Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter analyses the theme of revenge in Hercules furens. It focuses particularly on the richly intertextual prologue, in which an indignant Juno, cast out of heaven and forced to dwell on earth, sets out her plan for revenge against Hercules. It shows how the prologue exploits a variety of models, including Euripides’ Heracles, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as, notably, allegorical interpretations of Homer, which can be seen to underlie Juno’s argument that revenge is an act of defence of heaven against an imagined onslaught by Hercules, whom she presents as a transgressive, Gigantomachic figure. It examines closely Juno’s dubious motivations for pursuing revenge in the first place and the faulty logic that underpins her plan to infect Hercules’ mind with hellish furor. It suggests that Juno’s bizarre claim that, in order to turn Hercules mad, she must first become mad herself can be understood in metadramatic terms, adducing comparable passages in Seneca’s own De ira, Horace’s Ars poetica, and Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime. The chapter also considers the vindictive sentiments expressed by Hercules’ wife Megara against the tyrant Lycus who wishes to coerce her to marry him, and especially her claim that she intends to complete the crime of the Danaids by killing him.</jats:p>