Heracles

Euriphides' Heracles, first produced ca.415 BC, explores themes of violence and heriosm, family and nostos ("homecoming"), madness, identity, divine influence and the redemptive quality of philia ("friendship"). In this tragedy, Heracles' wife, Megara, together with his sons and his father, Amphitryon, are threatened with death by the tyrant Lycus. Heracles arrives back from the completion of his Labours, just in time to save them fand kill Lycus. In a dramatic turn of events, however, Iris and Lyssa (personification of Madness) appear and follow Hera's orders to send Heracles mad. He kills his wife and children, but with the support of his friend Theseus finds a way to continue to live. The challenging nature of the play's themes has imprinted itself on the pattern of its reception over the ages: it has, "always surfaced in historically charged periods" and despite infrequent staging has "had an undeniable impact on the history of ideas". For this reason Euripides' Heracles holds a distinctive place within the story of the widespread popularity and reception, from antiquity to the present day, of Heracles as a mythological character in general.