Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Macaria.
The gallery
Lucanian Red-Figure Pelike: The Children of Heracles at the Sanctuary of Marathon
Associated with the Karneia Painter, c. 400 BCE
This Lucanian red-figure pelike, attributed to the circle of the Karneia Painter (LCS I 283) and now in the National Archaeological Museum of Policoro, stages the opening tableau of Euripides' tragedy Children of Heracles, the play in which Macaria appears. Heracles' orphaned children — the Heraclids — are shown as suppliant youths gathered at the altar of a sanctuary at Marathon in Attica, the refuge where Athens shelters them against the pursuing Eurystheus. It is within this very crisis that the oracle demands the voluntary death of one of Heracles' offspring for victory, and Macaria, daughter of Heracles and Deianira, freely offers her life. Painted in southern Italy around the close of the fifth century BCE, the vase is among the earliest surviving artistic responses to the drama that preserves Macaria's self-sacrifice, the legend that also named the spring at Marathon after her.