Sophocles: ‘The Women of Trachis’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out that Deianeira, wife of the hero Heracles, might have become a fully developed human being. Her culture made her a prize of battle.

As a young woman, she was courted by the river god, Achelous, who had three forms: bull, snake and man with a bull’s head, with a beard that gushed like a fountain. Deianeira, contemplating her wedding night, prayed for death.

Heracles won her by killing her suitor. Deianeira was ecstatic. But being married to a hero came with a price. He was always away. He saw their kids occasionally, between adventures.

If you are a hero, you know that some traits come with the hero personality: you are willing to sacrifice anything for your own projects, your own vision of yourself as hero. Wives and kids — in fact all other people — are just not important. Sophocles could paint a narcissist. 

When Heracles sent Ione, a young woman he won in battle just as he had once won Deianeira, home as a trophy, Deianeira snapped. She remembered a potion that Nessus, a centaur, had given her.

When Deianeira was a new bride, Nessus ferried her across a river. When he put his lusty hands on her, Deianeira cried out. Heracles put an arrow into the centaur’s chest. As he died, Nessus gave Deianeira some of his blood and told her to save it as a potion. It was a love potion, the centaur said, and would prevent Heracles from loving another woman as he’d loved her.

You can see where this is going. A centaur’s blood is poison.

Sophocles could handle irony. The great hero is undone by a woman, not a rival hero. His undoing is done innocently, not by scheming. The great hero was killed from beyond the grave by the blood of a creature who, like Heracles, thought of women as prizes to be won or taken by force.

I couldn’t read The Women of Trachis without thinking of the scoundrels we’ve turned into folk heroes today.

Sophocles has many good lines of poetry. My favorites, spoken by Hyllus, Heracles’s son, are at the end:

 

You have seen a terrible death

and agonies, many and strange, and there is

nothing here which is not Zeus.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Woman of Trachis is on pp. 304-15.

The Woman of Trachis, translated by Michael Jameson, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 64-119. The quotation is on p. 119.