ABSTRACT
In the Heracles of Euripides, at the first signs of the madness that will prompt the titular hero to kill his first wife and three of their children, his servants are very frightened; so much so that they start to laugh. They have, just moments before, watched their master joyously if violently rid the world of one more tyrant, but as he prepares himself for another bout of mass murder, they still suspect he may be merely having a joke with them.1 In the culture of late fifth-century BC Athens, their schizophrenic response is perhaps unsurprising, for rarely can a mythical figure have generated such a conflicted reputation.
