Introduction

Abstract Herakles is a figure rarely found in Athenian drama playing a tragic role. Darker aspects of his life appear briefly in Homer. In the Iliad Achilles evokes .him as prototypical of a hero’s tragic mortality (18.117–18). Odysseus, visiting the world of the dead, meets Herakles’ ghostly double who is haunted by his former life of misery (Odyssey 11.601–26). More commonly Herakles is characterized by his fantastic exploits, by his geniality and by an immense capacity for endurance capped by final successes. This most famous and ubiquitous hero appears in the worlds of fairy tale and legend, close to the gods in the ancient time of the heroes, but also in the aristocratic world of the wellborn who achieve successes in their competitive life; and, as one can see in religious cult and dramatic comedy, he can be found to be a comfortably familiar figure of everyday life. Euripides’ play brings something of all these facets of the hero together to tragic effect, which may well be something like a dramatic experiment, bold and risky. This introduction will look at the play’s structure; how the hero is characterized by his deeds and by his family relations, human and divine; at the role of the gods and the place of religious practice in the play’s action; and, emerging out of all these, the role of poetic performance as the play itself draws our attention to it.