To fifth-century Greeks, the word heros (its singular form) had a meaning quite distinct from our own. We think of heroes as people who place themselves at considerable risk to accomplish something dangerous or courageous, often for the common good. The ancient Greeks, however, assumed an unusual capacity for anger and violence to be a common attribute of a heros, whether in myth or real life. Simply stated, the difference between our own and ancient Greek attitudes toward heroes is that we want heroic violence to be sanctioned in moral terms. A Greek heros’ destructive conduct, however, could be appreciated as an impressive, even divine attribute. Consider Kleomedes, an Olympic boxing champion who won his title between the battles of Marathon and Salamis. Enraged and maddened because his title was stripped after his blows caused the death of his final opponent, Kleomedes pulled down the pillars of a school building, killing all the pupils inside. To escape the wrath of the dead children’s families, he hid in a large trunk in the Temple of Athena but disappeared before they broke open the lid. When consulted by the townspeople about what to do next, the oracle at Delphi sardonically advised, “Honor him as a hero.” To modern readers, a hero’s heartless fury marks him as immoral; to the ancient Greeks, a heros’ anger—a most privileged word and concept in Greek culture—could make him immortal.
Zeus will grant the Herakles of the Trakhis immortality. But before this apotheosis, the dying Herakles will evaluate his life experience. In a highly charged conversation with his son Hyllos, Herakles recounts how much it cost him to keep Greece safe from savage tribes of beasts (natural and supernatural), to perform other nasty ‘Herculean’ tasks for twelve years—and how little peace he has earned. As evidence of the Olympian gods’ abandonment, Herakles complains that they did not protect him from Deianeira’s lethal gift, nor did they allow him to take revenge on her.
Hyllos patiently explains to Herakles why Deianeira does not deserve his father’s wrath:
Hyllos You wouldn’t hate her—if you knew.
Herakles Wouldn’t hate her? If I knew what?
Hyllos Her good intentions hurt you—that’s the truth.
Herakles Her “good intention” to kill me?
Hyllos When she saw the woman who’s in our house,
she used love medicine to keep you. It went wrong.
[ . . . ]
Herakles O what a miserable creature I am!
I’m finished. Finished! For me
there will be no more sunlight. (1286–1298)
Herakles neither takes responsibility for Deianeira’s jealous reaction to Iole’s arrival nor expresses regret for his wife’s suicide. He’s obsessed with his own shame at being destroyed by a woman. Herakles then attempts to impose a set of ‘labors’ on his son—a series of deathbed commands he forces Hyllos to promise, and swear to Zeus, that he’ll carry out. The first command orders Hyllos to transport his father to Mount Oita and burn him alive on a pyre of olive limbs. When Hyllos refuses (which the Greek audience would have attributed to the religious prohibition against kin murder), Herakles proceeds to negotiate. He agrees to let Hyllos build the pyre but find someone else—who turns out, in another play by Sophocles, to be Philoktetes—to light it. He then orders Hyllos to marry Iole. Horrified, but compelled by his divine oath to Zeus, Hyllos agrees. As a crew assembles to carry the mighty hero to the mountain, Hyllos speaks a few final, rebellious words:
Lift him up, friends. Forgive me
for what I am about to do.
But look at the cruelty of what
the ruthless gods have done
to us—the gods whom we call
our fathers, whose children we are—
and yet how coolly they watch us suffer.
No one foresees the future,
but our present is awash with grief
that shames even the gods, and pain
beyond anything we can know
strikes this man who now meets his doom.
Women, don’t cower in the house.
Come with us. You’ve just seen death
and devastating calamity, but
you’ve seen nothing that is not Zeus. (1435–1450)
Hyllos expresses grief for his father’s pain, but not for losing him. By condemning the cruelty of the gods—shouldn’t they treat mortals as their children, Hyllos asks, since mortals revere them as fathers?—he implies distress at his own father’s treatment of him. He concludes by blaming Zeus for the calamity that has struck his entire family. This might not have seemed blasphemous or impious to Sophocles’ audience; the gods’ cruelty and capriciousness were universally acknowledged and accepted. But Hyllos’ invocation of Zeus, and this father-god’s indifference to suffering, reminds us that Zeus was in fact Herakles’ father. In time, the advent of more compassionate deities caused the demise of Zeus and the other Olympians. The Trakhis was one of many works written in Sophocles’ Athens that eventually eroded uncritical acceptance of the arrogance and violence endemic to heroic culture itself.
At the end of his life, Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Kolonos, setting the play on the last day of the life of aged Oedipus, a hero who possessed anger more righteous than Herakles’ and whose solemn reception by the gods granted him an honor in death that had been withheld during his prime. Sophocles himself became after death a different breed of heros altogether, revered for receiving into Athens and very likely his own house a cult whose mission was to heal the sick.
—RB
Women of Trakhis
Translated by Robert Bagg
CHARACTERS
DEIANEIRA, Herakles’ wife
SERVANT, a woman of Deianeira’s household
HYLLOS, eldest son of Herakles and Deianeira
CHORUS of young Trakhinian women
LEADER of the Chorus
MESSENGER from Trakhis
LIKHAS, personal herald to Herakles
Captive Women of Oechalia
Iole, daughter of Eurytus
HERAKLES, heroic worker of miracles
OLD MAN, senior aide to Herakles
Soldiers serving Herakles
The play opens at Trakhis, in front of the house in which DEIANEIRA has been living. Its size and façade are impressive, but less than royal. DEIANEIRA and her female SERVANT enter the stage from the house.
DEIANEIRA
People have a saying that goes way back:
You don’t know your own life,
whether it’s good or evil—not
until it’s over. Mine I know now.
It’s unlucky and it’s harsh.
I know this long before
I’ll go down to Hades.
When I was still a girl, living
with my father in Pleuron,
marriage terrified me—like it 10
terrified no other girl in Aetolia—
because a river lusted for me, a river
named Achelous. He kept asking
Father if he could marry me,
each time in a different shape: first
a bull, next a glittering snake,
then an ox-head rising from a man’s trunk,
water sloshing from his rank beard.
When I imagined marrying that creature
I was so miserable! I’d want to die 20
before I got near a bed like his.
Then, just in time, joy arrived!
The amazing son of Zeus and Alkmene
battled him and saved me. Exactly
how he won this fight I can’t
tell you, because I don’t know. If someone
feeling less panic than I felt was watching,
he could tell you. I sat there numb, sure
my beauty would destroy me.
But Zeus the battle god blessed the outcome— 30
if what happened was really a blessing.
Ever since Herakles won me for his bed
I’ve nursed one fear after another.
There’s been no end to my anxiety.
Each night I imagi
ne some new threat
which the next night’s threat scares away.
Of course we had children. He sees them, sometimes,
the way a farmer tends a back field, twice
a year—sowing his seed, reaping the harvest.
That was his life: no sooner home than he’s 40
back on the road, always working for this one man.
Now that he’s put his labors behind him,
I’m more afraid than ever.
From the time
Herakles killed that brave fighter Iphitus,
we’ve been uprooted, so we live
among strangers here in Trakhis.
Where Herakles is now, nobody knows. He’s gone.
That’s all I know. And that I ache for him.
No herald’s brought news for fifteen months.
I’m all but sure he’s mired in more trouble. 50
Then there’s this tablet he left me.
I’ve prayed so often to the gods
that it wasn’t meant to bring me grief.
The female SERVANT who has been listening to DEIANEIRA worry out loud approaches and interrupts her mistress.
SERVANT
Deianeira, my lady, so many times I’ve quietly
watched while you’ve wept, suffering with you
since Herakles has been gone. But now
I’ve got to say—if a slave may advise
a freeborn person—what you should do.
Since you’re so blessed with sons,
why not send one to find your husband? 60
Hyllos your eldest is the one to send—
if he thinks news of his father’s well-being
matters to us.
Here he comes now,
jogging up the path. If my advice
makes any sense, why not take it?
Enter HYLLOS, breathing hard from sport or the hunt. DEIANEIRA stops him as he runs past. SERVANT goes indoors.
DEIANEIRA
Hyllos, my son, sometimes even a slave
knows just what to say. She wasn’t
born free but speaks as if she were.
HYLLOS
Her words, Mother? May I hear them?
DEIANEIRA
Your father’s been gone for so long. She thinks 70
it’s shameful you haven’t tried to find him.
HYLLOS
But I do know where he is. If you can
believe what people have been saying.
DEIANEIRA
Then why not tell me, Son. Where he’s living.
HYLLOS
He slaved during last year’s plowing season
—seed to harvest—for a Lydian woman.
DEIANEIRA
If he has sunk that low, we can expect
to hear much worse said about him.
HYLLOS
He’s gotten clear of it now. So I hear.
DEIANEIRA
Do people say where he is? Alive, dead, what? 80
HYLLOS
They say he’s attacking Euboean
territory—the kingdom of Eurytus—
or getting ready to attack.
DEIANEIRA
Did you know, Son, that Herakles left me
prophecies—ones I trust—about that very place?
HYLLOS
What prophecies, Mother? They’re news to me.
DEIANEIRA
They say that he’ll either be killed, or if
successful in the battle he takes on—
then he’ll have peace for the rest of his days.
With his life hanging in the balance, Son, 90
won’t you go help him? Our own survival
depends on his. If he dies, so do we.
HYLLOS
Of course I’ll go, Mother. If I had known
how dangerous these prophecies were,
I’d be there now. But I never saw
much reason to worry. Father’s luck was
never the kind that would make me anxious.
Now that I’m better informed, I will do
whatever it takes to find out the truth.
DEIANEIRA
Then go now, Son. 100
When you’ve searched out the truth, no matter how
late, it always works to your advantage.
HYLLOS exits stage left on the road out of town. CHORUS enters from the town, singing.
CHORUS
O Sun! The Night
pulsing with stars
gives birth to you
the moment she
reddens into death.
You set, O Sun,
fire to her sky
as she lays you 110
to rest. O Sungod—
where, tell us where,
is Herakles,
Alkmene’s child?
Master of flaming light,
find Herakles!
Is he edging
through the straits
of the Black Sea?
Or making landfall 120
where continents meet?
Speak to us, you who see
what no man sees.
Deianeira’s heart
aches for this man.
Once a prize won in battle,
she’s restless as a bird
who’s lost its mate.
She can’t still her desire
or stop her tears. 130
Sleepless, ravaged
by fears for the husband
who’s gone, she wastes away,
alone on a manless bed,
imagining her own
miserable fate.
Just as you watch
waves surge and foam
over the open sea
under tireless winds— 140
Northwind, Southwind—
so the troubles of a life
wild as the sea off Crete
plunge Herakles under,
then lift him to greatness—
because always some god,
when Death sucks him down,
pulls him back into life.
Lady, I respect you,
but not your despair. 150
I don’t think it’s right
for you to let hope die.
Zeus makes sorrow a part
of whatever he gives us.
Grief and joy
come circling back
to all of us,
circling as the Bear
retraces her steps
on the starpaths. 160
For the night pulsing with stars
slows for no man, nor does wealth,
nor does pain—they all
gone to some other man
who’ll know joy and its loss.
Now I ask you, Queen Deianeira,
to ask this of yourself:
When has Zeus ever been
indifferent to one of his sons? 170
DEIANEIRA
You’re here, I suppose, because you know my troubles.
But you cannot know the worry eating
my heart out. I hope you’ll never
learn it by suffering what I’ve suffered.
As young girls we thrive in our own safe place,
where the Sungod’s heat doesn’t oppress us,
nor the rain nor the wind. You glory there
in your innocent life—until you marry.
Then panic attacks you night after night—
you fear for your husband, your children. 180
Wives know the misery I feel now
when they face what I’ve had to face.
I’ve wept—so much—long before this.
But now I must tell you something far worse.
When Herakles embarked on his last journey
he left behind a message carved on wood.
Never before—and he went to fight often—
had he explained its meaning to me.
Always sure that he’d win,
he never believed he would die. 190
But this time he seemed to expect his own death.
He told me how much of his wealth
would be my widow’s share, which lands
would go to each of his children—but
this time he fixed the date of his own death.
When he’d been out of the country fifteen
months, that would be his time to die.
But if he survived after that,
there’d be no further trouble in his life.
The gods ordained this destiny, he said— 200
ordained that Herakles’ own labors
would cause it. So it will happen
just as the ancient oak at Dodona’s
shrine told him it would, when its leaves
rustled and whispered to its sibyls.
Today’s the day that prophecy falls due.
I wake in terror from a long sweet sleep, friends,
fearing I must live on without the man
who is—of all men living—the best.
LEADER
Shush. Let go of those mysteries for now. 220
A man wearing laurel flowers
is walking toward us, a sure sign
he brings news we can celebrate.
Enter MESSENGER.
MESSENGER
Queen Deianeira, let me
be the first to reassure you.
Herakles is alive. He’s won,
and from that battle he’s sent home
trophies to please our native gods.
DEIANEIRA
Old man, what’s this news you’ve just brought me? 230
MESSENGER
That your lord, loved by so many,
will be restored to your house
in all his victorious might.
DEIANEIRA
Who told you this, a stranger or a villager?
MESSENGER
Down in the meadow where oxen graze all summer,
a herald named Likhas is telling everyone.
I heard it from him and hurried here,
hoping that you’d be generous
if I was the first to tell you.
DEIANEIRA
Why doesn’t Likhas bring the news himself 240
if fortune’s been so good to Herakles?