How can I, when my country drives me forth?
To any other city should I fly,
The consequence were this: with looks askance
I should be viewed as one well-known, and harassed
With these reproaches by malignant tongues:
‘Is not this he, the son of Jove, who murdered
His children and his consort? from this land
Shall not th’accursed miscreant be expelled?’
But the archaic atmosphere of the ‘life’ of Hercules furnishes a solution for this problem. Theseus arrives from Athens! Apparently we are now living in the days which preceded the institution of citizen juries or even of Ephetae courts! As Theseus, the autocratic King-judge, tried Oedipus at the shrine of the Semnai,[212] so also, in a similarly informal manner, he tries Hercules. He knows already, without being told of it, that Hera is to blame. Therefore, he says[213]:
... This mischief