THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

The Heracles shares with several other Euripidean tragedies the characteristic
of falling into two parts which are somewhat inadequately knit
together. In this play the fault does not seem to be so glaring, because the
character of Heracles dominates the entire drama, giving it at least a
modicum of unity. Certainly the contrast between Heracles' triumph and
his cataclysmic downfall, which immediately follows, intensifies to the
extreme the impact of the play. Furthermore, the Heracles becomes more
unified because of the stress laid upon the religious implications of the
dramatic situation. Though unmitigated in his hatred for Hera, Heracles
at the end of the play seems to have reached a somewhat purified
religious position. He does not commit suicide, for he feels that to be a
coward's course. Influenced by the counsels of Theseus, he determines
to live on, courageously to endure the blows of fate, and to face fully
the responsibility for his deeds. He makes this decision after having contemptuously
rejected the anthropomorphism in the conventional religion,
while at the same time he maintains, so far as we can tell, a belief in a
higher, better deity behind the universe, inscrutable in his ways to man,
but who has decreed that it is the part of a man to endure life. When
Euripides presents Heracles in these terms, he completes his portrait of a
great tragic character.