and to pretend that he
was Jupiter, and he made this a pretext for seducing numerous women,
particularly his sisters; again, he would pose as Neptune, because he had
bridged so great an expanse of sea; he also impersonated Hercules, Bacchus,
Apollo, and all the other divinities, not merely males but also females.
The emperor would go to exceptional lengths to achieve accuracy in
the various parts he assumed: b b ªaæ Łºı
æØ
 øæA ŒÆd
ŒæÆBæÆ ŒÆd Łæ r, b
b Iææø
, ŒÆd Þ
ƺ ŒÆd ºB
j ήd ξ  I

Æ  KæØ (‘Now he would be seen as a woman,
holding a wine-bowl and thyrsus, and again he would appear as a
man equipped with a club and lion’s skin or perhaps a helmet and
shield’, ibid. 7). This image of Caligula alternating between bacchan-
tic and Herculean personae, with appropriate paraphernalia, recalls
the Euripidean Herakles whose madness Lyssa choreographs as a
maenadic dance.
The emperor Commodus (ad 180–92), son of Marcus Aurelius,
regarded himself as the very incarnation of Hercules, adding the title
of ‘Roman Hercules’ to his extraordinary nomenclature (the Em-
peror Caesar Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Pius Felix
Sarmaticus Germanicus Maximus Britannicus, PaciWer of the Whole
Earth, Invincible, the Roman Hercules, Pontifex Maximus, Holder of
the Tribunician Authority for the eighteenth time, Imperator for the
eighth time, Consul for the seventh time, Father of his Country),
which Dio accounts an unmistakable symptom of superlative mad-
ness (73. 15. 4). Vast numbers of statues were erected representing
Commodus in the garb of Hercules,20 and it was voted that his age

20 Mussolini’s attempts at Herculean self-representation likewise extended to

statuary. Among his grandiose architectural plans for Rome was a great new forum
to be dominated by a colossal bronze statue of Hercules, its features those of
Mussolini himself and its hand raised in a fascist salute. However, according to Scobie
60 ‘Let the monster be mine’
should be designated the ‘Golden Age’ (Dio refers to the emperor
derisively as y › æıF, y ›  ˙æÆŒºB, y › Ł, ‘this
golden one, this Hercules, this god’, 73. 16. 1). Like Nero, Commodus
is alleged to have re-enacted Herculean labours in the amphitheatre.
According to Dio, the spurious contests he fought involved actual
violence and were engineered expressly to indulge the emperor’s
perverted brand of savagery:
K
Ø
c ºª
ØBºŁ ‹Ø FÆ ØÆ KŁºØ u
æ ›  ˙æÆŒºB a
&ıƺ
Æ: ŒÆd K
ØŁ ª y › ºª, K
Ø


Æ f H


H K fiB
ºØ 
e ı j ŒÆd æÆ Øe ıæA Kæı
IŁæÆ
æÆŒø  ØÆ ÆPE Y

æd a ªÆÆ
æØ
º, ŒÆd

ªªı Id ºŁø  ººØ
f I
ŒØ Æ Þ
ºfiø
Æø ‰
ªªÆÆ. (73. 20. 2–3)
A report spread abroad that he would want to shoot a few of the spectators
in imitation of Hercules and the Stymphalian birds. And this story was
believed, too, because he had once got together all the men in the city who
had lost their feet as the result of disease or some accident, and then, after
fastening about their knees some likenesses of serpents’ bodies, and giving
them sponges to throw instead of stones, had killed them with blows of a
club, pretending that they were giants.
These examples of Herculean impersonation and self-mythiWca-
tion are illustrative of Braden’s deWnition of imperial derangement as
‘in great part the derangement of the classical competitive ethos with
nowhere to go—having survived, in a sense, its own culmination.
Furor is heroic anger diVused uncontrollably when the honoriWc
borders it had once maintained become elusive and unreal. . . . Seneca
depicts his hero’s madness precisely as a momentum of unstoppable
competitiveness under the spell of his own name.’21
Two passages in particular support the theory that Hercules
Furens is intended, on one level, to correct certain tendencies in the
young Nero that Seneca knew might easily lead to manifold abuses of
power and to the hubristic appropriation of godhead and divine

(1990, 2): ‘When the bronze for a foot had been poured, the project for the statue was
abandoned. Hercules was too expensive.’ Mussolini also commissioned sixty Hercu-
lean statues for his Stadio dei Marmi, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944
Olympic Games, postponed by World War II. Made of white marble, these 12-foot
statues stood atop 6-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. See Mott (2003).
21 Braden (1985), 14–15.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 61
prerogative. The Wrst is Juno’s criticism, at 39–40, that Hercules’
indomita virtus colitur et toto deus j narratur orbe (‘his indomitable
valour is revered, and throughout the whole world he is storied as a
god’). Although the verb colo may simply denote honour or rever-
ence, Juno seems to imply that Hercules is not only fabled as a god
but also worshipped as one. When Hercules appears, he gives sub-
stance to this implication by arrogating to himself a position equiva-
lent to Jupiter’s as an object of prayerful devotion, as though he has
already been deiWed. The second passage is contained in Theseus’
lengthy description of the Underworld (662–827),22 and concerns the
post-mortem judgement of domini and duces:
quod quisque fecit, patitur; auctorem scelus
repetit, suoque premitur exemplo nocens.
vidi cruentos carcere includi duces
et impotentis terga plebeia manu
scindi tyranni. quisquis est placide potens
dominusque vitae servat innocuas manus
et incruentum mitis imperium regit
animaeque parcit, longa permensus diu
vivacis aevi spatia vel caelum petit
vel laeta felix nemoris Elysii loca,
iudex futurus. sanguine humano abstine
quicumque regnas: scelera taxantur modo
maiore vestra.
(735–47)23

22 T. S. Eliot (1951, 69) ridiculed this narrative as an absurdly long and untimely
digression: ‘While Hercules is . . . engaged in a duel on the result of which everybody’s
life depends, the family sit down calmly and listen to a long description by Theseus of
the Tartarean regions.’ However, others have seen the infernal horrors recounted as a
metaphor for the irrational. Galinsky (1972), 172 believes Theseus’ description is ‘the
unparalleled centre piece of the tragedy’, its purpose ‘to reXect Herakles’ state of
mind’. Similarly, Mueller (1980), 24–5 asserts: ‘This mythical world, described in the
gloomiest colours of Senecan rhetoric, is plainly a metaphor for the destructive
psychic reality that the spectator is about to witness.’
23 Hercules himself brieXy echoes this message after the slaying of Lycus: ‘victima
haud ulla amplior j potest magisque opima mactari Iovi, j quam rex iniquus’ (‘No
victim more choice or bounteous could be slaughtered to Jove than an unrighteous
king’, 922–4). John Milton translated HF 922–4 in his pamphlet The Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates, published in 1649 following the execution of King Charles, which
Milton defended: ‘There can be slain j No sacriWce to God more acceptable j Than an
unjust and wicked king.’ On Milton and regicide, see Boehrer (1992), 132–7.
62 ‘Let the monster be mine’
What each man did, he suVers: the crime recoils on its perpetrator, and the
criminal is plagued by the precedent he set. I saw bloodstained leaders
immured in prison, and a ruthless tyrant’s back Xayed by the hands of the
plebs. But anyone who governs mildly, who keeps his hands guiltless as master
of life and death, who conducts a gentle, bloodless reign and spares lives—he
measures the long sweep of a life full of years, and then reaches either heaven
or the happy setting of the blessed Elysian grove, to serve as judge. Avoid
shedding human blood, all you who reign: your crimes are assessed with
heavier penalties.
Seneca’s exclusive focus on sinful rulers is a remarkably un-Euripidean
and un-Virgilian treatment of the traditional theme of infernal pun-
ishments, and, as Fitch asserts, ‘is clearly inXuenced by the political
experience of his age’.24 Lines 739–45, which advocate bloodless and
temperate sovereignty, anticipate Seneca’s advice to Nero in De Clem-
entia, written in December 55/6 when the emperor could still be
swayed by his old tutor and, as a consequence, Rome enjoyed a brief
period of stability and sober administration.25 Boyle remarks of this
passage: ‘It is as if the character has stepped out of the play and is
haranguing the audience (or certain members in it). Seneca could not
be less opaque.’26
‘Hercules,’ declares Stambler, ‘of all Seneca’s great characters,
shows the closest aYnities to Nero’s potential for good and for evil:
cruelty moving into actual violent madness, and then succeeded by
acts of gentle, sweet consideration. Is this Seneca’s portrait of Nero?
Or his hope that Nero might be thus transformed?’27 Certainly,
Hercules’ dual nature and divided potential have distinctly Neronian
overtones. Nero perilously combined youth, vicious ancestry, in-
stinctive depravity, singular energy, and consuming vanity, and his
tutor was keenly aware of how the added circumstance of absolute
power would augment and intensify the danger. Stambler’s ques-
tions, however, solicit too simplistic a response to Senecan Hercules.
A determinedly allegorical reading of the character, which seeks
speciWc correspondences with Nero, is both hazardous and unproW-
table. Hercules Furens is not so much a portrait of Nero as a portrait
of power, one that elicits its elements of design from the world of late

24 Fitch (1987), 311. 25 See esp. De Clementia 1. 7. 1–3 and 1. 11. 2–3.
26 Boyle (1997), 109. 27 Stambler (1986), 35–8, at 38.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 63
Julio-Claudian politics and morality. And, like so much of Senecan
tragedy, it ‘follows a cultural given to its incredible and cataclysmic
conclusion’.28

JUNO’S PROLOGUE (1–124) AND HERCULES’

ENTRANCE (592–639)

Any reading of the madness of Seneca’s Hercules is largely and un-

avoidably contingent upon our interpretation of Juno’s prologue and
Hercules’ behaviour on his Wrst entrance. Analysts of these vital
preparatory scenes have tended towards diametrically opposed con-
clusions. On one side are the many who believe Hercules to be an
impious and hubristic villain, the demented instrument of his own
destruction. Their dissenters, inferior in number, discern in Seneca’s
hero a Stoic sage, a godly human of exemplary pietas and virtus, and a
sane mind persecuted by an insanely hostile goddess. Among the
former group the most extreme position is that of Henry and Walker,
who claim: ‘At no point in the play does Hercules reveal heroic or
impressive qualities of character; he does not reveal even real
strength.’29 Although they see Juno ‘in the same absurd light as her
adversary’,30 Henry and Walker note that, in the prologue, ‘there is no
intention on the part of the dramatist to arouse sympathy for Hercu-
les. He is merely a doer, lacking all discrimination and earning merely
contempt.’31 Bishop construes Juno’s prologue as an ‘adequate report’
of Hercules’ ‘punishable status’, of ‘an oVence committed and
proved’,32 and he portrays Juno herself as a legitimate avenger of the
violated ordo mundi: ‘In Act I Juno plainly tells us that Hercules’ type
of life is tragically outrageous. . . . His physical capacity and accom-
plishments and his psychological readiness are dangerous. That is, the
kind of man Hercules is, coupled with the kind of deeds he does
produces a violence of action which Juno abhors because it is contrary
to the ordo mundi, regardless of the results and intentions of the
doer.’33 In her exposition of the prologue, Shelton goes so far as to

28 Braden (1970), 13. 29 Henry and Walker (1965), 11–22, at 18.

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 17.
32 See Bishop (1966), 216–24, at 216–17. 33 Ibid. 221–22.
64 ‘Let the monster be mine’
remove altogether Juno’s agential function and to redesignate the
goddess as ‘a vivid dramatization of the disorder in the human
mind’.34 According to this construction, Juno’s words describe accur-
ately, and in real time, Hercules’ self-activated descent into madness:
‘Rather than examining the problems of man in an irrational universe,
as Euripides had done, Seneca examines the problems of the irrational
man. Hercules, not the gods, is responsible for his own disaster,
because emotional excess (ambitious pride) has gained dominance
over the rational element in his soul.’35 Common to these negative
interpretations of Hercules’ ‘sane’ behaviour is an understanding of
Seneca’s internalization of the furor, which is communicated in terms
of either a tragic Xaw (hamartia) or a pre-existing psychological
disorder. However, this understanding is founded substantially on a
readiness to accept at face value Juno’s denunciatory allegations.
The Wrst critics to counter this lopsided reading of the prologue
were Motto and Clark, who argued: ‘[Hercules] is, as usual, perse-
cuted by Juno—and persecuted by her for what he is, not for what he
does. It is the function of Juno’s prologue to the play to make their
relationship patently obvious prior to the events of the play. Hence
this deiWc and triumphant Herculean story in the Hercules Furens is
nothing less (and nothing other) than the story of deliberately
oppressed and maligned greatness.’36 They further insist that Hercu-
les cannot be considered impious or hubristic since he is more than
mortal and ‘one among a number of contending gods; he is not
simply to be judged as a man’.37 Having dismissed the notion of
hamartia, they attack the suggestion that Hercules is irrational from
the play’s outset and spurred by megalomaniac aspirations: ‘At no
time when he is sane does he suggest that he will invade the skies or
scale the heavens to seize the reins of power. On the contrary, this is
Juno’s furious premonition and delirious vision (64), which is later
echoed by the maddened Hercules infected by Juno’s own disease
(957–73).’38 Lawall continued and expanded on Motto and Clark’s
thesis when he complained that the ‘ ‘‘naturalistic’’ interpretation of
Hercules’ madness may appeal to twentieth-century psychological

34 Shelton (1978), 23. 35 Ibid. 13–14.

36 Motto and Clark (1981), 101–17, at 111.
37 Ibid. 110. 38 Ibid. 111.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 65
critics, but it fails to account for the literary tradition behind the
Wgure of Juno in Seneca’s play’.39 As he correctly demonstrates,
‘Juno’s opening words place her Wrmly in the Vergilian-Ovidian
tradition’.40 She appears as the vengeful wife unseated from her
celestial throne by a succession of paelices, and as the relentless
enemy of Jupiter’s illegitimate oVspring.
Motto, Clark, and Lawall introduce a necessary caveat about Juno’s
odium and ira, but their concomitant description of Hercules as the
mentally sound and blameless victim of an Olympian vendetta is Xawed
on two counts. First, and rather glaringly, it is actually a description of
the Euripidean Herakles and ignores, therefore, Seneca’s very diVerent
conception and staging of the madness. Secondly, it fails to consider the
Augustan literary tradition behind the characterization of Hercules in
the prologue and in the moments following his return.
The polarity of critical opinion on Hercules’ temperament and
normal state of mind belies both the real complexity of the character
and the essential fact that in Seneca’s world there is no palpable
distinction between good and evil, heroes and villains, for, as Braden
perceives, ‘the mental mechanism is the same’: ‘The dramatic point is
not that good people think this way and bad ones think that way, but
that everyone in sight is thinking in much the same way, and there is
this result. Hence Hercules can perform as both hero and villain
without changing his personality.’41 More recently, Fitch and Boyle42
have recognized that what is stressed throughout the play, and
particularly in the prologue and Hercules’ Wrst scene, is the hero’s
ambivalence and the ease with which his celebrated strength may be
unreasonably and criminally misdirected.
Juno begins her prologue by identifying herself as ‘Soror Tonantis’
(‘Sister of the Thunder God’, 1), a bitter variation of the familiar
formula ‘soror et coniunx’.43 She then scornfully lists the constellations
which have shamelessly immortalized Jupiter’s various amorous
intrigues (6–18). Her grievances are brought up to date with her
allusion to Alcmena’s son (23), the target of her undying enmity:

39 Lawall (1983), 6–26, at 6. 40 Ibid.

41 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 14, n. 3.
42 See Fitch (1987), 15–24 and Boyle (1997), 106–7.
43 Cf. Virgil, Aen. 1. 46 f. (‘regina, Iovisque j et soror et coniunx’) and Ovid, Met. 3.
265 f. (‘si sum regina, Iovisque j et soror et coniunx, certe soror’).
66 ‘Let the monster be mine’
non sic abibunt odia; vivaces aget
violentus iras animus, et saevus dolor
aeterna bella pace sublata geret.
(27–9)
Even so, my hatred will not just evaporate. My mind will aggressively pursue
undying anger, and my Werce resentment will abolish peace and wage eternal
warfare.
Juno’s catalogue of constellations (cf. Ovid’s treatment of the Callisto
story in Met. 2.409 V.) and her pledge of eternal warfare (cf. Virgil,
Aen. 1.8–11, 25–8, and 46–8) form a clear index of the literary
context in which the veracity and objectivity of her subsequent
accusations against Hercules are to be measured.44 The Virgilian-
Ovidian Juno, whom Seneca conjures up in these opening lines, is the
humiliated spouse and rebel warrior whose cherished novercal odium
and perseverance in anger are pathological. She is not motivated by
righteous concern for the ordo mundi but by a fanatical sense of
personal injury. The grandiosity of Senecan Juno’s arraignment of
Hercules (30–88) conforms to her Virgilian-Ovidian persona. She
addresses her stepson as ‘superbe’ (89), and represents his katabasis
and abduction of Cerberus, which she ordered, as the aggressive and
sacrilegious expression of overweening ambition:
nec satis terrae patent:45
eVregit ecce limen inferni Iovis
et opima victi regis ad superos refert.
vidi ipsa, vidi nocte discussa inferum
et Dite domito spolia iactantem patri
fraterna. cur non vinctum et oppressum trahit
ipsum catenis paria sortitum Iovi
Ereboque capto potitur et retegit Styga?
parum est reverti, foedus umbrarum perı̂t,
patefacta ab imis manibus retro via est
et sacra dirae Mortis in aperto iacent.
(46–56)
Even the earth is not room enough. See, he has broken through the gates of
nether Jove, and brings spoils of triumph over that conquered king back to
44 See Lawall (1983), 6–26, at 6–8.
45 Ironically, Hercules echoes this phrase at 605–6: ‘non satis terrae patent j
Iunonis odio’ (‘For Juno’s hatred the earth is not broad enough’).
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 67
the upper world. With my own eyes I watched him, after he had shattered
the gloom of the Underworld and subdued Dis, as he showed oV to his
father spoils won from that father’s brother. Why not drag oV Dis himself,
bound and loaded with chains—the god who drew a lot equal to Jove’s? Why
not rule over captured Erebus, and unroof the Stygian world? It is not
enough to return: the terms governing the shades have been breached, a
way back to earth has been opened from the deep Underworld, and the
sanctities of dread death lie in plain view.
Warming to her subject, she accuses Hercules of planning to
commit a still more Xagrant oVence (‘magna meditantem’, 75)—an
invasion of the heavens and seizure of his father’s sceptre:
caelo timendum est, regna ne summa occupet
qui vicit ima—sceptra praeripiet patri.
nec in astra lenta veniet ut Bacchus via;
iter ruina quaeret et vacuo volet
regnare mundo. robore experto tumet,
et posse caelum viribus vinci suis
didicit ferendo; subdidit mundo caput
nec Xexit umeros molis immensae labor
meliusque collo sedit Herculeo polus.
immota cervix sidera et caelum tulit
et me prementem. quaerit ad superos viam.
(64–74)
It is heaven we must fear for—that after conquering the lowest realm he may
seize the highest. He will usurp his father’s sceptre! And he will not reach the
stars by a gradual approach, like Bacchus: he will forge a path by destruction,
and he will want to rule in an empty sky. Swollen with conWdence in his well-
tested might, he has learnt through bearing the heavens that his strength can
conquer them. When he bent his head to support the sky, the toil of that
immense weight did not bow his shoulders; no, the Wrmament rested more
securely on Hercules’ neck. Without budging, his back supported the stars
and heavens—and my pressure. Yes, he is seeking a path to the gods.
Shelton contends that these lines chart ‘the progressive stages in the
development of Hercules’ pride, ambition and madness’, and provide
‘an explanation of a psychological development’.46 This contention
takes for granted Juno’s status as a prescient and objective observer. It

46 Shelton (1978), 21.

68 ‘Let the monster be mine’
also relies on an erroneous interpretation of the signiWcance of the
shift in tense from ‘quaeret’ (67) to ‘quaerit’ (74):
Juno describes a sequence of events and thoughts in Hercules’ mind, and, as
she speaks, the point of time moves forward rapidly. First she fears that
Hercules, Wlled with conWdence about his strength, may challenge Heaven
(iter ruina quaeret, 67) and seize power from Jupiter (sceptra praeripiens
patri, 65). Next she states that he is actually challenging Heaven (quaerit ad
superos viam, 74). Juno’s words reXect the change in Hercules’ own attitude.
The shift in tense from quaeret (future) to quaerit (present) . . . signiWes that
dramatic time has advanced in this scene, from Hercules’ return from the
Underworld to his insane attack on Heaven.47
‘Quaerit’ does not signify an actual development, either temporal or
attitudinal. Rather, it is a generalizing present, and represents, at this
stage at least, an unwarranted inference on the part of hostile Juno,
based on Hercules’ deeds of prowess (‘robore experto’, 68). The sole
progression, which the shift in tense does chart, is that taking place in
Juno’s own mind: ‘What begins as a fear (timendum est) is no sooner
voiced than it turns into an expectation (praeripiet, veniet, quaeret,
volet); its likelihood is then backed up by arguments (68–74) which
turn it into a certainty in the present (quaerit). . . . Juno seems deter-
mined to believe the worst of her stepson, and to Wnd any excuse to
intensify her persecution of him.’48
It has been shown that Juno’s odium and ira in the prologue are
Virgilian-Ovidian topoi, that her portrait of Hercules is an extremely
prejudiced one, and that her fears, and the extravagance with which
she voices them, are disproportionate to the existing or proven threat
posed by Hercules. Nonetheless, when we strip away the conventional
bombast we Wnd, like Galinsky, that Juno’s ‘objections to Herakles
hybris do not lack an objective justiWcation’.49 Seneca’s Hercules is by
no means a straightforward victim of persecution. He too is a product
of Augustan literary tradition and, as such, an ambivalent hero with
dangerous potential. Juno’s version of Hercules’ twelfth labour as a
violent and vainglorious assault on Pluto’s throne has a basis in Aeneid
6, where pius Aeneas’ peaceful mission to the Underworld is contrasted
with Hercules’ belligerence. At 392–6 a wary Charon declares:

47 Shelton (1978), 20. 48 Fitch (1987), 141.

49 Galinsky (1972), 169.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 69
nec vero Alciden me sum laetatus euntem
accepisse lacu. . . .
Tartareum ille manu custodem in vincla petivit
ipsius a solio regis traxitque trementem.
In truth I was not glad to have received Alcides as he passed over the
lake. . . . He by his hand wrested the Tartarean guard in chains from the
throne of the king himself, and dragged him away trembling.
In Horace, Odes 1. 3, Hercules is paired with Daedalus as a hubristic
transgressor of the natural limitations imposed on humankind:
expertus vacuum Daedalus aera
pennis non homini datis:
perrupit Acheronta Herculeus labor.
nil mortalibus ardui est:
caelum ipsum petimus stultitia neque
per nostrum patimur scelus
iracunda Iovem ponere fulmina.
(34–40)
Daedalus made trial of the empty air on wings not given to man: Herculean
toil forced a way through Acheron. There is no such thing as diYculty for
mortals: heaven itself we seek in our folly, and through our sin we suVer not
Jupiter to set down the thunderbolts of his wrath.
Juno’s description of Hercules as an impetuous youth (‘violento
iuveni’, 43–4), exultant in his physical strength and both unthinking
and unrestrained in his fury, also has corroborative parallels in
Augustan poetry. The story of Hercules’ defeat of the Wre-breathing
demon Cacus in Aeneid 8 is an ultimately laudatory foundation
myth, but at the same time an interestingly unsanitized account of
the savagery of the venerated monster-slayer. Here Hercules’ anger,
although vented on an abhorrent creature and not without justiWca-
tion, is shown to be precipitate and excessive in nature, and thus a
species of furor:50

50 In his long poem Contra iudices, Theodulf of Orléans (c.760–821), who was,
next to Alcuin, the most distinguished and learned member of the Carolingian court,
attributes the violent killing of Cacus directly to ‘furor Herculeus’, while downplaying
the justiWcation for the killing. In doing so he has followed the interpretation of the
Hercules–Cacus episode in Book 9 of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, in which Cacus is
cast as a victimized outsider destroyed by Hercules’ bloodlust and megalomania.
Theodulf may also have been aware of Lactantius’ attack on Hercules’ celebrated
70 ‘Let the monster be mine’
hic vero Alcidae furiis exarserat atro
felle dolor: rapit arma manu nodisque gravatum
robur, et aërii cursu petit ardua montis.
(219–21)
Hereupon with black bile the wrath of Alcides blazed out in madness: he
seized in his hand his weapons and his heavily knotted club, and rushed with
speed at the top of the lofty mountain.
ecce furens animis aderat Tirynthius omnemque
accessum lustrans huc ora ferebat et illuc,
dentibus infrendens.
(228–30)
Behold! the Tirynthian drew near, frenzied with wrath, and, surveying every
entrance, turned his face this way and that, gnashing his teeth.
non tulit Alcides animis, seque ipse per ignem
praecipiti iecit saltu, qua plurimus undam
fumus agit nebulaque ingens specus aestuat atra.
hic Cacum in tenebris incendia vana vomentem
corripit in nodum complexus, et angit inhaerens
elisos oculos et siccum sanguine guttur.
(256–61)
In his wrath Alcides did not put up with this, and with a headlong leap he
hurled himself through the Wre, where the smoke pushes its wave forward in
a great mass and the vast cave heaves with a black mist. Here he seized Cacus
as he was vomiting forth vain Wres in the darkness, clasping him as in a knot,
and, clinging, throttled him till the eyes squeezed out and the throat was
drained of blood.)
In the tale of Hercules’ battle with the river Achelous for the hand of
Deianira, in Metamorphoses 9, Ovid paints a similar image of a hero
quick to anger and unmerciful. Invincible Hercules is boastful of his
might and contemptuous of his rival’s eloquence:
strength in De Divinis Institutionibus 1. 9: ‘Surely, he who subdues a lion is not to be
considered stronger than he who subdues anger, the wild beast shut up within
himself. . . . Excited by rage and madness, this same Wgure slew his wife together
with his children—and men think him a god!’ (trans. McDonald (1964), 40–2).
Nees (1991), 30 states: ‘Theodulf ’s Hercules is a hero whose virtue is ambiguous and
tainted. . . . Theodulf has drastically condensed the Vergilian passage of nearly one
hundred lines down to ten and condensed it in such a way that the brutality of
Hercules’ retribution is dramatically highlighted.’
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 71
accensae non fortiter imperat irae,
verbaque tot reddit: ‘melior mihi dextra lingua.
dummodo pugnando superem, tu vince loquendo’
congrediturque ferox.
(28–31)
Not manfully did he control his inXamed rage, and he replied in so
many words: ‘My right hand is better than my tongue. You prevail
by speaking, provided that I overcome by Wghting’, and he came at me
Wercely.
‘Dextra’ (29) in this context provides an illuminating key to under-
standing the ambivalent nature and dual potential of Seneca’s
Hercules. Boyle notes that the words manus and dextra ‘dominate
the linguistic texture of this play [HF] as of no other, and pervade
most especially Hercules’ own dialogue and the descriptions by
others of Hercules’ power’.51 The mighty hand of Hercules has rid
the world of monsters and brought peace and civilization to the
ends of the earth (Pax est Herculea manu j Auroram inter et
Hesperum, 882–3), but it ‘is also the instrument of anger, violent
aggression and narcissistic, megalomaniacal ambition, an amalgam
of passions or aVectus which move easily into madness and geno-
cide’.52 This paradox is illustrated in Metamorphoses 12, where
Nestor is made to recall Hercules’ slaughter of his brothers and
his career of destruction in the Peloponnese. The old king is still
full of grief and rage when he reveals to Hercules’ son, Tlepolemus,
his father’s murderous deeds:

quid me meminisse malorum

cogis et obductos annis rescindere luctus
inque tuum genitorem odium oVensasque fateri?
ille quidem maiora Wde, di! gessit et orbem
implevit meritis, quod mallem posse negare. . . .
ille tuus genitor Messenia moenia quondam
stravit et inmeritas urbes Elinque Pylonque
diruit inque meos ferrum Xammamque penatis
inpulit, utque alios taceam, quos ille peremit,
bis sex Nelidae fuimus, conspecta iuventus,

51 Boyle (1997), 106. 52 Ibid. 107.

72 ‘Let the monster be mine’
bis sex Herculeis ceciderunt me minus uno
viribus.
(542–6, 549–55)53
Why do you force me to remember evil things and to tear open a grief that
has been healed by the years, and to acknowledge my hatred and sense of
outrage towards your father? He has of course accomplished things beyond
belief, Heaven knows! and Wlled the earth with beneWts, which I wish I could
deny. . . . [But] that father of yours once razed Messene’s walls and demol-
ished the guiltless cities, Elis and Pylos, and wielded Wre and sword against
my own home. To say nothing of the others whom he slew, there were twelve
of us sons of Neleus, a striking band of youths, and all twelve, save me alone,
fell by Herculean might.
In Book 6 of the Aeneid Caesar Augustus is proclaimed Hercules’
successor:
nec vero Alcides tantum telluris obivit,
Wxerit aeripedem cervam licet, aut Erymanthi
pacarit nemora et Lernam tremefecerit arcu.
(801–3)
Nor, to be sure, did Alcides traverse so much of the earth, even if he pierced
the deer with feet of bronze, or made peaceful the woods of Erymanthus,
and with his bow made Lerna tremble.
This comparison underlines the ambivalence common to both
Wgures in their superhuman achievements. Virgil does not denigrate
or even directly question the greatness of these semi-divine heroes,
but he does ensure that the dark side of such greatness, and its
proximity to tyranny, madness, and other forms of excess, are
never far from the reader’s consciousness. In the prologue of Hercules
Furens Seneca similarly exposes the kinship between imperial great-
ness and excess, albeit through the transparently immoderate view-
point of Juno. The goddess relates the spectacle of Hercules leading
Cerberus through the cities of Greece in terms of a Roman triumph,
with Hercules the conquering imperator and the dog his spolia opima:

53 Homeric Nestor’s reference to this same episode at Iliad 11. 690–3 is sign-
iWcantly less emotional and less condemnatory of Hercules. The account given in
Ovid is in the spirit of Lucretius’ ironical disparagement of the alleged beneWts
conferred by Hercules on humankind (De Rerum Natura 5. 22 V.).
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 73
at ille, rupto carcere umbrarum ferox,
de me triumphat et superbiWca manu
atrum per urbes ducit Argolicas canem.
(57–9)
But he, in his arrogance at having smashed the prison of the ghostly dead, is
celebrating his triumph over me, and high-handedly parading the black
hound through Argive cities.
The verbs ‘triumphat’ and ‘ducit’ are not in themselves pejorative,
and, indeed, resonate with noble Roman values, but here they are
juxtaposed with the adjectives ‘ferox’ and ‘superbiWca’.54 Allowing for
Juno’s bias and overstatement, the juxtaposition of these morally
loaded words urges us to consider the diVerence between triumph
and triumphalism, and to evaluate the reasonableness of Hercules’
actions when he Wnally appears with Cerberus in tow.
Among the many charges brought by Juno against Hercules, one in
particular stands out as veriWable and revealing—her imputation
that he derives perverse enjoyment from her constant animosity
and the cruel tasks she prescribes (crescit malis j iraque nostra fruitur,
‘he grows greater through hardships, thrives on my anger’, 33–4;
laetus imperia excipit, ‘he receives my orders cheerfully’, 42). This
idea that there is something compulsive and unbalanced about the
relish with which Hercules executes each command, and the impa-
tience with which he awaits new challenges, is fundamental to Sen-
eca’s innovative portrait of the hero. Almost immediately on his
return to Thebes Hercules asks:
quid restat aliud? vidi et ostendi inferos.
da si quid ultra est, iam diu pateris manus
cessare nostras, Iuno; quae vinci iubes?
(613–15)
What else remains? I have seen and revealed the Underworld. Assign any
further task, Juno, you have left my hands idle too long: what do you bid me
conquer?
These lines are, of course, laden with dramatic irony, as we know
from Juno that the only thing left for Hercules to conquer is himself
54 The compound adjective superbiWcus is found only here. See Billerbeck (1999),
216.
74 ‘Let the monster be mine’
(nemo est nisi ipse; bella iam secum gerat, ‘There is none but himself.
Now he must war with himself’, 85; se vincat, ‘let him conquer
himself’, 116), that his most terrible labour is imminent. But as well
as being ironic, Hercules’ demands substantiate Juno’s claims at 33–4
and 42, and reveal him to be a driven, restless, and obsessive person-
ality. Hercules’ Wrst speech in the play also establishes that he is a
character who is self-obsessed and autarkic, features which strongly
distinguish him from Euripides’ Herakles. When Euripidean Herakles
arrives home (523 V.), he Wrst greets his house and expresses his joy at
having returned. He is then instantly alert to his family’s desperate
plight and asks his wife what has happened in his absence. By contrast,
Senecan Hercules is preoccupied with his recent and future conquests
and apparently unaware of anyone else’s presence until line 616. He
manifests, moreover, a disposition to megalomaniac fantasy: si placer-
ent tertiae sortis loca, j regnare potui (‘if the regions of the third lot
pleased me, I could have reigned there’, 609–10).
Commentators have made much of Hercules’ alleged bloodthirsti-
ness in spurring himself to action against Lycus:
mactetur impar, hanc ferat virtus notam
Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus.
ad hauriendum sanguinem inimicum feror.
(634–6)
Though not my equal, he must be slaughtered; my valour must bear this
stigma, and Alcides’ Wnal foe must be Lycus. I leave to drain his hateful blood.
Fitch, for example, speaks of ‘the relish which he takes in the task,
reXected in language which verges on the brutal’.55 But, in fact,
Hercules’ statement of revenge is far more succinct and restrained
than the words employed by Euripides’ hero at this point:

æH b r Ø ŒÆd ŒÆÆŒ łø
ı
ŒÆØH ıæ ø, ŒæAÆ
 IØ g
Þłø ŒıH ºŒÆ· ˚Æ
ø
 ‹ı
ŒÆŒf Kæ s
ÆŁÆ K KF
fiH ŒÆººØŒfiø fiH
 ‹
ºfiø ØæÆØ,
f
b
æøE
ØÆæH ÆØ

55 Fitch (1987), 274.

 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 75
ŒæH –
Æ  "e K
ºø ı,
˜æŒ  AÆ ºıŒe ƃÆŁÆØ:
(566–73)
First I shall go and raze to the ground the palace of this new king, I shall cut
oV his unholy head and throw it for the dogs to tear at. Those of the Thebans
whom I have found to be treacherous in spite of being well treated by me,
these I shall overcome with my conquering club. Dispersing others with my
winged arrows, I shall Wll the whole of the river Ismenus with bloody corpses
and the clear stream of Dirce shall run red with gore.
What seems more pertinent is that Hercules’ brevity and comparative
restraint are intrinsic to his restlessness and self-centredness, his lack
of demonstrative aVection for his family:
me bella poscunt: diVer amplexus, parens,
coniunxque diVer. nuntiet Diti Lycus
me iam redisse.
(638–9)
Battle calls me: postpone your embraces, father; wife, postpone them. Lycus
must carry to Dis the news of my return.
He exhibits none of the tenderness towards his children that Herakles
does at 622–36 of Euripides’ play; Hercules’ chief concern is his virtus
(634), and he treats the killing of Lycus as a new labour, a fresh
summons to ruthless action. Herakles, on the other hand, explains
that his extreme bloodthirstiness stems from his love for his family
and his overwhelming need to protect them, a duty which eclipses in
signiWcance the feats of his labours:
fiH ª æ  IØ Aºº j
ÆæØ æc
ήd
ÆØd ŒÆd ªæØ; ÆØæø
Ø·
  ªaæ ÆPf H
 Aºº XıÆ:
ήd
E  
bæ H
 , Y
æ ¥
 
bæ
Ææ,
ŁfiŒØ I · j   ŒÆºe
o
æfi Æ b KºŁE K   º 
¯PæıŁø

ÆEØ, H
 KH ο
PŒ KŒ
ø Ł Æ; PŒ ¼æ  ˙æÆŒºB
› ŒÆººØŒ ‰
æØŁ ºÆØ:
(574–82)
For whom should I protect if not my wife and children and father? Goodbye
to my labours! They are useless in comparison to these. If they, the children,
76 ‘Let the monster be mine’
were prepared to die for their father, I must die in defending them. Other-
wise what shall we say is so glorious about doing battle with a hydra and a
lion on Eurystheus’ orders, if I do not exert myself over the death of my
children? I shall never then be called as I once was, ‘gloriously conquering
Herakles’.
One Wnal observation to be made about Hercules’ ambivalence in
his Wrst scene is that the hero’s own words highlight, with heavy tragic
irony, his dual potential and prepare us for the catastrophic inversion
of roles madness will occasion: Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus
(‘and Alcides’ Wnal foe must be Lycus’, 635). The emphatic juxtapos-
ition of ‘Alcidae Lycus’ reinforces Braden’s point that the mental
mechanism is the same for Seneca’s heroes and villains. Bishop, how-
ever, misapprehends the signiWcance of the similarity when he says that
Hercules and Lycus ‘are men of the same basic quality. Since this is
tragedy, what happens to one is pattern, parallel, precedent for the
other.’56 The real message is surely that Hercules, a greater man than
Lycus—greater in strength, virtue, and achievement—has, in propor-
tion to his greatness, a capacity for transgression and suVering far in
excess of his enemy’s (cf. quicumque regnas: scelera taxantur modo j
maiore vestra, ‘all you who reign: your crimes are assessed with heavier
penalties’, 746–7).

THE MADNESS (926–1053)

Hercules’ transition from hero to villain, his metamorphosis into his

own ‘summus hostis’, is not the sudden, inexplicable event that it is in
Euripides’ play. Euripides’ strikingly un-Aristotelian structure, with
its wrenching use of peripeteia, focuses our attention on the discon-
tinuity between Hercules’ sane and insane behaviour; the deliberate
structural violence emphasizes the dislocation of existing reason and
moral order by a hostile and irrational external force. The emphasis
in Seneca’s structure, however, is on continuity and consistency, and
reXects an original interest in the inward, psychological actuation of
the madness. Critics, like Motto and Clark, who view Hercules in

56 Bishop (1966), 216–24, at 220.

 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 77
much the same light as his Euripidean counterpart, that is, in terms
of ‘deliberately oppressed and maligned greatness’, completely fail to
account for this crucial diVerence in structural emphasis between the
Greek and Roman plays.
The importance of Euripides’ startling central epiphany to the
externalization of Herakles’ madness cannot be overstated. The audi-
ence is in no way prepared during the Wrst half of the play for the
savage upheaval of the second half; the madness is unexpected and
explosive. There is no omniscient deity to prologize and forewarn,
and no indication in Herakles’ early behaviour of incipient madness
or punishable hubris. Although Hera is mentioned in the prologue as
the instigator of Herakles’ labours, Amphitryon concentrates not on
the goddess’ jealous anger but rather on his son’s protracted absence
and the present, increasingly hopeless situation in Thebes. Amphitr-
yon’s prologue leads into a suspenseful rescue drama, the denoue-
ment of which is merely the prelude to an electrifying reversal
initiated by the unannounced and highly dramatic midway appear-
ance of Hera’s emissaries. Euripides’ personiWcation of a reluctant
but chillingly methodical Lyssa makes immediate and unambiguous
both the supernatural causation of Herakles’ temporary psychosis
and the iniquity of the attack. Lyssa vividly activates the madness on
stage, announcing at 867 V. the physical signs of her successful entry
into Herakles’ heart:
j N
· ŒÆd
c Ø Ø ŒæAÆ ƺ
ø ¼

ήd
ØÆæı ºØ EªÆ ªæªø
f ŒæÆ,
I
a
 P øæØ, ÆFæ S K Kº,

Øa ıŒAÆØ
:
Look at him! He is already shaking his head at the start of his race, rolling his
distorted Xashing eyes without speaking. His breathing is uncontrolled like a
bull ready to attack, and he bellows terribly.
Seneca could easily have made Furor a character in his tragedy, but
he chose instead to conWne the level of divine motivation to the
prologue, where Juno summons up from Hell Discordia, Scelus,
Impietas, Error, and Furor. The omission of the interventionist
Wgures of Iris and Lyssa from the scene of Hercules’ insane trans-
formation obscures the boundary between reason and distraction,
78 ‘Let the monster be mine’
and lends psychological realism to the onset of madness which in
Seneca’s version occurs on stage:
—Sed quid hoc? medium diem
cinxere tenebrae. Phoebus obscuro meat
sine nube vultu. quis diem retro fugat
agitque in ortus? unde nox atrum caput
ignota profert? unde tot stellae polum
implent diurnae?
(939–44)
But what is this? Midday is shrouded in darkness. Phoebus’ face is obscured,
though not by clouds. Who chases the daylight back and drives it to its
dawning? Why is this strange night rearing its black head? Why are so many
stars Wlling the heavens in daytime?
The madness of Euripides’ Herakles ends, as it began, violently and as
a result of sudden divine intervention. A phantasmic Pallas Athene
hurls a stone at Herakles’ chest, causing him to collapse into a deep
palliative sleep (1002–6). In Seneca the supernatural element is again
omitted and replaced by a naturalistic loss of consciousness, as
Hercules is tranquillized by exhaustion:
vultus in somnum cadit
et fessa cervix capite summisso labat;
Xexo genu iam totus ad terram ruit,
ut caesa silvis ornus aut portum mari
datura moles.
(1044–7)
His eyes are closing in sleep, his head sinking, his weary neck drooping. Now
his knees bend and his whole body collapses on the ground, as heavily as an
ash tree felled in the woods, or a mass of masonry dropped in the sea to
create a harbour.
In Euripides the moment at which madness overcomes Herakles is
clearly signalled, Wrst by Lyssa herself when she exclaims j N
, and
later by the Messenger, who reports ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931). Both
announcements are followed by detailed accounts of Herakles’ de-
mented physiognomy (867–70 and 932–5). In Seneca’s text this
moment is less precisely and abruptly deWned, largely because the
symptoms of Hercules’ madness are predominantly psychological
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 79
rather than physical. Amphitryon asks Hercules at 952, Quod
subitum hoc malum est? (‘What is this sudden trouble?’), but the
onset of madness is, in fact, gradual and arguably precedes Hercules’
Wrst overt display of delirium, that is, his initial hallucination in
which he envisions a solar eclipse and interstellar warfare. In 1994
Motto and Clark penned a note on lines 926–39 of Hercules Furens
which was eVectively a revisionary addendum to the article they
published thirteen years earlier. They acknowledge in this note that
Hercules’ prayer for alta pax ‘smacks of hubris in the extreme’,57 that
it evinces ‘a host of unusual traits’,58 chieXy supreme naivety and
prodigious ego. In their attempt to rationalize what they regard as
aberrant conduct, Motto and Clark propose that the fantastic aspir-
ations expressed in the prayer suggest that the madness sent by Juno
is already operative at this stage: ‘In short, lines 926–39 portray a
Hercules who is steadily and incrementally becoming more and more
rash, illusionary, and unstable.’59 They legitimately dispute the trad-
itional conjecture that the madness commences at line 939, and their
proposition of an earlier onset is well supported by the evidence of
mental unbalance in the wording of Hercules’ prayer for a new
Golden Age. However, contrary to Motto and Clark, I believe that
the psychological traits exhibited in lines 926–39 are consistent with
Hercules’ characterization earlier in the drama.
The prayer for an impossible peace is, in essence, an ampliWcation
of the obsessive (particularly self-obsessive) and megalomaniac ten-
dencies manifest in Hercules’ Wrst speech at 592–615, which is also a
prayer that evolves into a soliloquy. Hercules’ petition at 926 V.
begins with a general plea for cosmic and terrestrial harmony, but
the speciWcs of this petition, listed at 931–6, are exceedingly unreal-
istic and reveal an irrational desire to arrest the natural order, to
eliminate seasonal and meteorological extremes:
Ipse concipiam preces
Iove meque dignas. stet suo caelum loco
tellusque et aequor; astra inoVensos agant
aeterna cursus, alta pax gentes alat;
ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor

57 Motto and Clark (1994), 269–72, at 269. 58 Ibid. 270.

59 Ibid. 271.
80 ‘Let the monster be mine’
ensesque lateant. nulla tempestas fretum
violenta turbet, nullus irato Iove
exiliat ignis, nullus hiberna nive
nutritus agros amnis eversos trahat.
venena cessent, nulla nocituro gravis
suco tumescat herba. non saevi ac truces
regnent tryanni. si quod etiamnum est scelus
latura tellus, properet, et si quod parat
monstrum, meum sit.
I shall pronounce prayers, ones worthy of Jove and of myself. May heaven
stand in its place, and earth and sea. May the eternal stars pursue their courses
unhindered. May deep peace nurture the nations, may iron be used only in the
harmless toil of the countryside, and may swords be hidden away. May no
violent storm disturb the seas, may no Wre streak down from angry Jove, may
no river fed with winter snows ravage the uptorn Welds. May poisons disap-
pear, and may no deadly herb swell with harmful juices. May no Werce and
cruel tyrants reign. If the earth is even now to produce some wickedness, let it
come quickly; if she is furnishing some monster, let it be mine.
Hercules’ irrationalism is compounded by his hubristic assumption
that he is the sole agent of peace and an invulnerable saviour Wgure
equal to Jupiter (‘Iove meque dignas’,60 927). His assertion of a
proprietary right over any remaining monster recalls lines 613–15
of his Wrst speech, and especially the command ‘da si quid ultra est’.
In both instances Hercules’ words are tragically ironic, but at the
same time symptomatic of his mental instability, his obsessiveness
and manic restlessness. The ‘monstrum’ referred to at line 938 is, of
course, Hercules. As Juno intended, Hercules is to do battle with
himself, the one earthly opponent equal to his strength. Juno
launches the battle and determines its course, but, in eVect, she
does no more than exploit and exacerbate a pre-existing or semi-
latent mania, a fact best illustrated by the content of Hercules’
hallucinations at 939–1038.
The madness of Euripides’ Herakles consists of a single coherent
hallucination. He imagines himself travelling by chariot to Mycenae

60 Boyle (1997), 108 notes that the use of dignus with the ablative ‘may well have
been a mannerism of Nero’s’, and he cites as evidence Suet. Nero 23. 1, in which the
historian claims to quote an imperial rescript from ad 66/7: ‘ut Nerone dignus
revertar.’ Cf. HF 957: ‘dignus Alcide labor.’
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 81
in order to kill his great enemy Eurystheus. Along the way he
prepares a banquet for himself and wrestles with an imaginary
adversary. Finally, with his bow and club he murders his own wife
and children under the illusion that he is wreaking revenge on the
family of Eurystheus. These demented exploits have a logical se-
quence, and, in a diVerent context and directed at the right target,
the violence, which culminates in serial slaughter, would not be
considered anomalous or excessive. As Barlow states, ‘the illusions
take place within the framework of normal and habitual acts’.61 By
contrast, Seneca’s Hercules experiences a series of hallucinations with
an ‘associative, rather than logical, connection between some of the
visions’.62 ‘It is the relevance of the visions to Hercules’ individual
psychology’, Fitch maintains, ‘that is of primary importance in the
play.’63 His is not simply a case of misdirected normal aggression; the
delusions themselves are megalomaniac and impious. In the same
way as the preceding prayer for peace, the hallucinations reXect on a
grand scale the preoccupations and abnormalities of the hero’s ‘sane’
mind. Juno may be orchestrating the madness as commander-in-
chief in Hercules’ war against himself, but the content of the hallu-
cinations is psychologically consistent with the symptoms of mental
disturbance previously displayed by Hercules. Just like Euripi-
des, Seneca has conceived a madness ‘which is Wtted to this parti-
cular man’.64
The second of Hercules’ hallucinations, in which he plans an all-
out assault on heaven, converts his usual obsession with new chal-
lenges and punitive action, and his self-equation with Jupiter (cf. 907,
914, 922–4, 927), based on his promised deiWcation, into explicit
Oedipal aggression towards his father:
Perdomita tellus, tumida cesserunt freta,
inferna nostros regna sensere impetus:
immune caelum est, dignus Alcide labor
in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar,
petatur aether: astra promittit pater.
—quid, si negaret? non capit terra Herculem
tandemque superis reddit. en ultro vocat

61 Barlow (1996), 165. 62 Fitch (1987), 29.

63 Ibid. 29. 64 Barlow (1996), 166.
82 ‘Let the monster be mine’
omnis deorum coetus et laxat fores,
una vetante. recipis et reseras polum?
an contumacis ianuam mundi traho?
dubitatur etiam? vincla Saturno exuam,
contraque patris impii regnum impotens
avum resolvam.
(955–67)
Earth is subdued, the swollen seas have yielded, the infernal realm has felt
my onslaught: heaven is untouched, a labour worthy of Alcides. I must travel
on high to the lofty expanses of the cosmos, and make for the sky: the stars
are my father’s promise. What if he should now refuse? The earth cannot
contain Hercules, and at last yields him to the world above. See, the whole
company of the gods spontaneously summons me and opens the doors, with
one goddess forbidding it. Will you receive me and unbar the Wrmament? Or
must I tear down the door of the stubborn heaven? Do you still hesitate?
I shall strip oV Saturn’s chains, and against my unnatural father’s unbridled
rule I shall loose my grandfather.
This proposed attack is not indicative of Hercules’ habitual behav-
iour, but it is certainly an extension of his habitual psychology,
especially his habitual megalomania. The phrase ‘dignus Alcide
labor’ (957) recalls Hercules’ assumption of parity with Jupiter at
927 (‘Iove meque dignas’), while his pronouncement ‘non capit terra
Herculem’ (960) recalls Juno’s claim at 46 (‘nec satis terrae patent’), a
belief apparently shared by Hercules (cf. 609). Braden sees in lines
955 V., and in the momentum of Hercules’ mounting insanity, ‘a
logical extrapolation of the pax Herculea’65 (929 V.): ‘The hallucin-
atory but lethal assault on the gods . . . reXects an ugly light back on
the vision of the new golden age: as if that vision itself were merely
imperial megalomania tilting on the edge.’66
At 976 V. Hercules envisages, in typically grandiose fashion, a
rebellion by the Giants:
Quid hoc? Gigantes arma pestiferi movent.
profugit umbras Tityos, ac lacerum gerens
et inane pectus quam prope a caelo stetit!
labat Cithaeron, alta Pellene tremit

65 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 250. 66 Ibid.

 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 83
marcentque Tempe. rapuit hic Pindi iuga,
hic rapuit Oeten, saevit horrendum Mimas.
What is this? The pestilential Giants are in arms. Tityos has escaped the
Underworld, and stands so close to heaven, his chest all torn and empty!
Cithaeron lurches, high Pallene shakes, and Tempe’s beauty withers. One
Giant has seized the peaks of Pindus, another has seized Oeta, and Mimas
rages fearfully.
These images are an extreme manifestation of Hercules’ habitual
obsession with order and chaos and with bringing to account the
recalcitrant forces of cosmic anarchy.
‘Sed ecce’ at 987 marks a sudden shift in this feverish hallucinatory
sequence67 to a less distant and expansive sphere of action, as Her-
cules catches sight of his children and believes they are those of Lycus.
Each of the subsequent murders is apparently carried out oV-stage,
while Amphitryon, with a view of events inside the palace, describes
the killings as they occur. Hercules continues to be audible and
intermittently visible throughout the scene. Having shot the Wrst
boy through the neck with an arrow, he prepares to hunt down his
remaining two sons:
Ceteram prolem eruam
omnesque latebras. quid moror? maius mihi
bellum Mycenis restat, ut Cyclopia
eversa manibus saxa nostris concidant.
(995–8)
I shall unearth the other oVspring and all their hiding-places. Why delay?
A greater struggle awaits me at Mycenae, to overthrow the Cyclopean walls
with my bare hands.
Hercules’ reference, in the middle of his Wlicidal rampage, to a future
confrontation with Eurystheus is characteristic of the restlessness and
overzealousness that delirium has aggravated. He seizes the second son
and dashes him against the palace walls (1005–7). The third son dies of
terror before his father can strike a blow (1023–4). Of considerable
psychological signiWcance is the fact that Hercules confuses Megara
with Juno (Teneo novercam, ‘I have caught my stepmother’, 1018), even
though he is conscious of her relationship to the child being pursued
67 Cf. ‘Sed quid hoc?’ (939) and ‘Quid hoc?’ (976).
84 ‘Let the monster be mine’
(ante matrem parvulum hoc monstrum j occidat, ‘before the mother let
this little monster be killed’, 1020). Just as the delusional plan to depose
Jupiter brought to the surface a latent Oedipal aggression, so the killing
of Megara is the climactic expression of Hercules’ intense resentment
of Juno.68 Seneca introduces into the hallucinations a degree of culp-
ability which is notably absent from Euripides’ text. Herakles’ mad
deeds are criminal but he is innocent of criminal intent; the false reality
he enacts does not in itself deviate markedly from the heroic norm.
Hercules’ imagined reality, on the other hand, entails behaviour far
outside the norm by which even a nonpareil, semi-divine hero is to be
judged. His actions, regardless of context, and directed at the supposed
target, would constitute gross impietas and nefas, and are, to some
extent, a vindication of Juno’s fears. This Senecan theodicy contrasts
strongly with Euripides’ insistence on an absolute lack of justiWcation
for divine anger.

T H E AWA K E N I N G A N D R E H A BI L I TAT I O N
OF HERCULES (1138–1344)

Act Five of Hercules Furens corresponds to lines 1089 V. of Euripides’

play, in which Herakles regains consciousness, is gradually restored
to sanity and cognizance, and forced to come to terms with his
misdeeds. Seneca’s emphasis in these post-madness scenes is once
again on the continuity of Hercules’ attitudes and behaviour with
those of the previous acts. In place of Euripides’ physical portrait of
the waking Herakles, which dwells on the hero’s awareness of his
immediate natural surroundings, his hot unsteady breath, bodily
constraint, and lack of weapons, Seneca presents a psychological
portrait. Herakles, on waking, reasonably infers from the evidence
of carnage nearby, and his unusual state of defencelessness, that he has

68 In the light of the Oedipal paradigm behind Hercules’ hallucinatory attack on

Jupiter, it is also tempting to read his imagined killing of Juno as an oblique reference
to, or an ironic warning of, Nero’s incestuous relationship with Agrippina and the
matricide he eventually commits.
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 85
returned to Hades. Hercules’ sense of dusgnoia (perplexity) and
displacement is typically on a grander scale:
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine
glacialis Ursae? numquid Hesperii maris
extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum?
quas trahimus auras? quod solum fesso subest?
certe redimus.
(1138–43)
What place is this, what region, what tract of the earth? Where am I? Beneath
the sun’s rising, or beneath the turning point of the icy Bear? Can this be the
limit set to Ocean’s waters by the farthest land on the western sea? What air
do I breathe? What ground lies under my weary body? Certainly I have
returned.
The grandiosity of these cumulative interrogatives,69 through which
Hercules expresses his disorientation, is perhaps not unreasonable in
view of his accustomed expeditions to the ends of the earth, but it is
also consistent with his equally accustomed self-aggrandizing modes
of thinking and discourse. Interestingly, in his 1999 translation of the
play Ranjit Bolt drastically reduces the extravagant tone of lines
1138–43 and, therefore, their psychological signiWcance: ‘Where am
I? South or North or West or East? j What is this ground I’m lying on?
At least j I know one thing: I’ve left the lower world.’70
‘So too’, says Fitch, ‘with Hercules’ narcissistic concern with him-
self, or rather with an image of himself as invincible hero.’71 On
discovering that his famous lion-skin and bow are missing, Hercules
construes the loss as a loss of primacy and virtus:
arma quis vivo mihi
detrahere potuit? spolia quis tanta abstulit
ipsumque quis non Herculis somnum horruit?
libet meum videre victorem, libet—

69 Cumulative interrogatives are a peculiarly Roman rhetorical feature, known as

percontatio (a persistent asking). Percontatio is a series of ‘wh-’ questions, as distinct
from interrogatio, which is generally a ‘yes-or-no’ type of enquiry. Quintilian uses
percontatio in the legal sense of interrogation or cross-examination (Insitutio Oratoria
5. 7. 27).
70 Bolt (1999), 62. 71 Fitch (1979), 240–8, at 243.
86 ‘Let the monster be mine’
exsurge, virtus! quem novum caelo pater
genuit relicto? cuius in fetu stetit
nox longior quam nostra?
(1153–8)
Who could strip my armour from me while I lived? Who stole such mighty
spoils and had no dread of Hercules even in his sleep? I long to see my
conqueror. Rouse yourself, my courage! What new son did my father leave
heaven to sire? For whose begetting was night delayed longer than mine?
The emphatic placement of the personal pronoun, which forms part
of the dative of disadvantage ‘vivo mihi’ (1153), and the pointed
reference to ‘Herculis’ (1155) and ‘meum victorem’ (1156), show
plainly Hercules’ egocentric perspective of the situation. Similarly,
when Hercules recognizes his dead wife and children, his response to
the murders is dominated by a sense of outrage at the violation of his
virtus and heroic self-image:
quis Lycus regnum obtinet,72
quis tanta Thebis scelera moliri ausus est
Hercule reverso? quisquis Ismeni loca,
Actaea quisquis arva, qui gemino mari
pulsata Pelopis regna Dardanii colis,
succurre, saevae cladis auctorem indica.
ruat ira in omnes: hostis est quisquis mihi
non monstrat hostem. victor Alcidae, lates?
(1161–8)
What Lycus holds the kingdom? Who dared encompass such crimes in
Thebes once Hercules had returned? All you who dwell in the districts of
Ismenos, the Welds of Attica, and the realms of Dardan Pelops, beaten by two
seas: run to help, point out the source of this cruel carnage. My anger must
pour out on all: my enemy is anyone who does not identify my enemy. Are
you hiding, conqueror of Alcides?
The emphatically positioned ablative absolute ‘Hercule reverso’
(1163), which has a concessive force, and the phrase ‘victor Alcidae’
(1168) represent the most important aspect of the killings as far as
Hercules is concerned. He measures the enormity of the ‘nefas’
(1159) committed by the perpetrator’s audacity (‘ausus est’, 1162).
72 This line and ‘victor Alcidae’ (1168) recall, with even greater tragic irony,
Hercules’ command at 635: ‘Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus.’
 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 87
Hercules’ ensuing call to action is also ‘in character’. At 1175 he
orders Amphitryon and Theseus to postpone their tears (diVerte
Xetus), recalling closely his injunction to father and wife, at 638–9,
‘diVer amplexus’. In these parallel instances Hercules’ obsessive haste
in administering retributive violence takes precedence over expres-
sions of love or grief between himself and his family. Later, in a brief
but moving moment of self-analysis, he curses his sacriWce of human
tenderness to the heroic condition, and speciWcally his inability to
weep as a father:
Pectus o nimium ferum!
quis vos per omnem, liberi, sparsos domum
deXere digne poterit? hic durus malis
lacrimare vultus nescit.
(1226–9)
O heart too Werce! Who can weep worthily for you children, scattered through-
out the house? This face, hardened by suVerings, is incapable of weeping.
The stichomythia between Amphitryon and Hercules at 1186–91 is
a contracted version of the corresponding exchange at 1111–45 of
Euripides’ Herakles. It involves, moreover, a very diVerent dynamic.
In the earlier text Amphitryon, acting the role of psychotherapist,
slowly and gently leads his son out of his trance-like state and
towards full recognition of his crimes. But in the Senecan sticho-
mythia Amphitryon is merely the voice of caution and grief, and not
the agent of anagnōrisis. Hercules has already discovered for himself
the corpses’ identities, and it is the ghastly evidence of his own
bloodied manus that dramatically betrays the identity of their killer:
Miserere, genitor, supplices tendo manus.
quid hoc? manus refugit: hic errat scelus.
unde hic cruor? quid illa puerili madens
harundo leto? tincta Lernaea est nece.
iam tela video nostra. non quaero manum.
quis potuit arcum Xectere aut quae dextera
sinuare nervum vix recedentem mihi?
ad vos revertor, genitor: hoc nostrum est scelus?
tacuere: nostrum est.
(1192–9)
88 ‘Let the monster be mine’
Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back
from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that
shaft, soaked by a boy’s death? It is steeped in the Hydra’s fatal blood. Now
I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that
bow, what hand Xexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of
you again, father: is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.
By not having Amphitryon as a central unifying presence, and by
drastically reducing Theseus’ part in the rehabilitative process, Sen-
eca has completely altered the structural emphasis and thematic basis
of the Wnal scene. Euripides emphasized philia, human solidarity and
unconditional love, as the keynote in Herakles’ rehabilitation; Seneca
substitutes autarkeia, the hero’s aggressive self-assertion and prized
sense of self-suYciency. Hercules is not saved from suicidal despair
by Theseus’ constancy, wisdom, and willingness to share his friend’s
pollution and suVering (cf. Eur. Her. 1400: ή, 
ı 
·
PŒ IÆÆØ, ‘Wipe away! As much as you like! I do not reject it’).
Rather, his determination to kill himself is checked by Amphitryon’s
desperate counter-threat of suicide, in what Fitch classiWes as a
species of the ‘Passion-versus-Restraint’73 scene:
sic statue, quidquid statuis, ut causam tuam
famamque in arto stare et ancipiti scias:
aut vivis aut occidis. hanc animam levem
fessamque senio nec minus fessam malis
in ore primo teneo. tam tarde patri
vitam dat aliquis? non feram ulterius moram,
letale ferrum pectori impresso induam;
hic, hic iacebit Herculis sani scelus.
(1306–13)
Whatever you decide, do so on the understanding that your glory and the
verdict about you is in a tight and critical position. Either you live, or you
kill. I am holding on my very lips this fragile life of mine, wearied with old
age and no less wearied with troubles. Can anyone be so slow in granting his
father life? I shall not endure further delay, I shall set my breast against the
deadly blade and thrust it in. The crime lying here will belong to the sane
Hercules.

73 See Fitch (1979), 240–8, at 245–6.

 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 89
Several critics have interpreted Hercules’ decision to go on living as
a moral victory, an exemplum of Stoic endurance and Wlial piety.74
But this is another instance of mistaking Seneca’s hero for the Eur-
ipidean Herakles. Herakles’ moving resolution KªŒÆææø 
(‘I shall have the courage to endure life’, 1351) is indeed a moral
victory and a crucial moral progression, but Hercules’ exhortation to
his virtus, ‘vivamus’ (1317), is, at best, an act of delayed and grudging
pietas.
Herakles’ decision to endure the painful companionship of his
bow and club (Her. 1377–85) is symbolic of his advancement to a
more mature and profound type of heroism, one exacting spiritual
strength and courage. In Seneca, Hercules at Wrst determines to
destroy his weapons to atone for his sons’ murders (1231–5), but
he quickly changes tack:
arma, arma, Theseu, Xagito propere mihi
subtracta reddi. sana si mens est mihi,
referte manibus tela; si remanet furor,
pater, recede: mortis inveniam viam.
(1242–5)
My arms, my arms, Theseus, I demand that my stolen arms be quickly
returned. If my mind is sane, give my hands back their weapons; if my
madness remains, father, stand away; I shall Wnd a path to death.
His decision to retain his weapons for the purpose of self-immol-
ation is symbolic not of his moral progress to heroic maturity, but of
precipitate reversion to punitive action. It is also, as Miola points out,
‘an act of self-assertion, a validation of heroic identity. The language
of Seneca’s play, particularly the insistent metaphors of exploration,
suggests the implicit hubris. Hercules’ declaration, ‘‘mortis inveniam
viam’’ (1245, ‘‘I shall Wnd a way to death’’), recalls his last great

74 Motto and Clark (1981), 101–17, at 105, for example, claim ‘the Senecan
Hercules contests not with a Theseus on the grounds of ‘‘friendship’’ and philia,
but with his father over the concepts of kinship, responsibility, honor, and duty.
Seneca’s Hercules is not the old, aristocratic Ajax of Sophocles, who, ‘‘caught in new
and anti-heroic circumstances which degrade him and make him ludicrous . . .
consistently prefers suicide to a life of absurdity in an alien time.’’ Rather, his is
ultimately the heroic commitment to survive, to protect, to endure.’
90 ‘Let the monster be mine’
labour, the Wnding of a way to Hades and back out. It also recalls his
greatest aspiration, the Wnding of a path to the stars (958–61).’75
The Wnal image of Euripides’ Herakles is of a dependent Wgure
who, through immense suVering, has deepened his understanding of
the value of human love and friendship. Underlining this image is the
epholkides (little boats in tow) simile, repeated at 1424, and Herakles’
epigrammatic last words:
‹Ø
b
ºF j Ł Aºº ºø
IªÆŁH

AŁÆØ ºÆØ ŒÆŒH æE.
(1425–6)
Whoever wants to acquire wealth or power rather than good friends is a fool.
In stark contrast, the end of Seneca’s tragedy highlights Hercules’
isolation, his incapacity for loving dependence, and thus his failure to
be fully or genuinely rehabilitated. The hero’s Wnal words are a prayer
for obscurity and death:
redde me infernis, precor,
umbris reductum, meque subiectum tuis
substitute vinclis; ille me abscondet locus—
sed et ille novit.
(1338–40)
Return me, I pray you, to the shades of the Underworld, and reinstate me in
your chains as your replacement. That place will hide me—but it too knows me.
Seneca’s dramatic portrait of the mad Hercules, which introduced
the concepts of psychological causation and moral culpability, was
eVectively a mirror of the excesses of the late Julio-Claudian age. In
reasoning the madness as the furor of imperial overachievement and
absolute power, Seneca also redeWned Hercules’ heroism in Roman
and imperial terms, creating an imperialist Hercules of tragically
divided potential, a Wgure increasingly isolated by megalomania
and destroyed by a sense of selfhood that is unmitigated by self-
knowledge or self-mastery. In Braden’s words: ‘A vision of furor
conquered and enchained yields to a vision of furor beyond all limits
and hope. For the very force that was to restrain the world’s violence

75 Miola (1992), 168.

 ‘Let the monster be mine’ 91
has become, as Blake would say, what it beheld: the emperor is
mad.’76 There is little optimism in this portrait, a symptom of the
palpable inexorability of the times.
Although Hercules Furens is unquestionably a product of the
Senecan world and the Senecan experience, it has had an enormous
inXuence on succeeding generations of playwrights, most notably in
the Renaissance depiction of princely distraction and ambitious
selfhood, and, fascinatingly, in late twentieth- and early twenty-
Wrst-century adaptations of Euripides’ Herakles, beginning with a
version by Archibald MacLeish. The modern theatre seems to have
rediscovered in Seneca’s ambivalent and autarkic hero a powerful
analogy for the mad excess and inexorable conceit of its own day.

76 Braden (1985), 8.
 3
A peculiar compound: Hercules
as Renaissance man

In a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, Roman Hercules

seized upon the Renaissance imagination. His ability to excite won-
der, to be assimilated into diVerent ideologies and artistic media, was
extraordinary. Around him two main traditions evolved, one focus-
ing on his heroic virtue, the other on his madness. In each case he
was a distinguishable type, and it was explicitly as a type that the
Renaissance received Hercules. The principal mode of reception was
allegorical interpretation, its motivating concern what Hercules and
his achievements signiWed morally. Outside the tragic stage, where
Hercules retained a spiritual rather than physical presence, the hero
was transformed from a character or being into an abstract idea.

VIRTUS HEROICA VERSUS FUROR

Renaissance Hercules represents a synthesis of various classical tra-

ditions. As an exemplum of virtus heroica he is also a distillation of
his complex classical self. For the most part he is recognized as a
civilizing hero of superhuman endurance and valour, who rid the
world of monsters and liberated it from chaos. But, unlike his ancient
counterpart, he is a Wgure of startling propriety and intellectual
consequence. Hercules the overreacher, the transgressor of boundar-
ies, becomes a paradigm of moderation. And where his propensity
for excess is apparent, it is justiWed as a manifestation of superior
 A peculiar compound 93
virtue. The newly decorous Hercules conforms to both courtly and
Christian ideals. As the hero of the Wrst two books of Raoul Le Fèvre’s
Le Recueil des hystoires de Troyes (1464),1 he exhibits the moral and
martial virtues of the true knight. What is more, Le Fèvre interprets
many of Hercules’ labours, such as supporting the heavens and
slaying the hydra, as intellectual feats rather than merely physical
exploits. Hercules is also celebrated for his strength of mind in Natale
Conti’s Mythologiae libri decem (1551) and Vincentio Cartari’s Le
Imagini con la Spositione de i Dei de gli Antichi (1556), where his
victories over the monsters and tyrants are explained as triumphs of
the mind over all sorts of vice. Similarly, in his Iconologia (1593)
Cesare Ripa depicts Hercules as a perfect fusion of the three con-
stituent parts of heroic virtue: the moderation of anger; the temper-
ing of greed; and contempt for strife and pleasure. Hercules’ club
accordingly symbolizes reason, while his lion’s skin represents gen-
erosity of mind and the conquest of concupiscence.
In the late Middle Ages Hercules was viewed as a standard-bearer
for the contemplative life. Guido da Pisa, in his Expositiones et Glose
super Comediam Dantis, construed the hostile relations between Juno
and her stepson as a clash between Juno as the active life and Hercules
as the life devoted to contemplation and virtue. This interpretation
contrasts markedly with Seneca’s portrait of a restless, overachieving
Hercules who gives some substance to Juno’s worst fears. However,
beginning with the poetess Christine de Pisan in the early Wfteenth
century, Hercules was adopted as a symbol of the active life, and, as
such, he attracted the attention of the Florentine humanists. His other
appeal to the humanists was as an emblem of eloquence, a quality
with which he was rarely associated in antiquity. Importantly, the
Renaissance concept of eloquence implied not only verbal Xuency but
also cultural aspiration. It could further imply moral goodness: the
notion that to be eloquent one had to be vir bonus. The crusader
Rinaldo in Torquato Tasso’s Allegory of Jerusalem Delivered (1575) is a
Herculean hero who exempliWes active virtue. He is also, incidentally,
an example of virtuous excess.

1 In 1475 William Caxton published a translation of Le Fèvre’s work in England.

Like the original, Caxton’s version enjoyed great popularity.
94 A peculiar compound
The most popular allegorization of Hercules in the Renaissance was
Hercules in bivio. In his quest for happiness at the crossroads of life,
the hero chooses plain Virtue with her steep and rugged path on
his right, and rejects the seductive path of ease and pleasure oVered
by Vice on his left. This parable, which seems to have originated
with the Wfth-century sophist Prodicus and Wrst appears in Xeno-
phon’s Memorabilia, ‘intellectualizes the older concept of the hero as a
redoubtable muscleman by making him an exemplar of reason and
his moral choice a heroic act’.2 SigniWcantly, the story as derived from
Prodicus is ultimately motivated by the pursuit of undying glory and
not by any abstract notion of goodness. In the Renaissance Hercules’
choice was evoked in iconography,3 emblem books, mythographies,
plays, pageants, and educational manuals. Among the artists who
employed this motif were Dürer, Raphael, Rubens, Poussin, and
most famously Annibale Carracci.4 Emblem 40 of GeVrey Whitney’s
A Choice of Emblemes (1586) shows Hercules at the Forum Romanum
courted by the opposing goddesses Minerva and Venus. In The Pil-
grim’s Progress Bunyan has the pilgrim Christian confront such a
choice, and in The Merchant of Venice Bassanio’s choice of the lead
casket is just such a choice as Hercules had made before him. For
obvious reasons, Hercules in bivio became associated with ‘the onto-
logical condition of the Christian torn between the forces of good
and evil’.5 He was, moreover, perceived as a model of Christian
asceticism, his choice serving as a parable for the rejection of the
body in favour of the spirit. Naturally enough, Hercules’ labours, his
descent into hell, and his apotheosis were also Christianized during
the Renaissance, and Hercules himself was often identiWed with
Christ. In his Hymne de l’Hercule Chrestien, the French poet Pierre
de Ronsard controversially proclaimed Hercules another Christ.
Dante compared Hercules’ katabasis with that of Christ, while at the
climax of Paradise Regained, Milton used the defeat of Antaeus by
Hercules as a simile for Christ’s victory over the Tempter (4.562–71).

2 Zimmermann (2006), 356–78, at 364.

3 Reid (1993), 527–9 lists 30 such depictions between 1500 and 1650. Panofsky
(1930) remains the most important study of the iconography of Hercules in bivio.
4 For an analysis of Carracci’s iconic painting of the Choice of Hercules for the
Farnese ceiling, see Braider (2004), 111–43.
5 Zimmermann (2006), 356–78, at 364.
 A peculiar compound 95
Part of the Renaissance process of purifying and moralizing the
Hercules myth was a rationalization of the hero’s madness in suitable
allegorical terms. In keeping with his chivalric conception of Hercu-
les, Le Fèvre conceived Hercules’ furor as the stuV of romantic tragedy:
the courtly lover is roused to anger by Linceus’ (Lycus’) false accusa-
tions of adultery, and kills both him and the innocent Megara. A more
extreme attempt to justify the violence was made by the Florentine
humanist Coluccio Salutati. In De Laboribus Herculis (c.1406), which
he began in response to a request from a friend to explain Seneca’s
Hercules Furens, he reasoned Hercules’ madness as a kind of righteous
excess beyond the understanding of lesser men, but intrinsic to his
quest to overcome the terrestrial impedimenta to spiritual perfection:
Inter hec [sic] autem furere Hercules videtur quia mundana abicientes
eternorum amore in nostris oculis insanire videntur. Unde Pater Augustinus:
‘Necesse est ut ab impiis et dissimilibus patiantur opprobria et despiciantur
tanquam stulti et insani qui presentia bona perdunt et invisibilia ac futura
sibi promittunt.’6
Among these Hercules seems to rage because those who throw oV mundane
things out of love for eternal things seem to be insane in our eyes. Whence
Father Augustine: ‘It is necessary that they who lose present goods and
dedicate themselves to invisible and future goods endure the scorn of the
impious and those unlike them and be despised as foolish and insane.’
The slaying of Megara is, therefore, extolled as a victory of the soul
over the Xesh, while Hercules’ three sons are murdered because they
symbolize irascibility, sensuality, and concupiscence. However, more
or less concurrent with the tradition of Hercules moralizatus was the
so-called Hercules furens tradition, which, in contrast to the former,
centred precisely on the inconsistencies and darkest recesses of the
myth, on the hero as raving misWt and murderer.
In his study of ‘The Madness of Hercules and the Elizabethans’,
Rolf Soellner reveals that the Hercules furens tradition is an amal-
gamated tradition and by no means the preserve of tragedy: ‘The
tradition of the mad Hercules as it evolved from the ancients to the
Renaissance is a peculiar compound. While Seneca’s Hercules furens
was its center, various theories and explanations arose, partly around

6 Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, in Ullman (1951), ii. 596–7.

96 A peculiar compound
it, partly independent of it, strangely blending literary, medical,
philosophical, and popular ideas.’7 The hero of the Hercules furens
tradition, in its popular and generic sense, is indeed a remarkably
composite character, a character ‘importantly, but not exclusively,
Senecan in shape’.8 There is, for example, the melancholic genius who
gives rise to the proverbial morbus Herculanus; the histrionic Hercu-
les, comically blustering exponent of English Seneca; and a Hercules
Oetaeus maddened by the blood of Nessus. Layered on top of this
composite tradition are a number of distinct motifs derived from
Seneca’s Hercules Furens.

M OR BUS HE RCULANUS: T H E M E L A N C H O L I C H E RO

In Renaissance popular imagination Hercules furens was identiWed

with a particular medical condition which, in turn, was associated
with madness. He was the archetypal melancholic hero. As with
Renaissance Hercules in general, the pathological diagnosis of Her-
culean furor did not originate in the Renaissance but was actually a
continuation and synthesis of ancient thinking. One of the central
tenets of the Hippocratic Corpus9 is a theory based on the four
humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile (respectively
linked to the qualities of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness), and,
although the Corpus contains no systematic discussion of melancho-
lia, it does identify melancholia (along with haemorrhoids, dysentery,
and skin eruptions) as a disease caused by an excess of black bile. In
the treatise De Morbo Sacro, humoral theory is applied to epilepsy,
which is pronounced a natural, not a ‘sacred’ disease. An epileptic Wt is
said to occur when a surplus of cold phlegm from the brain Xows into
the warm blood in the veins. The suVerer loses his speech and foams at
the mouth, his hands are contracted, and the eyes contorted. In De
Morbis Mulierum (1. 7) the term  ˙æ ŒºØ  appears as an

7 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314. 8 Miola (1992), 124.

9 The Hippocratic Corpus consists of some 60 medical treatises collected under
Hippocrates’ name. The majority of these are dated to the later decades of the Wfth
century bc or early decades of the fourth century.
 A peculiar compound 97
eponym of epilepsy, reXecting a common belief that Herakles suVered
from the disease.10
Euripides contributed, in no small part, to the dissemination of
this belief. For, while he avoids any medical rationalization of the
madness and emphatically presents the hero’s aZiction as an external
and temporary condition senselessly inXicted by vengeful gods, the
physiognomy and symptoms, such as
ØÆæ (or rolling of eyes),
which he gives the demented Herakles closely resemble a clinical
description of an epileptic Wt:
K æÆEØ O ø KŁÆæ
ÞÆ  K ZØ ÆNÆH
Æ KŒƺg
Iæe ŒÆÆ hæØ ªØ
.
(932–4)
His face contorted, he rolled his eyes so that their bloodshot roots protruded
and froth dripped down his Wne-bearded chin.
Barlow has noted the similarities between this account and the
Hippocratic symptomatology of epilepsy in De Morbo Sacro (7).11
Von Staden, however, sees these correspondences as limited. He
insists that they ‘could equally well be read as instances of Euripides’
deployment of tragic topoi used to describe pathological mental
conditions’,12 and he cites examples from other Euripidean tragedies
where one or more of these symptoms occur. Yet in the Herakles it is
the presence of all these symptoms in the one character that is
remarkable.
In the Problemata Physica, which were ascribed to Aristotle and as
such enjoyed considerable fame during the Renaissance, Herakles is
held to be the epitome of melancholic genius, in support of the
assumption that brilliance and achievement are always associated
with black bile:
˜Øa 
 ‹Ø
æØd ªªÆØ ¼
æ j ŒÆa غÆ j
ºØØŒc
j
Ø j Æ ÆÆØ ºÆªºØŒd Z; ŒÆd ƒ b oø u ŒÆd

10  ˙æ ŒºØ  and Herculanus or Herculeus morbus are regularly listed in

proverb anthologies. See Dicaearchus, quoted by Zenobius 4. 26; Diogenianus 5. 8;
Apostolius 8. 64; Pseudo-Plutarch, Proverbia Alexandrinorum 36.
11 See Barlow (1996), 166, on 933–5. 12 Von Staden (1992), 131–50, at 139.
98 A peculiar compound
ºÆ ŁÆØ E I
e ºÆ ºB IææøÆØ; x  ºªÆØ H 
æøœŒH a
æd e  ˙æÆŒºÆ; ŒÆd ªaæ KŒE ØŒ ªŁÆØ Æ B
ø;
Øe ŒÆd a IææøÆÆ H K
غ
ØŒH I
 KŒı
æªæı
ƒ IæÆEØ ƒæa : ŒÆd 
æd f
ÆE
Æ ŒÆØ ŒÆd 
æe B
IÆø K ˇYfi  H ºŒH ŒıØ ª F
ºE· ŒÆd ªaæ
F ªÆØ
ººE I
e ºÆ ºB. (30. 935a)
Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, politics, poetry, or
the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by
the diseases arising from black bile, as the story of Herakles among the
heroes tells? For Herakles seems to have been of this character, so that the
ancients called the disease of epilepsy the ‘sacred disease’ after him. This is
proved by his frenzy towards his children and the eruption of sores which
occurred before his disappearance on Mount Oeta; for this is a common
aVection among those who suVer from black bile.
This passage demonstrates how Hippocratic humoral theory shaped
non-medical as well as medical views of melancholy. Herakles is here
stated to have suVered from two speciWc melancholic diseases, epi-
lepsy during the murder of his family, and dermatological eruptions
while on Mount Oeta. The author of the Problemata is thus attrib-
uting the two explosions of Herculean furor, familiar from tragedy, to
the same source, and, in line with Hippocratic thinking, reasoning
the madness in physiological rather than supernatural terms.13
Humoral theory provided a general model for European concep-
tions of disease and illness, and indeed the diagnosis and prognosis of
mental disorders, up to the seventeenth century.14 Certainly the
Renaissance understanding of madness, including Herculean furor,
was greatly inXuenced by the humoral and corporeal discourses on
the subject found in Hippocratic, Galenic, and Aristotelian texts. In
his notes to Act 4 of Hercules Furens, Thomas Farnaby, the Wrst
English editor of Seneca’s tragedies, deWned the furor as wild delirium

13 IdentiWcation of certain states of melancholy with madness was common

among the ancients. In Tusculanae Disputationes (3. 5. 11), Cicero, having seen
ºÆªºÆ so often associated with temporary insanity, assumes that the Greek
term is equivalent to the Latin furor: ‘Graeci autem manı́an unde appellent, non facile
dixerim; eam tamen ipsam distinguimus nos melius quam illi. Hanc enim insaniam,
quae iuncta stultitiae patet latius a furore disiungimus. Graeci volunt illi quidem, sed
parum valent verbo: quem nos furorem, melagcolı́an illi vocant.’
14 On Renaissance conceptions and deWnitions of madness, see Salkeld (1993), esp.
7–33, and Neely (2004), esp. 1–26.
 A peculiar compound 99
and melancholy. Hercules’ sensation of darkness at 939 V., he rea-
soned, was caused by excretions of black bile rising from the stomach
to the brain: ‘Veluti caligant oculi a sublato de ventriculo vapore:
ita ubi halitus turbidi ab atra bile sursum feruntur concipiunturque in
cerebri venis, imaginatio laeditur unde falso iudicant sensationes: &
insequitur ŁæØ

ÆæÆæıc & ºÆªºÆ, quae tamen summis
ingeniis plerunque accidit. sic Herculi coelum falsum.’15 Hercules
must fall asleep, Farnaby continued, and exhale the black humour
before his furor can subside: ‘Ita quamvis Herculis ºÆªºØŒe

Ł somno mulceatur ac sedetur non tamen plane atrum atque

acrem humorem exspiravit.’
Like the eponymous  ˙æ ŒºØ  in the ancient world, morbus
Herculanus (and its variants) became during the Renaissance a prov-
erb for epilepsy or ‘the falling sickness’, and, as such, was lexicograph-
ically enshrined. Soellner notes that the term ‘was regularly listed in
Renaissance Latin dictionaries and explained in standard reference
works’.16 Erasmus accepted the term Herculanus morbus in his Adagia
(2.4.27), adding an explanatory essay in which (like Seneca) he gave
a human as well as divine reason for Hercules’ aZiction: the strain
of the twelve labours added to the threats of Juno. Thomas Cooper’s
Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1563) and Thomas Tho-
mas’s Dictionarium (1596) both list ‘Herculanus morbus’ as ‘The
Falling Sickness’. In Book 7, Chapter 10 (‘De epilencia vel de morbo
caduco’) of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, one of
the great encyclopedias of the High Middle Ages, it is claimed that
epilepsy is named ‘morbus Herculeus’ because the disease ‘is strong as
Hercules was’. This encyclopedia of natural science helped to codify
and formalize humoral theory, and it is worth noting that Batman’s
1582 English translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum has often been
referred to as ‘Shakespeare’s Encyclopaedia’.
The identiWcation of Hercules with epilepsy was not conWned to
medical and encyclopedic texts. The furor displayed by at least two
Herculean heroes in Elizabethan drama is diagnosed as the falling
sickness. As Iago’s insinuations of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness take
their toll, Shakespeare’s Othello suVers a complete physical and
emotional collapse. He trembles and raves at the ‘ocular proof ’ of

15 Farnaby (1613), 39. 16 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314.

100 A peculiar compound
Desdemona’s lost handkerchief, before falling into what the stage
directions describe as a ‘trance’. When Cassio appears on the scene,
Iago explains:
My lord is fallen into an epilepsy;
This is his second Wt, he had one yesterday. . . .
The lethargy must have his quiet course,
If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness.
(iv. i. 50–1, 53–5)
John Marston’s melancholic hero Antonio appears to be an amalgam
of Seneca’s Hercules furens and Hercules Oetaeus. He is given to
extravagant outbursts of grief and rage, which are frequently patho-
logical in nature:
antonio [aside] O how impatience cramps my crackèd veins,
And curdles thick my blood with boiling rage!
O eyes, why leap you not like thunderbolts
Or cannon-bullets in my rival’s face?
Ohimè infelice misero, o lamentevol fato!
[He falls to the ground]
alberto What means the lady fall upon the ground?
rosaline Belike the falling sickness.
(Antonio and Mellida, ii. i. 195–201)
In his passion he resembles Hercules with the shirt of Nessus upon him:
A sudden horror doth invade my blood;
My sinews tremble, and my panting heart
Scuds round about my bosom to go out,
Dreading the assailant, horrid passion.
(iv. i. 278–81)
Antonio himself makes the Herculean comparison explicit:
Behold a prostrate wretch laid on his tomb;
His epitaph thus: Ne plus ultra.17 Ho!
Let none out-woe me; mine’s Herculean woe.
(Antonio’s Revenge, ii. ii. 132–4)

17 ‘Ne plus ultra’ is the motto purportedly inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules, the
limits of the classical known world.
 A peculiar compound 101
‘Quite possibly’, Soellner surmises, ‘Marston used ‘‘Herculean woe’’
in the sense of ‘‘morbus Herculanus’’ and as equivalent to ‘‘falling
sickness’’.’18

‘ERCLES’ VEIN’: THE HAM ACTOR

In An Apology for Actors (1612), a spirited defence of the theatre

against Puritan attacks, Thomas Heywood (1573–1641)19 records a
strange, improbable story about the histrionic exploits of Julius
Caesar. Towards the end of the second book, entitled ‘Of Actors
and their ancient Dignitie’, he says:
Iulius Caesar himselfe for his pleasure became an Actor, being in shape, state,
voyce, iudgement, and all other occurrents, exterior, and interior excellent.
Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him, that
with general applause in his owne Theater he played Hercules Furens, and
amongst many other arguments for his compleatnesse, excellence, and
extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him. Being in the
depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting
Lychas, who before had from Deianeira brought him the poysoned shirt, dipt
in the bloud of the Centaure Nessus: he in the middest of his torture and
fury, Wnding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appointed him to creep
into of purpose) although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill
him by some false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carryed
away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of
the madnesse of Hercules to which he had fashioned all his native spirits, that
he slew him dead at his foot, and after swoong him terque quaterque (as the
Poet sayes)20 about his head.21
The Hercules Furens which Julius Caesar is claimed to have per-
formed is notably not the story dramatized by Euripides and Seneca,

18 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 320.

19 A possible relation of Jasper Heywood’s (translator of Seneca’s Hercules Furens),
but little is certain about his birth, family background, or formative years. Clark
(1931) remains the authoritative source for information about Heywood’s life and
canon. Other biographical and critical studies of the dramatist include Cromwell
(1928), Boas (1950), Grivelet (1957), and Baines (1984).
20 The phrase ‘terque quaterque’ is taken from Ovid, Met. 9. 217.
21 Heywood (1612; repr. 1973), E3̆.
102 A peculiar compound
but a version, after Ovid, of the madness of Hercules Oetaeus—a
version which Heywood himself adapted for the stage (see below).
But the real signiWcance of this curious anecdote lies not in what it
reveals about alternative traditions of Hercules’ madness or about
Julius Caesar, who is unlikely to have ever indulged in Herculean
impersonation on stage in the fashion of the aesthetic Nero. Rather, it
lies in the revelation of a particular theatrical tradition of Hercules
furens in the Renaissance, a tradition synonymous with frenzied
overacting. The Roman grammarian and philosopher Macrobius
had recorded a similar tale, which was well known in the Renaissance,
about the pantomime dancer Pylades of Cilicia being transported
to risible extremes of simulated rage in his portrayal of Herakles
mainomenos:
Cum in Herculem furentem prodisset et non nullis incessum histrioni
convenientem non servare videretur, deposita persona ridentes increpuit:
øæ; ÆØ OæFÆØ. hac fabula et sagittas iecit in populum.22
(Saturnalia 2. 7. 16–17)
When he had come on to dance The Madness of Hercules, some of the
spectators thought that he was not keeping to action suited to the stage.
Whereupon he took oV his mask and rebuked those laughing at him with the
words: ‘Fools, my dancing is intended to represent a madman.’ It was in this
play too that he shot arrows at the spectators.
Thus, in his reference to Caesar being ‘carryed away with the violence
of his practised fury’, Heywood is continuing an ancient tradition
about a furious stage Hercules. In his refutation of Heywood’s
Apology, the critic I.G. (John Greene), far from disputing the veracity
of the Caesarean anecdote, uses the probability of such a spectacle
repeating itself as an indictment of actors’ ‘ancient and moderne
indignity’ and of the theatre as a ‘heathenish and diabolicall institu-
tion’: ‘Next doth M. Actor recite a memorable example of Iulius
Caesar, that slew his own servant whiles he acted Hercules furens on
the Stage. Which example indeed greatly doth make against their
Playes. For it’s not unlikely but a Player might doe the like now, as

22 Lucian (Salt. 83) tells a similar story of a pantomimus who overacted the part of
‘mad Ajax’: he tore the clothes of one of the scabillarii, snatched a Xute from an
instrumentalist, and with it struck the actor playing Odysseus a near-fatal blow.
 A peculiar compound 103
often they have done. And then what a lamentable project would
there be for the Spectators to behold.’23
The most egregious exponent of the Herculean acting tradition is
Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A
brawny, conceited, and mock-heroic character, he is the incarnation
of overconWdent, overzealous, and overblown theatrical amateur-
ism.24 When he is allotted the part of Pyramus in the Mechanicals’
production of ‘The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death
of Pyramus and Thisby’ (a show of ‘exaggerated Senecanism’25), he
announces to the director Peter Quince, ‘my chief humour is for a
tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all
split’ (i. ii. 25–6).26 He then proceeds to give an impromptu audition
in ‘Ercles’ vein’ (i. ii. 37):
The raging rocks,
And shivering shocks,
Shall break the locks
Of prison-gates;
And Phibbus’ car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish fates.
‘As the tyrant Ercles,’ Miola observes, ‘Bottom swaggers in a bom-
bastic style, replete with pompous diction, alliterative thunderclap,
animated naturalism, and cosmic magniloquence.’27 The satirical
target of his ‘lofty’ Herculean improvisation has been supposed by

23 Greene (1615; repr. 1973), 28.

24 Actors throughout the years have enjoyed playing up Bottom’s self-conceit and
theatrical amateurism. Among 20th-century interpreters of the role, comedian Fran-
kie Howerd was praised for his ‘glorious representation of that universal type, the
over-conWdent amateur whom friends and relations have encouraged to believe
himself a Roscius’ (Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan. 1958), while Pete Postlethwaite’s per-
formance captured the full ghastliness of ‘the amateur dramatic society bore’ (Jewish
Chronicle, 25 July 1986). See GriYths (1996), 104–5.
25 Miola (1992), 186. Brooks (1979), pp. lxii–lxiii, believes Seneca is a major
neglected source of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and supports his argument with
a number of parallel passages.
26 I quote Shakespeare, including line numbers, from the Arden Shakespeare
Complete Works (1998).
27 Miola (1992), 181.
104 A peculiar compound
several scholars to be John Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules
Oetaeus (1581), with speciWc reference to two separate passages:28
O Lorde of ghostes! whose fyrye Xashe
That forth thy hande doth shake,
Doth cause the trembling lodges twayne,
Of Phœbus’ carre to shake.
Raygne reachlesse nowe: in every place
Thy peace procurde I have,
AloVe where Nereus lookes up lande,
Empalde in winding wave.
The roring rocks have quaking sturd,
And none thereat have pusht;
Hell gloummy gates I have brast oape,
Where grisly ghosts all husht
Have stood.29
However, David P. Young and John Velz have separately raised the
alternative possibility that Bottom’s alliterative rant is a travesty of
certain lines of Seneca’s Hercules Furens in Jasper Heywood’s trans-
lation of 1561.30
Whatever the intended literary target, this specimen of ‘Ercles’
vein’ alludes to more than the worst faults of ‘English Seneca’. In
his portrayal of Bottom, Shakespeare is invoking what is obviously a
familiar dramatic type. The Herculean hero was well known to
Elizabethan audiences from Christopher Marlowe’s enormously
popular Tamburlaine, the Great,31 and they would have immediately
identiWed in Bottom (a role probably created by the legendary clown
William Kempe) a parody of the grandiose acting style of Edward
Alleyn, Marlowe’s original Tamburlaine.32 In his Groatsworth of
Wit (1592) Robert Greene ridiculed the trend of Herculean grand-
iloquence in contemporary theatre. His Player-Patron, supplying

28 The suggestion was Wrst put forward by Rolfe (1879), 133. See also Koeppel
(1911), 190–1.
29 Quoted in Rolfe (1879), 133.
30 See Young (1966), 35 f. and Velz (1968), 376.
31 See below, Chap. 4.
32 The character of the cowardly braggart Pistol in 2 Henry IV also parodies
Alleyn’s tragic style. For the connection between Alleyn and Shakespeare, and be-
tween the diVerent companies performing in the 1590s, see Southworth (2000).
 A peculiar compound 105
a resumé of his stage experience, boasts to Roberto: ‘The Twelve
Labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage.’33 Bottom
is also a burlesque of recognizable Herculean characteristics, in
particular the Herculean style of selfhood. This burlesque draws
on a number of diVerent versions of the Hercules myth, including
the Madness. In fact, throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream
mad transformation and transforming madness are powerful motifs.
Bottom himself undergoes a famous metamorphosis of self, an
‘assiWcation’,34 which is followed by a restorative sleep and confused
awakening. He, therefore, perfectly illustrates the ‘peculiar com-
pound’35 that is the Hercules furens tradition.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not the only play in the Shake-
spearean canon in which we Wnd Hercules furens invoked as a
theatrical cliché, a byword for ludicrous declamation and shameless
‘hamming’. In Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen mocks her
Roman lover for playing admirably the role of his enraged ancestor, a
role clearly reckoned to invite histrionic bluster:
antony You’ll heat my blood. No more.
cleopatra You can do better yet; but this is meetly.
antony Now by my sword—
cleopatra And target. Still he mends,
But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian,
How this Herculean Roman does become
The carriage of his chafe.36
(i. iii. 81–6)
‘Cleopatra’, Waith perceives, ‘both accentuates and modiWes what is
Herculean in Antony. Like Caesar, she admires the man of valour and
noble rage, but she also encourages his carousals.’37 Her taunting
invocation here of a tragicomic Hercules reinforces the ambivalence
and inconstancy38 of Antony’s Herculean role-playing. Antony the col-
ossus, the ‘demi-Atlas of this earth’ (i. v. 24), emulates the semi-divine,

33 Carroll (1994), 69. 34 On Bottom’s ‘translation’, see Kott (1987), 73–85.

35 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314.
36 ‘The carriage of his chafe’ ¼ ‘the bearing or demeanour of his fury’.
37 Waith (1962), 120.
38 On Antony’s ambivalence and deliberate inconstancy, his refusal to tie ‘himself
to a single consistent and predictable self ’, see Miles (1996), 175–85.
106 A peculiar compound
world-conquering Hercules, but Antony the maverick warrior and
debauchee ‘looks like a good example on the stage of life of the
braggart sham-Herakles of comedy’.39

THE MADNESS OF HERCULES O E TA E U S

Thomas Heywood was apparently the only writer of the English Re-
naissance to put Hercules furens on stage,40 but, as mentioned, the furor
he dramatized was Hercules’ death agony on Mount Oeta. His furious
Hercules is not the Euripidean or Senecan Wlicide but the slayer of
Lichas, the messenger who brought Hercules the poisoned shirt of
Nessus from Deianira. Hercules’ Wnal tribulation and death were famil-
iar to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans more from Ovid’s Metamorphoses
9 than from Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (considered as genuinely Senecan
throughout the Renaissance). Ovid describes Hercules, with the fatal
mantle upon him, as raging like a bull that bears a hunting-spear deep in
its side. His blood bubbles and hisses, dark perspiration streams from
every pore, his scorching sinews crackle, and his marrow melts. He roars
at the mountain and brings great pines crashing down. As he catches
sight of Lichas, his pain mounts up to madness: ‘utque dolor rabiem
conlegerat omnem’ (9.212). This verse is the likely source of Thomas
Heywood’s depiction of Hercules’ excruciating pain as a type of mad-
ness in The Brazen Age, containing The Labours and death of Hercules, the
second of his four Ages which were successfully staged at the Red Bull
during Shakespeare’s last few years in the London theatre (c.1611–13).41
As Ewbank comments:

39 Galinsky (1972), 141. On the importance of the comic Hercules to the ambiva-
lent portrayal of Antony, see also Miola (1992), 130.
40 Listed under 1595 in the Annals of English Drama 975–1700 are two anonymous
lost plays, I Hercules and II Hercules, under the auspices of the Admiral’s Men (see
Harbage (1989, 3rd edn.), 64–5). Listed under 1561, together with Jasper Heywood’s
translation of Hercules Furens, is Queen Elizabeth I’s fragmentary MS translation of
Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (ibid. 38–9). This is a free translation of the second chorus,
although the Wrst 31 lines have no parallel in the Latin. Horace Walpole transcribed
the piece in 1806, and identiWed it as Elizabeth’s work: see Share (1998), 69–72.
41 Heywood Wrst put the Lichas episode into verse in his Troia Britannica (1602?),
a poetic tale based largely on William Caxton’s version of Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des
hystoires de Troyes (pub. 1467).
 A peculiar compound 107
These Ages were an enterprise aiming even more ambitiously, and at greater
length, than John Barton’s Tantalus, to put all Greek myth on stage, begin-
ning in The Golden Age with ‘The Lives of Jupiter and Saturn’ and ending
with the death of everyone except Ulysses at the end of The Iron Age—which
Age had gone down so well as to prompt a Second Part (like a kind of
Godfather Two). Not driven by a Shakespearian, or Bartonesque, urge to
work out an idea or a theme, Heywood simply packs everything in to
provide entertainment for a popular London audience.42
Perhaps because of this sweeping popular treatment, Heywood’s
Hercules comes across as an uncouth strongman and inveterate
braggart. The sound and fury of his ‘fustian heroism’43 led Galinsky
to pronounce The Brazen Age ‘in all essentials the dramatization of a
mythological comic strip’ and ‘the nadir of the Herakles tradition in
literature’.44 Yet, while little case can be made for its literary merit,
The Brazen Age is an important link in the Hercules furens tradition
and in the Renaissance conception of the Herculean hero. Heywood’s
version of Hercules’ Oetaean ravings represents an unusual intersec-
tion of Ovidian and Senecan threads.
When Heywood’s Hercules puts on the poisoned shirt, his increas-
ing physical anguish recalls the onset of the madness in Seneca’s
Hercules Furens (939 V.). His whole countenance changes and his
intense fury expresses itself in extravagant and impious threats of
violence against Jupiter and the heavens:

herc. Are all the furies with their

tortures,
Their whips and lashes crept into my skin?
Hath any sightlesse and infernall Wre
Laid hold upon my Xesh? when did Alcides
Thus shake with anguish? thus change face, thus
shrinke? . . .
jason What alteration’s this? a thousand pangues
I see even in his visage, in his silence
He doth expresse even hell.
priest Thou sacred Jove
Behold us at thy Altar prostrate here

42 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 44. 43 Galinsky (1972), 231.

44 Ibid. 232.
108 A peculiar compound
To beg attonement ’tweene our sins and thee,
Lend us a gracious eare and eye.
herc. Priest no more,
I’le rend thy Typet, hurle Joves Altars downe,
Havock his OVerings, all his Lamps extinguish,
Raze his high Temples, and skale heaven it selfe
Unlesse he stay my tortures.
jason Warlike Theban,
Whence comes this fury? is this madnes forc’t,
That makes Alcides thus blaspheme the Gods.
tell. Patient your selfe.
herc. I will not Jason, cannot Tellamon,
A stipticke poyson boyles within my veines,
Hell is within me, for my marrow fries,
A vulture worse then that Prometheus feeles,
Fiers on my entrails, and my bulke in Xames.
jason Yet be your selfe, renowned Hercules,
Strive with your torture, with your rage contend
Seek to ore-come this anguish. . . .
omp. What strange fury
Hath late possest him to be thus disturb’d?45
The reactions of the onlookers to Hercules’ rage are a further evocation
of Seneca’s hero. Jason and Tellamon, recalling Seneca’s Amphitryon at
952 (‘Quod subitum hoc malum est?’), diagnose Hercules’ condition
as a sudden loss or transformation of self (‘What alteration’s this?’,
‘Patient your selfe’, ‘Yet be your selfe’), while Omphale speaks of a kind
of demonic possession.
In Ovid, Lichas is the haplessly convenient victim of Hercules’
wrath, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heywood’s tortured
Hercules, however, does not merely catch sight of Lichas, he hunts
the messenger down, and the murder is preceded by a particularly
bloodthirsty Xow of rhetoric:
Lychas, where’s he that brought this poyson’d shirt,
That I may teare the villaine lim from lim,
And shake his body small as Winters snow,
His shattered Xesh shall play like parched leaves,
And dance in th’ aire, tost by the sommer winds.46

45 Heywood (1874), iii. 249–50. 46 Ibid. 251.

 A peculiar compound 109
Returning to Ovid’s account, Heywood has Hercules swing Lichas
about his head and hurl him into the Euboean Sea. The Argonauts
again interpret his actions as madness, a frenzy surpassing physical
trauma and confounding the physician’s skill:
jason Princes, his torments are ’bove Physicke
helpe,
And they that wish him well, must wish his death,
For that alone gives period to his anguish.
tell. In vaine we follow and pursue his rage,
There’s danger in his madnesse.47
Unlike Ovid, who immediately follows the slaying of Lichas with
Hercules’ construction of his own funeral pyre, Heywood attributes a
second murder to Hercules’ furor on Mount Oeta, that of the Lydian
queen Omphale whom Hercules mistakes for Deianira. This case of
mistaken identity leading to violent death places Heywood’s Hercules
in the tradition of Euripides and Seneca’s deluded killer. The con-
nection between the hero’s unbalanced state of mind and his homi-
cidal behaviour is underlined by Hercules’ self-diagnosis. Before
fatally striking Omphale with a rock, he cries:
Art thou not Deyaneira come to mocke
Alcides madnesse, and his pangues deride?48
This self-diagnosis of madness distinguishes Heywood’s Hercules
from the hero of the Senecan Hercules Oetaeus, who expressly con-
tradicts the opinion of the bystanders that he has again succumbed
to madness:
‘Resistite’ inquit, ‘non furor mentem abstulit,
furore gravius istud atque ira malum est:
in me iuvat saevire.’
(823–5)
‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Madness has not stolen away my senses, this evil is deeper
than madness or wrath: it delights to rage against me.’
Heywood was not the Wrst post-Ovidian writer to associate the events
on Mount Oeta with Herculean furor. In the Carolingian poem
Contra iudices, Theodulf of Orléans explicitly links the brutal and
47 Ibid. 252. 48 Ibid. 253.
110 A peculiar compound
entirely unjust murder of the ‘unfortunate Lichas’ (miseri Lichae) to
‘furor Herculeus’, the hero’s inability to govern his animal instincts.
Theodulf reproduces from Metamorphoses 9 Hercules’ disregard for
Lichas’ suppliant pleas for mercy, but he omits the climactic apothe-
osis which follows. Of Theodulf ’s anti-Herculean, anti-pagan ex-
ploitation of his ‘irreverent’ Ovidian model, Nees has remarked:
‘Surely it ought to be clear from his transformation of his literary
sources that Theodulf does not intend this passage to convey a paean
to Hercules as a personiWcation of virtue, but rather a warning
against the dangers even to an otherwise virtuous man of the vices
of anger and lust.’49
Among Heywood’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the
Oetaean strand of the Hercules furens tradition was reasonably un-
common but not unique. The Renaissance mythographer Natalis
Comes sees furor depicted in both of Seneca’s Hercules plays, that
is, in Hercules’ Juno-inspired Wlicidal frenzy and in his Nessus-
induced rage on Oeta.50 In Antony and Cleopatra, which was prob-
ably staged about Wve years before The Brazen Age, the Wgure of
Hercules Oetaeus is clearly part of Shakespeare’s grammar of
furor.51 Enraged at what he believes is Cleopatra’s treachery, her
capitulation to Caesar at Actium, Antony invokes and emulates the
furor of his divine ancestor Hercules:52
Better ’twere
Thou fell’st into my fury, for one death
Might have prevented many. Eros, ho!
The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage;
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o’th’ moon,
And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
(iv. xii. 40–7)

49 Nees (1991), 31. 50 See Mythologiae (1567; repr. 1976), 203ˇ, 208.
51 The Hercules–Cacus episode in Aeneid 8. 193 V. (see above, Chap. 2) undoubtedly
also forms part of the Shakespearean grammar of furor.
52 While Antony and Cleopatra as a whole is something other than the tragedy of a
Herculean hero, it nevertheless contains a major treatment of the type. See Waith
(1962), 113–21.
 A peculiar compound 111
Antony blames his downfall and imminent death on female perWdy, a
‘Triple-turned whore’ (iv. ii. 13), thus missing the irony of Deianira’s
innocence.

THE SENECAN TRADITION

A signiWcant component of the Hercules furens tradition in the

Renaissance was, of course, a more direct engagement with Seneca’s
Hercules Furens. This was evidenced by the appearance in England
and on the Continent of translations of the text and by the un-
doubted impact of such translations on the more creative appropri-
ation of the Senecan Hercules. The Wrst English translation of certain
date and identity53 was by Jasper Heywood in 1561. Heywood was
born in London in 1535, the son of the epigrammatist John Heywood
(c.1497–1580). Related on his mother’s side to Thomas More, he was
also the uncle of John Donne. A Catholic, he Xed England on the
accession of Elizabeth, but returned in 1581 as head of the Jesuit
mission. After arrest and imprisonment he was exiled, and died in
Naples in 1598.54
Hercules Furens was Heywood’s third and Wnal translation of
Seneca: his Troas was printed in 1559 and Thyestes in 1560.55 In
1581 all three translations were reprinted as the nucleus of Thomas
Newton’s The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca. C. S. Lewis, cataloguing the
manifold faults of ‘Drab Age Verse’, described this collection of
English Seneca as ‘execrable: the metre a torment to the ear, the
language at once artless and unnatural’.56 T. S. Eliot oVered a kinder
assessment in his essay ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, which
introduced the 1927 reissue of Newton’s edition: ‘If we look at the
dates we cannot overlook the probability that these translations
helped to direct the course of events. . . . It is not only as an embryonic
53 Harbage (1989), 209 includes in a supplementary list an extant anonymous
translation of Hercules Furens, which probably dates from the late 17th century.
54 Herbermann et al. (1910), vii. 319. See also Reed (1926), 66–7 and 90; Southern
(1950), 56; and Share (1998), 12.
55 Heywood’s Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules Furens were edited by Vocht (1913).
See also Spearing (1912). For an analysis of the three translations, see O’Keefe (1974).
56 Lewis (1954), 256.
112 A peculiar compound
form of Elizabethan tragedy that these translations have documen-
tary interest. They represent the transformation of the older form of
versiWcation into the new—consequently the transformation of lan-
guage and sensibility as well.’57 Of the Wve translators who contrib-
uted to the collection, Heywood is generally acknowledged as the
most proWcient. What is interesting about his Senecan translations as
a group or series is that, like Robert Browning’s trio of major
transcriptions from Greek tragedy (Euripides’ Alkestis and Herakles,
and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon), published in the 1870s,58 each one
employs a distinct translational technique, ranging from free and
interpretative adaptation to determined literalism. Lewis styled this
progression a movement ‘from a medieval to a humanistic concep-
tion of his task’ as translator.59 In the second act of Troas Heywood
introduces the ghost of Achilles (‘the Wrst vengeful ghost of Tudor
revenge tragedy’60), and substitutes for the geographically baZing
third chorus another which is partly a translation of a chorus in
Phaedra. For the Thyestes he invented a prologue in which he asks the
Fury of Seneca’s Wrst scene for inspiration.
Heywood’s Hercules Furens was his most literal translation and
appeared side by side with the Latin, in what Lewis called ‘an eclectic
text of his own manufacture’.61 As with his earlier translations, and all
but one of the translations in Newton’s Tenne Tragedies, it was
composed in ‘fourteeners’, the fourteen-syllable line of seven iambic
feet. The title-page read: ‘The Wrst tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca,
intituled Hercules furens, newly perused and of all faultes whereof it
did before abound diligently corrected, and for the proWt of young
schollers so faithfully translated into English metre, that ye may se
verse for verse tourned as farre as the phrase of the english permitteth
by Iasper Heywood studient in Oxford.’62 Heywood’s conWdent pre-
cursory deWnition of faithfulness, his objective of rendering the
original text ‘verse for verse . . . as farre as the phrase of the english
permitteth’, anticipates Browning’s defence of literalism in the pref-
ace to his Agamemnon in 1877: ‘If, because of the immense fame of
the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could
only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be

57 Eliot (1951), 98, 101. 58 See below, Chap. 6.

59 Lewis (1954), 254. 60 See Kerrigan (1996), 112–13.
61 Lewis (1954), 255. 62 Heywood (1561), sig. A.
 A peculiar compound 113
literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. . . .
I would be tolerant for once,—in the case of so immediately famous
an original,—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very
turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear.’63
In practice, Heywood’s translation of Hercules Furens is generally
free of tautology and embellishment. He preserves closely the ori-
ginal word-order, although sometimes too laboriously, a fault com-
pounded by the occasional infelicitous choice of word. His rendering
of lines 937–44 (the onset of Hercules’ madness) and 1138–42 (Her-
cules’ awakening) are illustrative of his technique:
But yf to lyght
some other mischiefe bryng
The grownde yet shall, let it make haste:
and any monstrous thyng
If it prepare, let yt bee myne.
but what means this? myd daye
The darknes have encloasde abowt,
lo Phoebus goethe his ways
With face obscure without a clowde.
who dryves the daye to Xyght,
And turns to east? from whence doth now
his dusky hed the nyght
Unknown bryng forth? whence fyl the peaks
so many rownde about
Of datyme starres?64
What place is this? What region?
or of the worlde what coaste?
Where am I? under ryse of sanne?
or bonde els uttermoste
Of th’ycy bear? or els doothe here
of sea of Hesperye
The farthest grownde appoynte a bonde
For th’ocean sea to lye?
What ayre drawe me? to weery myght
what grownde is undersette?
Of truthe we are returnde from hell?65

63 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 293. See further below,
Chap. 6.
64 Heywood (1561), sigs I 6–7. 65 Ibid., sig. L 2.
114 A peculiar compound
At its best, Heywood’s literalism is allied with a certain amount of
poetic instinct and sensitivity. Eliot made special mention of the
‘singular beauty’ of Heywood’s translation of 1131 V., lines addressed
by the chorus to Hercules’ slain children:
Ite ad Stygios, umbrae, portus
ite, innocuae, quas in primo
limine vitae scelus oppressit
patriusque furor;
ite, iratos visite reges.
To Stygian havens goe ye of shade and night,
goe hurtles souls, whom mischief hath opprest
Even in Wrst porche of lyfe but lately hadde,
And fathers furye goe unhappy kynde
O litle chyldren, by the way full sadde
Of journeye knowne.
Goe, see the angrye kyngs.66
‘Nothing can be said of such a translation,’ Eliot declared, ‘except that
it is perfect. It is a last echo of the earlier tongue, the language of
Chaucer, with an overtone of that Christian piety which disappears
with Elizabethan verse.’67
The following century, the Dutch poet and dramatist Joost van
den Vondel (1587–1679), who published translations of Seneca’s
Troades (1626) and Hippolytus (1628), made a prose version of
Hercules Furens as a private exercise. His published translations of
ancient tragedy also included Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (1666)
and Sophocles’ Trachiniae (1668). Renaissance France, meanwhile,
witnessed a profusion of translations and adaptations of Seneca’s
Hercules Furens, including those by Roland Brisset (1589), Pierre
Mainfray (1625), Benoist Baudyn (1629), Maurice de Chalvet
(1638), Nicolas L’Héritier (whose Hercule furieux (1639) is also
known by the title of Amphitrion), and Pierre Linage (1650). Like
Heywood’s translation in England, these French versions contributed
to a more popular awareness of Seneca’s play as well as to the
invocation by dramatists of mad Hercules as a type of stage hero,
and to a proliferation of original works incorporating ‘Furens’ in
their titles.
66 Heywood (1561), sig. L. 67 Eliot (1951), 104.
 A peculiar compound 115

Fig. 2. Alessandro Turchi, The Madness of Hercules (c.1620). Bayerische Staats-

gemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

While Hercules in bivio was a far more popular subject for Renais-
sance artists, Senecan Hercules inspired at least one seventeenth-
century painting, Alessandro Turchi’s The Madness of Hercules of
c.1620 (Fig. 2). In its general composition and treatment the picture
denotes the inXuence of Michelangelo, although the colour-scheme
is Venetian. In the centre of the painting Hercules is depicted holding
one of his children aloft and on the verge of hurling its helpless form
to the ground. Another child lies dead at his feet, and behind him
Megara, her remaining sons, and women of the household kneel,
recoil, or scatter in terror.
Senecan Hercules also found his way into Italian opera. During the
wedding celebrations for Cosimo III de Medici and Marguerite
Louise d’Orleàns in 1661, the Florentine court prepared a theatre
festival dominated by the production of Jacopo Melani’s Ercole in
116 A peculiar compound
Tebe. As Blanshard wryly observes: ‘At Wrst sight, scenes of domestic
violence make a strange choice for a wedding celebration, even if they
are set to ballet music. Yet their use here provides a clear indication of
the way in which these scenes were enjoyed for their dramatic
potential far more than their content.’68 The title role was performed
by the tenor Antonio Cesti, himself a celebrated composer of operas.
The production inaugurated Florence’s beautifully restored Teatro
della Pergola, and was especially notable for the emphasis it placed on
the dance, including four end-of-act balli.
During the Renaissance two distinct Herculean traditions arose
concurrently. Both centred predominantly on the typological use of
the hero. The more general and proliWc tradition established Hercu-
les as the incarnation of active virtue, of reason, triumphant temper-
ance, and eloquence. He became simultaneously an analogue of
Christ’s Passion and Resurrection and an emblem of supreme hu-
manist endeavour. However, the peculiarly composite Hercules
furens tradition, and especially its morally challenging Senecan strain,
held the greater literary potential and had arguably the greater
creative impact. As Galinsky indicates, the appropriation of Seneca’s
Hercules by Renaissance dramatists was not a case of ‘inventing
modern adventures for [him] . . . and putting him into modern costume’.
Writers ‘preferred to do without the physical appearance of Herakles
and instead transfer some of his spiritual qualities to some other
hero’.69 Thus, it is through characters such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
or Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Coriolanus that Hercules furens Wnds
a new and resonant theatrical voice.

68 Blanshard (2005), 59–60. 69 Galinsky (1972), 186.

 4
‘Even the earth is not room enough’:
Herculean selfhood on the Elizabethan stage

Immediately before his madness sets in, Seneca’s Hercules prays, si quod
etiamnum est scelusjlatura tellus, properet, et si quod parat monstrum,
meum sit (‘If the earth is even now to produce some wickedness, let it
come quickly; if she is furnishing some monster, let it be mine’, 937–9).
Later, with his reason restored, and having discovered for himself his
identity as the murderer of his children, he says of his crime, laudanda
feci iussus; hoc unum meum est (‘My praiseworthy deeds I did under
orders; this alone is mine’, 1268). Both moments—one of hubristic
triumph, the other suicidal despair—encapsulate the hero’s tragic
autarkeia. For Hercules’ tragedy is that he remains to the very end a
victim of his own unshakeable sense of selfhood and impenetrable
isolation. The dramatization of these attributes is arguably Seneca’s
greatest and darkest legacy to the Elizabethan theatre.
While none of the major Elizabethan playwrights wrote a Hercules
play based on the Euripidean-Senecan plot,1 Seneca’s tragic Hercules
lies behind several of the most famous madmen and megalomaniacs
of the Renaissance English stage, providing dramatists with ‘a rich
and resonant grammar of furor, an essential and expressive code of
thought and feeling’.2 The reasons for this have a great deal to do with
the political and cultural aYnity between Julio-Claudian Rome and
Tudor England, as Braden asserts:
It is documentable that Renaissance tragedians were far more interested in
their Roman than in their Athenian predecessors, and there are reasons for
that beyond mere linguistic diYculties. An important part of what, at least

1 See Chap. 3, n. 40. 2 Miola (1992), 122.

118 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
in its usual deWnition, distinguished the Renaissance as a period is the newly
imperial cast of its politics and the individualistic cosmopolitanism of its
culture—and the style of unappeasably ambitious selfhood that becomes the
central subject of Renaissance tragedy has, in general, more authentic
aYnities with the nihilistic villains of Seneca’s universe than with their
more temperate and socialized Greek antecedents.3
As we have seen, Seneca’s Hercules Furens is a mirror of the excesses of
the late Julio-Claudian age. Its hero is a Wgure of tragically divided
potential and with a fatal, all-consuming sense of selfhood. The furor
he embodies from the outset is the obsessive, restless ambition of the
imperial overreacher; the monster he becomes represents the perver-
sion, through absolute power, of the competitive ethos, natural
boundaries, heroic anger, and the bonds of kinship. For the Eliza-
bethan tragedians this psychological portrait of power held enor-
mous dramatic appeal, as did Seneca’s Weltanschauung pertaining to
State and Cosmos.
The Tudor monarchs, like the Julio-Claudian emperors, were a
highly dysfunctional dynasty that wielded an unprecedented author-
ity. Until the 1534 Act of Supremacy no English sovereign had been
head of Church and State. The Royal Supremacy was the apotheosis
of monarchy, making Henry VIII the ‘one supreme head and king’ of
a body politic in which spirituality and temporality were indivisible
concepts. He was the vicar of God and, in his own words, the ‘soul of
the whole kingdom’, with the divine mission to ‘animate, rule and
save’ his people.4 This destiny, Henry believed, showed him to be the
legitimate inheritor of the authority of Rome’s emperors. With the
establishment of a national Church of England, ‘a powerful new
national epic’ was born, ‘telling how for generations England had
groaned under the tyranny of the bishops of Rome; [how the popes
had] usurped the authority of those to whom all obedience is due,
God’s vicars on earth—Roman emperors and their successors, the
princes of Christendom—how the hour had come to throw oV this
usurpation . . . and restore the pristine right order’.5

3 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 257.

4 Foxe, Acts and Monuments in Pratt (1874), v. 535; ‘Treatise on Royal Power’ in
Public Record OYce, State Papers 1/238, fol. 245.
5 Scarisbrick (1997), 386–7.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 119
At the same time as this apotheosis occurred, a new idea of
nationhood emerged which became inextricably interwoven with
the Tudors’ extraordinary style of selfhood. As Guy indicates: ‘It is
striking that, whereas in 1500 the word ‘‘state’’ had possessed no
political meaning in English beyond the ‘‘state or condition’’ of the
prince or the kingdom, by the second half of Elizabeth’s reign it was
used to signify the ‘‘state’’ in the modern sense. In the reigns of Henry
VII and Henry VIII politicians had spoken only of ‘‘country’’,
‘‘people’’, ‘‘kingdom’’, and ‘‘realm’’, but by the 1590s they began to
conceptualize the ‘‘state’’.’6 The concept of the ‘state’, Guy continues,
identiWed England as ‘a sovereign government which recognized no
superior in political, ecclesiastical, and legal matters’.7 The implica-
tions of this identiWcation were ethnographic as much as political
and religious. Henry’s anti-papal campaign and ‘imperial’ theory of
kingship, and Elizabeth’s war with Spain sharpened the deWnition of
‘Englishness’. A vision of England as patria, and of her sovereign as an
Augustan pater patriae, took shape. In the promotion as well as the
analysis of this vision, the English language and the native literature
were crucial.
According to Braden, ‘Seneca presents us with a compelling ver-
sion of classical man, exaggerated and simpliWed to reveal something
of his essence. That in turn is what Renaissance writers see and
respond to in Seneca.’8 In Seneca’s compelling version of the mad
Hercules, Elizabethan dramatists saw and responded to the classical
hero’s ambivalent essence, a greatness that is both magnetic and
repellent. They saw reXected in this uncompromising Herculean
heroism the danger facing their own society—that ‘such superhuman
aspirations may tip over into amoral self-assertion’.9 Thus the arche-
typal Herculean hero of Renaissance English tragedy, Tamburlaine, is
a celebration of the Herculean overreacher, but a celebration suVused
with absolute awareness of the overreacher’s lethal menace. With
Shakespeare the Herculean hero reaches an apex of psychological
and moral complexity. His tragedies of madness and cataclysmic
selfhood, which belong most securely to a Hercules furens trad-
ition—Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and King Lear—are, to borrow

6 Guy (1988), 352. 7 Ibid.

8 Braden (1985), 2. 9 Miles (1996), 61.
120 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
Braden’s phrase, the ultimate ‘magnifying lenses’10 for making sense
of the Latin text and even, on occasion, the Greek text.

THE MAT TER OF SENECAN ‘INFLUENCE’

The inXuence of Seneca tragicus on the Elizabethan stage has become

almost a scholarly commonplace; the critical quest to deWne its
nature and extent has been an extremely proliWc endeavour.11 In
1893 John W. CunliVe produced a seminal thesis on the subject, in
which he submitted as categorical proof of his assertion of inXuence a
clinical itemization of verbal echoes and parallel passages. F. L. Lucas
followed suit in 1922 with an equally categorical exposition of Sene-
can inXuence, which relied on an equally problematic investigative
method. For many years after, Seneca’s impact, for better or worse,
on the development of English tragedy remained undisputed, a
‘given’ of literary criticism. In addition to parallel passages, discus-
sion of Senecan inXuence on Elizabethan playwrights centred on
elements of formal imitation (the Wve-act structure, stichomythia,
and stock characters); the borrowing of Senecan sententiae; and a
shared fondness for the rhetorical, the melodramatic, the supernat-
ural, and the gruesomely violent.12 The selection of these elements
largely explains why even those critics who most ardently and con-
scientiously dissected Senecan inXuence rarely judged it a particu-
larly positive thing. ‘Since the late eighteenth century,’ Braden
records, ‘a belief in the manifest inferiority of Senecan drama has
made that linkage [between Seneca and the Renaissance] seem an
10 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 257.
11 For an overview of the inXuence of Seneca on Renaissance English drama, see
CunliVe (1893); Theobald (1909), 323–7; Charlton (1921), pp. cxxxviii–cc; Lucas
(1922); Baker (1939); Wells (1944), 71–84; Johnson (1948), 33–53; Eliot (1951),
65–105 and 126–40; Hunter (1967), 17–26 and (1974), 166–204; Brower (1971), 141–
72; Kiefer (1978), 17–34 and (1985), 129–42; Muir (1978); Braden (1984), 277–92 and
(1985); Miola (1992) and (2000), 116–25; Kerrigan (1996), 111–141; and Boyle (1997),
141–212. On the inXuence of Senecan prose on Shakespeare, see Miles (1996), 38–62.
On Shakespeare’s classical reading, see Velz (1968); Martindale (1990); and Martindale
and Taylor (2004).
12 Many of these elements were, in fact, borrowed indirectly, through the medium
of 16th-century Italian tragedy. See Herrick (1965), esp. 115 and 292.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 121
unsatisfactory business: at best a puzzle, and often an embarrassment
or worse.’13 It is also the principal reason why the common assump-
tion of ‘inXuence’ was eventually challenged or at least qualiWed.
Renewed critical scrutiny in the second half of last century prompted
the counter-assertion that the putative Senecan legacy was, in reality,
slender and elusive.
In 1967 G. K. Hunter stressed the shortcomings of the ‘scientiWc’
approach typiWed by CunliVe, whereby the literary excavator would
ransack a chosen Elizabethan text (‘B’) for detectable and quantiW-
able linguistic relics of Senecan tragedy (‘A’). Such an approach, he
argued, oversimpliWed the search for inXuence by ignoring the syn-
cretism and eclecticism of the Renaissance era, the fact that ‘B’ was
part of a whole intellectual climate, and subject, therefore, to a
complex of competing inXuences, both classical and Christian.14 ‘B’
texts, such as the last plays of Shakespeare, were, he said, ‘too rich,
various and diYcult to place to be put under the inXuence. They
refuse to stay etherized upon the table.’15 Hunter’s corrective remarks
belonged to a necessary reaction against the earlier absolutist accept-
ance of Seneca’s inXuence and the reductionism of the ‘parallel-
passage’ mode of enquiry. The exponents of this counter-movement,
however, frequently indulged in their own form of reductive reason-
ing. Hunter, for instance, concluded that the Elizabethan debt to
Seneca was, if not actually negligible, certainly vastly overestimated
and, at any rate, impossible to isolate from the ‘stream of tendency
raining down upon’16 English tragedy: ‘If Seneca’s tragedies had not
survived, some details would have had to be changed—but the
overall picture would not have been altered.’17

13 Braden (1985), 1. 14 Hunter (1967), 17–26, at 18–19.

15 Ibid. 18. Contained in Hunter’s obvious allusion here to line 3 of T. S. Eliot’s
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is a further allusion to Eliot’s famous essays of
1927 on Seneca and the Elizabethans. Eliot was, in fact, one of the Wrst critics to move
away from the traditional parallel-passage method and to suggest a less formalistic
and quantitative approach to Senecan inXuence. At the end of his essay ‘Shakespeare
and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (repr. in Eliot (1951), 126–40), he wrote: ‘The inXuence
of Seneca on Elizabethan drama has been exhaustively studied in its formal aspect,
and in the borrowing and adaptation of phrases and situations; the penetration of
Senecan sensibility would be much more diYcult to trace’ (140).
16 Hunter (1967), 17–26, at 18. 17 Ibid. 24.
122 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
The Elizabethans’ dramatic sources were undeniably many and
diVuse, a fact more recently acknowledged by Inga-Stina Ewbank:
‘Intertexts move promiscuously on the Elizabethan and Jacobean
stage; the eclectic richness of texts is part of the strength of its
drama; and, when originals have been mediated through layers of
classical and native texts, apparent likenesses can be deceptive.’18
However, an acceptance of Renaissance England’s discursive literary
inheritance, its ‘eclectic richness’, should not automatically diminish
or negate Seneca’s considerable sway. A far more illuminating ap-
proach to the problem of inXuence, than either the ‘QED’ technique
of CunliVe and Lucas or the ‘eclecticism’ theory of Hunter, is that of
Robert Miola, who undertakes to trace Seneca’s inXuence on Shake-
speare. Miola’s interest is ‘in stylistic minutiae and in oblique, auda-
cious eVects’,19 ‘not only individual echoes and elements, but
also . . . larger patterns of concatenation and conWguration’.20 His
proWle of Senecan Shakespeare, which he assembles through close
textual analysis and a readiness to think laterally, embraces language
and imagery, characterization and psychology, atmosphere and set-
ting, tragic sensibility and tragic vision. Crucially, he views Seneca
not as ‘a terminus a quo’, but rather ‘as an intermediary legatee,
himself heir to the great and complex traditions of ancient tragedy’.21
The combined breadth and detail of Miola’s modus operandi provide
a valuable model for investigating the impact of individual Senecan
tragedies on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and especially the
subterranean, and often subtle, inXuence of the Hercules Furens.
In considering speciWcally the inXuence of Hercules Furens on Eliza-
bethan tragedy, one point above all needs to be determined: what is it
that makes Hercules Furens peculiarly Senecan? The basic dramatic
sequence which Soellner designates ‘the Hercules furens tradition’,
and which he ascribes to Seneca’s inXuence, involves a sudden and
temporary Wt of insanity followed by a palliative sleep and an inter-
rogative awakening. Other ‘traditional’ features include the sensation
of darkness accompanying the onset of madness, and violence arising
from mistaken identities. But, in truth, this scenario, which is funda-
mentally Euripidean, is not necessarily what gives the Hercules furens

18 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 38. 19 Miola (1992), 9.

20 Ibid. 10. 21 Ibid. 9.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 123
tradition, as a tragic tradition, its distinctive and demonstrable Senecan
essence. To extract and analyse this essence, we need to do more than
simply compile from the Elizabethan tragic corpus a checklist of plot
components and physical symptoms. The arbitrariness of such a check-
list is evident in Soellner’s pointed exclusion, from an otherwise in-
formative survey, of two of the most signiWcant Herculean heroes in
Elizabethan tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s
Lear.22 The real Senecan strain of the Hercules furens tradition is
discovered in those aspects of the myth that were original to Seneca
(and strikingly at odds with his major Attic source, Euripides’ Hera-
kles), namely, his psychological conception of the madness and his
characterization of Hercules as an autarkic hero at war with his own
nature. Equally, in investigating possible aYnities between Shake-
speare’s tragic heroes and Euripides’ Herakles, we need to focus on
the Herakles’ peculiarly Euripidean features.

‘ B E L L A I A M S E C U M G E R AT ’: OT H E L LO

In the prologue to Hercules Furens, Juno explicitly outlines the

strategy she will employ in her campaign against Hercules: quaeris
Alcidae parem? j nemo est nisi ipse; bella iam secum gerat (‘Do you
need a match for Alcides? There is none but himself. Now he must
war with himself ’, 84–5). Her masterly expedient is in se semper
armatus Furor (‘mad Rage, always armed against itself ’, 98). Hercules,
the peerless embodiment of heroic virtus, will be made to do battle
with himself, and thus his greatest victory will be simultaneously his
most comprehensive and ignominious defeat. Later, the hero’s own
words foreshadow, with tragic irony, the genius and eYcacy of Juno’s
nefarious plan: Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus (‘Alcides’ Wnal foe
must be Lycus’, 635); si quod parat j monstrum, meum sit (‘if [the

22 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 315: ‘Unless the writer refers directly to Hercules or
uses several distinct features of the tradition, we cannot claim that the raging hero
hovered in his imagination. On these grounds we must exclude from consideration
some very famous examples of temporary madness on the Elizabethan stage, such as
Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s Lear. Their resemblance to Hercules does not go
much beyond the simple fact that they become temporarily insane.’
124 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
earth] is furnishing some monster, let it be mine’, 938–9). The
goddess determines the timing and outcome of Hercules’ madness,
but, in complete contrast to Euripides’ Herakles, the hero himself,
through his character and actions, suggests the nature of the attack
and provides his stepmother with her most powerful weapon. Juno
succeeds by exploiting and exacerbating a pre-existing or semi-latent
mania, a personality already in conXict with itself.
Juno’s strategy of activating a self-destructive furor is also, as Somer-
ville indicates, the strategy devised by Shakespeare’s arch-manipulator
Iago, whose function in Othello is agential rather than generative:
‘[Iago is] the agent in the play for bringing about the overthrow of a
mind full of conXicting thoughts and emotions. The explosive charges
were ready. He was the spark that set them oV. He was the Diabolus ex
machina, the evil god brought in to complete a debacle in place of a
beneWcent power introduced to save the situation.’23 At the end of Act i,
Iago anticipates the ease with which he will execute his plan to make
Othello suspect Desdemona of inWdelity:
The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so;
And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose
As asses are.
(i. iii. 397–400)
However, it is not merely his master’s candour and credulity that Iago
exploits; even more insidiously and unscrupulously he exploits
Othello’s Herculean duality, the opposition between his nobility
and the ‘bloody passion’ that ‘shakes [his] very frame’ (v. ii. 44).
Othello, like Hercules, is a civilizing hero, a mighty warrior for order
and justice, and a benefactor to the far-Xung regions of earth. The
beginning of the play sees him confronting an external threat in the
form of a Turkish invasion of Cyprus, just as Hercules, on his Wrst
appearance in Seneca’s play, confronts the threat posed by the tyrant
Lycus. In each case, once the external threat has been averted a more
lethal internal threat must be faced. As Miola states: ‘The initial external
struggle sets up the conXict that the main action deconstructs, as each
hero confronts the loathed other within himself.’24 The prototype for

23 Somerville (1979), 76. 24 Miola (1992), 126.

 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 125
this deconstruction is Euripides’ Herakles, but there the action in each
of the play’s contrasting halves is externally motivated. Seneca and
Shakespeare introduce a double motivation: external design and or-
chestration plus internal conXict and susceptibility. In Hercules Furens
the juxtapositions at 635 (‘Alcidae Lycus’) and 939 (‘monstrum meum’)
highlight Hercules’ potential to become Lycus and his own monstrous
prey. In the same way, Othello becomes the inWdel Turk, a raging
barbarian who murders the gentle and faithful Desdemona. And,
following the Herculean pattern, it is in a burst of righteous anger
that Othello’s capacity for self-destructive furor is Wrst revealed. Roused
by a drunken brawl between Cassio and Montano, which has been
carefully contrived by Iago, he fears the ‘collying’ (darkening) of his
senses as he threatens the combatants with death:
Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
And passion, having my best judgement collied,
Assays to lead the way: if I once stir,—
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you—
Shall sink in my rebuke.
(ii. iii. 196–201)
In the wake of his catastrophic madness, the decision of Euripides’
Herakles to retain the instruments of his family’s destruction, his
famed bow and club, is emblematic of the transformation, or rather
deepening, of his characteristic aretē into something greater and
more spiritually exacting (1377–85). Seneca’s Hercules, surveying
the bodies of his murdered wife and children, calls for his arms
with the intention Wrst of destroying them (1231–5), then of destroy-
ing himself (1242–5), and thereby seeks to reassert his heroic identity.
He is thwarted in his second purpose only by his father’s desperate
counter-threat of suicide. His understanding and manifestation of
virtus remains unchanged. Faced with the knowledge of his crime,
Othello also seeks to reclaim his virtus and does so momentarily by
fulWlling Hercules’ intention to kill himself. Yet, as Brower points out,
Othello’s suicide has meaning beyond the heroic:
With the recovery of a true vision of Desdemona and the attainment of true
knowledge of his evil acts, Othello’s attitude is nearer the suVering Christian’s
than the hero’s:
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven . . .
126 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
For the ‘happiness’ of his death is more than a Wnal assertion of his heroic
self; it is also an acceptance of the damnation that he knows is his due, and
an act of self-sacriWce.25
But even in terms of the heroic standards prescribed by Greco-Roman
or humanist tradition, Othello does not die unchanged. Whereas
Seneca’s Hercules remarks bitterly on his inability to weep for his
children as a father should (1228–9), Othello, like Euripides’ Herakles
(1354–6), arrives at a deeper and agonizing recognition of his human-
ity, which declares itself in his unaccustomed facility in weeping:
Then must you speak . . .
Of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum.
(v. ii. 343, 348–51)
Othello is denied a Herculean apotheosis, but before his death he
experiences, at least partially, a Heraklean transWguration of virtus.

‘NON CAPIT TERRA HERCULEM’: TAMBURLAINE

AND HIERONIMO

‘With Tamburlaine,’ Braden declares, ‘Marlowe places at the head of

Elizabethan drama perhaps the least compromising version of the
Herculean hero on any Renaissance stage.’26 Part I of Tamburlaine
chronicles the hero’s ascent from Scythian shepherd to King of Persia,
his defeat of the Turkish emperor Bajazet, and his marriage to
Zenocrate, daughter of the Sultan of Egypt. In Part II the hero’s
pride, cruelty, and insatiable desire ‘to soar above the highest sort’
(ii. vii. 33) lead eventually to his ruin. On the question of whether
Tamburlaine is presented with approval or disapproval, Waith be-
lieves Marlowe’s ‘concept of heroic character is suYciently complex
to include what appear to be contradictory elements and that his atti-
tude, going beyond simple approval or disapproval, remains constant’.27

25 Brower (1971), 27. 26 Braden (1985), 186. 27 Waith (1962), 63.

 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 127
And Braden contends: ‘The ambivalence that marks our response to
Herculean Wgures is heightened in Tamburlaine to perhaps the breaking
point.’28 Marlowe’s bipartite structure emphasizes the contradictory
elements in Tamburlaine’s character and actions, his Herculean duality,
as well as the Elizabethans’ ambivalent attitude towards the type of hero
he exempliWes. The Wrst part can be read as a celebration of the glorious
and charismatic Herculean overreacher, while the second part portrays
the dangers and the mania inherent in a life deWned by overreaching.
Like Hercules, Tamburlaine is a Wgure of inWnite aspiration, im-
agination, and restlessness:
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,
And place himself in the imperial heaven,
Mov’d me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge inWnite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweetness of an earthly crown.
(Part I, ii. vii. 12–29)
Here he invokes the divine precedent of unWlial Jupiter, maps out the
cosmic dimensions of his soul, and, in ‘a daring exaltation of worldli-
ness’,29 envisions the fruition of his godlike pursuit in an earthly crown.
Thus, in true Herculean fashion, Tamburlaine does not belong entirely
either to heaven or to earth.30 He exists in an intermediate, or entirely

28 Braden (1985), 187. 29 Martin (1978), 248–64, at 254.

30 Cf. Silk’s description (1985), 1–22, at 6, of Herakles: ‘Heracles lies on the
margins between human and divine; he occupies the no-man’s-land that is also no-
god’s-land; he is a marginal, transitional or, better, interstitial Wgure.’
128 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
separate, sphere in which his energy and ambition are without equal or
consummation. As an intermediate or ‘interstitial’ Wgure, he is both
vulnerable and dangerous.31 His isolation is the result of his greatness,
but also his ‘colossal individuality’,32 self-absorption, obsessive concern
for his virtus and the absolute primacy of his will (‘This is my mind and
I will have it so’, Part I, iv. ii. 91), and his conviction that he is the sole
executant of a divine purpose (‘I that am term’d the Scourge and Wrath
of God’,33 Part I, iii. iii. 44).
In Part II Tamburlaine’s most telling Herculean speech, and most
violent assertion of autarkeia, reaches a climax in the sacriWcial-style
murder of his cowardly son Calyphas (iv. i. 111–20):
Here, Jove, receive his fainting soul again;
A form not meet to give that subject essence
Whose matter is the Xesh of Tamburlaine,
Wherein an incorporeal spirit moves,
Made of the mould whereof thyself consists,
Which makes me valiant, proud, ambitious,
Ready to levy power against thy throne,
That I might move the turning spheres of heaven;
For earth and all this airy region
Cannot contain the state of Tamburlaine.
[stabs Calyphas]
Following the pattern set by Seneca’s Hercules furens, Tamburlaine
claims parity with Jupiter before issuing impious threats against
Jupiter’s sovereignty. Lines 118–20 immediately recall Juno’s allega-
tion against her stepson, nec satis terrae patent (‘Even the earth is not
room enough’, 46), and Hercules’ deluded declaration of war on his
father’s Olympian throne:
in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar,
petatur aether: astra promittit pater.
—quid, si negaret? non capit terra Herculem
tandemque superis reddit.
(958–61)
31 On the vulnerability and dangers of the interstitial Wgure, see Douglas (1969),
95–6 and 104.
32 Waith (1962), 77.
33 In Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, the hero, addressing Jupiter, refers to himself in
similar terms: ‘ille qui pro fulmine j tuisque facibus natus in terris eram’ (‘He who
was born on earth in place of your Wery thunderbolt’, 1143–4).
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 129
I must travel on high to the lofty expanses of the cosmos, and make for the
sky: the stars are my father’s promise. What if he should now refuse? The
earth cannot contain Hercules, and at last yields him to the world above.
Both heroes have outgrown the limits imposed by heaven and earth;
they rage prodigiously and alone.
A quite diVerent but equally compelling example of Herculean
aspiration and autarkeia is the character of Hieronimo in Kyd’s The
Spanish Tragedy. Braden argues: ‘Whatever the exact chronological
relationship between Kyd’s play and Marlowe’s, The Spanish Tragedy
provides the logical succession to Tamburlaine. . . . Kyd brings England’s
unusually expansive version of Senecan selfhood into the crucial arena
of revenge tragedy, where Renaissance drama forces that selfhood into
its most intimate dealings with the lives around it.’34 Hieronimo,
Knight Marshall of Spain, is driven mad with grief by the murder of
his son Horatio, and, failing to secure justice, he plots to carry out his
personal revenge. In common with Hercules, his mania, isolation, and
restless punitive quest coalesce in titanic and tragic fashion; his solitude
becomes pathological, unreachable. As he spurs himself to the task of
vengeance in Act iii, he compares his uncompromising mission to
Hercules’ destructive katabasis, employing language which simultan-
eously recalls Hercules’ hallucinatory assault on heaven:
The upper billows, course of waves to keep,
Whilst lesser waters labour in the deep,
Then sham’st thou not, Hieronimo, to neglect
The sweet revenge of thy Horatio?
Though on this earth justice will not be found,
I’ll down to hell, and in this passion
Knock at the dismal gates of Pluto’s court,
Getting by force, as once Alcides did,
A troop of Furies and tormenting hags
To torture Don Lorenzo and the rest.
Yet lest the triple-headed porter should
Deny my passage to the slimy strand,
The Thracian poet thou shalt counterfeit:
Come on, old father, be my Orpheus,
And if thou canst no notes upon the harp,
Then sound the burden of thy sore heart’s grief,

34 Braden (1985), 200.

130 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
Till we do gain that Proserpine may grant
Revenge on them that murdered my son.
Then will I rend and tear them thus and thus,
Shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth.
(iii. xiii. 106–23)
As with Herculean Tamburlaine, earth cannot contain the rage and
the vengeful aspirations of Hieronimo. In enlisting a ‘troop of Furies
and tormenting hags’ (114), Hieronimo is also likening himself to
Seneca’s Juno, who marshals against Hercules the infernal army of
Dis, Scelus, Impietas, Error, and Furor (95–9).
Brower maintains that the most important feature of the Senecan
hero and his style of speech (and the one which particularly distin-
guishes him from Homeric and Virgilian heroes) is ‘the immense
sense of self, and the accompanying use of language to direct atten-
tion to the self ’.35 As we have observed in the speeches of Tambur-
laine, this ‘immense sense of self ’ is also one of the main features of
the Herculean hero. Characteristic of Senecan Hercules’ sane and
insane discourse is his habit of referring to himself in the third
person, or using his name as an aggressive assertion of self (631,
635, 957, 960, 990, 1152, 1155, 1163, 1168, 1218, 1295, 1316). This
habit is an intrinsic part of Hieronimo’s autarkic rhetoric:
Who calls Hieronimo? Speak, here I am.
(ii. v. 4)
Hieronimo, ’tis time for thee to trudge.
Down by the dale that Xows with purple gore
Standeth a Wery tower; there sits a judge
Upon a seat of steel and molten brass,
And ’twixt his teeth he holds a Wrebrand,
That leads unto the lake where hell doth stand

35 Brower (1971), 169. T. S. Eliot found repugnant the Senecan hero’s self-assert-
iveness and self-absorption. Of Othello’s last great speech (v. ii. 338–56), in which the
Moor refers to himself in the third person, he wrote (1951, 130–1): ‘What Othello
seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is
endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is
thinking about himself. Humility is the most diYcult of all virtues to achieve;
nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in
turning himself into a pathetic Wgure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral
attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but
the human motive is primarily to take in himself.’
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 131
Away, Hieronimo, to him be gone!
He’ll do thee justice for Horatio’s death. . . .
Justice, O justice to Hieronimo!
(iii. xii. 6–13, 27)
See, see, O see thy shame, Hieronimo.
(iii. xiii. 95)
Similarly, in the Wnal act, Hieronimo’s triumphant exclamations
before killing himself, ‘know I am Hieronimo’ (iv. iv. 83) and ‘now
behold Hieronimo, j Author and actor in this tragedy’ (iv. iv. 146–7),
are moments of autarkic epiphany which correspond strongly to
Hercules’ declaration that he is the author of his family’s and his
own destruction (‘hoc unum meum est’, 1268).

‘ H I C E R R AT S C E LUS ’ : M AC B E T H

The most psychologically and morally complex incarnation of Hercu-

lean autarkeia in the Elizabethan tragic canon is Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
whose Xight to exalted selfhood and the resulting crash to ordinary
mortality are, as Miola notes, clearly ‘plotted along Senecan coordin-
ates’.36 Like Seneca’s Hercules, Macbeth’s immoderate hopes (‘spes
immanes’, 162) to scale ad astra ‘start him on a vertiginous descent to
hell’.37 His ‘restless ecstasy’ (iii. ii. 22) is especially Herculean (cf. HF
613–14: ‘quid restat aliud? . . . da si quid ultra est’ and 996: ‘quid
moror?’); he ‘is always in an emergency, desperate to overtake, to leap
over, to outrun’.38 The tragic essence of both heroes is captured in
Braden’s analysis of extreme autarkeia:
To choose the way of self-conscious horror, a way systematically opposed to all
other human desires and responsibilities, is to certify an absolute lack of
ulterior motivation; no other part of the soul is being gratiWed or even
courted. ‘What I was praised for doing, I did on orders,’ says Seneca’s Hercules,
looking on the bodies of his murdered family, ‘only this is my own’ (Herc.f.
1268). Heroic evil is the ultimate autarceia [sic], enforcing and exploiting a
radical split between the self’s needs and the claims of its context.39
36 Miola (1992), 111. On the Senecan resonances in Macbeth, see Peyré (2004), 141–55.
37 Miola (1992), 111. 38 Poole (1987), 42. 39 Braden (1985), 47.
132 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
The terrifying results of this radical split are enacted in the heroes’
anagnōriseis. Hercules’ anagnōrisis in Act v is consistent with, and
potently symbolic of, his tragic selfhood. Boldly deviating from
Euripides’ psychotherapeutic stichomythia between father and son,
Seneca reveals to us the terrible workings of the autarkic conscience.
Hercules is the self-proclaimed author of his crime; unaided in his
recognition, his bloodstained hands betray his guilt:
Miserere, genitor, supplices tendo manus.
quid hoc? manus refugit: hic errat scelus.
unde hic cruor? quid illa puerili madens
harundo leto? tincta Lernaea est nece.
iam tela video nostra. non quaero manum.
quis potuit arcum Xectere aut quae dextera
sinuare nervum vix recedentem mihi?
ad vos revertor, genitor: hoc nostrum est scelus?
tacuere: nostrum est.
(1192–9)
Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back
from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that
shaft, soaked by a boy’s death? It is steeped in the Hydra’s fatal blood. Now
I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that
bow, what hand Xexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of
you again, father: is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.
In the wake of his Wrst crime, the murder of Duncan, Macbeth,
focusing on his ‘hangman’s hands’, undergoes a correspondingly
autarkic anagnōrisis. The diVerence is that Macbeth’s anagnōrisis
marks only the beginning of his madness and his hellish odyssey
into the darkest reaches of his soul:
macbeth One cried, ‘God bless us!’ and, ‘Amen,’ the other,
As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.
List’ning their fear, I could not say, ‘Amen,’
When they did say, ‘God bless us!’
lady macbeth Consider it not so deeply.
macbeth But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?
I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’
Stuck in my throat.
lady macbeth These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 133
macbeth Methought, I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep,’—the innocent Sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds,40 great Nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast;—
lady macbeth What do you mean?
macbeth Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house:
‘Glamis hath murther’d Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!’
lady macbeth Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy Thane,
You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things. Go, get some water,
And wash this Wlthy witness from your hand.— . . .
macbeth Whence is that knocking?—
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
(ii. ii. 26–46, 56–8)
This anagnōrisis takes the form of a virtual soliloquy in which the terror
of Macbeth’s subconscious mind is projected onto the screen of his
consciousness. He seems not to hear his wife, but to communicate in a
state of solitary Wxation, responsive only to the importunate sounds
and images conjured up from his raw conscience. The auditory hallu-
cinations of Duncan’s disembodied voice and the knocking, and the
visual hallucination of the hands that pluck out Macbeth’s eyes, are, as
Somerville describes, ‘the expression in consciousness of the content of
a mental conXict, and the acuteness of the fear is . . . directly propor-
tional to the severity of the conXict’.41 Somerville interprets the hero’s
incipient madness in this scene as a ‘distortion in his a-social person-
ality’.42 In other words, Macbeth’s guilt intensiWes, to the point of
mania, an already abnormal aloofness—the self-imposed isolation
and inverted altruism of the Herculean overreacher.

40 Muir (1959), 56 believes it ‘probable that ‘‘balm of hurt minds’’ was suggested
by the situation in Hercules Furens, where the Chorus invokes Sleep to cure the
madness of the hero’. The relevant lines are HF 1065–7: ‘tuque, o domitor j Somne
malorum, requies animi, j pars humanae melior vitae’ (‘And you, o Sleep, subduer of
troubles, rest for the spirit, sweeter part of human life’).
41 Somerville (1979), 48. 42 Ibid. 42.
134 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
The words manus and dextra dominate the linguistic texture of
Hercules Furens, continually underlining the duality of the Herculean
nature and modus vitae. Often they are used as metonyms for the
hero’s celebrated strength and civilizing deeds. As the focus of Her-
cules’ anagnōrisis, they vividly symbolize the realization of the mon-
ster-slayer’s potential to turn monster. The stain attached literally to
Hercules’ hands, and Wguratively to his soul, is commensurate with
his greatness and his extravagant style of selfhood:
quis Tanais aut quis Nilus aut quis Persica
violentus unda Tigris aut Rhenus ferox
Tagusve Hibera turbidus gaza Xuens
abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet
Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare
et tota Tethys per meas currat manus,
haerebit altum facinus.
(1323–9)43
What Tanais or what Nile or what Persian Tigris with its violent waters or
Werce Rhine or Tagus, turbid with Spanish treasure, can wash my right hand
clean? Though chill Maeotis should pour its northern seas over me and all
the Ocean stream across my hands, the deed will stay deeply ingrained.
In his parallel anagnōrisis, Shakespeare uses Seneca’s hand motif to
symbolize Macbeth’s Herculean scelus and indelible miasma:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand?44 No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
(ii. ii. 59–62)45

43 Cf. Seneca’s Phaedra 715–18, in which Hippolytus cries out after being polluted by
his stepmother’s attempted seduction: ‘quis eluet me Tanais aut quae barbaris j Maeotis
undis Pontico incumbens mari? j non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater j tantum expiarit
sceleris’ (‘What Tanais will wash me or what Maeotis pressing barbarous Xoods into the
Pontic sea? Not the mighty father himself with all his Ocean will expiate such a crime’).
44 C. B. Young (cited by Muir (1959), 58) points out that Shakespeare’s echo at
ii. ii. 59–60 is closer to the original than Jasper Heywood’s translation of HF 1328
(‘And al the water therof shoulde now pas by my two handes’).
45 On the familiar possibility that Macbeth ii. ii. 59–62 is an amalgamation of
Hercules Furens 1323–9 and Phaedra 715–18, see Muir (1959), 57–8. Miola (1992,
112–14) persuasively argues for Hercules Furens as a source. The hand motif is, of
course, peculiar to the Hercules passage.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 135
In so doing, he exploits the autarkic intensity of the original lines,
their revealing combination of horror, aspiration, and exhilaration.
As Poole explains: ‘[Macbeth] is overwhelmed by the sheer excite-
ment of possibility, of beginning. The great lines about the multitu-
dinous seas acknowledge the vast magical forces that lie beyond his
control, but they also express the absurd, magniWcent desire to tame
and possess those powers for himself, to reduce multitudinousness to
oneness.’46 The diVerence between the two passages is one of place-
ment and of psychological and moral emphasis. The Senecan passage
comes at the close of the play and is accompanied by a preWgurement,
however bleak and brieXy sketched, of Hercules’ absolution. Seneca’s
main interest in the Herculean psychology and morality is located in
the scenes up to and including the madness. Unlike Euripides’
Herakles, the nature of Hercules’ heroism does not undergo sign-
iWcant development or transformation as a result of his furor and
scelus. Shakespeare’s main interest is diVerently located. As Miola
discerns, the displacement of the anagnōrisis from the end of Hercules
Furens to the second act of Macbeth ‘enables more searching explor-
ation of the eVects of scelus, measured in terms personal, social, and
universal’.47 Macbeth’s is almost a Herculean journey in reverse, a
journey further and further away from absolution and redemption.
What both heroes share, however, near the end of their respective
journeys, is an acute sense of autarkic desolation:
Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius
morerque nihil est; cuncta iam amisi bona,
mentem arma famam coniugem natos manus,
etiam furorem.
(1258–61)
There is no reason for me to keep lingering in this light any further. I have lost all
of value: my mind, my weapons, glory, wife, sons, hands—even my madness.
I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.
(Macbeth, v. iii. 22–6)

46 Poole (1987), 47. 47 Miola (1992), 112.

136 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
Each is essentially aphilos, not merely friendless but beyond the reach
of human philia, a condition plainly demonstrated by Hercules’
inability to weep for his murdered sons (‘lacrimare vultus nescit’,
1229) and by Macbeth’s impassive acceptance of the news of his wife’s
death (v. v. 17–28).

‘HOC UNUM MEUM EST ’: CORIOLANUS

Aspiration and corruptibility render Macbeth aphilos; for him, as for

Tamburlaine and Hieronimo, isolation is a corollary of his restless-
ness. But for Shakespeare’s incorruptible Coriolanus the condition of
aphilia, the ‘drive toward superior isolation’,48 is an end in itself. He
hugs his solitariness to him; it is what sustains him, and the only
means by which he believes he can claim authorship of himself. It is
his persistence in this belief which brings him closest to the tragic
core of Seneca’s Hercules.
The main source of Coriolanus is Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius
Coriolanus’ in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which
Shakespeare read in the English translation by Thomas North (1579).
Shakespeare’s departures from Plutarch’s biography are what make
his hero more Senecan. Most importantly, to the account of the battle
in which Martius earns his cognomen he adds a single crucial word,
‘alone’.49 This becomes a recurring theme:
Following the Xiers at the very heels,
With them he enters; who, upon the sudden,
Clapp’d to their gates; he is himself alone,
To answer all the city.
(i. iv. 49–52)
Within these three hours, Tullus,
Alone I fought in your Corioles walls,
And made what work I pleas’d.
(i. viii. 7–9)

48 McCanles (1967), 44–53, at 49.

49 Cf. Plutarch’s version in Brooke (1909, 149): ‘But he looking about him, and
seeing he was entered the city with very few men to help him . . .’.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 137
Know, Rome, that all alone Martius did Wght
Within Corioles gates.
(ii. i. 162–3)
Alone he enter’d
The mortal gate of th’ city . . .
(ii. ii. 110–11)
It is also, Waith stresses, ‘one of the touches which reveals most
unequivocally [Shakespeare’s] heroic conception of the character.
In Coriolanus the opposition of the individual might of the hero to
the superior forces of nature and fate is pushed to the uttermost.’50
Coriolanus’ isolationism takes many forms. In the Wrst place he
harbours a pathological distaste for the ordinary citizenry, making it
his mission to be at perpetual variance with their cause:
He seeks their hate with
greater devotion than they can render it him, and
leaves nothing undone that may fully discover him
their opposite.
(ii. ii. 18–21)
In contrast to his friend and father-Wgure Menenius, he refuses, even
at the cost of the consulship, to aVect aVability and bestow bland-
ishments, in short, to play the politician. He is ‘too absolute’ (iii. ii.
39), ‘too noble for the world’ (iii. i. 25). Nor is his lack of political
mildness and ease compensated for by the revelation of a domestic
self. At no point in the play do we see Coriolanus enjoying his home
and family. His parting from his family at the opening of Act iv is
perfunctory (‘Come, leave your tears. A brief farewell!’), and recalls
precisely the instructions of Seneca’s Hercules to his loved ones
(diVer amplexus, ‘postpone your embraces’, 638; diVerte Xetus, ‘post-
pone your tears’, 1175).
Perhaps to an even greater degree than Hercules, Coriolanus is an
interstitial hero. He is set apart by his superhuman martial prowess (‘And
with a sudden reinforcement struck j Corioles like a planet’, ii. ii. 113–14),
his colossal physical presence (‘He’ll shake your Rome about your ears. j
As Hercules j Did shake down mellow fruit’, iv. vi. 99–101), and his
godlike aura (‘the nobles bended j As to Jove’s statue’, ii. i. 265–6). Above
50 Waith (1962), 142.
138 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
all, what separates himis his unwillingness to belong, to be part of awhole.
He must be entire of himself. When he is banished from Rome, he declares
deWantly, ‘There is a world elsewhere!’ (iii. iii. 135). Yet, so determined
is he to be both aphilos and apolis that he has no real place in any world; he
is neither Roman nor Volscian, but remains ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’
(v. i. 13). His otherworldliness is perceived by the Roman general Comi-
nius, observing Coriolanus’ eVect on the Volscian forces: ‘He leads
them like a thing j Made by some other deity than nature, jThat shapes
man better’ (iv. vi. 91–3). On leaving Rome, Coriolanus tells his mother
Volumnia: ‘I go alone, j Like to a lonely dragon that his fen j Makes fear’d
and talk’d of more than seen’ (iv. i. 29–31). According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, this is the Wrst recorded use of the word ‘lonely’ in
the English language.51 ‘It is’, says Poole, ‘as if Shakespeare were making
Martius Wnd a new syllable, to ‘‘exceed the common’’. ’52
Immediately after Coriolanus’ banishment, Volumnia rouses herself
by invoking the wrath of Hercules’ stepmother: ‘In anger, Juno-like.
Come, come, come!’ (iv. ii. 53). The self-comparison is apt, for in the
last act it is she who initiates Coriolanus’ decisive war against himself,
the battle between his desire for superior isolation and the constraints of
Wlial love. As ‘the honour’d mould j Wherein this trunk was fram’d’ (v. iii.
22–3), she is the source of his isolated being, his counsel in self-truth, and
as such he must honour her. Coriolanus is thus ‘perfectly trapped by the
Wssure in the nature created by his mother’s nurture’.53 Having aligned
himself with his great enemy AuWdius in the pursuit of vengeance against
Rome, he resolves to be merciless: ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’
(v. ii. 81). At the approach of the familial embassy mustered under
Volumnia, he summons his intransigent, unnatural solitariness:
But out, aVection!
All bond and privilege of nature break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curtsy worth? or those doves’ eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows,
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod; and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession which
Great nature cries, ‘Deny not’. Let the Volsces
51 OED (2001), viii. 1122. 52 Poole (1988), 76. 53 Ibid., 105.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 139
Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.
(v. iii. 24–37)
But his hope of authorship of himself is eventually vanquished by the
‘colder reasons’ (v. iii. 86) of his one true author, Volumnia, whose
admonitions and entreaties recall those of Seneca’s Amphitryon (HF
1306–13):
For myself, son,
I purpose not to wait on fortune till
These wars determine. If I cannot persuade thee
Rather to show a noble grace to both parts,
Than seek the end of one, thou shalt no sooner
March to assault thy country than to tread—
Trust to’t, thou shalt not—on thy mother’s womb
That brought thee to this world.
(v. iii. 118–25)
Coriolanus knows that his capitulation is a fatal act of treason against
himself. He has allowed his mother to penetrate the solitariness that
sustains him:
O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son, believe it, O believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.
(v. iii. 185–92)
Her victory is visible in her son’s alien tears: ‘it is no little thing to
make j Mine eyes to sweat compassion’ (v. iii. 199–200).
Yet, ultimately, it is not Coriolanus’ capitulation to the bonds of
philia which destroys him, but rather his reassertion of his aphilos
self. In the Wnal scene AuWdius taunts Coriolanus with the very
emblems of the latter’s surrender of self-authorship: ‘thou boy of
tears!’ (v. vi. 101). It is this accusation, far more than AuWdius’ cries
140 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
of ‘traitor’, which cuts Coriolanus to the quick. He responds by
inviting his own death in a chilling utterance of autarkic perfection:
Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter’d your Volscians in Coriole.
Alone I did it. Boy!
(v. vi. 111–16)
The Herculean Coriolanus, who seeks self-authorship through extreme
aphilia, is in many ways a preWgurement of the Nietzschean Herakles
who emerges in the Modernist period in the work of Lodge, Yeats, and
Wedekind.54 In both cases, the hero’s isolation is a dangerous creed of
transcendence, which holds the self as divinity and universe. It is a creed
as far removed from Euripidean philia as is possible to get.

‘QU I S H I C LOC U S? ’ : K I N G L E A R A ND PE R I C L E S

Act v of Hercules Furens memorably opens with the hero’s disorientated

and rhetorically grandiose awakening from the restorative sleep that
has overtaken madness:
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine
glacialis Ursae? numquid Hesperii maris
extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum?
quas trahimus auras? quod solum fesso subest?
certe redimus.
(1138–43)
What place is this, what region, what tract of the earth? Where am I? Beneath
the sun’s rising, or beneath the turning point of the icy Bear? Can this be the
limit set to Ocean’s waters by the farthest land on the western sea? What air do
I breathe? What ground lies under my weary body? Certainly I have returned.
This ‘interrogative awakening into painful self-consciousness was a
topos variously employed on the Elizabethan stage’,55 and frequently
54 See below, Chap. 8. 55 Miola (1992), 166.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 141
by means of direct quotation or adaptation of the Senecan passage.
In Part III (5.3) of Richardus Tertius (1580), Thomas Legge quotes
lines 1138–9 of Hercules Furens to indicate the perplexity and fear of
Henry Tudor alone and lost on the battleWeld:
Quis hic locus? quae regio? quae regni plaga?
ubi sum? ruit nox. hei ubi satellites?
inimica cuncta. fraude quis vacat locus?
quenquam rogabo? tuta sit Wdes vide.
nativus artus reliquit internos calor
rigore frigent membra vix loquor metu
tremisco totus.
(14–20)
What place is this, what region, what quarter of the kingdom? Where am I?
The night hastens on. Ah! where are my followers? All around is hostile.
What place is free from deceit? Shall I ask anyone? Take care that his loyalty
is assured! The natural warmth has left my inward joints; my limbs are
frozen with stiVness. I can scarcely speak for fear. I tremble all over.
In Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), John Marston uses the same
two lines to signal the beginning of Pasquill’s furor, and in Alaham
(1600), Fulke Greville presents his own version of Senecan perconta-
tio and Herculean dusgnoia:
But what is this? Wake I, or doe I dreame?
If chang’d; with whom, or into whom am I?
Doth Horror dazell sense, or multiply?
What world is this? Where’s Alaham? Where my Sonne?
(v. iii. 99–102)
Other contemporaneous examples of the Herculean sequence of
temporary insanity, palliative sleep, and confused awakening include
Bomelio in the anonymous The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune
(1582) and the hero of Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso (1591). Like
Seneca’s Hercules, Bomelio’s madness begins with the sensation of
darkness and has two levels of causation—internal and external; his
melancholic disposition is worsened by the goddess Fortuna’s perse-
cution of him. Greene’s Orlando twice imagines himself in his
madness to be Hercules, and his furor causes him to mistake his
servant for his enemy Medor and violently to attack Medor’s accomplice.
142 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
With the latter’s detached leg in his hand, he swings it about as
though it were Hercules’ club, and calls for a lion’s skin, declaring:
‘Thou seest I now am mightie Hercules j Look, wheres my massie
club upon my necke’ (ii. i). Later he orders his servant to fetch from
Apollo the shirt of Nessus (iv. ii). The Herculean ravings of Bome-
lio and Orlando are cured only by sleep. Two satirical treatments of
this ‘awakening’ topos are found in the academic play Lingua
(1607) and James Shirley’s Love Tricks (1625). In the earlier work
the boisterous coward Tactus becomes raving mad, and ‘cannot be
persuaded but he is Hercules furens’. He is eventually bound by
Somnus and his delirium remedied by sleep. Although a satirical
creation, Tactus owes something to Seneca’s characterization of
Hercules as a tragic miles gloriosus, an impetuous braggart con-
strained by an unthinking, unfeeling brand of heroism.
These stage representations of remedial sleep in the context of
Herculean furor also reXect contemporary medical opinion and
pharmaceutical practice. As Blanshard observes: ‘Seventeenth-cen-
tury physicians even recommended a ‘‘sleep cure’’ for madness based
on the period of unconsciousness experienced by Hercules before he
regained his sanity. Such a period of oblivion they reasoned allowed
the black bile that had ascended from the stomach to the brain to be
breathed out.’56 Narcotics such as opium and tobacco were com-
monly prescribed for this purpose.
The most famous Herculean awakening in Elizabethan drama
occurs in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act iv, scene vii:
Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?
I am mightily abused. I should ev’n die with pity
To see another thus. I know not what to say.
I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see—
I feel this pinprick. Would I were assured
Of my condition. . . .
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks I should know you and know this man,

56 Blanshard (2005), 60. For an overview of medical perspectives on sleep in this

period, see Dannenfeldt (1986), 415–41. On Renaissance beliefs in both the remedial
and harmful eVects of sleep, and in sleep as a near-relation to death, see Pollard
(2005), 67–8.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 143
Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
(iv. vii. 52–6, 63–9)
Here we have the same ‘slow drift back into consciousness, the
disordered sense of place, the fearful possibility that this waking is
a waking into damnation’.57 But what is remarkable about this scene
is its Euripidean rather than Senecan substance. As in the case of
Euripides’ Herakles, Lear’s awakening marks the beginning of his
rehabilitation which is achieved through philia, through the loyalty
of Gloucester and Kent and, above all, the redemptive love of his
daughter Cordelia who, in common with Euripides’ Amphitryon,
plays the part of the gentle psychotherapist and agent of anagnōrisis:
O my dear father, restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made.
(iv. vii. 26–9)
Lear’s interrogative awakening is more muted and less grandiose
than Hercules’, more naturalistic and less rhetorical. In place of Hercu-
les’ rage and self-assertion he exhibits humility, contrition, and a
Heraklean sense of aidos. He also aYrms his humanity (‘as I am a
man’).58 Unlike Herakles, of course, Lear wakes to the joyous realiza-
tion that the child whom he wronged (not in his madness, but in full
consciousness) is alive. Yet, it is this very diVerent realization that starts
Lear on a Heraklean journey towards forgiveness and salvation. In
contrast to Senecan Hercules’ autarkeia, Lear’s restoration and recog-
nition are characterized by a new, childlike dependence and vulnerability
(‘this child-changed father’, iv. vii. 17), which, paradoxically, enable the

57 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 259.

58 Cf. Euripidean Herakles’ bitter scepticism towards Zeus and his acknowledgement
of mortal Amphitryon as his true father at 1263–65. As Barlow (1996, 178) notes: ‘Here
Heracles is questioning his very identity.’
144 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
rehabilitation of his majesty and fatherhood.59 The progress of this
rehabilitative scene recalls Arrowsmith’s description of Euripides’
Herakles as ‘a play which imposes suVering upon men as their tragic
condition, but . . . also discovers a courage equal to that necessity, a
courage founded on love’.60 The scene ends with Cordelia leading
her father oV ‘in a brief but indelible version of Herakles’ exit with
Theseus’.61 ¨.

ı
æfi c Eæ ; ›
ªø
 Kª. (theseus.
‘Put your arm round my neck, and I shall lead you’,
1402) . . . ˙æ. E
 IƺÆ ÆNÆØ
 j ¨E

ÆºØ łŁ KºŒ
. (herakles. ‘I who have desolated

my house with shame and am utterly destroyed, shall follow The-
seus like a small boat in tow’, 1423–4).
cordelia Will’t please your highness walk?
lear You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget and
forgive; I am old and foolish.
(iv. vii. 82–4)
‘Shakespeare’, Braden perceives, ‘in eVect restores to the Senecan
scene an important part of what Seneca cuts out of Euripides; the
proud man’s discovery of a dependence and comfort that in fact will
restore his ruined standing (he is again ‘‘your Highnesse’’).’62 As we
know, the happy ending promised by that discovery is prematurely
annulled by the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. With this Wnal peripet-
eia Shakespeare takes us ‘from a consolation beyond Euripides’ to a
despair beyond Seneca’s. . . . [His] recasting of the classical scene
recapitulates its past and exceeds it’.63 But, for reasons which Brower
articulates, the play does not end with Seneca’s nihilistic despair; it
ends, like Euripides’ Herakles, with an image and an aYrmation of
transcendent love in the midst of insupportable fortune:
Lear’s demand for love, with which King Lear began, was an assertion of self, and
the only answer to that demand is Cordelia’s. But ‘love suVreth long and is kind’,
though the answer is ‘nothing’. Hence the overwhelming eVect of Lear’s last
words, that in the face of ‘No, no, no life!’ he looks for life, and he loves. . . . Lear

59 As in Euripides, the roles of parent and child are reversed. Cf. King Lear, v. iii. 10–11,
where, Brower (1971), 412 states: ‘As father kneels to child and asks forgiveness, a new and
tender inversion of relations takes place.’
60 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53.
61 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 260. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 261.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 145
dies loving and looking for life—that is ‘the wonder’, a kind of greatness more
remarkable than the power of endurance that Kent marvels at. To love and
hope with full tragic knowledge of the injustice, cruelty, and confusion of life
is to pass beyond god-like hero to something god-like indeed.64
In Act v, scene i of the tragicomic Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which has
several points of similarity with Act iv, scene vii of King Lear,
Shakespeare again recapitulates and transcends the Herculean anag-
nōrisis. To paraphrase Miola, Pericles is the antitype of a Senecan
protagonist and endures a kind of anti-furor, which culminates not in
a scelus of cosmic proportions but in a moving reunion scene be-
tween father and daughter:65
pericles This is the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep
Did mock sad fools withal; this cannot be
My daughter, buried. . . .
How came you in these parts? where were you bred?
marina The king my father did in Tarsus leave me;
Till cruel Cleon, with his wicked wife,
Did seek to murder me; and having woo’d
A villain to attempt it, who having drawn to do’t,
A crew of pirates came and rescu’d me;
Brought me to Mytilene. But, good sir,
Whither will you have me? Why do you weep? It may be
You think me an impostor: no, good faith;
I am the daughter to King Pericles,
If good King Pericles be.
(v. i. 162–4, 170–80)
T. S. Eliot discerned the Herculean subtext beneath the climactic
moment of Pericles’ recovery and recognition, selecting the beginning
of Hercules’ anagnōrisis (1138) as an epigraph to his poem ‘Marina’
(1930), which opens with a striking enjambement of Senecan percontatio:
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through
the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
(1–5)

64 Brower (1971), 415. 65 Miola (1992), 194.

146 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
The Senecan epigraph implicitly contrasts Pericles’ joyful recognition
of his daughter Marina, whom he believed was dead, with Hercules’
tragic recognition of his murdered children. In a postscript to his
letter presenting the draft of ‘Marina’ to the Bodleian Library, Eliot
wrote: ‘I intend a criss-cross between Pericles Wnding alive, and
Hercules Wnding dead—the two extremes of the recognition
scene—but I thought that if I labelled the quotation it might lead
readers astray rather than direct them. It is only an accident that
I know Seneca better than I know Euripides.’66 Eliot’s self-confessed
greater familiarity with the Senecan version may account for his
failure to discern the Euripidean subtext beneath Pericles’ recogni-
tion and Shakespeare’s subtle repudiation of Herculean autarkeia in
favour of Heraklean philia.
If Seneca is ‘the closest Shakespeare ever got to Greek tragedy’,67
the very fact of a discernible Euripidean subtext in his plays raises
fascinating, if ultimately unanswerable, questions. The close aYnities
in essence between the rehabilitative awakenings of Herakles, Lear,
and Pericles also illustrate Burrow’s point about the imaginative
complexity of Shakespeare’s mobilization of classical allusion: ‘A
large part of the creativity of Shakespeare lies in his willingness to
overlayer one shard of ‘‘the classics’’ with another, to misremember,
and to reinvent what he has read.’68

Seneca’s charismatic and uncontainable Hercules, who is nourished

and made desolate by the same ferocious sense of selfhood, assumed
many roles on the Elizabethan stage. As character and concept he
became a tragic archetype for Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
However, his subsequent inXuence was never as profound or perva-
sive, and for a time the Herculean hero of Senecan tradition eVec-
tively disappeared from the English stage. The causes of his
disappearance are bound up with changes, which were initiated
during the Restoration, in audience composition, theatrical tastes,
and heroic ideals.
The greatest achievement of the Restoration stage was the wit and
social satire of its comedy of manners, which laid the foundations of
66 Quoted in Moody (1994), 158.
67 Martindale (1990), 44. See also Silk (2004), 241–57, at 241.
68 Burrow (2004), 9–27, at 24.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 147
a quintessentially English comic mode. By contrast, the Restoration
heroic play was one of the more short-lived forms in the history of
the theatre. Its most proliWc exponent was John Dryden (1631–
1700), who endeavoured unsuccessfully to acclimatize the trappings
of French neoclassicism in English. With Dryden the heroic genre
rose, Xourished, and fell. In his major plays, The Conquest of Granada
(1670), Aureng-Zebe (1675), and All for Love (1677), we Wnd ‘legit-
imate descendants of the earlier Herculean heroes. However . . . these
descendants speak and behave very diVerently from their forebears.
One of the reasons why they do so is the acknowledged inXuence of
the romance, and especially of the French romance.’69 Likewise, there
are echoes of the Herculean hero in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane
(1702), but the distance between this play and the Senecan world of
Marlowe is vast. Restoration heroic drama was not part of the
problematizing tragic tradition. Its aim was to inspire admiration
and wonder, and a happy ending, which witnessed poetic justice for
the brave and noble, was de rigueur. Sober emphasis was placed on
the virtues of valour, honesty, and love, and, above all, on decorum
and propriety. Propriety required, for example, Nahum Tate in his
version of King Lear (1681) to restore Lear to his throne and marry
Cordelia to Edgar. In the same way, in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus, The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (published in 1682),
Tate replaced the desolate spectacle of Martius’ Wercely autarkic death
with ‘an impeccable funeral tableau; Martius dies with his wife under
one arm and his son under the other, the perfect family man’.70
Towards the end of the Restoration, and at the beginning of the
Georgian era, theatre audiences became more numerous and less
sophisticated, and were now more likely to comprise members of

69 Waith (1962), 154. Nearer in essence to the earlier Herculean heroes is the hero
of Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus (1678), whose deWant last words call to mind
Seneca’s grandiloquent and bombastic overreacher. On Dryden and Lees’s debt, in
this Wnal speech, to Seneca and to Milton’s Samson Agonistes, see Macintosh (2005a),
1–29, at 20.
70 Poole (1988), 120. The autarkic intensity of Shakespeare’s ending is also missing
from James Thomson’s Coriolanus (Wrst performed posthumously in 1749), in which
the hero, recalling his victory at Corioles, says nothing of being ‘alone’. As Waith
remarks, the omission of this word ‘makes all the plainer the consequences of
Shakespeare’s climactic emphasis on Coriolanus as an individual who can never be
assimilated into a city, his own or another’ (1962, 143).
148 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’
the professional and merchant classes than the aristocracy. The
change in audiences was accompanied by a shift in the type of plays
presented: sentiment supplanted comedy, and pathos substituted for
tragedy. Under these new conventions, the psychologically and mor-
ally complex Herculean hero lost his theatrical appeal.
In the early to mid-eighteenth century the work of dramatists such
as George Lillo (1693–1739), who is best remembered for his play
The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell (1731),
inXuenced the development of bourgeois tragedy and domestic
drama, the prototypes of Arthur Miller’s tragedy of the common
man. The discovery and elevation of the ordinary entailed a suspen-
sion of dramatic interest in the extraordinary, and the semi-divine
Hercules, greatest of all classical heroes, was an obvious casualty of
this movement. Waith mentions a slightly later development, which
had similar consequences for tragic Hercules—the rise of the novel:
Admiration for the uncompromisingly individual warrior ceases for a time,
to begin again in a somewhat diVerent form in the Romantic movement.
HeathcliV and Captain Ahab, diVerent as they both are from Tamburlaine or
Morat, are loved and feared for somewhat similar reasons. Their shocking
infractions of the code of ordinary decency are similarly accepted as integral
parts of their heroism. That the most obvious examples of the type occur in
the novel rather than on the stage is one of many indications of the
absorption by the novel of themes formerly sacred to epic and tragedy.71
The lengthy absence of the Herculean hero from English drama
reXects a more universal neglect. Following his Renaissance revival,
there is a hiatus of almost two centuries in the reception of mad
Herakles, the hero of Euripidean-Senecan tradition. He Wrst re-
appears at the turn of the nineteenth century, not in literary or
dramatic form but in the work of Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova,
one of the few artists ever to have attempted to capture the moment
of Herakles’ Wlicidal rampage.72 On the theme of ‘Hercules in his
Madness Killing his Sons’, Canova executed a preliminary sketch, an
oil painting, a wax bozzetto, and Wnally, in 1803–4, a plaster relief,
which is housed in the Canova Museum in his home town of

71 Waith (1962), 201.

72 Canova’s better-known depiction of Hercules, and indeed one of his most
celebrated works, is his marble sculpture Hercules and Lichas, completed in 1815.
 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’ 149
Possagno. This last conveys an extraordinary sense of space and
momentum.73 Hercules, an immense form of grim unstoppability,
leans far to the left, extending his bow to the full. At the extreme right
is the half-Xeeing, half-turning Wgure of Megara, cradling a dead son
in her left arm. Her other sons are scattered about the scene in
various attitudes of terror and supplication. In the centre of the relief
Amphitryon hurls himself before Hercules in a futile attempt to avert
complete disaster. This central Wgure of frantic intercession reveals
Canova’s chief source to be Euripides’ Herakles, a fact known to
copyists who, in engravings of the relief, provided act and scene
numbers. As Blanshard comments, ‘Canova doesn’t just want us to
look, he wants us to read’.74
In terms of documented performance, the gap is even greater;
Euripides’ Herakles does not reappear, in his own right, on a profes-
sional stage anywhere in the world until the beginning of the twen-
tieth century.75 His rediscovery occurs gradually and mainly through
the personal and progressive eVorts of a few individuals in the late
nineteenth century and early Modernist period. It is intrepid philo-
logical enquiry allied with rare poetic vision which engineers Hera-
kles’ eventual reinstatement and reinvention in theatres across
Britain, Europe, and the United States.

73 For detailed descriptions of the scene depicted in the relief, see Licht (1983), 262
and Blanshard (2005), 41–6.
74 Blanshard (2005), 46.
75 Euripides’ Herakles does, however, appear in his own right in a production by
Reading School in the late Georgian period. See Appendix 2. See also Hall (1997b),
59–81, at 68. Antonis Varveris apparently directed a performance of Herakles in
Greece in 1879, but very few details of this production have been recorded.
 5
Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist: the
nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides

The nineteenth century represents a crucial transitional stage in the

reception of Euripides’ Herakles. It was an era in which interest in
ancient drama generally was rekindled, when substantial studies of
the tragic genre were undertaken, and a time when beliefs in the
comparative merits of its best-known authors were devoutly wit-
nessed. For most of the century Euripides was dogmatically cast as
the least of the poets who made up the Wfth-century tragic triumvir-
ate; and the diYcult and disturbing Herakles was, like many of his
plays, not so much singled out for scorn or condemnation, as
ignored. Consistent, however, with the overall historical pattern of
the Herakles’ reception, whereby each generation has produced few,
but notable, advocates of the play’s worth, the nineteenth century
fostered a small number of eminent, and sometimes surprising,
champions whose heresy was both peculiar to its time and in advance
of it. The staunchest and most radical of these champions was the
poet Robert Browning, in his Aristophanes’ Apology of 1875. In order
to appreciate the full signiWcance of this work, it is Wrst necessary to
understand the critical and literary orthodoxy against which Brown-
ing’s radicalism asserted itself, as well as the emergent, but tentatively
voiced, heterodoxy which he energized.
What follows is essentially a survey of the nineteenth century’s
reception of Euripides and, in particular, the Herakles. The survey is
not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to record the principal
studies made of the playwright and to illustrate the views expressed
by his chief detractors and disciples. It is conWned to Germany and
Britain, where the century’s major scholarship on Greek tragedy
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 151
and the text of Herakles, and certainly that which had the most direct
impact on Browning and his contemporaries, was centred. It ends
in 1880, before the most intensive phase of Euripides’ rehabilitation
in the Modernist era. This rehabilitation was distinguished by the
progressive works of three notable scholars: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
MoellendorV, who substituted historicism for classicism as a meth-
odology for the investigation into Wfth-century tragedy; A. W. Verrall,
who applied to Euripides’ plays an extreme brand of rationalism; and
Gilbert Murray, who ‘viewed the plays primarily as pieces of theatre
which were to be relished and criticized as such’.1 Finally, with regard
to the scope of the present survey, it will encompass not only literary
criticism and scholarly editing, but also translation and poetry.

T H E NATURE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY
HELLENISM

Ironically, many twentieth-century critics have tended towards the

sort of generalizations and conWdent assertions which, they contend,
are characteristic of nineteenth-century Hellenism, in their own
attempts to scrutinize the trends of Euripidean criticism in the
nineteenth century. Gilbert Murray, writing in 1913 in Euripides
and His Age, from a Modernist perspective and with almost imme-
diate hindsight of the Victorian era, identiWed this tendency, and
indeed equally embodied it, in his analysis:
The Victorian Age had, amid enormous diVerences, a certain similarity with
the Periclean in its lack of self-examination, its rush and chivalry and
optimism, its unconscious hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems
to the bitter end. And in most of the current criticism on things Victorian, so
far as it is not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel the Victorian spirit
itself speaking. It arraigns Victorian things by a Victorian standard.2
Murray identiWes two general aspects of the nineteenth century’s
reception of Euripides. The Wrst, outlined in Euripides and His Age,

1 Barrett (1996), 39–50, at 47. 2 Murray (1913), 6.

152 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
is the pronounced polarization of opinion and allegiances surround-
ing the philosophical and political import of the extant Euripidean
corpus in the nineteenth century: ‘As a thinker he [Euripides] is even
to this day treated as a personal enemy by scholars of orthodox and
conformist minds; defended, idealized and sometimes transformed
beyond recognition by various champions of rebellion and the free
intellect.’3 The second aspect of the nineteenth century’s reception
identiWed by Murray (slightly later, in 1915) is the pejorative stamp
which the classicist reading of Attic drama had placed on Euripides:
‘Greek drama has always suVered from a school of critics who
approach a play with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than
of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic defect of classicism.
One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists heroes and
heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals.’4
Murray’s last remark is echoed, much later in the century, in
Richard Jenkyns’s assessment of the comparative levels of favour in
which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held during the
Victorian age. ‘The Victorians’, he says, ‘tended to worship those
artists who were most unlike themselves—Homer, Raphael, Bach—
and perhaps the supposed modernity of Euripides did not help his
reputation.’5 Ann Norris Michelini, in her outline of the history of
Euripidean interpretation, makes the same point:
The antimodernist or classicist stance that was associated with the educa-
tional mission of ancient or ‘classical’ studies made it diYcult to assimilate
an artist who was perceived as similar to the moderns. In fact it was only in
comparison with modern poetry like that of Racine that Euripidean art was
likely to appear at all admirable. This negative view of Euripides was
pervasive and powerful throughout almost all the nineteenth century.6
However true, in a broad sense, these generalizing remarks are, they
fail to do justice to the complexity of nineteenth-century Hellenism.
Jenkyns, for example, after taking to task Victorian critics’ conveni-
ent labelling of the three tragedians according to their supposedly
deWnitive qualities, oVers his own, perhaps overly tidy, classiWcation:
‘Speaking crudely, one can say that Aeschylus was the most inXuential

3 Murray (1913), 1. 4 Murray (1915), p. vi.

5 Jenkyns (1980), 107. 6 Michelini (1987), 6.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 153
of the three in the romantic period, Sophocles in the middle of the
Victorian age and Euripides towards the end of the century.’7 Jenkyns
is clearly acknowledging the somewhat arbitrary nature of his de-
marcation, but what such a generalization does is occlude the role
played by Euripides earlier in the century.
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Hellas8 (1822) demon-
strate that, in many respects, the Romantics did indeed ‘discover’
Aeschylus. At the same time, however, Sophocles and Euripides were
also favourites of Shelley, as The Cenci9 (1820) and his surprising
translation of The Cyclops10 (published posthumously in 1824)
prove. More surprising still is the apparent interest of Shelley’s
contemporary, Byron, in the Euripidean-Senecan Herakles. In Don
Juan Byron makes two slightly enigmatic references to Hercules
Furens, the Wrst in an aside, the second in a simile. In Canto 11. 52
(1823) he describes ‘That prodigy, Miss Araminta Smith j (Who at
sixteen translated Hercules Furens j Into as furious English)’, and in
Canto 17. 11 (1824), detailing his changes of temperament, he likens
himself at times to ‘a sort of ‘‘Hercules furens’’ ’.11 Towards the mid-
century, Mendelssohn’s Antigone, which was performed at Covent
Garden in January 1845, led to wide interest in the play, and in
Sophocles as the classical exemplar.12 In the same period, however,

7 Jenkyns (1980), 106.

8 Hellas was based on Aeschylus’ Persae. See Hall’s introduction to her edition of
the Persians (1996), 1–33, and Wallace (1997), 196–205.
9 The Cenci was inXuenced by Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Wrst staged in
1886. For a study of Shelley’s Greek translations, see Webb (1976), chaps. 1–3, and of
The Cenci, esp. 36–7 and 212–13.
10 The Cyclops was a translation of Euripides’ satyr play. See Webb (1976), 79–87
and Wallace (1997), 71–5.
11 Byron’s references to Hercules furens are unusual. The episode of Herakles’
madness scarcely features in the concordances to the major English poets of the 19th
century. However, the choice, labours, and death of Herakles were comparatively fertile
and popular themes for 19th-century writers and artists. See Reid (1993), 515–61, esp.
530, 545–6, and 551.
12 This production, which was overseen by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, employed Johann
Jakob Christian Donner’s translation of Sophocles’ text as well as Mendelssohn’s
orchestral introduction and choral settings. It premièred in Potsdam in October 1841,
and was performed in Paris in 1844 before transferring to London the following year.
For the inXuence of the ‘Mendelssohn Antigone’ on the 19th century, see Macintosh
(1997), 284–323, at 286–9.
154 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
stage adaptations of Euripides’ Medea13 and Alcestis14 were inXuen-
cing popular and parliamentary debate about the marital state gen-
erally, and divorce legislation speciWcally, which precipitated Britain’s
Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857. And whilst at the end
of the century Euripides was in many ways ‘rediscovered’, predom-
inantly by the sympathetic scholarship of Wilamowitz, Murray, Ver-
rall, and Norwood, it is also true that Aeschylus, and especially his
Agamemnon, became hugely popular from the 1880s onwards.15 In
the audience at Frank Benson’s presentation of the Agamemnon at
Balliol College, Oxford, in 1880 were Browning, Tennyson, and Oscar
Wilde. When the production transferred to London, among those
who saw it were George Eliot, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry. Sopho-
cles also found favour in the last two decades of the century, as shown
by the choice of Ajax as the inaugural Cambridge Greek play in 1882.

TH E SC H L E G E L I A N E U R IP I D E S B I L D

The most inXuential and durable appraisal of Euripides in the period

between 1800 and 1880 was by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1843).
This appraisal had a complex genesis that is frequently overlooked or
misunderstood by modern commentators. Schlegel and his younger
brother Friedrich (1772–1829) were largely responsible for populariz-
ing and enshrining the Romanticist approach to the study of ancient
Greek poetry, an approach fuelled by hostility towards French neoclas-
sicism. They idealized for modern poets and critics the quality of
completion (Volkommenheit) in ancient literature, and made the inse-
parableness of moral and aesthetic values, of personality and art, an
article of faith. Friedrich Schlegel concentrated much of his eVorts on
Greek epic poetry, while his brother is best known for his Vorlesungen

13 See Hall (1999), 42–77 and Macintosh (2000), 75–99, esp. 80: ‘The Wgure of Medea,
the abandoned wife and mother, was adopted and adapted on the stage to illuminate the
discussion about divorce legislation from, at least, the mid-1840s onwards.’
14 See Macintosh (2001), 281–308, and particularly her discussion of Frank Tal-
fourd’s burlesque production of Alcestis, Wrst staged at London’s Strand Theatre in 1850.
15 See Macintosh (2005b), 139–62.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 155
über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature), which were delivered in Vienna in 1808, ten years before his
appointment as Professor of Art and Literary History at Bonn Univer-
sity. Between them the Schlegels disseminated a theory, which prevailed
virtually unchallenged for two-thirds of the nineteenth century, of
Verfall, of literature’s progressive degeneration from the Greeks to the
moderns.16 A. W. Schlegel exercised this theory to compelling eVect in
his treatment of the Greek tragedians. Of his thirty lectures, nearly half
are concerned with the ancient drama and, in these, it is Sophocles who
is held up as the sublime exemplum of the classic standards of harmony,
completion, and dignity, and Euripides who represents the antitheses of
these qualities.
What has seldom been made clear, however, is that in regard to
Euripides the Schlegels were not of one mind. Ernst Behler, redressing
the misconception, initiated by August Wilhelm, that Friedrich Schle-
gel’s views on Euripides were indistinguishable from his own, main-
tains: ‘August Wilhelm simpliWed his brother’s complex and
ambiguous image of Euripides to an almost entirely negative one.’17
By appropriating and magnifying Friedrich’s concept of a sudden fall
from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Euripides, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel
inaugurated a phenomenon that we may describe as the nineteenth-
century damnatio of Euripides’.18 Behler reconstructs Friedrich’s view
of Euripides from a broad range of sources, including extant unpub-
lished material for an uncompleted history of Attic tragedy, earlier
articles on Greek literature, and later histories on ancient and modern
literature. His close examination of these sources reveals an ambivalent
and not unsympathetic attitude, which Behler terms Friedrich’s
‘dual evaluation of Euripides’.19 While Friedrich Schlegel found much
to criticize and regret in Euripides’ dramaturgy, his essentially progres-
sive literary and historical philosophy yielded a less monochromatic
portrait of the poet than is commonly assumed. It was his brother’s

16 Such ‘evolutionary’ literary theories were not uncommon in the 18th and 19th
centuries and were not conWned to tragedy. Epic poetry was frequently plotted and
studied according to a scale which descended from the noble primitivism of Homer
to the modern elegance of Virgil. See e.g. Jenkyns (1980), 8.
17 Behler (1986), 335–67, at 359.
18 Ibid. 335. 19 Ibid. 350. See also 351–4.
156 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
critique of Euripides, however, that was the more sustained and pub-
licized.
In his eighth lecture, entitled ‘Euripides: His Merits and Defects—
Decline of Tragic Poetry Through Him’, August Wilhelm Schlegel
expounded a denunciatory catalogue of complaints which became, for
most of the century, the received classicist view of Euripides as populist,
libertine, atheist, misogynist, and subversive sophist. He prefaces this
catalogue with an exposition of his urgent didactic purpose, namely to
arrest the decadence plaguing contemporary dramaturgy:
When we take him in his connexion with the history of art, when we look at
each of his pieces as a whole, and again at the general scope of his labours, as
revealed to us in the works which have come down to us, we are forced to
censure him severely on many accounts. . . . He either wanted the lofty
earnestness of purpose, or the severe artistic wisdom, which we reverence
in Aeschylus and Sophocles, to regulate the luxuriance of his certainly
splendid and amiable qualities. His constant aim is to please, he cares not
by what means; hence is he so unequal: frequently he has passages of over-
powering beauty, but at other times he sinks into downright mediocrity. We
have, besides, a particular reason for censuring without reserve the errors of
this poet; the fact, namely, that our own age is infected with the same faults
with those which procured for Euripides so much favour, if not esteem,
among his contemporaries. In our times we have been doomed to witness a
number of plays which, though in matter and form they are far inferior to
those of Euripides, bear yet in so far a resemblance to them, that while they
seduce the feelings and corrupt the judgement, by means of weakly, and
sometimes even tender, emotions, their general tendency is to produce a
downright moral licentiousness.20
For a modern reader, Schlegel’s portrait of Euripides, and the ‘revolu-
tion’ he wrought, depicts a Wfth-century equivalent of the ‘angry young
man’ or ‘kitchen-sink’ dramatist, a tormentor of respectable conser-
vatism.21 Euripides used as his framework the dramatic conventions
of his day in order to reinterpret the subjects, both divine and mortal,

20 Schlegel (1846, rev. English edn.), 111–12.

21 John Osborne worked within a traditional three-act structure when, in 1956, he
gave a new dramatic voice to a classless and leaderless section of post-war British
society in Look Back in Anger. See Kenneth Tynan’s review of the original Royal Court
production (Observer, 13 May 1956). For alternative readings of the ‘revolutionary’
Angry Young Men, see Rebellato (1999) and Carpenter (2002).
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 157
of the well-known myth cycles.22 Accordingly he had, in Schlegel’s
estimation, domesticated, or even trivialized, the tragic register
exempliWed by his predecessors and had infused familiar tales and
sacred notions with an all-too-modern scepticism:
[Euripides] endeavours to Wll up, or to build over the chasm that yawned
between his contemporaries and that wondrous olden world, and to come
upon the gods and heroes in their undress. . . . He introduces his spectators
to a sort of familiar acquaintance with them; he does not draw the super-
natural and fabulous into the circle of humanity, but within the limits of the
imperfect individuality. . . . He takes delight in depicting the defects and
moral failings of his characters.23
Schlegel does not name the Herakles in the course of his attack. With
the exception of a comparative review of Aeschylus’ Choephoroe and
the Sophoclean and Euripidean versions of Electra, his pronounce-
ments on the tragedians are generally made without illustration from
the plays themselves. He does mention the Herakles in his tenth
lecture, where he comments brieXy on the lack of causal unity
between the two halves of the play.24 Nevertheless, the general faults
which Schlegel enumerates would seem to have particular applica-
tion to the Herakles.
The other main charge brought against Euripides by Schlegel was
that of agnosticism, or indeed atheism, which was linked in the
critic’s eyes to a sneering and morally destabilizing intellectualism:
‘He thinks it too vulgar a thing to believe in the gods after the simple
manner of the people, and he therefore seizes every opportunity of
interspersing something of the allegorical interpretation of them, and
carefully gives his spectators to understand that the sincerity of his
own belief was very problematical.’25 Implicit in this judgement is the
notion, which Nietzsche later developed into the pivotal tenet of his

22 J. A. Symonds and Gilbert Murray each drew a distinction between the trad-
itionalism of Euripides’ dramatic technique and the radicalism of his ideas: ‘All the
cumbrous paraphernalia of the Aeschylean theatre environed the men and women of
Euripides, who cut but a poor Wgure in the garb of demigods’, Symonds (1893), 21;
‘In speculation he is a critic and a free lance; in artistic form he is intensely
traditional. He seems to have loved the very stiVness of the form in which he worked.
He developed its inherent powers in ways undreamed of, but he never broke the
mould or strayed away into shapelessness or mere realism’, Murray (1913), 7.
23 Schlegel (1846), 114–15. 24 Ibid. 137. 25 Ibid. 116.
158 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
attack on Euripides, of the pernicious force of ‘Socratism’ operative
in Euripides’ plays. Throughout the nineteenth century the issue of
Euripides’ alleged agnosticism and irreverence was a regular, and
often crucial, feature of the debate surrounding his poetic merit.
Among the few to speak in Euripides’ defence on this point was
John Keble (1792–1866), who, while Professor of Poetry at Oxford in
the 1830s, argued that the poet’s depiction of the purest chastity
(ŒÆŁÆæ) in his Hippolytus preWgured Christ’s promise that the
pure in heart shall see God (Matthew 5: 8).26 Towards the end of the
century a theory arose according to which the Bacchae was written
as a palinode (recantation), and provides evidence of Euripides’ old-
age conversion to religious orthodoxy. Walter Pater (1839–94)
expounded this theory in an essay on the Bacchae which formed
part of his Greek Studies of 1895:
Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily sordid,
in which (the shudder at the nearer approach of the unknown world coming
over him more frequently than of old) accustomed ideas, comfortable to a sort
of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have
lost, in a man’s allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to diVer
from the received opinions thereon. . . . Euripides has said, or seemed to say,
many things concerning Greek religion, at variance with received opinion; and
now, in the end of life, he desires to make his peace—what shall at any rate be
peace with men. He is in the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode, and
this takes the direction, partly of mere submission to, partly of a reWning upon,
the authorised religious tradition. . . . It is this extravagant phase of religion,
and the latest-born of the gods, which as an amende honorable to the once
slighted traditions of Greek belief, he undertakes to interpret.27
The ‘merits’ which Schlegel ascribes to Euripides are few and seldom
unequivocally conceded, but are usually precursory to an ever-more
damning indictment of the playwright’s transgressions. In the conclud-
ing remarks of his eighth lecture, for example, he declares that Euripides:

26 See Jenkyns (1980), 92. For the notion of Euripides as a proto-Christian, cf.
Browning’s The Ring and the Book, 10. 1717–25.
27 Pater (1895), 50, 55. On the ‘palinode’ theory and its prevalence in the 19th
century, see Dodds (1960), pp. xl–xlii. Dodds remarks on the irony that ‘good
Christian editors seem to have been gratiWed by this notion of their poet’s elev-
enth-hour conversion to pagan orthodoxy’ (p. xl).
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 159
has a particular strength in portraying the aberrations of a soul diseased,
misguided, and franticly abandoned to its passions. He is admirable where
pathos and moral beauty are united. Few of his pieces are without passages of
the most ravishing beauty. It is by no means my intention to deny him the
possession of the most astonishing talents; I have only stated that these talents
were not united with a mind in which the austerity of moral principles, and the
sanctity of religious feelings, were held in the highest honour.28
Schlegel is not insensitive to Euripides’ Wner poetic qualities, but his
sensitivity and occasional enthusiasms are much muted. Moreover,
when he lists Euripides’ contemporary detractors, Schlegel singles
out, with particular praise for his ‘inWnite cleverness and inexhaust-
ible Xow of wit’,29 the comic poet Aristophanes who, he says, ‘seems
almost ordained to be his [Euripides’] perpetual scourge, that none
of his moral or poetical extravagances might go unpunished’.30 This
reverential nod to the comic poet provides one of the most important
keys to the Schlegelian Euripidesbild and, indeed, the nineteenth-
century damnatio of Euripides.
Schlegel’s evaluation of Euripides is famously encapsulated in the
line: ‘He has neither the dignity and energy of Aeschylus, nor the
chaste sweetness of Sophocles.’31 The inXuence of his estimation of
the Greek tragedians was profound and widespread. The fact that his
comments had been embraced at both a popular and a scholarly level
accounted for the longevity of the century’s classicist perspective of
its literary ancestry. Schlegel’s antipathy towards Euripides, however,
was not received entirely without dissent by his contemporaries.
Most notable among those of his countrymen who opposed him
was Goethe (1749–1832). In a conversation with Johann Peter Ecker-
mann, which Eckermann records as having taken place on Wednes-
day, 28 March 1827, Goethe condemned Schlegel’s biased and
dubiously founded criticism of the drama. The conversation begins
with a consideration of Hinrich’s book on the nature of antique
tragedy, and progresses through Sophocles and Molière to Schlegel’s
treatment of Molière and the Greek tragedians in his lectures.
Goethe’s scathing response to the critic, and his own high opinion
of Euripides, are clearly set forth:

28 Schlegel (1846), 121. 29 Ibid.

30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 120.
160 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
He [Schlegel] is . . . just to Aeschylus and Sophocles; but this does not seem to
arise so much from a lively conviction of their extraordinary merit as from the
tradition among philologists to place them both very high; for, in fact, Schle-
gel’s own little person is not suYcient to comprehend and appreciate such lofty
natures. If this had been the case, he would have been just to Euripides too, and
would have gone to work with him in a diVerent manner. But he knows that
philologists do not estimate him very highly, and he feels no little delight that
he is permitted, upon such high authority, to fall foul of this mighty ancient,
and to schoolmaster him as much as he can. I do not deny that Euripides has
his faults; but he was always a very respectable competitor with Sophocles and
Aeschylus. If he did not possess the great earnestness and the severe artistic
completeness of his two predecessors, and as a dramatic poet treated things a
little more leniently and humanely, he probably knew his Athenians well
enough to be aware that the chord which he struck was the right one for his
contemporaries. A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle
lauded, whom Menander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of
Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been
something. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an
ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees.32
Schlegel’s Vienna lectures gained enormous currency through their
subsequent publication in four editions (1809, 1816, 1845, and 1846)
and their translation into almost every European language. In 1815 the
lectures were Wrst translated into English by John Black. A second
English edition appeared in 1840, and was followed in 1846 by a
‘Revised Edition According to the Last German Edition’ by A. J. W.
Morrison. By the middle of the century the impact of Schlegel on
British classical scholarship was easily discernible.

MAT THEW AR NO LD’S SILENCE

Schlegelian Romanticism, and German Hellenism in general, played a

vital role in formulating the concept of Hellenism which informed the
poetry and criticism of Matthew Arnold (1822–88), one of the Victor-
ian age’s most proliWc and decided theorists on Greek culture.33 It is
32 Trans. Oxenford, in Eckermann (1850), 377–8.
33 For a detailed discussion of Matthew Arnold’s Hellenism, see Turner (1981),
17–36.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 161
useful, when considering his opinions on ancient tragedy, to bear in
mind that, despite its ubiquity and inXuence, Arnold’s Hellenism is
strangely unrepresentative of, or at least unresponsive to, the period of
scholarship in which it was formulated. According to Turner: ‘The
content of Arnold’s Hellenism was largely uninformed by recent clas-
sical scholarship. Arnold had read widely in Greek literature, but not
deeply in contemporary classical studies. From his earliest prose works
through the discussion in Culture and Anarchy Arnold’s concept of
Hellenism and what the Greeks had been like combined the intellectual
elements of English humanism and German aesthetic Hellenism.’34
The signiWcance of Arnold to Euripidean reception in the nine-
teenth century resides in his studied silence on the tragedian, and his
inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford35 in November
1857 (published in 1869) was programmatic in this regard. The
lecture, entitled ‘The Modern Element in Literature’, opens with a
broad statement of Arnold’s cultural belief and prepares the standard
by which his judgement of literature is to be delivered:
An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are
called modern; and those nations are said to be imbued with the modern
spirit most eminently in which the demand for such a deliverance has been
made with most zeal, and satisWed with most completeness. Such a deliver-
ance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which
we ourselves live. All intellectual pursuits our age judges according to their
power of helping to satisfy this demand; of all studies it asks, above all, the
question, how far they can contribute to this deliverance.36
Arnold Wnds ‘a mighty agent of intellectual deliverance’37 in the
literature of ancient Greece, and he employs ‘the idea of the common
modernity of Periclean Athens and Victorian Britain to assert the
direct relevance of the literary achievement of Greece for British
literary life’.38 He praises Aeschylus and especially Sophocles for
their idealized representation of the heroic world and their ‘positive
cultural function in their own modern age’.39 Aristophanes, whom,

34 Turner (1981), 22.

35 Arnold was the Wrst Professor of Poetry at Oxford whose lectures were delivered
in English rather than Latin.
36 Arnold (1857a), in Super (1960), i. 18–37, at 19.
37 Ibid. 20. 38 Turner (1981), 28. 39 Ibid. 29.
162 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
to a large extent over the next two decades, Arnold assimilated to his
own critical and literary creed, is defended for his equally positive value
to Wfth-century Athenian society in his ability to expose fundamental
truths through comedy. Euripides is barely mentioned40 in the course
of Arnold’s lecture, and is thus condemned by exclusion. Unlike
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, Euripides did not provide
in his drama the requisite intellectual deliverance, which Arnold
sought for his own age of confusion from the literature of the Greeks.
In one respect Arnold’s silence on Euripides was less detrimental
than his voluble praise of Sophocles; at least he had not made
Euripides the prosaic emblem of a reactionary cause. In his inaugural
lecture at Oxford, Arnold’s deWnition of Sophocles’ supreme attri-
bute and greatest legacy comes as a thunderous anticlimax: ‘The
peculiar characteristic of the highest literature—the poetry—of the
Wfth century in Greece before the Christian era, is its adequacy; the
peculiar characteristic of the poetry of Sophocles is its consummate,
its unrivalled adequacy.’41 As Jenkyns wryly comments: ‘Arnold made
Sophocles, the man who ‘‘saw life steadily, and saw it whole’’, the
patron saint of his crusade against the Philistines, but he made him
sound so dull. . . . Who would join a crusade that had ‘‘Adequacy’’. . .
emblazoned upon its banners?’42
On the rare occasions when Arnold breaks his silence on Euripi-
des, in order to compare him unfavourably with Aeschylus and
Sophocles, he does not entirely do him a disservice. In the Preface
to Merope (also written in 1857), for example, Arnold distances
himself from those critics who condemn Euripides outright and, in
the process of declaring the moral essence of Euripides’ work inferior
to that of Aeschylus and Sophocles, he manages to make Euripides
sound an intriguing and colourful, if ethically problematic, poet: ‘In
none of the extant dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles is there a
character which is entirely bad. For such a character we must go to
Euripides; we must go to an art—wonderful indeed, for I entirely
dissent from the unreserved disparagers of this great poet—but an

40 Euripides is mentioned just once, and in passing, towards the end of the lecture,
where he is grouped with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes as one of the chief
dramatic poets of the 5th century whose work has survived.
41 Arnold (1857a), in Super (1960), i. 18–37, at 28.
42 Jenkyns (1980), 105.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 163
art of less moral signiWcance than the art of Sophocles and Aeschylus;
we must go to tragedies like the Hecuba, for villains like Polymestor.’43
As Jenkyns implies,44 Arnold’s creation of a dull Sophocles and a
shadowy Euripides may have unwittingly contributed to a general
revival of interest in Euripides in late nineteenth-century Britain.

NIETZSCHE AND THE SOCRATIC MASK

At the beginning of 1872 a new and extreme form of assault on

Euripides was launched within Germany with the publication of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem
Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). The
novelty of Nietzsche’s assault lay not in his treatment of Euripides,
but in the nature of his overall reading of Greek tragedy, wherein,
against the entrenched classicism of his day and its championship of
Sophocles, he proclaimed a primitivism, or archaism, which had
Aeschylus as its prototype. Its extremism, on the other hand, was in
the thesis itself and, speciWcally, Nietzsche’s apportionment of blame
for the demise of the tragic medium. Nietzsche had adopted, and
taken to its utmost limit, Schlegel’s evolutionary scheme, his theory
of degeneration in literature. Whereas Schlegel had seen Euripides as
the agent through which tragedy’s decline was eVected, Nietzsche
branded him its very murderer.45
Nietzsche had Wrst made this accusation publicly two years earlier,
in the second of two lectures on ancient drama, ‘Sokrates und die
Tragödie’ (‘Socrates and Tragedy’), which was delivered on 1 Febru-
ary 1870. In this lecture he based his argument on what was com-
monly accepted as the Aristophanic interpretation of Athenian
culture (as derived principally from The Frogs), and drew a direct
link between Socratic rationalism in Euripidean drama and the death
of the Aeschylean tragic form. He develops this thesis in chapters

43 Arnold (1857b), in Super (1960), i. 38–64, at 55.

44 Jenkyns (1980), 105–6.
45 As Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 381 points out, Nietzsche added to the familiar
Romantic cycle of birth, maturity and death, a ‘post-mortem phase, which he
perceived as a new birth, or a modern renaissance’.
164 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
11–14 of The Birth of Tragedy.46 In the opening chapters he sets out
the antithesis, which will dominate his argument, between the Apolline
and Dionysiac impulses in art, that is, according to Nietzsche, the
only genuine impulses in art. In chapter 12 he declares:
Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a
demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a
certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither
Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates.
This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work
of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. . . . The most magniWcent temple lies in
ruins. . . . And even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a
punishment by the art-critics of all ages—who could be content with this
wretched compensation.47
Henrichs demonstrates convincingly that the fundamentals of
Nietzsche’s invective against Euripides are derived from Schlegel,
and that Nietzsche oVers little that is original, insightful, or based
on a close reading of the poet he maligns. Moreover, Henrichs rightly
argues that the Euripidesbild in The Birth of Tragedy is Schlegelian
theory unqualiWed and unmitigated, a direct consequence of the
climate attending its embryonic form:
Nietzsche was raised in an intellectual climate rife with harsh criticism of
Euripides. When he entered the elite boarding school of Schulpforta in the
fall of 1858, the modern depreciation of Euripides that began, in Germany, with
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and culminated in the Schlegels, had
attained the status of absolute academic orthodoxy. Two generations of school-
masters and university professors had managed to deprive August Wilhelm’s
verdict of its Wner, more conciliatory touches and to reduce it to a crude
catalogue of the poet’s worst sins against dramatic convention and good taste.48
Nietzsche’s condemnation of Euripides motivated two polemical
pamphlets in response from a fellow alumnus of Schulpforta four
years his junior, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV (1848–1931),
who had been compelled by Rudolph Schöll to review the book and was
destined to become, in William M. Calder III’s phrase ‘sospitator

46 For an exposition of Nietzsche’s argument in these chapters, see Silk and Stern
(1981), 73–77.
47 Nietzsche (1872), in Levy (1909), i. 95–6.
48 Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 373.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 165
Euripidis’.49 On 30 May 1872 Wilamowitz published a thirty-two-page
attack entitled Zukunftsphilologie! Eine erwidrung auf Friedrich
Nietzsches ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie’ (Future-Philology! A Rejoinder . . . ).
Erwin Rohde (1845–98), for many years before his Wnal apostasy a
staunch friend and defender of Nietzsche’s, counterattacked with his
own pamphlet Afterphilologie (Pseudo- (or ‘Backside’) Philology), which
prompted a twenty-four-page rejoinder from Wilamowitz, Zukunft-
sphilolgie! Zweites Stück, published on 21 February 1873.50
To an even greater extent than Schlegel,51 Nietzsche’s argument is
constructed largely on generalizations, and his references to the
actual plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are made in a
very desultory fashion.52 The only Euripidean play on which he
comments is the Bacchae in chapter 12, while the Alcestis is alluded
to in chapter 8. As Henrichs maintains, the function of Euripides
within the design of The Birth of Tragedy was essentially a negative
one; but, ultimately and ironically, the portrait of Euripides that
emerged from Nietzsche’s study had a positive impact on the play-
wright’s subsequent reception by re-igniting the debate on ancient
tragedy in the last decades of the nineteenth century: ‘Nietzsche was
not interested in Euripides per se, but he needed him as a reverse
image of Aeschylus, the true tragedian, and as negative proof for his

49 ‘Sospitator Euripidis’ forms part of the title of a discussion by Calder (1986),

409–30, of Wilamowitz’s rehabilitative work on Euripides. He opens this discussion
by citing some striking bibliographical statistics: ‘Athenian tragedy always remained a
center of his [Wilamowitz’s] interest. Within this center he wrote least on Sophocles,
more on Aeschylus, but most on Euripides. The Hiller/KlaVenbach bibliography lists
45 items on Euripides, against 19 on Aeschylus and 18 on Sophocles’ (409).
50 Wilamowitz’s pamphlets are reprinted in Gründer (1969), 27–55 and 113–35.
See also Calder (1983), 214–54, and Silk and Stern (1981) 95–107. Lloyd-Jones
(1982), 178 has summarized the dispute between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz thus:
‘Wilamowitz asked, ‘‘What can we do for philology?’’; Nietzsche preferred to ask,
‘‘What can philology do for us?’’ To the classicists, with whom Nietzsche’s standpoint
has so much in common, the ancients had supplied a pattern, an ideal standard of
excellence; for the historicists with their relativistic outlook no such thing could exist.’
51 Henrichs’s claim (1986), 369–97, at 381 that ‘Schlegel’s points are always speciWc
and based on a close reading of Euripides’ cannot be supported by the relevant Lectures
themselves.
52 According to Silk and Stern (1981), 62, crude generalizations are a consistent
Xaw in Nietzsche’s argument: ‘Nietzsche frequently alludes, without explaining the
allusions, to more or less well-known features of Greek tragedy or the Greek world;
he gives virtually no dates for artists, thinkers, or events, ancient or modern; and he
sometimes makes points that rest, clearly enough, on unstated presuppositions.’
166 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
overall concept of tragedy. That concept, for better or worse, turned
out to be an inWnitely greater source of inspiration for subsequent
critics than anything Schlegel ever said on the subject of tragedy.’53
Silk and Stern arrive at a very similar conclusion, believing that,
despite his gross unfairness to Euripides, Nietzsche’s treatment of
the poet had the virtue of being ‘consistently right in raising the right
issues’,54 and that, of the three tragedians, it is Euripides whom
Nietzsche unwittingly succeeds in bringing to life:
It is perhaps to the point that if Nietzsche shows no sympathy with Euripi-
des, he nevertheless pays him the compliment of empathy. Where Aeschylus
and Sophocles remain shadowy Wgures, Euripides is made real. He sits in the
theatre and thinks (§11); he is a ‘passionate actor’ (§12); in the ‘evening of
his life’ he recants (§12). Accurately or not, Nietzsche ‘goes into’ him, in fact
he psychologizes him—and thereby, without any such intention, vindicates
one of Euripides’ own supreme innovations.55

THE BEGINNING OF EURIPIDES’ REHABILITATION

That The Birth of Tragedy made little immediate impression on

English criticism is attested by the fact that in 1873 it is Schlegel’s
attack on Euripides to which John Addington Symonds (1840–93)
responds in the Wrst series of the Wrst edition of his Studies of the
Greek Poets. What Symonds has in common with Nietzsche, however,
is his deployment of Schlegel’s degeneration theory as a premise and
point of departure for his own interpretation of tragedy’s evolution;
the diVerence being that Symonds is now acting as an apologist for
Euripides. Symonds begins his interpretation with the claim: ‘The
law of inevitable progression in art, from the severe and animated
embodiment of an idea to the conscious elaboration of merely
aesthetic motives and brilliant episodes, has hitherto been neglected
by the critics and historians of poetry.’56
Symonds refers, Wrst in broad terms, to three generations of artists
and to the qualities that necessarily deWne each of these, concluding
of the third generation:

53 Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 385. 54 Silk and Stern (1981), 258.

55 Ibid. 262. 56 Symonds (1873), i. 207.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 167
They have either to reproduce their models—and this is stiXing to true
genius; or they have to seek novelty at the risk of impairing the strength or
the beauty which has become stereotyped. Less deeply interested in the great
ideas by which they have been educated, and of which they are in no sense
the creators, incapable of competing on the old ground with their elders,
they are obliged to go aWeld for striking situations, to force sentiment and
pathos, to subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of the parts,
to sink the prophet in the poet, the hierophant in the charmer.57
He then applies this law of sequence to Greek sculpture, the three
orders of Greek architecture, proto-Renaissance and Renaissance
painting, and Wnally to the three tragedians. He draws a parallel
between Correggio and Euripides, whose function in this schema is
to illuminate their artistic genealogy and serve as archetypal speci-
mens of that genealogy’s natural end: ‘Those who rightly understand
them must, we imagine, be prepared to accept with gratitude the
existence of Correggio and Euripides, both as complementing Giotto
and Æschylus and also as accounting for the meridian splendour of
Sophocles and Raphael. Without the cadence of Euripides the ma-
jestic aria of Sophocles would hardly be played out. . . . It is thus, as it
were, that like projectiles, arts describe their parabolas and end.’58
Symonds’s strategy, therefore, is not to deny the majority of defects of
which Schlegel accuses Euripides, but instead to demonstrate that
these defects have an intrinsic historical and evolutionary value:
‘Cultivated in all innovations of morality and creed, Euripides
belonged essentially to his own day. As far as a tragic dramatist can
be the mouthpiece of his age, Euripides was the mouthpiece of
Athenian decline. . . . Aeschylus was the Titanic product of a bygone
period; Sophocles displayed the pure and perfect ideal; but Euripides
was the artist who, without improving on the spirit of his age, gave it
a true and adequate expression.’59
The achievement of Euripides, Symonds insists, must be gauged
within the context of its own time. He voices his impatience with
adherents to Schlegel’s school of thought, whom he brands a ‘ma-
levolent generation of critics’.60 These critics, he argues, oVend
against the law of sequence, which he applies to art, by making
comparisons across the generations and neglecting the inherent

57 Ibid. 208. 58 Ibid. 209.

59 Ibid. 201. 60 Ibid. 211.
168 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
worth of each of art’s evolutionary phases: ‘It is false criticism, surely,
to do as Schlegel, Müller, and Bunsen have successively done to
measure Euripides by the standard of the success of his predecessors,
or to ransack his plays for illustrations of pet dramatic theories, and
then because he will not bear these tests, to refuse to see his own
distinguished merits.’61

THE I RISH REBELS: MAHAFFY AND WILDE

In a footnote to his commendation of Browning’s Balaustion’s Ad-

venture in the second volume of the third edition of his Studies in
1893, Symonds acknowledges: ‘Since this chapter was Wrst published,
Mr. Browning has still further enforced his advocacy of Euripides by
Aristophanes’ Apology, while the great tragic poet has found a staunch
defender from the carping criticasters of the Schlegel school in
Dr. MahaVy.’62 The Revd John Pentland MahaVy (1839–1919) was a
Fellow, and later Provost, of Trinity College, Dublin, and Professor of
Ancient History in the University of Dublin. Having converted from
philosophy to the study of history early in his career, his best-known
works are his Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874),
Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876), a four-volume History of
Classical Greek Literature (1880), and Greek Life and Thought from
the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887).
MahaVy was a complex character, whose scholarship reXected an
interesting paradox in his thinking. He believed resolutely that the
value of scholarly enquiry into ancient civilizations was as a guide to
the complexities of modern life and to understanding the universal-
ity of human nature. He attracted controversy, notoriety, and even-
tually allegations of heresy with his unromantic portrait of the
Greeks and their seemingly modern failings, his candid discussion
of the Greek practice of homosexuality, and his conviction that
‘sophisticated Christianity absorbed, to its advantage, much of the
higher ethics of classical antiquity’.63 But, while his outspokenness on
these issues earned him the reputation of a maverick, he betrayed,

61 Symonds (1873), 230. 62 Ibid. ii. 57. 63 Stanford (1984), 241.

 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 169
politically and temperamentally, little aYnity with the ideals of
Periclean Athens. According to Stanford: ‘MahaVy’s favourite form
of citizenship in the classical world was not that of a small freedom-
loving city-state like Athens or Sparta. He would have preferred to
have been a citizen of one of the great Hellenistic monarchies (whose
kings were generous patrons of scholarship) that arose after the death
of Alexander the Great, and he saw their nearest modern equivalent
in the British Empire.’64 Moreover, as a staunch Unionist he was
deeply hostile to Irish culture and political nationalism in any form;
it has been argued that ‘MahaVy did not merely embody reactionary
Hellenism, he sought to justify British imperialism in Ireland
through his work as a classical scholar as well’.65
In his pronouncements on Euripides, however, MahaVy is seen at
his least reactionary and most provocative. Indeed, his partiality for
the tragedian, which he demonstrated on several occasions through-
out his career, became a facet of his notoriety. In 1867, at the theatre
of the Royal College of Science in Dublin, he delivered a lecture
entitled ‘Three Epochs in the Social Development of the Ancient
Greeks’, in the course of which he judged Euripides to be superior to
Sophocles. In 1879 he produced, as part of a ‘Classical Writers’ series,
a primer on the playwright, outlining Euripides’ biographical details
and the chief stylistic and dramatic qualities of his verse. As Stanford
and McDowell indicate: ‘Though intended for beginners, it was by
no means negligible for scholars, especially in a period when Euripi-
des was still generally regarded as inferior to Sophocles.’66 Most
unusually for a general study of Euripides in this era, MahaVy
provides some discussion of the Herakles, and in a manner that is
neither perfunctory nor depreciatory. He Wrst mentions the play in
chapter 5, where it is lauded as being ‘among the best of the poet’s
works’,67 and used as an anomalous example in an analysis of
Euripides’ dramas of character and situation, because it ‘is so strik-
ing in its combination of two subjects that it almost deserves to be
called a drama of plot’.68 In chapter 7, after summarizing the plot,
and particularly the progression of Herakles’ rehabilitation in the

64 Ibid. 220. 65 Macintosh (1994), 5.

66 Stanford and McDowell (1971), 160.
67 MahaVy (1879), 81. 68 Ibid. 82.
170 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
second half of the play, MahaVy aYrms that Herakles, in the
aftermath of madness, is one of Euripides greatest and most com-
plete tragic creations: ‘The dignity of a great nature asserts itself
against the utmost which a spiteful Providence can do to break it
down. . . . Here then we have a truly great and tragic Wgure, one
worthy of a permanent place in the temple of Fame.’69 MahaVy
sees Herakles as exceptional among Euripidean characters in having
a stature and grandeur commensurable with the heroes found in
Aeschylus and Sophocles. In chapter 8 he lists verse 1163 of Herakles
as an example of Euripides’ ‘peculiarly eVective’ use of lyric metre:
‘Theseus enters as a digniWed stranger, and marvels at the confusion
of the house and the bodies of the dead, the aged Amphitryon
answers his iambic questioning in extraordinarily hurried and agi-
tated metre (resolved dochmaics), which give a peculiarly dramatic
eVect to a splendid scene.’70 Chapter 10 of MahaVy’s study is a
synopsis of the history of Euripidean reception, beginning with
Aristophanes: ‘We may say that no Greek poet ever received more
constant and unsparing adverse criticism, and from the ablest pos-
sible critic [i.e. Aristophanes]. To have outlived, nay, to have con-
quered such attacks, is in my mind an astonishing proof of genius.’71
When he reaches his own century, MahaVy, like Symonds, takes
particular issue with Schlegel:
The weak points of Schlegel’s criticism were his dislike of the French and
depreciation of Euripides. Perhaps on account of Racine’s, Voltaire’s, and
AlWeri’s preference, and in opposition to it, every fault was found with
Euripides and every merit denied. . . . The fashion at last set in against the
poet, and the jibes of Aristophanes were exalted into the canons of criticism.
The present century, while correcting the antipathies of Schlegel’s school,
has nevertheless not reinstated Euripides completely into his former posi-
tion. . . . Many recent editors and historians, and one of our greatest poets,
Mr. Browning, have set themselves to assert for Euripides his true and
independent position beside these rivals, who have failed to obscure or
displace him. The Germans, still infected by Schlegel, talk of Euripides as
the poet of ochlocracy, that debased democracy which they have invented at
Athens after the suggestion of Thucydides.72

69 MahaVy (1879), 107. 70 Ibid. 119.

71 Ibid. 129–30. 72 Ibid., 142–3.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 171
MahaVy’s advocacy of Euripides’ genius, and his nonconformist
regard for the Herakles, may well have had a profound inXuence on
the most famous of his pupils, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). MahaVy,
whom Wilde credited as ‘my Wrst and best teacher’ and ‘the scholar
who showed me how to love Greek things’,73 was Wilde’s tutor from
the commencement of his three years at Trinity College, Dublin
(1871–4), during which time he was awarded both a Foundation
Scholarship and the Berkeley gold medal for achievement in Greek.
After Wilde went on a Demyship up to Magdalen College, Oxford,
with MahaVy’s blessing, he maintained reasonably close contact with
his former tutor, even assisting him in the revision and proof-reading
of his Social Life in Greece and Rambles and Studies in Greece. In April
1877 Wilde accompanied MahaVy on a tour through Greece.74 Part
of MahaVy’s purpose in inviting Wilde was to prevent the latter’s
intended pilgrimage to Rome, prompted by his developing interest in
Catholicism, and to sway him ‘from Popery to Paganism’.75
While at Oxford, Wilde kept a commonplace book76 in which the
scope of his reference extended well beyond the prescribed texts of
his course, and he routinely applied himself to questions of art and
beauty and demonstrated a facility for interweaving classical and
contemporary issues. The commonplace book contains ten refer-
ences to Euripides, including citations of four speciWc plays (Bacchae,
Ion, Cyclops, and Electra).77 The Wrst of these references is part of a
brief discussion of the Aristophanic legacy in Euripidean reception:
The Frogs of Aristophanes form an era both in the development of comedy,
and the history of literary criticism.
Euripides, who was criticised by the conservatives of his own day much as
Swinburne is by the Philistines of ours, is there attacked for the laxity and
extravagance of his metres as well as for the immorality of his teaching: and
there are in the main the two channels into which the stream of Greek

73 In a letter probably written in 1893. See Ellman (1987), 27. A change in their
relationship is signalled by Wilde’s anonymous and predominantly scathing review in
the Pall Mall Gazette (1887) of MahaVy’s Greek Life and Thought. An irrevocable
breach in their friendship occurred after Wilde’s arrest and disgrace.
74 See Stanford and McDowell (1971), 38 V.
75 MahaVy in a letter to his wife (dated 2 April 1877), quoted in Stanford and
McDowell (1971), 41.
76 Repr. in Smith and Helfand (1989), 107–74, with notes at 175–201.
77 On Wilde’s treatment of Euripides in his commonplace book, see ibid. 26–7.
172 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
literary criticism Xowed—poets were criticised on ethical grounds, and on
the grounds of style.78
In a later entry, which appears opposite comments on the stage
history of the Bacchae, Wilde continues the theme of Euripidean
reception, noting some of the poet’s more recent disciples, among
whom he counts himself:
Cited by the orators as a patriot, by Aristotle as the most tragic of poets, he
was to the age of Menander the model and the delight[;] more than this,
Euripides witnessed to nature in the stilted rhetoric of the Roman stage, in
the studied pomp of the French Court: He fed the youth of Racine and of
Voltaire, fanned into a Xame the genius of AlWeri, and occupied [such] great
poets as Shelley, Schiller, Browning with the task of translating him.
And we who toil in the heated quarries of modern life may perhaps—or is
it only a fancy—gain some freedom of soul from his genius who was the
great humanist of Hellas, the cor cordium of antiquity[.]79
Wilde’s other mentor at Trinity was Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who
had been appointed Professor of Latin at the age of 25 and was the
founder and editor of the magazine Kottabos, to which Wilde contrib-
uted a number of translations and original poems. Among Wilde’s
contributions was a sonnet entitled ‘A Vision’, which was Wrst pub-
lished in Kottabos 2, Hilary Term 1877.80 It was inspired in part by
Dante’s Divine Comedy and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Vision of
Poets’, and is a poetic statement of the nineteenth-century reception of
the three tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides:
Two crownèd Kings, and One that stood alone
With no green weight of laurels round his head,
But with sad eyes as one uncomforted,
And wearied with man’s never-ceasing moan
For sins no bleating victim can atone,
And sweet long lips with tears and kisses fed.
Girt was he in a garment black and red,
And at his feet I marked a broken stone
Which sent up lilies, dove-like, to his knees.
Now at their sight, my heart being lit with Xame

78 CB [23] and [25], repr. in ibid. 113. 79 CB [130], repr. in ibid. 132.
80 The sonnet was later published in Poems, 1881.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 173
I cried to Beatricé, ‘Who are these?’
And she made answer, knowing well each name,
‘Æschylus Wrst, the second Sophokles,
And last (wide stream of tears!) Euripides.’
Most remarkable of all, for the purposes of this survey, is a letter
written by Wilde to George Macmillan, of the publishing Wrm, on 22
March 1879, Wve months after taking his degree and at a time when
Wilde was seriously contemplating an academic career. Macmillan
had been a member of MahaVy’s touring party in Greece in 1877, was
a founder of the Hellenic Society,81 and, since January 1879, a full
partner in his father’s Wrm, with special responsibility for publica-
tions on music, the classics, and natural history. In the letter, after
expressing a desire to translate selections from Herodotus, Wilde
writes: ‘I do not know how many Greek plays you intend publishing,
but I have been working at Euripides a good deal lately and should of
all things wish to edit either the Mad Hercules or the Phoenissae: plays
with which I am well acquainted. I think I see what style of editing is
required completely.’82 In his reply to this suggestion, two days later,
Macmillan goes so far as to oVer Wilde a fee for the tendered work:
half-proWts and an advance of £25 or £30 for Herodotus and half-
proWts or £45 down for the plays. Unfortunately these negotiations
never came to fruition, and Wilde’s ambitions as a scholarly editor
seem to have been abandoned in the wake of his failure to secure a
Fellowship at Magdalen.83 Nevertheless, the very fact that so cele-
brated and iconic a literary Wgure should, in the formative years of
his career, have expressed a particular familiarity with, and wish to
edit, what was at that time still a relatively obscure play, remains
extraordinary.84 It is interesting to speculate that, had the proposed
edition of Herakles been submitted and published within a reasonable

81 Founded in 1879. MahaVy was a co-founder of the Society, which counted

Wilde and John Addington Symonds among its members.
82 Repr. in Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), 78.
83 See Guy and Small (2000), 67.
84 Calder (in correspondence with the author, 5 May 2002) believes the subcon-
scious reason behind Wilde’s attraction to the Herakles is that ‘it is the dream play for
a male homosexual: the super athlete/hero/big guy murders wife and children to run
oV with boyfriend’. This psychoanalytic explanation seems unlikely, and there is
certainly no evidence to suggest that Wilde’s interest in the play was based on a
homoerotic reading of the relationship between Herakles and Theseus.
174 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
period of time after Wilde’s correspondence with Macmillan, it
would have been the Wrst separate nineteenth-century edition of
the text published in Britain and would have preceded Wilamowitz’s
seminal edition by several years.

SWINBURNE’S SCENIC SOPHIST

Wilde’s pairing in his commonplace book of Euripides and the English

poet and essayist Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) as objects of
philistine scorn would have been regarded by Swinburne, at best, as a
most unholy alliance and a comparison deeply degrading to himself.
A younger contemporary of the Brownings, Swinburne nurtured a
lifelong hatred, of fantastic and almost pathological proportions, towards
Euripides—a hatred, moreover, in which he always asserted he was
supported by Benjamin Jowett. In a letter to his friend Sir Edmund
Gosse, dated 2 January 1876, he expressed, with scatological frenzy,
violent indignation at the description, which had appeared in the previ-
ous day’s Athenaeum, of his Erectheus as ‘a translation from Euripides’:
When a fourth form boy could see that as far as it can be said to be modelled
after anybody, it is modelled throughout after the earliest style of Æschy-
lus—the simple three-parts-epic style of the Suppliants, Persians, and Seven
against Thebes: the most radically contrary style to that of the scenic sophist
(with his ‘droppings,’ as Mrs. Browning aptly rather than delicately puts it)
that could possibly be conceived.
I should very much like to see the play of Euripides which contains 500
consecutive lines that could be set against as many of mine. I did introduce a
good deal of the ‘long and noble fragment’ referred to, into Praxithea’s Wrst
long speech—but the translated verses (I must say it) were so palpably and
pitiably inferior both in thought and expression to the rest that the Wrst
persons I read that part of the play to in MS . . . remarked the falling oV at
once—the discrepancy, and blot on the face of my work—so I excised the
sophist—wiped up and carted oV his ‘droppings’—only keeping a hint or
two, and one or two of his best lines. If this sounds ‘outrecuidant’ or
savouring of ‘surquedry,’ you may remember that I always have maintained
it is far easier to overtop Euripides by the head and shoulders than to come
up to the waist of Sophocles or the knee of Æschylus.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 175
‘Sympathetic touch which distinguishes the two—there are but two—
tragic poets’! Have such critics neither eyes nor ears? Or is there really a
human reader who does actually Wnd Phædra, Hecuba, Medea, Iphigenia,
more pathetic than Antigone, or the Oresteia? . . . And then—the ‘prodigality
of splendid imagery such as Wnds no place’ (heavens and earth!) ‘in Greek
literature’!!! Well, it certainly doesn’t in Euripides, who was troubled with a
dysentery of feeble imagination and a diarrhœa of rhetorical sophistry.85
Thirteen years later, in a discussion of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries,
Swinburne referred to Euripides with alliterative venom as ‘that
Xuent and facile dealer in Xaccid verse and sentimental sophistry’.86
Later in the same study, deploring Jonson’s egregious lapse of literary
judgement in ascribing perfection to Euripides, he singles out the
Herakles as proof of Euripides’ outrageous crimes:
It is unlucky that . . . Ben Jonson should have committed himself to the assertion
that Euripides, of all men, ‘is sometimes peccant, as he is most times perfect.’
The perfection of such shapeless and soulless abortions as the Phoennissae and
the Hercules Furens [n.b. the two Euripidean works which Oscar Wilde particu-
larly wished to edit] is about as demonstrable as the lack of art which Ben
Jonson regretted and condemned in the author of Hamlet and Othello.87

PHILOLO GY A ND TRA NSL ATION

Paradoxically, while Germany was the centre for the century’s most
persistent and vociferous disparagement of Euripides, it also pro-
duced the most sustained and large-scale editorial work, which
fostered a revival of interest in the poet and a movement towards
his rehabilitation. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century
very few separate editions of the Herakles were published. The Wrst
was that of Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848) in 1810. Hermann had
been made Professor of Poetry at Leipzig in 1809, and the Herakles
was the Wrst of thirteen Euripidean plays which he edited separately
between 1810 and 1841. In his introduction to the text he remarks on

85 Repr. in Gosse and Wise (1927), viii. 221–2.

86 Swinburne (1889), 139. 87 Ibid. 179.
176 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
the paucity of inexpensive and satisfactory critical editions of Euripi-
des with which he himself had been confronted, and elucidates his
reasons for choosing to work on the Herakles:
Quum Euripidis aliquam fabulam in publicis meis scholis interpretari con-
stituissem, neque invenirem editionem, quae et exiguo pretio parabilis esset,
nec textum haberet a criticis aut nimis, aut minus, quam par videretur,
mutatum: ipse animum adieci ad edemdam aliquam huius poetae tragoe-
diam. Praetuli autem aliis Herculem furentem, tum quod haec fabula in
melioribus est, tum quod non est ex his, quae in carminibus antistrophicis
nihil proprium habent, tum denique quod diYcultates, quibus laborat,
maximam partem vinci posse videbatur.88
When I had decided to expound on some play or other of Euripides in my
public lectures, I could not Wnd an edition that was readily available at a
small price, nor could I obtain a text that had not been altered by editors
either too much, or less than seemed proper. I turned my mind to the task of
publishing some tragedy of this poet myself. But I preferred Hercules Furens
to the others, not only because this play is among the better ones, but also
because it is not among those which have nothing individual in the anti-
strophic verses, and Wnally because it seemed that the problems with which
the play is aZicted were, for the most part, surmountable.
Just before his premature death August Julius Edmund PXugk (1803–
39) edited seven plays of Euripides, including Herakles, for a series
produced at Göttingen in which Wunder’s edition of Sophocles also
appeared. For the next Wfty years in Germany, prior to Wilamowitz’s
ground-breaking edition in 1889, it was only in complete editions of
Euripides’ extant dramas that the Herakles received attention. These
editions include those of August Matthiae (1769–1835), published in
nine volumes, along with the Fragments and Scholia, between 1813
and 1829; the brothers Karl Wilhelm (1802–83) and Ludwig Dindorf
(1805–71)—the younger brother edited Euripides in 1825 and Wil-
helm Dindorf edited all the Greek dramatists, with notes and Scholia,
for the Clarendon Press between 1832 and 1863;89 August Nauck
(1822–92) in 1854; and Adolf KirchhoV in 1855. In addition to these
works, Johann Adam Hartung (1802–67), a fervent admirer of

88 Hermann (1810), III.

89 A text of the whole was Wrst published in a single volume in 1830 as the Poëtae
Scenici Graeci.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 177
Euripides, analysed all the plays in his Euripides Restitutus, published
between 1843 and 1845.
During this period Wilamowitz produced his earliest work on
Euripides, beginning in 1867 when he carefully scrutinized the entire
preserved Euripidean corpus, including Rhesus, in composing his
Valediktionsarbeit at Pforta. In this he cited verses 674–77 of the
Herakles, a passage on lifelong service to the Muses, which supplied
him with his motto:
P
ÆÆØ a $ æØÆ
ÆE %ÆØØ ıªŒÆÆØ-
ª; 
Æ ııªÆ.
c fi  IıÆ,
ÆNd
 K  ØØ Y.
I will never stop blending [in song] the Graces with the Muses, that most
charming conjunction of goddesses. I don’t want to live without the Muses’
gifts; may I ever be among the crowned.
The passage reappeared on the dedication page of his edition of the
play (dedicated to Schulpforta) and in the Nachwort to the second
volume of his Platon. Wilamowitz’s schoolboy estimation of Euripi-
des’ artistry conformed unreservedly to the contemporary ortho-
doxy. In his valedictory address he declared the playwright ‘a
middling poet and a poor tragedian’, but his thorough and historical
approach to Euripides’ plays was something radical and refreshing.90
Throughout his undergraduate years Wilamowitz’s opinion of
Euripides gradually improved, and, most importantly, he realized
that Euripides was the ideal poet with whom to launch his revolu-
tionary hermeneutics. In 1875, the year of Browning’s Aristophanes’
Apology, he published his Habilitationsschaft, Analecta Euripidea, a
programmatic work in which he initiated certain lines of enquiry that
were later developed in his Herakles commentary. Above all, he
rejected the canonized Sophocles and nineteenth-century classicism,
and in place of these he substituted the ‘unclassical’ Euripides and
historicism, ‘the art of seeing the Greek world as the Greeks saw it’.91
He approached philological interpretation in the manner of a biog-
rapher; he was concerned with the historical context in which a play
was produced, and he was anxious to stress the similarities rather

90 See Calder (1986), 409–30, at 412. 91 Fowler (1990), 489–522, at 493.

178 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
than the diVerences between ancients and moderns. In the Analecta
Euripidea Wilamowitz also demonstrated an early interest in the
question of staging, the notion of the play as performance. The
work includes an essay on the staging of Hippolytus.
Although his maximum opus did not oYcially appear until 1889,
Wilamowitz had formulated a plan to edit the Herakles as early as
January 1877. At Greifswald on 10 September 1879 a manuscript
version, comprising a text and translation,92 was presented as a gift to
his father-in-law Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) on the occasion
of his silver wedding anniversary. The appropriateness of the gift was,
on the face of it, extremely dubious in view of the play’s uxoricide
and infanticide, not to mention Mommsen’s intransigent hostility
towards Euripides.93 The point of the presentation, however, was as a
scholarly tribute to Mommsen as mentor and as one whom, at that
stage in his career, Wilamowitz revered as the Herakles of Wis-
senschaft and as a ŁE Iæ.94
In England, before the middle of the century, a few critical commen-
taries were printed in English (as opposed to Latin) on single plays of
Euripides, but no attempt was made to annotate a collected edition. The
three-volume edition of Euripides, Wrst published for Bibliotheca Clas-
sica between 1857 and 1860, by Frederick Apthorp Paley (1816–88) was
unique in scale and remained the automatic recourse of English-speaking
Euripidean commentators until at least the 1880s. Paley’s general method
of annotation is described by Collard:
Theatrical moments are rarely remarked. . . . What he gives his reader is a
mixture of text-critical, grammatical, lexical, interpretative and contextual
comment, with succinctly pointed comparative illustration, in a direct and
unpretentious way. Metrical comment is conWned to identiWcation of the
rhythms, except in dialogue trimeters. . . . In all this, Paley holds true to the
editorial principles of the Bibliotheca Classica, but in one important respect
he goes further: he is discreetly suggestive to the sensibility or emotions.95

92 Wilamowitz (1879).
93 Mommsen had roundly denounced Euripides in his Römische Geschichte
(1854–6). He held several of the Aristophanic and Schlegelian prejudices against the
poet, including an abhorrence of Euripidean women, as well as two of his own. He
believed Euripides, the prophet of the oikoumenē, to be subversive and anti-nation-
alistic, criticisms which anticipated the anti-Semitism and anti-Cosmopolitanism
expressed in the third volume of his Römische Geschichte.
94 See Calder (1985), 80–110, at 95–6 and (1986), 409–30, at 418–19.
95 Collard (1996), 67–80, at 74.
 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 179
The Herakles is the Wrst play in the third volume of Paley’s edition.
Paley begins his account of its history by stating: ‘In several respects
the Mad Hercules is a remarkable play. It diVers materially in the style
and treatment from the other dramas of Euripides.’96 SigniWcantly, he
Wnds in the play borrowings from the Aeschylean style of diction and
Œ
ºØ. He maintains that the Herakles ‘can hardly be said as yet to
have obtained the editorial care that it deserves’,97 but he seems
somewhat undecided as to its success. On the one hand, he says:
‘We shall be disposed, while we attach some value to it as a tragic
experiment, not perhaps altogether congenial to the author’s mind,
to doubt whether, for that very reason, the success was com-
mensurate with the eVort,’98 while, on the other hand, he charges
K. O. Müller with not having given the play’s merits a high enough
estimate.99 In addressing the complaint of Müller and other German
critics about the incongruity of the two main actions of the plot,
Paley oVers a solution in the form of an aetiological connection
between these two movements:
The Wrst part of the play has . . . this direct relation to the last, that it
represents the hero not only as a self-sacriWcing benefactor of mankind,
but as the greatest deliverer of the Theban people, who, at the very moment
of their joy and gratitude to the family of Hercules, are deprived of them by a
crime which renders it legally impossible to retain Hercules in their city.
Thus excluded from both Argos and Thebes, he has Athens only left as an
asylum. The play therefore as a whole may be deWned to be ‘the history of the
connexion of Hercules with the Athenian people’.100
The timing of Herakles’ madness and the signiWcance of the central
epiphany and peripeteia are left unaccounted for by Paley.
In 1875 J. T. Hutchinson and A. Gray of Cambridge University
produced an edition of the Herakles ‘with introduction, notes, and
analysis’, the text of which was based mainly on the editions of Paley
and Nauck. In a prefatory note, dated December 1875, the editors
acknowledge ‘the translation of the play contained in Browning’s
Apology of Aristophanes [sic], which is especially remarkable for its
Wdelity to the original’.101 What is also noteworthy is that Hutch-
inson and Gray anticipated the use of their edition in schools,

96 Paley (1860), iii. 3. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid.

99 Ibid. 4. 100 Ibid. 6. 101 Hutchinson and Gray (1875), preface.
180 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist
by quoting at length passages by classical authors to which they have
referred.
Between 1800 and 1880 no separate translation of the Herakles was
published in England with the exception of Robert Browning’s,
which formed part of Aristophanes’ Apology. All nineteen extant
plays of Euripides, however, were translated literally in two volumes
by Theodore Alois Buckley of Christ Church, Oxford, and Wrst
published in 1850. A later edition of this work was among the nine
editions of Euripides’ dramas in Browning’s library on its dispersal in
1913, and would appear to have been a more immediate galvanizing
force behind Browning’s defence of Euripides in Balaustion’s Adven-
ture and Aristophanes’ Apology than the work of either Schlegel or
Matthew Arnold. In his introduction Buckley denigrates Euripides
with such vehemence that it is astonishing that he regarded the
considerable task of translation deserving of his time and labour,
and the plays themselves of a wider English readership. ‘The infer-
iority of our author to the great tragedians’, he professed, ‘prevents
our feeling much desire to enter upon the respective merits and
demerits of his several plays, especially as we are completely antici-
pated by Schlegel, with whose masterly analysis every reader ought
to be acquainted.’102 Despite this initial protestation of reluctance,
Buckley swiftly summons the will to reiterate the most condemna-
tory of Schlegel’s assertions, including Euripides’ responsibility for
the decline of tragic poetry, and to endorse the classicist conception
of a correlation between the artist’s character and his art: ‘So great is
the prodigality of slaughter throughout his dramas, that we can but
imagine morbid cruelty to have formed a considerable ingredient in
the disposition of Euripides. Even his pathos is somewhat tinctured
with his taste for painful images.’103 Having noted the shortcomings,
in subject, morality, and technique, which he, after Schlegel, Wnds in
the poet’s work, and having bypassed any degree of subtlety or
ambivalence present in Schlegel’s critique, Buckley is conWdent that
‘there is no true tragedy in Euripides’.104
Browning scribbled his wrathful response to this particular dam-
natio in his own copy of Buckley’s edition, and, according to DeVane,
he ‘expressed himself so violently in Greek that the matter is better

102 Buckley (1850), i. p. vi. 103 Ibid. x. 104 Ibid.

 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist 181
not translated’.105 What Browning must have objected to most
strongly in Buckley’s crude attack was the translator’s observation
‘that the study of Aristophanes is indissolubly connected with that of
our author. If the reader discover the painful fact that the burlesque
writer is greater than the tragedian, he will perhaps also recollect that
such a literary relation is, unfortunately, by no means conWned to the
days of Aristophanes.’106 In Buckley’s attempt to perpetuate the
Aristophanic caricature of Euripides, we Wnd his wearisome regurgi-
tation of the most negative aspects of the Schlegelian position; and
with the pedestrian and pedagogic quality of his literal prose trans-
lation and his querulous notes on the clumsiness of Euripides’
phrasing, Browning found much to censure and correct.
The nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides was a robust and
clamorous orthodoxy which few were daring or fervent enough to
challenge. As a consequence, before 1875 attempts to rehabilitate
Euripides were desultory and largely unproductive. Admiration for
this emblem of decadence amounted almost to a guilty pleasure, and
was often deemed a symptom of maverick tastes and unsteady
scholarship. While the Herakles excited modest interest in some
distinguished quarters, until Browning and Wilamowitz it did not
inspire a major piece of rehabilitative criticism or composition.
There was a failure by Euripidean critics and champions alike to
engage in a precise or meaningful way with the plays themselves. The
prevailing portrait of Euripides during this period was, in essence,
the annexation by Schlegel and others of an Aristophanic burlesque.
The success of any rehabilitative counter-movement would therefore
depend on a readiness to dismantle Aristophanic tradition and delve
deeply into Euripidean tragedy for its own sake.

105 DeVane (1955), 352. 106 Buckley (1850), i. p. xi.

 6
The Browning version: Aristophanes’
Apology and ‘the perfect piece’

Gilbert Murray’s self-confessed generalization that, throughout the

ages, Euripides has been ‘loved by poets and despised by critics’,1
can, with some justiWcation, be applied to the nineteenth century
and especially its attitude towards the Herakles. The greatest artistic
contribution to the rehabilitation of Euripides as tragedian, which
began in the latter half of the century, and to the nascent awareness
of the Herakles’ excellence in particular, was undoubtedly made by
Robert Browning (1812–89). In Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) Brown-
ing applies himself valiantly, and at length, to the whole issue of
Euripidean reception, both ancient and modern; and, as the coup de
grâce in his defence of the playwright, he translates Herakles in full. The
play is deemed by Browning ‘the consummate Tragedy’ (AA 3526),
‘the perfect piece’ (3534) by which to ‘test true godship’ (3529).

THE BROWNINGS AND EURIPIDES THE HUMAN

Robert Browning’s enthusiasm for Euripides was largely inspired by

his wife, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61). A mutual love of Greek tragedy
had been at the centre of their courtship, throughout which Barrett
reworked her translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, published
in 1833, in close consultation with Browning. In their correspondence
with each other, the two poets incorporated Promethean language and

1 Murray (1913), 1.
 The Browning version 183
imagery into the context of their burgeoning relationship in a way that
reXected the constraints of their respective situations.2 Barrett’s fa-
vourite tragedian was Euripides, and in her poem ‘Wine of Cyprus’
(1844), written two years before her elopement with Browning, she
conceived in praise of the ancient poet an epithet and accompanying
image that would often be invoked, and occasionally parodied, by
other writers:
Our Euripides, the human
With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres.
(89–92)
Browning reprinted these lines as the preface to Balaustion’s Adven-
ture, and in the epilogue, which follows the dramatic recitation of
Alcestis in that poem, Balaustion professes to know
The poetess who graved in gold,
Among her glories that shall never fade,
This style and title for Euripides,
The Human with his droppings of warm tears.
(2668–71)
After his wife’s death in 1861 and his subsequent relocation from
Florence to London, Browning engaged in an intensive study of
Euripides, who, King says, ‘became his frequent companion. Both
his personal loss and the tragic vision of the aged poet helped
sharpen the sense of reality which informs The Ring and the Book.’3
The Ring and the Book, the longest, and universally recognized as one
of the greatest, of Browning’s works, was published in instalments
between 1868 and 1869, and was based on the proceedings of a trial
in Rome at the beginning of 1698 in which Count Guido Fran-
ceschini was charged with the murder of his young wife, Pompilia.
There are ten verse narratives in the poem, which all concern the
same crime and are each written from a distinct perspective. Con-
tained in Book 10 is a startling defence of Euripides against the
common imputation of atheism. Browning resurrects Euripides
2 See Prins (1991), 435–51 and Hardwick (2000), 32.
3 King (1968), 129.
184 The Browning version
and puts into his mouth a lengthy dissertation, addressed directly to
Pope Innocent XII, in which the tragedian assumes the persona of a
monotheistic prophet and proto-Christian whose particular form of
paganism anticipated, by half-a-millennium, many aspects of Pauline
teaching:
Five hundred years ere Paul spoke, Felix heard,—
How much of temperance and righteousness,
Judgement to come, did I Wnd reason for,
Corroborate with my strong style that spared
No sin, nor swerved the more from branding brow
Because the sinner was called Zeus and God?
How nearly did I guess at what Paul knew?
How closely came, in what I represent
As duty, to his doctrine yet a blank?
(1717–25)
Euripides is also made to assert, in marked contradiction of Schlegel
and his disciples, that he ‘Adopted virtue as my rule of life’ (1710),
and to claim for his work, far from a populist motive, a moral and
didactic mission:
And, what my heart taught me, I taught the world,
And have been teaching now two thousand years.
Witness my work,—plays that should please, forsooth!
‘They might please, they may displease, they shall teach,
For truth’s sake,’ so I said, and did, and do.
(1712–16)
In the preface to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
(1871), Browning quotes and supplies his own translation of lines
1275–80 of Herakles, in which the hero speaks bitterly of his frenzied
murder of his family as his last crowning labour. But the poet’s most
concentrated and large-scale defences of Euripides were Balaustion’s
Adventure in 1871 and Aristophanes’ Apology in 1875, which included
‘transcriptions’ of Alkestis and Herakles respectively. Balaustion’s
Adventure preceded the vindication of Euripides attempted by
Symonds and MahaVy, and was written primarily in tribute to the
memory of Elizabeth Barrett and her love of the tragedian. It deals
with the theme of miraculous salvation, with Herakles emerging as a
 The Browning version 185
Christ-like saviour Wgure, a fully rounded spiritual hero who exercises
transcendent powers over Death.4 In Aristophanes’ Apology, however,
can be found Browning’s ultimate expression of his personal kinship
with the ancient poet and his ultimate riposte to Euripides’ critics
and his own.

AR IS TOPHANES’ APOLOGY: CONTEMPORARY

AND SUBSEQUENT RECEPTION

Aristophanes’ Apology was published on 15 April 1875. It comprised

5,705 lines of verse, making it the third-longest of Browning’s works
after The Ring and the Book and Sordello, and four times the length of
any extant Greek tragedy.5 The poem was revised for the collected
edition of 1888–9 and Browning added six lines throughout the text.
It has a complex narrative and temporal structure of multiple layers.
The subsuming narrative mode is a dramatic monologue spoken by
the heroine Balaustion as she and her husband Euthukles sail to
Rhodes after the destruction of Athens’ long walls by the Spartans.
Within the ‘present’ of this monologue is built a dialogue, an
extended agon between Balaustion and the comic poet Aristophanes,
recollected from one year previously when Euthukles brought
Balaustion news of Euripides’ death. Part of this dialogue is a tran-
scription from Euripides, an uninterrupted and unedited recital of
the Herakles which occupies 1,549 lines of the complete text.
4 Poole (1987), 139 observes that in Balaustion’s interpolative narrative Herakles
‘loses nothing of his rollicking pagan pedigree, but he acquires the aura of a spiritual
life-force, which in its turn reinterprets the Wgure of Christ’. On Herakles’ Christ-like
attributes in Balaustion’s Adventure, see Roberts and Prins (forthcoming), general
introduction, sec. 4. With more speciWc reference to Euripides’ Herakles, Elizabeth
Hasell (1874), 545–67, at 567, contemplated ‘the full spiritual signiWcance of
the legend. . . . There are hints, but no more than hints, in the ‘‘Frenzied Hercules’’
of the dim inexplicable feeling which we cannot doubt haunted the mind of antiquity,
that if ever the bonds of Hades were burst and its gates thrown open, it could only be
at the cost of unexampled anguish . . . that if ever human nature raised above the stars
it could only be in the person of one whose sorrows as well as his deeds should alike
transcend the measure of human doing and suVering.’
5 The Ring and the Book was published in monthly instalments from November
1868 to February 1869. It comprises twelve books (21,204 lines). Sordello was
published in March 1840 and comprises six books (5,981 lines).
186 The Browning version
Contemporary critics,6 giving their attention mainly to the poem’s
recondite style and the esoteric nature of its ostensible subject matter,
typically treated the Apology as a scholarly curiosity. The reviewer for
the Athenaeum of 17 April 1875 suggested, much to Browning’s
annoyance, that the poem was conceived during a discussion of the
conclusion of Plato’s Symposium between the poet and Benjamin
Jowett, the Master of Balliol College (Browning was Jowett’s friend
and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol).7 This suggestion is probably less
than earnest, but, in making it, the reviewer has uncovered an
important point, that the dramatic narrative surrounding the tran-
scription is far more Platonic than Euripidean. The reaction of
novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant, writing in Blackwood’s Edin-
burgh Magazine (July 1875), was indicative of the bewilderment and
irritation that the Apology excited in many quarters:
Three-fourths of the readers of English poetry are absolutely indiVerent to
the question why Aristophanes attacked Euripides in his comedies, which is
exactly one of those details which the dilettante critic delights in, but which
convey neither information nor ediWcation to any one else. . . . The fact
remains that Englishmen are not Greeks, and that no poem nor other
work plentifully besprinkled with classic vocables, and made up of classic
allusions, ever will or can be anything but caviare to the multitude, and
never can or will be anything original or great.8
While there was consensus among the critics regarding the Apology’s
demonstration of the poet’s erudition, there was a mixture of opinion
on the quality of the verse. John Addington Symonds, whose review in
the Academy (17 April 1875), although not unqualiWed in its praise,
oVered the most favourable assessment of the poem’s merits, wrote:
‘Mr. Browning is unrivalled in the art of following thought through all
its windings, tracing and retracing labyrinths of sophistry and preju-
dice, blending the specious and the true as he conceives them, the
coarse and the reWned, spinning with words a closely-Wtting veil of
gossamer for the spirit he imprisons in his verse.’9 By contrast, the

6 A representative selection of contemporary criticism on Aristophanes’ Apology is

reproduced in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 398–403.
7 For Browning’s reaction to this suggestion, see Hood (1933), 171.
8 Repr. in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 401–2. 9 Ibid. 398.
 The Browning version 187
reviewer in the Spectator (3 July 1875) thought Browning’s mastery of
the stylistic elements of the Apology very dubious:
Mr. Browning permits the passion for analysing character so to dominate
him, that he becomes careless of things essential to his art. Sweetness, bright-
ness, grace, melody, eloquence are either absent, or present at but the rarest
intervals. Here and there he condescends to give us a glimpse of them. Once in
some twenty pages or so comes a beautiful line, even a beautiful passage,
though seldom this latter without some harshness to blot it.10
Other reviewers considered the poetry of the Apology inferior to the
lyricism of Balaustion’s Adventure, and that, as a sequel, the work was
a disappointing failure.
A common feature of these immediate responses to Aristophanes’
Apology is their silence on the transcription from Euripides. Mrs
Oliphant did make reference to Browning’s earlier transcription of
Euripides’ Alkestis, and conceded that his most recent eVort was ‘a
good translation of a great poem’.11 However, she saw the translation
as a separate concern, and in no way a mitigation of the oVence she
believed Browning had committed by his intellectual posturing, the
‘prank’ he had played ‘for the gratiWcation of a small and select
audience’.12 In other reviews the translation is altogether ignored.
The translation did, however, attract the appreciative attention of
two notable contemporaries of Browning’s, the Greek scholar
MahaVy and the historian, critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle.
MahaVy clearly regarded Browning as a great poet and a superior
translator. In his concise survey of Euripides’ life and works, pub-
lished in 1879, he reproduced the poet’s translation of two choric
stanzas of Hippolytus (beginning at line 525), which, as he proudly
revealed, Browning had specially made for him on 18 December
1878, ‘so that the general reader may not miss the meaning and spirit
of the ode’.13 In chapter 5 of this volume MahaVy described the
translation of Herakles in Aristophanes’ Apology as ‘admirable’14 and
an invaluable resource for the English reader, and in his conclusion

10 Ibid. 402. 11 Ibid. 401.

12 Ibid. 402.
13 MahaVy (1879), 115. MahaVy used the translation again in A Survey of Greek
Civilization (1897), paying tribute to ‘this great poet’.
14 MahaVy (1879), 82.
188 The Browning version
he included the Browning versions of Herakles and Alkestis in a list of
‘the best and most accessible helps to the study of the poet’.15
Soon after the publication of Aristophanes’ Apology, Carlyle wrote
to Browning: ‘Ye won’t mind, though it’s the last advice I may give ye,
but ye ought to translate the whole of the Greek tragedians—that’s
your vocation.’16 This substantial endorsement of his skills as a
translator persuaded Browning to undertake a translation of Aes-
chylus’ Agamemnon, which was published two years later. In his
preface to this later work, Browning in fact states that Carlyle com-
manded him to do the translation, a responsibility that Carlyle was
quick to disavow when he saw the ‘unreadable’17 result of his earlier
exhortation. Browning sent a copy of Aristophanes’ Apology to Mat-
thew Arnold soon after its publication, a gesture to which Arnold
responded gallantly and graciously.18 It is also probable that Oscar
Wilde had read the poem, since in June 1881 he sent Browning the
Wrst copy of his poems as ‘the only tribute I can oVer you in return
for the delight and the wonder which the strength and splendour of
your work has given me from my boyhood’.19
In the twentieth century, scholarship on the Apology focused
largely on the question of Browning’s classical sources and how
necessary a knowledge of these is to a proper appreciation of the
poem. Critics also asked whether the apologiae of Balaustion and
Aristophanes relate to Wfth-century Athenian dramaturgy or whether
they actually represent a clash of literary ēthē in Victorian Britain;
and they explored the ways in which Browning’s advocacy of Euripi-
des’ poetic principles can be related to his own aesthetics. Seldom in
these discussions, however, was Browning’s translation of Herakles
more than cursorily examined.

15 MahaVy (1879), 144. 16 Quoted in GriYn (1910), 256.

17 See Carlyle’s comments on Browning’s translation of the Agamemnon recorded
in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 432–3.
18 In a letter dated May 20 1875, and reprinted in Lang (2000), iv. 262, Arnold
thanked Browning for the poem, ‘which I shall keep to read when my summer holiday
comes and I can read a poem steadily. It is sure to leave me with the impression which
your writings from the Wrst have given me and which the writings of so few other living
people give me—that the author is what the French call a grand esprit.’
19 Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), 111. Wilde was certainly aware of Browning’s
translations of Euripides since he refers to them in his Oxford commonplace book
([130], repr. in Smith and Helfand (1989) 132).
 The Browning version 189
Sir F. G. Kenyon, editor of the 1912 centenary edition of The Works
of Robert Browning, makes several pronouncements which are typical
of the critical attitude that has persisted in relation to the transcrip-
tion. In his introduction to Aristophanes’ Apology, Kenyon says:
‘Whereas in the earlier work [Balaustion’s Adventure] the main object
was the translation, with which the comparatively slight setting was
inextricably interwoven, in Aristophanes’ Apology, the main interest is
in the setting and the translation might be detached, or ‘‘taken as
read,’’ without aVecting the main theme.’20 He further maintains that
the ‘discussion is complete in itself; the translation of the Hercules is
only introduced by way of illustration of Balaustion’s triumphant
advocacy of her beloved poet. It is a Wne translation of a Wne—
though by no means perfect—play; but its interest is eclipsed by
Browning’s own poem.’21 Kenyon’s comments are instructive because
they demonstrate, Wrst, the misconception that the literalness of
Browning’s translation, and the absence of authorial comment on
the play, make the interest of the transcription to the reading of the
poem minimal, and secondly, the opinion, long current, that the
Herakles was a Xawed component of the Euripidean corpus. Simi-
larly, William DeVane22 and R. A. King,23 in their evaluations of
the Apology, believe the translation to be subordinate to the rest of
the poem. DeVane seems to judge the comparative signiWcance of the
translation and the surrounding debate in terms of length. ‘It is
obvious’, he states, ‘that the Herakles holds no such central place in
Aristophanes’ Apology as the Alcestis holds in Balaustion’s Adventure.
The arguments of Balaustion and Aristophanes, in point of space,
overwhelm the play by Euripides.’24
Donald Smalley25 and Jane McCusker26 have each made an inter-
esting study of how the Apology aVords the reader insights into the
conXicting ideals of poetry and the role of the poet espoused by
Browning and his contemporaries. But they have failed to consider
how, and to what extent, the translation of the Herakles is made
relevant to an oblique commentary on the literary landscape of
Victorian Britain, and how it is used to attest the truth of Browning’s

20 Kenyon (1912), viii. pp. v–vi. 21 Ibid., p. vi.

22 See DeVane (1955), 350 V. 23 See King (1968), 203 V.
24 DeVane (1955), 376. 25 See Smalley (1940), 823–38.
26 See McCusker (1984), 783–96.
190 The Browning version
poetic creed. Towards the end of her essay, ‘Browning’s Aristophanes’
Apology and Matthew Arnold’, McCusker emphasizes that ‘the
reader’s understanding of the poetic situation and of the poetic
debates is created by the eVect of the whole poem, including Brown-
ing’s translation of the Herakles’.27 Yet, while she oVers a very thor-
ough and cogent exposition of the way speciWc lines in the poem
relate to details in the debate between Browning and Matthew
Arnold, she never addresses the question of exactly what the choice
of text for transcription contributes to ‘one of Browning’s fullest
examinations of poetic theory’.28
More recently, Adam Roberts29 and Daniel Karlin,30 recognizing
that the Apology has been a greatly neglected and misunderstood
work, have presented fresh perspectives on the issue of Browning’s
deployment of sources. Karlin explores the complex framework of
dualities and oppositions in the poem and its central antithesis
between love and hate, while Roberts treats the poem as ‘one of
Browning’s most complex statements on the nature of Art and
humanity’.31 Neither of these revisionist theses, however, deals with
the translation of the Herakles.
This brief synopsis of the major critical discourse on Aristophanes’
Apology since its publication should give some indication of how
Browning’s Herakles has been the casualty of serious scholarly neg-
lect. Two critics, however, while by no means providing a compre-
hensive dissection of the translation, have at least acknowledged its
importance within the context of the poem. Frederick Monroe Tisdel
sees Balaustion’s reply to Aristophanes as ‘Browning’s real contribu-
tion to the criticism of his time on the merits of Greek drama. It is his
answer to the estimate of Schlegel, his eVort to do justice to the
enduring worth of Euripides.’32 Although he erroneously states that
the discussion between Balaustion and Aristophanes ‘closes’33 with
the reading of the Herakles, Tisdel is conscious that, in determining
how the translation aids a defence of Euripides’ genius, ‘the import-
ant consideration . . . is the way in which the play illustrates the

27 See McCusker (1984), 796. 28 Ibid. 795.

29 See Roberts (1990–1), 32–45. 30 See Karlin (1993), chap. 7.
31 Roberts (1990–1), 32–45, at 32. 32 Tisdel (1927), 1–46, at 11.
33 Ibid. 5. In fact 626 lines (5,085–711) follow the transcription.
 The Browning version 191
argument’.34 He thus lists, with appropriate examples, four ways in
which the characterization, action, and language of the Herakles
plainly answer the strictures of Aristophanes, and by extension
Schlegel, upon Euripides.35 This list comprises Euripides’ humaniza-
tion of Herakles; his humanization of the gods; his moralization on
the subject of fate; and his use of maxims. If Browning’s intention in
the transcription of Herakles is to answer Schlegel’s criticisms, his
choice of text is a bold one. By selecting the Herakles, in which
humanization of the heroic status and scepticism about the gods
and accepted myths are critical elements, his purpose seems not
categorically to refute Schlegel’s charges by proving their opposite,
but rather to confront them directly by means of a literal translation
through which the power and beauty of the original might be
discovered and appreciated anew.
Deviating in certain aspects from Tisdel’s thesis, Clyde De L. Ryals
oVers a more complete understanding of the signiWcance of Brown-
ing’s very literal translation of Herakles to the structural and philo-
sophical design of the poem.36 He attributes the eVectiveness of
Browning’s defence of the tragedian not to the words spoken by
Balaustion, but rather to the translation, which, he says, the poet
‘wished to be as neutral and objective in style as possible’.37 Within
the framework of the Apology, Browning intended the Herakles to
serve as the ‘pure statement, distinct from the biased utterances of
Aristophanes and Balaustion’.38 The unembellished transcription,
therefore, is made separate from the rather myopic arguments
employed by Balaustion and Aristophanes, who each make conces-
sions to the other’s viewpoint only for those concessions to be swiftly
withdrawn and the pair’s original polar positions to be resumed.
Ryals further maintains: ‘Browning must have reasoned that one way
to circumvent the subjectivity of his monologist was to provide
within the monologue a full-Xedged drama, the most objective of
literary forms, unedited and without commentary.’39 He contends
that Balaustion and Aristophanes each represent one pole
of a dialectic—transcendental versus descendental, or soul versus

34 Tisdel (1927), 18. 35 See ibid. 18–22.

36 See Ryals (1975), chap. 5 and (1993), 196–9. 37 Ibid. 104–5.
38 Ibid. 105. 39 Ibid. 104.
192 The Browning version
body—and that the translation demonstrates that Euripides, by
contrast, ‘speaking to both soul and sense, creates the kind of
drama reXective of a true understanding of human nature’.40

T H E EV ID E N C E OF T H E B A L L I O L M A N U S C R I P T

Ryals makes two elementary, but frequently overlooked, points which

together suggest a radical approach to the study of the poem. He
recalls the fact that the translation of Herakles preceded the compos-
ition of the surrounding poem by fourteen months,41 and insists that
‘the translation is not a mere Xexion of Browning’s classical muscles
but an organic part of the work whose full title is Aristophanes’
Apology; Including a Transcript from Euripides: Being the Last Adventure
of Balaustion’.42 Far from dismissing the transcription as a subordinate
or detachable element in the work, Ryals in fact proposes that the
Herakles is a logical point of entry into an analysis of the poem.
Moreover, this approach to the poem accords with the order and
method of construction which Browning himself followed and which
can be deduced from the manuscript of Aristophanes Apology housed
in Balliol College Library.43 In the manuscript the transcription and
the beginning and conclusion of the poem are written on paper that is
clearly margined and of superior quality to that on which the bulk of
the work is composed.44 These sections were probably composed in
London. The transcription itself is dated at the end ‘June 17 ’73.’ Some
half-sheets of the same quality as the transcription have been pasted
into the sections immediately preceding and following the Herakles,
signalling the probability that while Browning was making the trans-
lation he was already giving thought to a context in which to place it.
On the Wnal page of the manuscript Browning has written: ‘Begun
about August 11—ended Saturday, Nov. 7 ’74, Mers Picardy.’ The

40 See Ryals (1975), chap. 5 and (1993), 112. 41 Ibid. 101–2.

42 Ibid. 104. 43 Balliol MS 389.
44 DeVane (1955), 376 has remarked on the diVering quality of the paper used in
the ms to show that the composition of the poem had at least two distinct stages. He
does not, however, draw any conclusions about the signiWcance of the order in which
these stages occurred.
 The Browning version 193
transcription has been numbered twice, Wrst, as folios 1–32 in the same
black pen as the transcription itself and, secondly, in a brown pen as
folios 112–70. Throughout the rest of the manuscript the pages have
been numbered three and even four times, indicating the various
stages of composition and reorganization. The chronological develop-
ment of Aristophanes’ Apology suggests the following conclusion: that
Browning wrote his translation of the Herakles as a complete work, an
intellectual exercise in its own right and for its own sake, but that, at
the same time, he envisaged the translation as a central part of a whole,
the focal point of a comprehensive treatise on the reception of ancient
drama and Euripides’ place in the tragic canon, and by extension a
profession of poetic faith and a labour of love.
I believe, therefore, that by observing the poet’s known modus oper-
andi, and examining in detail his transcription of Herakles and the
theory of translation by which it has been fashioned, the true substance
of Browning’s consummate defence of Euripides is to be found.

B ROW N I N G’ S G R E E K A N D T H E
NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSLATION DEBATE

The principle of translation which Browning applies in the Herakles

is key to understanding its intended signiWcance within Aristophanes’
Apology, especially when this principle is examined in terms of a
comparison with the poet’s two other major transcriptions from
Greek tragedy, namely Euripides’ Alkestis (1871) and Aeschylus’
Agamemnon (1877). In each of the three translations a distinct theory
and methodology are discernible, and a diVerent experience of Greek
tragic drama made available to the reader.
The composition of these works coincided with an intense schol-
arly debate on the method which those attempting translations of
Greek and Latin texts should employ. As Lorna Hardwick indicates:
‘The variety of approaches to translation and the broadening spec-
trum of authorship in the nineteenth century oVer evidence of Werce
debate, not only about the nature and purposes of translation and its
cultural and political implications, but also about the role of translation
194 The Browning version
in the lives and work of writers and in the perceptions of both the
classically educated and the broader readership.’45 Crucial to this
dispute, and not unfamiliar to our own era, was the question of
‘faithfulness’ to the original: how to deWne this abstraction in a way
that was neither nebulous nor arbitrary, but that would provide
translators with practical guidelines for their task. In order to arrive
at any sort of deWnition, the theorist had to contend with several
interrelated issues: the virtue, or otherwise, of literalism as a trans-
lational system; the beneWt to be gained from, and the sheer linguistic
attainability of, lexical, syntactical, and conceptual accuracy; and the
more philosophical and ethical dilemma of whether translation
should entail a process of alienation or acculturation, that is, whether
the translation should communicate to the reader a sense of the
remoteness, in time, culture, and language, of the original text, or
render Xuent and accessible what may be fractured and distancing.
Two of the chief combatants in this controversy were Francis William
Newman (1805–97) and Matthew Arnold. Newman’s translation of the
Iliad (1856) into unrhymed English metre was made according to his
theory that what was diYcult or strange in the original should be
replicated in the translation by deliberate archaisms, in his case by the
use of alliterative verse and words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Arnold heavily
criticized this technique in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ (1860–1),
which were intended to give practical advice to would-be translators of
Homeric epic, accusing Newman of substituting his own eminent
ignobility for Homer’s eminent nobility.46 Co-opting and paraphrasing
Coleridge, Arnold proposes a contrasting theory: ‘It may be said of that
union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a
good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between
them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking and feeling on the
translator’s part—‘‘defecates to a pure transparency,’’ and disappears.’47
The conXict in approach between Newman and Arnold led to a
surge in the publication of translations and essays on the practice of
translation. It was against this background that Browning published

45 Hardwick (2000), 24. See also Daniel Weissbort’s general synopsis of 19th-century
verse-translation theories in France (2000), 89–96, esp. 91–2, and the discussion by
A. D. P. Briggs of how these theories were applied to the Greek tragedians, ibid. 356–67.
46 Arnold (1861), in Super (1960), i. 97–216, at 103. See contra, Newman (1861).
47 Arnold (1860–61), in Super (1960), i. 97–216, at 103.
 The Browning version 195
his three complete transcriptions from Greek tragedy within the
space of six years. His contribution to the debate, therefore, was
one of practical demonstration; and the hallmark of his experimen-
tation in the Weld of translation was versatility. It is Browning’s ability
with these three translations to traverse the expanse between New-
man and Arnold that is most noteworthy. Each translation serves a
unique purpose and engages a technique appropriate to, and eluci-
dative of, that purpose.
Browning’s transcription of the Alkestis in Balaustion’s Adventure is
essentially an adaptation of the Euripidean original, and has a num-
ber of features in common with a working playscript. In reciting,
interpreting, and revising the text before a small audience of friends,
the heroine Balaustion performs the role of a dramaturge presenting
a read-through of the play. Similar to the structure of Aristophanes’
Apology, the recitation is, in fact, part of the adventure narrative in
which Balaustion recalls how, making for Athens after the Sicilian
disaster, she rescued herself and fellow Rhodians from attack by the
Syracusans when she recited solo Euripides’ Alkestis. Her vivid read-
ing of the drama is interspersed with lively descriptions of the action
and characters, stage directions in verse, and explanatory digressions.
Balaustion also outlines for her audience a new moral direction for
the play, whereby Admetus’ character is purged of much of its
weakness and ignobility. Ryals construes this method as ‘not a criti-
cism but a ‘‘higher criticism’’ of the text. . . . Just as a modern herme-
neuticist may look behind the literal accounts of the gospels to grasp
the essence of the Christian message, Balaustion looks beyond the
actual text to seize upon Euripides’ essential meaning.’48 Browning’s
Alkestis is a recasting of Euripides, a creative appropriation that
endows the ancient poet with an anachronistic historical conscious-
ness. It demonstrates, therefore, a theory of translation which is
almost the reverse of that operative in his two later transcriptions.
The Agamemnon is Browning’s most literal translation, but its
literalism is of a very diVerent order from that of his Herakles, and
one for which the poet was greatly castigated at the time and has
rarely been commended since. It is the only one of the three trans-
lations to which Browning appended a preface. In this he protests:

48 Ryals (1993), 177–8.

196 The Browning version
If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint
myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require
him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. . . .
I would be tolerant for once,—in the case of so immediately famous an
original,—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each
phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear. . . . Further, if I obtained a mere
strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should
hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and
sonority of the Greek. . . . I should expect the result to prove very hard reading
indeed if it were meant to resemble Aeschylus. . . . All I can say for the present
performance is, that I have done as I would be done by, if need were.49
Despite this anticipatory defence, Browning’s approach was most
unwelcome. The extremely demanding, and often baZing, nature
of his English was met with frustration and oVence. Even Browning’s
usual admirers expressed perplexity and mild chagrin. Kenyon la-
belled the translation ‘a perverse tour de force’,50 and saw in it an
oblique attempt by Browning to show his beloved Euripides in a
favourable light by contrast. William Cranston Lawton believed
Browning failed in the Agamemnon because he had misguidedly
applied to Aeschylus the same literalist method which he had applied
to the ‘easier’ verse of Euripides: ‘When Browning attempts to render
these most diYcult Aeschylean choral songs in English verse, and
rhymed verse, and at the same time to be niggardly, solemnly,
absolutely literal, the result is too often but the disjecta membra of
articulate speech.’51
In more recent times Yopie Prins has discerned a method to Brown-
ing’s madness and a purpose to his alleged perversity. She argues:
The translation presents English as a foreign language that must be trans-
lated back into Greek in order to be understood. Ultimately, Browning’s
Agamemnon undoes the opposition between the two languages altogether, as
it moves into an interlingual realm that John Addington Symonds criticized
for being ‘neither English nor Greek.’ However, rather than criticizing this

49 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 293–4. The wording of

Browning’s apologia closely recalls Jasper Heywood’s literalist cause as stated in the
title-page of his translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens. See above, Chap. 3. Undoubt-
edly, Browning was aware of Heywood’s translation.
50 Kenyon (1912), viii., p. xi. 51 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 384.
 The Browning version 197
radical linguistic estrangement, we might ponder how Browning’s transla-
tion serves as metaphor for the act of reading itself.52
Prins’s suggestion is that ‘Browning is interested in translation as a
process of alienation that is also exacted in the process of reading’.53
She believes that ‘Aeschylus’ obscurity poses certain challenges to the
reader, who must interact with the text in order to reenact both its
meaning and its resistance to meaning. On this model of reading, the
obscure is a necessary condition for the sublime.’54 This idea of pur-
poseful obscurity appears much earlier in MahaVy’s assessment of
Aeschylus’ ‘pregnant obscurity, as contrasted with the redundant ob-
scurity of some modern poets or the artiWcial obscurity of the Attic
epoch’.55 W. B. Stanford, writing half-a-century after MahaVy, qualiWes
this by saying: ‘The poets of the 1930s and 1940s are nearer Aeschylus in
their obscurities and ambiguities than were the ‘‘modern’’ poets of
MahaVy’s day, though among them Browning and Hardy show Aes-
chylus’ direct inXuence.’56 Prins maintains that in the diYculty and
obscurity of Aeschylean verse, Browning found ‘a precursor for his
style, which is often described in terms of a catachrestic or ‘‘grotesque’’
literalism’.57 Stanford uses the word ‘catachresis’ to categorize instances
where Aeschylus deliberately alters the meanings of words to suit his
needs.58 Discussing Aeschylus’ neologisms, which are, for the most part,
compound words, he states, ‘Aeschylus is straining language almost to
the breaking point. One is reminded of the strained, distorted, almost
grotesque, Wgures of a painting by El Greco.’59 Browning re-creates a
similar tension in his translation of the Agamemnon, and, in so doing,
resembles Gerard Manley Hopkins (1849–89), who broke with the
conventional poetic diction of his time in reviving archaisms, appropri-
ating dialect words, and employing coinages of his own to communicate
hitherto unexpressed concepts, and produced in his verse an overall
eVect of strangeness or, as he called it himself, ‘queerness’.60
52 Prins (1989), 151–70, at 152. 53 Ibid.
54 Ibid. 156. 55 MahaVy (1880), i. 275.
56 Stanford (1942), 128. 57 Prins (1989), 151–70, at 157.
58 Stanford (1942), 64. 59 Ibid. 65–6.
60 According to Gardner (1948), i. 112: ‘Taken altogether, his [Hopkins’s] lexical
and syntactical neologisms, like his innovations in rhythm, produce an air of strange-
ness more marked than in any other English poet. . . . The aim of poetry being to
move, to excite, the ‘‘foreign air’’ or strongly idiosyncratic Xavour of his verse is a
powerful emotive factor.’
198 The Browning version
The diYcult style of Browning’s Agamemnon has also been
accounted useful and eVective by British poet Tony Harrison (b. 1937)
who, surprisingly, claims that the translation had a direct inXuence on
his own version of the Oresteia, which opened at the National Theatre in
November 1981:
It is certainly Browning’s feel for the consonantal, potentially clogging,
energy of Aeschylus’ verse, his awareness of the oral physicality and
what George Steiner calls the ‘aural density’ of the original language, that
distinguishes Browning’s Agamemnon translation. It may clog but it never
cloys like so much inferior Victorian poetry. Somewhere though, almost
more than in any other English-speaking poet who has tackled Aeschylus,
I have always felt, even before I began to think of translating him myself,
there were clues to the way Aeschylus might sound in English in the
Browning version.61
While he is alert to the Xaws in Browning’s translation, Harrison
believes it is neither unreadable nor, it seems, lacking in dramatic
potential. He says in reply to Kenyon’s charge of perversity, ‘some-
where, I think, those very perversities point the way to a means of
making the text massive and megalithic, doing honour to the daunt-
ing Dunkelheit of Aeschylus but without renouncing the intelligibility
at the heart of all theatrical communication’.62
Harrison’s reference to George Steiner invokes a comparison between
Browning’s Agamemnon and the literalist techniques adopted by Frie-
drich Hölderlin (1770–1843) in his translations of Sophocles. Hölderlin
saw a need to re-primitivize Sophocles’ text for his German audience
through a process of estrangement from ‘natural’ German. According to
Steiner, by this practice Hölderlin was ‘polemicizing, obliquely, against
Schiller’s idealization of the harmonic universality of Greek art and
against F. W. Schlegel’s insistence on the never-to-be-rivalled perfection
of the classical’.63 His technique was extremely unpopular in his own
lifetime, but was rediscovered and treated in a positive light in the early
and mid-twentieth century, an experience analogous to that of Brown-
ing with his Agamemnon. The publication in 1804, and subsequent
editions in 1808 and 1846, of Hölderlin’s Oedipus der Tyrann and
Antigona were regarded as ‘the tragic indices of mental crisis and

61 Harrison (2002), 9. 62 Ibid. 12. 63 Steiner (1984), 67.

 The Browning version 199
decay’,64 a view which persisted until the rehabilitative judgements of
Norbert von Hellingrath in 1911 and Karl Reinhardt in 1951.
Between the digressive style of Browning’s Alkestis, with its ‘inter-
pretative paraphrase’,65 and the extreme literalism of the Agamemnon
stands the Herakles, the most successful, and yet the least familiar and
least studied, of Browning’s three translational experiments. It is
successful because, of the three, it comes closest to achieving the
impossible, namely the transmission of much of the linguistic power
of the original text simultaneous with the creation of a highly
readable work of English poetry which is seldom strained or inele-
gant. The transcription has a Xuency and a simplicity that are often
wanting in Browning’s own surrounding verse. Two judgements,
read before the Boston Browning Society at the close of the nine-
teenth century, endorse Browning’s Herakles as an exemplary essay in
the art of translation. Philip StaVord Moxom declared: ‘As a transla-
tion it leaves almost nothing to be desired in faithfulness to the
original. In this respect it serves as a model for the ablest workers
in the Weld of translation from the Greek classics.’66 William Cran-
ston Lawton, meanwhile, predicted: ‘The Heracles may long remain
the best single version in English of a masterly Greek drama.’67

HE RAKLES TRANSCRIBED

The transcription of Herakles, like the rest of Aristophanes’ Apology, is

composed mainly in blank verse. Apart from the choral odes, which are
in rhyme, Browning’s use of rhyme in the translation is sporadic but
striking in its re-creation of the original dramatic impact of a scene. For
example, in translating the lyric dialogue between Amphitryon and the
chorus at verses 1042–88 of Euripides’ text, Browning has employed a
varied and highly eVective rhyme-scheme which captures the suspense
and nervous movement of the original passage as well as the extraordinary
tension, palpable in the characters’ language, between the emotional

64 Ibid. 66. 65 Moxom (1897), 411–37, at 413.

66 Ibid. Moxom Wrst made his address, ‘Balaustion’s Opinion of Euripides’, on 25
February 1896.
67 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 386. Lawton Wrst made his address, ‘The Classical
Element in Browning’s Poetry’, on 31 December 1895.
200 The Browning version
and practical necessities imposed by the situation. Browning’s version
of the scene, at lines 4659–721, begins and ends in blank verse, but the
greater part of the exchange alternates between rhyme at the end of
every line and rhyme at the end of every second line. This alternation
reproduces the shifts between fearful urgency and calm resolution
controlled by Euripides’ use of agitated dochmaics interspersed with
iambics. As well as retaining Euripides’ combination of short, sharp
imperatives and enjambement, Browning rhymes the last line of the
Wrst speaker with the Wrst line of the second speaker, creating the eVect
of a fraught dialogue in which the interlocutors talk across one another:
choros
Old man, the fate of thy son!
amphitruon
Hush, hush! Have done!
He is turning about!
He is breaking out!
Away! I steal
And my body conceal,
Before he arouse,
In the depths of the house.
choros
Courage! The Night
Maintains her right
On the lids of thy son there, sealed from sight!
amphitruon
See, see! To leave the light
And, wretch that I am, bear one last ill,
I do not avoid; but if he kill
Me his own father.
(4685–99)
Another striking example of Browning’s manipulation of rhyme to re-
create the force of the original is his rendering of verses 861–6 of Lyssa’s
speech in which she makes her chilling disclosure of the destruction she
will visit on Herakles. Barlow remarks of the original lines, ‘there is an
extraordinary energy from the pent-up movement, sight and sound,
impressions concentrated within a short space to parallel the explosive
force with which Heracles’ madness is created’.68 It is this momentum
and density of images that Browning has impressively reproduced:

68 Barlow (1996), 162.

 The Browning version 201
Go I will! and neither the sea, as it groans
with its waves so furiously,
Nor earthquake, no, nor the bolt of thunder
gasping out heaven’s labor-throe,
Shall cover the ground as I, at a bound, rush into
the bosom of Herakles!
And home I scatter, and house I batter,
Having Wrst of all made the children fall,—
And he who felled them is never to know
He gave birth to each child that received the blow,
Till the Madness, I am, have let him go!
(4447–54)
At line 4449 the blank verse sharply breaks oV, just as the imagery,
which Lyssa employs, changes from the metaphorical and universal
to the literal and particular. A short, concentrated passage of rhyme
follows, within which Browning shifts briskly between internal
rhyme in lines 4450 and 4451 and rhyme at the end of the next
three lines. The overall movement of the passage is at once frenetic
and unrelenting.
The system of spelling Greek proper nouns, which Browning
employs in the Herakles, is one he adopted in ‘Artemis Prologuizes’
(Dramatic Lyrics, 1842) and adhered to in all his subsequent tran-
scriptions from classical Greek. In deWance of the more conventional
Latinizations or Anglicizations, whereby y is substituted for ı, c for Œ,
and ae for ÆØ, Browning provides very precise transliterations of
Greek names. In the preface to his translation of the Agamemnon
Browning protests the soundness and increasing currency of this
practice in anticipation of its detractors:
Just a word more on the subject of my spelling—in a transcript from the
Greek and there exclusively—Greek names and places precisely as does the
Greek author. I began this practice, with great innocency of intention, some
six-and-thirty years ago. . . . I supposed I was doing a simple thing enough.
But there has been till lately much astonishment at os and us, ai and oi,
representing the same letters in Greek. Of a sudden, however, whether in
translation or out of it, everybody seems committing the oVence, although
the adoption of u for ı still presents such diYculty that it is a wonder how
we have hitherto escaped ‘Eyripides.’69

69 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 295–6.

202 The Browning version
This system, however, relies on a Xawed premise, as Kenyon indicates
with reference to the Agamemnon: ‘If Greek and English vowel
sounds were identical, transliteration would no doubt be the correct
procedure, but since they are not, transliteration is often as far from
the truth as the more common Latinisation.’70
In the Herakles, while Browning has transliterated most names and
their adjectival forms according to this system (e.g. Amphitruon,
Alkaios, Eurustheus, Thebai, Lukos, Kadmeian, Euboia, Minuai,
Hudra, Mukenaian, Kuklopian, Olumpos), there are a few names
for which he has simply given an English equivalent, for example
‘Madness’ for ¸Æ, ‘Night’ for ˝, and ‘Heaven’ for ˇPæÆ. This
is a surprising inconsistency in view of the fact that the poet’s
insistence on ‘accuracy’ extended to ordinary nouns and even ex-
clamations of grief. At 4485 he translates the cry Ng
Ø (891),71
which refers to Amphitryon’s NŒ, as ‘O ye domes!’, and at 4831 he
gives ‘peploi’ for

ºØØ (1198). The chorus’ lament OE
(875) is reproduced at 4463 as ‘Otototoi.’
A remarkable feature of Browning’s literal rendering of the text is the
way it often achieves simultaneously Wdelity to the Greek phraseology
and an arresting quality in the English verse. This achievement is dem-
onstrated in his translation of Iris’ instructions to Madness (834–42):
Up then, collecting the unsoftened heart,
Unwedded virgin of black Night! Drive, drag
Frenzy upon the man here—whirls of brain
Big with child-murder, while his feet leap gay!
Let go the bloody cable its whole length!
So that,—when o’er the Acherousian ford
He has sent Xoating, by self-homicide,
His beautiful boy-garland,—he may know
First, Here’s anger, what it is to him,
And then learn mine. The gods are vile indeed
And mortal matters vast, if he ’scape free!
(AA 4418–28)
Here Browning has retained much of Euripides’ asyndetic structure
and concentration of imperatives. His literal transcriptions of the
70 Kenyon (1912), viii. p. xii.
71 This and all subsequent numbers in parentheses (unless marked AA) refer to the
line-numbers in Euripides’ text.
 The Browning version 203
participial phrase
ÆØ
Œı j æH Ææƪf (835–6)72 and the
clause ‰ i
æÆ . . . j e ŒÆºº
ÆØ
Æ Æ ÆPŁfi fiø
(838–9) are appropriately graphic and successfully emulate Euripides’
grotesque juxtapositions of the imagery of Dionysiac ritual with the
stark vision of infanticide and of innocence with evil. Similarly, Brown-
ing has translated the future verbs in Lyssa’s announcement at verse
871,  Æ  Kªg Aºº æø ŒÆd ŒÆÆıºø fiø, as powerful
and portentous transitive verbs that communicate the direct and
violent operation of Madness through Herakles:
Ay, and I soon will dance thee madder, and pipe
thee quite out of thy mind with fear!73
(AA 4459)
Browning remains equally faithful to Euripidean imagery in pas-
sages where his style becomes less literal and more allusive and
condensed. For example, in the stichomythia between Amphitryon
and Herakles, in which the father acts as psychotherapist to the son,
Browning has replaced Euripides’ direct Bacchic metaphor in lines
1119 and 1122 with the idea of the literal and Wgurative intoxication
associated with the worshippers of Bacchus:
amphitruon
If thou no more art Haides-drunk,—I tell!
herakles
I bring to mind no drunkenness of soul.
(AA 4755–6)
One very notable aberration from his own methodology, however,
is the poet’s handling of the repeated simile of the ‘little boats in tow.’
At lines 628–32 Euripides uses the rare word KºŒ
 to describe
the manner in which Herakles’ children trail after their father upon
their reprieve and re-entry into the house:
p,
¥
 PŒ IØA ; Iºº I
ÆØ

ºø
fiH
 Aºº· z
  
d ıæF;
72 Cf. Barlow’s translation (1996, 79) of the adjective
ÆØ
Œı as a Wnal clause
(‘so that he kills his children’), which tends to weaken its dramatic impact.
73 Cf. Barlow’s translation (ibid. 83) of verse 871, which invests æø with a
causal rather than a transitive force: ‘I shall soon make you dance more wildly and
I shall play upon you a pipe of terror.’
204 The Browning version
¼ø ºÆ ª 
 KºŒ
Æ æE,
ÆF
 S Kºø.
Browning translates these lines accurately:
Ah,—
No letting go for these, who all the more
Hang to my garments! Did you foot indeed
The razor’s edge? Why, then I’ll carry them—
Take with my hands these small craft up, and tow
Just as a ship would.
(AA 4226–231)
Echoing this passage, Euripides uses KºŒ
 at the end of the play,
but this time the word applies to Herakles and his newly formed
dependence on his friend Theseus:
E
 IƺÆ ÆNÆØ

¨E
ÆºØ łŁ KºŒ
.
(1423–4)
The repetition is pronounced. In her translation of verses 1423–4,
Barlow’s choice of words preserves the parallel with the earlier simile
in order to highlight the tragic irony of the Wnal scene and the
important role reversal experienced by the hero:
I who have destroyed my house
with shame and am utterly destroyed, shall follow
Theseus like a small boat in tow.74
By contrast, Browning’s translation of the same verses diverges from
the original in both linguistic and thematic terms:
Myself,—who with these shames
Have cast away my house,—a ruined hulk,
I follow—trailed by Theseus—on my way.
(AA 5076–8)
What Browning has given us in these lines is a portrait of grand and
noble wreckage (‘a ruined hulk’), a tragic fall certainly, but signiWcantly

74 Barlow (1996), 121.

 The Browning version 205
not, as Euripides intended, to the vulnerable condition of a ‘child-
changed father’.75 Herakles is still the ship, while Theseus is the boat
in tow.
Two further general features of Browning’s method of transcrip-
tion, which are characteristic of his attempt to retrieve for the English
reader something of the experience of reading ancient Greek poetry,
are his respect for the original word order and its dependent em-
phases and his imitation of certain Greek idioms. Browning has not
slavishly reproduced the word order of the Greek text at the expense
of good sense and sound verse, but, within the constraints of an
uninXected and less economical language, he has as far as possible
adhered to it. A clue to Browning’s thinking on the subject of word
order is found in his manuscript, where his translation of lines 631–2
appears thus:
3 2 1
Take / up / these small craft / with my hands / and tow
Just as a ship would.
In the Wrst version he made of these lines, Browning maintained almost
exactly the Greek word order. In the second version, which is indicated
by his numbering, he worked out an order that produced a more poetic
verse in English. By his careful positioning of words Browning has also
ensured that his translation, where it cannot or does not reXect the
original word order, at least retains the emphasis intended by Euripides.
This is best illustrated by his translation of the important verse 931, ›

PŒŁ Æe q, which powerfully signals the immediate and very
physical invasion of Herakles by Madness. Browning translates this
literally (‘But he was himself j no longer’) and, in order to achieve in
English an eVect comparable to the Greek, he places the most import-
ant words emphatically at the end and beginning of the lines.
In his essay to the Boston Browning Society two decades after the
publication of Aristophanes’ Apology, William Cranston Lawton
remarked of the transcription: ‘The little detail he has added is rarely
modern or in any way un-Hellenic. Indeed, the minute faithfulness
and self-suppression of this task must have been most irksome to a
nature so alert and self-moved.’76 An example of the Hellenic detail

75 King Lear, iv. vii. 17. 76 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 382.

206 The Browning version
evident in Browning’s style is the way he imitates the rhetorical
doubling between verb and object favoured in Greek. Thus, in his
rendering of line 1093,
a Łæa
ø, as ‘breathings hot
I breathe’, he keeps the original word order and doubling. He em-
ploys this idiom even where it does not occur in Euripides’ text,
translating Herakles’ exhortation at line 1390 to the people of
Thebes, ı
ŁÆ , as ‘lament one wide lament’.
The value of the translation of Herakles to Browning’s defence of
Euripides is intimately connected to the method of translation
Browning employs. In contrast to his Alkestis, the poet avoids inter-
posing comment, either explicatory or reinterpretative. In contrast to
his Agamemnon, his literalism here is regulated and not a deliberate
cause of estrangement. In most respects, by allowing Euripides’ own
voice to be heard, Browning’s translation restored to the Herakles its
dramatic and moral essence, something which had been altered, or
removed altogether, by the majority of translators of the text since
Seneca, and which has been largely absent from modern versions in
which the writers’ personal agenda are given precedence. Without
denying or diminishing the individual character of his translation, it
could be argued that Browning’s agenda in his version of the Herakles
was, in a sense, precisely to eschew any ideological intrusion of an
overtly private or contemporary nature, and was, therefore, a reaYr-
mation of Euripidean thinking. Galinsky, assessing the importance of
the translation to the nineteenth century, concludes:
At Wrst sight, it may seem paradoxical that in the Herakles Browning’s contri-
bution to the tradition is precisely that he refrained from adapting and, thus,
tampering with Euripides’ portrait of the hero. At a time when Matthew
Arnold used classical themes for escapism, when Swinburne dismissed Euripi-
des as a ‘botcher’ and a ‘scenic sophist’, and when Wilamowitz pronounced
Herakles’ madness to be the result of his megalomania, Browning sounded the
true and authentic Euripidean note by helping the poet speak for himself.77
Truth and authenticity in this context are thorny notions, and their
application perilous. But if we understand the process involved in the
translation of classical literature as a dialogue between the ancient writer
and his modern interpreter, the Browning version of Herakles reads as a
remarkably empathetic and immediate exchange with the tragic poet.

77 Galinsky (1972), 263–4.

 7
The psychological hero: Herakles’ lost self
and the creation of Nervenkunst

If Browning’s main contribution to the reception of Herakles was his

boldly sympathetic transcription of its unreasoned madness, the next
decade marked the beginning of a process of appropriation which
assumed the speciWc form of psychologizing the hero and internal-
izing his madness, and discovered in the text an electrifying proto-
type of Modernist neuroses. Two charismatic individuals, Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-MoellendorV and Hermann Bahr, were pre-eminently
responsible for ensuring that the Modernist era can be regarded
conWdently as the most decisive in the history of the play’s reception.
The Wrst, Wilamowitz (1848–1931), was the great German classical
scholar, whose monumental two-volume edition of Herakles, pub-
lished in 1889, is widely regarded as ‘the foundation of modern
classical scholarship, the Wrst modern commentary on a Greek tra-
gedy, the one book every classical scholar must know’.1 Hermann
Bahr (1863–1934) was Austria’s self-appointed architect and diag-
nostician of ‘Die Moderne’. Their separate life missions—one philo-
logical, the other cultural—coincided in fortuitous combination to
facilitate the interest of the later twentieth century’s directors and

1 Fowler (1990), 489–522, at 498. August Nauk (1822–92), the best Hellenist of his
day, was the Wrst to review the edition. In a letter he wrote to Wilamowitz on 2
October 1889, Nauck described the Bearbeitung as ‘unvergleichliche’: ‘Dies Werk, das
ich während der letzten Tage kaum aus den Händen gelegt habe, macht einen
überwältigenden Eindruck. Es gibt wohl kaum ein Gebiet des philologischen Wissens,
wo Sie nicht sichtend und lichtend die Wunderkraft Ihrer Genialität betätigen’ (‘This
work, which I have hardly put down over the last days, leaves an overwhelming
impression. There seems no area of philological knowledge unilluminated by the
wonder of your penetrating genius’). See Calder (1977), 375–85.
208 The psychological hero
dramatists in the mad Herakles, and the ongoing theatrical appro-
priation of Euripides’ hero as a means of exploring private and
historical crises. Euripides’ Herakles had a profound eVect on both
men, when each was in his fortieth year (his akmē, in the ancient
sense), and, although they pursued distinct objectives, their work
intersected at an important intellectual watershed.
On 6 January 1902 the Wrst and only performance of Wilamowitz’s
translation of the Herakles was staged at Vienna’s Theater in der
Josefstadt, and was reviewed by Hermann Bahr in a lengthy feuille-
ton. This production, and its powerful impact on Bahr, occurred
simultaneously with the emergence in Wn-de-siècle Vienna of revolu-
tionary movements in literature, art, theatre, and music, and with the
focal shift, identiWed by Carl E. Schorske, within these convergent
spheres, from rational man to psychological man.2 Viennese Mod-
ernism became synonymous with irrationalism, subjectivity, individ-
ual instinct, dreams, and above all, nerves and nervous complaints.
Herakles played a key part in one of the ‘big bangs’ of European
thought, which led (amongst other things) to the psychoanalytic
rediscovery of Attic tragedy, a phenomenon demonstrative of the
predominant inward-turning of Wn-de-siècle Vienna, and of which
Sigmund Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ is the best-known example.
Pioneering psychoanalysts like Freud (1856–1939) extracted from
the archaic Greek myths, as reinterpreted by the Wfth-century tra-
gedians, paradigmatic diagnoses of repression and hysteria.3 At the
same time, classical scholars began to make use of the new science of
psychology in their work and to consider the tragic representation
of madness in terms of clinical accuracy.
A creative corollary of this reciprocal interest in the psychic life of
the ancients was the development of what Bahr deWned as the
Nervenkunst (neurotic art) of Modernism. The initial cause célèbre,
and the enduring ideal, of Nervenkunst was Hugo von Hof-
mannsthal’s free and (as contemporary critics believed) ‘ungrie-
chisch’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Elektra, which premièred in Berlin

2 See Schorske (1979), esp. chaps. 1 and 4.

3 For a comprehensive discussion of how antiquity is implicated in psychoanalytic
theory, and how Freud appropriated Wgures and themes from classical mythology, see
Armstrong (2005).
 The psychological hero 209
in 1903, revealing modern hysteria in classical guise.4 It is my belief,
however, that Hofmannsthal’s engagement with the ‘pathological’
in Greek tragedy and the Nachtseite of human psychology was
inXuenced, at a very deep level, by Euripides’ Herakles, through the
agency of Hermann Bahr in his capacity as cultural mediator to the
Jung-Wien generation. Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), like others
among his literary circle, was both fascinated and disturbed by
Bahr’s theory of the lost self or ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’,5 which
Bahr derived directly from verse 931 of Herakles (›
 PŒŁ Æe q)
and held to be the essence of Euripidean tragedy. Hofmannsthal’s
Elektra, which broke violently with his earlier lyrical dramas,6 was an
almost immediate response to Bahr’s implicit challenge, towards the
end of his review of Herakles, to the writers of his day to ‘lose’
themselves in the eternal insecurity of the self and to depict, in
contemporary terms, the terrifying potential within all human beings
suddenly to be borne away from themselves. My purpose in this
chapter, therefore, is to uncover the wider signiWcance of the 1902
Viennese Herakles, which, in the century since its performance, has
been completely overlooked, and to propose that it was indeed this
production that, through the intermediate dynamism of Hermann
Bahr, inspired Hofmannsthal’s psychologically explicit Elektra of the
following year.
The timing of the Viennese Herakles and its place in the reception
history of Euripides are extremely noteworthy. Wilamowitz, Bahr,
and Hofmannsthal were, in their varying ways, initiators of the
change in Hellenism that occurred at the close of the nineteenth
century, a change speciWcally concerned with attitudes towards Eu-
ripides and which led to the dethroning of Schlegelian and Arnoldian
classicism. Despised for most of the 1800s for his ‘modernity’, his
Xagrant disharmony and decadence, Euripides became the tragedian
best suited to the age of unreason, a poet and prophet of the mental
and spiritual disquietude that ushered in the nervous new century.

4 Gustav Zieler, in a review of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (Kreuz-Zeitung, 31 Oct.

1903), proclaimed the characters ‘moderne Hysteriker, die sich in ein antikes Gewand
gehüllt haben’ (‘modern hysterics who have wrapped themselves in the cloak of
antiquity’).
5 Bahr (1904), 93. 6 See e.g. McMullen (1985), 637–51, at 639.
210 The psychological hero
Not only was Euripides now appreciated for his modern attributes,
but through him critics and writers also arrived at a new under-
standing of the nature of Sophocles. Hofmannsthal’s Hellenism was
grounded largely in a desire ‘to make Euripides anew’ and to invest
the ancient poet with the Dionysian element that Nietzsche had
accused Euripides of removing from tragedy. Hofmannsthal’s Elek-
tra, in both its dramatic and operatic forms, presented audiences
with an alien and unromantic perspective of Sophocles, a Sophocles
stripped of his classicist habiliments; it signiWed the making anew of
Sophocles through the medium of Euripides.

WILAMOW ITZ AND THE SEEDS OF MADNESS

In response to the passage in the Aristotelian Problemata Physica

(30.953a), in which Herakles is categorized, along with Empedocles,
Plato, and Socrates, as a ‘melancholic man’ or unstable genius, Wila-
mowitz says that Herakles has been placed ‘in die Reihe der Heroen des
Geistes’ (‘in the order of the heroes of the mind’).7 A major part of
Wilamowitz’s contribution to the reception of Euripides’ Herakles was
his internalization and rationalization of the madness as the climax of a
pre-existing disorder: ‘die Tat aber ist eine Folge der Herakleischen
eignen Natur geworden’ (‘however, the deed has become the conse-
quence of the Heraklean nature itself’).8 He concludes that what makes
Herakles a great hero is also what drives him over the edge into
psychopathy and, therefore, the seeds of madness are in him before
the arrival of Hera’s emissaries. With this interpretation Wilamowitz
sought to resolve the persistent problem of the play’s disjunctive struc-
ture, the apparent irreconcilability of its two halves. Like Seneca before
him, he problematizes Herakles’ physis through the revelation of the
hero’s pathogenic mentality of revenge and slaughter, in short, his
megalomania. His argument, which is founded exclusively on verses
562–82 and 966–7, is that Herakles’ mind has been unbalanced by years
of killing and, on his return to Thebes from the Labours, his normal
heroic bloodlust has reached the point of insane excess.

7 Wilamowitz (1959), ii. 93. 8 Wilamowitz (1895), i. 128.

 The psychological hero 211
Herakles’ speech at 562–82, in which he sets out the revenge he will
take upon the usurper Lycus and the disloyal citizens of Thebes, is
construed by Wilamowitz as evidence of incipient madness. The
critical lines are 566–73:

æH b rØ ŒÆd ŒÆÆŒ łø
ı
ŒÆØH ıæ ø, ŒæAÆ
 IØ g
Þłø ŒıH ºŒÆ· ˚Æ
ø
 ‹ı
ŒÆŒf Kæ s
ÆŁÆ K KF
fiH ŒÆººØŒfiø fiH
 ‹
ºfiø ØæÆØ,
f
b
æøE
ØÆæH ÆØ
ŒæH –
Æ  "e K
ºø ı,
˜æŒ  AÆ ºıŒe ƃÆŁÆØ.
First I shall go and raze to the ground the palace of this new king, I shall cut
oV his unholy head and throw it for the dogs to tear at. Those of the Thebans
whom I have found to be treacherous in spite of being well treated by me,
these I shall overcome with my conquering club. Dispersing others with my
winged arrows, I shall Wll the whole of the river Ismenus with bloody corpses
and the clear stream of Dirce shall run red with gore.
Wilamowitz believes this passage to be a display, not of heroic anger,
but of manic intemperance:
Ob Lykos ein Haus hat, ob seine Demolirung Zweck hat, davon weiss Her.
nichts. Beides ist auch gar nicht der Fall. Es lodert eben der Jähzorn in ihm
und bringt ihn schon hier zu törichten Plänen, die er in wilder Übertreibung
prahlend ausruft: auch nachher, wenn der verderbliche Wahnsinn ihn
beherrscht, ist die Zertrümmerung des Schlosses seines Feindes sein Haupt-
wunsch: die Überfülle von Kraft sucht sich eine möglichst gewaltige Aufgabe.9
Herakles does not know if Lykus has a house or if there is a purpose to his
demolition. Neither is the case. Rather his violent temper blazes up and
already at this point leads him to foolish plans, which he proclaims boast-
fully in wild exaggeration; even afterwards, when he is ruled by pernicious
insanity, his main wish is the total destruction of his enemy’s palace: the
superabundance of strength seeks out the most violent task.
Herakles’ graphically violent language shows him relishing the grisly
duty ahead of him, a sure sign, according to Wilamomitz’s reading of

ØÆæH at 571, of the conquering hero’s mental imbalance:

9 Ibid. ii. 131, on v. 566.

212 The psychological hero

ØÆæE zerreißen, zerXeischen, ist eigentlich für den Erfolg der
Pfeilschüsse ein zu grausames Wort, das eher dem Schlage der Keule
zukommt. Die Phantasie des Her. labt sich am grassesten und blutigsten:
die Inconcinnität ist also wohlberechtigt.10

ØÆæE to rip up, to tear apart, is actually too awful a word for the results
of arrow shots. It would apply more to the blows of the club. Herakles’
fantasy feeds on the superlatives of crassness and bloodiness: his roundabout
use of the word here is therefore justiWed.
Amphytrion’s question to his son, h 
ı   K Œı
ŒæH j R ¼æØ ŒÆØ; (‘Surely the blood of those you have just
been killing has not made you mad?’, 966–7), suggests to Wilamowitz
a rational explanation for Herakles’ homicidal rampage, that the
madness is a psychological reaction to the murders he has just
performed in defence of his family, and the inevitable consummation
of a bloodlust of such enormous proportions as that manifest in
verses 566–73. This explanation better applies to Seneca’s Hercules
Furens, in which the epiphany of Iris and Lyssa does not occur, and
Hercules, in his madness, imagines that his victims are the children of
Lycus (HF 987–8) rather than those of Eurystheus.
Wilamowitz’s psychological interpretation of Herakles’ madness was
adopted by several leading Euripidean scholars well into the next
century. The Wrst to acknowledge his debt to Wilamowitz was A. W.
Verrall (1851–1912), who took the rationalization of the madness to an
extreme and outlandish conclusion. Verrall, the Wrst holder of a chair of
English Literature at Cambridge, contributed greatly to the late nine-
teenth-century rehabilitation of Euripides and to the undermining of
the Schlegelian position. His championship of the ancient poet relied
on an exciting and original, but sometimes dangerous and self-defeat-
ing, hypothesis. In 1895, the year Wilamowitz’s revised edition of
Herakles appeared, Verrall published Euripides the Rationalist, in
which he claimed that Euripides’ genius could not be appreciated
until one had accepted that beneath the surface of his plays lay a satiric
or ironic viewpoint. He insisted that, while the plays outwardly con-
formed to popular and traditional thinking, their real meaning and
hidden scepticism were only intelligible to the educated among the
original audience. Verrall’s obituarist in the Classical Review admitted

10 Wilamowitz (1895), 131–2, on v. 571.

 The psychological hero 213
that this position could lead him astray, although it was nonetheless
valuable for that reason: ‘It would be foolish for even his most ardent
admirer to deny that this very IªØÆ at times betrayed him into
error. . . . But in Verrall’s case these occasional aberrations were hardly
to be regretted, for his advocacy of an untenable position was as likely as
not to be more suggestive and stimulating than many a note unim-
peachably correct.’11 Recent critics, such as Michelini, have taken a
more exacting view of Verrall’s approach: ‘His methods amount almost
to parodies of traditional scholarship. . . . Instead of athetizing or
emending diYcult passages, he introduced fanciful interpretations
that were intended to eliminate the diYculties and preserve the text.’12
Perhaps most fanciful of all was his essay on Herakles, ‘A Soul’s
Tragedy’, published in 1905. Taking his cue from Herakles’ protest-
ation at verse 1346, IØ
H ¥

Ø ºªØ (‘These are the
miserable tales of poets’), Verrall asserts:
The legend of Heracles, as commonly told, is not supposed as part of the
story, but replaced by some totally diVerent conception of Heracles, and of
his mental and physical history. . . . In these circumstances it would seem
imperative, as the next step, at least to attempt the interpretation of the play
upon the hypothesis that the hero is not a superhuman personage, nor his
story supernatural, but he a man, however great, like other men, and the
scene of his action, however remote in time and diVerent in circumstances
from the age of Euripides or from our own, nevertheless no other in its
physical laws than that same world which the Athenians knew and we know.
Not only is this the truth, but upon the perception of it depends all the
coherence of the play, all its meaning to the intelligence, and the better part
of its appeal to the emotions.13
He concurs with Wilamowitz that Herakles is mad from his Wrst
entrance, but his attempt to rationalize the events of the story becomes
an extraordinary exercise in reductionism. Among his claims are that
the divine epiphany at 815 V. is merely an apparition dreamt up by a
member of the chorus;14 Cerberus is an ordinary dog;15 and Herakles’
descent into Hades was nothing more than a mine disaster.16

11 BayWeld (1912), 172–3, at 172. 12 Michelini (1987), 15.

13 Verrall (1905), 136–7. 14 Ibid. 171.
15 Ibid. 193–4. 16 Ibid. 185–6.
214 The psychological hero
Verrall’s theory on the Herakles was reproduced Wfteen years later
by Gilbert Norwood: ‘Herakles suVers from a growing tendency to
madness; in his moods he knows that all his story is human, all the
nobler for its humanity, but in his dark hours he accepts the vulgar
splendours which rumour throws round his adventures, at such
times lending nascent myth the support of his own false witness.
The tragedy of his life has been this mental distemper, which has
Wnally caused him to destroy his wife and children.’17 The inXuence
of Wilamowitz is also clear in Norwood’s argument that, although
the appearance of Iris and Lyssa seems to overthrow the idea of
Herakles’ madness as internally motivated, ‘the past scene [562–
82], before ever Frenzy arrives, has shown the hero not mad, yet
not in full possession of his senses’.18
One of Wilamowitz’s staunchest disciples was Gilbert Murray
(1866–1957), whose rehabilitative work on Euripides owed a great
deal to the German scholar’s ‘historical insight and singular gift of
imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece’.19 Murray had been over-
whelmed by Wilamowitz’s edition of the Herakles, although he
remained ambivalent in his opinion of the play itself: ‘It is broken-
backed; it has too much conventional rhetoric; but for sheer loftiness
of tragic tone the last act, after Heracles awakes from the trance in
which he has murdered his children, will stand beside anything in
ancient drama.’20 His pronouncement on the nature of Herakles’
madness conforms faithfully to the position of Wilamowitz:
When a writer of Wction wishes to make a character go mad or change his
nature he has obviously a choice before him, a choice between contrast and
preparation. Suppose, as here, it is a case of violent homicidal rage, pro-
duced by some external accident, he can get an eVect by making the victim
in his normal state a particularly gentle and reasonable person who is utterly
transformed. . . . Or he can equally get an eVect by showing certain slight
tendencies in the normal man which blaze out into excess in the new
conditions. It is clear that Euripides in his treatement of Heracles follows
the second method and not the Wrst. Heracles is a warm-hearted and
passionate Wghter who goes mad passionately and pugnaciously.21

17 Norwood (1920), 232. 18 Ibid. 233. 19 Murray (1897), preface.

20 Murray (1946), 112. 21 Ibid.
 The psychological hero 215
E. R. Dodds (1893–1979), in an essay on ‘Euripides the Irration-
alist’ published in 1929, described the ‘scientiWc care’22 and ‘fascin-
ated precision’23 with which Euripides explored the dark, irrational
side of human nature, giving as an example Herakles, ‘whose insanity
is clearly marked as belonging to the manic-depressive type’.24 Dodds
concludes his article with the observation that the present threat to
the supremacy of rationalism posed by Dr Jung and Dr Freud, among
others, is one reason why Euripides ‘is for our generation one of the
most sympathetic Wgures in the whole of ancient literature’,25 and this
is why his Herakles is the Wn-de-siècle text.
G. M. A. Grube’s thesis on Herakles in 1941 aimed to redress the
extravagances of Verrall’s interpretation and subsequent readings of
the internalization of Herakles’ madness, which paid too little heed
to Euripides’ dramatic intention by discrediting the play’s supernat-
ural agents. He found the theories of Wilamowitz and Verrall on the
seeds of madness illuminating but not conclusive:
[Heracles] promises vengeance on Lycus; his words become more and more
violent; he speaks like one intoxicated with his own strength and greatness
until he seems to pass from greatness to megalomania. . . . The reckless
wildness of the promised vengeance argues a dangerous exaltation, and the
grandiloquent words in which he boasts of his own might—great though
that be—stand out uncomfortably. . . . The cause of Heracles’ madness, how-
ever, seems to lie entirely outside himself, which is no doubt why it is
represented externally, by this sudden divine appearance. . . . We Wnd little
of the psychological motivation at which Euripides is such a past master. We
have Madness and Iris instead.26
The inXuence of Wilamowitz’s psychological explanation of Hera-
kles’ madness continued right up to the close of the twentieth
century, as critics and dramatists located the seeds of madness in
the play’s Wrst part in order to make sense of the violence of the
second part. In 1945 E. M. Blaiklock, taking his cue from ancient and
Renaissance humoral theory, proposed that the madness was an
epileptic furor.27 Two decades later J. C. Kamerbeek rationalized the

22 Dodds (1929), 97–104, at 99. 23 Ibid. 100.

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 104. 26 Grube (1941), 252–6.
27 Blaiklock (1945), 48–63. Repr. in Blaiklock (1952), 122–40.
216 The psychological hero
murders as ‘the violent reaction to the overstrain of a burdensome
life’,28 a kind of ‘executive stress’. In the Herakles of American poet
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), staged in 1965, the delusion,
which causes the hero to slaughter his sons, is linked directly to his
megalomaniac progress towards deiWcation. British poet Simon
Armitage (b. 1963), in his millennial version of the tragedy, Mister
Heracles, portrayed the hero’s condition as psychosis induced by
combat trauma and desensitization to the act of killing.29

T H E P H I LO LO G I S T A S ACTO R

Wilamowitz’s role in the rehabilitation of the Herakles and its author,

and the breadth of his inXuence, were not conWned to the world of
scholarship and exegetic discourse. He was also responsible for the
Wrst performance of the Herakles of the twentieth century and,
indeed, the Wrst professional revival of a Euripidean tragedy30 on
the European stage prior to the productions of Gilbert Murray’s
translations which Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) presented
in London.31 Wilamowitz’s translations of Greek tragedy for the
stage were part of a lifelong obsession with theatre and tragic
drama. From the obituary he wrote for himself in about 1912, it is
clear that he ‘thought of himself Wrst as a soldier, second as an actor,
third as a teacher, fourth as a scholar’.32 As an 18-year-old schoolboy
at Pforta he had played Goethe’s tragic hero Egmont, a revelatory and
liberating experience which, at the time, he described in ecstatic or
epiphanic terms as though it were a kind of religious conversion.33
The lasting potency of his hour upon the stage and his close identiWcation

28 Kamerbeek (1966), 1–16, at 14.

29 On MacLeish and Armitage’s versions of Herakles, see below, Chap. 9.
30 Adolf Wilbrandt had directed his own translation of Euripides’ satyr play
Cyclops at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1882, as an afterpiece to Sophocles’ Elektra.
31 The Wrst of these was Hippolytus for the Stage Society at the Court Theatre in
1904. See Hall and Macintosh (2005), 492 V.
32 Calder (1994a), 355–8, at 358.
33 See Wilamowitz’s letter to his mother, probably written two days after the
performance on 7 March 1867, and signed ‘Ulrich, Graf von Gaure’. Published for
the Wrst time in Calder (1994b) 371–6, at 372–4.
 The psychological hero 217
with the isolated Wgure of the aristocratic, idealistic, and uncom-
promising Egmont had, as Calder points out, ‘great implications for
the history of tragic exegesis’.34
The passion of the young Thespian remained with the mature
scholar and informed his whole approach to the critical interpretation
of ancient texts. At the end of the ‘Einleitung’ of his Herakles, Wilamo-
witz explicitly rejected the Nietzschean ideal of the philologist as
prophet. Instead he asserted that the philologist’s assignment should
be comparable to that of the actor, but he was careful to distinguish
between bravura acting and vain histrionics, and to stress the ability of
the true artist to submerge his own personality and to inhabit and
animate a diVerent character:
Wie wir unser Geschäft nur dann recht besorgen, wenn wir in jedes alte
Buch, das wir unter den Händen haben, nicht unsern Geist hineintragen
sondern das herauslesen, was darin steht, so liegt überhaupt die speziWsch
philologische Aufgabe in dem Erfassen einer fremden Individualität. Es gilt
sich in eine fremde Seele zu versenken, sei es die eines einzelnen, sei es die
eines Volkes. In der Aufopferung unserer eigenen Individualität liegt unsere
Stärke. Wir Philologen als solche haben nichts vom Dichter noch vom
Propheten, was beides bis zu einem gewissen Grade der Historiker sein
muß. Dagegen müssen wir etwas vom Schauspieler in uns tragen, nicht
vom Virtuosen, der seiner Rolle eigene Lichter aufsetzt, sondern vom echten
Künstler, der dem toten Worte durch das eigene Herzblut Leben gibt.35
Just as we only do our work properly when, in every ancient book that comes
into our hands, we read out of it what is there rather than put our own spirit into
it, so it is the speciWc task of the philologist to comprehend an alien individuality.
The task is to immerse ourselves in an alien soul, be it of an individual or of a
people. Our strength lies in our giving up our own individuality. We philologists
as such do not have much of the poet or prophet in us, both of which a historian
must have to a certain extent. No, we must have something of the actor in us—
not the virtuoso who interprets his role in his own way but rather the true artist
who through his heart’s blood gives life to the dead word.
The equivalence of Wilamowitz’s own hermeneutic methods to the craft
of the ‘Schauspieler’ or ‘echten Künstler’ was nowhere more discernible
than in his peculiar empathy with the character of Herakles,36 while the

34 Ibid. 372. 35 Wilamowitz (1959), i. 257.

36 On Wilamowitz’s ‘profound personal aYnity’ with the Wgure of Herakles and
his perception of himself as a   ˙æÆŒºB, see Calder (1985), 80–110, at 91–101.
218 The psychological hero
image he fervently evoked of giving life to dead words was practically
expounded in his eVorts to revive Greek tragedy on the modern German
stage in actable translations.
The return of Greek tragedy to the German stage had been initi-
ated in the late nineteenth century by the poet, novelist, and drama-
tist Adolf Wilbrandt (1837–1911), who was director of the
Burgtheater in Vienna between 1881 and 1887. While he was an
eminently practical man of theatre, Wilbrandt had a respectable
academic background, including a doctorate. The son of a professor
at the University of Rostock, he had brieXy studied law there before
making the transition to philology and history and continuing his
studies at Berlin and Munich. During his literary career he had the
rare distinction of being twice awarded the prestigious Grillparzer
Prize, Wrst in 1875 for his tragedy Gracchus der Volkstribun and again
in 1890 for his dramatic poem Der Meister von Palmyra. In the mid-
1860s Wilbrandt published translations of Sophocles with the express
design of making the plays stageworthy in a modern sense. To this
end he simpliWed the tragedies’ mythological references, substituted
German iambic pentameter for the Greek trimeters, and reduced the
choral passages to speaking parts. His translations were performed in
the next two decades in Meiningen, Darmstadt, Berlin, and Munich,
but he exercised little directorial control over these productions.
It was not until his tenure at the Burgtheater that Wilbrandt
achieved recognition as a director of Sophoclean tragedy, beginning
in 1882 with his Elektra, the inaugural production of his newly
instituted repertory. His greatest triumph was his staging of Oedipus
Tyrannus, which opened on 29 December 1886 and starred the
Hungarian actor Emerich Robert, whom Wilbrandt recalled in his
memoirs ‘in griechischer Wohlgestalt und Beredsamkeit, aber mit der
Freiheit, dem Feuer, den Seelentönen unserer Tage’ (‘in Greek come-
liness and eloquence, but with the freedom, the Wre, the soul tones of
our day’).37 In his review of the première, Ludwig Speidel, the critic
for the liberal Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, conWdently
announced: ‘Wien ist für die große Tragödie, von der es sich früher
mehr oder minder wehleidig zu verschließen pXegte, mündig gewor-
den’ (‘Vienna used to close its mind to great tragedy, more or less in a

37 Wilbrandt (1905), 44.

 The psychological hero 219
self-pitying way, but has now come of age’).38 It is very possible that
Freud saw Wilbrandt’s Oedipus, either in its Wrst presentation a few
months after his return to Vienna from Paris (where he had seen and
been deeply impressed by the great Jean Mounet-Sully’s deWnitive
Oedipus at the Comédie Française39), or in one of its thirty revivals at
the Burgtheater prior to 1900. One whose receptiveness to Wil-
brandt’s Elektra and Oedipus can, with more certainty, be conWrmed
is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He had attended the Burgtheater pro-
ductions as a teenager, and his own ground-breaking Sophoclean
adaptations were partly a progression of Wilbrandt’s work. It is as a
precursor and a facilitator that, in Hellmut Flashar’s estimation,
Wilbrandt ranks highly in the German reception of Greek tragedy,
having prepared both the stage and public sentiment for the radic-
alism of his theatrical heirs:
Diese Inszenierungen sind Marksteine auf dem Wege der Einbürgerung des
antiken Dramas auf der Bühne der eigenen Zeit. Die zuvor geäußerte
Skepsis, ob die griechische Tragödie überhaupt auf dem modernen Theater
ein Existenzrecht habe, ist ein für alle Male beseitigt, jedenfalls was Sopho-
kles betriVt. Die Übersetzungen Wilbrandts werden nun auf den Bühnen
mehrerer Städte (Berlin, München, Nürnberg, Mannheim, Stuttgart)
gespielt. Ohne sie sind die dann weitergehenden Schritte von Wilamowitz
und Max Reinhardt nicht denkbar.40
These productions are milestones on the road to establishing ancient drama
on the contemporary stage. The former scepticism, which doubted if Greek
tragedy even had the right to exist in modern theatre, has been removed
once and for all, at least with regards to Sophocles. Wilbrandt’s translations
are played on the stages of several cities (Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg,
Mannheim, Stuttgart). The work of Wilamowitz and Max Reinhardt builds
upon these translations and goes one step further and is therefore unthink-
able without them.

38 Cited in Smekal (1916), 216.

39 Between 30 October 1885 and 28 February 1886 Freud studied with the
neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. It was during this period
that he saw Mounet-Sully (1841–1916) perform the title role in L’Oedipe roi (a
version by Jules Lacroix). According to Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones (1953,
194), the interpretation ‘made a deep impression on him’. On the inXuence of
Mounet-Sully’s Oedipus, see Macintosh (1997), 284–323, at 289–90 and her forth-
coming Oedipus Tyrannos: A Production History. On Freud’s fascination with Oedipus
and his development of the Oedipus complex, see Armstrong (2005), 47–62.
40 Flashar (1991), 103.
220 The psychological hero
At the turn of the new century Wilamowitz emerged as Wil-
brandt’s Wrst and improbable successor in the task of revitalizing
Greek tragedy for the contemporary theatre—improbable because,
unlike Wilbrandt, he was not a poet or practitioner, but occupied the
venerable position of philology’s high priest. He did, however, alter
the course of this revitalization process, in a way consistent with his
most sustained philological project, by placing Euripides at its fore-
front. Wilamowitz made popular and non-literal translations of eight
Euripidean plays into German verse (Alkestis, Bacchae, Herakles,
Supplices, Hippolytus, Medea, Troades, and Cyclops), Wve of which
(Herakles, Hippolytus, Medea, Alkestis, and Cyclops) were given theat-
rical performances. The staging of his Wrst Euripidean translation, the
Herakles, was preceded by productions of his only non-Euripidean
translations, Sophocles’ König Oedipus and the Orestie of Aeschylus,
which both premièred in Berlin in 1900, under the direction of
Hans Oberländer.41 Flashar has documented the performance history
of Wilamowitz’s translations between 1900 and 1981.42 According
to his chronology, the thirty-Wve professional (as opposed to aca-
demic) productions mounted during this time constitute Wfteen
presentations of the Orestie, seven of König Oedipus, and thirteen
from Euripides. Of the Euripidean translations, Hippolytus proved
the most popular, with four separate stagings in Wilamowitz’s life-
time, while Herakles and Alkestis each received just one performance.
Although he was not a professional man of the theatre, Wilamo-
witz was no less mindful than Wilbrandt of the importance of
producing translations that were viable on the modern stage. His
collaboration with Hans Oberländer on the Orestie, which Wilamo-
witz details in his Erinnerungen, was probably typical of the nature
and extent of his involvement in the dramaturgy of his translations:
An dem Einstudieren habe ich keinen Anteil gehabt, aber er verhandelte
mit mir, ich nahm Streichungen an dem Texte vor und besprach vielerlei,
die AuVassung der Charaktere, die Bühnenbilder, die Chöre, die er zumeist
so einzustudieren verstand, daß sämtliche Choreuten zusammen sprachen

41 König Oedipus was Wrst performed on 28 February at the Berliner Theater.

Orestie followed on 24 November at the Theater des Westens Berlin.
42 See Flashar (1985), 306–57, at 352–3.
 The psychological hero 221
und doch die Worte verstanden wurden. Diese letzte Forderung hatte ich
erhoben. . . . Ich lernte mancherlei, freute mich an vielem.43
I did not play any part in the actual rehearsals, but he consulted with me;
I agreed to text being deleted and discussed many things: the interpretation of
the characters, the scenery, the chorus, which he directed in such a way that all
members of the chorus could speak at the same time and yet be understood.
I had demanded the latter. . . . I learnt this and that and enjoyed much.
He also mentions taking part in similar performances of König
Oedipus, Hippolytus, and Medea (although there is no suggestion
that he assisted the production side of Herakles or that he even
attended the performance), and that his occupation with the theatre
was substantial enough to cause him to be nominated to the com-
mittee awarding the Schiller Prize, a post he held until World War I.44
As Philip Ward has noted, the stageworthiness of Wilamowitz’s
translations necessitated, to some degree, a reconciliation between
the scholar’s sturdy historicist principles and the exigencies and
changing expectations of Modernist theatre:
This ambiguity is reXected in the diction of his translations, which combine
archaism and Modernism into a curious mish-mash of Schiller, Geibel,
Protestant hymn, late Goethe rhythms, Hebbelesque dialogue and strange
lapses into colloquialisms. The stated aim was comprehensibility. . . . Inevi-
tably this could only be achieved by accommodating his translations to
prevailing theatrical taste, which in the 1890s meant the Naturalism of
Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne.45

THE VIENNESE HE RAKL ES

Herakles was the second of Wilamowitz’s translations to be per-

formed in Vienna. His Orestie (which premièred in Berlin) had
been staged at the Burgtheater in December 1900. By contrast, the
venue for the Wrst modern European production of a Euripidean
tragedy was not in the heart of the city, but rather in Josefstadt, a
district just outside the walled centre and within walking distance of
the Ringstrasse. Here it formed part of a vigorously avant-garde

43 Wilamowitz (1928), 253. 44 Ibid. 254. 45 Ward (2002), 52.

222 The psychological hero
repertoire of thirteen plays by eight authors produced by the Wiener
Akademischen Verein für Kunst und Literatur between November
1901 and April 1903. The other authors whose works were featured
included Goethe, Ibsen, Hauptman, and Maeterlinck, and the most
notable première of the season, apart from Herakles, was the Wrst
German performance of Peer Gynt. Herakles was only the second
production of the Viennese Akademischen Verein, established in
1901 along similar lines to the Berlin association of the same name
which was dedicated to the revival of Greek drama on the modern
stage.46 The Theater in der Josefstadt was the smallest of the outer
city’s permanent commercial playhouses,47 but, owing to the energy
and foresight of Joseph Jarno, its director from 1899, it had become
a forum for the Modernist cause. As Yates explains, the theatre’s
middlebrow entertainment provided a Wnancial safety-net for its
highbrow experimentation: ‘Jarno’s strategy was to make money
with light comedies, which allowed him also to put on an adventur-
ous programme of ‘‘literary evenings’’, featuring dramatists such as
Strindberg, Wedekind, Shaw, and Maeterlinck: here far more than in
the Burgtheater or the Deutsches Volkstheater, the theatre-going
public of Vienna were brought into touch with the leading trends
in contemporary international drama.’48
The director chosen for Herakles was Albert Heine, a future dir-
ector of the Burgtheater, whose acting credits included the roles of
Oedipus and Kreon in Berlin. Six of the eight cast members were
recruited from the Burgtheater, an ensemble of German and Austrian
actors, while the Chorus consisted mainly of student members of the
Akademischen Verein. Erich Schmidt performed the title role and
Heine took the part of Amphitryon. Intriguingly, top billing was
given to the actress Frieda Wagen in the part of Iris, clearly, from the
programme, a leading light in the Josefstadt’s company (see Fig. 3).
The performance took place on the Feast of the Epiphany (an oYcial
holiday in predominantly Catholic Vienna) in a 2.30 Monday mati-
née. It would have had an audience of less than 800 people (the
capacity of the Josefstadt at that time was 798). Yet, in spite of its
46 See Flashar (1991), 123 and Ward (2002), 54.
47 The largest was the Theater an der Wien and the oldest the Theater in der
Leopoldstadt.
48 Yates (1996), 186.
 The psychological hero 223

Fig. 3. Theatre programme for Herakles, Vienna, 1902.

relatively low-key circumstances, the signiWcance of this once-only

event did not pass unrecorded. The next day reviews of Herakles
appeared in a number of Vienna’s major newspapers, unanimously
aYrming the play’s enthralling beauty and brutality. Herakles, in its
dark presentation of the irrational, confronted its audience with an
entirely new and profoundly unsettling experience of Greek tragedy
224 The psychological hero
that obviously found intense resonances in ‘nervous’ Vienna. It also
underlined the claim made by the poet and dramatist Friederich
Hebbel (1813–63), that ‘Dies Oesterreich ist eine kleine Welt, j In
der die grosse ihre Probe hält’ (‘Austria is a little world in which the
big world has its dress rehearsal’).49
The Neue Freie Presse hailed the performance as a milestone in
Viennese theatre history and in the reception of Euripides:
Er war wiederum, zumal der Stimmung des Publikums nach, ein kleines
literarisches Fest, sagen wir getrost, ein großes, denn zum erstenmal erschien
auf einem Wiener Theaterzettel der Name Euripides. Zum erstenmale
wenigstens wurde eine Tragödie des hellenischen Dichters aufgeführt. Die
Wahl war auf ‘Herakles’ gefallen, und der Erfolg bewies, daß sie nicht besser
sein könnte! . . . Überhaupt ließ die Tragödie einen tiefen Eindruck zurück
und fand echten Beifall, der während des Actes athemlos an sich hält, um
sich am Schluße in einem Sturm Luft zu machen.50
Going by the mood of the public it was a little literary celebration—let’s feel
free to say a big celebration—because for the Wrst time the name Euripides
appeared on a Viennese playbill. At least, one of this Hellenic poet’s tragedies
was performed for the Wrst time. Herakles was chosen, and the resulting
success proved that the choice couldn’t have been better! . . . The perform-
ance made a lasting impression and was met with true approval, which held
itself in breathlessly during the performance and released itself in a storm of
applause at the end.
The critic for the Wiener Abendpost, a supplement of the Wiener
Zeitung, was greatly moved by Euripides’ virtuosity in dramatizing
universal human themes:
Während Chorstudenten auf der Bühne die großen Fragen der Menschheit:
Jugend und Alter, Leben und Sterben erörterten, saßen Philologen und Anti-
quare zu ihren Füßen und hörten das mächtige Rauschen der schwingenden
Verse des Euripides. Es erklang wie eine große Orgel, wenn Meisterhand alle
Register beherrscht.51
While on the stage the students of the chorus debated all the big questions of
humanity—youth and age, life and death, philologists and antiquaries sat at
their feet and listened to the mighty roar of Euripides’ vibrant verses. It sounded
like a huge pipe organ played by a maestro in command of all the stops.

49 Quoted in Benedikt (1954), 14. 50 Neue Freie Presse, 7 Jan. 1902, p. 6.

51 Wiener Abendpost, 7 Jan. 1902, p. 7.
 The psychological hero 225
Wilamowitz himself testiWed to the performance’s tremendous re-
ception when, in a letter to his friend Gilbert Murray dated 5
December 1902, he reported, ‘Voriges Jahr hat Herakles in Wien
einen grossen Erfolg gehabt’ (‘Last year in Vienna Herakles enjoyed
a great success’).52 Hermann Bahr, writing in the Neues Wiener
Tagblatt,53 concluded his review of Herakles with a brief and disap-
proving critique of the company’s declamatory, rather fustian, acting
styles,54 but he insisted that any Xaws in interpretation did not
detract from the tragedy’s powerful appeal to its audience:
Den Herakles gab Herr Erich Schmidt doch gar zu sehr als fahrenden
Athleten. Ich kann mir schon denken, was er herausbringen wollte: die
volkstümliche Gestalt der Sagen und der Schwänke. Aber er geriet dabei
manchmal fast in einen Hans Sachs-Stil. Der Horatio-Natur des Theseus
kam Herr Gregori mit seinem singenden Predigerton nicht bei. Herr Heine,
als Amphitryon, in einigen Momenten, besonders in seiner Wut gegen die
Untreue des Zeus, von starker Wirkung und auch interessant durch das
deutliche Bestreben, den Eindruck des Reliefs zu erreichen, überschrie sich
später so, daß er damit das richtige Verhältnis der Gestalten ganz zerstörte.
Ich fand die Vorstellung überhaupt zu gewaltsam, zu lärmend, zu—um das
böse Wort auszusprechen: zu deklamierend. Trotzdem oder auch vielleicht
gerade deswegen wirkte sie auf das Publikum sehr.55
Mr Erich Schmidt portrayed Herakles too much like a travelling athlete. I can
imagine what he wanted to emphasize: the popular character of the legends
and farces. But in doing so he sometimes fell almost into the style of Hans
Sachs. Mr Gregori did not grasp the Horatio-nature of Theseus with his
singing-preacher tone. In his role as Amphitryon Mr Heine had a few
moments of strong impact, particularly in his rage against Zeus’ betrayal,
and was also interesting in his clear attempt to achieve the impression of

52 Reproduced in Bierl, Calder, and Fowler (1991), 54.

53 Bahr reproduced his feuilleton on Herakles in his third volume of drama
criticism, Rezensionem: Wiener Theater 1901–1903, (1903), 112–20.
54 The actor’s craft was a subject of particular concern to Bahr the theoretician and
one integral to his programme of modernity. In an essay entitled ‘Der neue Stil’, which
appeared in his Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (1894), he interviewed fourteen leading
performers about the new naturalistic style of acting. All of the actors spurned
Naturalism and, like Bahr, advocated a modern, Xexible technique. Bahr emphasized
the need for real human beings (‘wirkliche Menschen’) and the personal view of the
individual artist to be portrayed on stage. Among the actors whose personal, non-
derivative styles he most admired were Eleanora Duse, Mounet-Sully, Sarah Bernhardt,
and Adele Sandrock.
55 Bahr (1903), 120.
226 The psychological hero
relief; however, later in the piece he overdid the shouting so much that he
quite destroyed the proper proportion of the characters. Overall I found the
performance too violent, too loud, too—to utter the evil word—bombastic.
Despite this, or perhaps even because of this, the performance had a
powerful impact on the audience.

HERMANN BAHR’S RESPONSE

The paragraph above is Bahr’s only comment on the production

itself. For the most part his review, of between 1,500 and 2,000
words, consists of two strands: an analysis of Euripides’ virtuosity,
and an extremely personal reaction to the ‘vile surge of chaos’56 at the
play’s centre. Throughout his discussion he demonstrates a close
reading of both the original text and Wilamowitz’s ‘Einleitung’. He
begins by comparing Herakles, internally and technically, to the black
dramas of the ageing Shakespeare, especially Antony and Cleopatra,
Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, likening the
two playwrights to master chess-players, worn out with bitter loath-
ing for the too easy, too routine execution of their expert stratagems.
Their disenchantment manifests itself in hasty exposition, as they go
through the motions of preparation and distribution, of build-up
and tension, climax and resolution. Then suddenly, Bahr contends,
the tired masters rouse themselves from their weariness with the
banalities of the dramatic form, in order to amaze their audience
with the creation of a forceful and transcendent work of art:
Haben sie sich so noch einmal aufgeraVt, den Mut und die Kraft ihrer Kunst zu
zeigen, so kommt ein wilder Zorn über sie, sie stoßen das eben erst mühsam
aufgebaute Werk mit den Füßen weg, zerschlagen es und erschrecken uns durch
ihr eigenes Antlitz, das plötzlich hinter den zerrissenen Figuren, still gebietend,
traurig spottend, gramvoll gefaßt erscheint. . . . Man hat in solchen Momenten
das Gefühl, als trete der Dichter selbst ungeduldig vor, winke den Schauspielern
ab und wolle uns bedeuten, daß es doch zu töricht sei, das öde Spiel fortzu-
setzen, er wolle lieber endlich einmal ernst über Ernstes mit uns reden.57
As soon as they have built themselves up again to show the courage and
power of their art, then a wild fury overcomes them, they kick over the work
56 Bahr (1903), 119. 57 Ibid. 113–14.
 The psychological hero 227
they have just carefully constructed, destroy it, and shock us by their own
face—silently commanding, sadly ridiculing, sorrowfully composed—which
suddenly appears from behind the Wgures who are now in tatters. . . . In such
moments one has the feeling that the poet himself takes the stage, waves the
actors away, and tries to convince us that it is pointless to continue the
performance: he would rather discuss something very serious with us at last.
This account contains Hermann Bahr’s original solution to the
problem of the apparent lack of unity between the two halves of
Herakles, the play which he deems the Wnest example of the sort of
internal transformation he has just outlined. The Wrst half, he says, is
an exposition in the style of a dispatch, a melodramatic tale of danger
and rescue, executed with impatience. It is proof of the master
craftsman’s ennui. The second half, however, is an expression of the
artist’s renewed leonine fury, and is launched by Euripides’ ‘trump-
card’, the terrible epiphany of Lyssa, played with the deftness of the
virtuoso magician:
Halten wir hier an, um das fabelhafte Kunststück zu verstehen, das dem
Dichter mit dieser Exposition gelungen ist: er hat seine Ungeduld, jenen
Verdruß des gelangweilten Routiniers, der es nicht mehr erträgt, ewig wieder
dasselbe zu machen, für die dramatische Stimmung ausgenützt und in
dramatische Haft umgesetzt. Was im Grunde nur der Ekel, bei der Vorber-
eitung zu verweilen, und das Bedürfnis, schneller zur Sache zu kommen, ist,
läßt er uns als die atemlose Not einer überwältigten Stadt, als die Todesangst
der Mutter um die verfolgten Kinder empWnden. Und nun richtet er sich
plötzlich wie ein Löwe auf. Nun hat er gespürt, was er, selbst unwillig, immer
noch kann. Nun regt sich die längst entwöhnte Lust des großen Zauberers an
der Gewalt des Metiers noch einmal in ihm. Man vernimmt fast, wie hinter
der Erscheinung der bleichen Lyssa der verdrossene alte Dichter boshaft
lacht: ‘Ja, jetzt kommt mein Trumpf, den doch keiner ahnt!’ Lyssa bringt,
von Hera geschickt, den Wahnsinn über Herakles. Sie schlüpft in das Haus,
der Chor stimmt die Klage an, und wir rücken erregt zusammen: nun wird
der rasende Herakles erscheinen, die große Szene ist da!58
Let us take pause here to understand the amazing feat the poet has achieved
with this exposition: he has taken his impatience, that chagrin of the bored old
hand who can no longer bear to do the same old thing, and exploited it for the
dramatic mood, transforming it into dramatic arrest. What was actually just
his distaste for taking too long for preparation and for the need to get to the

58 Ibid. 115–16.
228 The psychological hero
crux of the matter more quickly, he now lets us feel as the breathless distress of
an overpowered city, as the mother’s fear for the lives of her persecuted
children. And now he suddenly stands up like a lion. Now he has felt what
he can still do, even if he doesn’t want to do it. The passion of the great
enchanter in the power of verse, a joy given up long ago, now stirs in him
again. Behind the appearance of the pale Lyssa one can almost perceive the
querulous old poet laughing wickedly: ‘Yes, now comes my trump-card and
nobody expects it!’ Lyssa, sent by Hera, brings madness upon Herakles. She
steals into the house, the Chorus intones its lament, we move together
excitedly: now the raging Herakles will appear, the big scene is on!
According to this reading of the play, the disunity is not a technical
weakness; it is purposeful and necessary.
Next in his piece Bahr outlines the ‘colossal eVect’ of the oV-stage
explosion of madness which is rehearsed three times in the audience’s
imagination:
Da tritt Herakles nicht auf, sondern durch die Schreie des Vaters, die aus
dem Hause gellen, wird der Chor, vom Anblick jener bleichen Dienerin
schon auf Furcht gestimmt, plötzlich von einer Vision des Schrecklichen
erfaßt, die unser Gemüt, das ja die ganze Zeit schon daran gearbeitet hat, die
unabwendbare Szene bei sich zu entwerfen, sogleich mit solchem Schauer
erfüllt, daß wir eigentlich die Schilderung des nun nachstürzenden Boten gar
nicht mehr brauchen würden, aber indem wir ihn jetzt die unselige Tat auch
noch erzählen hören, alle Greuel zum zweiten Male zu erleben glauben.
Auch das ist eigentlich nur ein technischer KniV, es ist, wenn man so sagen
darf, schließlich nur Sardou. Der Dichter hat den Einfall, weil es ihm zu
schwer ist, die Raserei des Herakles so stark zu zeigen, als sie unsere
Phantasie erwartet, sie lieber gar nicht zu zeigen, sondern uns von eben
unserer dreimal erregten Phantasie vorspielen zu lassen—dreimal: durch die
Schreie, dann durch das Entsetzen des Chors, endlich durch den genauen
Bericht. Die Wirkung ist eine ungeheure. . . . Man fühlt sich hier, auch wie
manchmal bei Shakespeare, an der Grenze der Dichtung, wo das Wort vor
dem Unsagbaren zu verstummen und der Musik zu weichen hätte.59
Herakles does not actually come on stage. Rather the Chorus, already made
anxious by the look of the pale servant, is suddenly gripped by a vision of
horror when it hears the father’s screams ringing from the house. This Wlls
our mind, which has already been working the whole time to create the

59 Bahr (1903), 116–17. Bahr refers to Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), popular

French author of ‘well-made’ but superWcial plays.
 The psychological hero 229
unavoidable scene, with such dread that we really do not need the report of
the Messenger who dashes in afterwards, but now as we listen to him tell the
disastrous deed, it is as if we live through the horror a second time. This is
actually only a technical trick; it is, if one may say so, ultimately only Sardou.
Because it is too diYcult for the poet to show Herakles’ madness as strongly
as our imagination expects, the poet had the idea of not showing it at all, but
rather letting it play in our own heads by exciting our imagination three
times: Wrst through the screams, then the horror of the Chorus, and Wnally
the precise report. The eVect is colossal. . . . One feels here, as sometimes with
Shakespeare, that one is on the boundary of poetry, where the word is
silenced by by the unspeakable and must yield to music.
His last statement about being on the ‘boundary’ of poetry antici-
pates the cry of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, ‘Wer glücklich ist wie wir,
dem ziemt nur eins: j schweigen und tanzen!’ (‘For those as happy as
we, only one thing is Wtting: to be silent and dance!’),60 during her
manically triumphant dance towards death.
Bahr makes a further comparison between Euripides in the Hera-
kles and the attitudes of the older Shakespeare; he discerns in Euripi-
des’ relationship to the ideal of Greek virtue and in Shakespeare’s
perspective of the Homeric world in Troilus and Cressida the same
discomWting scepticism towards the concepts of dikē and autarkeia.
He cites, with page references, part of Wilamowitz’s discussion of the
signiWcance of Herakles to the pure Greek mind, his embodiment of
the Dorian ideal of man, before illustrating how completely the poet
subverts this ideal:
Es ist der reinste Ausdruck des alten Glaubens an die Autarkeia: daß der
Mann auf der Welt nichts braucht als die eigene Kraft, um sich selbst und
allen Menschen und den Göttern zu genügen, wenn er sie nur gerecht, treu
und tapfer übt. Und gerade in diesen tiefsten Grund der dem Hellenen
überlieferten Weisheit bohrt Euripides seinen Zweifel ein. Wer kann denn
sagen, daß er sich selbst genügt, da doch keiner auch nur sicher ist, derselbe
zu bleiben? Die Götter hauchen ihn an und er wird ein anderer. Hera schickt
den Wahn auf Herakles herab, und Herakles hört auf, Herakles zu sein, ›

PŒŁ Æe q.61
This is the purest expression of the old belief in autarkeia: that in this world
man needs only his own strength to satisfy himself, all people, and the gods,
if he is only just, faithful, and brave. And it is exactly into this deepest
60 Hofmannsthal (1920), 94. 61 Bahr (1903), 118–19.
230 The psychological hero
ground of wisdom handed down to the Greeks that Euripides bores his
doubt. Who can say that he is suYcient unto himself, since no one can be
sure that he will stay the same? The gods breathe on him and he becomes
someone else. Hera sends down madness upon Herakles and Herakles ceases
to be Herakles, he is no longer himself.
At this point it is important to note that Hermann Bahr practised a
species of theatre criticism very diVerent from that of our own era. In his
reviews he could adopt a highly impressionistic and subjective ap-
proach, but this was always underpinned by the extraordinary breadth
of his reading, the depth of his technical knowledge, and the scope of his
experience of European drama. As Daviau contends, Bahr was
interested in interpreting theater works as expressions of ideas useful to his
own age and to the development of the new humanity. . . . His reviews are
not ephemeral opinions intended merely to inform the public about
whether a given play was worth its time and money but valid and important
theoretical documents that partly reXect the tendencies of the time and,
more importantly, chart the course of the theater in Vienna during the
critical transition period at the turn of the century.62
Bahr himself maintained that the purpose of his criticism was to
extract the ‘demands of his time’,63 and it is with this objective in
mind that the full consequence of his response to Euripides’ Herakles
must be considered.
Bahr had certainly read the play before he saw it performed, a fact
unusual in itself, and his feuilleton is the result of considerable
reXection upon its themes. The one verse that he quotes from the
original text is 931, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, a concept which seems to have
shaken him to the core (‘das ist das schauerliche Wort der Dichtung’,
‘this is the spine-chilling poetic phrase’), the idea of the loss of self,
the unforeseen stealing away of one’s reason and identity, the poten-
tiality and randomness of which conspire to cancel equally the pos-
sibility of self-determination and faith in Providence. What Bahr had
chanced upon in the Messenger’s stark communiqué was a deWnition
of Wn-de-siècle angst, and, over the next two years, he endeavoured to
elevate these words to the status of a Modernist mantra:
Er war es nicht mehr, war verwandelt, war ein anderer, kannte sich nicht
mehr, hatte sich selbst nicht mehr. Wenn dies geschehen darf, daß ein Mann

62 Daviau (1985), 71. 63 See Bahr (1923), 285.

 The psychological hero 231
sein eigenes Selbst verlieren kann, und keiner weiß, was, wenn die Götter
zürnen, morgen aus ihm geworden sein wird, was soll dann die Lehre der
Väter, daß nur jeder seiner Kraft vertrauen, seinem Sinn gehorchen möge?
Da doch eben der eigene Sinn stets ungewiß, die eigene Kraft durch jeden
Hauch des Schicksals veränderlich ist! Wer kann sich behaupten, wenn ihm,
‘einer wüsten Wirrsal Brandung den Sinn ergreift?’ Wer wagt noch zu leben,
wenn er so zu jeder Zeit sich selbst entrückt werden kann?64
It was no longer he, he was transformed, he was someone else, he did not
know himself anymore, he did not possess himself anymore. If this can
happen, if a man can lose his own self, and no one knows what may become
of him tomorrow if the gods are angry, what is one to make of the teaching
of the fathers that each man is to trust in his own strength, to obey his own
mind? After all, it is precisely one’s own mind that is always uncertain and
one’s own strength can be changed by any breath of fate. Who can assert
himself if ‘a wild surge of confusion seizes his mind?’ Who dares go on living
if at any time he can thus be borne away from himself?
In grappling with the inescapable questions brought to light by
Euripides’ penetration of the Nachtseite of the Herakles myth, Bahr
asks: ‘Welcher Dichter dürfte es heute wagen, sich so ins ‘‘Patholo-
gische’’ zu ‘‘verirren’’ und darzustellen, daß kein Mensch jemals
davor sicher ist, nicht durch unbekannte Mächte plötzlich sich selbst
entwendet zu werden?’ (‘What poet today would dare to ‘‘lose’’
himself in this way in the ‘‘pathological’’ and to depict the fact that
no human being is ever safe from suddenly being stolen from himself
by unknown powers?’)65 This is eVectively an urgent summons
issued in the hope of discovering Euripides’ modern Viennese coun-
terpart, a poet of the psyche and of Nerven, and a dramatic voice for
decadent culture’s crisis of identity. The Wrst to answer the summons,
to discern in line 931 of Herakles exactly what Bahr discerned and to
make it contemporary, was Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his Elektra.

MODERNISM’S CULTURAL MEDIATOR

Simon Goldhill, in an essay on the historical impact of Richard

Strauss’s operatic adaptation of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, makes a

64 Bahr (1903), 119. 65 Ibid. 119–20.

232 The psychological hero
point that must already be apparent to the reception scholar: ‘If
theatrical performance is to be studied as an event, or performance
history to be written, it is necessary, I think, to try to uncover the
multiple frames that make an occasion a cultural moment: the full
grammar of contemporary performances, the range of competing
intellectual and social understandings, the varied media and genres
of commentary and opinion formation.’66 The multiple frames of
cultural reference surrounding the 1902 Viennese production of
Herakles converge in the single Wgure of Hermann Bahr. In addition
to being Austria’s dominant theatre critic, Bahr was a proliWc drama-
tist, essayist, and feuilletonist with an exceptionally wide remit, a
catalyst of Modernism and avant-garde ideas without parallel. He has
often been credited with coining the term ‘Die Moderne’, an error he
happily encouraged. The genuine originator of this usage was Eugen
WolV in 1886, but, as Barker argues, to Bahr ‘must go the distinction
of having brought the term into everyday literary currency, above all
after the appearance of his collection Zur Kritik der Moderne in
1890’.67 ‘Die Moderne’ was Bahr’s credo and manifesto, the banner
under which he fought his many and diVuse campaigns. His arc of
aesthetic jurisdiction in Wn-de-siècle Vienna swept across every Weld
within the arts and secured him a place in the vanguard of the
‘collective Oedipal revolt’68 which characterized the relationship of
Vienna’s Jungen to their political and cultural past.
Bahr was the nucleus of the Café Griensteidel gatherings, the city’s
interchange for literary Modernism, and as such he became a mentor
to several leading members of Jung-Wien, including Hofmannsthal
and Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), a generation of writers preoccu-
pied with the nature of modernity and the life of the psyche.69 Bahr
was likewise instrumental in both formulating and advocating the
regenerative aims of the Secession, an artistic movement formally
established by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) on 3 April 1897 as a new
Roman secessio plebis, an assault on nineteenth-century historicism
and certainty and their concealment of modern man’s true face. In
Bahr the seceding artists acquired a passionate spokesman. Along
with the Burgtheater’s director Max Burckhard, he was literary

66 Goldhill (2002), 175. 67 Barker (1983), 617–30, at 622.

68 Schorske (1979), p. xxvi. 69 See Schorske (1981), 415–31, at 420.
 The psychological hero 233
adviser to the movement’s oYcial journal Ver Sacrum, and through
this and his own paper Die Zeit he championed the Secessionists’
frequently shocking exploration of instinctual life and psychological
experience. Bahr’s presence was also strongly felt in the theatre world
over many years. His four volumes of theatre criticism, published
between 1898 and 1906, served his overall cultural programme as a
criticism of encouragement and ideology, or what Yates has called a
‘strategy of eclectic receptiveness’.70 At the turn of the century he was
employed by the Deutsches Volkstheater as a consultant. From 1906
to 1907 he directed plays for Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) in Berlin,
and in 1918 he was appointed director of the Burgtheater. In
attempting to summarize the protean nature of Bahr’s participation
in Viennese Modernism, Daviau pronounced him a cultural medi-
ator rather than a cultural innovator.71 Bahr followed trends as much
as he led them; he was a commentator no less than a forecaster: ‘He
was not a poet in the German sense of Dichter but a highly gifted
journalist and cultural man of letters, who was also a visionary, an
educator, and the conscience of his age. He had a gift for reading the
‘‘demands of his time’’ and the willingness to respond to them. It was
this sensitivity to nuances of change and shifts of attitude that
enabled him to remain in the forefront of developments.’72 In and
alongside Bahr’s reaction to the 1902 Herakles exists a fascinating
insight into, and a speciWc instance of, his cultural mediation.

‘ER WAR NICHT MEHR DERSELBE’

The Herakles presented a particular and united focus for Bahr’s two
current obsessions, ancient Greek culture and contemporary psych-
ology. Periclean Athens had supplied Bahr with a blueprint, which he
drew up in Bildung in 1900, for a renascent Austrian culture and
a comprehensive educational programme integral to this vision.
In 1901 he travelled to Greece, where the sight of the Parthenon
made a deep impression, and he subsequently immersed himself in
Wfth-century Greek literature. Bahr’s interest in the human psyche

70 Yates (1992), 3. 71 Daviau (1984), 30–68, at 33.

72 Daviau (1985), 142.
234 The psychological hero
and nervous complaints Wrst materialized in an essay from 1890 on
‘Die Herkunft der Weltanschauungen’. By the following year, with the
publication of a collection of essays under the title Die Überwindung
der Naturalismus, Nerven had become Bahr’s deWnitive program-
matic utterance. He used the book’s opening essay, ‘Die Moderne’,
to advance his vision of a new art, and indeed a new religion, based
on nervous sensitivity:
Wir wollen alle Sinne und Nerven auftun, gierig und lauschen und
lauschen. . . . Ja, nur den Sinnen wollen wir uns vertrauen, was sie verkündi-
gen und befehlen. . . . Wir haben kein anderes Gesetz als die Wahrheit, wie
jeder sie empWndet. Der dienen wir. Wir können nichts dafür, wenn sie rauh
und gewalttätig ist und oft höhnisch und grausam. Wir sind ihr nur gehor-
sam, was sie verlange. Manchmal verwundert es uns selbst und erschreckt
uns, wir können uns aber nicht helfen. Dieses wird die neue Kunst sein,
welches wir so schaVen. Und es wird die neue Religion sein. Denn Kunst,
Wissenschaft und Religion sind dasselbe. Es ist immer nur die Zeit, jedesmal
in einen andern Teig geknetet.73
We want to open all our senses and nerves, greedily, and listen, listen. . . . Yes,
we only want to trust in our senses, in what they proclaim and com-
mand. . . . We have no other law than the truth as each person perceives it.
We serve the truth. We cannot help it if the truth is rough and violent and
often derisive and brutal. We obey only the truth, which is what truth
demands. Sometimes we are surprised and shocked ourselves by this but
we cannot help ourselves. This will be the new art which we create. And it
will be the new religion. For art, science, and religion are the same thing. It is
always just the spirit of the age, kneaded each time into another dough.
In the essay ‘Die Überwindung des Naturalismus’ in the same volume,
Bahr emphatically asserted the centrality of nervous sensitivity to
Decadence: ‘Der Inhalt des neuen Idealismus is Nerven, Nerven,
Nerven’ (‘The essence of the new idealism is nerves, nerves, nerves’).74
Bahr’s pronouncements on Nerven were made on the threshold of
an explosion of creative and scientiWc interest in the hidden recesses
of mental life, and seem almost prophetic. The advent of the new
century was signalled by a proliferation of book and play titles
concerned with dreams,75 culminating in Freud’s Die Traumdeutung,

73 Bahr (1891), 3 and 6. 74 Ibid. 157.

75 On the dominance of dream narratives in the Wn de siècle, see Cohn (1982), 58–71.
 The psychological hero 235
which Wrst appeared in late 1899, although its publication date is
normally given as 1900 to ensure its lasting renown as a ‘happening’.
Simultaneously, as Die Traumdeutung proved, Greek mythology be-
came the object of intense psychoanalytic investigation, a develop-
ment that led to a cross-fertilization of ideas between literature and
psychological scholarship: ‘Interest in mythology was awakened by a
process of reciprocity. On the one hand the psychoanalytic penetra-
tion of myth bore fruit in poetry; on the other hand literature itself
was a source of important corroboration, as well as illustrative
material, for the psychoanalysts.’76
Hermann Bahr’s Dialog vom Tragischen, completed in 1903 and
published a year later, represents a synthesis of his personal mission
and these wider intellectual currents. In this work, which he dedi-
cated to Gustav Klimt, Bahr applies the terminology of Josef Breuer
and Sigmund Freud’s Studien über Hysterie of 1895, and in particular
the theory of psychical catharsis by means of psychoanalysis, to the
workings of Greek tragedy.77 The Wrst section of the book takes the
form of a dialogue in which the character of the host insists that the
purpose of tragedy is no diVerent from the work of ‘jene beiden
Ärzte’ (‘those two doctors’), the authors of Studien über Hysterie. As
Ward states, what Bahr is suggesting here is ‘a meeting point for
Ancient and Modern: they meet in the person of the hysteric’.78
Die ganze Kultur der Griechen war denn auch rings von Hysterie beschli-
chen und umstellt. Wir sehen sie überall lauern, wir hören sie überall
röcheln, die Mythen sind von ihr voll, wir spüren sie aus der traumhaft
hellen Sprache durch, ja der ganze BegriV der Polis, in welchem sich der
Bürger für den Genuß einer erhabenen Stunde oder für den Wahn des unter
den Nachkommen fortschallenden Ruhms mit Lust zerstört, ist hysterisch.
Aber da hatte die Nation noch die Kraft, eine Anstalt zu erWnden, die ihr
half, ihre Hysterie auf die größte Art ‘abzureagieren’.79
Hysteria crept up on and surrounded the entire Greek culture. We see it
lying in wait everywhere, we hear it groaning everywhere, the myths are full
of it, we feel it come through the bright dreamlike language, the whole
concept of the polis is hysterical, in which the citizens wilfully destroy for the

76 Schmidt-Dengler (1982), 32–45, at 42.

77 See Worbs (1983), 139–43 on ‘Hermann Bahrs Entdeckung der Studien über
Hysterie’.
78 Ward (2002), 143. 79 Bahr (1904), 23.
236 The psychological hero
sake of enjoyment of a sublime hour or for the delusion of fame resounding
forth through successive generations. But at that time the nation still had the
power to invent an institution to help them abreact this hysteria.
The second part of the Dialog is entitled ‘Das Unrettbare Ich’
(‘The Irredeemable Self ’). In the course of Bahr’s elucidation of
this concept, he divulges its provenance as Herakles:
Manchmal hat man wirklich die EmpWndung, als würde man, ohne es zu
wissen, geheimnisvoll geführt, und mir ist, als wäre ich die ganzen letzen drei
Jahre her durch eine unbekannte Macht nur immer auf einen Gedanken
gestimmt worden, dem ich nun also endlich wehrlos erliegen mußte. Das
begann mit einer Stelle im Herakles des Euripides, die mich erschütterte.
Herakles fällt im Wahnsinn seine Kinder an. Der Bote, der schildert, wie sich
der Rasende betrug, sagt: Er war nicht mehr derselbe! Dies traf mich
furchtbar. Ich hielt im Lesen ein und hatte das Gefühl: über der bloßen
Vorstellung, daß es einem geschehen könnte, nicht mehr derselbe, sondern
plötzlich ein anderer Mensch zu sein, müsse man eigentlich schon wahn-
sinnig werden. Ich fand es in der Phädra wieder und allmählich schien es mir
der eigentliche Gedanke des Euripides, die Unsicherheit des Ich darzustellen.
Nun las ich ein entsetzliches Buch, Ribots ‘les maladies de la personnalité’;80
hier werden Menschen gezeigt, welche plötzlich ihr Ich verlieren und als
neue Wesen eine andere Existenz beginnen, aus der sie manchmal, ebenso
plötzlich und rätselhaft, wieder in die erste zurückgestoßen werden.81
Sometimes one really has the feeling that, without knowing it, one is being
guided secretly, and it seems to me that, over the whole of the last three
years, I have been destined by an unknown power to think only one thought,
to which I Wnally had to succumb. It began at a spot in Euripides’ Herakles,
which shook me up. In his madness Herakles attacks his children. The
Messenger, who describes how the madman behaved, says: he was no longer
the same person! This shook me up terribly. I stopped reading and had the
feeling: that the mere idea that it could happen to a person that he was no
longer the same, but suddenly another human being, could make one really
go mad. I rediscovered it in Phaedra, and gradually it seemed to me that it
was Euripides’ actual intention to show the insecurity of the self. Then I read
a terrifying book, Ribot’s Les Maladies de la personnalité; it shows people

80 Theodule Armand Ribot (1839–1916) was Professor of Experimental Psychology

at the Sorbonne and later at the Collège de France. Les Maladies de la personnalité was
Wrst published in 1885.
81 Bahr (1904), 92–3. By Phaedra Bahr is presumably referring to a version of
Euripides’ Hippolytus.
 The psychological hero 237
who suddenly lose their self and begin a new existence as diVerent beings, an
existence out of which they are sometimes just as suddenly and mysteriously
pushed back into the Wrst one.
In this passage Bahr has returned to the Euripidean verse, ›
 PŒŁ
Æe q, that horriWes him (‘die mich erschütterte’; ‘dies traf mich
furchtbar’), and which he translates precisely as ‘er war nicht mehr
derselbe’.82 This powerfully austere report of the moment of Hera-
kles’ insane metamorphosis has allowed Bahr Wnally to articulate a
long-felt sense of vulnerability and apprehension. He believes Hera-
kles 931 encapsulates Euripides’ pivotal tragic idea, ‘die Unsicherheit
des Ich’ (‘the insecurity of the self ’). The original Greek words have
so penetrated his psyche that, in a moment of acute introspection,
Bahr seems to feel that he himself is no longer the same, and that he is
literally ‘beside himself ’. The experience he relates to the reader is
parallel to Herakles’ øØ at 965, where the word carries the
singular meaning of an ‘aberration’83 or, as Barlow suggests, ‘an
‘‘alienation’’ from his former self ’.84 Bahr’s conception of the loss of
self as somehow pre-determined, or at least as an ever-present pos-
sibility, also accords with Wilamowitz’s explanation of Herakles’
temporary psychosis as the violent activation of a semi-latent state
of mind. However, while Wilamowitz linked the loss of self expressly
to a megalomaniac bloodlust on the part of Herakles, Bahr determines
that it is an ineluctable fact of the human condition.
Just as Bahr Wnished writing the Dialog vom Tragischen in the
spring of 1903, Hugo von Hofmannsthal commenced his period of
intensive work on Elektra. Throughout the late summer of that year
the two men were in close contact. Bahr visited Hofmannsthal in
Rodaun almost daily and discussed with him the argument of the
Dialog, which, as we know from a letter Bahr wrote to Hofmannsthal
on 19 July 1903 thanking him for his comments, Hofmannsthal had
already read and rated highly. This discourse proved the catalyst for
Hofmannsthal’s active engagement in psychopathology.85 Bahr’s

82 Cf. Wilamowitz’s slightly less literal translation of 931: ‘doch er war wie
verwandelt’, in Wilamowitz (1895), i. 233.
83 See Bond’s note (1981), 315, on ø.
84 Barlow (1996), 167.
85 On the interaction between Bahr and Hofmannsthal during the construction of
Elektra, see Martens (1987), 38–51, at 38–40.
238 The psychological hero
contention that the techniques of modern science, and in particular
psychoanalysis, could be used to illuminate ancient myth, opened up
for Hofmannsthal the possibility of using ancient myth to illuminate
modern issues, and of thus closing the breach that he declared existed
in Wn-de-siècle Vienna between ‘old furniture and young neurosis’.
Two books which Hofmannsthal later revealed he had consulted
during the composition of his tragedy were Erwin Rohde’s Psyche
and Breuer and Freud’s Studien über Hysterie. A Wrst edition of the
latter work was in Hofmannsthal’s personal library, although it seems
that initially he borrowed a copy from Bahr. In an undated letter,
believed to have been written in the summer of 1903, Hofmannsthal
asked Bahr: ‘Können Sie mir eventuell nur für einige Tage das Buch
von Freud und Breuer über Heilung der Hysterie durch Freimachen
einer unterdrückten Erinnerung leihen (schicken?)’ (‘Would you be
able to lend me just for a few days Freud and Breuer’s book on
‘‘Healing hysteria through release of a suppressed memory’’?’).86 In
common with Studien über Hysterie and Dialog vom Tragischen,
Hofmannsthal’s Elektra employed the theory that hysteria was caused
by the repression of a traumatic memory and could be cured by
abreaction.87 When Hofmannsthal read Bahr his completed manu-
script, Bahr instantly recognized in the tragedy ‘his’ hysterical Greeks.
On 13 September 1903 he recorded in his diary: ‘Zum Hugo nach
Rodaun. Elektra fertig. Liest daraus vor. Der wilde Tanz am Ende
herrlich. Auch durchaus meine Griechen, hysterisch, abgehetzt, ins
Ruhelose getrieben’ (‘Travelled to Rodaun to Hugo. Elektra is
Wnished. He read bits aloud to me. The wild dance at the end is
fantastic. Just like my Greeks: prone to hysteria, always rushing
around, driven into restlessness’).88
Studien über Hysterie was not the only book about the psycho-
logical dark side in which the two writers shared an interest, as a
letter Hofmannsthal wrote to Bahr in August 1904 indicates:
Ich möchte Sie aber um ein anderes bitten: um jene ‘Maladies de la person-
nalité’. Es handelt sich in dem StoV, der mich jetzt am meisten lockt, in dem

86 Hofmannsthal (1937), 142. The editors of this volume of correspondence place

the letter in the period Nov. 1903–May 1904.
87 On Hofmannsthal’s use in Elektra of the theme of repressed memory, see
Martens (1987), 38–51.
88 Reproduced in Farkas (1987), 149.
 The psychological hero 239
‘Leben ein Traum’, ja darum, in die tiefsten Tiefen des zweifelhaften Höh-
lenkönigreichs ‘Ich’ hinabzusteigen und dort das Nicht-mehr-ich oder die
Welt zu Wnden.89
I would like to ask you about something else: about that Maladies de la
personnalité. It deals with the subject which at present most attracts me in
Leben ein Traum, about descending into the deepest depths of the uncertain
cavernous kingdom of the self and Wnding there the self that no longer exists
or the world.
The date of the letter and the mention of Theodule Ribot’s Les
Maladies de la personnalité help to contextualize Hofmannsthal’s
increasing curiosity about das Selbst and der Ander. What he desig-
nates the ‘uncertain cavernous kingdom of the self ’ has an immediate
point of reference in Bahr’s contemplation of ‘die Unsicherheit des
Ich’ in the Dialog vom Tragischen. More striking still is Hof-
mannsthal’s invention of the hyphenated phrase ‘das Nicht-mehr-
ich’ to classify the abstraction of the lost self, which, he discloses, is
his present most absorbing occupation. The phrase exactly, and
irrefutably, recalls Euripides’ ›
 PŒŁ Æe q and amalgamates,
linguistically and conceptually, Bahr’s ‘er war nicht mehr derselbe’
and ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’.
Hofmannsthal’s appropriation, through Bahr, of Herakles 931 also
signiWes the evolution of his own sense of ‘das Gleitende’ (‘sliding’ or
‘slipping away’), a concept he introduced in his most famous essay,
Ein Brief, written in 1902. In this Wctional letter from Lord Chandos,
the younger son of the Earl of Bath, to Francis Bacon, Chandos
confesses a crisis of language (‘Sprachkrise’), manifest in an inability
to express himself coherently.90 Hofmannsthal represents Chandos’s
diYculty as symptomatic of a pervasive feeling of impermanence, the
belief that the social and cultural institutions taken for granted by
previous generations now rested on ‘das Gleitende’. For the individ-
ual, ‘das Gleitende’ means the impermanence of notions of Self, of
one’s own identity, and mental soundness. The loss of self, therefore,
is the extreme outcome of this crisis.

89 Hofmannsthal (1937), 155.

90 An English translation of the ‘Chandos Letter’ appears in Hofmannsthal (1952),
129–41.
240 The psychological hero

ELEKTRA: AN ANATO MY OF THE LOST SELF

Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, commissioned and directed by Max Rein-

hardt, premièred at the Kleines Theater in Berlin on 30 October 1903,
with Gertrud Eysoldt (1870–1955) in the title role. With its morbid
irrationalism, animalistic savagery, and disturbed sexuality, the play
was an immediate sensation and a provocative reconceptualization of
Greekness as something demonic and ecstatic. When it was produced
in Vienna in 1905 one reviewer deWned Hofmannsthal’s achievement as
‘eine ‘‘Elektra’’ im Spiegelbild unseres psycho-künstlerischen Zeitideals’
(‘an Elektra as reXected in the psycho-artistic ideal of our time’).91
In November 1903 the composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949) saw
the Elektra in Berlin and conceived the notion of a full operatic
setting for the text. Earlier in the same year he had been similarly
inspired by Reinhardt’s staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which also
starred Gertrud Eysoldt. However, it was not until 1906, by which
time the opera of Salome had been launched, that Strauss approached
Hofmannsthal for permission to adapt his Elektra, and their cele-
brated collaboration began.92 The score was completed on 22 Sep-
tember 1908, and the Hofmannsthal–Strauss Elektra received its Wrst
performance on 25 January 1909 at the Königliches Opernhaus in
Dresden, under the conductor Ernst von Schuch and the director
Willi Wirk. Annie Krull and Ernestine Schumann-Heink created the
roles of Elektra and Klytämnestra. (Interestingly, a famous later
Klytämnestra was the soprano Anna von Mildenburg (1872–1947),
the wife of Hermann Bahr.)
Strauss’s score, which required a huge orchestra, exempliWed a new
extreme in Nervenkunst. It has been described as psychoanalysis in
music, and is said to be fraught with ‘its period’s mod cons of psych-
ology and decadence’.93 Michael Ewans has called Strauss’s Elektra ‘one
of the most extreme works of expressionist art, an opera of unrelenting
emotional intensity which in performance imposes an almost unbear-

91 Wiener Mittags-Zeitung, 15 May 1905.

92 On the genesis and composition of the opera, see the correspondence between
Strauss and Hofmannsthal (Mar. 1906–Aug. 1908), trans. Hammelmann and Osers
(1961), 2–22.
93 R. Holloway in PuVett (1989), 145.
 The psychological hero 241
able strain on everyone involved’,94 and ‘a music which is poised on the
almost indeWnable borderline between decadence and extreme expres-
sionism’.95 Modernism had rudely and conclusively usurped the place
of classicism.96 Critics and audiences reacted to the opera with shock
and violent distaste, many Wnding it rebarbative, brutal, and iconoclas-
tic. But the production excited an equally fervent attraction, with its
aurally and visually confronting juxtaposition of modern neuroticism
and familiar ancient myth.97 Performances soon followed in other
major cities around the world, with the new and degenerate Hellenism
never failing to fascinate and scandalize. Although in England the Lord
Chamberlain had refused Strauss’s Salome a licence until certain mod-
iWcations were introduced, on 19 February 1910 Sir Thomas Beecham
(1879–1961) conducted the Wrst British performance of Strauss’s Elek-
tra at Covent Garden in the presence of King Edward VII. The London
production was the centre of massive publicity and caused a heated
exchange of open letters between Ernest Newman and George Bernard
Shaw in The Nation. Beecham later declared that the ‘journalistic fever’
inspired by the première was eclipsed only by the death of the king later
that year.98 The opera was initially banned at the New York Metropol-
itan and had to be performed at an alternative Manhattan venue—in
French.
In the original text and in the subsequent libretto there is com-
pelling semantic evidence that Euripides’ Herakles played an import-
ant part in the conception and construction of Hofmannsthal’s
Elektra. Hofmannsthal’s Modernist reworking of Sophocles’ play is,
at basis, a Euripidean study of the loss of self; it owes as much to
Euripides as it does to Breuer and Freud. The theme of the lost self is
emphatically announced, in a verse identical to Bahr’s translation of

94 Ewans (1984), 135–54, at 135–6. 95 Ibid. 137.

96 According to Ewans (ibid. 136): ‘A contemporary cartoon shows Sophokles as a
helpless old man, with the victor’s crown fallen from his brow and his chiton half
stripped from him as he is violently assaulted by two suave young men in the evening
dress of the twentieth century. Von Hofmannsthal, his eyes gleaming with manic
intensity, holds Sophokles by the beard while gouging out his eyes; on the other side
of the picture, Strauss genially puts his boot into Sophokles while striking blows at
him with drumstick and cymbals.’
97 On the critical reception of the original performances, see Gilliam (1991), 9–17.
On the British reception, see Goldhill (2002), 131–9.
98 Beecham (1944), 146.
242 The psychological hero
Herakles 931, at the very start of the play’s centrepiece, the confron-
tation between mother and daughter. Elektra cautions the Lady
Macbeth-like Wgure of Klytämnestra, ‘Du bist nicht mehr du selber’
(‘You are no longer yourself ’).99 The verse calls attention to the
alteration in the queen’s appearance as well as her mental aberration
or disease. Within Strauss’s arrangement of the scene the unexpected
shifts in tonality retain the emphasis on these words. Musically the
key phrase is highlighted in several ways: (1) the harmony, based on B
dominant seventh, is a sudden bright change from the gloomy, rather
ambivalent and portentous, G# dominant seventh/augmented Wfth;
(2) the change in time-signature from 3/2 to 6/4 provides a more
marked rhythm, almost suggesting waltz time; (3) the counterpoint
running with the melody is based on thirds, and is sweet and lilting;
(4) the key phrase stands out with its crescendo, dropping back to
pianissimo at the end, when the tonality arrives at E minor and the
darker tone returns.
Shortly after this point in the play, although not in the opera, the
neurotic somnambulist Klytämnestra gives a graphic account of the
symptoms of her loss of self:
Ich Wnde nichts! . . .
dann schwindelt’s mich, ich weiß
auf einmal nicht mehr, wer ich bin, und das ist
das Grauen, das heißt mit lebendigem Leib
ins Chaos sinken.100
I cannot Wnd anything! . . . Then I get dizzy, suddenly I no longer know who
I am, and that is the horror, it means being buried alive in chaos.
What she describes here is something akin to Herakles’ second kata-
basis, an infernal descent into the chaos that supplants reason and
eradicates all sense of self. Elektra too analyses her own condition as a
loss of self and a sinking into nothingness. She tells Orest that her
obsession with avenging their father’s murder has resulted not only in
her physical degradation but also in the sacriWce of her whole identity:
‘Sieh, ich bin j gar nichts. Ich habe alles, was ich war, j hingeben müssen’
(‘Look, I am nothing at all. I had to give up everything that I was’).101

99 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27.

100 Ibid. 33. 101 Ibid. 80.
 The psychological hero 243
In his retrospective expositions of the play’s meaning, Hof-
mannsthal consistently maintained that his Elektra was about the
fragility of the self and the dissolution of the concept of individuality.
In 1911, in a letter to Richard Strauss concerning the recently Wnished
manuscript of Ariadne auf Naxos,102 Hofmannsthal explained to his
collaborator that the underlying idea of the new work was the same as
that of Elektra—the complexity of the preservation of the self:
What it is about is one of the straightforward and stupendous problems of
life: Wdelity; whether to hold fast to that which is lost, to cling to it even unto
death—or to live, to live on, to get over it, to transform oneself, to sacriWce
the integrity of the soul and yet in this transmutation to preserve one’s
essence, to remain a human being and not to sink to the level of the beast,
which is without recollection. It is the fundamental theme of Elektra.103
Hofmannsthal’s most unequivocal aYrmation of the Elektra as a
study of the lost self occurs in his Aufzeichnungen for 1922–9,
where he recalls:
Meine antiken Stücke haben es alle drei mit der AuXösung des Individualbeg-
riVes zu tun. In der ‘Elektra’ wird das Individuum in der empirischen Weise
aufgelöst, indem eben der Inhalt seines Lebens es von innen her zersprengt, wie
das sich zu Eis umbildende Wasser einen irdenen Krug. Elektra is nicht mehr
Elektra, weil sie eben ganz und gar Elektra zu sein sich weihte. Das Individuum
kann nur schemenhaft dort bestehen bleiben, wo ein Kompromiß zwischen
dem Gemeinen und dem Individuellen geschlossen wird.104
My three ancient plays all deal with the disintegration of the idea of the
individual. In Elektra the individual disintegrates empirically when the
substance of the individual’s life is blasted from within, just as water freezing
in an earthen jug cracks the jug apart. Elektra is no longer Elektra, precisely
because she has utterly devoted herself to being Elektra. The individual can
only continue to exist, and this in a shadowy form, where a compromise is
met between commonality and individuality.
Like Euripides at 932–5 of the Herakles, Hofmannsthal has written a
detailed physiognomy of the lost self. Klytämnestra’s unusually large

102 Aridane auf Naxos, an opera in one act, was Wrst performed in Stuttgart on 25
October 1912. A revised version premièred in Vienna on 4 October 1916.
103 The letter from mid-July 1911 is translated by Hammelmann and Osers (1961), 94.
104 Hofmannsthal (1959), 201.
244 The psychological hero
and heavy eyelids, her sallow and bloated countenance are, according
to his stage directions, lit in lurid colour, and her speech is punctu-
ated with laboured breathing. Haunted by dreams in which she is
persecuted by demons for her sins, she appeals to Elektra to advise
her by what new human sacriWce her soul may be released from
torment and her former self restored: ‘Aber diese Träume müssen j
ein Ende haben. Wer sie immer schickt: j ein jeder Dämon läßt von
uns, sobald j das rechte Blut geXossen ist’ (‘But these dreams must
come to an end. Any demon, no matter who sends it, lets us be as
soon as the right blood has Xown’).105 ‘Das rechte Blut’ refers to the
necessary expiatory sacriWce, but it also supposes, in this context and
by antithesis, a pathology of the loss of self. In his characterization of
Klytämnestra Hofmannsthal has combined the ancient concept of
pollution with twentieth-century pathology.106 Klytämnestra’s ap-
pearance and behaviour suggest a chemical imbalance and the ab-
sence of ‘das rechte Blut’ in her own veins. This ‘alienation’ from the
self is a consequence of pollution, of repressed guilt, the reverse of
Herakles’ øØ. Elektra slowly, and with chilling calmness building
to feral excitement, reawakens her mother’s repressed memory of her
crime and, as Butler observes, the relationship between the two
characters acquires a very contemporary dynamic: ‘The interview
which . . . takes place between the guilty mother and the vengeful
daughter is a poetical version, highly charged with tragic irony, of
the analysis of a neurotic patient by a psychician [sic] of the Viennese
school.’107 This reading of the confrontation is supported by the text
itself, in which Klytämnestra, in an aside to her companion, remarks
of Elektra’s tone, ‘Sie redet wie ein Arzt’ (‘She talks like a doctor’).108
Hofmannsthal’s startling incorporation of modern pathology and
psychoanalytic discourse was reXected in the clinical terminology
of the critics, who applied to the characters of Elektra words such
as haematomania and neurasthenia.109
Throughout Euripides’ Herakles the hero’s madness is repeatedly
deWned as a ghastly form of Bacchic ekstasis: ÆŒØ (897);
K Œı (966); ´ Œ (1119); ´ÆŒÆ æÆ (1122). The

105 Hofmannsthal (1920), 35. 106 See Martens (1987), 38–51, at 41.
107 Butler (1939), 164–75, at 169.
108 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27. 109 See Goldhill (2002), 137–8.
 The psychological hero 245
hysterical symptoms displayed by Hofmannsthal’s principal charac-
ters also correspond to the symptoms of Bacchic intoxication. After
warning her mother that she is no longer herself, Elektra declares, ‘so
gehst du hin im Taumel, immer j bist du als wie im Traum’ (‘And so
you go along in giddiness, you always act like you are in a dream’).110
The word ‘Taumel’ (giddiness or reeling, or, more Wguratively, a
transporting frenzy) suggests the literal and metaphorical drunken-
ness of a bacchante. Lyssa’s announcement, æø (I shall make
you dance), at 871 of the Herakles, and the cries of the Chorus at 878–
89 and 889–97, characterize Herakles’ madness as a maenadic dance
and a macabre inversion of Dionysiac revelry. In his stage directions
Hofmannsthal represents Elektra’s Wnal exultant frenzy upon the
murders of Klytämnestra and Aegisth in precisely similar terms:
‘Sie hat den Kopf zurückgeworfen wie eine Mänade. Sie wirft die
Kniee, sie reckt die Arme aus, es ist ein namenloser Tanz, in welchem
sie nach vorwärts schreitet’ (‘She has her head thrown back like a
Maenad. She throws up her knees and stretches her arms out in a
nameless dance with which she strides forward’).111 Herakles’ mad
dance concludes with his supernaturally enforced collapse into un-
wholesome sleep, while the maenadic Elektra falls to earth as the
result of an apparently fatal stroke. The new ending Hofmannsthal
has given Sophocles’ tragedy seems to answer the Chorus at 1025–6
of Herakles: ÆNÆE; Æ ƪe j j ª j ŁØH fiT
a j  )Ø- j
Æ
æe Iø; (‘Alas, what lament or dirge shall I sing? What dance to
Death?’).
According to Yates, ‘Hofmannsthal’s modernization of the myth
[of Elektra] transforms Sophocles’ heroine into a character whose
mind is fashioned out of the insights of Freudian psychology and the
imagery of the Secessionists’.112 As we have seen, the characters of the
1903 Elektra have also been fashioned out of Euripidean psychology,
and speciWcally Euripides’ conceptualization of the lost self. Why then,
in view of his debt to the Herakles, did Hofmannsthal elect to adapt
Sophocles’ rather than Euripides’ more psychologically weighted
version of the myth? One answer is that, by avoiding the obvious
starting-point and superimposing both the psychoanalytic portrait

110 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27.

111 Ibid. 93. 112 Yates (1992), 148.
246 The psychological hero
of hysteria and the Euripidean idea of ‘das Nicht-mehr-Ich’ onto the
sublimely ‘harmonious’ Sophocles, Hofmannsthal was challenging
the tragic demarcations Wxed by nineteenth-century classicism and
reintroducing Sophocles as a less remote and idealized poet.113 He
was also continuing, in spectacular fashion, the reaction, begun by
Wagner and Nietzsche, against German neoclassicism as embodied in
Goethe’s ‘devilishly humane’114 reworking of Euripides’ Iphigenia in
Tauris.

‘NACH RODAUN, MIT H UGO’

This persuasive internal evidence of the relationship between Hof-

mannsthal’s Elektra and Euripides’ Herakles prompts the other obvi-
ous question of whether Hofmannsthal had himself seen the
performance of Wilamowitz’s translation. The resemblances outlined
above indicate that Hofmannsthal’s knowledge of the Herakles did
not rest solely on Hermann Bahr’s reading of 931; it seems likely that
he had read the play in full or even seen it performed. Crucially, on
the day that he attended the performance of Herakles in Josefstadt,
Bahr went to Rodaun (in those days a tram-ride out of town) and
accompanied Hofmannsthal and his wife on a walk. Afterwards he
visited the writer Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866–1945), as his diary
entry for 6 January 1902 establishes:
Nach Rodaun, mit Hugo und Gerty spaziert, dann bei Beer-Hofmann.
Herein, bei Mama Schlesinger gegessen, Hans da. Herakles. Mit Burckhard
besprochen, wie Schnitzler Grillparzer Preis verschaVen.115
Travelled to Rodaun, went for a walk with Hugo and Gerty, then dropped in
on Beer-Hofmann. Dined at Mama Schlesinger’s; Hans was there. Herakles.
Discussed with Burckhard how to procure Schnitzler the Grillparzer Prize.

113 See also the argument of Ewans (1984), who believes that: (a) with the Elektra
‘the legend of Sophokles’ detachment and nobility is hardest to sustain’ (141); and (b)
‘every major theme of the operatic treatment is already either explicit or implicit in
Sophokles’ original play’ (142).
114 Goethe’s description of ‘this Hellenizing work of art’ as ‘devilishly humane’ is
cited by Hofmannsthal (1959), 131.
115 Bahr (1997), iii. 165.
 The psychological hero 247
The entry is, in fact, a microcosm of Bahr’s extraordinary sphere of
inXuence within literary and theatrical Vienna at that time, as well as
an indication of the regular social intercourse between the members
of Jung-Wien which must inevitably have entailed a proWtable ex-
change of creative ideas. In a collection of Bahr’s Tagebücher for
1888–1904, edited by Reinhard Farkas in 1987, the entry has been
reduced by half and documents only Bahr’s morning visits, not his
afternoon at the theatre.116 The omission is an example of how both
the production and Bahr’s mediation between the play and his
contemporaries have been ignored.
Bahr’s account of his movements on 6 January is tersely factual
rather than conveniently elaborative. Nevertheless, the bare details he
provides oVer tantalizing possibilities, and indeed probabilities, of
who else among Vienna’s cultural establishment saw that historic
performance of the Herakles. That the theatre director Max Burc-
khard was present at the Josefstadt that afternoon, and this was the
venue for Bahr’s conversation with him about Schnitzler and the
Grillparzer Prize, is a reasonable inference. Moreover, it is entirely
conceivable that either Hofmannsthal or Beer-Hofmann, or perhaps
both, accompanied Bahr to the theatre after lunch. In default of any
extant journal or epistolary evidence on the part of Hofmannsthal or
Beer-Hofmann, it is impossible to prove categorically that this hap-
pened, but the likelihood of such a proceeding can be attested on the
basis of a veriWable shared interest in the idea of the lost self. It is
almost certain that Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann were, at the
very least, aware of the Herakles production, that they read Bahr’s
feuilleton of 7 January, and that Bahr discussed the play when he met
them on the Monday of the performance or soon afterwards. Beyond
dispute is the fact that the two friends whom Bahr called upon in
Rodaun that day later read the Dialog vom Tragischen well in advance
of its publication. The fact in itself appears merely coincidental, but
when duly considered in the light of Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hof-
mann’s written responses to Bahr concerning the Dialog, it assumes
great signiWcance. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Bahr in the late summer
of 1904, in which he speaks of ‘das Nicht-mehr-ich’, has already been

116 See Farkas (1987), 111.

248 The psychological hero
cited. Equally revealing is a note Beer-Hofmann sent to Bahr on 3
November 1903, in which he wrote:
Ich habe ihn in der ‘Rundschau’ nur Xüchtig lesen können, und erst jetzt
habe ich mich mit Ruhe daran gefreut. Von den andern Aufsätzen war mir
nur ‘Der böse Goethe’ bekannt. Selbstverständlich—das heißt selbstverstän-
dlich für Jemanden der mich kennt—musste mich ‘das unrettbare Ich’, und
was sie darin von Euripides und seiner Art die Unsicherheit des ‘Ich’ zu
betonen, sagen, am tiefsten berühren.117
I was only able to read it hastily in the Rundschau, and only now have I had
the chance to read it in peace. Of the other essays, I knew only ‘The Evil
Goethe’. Naturally—that is, naturally for anyone who knows me—‘The
Irredeemable Self ’, and what it says therein about Euripides and his way of
emphasizing the insecurity of the ‘self ’, touched me very deeply.
Both writers have singled out from the entire Dialog the passage in
‘Das Unrettbare Ich’ on Herakles 931, by which they have been
profoundly aVected. This remarkable set of circumstances again dem-
onstrates Bahr’s gift for keeping his Wnger on the Viennese pulse and
for diagnosing precisely the collective anxieties of his day. It could be,
however, that Bahr’s argument about ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’ con-
solidated Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann’s Wrst-hand knowledge
of the Herakles performance in Josefstadt. In either event, under
Bahr’s counsel the two men came to a deeper understanding of the
play’s meaning and of the aYnity between Euripides’ art and their
own literary preoccupations and aspirations.

HOFMANNSTHAL’ S GREEKS

The case for Hofmannsthal’s presence at the 1902 Herakles is

strengthened by his well-documented involvement at the turn of
the century in tragic drama, the reshaping of ancient mythology,
and above all the renewal of Euripides. The year 1900 marked a shift
in the young Hofmannsthal’s creative orientation from poetry to
drama. This shift occurred concurrently with his most concentrated

117 Beer-Hofmann (1999), 14.

 The psychological hero 249
enquiry into the Greeks and the literary representation of Greekness.
Like Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann, Hofmannsthal had been a pupil
at Vienna’s Akademisches Gymnasium, where he received a solid
grounding, and attained Xuency, in the Greek and Latin languages.118
Now, in his mid-twenties, he began a process of ‘rediscovering’ the
classics, which reached its height in 1901–2. During this period he
experimented with the dramatic form, while educating himself in the
works of the Greek tragedians. He usefully combined these pursuits
by writing prologues to the classical productions of the Berlin Aka-
demischen Verein, beginning in January 1900 with his prologue to
Wilamowitz’s translation of Oedipus.119
Between 1899 and 1904 Elektra was the only play Hofmannsthal
completed. He had, however, made several previous attempts at
adapting tragic subjects for the stage. In a postscript to a letter he
sent Richard Beer-Hofmann on 12 July 1901, Hofmannsthal
reported, ‘ich beginne nächstens das große Stück nach Browning’
(‘soon I will begin the big play from Browning’). The ambitious
undertaking referred to here was a Wve-act tragedy, ‘Die GräWn
Pompilia’, based on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Al-
though the play was never Wnished, it is intriguing that, at the start of
his career as a serious dramatist, Hofmannsthal was drawn to the
work of the English poet who championed Euripides’ Herakles and to
the poem that, in its tenth book, contains a long and extraordinary
vindication of Euripidean thinking.
Hofmannsthal’s interest in Euripides pre-dated the composition of
Elektra by a decade. As early as 1893 he wrote in a manuscript note to
himself: ‘Bacchen des Euripides zu erneuern.’120 Ward has shown that
this project to adapt or rewrite the Bacchae, although never fully realized,
occupied Hofmannshal’s eVorts in three distinct phases over twenty-Wve
years (1892–3, 1904, and 1905–18).121 The fragmentary notes Hof-
mannsthal made on the play reveal plans for a two-act drama, ‘radically
diVerent from previously published versions’.122 They also reveal that the
proposed renewal of the Bacchae enabled Hofmannsthal ‘to rehearse

118 On the classical curriculum during Hofmannsthal’s time at the Akademisches

Gymnasium, see Schmidt-Dengler (1982), 32–45, at 33.
119 See Ward (2002), 70. 120 Hofmannsthal (1980), 365.
121 See Ward (2000), 165–94. 122 Ibid. 165.
250 The psychological hero
many of his fundamental concerns’.123 Notes written in 1904, for ex-
ample, depict the palace of Pentheus, full of trapdoors and secret shafts,
as a metaphor for ‘des zweifelhaften Höhlenkönigreichs ‘‘Ich’’ ’ (‘the
uncertain cavernous kingdom of the ‘‘self’’ ’).
In the same year that he began his Bacchae project, Hofmannsthal
was working on an adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis which was not
performed until 1916. Both these attempts to renew Euripides for the
modern stage were made in reply to Nietzsche’s argument in Der
Geburt der Tragödie about the Dionysian element in tragedy and its
elimination by the Socratic Euripides.124 Hofmannsthal’s programme
of renewal involved rewriting the Dionysian element into Euripides. In
his Alkestis, Death is equated with Dionysiac intoxication, as Herakles
is made to proclaim: ‘Göttliche Art der Trunkenheit vielleicht j ist, was
wir Totsein heißen!’ (‘A divine kind of drunkenness perhaps is what we
call death!’).125 The character of Herakles has been drastically modiWed
from the original; in place of Euripides’ blundering, good-natured
drunk, Hofmannsthal introduces a mystical sage.
In view of his own diligent endeavours in the last years of the
nineteenth century to renew Euripides, his rehabilitation of Herakles
in the Alkestis, and his increasing fascination with the irrational in
tragedy, it becomes highly probable that on 6 January 1902 Hof-
mannsthal did attend the historic revival of Euripides’ Herakles in
Josefstadt.
From the evidence collated above, both textual and circumstantial,
as well as that provided by supporting documents such as private
correspondence, journals, and published works, it is possible to
construct a revised reading of the beginnings of Nervenkunst and
to establish a demonstrable link between Euripides’ Herakles and
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. That link is verse 931 of Herakles,
which Hofmannsthal appropriated through his association with
Hermann Bahr and used as the conceptual basis of his reworking of
Sophocles’ Elektra. Bahr’s interpretation in Dialog vom Tragischen

123 See Ward (2000), 191.

124 Between 1892 and 1893 Hofmannsthal attended lectures by Alfred von Berger,
Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna, on ‘Schönheit in der Kunst’ and ‘Dramaturgie der
antiken Tragiker’, which discussed Nietzsche and inspired Hofmannsthal’s rereading
of Die Geburt der Tragödie.
125 Hofmannsthal (1953), iii. 37.
 The psychological hero 251
of the Euripidean idea of the lost self consolidated Hofmannsthal’s
twin preoccupations of Greek myth and psychopathology, and,
very likely, his Wrst-hand impressions of the 1902 performance of
Herakles.
The Josefstadt production of Herakles, although not itself steeped
in the theories of psychoanalysis, was the progenitor of the Wrst
overtly psychoanalytic treatment of a Greek tragedy on stage. Not
only did the play have a tremendous impact on the most inXuential
critic of the day, Hermann Bahr, but its violent unmasking of the
instability of the self also resonated in the high-strung intellectual
and creative climate of Wn-de-siècle Vienna. Moreover, the play’s
translator, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, had put forward
the Wrst psychological explanation of the madness of Herakles in
the modern era, and was equally instrumental in the revival of Greek
tragedy on the German stage. Hofmannsthal’s achievement with
Elektra must, therefore, be measured against his obvious (but
scarcely acknowledged) indebtedness to the philological and theatri-
cal accomplishments of Wilamowitz.
 8
Herakles’ apotheosis: the tragedy
of Superman

The Wrst two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an import-

ant detour in the Modernist reception of Euripides’ Herakles. The
process of psychological appropriation, begun by Wilamowitz and
Bahr, was temporarily interrupted by a less coordinated process of
allegorical and philosophical appropriation. Dramatic interest in the
tragic Herakles shifted from his latent psychosis to his latent divinity,
his uniquely ambivalent status as theios āner. As a consequence, the
madness and Wlicide gathered signiWcance not as manifestations of
the Heraklean psychology, but because they anticipated and aYrmed
a superhuman destiny.
Michael Silk views Euripides’ Herakles as a play that is primarily
concerned with the demigod Herakles’ interstitial predicament:
H.F. dramatizes a conXict between the god and the man in Heracles, and
ends by clearly destroying one element, the god, and isolating the other, the
man. The whole shape of the play is calculated to throw the god–man
opposition into relief. . . . Lucid humanity is isolated, however painfully, at
the end, rejecting a divine potentiality, rejecting a capacity for madness,
rejecting both as intolerably arbitrary manifestations of a cosmos which, in
desperation, it invests with pious hopes.
The logic of Euripides’ drama is dependent on his inversion of events in
the myth. Inter alia, by abandoning the sequence of madness followed by
labours, he avoids any suggestion that Heracles can be redeemed by a
saviour-god’s exercise of his superhuman powers. Only the human values
of friendship can provide that redemption.1

1 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 18.

 Herakles’ apotheosis 253
Euripides’ radical resolution of the great Heraklean paradox is a kind
of ‘anthroposis’, an apotheosis in reverse; it necessitates the hero’s full
integration into the human community, the consummation of his
human potential. By repudiating the accepted theology (1340–6),
Herakles is repudiating his divine self and asserting the superiority of
cooperative human values to the amoral, self-seeking ways of the gods.
George Cabot Lodge’s Herakles, an allegorical verse play published
in 1908, explores the same contradiction between the interstitial
hero’s human and divine properties. In this case, however, the con-
tradiction is overcome by the hero’s alienation and apotheosis, a
progression or transition that is the opposite of Euripides’ integra-
tion and humanization. Lodge’s Herakles repudiates the accepted
theology in order to assert his own divinity. This unperformed play
is the major work of an indisputably minor poet, and the product of
a militantly esoteric philosophy. Yet it does warrant critical examin-
ation, for it is also the most extensive and least compromising
example of a wider current in the Modernist reception of mad
Herakles. This becomes clear when we compare Lodge’s Herakles
with two other allegorical plays which draw on the Herakles myth,
both by major Modernist writers: W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (Wrst
staged in 1904 and revised in 1906) and Frank Wedekind’s Herakles
(written in 1917 and Wrst performed in 1919). The connection
between these three works is that their Heraklean heroes are tragic
variations of Nietzsche’s Superman (Übermensch), embodiments of
unyielding, transcendental autarkeia, who pay a terrible price for
self-aYrmation and deiWc independence.

HERAKLES AS CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN

A NA RC H I ST

The life and work of American poet George Cabot Lodge (1873–1909)
are so inextricably linked that Herakles, his magnum opus completed
less than a year before his premature death, makes sense only in a
biographical context, as the culmination of an intensely personal and
deeply held philosophy.
254 Herakles’ apotheosis
Although he was himself a minor poet whose achievement, uneven
at best, has been neglected in recent decades, George Cabot ‘Bay’
Lodge was part of a prominent literary circle which included Brooks
and Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The son of
Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), he carried with
him ‘impeccable educational and social credentials’,2 not least an
enviable New England pedigree. At Harvard he undertook the trad-
itional classical curriculum and developed particular interests in
French literature and German philosophy. He also began to write
poetry. After graduation he continued his education in Paris, making
a thorough study of the Romance languages, and later in Berlin
where he learnt German. His friend Edith Wharton described him
as ‘an admirable linguist, a good ‘‘Grecian’’, a sensitive lover of the
arts, and possessed, on the whole, of the fullest general ‘‘culture’’
I have ever known in a youth of his age’.3
Recoiling from the materialism of his ‘Proper Bostonian’4 ancestry,
Lodge chose to pursue the decadent Brahmin life, to which he was
temperamentally better suited, becoming what Martin Green has
called a Boston aesthete, one who ‘renounced responsibility for social
and political reality—resigned it to the philistines’;5 and, as an
alternative, placed a premium on intellectuality and aestheticism
for their own sakes. His choice was not inevitable. Apart from his
father, the formative inXuences on his life were his father’s closest
friends, William Sturgis Bigelow and Theodore Roosevelt. The car-
eers of these two men presented to young Lodge widely diverging
examples to follow, something, in fact, of a Heraklean dilemma. A
convert to Buddhism, the eVete and eccentric Bigelow represented
the Brahmin life in its purest, if most decadent, form—the life of
withdrawal. In complete contrast, Roosevelt was an exponent of, and
evangelist for, the life of immersion, the life of manly action and
strenuous toil in the open country. Despite his sympathy with Roo-
sevelt’s rugged idealism, and his own robust appearance, Lodge
ultimately aspired to the intellectual triumphs of the sequestered

2 Galinsky (1972), 218. 3 Wharton (1910), 236–9, at 236.

4 Crowley (1976), 17 deWnes ‘Proper Bostonians’ as ‘families whose social position
resulted not so much from their MayXower ancestry or their intellectual distinction as
from their commercial success’.
5 Green (1966), 151.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 255
man of thought rather than the vigorous triumphs of the public man
of action. Withdrawal and alienation became for him both an ideal
and an obsession, his way of doing battle with the plutocracy and
philistinism he associated with Boston society and with modern
civilization generally. ‘The world cannot be fought with its own
weapons’, he wrote to his mother in August 1896. ‘David fought
Goliath with a sling, and the only way to kill the world is to Wght it
with one’s own toy sword or sling, and deny strenuously contact
with, or participation in, the power it cherishes.’6
While in Paris, during the spring of 1896, Lodge and his close
friend and fellow ‘Harvard Poet’ Trumbull Stickney founded the
Conservative Christian Anarchist Party, more ‘as a playful intellectual
pose than a rigorous philosophy’.7 For Stickney and his party replace-
ment Henry Adams, Conservative Christian Anarchism remained an
essentially whimsical doctrine, an illusory attempt to impose philo-
sophical order on a chaotic world, but, according to Crowley, Lodge
redeWned it as a serious programme of ethical rebellion:
Although Adams came to see man as a dwarfed and impotent manikin whose
destiny was blindly ordained by forces beyond his control and perhaps his
understanding, Lodge asserted the power of the individual will (or soul) to
shape its own destiny and to reclaim man’s divine inheritance. Using Conser-
vative Christian Anarchism as both a rationale and a rationalization for his
estrangement from society, Lodge transformed Adams’s passive construct into
a plan of action.8
Central to Lodge’s plan of action, and informing all his subsequent
work, was the Nietzschean concept of ‘overcoming’ and a belief in the
principle of self-divinity.
Lodge Wrst expounded his revised theory of Conservative Christian
Anarchism in the novel Mediocracy (1901), where he argued that human
individuality and divine potentiality had been consumed in a process of
‘artiWcial selection’ whereby the ‘Wttest’ were determined by economic
rather than natural criteria. This process had given rise to a ‘Mediocracy’,
a classless society driven by mediocrity and commercialism, and repre-
sented by the ‘Social or Conservative Man’ who, under the guise of
Christianity, practised a morality of aZuence. The antithesis of the

6 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 33–4. 7 Ibid. 50. 8 Ibid. 51–2.

256 Herakles’ apotheosis
‘Social or Conservative Man’ was the ‘Eccentric or Anarchist’, one who
rebelled against the current unnatural order by alienating himself from
it and asserting his full humanity and, therefore, his innate divinity.
Lodge’s anarchism was both elitist and anti-political; its ultimate goal
was not mass revolution but the evolution of ‘True’ values among an
intellectual and cultural elite. He cast himself in the role of the alienated
‘poet anarchist’, ‘a prophet-seer who chanted the ‘‘Truth’’ to an indiVer-
ent or hostile society’.9
From this point, the persistent theme of Lodge’s poetry was tran-
scendence. As Henry Adams observed, ‘the thought was ever the same:
the soul of Man was the soul of God’.10 The thought is summarized in
‘The Song of Man’ (1902),11 which contains a hymn in praise of the
human deity and absolute, transcendental self-suYciency:
For my God is the friend that I cherish, and my God is the woman I love,
My God is the Spring on the hillsides, the Sea and the marvel thereof,
My God is the justice of sunlight unhindered by power or pelf,
And vast beyond all and inclusive of all things, my God is Myself!
(i. 227)12
In 1906 Lodge took advantage of two quite diVerent public occasions
to declaim his superhuman philosophy. Having been invited to
deliver a poem before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa
Society, he produced ‘The Soul’s Inheritance’, in which he envisioned
the awakening and emancipation of the divine self:
We know not when, from carnal lethargies
And trivial pastimes and derisive dreams

9 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 60. 10 Adams (1911), 156.

11 Cf. Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’ from Leaves of Grass (1855), esp. ‘I
celebrate myself, and sing myself . . . Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy
whatever I touch or am j touched from, j The scent of these armpits aroma Wner than
prayer, j This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. j If I worship one
thing more than another it shall be the spread of my j own body, or any part of it, j
Translucent mold of me it shall be you! . . . I too am not a bit tamed, I too am
untranslatable, j I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’ Lodge held
Leaves of Grass to be almost a sacred text. He cast Whitman (1819–92) as the model of
the alienated poet and dedicated his Poems (1899–1902) to him. According to
Crowley (1976), 49: ‘Ignoring Whitman’s hopes for a democratic American poetry,
Lodge interpreted him as a prophet of Conservative Christian Anarchism.’
12 This and all subsequent references to Lodge’s poems and dramas are to the
volume and page numbers in Lodge (1911).
 Herakles’ apotheosis 257
Of ineVectual felicities,
Irresolutions and timidities
And temperate ambitions, we shall wake
To Wnd our safe exclusions overborne,
The pale of our defence invaded, all
Our precincts of secure retreat destroyed;
To feel the dark enchantments yield; to hear
Thy trumpets blowing in our citadels.
(ii. 89)
A few months later he was invited to deliver a poem about the
Pilgrims at the annual meeting of the New England Society in New
York. He used the literal journey of the Pilgrims as an analogy for the
soul’s mystical pilgrimage towards the Wnal vision of the truth:
May we with haughtier strength and hardihood
Send forth the vagrant and victorious soul
From dreams and desolate insanities
And gross deceptions of the solid world,
Into the shining light, on to the Road!
(ii. 100)
As these verses indicate, the soul’s awakening into transcendental
glory is not a gentle awakening. For Lodge, as Conservative Christian
Anarchist, the realization of the divine self and the attainment of true
freedom and self-suYciency are predicated on struggle and sacriWce.
Transcendence requires alienation and severance from all that the
world has to oVer, including the best it has to oVer—the tenderness
and comfort of home and family. The creation of the divine self is
only possible through the annihilation of the domestic and depen-
dent self. In his verse plays Cain (1904) and Herakles (1908), Lodge
transformed the Conservative Christian Anarchist idea of sacriWcial
severance into myth. He reinterpreted Cain’s crime of fratricide and
Herakles’ crime of Wlicide as redemptive acts, necessary to free
humanity from ignorance and slavish faith.
Lodge’s freethinking and rebellious Cain, recognizing his indwell-
ing divinity, urges his brother Abel to relinquish his submissive trust
in God and to seek instead ‘the soul’s inheritance’, ‘thy crown’, ‘thy
liberty’. When Abel refuses, Cain murders him to prevent the en-
slavement of future generations:
258 Herakles’ apotheosis
How shall I suVer that such a traitor live
When by his life the future world is doomed
To stumble in the shadow of ignorance
Stung by the lash of self-inXicted fears?
Shall I not rather with violence even and death
Safeguard the treasure in jeopardy and keep
Flawless the sacred seed?
(i. 317)
Exiled by Adam and by God, Cain accepts his solitary mission and is
consoled by Eve’s understanding and blessing: ‘Go forth, go forth,
lonely and godlike man!’
The resolute inhumanity of the transcendent superhuman is pre-
sented nowhere more explicitly or agonizingly than in Lodge’s Herakles,
in which the Greek hero emerges, through reasoned violence and
purgative madness, as the archetypal Conservative Christian Anarchist.
At 272 pages almost equal in length to all the rest of his writings
together, Herakles was Lodge’s most ambitious composition and, over
three years of intensive work, it became his raison d’être. Although he
claimed indiVerence to the poem’s popular success, and anticipated
only half-a-dozen readers, in writing the Herakles Lodge was driven by
an acute need for personal fulWlment, focusing all his aspirations on its
completion. From late 1907, having developed a serious heart condi-
tion, he was also driven by the spectre of his own mortality. At that time
he conWded in a letter to his friend Langdon Mitchell: ‘I’ve been a little
fussed about my heart taken in connection with the fact that my
‘‘Heracles’’—which signiWes such endless things to me—is only just
three quarters done.’13 This endless personal signiWcance was attested to
by the Florentine critic Pavolini, who saw concentrated in Lodge’s
Herakles ‘all the force of his thought, his conception of the world of
man, all the mystic ardor of his soul, all the force and grace and
splendor of his poetry’.14 From Lodge’s own words it is clear that he
perceived himself as a Herakles Wgure, struggling towards autarkic
divinity, and that his magnum opus was both a reXection and a
resolution of the conXict in his life between contented domesticity
and the restless expectancy of the poet anarchist. He wrote to Mitchell,
lamenting his lack of time and solitariness in trying to Wnish Herakles:

13 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 95. 14 Pavolini (1913), 400–8, at 402.

 Herakles’ apotheosis 259
‘I feel terribly hampered & thwarted by the many little things of daily
life & social life. The anchorites & the Solitaries had in them much
wisdom & the time is near when I shall crudely sacriWce everything
including my family to preserve that retirement, that spaciousness &
even Xow of Time which must be had if the voice of God within me is to
be heard.’15
Bypassing completely Euripides’ treatment of the myth, Lodge
based his Herakles on the account provided by Diodorus Siculus
(4.10–11 and 15), in which the madness and Wlicide precede the labours.
An extract from this account prefaces the main action of the drama,
which is divided into twelve scenes. To the mythical dramatis personae
(Herakles, Megara, Creon, Alcmena, Iolaus, Teiresias, the Pythia, and
Prometheus) are added the symbolic characters of the Poet and the
Woman, with whom the drama opens. Their function is akin to that of
the Greek tragic chorus. They also serve as a sub-plot or an epitome of
the central Heraklean quest. The Poet has travelled to Thebes from his
native Athens, forsaking carnal love and meretricious beauty, in search
of the light of spiritual perfection. The Woman initially ridicules his
solemn stance, but is soon converted to his quest. Pavolini likens this
Wrst scene to ‘an overture in which is presented the leading motive of the
opera; the spirit which is seeking for the inner light’.16
In the second scene King Creon has assembled his people to
witness his abdication in favour of his son-in-law, Herakles. Creon
is the archetypal ‘Social or Conservative Man’, a being of supreme
worldliness, and, as such, he is entirely rebuVed by Herakles who will
not be forestalled, in his search for the soul’s inheritance, by the
unsolicited burden of temporal responsibility:
I will be Lord of none,
And thus unto myself be Lord and Law!
I, with the soul’s immortal thirst to slake,
How shall I down into the shallow stream
Where beasts and many men have drunk together
And left foul waters strangled in their course?
(ii. 208–9)
The hero is roused to deWant anger by the same force that inspires Cain
to rebel, by what Henry Adams describes as an ‘unshaped, mystical
15 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 90. 16 Pavolini (1913), 400–8, at 403.
260 Herakles’ apotheosis
consciousness of a destiny to become the Savior, not the Servant,—the
creator, not the economist,—the source itself, not the conduit for
‘‘these safe human mediocrities’’ ’.17 In renouncing Creon, Herakles is
also dissociating himself from common humanity:
The Xorid animal
Which laughs and longs, is pleasured and distressed,
The heart that feels and feigns, that faints and dreams,
That sorrows and is glad—the facile brain
That schemes and lies and is alert to seize
Success and is ambitious of no more
Than serviceable ingenuity
Can aptly compass—that supremely serves
To methodize the waste of the world’s work
To proWtable order and endow
Life’s labor with a seeming worth and end—
These are not I.
(ii. 209)
As Adams notes, the climax of Herakles’ quest is built ‘from the
ground,—that is to say, from the family, which is always the Wrst
sacriWce in these mystical ideals of the Savior’.18 The sacriWce is
foreshadowed in the fourth scene by a tableau of gentle domesticity.
Herakles listens as Megara sings to their three sleeping children:
My children sleep, whose lives fulWl
The soul’s tranquillity and trust;
While clothed in life’s immortal dust
The patient earth lies dark and still. . . .
For yesterday is all we are,
Tomorrow all we yet shall be;
The end is where no eye can see . . .
We only know the way is far!
We only know men grow and grieve
And die . . . And death is strange and sore!
O sleep, my darlings, sleep!—before
The time returns to wake—to live!
(ii. 228)

17 Adams (1911), 168. 18 Ibid. 169.

 Herakles’ apotheosis 261
Megara’s lullaby signiWes resignation to the great mystery that lies
beyond the limits of human understanding, to the familiar cycle of
birth and death. For Herakles, resignation is a forfeiture of the soul’s
inheritance, a failure to fulWl spiritual potential. He does not seek the
‘soul’s tranquillity and trust’, but the perfection of the enfranchised
soul. His journey begins with a katabasis. In search of some sign of
his true identity and destiny, he enters the city’s nocturnal under-
world, a tavern frequented by thieves and prostitutes. There, in a
scene redolent of Mary Magdalene’s recognition of the resurrected
Jesus,19 he is recognized by the Woman as the Light and the Re-
deemer. The Woman begs to follow him, but Herakles declares:
‘There are no followers j Nor captains on the soul’s eternal quest!’
He thus determines to lead a life of alienation and withdrawal.
Herakles’ planned withdrawal is foiled, however, by the arrival of
Eurystheus’ messenger, bringing the order to submit to the King of
Argos and the gods, and to perform the imposed labours. For
Herakles, as an embryonic superhuman, the labours are an intoler-
able impediment to his personal transcendental quest, as they de-
mand from him both servitude and altruism. He is the antithesis of
Euripides’ hero who, Barlow says, is motivated by ‘no narrow per-
sonal vision but a beneWcent mission to mankind as a whole’.20 Here
we can see Nietzsche’s inXuence on Lodge. In Thus Spake Zarathustra
(Also sprach Zarathustra), the Persian sage cautions the Higher Men
not to sacriWce their self-seeking creative mission for the selXess,
cooperative values of lesser men:
Do not let yourselves be imposed upon or put upon! Who then is your
neighbour? Even if ye act ‘for your neighbour’—ye still do not create for him!
Unlearn, I pray you, this ‘for,’ ye creating ones: your very virtue wisheth
you to have naught to do with ‘for’ and ‘on account of ’ and ‘because.’
Against these false little words shall ye stop your ears.

19 Lodge, in fact, viewed Jesus Christ as a Messiah for Conservative Christian

Anarchism, who, forsaken by God on the cross, trusted in the divine power he found
within himself. The dedication of Cain read: ‘To the deathless memory of jesus of
nazareth seer and sayer of truth who was believed only by the poor and outcast,
who was recognized by all reputable and respectable people as the avowed enemy of
law, order and religion, and who was at last brought to his death by the priesthood of
the orthodox church through the operation of the established courts of social justice,
this poem is inscribed with measureless love’ (i. 231).
20 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 17.
262 Herakles’ apotheosis
‘For one’s neighbour,’ is the virtue only of the petty people: there it is said
‘like and like,’ and ‘hand washeth hand’:—they have neither the right nor the
power for your self-seeking!
In your self-seeking, ye creating ones, there is the foresight and foreseeing
of the pregnant! What no one’s eye hath yet seen, namely, the fruit—this,
sheltereth and saveth and nourisheth your entire love.
Where your entire love is, namely, with your child, there is also your entire
virtue! Your work, your will is your ‘neighbour’: let no false values impose
upon you! (4. 73. 11)21
The other impediment to Herakles’ self-seeking quest has not yet
become apparent to him. He is, at this point, still bound to domestic
life, believing his family will share in his ultimate achievement:
This is the loveliest and most beautiful
Of all good fortune of man’s mortal life:
Surely it shall not for the truth’s sake pass
Out of the sum of real prosperities!
Rather my loved ones and my love shall share,
Always with me and to whatever end,
The days and ways of the enfranchised soul.
(ii. 274–5)
He does not understand the true cost of his soul’s transcendent
destiny, even when it is prophesied by Teiresias:
For all his life is lost to save his life;
And all he loved is sacriWced and slain
To make love pure and perfect in his heart!
(ii. 333)
The ninth scene takes place before and within the Temple of Apollo
at Delphi, where Herakles, full of anger and doubt, has gone to discover
from the oracle his true identity. There he drags the Pythoness from her
Tripod and tears asunder the veil that covers the image of God, to Wnd
the sanctuary empty. It is a moment of self-epiphany; Herakles Wnally
recognizes that the God is within him, that he is the only God. He also
comprehends the full meaning of Teiresias’ prophecy, that the cost of
self-divinity is violent severance of his cherished earthly attachments.
The Pythia explains to Herakles the ordeal awaiting him:
21 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 356–7.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 263
Life’s perfected metamorphosis
From man to God shall hardly come to pass
Save in exceeding travail and grief and pain.
Only in anguish man is born again,
Other and more and mightier than he was! . . .
Only with strange and tragic ecstasies
Of body and being, mind and heart,
Life’s human chrysalis
Is torn asunder, and ruined, and rent apart,
To loose man’s winged divinity
Into the light of truth, the skies of liberty!
(ii. 359–60)
Before Herakles resolves to fulWl his spiritual destiny, the God and the
man within him engage in one last struggle. Like Jesus in the Garden
of Gethsemane, he contemplates in anguished solitude the bitterness
of his cup, his impending sacriWce:
Life is a bitter thing to lose, and love
And home and wife and child and happiness
And rest and the contentment of mild joys
And small achievements and brief brilliant glories:—
These all are welcome and pleasurable things,
And bitter things to lose! . . . And know you well
It is a bitter thing to go adrift,
Companionless and without pause or end,
Into the vast dark spaces of the soul;—
To dwell, sense-stripped and naked to the core,
In the chill heights of man’s divinity!
(ii. 359)
The struggle ends with Herakles overcoming his human self and
asserting his remorseless, unstoppable divinity in an explosion of
autarkic ecstasy:
I am resolved to death, to tears and blood,
To desolation and intolerable
Bereavement,—to the worst that needs must be!
And to the best, to new nativities,
I am resolved! And I will stand apart,
Naked and perfect in my solitude,
264 Herakles’ apotheosis
Aloft in the clear light perpetually,—
Having aVorded to the uttermost
The blood-stained, tear-drenched ransom of the soul!
(ii. 363–4)
Filled with the power of that assertion, Herakles returns home and,
in scene 10, proceeds to act out ‘the logical insanity of the Conser-
vative Christian Anarchist: murder for the sake of life’,22 and, as
Adams remarks, ‘the insanity of Herakles surpassed all other insan-
ities, as the CruciWxion of Christ surpassed all other cruciWxions’.23
Ignoring the tender remonstrations of his wife and mother, Herakles
kills his children one by one as they scream for mercy, thereby
completing ‘One violent and intolerable deed j Of sacriWce’ in the
name of his newly discovered Godhead. He collapses before he can
strike Megara with his sword. When he reappears in scene 11, he
intones a psalm of rebirth, recalling Jesus’ assurance to Martha before
raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11: 21–7):
I am the madman; and the murderer
I am; and I am Herakles; and I,
I am the Resurrection and the Life,
I am the Soul, whose inmost virtue is
Thus to outlive destruction and return,
Valid with Truth’s perennial victory!
(ii. 407)
The allegorical interpretation of Herakles’ frenzied slaughter of his
sons as a sacriWcial deed, essential to spiritual perfection and incom-
prehensible to ordinary humanity, was not original to Lodge. It
appears 500 years earlier in Coluccio Salutati’s De Laboribus Herculis,
where the Wlicide is justiWed as the soul’s victory over earthly pre-
occupation and sin.24 In sacriWcing his children, Lodge’s Herakles is
also accomplishing the superlative evil peculiar to the Nietzschean
Superman. ‘Man must become better and eviler’, counsels Zarathus-
tra. ‘The evilest is necessary for the Superman’s best’ (4. 73. 5).25
‘Only the soul survives’ the sacriWcial carnage. Reborn and invul-
nerable, Herakles ordains himself ‘the future and the hope of man’, and

22 Crowley (1976), 102. 23 Adams (1911), 175. 24 See above, Chap. 3.

25 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 353. Cf. Lodge’s Herakles: ‘I am resol-
ved . . . to the worst that needs must be! j And to the best.’
 Herakles’ apotheosis 265
now willingly undertakes the labours in order to free his people from
their slavery to false gods, to raise humanity to the level of divinity:
Therefore the Labours!—for the soul must strive,
The God must serve, until His virtue is,
In man’s degraded being and abject heart,
In man’s deformed, incurious, haunted mind,
In man’s gross greed and dull brutalities,
Illustrious and exempliWed!—till truth,
Loved and proclaimed, at last is lived and known!
(ii. 420)
The twelfth scene, which Adams designates the ‘Prometheus Un-
bound’,26 represents Herakles’ Wnal labour as the liberation of Pro-
metheus from his Caucasian torment. Herakles frees Prometheus by
dispelling the myth of God, which was fashioned from human fear
and immaturity, and proclaiming the new theology:
Now we have looked abroad and looked within,
Straining the symbol, and we learn to know,
Quietly and at last, its secret sense,
Shadowed and insuYciently set forth,
Is, in the meaning and the truth, ourselves!—
We are the Gods!
(ii. 443)
In his enlightened state, Prometheus realizes that his chains, like the
God whom he deWed, were insubstantial, and he gains ‘the freedom
to become Free.’
Prometheus Unbound represents the logical conclusion of Lodge’s
philosophy, the dramatic climax of his faith,27 but, as readers, we are
left with the stark image of the Man-God’s desolate achievement. In
an essay on the uses made of the Promethean legend by three young
American poets of the turn of the twentieth century (Trumball
Stickney, William Vaughn Moody, and George Cabot Lodge), Tho-
mas Riggs comments on the immense void confronting Lodge’s
apotheosized Cain and Herakles: ‘At the points at which the heroes

26 Adams (1911), 178.

27 Silk and Stern (1981), 296, note: ‘The suVering hero of Greek tragedy, Oedipus
or Prometheus, is the original model for Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the superman.’
266 Herakles’ apotheosis
are depicted as having achieved their release, their perfect self-
discoveries and self-realizations, the poems are empty. The envisaged
goal is without content. The moment of apotheosis which Cain and
Herakles approach through disciplines of destruction turns out to be
little after all: their souls are inWnite, God is dead. In the slaughter of
deity they are left alone and bleak against stark scenery.’28 Herakles as
Conservative Christian Anarchist is a celebration of Nietzschean
overcoming, but this celebration is ultimately as bleak as Seneca’s
despairing portrait of Herculean overreaching. The proximity of
Lodge’s hero to Seneca’s overreacher is discernible in GeoVrey Miles’s
critique of Senecan Hercules’ superhuman quest for self-perfection:
‘Hercules embodies in extreme form the aspirations of Senecan
Stoicism: immovability, self-consistency, superiority to fortune, god-
like self-perfection. He shows what happens when these aspirations
are taken to their logical conclusion. In the process constancy be-
comes detached from normal Stoic moral values, and ‘‘authenticity
of self ’’ becomes an end in itself.’29

‘ T H E WAV E S H AV E M A S T E R E D H I M ’

Lodge claimed, probably defensively, that he wrote Herakles for his

‘inside ring’, a select circle of literary friends whom he felt ‘would
understand its secrets and liberties’.30 To his sorrow, this privileged
audience received the poem with muted enthusiasm and some per-
plexity. A Wrst edition of more than 200 copies was made available to
the public and a few reviews appeared nationally, but, with the
exception of scene 10 (the Wlicide), Herakles was generally criticized
as lifeless and repetitive. Ironically, this most private of poems
became the Wrst of Lodge’s works to enter a second edition, although
its appeal was mainly conWned to what Lodge warily regarded as a
crank element in American poetry’s small readership. Lodge resigned
himself, as alienated prophet-seer, to ‘singing in a vacuum’. However,
in spite of his sense of failure and isolation, he was not alone among

28 Riggs (1951), 399–423, at 421–2. 29 Miles (1996), 61.

30 Crowley (1976), 105.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 267
Modernist writers in his allegorical treatment of the madness of
Herakles, in portraying the madness as a precondition of Nietzschean
overcoming. A brief analysis of two roughly contemporary plays,
which, unlike Lodge’s Herakles, were written for the stage, will reveal
a more widely evolving interest in the tragic Herakles and his rela-
tionship to Nietzsche’s Superman.
On 27 December 1904 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin opened as the
permanent home of the Irish National Theatre Society. The occasion
was marked by the première of W.B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand, the Wrst
(and most frequently revived) of a cycle of Wve plays featuring the
mythical Celtic warrior Cuchulain.31 Yeats (1865–1939) conceived
Cuchulain as the central Irish myth, and, as Maeve Good points out,
since the poet’s preoccupation with Cuchulain ‘spans almost his
entire career, Yeats’s attitude and presentation of the hero necessarily
alters and develops’.32 Fiona Macintosh has described the Cuchulain
of On Baile’s Strand as ‘the Nietzschean tragic hero, whose deWance
we rejoice at, and yet, whose annihilation vindicates a higher neces-
sity’, concluding that he is ‘a problematic and dangerous hero for
modern Ireland to inherit’.33 We also have here Cuchulain in his role
as the ‘Irish Herakles’.34 On Baile’s Strand is Yeats’s most Nietzschean
play35 and his most Heraklean. It is a potently compressed exposition
of the sort of Heraklean quest dramatized by Lodge, a quest that
culminates in sacriWcial Wlicide and madness.
Yeats had originally treated the subject of Cuchulain’s killing of his
son and subsequent madness in a narrative poem, ‘Cuchulain’s Fight
with the Sea’ (Wrst printed in 1892), but the more immediate inspir-
ation for On Baile’s Strand was the story ‘The Only Son of Aoife’

31 The rest of the cycle included The Green Helmet (1910, revised from The Golden
Helmet of 1908), At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and
The Death of Cuchulain (1939). The plays were not written or produced in chrono-
logical order in terms of the myth.
32 Good (1987), 11.
33 Macintosh (1994), 18.
34 Celtic scholars have regularly compared the myth of Cuchulain to the myth of
Herakles, focusing particularly on aspects such as the descent into hell, and the
imposition and successful accomplishment of impossible tasks. In 1888 John Rhys
identiWed Cuchulain with Herakles by making them both sun-gods. See Macintosh
(1994), 11.
35 On the inXuence of Nietzsche on Yeats, see Good (1987), 75–80 and Donoghue
(1989), 38–48.
268 Herakles’ apotheosis
from Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Lady Gregory’s translation of
the old Gaelic saga-epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley).
In ‘The Only Son of Aoife’, Cuchulain is aware that he has fathered a
child with Aoife. That child, Connla, has been raised by Aoife for the
purpose of carrying out her revenge on Cuchulain for his marriage to
Emer. Connla lands at Baile’s Strand under strict command not to
divulge his identity on any account. But when he is challenged by
Cuchulain, and lies dying from his wounds, he reveals himself to his
father, who is overcome by grief. Conchubar, the high king, a negli-
gible presence in the story until this point, sees the Wlicidal Cuchulain
as a threat to the kingdom, and, out of fear, bids Cathbad, the Druid,
to put an enchantment on the hero, binding him ‘to go down to
Baile’s Strand, and give three days Wghting against the waves of the
sea, rather than kill us all.’
Where Lady Gregory emphasized the tragic consequences of Aoife’s
consuming hatred, Yeats explores a tragic code of heroism. He intro-
duces a sub-plot involving the Blind Man and the Fool, who function
as grotesque shadows of Conchubar and Cuchulain. He makes Cuchu-
lain unaware that he has left Aoife with child, and removes the scene in
which Connla reveals his identity, leaving Cuchulain to discover the
truth from the Blind Man. His explanation for Cuchulain’s desperate
battle against the waves is madness and not a druidical spell. By 1906
Yeats had completely rewritten the Wrst half of On Baile’s Strand, up to
the entrance of the Young Man. The revisions he made brought to light
the story’s Heraklean echoes, namely Cuchulain’s Heraklean anagnōr-
isis and loss of self, his conXicts, both internal and external, as an
interstitial hero, and Wnally his Heraklean collapse.
In the 1906 version, ‘Yeats centres the play’s entire thematic struc-
ture squarely on the conXict between the values of Cuchulain and the
values of Conchubar’.36 These two opposing Wgures represent the
same heroic dichotomy as Lodge’s Herakles and Creon. Cuchulain
is an embryonic Superman, self-suYcient and recalcitrant. He has
killed ‘Kings and the sons of kings, j Dragons out of the water, j And
witches out of the air, j Banachas and Bonachas and people of the
woods’ (54).37 His philosophy is to ‘dance or hunt, or quarrel or

36 Skene (1974), 41.

37 This and all subsequent references to On Baile’s Strand are to the page numbers
of the 1906 version printed in Yeats (1997), 49–72.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 269
make love, j Wherever and whenever I’ve a mind to’ (54). His
unsanctioned killings, wanton largesse, and supposed childlessness
combine to make him a dangerous maverick force. For he has, as
Zarathustra instructs the Higher Men, surpassed ‘the petty virtues, the
petty policy, the sand-grain considerateness, the ant-hill trumpery,
the pitiable comfortableness, the ‘‘happiness of the greatest
number’’—!’38 Cuchulain reXects Yeats’s interest, at that time, in the
principle of self-divinity exempliWed by the Nietzschean Superman:
Yeats in 1903 found Nietzsche’s projection of such a man exhilarating. . . . It
was clearly a relief to Yeats to Wnd a structure of ideas which accommodated
the tragic hero, the Renaissance prince, the personage. Yeats’s answer to the
secularization enforced by positivist science and economics was not to assert
the sacredness of life as such, the form in which a divine will is expressed, but
to locate images of sacredness in the individual personage, the hero; a
Nietzschean alternative to the Christian saint.39
Possessive of his godlike independence, Cuchulain battles a world of
lesser men hostile to his heroic temperament. He also Wghts an
internal battle to remain constant to his self-seeking quest. Like
Lodge’s Herakles, he refuses to be responsible and altruistic, but is
thwarted by the demands of the lesser world in the shape of Con-
chubar, High King of Uladh, who requires him to take an oath of
submission to safeguard family values and the interests of Conchu-
bar’s heirs:
conchubar I would leave
A strong and settled country to my children.
cuchulain And I must be obedient in all things;
Give up my will to yours; go where you please;
Come when you call; sit at the council-board
Among the unshapely bodies of old men;
I whose mere name has kept this country safe,
I that in early days have driven out
Maeve of Cruachan and the northern pirates,
The hundred kings of Sorcha, and the kings
Out of the Garden in the East of the World.

38 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 352.

39 Donoghue (1989), 38–48, at 41.
270 Herakles’ apotheosis
Must I, that held you on the throne when all
Had pulled you from it, swear obedience
As if I were some cattle-raising king?
Are my shins speckled with the heat of the Wre,
Or have my hands no skill but to make Wgures
Upon the ashes with a stick? Am I
So slack and idle that I need a whip
Before I serve?
conchubar No, no whip, Cuchulain,
But every day my children come and say:
‘This man is growing harder to endure.
How can we be at safety with this man
That nobody can buy or bid or bind?
We shall be at his mercy when you are gone;
He burns the earth as if he were a Wre,
And time can never touch him.’
(54–5)
Like Lodge’s Creon, Conchubar is a wily politician, tied to matters
temporal, and concerned, above all, with material security and the
greater good. Cuchulain resists his power because, as Yeats later
declared in A Vision (1925; revised version 1937), the heroic nature
‘is conscious of the most extreme degree of deception, and is wrought
to a frenzy of desire for truth of self ’.
The masked characters of the Fool and the Blind Man40 are in
some sense equivalent to Lodge’s Eternal Woman and Eternal Poet;
their initial dialogue foreshadows symbolically the crucial argument
between Cuchulain and Conchubar, whose relationship they mimic.
The Blind Man, resting on Conchubar’s throne, symbolizes the
King’s wiliness and worldliness, while the Fool is his labouring,
risk-taking dupe. In a letter outlining his heroic image of Cuchulain,
Yeats makes explicit the parallel between the Cuchulain–Conchubar
opposition and the Fool–Blind Man opposition: ‘The touch of
something hard, repellent yet alluring, self-assertive yet self-immol-
ating, is not all but it must be there. He is the fool—wandering
passive, houseless and almost loveless. Conchubar is reason that is

40 The Fool and Blind Man were originally given the names Barach and Fintain
respectively; these were omitted in the 1906 version, presumably to stress the char-
acters’ symbolic importance.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 271
blind because it can only reason because it is cold. Are they not the
hot sun and the cold moon?’41
Cuchulain eventually agrees to take the oath, betraying his heroic
code and his ‘desire for truth of self ’. But his submission entails more
than a betrayal of self; it precipitates the destruction of self. As a
token of obedience, Conchubar insists that he meet the challenge of
the young stranger out of Aoife’s country. Cuchulain takes the Young
Man for a worthy ally and surrogate son:
Boy, I would meet them all in arms
If I’d a son like you. He would avenge me
When I have withstood for the last time the men
Whose fathers, brothers, sons, and friends I have killed
Upholding Conchubar, when the four provinces
Have gathered with the ravens over them.
But I’d need no avenger. You and I
Would scatter them like water from a dish.
(65–6)
He violently refuses to do the King’s bidding, but cries of ‘witchcraft’
from the assembled court compel him to draw his sword and unwit-
tingly kill his only child. Recalling the anagnōrisis of Euripides’ Herakles,
Cuchulain discovers the identity of his victim gradually and painfully:
blind man He was a queen’s son.
cuchulain What queen? what queen? [Seizes Blind Man, who is now
sitting upon the bench.] Was it Scathach? There were many queens. All
the rulers there were queens.
blind man No, not Scathach.
cuchulain It was Uathach, then? Speak! speak!
blind man I cannot speak; you are clutching me too tightly. [Cuchulain
lets him go.] I cannot remember who it was. I am not certain. It was
some queen.
fool He said a while ago that the young man was Aoife’s son.
cuchulain She? No, no! She had no son when I was there.
fool That Blind Man there said that she owned him for her son.
cuchulain I had rather he had been some other woman’s son. What
father had he? A soldier out of Alba? She was an amorous woman—a
proud, pale, amorous woman.

41 Repr. in Wade (1954), 425.

272 Herakles’ apotheosis
blind man None knew whose son he was.
cuchulain None knew! Did you know, old listener at doors?
blind man No, no; I knew nothing.
fool He said a while ago that he heard Aoife boast that she’d never
but the one lover, and he the only man that had overcome her in battle.
[Pause.]
blind man Somebody is trembling, Fool! The bench is shaking. Why are
you trembling? Is Cuchulain going to hurt us? It was not I who told
you, Cuchulain.
fool It is Cuchulain who is trembling. It is Cuchulain who is
shaking the bench.
blind man It is his own son he has slain.
(70)
With this discovery, Cuchulain is seized by madness. He rushes
down to the sea and strikes at the waves with his sword, imagining
Conchubar’s crown on each foaming crest. His frenzied battle with
the waves has strong overtones of Herakles’ hallucinatory rampage.
As the Fool sounds his death-knell, he is Wnally subsumed by the
power of the sea:
There, he is down! He is up again. He is going out in the deep water. There is a
big wave. It has gone over him. I cannot see him now. He has killed kings and
giants, but the waves have mastered him, the waves have mastered him! (71)
The waves’ mastery signiWes Cuchulain’s physical defeat, but an apothe-
osis and spiritual rebirth are implied.42 The hero achieves the elemental,
inoculative fury out of which the Nietzschean Superman is born:
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with
which ye should be inoculated?
Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!— . . .
I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman,
the lightning out of the dark cloud—man.43

42 SigniWcantly, in his critique of Lodge’s Herakles Pavolini (1913, 400–8, at 408)

recalls a verse from Lodge’s Wrst poem: ‘This is the song of the wave, that j died in the
fullness of life.’ He then concludes, ‘Has not Cankara, the greatest theologian of India,
already said in a strophe worthy of a poet: ‘‘There is no diversity of essence between
thee and me, O Lord; I am thine but thou art not mine; because the wave is of the sea
but the sea is not of the wave.’’ ’
43 Nietzsche (1883), in Levy (1909), xi. 9, 16.
 Herakles’ apotheosis 273

H ERAK LES AS SUPER HUMAN MISFIT

In common with Euripides and Lodge, Frank Wedekind’s interest in

Herakles is centred on the internal conXict of the theios anēr. Euripides’
resolves this conXict by destroying the god and elevating the man. In an
exact reversal of Euripides, Lodge dramatizes a Nietzschean apotheosis,
Herakles’ realization of self-divinity. For Wedekind (1864–1918), a
deWnitive resolution is unattainable. His Herakles is aware from the
outset of his divine inheritance, and engages in a desperate struggle to
ascertain his human identity and to achieve domestic happiness and
earthly fulWlment. He is the ultimate outsider, an interstitial hero or
‘superhuman misWt’44 who Wnds communion and solace only in death.
Although divided into three acts, Wedekind’s Herakles is actually a
series of twelve individual scenes or ‘Stationem’, resembling in struc-
ture the mystery plays which dealt with the stations of Christ’s Passion
and the Resurrection. According to Galinsky, Wedekind ‘deliberately
chose this form to underline its inverted content’.45 Herakles is unwill-
ing to fulWl a Christlike destiny, to assume the role of Saviour. The
stations of his passion are essentially diVerent. As Ward B. Lewis states,
the prologue, delivered by the god Hermes in his role as psychopompos
(conductor of souls to the nether world), prepares us for ‘the dramatic
representation of a human fate; it is that of Hercules, a bastard between
men and gods, a mortal with divine gifts who struggles for human
happiness but fails to gain the love of mankind’.46 Hermes makes clear
to his audience that what he is about to present is not a celebration of
the superhuman Herakles, but rather the universal tragedy of a ‘driven
soul’, whose godly deeds are the measure of his human failure and
ultimately devoid of meaning:
Der Götterbote, der die Seelen leitet,
Heißt eure Seelen, wenn sie’s sind, willkommen.
Er kommt, euch eine Seele vorzuführen,
Die des Geschickes weitste Spur durchmaß.
Was er an Taten tat, der Gottbegabte,
Der Hohnbeladene, bleibt abgetan.

44 Galinsky (1972), 237. 45 Ibid. 236–7. 46 Lewis (1997), 131.

274 Herakles’ apotheosis
Der Löwe von Nemea und der Ebe
Vom Erymanthos und der Artemis
Behende Hirschkuh und die Rinderherden
Des Augias und die Stymphalidenvögel
Und König Diomedes Rosse und
Der Stier von Kreta und der Drache Ladon
Und selbst der Höllenhund—seid ohne Furcht,
Kein Tier beleidigt euren klugen Sinn.
Befürchtet ihr, daß toller Mummenschanz
Den Sinn mit Zimbelklang und Paukenschlägen
Betäubt und langweilt?—Stiege Hermes nieder,
Bedenkt es selbst, solch Schauspiel zu verkünden?
Was lichtscheu sich in Busch, Ruinen, Höhlen
Auf Erden birgt, gelobt sich meinem Schutz.
Auch wer die Schranken mit Gewalt durchbrach,
Die zwischen Mensch und Mensch gezogen, mir
Vertraut er sich. Aus Stoßgebeten kenn ich
Das wilde Flackern der gehetzten Seelen.
Oh, fürchtet nimmer, daß mit solcher Kenntnis
Vom Ungeheuerlichen schauderndes
Erstaunen ich in euch erwecke, mit
Dem Schlangenstab auf den Gewaltigen deutend.
Nur was vor abertausend Jahren war,
Nur was in abertausend Jahren sein wird,
Nur was entsteht, was lebt, was sich erneut,
Nur das führ ich euch vor: Ein Menschenschicksal.
(Act i, scene i)47
The messenger of the gods, he who guides the souls, welcomes your souls, if
that’s what they are. He comes to show you a soul, one that measured the
furthest trail of fate. What deeds he performed, this divinely endowed one,
the one heaped with scorn, are shrugged oV still. The lion of Nemea and the
boar of Erymanthos and Artemis’ nimble hind and the cattle of Augias and
the Stymphalian birds and King Diomedes’ mares and the bull of Crete and
the dragon Ladon and even the hound of hell—be not afraid, no beast will
insult your good sense. Do you fear that mad masquerade will numb and
bore you with the crash of cymbal and beating of drum?—Would Hermes
descend, think you, to herald such a spectacle? That which hides in bushes,
ruins, and caves, shy of light, claims my protection. And also he who would

47 Wedekind (1964), ii. 601.

 Herakles’ apotheosis 275
violently break through the barriers erected between one human and another,
entrusts himself to me. From their fervent prayers I know the wild Xickering
of driven souls. Oh, never fear that with such knowledge of the monstrous
I will awaken in you shuddering amazement, pointing my serpent rod at the
violent one. Only that which has been for thousands of years, only that which
shall be in thousands of years to come, only that which is created, lives, and
renews itself, only this will I show you: a human fate.
Unlike Lodge’s Herakles, who does not fully understand his true
identity until his visit to Delphi in scene ix, and who must learn to think
and act like a Superman—to reject all values and concerns external to
himself—Wedekind’s hero behaves from the start as a consummate
Superman, displaying every attribute of the self-made god, including
absolute moral autonomy and lethal implacability. In true Nietzschean
fashion, he regards nothing as forbidden unless it is weakness under the
form of ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’. ‘Though mightier than [Wedekind’s] Samson,’
remarks Izenberg, ‘he is even less controlled, lustful, easily enraged.’48
When King Eurytos is defeated by Herakles in an archery contest and
reneges on his promise to give the victor his daughter Iole, Herakles
exacts revenge by murdering Eurytos’ son Iphitos. Later, furious at
Iole’s loyalty to her father, he storms the Oechalian palace, killing the
King and his three remaining sons. In another episode, Herakles cruelly
rejects his faithful wife Dejaneira because he blames her for his murder
of a Xirtatious young man who aroused his jealousy.
The tragedy of Wedekind’s Herakles lies in his very perfection and
self-suYciency as a Superman, and in his awareness, implicit in his
exchange with Apollo, of his constant failures to attain the human
worthiness and domesticity he genuinely desires:
apollo
Ist’s keine Göttergnade, Mensch zu sein?
herakles
Das will gekonnt sein. Mir gelingt es nicht.
(Act i, scene iii)49
apollo Isn’t it a god-given grace to be human?
herakles One has to be capable of being that. I’m not successful at it.
Herakles has overcome his domestic self too decisively, alienated
himself from the human community too irrevocably. He cannot
48 Izenberg (2000), 94. 49 Wedekind (1964), ii. 611.
276 Herakles’ apotheosis
contain his restless, superhuman fury, the Nietzschean insanity
which caused him to slaughter his wife and children:
eurytos
Du konntst zu Haus bei deinen Lieben dich
Erholen. Mordend überWelst du sie!
herakles
Die Wut, durch stets gewalt’gere Ungeheuer
In Herakles entfesselt, raste fort.
(Act i, scene ii)50
eurytos You could have recovered at home with your loved ones.
Instead you attacked them murderously.
herakles The fury, unleashed in Herakles by always more violent
monsters, kept on raging.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Man is deWned as something that is to be
surpassed:
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over
an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back,
a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in
man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. (1: Zarathustra’s Prologue, 4)51
For Wedekind’s superhuman Herakles, the opposite is true: the goal,
which he strives to achieve, is his perfection as Man, but he is
constrained by his unsurpassable perfection as Superman. As in
Lodge’s Herakles, the Superman’s desolate perfection is highlighted
in the play’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ segment (Act ii, scene viii).
Prometheus is the anti-Superman who, paradoxically, achieves au-
tonomy by virtue of his selXessness. In contrast to Herakles, whose
labours were self-assertive demonstrations of merely physical super-
iority, Prometheus’ art and altruism have invested his suVering with
real meaning. Before he departs to free Prometheus, an act Wedekind
characterizes as entirely self-serving, Herakles weighs this test of
physical strength against the greater test of moral strength confront-
ing the Superman in his bid for simple human dignity and freedom:

50 Wedekind (1964), ii. 605. 51 Nietzsche (1883), in Levy (1909), xi. 9.

 Herakles’ apotheosis 277
Mein SchiV!—So freud- und ruhmlos ist kein Kampf
Wie der um schlichte Menschenwürde. Kräfte
Verschlingt der Kampf, sie reichten aus, Prometheus
Vom Kaukasus zu reißen!
(Act ii, scene vii)52
My ship!—No struggle is as joyless and infamous as the one for simple
human dignity. The struggle consumes my powers, but they suYce to drag
Prometheus from the Caucasus.
In the Wnal two scenes Herakles achieves a type of freedom in his
autarkic death, and domesticity of a sensual Olympian variety in his
marriage to Hebe. But the purpose of the play’s ending is not to rejoice
at Herakles’ transcendence; it is to reinforce, in Herakles’ own words,
his failure to become Man and his ‘awesome solitude’53 as Superman:
Wahrlich, es Wel nicht leicht,
Göttliche Gaben zu bändigen.
Nie fand ein Sterblicher sich
Schwerer ins irdische Joch. . . .
Stets wieder tobte das Chaos,
Stets wieder wankte die Erde.
Leichter war alles errungen
Als der häusliche Herd.
(Act iii, scene xii)54
Truly, it was not easy to keep my godlike gifts in check. Never did a mortal
Wnd himself more ensnared in the earthly yoke. . . . Again and again chaos
raged, again and again the earth shook. Everything was easier to gain than
the domestic hearth.
The profound pessimism of Herakles, Wedekind’s last play (performed
posthumously in Munich in September 1919), is at least partly explained
by the historical context in which it was written—Germany’s impending
defeat and disintegration in the closing stages of World War I. What
Wedekind seems to be advocating is the urgent need, in a dehumanized
post-war world, for ordinary human beings and not superheroes.
Galinsky terms Wedekind’s Herakles a turning-point, ‘a return to
the Euripidean concept of the hero’.55 The play certainly marks a

52 Wedekind (1964), ii. 636. 53 Galinsky (1972), 238.

54 Wedekind (1964), ii. 660–1. 55 Galinsky (1972), 236.
278 Herakles’ apotheosis
turning-point in the reception of mad Herakles, but it is actually a
turning away from Euripides towards a neo-Senecan Herakles. It also
signiWes a resumption of interest in the dark and dangerous Herak-
lean psychology, an initial step towards the discovery of a ‘Herakles
complex’. The Nietzschean Herakles and Seneca’s Hercules share a
Werce autarkeia and self-proclaimed divinity, which make them a
grave threat to the sanctity and survival of all civilized, cooperative
institutions, including the family. Neo-Senecan Herakles, who
emerges in the second half of the twentieth century, challenges,
more unequivocally than any previous theatrical incarnation of
mad Herakles, the desirability and validity of this uncompromising
brand of superhuman heroism.
 9
The Herakles complex: a Senecan diagnosis
of the ‘Family Annihilator’

Euripides’ tragic Wgure of Herakles, the father who murders his own
family, did not resonate powerfully in the mid-twentieth century,
although other aspects of the Herakles myths (especially the labours)
did appeal to the German-speaking world. Werner Herzog’s Wrst
‘short’ Wlm, Herakles (1962),1 ironically juxtaposed the mythical
hero with a contemporary body-builder. Neither the Swiss play-
wright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Herkules und der Stall des Augias
(Wrst broadcast on Radio Bern in 1954 and staged in 1963) nor
Heiner Müller’s anti-tragedy Herakles 5 (written in 1966, although
not performed until 1974) had much to do with Euripides.2 Even
Hartmut Lange’s Brechtian treatment of the myth in Herakles, a
study of Stalin performed in West Berlin (1968), which deals with
the hero’s guilt in general terms, did not centre on infanticide.3 Yet
directors have now begun to appreciate the importance of Euripides’
decision to place at the centre of a tragedy the darkest episode
of Herakles’ myth, the murder of his wife and children. The concept
1 This was a 12-minute black-and-white Wlm which alternated between footage of
a body-builder, Mr Germany, and a crash at Le Mans.
2 On Herakles 5, see Gruber (1989), 58–62 and Preusser (2000), 259–66. For
general critical studies of Müller’s dramas, see Keller (1992), Schmitt (1999), and
Ostheimer (2002).
3 Dürrenmatt’s play was revived several times both in the 1960s and subsequently;
the text is available in Dürrenmatt (1998), vol. viii. Hartmut Lange, who was the
Chief Dramaturg of the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin between 1961 and 1964,
moved to West Berlin in 1965. In 1968 two of his plays were staged there together as a
diptych, Der Hundprozess and Herakles, under the direction of H. Heyme. The Wrst
play considered the negative side of Stalin, the second the positive. They are published
in Lange (1988).
280 The Herakles complex
of the warrior, the trained killer who misdirects his aggression against
his own household, has found powerful resonances in our own
society, where marital violence and the male child-killer are pressing
social concerns, not least aZicting our own ‘warriors’ in the military
forces. The apparent topicality of the issues raised by this hero has
been a crucial factor in putting him back on the public stage.
The last decade has been the most proliWc in the play’s entire
performance history. In 1998 alone four professional productions
of new translations were staged, two in Amsterdam, one at London’s
Gate Theatre,4 and one in Vicenza. The following year Euripides’
tragedy was incorporated in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Heracles Tril-
ogy, staged in Istanbul, Japan, and Barcelona. In March 2001 a new
German translation of Herakles was performed at Theater am Kirch-
platz in Liechtenstein, and in August 2002 the National Theatre of
Northern Greece staged Mary Yiosi’s modern Greek translation at the
Ancient Theatre of Epidauros. In Zagreb in October 2004 the Cro-
atian National Theatre produced in tandem translations of Euripides’
Herakles and Alcestis by Neven Jovanovic. These productions were
reprised a year later in Germany for the Festspiele Ludwigshafen. The
madness of Herakles has also made an impression on New York’s
fringe theatre scene. In November 2000 a multi-media and site-
speciWc production, colliding the text of Euripides’ Herakles with
Müller’s Herakles 5, was mounted by Chashama Theatre in Times
Square. Between April 2004 and November 2006 La MaMa Experi-
mental Theatre Club on the Lower East Side presented no fewer than
three world premières featuring striking modern incarnations of
Heraklean madness. These were Hercules in High Suburbia: A Musical
Tragedy!, the Wrst-ever rock-and-roll adaptation of Euripides’ Hera-
kles; Herakles via Phaedra, an all-singing, all-dancing Herakles biog-
raphy with a Prohibition backdrop; and Home Front, a drama
inspired by Euripides’ Herakles and set in America’s Midwest in 1972.
Amongst other productions staged in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century, Herakles has attracted the attention of two major
English-language poets with high public proWles, each writing in a
4 For reviews of Nick Philippou’s Gate production, see Alastair Macauley, Finan-
cial Times, 14 July 1998; Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 15 July 1998; Robert Hanks,
Independent, 16 July 1998; Helen Morales, Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 1998;
and Andrew Aldridge, Stage, 6 Aug. 1998.
 The Herakles complex 281
historical period of momentous change and uncertainty, who, in
common with Seneca, have deployed Herakles’ ambivalent heroism
as a symbol of the fragile and paradoxical condition of civilization in
their own era. The verse play Herakles by the American poet Archi-
bald MacLeish, conceived and produced at the height of the Cold
War, and British poet Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles, a version of
Euripides’ tragedy commissioned in the dawn of the new millen-
nium, scrutinize the problematic place of the returned warrior within
a domestic and broader cultural context.
While few Euripidean scholars would now endorse Wilamowitz’s
‘seeds of madness’ or ‘megalomaniac’ theory, MacLeish and Armi-
tage demonstrate that contemporary dramaturgical interest in the
madness of Herakles lies resolutely in the question of psychological
causation, in diagnosing the potential of the patriarch and protector
to turn ‘family annihilator’. Indeed, the theatrical reception of Eu-
ripides’ Herakles in the late twentieth and early twenty-Wrst centuries
is distinguished by the identiWcation, either consciously or subcon-
sciously, of a ‘Herakles complex’ as part of the heroic male psyche:
the hero’s habitual aggression, the excesses of his modus vitae, and the
particular cultural imperatives to which he is subject cause him to be
at war with himself, his dependants, and his society. An analysis of
MacLeish’s Herakles and Armitage’s Mister Heracles reveals that the
dramatization of the ‘Herakles complex’ necessarily involves apply-
ing a Senecan or Wilamowitzian reading to Euripides’ text, and
especially to Euripides’ innovative sequencing of events in the myth.

A RC H I B A L D MACL E I S H ’ S H E R A K L E S

The public poet

Archibald MacLeish was a poet whose considerable literary achieve-
ments ran parallel to a distinguished career of public service and high
oYce. An alumnus of Yale, where from 1911 to 1915 he became well
versed in English and classical literature, and Harvard Law School,
and a veteran of World War I, his education and early life experiences
instilled in him the seeds of liberal humanism, as well as an acute
282 The Herakles complex
social and political conscience. At Yale MacLeish studied under
Clarence Whittlesey Mendell (1883–1963), Professor of Latin and
Greek, who recalled on the thirty-Wfth anniversary of the class of
1915: ‘Yours was the last class with whom I read Petronius and
Euripides and Horace with a sense of permanence and security that
made possible for us a leisurely sympathy with them, ignoring the
storms and wreckage of the centuries and the continent that lay
between.’5 This sympathy and proximity in consciousness with the
ancients, which MacLeish gained in his young manhood, informed
much of his subsequent work, especially his plays, in which he drew
on classical mythology to attest the universality and endurance
of ethical truths and their direct relationship to the modern American
experience. For Wve years from 1923 MacLeish was part of the expatriate
literary community in Paris, which also included E. E. Cummings,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. As Dan JaVe
points out, in common with these contemporaries MacLeish sought
from his self-imposed exile a deWnition of his native land and to replace
a nostalgia for Europe ‘by mapping out a tradition’.6 It was a tradition
that, at critical moments in America’s history, he retraced to the heroic
world of Greek epic and tragedy.
MacLeish’s ideal of the poet’s function, and the attitudes and events
that determined the development of that ideal, provide a setting in
which to understand his aspirations for his Herakles and the vigorous
philosophy at the play’s source. Many of his early poems owe much to
the inXuence of pioneering Modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound,7 and the often-quoted Wnal couplet of his Ars Poetica (1926),
‘A poem should not mean j But be’, was simplistically adopted as a
kind of mantra of extreme Modernism.8 However, while he betrayed
certain Modernist mannerisms in his verse, MacLeish eschewed the
Modernist preoccupation with the private individual’s experience and
the poet’s alienation from society. He was the antithesis of George
Cabot Lodge’s ideal of the withdrawn, self-seeking ‘poet anarchist’
whose verse was essentially a private language intelligible only to his

5 Quoted in Somer (1988), 115–121, at 117. 6 JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 146.

7 e.g. The Pot of Earth (1925), Nobodaddy (1926), Einstein (1926), and The Hamlet
of A. MacLeish (1928).
8 See Jerome’s analysis of MacLeish’s peculiar Modernism in Drabeck, Ellis, and
Rudin (1988), 9–15.
 The Herakles complex 283
fellow Brahmins. JaVe maintains: ‘During the 30s MacLeish set out to
do as man and poet what no other twentieth century American poet
had dared. Stirred by devastating eVects of the economic breakdown at
home and startled by the hints of a dangerous anti-humanistic and
anti-intellectual revolution abroad, he set out to make the entire social
scene his domain. He was to try to do Shelley one better, to make the
poet the acknowledged legislator of his time.’9
Towards the end of the 1930s MacLeish evolved, in a series of essays,
a notion of poetry as ‘public speech’. In ‘Public Speech and Private
Speech in Poetry’ (1938) he contrasts what he deems the ridiculous
romanticism of the British nineteenth-century poet, that is, the private
speaker, with the ground-breaking poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound,
in which he discerns both a ‘transition towards a poetry capable of
accepting a political and revolutionary era upon its own terms’10 and
‘hope of a new and shaping inXuence in a world which needs, of all
things, shape and meaning most’.11 Perhaps most revealing of his
personal literary mission is his assessment of Yeats’s later poetry as
‘an act upon the world’.12 Among the poets, throughout history, whose
work MacLeish designates as public speech are those of ancient Greece
and Rome.13 The following year in ‘Poetry and the Public World’,
MacLeish proclaimed: ‘Art is a method of dealing with our experience
of this world, which makes that experience, as experience, recognizable
to the spirit’,14 and he decried ‘the failure of contemporary poetry to
bring to poetic recognition the experience of our time’.15 His essay
entitled ‘The Irresponsibles’ (1940) was an attack on intellectual ap-
athy in the face of impending international crisis: ‘Nothing is more
characteristic of the intellectuals of our generation than their failure to
understand what it is that is happening to their world. And nothing
explains that failure so precisely as their unwillingness to see what they
have seen and to know what they do truly know.’16 L. G. Salingar,
deWning T. S. Eliot’s unparalleled importance in restoring the intellec-
tual dignity of English poetry, wrote: ‘At a time when few people would
take it seriously, he formed a means of expression in poetry for the
surface and depths of a representative modern mind, intensely aware

9 JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 145. 10 MacLeish (1938), 536–47, at 546.

11 Ibid. 540. 12 Ibid. 544.
13 Ibid. 542. 14 MacLeish (1939), 823–30, at 825.
15 Ibid. 828. 16 MacLeish (1940), 618–23, at 619.
284 The Herakles complex
of his surroundings, their place in history, and his intimate reaction to
them.’17 This deWnition closely accords with MacLeish’s idea of the
‘responsible’ writer and thinker. Through his essays and poetry MacLe-
ish was advocating what Somer perceives as ‘his personal commitment
to his art, to turn it outward upon the living world’.18 In a critique of
MacLeish’s Herakles, Gianakaris declares that the poet, ‘in his every act
mirrored an altruistic zeal for improving the well-being of the coun-
try’s people. All the while, from the artistic standpoint his poetry
scarcely ranged outside the subtly but clearly didactic spectrum.’19
MacLeish’s role as a public poet was not conWned to the promo-
tion of humanist values in his creative work. He also had a long and
active involvement in his country’s public life. An admirer of Eleanor
and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he became a chief adviser to the president
as well as an occasional scriptwriter of Roosevelt’s speeches and the
famous ‘Fireside Chats’. Among the numerous appointments he held
during World War II and the immediate post-war period were
Librarian of Congress (1939–44), assistant director of the OYce of
War Information (1942–3), Assistant Secretary of State (1944–5),
and assistant head of the US delegation to UNESCO (1946).
MacLeish was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Ora-
tory at Harvard in 1949, and during the next decade devoted himself
to teaching and writing, and was awarded two of his three Pulitzer
Prizes. His public voice throughout this time was raised against the
unwholesome climate of anti-communist hysteria, notably in his
radio play The Trojan Horse, broadcast and published in 1952.
Having been under investigation by J. Edgar Hoover since the early
1940s for his liberal values and left-wing sympathies, and in particu-
lar his involvement with the League of American Writers and other
anti-fascist groups, he gained the distinction of having an FBI Wle
that eventually ran to 600 pages, longer than that of any other writer
in the United States. In October 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy
claimed that MacLeish had belonged to more communist front
organizations than any man he had investigated. That same year, in
his capacity as the newly elected president of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, MacLeish had tried unsuccessfully to involve the

17 Salingar (1983), 443–61, at 443. 18 Somer (1988), 115–21, at 121.

19 Gianakaris (1971), 445–63, at 445.
 The Herakles complex 285
Academy in challenging the irrationality, scaremongering, and
strong-arm tactics of McCarthyism. Despite the intense scrutiny he
faced, MacLeish emerged relatively unscathed from this grubby and
shaming episode of his nation’s history. He loyally defended friends
and colleagues whom McCarthy threatened, and managed never to
compromise his principles and integrity.

Herakles, the great modern myth of science

In early 1959, soon after his verse play J. B., a twentieth-century
retelling of the story of Job which earned him his third Pulitzer, had
been successfully produced on Broadway, MacLeish began work on
Herakles. The task which the poet had assigned himself, of recasting
the myth of Herakles and the murder of his sons as a ‘dramatic
parable’20 for the atomic age, a contemplation of its wonders and
evils, took six years to realize. These six years constituted undoubt-
edly the most destabilizing chapter of the Cold War, in which the
world witnessed intensive nuclear armament, experimentation, and
brinkmanship culminating, in October 1962, in the thirteen days of
the Cuban missile crisis; the Bay of Pigs invasion; the start of the
space race between the United States and the USSR; the construction
of the Berlin Wall; the detonation of the Soviets’ ‘Tsar Bomba’, the
largest nuclear weapon ever constructed; America’s oYcial and bit-
terly divisive entry into the Vietnam conXict; and the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy.
Inevitably, writers and Wlm-makers were quick to respond to the
growing and ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation that charac-
terized this era, and to the widespread fear, ideological belligerence,
and above all, the awesome helplessness the new vision of Armaged-
don induced. In 1958 Peter George’s novel Red Alert was published.
Five years later it became the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s darkly comic
science-Wction movie Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worry-
ing and Love the Bomb, in which military paranoia and scientiWc genius
diabolically conspire to launch an unprovoked and irrevocable nuclear
attack on Russia. In a similarly grotesque comic vein was Dürrenmatt’s

20 Donaldson (1992), 482.

286 The Herakles complex
1962 play Die Physiker (staged in London in 1963 and in New York the
following year). The comedy is set in a lunatic asylum in which a
nuclear physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, has taken refuge after
destroying his papers to prevent his research on nuclear Wssion being
put to evil use. Two other inmates, also posing as lunatics, are physicist
agents who have been sent by their respective governments to kidnap
Möbius. Eventually all three men decide to stay safely in the asylum,
but the female doctor in charge has copied Möbius’s notes and plans to
seize control of the world. Dr Strangelove and Die Physiker satirize
science’s fatal and irreversible progress in an increasingly insane and
unscrupulous world. Stanley Kramer’s Wlm On the Beach, adapted
from a novel by Nevil Shute and released worldwide in December
1959, dealt tragically with the same theme, depicting the desolate
aftermath of global nuclear conXict as the last human survivors in
Melbourne await the radioactive fallout and certain extinction. When
asked by a young naval oYcer (Anthony Perkins) who he thinks
started the war, atomic scientist and ‘blind mechanic of disaster’ Julian
Osborn (Fred Astaire) replies, ‘Albert Einstein’:
The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be
maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t
possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb
and counter bombs and counter-counter bombs; the devices outgrew us, we
couldn’t control them. I know—I helped build them, God help me. Somewhere
some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen, thought he saw something,
knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second his whole country would
be wiped oV the map. So he pushed the button, and the world went crazy.
In comparison with these better-known works of Cold War Wction,
MacLeish’s Herakles is an esoteric and more ambitious attempt to
expose the political and scientiWc hubris that had made humanity too
easily expendable a commodity. The vision and conviction that
fuelled its creation were unapologetically grand. Whereas other
writers examined the morality and the terrors of the nuclear age
from a futuristic perspective, MacLeish chose to locate the origins of
the present madness Wrmly in Greek mythology. In a letter to Gerald
Murphy, written just over twelve months before the world première
of Herakles, he explained his attraction to the myth of Herakles and
his sudden realization of the tragic aYnity between his own age and
 The Herakles complex 287
the heroic age. The letter reads like a stream of poetic consciousness,
a gradual and revelatory reasoning out of the play’s thematic premise.
Scattered throughout are lines and phrases that made their way into
the Wnal play:
It occurred to me this morning that this age in which we have lived, you and
I, is actually, if one looks through the trash, plastic containers, paper cups,
half-used words and soiled hypocrisies which Xoat on its surface like the
steamer-leavings on the precipitous deep blue of Lake Como—is actually a
heroic age and that that is its tragedy. The heroic ages in the myths—those
only true rememberers—were the ages in which men, some men, perhaps
only one, dared to believe that it might be possible—that it was possible—
with nothing but human head and hands to slaughter the great beasts, to
overcome the monsters, to go down into the dark, into death itself, and drag
the dog up howling and so, as Herakles was assured by the oracle, to live
thereafter like gods.
I have known for a long time that that myth was our myth. That is why
I have been struggling for Wve years with a play about Herakles. But not until
this morning did I see what I must have known all along—that it is because
our age like his life is heroic in that highest and most daring sense that we
take our meaning from him. For our age is tragic as his life was and as all the
heroic ages must be. The deeds are performed, the miracles accomplished,
the wonders visited—and there is still the world as it was—the dog as it
was . . . except that the dog is now tied up in the cook’s slops in Eurystheus’
kitchen. Le prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie. It is true tragedy—tragedy to
wring the heart: all these tremendous intelligences daring to take space and
time and matter apart and to dig deep down under into the eternal dark and
returning in triumph to what? Night as usual. Dust as usual. Someone
sprinkling water on the dust as usual—the old sad smell. But then one
reminds one’s self that in the myth Herakles does become a god at the end.
So that the oracle comes true in the myth. So what should we think of
ourselves—of our destiny? The myths are always right—but right in another
language. Are we also gods, we victims of ourselves—but in some sense we
do not understand?21
MacLeish retained Euripides’ distinctive ordering of events in the
Herakles myth. Contrary to what was probably the traditional chron-
ology, in which Herakles performed the labours as a penance for the
murder of his family, Euripides placed the murders after the twelfth

21 16 Sept. 1964. Repr. in Winnick (1983), 420.

288 The Herakles complex
labour had been successfully accomplished. This bleak sequence
necessitates a reassessment of the labours and raises the question of
whether they have been nulliWed or made futile. MacLeish summar-
ized in a programme note the unsettling moral conundrum pro-
duced by the labours–madness chronology: ‘If the labors come Wrst
as they do in Euripides, how do the murders follow? If it is not the
murderer of the sons who masters the beasts by way of penance, but
the master of the beasts who murders the sons, why are they mur-
dered?’ As Gianakaris asserts: ‘It is evident that MacLeish considers
these distinctions between event sequences as comprising the crux of
the Heraclean dilemma.’22 Crucially, MacLeish added a deWnite Sene-
can dimension to this dilemma by replacing the interventionist Wgure
of Lyssa with a blinding Wt of megalomaniac violence and obscuring
(or indeed removing) the contradistinction between Herakles sane
and Herakles insane. He thus introduced into his Euripidean frame-
work the concept of inevitability and a changed notion of culpability,
and he formulated these in a way that underlines the ambiguity of
what he saw as the ‘Herakles’ of the late twentieth century—our
notion of Science:
I felt very strongly then that the myth of Herakles was the great modern
myth . . . because the labors of Herakles were all of them labors of delivering
the world from its fears, from its monsters, delivering it from evil, creating a
world in which people would live simply and humanly, which is very much
what the modern myth of science has been. Science Wghts against cancer. It
cures infantile paralysis. It puts an end to yellow fever. It accomplishes miracles
in regard to the decency of living. The myth of Herakles ends with his return
from the labors and the discovery that in his wars against the monsters he has
destroyed his own sons. This is also the myth of science for us. Science has
produced the bombs; science has produced the destruction of the young.23

The stage production (1965)

MacLeish’s Herakles opened on 27 October 1965 in Ann Arbor, where it
ran for fourteen performances, and was produced by the University of
Michigan’s Professional Theater Program with the APA (Association of

22 Gianakaris (1971), 445–63, at 454.

23 MacLeish, in Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 213–14.
 The Herakles complex 289
Producing Artists) Repertory Company in the University’s Lydia Men-
delssohn Theatre. With the establishment of the Professional Theatre
Program in 1962, the University of Michigan became the Wrst university
in the United States to engage a resident repertory ensemble for a long-
term contract. Its honorary sponsors included playwrights Arthur
Miller and Thornton Wilder and actresses Judith Anderson and
Helen Hayes. The purpose of the Program was to oVer a broad selection
of high-quality contemporary theatre and to produce a new play each
year. It had previously presented the American premières of Behan’s
The Hostage and Shaw’s Man and Superman. The world première of
Herakles was part of the Program’s fourth Fall Festival, along with three
other plays—Hart and Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You, Ibsen’s
The Wild Duck, and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The production was
directed by Alan Schneider, who had previously directed MacLeish’s
television play The Secret of Freedom (1960).
Throughout his career as one of America’s foremost theatre dir-
ectors, Schneider alternated between academic and commercial as-
signments. While serving as an assistant professor at the Catholic
University of America, he directed productions of Sophocles’ Electra
(1943) and Oedipus the King (1950). He enjoyed a close association
with Samuel Beckett, staging all the American premières of Beckett’s
plays, beginning with Waiting for Godot. He also directed the original
productions of all the major plays of Edward Albee and several works
by Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht. In the cast of Herakles were APA
members Rosemary Harris as Megara and Sydney Walker as Hera-
kles. It is clear from a letter MacLeish wrote to Richard Burton on 7
August 1965 that casting and initial rehearsals took place at the
Phoenix Theatre in New York, with which the APA had an alliance.
The play comprised only one act, and had a running time of an
hour and Wfteen minutes. It opened in the present at the site of the
Delphic oracle’s ruined temple, where three American tourists (Mrs
Hoadley, her daughter Little Hodd, and a governess Miss ParWt) had
come to investigate the ancient myth of Herakles with the aid of a
Greek guide. With this contemporary scene MacLeish juxtaposed the
tragic denouement of the myth, so that the modern Americans
shared the stage with Megara, Herakles, and the Pythian priestess,
Xenoclea. The tourists, literally drawn into the myth, watched as
Herakles returned in triumph from his labours and demanded
290 The Herakles complex
from Apollo oracular approbation of his exploits and the deiWcation
he had been promised. The main movements of the play were towards
and beyond Herakles’ realization that the monstrous ‘enemies’ he
boasted of killing upon re-entering the Theban gate were, in fact, his
seven sons come to greet him. In these movements MacLeish appro-
priated elements of Euripides’ anagnōrisis, waking, and rehabilitation
scenes, and transformed the role of Megara into an amalgamation of
the Euripidean characters Amphitryon and Theseus.
The high proWles of MacLeish and Schneider ensured that the
production was reviewed in national newspapers and magazines
such as Variety, Life, the New York Times Book Review, and the
Christian Science Monitor. A common critical reaction was disap-
pointment. There was unanimously high praise for Rosemary Harris’s
performance, but many critics felt that MacLeish’s subject was ab-
struse and his treatment of it dramatically static. The review in Variety
claimed that the play was ‘better to read than see on the stage’, and that
MacLeish’s message was ‘lost in a plethora of spoken words too
complex in their poetic structure for dramatic impact. The great
ideas suVocate in verbiage.’24 Several reviewers stated their preference
for the suspense and tragedy of the original text. This is surprising, in
view of how rarely Euripides’ play had been performed in America or
elsewhere.25 In fact, the only vaguely commercial production of
Herakles contemporary with MacLeish’s play was a ‘partially staged’
reading of William Arrowsmith’s 1956 translation26 on 20 February

24 Variety, 10 Nov. 1965. 25 See Hartigan (1995), 142–3.

26 Arrowsmith (1924–92) was one of the 20th century’s most inXuential theorists
and exponents of translation (not only of the classics). Apart from the translations he
produced himself, he coedited, with Roger Shattuck, The Craft and Context of
Translation (1961) and was the instigator and general editor of the Oxford University
Press series The Greek Tragedy in New Translations. The former initiative was ‘based
on the conviction that poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides can only be
properly rendered by translators who are themselves poets’. See Arrowsmith’s self-
interview on this topic (1981, 56–67). His translation of Herakles for The Complete
Greek Tragedies, edited by Grene and Lattimore, has proved over the years a relatively
popular version of the play, particularly it seems as a script for school and university
productions. The prevalence and accessibility of the translation are largely attribut-
able to its clarity and to Arrowsmith’s sensitive introductory appreciation of the play,
which includes a radical defence of its un-Aristotelian structure. Conacher’s review
(1957, 85–7, at 85) of Arrowsmith’s translation provides a good summary of its
merits and shortcomings: ‘This version (which is preceded by a brilliant analysis of
 The Herakles complex 291
1959, performed by Qwirk Productions in the Great Hall of New
York’s Cooper Union and directed by Geraldine Lust.27 One of the
more sympathetic reviews MacLeish’s play received was that in the
Christian Science Monitor by Richard Cattani, who, while acknow-
ledging the diYculties that Herakles posed as a piece of theatre (for
example, its brevity and lack of action), came nearest to penetrating
the play’s philosophical core and identifying the precise correlation
between the ancient myth and modern reality. Cattani understood
that, like Euripides and, to a greater extent, Seneca, MacLeish ‘was
more concerned with the moral implications of the twelve labors of
the protagonist than with their spectacle’. He was also aware of the
importance of the hero’s climactic recognition of his crimes to inter-
preting the meaning of the labours, and of the conXict between heroic
and domestic values, which MacLeish had inferred from Euripi-
des’ text:
This revealed Wlicide points to the true assessment of Herakles’ labors: gran-
diose, selWsh, tragically delusive. Though he had silenced the dogs at the gates
of hell and seized on the golden apples—symbolical of his having overcome
the world and become a god—he had failed to overcome the horror of his
own heart. . . . Herakles presses us to consider the values of decency and family
life in an aZuent and atomic age wherein labors of Herculean magnitude can
so easily entice us to feats of mock-godly grandeur.28
Although the play’s subdued critical reception indicated a cultural
climate inhospitable to Greek tragedy, even in modern adaptation,
audience attendance in Ann Arbor was encouragingly large, leading
to a strong expectation that the production would transfer to Broad-
way. However, the managing director of the Phoenix Theatre,
T. Edward Hambleton, and Alfred ‘Delly’ de Liagre, the producer of
J. B., were both convinced (almost certainly correctly) that the play

the play’s unusual structure) has at least all the minor virtues of the best modern
translations: it is clear, quiet in tone, completely lacking in bombast and, for the most
part, faithful to the original—particularly in the important quality of never trying to
improve on it. In a few of the more dramatic speeches, the tone strikes one as a little
too tranquil, even sleepy, but the easy rhythms of the translator’s blank verse are
particularly eVective in the moving speeches of Heracles toward the end of the play.’
27 The reading was reviewed by Michael Smith in Village Voice, 25 Feb. 1959, p. 8.
28 Christian Science Monitor, 13 Nov. 1965.
292 The Herakles complex
was commercially unviable. Their grounds were that it was written in
verse, it presupposed too much classical knowledge, and its grim,
implacable judgement on the civilized world was ill-suited to the
tastes of the average Broadway theatregoer.29 Yet MacLeish’s pro-
gramme note shows that he believed absolutely in the modernity
and relevance of his play’s mythical hero:
In our generation the myth of Herakles is closer to the human mind, to the
imagination of the race, than it has been for thousands of years. The
impossible labors are no longer impossible because we have accomplished
more than all of them together. The hero is no longer too strong to be a man
because we are stronger. The murders are no longer madness because we
know ourselves to be capable of more dreadful murders, with the conse-
quence that the fable of that wandering, laborious man is no longer merely
fable. Indeed, the mocking question of our time, the question which later
generations may think most characteristic of our time, is precisely the
question of the labors of Herakles.

The published version (1967)

This conviction led MacLeish to add a Wrst act to the existing drama
and to publish the expanded version in 1967. The most important
change is the addition of Professor Hoadley, a Nobel laureate physi-
cist, who, conWned to a wheelchair, seems remarkably like Peter
Sellers’s German nuclear scientist Dr Strangelove. Hoadley, accom-
panied by his family, has arrived in Athens ‘fresh from his beneWcent
discoveries’ (1)30 and the prize ceremony in Stockholm, prior to
returning home to America. He has come to Greece, ‘the fatherland
of his heroic soul’ (5), seeking, like Herakles, oracular guidance at the
conclusion of his labours. The physical analogy between Hoadley and
Herakles is unequivocally drawn in the stage directions, where the
Professor is described as ‘a huge bulk of a man, strong hands strain-
ing at the Xanges of the wheels’ (2). The two characters are further
related in terms of temperament and their dichotomous potential as
Wghters against the monsters that threaten the world. Both men are

29 See MacLeish, in Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 214.

30 This and all subsequent references to MacLeish’s Herakles are to the page
numbers in MacLeish (1967).
 The Herakles complex 293
bullies and share a madness or megalomania with other Wctional
Cold War characters, such as the psychotic Brigadier-General Jack D.
Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and the gung-ho Joint Chief-of-StaV Gen-
eral ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr Strangelove, and the
asylum director Dr Mathilde von Zahnd in Die Physiker. Herakles
and Hoadley also suVer from a malaise of the soul, a restless discon-
tent that they can only partially deWne. Hoadley’s sojourn in Greece is
born of a desire to revisit the myth of Herakles, which he believes will
make meaningful his own labours, in the only setting commensurate
to his heroic vision and heroic longing:
This is heroic ground where to be born
was beautiful, where breathing mattered,
where to dare and think and do were . . .
Oh . . . wonders!
(16)
MacLeish appended to the published text a succinct author’s note
which is our best guide to appreciating the play’s construction and to
unravelling its meaning: ‘As the generation of Euripides knew the
myth, it was after the Labors had been accomplished and the dog
dragged from the gate of death that Herakles, unknowing, killed his
sons.’ Here MacLeish is explicitly acknowledging his debt to Euripi-
des’ version of the myth, but his reference to Cerberus being dragged
from Hades is a subtle, or perhaps entirely unconscious, acknow-
ledgement of a greater debt to Seneca. In Euripides, Cerberus does
not appear on stage, and the playwright pointedly has Herakles
explain that he has left the dog at Hermion in Demeter’s grove
(615). But in Seneca, although the stage directions are less than
clear on this point, Hercules apparently enters leading Cerberus as
spolia opima in his triumph over Pluto (in lucem extuli j arcana
mundi, ‘I brought earth’s hidden things into the light’, 596–7; hoc
nefas cernant duo, j qui advexit et quae iussit, ‘Only two should behold
this enormity: he who fetched it, she who ordered it’, 603–4). In the
prologue Juno describes this action as the latest example of Hercules’
gross impiety and megalomania:
at ille, rupto carcere umbrarum ferox,
de me triumphat et superbiWca manu
294 The Herakles complex
atrum per urbes ducit Argolicas canem.
viso labantem Cerbero vidi diem
pavidumque Solem.
(57–61)
But he, in his arrogance at having smashed the prison of the ghostly dead, is
celebrating his triumph over me, and highhandedly parading the black
hound through Argive cities. I saw the daylight faltering at the sight of
Cerberus, and the Sun afraid.
Although Juno’s viewpoint is an obviously prejudiced one, Seneca at
least implies that it is not wholly unsubstantiated. For MacLeish,
Herakles’ treatment of Cerberus is an unambiguous indicator of
megalomania, of extraordinary might transmuted into an extraor-
dinary display of hubris. His hero boasts aggressively of how he
gagged the dog and ‘tied him up in the cook’s slops in Eurystheus’
kitchen’ (64). The Euripidean labours–madness chronology is essen-
tial to MacLeish’s purpose, but his use of it is at variance with
Euripides’ exculpatory externalization of Herakles’ madness. In Eu-
ripides, the fact that the madness and murders immediately follow
the completion of the labours underlines the gratuitousness and
magnitude of Herakles’ tragic fall and the terrible injustice of the
gods. In Seneca, however, and even more so in MacLeish, there is a
psychological and causal link between the labours (and all that they
represent) and the subsequent explosion of madness.
Porter has observed that MacLeish’s printed text is structurally
quite close to Euripides’ Herakles:
The bipartite structure of MacLeish’s Herakles, in which Act One and Two
are related to each other as contrasting panels, Act One poising the hero at
the peak of his career, Act Two plunging him into the depths, owes much to
the structure of Euripides’ play. Most Euripidean of all, perhaps, is the
freedom with which MacLeish handles his classical sources, transposing,
conXating, redirecting them with a daring worthy of the creator of the
Orestes, the Medea, or the Herakles itself.31
What Porter does not consider, however, is the very diVerent nature
of MacLeish’s peripeteiac design. In Euripides’ play the main peri-
peteia, which is announced by the unusual central epiphany, is not

31 Porter (1985), 145–50, at 147.

 The Herakles complex 295
the inevitable consequence of the hero’s hamartia or of a madness
that has hitherto lain dormant. Herakles’ psychosis is a temporary
condition senselessly inXicted by vengeful gods. The action of the
second half of the play cannot, therefore, be rationalized by the
action of the Wrst. By contrast, MacLeish has ordered his text so
that the events of Act Two directly answer the moral questions posed
in Act One. The two acts function as a dialogue in which, paradox-
ically, the present foreshadows the mythical past. Act One concludes
with Mrs Hoadley asking how the myth of Herakles ends. Hoadley
insists that the myth ends with Herakles giving the oracle himself,
having mastered everything on earth, his destiny, and even God. But
his wife is not satisWed by this answer:
There must be something else beyond the doing.
After the world is mastered he comes home . . .
he must come home. They meet him . . . his . . .
his sons. He has sons, hasn’t he? They meet him
running. Oh, they run to meet him.
(20–1)
The peripeteia of the second act, which Mrs Hoadley anticipates, is
not, as in Euripides’ Herakles, an explosive event, but is gradually
revealed, through the agency of Xenoclea, as ‘the last unconquerable
horror’ (82), in a scene comparable to the psychotherapy scene
between Amphitryon and Herakles at verses 1111–45 of Euripides’
text:
xenoclea There is blood on your
hands, Herakles.
herakles My enemies’.
xenoclea What enemies? . . .
The blood . . .
It is your blood, Herakles.
herakles Mine!
I haven’t a scratch. They never touched me.
xenoclea No, they never touched you, Herakles . . .
How many children have you, Herakles?
megara No! No! No! No!
296 The Herakles complex
herakles Seven sons.
xenoclea Whose blood have they, Herakles? . . .
Think of them, Herakles. Try to think of them.
herakles When I forget my seven sons! . . .
xenoclea Try to remember them–each one . . .
It all comes true when you remember.
Silence.
Let your mind remember, Herakles:
it’s trying to remember. Let it!
Don’t be afraid.
herakles There’s not a creature
dead or living I’m afraid of.
xenoclea So! Go back to them, Herakles.
herakles Back
where?
xenoclea You’ll know.
herakles Beside the gate there . . .
xenoclea Look at them, Herakles!
herakles They’ve fallen:
how can I face them when they’ve fallen?
xenoclea Lift their heads!
Lift their heads!
Lift their bloody heads!
herakles No!
xenoclea You are remembering, Herakles. Look at them!
herakles Take them away!
(84–7)
As outlined in a letter MacLeish wrote to Alan Schneider during the
play’s rehearsal period in New York, the Wgure of Xenoclea was partly
inspired by Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceil-
ing. The poet’s conception of this character is critical to the dialogue
between past and present around which the play revolves:
Like M. A.’s Sybil she is full of the knowledge of event—of enormous events
which have shaken and will shake the world of men. She knows what we do
not know—the future. She knows too that dimension of the future which is
the past. . . .
One thing does concern her—the truth. As the truth concerns the Sibyl.
She must bring mankind to the truth—to see the truth—to Wnd it for
themselves.
 The Herakles complex 297
She is the agency of catharsis—the agency through which Herakles is
brought to see what he has done—what he is—where he is.32
Another key to interpreting the relationship between past and
present in the published version of MacLeish’s Herakles is one that,
as Colakis indicates, ‘remains curiously neglected’.33 The dedication
to the twentieth-century Greek poet George Seferis serves obliquely
as a programmatic statement of the sort of easy interchange between
the mythical and contemporary worlds which MacLeish sought to
devise in dramatic form. Like MacLeish, Seferis (1900–72) was an
eminent writer-statesman.34 He occupied various top governmental
and diplomatic posts, and was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature. As a public poet Seferis shared with MacLeish ‘a capacity
to transform a personal experience or insight into a metaphor that
deWnes the character of our times’,35 and to this process of trans-
formation myth was fundamental. The value of myth for Seferis was
not as a private, nostalgic study, but rather as a vital exegesis of
modern existence. In his verse, ‘the past is always there to shape
and illuminate an image of the present’.36 The mythical characters in
whom Seferis was interested, particularly the Wgure of the wanderer,
have illuminating parallels with MacLeish’s Herakles:
Men of inconstancy, of wanderings and of wars, though they diVer and may
change in terms of greatness and value . . . always move among the same
monsters and the same longings. So we keep the symbols and the names that
the myth has brought down to us, realizing as we do so that the typical
characters have changed in keeping with the passing of time and the
diVerent conditions of our world—which are none other than the condi-
tions of everyone who seeks expression.37

32 Letter from the Alan Schneider Papers, by permission of the Mandeville Special
Collections Library, University of California, San Diego.
33 Colakis (1993), 34.
34 In Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 213, MacLeish expresses his admiration for Seferis
as a poet ‘whose relation with the aVairs of his generation was . . . in the public sphere
and the private one’.
35 Keeley and Sherrard (1973), pp. xi–xii.
36 Ibid., p. ix. See also the study of Seferis’s relationship to Homer in Ricks (1989),
119–71.
37 From Seferis’s ‘* EÆ ªæ Æ ªØa c ð˚º)’ (‘A Letter on ‘‘Thrush’’ ’, 1950),
quoted in Keeley & Sherrard (1973), p. ix.
298 The Herakles complex
Furthermore, the technique Seferis employed to create an eloquent
and credible poetic dialogue between the present and the mythical
past is one to which MacLeish consciously aspired in his Herakles:
His [Seferis’s] secret (in addition to his advantage) is that he always oVers an
appropriate setting—a poetically realistic setting—before he allows any le-
gendary Wgures to appear on his stage; before he attempts to carry the reader to
the level of myth, he earns his sympathy and belief by convincingly represent-
ing the present reality sustaining his myth. . . . In this way the myth comes to
life fully, the ancient and modern worlds meet in a metaphor without strain or
contrivance as we Wnd the legendary Wgures moving anachronistically onto the
contemporary stage that the poet has set before our eyes.38

A humane antidote to a brave new world

The augmented version of MacLeish’s Herakles reXects the date of its
genesis in the mid-1960s in its connection between the domestic
circumstances of the writer’s mythical and contemporary heroes.
The dysfunctional marriage and constant acrimony of the Wrst act
lend it Albee-esque strains. It resembles scenes from Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and A Delicate Balance (1966), in which
the drawing-room becomes an arena for competing familial cruelties.
Yet the dynamics of this particular sex war also suggest the inXuence of
Strindberg’s The Father (1887), which was largely inspired by the
nineteenth-century theory that Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and especially
the trial scene in Eumenides, ‘described a real historical shift from
matriarchy to patriarchy which, like all hard-won achievements,
could easily be reversed’.39 Strindberg’s father is both a soldier and a
scientist, but his wife Laura ‘undoes the entire construction of the
Captain’s masculinity. She undoes him as a scientist, and as a father.’40
Although with less design or eYcacy, Mrs Hoadley similarly attempts
to undo her husband’s male and heroic identity by demeaning and
even infantalizing him (‘So that’s it!—why we came. You wanted j
Herakles to play with!’ (18)). She is an embittered, waspish, and
possibly alcoholic woman, both afraid and disdainful of her husband’s

38 Keeley & Sherrard (1973), p. viii.

39 Rosslyn (1998), 183–96, at 190. 40 Ibid. 190.
 The Herakles complex 299
unforgiving master plan. Although certainly not the creation of a
misogynistic writer, her character plainly pre-dates feminist revision-
ism in the theatre. Within this Strindbergian struggle, however,
MacLeish problematizes the male–female opposition. Unlike Laura,
Mrs Hoadley is undoubtedly a victim and ultimately powerless. By
reproof and mockery she may challenge the notion of male heroism,
but does not succeed in subverting it. Moreover, MacLeish does not
present maleness as a straightforward construction, but creates instead
images of compromised masculinity: in the words of the crippled
professor’s Stockholm oration lurks the spectre of the Hoadleys’ es-
tranged homosexual son, who represents the sons of Herakles slaugh-
tered in a frenzy of overachievement, and who has no place in his
father’s heroic schema, a schema which gloriWes
boundless daring, unknown deeds
never before attempted, arduous
undertakings in a room alone,
impossible discoveries, dreadful weapons
capable of holocaust, of extermination,
Wre as hot as God’s.
(17)
MacLeish sets up meaningful contrasts between his male and female
protagonists which provide the reader with conXicting perspectives on
the heroic paradigm at the play’s centre. The voices of human despair,
reason, and enlightenment in the drama are all female. Hoadley’s
ambition for a world controlled by science, and his intolerance of
weakness and imperfection, is perceived by Mrs Hoadley as Orwellian
lunacy. As a humane antidote to her husband’s brave new world, she
pleads the importance of human fallibility and pain:
To want the world without the suVering is madness!
What would we be or know or bear
or love without the suVering to love for?
(21)
But Hoadley responds that the only thing left to man, and his
‘ultimate pride’, is, through science, to make the world free from
suVering (22).41 Without politicizing the point, MacLeish makes
41 Cf. General Ripper’s obsession with ‘the purity of essence’ and his belief in
a communist Xuoridation plot, or Dr Strangelove’s sinister Darwinian vision of a
300 The Herakles complex
clear throughout the play that it is the two wives, Mrs Hoadley and
Megara, and the oV-stage eVeminate youth, who suVer from this
‘ultimate pride’, this masculine conception of the heroic. Hoadley’s
grand design to eliminate suVering is comparable to the prayer of
Seneca’s Hercules for a new Golden Age:
alta pax gentes alat;
ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor
ensesque lateant; nulla tempestas fretum
violenta turbet, nullus irato Iove
exiliat ignis, nullus hiberna nive
nutritus agros amnis eversos trahat.
venena cessent, nulla nocituro gravis
suco tumescat herba.
(929–36)
May deep peace nurture the nations, may iron be used only in the harmless
toil of the countryside, and may swords be hidden away. May no violent
storm disturb the seas, may no Wre streak down from angry Jove, may no
river fed with winter snows ravage the uptorn Welds. May poisons disappear,
and may no deadly herb swell with harmful juices.
This prayer immediately precedes Hercules’ homicidal hallucination
and can, in fact, be read as the Wrst sign of madness. Fitch has
indicated ‘the sheer impossibility of what he prays for—an end to
sea storms, lightning, winter Xoods, poisonous herbs; these things
belong to the very fabric of nature, and the wish to eliminate them
reXects an unbalanced obsession with stamping out all possible
sources of disorder. In addition, the prayer is tainted by the atmos-
phere of hubris and ambition in which it is spoken.’42
Hoadley is last seen at the close of Act i roughly handling his wife as he
sermonizes on ‘human perfection’ and the ‘triumphant mind’. Resentful
of her undisguised loathing of his scientiWc dystopia, he laughs at her pain
as he tightens his grip on her wrist. The denouement, which is played out
in Act ii, is revealed only to the women in the party, whose prescience is
post-fallout world in which a nucleus of survivors will go forth in ‘a spirit of bold
curiosity for the adventure ahead’. A humane antidote to this brave new world is only
ironically suggested by the incongruous music accompanying the Wlm’s opening
credits (an instrumental version of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’) and the closing scenes
of nuclear apocalypse (Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’).
42 Fitch (1987), 27.
 The Herakles complex 301
contrasted with Herakles’ short-sightedness. As Herakles violently tries
to force an answer from the oracle, Megara oVers him an alternative to his
laborious, heroic existence, but it is not one he can comprehend:
megara Oh leave the oracle to the oracle.
We have our life: there’s enough of it, isn’t
there,
taking it year by year as it comes . . . ?
taking a day at a time as it comes to us . . . ?
night at a time . . . ?
There’s enough in a man’s
life to live by . . .
bitterly
woman’s either!
herakles A life is inconceivable without the silence
answering somehow!
megara No! Come with me!
Come with me! Oh, come away!
We need the edge of ignorance to live by,
the little, ignorant unknown of time
beyond us in the dark that could be anything.
(76–7)
After Herakles has been made to realize his identity as the murderer
of his sons, Megara pleads with him to help her bury their children
and to seek puriWcation, but the play ends with Herakles conforming
to the heroic pattern set for him, reverting to blind violence, still
determined to give the oracle himself. By the end of Euripides’ play
Herakles has emerged as a new type of hero, one who has acquired
spiritual courage and true understanding, and who has learnt the
importance of human suVering. This is conWrmed by the emphatic
placement of the words ºø and æE in the last two verses
spoken by him (1425–6). MacLeish’s Herakles, however, ultimately
symbolizes an unreXective and unrepentant heroism, unchecked by
evidence of its cataclysmic capacity. This type of heroism is pre-
Wgured early in Act i by the myth of Theseus which Hoadley invokes.
Like Herakles, Theseus the returning warrior was inadvertently
responsible for the death of a loved one. Hoadley and his wife
represent opposing perspectives of the myth. Mrs Hoadley focuses
on ‘the black forgetful sail’ which caused Aegeus, out of needless
302 The Herakles complex
grief, to commit suicide, and she tells her daughter, ‘Heroes are like
that, darling; they forget j the little things . . . like sails’ (7). Hoadley,
however, typically cannot see beyond the daring and magniWcence of
Theseus’ exploits, believing that the achievement itself outweighs
other consequences and absolves the hero from guilt:
Theseus!
Theseus from the labyrinth retrieved . . .
the room beyond the room beyond the
last impossible room
where no man till that night had ventured . . .
why should Theseus have remembered the black
sail?
He had the minotaur to think of:
that terrible victory beyond the reach
of men or of men’s minds with only
one thin, ravelling thread to lead him.
(8–9)
The most urgent message contained in MacLeish’s Herakles con-
cerns the perilous ease with which the selXess monster-killer arrogates
to himself godlike powers and prerogatives. In a letter to Karl
Galinsky, MacLeish wrote: ‘The great modern myth is not Jesus but
Herakles—not God become man but man become God . . . it is still
true that man-become-God is the great contemporary tragedy—dead
sons and ruined faith.’43 His play portrays a situation in which the
modern ‘Herculean feats’ of science and technology are motivated not
by altruism, but by an endless need to prove divine capability. This
pessimistic view of progress and power in the late twentieth century
mirrors Seneca’s judgement, as expressed by Braden, of the dangerous
reality of Julio-Claudian rule: ‘It was not until the possibility of
eVectively unlimited power became totally real that the psychology
of ruling became dangerously problematic. Technology by its very
nature presents opportunities without instructions; and any technol-
ogy developed beyond its possessors’ ability to handle it tends to
eliminate checks on human behavior and to encourage apocalypses.’44

43 The letter, which is dated 18 Mar. 1970, is quoted in Galinsky (1972), 244.
44 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 9.
 The Herakles complex 303
In Act i of MacLeish’s Herakles, Hoadley, extolling the achieve-
ments of his own age, declares, ‘We should be gods to know what we
know’ (13), and talks of atomic weapons, the new instruments of
apocalypse, as having a ‘Wre as hot as God’s’ (17). It is Megara, at the
close of Act ii, who responds to her husband’s assertion that ‘A man
is made for anger’ by suggesting that aspiring to godhead entails
imitating the senseless destruction practised by divinity:
Nothing, neither love nor trust
nor happiness matters to the will of god:
it can and down the city tumbles . . .
down the children in the bloody dust.
Nothing is terrible as the will of god
that can and can and can.
(88–9)
Implicit in this impassioned protest is the opposition between male
and female, heroic and civilized values. The writer opposes domes-
ticity, compassion, and female suVering to the indiVerence of the
male demigod.

Forty years on
MacLeish was the Wrst modern playwright to dramatize the Herakles
complex, and, following Seneca, to establish ‘the continuity between
the sane and insane mind’,45 the relationship of the monster-slayer to
the child-slayer. In doing so, his failure to arrest popular imagination
must be qualiWed. The 1965 stage production of Herakles was the
imperfect realization of an unfashionably tragic vision of the world.
Part of the problem was the play’s unabashed didacticism, its con-
ceptual strength, which has been seen as a dramaturgical weakness.46
The two-act version, published in 1967, resolved some of the ambi-
guities of the original script, but sadly was never performed in
MacLeish’s lifetime. However, forty years after the one-act Herakles

45 Fitch (1987), 30.

46 JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 147, remarks: ‘As a poet of social consciousness he
satirizes more eVectively than he dramatizes. . . . Too often he is over-insistent, a
shouter and convincer rather than a seducer.’
304 The Herakles complex
premièred in Ann Arbor, MacLeish’s second attempt was Wnally
staged by a small, newly established professional theatre company
of some daring and imagination.
In August 2005 Natural Theatricals, artists in residence at the
George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Vir-
ginia, presented Rip Claassen’s production of MacLeish’s two-act
Herakles in the classical ambience of the Memorial’s indoor amphi-
theatre. The production was the centrepiece of a summer season that
also featured a translation of Euripides’ Ion and a new play inspired
by classical Greek myth, Alexa’s Necklace. According to its mission
statement, Natural Theatricals is dedicated mainly to presenting
plays with classical themes derived from the ancient Greek theatrical
tradition, which may include English translations of ancient works,
adaptations by modern masters, or new works built upon or inspired
by classical themes. The company’s Wrst two seasons demonstrated a
particular fascination with the tragic Herakles. In 2004 it proudly
staged the Wrst professional production of Sophocles’ The Women of
Trachis in North America since 1960. Although unaware of the fact at
the time, in rescuing MacLeish’s Herakles from theatrical oblivion,
Natural Theatricals accomplished an even more remarkable feat.
The company’s artistic director, Paula Alprin, had discovered a copy of
the 1967 text on the bottom shelf of a used bookstore, where ‘it was
practically a doorstop’.47 Because of its strong classical inXuence and
apparent neglect, ‘this Wne and fascinating play’48 accorded ideally with
the company’s artistic mission. But, as Brian Alprin, the producing
director, explained: ‘We were certainly unaware of the pervasive neglect
of Herakles since 1965. We knew it was underproduced—we specialize in
underproduced and neglected works as well as new works—but not the
extent of the neglect.’49 The Alprins did not know that the 1965 play had
not been professionally revived in the intervening decades; that there
were, in fact, two versions of the play; or that the published version had
never been performed. Thus Natural Theatricals was unwittingly respon-
sible for staging the world première of MacLeish’s two-act Herakles.

47 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 27 Feb. 2006.

48 Ibid.
49 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 2 Mar. 2006.
 The Herakles complex 305
Such a milestone was worthy of more than local recognition. It is
unfortunate, therefore, that unlike the Schneider production forty
years earlier, Natural Theatricals’ eVorts were reviewed only by critics
in Greater Washington, DC.50 The reviews, in one respect, echoed the
consensus of the national critics in 1965, that as a stageable entity the
play was strangely lifeless. Technical diYculties and ineVectual air-
conditioning conspired on the press opening to reinforce this con-
viction. Nevertheless, it is likely that even a Xawless production
would expose persistent dramatic deWciencies in MacLeish’s revised
script. The fact remains that the play’s lyricism and fervour somehow
defy easy translation to the stage.
What distinguished the critical reaction to the play in 2005 from
that in 1965 was a complete failure (despite the inclusion of MacLe-
ish’s author’s note in the programme) to understand the importance
of the Euripidean chronology to the story, and especially to MacLe-
ish’s reading of the Wlicide. It is not clear what ancient source one
critic had in mind when he wrote: ‘Mr Macleish’s Herakles timeline
may not be exactly as the ancient Greeks wrote it.’51 Not one review
mentioned MacLeish’s conscious debt to Euripides’ Herakles or how
the revelation that Herakles has killed his own sons exempliWes the
play’s central concerns. These omissions, I suspect, indicate a lack of
directorial focus as much as inattention and classical illiteracy on the
part of the critics. Rip Claassen’s programme note is a rather equivo-
cal excursus on the play’s periphery; it fails to engage with the
implications of either the Wlicide or the Euripidean chronology:
‘This wonderful work that Mr. MacLeish left us has our heroes
seeking truths. To me, anyone who is brave enough to explore truth
and destiny is a hero, for to face questions and answers (or no
answer) is brave, to accept and never question is folly. Do the gods,
or does God, make our destiny? Or do our choices, whatever they are,
give us our due?’
50 For reviews of the Natural Theatricals production, see ‘Greek Mythology
Viewed from the 1960s’, Potomac Stages, 5 Aug. 2005 (http://www.potomacstages.
com/NaturalArchive.htm#herakles); Brad Hathaway, ‘Herakles On Stage But OV to
Rough Start’, Alexandria Gazette Packet, 11 Aug. 2005; ‘Herakles at the Temple’, Del
Ray Sun, 20 Aug. 2005; Walter RuV, ‘An Evening with Herakles’, DC Theatre Reviews
(http://dctheatrereviews.com/review/2006/02/24/25).
51 Rich See, ‘A Summer of Greek Theatre’, Curtain Up, 5 Aug. 2005 (http://
www.curtainup.com/greeksummerdc.html).
306 The Herakles complex

Fig. 4. Herakles, Archibald MacLeish, Alexandria VA, 2005. Deborah Rinn

Critzer (Mrs Hoadley) and Bruce Alan Rauscher (Hoadley). Photo: Stan
Barouh.
 The Herakles complex 307
Where Claassen demonstrated a more incisive appreciation of the
play was in his staging of its sex-war dynamics. It is signiWcant that
MacLeish’s reading of the Wlicide, as a paradigm of the dangerous
potential of scientiWc militarism, is devoid of any subtext relating to
sexual politics. However, the text now demands reappraisal in the
light of the feminist revision of gender roles, and recent thinking on
male violence, especially domestic violence. A modern staging needs
to make explicit the relationship between child-murder and prob-
lematic masculinity, a relationship only implicit in MacLeish’s inves-
tigation of the Herakles complex. Claassen went some way towards
this by drawing a parallel between the instinctive and misogynistic
violence practised by the two heroes, between Hoadley’s manhand-
ling of his wife and Herakles’ violation of the Pythian sanctuary.
According to Brian Alprin: ‘We ratcheted up the physicality between
the Hoadleys—instead of catching her wrist he circled behind the
couch and caught her by the hair, viciously twisting her neck to direct
her towards the window. It corresponded well to Herakles grabbing
Xenoclea’s hair to cast her on to the court beneath the stairs leading
to the door.’52 This parallel could have been made more explicit by
doubling the roles of Hoadley and Herakles. Instead, actor Bruce
Alan Rauscher (Hoadley) doubled as the Greek guide. But the pro-
duction clearly established the Hoadleys’ absent alienated son as one
of the keys to the play: ‘We tried to make sure that his role in the
dynamics of the family was understood by our audience in prepar-
ation for Act II.’53
The two attempts, forty years apart, to bring MacLeish’s Heraklean
vision to theatrical fruition have been partly thwarted by the play’s
inherent dramaturgical shortcomings. Yet the vision itself retains its
power and urgency. Certainly the play is ripe for revaluation by a
twenty-Wrst-century audience; the relevance of its warning about
‘man become God’ has been renewed by the ethical debates on
biotechnology (especially cloning and stem-cell harvesting), by
intensiWed fears of chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare in the
wake of 9/11, by the descent of ‘liberated’ Iraq into slaughterous
chaos, and by the constant spectre of global terrorism.

52 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 4 Mar. 2006.

53 Ibid.
308 The Herakles complex

Problematizing traditional male heroism

MacLeish’s Herakles is unmistakably a product of its time, located in
a period of transition between diVerent cultural and theatrical lan-
guages. It was written and staged on the eve of the social changes
initiated by the women’s movement, a corollary of which was a new
curiosity on the part of theatre and Wlm practitioners about the male
psyche. Just weeks after MacLeish’s Herakles opened, the English
Stage Company gave the première at London’s Royal Court, of
Edward Bond’s Saved, a powerful and acutely observed study of the
violence endemic to a South London council estate and its aimless
young men. The play, which contains an on-stage infanticide, helped
to precipitate the abolition in 1968 of the Lord Chamberlain’s power
to censor plays. It has been frequently restaged since its première, a
mark of the interest shown by directors of the feminist and post-
feminist eras in the problematization of received notions of maleness
and in the relationship between these notions and the social evils of
domestic violence and child abuse.
More recently, mainstream cinema has displayed a similar interest
in representations of masculinity. In 1993 Susan JeVords was already
observing that ‘externality and spectacle have begun to give way to a
presumably more internalized masculine dimension. . . . More Wlm
time is devoted to explorations of [men’s] ethical dilemmas, emo-
tional traumas, and psychological goals.’54 The central question
posed by Hollywood depictions of male heroism since the 1980s
has been ‘whether, and how, masculinity can be reproduced success-
fully in a post-Vietnam, post-Civil Rights, post-women’s movement
era’.55 Within this cultural climate, Euripides’ Herakles, which details
the shift from external to internal heroism, becomes an ideal text for
the modern enquiry into the problematic male hero, and conse-
quently a powerful piece of social drama.
In the last decade editors and translators of Herakles have tried to
show how ‘Euripides’ original play probes the nature of heroism,
violence, and masculinity’.56 In the introduction to her 1996 edition
of the text, Shirley Barlow stated that Herakles’ externally caused

54 JeVords (1993), 245–62, at 245. 55 Ibid. 247.

56 Hall (2003), pp. vii–xli, at xii.
 The Herakles complex 309
madness parodies and perverts the hero’s habitual violent behaviour.
She deduces from Euripides’ careful staging of the madness, his
tragically methodical inversion of Herakles’ normal heroic qualities,
that the playwright views the normalization or legitimization of
heroic violence as morally problematic:
Heracles’ precision in dispatching in sequence his children and his wife with the
same deadly weapons and the same eYciency with which he has accomplished
other violent actions shows both the continuity with and also now the negative
side of physical strength. The line between legitimate violence and taboo
violence is a very Wne one, as Euripides’ use of the hallucination underlines,
for it is the beguiling delusion which makes Heracles’ actual deeds seem natural
to him when in fact they are unnatural to an extreme degree.57
Kenneth McLeish saw Euripides’ Herakles as ‘an early example of
that favourite character in myth and legend, the Xawed and suVering
hero. . . . He has two natures, and they are at war.’58 His comparison
of Herakles with the infamous female Wlicide Medea is instructive:
‘While Medea’s murder of her sons imposes no guilt on her, setting
both her and them free from the trappings of mortality, the murder
of Herakles’ sons intensiWes his human feelings, forcing him to Wnd
ways to cope not only with the guilt he feels for their deaths, but with
the Xawed and mortal part of himself of which those deaths are a
consequence.’59 SigniWcantly, in July 1998 McLeish’s translation of
Herakles was performed, under Nick Philippou’s direction, at The
Gate in London as the second of two plays in the theatre’s ‘No More
Heroes’ season. According to a programme note, the season pre-
sented ‘the parallel stories of two men coming home. They should
be treated as heroes. But they Wnd themselves in a world they don’t
recognise as their own.’ The other work was Outside on the Street, a
new translation by Tom Fisher of Wolfgang Borchert’s autobiograph-
ical and only play Draußen vor der Tür.60 Its central character is a
German soldier who returns from a prisoner-of-war camp on the
Russian front and is unable to adapt himself to civilian life.
In 2001 Christian WolV, introducing an original translation of
Herakles by poet Tom Sleigh, wrote:

57 Barlow (1996), 10. 58 McLeish (1997), pp. xxiv–xxxiv, at xxxi.

59 Ibid., p. xxxii. 60 First performed on 21 Nov. 1947.
310 The Herakles complex
Herakles’ heroic identity requires deeds of force and violence, carried out
usually far from home. When he comes home to save his family and be with
them, looking forward to passing on his fame, his heroic example, to his
sons, the heroic identity, with its divine baggage, will not adapt; it self-
destructs. One might suppose that Herakles brings home the craziness that
makes great warriors and that his madness, a caricature of his heroic
behavior, is psychologically plausible.61
While WolV acknowledges that Euripides himself does not encourage
this sort of rationalization, he does assert that the tragedy is subversive,
that it calls into question presumed norms of order, including heroic
values.62 Introducing Robin WaterWeld’s translation of Herakles in
2003, Edith Hall commented on Euripides’ persistent interest in male
violence and on the easy appropriation of this ancient poet by modern
interpreters who have a ‘paciWst feminist’ agenda.63 She also made an
explicit connection between the madness of Herakles and that aVecting
the warrior or trained killer: ‘Heracles is the only Greek tragedy in
which Madness herself appears. Here she takes the form the Greeks
called Lyssa, a personiWcation of the peculiarly male form of mental
disorientation to which trained killers are vulnerable, the madness
characteristic of soldiers who have gone berserk on the battleWeld.’64
In a preface to her translation of Herakles in 2006, Canadian poet and
classicist Anne Carson deWned Herakles’ madness speciWcally as ‘ber-
serker furor’65 and Herakles himself as a ‘brutalized and brutalizing
hero’.66 Her analysis of the play’s violent self-splintering evoked the lethal
duality of Seneca’s Hercules at war with himself: ‘Herakles is a two-part
man. Euripides wrote for him a two-part play. It breaks down in the
middle and starts over again as does he. Wrecks and recharges its own
form as he wrecks and recharges his own legend.’67 In developing this
theme Carson combined a species of Arnott’s ‘red-herring’ theory with a
more extreme form of Arrowsmith’s ‘conversion of reality’ theory:
The Wrst eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to.
Euripides assembles every stereotype of Desperate Domestic Situation and a
Timely Hero’s Return in order to place you at the very heart of Herakles’
dilemma, which is also Euripides’ dilemma: Herakles has reached the

61 WolV (2001), 3–23, at 13. 62 Ibid. 17.

63 See Hall (2003), pp. vii–vli, at x and xiii. 64 Ibid., p. xxii.
65 Carson (2006), 14. 66 Ibid. 15. 67 Ibid. 13.
 The Herakles complex 311
boundary of his own myth, he has come to the end of his interestingness. . . .
For this practical dilemma Euripides’ solution is simple. From inside the
cliché he lets Herakles wreck not only his house, his family, his perfection,
his natural past, his supernatural future, but also the tragedy itself. Into the
Wrst half of the play he packs an entire dramatic praxis, complete with
reversals, recognitions, laments, revenge, rejoicing, suspense and death.
This melodrama ends at 814. The actors leave the stage. You may think it’s
over and head for the door.
But if you stay you will see Herakles pull the whole house of this play
down around himself, tragic conventions and all. Then from inside his
berserker furor he has to build something absolutely new. New self, new
name for the father, new deWnition of God. The old ones have stopped. It is
as if the world broke oV. Why did it break oV? Because the myth ended.68
Presented here is an image of Herakles as a damaged war veteran
needing to break literally with a dangerously obsolescent self and an
equally incongruous world-view. Probably taking its cue from this
prefatory image, Hilton Als’s review of Carson’s translation, which
appeared in the New Yorker, reads almost like an appreciation of
Seneca’s Hercules Furens and very much like an arraignment of Iraq
War hawks:
We have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to
ideology. . . . Carson oVers us a familiar portrait: Herakles is a man whose
hubris, political and otherwise, brings his nobility to a crashing close.
Carson focuses on Herakles’ ‘berserker furor’, oVering an apt description
of an imperialist, ancient or modern, who fails to provide for his people’s
safety or who sends young soldiers to Wght wars that rob them and their
country of the promise inherent in tomorrow.
Strangely, there is very little in Carson’s translation itself to justify a
Senecan reading. There is no suggestion of hubris (although the
publisher’s blurb refers to Herakles swaggering home) or of intern-
alized furor. In fact, Carson’s rendering of Lyssa’s on-stage activation
of the madness is consummately Euripidean in its emphasis on the
physical immediacy and externality of her manoeuvres:
Wilder than the wild cracking sea,
than earth split open,
than the lightning bolt that breathes pain,

68 Ibid. 14.
312 The Herakles complex
is the race I shall run into the breast of Herakles!
I’ll smash his halls, pull down the house,
kill the children.
And the killer will not know who it is he kills
until my madness ends.
Watch! . . .
I call upon the dooms of death
to howl in like dogs to the hunt.
Soon I will set you dancing, my man, yes
I will turn you into a Xute of fear!
(820–8; 833–6 ¼ Eur. Her. 861–7; 869–71)69
Her translation of ΠI
ŒÆÆ (865) as ‘I’ll kill the children’,
and ŒÆÆıºø fiø (871) as ‘I will turn you into a Xute of fear’,
conveys more explicitly than Barlow’s version (‘I shall have made him
kill his children’; ‘I shall play upon you a pipe of terror’) Lyssa’s active
part in the Wlicide and her transformative power.

SIMON ARMITAGE’S MISTER HE RAC LE S

The trained killer: a case study

These trends in theatre, Wlm, and scholarly criticism have precipitated
the current reversal of fortune in the performance reception of Euripi-
des’ Herakles detailed at the opening of this chapter. An excellent
example of how recent social and cultural developments have
inXuenced, consciously and subconsciously, the modern reading of
this ancient play and the ongoing diagnosis of the Herakles complex
is Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles. Born in West Yorkshire two years
before MacLeish’s Herakles was staged, Simon Armitage was Britain’s
oYcial Millennium Poet and is a prescribed author in the GSCE
syllabus. Mister Heracles, his Wrst major project undertaken for the
stage, was commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds
where, under the co-direction of Natasha Betteridge and Simon God-
win, it received its world première on 16 February 2001. The adaptation
of a Greek tragedy was an uncharacteristic assignment for Armitage,
69 Carson (2006), 54–5.
 The Herakles complex 313
and a departure from his familiar idiom and the more localized sphere
in which he writes. He maintains that this was not a conscious change
of direction, but rather a product of his maturity as a writer: ‘In writing
my poems and some of the prose I’ve done in the past, I’ve always been
drawn to characters who exist on the margin. But Mister Heracles is
about the big things, and maybe I just thought I’d arrived at a time in
my life when I got a kind of writing conWdence and I could tackle
that.’70 Explaining his approach to interpreting the original text, Armi-
tage says he ‘didn’t simply want to contemporise’ the ancient drama or
update it to a speciWc point in history: ‘In Mister Heracles, it is as if
the whole of human history has occurred within the lifespan of
one family. Atomic weapons and spears are spoken of in the same
sentence, quantum physics and spinning wheels considered in the
same thought. . . . No cultural or historical co-ordinates were beyond
possibility using this full-spectrum approach.’71 The play, therefore,
incorporates a vast transhistorical compass, into which are built many
deliberate anachronisms. These anachronisms were reXected in the
stage design and costuming. What gives cohesion to this chronologic-
ally ‘full-spectrum approach’ is not the play’s temporal context, but
rather its thematic focus.
In his penultimate speech, the hero of Mister Heracles demon-
strates to Theseus that his lineage and life’s work constituted a
progression towards catastrophe. He declares himself ‘a case study,
j a living, breathing, one-man case-history’ (51). Armitage has said
that the play is about what he sees as the ‘very strong contemporary
theme’ of heroism.72 Central to his reworking of Euripides’ drama is
the notion, which seems to have been original to Seneca and which
was developed by Wilamowitz, that the potential for violence is
within Herakles from the outset of the play. In the Senecan version
the madness is externally instigated by Juno, but the characters of Iris
and Lyssa are excised, and what actually precipitates Hercules’ down-
fall is his own divided nature. Armitage is even more explicit than
Seneca in internalizing the germ of violence. At the same time, he
perceives a meaning in the violence that extends far beyond the Wgure
70 In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Feb. 2001.
71 Armitage (2000), pp. ix–x. All subsequent page numbers in the main text of this
chapter refer to this edition.
72 Front Row, Feb. 2001.
314 The Herakles complex
of Heracles: he sees the madness and infanticide as the inevitable, if
extreme, products of the terrifying capabilities bred by such modern
phenomena as virtual reality, relentless acceleration in the speed of
technological advances, and systematic desensitization to all forms of
violence. More particularly, Armitage’s study of the Herakles com-
plex has at its core the cultural psychology of militarism and mascu-
linity, and the problem, above all, of trained killers adapting to
civilized and civilian society. In contrast to MacLeish, for Simon
Armitage, writing in the post-feminist era, the Herakles who is a
paradigm of militarism is also necessarily a comment on the way
society construes masculinity and the cultural and political author-
ization of male violence.
From the beginning of the production an overt, although highly
eclectic militarism was established through images borrowed and
condensed from history and popular culture, and reXecting the
fragmented focus of the military in the post-Cold War era. The
play opened in outer space, where Mister Heracles, an astronaut,
gradually Xoated into view as the title of the play Xashed above the
stage like the opening credits of a Wlm. At the beginning of Euripides’
play the explanation for Herakles’ absence is that he is undertaking
his twelfth labour, an attempt to abduct Cerberus from the Under-
world. In Armitage’s version the twenty-Wrst-century equivalent of
this katabasis is interplanetary exploration, with Heracles the Wrst
man to travel at the speed of light. Dispossessed and anxiously
awaiting his return, Megara, Amphitryon, and the three sons of
Heracles had the appearance of refugees or prisoners of war, whose
images are familiar from World War II newsreels. The setting also
gave the impression of a post-atomic apocalypse, an impression
supported by the presence of the chorus, who, in modern dress and
grimy blue work-coats, had the task of cleaning up after the fallout.
In the second choral ode, the original strophe and antistrophe were
adapted in the choreography of twelve songs, performed alternately
by the four members of the chorus in a style akin to modern rap
music. These songs depicted the labours of Heracles as the exploits of
a comic-strip hero or a character from the Boys’ Own annuals.
In preparation for their execution, and at Megara’s request, the
family are permitted by Lycus to enter their house and exchange their
ragged clothes for party outWts. In the production, the boys emerged
 The Herakles complex 315

Fig 5. Mister Heracles, Simon Armitage, Leeds, 2001. Clare McCarron

(Megara) and Adrian Bower (Heracles). Photo: Keith Pattison.

dressed in kilts, Megara in a party dress and tartan sash, and Am-
phitryon in tails and campaign medals. They appeared as the proud
stock of the army establishment. Heracles, on his return, reinforced
this image, assuming again his role as head of a traditional nuclear
family within a rigidly hierarchical military community. His costume
was a cross between the uniforms of an English soldier and a US air-
force pilot. King Eurystheus of Argos, who in Euripides’ tragedy
ordered the labours, has been replaced in this version by a state
military organization from which, by his own admission, Heracles
is absent without leave. Consistent with his unspeciWc uniform, this
military entity is unnamed and could as easily be NASA as a military
battalion. It is clear, at any rate, that unlike Euripides’ Herakles, who
is an individual and solitary alexikakos (averter of evil), Armitage’s
hero operates within an oYcial and organized military culture.73
73 As Hall (2004b), 1–46, at 16, states: ‘The idea of Heracles as military hero was
brought home in the Euripidean section of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Heracles Trilogy,
which premiered in Istanbul in 1999, and was performed by both Greek and Turkish
actors.’
316 The Herakles complex
In drawing a contrast between Heracles’ initial bluster, bravado,
and slightly imperious manner (qualities which liken him to a miles
gloriosus from New Comedy), and the tenderness of his reunion with
his family, Armitage has reproduced the breach Euripides also high-
lighted between heroic and domestic values. He has beautifully
rendered into modern verse the moving simile in which Herakles
compares his children to epholkides, little boats towed after a ship:
All climb into me,
life will not give out,
will not splinter me.
Sail in my slipstream,
my candle aXoat
and my paper boats.
(25)
Heracles’ simple assertion to his family, ‘Today is put back’ (22), pro-
vides both a powerful closure to the traditional nostos tale dramatized in
the play’s Wrst half and an eVective prelude to the climactic peripeteia
with which the second half begins. Armitage is signiWcantly juxtaposing
Heracles’ behaviour as an aVectionate father and unfailing protector
with his celebrated public image as a relentless killing machine.
The sudden appearance of Iris and Lyssa midway through Euripi-
des’ play, which interrupts the joyous choral ode celebrating Hera-
kles’ rescue of his family (763–814), marks a chilling reversal for
which the audience has in no way been prepared. Armitage’s robust,
almost ribald, interpretation of the ode prepares the audience, in
some measure, for the tone and import of the supernatural dialogue,
especially when the chorus remark:
Goodness has come with years of nurture,
but willpower and killer instinct too
are in his nature.
(31)
These lines adumbrate the disaster in that Heracles’ ‘killer instinct’ is
the very instinct that Armitage’s Madness is able to activate and turn
against Heracles. The chorus oVer a further, ominous reminder that
Heracles’ skills as a killer, the skills he will now employ to save his family,
have been honed and perfected in his unquestioning service to duty:
 The Herakles complex 317
Now, with kith and kin
to be protected,
the true Heracles steps forward.
Now he must kill for himself, not just to order.
(31–2)
In a radical departure from its Euripidean model, the epiphany of Iris
and Madness, as staged by Betteridge and Godwin, seemed to parody
the James Bond world of glamour and gadgetry and owe something
as well to the Cold War landscape of a John Le Carré spy novel. The
two characters, as Armitage has drawn them, represent the state
military organization which Heracles, by exerting his independence,
has snubbed. Although their entrance, which ‘smacks of oYcial
disaster’ (32), strikes terror in the chorus, the eVect turns to bathos
with Iris’ opening words of reassurance:
People, please, don’t stand up—we’re not stopping.
It’s a Xying visit—we were just passing.
Anyway, it isn’t you we’re interested in, obviously,
but you-know-who, everyone’s favourite dreamboat,
who I see from the way you’re carrying on
is back in the neighbourhood, making himself at home.
(32)
Madness, who on stage was represented by a male actor, is a middle-
class under-achiever dissatisWed with his dirty work and, in contrast
to the sobriety and prudence of Euripides’ Lyssa, a querulous and
self-obsessed creature:
I come from a good family, went to private school,
I could have been something big in the city
or the church, but it didn’t work out.
I seem to have fallen between schools. . . .
It’s the very thanklessness of the task
gets a person in the end; there’s no gratitude
from upstairs, and obviously no slap on the back
from those on the receiving end.
(33)
The comic interplay between Iris and Madness creates a surreal
prelude to the climactic explosion of homicidal madness. Godwin
and Betteridge’s staging of this important scene was very similar in
318 The Herakles complex
style and purpose to Nick Philippou’s epiphany in the 1998 Gate
production. In a review of this earlier production for the Times
Literary Supplement, Helen Morales noted: ‘Emily Python’s Madness
is portrayed as a petulant teenager in a short dress and black boots,
with hair in scrunched knots. This conception . . . lessens her dra-
matic impact. Euripides conjures Madness with ‘‘eyes white, veins
throbbing and beard spit-drooled’’, but Python merely Xicks through
magazines while Herakles writhes in anguish.’74 The eVorts of these
modern directors to diminish the dramatic impact of Euripides’
striking central epiphany betray a Senecan conception of the mad-
ness. As Fitch explains, in Hercules Furens, ‘as often in classical
literature, we Wnd two levels of motivation: one divine and the
other human, or one mythological and the other psychological’.75
Seneca’s real interest lay in the human/psychological level. But rather
than dispense with the divine/mythological level altogether, and
thereby defy centuries of dramaturgical convention, he conWned it
to the prologue. He therefore, as Fitch says, ‘distanced the divine
action as far as possible from the actual madness, and showed the
planning stage, involving Juno herself, rather than her agents as in
Euripides’.76 Similarly, modern directors prefer to minimize or even
make light of the gods’ intervention and to concentrate on the
psychological causation of the madness.
Unlike Euripides’ Lyssa, who runs races into Herakles’ heart (Kªg

ØÆ
æÆFÆØ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı, ‘I shall run races into
Herakles’ heart’, 863), Armitage’s Madness uses an electronic device
that locks onto Heracles’ frequency, activating a violence that is
intuitive. SigniWcantly omitted from this scene is any mention of
Hera, her vengeful purpose, or her initiation of the madness. Nor
does Madness admonish Iris and Hera, as in Euripides’ text (848–54),
for proceeding against an undeserving object of Olympian wrath.
Armitage’s Iris explicitly conWrms what the chorus had earlier un-
wittingly predicted, that the eYcacy of the method by which Heracles
will become mad is entirely contingent upon his predisposition to

74 Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 1998, p. 20. Lyn Gardner, in her review of the
same production, described Madness as ‘a Hello!-reading hairdresser waiting for her
client’s hair to dry’ (Guardian, 15 July 1998, p. 13).
75 Fitch (1987), 32. 76 Ibid.
 The Herakles complex 319
violence. The ‘injection’ of madness to be administered to Heracles
will multiply ‘his sense of being human’, which Iris says:
is Wne if he’s as meek as a lamb and so on,
but poor Heracles—a born killer through and through—
there’s no telling what a man like that might do.
(33–4)
Iris’ depiction of Heracles as ‘a born killer’ establishes for the con-
temporary audience an immediate association with Oliver Stone’s
1994 Wlm Natural Born Killers. The Wlm, based on a story by Quentin
Tarantino, is an analysis of the mass media’s gloriWcation of the
culture of violence, and charts the career of two psychopathic serial
murderers who achieve the status of legendary folk-heroes. Like
Stone, Armitage is dissecting the celebrity attached to the perpetrator
of violence and the impact on the individual of a cultural psychology
according to which violence is the norm.
The symptoms of Mister Heracles’ madness reveal Armitage’s
internalization of his hero’s psychosis and explanation of his loss of
self as symptomatic of the imperative of violence that has deWned his
previous existence. In Euripides’ text, Lyssa describes how she will
carry out her commission predominantly in the Wrst person (861 V.),
thus stressing her very physical operation through Herakles, whose
mind and body will be consumed by her force. Moreover, Herakles’
madness begins to take eVect while Lyssa is still on stage, drawing
attention to what she is doing to him: j N
 (‘Look at him!’, 867).
By contrast, Armitage’s Madness, whose concise diagnosis is given in
the third person, exhibits a clinical detachment in the execution of
his work. The process of triggering Heracles’ madness is not one of
violent upheaval (as charted by the Euripidean Lyssa’s catalogue
of graphic images at 861–71), but involves what Iris describes as an
‘electronic adrenalin shot’ (32). Madness elaborates on this process:
The subject feels a Xash
of blinding light, leading to temporary memory loss
and sometimes a funny turn or possible blackout
before sense returns.
(33)
This electronic charge will sever instinct from reason and Heracles
will act ‘as if spell-bound, radio-controlled, or on strings’ (34).
320 The Herakles complex
Madness does not specify the consequences of Heracles’ hallucin-
atory behaviour. Euripides’ Lyssa states, Œ I
ŒÆÆ
æH
(‘First I shall have made him kill his children’, 865). Armitage’s
Madness is less precise, although the psychosis will involve a kind
of ‘cinematic replay’ of the twelve labours: ‘All the past comes spool-
ing through the mind’ (34). The chorus also interpret the madness as
serial Xashbacks to the routine slaughter imposed by the labours:
Some whirlwind of the mind
whips up a version of his life
which he acts out on his own kind.
(35)
Thus, as in Euripides, the hallucination is a parody of the labours and
an inversion of Heracles’ heroic self. Where Armitage diverges from
Euripides and assumes a Senecan standpoint is in his suggestion,
developed in his reworking of the rehabilitation of Heracles, that the
madness and murders are the culmination of a natural progression
towards an unnatural act.
In the Messenger’s account of the onset of Heracles’ madness in
Mister Heracles there is signiWcantly no English equivalent of the
powerful Euripidean phrase ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931) to signal the
abrupt transition from sanity to insanity. Similarly, as Euripides’
Messenger recounts the physical symptoms of the madness at
932–5, the emphasis is on the metamorphosis and distortion of the
normal self—the contorted features, the foaming mouth, and the
maniacal laugh—but Armitage’s Messenger describes a system in
overload, the intensiWcation of symptoms already present, and the
easy awakening of a latent psychosis:
A nerve pumped in the wall of his neck,
just here, as if the man couldn’t swallow,
and his eyes swelled in their sockets. His veins
were hot, overloaded.
(37)
Heracles’ mad speech, as reported by Armitage’s Messenger, is also
symptomatic of the heightening of a mentality practised in violence
and enslaved to a manic speed of activity:
Father, this isn’t the time to clean the house,
I have breakthroughs to make, barriers to crash,
 The Herakles complex 321
more dirty work to do before I stop.
No rest for the wicked indeed. No peace.
(37)
The snatches of speech, which in Armitage’s text precede the murders
of the Wrst two sons, generalize the targets of his rage: ‘Here’s one
I’m killing for the mother state’; ‘here’s a killing for the greater
good’ (38). These statements indicate that the madness has not
necessarily been triggered by the most recent events in Heracles’
life, but is the inevitable consequence of a culture steeped in violence
in which, as MacLeish’s play also pleaded, the achievements that
advance civilization can also be responsible for its dehumanization
and destruction.
In the Leeds production the same actor played the roles of Mad-
ness and the Messenger. He was, therefore, the last character to enter
the house before the madness erupted and the Wrst to re-emerge in its
aftermath. Armitage’s adaptation of the Messenger’s speech is one of
the Wnest monologues in the play, and Nick Bagnall’s interpretation
of it was a compelling piece of naturalistic acting through which the
impact of the tragedy was conveyed. What Armitage has successfully
translated from the original speech is the sense of the ordinary and
domestic that is fractured by the onset of madness. His Messenger
begins his account by saying:
It was just happenchance I was present,
the way that a person walking the beach
or harbour might be asked to photograph
a sweet family grouping with their camera.
(36)
From this quiet opening he reconstructs, in steady rhythm, each mur-
der and the mounting sense of his own powerlessness. Armitage adds
an even more sinister element to the original by indicating the pent-up
violence beneath the surface of this ideal image of the nuclear family.

Profile of the ‘family annihilator’

At the end of the Messenger’s speech the façade of the house was
slowly lowered onto the stage to reveal, within a blood-red cavity, the
322 The Herakles complex
tableau scene of a family living-room in which Heracles was asleep
and bound amid the carnage he had wrought.77 This image of
‘ordinary suburban horror’, identiWed by Lyn Gardner in her review
of the play,78 found almost simultaneous analogies in two widely
publicized real-life incidents of domestic homicide, both occurring
in quiet middle-class English suburbia. In Surrey, one week before
the opening of Mister Heracles, a former sergeant-major in the Cold-
stream Guards, described by family and neighbours as a devoted
husband and father who had enjoyed a glittering military career,
suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, shot dead his wife and two
small children. Unlike Euripides’ Herakles, he then succeeded in
killing himself. Gardner mentioned the case in her review of Mister
Heracles, while another newspaper reviewer asked: ‘Does the violence
of warfare incite soldiers to other sorts of violence?’79 Six months
later PC Karl Bluestone of Gravesend, also remembered as a
respected oYcer and an adoring father, used a hammer to bludgeon
to death his wife and two of his four children before hanging himself.
In an article which appeared in the Daily Telegraph in the wake of this
second tragedy, the writers attempted to explain the psychology
behind such increasingly common instances of Wlicide, declaring:
‘The ordinariness and decency of the situation are an aVront to the
imagination.’80 These men were only two amongst nine British
fathers who murdered their children in the space of two years.
What makes Smith and Bluestone oVer particularly close analogies
to Euripides’ Herakles is their role as heroes of modern civilization:
Smith had been a member of the queen’s ceremonial guard at Buck-
ingham Palace and had served with his regiment in Northern Ireland,
while Bluestone had been part of a tactical unit in North Kent, whose

77 This highly eVective piece of staging successfully re-created the function of the
ekkyklema (a wheeled platform). At 1029–30 of Euripides’ text the chorus cries out:
Y
Ł,
Ø 
ØÆ ŒºfiBŁæÆ j ŒºÆØ łØ
ºø
ø (‘Ah, ah—look! The double doors
of the high-gated palace are being moved’). At this point the skēnē doors would be
opened and the tableau of the sleeping Herakles lashed to a pillar amidst the corpses
of his family would be wheeled out on the ekkyklema. On the use of this machine, see
Bond’s note (1981), 329 on 1028 V.
78 Guardian, 24 Feb. 2001.
79 Susannah Clapp, Observer, 25 Feb. 2001.
80 Elizabeth Grice and Nicole Martin, ‘What Drives a Father to Kill his Family?’,
Daily Telegraph, 31 Aug. 2001, p. 21.
 The Herakles complex 323
purpose was to combat speciWc antisocial crimes such as vandalism.
The disturbing phenomenon of ‘civilization heroes’ as the perpet-
rators of domestic violence has also surfaced in America’s ‘War on
Terror’. Between 11 June and 19 July 2002, four military wives were
murdered, allegedly by their husbands who were based at Fort Bragg
in North Carolina, the headquarters of America’s élite Special Forces
unit. Three of the men were Special Operations soldiers, who had
recently returned from service in Afghanistan; and, of these, two
committed suicide after their wives were killed. Military authorities
denied that there was a connection between the killings and the
men’s service in Afghanistan, but the much-publicized wife-murders
prompted an investigation into the military’s provision of ‘reuniWca-
tion training’ for soldiers returning from combat deployment, family
assistance centres and support groups, and post-deployment coun-
selling. Today on the website of the National Center for PTSD (Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder), established by America’s Veteran AVairs
in 1989, soldiers and their families can download guidelines on
‘Returning from the War Zone’. Such cases as the Fort Bragg murders
certainly lend powerful and truly tragic force to Mister Heracles.
When Georg Rootering directed Wolfgang Heyder’s version of
Herakles at Liechtenstein’s Theater am Kirchplatz in March 2001,
he argued that the reason it was so important in today’s society to
stage this once rarely performed piece was the topicality of the crime
of Wlicide and its never-lessening power to horrify us: ‘Mit seinem
Werk bezieht Euripides Stellung zu Themen, die uns heute noch
beschäftigen. Ein Held erschlägt in Blutrausch seine Familie—gewiss,
das ist auch im Jahr 2001 nicht alltäglich’ (‘In his work Euripides
takes a stand on themes that still occupy us today. A hero slays his
family in a murderous frenzy—well, admittedly this isn’t an everyday
occurrence even in 2001’).81 The fact that fathers as child-killers have
increasingly become the focus of both public interest and forensic
psychology has helped to make Euripides’ shocking Herakles
a more attractive and stageable proposition than in previous decades.
Herakles conforms in several respects to what American criminologists

81 ‘. . . schon beim ersten Lesen habe ich die Stimmen gehört’ (‘. . . even upon the
Wrst reading [of it] I heard the voices’), Georg Rootering in conversation with
Wolfgang Heyder, Herakles programme, 5.
324 The Herakles complex
now deWne as a new sub-category of killer, the ‘family annihilator’.
According to his psychological proWle, the family annihilator is a
devoted husband and father, a responsible provider, and a model
citizen. He is also, like Seneca’s Hercules, an overly controlling and
autarkic personality. Professor Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick
Centre on ConXict and Violence at Northeastern University in Bos-
ton, says family annihilators share one key characteristic: ‘They are
loners. These killers don’t share responsibility. They have the mental
attitude that they are ‘‘commander-in-chief ’’, and that it’s lonely at
the top. They cannot share their problems with the foot soldiers.’82 It
is this attitude, combined with deep psychological disturbance and
personal catastrophe, that persuades the family annihilator that the
killings he is methodically carrying out are altruistic in nature (cf.
Armitage’s Heracles: ‘here’s a killing for the greater good’ (38)). In his
large-scale survey of infanticide, Hardness of Heart, Hardness of Life
(2000), Larry S. Milner draws on forensic case-studies, international
statistics, and literary representations in categorizing psychologically
the perpetrators of this crime. The myths of Medea and Herakles are
both analysed, but under separate categories. The term ‘Medea
syndrome’ or ‘Medea complex’, Milner says, designates the murder
of a child in revenge against a spouse.83 It is used almost exclusively
of female infanticides, despite the signiWcant number of men who kill
their children in order to punish their wives. Herakles, together with
Athamas,84 is listed by Milner as a prime example of the Wlicidal
parent who kills out of insanity or extreme psychosis, and whose
condition has traditionally been ascribed to the workings of a ma-
levolent god.85 Recent stagings of Euripides’ Herakles provide evi-
dence of the ways in which, as Milner observes, modern medical
thought has replaced mythological interpretations based on divine
causation with speciWc psychiatric diagnoses.86 They are also evi-
dence of an important shift in social and theatrical priorities from

82 ‘Family Man’, Guardian Weekend, 13 July 2002, p. 24.

83 See Milner (2000), 380–2.
84 Like Herakles, Athamas was a victim of Hera’s jealous anger: he and his wife Ino
had raised Dionysus, the illegitimate child of Zeus and Semele. Hera drove Athamas
insane, causing him to kill Ino and his young sons Learchus and Melicertes after
mistaking them for a lioness and her cubs. See Ovid, Met. 4. 416–530.
85 See Milner (2000), 417–19. 86 Ibid. 419.
 The Herakles complex 325
the Medea complex to the Herakles complex. The Wlicide in Euripi-
des’ Medea has been of primary interest to directors throughout the
play’s performance history. By contrast, the issue of Wlicide in Hera-
kles has been largely subordinate to the broader issue of heroism.
This discrepancy was memorably pointed up by Tony Harrison in a
reference to Herakles as Medea’s male counterpart in Medea: A Sex-
War Opera (1985). The comparison underlines the unfairly diVerent
treatment, in both ancient myth and modern media, meted out to
male and female Wlicides:
He killed his children. So where
Is Hercules’s electric chair?
A children slayer? Or is Medea
The one child-murderer you fear.87
Harrison’s drama ends by initiating a change in media focus from the
female Wlicide to the male Wlicide. Newspaper headlines and front-
page reports of mothers murdering their children are projected on a
screen, but the Wnal projection, ‘which freezes the music and the
chorus’, quotes a real tabloid newspaper headline, ‘a father cuts
his 4 kids’ throats’, with ‘father’ crudely underlined in red.88

Rehabilitating the ‘connoisseur of death’

In The Veteran Comes Back (1944) Willard Waller described the
unrehabilitated war veteran as ‘America’s gravest social problem’
and ‘a threat to society’.89 The threat, as Waller perceived it, existed
in the fact that the veteran is a trained killer who has become a
stranger to the civilian world, a ‘connoisseur of death but an illiterate
of peace’.90 He has to renaturalize himself into the ‘estranged world of
peacetime complexity’, to modify his ‘sadistic-aggressive tendencies’,
and to restore ‘his dominion over himself ’.91 But the veteran ‘can
never quite recapture his former self ’; there remains in his soul ‘a core

87 Cf. Kenneth McLeish’s comparison, cited earlier, of Herakles and Medea as

child-killers.
88 Harrison (1986), 370, 437, 448. The quotation was from the Sun, 19 Oct. 1983.
89 Waller (1944), 13. 90 Ibid. 247. 91 Ibid. 35, 44, 296.
326 The Herakles complex
of anger’ that is potentially explosive.92 Waller’s book, published in
the closing months of World War II, was an urgent plea to govern-
ment and society to prepare for the impending inXux of veteran GIs
by creating an ‘art of rehabilitation’ and a ‘science of Vetranology’.93
Two years later the Academy Award-winning Wlm The Best Years of
Our Lives, directed by William Wyler, explored many of the issues
which Waller had raised, about the plight of readjusting veterans and
the need for rehabilitative programmes. Like its Vietnam successor,
Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), it sensitively and un-
romantically interwove the stories of three ex-servicemen struggling
to resume their pre-war lives in small-town America. Armitage, at the
beginning of the twenty-Wrst century, has used Euripides’ Herakles to
address the same problem of the returned warrior and his estrange-
ment from ordinary domestic and civilized life. His reworking of the
post-madness scenes shows the aftermath of the type of explosion
Waller forecast. The rehabilitation of Mister Heracles is quite expli-
citly the slow and partial rehabilitation of a war veteran and a ‘con-
noisseur of death’.
Following Euripides, the rehabilitation of Armitage’s hero com-
prises three main stages: Heracles’ waking and the psychotherapy
scene in which Amphitryon guides his son towards recognition of his
deeds; Theseus’ arguments; and Heracles’ Wnal progress from the
contemplation of suicide to the shouldering of his fate. In Euripides’
play Herakles wakes from his madness uncertain whether he has
returned to Hades. The disorientation experienced by Armitage’s
Heracles, however, is expressed in a military context.94 He asks,
‘Am I captured? Were we overtaken j in battle?’ (42), and wonders
whether he has been the victim of some form of chemical warfare. On
seeing his father nearby, Heracles begs to be freed ‘before the enemy
returns’ (43). When Euripides’ Herakles Wnally recognizes the
corpses as those of his wife and children, and asks the identity of
their murderer, Amphitryon gives the answer, f ŒÆd a Æ ŒÆd
ŁH n ÆYØ (‘You with your bow and whichever god was respon-
sible’, 1135), thereby pronouncing the gods’ guilt and Herakles’ role

92 Waller (1944), 31, 109, 167. 93 Ibid. 305, 308.

94 Cf. the military frame of reference used by Seneca’s Hercules in the waking and
recognition scene: spolia (1154), victorem (1156), hostis (1167), praeda (1185).
 The Herakles complex 327
as the blameless instrument of divine will. In contrast, reXecting the
relative absence of the gods from Mister Heracles, Armitage has
Amphitryon answer pointedly, ‘Heracles, you killed them, nobody
else’ (44). When Heracles then asks his father whether he killed his
family ‘By force of hand or something inside me?’, Amphitryon
replies, ‘Like a man possessed, by his own dark thoughts’ (45). This
stands in revealing contrast to Amphitryon’s straightforward an-
nouncement in Euripides, Æ (‘You were mad’, 1137). Armitage
is redeWning Heracles’ temporary loss of reason and control as
possession by an internal force generated by the hero’s very mode
of existence. Consistent with this reading of the madness is Heracles’
admission, ‘It came from inside. I was . . . capable’ (49).95
The role of Theseus in Armitage’s play highlights the playwright’s
perception of the complexities inherent in any attempt to apportion
blame for the murders. He is the one character who tries to externalize
Heracles’ madness and who, at least at Wrst, alludes to workings on a
supernatural level (‘This reeks of intervention at a high level’ (47); ‘you
were disturbed from outside’ (49)). Yet even he soon argues that the
madness was inevitable in view of Heracles’ lifelong obedience to the
destiny which his own heroic attributes had shaped for him:
All your life you have fallen into step.
Born musclebound you’ve thrown your weight around,
born bright you’ve cracked the most cryptic of codes,
born of such birth you’ve held your head high,
followed the script exactly as planned.
So this fall was the most obvious thing
in the world—it was certain to happen.
(52)
Theseus thus represents for the audience the problem of determining
the cause of the violence that has erupted and indicates the necessity
of treating the individual psychology as merely part of a complex
social whole.
Herakles’ two major speeches in Euripides (at 1255–310 and 1340–
93), in which he makes his moral and spiritual journey from an old to
a new (or from an emergent to a mature) type of heroism, have been
95 Cf. Megara’s lines in MacLeish’s Herakles (1967), 89: ‘Nothing is terrible as the
will of god j that can and can and can.’
328 The Herakles complex
substantially altered and truncated by Armitage in accordance with
his own objectives. In the original version of these speeches Herakles
protests against the immorality of the gods and their indiVerence to
human suVering. He acknowledges Amphitryon as his ‘true’ father
and renounces Zeus who, he says, begot him to be the enemy of Hera
(1262–3). In Armitage’s play it is not the enmity of his stepmother
but the expectations created by his divinity that have contributed to
Heracles’ tragedy:
Well, father, I have tried to be your son,
tried hard to be a son of a true man,
not someone god-like or legendary,
but it cuts deep. Living up to his name
keeps driving me on, towards the extreme,
all part of a bigger push to be seen.
(51)
Whereas Euripides’ Herakles, by renouncing Zeus, asserts his human-
ity, Armitage, like MacLeish before him, goes further in declaring the
death of Zeus and dramatizes the dangers of man becoming God in
God’s absence. In the Wrst of these Wnal speeches Heracles concludes:
I see my life for what it is—a list
of things accomplished, acceptance speeches,
records broken, puzzles solved, clocks beaten,
all in the end without wider meaning.
(52)
Like MacLeish’s Herakles, and his Cold War counterpart Professor
Hoadley, Armitage’s hero has sought and failed to discover the
ultimate meaning of his labours. In his second speech, however, he
does try to re-evaluate his past achievements in the aftermath of their
tragic culmination. Armitage has ampliWed verses 1281 (lο

I ªŒ K 
 , ‘The pitch of necessity to which I have come is
this’) and 1294 (K F
 lØ ıæA rÆ
, ‘This is the
pitch of disaster I think I shall reach’) of Euripides’ text to give a very
diVerent exposition of Heracles’ tragic fall and his relationship to
Anagkē (Necessity). In the play’s most sustained analysis of the causes
of the madness, Heracles recalls, in Theseus’ presence, the process of
his gradual desensitization to the act of killing; the anaesthetizing
frequency of the deed; the shift from what was a trained action to the
 The Herakles complex 329
point where ‘instinct and reaction take over’ (53); and the sort of
impassivity that can only end in mania:
Remember the Wrst time you killed a man,
cousin? As if a threshold had been crossed
or some Wnal obstacle overcome?
But then what, after the second, third kill?
Did you keep count into double Wgures?
Did you round it up to a square number,
or round it down, back into proportion?
Soon instinct and reaction take over.
I’ve loaded magazines without thinking,
lined up the cross-hairs, beaded a target
as if I were just pointing a Wnger,
then beckoned death by pulling the trigger.
Along lines of sight, I’ve followed the trace
of gunWre passing through armour and Xesh,
seen daylight Xashing on the other side,
seen death blink its eye, and not broken sweat.
At Wrst it caused a dryness in the throat;
these days it doesn’t even raise the pulse.
I’ve killed without giving a single thought
to the speed of a bullet: one mile
per second, and spinning for good measure.
(53–4)
Armitage even ascribes to Heracles, during the madness, a degree of
consciousness—consciousness of excitement, something that Euripi-
des’ hero never experiences:
They dreamed up a plan
that couldn’t be more sweet: madness to strike
from inside, turning me loose on myself,
the gorgon’s head in a hall of mirrors.
During my crimson rage, here in my house,
when the red mist came down into my eyes,
even though I was cut oV from my soul
I remember one thing—feeling alive.
That’s how far I’ve come: only butchery
of those I love most provokes life in me. . . .
Oh, my children and my wife, that your death
were in me all the time, waiting to hatch.
(54)
330 The Herakles complex
These extraordinarily acute insights, which Armitage’s Heracles ar-
ticulates, into his own psychological condition have strong resonance
for a society that is becoming better educated about the role of post-
traumatic stress disorder in the experience of combat veterans.96
Benedict Nightingale astutely began his review of Mister Heracles in
The Times by noting the connection made in the play between the
Vietnam experience and the madness of Heracles: ‘We have all heard
of Vietnam vets who, years after the war, have gone on the rampage,
sometimes killing their nearest and dearest. For the poet Simon
Armitage, Euripides’ Heracles is an example of much the same
syndrome.’97
The resurgence of interest in performing Euripides’ Herakles co-
incides with the public impact of Jonathan Shay’s highly original
study Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Char-
acter (Wrst published 1994). In this work Shay, a psychiatrist in the
Department of Veteran AVairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, investi-
gates the symptoms of combat trauma through a comparative an-
alysis of the mutually illuminating Wrst-hand narratives of Vietnam
veterans and Homer’s descriptions in the Iliad of behavioural phe-
nomena displayed by combatants, especially Achilles. One behav-
ioural phenomenon particularly pertinent to Armitage’s reading of
Heracles’ madness is ‘the berserk state’, a term used by Shay to
designate the warrior’s blind and concentrated frenzy: ‘A soldier
who routs the enemy single-handedly is often in the grip of a special
state of mind, body, and social disconnection at the time of his
memorable deeds.’98 In the light of vivid reports by his patients,
who are Vietnam combat veterans with severe, chronic PTSD, Shay
re-examines aspects of the Wve aristeiai (heroic killing sprees) on
which Achaean warriors embark in the Iliad, and their transgression
of ‘the ambiguous borderline between heroism and a blood-crazed,
berserk state, in which abuse after abuse is committed’.99 During this

96 See the following recent surveys of post-combat syndromes: Hyams, Wignall,

and Roswell (1996), 398–405; Jones et al. (2002), 1–7; Ellard (2003), 246–54. On
World War II, see Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); on Vietnam, see
Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978); Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978); Ted KotcheV’s
First Blood (1982); and Steve Tesich’s stage play, The Speed of Darkness (1989).
97 ‘All the World’s a Rage’, The Times, 23 Feb. 2001.
98 Shay (1995), 77. 99 Ibid.
 The Herakles complex 331
state the ‘berserker’ exhibits attributes that are simultaneously god-
like and bestial, the factor common to both conditions being a lack of
all restraint: ‘Restraint is always in part the cognitive attention to
multiple possibilities in a situation; when all restraint is lost, the
cognitive universe is simpliWed to a single focus. The berserker is
Wguratively—and sometimes literally—blind to everything but his
destructive aim. He cannot see the distinction between civilian and
combatant or even the distinction between comrade and enemy.’100
The inability to distinguish between philoi and polemioi, along with
the other cognitive inversions of what would ‘normally’ be described
as deeds of courage, inversions symptomatic of the berserk state, are
what Ruck is referring to when he describes Euripides’ maddened
Herakles as ‘the ironic antithesis of his own dominant heroism.’101
The madness of Mister Heracles has notably precise similarities to
the martial rage of certain heroes of the Iliad, in which ºÆ and its
cognate epithet ºı
 are used to denote the soldier’s possession
by blind fury and bloodlust. Moreover, Shay’s deWnition of the
berserk state, which is apposite to Heracles loss of self, also corres-
ponds to the Homeric meaning of ºÆ, for example in the descrip-
tion of Hektor at Iliad 9.237–9:
* ¯Œøæ
b ªÆ Łœ ºÆø
ÆÆØ KŒ
ªºø;
ı ˜Ø; P
 Ø Ø
IæÆ P
b Ł: ŒæÆæc
  ºÆ

ıŒ.
And Hektor exulting greatly in his strength rages fearfully, trusting in Zeus,
and regards not men nor gods; and a mighty madness has possessed him.
As Shay demonstrates (and Armitage’s hero acknowledges), the po-
tential of the berserk state to recur episodically in civilian life is ever-
present and can destroy the victim’s ability to function as a responsible
citizen in a normal domestic or co-operative environment: ‘Unhealed
combat trauma . . . destroys the unnoticed substructure of democracy,
the cognitive and social capacities that enable a group of people to freely
construct a cohesive narrative of their own future.’102 The explosive
potential, which Armitage’s Madness actuates in Heracles, has a close
equivalent in recent history and in the personal experience related
by one of Shay’s patients, a veteran of three Vietnam combat tours in

100 Ibid. 86–7. 101 Ruck (1976), 53–75, at 60. 102 Shay (1995), 181.
332 The Herakles complex
tanks: ‘Every three days I would totally explode, lose it for no reason at
all. I’d be sitting there calm as could be, and this monster would come
out of me with a fury that most people didn’t want to be around. So it
wasn’t just over there. I brought it back here with me.’103
Mister Heracles’ Wnal speech reads as a dissection of the causes and
eVects of the berserk state. It is away from the excess of sensation,
hyper-alertness, and disconnection (‘I was cut oV from my soul’),
which are characteristic of this state, that Heracles realizes he must be
rehabilitated:
I need to go back to the beginning
get into a calm life, depressurise,
have a normal heart for half a minute,
tone it down, tune it to a Wner scale
of living.
(54)
His last words in the play are a prayer that he might ‘come down to
earth, back to personal space’ (57). The need for rehabilitation is
eventually acknowledged, but the process of rehabilitation only
partly and awkwardly begun.
In 2002 Shay published a sequel to his Homeric-based investiga-
tion, entitled Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of
Homecoming, in which he argued that the Odyssey oVers explicit
portrayals of behaviour common among returning soldiers in our
own culture. Just as Homer’s most famous berserker, Achilles,
‘speaks’ to the psychology of the modern combat soldier, the char-
acter and experience of Homer’s most famous returning veteran,
Odysseus, Shay maintains, are full of insights for modern veterans,
their families, and their commanders. Shay not only documents the
problems faced by veterans in reintegrating themselves into civilian
society,104 but, like Waller a generation earlier, he also issues an
impassioned plea to America’s military institutions and policy-
makers to reform the cultural and systemic conditions that engender
moral and psychological injury among veterans, and to apply them-
selves more earnestly to preventative and rehabilitative solutions.105

103 Shay (1995), 33. 104 Shay (2002), 11 V. and 149 V.

105 Ibid. 205 V.
 The Herakles complex 333
Shay and Armitage provide good examples of how, in the last
decade in particular, writers with very diVerent commissions have
used the mythology and literature of the ancient Greeks as a tool in
their analyses of the problems inherent in the roles designed for men
in modern society and especially the military. Armitage’s portrayal of
Heracles as a victim of post-combat syndrome and the berserk state
has speciWc parallels not only with Vietnam veterans, but also with
veterans of the most recent conXicts in the Persian Gulf. Anthony
SwoVord’s Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War, published in
2003 and made into a Hollywood Wlm in 2005 under the direction of
Sam Mendes,106 provides a profoundly disturbing insight into the
army’s culture of brutalization and the psychology of the trained
killer in war and peace. SwoVord, a veteran of Operation Desert
Storm, believes, like Mister Heracles, that ‘because of my unalterable
genetic stain, I was linked to the warrior line’.107 His father had served
in Vietnam, his grandfather in the army air force during World War
II, and he claims that his initial impulse to enlist in the Marine Corps
‘had nothing to do with a desire for combat, for killing, or for a
heroic death, but rather was based on my intense need for acceptance
into the family clan of manhood’.108
SwoVord witnessed his father’s maladjustment to civilian and
domestic life, which expressed itself physically in the strange locking
of his hands into Wsts: ‘My father was thirty-nine years old and the
world seemed a dead, cold place, void of promise. The problems of
his psyche had become manifest in his hands. With his Wsts he beat at
the thick chest of the world, but the world ignored him. Of course the
world ignored him.’109 Years later the son recognized in himself the
same feelings of emptiness and anger as well as a Heraklean volatility
and self-destruction: ‘I remember about myself a loneliness and
poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks
of exhaustion; discomWting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears;
sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; Wts of rage and
despondency; mutiny of the self.’110

106 Reviewing the Wlm in the Village Voice (‘Weathering the Storm’, 1 Nov. 2005),
J. Hoberman described it as ‘a referendum on the second Gulf war’.
107 SwoVord (2003), 128. 108 Ibid. 203.
109 Ibid. 41. 110 Ibid. 3.
334 The Herakles complex
Mister Heracles admits to ‘feeling alive’ while carrying out the
murders of his wife and sons. In his exposition of the veteran psyche,
Waller declared that ‘often only a narrow margin separates the
horrible from the pleasurable’.111 SwoVord illustrates this very point
in his vivid description of the ex-soldier’s deeply ambivalent rela-
tionship to his weapon: ‘The man Wres a riXe for many years, and he
goes to war, and afterwards he turns the riXe in at the armory and he
believes he’s Wnished with the riXe. But no matter what else he might
do with his hands—love a woman, build a house, change his son’s
diaper—his hands remember the riXe and the power the riXe proV-
ered. The cold weight, the buttstock in the shoulder, the sexy slope
and fall of the trigger guard.’112 The contrast SwoVord draws in
describing the veteran’s hands as instruments of carnage and of
peaceful domesticity reinforces the point made by Seneca and Armi-
tage about the warrior’s divided potential, and the endless contest
between his creative and destructive instincts.
Only one comprehensive study has examined the mental-health
impact of the current war in Iraq.113 The results of this study indicate
that the estimated risk of PTSD from service in Iraq is 18 per cent.
Apart from the intensity of combat operations in Iraq, soldiers are
exposed to a set of unique ‘stressors’ arising from the fact that much
of the conXict, particularly since the end of formal operations, has
involved guerrilla warfare and terrorist actions from ambiguous or
unknown civilian threats. In this context there is no safe place and no
safe role. An unprecedented degree of vigilance needs to be main-
tained, and there is great concern that soldiers will mistake for
combatants civilians who mean them no harm. Such statistics and
fears are conWrmed by the increasing familiarity of news reports
featuring the fatal maladjustment of Iraq veterans to their domestic
environment. On 5 October 2006, in the nearly deserted French
Quarter of New Orleans, Zachary Bowen strangled his girlfriend,
Addie Hall, whom he had met the night Hurricane Katrina struck
in August 2005. He dismembered her body and cooked some of her
body parts on his stove. Eleven days later he jumped to his death

111 Waller (1944), 52.

112 SwoVord (2003), 123. Interestingly, in view of Shay’s comparative study,
SwoVord mentions that during his service in the desert he read the Iliad (54).
113 Hope et al. (2004), 13–22.
 The Herakles complex 335
from a hotel roof. What shocked investigators and the public even
more than the grisliness of the murder was the fact that Bowen was a
decorated war hero. He had served in Kosovo and Iraq as a military
policeman, earning several medals, including the NATO medal and
the Presidential Unit Citation. However, his re-entry into civilian life,
aided by drugs and alcohol, was much less distinguished. He found
part-time work bartending and delivering groceries. After the mur-
der-suicide a fellow bartender claimed Bowen would grow depressed
when talking about his military service, and that there had been an
incident in Iraq involving a child that haunted him. Apparently
Bowen’s suicide note also left several clues as to his failure to leave
behind in Iraq his war experiences.
In contrast to many such tragic real-life counterparts, at the end of
Euripides’ Herakles the hero discovers a capacity to endure the life
that confronts him. As he states, KªŒÆæø  (‘I shall have the
courage to endure life’, 1351). Barlow maintains that ‘this is the most
important line in the play, for it represents the turning point in the
hero’s rehabilitation. With these positive and assertive words Hera-
cles shows he has overcome his destructive despair and has once
more taken control of his life.’114 Of greater symbolic importance is
Herakles’ decision to retain his weapons (1377–85), the traditional
tokens of a less complicated heroism, now grievously laden with new
meaning and demanding superior courage and resolve from their
bearer. Herakles is able to make this progression through the re-
demptive power of philia oVered him by Theseus, who conveys him
to a new life in Athens. Curiously, in view of the emphasis on
militarism throughout Mister Heracles, Armitage attaches no sym-
bolic signiWcance to Heracles’ weapons at the end of the play. This
oversight is not unique. Modern adapters generally have failed to
exploit (or even apparently to perceive) what is the play’s crucial
moment of spiritual transWguration—Herakles taking up again the
instruments of his family’s annihilation. It seems a great theatrical
opportunity missed. Yet this failure is certainly consistent with the
trend of neo-Senecanism in the recent reception of Euripides’ Hera-
kles. For it is in Seneca’s Hercules Furens that the retained weapons
lose their meaning of moral progress and heroic maturity, and

114 Barlow (1996), 182.

336 The Herakles complex
become instead symbols of moral stagnancy and heroic obsolescence.
One exception to this trend is Robin WaterWeld’s 2003 translation of
lines 1377 V. of Herakles. This includes a stage direction which,
following Euripides, juxtaposes Herakles’ tender handling of the
corpses of his wife and children with his contemplative and ambiva-
lent handling of his weapons: ‘I am parting company from my wife
and children. O, the sweet pain of kissing them! (He kisses the bodies
one by one, and then handles his fallen weapons) O, the painful
partnership of these weapons! I don’t know whether I should keep
them or discard them, because as they cling to my side they will say:
‘‘You used us to slay your children and your wife. You still have us,
the killers of your children.’’ ’115
Just as he makes nothing of Herakles’ heartbreaking determination
about his weapons, Armitage does not stress the importance to this
determination of the notion of philia. In fact, his Heracles exhibits a
Senecan autarkeia in the course of his rehabilitation. This is clear from
Armitage’s explanation that, ‘when the gods die, they leave man in
control of his own moral identity, and after experiencing his greatest
tragedy, Heracles must confront his greatest challenge. We observe the
agonising creation of the new kind of superman: one who takes
responsibility for his actions.’116 Consequently, the reworked ending
does not achieve the impact of the original. Armitage’s ‘despressurisa-
tion’ is in no way comparable to Euripides’ impressive KªŒÆæø
, or to his hero’s moving refusal to repudiate the painful com-
panionship (ºıªæÆd ŒØøÆØ) of his club and bow. In removing the
emphasis on philia, Mister Heracles seems to have gained only half a
new understanding. He knows that he ‘was born to a way of life j that
went into receivership’ (51), but has not yet found a substitute. It
appears, in true Senecan style, a deliberately disquieting ending, lack-
ing the muted optimism of humanistic resolve with which Euripides
had invested his own reworking of the Herakles myth.
Archibald MacLeish’s Herakles and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles
are a continuation of the process, begun by Euripides in the Wfth century,
of deconstructing and tragically redeWning the heroic Herakles and
identifying, in contemporary terms, the implications of his madness
and his suVering. Both writers discovered in Euripides’ play a powerful

115 WaterWeld (2003), 71. 116 Armitage (2000), p. x.

 The Herakles complex 337
symbol for the uncertainties of their own age as well as a means of
formulating, and responding to, questions about the nature and validity
of traditional male heroism and about the cultural legitimization of
violence. Their discovery underlines Michael Billington’s observation,
quoted in the Introduction to this book: ‘Where does our theatre
instinctively turn in times of crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to
the Greeks.’117 At the same time, however, MacLeish and Armitage
establish that, where the Herakles is concerned, this instinctive modern
leaning towards Greek myth has assumed an intriguing un-Hellenic
aspect. From the theatrical rehabilitation of Euripides’ mad hero in the
last half century a neo-Senecan Herakles has emerged, an ambivalent,
hubristic, restless, and autarkic hero.
Like Seneca before them, MacLeish and Armitage have located the
psychological causation of Herakles’ madness in an obsessive and
excessive modus vitae and in the labours, which they have reinterpreted
as scientiWc and military exploits. They have substantially reconWgured
the madness itself, internalizing and rationalizing it as the inevitable
culmination of a deep-seated individual and cultural complex. This
Senecan and psychoanalytical reading of Herakles’ madness has pro-
foundly aVected, and certainly focused, our understanding of the
Wlicide. No doubt MacLeish and Armitage represent only the beginning
of the creative exploration of the Herakles complex.

117 ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June
2004.
 10
Creating a Herakles for our times: a montage
of modern madness

At the close of the twentieth century, and now in the Wrst decade of
the new century and new millennium, the Wgure of mad Herakles is
not simply to be found in speciWc adaptations of Euripides’ text. He
has inWltrated contemporary culture, and our continuing fascination
with both the heroic and the irrational, in all kinds of mediated ways.
The waking scene in King Lear provides a fascinating link between
Euripides’ Herakles and Alan Bennett’s stage play The Madness of
George III, which premièred at the National Theatre in 1991 and
starred Nigel Hawthorne. In and out of madness, King George
identiWed strongly with Shakespeare’s confused and beleaguered
patriarch, King Lear. During the last ten years of his life, having
been pronounced insane and conWned to Windsor Castle, he as-
sumed the appearance of Lear, with his wild hair and long white
beard, and his dying words were reputed to be ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold’
(King Lear, iii. iv. 143). Borrowing appropriately from historical
fact,1 Bennett transported Act iv, scene vii of King Lear to the
point in his play where George III is steadily emerging from his
madness:

thurlow ‘Will’t please your Highness walk?’

(The king stands, Wrst as Lear, then as himself.)
king There.
willis So is that the end?

1 As part of George III’s rehabilitation, Willis, the king’s physician, read King Lear
with him.
 A Herakles for our times 339
king No, no . . . Cordelia—that’s Thurlow—dies. Hanged. And the
shock of it kills the King. So they all die. It’s a tragedy.
thurlow (Blowing his nose) Very aVecting.
king It’s the way I play it. Willis murders it.
thurlow Your Majesty seems more yourself.
king Do I? Yes, I do. I have always been myself even when I was ill.
Only now I seem myself. That’s the important thing. I have remembered
how to seem. What, what?2
While Bennett’s immediate and conscious point of reference in this
scene is King Lear, the comments of director Nicholas Hytner reveal
that the scene is also Wrmly located within a classical tradition, indeed
the Hercules furens tradition:
There has to be mythic resonance to a story about a king dying and coming
back to life. The king dies and comes back to life and the nation rejoices.
And that’s what happened in the theatre. That’s why it works. I didn’t realise
this until well after the play opened, but if you presented it as a myth . . . that
form of theatre is interesting, eVective and sometimes impressive, but it was
the truthfulness and the humanity of the performance that, I think, enabled
the huge audience that it got to tune into that cycle of death and rebirth.
That’s one of the dramatic archetypes.3
Hytner conceives George III’s madness and restoration in terms of a
Heraklean katabasis and anagnōrisis. Moreover, in his dramatization of
George III’s loss and recovery of reason, Bennett has unconsciously
drawn a visual parallel with Herakles: the King, bound and helplessly
enthroned in a restraining chair, recalls the tableau scene of Herakles’
amechania at 1094–7: the broken hero roped to a pillar. He has also
drawn a linguistic parallel. In Euripides’ Herakles, the phrase
›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931) designates the hero’s violent transformation
of self as well as Lyssa’s immediate and very physical operation through
him. In The Madness of George III the phrase ‘not himself’ is used three
times in reference to the King’s deranged state.4 Its force is weaker than
its Greek equivalent, but it deWnes a similarly inexplicable overturning
of the King’s normal public and private selves. Correspondingly,

2 Bennett (1992), 80–2. 3 Quoted in Riley (2004), 264–5.

4 In the Wlm version, The Madness of King George (1994), the distracted king,
trying to reassure his daughter Amelia, says tearfully: ‘Papa’s not mad, my darling.
No, no. He has just lost himself, that’s all.’ See Bennett (1995), 33.
340 A Herakles for our times
George III’s recovery is judged a restoration of self. Towards the end of
the play Thurlow declares the King to be ‘his old self’,5 while George’s
Wnal words on stage boast of his regained, though not unaltered, self:
‘The King is himself again. God save the King.’6
A decade after he had pointed out Herakles the child-murderer as
Medea’s male (and less maligned) counterpart in A Sex-War Opera,
Tony Harrison wrote and directed a graphic, idiosyncratic scene of
Wlicidal madness in The Labourers of Herakles. The play, a co-produc-
tion between the European Cultural Centre of Delphi and the Royal
National Theatre Studio in London, was commissioned in 1995 for the
Eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, whose parti-
cipants also included Theodoros Terzopoulos, Tadashi Suzuki, and
Heiner Müller. In the same year Harrison was commissioned by the
Guardian to write poems based on Wrst-hand experience of the civil
war in Bosnia, the most brutal chapter in the break-up of Yugoslavia.
He left for Bosnia immediately after the première of The Labourers of
Herakles on 23 August, and his anticipation of his front-line assign-
ment, as well as his heightened awareness of the Delphic gathering’s
proximity to the atrocities in the Balkans, undoubtedly inXuenced the
play’s conception and execution. From his programme notes we learn
that Harrison speciWcally formulated Herakles’ furor as ‘racist rage’,
the Wlicide as part and parcel of genocide. In the play the children
are butchered in a round of orgiastic ethnic cleansing. Also in the
programme notes we discover Harrison’s Senecan diagnosis of the
madness: ‘the most destructive forces Herakles must wrestle with
are himself and his own destructive impulses which led him to the
unspeakable murder of his own children.’
The other productions presented in Delphi that summer were
mostly costly spectacles staged in the vast ancient stadium above
the sanctuary. Harrison’s Labourers drew attention for its modest
scale, muscular language, and rhythmic thrust, all of which contrib-
uted to its immediacy. It was performed on an excavated site in-
tended for the New Theatre of the European Cultural Centre of
Delphi. The set comprised a ring of nine cement-mixers and a
thirty-Wve-foot cement silo, bearing the company logo of Herakles
General Cement (the black proWle of Herakles crowned with the lion

5 Bennett (1992), 83. 6 Ibid. 93.

 A Herakles for our times 341
skin). Littered about the ‘stage’ were wheelbarrows, planks, assorted
scaVolding, and the usual detritus of a half-Wnished building site.
There was also a large pile of cement sacks, all stamped with the
Herakles logo.
The cast consisted of Wve Labourers in hard hats. For the Wrst
twenty minutes of the hour-long piece they enacted a percussive
pantomime, banging the drums of the cement mixers and the bodies
of the wheelbarrows in hypnotic harmony and rising to a crescendo,
which stopped suddenly. Each Labourer was then lured inside the
ring by the voice of his ancient self emanating from the silo and
singing the sole surviving fragment of the Herakles tetralogy of
Phrynichos, referring to Herakles’ wrestling match with Death
(‘øÆ
 IŁÆ ªıØ
 j ØæØ’). Suddenly a barrier col-
lapsed to reveal an ancient statue of Herakles. According to Harri-
son’s stage directions: ‘It is as if the statue has come up through the
silo from the underworld, where Herakles has been wrestling with
death for the body of Alkestis.’7
This image of Herakles as saviour and deus ex machina was
abruptly subverted by an image of Herakles as madman and agent
of indiscriminate destruction. Labourer 4 became possessed by the
madness of Herakles, which manifested itself in ‘a manic percussion
solo’.8 This began a contagion of madness. Labourer 1 demolished the
statue with savage blows from his shovel, his possession (apparently
hallucinatory in form) culminating in a bravura demonstration of
rhythmically propelled violence9 and ending, like Herakles’ madness,
in restorative catalepsy:
With the increase of sound from the manic cement mixers, Labourer 1 turns
his murderous attentions to the sacks of Herakles cement, which he batters,
throws, slashes and deguts in his frenzy, hauling out of the ripped open

7 Harrison (1996), 122. 8 Ibid. 122.

9 Carol Chillington Rutter believes this tour de force of male violence reveals an
inconsistency between Harrison’s theatrical practice and his oYcial pro-feminism. In
her review of the Delphi performance (1997, 133–43, at 140) she argues that the
‘enormous theatrical pleasure in the sheer feat of physical and technical virtuosity’
undermined the scene’s disturbing content. ‘It turned out to celebrate, not to critique
male violence. The audience did not ‘‘just sit and stare’’. They gave the rage of
Herakles a round of applause.’ Rutter’s charge of inconsistency may have some
legitimacy, but I suspect her unease at the audience’s complicit enjoyment of the
spectacular violence was part of Harrison’s dramatic point.
342 A Herakles for our times
stomachs yards of red and white barrier tape, like guts. He seems to have
slain all the cement sacks. He searches. Nothing. Then he notices two small
sacks (representing children). He impales their little bodies on the end of a
pick. Red silk guts protrude from their gaping wounds. Exhausted by the
eVort of killing, Labourer 1 adopts the pose of the statue of Herakles in the
catatonic aftermath of slaughter and devastation.10
What followed was a scene of tragic anagnōrisis. Labourers 4 and 5
hurled the sacks of cement into an open trench ‘as if for mass burial’,11
while Labourers 2 and 3 sorted the fragments of the dismembered
statue. Then Labourers 3 and 4 searched the rubble of the gutted city,
‘like mothers who search for their missing children’,12 until they came
upon the tiny cement sacks: ‘With a tragic shriek of recognition,
Labourers 2 and 3 fall to their knees, and embrace and huddle to the
cement sacks (their dead children) in their grief. They each pull from
the gaping wounds of their babies a length of red silk, which becomes
their robe and a classical female mask. They become the two Women
of Miletos.’13 As the mourning mothers of devastated Miletos they
sang another fragment of Phrynichos. Thus male violence brieXy
yielded to female grief. At the end of their song of mourning, Labour-
ers 2 and 3 picked up the small cement sacks and, turning towards two
cement-mixers, threw the sacks, together with their women’s masks,
into the revolving drums before resuming their male labours.
In 1997 Walt Disney Pictures released its version of the Herakles
myth, a blockbuster animated feature, set in Thebes (‘The Big Olive’),
but bearing the Romanized title Hercules. Notwithstanding the many
liberties it takes with the classical tradition, the Wlm may be regarded as
part of the reception history of mad Herakles, if only because of the
centrality to the screenplay of Megara, the wife best known to us from
the Euripidean-Senecan tradition of Herakles’ madness.
Disney’s is a predictably family-oriented and, therefore, sanitized
reconstruction and conXation of mythical threads, devoid of anthro-
pomorphous adultery, novercal vindictiveness, Wlicide, and uxori-
cide. In this retelling Hercules is the product of Zeus and Hera’s
loving and monogamous marriage, an adored prince royal. Abducted
from his Olympian idyll by Hades’ henchmen, preparatory to a coup

10 Harrison (1996), 122–3. 11 Ibid. 123.

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.
 A Herakles for our times 343
d’état, the infant Hercules is stripped of his divinity (although not his
godlike strength), deposited on earth, and soon found by an elderly
bucolic couple, Amphitryon and Alcmene, who raise him as their
own son. The rest of the Wlm charts Hercules’ passage to heroic
maturity (and indeed commodiWed superstardom) and his discovery
of both his celestial birthright and his earthly destiny.
The prologue, intoned by Charlton Heston, asks ‘What is the
measure of a true hero?’, a reXection interrupted by a chorus of
gospel-singing muses who complain, ‘He’s makin’ this story sound
like some Greek tragedy.’ But, despite its feel-good orthodoxy and
staunchly tongue-in-cheek treatment of classical antiquity, Disney’s
Hercules is liberally peppered with references (unmistakable to the
trained ear and eye) to the darker aspects of the Heraklean condition.
Although the Wlm reverses the familiar Heraklean trajectory from
mortality to immortality, it does invoke the familiar Wgure of Hera-
kles Monoikos, portraying its hero as a confused interstitial dweller, a
Messianic misWt. With echoes of George Cabot Lodge’s restless pil-
grim roused to consciousness of self-divinity, the adolescent Hercules
conWdes to his adoptive father, ‘I try to Wt in . . . I just can’t. Some-
times I feel like . . . like I really don’t belong here . . . like I’m supposed
to be someplace else.’ Tragic Herakles is comically alluded to when,
after attending a performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, the
adult Hercules remarks, ‘Man! I thought I had problems.’
The character of Megara (‘Meg’), Hercules’ love interest, is an intri-
guing hybrid of tragic wives. Hercules’ Wrst encounter with her is
borrowed from the story of the attempted rape of Deianeira by the
Centaur Nessus. Towards the end of the Wlm, in a scene strongly
reminiscent of Herakles wrestling with Death for the life of Alcestis,
Hercules descends into Hades, oVers himself in Meg’s place, and
snatches her soul from its Stygian grave. Most signiWcantly, and iron-
ically, for viewers familiar with Euripides’ Herakles is Hercules’ assur-
ance to Meg, ‘I would never ever hurt you.’ Meg herself, in trying to
convince the villainous Hades of Hercules’ singularity and innate de-
cency, repeats this assurance: ‘He would never do anything to hurt me.’
At the end of 2000, in direct opposition to Disney’s ‘hot, blonde,
rippling image of heroic deeds’, director Jay Scheib merged Euripides’
Herakles with Heiner Müller’s Herakles 5 and used this amalgamation,
which he supplemented with material from Pindar and from Händel’s
344 A Herakles for our times
one-act dramatic cantata The Choice of Hercules (1751), as the sub-
stance of a dark and persistent enquiry into the dual nature of Herakles’
heroism. Just as the text was concocted from a variety of sources, so too
the production, presented by the alternative theatre group Chasama14
in the basement of its Times Square venue, was a composite palette of
video loops, physical images, puppets, and digitally sampled and ma-
nipulated sounds. Through the collision of Euripides and Müller’s
Heraklean portraits Scheib’s Herakles set at jarring right angles the
civilizing labours and the ecological catastrophe they engendered; the
hero as monster-slayer and the hero as monster; an altruistic, socially
integrated Herakles and a Herakles who does not want to take part
any more and who wants out of his own myth.
Earlier in 2000 an exhibition, entitled A Measured Quietude:15
Contemporary Irish Drawings, was held at the David Winton Bell
Gallery in the List Arts Center at Brown University. It featured the
work of nine artists from the Republic of Ireland and Northern
Ireland, including John Kindness from Belfast, who re-created a
large-scale wall drawing, Scenes from the Life of Herakles #2, produced
Wrst at The Drawing Center’s Project Room in New York’s SoHo. In
this drawing Kindness has transposed the Attic vase style of classical
Greece into a black-and-white horizontal fresco of continuing se-
quential images that recount the labours of Herakles in the context of
contemporary Irish experience. Herakles himself is reimagined as ‘a
Belfast youth meeting the challenges of the street with fearless,
slightly robotic aplomb’.16 One panel depicts a young, dishevelled
Herakles, possibly the inmate of a psychiatric hospital, being brought
before a white-jacketed doctor in search of healing.17

14 Chasama (Farsi for ‘to have vision’) was founded by Anita Durst in 1995 as a
non-proWt arts organization in New York City.
15 ‘A measured quietude’ is taken from W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘To Ireland in the
Coming Times’.
16 Roberta Smith, ‘The Irish Struggle for a Visual Poetry to Call Their Own’, New
York Times, 25 June 1999.
17 Kindness is not the Wrst Irishman to draw on the madness of Herakles in
examining his national history. In Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968), the explosion of
desperate violence by village leader John Connor, whom the playwright calls ‘a
physical force man, one of the ‘‘mad and vicious Connors’’ ’ (Murphy 1992, p. xv),
is a heartbreaking echo of the madness of Euripides’ hero. For earlier links between
mad Herakles and the Celtic hero Cuchulain, see above, Chap. 8.
 A Herakles for our times 345
In May 2004 the Young Vic, Wiener Festwochen, and Chichester
Festival Theatre, in collaboration with the Théâtre des BouVes du
Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Wrst presented Cruel and
Tender,18 Martin Crimp’s original version of Sophocles’ Trachiniae.19
Directed by Luc Bondy, the production was a direct response to
global terrorism and the latest war in Iraq. Crimp’s Herakles, the
General, is a megalomaniac, a neocon holy warrior crazed by combat
and conquest, who mutters his famous epithet, Kallinikos, by way of
self-validation. He also recalls the ethnic cleanser of Harrison’s The
Labourers of Herakles, who wears ‘the shirt of modern Europe’s
agony’20 and is cremated in ‘Europe’s conscience’.21
The family he has left behind sees plainly the irrationality, and
gradually the illegality, of his attempts to eradicate a hydra-headed
Terror. His wife Amelia (Deianeira) describes him as a hurt man whose
mind is blank and who does not understand ‘that the more he Wghts
terror j the more he creates terror— j and even invites terror—who has
no eyelids—into his own bed’.22 The General’s son, James (Hyllus), a
half-jaded, half-appalled specimen of Generation Y, condemns his
father’s impassive, workaday attitude to the collateral damage he
inXicts: ‘You have wiped people oV this earth like a teacher j rubbing
out equations. You’ve stacked up bodies like j bags of cement.’23 At the
end of the play the General stands convicted of crimes against human-
ity. Yet he remains unrepentant, ‘a deluded Wgure who goes to his
death believing in the sanctity of his anti-terrorist mission’.24 In reply
to James’s unWlial candour, he delivers a chilling speech reminiscent of
18 Reviews of the Young Vic production include: Michael Billington, Guardian, 14
May 2004; Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 14 May 2004; Jeremy Kingston, The
Times, 14 May 2004; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2004; Susannah Clapp,
Observer, 16 May 2004; Victoria Segal, Sunday Times, 16 May 2004; Ian Shuttleworth,
Financial Times, 17 May 2004; Paul Taylor, Independent, 24 May 2004; and Patrick
Marmion, Daily Mail, 13 Aug. 2004.
19 For a list of echoes, allusions, and reworkings of the text of Trachiniae in Cruel
and Tender, see Pat Easterling’s ‘Critical Review’ compiled in January 2004 for the
project ‘The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece in Late-Twentieth-
Century Drama and Poetry in English’ (http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/
GreekPlays).
20 Harrison (1996), 146.
21 Ibid. 148.
22 Crimp (2004), 2.
23 Ibid. 57.
24 Michael Billington, review of Cruel and Tender, Guardian, 14 May 2004.
346 A Herakles for our times
Senecan Hercules’ obsessive prayer for a new Golden Age, a homily
mounting to paranoiac and autarkic frenzy:
I have puriWed the world for you.
I have burnt terror out of the world for people like you,
I have followed it through the shopping malls
And the school playgrounds
Tracked it by starlight across the desert
Smashed down the door of its luxury apartment
Learned its language
Intercepted its phone calls
Smoked it out of its cave
Thrown acid into its eyes and burned it to carbon.
While you’ve been logged on to internet chat-rooms
I’ve seen my friends burst open like fruit.
While you were hiding your face in that girl’s hair—
yes?—yes?—
I have been breathing in uranium.
Every streak of vapour in a cold sky
is a threat
every child with no shoes
wandering up to a checkpoint
every green tree-line
every quiet evening spent reading
is a threat
and even the lamp on the bedside table
even the coiled Wlament inside the lamp
is a threat.
So don’t you talk to me about crimes
because for every head I have ever severed
two have grown in their place25
and I have had to cut and to cut and to cut
to burn and to cut to purify the world—
understand me?

25 The appropriation of Herakles’ second labour (the Lernean Hydra) as a piece of

wartime political propaganda has an interesting historical antecedent. An early
American Civil War cartoon, ‘The Hercules of the Union, Slaying the Great Dragon
of Secession’ (1861), depicts General WinWeld Scott, commander of the Union
Forces, as Hercules about to strike the many-headed hydra that is the secession of
the Confederate States. Scott wields a Herculean club marked ‘Liberty and Union’.
The hydra has seven heads, each representing a prominent Southern leader. The neck
of each Southerner is labelled with a vice or crime associated with him.
 A Herakles for our times 347
(softly) I killed the Nemean lion
oh yes—
with these hands—with these hands—
and the dog
the dog with the three heads
I collected it from hell in front of the cameras
I have visited the dead in front of the cameras—
Remember?
(Points to himself proudly.) Kallinikos. Kallinikos.26
The General’s kinship with Seneca’s imperial overreacher and his
Renaissance counterpart, MacLeish’s Strangelovean scientist, and
Armitage’s celebrity superhero and berserker is striking. But, like
Mister Heracles, the evil he embodies is, in fact, symptomatic of
something larger, something mainstream, a crusade combining
amoral calculation and casual cruelty. As his Wnal words reveal, the
General’s tragedy is to have been this crusade’s avenging instrument
as well as its sacriWcial victim:
I will explain into the microphones
that my labours are at an end
that what I have done
is what I was instructed to do
and what I was instructed to do
was to extract terror like a tooth from its own
stinking gums.
I will explain
from my own carefully prepared notes
and meticulous diaries
oh yes
oh yes
that I am not the criminal
but the sacriWce.27
David Lan, who commissioned Cruel and Tender for the Young
Vic, echoes Michael Billington’s remark about the ubiquity and
enduring appeal of Greek tragedy:
Luc Bondy came across Sophocles’ play while researching Handel’s opera,
Heracles, and found in it something that resonated with a world seeking to

26 Crimp (2004), 57–8. 27 Ibid. 67–8.

348 A Herakles for our times
justify the invasion of Iraq. And, if we constantly go back to the Greeks, it is
because of the immediacy of their engagement with the world. Sophocles
used a myth the audience all knew to comment on his own time. In a similar
way we are using Sophocles’ play as a way of illuminating ours.28
But whatever Bondy and others may think, it is actually the Roman-
ized Greek hero, the morally and psychologically problematic Sene-
can Herakles that appears to have caught the cultural imagination of
the early twenty-Wrst century, and to have become a potent emblem
of the new nihilism and humanity’s age-old capacity for self-destruc-
tion. Critic Charles Spencer declared of Cruel and Tender, ‘Nothing I
have seen in the theatre to date so resonantly and provocatively
captures our bewildering post-9/11 world’, and he proclaimed Joe
Dixon’s General ‘a deranged Hercules of our time. His roaring
insistence that he has ‘‘burnt terror out of the world’’ and that
he has only done ‘‘what I was instructed to do’’ seems to bring us
close to the heart of contemporary darkness.’29
One of the most recent full-scale adaptations in English of Euripides’
text was a raucous rock-and-roll musical, Hercules in High Suburbia,
produced in April 2004 by Watson Arts, a resident company of the
renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City, and
re-produced as part of the Ninth New York International Fringe Festival.
Like its predecessors since the 1960s, it too is essentially a neo-Senecan
creation, portraying Hercules as a pretentious suburbanite and reality-
TV producer whose absence from the gated community of Thebes by
the Sea is explained by the fact that he is shooting the two-hour season
Wnale of his latest show in the Underworld.
Writer and director Mary Fulham follows Seneca in ascribing to
the madness two levels of motivation: this Hercules is destroyed as
much by his hubris and unimaginative recourse to brute force as by
Hera’s jealousy. She also, like Seneca, places the Wlicidal Hercules in
the context of a complicit prevailing culture, in this case an American
culture of excess and voyeurism, of celebrity murder trials à la
O. J. Simpson, of SUV sovereignty and rampant individualism com-
pounded by collective irresponsibility. The original rockabilly-blues
score, which won composer Paul Foglino a Fringe NYC Overall

28 Quoted in Michael Billington’s article ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage
for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June 2004.
29 Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2004.
 A Herakles for our times 349
Excellence Award, included new cultural anthems such as ‘I’ve Got a
McMansion on the Hill’ (sung by the parvenu Lycus) and ‘Because
I’m God’. Hercules’ rampage as the familiar Family Annihilator is
captured on a surveillance video, which an opportunistic security
guard hopes to sell to ‘Greeks Gone Wild’. Meanwhile a nonchalantly
bloodthirsty reporter cruises the scene in search of sensational copy.
A review of the production, which appeared in the New York Times,
was headed ‘Demigod Gone Wild in Land of Soccer Moms’.30 This
headline is itself a succinct critique (or possibly an indictment) of the
sub-editorial crassness that deWnes the show’s targeted culture.
The Annex at La MaMa was the venue in May 2006 for another
exuberant musical make-over of the Herakles myth. Herakles via
Phaedra31 interwove the stories of Herakles and his friend Theseus,
combining elements of Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Euripides’ Hippo-
lytus but presenting a fundamentally un-Euripidean mad Herakles.
Herakles’ Hera-induced insanity occurred early in the Wrst act as the
show followed the alternative Heraklean chronology whereby the
Wlicide precedes the imposition of penitential labours. Further de-
partures from Euripidean tradition were the reduction of the number
of murdered sons to two and the exclusion of Amphitryon.
The piece was conceived, directed, choreographed, and co-composed
by Ellen Stewart, La MaMa’s founder and artistic director and one of
OV-Broadway’s great pioneers, and performed by her Great Jones
Repertory Company.32 Billed as a Dance Theatre Epic, the production
was almost entirely sung and danced to the accompaniment of live
music throughout. Its theme and musical setting were ostensibly the
Jazz Age of Xappers, gangsters, and speakeasies, but actually the show
was marked (and to some extent marred) by an extreme eclecticism. The
many fast-paced scenes amounted to a bizarre terpsichorean farrago
merging Charleston, Can-Can, chorus line, Flamenco, and ballet. The
musical styles ranged from operatic recitative to blues and salsa, while

30 Rob Kendt, New York Times, 15 Aug. 2005.

31 For reviews of the production, see Miriam Horn, ‘At La MaMa, Greek Myths
Retold Acrobatically in Herakles via Phaedra’, New York Times, 24 May 2006 and New
Yorker, 5 June 2006.
32 Herakles via Phaedra was essentially a re-creation of Another Phaedra via
Hercules, which the Great Jones Repertory Company premièred at La MaMa on
3 March 1988. La MaMa’s tradition of doing Greek plays with the Great Jones
Repertory Company began in 1972.
350 A Herakles for our times
the instrumentation included a synthesizer, gongs, woodblocks, and
a bamboo Xute. If the co-ordinated sum of these disparate parts was,
in the end, unilluminating in narrative terms, it was at least entertaining
and often arresting.
The most interesting example of the contemporary theatre’s Senecan
recreation of Euripides’ hero is La MaMa’s third and most serious
Heraklean oVering, E. Randahl Hoey’s production of Daniel Algie’s
Home Front, a play consciously inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, yet
which, in its despairing nulliWcation of Euripides’ radical rehabilitative
message, is startlingly original. A former Jesuit, who as an emerging
playwright in the 1960s was sponsored by Arthur Miller, Algie wrote
Home Front over a period of ten years. In it he reimagines Herakles’
return to Thebes from Hades as the disorienting homecoming of a
Vietnam MIA (‘missing in action’). But, although it is set against the
moral morass of an earlier conXict, a programme note reminded
audiences of the play’s timeliness: ‘Today, we look forward to welcom-
ing home a legion of returning veterans. Euripidean themes may have
important lessons for us as we assimilate these wounded souls back into
our communities.’ What is more, the world première of Home Front on
9 November 2006 occurred two days after a mid-term election in which
the Iraq War acted as a lightning-rod for sweeping change. It also came
just weeks after the much-publicized murder-suicide committed by
Iraq War veteran Zachary Bowen.33 The convergence of these events did
not escape the notice of the New York critics, many of whom gave
utterance to a nation’s shame and sorrow. Steven Snyder, for instance,
ended his review in The Villager with this reXection: ‘In a culture that
doesn’t look at the caskets returning home from war, or discuss the
spirits of the men who have now been forced to serve two or three tours
of duty, this is the face we haven’t seen. As debates about timetables,
‘‘victory’’ and insurgents have Wlled the headlines, what we’ve lost sight
of are the individual stories of our men and women, struggling against
increasingly overwhelming odds.’34
The play takes place on the porch and in the front yard of a mid-
western farmhouse during a summer’s weekend in 1972. Meg, her two

33 See above, Chap. 9.

34 Stephen Snyder, ‘Disquiet on the Home Front’, The Villager, 76: 26 (Nov. 2006),
15–21.
 A Herakles for our times 351
sons, Bobby and Jason, and her father-in-law, Arthur (Amphitryon),
await the unlikely return of Harrison (Herakles), an honourable army
corporal missing in action for seven years and declared dead by the
military. There is no external threat to this family group in the shape of
an equivalent Lycus character. Instead we see a dysfunctional family on
the verge of implosion, much like the Hoadleys in MacLeish’s Herakles.
Meg, ‘who hangs around in a bathrobe like a bedraggled Tennessee
Williams heroine’,35 refuses to accept oYcial notiWcation of her hus-
band’s death, an attitude that has led her to a nervous breakdown and
periodic hospitalization. This evening she claims to have received a
phone-call from Harrison, who merely sobbed on the other end of the
line and hung up. Reckoning this to be another of her delusions, Arthur
castigates Meg for her neuroticism and neglect of her children. He then
indulges in his own brand of denial, distancing himself from his missing
son by revealing to Meg Harrison’s true paternity. Harrison, he tells her,
is the son of a barnstorming pilot named Everett (Zeus). He also reveals,
without remorse, how his hatred of his adulterous wife, Alice (Alc-
mene), and his refusal to forgive her even when she was dying of cancer,
provoked her suicide. Sickened by these revelations, Meg resolves to give
up hope of her husband’s return and to take the boys away from their
grandfather whom she likens to ‘a toxic dump’.36 Early the next morn-
ing, with Meg alone outside and her resolve intact, Harrison appears
suddenly in the front yard. Even as the two embrace, the audience is left
uncertain about the reality of Harrison’s appearance, for in an earlier
scene Meg’s solitude and fragile hopefulness had imagined her lost
husband momentarily into being.
At the opening of Act ii we learn that Harrison has indeed
returned and is AWOL from a stateside repatriation hospital. He is
deeply disturbed by his years of imprisonment and torture at the
hands of the Vietcong, in a place ruled by a sadistic colonel given
the appellation of ‘Hell’s Dog’, and by his personal moral surrender in
the name of survival. Meg tries desperately to push away her own
depression, believing she can rehabilitate her husband. Harrison,
however, believes his faith and his pre-war self to be lost forever:
Pain like that? I know you’re trying to comfort me, but the day I was
captured, in the space of an hour, I’d smothered one of my own men and

35 Anita Gates, ‘Dysfunctional, To Put It Mildly’, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2006.
36 Algie (2006), 34.
352 A Herakles for our times
saved an enemy, dug him out of his tomb. Everything I ever believed I’d do
had turned upside down. (his voice takes on a Xat tone) I went to war young
and strong, but only came back in pieces—feet moving under me, a thumb
asking for a ride, eyes that ached to see my wife and children, a whisper
begging to reach something clean and good just once more before there was
nothing left of me.37
He struggles to reintegrate himself into his family; he is a stranger to
his sons who respond to him with fear and reluctance. But, like
Euripides’ hero, he shows great tenderness towards his children,
and his Wnal words before madness strikes echo Herakles’ statement
of universal parental love: ‘Oh, they put strength in me. (lifts both)
My two boys, Meg. A son on either side of my heart. (his eyes welling)
Despite the diVerences between people everywhere, they love their
children.’ Although Harrison is a gentle and loving father, he never
appears to his sons as an invincible saviour. He is already at his
homecoming a broken and dependent Wgure, needing to be sup-
ported by Meg as he re-enters the house. His physical and emotional
dependence at this point contrasts markedly with his refusal at the
end of the play to be helped to his feet by his friend Ted (Theseus).
Harrison’s post-madness declaration of independence from a God
who he decides is either callous or non-existent does not translate
itself into a new humanistic faith or a capacity for dependence. He
cannot accept goodness and, instead, submerges himself in a deWant
and masochistic autarkeia.
As in Euripides’ Herakles, Harrison’s Wlicidal madness erupts oV-
stage. A great shriek from inside the house, a child’s voice, reaches
Arthur who is alone on the porch. This is followed by Meg’s pleading
howls, the screams of a second child, a clamour of things falling, and
lastly Meg’s groans as fearful blows are struck. Harrison rushes out of
the house with a riXe raised in his Wsts, ‘the wood, red-stained end
wielded like a club’.38 He lunges toward Arthur, who Xees down the
porch steps, stumbles, and crawls away. Harrison overtakes him and is
about to bring the riXe-butt down when the screen door bangs shut. At
that sound Harrison, stunned, drops the weapon and collapses into
unconsciousness. There is no orderly messenger report of what hap-
pened inside the house and details of the critical pre-madness moments

37 Algie (2006), 59. 38 Ibid. 66.

 A Herakles for our times 353
are less than precise. What is clear, however, is that the madness
explodes from within Harrison. Like Seneca, Algie has dispensed with
the interventionist Wgures of Iris and Lyssa and removed any discernible
threshold between his hero’s sanity and insanity. The madness is
reasoned as the terrible climax of severe PTSD and guilt. The presence
in the farmhouse of an empty shotgun has triggered in Harrison
memories of a past battle context. He seems to have mistaken his family
for the Vietcong, although the exact nature of his hallucination is
problematic because he has also been haunted by the memory of a
wounded American lad he smothered to death in a failed attempt to
protect himself and his men from capture. As a species of the neo-
Senecan Herakles, Harrison suVers from a madness that is internal and,
at the same time, reXective of larger forces. Like Armitage’s Heracles, he
is a trained killer estranged from the civilian world and domestic
normalcy, and cut oV from his former self:
arthur You were made into a killer!
harrison (abstracted) They train you to be . . .
arthur (unable to contain himself) You think you’ve changed?
harrison It doesn’t happen in a day, I guess. When you come back, you’re
supposed to get rid of all that, as easily as you’d unclip a round of ammo.
Turn in your weapon, soldier. War’s over. Dismissed. And I’m only one of
the walking wounded.39
While Algie’s rationalization of the madness is (unconsciously) quite
Senecan,40 his treatment of the post-madness scenes goes well be-
yond the autarkic desolation of Seneca’s version and could almost be
classiWed as anti-Euripidean. In particular, he drastically alters the
key role of Amphitryon and Theseus in these scenes. Arthur at least
partially performs a psychotherapeutic function during Harrison’s
bewildered awakening. He removes the gun, questions his son in
stages, and Wnally forces him to look upon the carnage inside the
house. When Harrison is made to recognize his guilt, he wishes not

39 Ibid. 71.
40 Algie states that he read Seneca’s Hercules Furens ‘some thirty-Wve years ago, but
hadn’t looked at it since, so its inXuence could only have welled from my uncon-
scious. One reason I deliberately avoided re-reading it was that I had trouble enough
Wnding the right distance from Euripides’ play to shape one which would incorporate
the central myth, yet hold the stage on its own.’ In correspondence with the author,
26 Jan. 2007.
354 A Herakles for our times

Fig 6. Home Front, Daniel Algie, New York City, 2006. Joseph Jamrog
(Arthur), H. Clark (Ted), and Fletcher McTaggart (Harrison). Photo:
Jonathan SlaV.
 A Herakles for our times 355
for death but for a long life of pain and punishment: ‘I’ll get the riXe.
Put shells in it. Do it myself. I deserve to die. (suddenly crawling on all
fours) No! Not enough! Not enough pain! Never enough of it for me!
(scrambling toward the door of the porch) They won’t execute the mad!
Thank God. Pray I have a long life. With every breath, more agony.
Even in sleep, the nightmares. Everywhere for me, nothing but
punishment. I should never see the light again!’41 He pulls the back
of his shirt up over his head, an action symbolic not only of his
shame but also his negation of self (cf. Herakles, who, at 1159–60 of
Euripides’ text, veils his head with a cloak). Arthur calls to the farm
Harrison’s lifelong friend and war buddy, Ted, who returned from
Vietnam Wve years earlier and is now a deputy sheriV. Ted is horriWed
by the murders. He handcuVs Harrison and is about to haul him to
the sheriV’s oYce, but Arthur persuades him to delay the arrest,
invoking the young men’s friendship and Harrison’s childhood res-
cue of Ted. Ted relents, urging Harrison to uncover his head and
treating him with gentleness and compassion. In Euripides’ play
Theseus, at the risk of pollution to himself, lovingly undertakes to
share Herakles’ suVering and oVers his suicidal friend real hope of
redemption. In Home Front Ted oVers Harrison such hope to secure
his cooperation, but it is an oVer apparently without substance or
conviction:
ted Sorry, pal, but I’ll have to lock you in the back seat then.
harrison And from that cage, I’ll go into another. Forever. I know where
I belong, what I’m heading to now, all alone. But I’ll bear that, too. Even
the mad can be brave.
ted With treatment, a doctor might be able to bring you back.
harrison To what? Accepting what I did? Any peace about that?
As a result of this exchange and Harrison’s ‘wordless, unwilling cry of
soul agony’,42 Ted determines a solution focused on release rather
than redemption. In what is portrayed as an act of both cynicism and
mercy, he kills Harrison, Wring a single shot into his back as Harrison
says goodbye to his father. Arthur agrees to tell the sheriV and
coroner that Ted shot Harrison when, on his arrival at the house,
he found Harrison attacking Arthur. Thus the philia shown by

41 Algie (2006), 77. 42 Ibid. 85.

356 A Herakles for our times
Amphitryon and Theseus, which is crucial to Herakles’ rehabilita-
tion, is here converted into a dark conspiracy born of sheer hope-
lessness.
A synopsis of Home Front on the play’s oYcial website states that,
like Euripides, Algie has composed a ‘disquisition on the suVering of
war, the role of heroism and the healing power of friendship and
community’.43 It is a strange assertion; for, as it is written and
performed, Home Front leaves us with the impression that in some
cases philia is an insuYcient healer and rehabilitation simply not
achievable. The play’s compelling Wnal image is an imperfect pietà,
Arthur mourning the body of his ‘only son’44 in an agony of stran-
gulated love:
His palms quickly draw away from Harrison’s head, are held out both in
terror and compassion. Trembling, they approach his son again, do not
quite touch him, cannot bring any comfort.
As he keeps repeating this heartrending gesture, always edging nearer, yet
withdrawing, and his mouth stretches wide in unspeakable anguish, dark-
ness rushes down.45
For Algie, this ending with its shocking cancellation of Euripidean
possibility and salvation is appropriate and unavoidable in the mod-
ern context: ‘I built a reversal of expectation into every aspect of my
drama, using that to express the constant overturning of belief, a
tragic vision which is absolutely necessary and all but unbearable.’46
Home Front is a fearless and impressive rereading of Herakles and, if it
ultimately transforms or cancels out the play’s Euripidean essence, it
does retain something of Euripides’ conception of ‘a random nemesis
descending at times even upon the innocent; a force to be reckoned
with, certainly, yet one without our ability to wrest from it a satisfy-
ing meaning—the paradox, if you will, of a capricious necessity’.47
At the opening of her discussion of the transmission (or transmi-
gration) of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to the English Renaissance stage,
Ewbank quotes Hamlet’s Pyrrhus speech (Hamlet, ii. ii. 452 V.), cen-
tring on the line recited by the First Player: ‘Anon he Wnds him j Striking
too short at Greeks.’ The impotence of aged King Priam, ‘striking too

43 http://www.homefrontplay.org. 44 Algie (2006), 86. 45 Ibid. 87.

46 Daniel Algie, in correspondence with the author, 8 Dec. 2006.
47 Id., in correspondence with the author, 26 Jan. 2007.
 A Herakles for our times 357
short at Greeks’, she says, ‘seems to image a long-held axiom of English
Renaissance scholarship that, when the playwrights wielded their an-
tique sword, it struck too short at Greeks and lay where it fell, that is on
Roman Seneca’.48 As Ewbank points out, this axiom is no longer
unquestioned, at least in respect of Shakespeare. However, the phrase
‘striking too short at Greeks’ serves as a very apt designation for the
current phase in the theatrical reception of Euripides’ Herakles. In our
attempts to create a Herakles for our times, Seneca has clearly provided
us with a powerful medium through which to anatomize ‘the heart of
contemporary darkness’. The neo-Senecan Herakles that has emerged is
the embodiment of Foucault’s statement that ‘Madness has become
man’s possibility of abolishing both man and the world. . . . It is the last
recourse: the end and the beginning of everything. Not because it is a
promise . . . but because it is the ambiguity of chaos and apocalypse.’49
On the other hand, Euripides’ text, with its unreasoned madness and
unconditional philia, enables us to conceive a positive alternative. For,
to quote again the description by Arrowsmith of the play’s deepest
motive: ‘the Herakles is a play which imposes suVering upon men as
their tragic condition, but it also discovers a courage equal to that
necessity, a courage founded on love.’50 Each new manifestation of mad
Herakles is revealing in its own right, and perhaps more so because of
its departures from Euripides. Nevertheless, my own hope is that in the
next phase of its theatrical reception we might witness a direct engage-
ment with the radical second half of Euripides’ play, leading to a
persuasive modern rendering of the transcendent human nobility and
fellowship at its heart. A neo-Euripidean Herakles could well prove an
attractive antidote to the terrifying irrationalism and inhumanity of a
neo-Senecan world.

48 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 37. 49 Foucault (1988), 281.

50 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53.
 APPENDIX 1

Heraklean madness on the

modern stage: a chronology

The following chronology includes theatrical performances of translations,

adaptations, and versions of Euripides’ Herakles post 1800.

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter

(Language)

1818 Herakles Richard Reading School, Reading, Oct.

(Ancient Greek) Valpy Reading Town Hall England
1879 Herakles Antonis Greece 17 Aug.
Varveris
1902 Herakles Albert Wiener Vienna 6 Jan.
Ulrich von Heine Akademischen
Wilamowitz- Verein für Kunst
Moellondorff und Literatur,
(German) Theater in der
Josefstadt
1919 Herakles Prinzregenten Munich 1 Sept.
Frank Wedekind Theater
(German)
1953 Héraklès Ballet de France, Paris 20 Apr.
Choreographer: Théatre de
Janine Charrat Champs Elysées
Composer:
Maurice
Thiriet
Librettist:
André Boll
1958 Heracles Vlado Croatian National Zagreb, 1 Feb.
Marijan Matkovic Habunec Theatre Croatia
(Croatian)
1959 Heracles Geraldine Qwirk Productions, New York 20 Feb.
William Lust The Great Hall,
Arrowsmith Cooper Union for
(English) the Advancement
of Science and Art
Hercules Furens King’s College, London
(Ancient Greek) London
 Appendix 1 359

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter

(Language)

1960 Iraklis Takis Ethniko Theatro Epidauros, 26 June–9

Panagis Lekatsas Mouzenidis (National Theatre Greece July
(Modern Greek) of Greece),
Epidauros
Festival, Ancient
Theatre of
Epidauros
Athens Festival, Athens 31 July–15
Ancient Odeion Sept.
of Herodes Atticus
Heracles Living Theatre New York 8 Sept.
Company
1962 Iraklis Takis Ethniko Theatro Epidauros, 30 June
Panagis Lekatsas Mouzenidis (National Theatre Greece
(Modern Greek) of Greece),
Epidauros
Festival, Ancient
Theatre of
Epidauros
1964 Eracle Giuseppe Istituto Nazionale Syracuse
Salvatore Di Martino
del Dramma
Quasimodo Antico, 18th
Composer: Syracuse Festival,
Bruno Nicolai Teatro Greco di
(Italian) Siracusa
Hercules Furens Tetuo University of Tokyo
Tamura Tokyo (Greek
Tragedy Study
Club), Hibiya
Amphitheatre
1965 Iraklis Takis Ethniko Theatro Epidauros,
Panagis Lekatsas Mouzenidis (National Theatre Greece
(Modern Greek) of Greece),
Ancient Theatre
of Epidauros
Dodonaia Festival, Dodona, Aug.
Ancient Theatre Greece
of Dodona
Herakles Alan University of Ann Arbor, 27 Oct.–7
Archibald MacLeish Schneider Michigan’s USA Nov.
(English) Professional
Theatre Program,
4th Fall Festival,
APA Repertory
Company, Lydia
Mendelssohn
Theatre
360 Appendix 1

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter

(Language)

1968 Herakles Hansgünther West

Harmut Lange Heyme Berlin
(German)

1974 Herakles 5 Munich

Heiner Müller
(German)
1983 Heracles Jem King’s College, London 16 Mar.
Bolland London,
Dept. of Classics,
New
Theatre, King’s
College
Heracles: A new Dyll King’s College, London 15 Sept.
verse drama in Davies London,
ancient Greek and (artistic Dept. of Classics,
modern English by director) New Theatre,
Sophocles, Euripides, / Michael King’s College
and Aristophanes, Silk (tour Players Theatre, Montreal, 30 Sept.
with arrangement director) McGill University Canada
of English material Horace Mann New York 6 Oct.
and songs by Theater, Columbia
Michael Silk University
Wheeler School Providence, 11 Oct.
Auditorium RI
Second Storey Newport, RI 12 Oct.
Theater
1987 Herakles Qwirk Productions New York
1988 Herakles Joanne Dept. of Drama & Colorado 18 Feb.
William Klein Dance, Colorado Springs, USA
Arrowsmith College, Armstrong
(English) Theatre
1992 Herakles 5 Theater Zuidpool Antwerp
Heiner Müller
(German)
1997 Herakles Theodoros Attis Theatre Athens 26 Feb.–
Heiner Müller Terzopoulos 2 Mar.
Thessaloniki, 11–14 Mar.
Greece
Attis Theatre Athens 18–31 Mar.
Herakles Melinda Barnard-Columbia New York 28 Mar.
Powers Ancient Drama
Group,
Minor Latham
Playhouse
 Appendix 1 361

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter

(Language)

The Madness of American USA

Heracles (Two Repertory
Theban Plays, with Theatre (ART)
The Phoenician
Women)
Philip Vellacott
(English)
Herakles Theodoros Argos, Greece 29 June
Heiner Müller Terzopoulos
Attis Theatre Athens 26 Nov.–
31 Dec.
1998 Herakles Theodoros Attis Theatre Athens 1–8 Jan.
Heiner Müller Terzopoulos
Herkules: Hero Hein van Transformatorhuis Amsterdam 3–24 Jan.
of the People der Heijden Toneelgroep,
Oscar van Amsterdam
Woensel
Herakles Titus Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam 22–4 Jan.
Gerrit Muizelaar
Komrij
Toured Alkmaar,
Apeldoorn,
Arnhem,
Den Bosch, Breda,
Eindhoven, Gouda,
Groningen,
Leeuwarden,
Maastricht,
Nijmegen,
Roosendaal,
Rotterdam,
Tilburg, Ijmuiden,
Zoetermeer
(Netherlands) and
Leuven (Belgium).
Last performed
29 May 1998
Herakles Theodoros Festival Bogota, 4–7 Apr.
Heiner Müller Terzopoulos Iberoamericano Columbia
de Teatro de Bogota,
Teatro National
Herakles Nick The Gate Theatre, London 9 July–
Kenneth McLeish Philippou Notting Hill 1 Aug.
(English)
Herakles Theodoros Internationale Frankfurt 13–15 Aug.
Heiner Müller Terzopoulos Sommerakademie,
Mousonturm
Theatre
Eracle Andrée Ruth Teatro Olimpico Vicenza 4–7 Sept.
Dario Del Corno Shammah di Vicenza
362 Appendix 1

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter
(Language)

Herakles Theodoros L’Invenzione del Ravenna 30–1 Oct.

Heiner Müller Terzopoulos Silenzio, Teatro
Ravenna
1999 Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 11th International Istanbul 26 May
Herakles Terzopoulos Istanbul Theatre
Based on Festival,
Heiner Müller’s Istanbul Municipal
Herakles 2 and 13 Theatre:
Mushin Ertugrul
Stage
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 11th International Istanbul 27 May
Herakles Mainomenos Terzopoulos Istanbul
Based on Euripides’ Theatre Festival,
Herakles, Sophocles’ Istanbul
Trachiniae, and Municipal Theatre:
Heiner Müller’s Mushin
Herakles 5 Ertugrul Stage
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 11th International Istanbul 28 May
Herakles Kathodos Terzopoulos Istanbul Theatre
Based on Euripides’ Festival, Istanbul
Herakles and Municipal Theatre:
Sophocles’ Mushin Ertugrul
Trachiniae Stage
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Shizuoka, 4 June
Herakles Terzopoulos Olympics, Japan
Based on Shizuoka Arts
Heiner Müller’s Theatre
Herakles 2 and 13
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Shizuoka, 5 June
Herakles Mainomenos Terzopoulos Olympics, Japan
Based on Euripides’ Shizuoka Arts
Herakles, Sophocles’ Theatre
Trachiniae, and
Heiner
Müller’s Herakles 5
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Shizuoka, 6 June
Herakles Kathodos Terzopoulos Olympics, Japan
Based on Euripides’ Shizuoka Arts
Herakles and Theatre
Sophocles’ Trachiniae
Iraklis Mainomenos Theodoros Attis Thiasos Moscow 20–1 June
Tasos Roussos Terzopoulos
Composer: Ioannis
Christou
(Modern Greek)
 Appendix 1 363

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter
(Language)

2000 Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 10th International Delphi, 2 July

Herakles Kathodos Terzopoulos Meeting on Ancient Greece
Based on Euripides’ Greek Drama,
Herakles and Ancient Stadium
Sophocles’ of Delphi
Trachiniae
Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros Festival de Merida, 30–1 July
Herakles Mainomenos Terzopoulos Teatro Clasico, Spain
Based on Euripides’ Amphiteatro
Herakles, Sophocles’ Romano
Trachiniae, and
Heiner Müller’s
Herakles 5
Festival of Epidauros, 25–6 Aug.
Epidauros, Greece
Ancient Theatre
at Epidauros
Herakles Jay Scheib Chashama New York 30 Nov.–
After texts by (basement), 16 Dec.
Euripides, Times Square
Müller, Sophocles,
Pindar, and Handel
(English)
2001 Mister Heracles Natasha West Yorkshire Leeds, 16 Feb.–
Simon Armitage Betteridge Playhouse England 17 Mar.
(English) and Simon
Godwin
Herakles Georg Theater am Schaan, 16–31
Wolfgang Heyder Rootering Kirchplatz Liechtenstein Mar.
(German)
2002 Theater am Schaan, 15–16
Kirchplatz Liechtenstein Mar.
Haus der Kultur, Bozen 19 Mar.
‘Walther von der
Vogelweide’
Meraner Meran 21 Mar.
Stadttheater
Heracles Andrei National Thessaloniki,
Mary Yiosi Serban / Theatre of Greece
(Modern Greek) Thymios Northern Greece, 17–19
Karakatsanis Forest Theatre July
Ancient Theatre Filippi, 27 July
at Filippi Greece
Amphitheatre Siviri, 7 Aug.
of Siviri Greece
364 Appendix 1

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter
(Language)

Festival of Epidauros, 16–17

Epidauros, Greece Aug.
Ancient Theatre
at Epidauros
Ancient Theatre Dion, Greece 24 Aug.
of Dion
Ancient Theatre Olympia, 28 Aug.
of Olympia Greece
Roman Patra, Greece 31 Aug.–1
Amphitheatre Sept.
of Patra
Theatre Alexis Athens 4 Sept.
Minotis, Egaleo
Theatre Vrachon, Athens 7 Sept.
Melina Merkouri,
Ymitos
Katrakio Theatre, Athens 10 Sept.
Nikea
Forest Theatre Thessaloniki, 13–15
Greece Sept.
2004 Hercules in High Mary A Watson Arts New York 15 Apr.–
Suburbia: A Musical Fulham Project, 2 May
Tragedy! La MaMa
Mary Fulham Experimental
Original songs by Theatre Club (First
Paul Foglino Floor Theatre)
(English)
Heracles Linda Grass Roots Greeks, San Diego, 26 Apr.
(English) Castro 6th @ Penn USA
Theatre
Herakles Ozren Hrvatsko Narodno Zagreb, 15 Oct.
Fragments Prohic Kazaliste (Croatian Croatia
of Euripides National Theatre)
Neven Jovanovic
(Croatian)
2005 Hercules Furens Elias Brasenose Arts Oxford 10–13
(English) Mitropoulos Festival, May
Brasenose College
Chapel
Herakles Ozren Hrvatsko Zagreb, 11 Apr.
Fragments of Prohic Narodno Kazaliste Croatia
Euripides (Croatian National
Neven Jovanovic Theatre)
(Croatian)
Herakles Rip Natural Theatricals, Alexandria, 5–28 Aug.
Archibald MacLeish Claassen George USA
(English) Washington
Masonic
National Memorial
(amphitheatre)
 Appendix 1 365

Year Title Director Company/venue Place Date

Translator/adapter
(Language)

Hercules in High Mary A Watson Arts New York 13–25 Aug.

Suburbia: A Musical Fulham Project, The
Tragedy! Ninth New York
Mary Fulham International Fringe
Original songs by Festival, Mazer
Paul Foglino Theatre
(English)
Herakles Ozren Hrvatsko Narodno Ludwigshafen, 10–11 Nov.
Fragments Prohic Kazaliste u Zagrebu Germany
of Euripides (Croatian National
Neven Jovanovic Theatre, Zagreb),
(Croatian) Festspiele
Ludwigshafen
Theater im Pfalzbau
2006 Herakles via Phaedra: Ellen The Great Jones New York 18 May–11
A Dance Theatre Stewart Repertory June
Epic Company,
Ellen Stewart La MaMa
Music by Genji Ito Experimental
Additional music Theatre Club,
by Ellen Stewart The Annex
et al. (English) at La MaMa
Home Front E. Randahl La MaMa New York 9–26 Nov.
Daniel Algie Hoey Experimental
(English) Theatre Club
(First Floor
Theatre)
2007 Eracle Istituto Nazionale Syracuse 11 May–24
Salvatore del Dramma June
Quasimodo Antico, Teatro
(Italian) Greco di Siracusa
 APPENDIX 2

The Reading school play

The entire performance history of the Herakles is relatively sparse, and the
nineteenth century is no exception. The only recorded performance of the
play between 1800 and 1880 appears to be that produced by Dr Richard
Valpy, headmaster of Reading School between 1781 and 1830. Valpy was
something of a charismatic figure, liberal in temperament, but with a
reputation for harshly administering corporal punishment. Between 1809
and 1816 he produced several classical school textbooks. He had also been
stagestruck since his youth, and in 1806 inaugurated at the school a triennial
Greek play. Of the six full-scale productions of Greek tragedies he mounted
in Reading Town Hall over the next twenty-one years, five were by Euripides,
including two productions of Alcestis (1809 and 1824); Orestes (1821);
Hecuba (1827); and, most extraordinarily of all, Herakles (1818). As Edith
Hall points out: ‘The performances were surprising in the context of theatre
history, because in the first two decades of the nineteenth century tragedy
had retreated from the public stages of Britain almost altogether. By the
1820s, partly as a result of the Greek War of Independence, Greek themes
began to appear occasionally on the commercial stage. . . . But the Valpeian
plays had anticipated this revival of Hellenic theatricals by fifteen years.’1
Moreover, Frank Benson’s staging of the Agamemnon at Balliol College and
the institution of the Cambridge Greek Play were still several decades in the
future.2 One likely reason for Valpy’s choice of the Herakles is the fact that in
1794 Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801), Unitarian minister, controversialist,
and sometime fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, published a popular new
selection of tragedies with notes specifically for the use of schools. The first
volume of his Tragoediarum delectus contained Hercules Furens, Alcestis, and
Trachiniae.3 Wakefield’s laudable intention was to introduce the lesser-
known plays to school reading.

1 Hall (1997b) 59–81, at 76.

2 The Agamemnon was performed on 3 June 1880 in the Hall of Balliol. The first
Cambridge Greek Play was produced in 1882, and the first Cambridge production of
Euripides was Ion in 1890.
3 See Clarke (1945), 17.
 Appendix 2 367
In the context of Euripidean reception in the second decade of the
nineteenth century and the general critical and performance history of the
Herakles, Valpy’s production in 1818 was singularly ambitious and, indeed,
heroic. The production was reviewed in the Reading Mercury of Monday, 18
October 1818, by Mary Russell Mitford, a friend of Valpy’s and, later, of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s. Mitford informs her readers that the plot
‘contains much striking situation, much of the fitness of representation,
which distinguishes Euripides from his great rival [Sophocles], and much of
the tender pathos, for which he is so justly celebrated’.4 Special mention is
also made of the interpretation of the waking scene by a Mr Harington, who
performed the title role.

4 Reading Mercury, 18 Oct. 1818, p. 3.

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 Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Accius 49
actors 101–6
Gertrude Eysoldt 240
in MacLeish’s Herakles 289, 290
Nero 50, 57–8
Wilamowitz as 216–18
in Wilamowitz’s Herakles 218–19,
222, 225–6
Adams, Henry 254, 255, 256, 259–60,
264, 265
adaptation 12–13
Adkins, A.W.H. 40–1
Aeneid (Virgil) 54, 68–9, 72
Agamemnon (Browning) 195–8
agnosticism 18, 157–8
see also atheism; Christianity
Algie, Daniel 8, 350–7
Alkestis (Browning) 187, 193, 195, 199, 206
Alleyn, Edward 104
Alprin, Brian 304, 307
Alprin, Paula 304
Amphitryon:
Algie’s 351, 353, 355
Armitage’s 314, 327
Canova’s 148–9
Euripides’ 18–19, 21, 24–7, 35,
38–42, 39, 143 n. 58
Seneca’s 77, 83, 87, 88
Walt Disney Pictures’ 343
anagnōrisis:
Algie’s Home Front 353–4
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 326
Bennett’s The Madness of George III 339
Euripides’ Herakles 38–40
Harrison’s Labourers of Herakles 342
MacLeish’s Herakles 290
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 84–8, 122,
134, 140
Shakespeare’s King Lear 142–5
Shakespeare’s Macbeth 132–5
Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 268–71
anger 55, 69–70, 73, 84
see also madness
Antony and Cleopatra
(Shakespeare) 110–11
Apocolocyntosis (Seneca) 56–7
Apollodorus of Athens 48–9
Apollophanes 50
Apology for Actors, An (Heywood) 101
apotheosis:
as conservative Christian
anarchist 253–66
Wedekind’s Herakles 273–8
Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 267–72
see also divinity
aretē 5, 17–18, 40–1, 44
Aristophanes 171–2
Aristophanes’ Apology (Browning) 150,
182, 185–92
Aristotle 16, 97
Armitage, Simon 8, 216, 312–21, 315
Armstrong, Richard H. 208 n. 3, 219 n. 39
Arnold, Matthew 160–3, 188, 194–5
Arnott, W.G. 22, 23 n. 41, 310
arrows:
Euripides’ Herakles 27, 40, 42, 43
and Julius Caesar 102
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 83
Wilamowitz’s Herakles 211, 212
Arrowsmith, William 23–4, 42, 43–4,
144, 290–1
Asteas 47–8, 47
atheism 157, 183–4
see also agnosticism; Christianity
Athena 30 n. 61, 38–9, 78
autarkeia 45 n. 108, 88, 128–9, 134–5, 229
Bacchae (Hofmannsthal) 249–50
Bacchic ritual 35–6, 35 n. 76
Bahr, Hermann 7
Dialog vom Tragischen 235–7
and Hofmannsthal 237–9, 246–8,
250–1
and Modernism 207–9, 232
and psychology 233–7
and the Viennese Herakles 225–31
390
Baines, Barbara J. 101 n. 19
Baker, Howard 120 n. 11
Balaustion’s Adventure (Browning) 168,
180, 183
Balliol manuscript 192–3
Barker, Andrew W. 232
Barlow, Shirley A. 24–5
aretē 44
on Browning 203 n. 72, 73
Herakles complex 308–9
identity 143 n. 58
on madness 13, 97
murder 37
philia 41
on Pindar 27 n. 55
structural unity 20 n. 26
Barrett, Elizabeth 182–3
bastardy 32–3
Beecham, Sir Thomas 241
Beer-Hoffmann, Richard 246–8
Behler, Ernst 155–6
Bennett, Alan 338–9
bia 37, 38 n. 86, 40
Billerbeck, Margarethe 52 n. 1, 73 n. 54
Billington, Michael 3–4, 337, 345 n. 18,
347–8
Bishop, J. David 63, 76
black bile 96, 98, 99, 142
Blaiklock, E.M. 18 n. 17, 215
Blanshard, Alastair 58 n. 19, 116, 142,
149, 149 n. 73
Boas, Frederick S. 101 n. 19
boats 30, 90, 144, 203–5, 316
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas 61 n. 23
Bolt, Ranjit 85
Bomelio 141, 142
Bond, Godfrey W.:
Euripides’ Herakles 21, 27 n. 55, 30,
32–3, 35 n. 74, 37
Heraklean myth 24 n. 45
wheeled platform 322
Bottom, Nick 103–5
bows 26–7, 40, 42–3, 81, 85, 125
Boyle, A.J. 53, 60 n. 60, 65, 71, 120 n. 11
Braden, Gordon:
on good and evil 65
science and technology 302
on the Senecan influence of
Elizabethans 117–20
Index
on Seneca’s Hercules 54, 60, 82, 90–1,
302
on Shakespeare’s King Lear 144
and Tamburlaine the Great
(Marlowe) 126, 127
on The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 129–30
Braider, Christopher 94 n. 4
Brazen Age Containing The Labours
and death of Hercules, The
(Heywood) 106–9
Breuer, Josef 235, 238, 241
Brooke, C.F. 136 n. 49
Brooks, Harold F. 103 n. 25
Brower, Rueben A. 120 n. 11, 125–6,
130, 144
Browning, Robert:
Alkestis 187, 193, 195, 199, 206
Aristophanes’ Apology 150, 182, 185–92
Bailliol manuscript 192–3
Balaustion’s Adventure 168, 180, 183
and Euripides 182–5
Herakles 180–1, 192–206
and influence on Hofmannsthal 249
Buckley, Theodore Alois 180–1
Burkert, Walter 26 n. 52
Burnell, Peter 54 n. 9
Burnett, Anne Pippin 18–19, 29, 37, 45
n. 108
Burrow, Colin 10, 146
Butler, E.M. 244
Caesar, Julius 101–2
Cain (Lodge) 257–8
Calder, William M. III:
on Oscar Wilde 173 n. 84
on Wilamowitz 164–5, 207 n., 216 n.
33, 217
Caligula 59
calyx-krater 47, 48
Canova, Antonio 148–9
Carden, Richard 30 n. 61
Carlyle, Thomas 187–8
Carpenter, Humphrey 156 n. 21
Carson, Anne 310–12
celebrity 348
censoring of plays 308
Cerberus 72–3
Chalk, H.H.O. 17, 37 n. 86, 40
Charlton, H.B. 120 n. 11
 Index
Christianity 94, 116, 158, 253–66
see also agnosticism; atheism
chronology of performances 358–65
Clark, Arthur Melville 101 n. 19
Clark, John R. 64–5, 76–7, 79, 89 n.
Claassen, Rip 304, 305, 307
clubs (weapons) 50, 81, 125, 142, 352
Cohn, Dorrit 234 n. 75
coins 58
Colakis, Marianthe 297
Cold War 285–7
Collard, Christopher 178–9
Comes, Natalis 110
Commodus, Lucius Aurelius 59–60
Conservative Christian Anarchist
Party 255–66
Contra iudices (Theodulf of
Orléans) 109–10
‘conversion of reality’ theory 42
Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 136–40
Crimp, Martin 345–8
Cromwell, Otelia 101 n. 19
Cropp, Martin 23
Crowley, John W. 254 n. 4, 255, 256 n. 11
Cruel and Tender (Crimp) 345–8
Cuchulain 267–72, 344
Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 161
Cunliffe, John W. 120, 120 n. 11
cures for madness 142
dance 35–6, 245
Dannenfeldt, Karl H. 142 n.
Daviau, Donald G. 230, 233
De Morbo Sacro (Hippocrates) 31 n. 63,
97
dehumanization 277, 321
see also humanization
DeVane, William Clyde 180–1, 189,
192 n. 44
Devereux, George 39–40
dextra 71, 134
Dialog vom Tragischen (Bahr) 235–7,
250–1
Diodorus Siculus 48–9
Dionysian terms of reference 34 n. 73
Dionysus 30 n. 61
disunity 5, 15–24, 288
divinity 3, 19, 45, 140, 302
see also apotheosis
391
divorce legislation 154
Dodds, E.R. 158 n. 27, 215
domestic violence 5, 28, 116, 307, 308,
322–3
see also murder
Donoghue, Denis 267 n. 35
Douglas, Mary 128 n. 31
Drabeck, Bernard A. 297 n. 34
drawings 344
dreams 208, 234, 244
Duchemin, J. 31 n. 64
Dunn, Francis M. 43 n. 98
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 279, 285–6
Easterling, Pat 345 n. 19
Eckermann, Johann Peter 159–60
Ehrenberg, Victor 2, 45
Elektra (Hofmannsthal) 208–10, 237–8,
240–6, 250–1
Eliot, T.S. 283–4
on Heywood 114
‘Marina’ (poem) 145–6
and Senecan influences 61 n., 111–12,
120 n. 11, 121 n. 15
on Shakespeare’s Othello 130 n.
Elizabethan period 99–100, 117–49,
120–3
Ellard, John 330 n. 96
Ellis, Helen E. 297 n. 34
Ellman, Richard 171 n. 73
Empire, Roman 54–5
English translations 179–81
epilepsy 18, 30, 31, 96–7, 98
epiphany 30–4
Erasmus 99
Euripides 1–2, 5
see also Herakles (Mainomenos)
Euripides and his age (Murray) 151–2
evil and good 65
Ewans, Michael 240–1, 246 n. 113
Ewbank, Inga-Stina 106–7, 122, 356–7
external madness 30–1, 37, 45, 308–9
Eysoldt, Gertrude 240
Falkner, Thomas 47 n. 111
‘falling sickness’ 99, 100–1
Farkas, Reinhardt 247
Farnaby, Thomas 98–9
feminism 307, 308
392
filicide see murder
film 279, 286, 342–3
Fitch, John G. 52 n. 1, 56 n. 12, 57 n. 17,
62, 65, 74, 85, 88, 318
Fitzgerald, G.J. 38 n. 87, 42 n. 97
Flashar, Hellmut 219, 220
Foley, Helene 44 n. 102
Foucault, Michel 357
Freud, Sigmund 208, 219, 234–5, 238
friendship see philia
Fulham, Mary 348–9
Furley, David J. 19 n. 24
furor see madness
Galinsky, G. Karl 20, 54 n. 9, 61 n. 22,
107, 302
Gardner, Lyn 318 n. 74, 319 n. 74, 322
Gardner, W.H. 197 n. 60
Georgian era 147–8
Gianakaris, C.J. 284, 288
Gilliam, Bryan Randolph 241 n. 97
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 159–60,
246
Goldhill, Simon 231–2, 241 n. 97
good and evil 65
Good, Maeve 267
Gosse, Sir Edmund 174–5
Granville-Barker, Harley 216
Gray, A. 179–80
Green, Martin 254
Greene, John 102–3
Greene, Robert 104–5, 141–2
Gregory, Justina 19, 28
Grene, David 290 n. 25
Griffiths, Trevor R. 103 n. 24
Grivelet, Michael 101 n. 19
Groatsworth of Wit (Greene) 104–5
Grube, G.M.A. 215
Gründer, Karlfried 165 n. 50
Guy, John 119
Hall, Edith 9, 10–11, 52, 310, 315 n. 73
hallucinations:
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 320
Euripides’ Herakles 34, 37, 38
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 129–30
MacLeish’s Herakles 300
Seneca’s Hercules 80–3
Shakespeare’s Macbeth 133
Index
hamartia 18, 29, 64, 295
Hammelmann, Hanns 240 n. 92
Harbage, Alfred 106 n. 40, 111 n. 53
Hardwick, Lorna 12 n. 22, 193–4
Harrison, Tony 198, 340–2
Hart-Davis, Rupert 188 n. 19
Hartigan, Karelisa V. 37
Hasell, Elizabeth 185 n. 4
Helfand, Michael 188 n. 19
Hellenism 151–4, 160–3
Hellenistic period 46, 48
Henrichs, Albert 163–6
Henry, Denis 63
Hera 24, 31–3, 324 n. 84
see also Juno
Herakles (Carson) 310–12
‘Herakles complex’ 8
see also Herakles (MacLeish); Mister
Heracles (Armitage)
Herakles (Lodge) 258–67, 272 n. 42
Herakles (MacLeish) 281, 306
madness 291, 295–7, 307, 309
the published version 292–8
and science 285–8
stage productions 288–92, 304–7
Herakles (Mainomenos) (Euripides) 1
appearance of Herakles 24–30
awakening 38–40
Bahr on 236–7
epiphany 30–4
history of performances 3–4,
279–81, 358–67
madness 5, 14, 17, 24–5, 30–8, 77, 78,
80–1
rehabilitation 40–5
and Seneca’s Hercules 89
and Shakespeare’s King Lear 143–4
and Shakespeare’s Othello 125–6
structure of the play 15–24
see also Browning; individual
characters
Herakles (Rhinthon of Syracuse) 46–7
Herakles (Scheib) 343–4
Herakles via Phaedra (Stewart) 349–50
Herakles (Waterfield) 310
Herakles (Wedekind) 273–8
Herakles (Wilamowitz) 7, 207, 208
madness 18, 30, 210–16
Viennese Herakles 221–6, 223
 Index
Hercules Furens (Heywood) 111–14
Hercules Furens (not Seneca’s) 101–2
Hercules Furens (Seneca) 5–6
anagnōrisis 84–8, 122, 134, 140
compared to Tamburlaine 127–8
and Heywood’s The Brazen Age 107–8
history of the play 51–2
Juno’s prologue 63–76
madness in 5–6, 52–5, 76–84, 122
and melancholia 98–9
rehabilitation 88–91
and Roman emperors 55–61
and Shakespeare’s Macbeth 131–6
and Shakespeare’s Othello 123–6
see also individual characters
Hercules in High Suburbia
(Fulham) 348–9
Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca) 51–2
Hercules Oetaeus (Studley) 104, 106–11
Hercules (Walt Disney Pictures) 342–3
heresy 18–19, 168
Hermann, Gottfried 175–6
heroism 40, 43–4, 308–12
Herrick, M.T. 120 n. 12
Herzog, Werner 279
Heywood, Jasper 104, 111–14
Heywood, Thomas 101–2, 106–9
Hieronimo 129–31
Hippocrates 31 n. 63, 97
Hippocratic Corpus 31 n. 63, 96–8
Hippocratic humoral theory 96, 98, 99,
215
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 7, 219
Bacchae 249–50
and Bahr 237–9, 246–8, 250–1
and Browning’s influence 249
Elektra 208–10, 237–8, 240–8, 250–1
Hölderlin, Friedrich 198–9
Home Front (Algie) 8, 350–7, 354
Hood, Thurman L. 186 n. 7
Horace 69
humanization 24, 29, 45, 191, 253
see also dehumanization
humoral theory 96, 98, 99, 215
Hunter, G.K. 120 n. 11, 121–2
Hutcheon, Linda 12
Hutchinson, J.T. 179–80
Hyams, Kenneth 330 n. 96
hydra 345–6
393
impersonation of Hercules 58–60
in bivio 94, 115
infectious pollution 41–2
injustice 3, 5, 21 n. 31, 22, 33
Iraq 334
Iris 31, 316
Armitage’s 317–19
Browning’s 202
Euripides’ 20, 30 n. 62, 31–5
isolationism 137, 139–40
Izenberg, Gerald N. 275
Jaffe, Dan 303 n. 46
James, C. 44 n. 105
Jeffords, Susan 308
Jenkyns, Richard 152–3, 155 n. 16, 163
Johnson, Francis R. 120 n. 11
Johnson, W.R. 54 n. 9
Jones, Edgar 330 n. 96
Jones, Ernest 219 n. 39, 220 n. 29
Juno 63–76, 123–4, 130, 294
see also Hera
Jupiter 128–9 see also Zeus
justice 3, 5, 21 n. 31, 22, 33
Kallinikos 8, 21
Kamerbeek, J.C. 18, 215–16
Karlin, Daniel 190
Keble, John 158
Keeley, Edmund 297 n. 37
Kenyon, F.G. 189, 196, 198, 202
Kerrigan, John 120 n. 11
Kiefer, Frederick 120 n. 11
Kindness, John 344
King Lear (Shakespeare) 142–5, 147, 338–9
King, Roma A. 183, 189
Kitto, H.D.F. 16 n. 5
Kossatz-Deissmann, Anneliese 31 n. 64
Kraus, Christina 20 n. 27, 34 n. 73
Kyd, Thomas 129–30
Labourers of Herakles, The (Harrison)
340–2
labours:
Euripides’s Herakles 20–1, 24, 27–8, 42
MacLeish’s Herakles 287–8, 291
and madness 49
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 75–6, 89–90
Wedekind’s Herakles 274–5
394
Lange, Hartmut 188 n. 18, 279
Latttimore, Richmond 290 n. 25
Lawall, Gilbert 64–5
Lawton, William Cranston 196, 205
Lee, Kevin 18, 28, 31, 41–2
Lewis, C.S. 111, 112
Lewis, Ward B. 273
Lichas 108–10, 148 n. 72
Licht, Fred 149 n. 73
Lincoln, Bruce 32 n.
linguistics 20 n. 27, 27 n. 55, 35 n. 74, 37
lion’s skins 85, 142, 340–1
Litzinger, Boyd 186 n. 6
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 31 n. 64, 165 n. 50
Lodge, George Cabot 7–8, 253–66,
272 n. 42
loss of self 8
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 319
Bahr on 209, 230–1, 236–7
Bennett’s The Madness of George III
339–40
Euripides’ Herakles 14
Hofmannsthal on 239–46
Lucas, F.L. 120, 120 n. 11
Lycus:
Armitage’s 314
Euripides’ 15, 20, 21, 26, 38 n. 87
in the Renaissance 95
Seneca’s 61 n. 23, 74–6, 83, 86
Lyssa 3
Armitage’s 316–20
Bahr on 227–8
Browning’s 200–3
on calyx-krater 48
Carson’s 310–12
Euripides’ 14, 20, 30–7, 77–8, 316
Seneca’s 6
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 131–6
McCusker, Jane A. 189
McDonald, Mary Francis 70 n.
McDowell, R.B. 169
Macintosh, Fiona 10–11, 12, 147 n. 69,
153 n. 12, 154 n. 14, 216 n. 31,
219 n. 39, 267 n. 34
MacLeish, Archibald 8, 216, 281–5, 293
see also Herakles (MacLeish)
McLeish, Kenneth 309
Madness see Lyssa
Index
madness:
Algie’s Home Front 352–3
Armitage’s Mister Hercules 316–21,
329–30
Bennett’s Madness of George III
338–40
Browning’s Herakles 205
cures for 142
Euripides’ Herakles 5, 14, 17, 24–5,
30–8, 77, 78, 80–1
external 30–1, 37, 45, 308–9
Foucault on 357
Harrison’s The Labourers of
Herakles 340, 341–2
Heywood’s Hercules Furens 113
internalized 53–5, 64, 327, 340, 353
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 129–30
and labours 49–50
linguistic 20 n. 27
Lodge’s Herakles 266–7
MacLeish’s Herakles 295, 300
Madness of Herakles (calyx-krater)
47, 48
Madness of Hercules (Turchi) 115
Ovid’s Metamorphoses 106
‘seeds of madness’ theory 30, 210–16,
281
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 52–5, 64,
76–84
Studley’s Hercules Oetaeus 106–11, 109
today’s definition of 4–5, 64–5
and virtue 92–6
Wilamowitz’s Herakles 18, 210–16,
228–30
Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 267–8, 272
see also loss of self; Lyssa; murder
Madness of George III, The (Bennett)
338–40
Madness of Herakles (calyx-krater) 47, 48
Madness of Hercules (Turchi) 115
Mahaffy, John Pentland 7, 168–71, 184,
187–8
Mania 48 see also Lyssa
manus 134
Marlowe, Christopher 104, 127–8
Marston, John 100–1, 141
Martens, Lorna 237 n. 85, 238 n. 87
Martindale, Charles 9–10, 120 n. 11
‘Medea syndrome/complex’ 324–5
 Index
Megara:
Algie’s 351, 352
Armitage’s 314
on calyx-krater 48
Walt Disney Productions’ 342, 343
Euripides’ 18–19, 315, 315
poem by Theocritus 46
in sculpture 149
as seen in the Renaissance 95
‘Megara’ (Theocritus) 46
melancholia 96–101
mental illness see madness
messengers:
Armitage’s 320–1
Euripides’ 34, 36
Studley’s 106
Metamorphoses (Ovid) 70–2, 101 n. 20,
106, 108–9, 324 n. 84
Michelini, Ann Norris 22–3, 27, 152, 213
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
(Shakespeare) 103–5
Miles, Geoffrey 105 n. 38, 120 n. 11, 266
militarism 307, 314, 315, 321–6, 325–37
Milner, Larry S. 324
Miola, Robert S.:
on Senecan influence 120 n. 11, 122,
134 n. 45, 145
on Shakespeare 103
on weapons 89
mistaken identities 109, 122, 141, 334,
352
Mister Heracles (Armitage) 216, 312–21,
315, 327–8, 334
Modernism 151, 208–9, 231–3, 241, 282
Mott, George 60 n. 20
Motto, Anna Lydia 64–5, 76–7, 79, 89 n.
Moxom, Philip Stafford 199
Mueller, Martin 61 n. 22
Muir, Kenneth 120 n. 11, 133 n. 40,
134 n. 45
murder:
Algie’s Home Front 355–6
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 314, 319,
328, 334
Euripides’ Herakles 20, 34–8
and the Herakles complex 279–80
Lycus’ 38 n. 87, 74–6
Macleish’s Herakles 291, 295–7,
307, 309
395
Megara (Theocritus) 46
modern profile of 321–5, 334–5
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 5–6, 74–6,
83–4
Yeat’s On Bailes’s Stand 267–8
Murphy, Tom 344 n. 17, 345 n. 17
Murray, Gilbert 151–2, 157 n. 22, 182,
214, 225
Naevius 49–50
Natural Theatricals 304–5
Neely, Carol Thomas 99 n. 14
Nees, Lawrence 110
Nero Claudius Caesar 50, 55, 57–8, 62,
80 n., 84 n.
Nervenkunst 7, 208, 234–5, 240, 250
Newman, Francis William 194–5
Nicolaus of Damascus 48–9
Nietzsche, Friedrich 163–6, 265 n. 27
Norwood, Gilbert 214
Odes (Horace) 69
oikos 25, 26 n. 49
O’Keefe, John J. 111 n. 55
Oliphant, Margaret 186, 187
On Baile’s Strand (Yeats) 267–72
opera 115–16, 240–1
Orlando Furioso (Greene) 141–2
Osers, Ewald 240 n. 92
Othello (Shakespeare) 123–6, 130 n.
Ovid 70–2, 101 n. 20, 106, 108–9,
324 n. 84
Padel, Ruth 14, 31 n. 64, 36
painting 115
Paley, Frederick Apthorp 178–9
palinode theory 158
Pallas Athene 30 n. 61, 38, 78
Panofsky, E. 94
‘Passion-versus-Restraint’ 88
Pater, Walter 158
paternity 19, 21
Pavolini, P.C. 258, 259, 272 n. 42
peace, prayers for an impossible 79–80,
81
performance reception 9–13
performances of Herakles 3–4, 6–7,
10–11, 208, 221–6, 279–81,
358–67
396
Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Shakespeare)
145–6
Peyré, Yves 131 n. 36
philia 44 n. 101
Algie’s Home Front 355–6
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 335, 336
Euripides’ Herakles 5, 8, 17, 40–1, 90,
140, 335
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus 139–40
Shakespeare’s King Lear 143
Shakespeare’s Macbeth 136
Pindar 27
polis 25, 26 n. 49
political influences 60–3, 90, 118–19
Pollard, Tanya 142 n.
Poole, Adrian 135, 185 n. 4
Porter, David H. 294–5
post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) 323, 330, 334–5, 353
prayers 79–80, 81, 117, 300, 332, 346
Prins, Yopie 185 n. 4, 196–7
prologue of Juno 63–76
Raeburn, David 23 n. 41
Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune
(Anonymous) 141–2
Reading school play 366–7
Rebellato, Dan 156 n. 21
reception see performance reception
red herring theory 22–3, 27
rehabilitation 40–5, 88–91, 325–37
Reid, Jane Davidson 94 n. 3, 153 n. 11
Renaissance 6, 92–116, 120 n. 11
Restoration period 146–7
revenge 74–5, 81
Rhinthon of Syracuse 46
Riggs, Thomas, Jr. 265–6
Ring and the Book, The (Browning)
183
Roberts, Adam 185 n. 4, 190
Rolfe, William J. 104 n. 28
Roman period 49–50, 55–60, 62,
101–2
Romantics 153, 154
Romilly, Jacqueline de 44 n. 105
Roswell, Robert 330 n. 96
Ruck, Carl A.P. 18 n. 16, 331
Rutter, Carol Chillington 341 n. 9
Ryals, Clyde de L. 191–2, 195
Index
Salingar, L.G. 283–4
Salkeld, Duncan 4–5, 98 n. 14
Scheib, Jay 343–4
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 15 n. 4,
154–60, 170
Schlesier, Renate 34 n. 73
Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin 249 n. 118
Schneider, Alan 296–7
Schorske, Carl E. 208
science 285–8, 299, 302–3
Scobie, Ruth 59 n. 20
sculpture 148, 167
Seaford, Richard 34 n. 73
‘seeds of madness’ theory 30, 210–16,
281
Seferis, George 297–8
self 130
Algie’s Home Front 355
divine 140, 255–7
Elizabethan period 117–49
Heywood’s The Brazen Age 108
image 86
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 130
loss of 8, 209, 230–1
Armitage’s Mister Heracles 319
Bahr on 236–7
Bennett’s The Madness of George
III 339–40
Herakles (Euripides) 14
Hofmannsthal on 239–46
Seneca’s Hercules Furens 86
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream 105
Shakespeare’s King Lear 144–5
Shakespeare’s Macbeth 131–3
self-divinity 255
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 5–6, 51–2,
111–16, 120–3, 120 n. 11
see also Hercules Furens
Shakespeare, William 119–20
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 103–5
Coriolanus 136–40
King Lear 142–5, 147, 338–9
Macbeth 131–6
madness 105–6
Othello 123–6, 130 n.
Seneca’s influence on 122
Share, Don 106 n. 40
Shay, Jonathan 330–3
 Index 397
Shelton, Jo Ann 63–4, 67–8 Armitage’s 327, 335
Sheppard, J.T. 17 Browning’s 204–5
Sherrard, Philip 297 n. 37 Euripides’ 40–2
Silk, Michael: MacLeish’s 290, 301–2
on the divine man 2–3, 127 n. 30, 252 Mahaffy on 170
on madness 19 Oscar Wilde on 173 n. 84
on Nietzsche 165 n. 52, 265 n. 27 Seneca’s 53, 61–2, 87, 88–9
sleep 38–9, 78, 99, 122, 141, 142 Stewart’s 349
Sleigh, Tom 309–10 Thomas, Richard 9
Smalley, Donald 186 n. 6, 189–90 Tisdel, Frederick Monroe 190–1
Smith, Philip E. 188 n. 19 Trendall, A.D. 31 n. 64
Soellner, Rolf 95, 99, 122–3 triumphs, Roman 72–3
Somer, Richard F. 284 Turchi, Alessandro 115
Somerville, H. 124, 133 Turner, Frank M. 160 n. 33, 161
Sophocles 153, 155, 162, 198–9 twentieth-century performances 279–81
Southworth, John 104 n. 32
Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd) 129–30 unity 5, 15–24, 228
Spearing, E.M. 111 n. 55
spears 26–7, 39, 313 Valpy, Richard 7, 366
Stahl, Hans-Peter 54 n. 9 Velz, John W. 104, 120 n. 11
Stambler, Bernard 62 Verrall, A.W. 212–13
Stanford, W.B. 169, 197 veterans 325–37, 350
Steiner, George 198 Victorian period 151–4
Stern, J.P. 164 n. 46, 165 n. 52, 265 n. 27 Viennese Herakles (Wilamowitz)
Stewart, Ellen 349–50 221–31, 223
stichomythia 39, 87, 120, 203 Virgil 54, 72
Strauss, Richard 240–2 virtue 92–6
structural unity of Euripides’ Vocht, H. de 111 n. 55
Herakles 5, 15–24, 228 Von Staden, Heinrich 97
Studien über Hysterie (Freud) 238
Studley, John 104 Waith, Eugene M. 110 n. 52, 126, 137,
Suetonius 50, 57–8 147 n. 70
suicide 44, 45, 53, 88, 125, 131 Walker, B. 63
Superman 273–8 Wallace, Jennifer 153 n. 8
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 174–5 Waller, Willard 325–6
Symonds, John Addington 157 n. 22, Walt Disney Pictures 342–3
166–8, 186 Ward, Philip 249
Waterfield, Robin 310
Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe) 104, weapons:
119, 126–9, 127–8 Algie’s Home Front 353
Taplin, Oliver 30 n. 62 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 335
Tarrant, R.J. 52 n. 1 Euripides’ Herakles 39, 42–3, 125
Taylor, A.B. 120 n. 11 Home Front (Algie) 355
theios anēr 2, 252 Seneca’s Hercules 89, 125, 335–6
Theobald, William 120 n. 11 Webb, Timothy 153 n. 10, 11
Theocritus 46 Webster, T.B.L. 31 n. 64
Theodulf of Orléans 69 n. 50, 109–10 Wedekind, Frank 8, 273–8
Theseus: Wells, Henry W. 120 n. 11
Algie’s 352, 353, 354, 355 Weltanschauung (Seneca) 52
398 Index
Wharton, Edith 254 Xenoclea 295–7, 307
wheeled platform 322 n. 77
Wignall, Stephen 330 n. 96 Yates, W.E. 245
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich Yeats, W.B., On Baile’s Strand 267–72
von 163–6, 177, 218–21 Yoshitake, Sumio 44 n. 105
Herakles 18, 30, 207, 208, 221–6, 223, Young, David P. 104
281
influence on Hofmannsthal 246–8 Zeitlin, Froma I. 34 n. 73
on the madness of Herakles 210–16 Zeus:
Wilbrandt, Adolf 216 n. 30, 218–19 Algie’s 351
Wilde, Oscar 7, 171–4, 188 Euripides’ 19, 25, 41, 143 n. 58, 328
Willink, C.W. 38 n. 88 Walt Disney Productions’ 342
Wilson, Peter 34 n. 73, 36 see also Jupiter
Wolfe, Christian 310 Zwierlen, Otto 52 n. 1