Heracles

A central theme of Euripides’s Heracles is suffering and how human beings are to endure that suffering. The first part of the play finds Heracles’s family—his foster father Amphitryon, his wife Megara, and his children—poised to suffer a terrible death at the hands of Lycus. Amphitryon and Megara must find a way to endure their situation. In the second part of the play, Heracles must find a way to endure his own suffering after he kills his wife and children in a bout of madness.

The idea that suffering is inevitable and that courage is defined as perseverance in the face of that suffering is introduced in the Prologue, when Amphitryon tells Megara that “to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has / Is courage in a man” (Lines 105-6). Amphitryon’s view is not the complete or the only definition of courage in the play. As Megara argues, one must also acknowledge the power of fate and of necessity over human life and realize that to resist these powers is futile and “base” (Line 282). Megara’s resignation is not quite despair; rather, it is a dignified acceptance of one’s fate, and represents another way to show perseverance even when external circumstances make perseverance impossible and death inevitable.