CHAPTER 7 The Women of Trachis

Sophie Mills

Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (Trachiniae) is a story of love, jealousy and pain, both emotional and physical. It is permeated by contrasts between the worlds of male and female, and between wildness and civilization, and by a deep sense of the uncertainty of life, as represented by an act performed in good faith that will prove lethal. Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, has been waiting for his return for 15 months. Long absences are all too typical for him, and she is anxious and frustrated. Her Nurse and the Chorus of women of the nearby town of Trachis (north of Delphi, in central Greece), advise her to send their son Hyllus to find him, since she is also worried about a prophecy she has heard about her husband. But after she has sent Hyllus, a messenger comes to announce that Heracles has been victorious and is coming home. Soon after, the herald Lichas arrives with female captives from the town of Oechalia (in central Greece) which Heracles has been besieging, and claims, untruthfully, that Heracles’ motive for the siege was revenge against Oechalia’s king, Eurytus, for having been enslaved by him. In fact, as is revealed by a messenger, who forces Lichas to reveal the truth, Heracles’ motive was desire for young, beautiful Iole, who is one of the captives. When Deianeira understands this, she recalls an earlier episode in her life. When she was first married to Heracles and had to cross the river Euenus, the Centaur Nessus offered to convey her over, but attempted to rape her on the way and was killed by Heracles’ arrow, tipped with poison from the Hydra. At his death, Nessus claimed that his blood would be a love charm that would keep Heracles in love with her. And so, with the support of the Chorus, she smears it on a robe and tells Lichas to take it to Heracles, instructing him that no one except Heracles is to wear it. But soon, she begins to worry that the charm is not what it seems, espe- cially when some of the left-over material begins to react like acid on the cloth when exposed to the sun. Hyllus arrives soon after to tell her angrily that Heracles is in agony from the effects of the robe on his skin. Deianeira is horrified at what she has unwittingly wrought and kills herself, though soon Hyllus comes to realize that she did not act out of deliberate malice. Heracles, in agony and enraged at what he thinks is his wife’s duplicity, is then carried into his home. Hyllus explains the truth to him and at last Heracles understands a prophecy that was once made to him that he would be killed by someone already dead (Nessus). Through this understanding, Heracles is somewhat reconciled to what has happened, but he is

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004300941_009 the women of trachis 513 still in agony and begs to be put out of his misery. He requests Hyllus to burn him on the pyre, which Hyllus will not do, and to marry Iole, to which he reluctantly agrees, and Heracles is carried off to the pyre.

In Literature

“The Women of Trachis is itself already a ‘reception’, a reworking based on fifth- century concerns and interests, of older stories.”1 As Greece’s greatest hero, Heracles was the subject of countless interconnected, not always consistent stories, that served as the material from which poets created new narratives of his life and deeds. Long after the heyday of Greek culture, and far beyond the boundaries of Greece, Heracles retained his popularity as a kind of superman, an iconic representation of the aspirations of different ages,2 but his consistent popularity over some 2700 years contrasts starkly with the post-Sophoclean for- tunes of the Women of Trachis until very recently. The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) lists a mere 107 productions of the play between 1450 and 2016, as compared with over 911 for Oedipus the King.3 One author of a recent overview of Sophocles’ influence on modern literature and art notes that, along with Ajax, the Women of Trachis is imitated “hardly at all”

1 Levett (2004) 115. Many of the stories to which the Women of Trachis alludes have a substan- tial pre-Sophoclean history, though details of their exact connections with one another are not always clear: for an interesting account of the Capture of Oechalia, an early epic which may have been an important source for Sophocles, see Davies (1991) xxii–xxxvii. Fr. 276 and 286–8W of the 7th-century BC poet Archilochus refer to Heracles’ combats with Achelous and Nessus. Hesiod fr. 25.20–25 Merkelbach/West (1967) knows the story of Deianeira and the poisoned robe, while 23.29–33 connects Iole, Heracles and Oechalia. Pisander of Rhodes (fl. c. 640) and Panyassis (early 5th-century BC) both wrote Heracles epics, and Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (“Patchwork”) 6.25.1 in the 2nd century AD claims that Panyassis stole some of his material about Heracles, Iole and Eurytus from Creophylus’ Capture of Oechalia: West (2003) 175. A brief reference in Herodotus 7.198.2 suggests that the story of Heracles on the pyre was well known by the mid-5th century BC (cf. Euripides Children of Heracles 910–16). Heracles’ apotheosis is known since at least 600, and there is archaeological evi- dence for a cult of Heracles on Mount Oeta, where he was burned on the pyre, from the 6th century. Hyllus and Iole, whom Heracles commands his son to marry at the end of the Women of Trachis, were the traditional ancestors of the Heraclidae: Easterling (1982) 17. 2 For an overview, see Galinsky (1972) and (2010), and for an encyclopedic list of literary and artistic representations of Heracles, see Reid (1993) vol. 1, 515–561, esp. 535–40. 3 APGRD database, accessed 4/7/16. Depending on the tools and items one uses for the search, the database offers different results about the number of adaptations/productions of (in this case) Oedipus the King: on this, see Lauriola above, 272 (and related notes).