Herakles
Herakles was first performed in Athens around 416 BCE during the devastating Peloponnesian War against Sparta and its allies. Euripides takes the familiar myth of one of the most famous of all legendary heroes and creates a gripping tragedy about the return of a warrior who instead of saving his own family turns on them in a fit of madness and kills them all. Euripides created this play for a society traumatized by years of brutal conflict and wanted to show the effects of war on a family left at home and present difficult questions about how a man blooded by combat might ever be reincorporated back into peacetime society. Though extreme in its content, Herakles articulates the strain of war, the effects of combat trauma and the psychology of a man driven to violence. Herakles is a story that speaks directly and urgently to Americans today.
