ARTicles vol. 1 i.2: Opinion: Drama of the Dispossessed

The Children of Herakles was first performed in Athens in 430 BC. The venue was the City Dionysia, an urban religious festival held every spring to honor Dionysus, the god of theater. The play’s author, Euripides, was born in the 480s and his theatrical career spanned the entire second half of the fifth century BC. By the time of his death in 406 he had written sixty-six tragedies, seventeen of which survive (more than twice as many as Aeschylus and Sophocles, from whom we have only seven tragedies each, a result of the greater popularity of Euripides’ works in antiquity both as staged drama and as teaching texts). Of the surviving plays The Children of Herakles has never ranked among the most popular for teaching or research, nor has it been among the most frequently performed. Indeed, since the first modern revival in London of 1781, there have been only six other productions (not including the present run at the A.R.T.), four of them in Greece (1943, 1970/71/72), one in London (1984), and one in Basel, Switzerland (1996). Thus Peter Sellars’ production marks the American professional premiere of The Children of Herakles, and a major milestone in the public rehabilitation of one of Euripides’ most neglected and undervalued plays.

How are we to explain this neglect? The Children of Herakles has been repeatedly dismissed, by both classical scholars and theater producers, ancient and modern, as a mechanical and dull panegyric of Athens, a poor piece of jingoistic propaganda. As you will see, however, this is far from being the case. Euripides has crafted a dynamic and effective tragedy, which can challenge us, no less than its original fifth-century Athenian audience, to reflect on substantial problems of morality, politics, and law within our own society: the proper treatment of refugees and prisoners of war, for example, or the struggle between ethical conduct and the untrammeled exercise of power. Such issues, no less relevant or pressing in our own time, may still be illuminated by the experience of Euripides’ play.

As with any other work of literature, our understanding of The Children of Herakles is greatly enhanced by a sense of its historical context, so I will briefly outline the social and cultural background to fifth-century Athenian tragedy. The particular civic and festival context of Athenian drama illustrates the deep links that existed between the theater and the wider cultural, political, and religious life of the ancient Greek polis (“city-state”). The City Dionysia was not the only Athenian festival involving poetry, music, and dance, but it was by far the largest and most prestigious dramatic festival, attracting visitors from many Greek cities. The theater of Dionysus could accommodate between 15,000 and 20,000 spectators. As the highpoint in the city’s dramatic calendar, the Dionysia was also an opportunity for Athens to impress foreign visitors with its cultural and military achievements. However, rather than simply endorsing Athenian civic ideology, the tragedies expose the most fundamental tensions and conflicts within Athenian society, and explore its underbelly from a variety of angles. In doing so they are far from promoting the reproduction of an official civic dogma or from being straightforwardly didactic in any sense.

The myths surrounding The Children of Herakles offer some of the most interesting examples of the politicization of myth in ancient Greek culture. These myths can be treated in two distinct stages: first, the flight of Herakles’ children to Athens and the city’s support for the suppliants (the subject of Euripides’ play); second, the return of Herakles’ descendants to the Peloponnese (the southern part of Greece, dominated by Athens’ arch-enemy, Sparta). Though people knew that myths could be freely invented by the poets, such narratives as the return of The Children of Herakles still had considerable ideological power and were exploited for different purposes by competing Greek communities. While the myth of the children’s return is typically pro-Spartan and probably developed in archaic Sparta as a fictional legitimation of the Dorian invasion, the Athenians appropriated the myth for their own ends by developing an earlier episode in the exile of Herakles’ children. The children of the demigod thus became part of Athens’ own political mythology and the Athenians gained the prestige of association with Herakles, the greatest of Greek heroes.

It is the fifth-century BC Greek historian Herodotus who first makes clear how the Athenians might exploit the myth for their own benefit. In his account of the preparations for the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, Herodotus presents a debate between the Tegeans and the Athenians over who should hold the wing, a place of honor in the Greek army (book 9, chapters 25-8). In order to impress the Spartans, who are in overall command, the Athenians stress that they alone gave shelter to The Children of Herakles (from whom the Spartans are descended), and released the Peloponnese from the tyranny of Herakles’ enemy, Eurystheus. The Spartans, Herodotus tells us, decided in favor of the Athenians. Thus, it is clear that the myth of The Children of Herakles was a source of patriotic pride and that the Athenians sought to bolster the links between Herakles, his children, and Attica (the region around Athens). Euripides’ play takes up this political myth and explores not only its glories but also its ambivalences.

Euripides has boldly innovated in attributing the killing of Eurystheus to Alcmene, Herakles’ mother. Traditionally Eurystheus was killed in battle by Iolaus or Hyllus, Herakles’ eldest son, but in The Children of Herakles Eurystheus is taken prisoner and then executed at the behest of Alcmene. Her decision to kill him despite the protests of the Servant and the Chorus is one of the most remarkable and shocking events in the play. This gratification of passionate revenge seems inhumane. Indeed, Alcmene’s conduct is particularly disturbing because it explicitly opposes a law that forbids the murder of war prisoners. Euripides has also invented the figure of Herakles’ self-sacrificing daughter, Makaria. The Children of Herakles is the earliest surviving play of Euripides to show self-sacrifice averting disaster for the individual’s family or city. Euripides clearly appreciated the emotional possibilities of such scenes, and they show his interest in exploring the pressures of war and civic crisis from the perspective of its young and innocent victims.

In The Children of Herakles the citizens of one state come to another seeking protection, but their native land demands them back. No Greek state was duty bound to accept any suppliant, no matter how deserving or upstanding he might be. So although no tragic suppliant is ever expelled from an Athenian shrine, the suppliant’s success is by no means a foregone conclusion, and the agreement of the Athenians marks their generosity and their acute sense of religious and moral propriety. Moreover, the Athenians agree to protect the asylum-seekers in the full knowledge that this will mean war with their pursuers. Thus the first part of the play shows both protector and protected working together to achieve victory. Nevertheless there is much in The Children of Herakles to provoke uneasy reflection in a modern, as well as an ancient Athenian, audience. First, the play is extremely acute in its presentation of the conflict between morality and power. Secondly, and perhaps more disturbingly, Alcmene, the former suppliant, reenacts the enemy’s violation of the law when she decides to kill Eurystheus, despite his being a prisoner of war.

We can appreciate how well tragedy articulates and clarifies such questions only if we see the plays within the history of their time. Concern about the correct use of power, for example, is well attested in the Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of the period. During a debate in 432 BC on whether to go to war, the Athenian representatives at Sparta openly admit that considerations of self-interest and power override talk of right and wrong. Their amoral realism is bluntly stated: “It has always been a rule that the weak should be subject to the strong” (book 1, chapter 76, trans. R. Warner). Again in 416 BC the Athenians take it as common knowledge that “the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept” (book 5, chapter 89).

Despite its detractors, The Children of Herakles is a powerful and challenging tragedy of exile. At its center stand a group of political refugees who have been driven from their homeland and shoved, unwanted, from state to state. Though they are finally granted protection, their presence threatens internal revolt among their allies and hostile attack from their persecutors. As the play clearly shows, the tragedians of fifth-century Athens explored complex moral issues, such as the conflict between power and justice, with as much insight as the historians or philosophers. Euripides has created a work that raises fundamental questions about the treatment of refugees and prisoners of war and about the temptation to sacrifice moral values to self-interest. Here we can see theater directly challenging its audience to reappraise their assumptions and to review their actions, past and present, in a more critical manner. Therefore, far from being a work of patriotic propaganda, The Children of Herakles reflects, and engages with, central moral issues in a more complex and stimulating way, and emerges as not merely a political, but also a tragic drama.

William Allan is Assistant Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. He is the author of The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2000), Euripides: The Children of Heracles (Aris & Phillips, 2001) and Euripides: Medea (Duckworth, 2002).