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Dangerous supplements: Etymology and Genealogy in Euripides' Heracles*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Christina S. Kraus
Christina S. Kraus
Affiliation:
Oriel College, Oxford
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Extract

The complex patterns of repetition and reversal in the Heracles have been carefully and convincingly explored. Whether dividing the play into two, three, or even four major scenes, scholars have shown that it is not simply imagery or language, but whole actions or plot-elements which recur from scene to scene, and indeed from generation to generation. A consensus has developed that the play's violent disruptions and juxta-positions of opposites work together with near-obsessive repetitions of language, plot, and myth to stage Euripides’ vision of epic valour savagely mutated into a new, moral heroism contained by a new, democratic philia.

It is appropriate that repetition, and repetition-as-reversal, should figure so largely in this drama, whose action depends on a doubly-fathered hero and whose centrepiece is the triply repeated description of an action which is itself a play within a play. In a prominent ode the chorus long for a second youth as a sign of goodness (655-72), a desire apparently realised by Heracles' reappearance from the dead. Nor is he the only one to be reborn: in the last act, Theseus' appearance, also – ultimately – from Hades (1170), redoubles Heracles' first entrance: another hero with two fathers, another monster-killer, another rescuer from the dead.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 44 , 1999 , pp. 137 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1999

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