Dangerous supplements: Etymology and Genealogy in Euripides'Heracles

Abstract

The complex patterns of repetition and reversal in theHeracleshave 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, democraticphilia.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.