Reframing Tragedy

Anne Carson’s long-term obsession with Herakles emerges from endless contradictory representations of this unique Greek hero/eventual divinity. The colossal Herakles of the famed labors kills an array of monstrous beasts; wears a lion skin; uses a bow and arrow and club more often than the heroic shield and spear; defeats whole cities or armies by himself; briefly takes over holding the world on his shoulders from the god Atlas; travels the globe from far east to far west; descends to Hades to retrieve the three-headed dog of the Underworld, Cerberus; and makes the world safe for civilization from the margins. This figure is ubiquitous on Greek pots and temples but is remote and not quite accessibly human. Herakles/Hercules was also for Greeks and Romans a stoic hero who accepts a life of continuous toil because Hera, the goddess who hated him from the moment Zeus conceived him with the mortal woman Alkmene, cheated him of his birthright and doomed him to serve his cousin Eurystheus. Even his name, which means “glory of Hera” (hera/kleos), derives from this enmity. Unlike other heroes, Herakles never receives the kingship of Argos or Thebes to which he was entitled. All his wives die. Every time he makes a rare entrance into a city or a civilized context, trouble explodes. A repeated violater of host-guest relations, he is punished for killing his host’s son Iphitus by serving an eastern queen Omphale for a year. His appetites are excessive, as well. During one visit he impregnated all fifty daughters of Thespius, who was anxious to have heroic descendants. In comedy, where his appetitive character fits quite well, he attends only to food and wenching.