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SophoclesWomen of Trachis
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Divine Mystery
Like most of the tragedies that have survived relatively complete, Women of Trachis retells a mythical narrative, both drawing on and modifying traditional elements. The ancient Greek myths were a vast, interconnected web of stories. Playwrights extracted threads of narrative from this web they reshaped to suit the needs of the moment. In the case of the tragedies, they were also performed in the context of providing ritual honors to the gods at festivals. This sacred component must always be taken into consideration when attempting to interpret a play’s potential meanings and messages.
Though the stories served a sacred function, altering details was not only permissible but possibly also expected to make the story relevant for the perceived needs of the community for which it was performed. Because the dating of Women of Trachis is uncertain, it is not possible to determine what pressures of the time the play may have been reacting to specifically. Nevertheless, the inscrutability of the gods and the impossibility of knowing their plans and intentions is a concern to which the play returns repeatedly.
Women of Trachis tells a piece of the larger myth of Heracles dealing with the events around Heracles’ death. This death is delivered through the hands of his wife Deianeira via a poisoned robe but it also arrives through the divine force of Love. A question that troubles interpretations of Women of Trachis is what Sophocles means to say about the gods’ relationship to human suffering. Specifically, scholars debate whether Sophocles intends a critique of the gods, who not only allow humans to suffer but seem to impose that suffering on them.
Heracles falls in love with Iole and destroys an entire city to possess her. Deianeira’s love for Heracles and longing to recapture his love is so intense that she fails to heed good sense, allowing herself to be convinced that poisoned blood could act as a love potion. Love, a personified deity of primordial power drives their desires, but the disastrous acts themselves come about because of poor decision making and impulsivity. The wills of the gods and the mortals converge, and it is in the convergence that disaster blooms.
Hyllus’ final statement in the play—“nothing in this is not Zeus”—does not attribute events to Zeus and the gods per se but portrays everything being of a piece with Zeus (135). Conceptually, this suggests that because humans exist apart from gods, they cannot perceive the ways that they are connected to them. They cannot understand suffering because they are not plugged into the mind of Zeus, the divine figurehead and the part that represents the whole. Since expectations are repeatedly overturned and outcomes continually surprise mortals, the play may be showing how events that are mysterious to mortals remain part of a divine, if capricious, plan.
The Subversion of the Returning Hero Narrative
Mythical heroes seem to have been central figures in classical Athens. They were the subject of stories that permeated daily life via omnipresent visual and verbal arts and to whom cult honors were paid in ritual. Per the epic poet Hesiod, heroes belonged to an earlier age of mortals who possessed superhuman strength and intensity, were directly descended from the gods and at least one mortal parent, and were in direct communication with the gods. This closeness proved destructive, burdening Earth, causing enmity among the gods that spilled over into the mortal realm which destabilized the cosmic order. Zeus thus decided to bring their age to end via the Trojan and Theban wars. The poems of Hesiod (Theogony and Works and Days) and Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) can be understood as narratives of this transition from the heroic age to the historical present of classical Athens. The narrative arc of Homer’s Odyssey features a Trojan war hero attempting to return home and reclaim his mortal identity, which is called a nostos narrative, or a narrative of return.
If Odysseus represents an ideal scenario, in which the hero returns home to find that his family has waited for him loyally, protecting his interests and enabling his seamless reintegration, Athenian tragedies can be said to subvert this ideal in various ways. Two central components that figure prominently in Women of Trachis are the waiting woman (Deianeira) and garments presented to welcome the hero.
Deianeira is, like Odysseus’ Penelope, a loyal wife who has waited patiently. Unlike Odysseus, however, who returns home alone, seeking only to reunite with his one wife, Heracles sacks a city out of desire for another woman who he captures and sends to his marital home ahead of himself. The idea of sharing her husband with another woman devastates Deianeira and puts her on her disastrous path to attempt to recapture Heracles’ love. She rubs the centaur’s blood onto a robe she has woven for Heracles and sends to him as a gift to celebrate his success and imminent return. Welcoming heroes with garments is a familiar feature of nostos narratives, but in Women of Trachis, it becomes the instrument that prevents homecoming. Distraught at the realization that her desire to restore their love has destroyed Heracles, Deianeira kills herself before he returns.
The quality that Odysseus and Penelope share, which enables their successful reunion despite 20 years apart is homophrosyne, or like-mindedness, husband and wife thinking with one mind. In comparison, Deianeira pushes against the will of her husband, and he too does wants what he wants without considering how it will affect her. Under these conditions, reunion cannot be achieved.
The Certainty of Fate
Attempting to comfort Deianeira after she realizes that her intended love potion is instead a deadly poison that will prevent her reunion with Heracles, the Chorus tells her, “But when people stumble unwittingly, / Anger is softer. And that’s what fits your case” (118). Hyllus later echoes this sentiment to Heracles, when he is raging against Deianeira: “You’d turn your anger down if you knew the whole story” (130). These are crucial moments in the play that encapsulate its portrayal of Fate’s victims. Consistent with the ancient Greek concept of interconnectedness, the reverberations of Deianeira’s actions touch everyone in the play in some way.
Fate in Greek mythology is a divine force. Its personified form is three sisters: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropis. In Hesiod, they are the daughters of Nyx (Night); other Greek versions portray them as the daughters of Zeus and Themis (the personification of order/justice). In both these manifestations, the Fates determine the contours of each human life. Their authority must be respected even by the gods, who cannot disregard them with impunity.
Anyone, no matter their status, can suffer from the dictates of Fate, with the consequence that their status reverses course suddenly and seemingly without warning. This occurs for Deianeira, Heracles, Hyllus, and Iole. Deianeira worries that her husband will not return and instead discovers that he will return but not alone. Heracles anticipates that securing his prize—Iole—will bring lead him to a happy life but instead discovers that his labors will end when his life does. On the day of her capture, Iole starts her day as a princess and ends enslaved. Hyllus goes in search of his father anticipating the reunion of his family and instead becomes an orphan.
At the heart of these reversals is Love, which leads mortal desires and divine forces to converge. Since anyone can suffer from divine force, whether because of the whims of others (in the case of Iole) or because they have been overtaken by bad choices (Deianeira), the appropriate response to others’ suffering is pity. Sophocles shows this through Deianeira’s pity for Iole, as well as the Chorus and Hyllus’ pity for Deianeira.
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