INTRODUCTION
“YOU’VE SEEN NOTHING THAT IS NOT ZEUS”

In Sophocles’ Women of Trakhis, Deianeira is the loyal wife of Herakles, a canny and violent enforcer who carries the ideal of Greek manhood to its logical (and superhuman) conclusion. To cope with her anxiety about his labors and escapades, yet keep his affection and preserve her marriage, she tolerates his conduct. But ultimately her actions—given her predicament, plus the nature and history of her husband, the most feared and storied hero of the ancient world—destroy not only her but Herakles as well.

By the time Sophocles wrote this play, Herakles had become a widely worshipped cult figure. (As the son of Zeus and Alk-mene—the mortal wife of Amphytrion of Thebes—Herakles displayed his strength and resourcefulness at an early age: he strangled two snakes sent by Zeus’ revengeful goddess wife Hera to kill him in his cradle.) His reputation as a savior and benefactor of humankind swelled over centuries. Mythmakers invented countless improbable monsters and obstacles for him to overcome. But egomania and cruelty were also part of the legend. In Women of Trakhis, Sophocles undermines reverential accounts of the hero’s selfless service to his fellow Greeks by taking equal notice of his crimes and his brutal, deceitful, selfish acts. When Herakles finally appears, he is writhing in a robe smeared with clinging, burning, penetrating acid, yet Sophocles makes it difficult for an audience to feel sorry for him.

Deianeira is a shadowy or absent figure in the earliest versions of the Herakles myth. By making her the driving force in his play, Sophocles succeeds in dramatizing the destructive side of his culture’s fascination with hero cults and especially with Herakles himself. He creates in Deianeira one of the most sympathetic and realistic female characters in Greek drama, and presents a Herakles who, though blessed with immense strength and resourcefulness, is also egomaniacal and cruel.

As the play begins, Deianeira explains to the chorus of Trakhinian women how painful it is loving “the best” man alive. “People have a saying that goes way back,” she explains. “You don’t know your own life, / whether it’s good or evil—not / until it’s over. Mine I know now. / It’s unlucky and it’s harsh” (1–5). Deianeira has missed Herakles. She resents his latest fifteen-month absence. But until now—when she is confronted by Iole, an attractive and aristocratic captive whom Herakles has sent ahead to become his third wife—she has tolerated his sexual conquests and his neglect. Sophocles renders, with striking realism, Deianeira’s struggle to reconcile passion, devotion, and jealousy as she reacts to the girl’s sudden arrival at her house. Pondering how to deal with the threat posed by Iole, Deianeira remembers a “love charm” given her by Nessus, a centaur who was attempting to rape her when Herakles pierced his chest with a poison-soaked arrow. Dying, Nessus promised that the gore from his wound, if carefully preserved, could be used to keep Herakles “from seeing and loving” anyone but her. Deianeira, having saved the gore all these years, will now rub it into a robe and have a messenger take it to Herakles as a homecoming gift. In so doing, she inflicts on him a horrible, unquenchable agony. This epitome of warrior culture is rendered helpless at the hands of a “frail woman, / born with no male strength” (1192–93). “She beat me—only she,” says Herakles. “And didn’t even need a sword” (1094–95). When Deianeira hears from her son Hyllos what her love potion has done to her husband, whose passion she craves and fears, she plunges a shortened sword into her heart.

Deianeira insists she has never resented her husband’s other women, whose number she claims exceeds those of any other mortal. But imagining that she will sleep “under the same blanket” with Herakles and his new bride is more than she can bear. Sophocles could easily have given Iole a chance to speak for herself, thus enlivening the drama with a face-off between the two women. He chose instead to show Herakles’ lover as visibly nubile but utterly intimidated, seemingly incapable of speech. In this play, as in most versions of the myth, Iole is brought to Trakhis against her will. Iole’s silence and Deianeira’s instinctive pity for her allows the audience to focus on the conflict between the loyal wife and the husband wedded to his own legend. The drama thus takes off on a collision course of conflicting passions, Deianeira’s to keep her husband’s love, and Herakles’ to make his latest conquest permanent.

To fifth-century Greeks, the word heros (its singular form) had a meaning quite distinct from our own. We think of heroes as people who place themselves at considerable risk to accomplish something dangerous or courageous, often for the common good. The ancient Greeks, however, assumed an unusual capacity for anger and violence to be a common attribute of a heros, whether in myth or real life. Simply stated, the difference between our own and ancient Greek attitudes toward heroes is that we want heroic violence to be sanctioned in moral terms. A Greek heros’ destructive conduct, however, could be appreciated as an impressive, even divine attribute. Consider Kleomedes, an Olympic boxing champion who won his title between the battles of Marathon and Salamis. Enraged and maddened because his title was stripped after his blows caused the death of his final opponent, Kleomedes pulled down the pillars of a school building, killing all the pupils inside. To escape the wrath of the dead children’s families, he hid in a large trunk in the Temple of Athena but disappeared before they broke open the lid. When consulted by the townspeople about what to do next, the oracle at Delphi sardonically advised, “Honor him as a hero.” To modern readers, a hero’s heartless fury marks him as immoral; to the ancient Greeks, a heros’ anger—a most privileged word and concept in Greek culture—could make him immortal.

Zeus will grant the Herakles of the Trakhis immortality. But before this apotheosis, the dying Herakles will evaluate his life experience. In a highly charged conversation with his son Hyllos, Herakles recounts how much it cost him to keep Greece safe from savage tribes of beasts (natural and supernatural), to perform other nasty ‘Herculean’ tasks for twelve years—and how little peace he has earned. As evidence of the Olympian gods’ abandonment, Herakles complains that they did not protect him from Deianeira’s lethal gift, nor did they allow him to take revenge on her.

Hyllos patiently explains to Herakles why Deianeira does not deserve his father’s wrath:

HYLLOS You wouldn’t hate her—if you knew.

HERAKLES Wouldn’t hate her? If I knew what?

HYLLOS Her good intentions hurt you—that’s the truth.

HERAKLES Her “good intention” to kill me?

HYLLOS When she saw the woman who’s in our house,

she used love medicine to keep you. It went wrong.

[ . . . ]

HERAKLES O what a miserable creature I am!

I’m finished. Finished! For me

there will be no more sunlight.(1286–1298)

Herakles neither takes responsibility for Deianeira’s jealous reaction to Iole’s arrival nor expresses regret for his wife’s suicide. He’s obsessed with his own shame at being destroyed by a woman. Herakles then attempts to impose a set of ‘labors’ on his son—a series of deathbed commands he forces Hyllos to promise, and swear to Zeus, that he’ll carry out. The first command orders Hyllos to transport his father to Mount Oita and burn him alive on a pyre of olive limbs. When Hyllos refuses (which the Greek audience would have attributed to the religious prohibition against kin murder), Herakles proceeds to negotiate. He agrees to let Hyllos build the pyre but find someone else—who turns out, in another play by Sophocles, to be Philoktetes—to light it. He then orders Hyllos to marry Iole. Horrified, but compelled by his divine oath to Zeus, Hyllos agrees. As a crew assembles to carry the mighty hero to the mountain, Hyllos speaks a few final, rebellious words:

Lift him up, friends. Forgive me

for what I am about to do.

But look at the cruelty of what

the ruthless gods have done

to us—the gods whom we call

our fathers, whose children we are—

and yet how coolly they watch us suffer.

No one foresees the future,

but our present is awash with grief

that shames even the gods, and pain

beyond anything we can know

strikes this man who now meets his doom.

Women, don’t cower in the house.

Come with us. You’ve just seen death

and devastating calamity, but

you’ve seen nothing that is not Zeus.(1435–1450)

Hyllos expresses grief for his father’s pain, but not for losing him. By condemning the cruelty of the gods—shouldn’t they treat mortals as their children, Hyllos asks, since mortals revere them as fathers?—he implies distress at his own father’s treatment of him. He concludes by blaming Zeus for the calamity that has struck his entire family. This might not have seemed blasphemous or impious to Sophocles’ audience; the gods’ cruelty and capriciousness were universally acknowledged and accepted. But Hyllos’ invocation of Zeus, and this father-god’s indifference to suffering, reminds us that Zeus was in fact Herakles’ father. In time, the advent of more compassionate deities caused the demise of Zeus and the other Olympians. The Trakhis was one of many works written in Sophocles’ Athens that eventually eroded uncritical acceptance of the arrogance and violence endemic to heroic culture itself.

At the end of his life, Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Kolonos, setting the play on the last day of the life of aged Oedipus, a hero who possessed anger more righteous than Herakles’ and whose solemn reception by the gods granted him an honor in death that had been withheld during his prime. Sophocles himself became after death a different breed of heros altogether, revered for receiving into Athens and very likely his own house a cult whose mission was to heal the sick.