Zeus's Destruction Of Eurytus

I heard that man declaring, before a host
Of witnesses, this: It was all for that beautiful girl
That Heracles sacked Oechalia’s loft towers
And conquered Eurytus. Love was the only god To charm him into his warlike expedition.
Soon after, Lichas’ verifies this account, continuing ‘But his love for her proved his utter defeat.’ Repeating once again Heracles’ vanquishing by his passion for this girl.
Prior to the insight provided in Lichas’ revised utterance, Zeus was considered to have played a more prominent role, while eros remained a player in the background. However, when Heracles’ true incentives are brought to light, eros becomes a flourishing feature until the very last line. Both Conacher and Winnington-Ingram wrote scholarly interpretations of the play. Winnington-Ingram first addresses Zeus’ carelessness for his children and credits him with the destruction of his own son. He, as well, mentions Lichas’s stories of Heracles’ destruction of Oechalia. He touches on the fact that the first story attributes much more of the blame to Zeus, while the second hands more blame to lust. He …show more content…
There is one world, and it is Zeus’s world.
However, Winnington-Ingram states many times that the death of both Hercales and Deïnira is the fault of sex. Both Conacher and Winnington-Ingram attribute the death of Hercales and Deïnira to Cypris. They classify Deïnira’s love as domestic, while claiming the others were affected by an assault of eros., Winnington-Ingram goes so far as to say the power and the victory alone belongs to Cypris and that “what brings about the deaths of Heracles (himself supreme in that arete) and of Deïnira is the power of sex. The goddess in the play is Aphrodite, not