The Gorgonic Archer: Danger of Sight in Euripides' Heracles

Abstract

Athenian tragedy often ironizes its poetic tradition. The plays peer behind the stable and reassuring facade of the Olympian pantheon and, like Heraclitus' bent-back bow linking life and death, find it joined to powers utterly, destructively alien. ' Euripides' Heracles figuratively dramatizes this revisionary principle in the terms of a thematic interconnection between sight and danger, visibility and vulnerability. Amphitryon's debate with Lycus (140-235) 2 establishes a formal paradigm of this notion amid its opining of the archer (toxotes). Heracles' distinction as an archer-a warrior who ideally remains invisibly safe while posing a threat to his enemy-provides for the three panels of dramatic action a model of characterization adhered to or distorted: 1) Heracles' family and friends look to him for the archer's martial attributes, a hope which the hero fulfills in divine terms. 2) Iris and Lyssa corrupt this godly archer role through their specific arrangement of the parricides. 3) Upon the hero's regaining of consciousness, the motival interrelation metaphorically expands. Heracles hoods his head so as not to export pollution onto Theseus' eyes; struggles with the shame of vulnerable appearance; and moves toward, but ultimately fails to accept, tragic insight into his paradoxical relationship with the gods. The play concludes ambiguously: the hostile alterity of the gods' prerogatives overshadows Heracles' capacities as a human god, while his family's destruction and the continued use of the bow compromise his initiation into the possibilities of philia.