The statement of Jocasta[195] that Oedipus was imprisoned in order that his disgrace might be forgotten, and that of Kreon[196] that Oedipus had to be exiled for ever because he was ‘polluted,’ are inconsistent; but we may infer from these statements, which Euripides himself composed, that he did not quite understand the origin and motive of the story of the imprisonment of Oedipus. For whoever invented this story did so with a definite purpose, namely, to reconcile religious doctrine with historical fact. The inventor knew the meaning and purpose of his invention. Hence the statement of Jocasta to which we have referred cannot have originated with the inventor of the story, for otherwise she would have said that Oedipus was imprisoned to avoid pollution.
Nevertheless we think that here again Euripides sought to achieve dramatic interest by introducing an antique variant of the story which Sophocles had ignored. In Sophocles, Oedipus dies before the clash of arms takes place between the Argives and the Thebans. In Euripides he lives to see the realisation of his own curses, and becomes more easily reconciled to his own sad fate when he finds that Destiny has avenged him in his turn, as Laius was avenged, and that in leaving Thebes he has removed from his life the local anger of ghosts and gods.
The ‘Mad Hercules’
The theme of this drama is one of the multitudinous episodes which are associated with the life of Hercules. Now the legends of Hercules have this much in common with such legends as we have examined concerning Orestes and Oedipus, that they refer to the deeds of a great man who has died. In Greek religion, apart from the Olympian Pantheon of the Achaean caste, every great man assumed a divine nature when he died. But the Olympian religion did not recognise the right of man to become divine, and therefore whenever legend attributes human acts to such Olympian gods as Apollo or Athene (of whose mortal life there was no record) we must assume that at the time of such acts these gods have temporarily assumed a human form. But Hercules never was an Olympian. In Homer, Hercules is mentioned in a manner which suggests that he had been living quite recently upon this earth, and living moreover a normal human life. We find him in Hades, like all other dead men, though, curiously, he retains some of his old vitality, for he is married to Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth.[197] We hear of his maternal uncles living ordinary human lives in Argos or in Thebes,[198] and his grandsons actually fought in the Trojan war! We will not here attempt to discuss the origin of the Grecian cult of Hercules. Müller, of course, connects him with the Dorians. He thinks that Hercules and Apollo, in their respective rôles of hero and of god, satisfied the normal wants of Dorian religiousness.[199] We admit that the exaltation of Hercules as a divinity was of post-Homeric origin; but it is futile, we believe, to seek to distinguish the historical from the fictitious strata in Heraclean legends. At the dawn of European literature the human life of Hercules, if there ever was such a man, was a thing of the past, and it is therefore more than probable that all the post-Homeric legends of Hercules are equally fictitious. The main point which we wish to emphasise here is that most of the legends of Hercules are based on the assumption that he had not yet died: that he was a mortal man, who obeyed, on most occasions, the laws of social humanity, not a god who had condescended to take human form and who was superior to the operation of natural laws. We agree that in the legends of Hercules there is a certain element of magic, such as is found in the legends of Medea, or Jason, or Iphigeneia. This element imports into Heraclean legends a certain degree of lawlessness or of chaos. But, so far as homicide at least is concerned, we will assume that Hercules is a man; not indeed an ordinary man, subject to every ordinary law, but nevertheless a man, whose actions, however archaically they may be conceived, can nevertheless be explained. The difficulties which are presented by the Heraclean legends are due in part to their archaic setting, but still more to their almost infinite variety—a variety which we may attribute to the multitude of localities in which this Hero-god was worshipped. The greater the number of shrines which a god or hero possessed, the greater was the variety of the myths which grew up around him, because ancient myths—which are not like modern fairy tales, but which were rather sacred commemorations of religious events—could be transferred from one Hero to another. Herodotus tells[200] how Cleisthenes of Sicyon transferred the ‘tragic choruses’ which commemorated the sorrows of Adrastus to the cult of Dionysus. Thus too must Hercules have had attributed to him the joyful exploits as well as the sorrowful events of the ‘lives’ of local Heroes. For this reason, and because of the tendency of myths to become more and more fanciful, we believe that the legends of Hercules as of most gods are ‘fictitious.’
In the Euripidean drama, the Mad Hercules, we are told that Hercules, in a fit of madness, slew his wife, Megara, and his children.[201] He was deluded by the goddess Hera[202] into believing that he was thereby inflicting death upon the children of his taskmaster, Eurystheus. We may recall a somewhat similar delusion which was sent in a Sophoclean drama by Athene upon Ajax. But whereas in the Ajax no actual homicide occurs, here we have actual bloodshed, and, worst of all, kin-slaying. From a legal point of view, the position of Hercules is therefore quite different from that of Ajax. It is, we think, more akin to that of Oedipus. Hercules slays his children without knowing that they are his children. We may omit, for purposes of legal analysis, the death of Megara, his wife, for this death is obscured by the more heinous slaying of his kindred. Like Oedipus, Hercules discovers the truth; like Ajax, he contemplates suicide. He gives expression to sentiments regarding the punishment of kin-slaying which are suggestive of historical Attic law; though he forgets, for the moment, that his act was involuntary, when he says[203]:
Ah! why lengthen out
A guilty life, when of my dearest children
I am become the murderer? Why delay
To leap from the high rock or with a sword