Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Euripides’ Thebes, while Heracles is still abroad completing his labors—having gone even into Hades for Cerberus—a usurper named Lycus rules. Lycus intends to kill Amphitryon, Megara, and Heracles’ sons, claiming the children as a threat and exploiting the city’s fear. Megara prepares herself and the boys for death with tragic dignity; Amphitryon appeals to Zeus and to absent friendship. Heracles returns in time, learns of the danger, and kills Lycus inside the house, restoring his family. Then Hera’s agents appear: Iris brings Lyssa (Madness), who reluctantly enters Heracles at Hera’s command. In the ensuing vision he believes he is assaulting Eurystheus’s household at Mycenae; instead he hunts down and kills his own sons, and Megara dies with them. Athena finally strikes him into sleep; when he wakes and is shown the corpses, he would kill himself, but Theseus arrives from Athens—bound to him by gratitude for rescue from the underworld—and persuades him that a friend’s shared pollution and an Athenian refuge are better than suicide. Heracles leaves Thebes under Theseus’s protection, broken but alive. This Attic plot makes the labors the *precondition* of the catastrophe rather than its consequence: divine jealousy waits until the hero’s glory is complete, and human politics (Lycus) frame the household’s vulnerability. Because the sequence, the death of Megara, the personified Madness, and Theseus’s intervention cannot be folded into Apollodorus without contradiction, the play stands as its own version line.