In Herakles, Euripides reveals with great subtlety and complexity the often brutal underpinnings of our social arrangements. The play enacts a thoroughly contemporary dilemma about the relationship between personal and state violence and civic order." "Of all of Euripides' plays, this is his most skeptically subversive examination of myth, morality, and power. While Herakles is away from home performing his labors, a tyrant rises to power and threatens to execute Herakles' wife, children, and father-in-law. Herakles returns just in time to assassinate the tyrant and rescue his family. But at the moment of celebration, Madness appears and drives Herakles to murder his wife and children, eventually leading to his exile, by his own accord, to Athens.