The Limit of Anoikeios Logos in Sophocles’ Trachiniae

The mute Iole in Sophocles’ Trachiniae is a fascinating figure. Although she is on stage for only part of the first episode (229-334), her enigmatic presence generates the major events of the drama. Commentators have often compared her with other female characters, both in the Trachiniae (Aphrodite, Deianira, the Nurse) and elsewhere (e.g.

Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon). When studied on its own, her silence has been thought to signify inter alia “the impossibility of articulating the boundlessness of her despair and isolation” (Bowra 1944: 123), “the other in the purest sense” (Wohl 1998:

48), and “the mortal problem of having to live in time without full knowledge of the past or future” (Rood 2010: 360).

In this paper, I look at the use and function of language in the play from an angle that enriches the existing interpretative spectrum by examining Iole alongside Heracles on the grounds that both are liminal figures poised uneasily between mutually incompatible states of being. Their fluidity or indeterminacy, I argue, makes them adopt an anoikeios logos, a diction that in different ways is not their own in the sense that it does not issue from them as bearers of a stable (social) identity: Iole is resolutely silent, while Heracles either speaks tormented by pain and in the grip of insanity or reports another’s words. The only purposeful speech that Heracles utters is the oath that he places upon Hyllus whereby he dictates the conditions under which he, viz. Heracles, and

Iole will acquire fixity and presumably (continue to) speak, albeit beyond the confines of the drama.

Away from Trachis Iole is the princess of Oechalia who first enslaves Hercules and is then enslaved by him; in Trachis she is a harmless parthenos and a destructive gunê, the nameless daughter of a king and the fatherless Iole, the putative dweller of a sheltered spot and Heracles’ “secret bed,” the silent captive of warlike valor and the weeping bearer of a Fury, the pitiable xenos and the fearsome fortos. Her silence shows simultaneously strength, because it turns her into an impenetrable mystery, and weakness, because it erodes her personal voice. As for Heracles, away from Trachis he is a savage hero whose exploits are seen as service to others and who, though victorious in all else, is enslaved by Iole; in Trachis he is carried in a litter barely alive and, at the same time, he is “nothing, nothing that can even crawl” (1107-8). He is a man feminized by pain (1070-

5) whose entrance on stage is marked by the silence of sleep. When he awakens, he speaks ineffective words while being wracked by pain (Deianira’s suicide has preempted his killing her) or the language of the illness (lavish descriptions of its effects and cries of agony) or another’s words (his father’s oracle about his death). His speech evinces simultaneously strength by allowing him to express his thoughts and weakness by communicating his total surrender to agony. The only utterance that Heracles freely chooses is the oath that he forces upon his son: Hyllus must facilitate his father’s death and marry Iole. The recovery of his voice goes hand in hand with a degree of self- recovery and has political implications: the infliction of the oath shows that Heracles has reasserted himself both as a potent hero by temporarily overcoming his paiin and as a father by subordinating his son to his will and prescribing the conditions of his death and the continuation of his house. Before the oath Heracles is at the mercy of his illness, but afterwards Hyllus is at the mercy of his father. The implementation of the oath will deliver Heracles from pain altogether and enable him to speak as an omnipotent immortal. It will also end Iole’s indeterminacy and, presumably, allow her to speak as Hyllus’ legitimate wife and queen of the new oikos.

Works Cited

Bowra, C.M. 1944. Sophoclean Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rood, N. 2010. “Four Silences in Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” Arethusa 43.3: 345-64.

Wohl, V. 1998. Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek

Tragedy. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.