Spelling doom: Writing, Heracles and Deianira

ὧν ἐγὼ μεθύστερον, 

ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἀρκεῖ, τὴν μάθησιν ἄρνυμαι. 710-11

. . .too late for it to be any use, I reap the knowledge

Throughout Women of Trachis, Deianira points to the moment of consciousness, the dawning awareness that comes from suffering, then from reflecting upon the experience. She tells the chorus:

You have heard of my trouble, I would guess, and that has brought you here. But the anguish which consumes my heart—may you never come to know it through your own experience!—to that now you are total strangers. (141-144)

First she distinguishes between hearing of trouble (in this case, hers) and actually experiencing it for oneself. This difference between knowing-through-hearing and direct experience is the difference between being a young girl and being a wife:

Yes, a young life grows in those sheltered regions of its own, and the Sun-god's heat disturbs it not, nor rain, nor any wind. Rather it takes up a toilless existence amidst pleasure, until such time as she is called “wife” instead of “maiden”, and takes her portion of anxious thoughts in the night, fearing for husband or for children. At that point a woman could understand the burden of my misfortunes by recalling [σκοπῶν: looking, considering] her own experience. (144-150)

One's own experience sheds light upon that which one hears about from others, enabling understanding.

It's precisely that light of experienced understanding that is eclipsed in charms. The "precepts" of Nessus, carved in her memory, banish all light:

I neglected no part of the precepts which the savage Centaur gave me when he was hurting from the bitter barb in his side; they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze. Now this was his order to me, and I obeyed it: [685] to keep this potion hidden in inmost recesses always away from fire and untouched by the sun's warm ray, until I should apply it, newly spread, where I wished. So I had done. And just now, when the moment for action had come, I performed the anointing secretly in the rooms of the house [690] with a tuft of soft wool which I had plucked from a sheep of our home-flock; then I folded up my gift, and laid it, unvisited by sunlight, within its hollow chest, as you saw.

Just previously she had spoken of the tablet carved with strange signs that Heracles had shown her. The signs could not be read, at least by her - they are dark, but they contain the fate of Heracles. But after she's finished composing the charm in perfect darkness, an accident brings light, and something unexpected:

But as I am going back into the house, I see a thing inexplicable by words and beyond the knowledge of the human mind to understand. [695] For somehow I happened to have thrown the ball of wool, with which I had been anointing the robe, into the full blaze of the sun's rays. As it grew warm, it ran all into confusion, and quickly crumbled to powder on the ground, like nothing in appearance so much as [700] the morsels left by a saw's teeth when wood is cut. It lies just so, fallen. And from the earth, where it lay exposed, clotted foam seethes up, like the rich juice of the blue fruit from the vine of Bacchus when it is poured on the ground. (680-704)

This event - much like a chemical reaction in an experiment - triggers thinking:

And so I am distraught, and I do not know to which side my thoughts should fall. I only see [ὁρῶ] that I have brought a terrible deed to completion. For why or in thanks for what should the monster in his death-throes have shown good will to me, because of whom he was dying? Impossible! No, he was enchanting me in order to destroy the man who had shot him.

Into the dark spell of the charm-making stabs a ray of sunlight, and immediately, because Deianira is no fool, she sees what she has been doing in an entirely other "light." The script of the charm was precisely like those inscrutable symbols on Heracles' tablet, until the sun not only brings it to light, but acts upon the tuft of wool. In an instant, her mind is changed, the illusion is consumed in a flash of insight. Then come the words printed above:

 ὧν ἐγὼ μεθύστερον, ὅτ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἀρκεῖ, τὴν μάθησιν ἄρνυμαι.

And now too late I gain the knowledge of this, when it can no longer help.

Deianira sees that she was blind when she acted, but that doesn't change the act. It is "too late": the lethal effect of the deed executed in ignorance cannot be reversed in the throes of consciousness, although its meaning can be, and is.

No clearer example of the tragic divorce of power from knowledge, action from thought, is necessary. Sophocles is never more Sophoclean than when this divorce is what is on offer on his stage. He wishes us, epigones of both Chiron and Nessus, of divine logos and dark magic, to "see" that while we are creatures that know and creatures that do, it is perfectly possible that we have no understanding of what we are doing, and no power to do anything about what we've done once we understand, too late, what it was.

Later on we learn that Heracles wrote down the prophecies he heard at Dodona:

It was foreshown to me by my father far in the past that I would perish by no creature that had the breath of life, but by one already dead, a dweller with Hades. So this savage Centaur in death has killed me alive, just as the divine will had been foretold. And I will show you how later oracles tally with the first and testify to the old prophecy. I wrote them down [εἰσεγραψάμην] for myself from the mouth of my father's oak of many tongues [πολυγλώσσου] in the grove of the Selli, who dwell on the hills and sleep on the ground. (1159-69)

Can Zeus's "oak of many tongues" in fact be unambiguously translated into unequivocal writing? It's one thing to write down what one hears, another to know how to read what's written. By the time Heracles knows what his writing says, it is, once again, too late.

The Centaur who kills Heracles is dead, but his precepts, "like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze," live on. Automata working beyond the end of the tongue that spoke them, Nessus's words charm beyond the grave.

Both Deianira and Heracles discover that they had utterly misread signs that they were given - signs from Zeus in Heracles' case; signs from Nessus for Deianira. The pattern beautifully described by Deianira of the young girl who must experience suffering before she can understand life holds: we act, then suffer discovering what we were doing, or what was being done to us.

The joint errors of Deianira and Heracles bring the play to a climactic impasse. What can Heracles do, other than die? Yet the play doesn't end quite that way. He acts again before his end.  The effect of that remains to be seen.

Mirroring Centaurs and inverted medicines: Chiron and Nessus

Here's an odd example of unexpected symmetry in The Women of Trachis -- some might say it's a stretch, but bear in mind, the material of the myth was all one giant text to the Greeks.

Deianira is about to relate her discovery -- her dawning apprehension that Nessus gave her no love charm. She tells how she faithfully followed the dying Centaur's every instruction:

I let fall (παρῆκα) no part of the precepts which the savage Centaur gave me when he was hurting from the bitter barb in his side; they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze.

ἐγὼ γὰρ ὧν ὁ θήρ με Κένταυρος, πονῶν
πλευρὰν πικρᾷ γλωχῖνι, προυδιδάξατο
παρῆκα θεσμῶν οὐδέν, ἀλλ᾽ ἐσῳζόμην
χαλκῆς ὅπως δύσνιπτον ἐκ δέλτου γραφήν.

She is thinking of Nessus as if he were a teacher, not a rapist. She adheres to his formula for making the charm as if it were a medicine she is learning to compound from a learned pharmacist. This of course should remind us of Chiron, the one Centaur who was learned in many arts, including medicine. (Chiron was a giver of the gift of knowledge not unlike Prometheus, only he did not suffer the wrath of Zeus for having stolen sacred fire.)

The irony is that Heracles killed both Nessus and Chiron with the same poisoned weapon -- though in the case of Chiron, it was an accident. At least one well-known tale goes this way:

Chiron had been poisoned with an arrow belonging to Heracles that had been treated with the blood of the Hydra . . . this had taken place during the visit of Heracles to the cave of Pholus on Mount Pelion in Thessaly when he visited his friend during his fourth labour in defeating the Erymanthian Boar. While they were at supper, Heracles asked for some wine to accompany his meal. Pholus, who ate his food raw, was taken aback. He had been given a vessel of sacred wine by Dionysus sometime earlier, to be kept in trust for the rest of the centaurs until the right time for its opening. At Heracles' prompting, Pholus was forced to produce the vessel of sacred wine. The hero, gasping for wine, grabbed it from him and forced it open. Thereupon the vapors of the sacred wine wafted out of the cave and intoxicated the wild centaurs, led by Nessus, who had gathered outside. They attacked the cave with stones and fir trees. Heracles was forced to shoot many arrows (poisoned with the blood of the Hydra) to drive them back. During this assault, Chiron was hit in the thigh by one of the poisoned arrows. (Wikipedia)

The tale continues with Chiron, who was immortal, suffering so greatly that he wished to die. Heracles then brokered an exchange by which the Centaur was permitted to die and Prometheus was freed from his savage punishment.

Heracles, then, killed both the noblest Centaur and the worst of them, and used knowledge gained from Chiron (about the poison) to do it. When Nessus tells Deianira that he can give her a potent charm, he is imitating Chiron's instruction of Heracles. And when he is struck by the Hydra-tainted arrow, he replicates the death of Chiron. Deianira, then, could have been misled by a kind of chiastic mirroring:

Chiron - teacher of Heracles - wounded by Heracles' poisoned arrow:

<> 

:Nessus - mortally wounded by Heracles - teacher of Deianira

The similarities are superficial. Upon closer consideration one might realize that if anyone could have used the Hydra's poison to good purpose, it would have been Chiron, but he couldn't. Chiron gave men medicine to preserve life and knowledge to make the best of it. Nessus, the doppelganger, gives a charm that horribly takes life. And the charm takes the form of a shirt, a copy, or replica, of the human form beneath.

Chiron certainly gave Centaurs an aura of primal learning - an air of authority and respectability which even someone as intelligent as Deianira might mistakenly attribute to all Centaurs.

The balanced structure of the myth would surely have fascinated the Greeks: Heracles was brought up and became who he was thanks to the illumination and humane tutelage of Chiron. And then he was brought down thanks to the prescription of a fraudulent beast who resembled him superficially. That doubleness, the real and the mere copy -- is itself underscored by the reality that Chiron and Nessus are "like" each other precisely in being dual creatures, double natures. And the difference between the dual natures lies precisely in the gift of benign culture -- of teaching, paideia.

We are not far from the Phaedrus's lesson in the differences between true knowing and mere writing. And writing is indeed present in Deianira's account of how she faithfully followed Nessus's precepts:

they were in my memory, like the graven words which no hand may wash from a tablet of bronze.

In a coming post we'll look at the charm itself in the Women of Trachis.

Deianira and the brutal charms of Aphrodite

Women of Trachis 458-59:

τὸ μὴ πυθέσθαι, τοῦτό μ᾽ ἀλγύνειεν ἄν: τὸ δ᾽ εἰδέναι τί δεινόν;

it is not learning the truth that would pain me.

But to know it, what is terrible in that?

Deianira is trying to wrest the truth from Lichas, after learning from a local source that Lichas, the official herald of Heracles, has not been entirely -- or even remotely -- straightforward about Iole.

The queen here sounds like Oedipus. She wants to "unconceal" what is hidden, in this case the fact that Iole is no mere sexual dalliance, but in reality another queen, another Deianira. It is with this oddness of the doppelgänger in mind that we can hear a richer sense of δεινόν here. It's tending toward the full complexity found in the Ode to Man sung in the Antigone:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει

Many things are uncanny, none stranger than man.

It was Heidegger who caught the sense of Das Unheimlich (the uncanny) in the Ode to Man -- a sense rife with tension between something wondrous and something strange, to the point of inducing a weird combination of exaltation and terror. The ode from the Antigone crosses into the territory of the sublime.

Deianira is not quite that far from the commonplace, but she's moving in that direction. If anyone ever married a strange, wondrous and terrible man, it was she, and now he's bringing to her another her. She does not know this yet. At this point, she thinks there can be no terror in knowing.

The Oedipal urge to know is, let's be clear, not peculiar to Oedipus, or to kings of Thebes, or to males of the species. In the Women of Trachis, where so much is a matter of waiting (ἀναμένω) and wanting to know, the suspense begins at the play's very beginning:

λόγος μέν ἐστ᾽ ἀρχαῖος ἀνθρώπων φανείς, ὡς οὐκ ἂν αἰῶν᾽ ἐκμάθοις βροτῶν, πρὶν ἂν θάνῃ τις, οὔτ᾽ εἰ χρηστὸς οὔτ᾽ εἴ τῳ κακός:  
(lines 1-3)

There is a saying among men, put forth long ago, that you cannot judge a mortal's life and know whether it is good or bad until he dies.

The space of waiting for the truth to appear is where the Women of Trachis takes place. It is found at every turn, as, for instance, when Deianira tells the chorus that she has applied the "charm" given her by Nessus:

Deianira
and yet, I cannot know until I am in close quarters [προσωμίλησά] with experience [πείρᾳ]   (590-91)

Deianira here uses πείρᾳ - "experiment, experience" in speaking of how, and when, she will know whether the charm works. πείρᾳ is the root not only of experience, but of "empirical." The queen is in fact articulating a scientific commonplace -- one does not know the truth of an experiment until the result is experienced.

The chorus concurs, using a verb form of the same root:

Chorus Knowledge must come through action. You will never
be sure unless you put it to the test (πειρωμένη).

Deianira says she cannot know until she is προσωμίλησά  -- "until I have come to close quarters with" is a reasonable translation. One might wish not to ignore, however, that προσωμίλησά has another meaning, or a further development of its first meaning, i.e., "to have intercourse with." The Greek sense of knowing through experience reaches a more intimate mode here, one that may or may not be susceptible to the rigorous hygiene of scientific clarity.

Oedipus only comes to "know" who he is when he has grappled so intimately with his origin as to discover he is married to her -- he is both husband and son, Jocasta is mother and wife, and the uncanniness of their coupling is a doubling whose impropriety neither can bear.

For Deianira, the suspense is not who she is, but whose. Her opening speech recounts the terrible memory of how she waited in suspense to learn who'd bear her away -- Achelous the frightening river god, or Heracles. Further on, not long after she says it can't be terrible to know, the choral ode that begins on line 499 evokes that agon even more vividly. It begins:

μέγα τι σθένος ἁ Κύπρις ἐκφέρεται νίκας ἀεί 

Great is the power of the victory Cypris bears away.

It continues:

οἳ τότ᾽ ἀολλεῖς ἴσαν ἐς μέσον ἱέμενοι λεχέων: 
μόνα δ᾽ εὔλεκτρος ἐν μέσῳ Κύπρις ῥαβδονόμει ξυνοῦσα.

These two then met in a mass, lusting to win a bride, and the Cyprian goddess of nuptial joy joined in as umpire in the middle. (513-15)

Aphrodite here is doubly potent -- not only has she triangulated these hearts -- the god's and the demi-god's -- to Deianira, she's also the umpire. As both motivator of the contest and official who decides its outcome, she has already considerably complicated the "experiment." What appears to be a test or contest of "well-matched rivals" to see who wins the girl could remind us of Aphrodite's appearance at the opening of the Hippolytus, making it clear that she wrote the script and knows its outcome before it begins.

So as Deianira sits far off, her far-beaming eyes viewing the struggle they have caused to occur, she might not quite appreciate how unclear it is whether she's witnessing a fair fight in close quarters, or, quite possibly, one that has been fixed from the start, that is, scripted, like a potion, or charm, worked up in order to bring about a certain preconcerted conclusion. She is doubly suspended -- neither sure of the outcome, nor whether there is any doubt about it to begin with. If it's a fair fight, the empirical method will bear true knowledge. However -- and this is relevant to the action of Nessus' charm -- if the game is rigged beforehand, the outcome will prove nothing. In that case, there is no empirical truth to learn, no knowledge born of experience. The witness might as well be blind.

The choral ode stages the fight as a knock-down, drag-out affair:

τότ᾽ ἦν χερός, ἦν δὲ τόξων πάταγος, 
ταυρείων τ᾽ ἀνάμιγδα κεράτων: 520ἦν δ᾽ ἀμφίπλεκτοι κλίμακες, 
ἦν δὲ μετώπων ὀλόεντα 
πλήγματα, καὶ στόνος ἀμφοῖν. 

ἁ δ᾽ εὐῶπις ἁβρὰ 
τηλαυγεῖ παρ᾽ ὄχθῳ 525ἧστο, τὸν ὃν προσμένουσ᾽ ἀκοίταν. 

ἀγὼν δὲ μαργᾷ μὲν οἷα φράζω: 

There was clatter of fists and clang of bow and crash of a bull's horns mixed together; [520] then there were close-locked grapplings and deadly blows from foreheads and loud deep cries from both. 

The delicate beauty with far-beaming eyes sat on the side of a hill, awaiting the husband that would be hers.

So the mad battle rages, as I narrate.

Note the superb glide from the brutal grapplings of head-butts and fists and wrestling holds, and all the clatter and clash of it, to the beautiful eyes, τηλαυγεῖ: "far beaming" of the girl sitting far off on the hill, waiting.

The ode finishes on a note that might be less surprising if we consider that the girl awaiting her fate is in no way able to control it, despite her being both its origin and goal:

τὸ δ᾽ ἀμφινείκητον ὄμμα νύμφας ἐλεινὸν ἀμμένει: κἀπὸ ματρὸς ἄφαρ βέβακεν, 530ὥστε πόρτις ἐρήμα.

But the face of the bride which is the prize of the strife awaits the end in piteous anguish. 

Straightaway she walks from her mother like a solitary calf.

How strange that the play of beauty and brute force ends like this. No festive description of awarding the "prize" to Heracles (the victory belongs to Cypris), no joy lighting up Deianira's face as the bestial fight reaches its decision. The titanic bout for the most beautiful woman on Earth ends with the prize isolated, walking, not towards her man, but away from the only love she has known. Moving not with the pride of one betrothed, but like a calf. Sophocles never does the expected -- if we can be open to his strangeness, he'll teach us something about reading.

Rending through rendering: Deianira's caustic tongue

Ovid's letter from Deianira to Hercules (Heroides #9) recounts the standard list of the hero's mighty deeds:

. . . of enormous serpents, throttled and coiling their lengths about your infant hand; how the Tegeaean boar has his lair on cypress-bearing Erymanthus, and afflicts the ground with his vast weight. You do not omit the skulls nailed up in Thracian homes, nor the mares made fat with the flesh of slain men; nor the triple prodigy, Geryones, rich in Iberian cattle, who was one in three; nor Cerberus, branching from one trunk into a three-fold dog, his hair inwoven with the threatening snake; nor the fertile serpent that sprang forth again from the fruitful wound, grown rich from her own hurt; nor him whose mass hung heavy between your left side and left arm as your hand clutched his throat; nor the equestrian array that put ill trust in their feet and dual form, confounded by you on the ridges of Thessaly. (Showalter translation, 85ff).

Only here, the hero, dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Omphale, is the one speaking them . . .

Deianira goes further than the painter to imagine the Lydian nymph in an exchange of Hercules' famed attire:

These deeds can you recount, gaily arrayed in a Sidonian gown? Does not your dress rob from your tongue all utterance? The nymph-daughter of Jardanus has even tricked herself out in your arms, and won famous triumphs from the vanquished hero. Go now, puff up your spirit and recount your brave deeds done; . . .  O shame, that the rough skin stripped from the flanks of the shaggy lion has covered a woman’s delicate side! You are mistaken, and know it not – that spoil is not from the lion, but from you; you are victor over the beast, but she over you. A woman has borne the darts blackened with the venom of Lerna, a woman scarce strong enough to carry the spindle heavy with wool; a woman has taken in her hand the club that overcame wild beasts, and in the mirror gazed upon the armor of her lord!

The queen's scathing image combines moral force with witheringly vivid reflection. The imagined mirror in which Omphale admires herself is designed to burn Heracles' conscience to the ground.

Before he dons the shirt of Nessus, Heracles is already sizzling. Prior to putting on the blood-smeared texta, Ovid finds the poetic equivalent of the Lernaean Hydra's blood in the caustic sarcasm of Deianira's text:

Inlita Nesseo misi tibi texta veneno.