Euripides: Herakles

In "Herakles", Euripides reveals with great subtlety and complexity the often brutal underpinnings of our social arrangements.

The play enacts a contemporary dilemma about the relationship between personal and state violence and civic order.

Of all of Euripides' plays, this is his most sceptically subversive examination of myth, morality, and power.

The play depicts Herakles being driven mad by Hera, the wife of Zeus.

Hera hates Herakles because he is one of Zeus' children born of adultery.

In his madness, Herakles is driven to murder his own wife and children, and he eventually exiles himself to Athens.