Sophocles' Tragic World Whether There Is a Hero at All

rjlTjj ^JCT^J FJCCaj ΠCJ?j ŒJ 2 Myth, Poetry, and Heroic Values in the Trachinian Women IN THE TRACHINIAN WOMEN the humanist view of Sophocles as a dramatist of the emotions and of character meets its greatest stumbling block. The monstrous river-god Achelous wooing a tender maiden and defeated amid the crash of fist and horn; the "beast-man" killed in the river; the poisonous blood of the Centaur mingled with the venom of the Hydra; the tuft of wool flaring up and crumbling ominously in the sunlight; the hideous sufferings of the great hero Heracles as the venom, heated by the sacrificial fires and his own sweat as he slaughters bulls, seeps into his flesh—this is the mythical stuff of which Sophocles made his Trachiniae.1 These elements are not merely pieces of decora- tive vignettes or "sensational tableaux."2 They are essential elements in one of the boldest and most powerful creations of Greek dramatic poetry. And yet the failure to take at full seriousness these mythical elements and the imagery surrounding them has led to misunderstand- ing and undervaluation of this great play. No other extant Sophoclean play makes use of such intractable mythical material and opens such a gulf between the characters as human beings and the characters as symbolic figures. Sophocles draws Deianeira's domestic tragedy with the fullness and naturalism appro- priate to the developed sensibilities of the civilized realm in which she 26 Heroic Values in the Tracbinian Women * 27 belongs, whereas Heracles never emerges entirely from the remote mythical past and from the ancient powers of nature that he vanquishes. Of necessity he receives a more schematic, less realistic representation. Yet this very difference reflects the fact that the play places us at the intersection of opposed worlds, at the frontier between man and beast, between civilization and primitive animal drives.3 Not surprisingly, the Trachiniae has given scandal to critics looking at Sophocles as an embodiment of the classical ideal of harmony and serenity. "Below Sophocles' usual elevation," August von Schlegel de- clared, and assigned the play to Iophon.4 Critics as different as Henri Patin in the nineteenth century and S. M. Adams in the twentieth have followed Schlegel in doubting Sophoclean authorship.5 Gottfried Her- mann and Theodor Bergk did not go quite so far but suspected two recensions.6 Those who allowed it to be Sophocles' work have called it "the weakest of the extant plays" (Maurice Croiset) or found it lacking in "far-reaching generalizations" and issuing from "no universal apprehension about life."7 Inferior, imperfect, "very poor and insipid," gloomy, dark, puzzling, odd, nebulous, curious, bitter, difficult: these are its standard epithets.8 There have been a few voices on the other side. Schiller wrote enthusiastically to Goethe on the "depth of essential femininity" ("Tiefe des weiblichen Wesens") depicted in Deianeira and found here what he "missed elsewhere in Homer and tragedy."9 Even critics who objected to the plot admitted the splendor of the poetry and the vividness of the action.10 C. M. Bowra, Max Pohlenz, Karl Reinhardt, and others have amply demonstrated that the play is worth the effort required to understand it, and recent scholarship has brought renewed insight into its problems and its poetry.11 Schiller's enthusiasm raises the first obstacle to the interpreter of the Trachiniae. Critics wax eloquent in praise of Deianeira and take delight in heaping persiflage on the brutality and "animalistic rawness" of Heracles.12 Indeed, the contrast has become almost a rhetorical topos for criticism of the play.13 Some critics pay scant attention to Heracles at all, or else find the play redeemed by Deianeira.14 R. C. Jebb sug- gested that Sophocles let the figure of Deianeira run away with him at the expense of Heracles and the unity of the work, giving us in fact two tragedies, Deianeira's "of consummate excellence" and Heracles', "most pathetic . but produced at a moral disadvantage."15 Jebb's approach raises the celebrated question of who is the hero or 3<3 * Sophocles' Tragic World whether there is a hero at all. Those who have stressed the interde- pendence and complementarity of the two figures, as Bowra, Albin Lesky, Reinhardt, and others have done, are probably closest to the truth.16 But we must here advert to our initial proposition that character is not the best handle by which to grasp this play. Despite the importance of the domestic relationships of Heracles and Deianeira, the Trachiniae is not the mere "domestic tragedy" of an unhappy mar- riage.17 Both Heracles and Deianeira have their place within a larger pattern that includes also the monstrous figures of phantasmagoric myth, Achelous, Nessus, the Hydra. Here even the contrast between the so tenderly and humanly drawn Deianeira and the inhuman, thinly characterized Heracles has its significance. The wide divergence in interpretation and evaluation of the Trachiniae has led to equally wide divergence in dating.18 Some of those who have advocated an early date see traces of immaturity.19 Those who have placed it late have found evidence of waning power.20 The question of the play's relation to the Alcestis, Medea, and Hercules Furens of Euripides is still controversial. Reinhardt, Gordon Kirkwood, and others have adduced evidence for placing the play in the 440s, that is, between the Ajax and the Antigone. But none of their evidence is decisive, and the supposed archaism of style may be due as much to the play's peculiar subject matter as to early composition. The poetry of the Trachiniae magnificently depicts the darkness of destructive passions and the unleashed powers of a primordial beast- world beneath the civilized surface of human life. One is tempted to see in this power the "weightdness" (onkos) of Sophocles' "Aeschylean" period; but the unusual tonality of the play may equally be the result of Sophocles' mythopoeic imagination boldly grappling with raw material of unique, awesome force. The static structure and the dramatic "stiffness" of the long narrative speeches are due, I suggest, as much to the formal rendering of a mythic vision as to immature dramaturgy.21 If we insist on chronological placement, we should keep in mind the two lacunas, of at least ten years each, between Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus and between the Tyrannus and the Electra, two decades in which we do not know what depths Sophocles' mind may have been plumbing. The importance of the oracles, the similarities between the exit of Deianeira and those of Eurydice in the Antigone and Jocasta in the Oedipus Tyrannus, the close parallels with the Alcestis, and perhaps the Euripidean coloring in the theme of female passion would suit a Heroic Values in the Tracbinian Women * 29 date in the late 430s.22 But no certainty is as yet possible. In addition to its other difficulties the Trachiniae also poses problems for the evolutionary approach to Sophocles,23 for it has affinities both with his earliest known play, the Ajax, and with his latest, the Oedipus at Colonus. © s Φ Like the Ajax and the Philoctetes, the Trachiniae is a play not of cities, but of wild landscape. The city of Trachis never tangibly materializes, and Heracles' family is not especially well established there: they are "uprooted" (anastatoi, 39), a word that gives a certain restless coloring to the setting from the beginning.24 One recalls Thucydides' descrip- tion of the age of the migrations (1.12). The other city important to the play, Oechalia, is an object of plunder. Instead of cities there are the two great rivers of northwestern Greece, Achelous and Euenus, the rugged mountains of Trachis and northern Euboea echoing with the cries of human suffering (787-788), and the great peak of Oeta. Akin in symbolic function to Cithaeron in the Oedipus Tyrannus, these set- tings suggest the presence of brooding, silent powers. But vaster and more salient than the setting of the Oedipus, the landscapes of the Trachiniae throw into relief the question of man's place in a world whose violence he both shares and subdues. The battle between Heracles and the river-god Achelous is virtually our introduction to the story (9-17). Achelous' attributes are generally a bull's body and a human head,25 but Sophocles has endowed him with an even more outrageous monstrosity: he has the triple form of bull, snake, and man. H. D. F. Kitto considered Achelous an "un-Sopho- clean monster ... ill at ease in this setting."26 Paul Masqueray, object- ing that a fifth-century audience was no longer accustomed to such "metamorphoses," could only express puzzlement at diis detail in this "most curious of the Sophoclean plays."27 Sophocles' Achelous is indeed more "primitive" in his manner of presentation than Homer's river-gods in Iliad 21.28 But this primitive aspect stands at the very center of the play's mood and concerns. Deianeira's fine lines in the prologue describing the water pouring down the foresdike tangle of his beard (13) make clear at once that we have to do with a figure who is not yet fully differentiated from the forces of nature.29 The first stasimon (497-530) returns to this battle in vivid lyrical narration, with expressively harsh alliterations of k and 3<3 * Sophocles' Tragic World g and a swift movement from rapid anapests to iambic and choriambic meters. The long account of Nessus' attempted rape (555-577) continues the theme of elemental violence. This scene begins with a heavy stress on archaic remoteness. Nessus is an "ancient beast," and his gift too is "old" (555-556).

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