Fra mito e diritto: forme e funzioni della vendetta nell'Ecuba e negli Eraclidi di Euripide

The revenge taken by Hecuba and Alcmena on their enemies, described (respectively) in Euripides’ Hecuba and Heraclides, has been analysed now as an execrable act of excessive brutality, now as a morally acceptable action (at least in the eyes of the ancient audience) insofar as it was based on “legitimate” instances of retaliatory justice. A century or so later, Aristotle in the Rhetoric observes how there are those who, in order to retaliate a wrong suffered by themselves or their loved ones, do not desist, like the Euripidean characters, from the “pleasurable” desire for revenge. The social statute of revenge, known since Archaic Greece, had been modifi ed and progressively integrated into the criminal proceedings provided for in the legal system of the πόλεις. Adapting the myth to Athenian political reality and legal procedure, Euripides examines the paradoxical nature of law and norms, whether universal or divine and panhellenic (Hecuba) or individual provisions of a political community (Heraclides) which, in order to assert their social and legal validity, are occasionally obliged to employ retaliatory violence, which νόμοι also intend to oppose