Euripides: Children of Heracles

Florence Yoon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350193871
• eBook ISBN: 9781350076778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

This book is an accessible guide through the many twists and turns of Euripides' Children of Heracles, providing several frameworks through which to understand and appreciate the play. Children of Heracles follows the fortunes of Heracles' family after his death. Euripides confronts characters and audience alike with an extraordinary series of plot twists and ethical challenges as the persecuted family of refugees struggles to find asylum in Athens before taking revenge on its enemy Eurystheus. It is a fast-paced story that explores the nature of power and its abuse, focusing on the appropriate treatment and behaviour of the powerless and the obligations and limitations of asylum. The audience must continually re-evaluate the play's moral dimensions as the characters respond to complications that range from the fantastic to the frighteningly realistic. Yoon situates Children of Heracles in its literary context, showing how Euripides constructs a unique kind of tragic plot from a wide range of conventions. It also explores the centrality of the dead Heracles and the leading role given to the socially powerless and the dramatically marginal. Finally, it discusses the historical contexts of the play's original performance and its political resonance both then and now.

1

Action and Expectation

Children of Heracles is an unusually action-packed, fast-paced play. In recounting the fortunes of Heracles’ family after his death, Euripides gives us a pitiful refugee tableau, a sudden and sacrilegious attack, an unexpected rescue, a divine demand for human sacrifice, a willing victim, a pseudo-comic scene, a battle narrative, a miraculous rejuvenation and a vicious triumph – all in just over a thousand lines. With every scene Euripides suggests a new direction for the play, only to turn us around again in the next. In performance the intensity of each scene carries the audience along rather like a modern action film, but those looking for the bigger picture – particularly readers with more leisure to consider the play’s artistic merits – can find these twists and turns more challenging. This chapter focuses on the action of the play and the shifting expectations that it creates.

Our reading of the play must rely almost entirely on the evidence provided by the text itself because we have few external clues to guide us. Children of Heracles is one of the nine plays often called ‘alphabetic’ which have survived by chance, as they belonged to what seems to be the only volume – E to K – to be preserved in a single copy from a complete alphabetic collection of Euripides’ plays.¹ No information about the play’s original performance has been transmitted with it. Accordingly, we do not know exactly when it was produced, but it seems to be one of the earliest extant plays of Euripides, probably dating before 425 BCE and possibly as early as 455 BCE.² We can assume that, like all extant tragedies, it was written for outdoor performance at one of two competitive festivals before an audience composed of both Athenian and non-Athenian spectators.³ If so, it was written and performed with at least one other tragedy (at the Lenaia festival) or with two other tragedies and a satyr-play⁴ (at the City Dionysia), but we do not know what those other plays were, or how they might have influenced the audience’s experience of our play.

Despite the lack of precise contextual information, we can make some general deductions about the audience’s initial state of knowledge. Following this, we will turn to the play itself, laying out as simply as possible the events of each scene, including the controversial ending, and considering the audience’s changing state of knowledge and expectations as the play progresses. Included in this outline are important elements of staging, which are essential to our understanding of the play but which we must reconstruct from textual indications as the plays come to us with no indications of stage action or movement.⁵

Audience anticipations

What would the original audience of Children of Heracles have known or guessed about the play they were waiting to see?⁶ There are three sources we can consider as likely to have shaped the audience’s expectations of any Greek tragedy as they sat down for the performance. Our knowledge of each of these sources is extremely limited, and the audience itself would have been made up of very different kinds of people with different access to these sources. Nevertheless, it is useful to keep in mind the kinds of expectations that Euripides had to work with.

The first source for the Greek audience is traditional mythology, from which most tragedies drew their plots.⁷ It is impossible to state with any confidence just what a given audience would have known; in addition to the diversity in the audience, the myths themselves are full of variations, many of which have not been preserved. The versions most familiar to us now are often familiar precisely because of a particularly influential tragedy. However, we do know that while Heracles was one of the most famous figures of mythology then as today, ubiquitous in art and literature as well as one of the most widely worshipped cultic heroes, his children did not share his popularity. Their story seems to be a much later development from their father’s; we do not have evidence for the mythology of the Heraclids before the fifth century,⁸ and our records of their cults in several Attic communities date from the fourth century.⁹ It is tempting to try to distinguish which details of our play’s plot were traditional and which were Euripidean inventions, but such efforts must remain speculative.

However, we do have evidence that the story of the Heraclids played an important role in how fifth-century cities in Attica and the Peloponnese shaped their identities. This is best demonstrated in an account given by Herodotus, whose Histories are approximately contemporary with our play. Herodotus recounts that as the Greeks prepared to engage the Persians at Plataea in 479 BCE, in one of the most important battles of the Persian War, a dispute arose between the Tegeans (inhabitants of a powerful city in the central Peloponnese) and the Athenians over precedence of position (9.26–28.1). Each side supports its claim in part by recounting its role in the Heraclid legend. The Tegeans argue that the more prestigious position is one of the particular privileges granted to them long ago by the other Peloponnesians, because when the Heraclids first tried to return to their ancestral Peloponnesian home after the death of Eurystheus, the Tegean king was the champion who fought and killed Heracles’ son Hyllus in single combat, and secured for the Peloponnese a hundred years of protection from Heraclid invasions. Herodotus’ Athenians respond to this claim with five stories, the first of which is a brief version of the one that forms the basis of our play: that when the Heraclids were being persecuted by Eurystheus, Athens alone defended them and defeated the invading Peloponnesians. The myths are used here to express political identity; Herodotus’ Tegeans present themselves as defenders of the Peloponnese against Heraclid invaders, while his Athenians present themselves as defenders of the Heraclids against Peloponnesian persecution.¹⁰ Herodotus’ account cannot be accepted as a record of an actual debate, but it shows both the prevalence and importance of such stories in the time of our play, and these two particular stories – the Athenian defence of the Heraclids and the ‘return of the Heraclids’ to the Peloponnese several generations later – are crucial background knowledge for our play.

The second possible source of information – if the play was performed at the City Dionysia festival – would have been the proagōn, a formal ceremony that took place about a week before the performances themselves. Once again, our information is limited,¹¹ but we do know that the poet gave a speech to introduce the play, and that a significant part of the audience would have heard it, though the audience of the proagōn could not have been as big as the audience of the plays themselves. We may compare the concept (if not the content) of the modern film trailer; the poet is likely to have sketched an outline of the general plot without giving away the details of how it would resolve or any innovations that depended on surprise for their effect. It is possible that the cast of the play had some role in this presentation; we know that the chorus and actors were present, but as they did not wear their masks and costumes it is unlikely that scenes of any length were performed. The playwright would have had almost complete control over how much information to give the audience, and this will have played an important part in shaping audience expectations.

The third source available to some members of the Greek audience would have been other plays written along similar lines. We will return to this possibility later, but it is worth noting here that we know of another play called Children of Heracles written and produced by Aeschylus, which must have preceded our play. Only four brief fragments of the play survive, none of which gives any indication of the shape of the plot as a whole. Titles of plays can be misleading¹² – Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called Suppliant Women but based on entirely distinct stories – but our title is specific enough that it is likely to follow the same group of people. Even if the lost play staged a different part of the adventures of the Heraclids – or indeed a different generation of Heracles’ descendants – it will have reinforced familiarity with the story and perhaps influenced the expectations of any audience members who had seen it.¹³

In addition to these general and official sources of information, Davidson (2005) reminds us to consider the informal channels through which information about the plays might have been disseminated. There were at least thirty people involved in this production, including the chorus of between twelve and fifteen,¹⁴ the three speaking actors, the musicians, adults playing mute roles, and the children who were presumably brought to and from rehearsal by slaves, not to mention the craftspeople responsible for the costumes, masks and other material elements. We have no information about where rehearsals were held, but the performance space was outdoors with excellent sightlines; if any rehearsals at all were held in the performance space it is difficult to imagine that they were never observed. Access to this information would, of course, have been limited and privileged; nevertheless, it adds a further dimension to the audience.

We can reasonably conclude that most of the ancient audience waiting to see Children of Heracles would have had a general sense of the shape of the play: of the initial problem – the persecution of the children of Heracles after his death by his old enemy Eurystheus – and its resolution – that Athens would succeed in protecting them. The question is not what will happen, but how.

Outline

Fig. 2 Outline of the play’s action.

Setting the stage

The play opens with a tableau showing a number of small boys – perhaps six of them, or as many as twelve – grouped around an altar, probably placed at or near the centre of the circular dancing area (orchēstra).¹⁵ They wear the garlands and carry the branches of suppliants.¹⁶ Near them is an old man, probably also marked as a suppliant, and behind them is the stage building (skēnē) representing a temple. One possible – but entirely speculative – staging is given as an aid to visualization at Figure 3.

We cannot be sure just when or how this tableau was set up. In the Greek open-air theatre there was no curtain or comparable device to conceal the actors as they took up their positions, so the actors must have arrived onstage in full view of the audience before the official start of the play in what is sometimes called a ‘cancelled entry’. Perhaps a musical cue (or the absence of music) would have signalled that the audience should ignore the actors as the scene was set up.

Probable expectations established

The tableau produces a powerful visual effe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Action and Expectation
• 2 Summing the Parts
• 3 Heracles and Other Imagined Figures
• 4 The Power of the Weak
• 5 Then and Now
• Appendix: Fragments
• Selected Chronology
• Guide to Further Reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright