Heracles and Athenian Propaganda

<p><i>Heracles and Athenian Propaganda </i>examines how Greece's most important hero was appropriated and portrayed by Athens in religion politics architecture and literature with a detailed study of Euripides' <i>Heracles </i>in relation to this interplay between the hero and the city's ideology. Though Athens needed a hero of Hellenic stature Heracles was a deeply problematic figure: a violent hero of ancient epic with an aristocratic nature and a murderous temper who did not naturally fit into the new ideals of democratic society at Athens. <p/>Examining how Euripides' play fits within the space of the <i>polis </i>and its political ideology Sofia Frade asks specific questions of tragedy and politics: how does Euripides' tragic drama of grief insanity and murder reconcile this hero to a palatable patriotic ideal? How does the tragic hero relate to his own representations and his cult within the <i>polis</i>? In a city so marked by iconographic propaganda how did the imagery influence the audience? <p/>By looking at the play's larger contexts - literary civic political religious and ideological - new readings are offered to the most problematic elements of the play including the question of its unity the nature of the hero's madness and the role of the gods.</p>