Hercules — known since the Renaissance as Hercules Furens, the “mad” Hercules, to distinguish it from the Hercules Oetaeus — is the first of the eight tragedies securely Seneca’s, and it dramatizes the most terrible episode in the hero’s life: returning in triumph from the underworld, the last of his labors accomplished, Hercules is struck by a madness sent by Juno and slaughters his own wife and children with the very weapons that made him the world’s deliverer. The matter is the same as Euripides’ Heracles, but the design is Seneca’s own, and so is the meaning.

The play opens not with the hero but with his enemy. Juno, displaced from heaven by the constellated mistresses of Jupiter and now seeing the bastard Hercules on the verge of the stars, delivers a prologue of extraordinary venom: she has run out of monsters for him, every labor has only enlarged him, and so she will arm him against himself — “there is none his match but himself.” She summons the Furies and resolves to drive him mad. The first act thus frames everything that follows as the work of divine ira, the very passion Seneca had just anatomized in the treatise On Anger. Meanwhile, in Thebes, the usurper Lycus has killed Hercules’ father-in-law Creon and presses Hercules’ wife Megara to marry him; the long central confrontation, with the aged Amphitryon defending his son’s divine paternity and Megara choosing death over the usurper’s bed, is a set-piece of Senecan declamation, debate sharpened to the edge of a sword. Hercules returns, kills Lycus offstage, and Theseus — whom Hercules has brought back from the dead — narrates the descent to the underworld in a great messenger-speech that is at once a geography of Hades, a moralizing meditation on the judgment of the guilty, and the report of how the hound Cerberus was bound. Then, at the very altar of his thanksgiving, the madness falls: Hercules hallucinates that the children are the brood of his enemy and Megara is Juno, and kills them. He wakes to a sleep-clouded recognition, learns by the evidence of his own arrows what he has done, and resolves on suicide; Amphitryon, threatening to kill himself first, holds him to life, and Theseus offers him purification and refuge at Athens.

The play is the fullest tragic test of the Stoic paradox that the wise man is invulnerable. Hercules is built throughout as the figure of virtus itself — the labors are recited again and again as the conquest of every terror earth, sea, and hell can produce — and the question the action forces is whether such a man can be touched by fortune at all. Juno’s answer is to make him the instrument of his own ruin: the strength that subdued the world destroys his house, and the hands that defended the gods are the ones that must be purified. The horror is precisely that he is guiltless and yet polluted — “the grief is yours, the crime your stepmother’s” — and the play’s hardest turn is the ending, where the truly heroic act is not death but the endurance of a life made unbearable: vivamus, “let me live,” becomes one more, and the greatest, of the labors. Whether Seneca means us to admire that endurance or to see in Hercules’ furor an image of the passions that any soul must fear remains the central interpretive crux.

The style is high Senecan tragedy at full pitch: the catalogue raised to a principle of structure, the stichomythic duel of Act II, the descriptive tour de force of the underworld narrative, the hymn to Sleep in the fourth chorus, and the recurring astronomical and cosmic imagery that keeps the stars — the prize Hercules is reaching for — always in view. The choral odes move from the serene dawn ode that praises the small, safe life against the ambition of the great, through the meditations on Fortune and on death that all men share, to the lament over the sleeping hero. The translation renders the verse in clear modern English lines, keeping the line structure of the Latin and the line-for-line cut of the stichomythia, and imposing no English meter or rhyme; the speaker attributions and the act and scene divisions follow the standard editorial tradition (the manuscripts give neither), and the section numbers track the line numbering by which the play is cited. “Alcides” (grandson of Alceus) and “the son of Alcmene” are Seneca’s frequent names for Hercules and are kept; the gods are kept Roman (Jupiter, Juno, Dis, Gradivus). Where the transmitted text is disturbed — as in the rapid antilabe of the final scene — the translation follows the most widely accepted reading and divides the half-lines between speakers accordingly.