The ‘Trachinian Maidens’
This drama centres round the name of Hercules, and records his tragic death under circumstances which to us suggest the presence, at the birth of the story, of a morbid passion for legal problematising. As we shall have to deal with the legends of Hercules at greater length when we discuss the Euripidean dramas which are based upon them, we shall postpone for the present our general remarks about this Hero-god. In this play there is an incidental reference to the murder by Hercules of Iphitus, the son of Eurytus, King of Oechalia, a deed which is mentioned by Homer.[115] The herald says[116]:
When Iphitus to the Tirynthian height
Followed the track where his brood-mares had strayed,
He, while the thought and eye of the man by chance
Were sundered, threw him from the tower-crowned cliff.
In anger for which deed the Olympian king,
Father of gods and men, delivered him
To be a bond-slave.
Now, in Homer, the Olympian Zeus takes no such action. It is merely stated that the act of Hercules was a violation of the etiquette of hospitality![117] The act is censured, but not punished. But in later times, when murder became a religious offence and legend-makers imported the pollution-doctrine retrospectively into pre-existing legends, Hercules could not have escaped the pollution which even Apollo was said to have incurred when he slew the Python. And just as Apollo was said to have served as a bondman with Admetus,[118] so Hercules had to endure also a period of bondage. We cannot suppose that the penalty of servitude in the ‘pollution’ religion was identical with the tribal penalty of ‘servitude’ which is sometimes found in primitive societies.[119] The latter penalty was domestic and local, being regarded as a substitute for wergeld; the former penalty could only have been served ‘abroad,’ and it was, we think, really a consequence of the helpless poverty of an exile. Thus it is quite in keeping with what we may call the ‘pollution’ bondage of Hercules that Deianira should say[120]: