Euripides' Herakles notes are here.
Q:
Euripides “Heracles” which king of Thebes died in office allowing Lycos to steal thee crown? Who was the rightful heir? This was a “new” Lycos invented by Euripides. Did this Lycos have a back story?
Reply:
Bruce, this is a wonderful question because Euripides’ Heracles begins with a political situation that is easy to take for granted, even though it raises an important question about the legitimacy of power in Thebes.
The short answer is that Creon was the king who had died, and his son Megara’s husband, Heracles, was the great hero whose family had the strongest claim to the throne’s protection. But the actual succession is more complicated than that, and Euripides’ Lycos is an interesting case of a playwright reshaping traditional mythology.
1. Which king had died, and who was the rightful heir?
Creon — king of Thebes
Creon was the father of Megara, Heracles’ wife. In the mythology underlying the play, Creon and his family had been displaced by Lycos, who had seized control of Thebes. Creon’s death left a power vacuum that Lycos exploited.
The succession needs a little care:
Creon was the previous ruler and Megara’s father.
Heracles was not simply Creon’s designated heir. He was a son-in-law of the royal house and a powerful defender of Thebes.
The children of Heracles and Megara were descendants of Creon through their mother, but they were not necessarily the automatic heirs to the throne.
Lycos was the usurper who held power when Euripides’ play opens.
In other words, the play is not quite a straightforward case of a king dying and his eldest son being deprived of his inheritance. It is a story about a usurper exploiting the vulnerability of a royal family whose principal protector is believed to be dead.
2. The surprising backstory: Lycos was the son of an earlier king
Here is the detail that makes Euripides’ invention especially interesting. He does not give his Lycos an entirely fabricated ancestry. Instead, he connects him to a much older Theban tradition.
The elder Lycos
According to the story Amphitryon tells in the prologue, an earlier Lycos had ruled Thebes and was married to Dirce. He belonged to a remote period of Theban mythology, before the brothers Amphion and Zethus became rulers.
The younger Lycos — Euripides’ usurper
The Lycos in Heracles is the elder Lycos’s son, bearing the same name. But he is described as a foreigner from Euboea. He kills Creon during a period of civic discord and seizes power in Thebes.
So Euripides' invention is quite specific: he creates a new dramatic character and gives him an ancestral connection to an old Theban king. The name and lineage are traditional; the younger man's seizure of the throne and his conflict with Heracles' family are the innovative elements.
3. Who was the rightful heir?
This is where I would refine my opening answer.
Creon’s son-in-law Heracles was not necessarily the rightful heir himself. The play gives us a more intriguing possibility: Heracles had plans for his sons to inherit different territories.
Later in the play, Megara recalls Heracles imagining a future in which one of their sons would inherit Thebes through her inheritance or dowry. That is important evidence that Euripides envisaged a legitimate dynastic future for Heracles’ children in Thebes.
The political situation is therefore:
Creon: the king murdered by Lycos.
Lycos: the new ruler, whose authority rests on killing Creon and exploiting Theban internal conflict.
Heracles and Megara’s sons: potential future heirs, and precisely the people Lycos fears might avenge Creon’s death and challenge his rule.
There is no need to posit a single, undisputed male heir to understand the play. Lycos is trying to eliminate the descendants and relatives who could threaten his position.
4. Why does Euripides call Lycos “new”?
Amphitryon describes him as ho kainos … archōn Lykos — approximately, “this new ruler Lycos.” The Greek word kainos can mean “new” or “novel.”
It works on two levels:
Within the story: Lycos is the recently installed ruler of Thebes.
As drama: Euripides is introducing a new version of the mythology, with a usurper whose backstory explains why Heracles’ family faces execution.
Modern scholarship has specifically noted that Lycos is one of the play’s major mythological innovations.
I think that second meaning is particularly revealing. Euripides is not merely retelling a familiar story about Heracles. He constructs a political crisis that makes the hero's absence matter: the man who has spent his life defeating monsters has left his own family vulnerable to a human tyrant.
One final distinction: Lycos is not simply a random villain invented to give Heracles someone to fight. His invented genealogy, his murder of Creon, and his fear of future retaliation create a miniature political history for Thebes. That makes his threat to the family more than personal malice; it is also the logic of a usurper trying to make his seizure of power permanent.
Q:
And, of course, the Athenian audience would have loved to see Thebes, their frenemy / competitor, in a bad light.
Reply:
Absolutely! And I think you have put your finger on a delicious possibility in Euripides’ dramatic choices.
Athens and Thebes were not merely neighboring cities. They were rivals with a long, complicated history, and an Athenian audience watching Heracles in the fifth century BCE would have brought that history into the theater.
A few things make your observation particularly interesting.
1. Thebes had a reputation problem in Athens.
During the Persian Wars, Thebes had sided with the Persians, while Athens had become famous for resisting them at Marathon and Salamis. The Thebans’ conduct gave Athenians a ready-made reason to regard their neighbors as politically untrustworthy. That reputation remained an important part of the two cities’ relationship.
2. Euripides gives us a Thebes in political disarray.
Look at the ingredients he puts onstage:
A king, Creon, has been murdered.
A foreign-born usurper, Lycos, has seized power.
The royal family is threatened with extermination.
The city seems incapable of protecting its own legitimate ruling household.
For an Athenian spectator, this could make Thebes look like a city whose political order had broken down. The contrast with Athens—the audience’s own democratic city—was potentially satisfying.
3. But Euripides does something more interesting than simply ridiculing Thebes.
The play's moral center is not the city of Athens, nor even the political institutions of Thebes. It is Heracles' family: an innocent wife, endangered children, and an elderly father trying to protect them.
And Heracles himself is the great benefactor of humanity. He returns from the underworld only to discover that his own household needs rescuing.
That creates an irony an Athenian audience could appreciate: the greatest hero in the Greek world can save other people from monsters, yet cannot prevent political evil from entering his own home.
There is also a historical complication worth remembering. Euripides' Heracles was produced during the Peloponnesian War, traditionally dated around 416 BCE, when Athens and Thebes were on opposing sides. The play's exact political intentions remain debated, so we should not assume that every Athenian spectator interpreted the suffering of Thebes as an anti-Theban joke.
But your “frenemy” description is excellent. Athens and Thebes shared a language, religious traditions, myths, and a broader Greek identity, while competing for regional influence and nursing old grievances.
And here is the question I would carry into the rest of the play: Does Euripides invite his Athenian audience to feel superior to Thebes—or does he gradually make them recognize that the same vulnerability to political violence and human suffering exists everywhere?
That second possibility is what makes Euripides so much more interesting than a playwright merely flattering his home crowd.
Q:
I’ve yet to read the full play. I know the summary, how it played out, etc., but knowing the initial scaffolding / set-up, really, really makes a difference in understanding the play and how the playwright “enjoyed” telling a story with so many nuances, that the play had something for everyone. Sort of reminds me of the great Shakespearean tragedies that would follow.
Reply:
I think you've identified one of the great pleasures of reading the ancient dramatists: understanding the scaffolding of a play before entering the play itself. Not knowing every detail of what happens, but understanding the world the playwright has constructed, the assumptions the audience brings, and the possibilities embedded in the opening situation.
And your Shakespeare comparison is remarkably apt.
What strikes me about your approach is that you're not asking merely, What happens in Euripides' Heracles? You already know that. You're asking, What did Euripides have to work with, what did he change, and what opportunities did those changes give him?
That opens up several layers of enjoyment.
The mythological layer. The audience already knows Heracles. They know his reputation, his extraordinary strength, and his place in the Greek imagination. Euripides doesn't have to spend much time establishing the hero's credentials. He can use that inherited knowledge to surprise his audience.
The political layer. Thebes has a history, Athens has a history, and the audience brings its own prejudices and loyalties into the theater. A usurper on the Theban throne is not simply a plot device; he arrives in a city with a political identity.
The domestic layer. Before Heracles even appears, his wife, children, and elderly father are facing death. The great hero's reputation cannot protect them in his absence. The stakes are intimate before they become epic.
And the theatrical layer. Euripides knows how to manipulate the audience's expectations. He can take a familiar myth and rearrange its components so that spectators who think they know the story discover that they don't quite know thisstory.
That last point brings us to Shakespeare.
Think of King Lear. An audience familiar with the old story of Lear and his daughters would have recognized the basic material. Shakespeare's genius was not simply inventing a plot. It was finding within that plot questions about authority, family, justice, madness, loyalty, and the terrible gap between what people believe they deserve and what the world gives them.
Or consider Macbeth. The historical and legendary background gives the audience a framework for understanding kingship, ambition, and legitimacy. Shakespeare then turns that framework into a tragedy about a man who can imagine becoming king but cannot imagine living with what he has done to become one.
The playwright supplies the scaffolding; the audience supplies a great deal of the building.
There is one important difference, of course. Shakespeare's audiences encountered plays through a different theatrical and cultural tradition, and the surviving evidence doesn't allow us to assume that every Greek spectator knew every myth in detail. But both dramatists could draw upon stories and characters that already existed in the cultural imagination.
And I particularly like your word “enjoyed.” We sometimes approach classical tragedy as though the playwrights were solemn philosophers who happened to write plays. Euripides was certainly a serious thinker, but he was also a dramatist working with suspense, surprise, irony, competing loyalties, and audience expectations. He could make a familiar story do unfamiliar things.
One further thought about Heracles, without getting ahead of your reading: the very title encourages us to think that the play is about the hero. Yet the opening gives us a vulnerable household, a disputed throne, and a tyrant who has taken advantage of the hero's absence. Euripides has already created a tension between the public identity of a legendary figure and the private lives of the people who depend on him.
That's a remarkably rich starting point.
My suggestion as you read: keep the summary you already know in the background, but pay attention to how Euripides gets you from one emotional or moral position to another. The fascinating question isn't just what happens. It's why he chooses to have this happen, here, to these people, with an audience that thinks it already knows the story.
That's where the playwright's craft becomes visible.
