Heracles

Madness and reason are naturally prominent motifs throughout Euripides’s Heracles, a play whose alternative title is often given as “Heracles Mad” or “The Madness of Heracles.” The play culminates in the madness of Heracles and the subsequent restoration of his sanity. The motifs of madness and reason, which develop the play’s exploration of the themes of perseverance in the face of suffering and the role of the gods in human life, pervade much of the play, perhaps from the very beginning. Some scholars have even argued that Heracles exhibits the “seeds” of madness before Hera drives him to kill his family, although scholars today generally dismiss this idea.

In Euripides’s Heracles, human beings are represented as basically reasonable, and this relates to how they view the world and construct their values such as courage, heroism, duty, and so on. Even the murderous and tyrannical usurper Lycus is far from being irrational, for even though his values do not align with those of the play’s central characters, his policies do exhibit a carefully calculated and reasoned understanding of realpolitik. When Heracles first comes on stage, he too is at least outwardly in command of his reason, exhibiting a normal and stable sense of his own heroism balanced by a sense of duty to his family.