The ancient title of this play was Trachiniai, taken from the chorus which is made up of women from Trachis, the town where it is set. Heracles’ family have taken refuge there after his exclusion from other places because of his past acts of violence. Trachis (see the map) was not a place of great mythical or political importance;1 and its chief significance for this tragedy is that it is close to the massif of Mount Oeta (Greek Oite) where Heracles’ funeral pyre was famously located. The usual modern titles Women of Trachis or Trachinian Women have no particular resonances, and may be felt, indeed, to be rather off-putting because of their obscurity. So I have felt justified in seeking for a more appealing alternative.
I have settled on Deianeira. It is true that she too is relatively little-known, and that she has a slightly esoteric-sounding name, but since she is the most interesting character, and dominates three-quarters of the play—and in view of its place in this volume of the three ‘female’ tragedies of Sophocles—Deianeira calls for the spotlight. I had also considered The Wife of Heracles, The Death of Heracles, and even The Shirt of Nessus,2 but the title Deianeira reflects the way that, while she herself defines her role as the hero’s spouse, she is ultimately a more powerful tragic figure than he is.
There were many stories current before Sophocles’ play about the great super-hero Heracles, especially about his ‘labours’ (which were eventually canonized into twelve). The stories extended from his strangling snakes in his cradle, via many places including Troy and the island of the Hesperides, to his being burnt on a bonfire on Mount Oeta as the only way to put an end to the agony caused by the robe (or ‘shirt’) poisoned with the blood of Nessus. They told, among many other exploits, of how in a fit of madness he killed his wife Megara and their children at Thebes; how he fought the river-god Achelous to win the hand of Deianeira; and how he sacked the city of Oechalia (location uncertain) to obtain the beautiful Iole. It was a life-story of such larger-than-life derring-do, so voracious, so grotesque at times, that it made Heracles unsuitable to be an archetypal figure for tragedy,3 and, indeed, made him more familiar on the comic stage.
This ambivalence about the ‘seriousness’ of Heracles may be part of the reason for the way that Deianeira has been the least known of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, and one of the two least performed.4 I strongly believe that it deserves to be better appreciated. First, Sophocles sets the story in a disturbingly unfamiliar borderland between a primeval world of monsters and ‘our’ world of settled society. River-gods, hydras, Centaurs, and other mythical creatures are synchronous with family life, marital loyalty, human rationality, understanding, and misunderstanding. Heracles moves between both worlds, but they are ultimately irreconcilable: his life as the monster-slaying hero destroys his family life, and in the end destroys himself. It is telling that Heracles and Deianeira are never on stage together: they stand for worlds that can never be merged. Deianeira presents the anxieties of wifehood and motherhood, threatened by the intrusion of her husband’s lust for a younger woman’s body. Her conflicts and confusions are human, and all too familiar for ordinary people. Heracles, on the contrary, is the son of Zeus, and has spent his life confronting foes, winning trophies, and possessing women. Along with his prowess go pride, anger, and lust. In the end he lives and dies bound up in a world of monstrous strength.
Why has this play, nonetheless, been relatively overlooked? Sophocles has seldom been explicitly criticized in the way that Euripides has been, and so working out negative responses has to be to some extent guesswork. Some readers have found the portrayal of Heracles overblown and even un-human. He entirely dominates the last quarter of the play, and spends much of this on repeatedly complaining of the agonies that he is suffering, and on railing against his unmerited humiliation. He devotes a very long speech (1046–1110) to his mighty deeds in the past, now bought down by a mere woman. And when he finds out about the mistaken good intentions and death of Deianeira, he shows no interest or regret whatsoever. Instead he goes on to pressure his loyal son, Hyllus, to agree to take on Iole as his wife, even though she has proved to be, however innocently, his mother’s downfall. Heracles insists, with characteristic insensitivity, that this is only a ‘small’ demand (1217, 1229).
So it is hard to feel much ‘sympathy’ for this Heracles. But we should put in the other scale that he is not portrayed as a mere brute, and that this is not an everyday story of sordid marital infidelity. This son of Zeus is no ordinary man, and it might be claimed that he should not be judged by ordinary human standards. He is fuelled by more-than-human passions; and he makes no pretence to be super-virtuous. And in the end is he even mortal? Does he die like everyone else? The play leaves this question tantalizingly open, and the issue will be explored more fully on pages 73-5 below. Whatever the colouring of the ending of the play, Heracles is presented as, for all his flaws, indisputably the ‘greatest’ human who has ever lived—at least by the traditional measures of heroic greatness. As Hyllus says in the last words that Deianeira hears as she leaves the scene to kill herself (811–12):
You’ve killed the greatest man of all upon the earth,
whose like we shall not see again.
In any case it is Deianeira, not Heracles, who dominates the first three-quarters of the play. She is deeply human, far from superhuman, and is open about her frailties. Indeed, she is, it may be claimed, a highly sympathetic, almost ‘modern’, individual. In the past, however, some readers and critics have been at least somewhat negative towards her, and this disapproval may have been a factor in the undervaluing of the play as a whole. She has been seen as a selfish, over-possessive woman: there is, after all, nothing so unusual (they say) about a powerful man taking a mistress—or even several. Such a man cannot be expected to be satisfied by an ageing spouse. Indeed Deianeira herself seems to acknowledge as much (459–63):
Heracles has been to bed
with many, many women, hasn’t he?
And yet not one of them has had to face
abuse or blame from me.
Nor shall this one, not even if he’s utterly
consumed in his desire for her.
And the herald Lichas praises this worldly attitude (472–3):5
I see, dear mistress, that you think
in human terms, and not inflexibly.
Some critics have maintained that she is in fact driven by sexual jealousy all along, and that this apparent complaisance is a calculating deceit. That would make her a crafty manipulative female, however understandable. There is, however, no hint at all in the text that Deianeira is being deliberately deceitful: rather she is trying to persuade herself that she should adopt the worldly attitude of males to their sexual appetites. What she has not reckoned with, and what she does not recognize until she has gone indoors into her house, is that this new sexual rival is no secret mistress,6 but will be there sharing her household space. As Deianeira envisages it (539–40):
And now the two of us shall lie
beneath a single coverlet,
and wait to see which one he will embrace.
It is important, then, and surely ‘sympathetic’ that what Deianeira cannot stomach is not the idea that Heracles should have bedded other women, but that he intends to do so in her own house, the house she has so loyally kept for him.
The other complaint that has been raised against Deianeira is that she is allegedly stupid. She shows herself as half-aware that sending her husband a love-potion (smeared on cloth) is dubious behaviour for a respectable woman (582–6):
I hope that I may never know or learn dark practices;
and I hate women who experiment with them:
but if I can in some way make this potion
work on Heracles with charms that will outbid
this girl, well then, the process has been set.
Surely, it is complained, she should have realized sooner that a favour offered by the dying Centaur Nessus was bound to be malicious. But, since Nessus was dying because of his erotic desire for her, might he not be doing her a sexual favour in recognition of this? She may fairly be accused of being naïve, and of being susceptible to jealousy and to protectiveness for her own status, but these are not traits to be bluntly condemned. On the contrary, to the sensibilities of the twenty-first century at least, her attitude is understandable and forgivable.
It is, indeed, Deianeira’s relationship with the man of power and his world that is central to the case for the re-evaluation of the play in the twenty-first century. Heracles did not marry her for the beauty of her soul, but for the beauty of her body. He did not fight the river-god Achelous to rescue a damsel in distress, but so that he could have her in his bed. Her beauty is her danger; as she says (24–5):
I sat there petrified with dread
that my own beauty might result in agony for me.
Then, less than a day’s travel away from Achelous, it is again her beauty that brings conflict: the Centaur Nessus could not resist its allure, and he pays with his life.
When the play begins it has been a good many years (at least twenty) that Deianeira has kept Heracles’ household, borne him children, and worried about his welfare. Most of the time he has been away—as she vividly puts it (31–2):
Yes, we have children, but he—
like some farmer with an isolated plot of land—
devotes attention to them only at the time
of sowing and of harvest.
Over these years Heracles may well have had other women, but none is named or specified.7 It is implied that Iole, the daughter of Eurytus of Oechalia, is the first that he has actually brought back home. In the version of the story, as initially given by his agent Lichas (254 ff.), the reason why Heracles sacked Oechalia, killing its men and enslaving its women, was that he had been outrageously insulted by Eurytus. Later Lichas admits that it was really because of Iole. Furthermore, it seems that Heracles is proud of this. The old man repeats what he heard Lichas say (351–5):
I heard this herald say in front of lots of witnesses
that it was all because of this young woman
Heracles destroyed Eurytus and his citadel Oechalia.
And Eros was the only god who lured him to this war. . . .
Once Heracles has come back, he makes no allusion to this in his agony, and he does not admit to any fault. He shows no remorse about the fate of Deianeira, and unashamedly makes Hyllus take his place in Iole’s bed (1225–7):
Do not let any other man but you possess her,
who has lain with me,
her body pressed to mine.
So Iole also is a victim of Heracles’ overmastering sex-drive. She is evidently young and beautiful, and, when she sees her, Deianeira speculates on her life-story (307–9):
Poor creature, who are you among these girls?
Unmarried? Or have you a child? (no response)
Your manner seems to say you’re not experienced
in all these things. . . .
Later, however, when the truth has come out, she speaks in very different terms (536–40):
I have, you see, let in a girl—
and yet no more a simple girl, I think,
a fully harnessed woman—
I’ve taken her on board,
the way a merchant stows a cargo;
but these goods will wreck my peace of mind.
And now the two of us shall lie
beneath a single coverlet,
and wait to see which one he will embrace.
Yet, for all her jealousy, she was intuitively right to feel an affinity: they both share in Heracles’ bed as a consequence of their beauty, and through his violent ways of getting the woman he wants.
All the same, no one expressly condemns Heracles, except for once: Deianeira in the lines that immediately follow those just quoted (540–2):
Is this the kind of payment
that the so-called good and trusty Heracles
has sent me in return for caring for his house
through such a stretch of time?
His hyper-libido is treated as all part of the strong-man package—it is not hard to think of modern parallels! What is so interesting about Deianeira is that she is not portrayed as a mere passive victim. She struggles with the inequity of her world. At the same time she is not a ruthless avenger either (no Clytemnestra or Medea). She has devoted her life to the house and bed of Heracles, and in a sense she has come to love them, as the sympathy of the women of the chorus reflects, and as is made clear when she kills herself on the marital bed.
Is there some sense, then, in which Heracles gets the suffering that he deserves? Is he punished, even, for his excesses? After all, despite all his mighty deeds, and even though Zeus is his father, he does in the end meet an agonizing death. Is this a kind of corollary of his violent and libidinous life—he who lives by testosterone shall die by testosterone? This may sound neat, but there is something more complicated going on; and this raises the whole issue of the ending of the play.
By the time of Sophocles there were two incompatible accounts of what happened to Heracles after the end of his life. One had him down in Hades along with all other mortals—‘even Heracles . . .’. Other versions, however, took him up to Olympus where he enjoyed an afterlife of immortal privilege, even sharing his bed with Hebe, the goddess who personified the bloom of youth. And these stories of his ascension to the realm of the gods were often associated with his funeral pyre on Mount Oeta. The story was that he was fetched out of the flames by a divine chariot, and carried, shining in his armour, up into the sky.8 That pyre is precisely where he is about to be taken at the end of our play.
There was a well-known cult site there on Oeta, where annual sacrifices were made, adding to the huge ash-pile that built up over the years.9 It seems very likely that Sophocles’ audience—or at least most of them—will have been aware of this cult, and of its association with Heracles’ translation to a hedonistic afterlife. So there can be little doubt that this is in some way hinted at the end of Deianeira. There is nothing explicit or assured, but the possibility must be there. Would that mean, though, that, far from being in any way punished, Heracles is in fact rewarded in the end?
While this is a disputed issue, it seems most plausible to take it that the play ends on an uncertain note. Has Zeus abandoned his far-from-perfect son to an appropriately extreme death? Or does the very name of Oeta cast something of a golden glow from beyond the conclusion? How is one to know? The difficulty of attaining knowledge, and the further difficulties that knowledge can bring, have in fact been a recurrent motif of the play. At one point, when trying to elicit the truth from Lichas, Deianeira asks (459) ‘What is so terrible in knowing?’. The play goes on to show, all too tellingly, how terrible things may indeed flow from knowing. At the same time, it is arguably a fundamental human drive to want to know. It might, indeed, be maintained that it is a central concern in tragedy of all eras that humans have a need to know. And yet that knowledge can prove to be far from a blessing; it may, on the contrary, lead to terrible consequences.
And how secure is whatever knowledge we can grasp? How complete is it? What remains still obscured? Such uncertainty is one reason why oracles and prophecies play such a large part in some Greek tragedies, including Deianeira. Oracles give a partial picture of the truth, but they are at the same time open to misunderstandings and uncertainties. Thus an oracle evoked at several junctures in this play said that after a certain time Heracles would be at last released from his labours. This is taken to mean that he will enjoy a long life of ease; but, as the chorus are the first to see clearly, there is another way of fulfilling this prediction (827–30):
Time has steered that to its port
truly as it said:
for how could someone take on more
labours if they’re dead?
And Heracles himself comes to see this (1169–73):
I thought this meant that I should go on happily,
but what it meant was I should die—
because no troubles are imposed upon the dead.
It is after this realization that he gives instructions about being taken to a pyre on Oeta. Even then, though, there is no indication that he knows what that will bring apart from the end of his agony. And the audience is left not knowing either.
The possibility of a blessed future has to be measured within the context of the way that Sophocles actually closes the play. It has to be set side-by-side with the agonies and dilemmas of the final scenes, summed up in Hyllus’ last lines before the funerial procession sets off. His last response10 takes the form of a rebuke against the gods, and Zeus in particular, and is expressed in extraordinarily fierce terms (1264–72):
Come, my comrades, lift his body.
Grant to me your deepest fellow-
feeling: but condemn the gods for
deepest lack of any feeling.
They get children and are famed as
fathers, yet look down indifferent
on such dreadful scenes of suffering.
No one can foresee the future,
but this present shows us right for
pity, yet shows them as shameful.11
Those lines give the human perspective. Even if there is an apotheosis in store, the present human suffering is grim and inexplicable. And this should not be diluted by inappropriate associations with religious notions of martyrdom or of Paradise. According to these (to put it crudely) an afterlife of eternal blessings for those who have merited it redeems the suffering of this brief mortal life. Greek tragedy does not admit any such evasions of the immediacy of human suffering; it never looks over the shoulder of this life, so to speak, at the party which is being enjoyed in the next room, the afterlife. In other words the prospect, left uncertain in any case, of Heracles’ immortality does not redeem his terrible agony in the robe of Nessus. Nor does it do anything to lighten or excuse the sufferings of the women who have been dragged down by his sexual voracity. A more comfortable ending would have made this a less great play.