,” says Aristotle — he ended up in ecstasy, he remained stuck outside himself. The internal chaos, which had gone hand in hand with a breakdown of the order of the external world, drove him to suicide.
Much the same can be said of Bellerophon of Corinth. His heroic deeds entitled him to consider himself superior to everything, which led to his beginning to doubt the given order of life: anyone who surpasses the ordinary laws of the world will inevitably become curious about new limits and unfamiliar laws. For Bellerophon, the universal validity and meaning of existence had been lost, so he began to doubt the very existence of the gods: “Does anyone maintain that there are gods in heaven? No, they do not exist. They do not!” Euripides has him say in a fragment of the play Bellerophon (286, 1–2). On his horse, Pegasus, he takes to the heavens to look for traces of the gods, but fails to reach them: the gods thrust him back to Earth. Thus, for anything beyond the certitudes of simple faith, the gods are not only inaccessible but also cruel. Bellerophon plummets to Earth, and awareness of the absurdity of existence gains ascendancy over him:
But when even Bellerophon came to be hated by all the gods,
he wandered all desolate and dismayed upon the Aleian plain,
devouring his own soul,
4
and shunning the paths of men,
(Homer, Iliad, bk. 6, 200–202)
Homer recounts, and that “even” is a signal that Bellerophon had fallen victim to some dreadful principle. “A thing which is sweet beyond measure is awaited by a most bitter end,” Pindar writes by way of warning (
Isthmia
, 6). He was not driven by the depths of despair to suicide in the way Ajax was, but becoming an outcast was tantamount to death. “I too say,” he declaims to the audience, “it’s best for a man not to be born” (
Bellerophon
, 287, 1–2). Sophocles has the chorus of
Oedipus at Colonus
say the same thing, as Kierkegaard was fond of quoting: “It is best not to have been born at alclass="underline" but, if born, as quickly as possible to return whence one came” (1388–91). Human life is condemned to failure from the very outset; indeed, it is not that failure will happen but that it is unceasingly present, it is continuous. Bellerophon speaks of those who suffer the fate of humans, who live a double life: a life of suffering and a life of awareness of such suffering. Human beings suffer not only from being human, but also from being fully conscious of their human predicament. Heroism and dejection emerge in the same individual, raising the suspicion that dejection and a sense of hopeless failure, of futility, seized hold
of Bellerophon precisely because he was marked out from birth for superhuman feats, outstanding actions.
The suffering and death of Heracles seem to reinforce this hypothesis. Born of an earthly mother and a celestial father, he is one of the strangest figures in Greek mythology: so human and yet superhuman that his solitude appears to be virtually predestined. He has no partners or allies; his enemies are shrouded in obscurity, just as his wife and children also hide in the background. Heracles stands before us statue-like, without any frame of reference, to the point that by dominating everything wherever he makes an appearance, he discredits reality itself, the world, the places he visits where he accomplishes his deeds, and holds all existence virtually under a spell.5 The twelve labors seem incredible even in the fairy-tale world of mythology: here the solid boundaries of existence melt away, and compared with the miraculous atmosphere of the labors, more than a few mythological stories seem downright prosaic. The very basis of Heracles’ existence is boundlessness: for him, anything is possible, and he comes to the realization (and this is what mere mortals do not experience) that anything is also possible in the world surrounding him. It is for this reason that his figure, pellucidly delimited and statuesquely rounded off, awakens a sense of infinity: as if time and space, the whole universe, were organized to suit his pleasure, to comply with his wishes. His strength, though, was at the same time his weakness: he owed his strength (not just his physical but also his “world-creating” power) to the fact that he was not a mere human and also not a divinity, but rather intermediate, being at home in both worlds.6 Yet that meant that he was truly at home nowhere: “I will unfold to you why life now, as well as formerly, has been unbearable to me.” Heracles says these words unworthy of a hero in the tragedy of Euripides (1257), after which one reads the following: “He who is always unfortunate feels no such pain, for sorrow is his birthright” (1292–94). The metaphysical homelessness cannot be lifted (when Odysseus descends into the underworld, he encounters only the body of Heracles, for his soul ascended into the divine regions; that is, not even death can put an end to this homelessness, the condition of being ripped asunder), for there is no foothold to grasp in one’s effort to render the world contained and snug: there is nowhere to set off from, and nowhere to arrive. At first, Heracles had no presentiment of all this; most likely his destiny became clear to him when, before his descent into the underworld, he had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. The mutually complementary concepts of life and death, a fateful preoccupation with boundlessness, and an anxiety over finitude made themselves felt in him there, and presumably that superior way of looking at things — one that he acquired there, a hair-raising overture for a finite mortal being — opened up the irrevocable split that he owed to his divine-human, eternal-mortal nature. After he returned from the underworld, people started worshipping him under the name Charops as well (an epithet kindred to “Charon,” the name of the ferryman of Hades), which indicated the unexpectedly frightful nature of a transformed Heracles. And the madness that erupted in him following the initiation into the mysteries and the “excursion” to the underworld, and that, as an external force, made him exterminate his own children, did not differ from the madness of Ajax and Bellerophon. “O Zeus, why hast thou shown such savage hate against thine own son and plunged him in this sea of troubles?” the chorus asks, perplexed, in Euripides’ drama Heracles (1086–87). The “troubles” signify more than simple melancholy in the present-day sense: 
and 
also denote unsuitability, weakness, badness in a moral sense, unworthiness, poverty, suffering, and misfortune.