num_pages: 112
description: In Herakles, Euripides reveals with great subtlety and complexity the often brutal underpinnings of our social arrangements. The play enacts a thoroughly contemporary dilemma about the relationship between personal and state violence to civic order. Of all of Euripides' plays, this is his most skeptically subversive examination of myth, morality, and power.Depicting Herakles slowly going mad by Hera, the wife of Zeus, this play continues to haunt and inspire readers. Hera hates Herakles because he is one of Zeus' children born of adultery, and in his madness, Herakles is driven to murder his own wife and children and is eventually exiled, by his own accord, to Athens. This new volume includes a fresh translation, an updated introduction, detailed notes on the text, and a thorough glossary.
language: English
title: Herakles
titlecomplete: Herakles
characters: Iris (Goddess), Madness, Theseus (mythology), Amphitryon, Heracles, Megara (mythology), Lykos
genres: Classics, Drama, Theatre, Plays, Tragedy, Greece, Poetry, Literature, Mythology, Fiction
ratings_count: 1314
places: Ancient Greece, Greece
publisher: Oxford University Press