Herakles, Theseus, and the Limits of Friendship

Musings on Euripides' Bizarre Tragedy, Judas, and Christian Friendship

Megara: If your luck goes bad, you have no friends.

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Thesues: I can bear it if your suffering falls on me—you stood by me once: You led me from the underworld back into the sunlight. I hate fair-weather friends—whose gratitude goes stale.

If you haven’t been there yet, you will.

You get a call from a buddy, you see a post on social media, or, perhaps if you have friends in high places, you see it in the news. No matter how it happens, you find yourself staring the failure of a friend in the face, and it’s not pretty.

Maybe the marriage fell apart and it’s his fault. Maybe two beers turned to a few more and they blew over the limit. Who knows? There are plenty of ways to blow up a life. Maybe they blew up yours too.

It’s in moments like these that the bonds of friendship are pressed to the limits, and we find ourselves asking, “where do we draw the line?”

Euripides, the great Greek tragedian, forces us to ask that very same question in his bizarre yet beautiful tragedy, Herakles.

The story of Herakles (aka, Hercules)

In case you’re not familiar with the story, I’ll recap it briefly. But may I suggest on your next rainy Sunday afternoon, crack open a copy—whether of Herakles or another Euripidean tragedy. If you have cool friends, do a table read with them. It’ll be well worth your time, and if you find this threatens your carefully cultivated masculinity and you must do so while smoking cigars, drinking whiskey, or telling your wife that you all are actually going out to chop down trees and fight bears, so be it.

So, the story. At the opening of the play, Herakles is off in Hades, completing the 12th and final of his famous heroic Herculean tasks. Meanwhile at home and in the scene, his elderly father, his wife, Megara, and his three young sons are about to be killed at the hand of Lykos, a political usurper who fears Herakles’ sons will grow up to challenge his newly won power.

At the last minute, in a dramatic turn, Herakles returns and kills Lykos, saving his family. Huzzah!

But remember, this is a tragedy.

In yet another twist, Hera, Zeus’ wife, orders the goddess Lyssa to strike Herakles with madness. It’s a petty act of revenge against her husband’s son who was born to another woman by no fault of Herakles’. Despite Lyssa’s reticence, she does so, and in a rage, Herakles kills his own wife and children, believing them to be his enemies. When he comes to, he’s flooded with shame, seeing suicide as the only fitting response.

Then Theseus arrives, whom Herakles had just rescued from Hades itself. To say Theseus was in his debt would be mild. It’s their interaction which forms the crux of the play as Theseus seeks to talk Herakles off the edge, and in doing so, we get a glimpse into how friendship operates in the most extreme circumstances.

The limits of friendship

At the beginning of the play, Megara, Herakles’ wife, uttered the words quoted at the top of this essay, “If your luck goes bad, you have no friends.” Notice: It’s not that it’s bad luck to have no friends. It’s that, even if you had friends, once you run into hard times, those friends will be nowhere to be found. Perhaps you’ve experienced this firsthand.

Megara repeats this idea shortly after the previous quote, saying, “bad fortune has no friends.” After her death, this is put to the test because Herakles has faced the worst of fortunes.

And this framing is important. It it fortune and fate at play here, not, in the words of the wise Albus Dumbledore, “moral fiber.” All the characters in the play accept that Herakles was possessed by a god. There is a strong sense of resignation that man suffers the whims of the gods.

So, Herakles, having had the misfortune of being deranged, assumes that he will now be friendless. He covers his head in shame, and even when Theseus insists that he’ll stand by him, Herakles responds, “I have no friends … But I’ll never regret having been yours.”

The logic here is such that our actions can unilaterally sever friendships. Screw up, and you can kiss your friends goodbye. Friendships then, are a fickle thing.

But Theseus operates with a different logic. He sees in friendship a mutual grasping of the other, and even when one hand goes slack, the other can hold on. This is a friendship that doesn’t falter in bad fortune.

There’s another dynamic at play here besides how friendships are maintained, and it can be seen today as well: the contagion of guilt.

Herakles believes that guilt and shame are contagious. That’s why he hides and pushes his only friend away. Many of you may be familiar with the Hebrew Bible’s theology of unclean people being able to make clean people unclean merely by touching them. You can think of it along those lines, if it helps. Herakles thinks that guilt and shame would be transferred to Theseus if he were to associate with him. He even says, ‘Steer clear from me. Run from my infection.” The infection here is not his madness. That was momentary and gone. The infection is his guilt, his sin, if you will.

The worldview of Leviticus or Herakles on the surface might seem foreign. But is it really? Although the fever pitch around cancel culture seems to have ebbed a bit of late, we nevertheless find ourselves in a time when mistakes lead to public pile-ons and trials carried out in comment sections.

And why do we do this? Is it because we’re so committed to morality?

I’m afraid the truth is a bit darker than that. More than caring about morals we seem hell-bent on justifying ourselves before our peers. We must know who’s on the right side; we must tell everyone that we are one of those justified ones; and we must, at all costs, avoid being thought otherwise.

The easiest way to do this? Shun those who are in the wrong. Keep them far from you and hope their guilt doesn’t infect you.

Theseus calls BS on this approach. He parries, “No vengeful spirit of the dead can taint the love between friends.”

This is a truly radical statement, and I see in it echoes of Jesus’ work of reversing the flow of clean and unclean in his ministry. When Jesus touches a leper, instead of Jesus becoming unclean—which is the logic of both Herakles and Leviticus—the Leper becomes clean. Theseus in a similar way sees the love between friends as stronger than the stain of sin.

For Theseus, true friendship is forged in the hard times. He says, “I can bear it if your suffering falls on me—you stood by me once: You led me from the underworld back into the sunlight. I hate fair-weather friends—whose gratitude goes stale.”

True friendship then, is steadfast even in the face of the most austere falls from gace.

Sed Contra

I must admit, I find this type of friendship deeply moving. I’m not here to say these two are the paragons of perfect friendship, but there’s something real, something human in these scenes. Deep connection with others is what we all yearn for, and it’s when we’re at our lowest, when we’re pushing others away, that we really need them the most.

However, it would be an oversimplification to simply say, “here’s our model, go live it out.”

On the one hand, it’s easy to castigate the ills of cancel culture and praise the virtue of friendship. I lean this way.

But on the other hand, “What about consequences? What about right and wrong?” you might ask. It’s worth remembering that Euripides writes the play in a seemingly a-moral way. Herakles killing his family is described as fate, misfortune, and being dragged down by the gods. All of these are passive. Herakles was acted upon rather than acting out his own actions. In this context, it can be easier to feel sorry for Herakles, but is that the context of every day life, and if we are to be friends like Theseus, must we pity our friends for their passivity? Are their worst actions not really their own? If they are, what then? In other words, can Herakles be forgiven if he’s culpable?

Herakles and Judas: A biblical parallel

Let’s put a bit of a finer point on this question. Herakles is a man who has done the unthinkable: he’s killed his own family. But along comes his friend who says he’ll stand by him still.

I write this during Holy Week, and I can’t help but think of Judas, another man who did the unthinkable, and he did it when Satan entered into him. Imagine one of Judas’ friends found him weeping as he walked off to his new plot of land. What should they do? What should they say to him?

If we were to commit to Theseus’ theology, Judas’ actions weren’t his fault. As the Scriptures clearly say, Satan entered into him. For Theseus, human actions are caught up in divine politics and power plays infinitely higher and more complex than we could ever hope to understand or overcome. In that case, Judas couldn’t help but do what he did. So, his friends ought to pick him up, tell him to dust himself off and move on with his life.

Would this be virtue or vice?

A path forward for friendship

These aren’t easy questions, and they’re even harder scenarios to live out in real life. When these situations go from words on a page to flesh and blood, they get messy, and I won’t pretend to have the answer to all the nuances of any given scenario.

Nevertheless, I do think both in the larger story of Herakles and in the ultimate story, the story of Christ, we find the beginnings of answers to the questions we’ve explored here.

We’ll begin with Herakles. There is one detail I’ve left out up to this point. While everything I’ve said is true about Theseus’ support, he also does something critical: He tells Herakles he has to leave the city. Herakles cannot remain at the scene of the crime, not because Theseus wants him to avoid punishment but precisely because his punishment is exile. He recognizes that even if Herakles actions were out of his control, they still have consequences. Those consequences just don’t extend to the severing of friendship.

In the end, Euripides leaves us with something of a confused picture, not for his lack of thought but because of it. In Euripides’ plays, the gods are almost always far off. They have great power but often little interest in the day to day. They’re capable of upending our lives but don’t stick around to deal with the mess.

Euripides gives us Job without the frame story, only the loss of everything and the endless questions of why. We get no neat and tidy answers. And while this is intellectually unsatisfying, it does resonate with much of human experience. Absent revelation, life often feels as though the gods, if there are any, are far off. Our lives moves along normal lines … except when they don’t. When everything changes on a dime and we’re given no reasons or explanations.

In such a world, fate makes a lot of sense. In that world, our actions have consequences, not because we’re moral agents but because that’s just the way of the world. We push our rocks up the hill and sometimes lightning strikes. Our best hope of finding meaning is in one another, and even in that rocky soil can the virtue of friendship bloom.

The story of Jesus gives us something more, though.

Surely in the Christian story we find strong notes of providence. We find man living in a world with powers greater than his that can blow the sails of his ship unexpectedly. But there is also synergy. Man stands at the rudder. Virtue is forged with the fire of the will and the blow of every choice strikes like hammer on steel. In the Christian story we’re told our actions have consequences because in some sense or another we really chose them.

This means that when our friends fall it hurts even more. It means what Judas did is even worse. It means that we cannot throw up our hands as victims of fate but must stare ourselves in the mirror and see the depths of our sinfulness.

It’s enough to make a man despair of himself and the very possibility of friendship.

But there’s more.

In the Christian story we’re told of a friendship that knew no bounds. We’re told of a friend that, like Theseus wasn’t afraid of the stain of sin, but unlike Theseus knew that what we did really was as bad as it seemed. Still he pressed on. Like Theseus when our hand goes limp His holds on.

In this Christian story friends are told to forgive seventy times seven those who wrong them, not pretend that our friends have done no wrong.

The Christian, then, is called to be a friend like Theseus and then some. Theseus felt he owed his friend loyalty because he pulled him out of Hades. Our friends have done no such thing, but our Savior has. He pulled us out of Hell itself and we, though ever-feebly and ever-faltering, pursue that same love in our friendships.

All of which brings us back to Judas. What he did, was really as bad as it seems. Probably worse. In another sense it wasn’t unique. He betrayed Jesus, yes, but all the disciples abandoned him. All of us do too. And yet, grace abounds and our friendship with Christ persists, if only we know where to turn.

It’s speculative, certainly, but had Judas gone to Jesus and not those who had paid him, I can’t imagine he would’ve found anything but a friend that forgives.

May we be such friends. Friends like Theseus, yes, but even more, for what a friend we have in Jesus ought point us to a friendship that truly knows no bounds.