Paradiso 16: Some help from John S. Carroll

The dense texture of Florentine family names in Paradiso 16 is truly a thick wood, yet there are traces in it of an argument developed by Cacciaguida that has larger implications. Here's one particularly thorny passage, followed by a comment found among the Dartmouth commentaries.

Had not the folk, which most of all the world
Degenerates, been a step-dame unto Caesar,
But as a mother to her son benignant, 

Some who turn Florentines, and trade and discount,
Would have gone back again to Simifonte
There where their grandsires went about as beggars 

At Montemurlo still would be the Counts,
The Cerchi in the parish of Acone,
Perhaps in Valdigrieve the Buondelmonti. 

Ever the intermingling of the people
Has been the source of malady in cities,
As in the body food it surfeits on; 

And a blind bull more headlong plunges down
Than a blind lamb; and very often cuts
Better and more a single sword than five. (16.58-72)

Robert Hollander helpfully points to the Expositions by John S. Carroll on this passage from Paradiso 16. Carroll adduces several other sources, including Villani, Villari, and John Richard Green:

58-66:

It is to this 'confusion of persons' – this contamination of a pure citizenship by the introduction of inferior blood from the surrounding country , . . .  that Cacciaguida traces the evil that had befallen the city, and the blame of this he lays upon the Church, 'the people that on earth degenerates most.' Had the Church acted the part of a mother instead of a stepmother to Caesar, there had been no need for the Cerchi, the Buondelmonti, and others to have been brought within the city walls [Par. xvi. 58-66]. 

It is not known who was the incomer from Simifonti, now a Florentine banker and merchant, but whose grandfather went round begging in his native village. Simifonti is in the Val d'Elsa. For the taking and destruction by the Florentines in 1202, see Villani, Chron. v. 30; Villari, Flor. History, 163-166. 

The Cerchi came from Acone, a village near Florence whose exact stituation is uncertain. They rapidly became one of the richest families, lived in grand style, yet remained rustic and uncultured in manners: Villani calls them 'luxurious, inoffensive, uncultured and ungracious, like folk come in a short time to great estate and power' (viii. 39). As the leaders of the White Guelphs, Dante calls that party la parte selvaggia (Inf. vi. 65), the savage, rustic, boorish party. For the futher reference to them in the present Canto (94-99) see note* [below]. 

The Montemurlo of l. 64 was a castle near Pistoja, which the Conti Guidi were forced to sell to Florence because they were not able to hold it against the Pistojans. See Villani, v. 31]. To understand this, we must remember that the strife in Florence sprang from the existence within her of two races. Villani and Dante alike trace the origin of this difference to the conquest of Fiesole by Florence, and the consequent mingling of the two peoples. According to Villani, 'the Florentines are to-day descended from two peoples so diverse in manners, and who ever of old had been enemies, as the Roman people and the people of Fiesole; and this we can see by true experience, and by the divers changes and parties and factions which, after the said two people had been united into one, came to pass in Florence from time to time' [Chronicle, iv. 7. See also i. 38]. In the denunciation of the Florentines which Dante puts into the mouth of Brunetto Latini, the same view is taken of the contrast between

'That ungrateful and malignant people
Which of old time from Fiesole descended,
And smacks still of the mountain and the granite,'

[Inf. xv. 61-78.]

and 'the holy seed of the Romans,' from which the poet undoubtedly believed himself descended. Even if we put aside much of this as legendary, it remains true, as Prof. Villari says, that 'the diversity between the Germanic strain in the nobility and the Latin blood of the people, really constituted a strong element of discord.... Its whole territory bristled with the castles of feudal barons of Germanic descent, all hostile to Florence, and many of whom, safely ensconced on the neighbouring hill of Fiesole, were always ready to swoop down on Florentine soil' [The First Two Centuries of Florentine History, p. 73 (Eng. transl.) – an invaluable book for the understanding of the ever-changing factions of early Florence]. 

As the commerce of the city grew, it became necessary to make the roads safe for traffic, and the only way of doing this seemed to be by compelling the robber-barons to come inside the city-walls. But, as Green says, 

'it was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls.  

Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled' [John Richard Green, Stray Studies from England and Italy, p. 162]. 

And this terrible state of things Dante traced to the Papacy. Had the Church given the temporal power to Caesar as it ought to have done, the Emperor, in Dante's belief, would have proved strong enough to have brought the territorial nobles under the restraint of law, and thus have obviated the necessity to which the cities were reduced of adding a new and dangerous element of discord to those already existing within their walls. (emphasis added)

*Note on the Cerchi: 

ll. 94-99 refer to the Cerchi (see note {in comm. to vv. 58- 66}). Their houses were above the Porta San Piero, and had been acquired by this wealthy family from the Conti Guidi, who sprang from the ancient house of the Ravignani, the head of which was the Bellincion Berti of Par. xv. 112. The fellonia or treason charged against the Cerchi seems to be their failure as leaders of the Whites to defend the city against the Blacks in Nov. 1301. Dino Compagni says 'their hearts failed them through cowardice': the Priors gave them orders to prepare for defence and urged them 'to play the man.' But 'from avarice' they refused to pay the hired troops, made practically no preparations, and so handed over the city to six terrible days of outrage and pillage. The exile of the Whites which followed is the 'lightening of the barque' to which Dante refers in l. 96. For a full account of this disastrous struggle between the Bianchi and the Neri, see Dino Compagni's Chronicle, Bk. II. and Villani's, viii. 38-49.

From geometry to rapture: Paradiso 14

Paradiso 14 begins with a geometric structure, captured in the rhetorical pattern known as chiasmus. The word pattern is reflecting, or mimicking, the echoic pattern of water moving in a round vase - from center to circumference, or vice versa, depending upon where something strikes it:

Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro
movesi l'acqua in un ritondo vaso,
secondo ch'è percosso fuori o dentro: 

From centre unto rim, from rim to centre,
In a round vase the water moves itself,
As from without 'tis struck or from within. (Par. 14. 1-3)

The geometry is not only exact, it is also ineluctable -- the water (or a light, or a sound) will always behave this way. The structure of the circle is such that it will produce the same result each time something either strikes it on the outside, or drops from above.

Such patterns and their identification belong to the work of pattern recognition, which Dante draws our attention to (as we saw a few posts back) with regard to the patterns found in the night sky, and in the sphere of the sun. The reliability of knowledge, we learned, depends upon our capacity to detect formal patterns in nature as well as in language.

Sophie Germain

Some patterns occur in ways that are easily explicable. Others occur quite reliably, but seem less easily explained. Chladni plates (named for Ernst Chladni, whose research explored the invisible interface between sounds and visual patterns) offer evidence of relationships between grains of sand (or couscous) and different frequencies which manifest in distinct patterns at different vibrations. The relationships turn out to be mappable by equations (worked out by Sophie Germain and others) that describe wave dynamics:

Beyond the Sun

This pattern of pattern recognition is violated in Paradiso 14 right after Solomon explains how, after the Resurrection of the body, the souls will still have their glowing light, but now they will have their senses, newly strengthened and able to experience all things new.

No sooner does Solomon end his resonant (and very chiastic) account of this event (at line 66) than we hear Ed ecco -- behold! -- something new and unexpected occurs:

Ed ecco intorno, di chiarezza pari,
nascere un lustro sopra quel che v'era,
per guisa d'orizzonte che rischiari. 

E sì come al salir di prima sera
comincian per lo ciel nove parvenze,
sì che la vista pare e non par vera, 

parvemi lì novelle sussistenze
cominciare a vedere, e fare un giro
di fuor da l'altre due circunferenze. 

Oh vero sfavillar del Santo Spiro!
come si fece sùbito e candente
a li occhi miei che, vinti, nol soffriro!

And lo! all round about of equal brightness
Arose a lustre over what was there,
Like an horizon that is clearing up.

And as at rise of early eve begin
Along the welkin new appearances,
So that the sight seems real and unreal,

It seemed to me that new subsistences
Began there to be seen, and make a circle
Outside the other two circumferences.

O very sparkling of the Holy Spirit,
How sudden and incandescent it became
Unto mine eyes, that vanquished bore it not!  (14.70-78)

The moment is mysterious -- a third circle, but not quite stable, begins to surround the other two. It glimmers like faint lights flickering at dusk, then suddenly becoming blindingly incandescent, overpowering the pilgrim's eyes, which had so far supported the potent rays of the Sun.

Joachim of Flora

Commentators have pondered he meaning of this third circle at length, relating it to the other circles as the Holy Spirit to the Father and Sun, and to prophecies of the Calabrian Joachim of Flora and the dawning of a third age.

What we can say for sure is that in this gloaming nothing is sure: The nove parvenze, or novel appearances, are said to "appear to begin to be seen,"

Si che la vista pare e non par vera,  

So that the sight seems real and unreal.

The canto moves from a realm of regular and predictable order (like the geometry of a vase of water) to a place where appearances are such that they suspend, put into question, our apprehension of pattern. This cognitive predicament, known to psychologists as apophenia, has been described as "the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data." To find a man or a face in the moon is a common example. The article goes on to note:

Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling.

Paradiso 14 is quite clear in breaking with patterns it has produced. It's at line 67 for example that we expect to find another set of 33 lines reiterating the first two, whose clear structure was noted by early commentators like Benvenuto da Imola.

This moment of sunset takes place just as Dante and Beatrice, before they even know it, leave the sun and with it the confidence owed to its clarity. In this darkling moment nothing is certain. If the new circle contains dottori, learned authors, it's unclear how many authors, let alone who they might be. It's all indistinct, says Benvenuto:

non tamen plene et manifeste sicut primae, sed confuse, quia hic erat maximus numerus doctorum quos autor non poterat nominatim numerare, sicut fecerat superiores, nec distincte; sed sub involucro comprehendit omnes.

A new circle appears to appear, and the passage puts stress not upon the solid form of a new circumference, but rather seems to find astonishment that what had been the circumference seems surpassed (sublated, i.e., cancelled and transcended)  by a new circumference -- yet one whose borders remain vague, with the possibility of containing millions of sussistenze in its sparkling (sfavillar). 

The challenge of not knowing is not trivial. It's at this moment that Dante and Beatrice are translated to the sphere of Mars, and now the pilgrim seems to fall back upon his own powers. He raises his eyes, and, as he does so, he and Beatrice are raised up; he now performs a sacrifice in his breast. He is doing these things unprompted and undirected. The action brings results -- a glowing redness in the new sphere appears to answer and approve his internal holocaust.

Close attention to the remainder of the canto will show that the language of action, of performative utterance, supplants the descriptive language of pattern. As the vast galaxy within Mars appears, the vision seems boundless, open-ended, and what the pilgrim begins to experience are, not patterns, not meanings that are understood, but potent beauties that seize the soul:

E come giga e arpa, in tempra tesa
di molte corde, fa dolce tintinno
a tal da cui la nota non è intesa,

così da' lumi che lì m'apparinno
s'accogliea per la croce una melode
che mi rapiva, sanza intender l'inno.

And as a lute and harp, accordant strung
With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make
To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,

So from the lights that there to me appeared
Upgathered through the cross a melody,
Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn. (14.118-123)

Three times in quick succession we hear that something is non intesa -- not understood. To go from the Sun to Mars is to go from an aesthetic of beauty to that of the sublime. Perhaps nothing makes this more "clear" than the simile that juxtaposes the vast armies that seem to move along the flashing crossbeams to specks and motes moving at random in a sunbeam. The beam shines through an artificial shade devised by human cunning and art to shield us from the harsh sun. Ingenio e arte provide a glimpse of what was always there, unseen in the full light of day:

così si veggion qui diritte e torte, 
veloci e tarde, rinovando vista, 
le minuzie d'i corpi, lunghe e corte, 

moversi per lo raggio onde si lista 
talvolta l'ombra che, per sua difesa, 
la gente con ingegno e arte acquista.

Thus level and aslant and swift and slow
We here behold, renewing still the sight,
The particles of bodies long and short,

Across the sunbeam move, wherewith is listed
Sometimes the shade, which for their own defence
People with cunning and with art contrive. (14.112-117)

The random specks are not caught up in some Chladni pattern - they remain random. And, of course, they are tiny, compared to the galassia and the giant cross, and the figures moving along its beams. This is perhaps as Miltonic as Dante gets -- vast and small, order and unforced happenstance, equated in a heightened moment of sublime apprehension -- not of pattern, rather a new rapture, potent and uncircumscribed by finite meaning.

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.

Science vs mageía: The Greeks' polemic view

710 ἔθελγέ μ᾽:  he bewitched me

Before we discuss the nature of charm in The Women of Trachis, let's take another quick look at how Sophocles quietly makes us aware that the heroic career of Heracles begins and ends with Centaurs. Chiron stands at the beginning, the divinely wise master of the greatest Greek heroes. Nessus, after bewitching Deianira, sends Heracles a "gift" that ends his labors, and his earthly life.

What's worth noting is the symmetry: these two centaurs are positioned like bookends at either end of the hero's life. One brings enlightenment, skills, the powers of the mind and body, medicine; the other brings delusion, error, and death.

Deianira links the two in her momentous epiphany. Nessus, she says,

bewitched me in order to destroy the man who had shot him. And now too late I gain the knowledge of this, when it can no longer help. Yes, I alone—unless my outlook prove mistaken—I, miserable one, shall completely destroy him! For I know that the arrow which made the wound harmed [715] even the god Cheiron, and that it kills all varieties of beasts that it touches. Since it is this same black venom in the blood that has passed out through the wound of Nessus, must it not kill Heracles also?

Deianira is beginning to work out, to reason about, what has happened. She is no longer in thrall to the dark power of the charm.

Today we are confident that if we mix vinegar and baking soda, we can make a bottle rocket. It's a recipe or formula that produces a predictable result so long as the materials are combined in the prescribed manner.

The ancient world was suffused in charms that had designs upon people. I recently came across a collection of ancient Mesopotamian charms which in fact were counter-charms. They were used to ward off, or neutralize, the work of other people's charms.

Here's a sample counter-charm from Babylonia taken from a scholarly collection at the Universitat Wurzburg:

[If a m]an is constantly frightened (and restless) on his (sick)bed, healways suffers from [depres]sion, 4he has [ver]tigo (and) his feet cause him a stinging pain, 5figurines of that man have been buried in the tomb of a dead person. 6[In the mornin]g you purify the claypit. You take clay from the clay pit. 7You make [two figur]ines.[For the] male [figurine]: 8[You take] a bronze ring [an]d you press(it) on [his] wais[t]. 9[... of ced]ar wo[od ...] you press (it) on her[wa]ist. 10You have them stand [...] ... [...]. 11[...], you libate beer.12[...] ... [

While this practice made for an elaborate system in the Middle East, it was not received without skepticism by the Greeks, according to the authors of the Wurzburg site:

from the very beginning, mageía is not a word that objectively refers to ancient Near Eastern practices, but a term that carries a value judgment prompted by Greek perceptions of the Middle East. Therefore, the origins of ‘magic’ may well be regarded as an early example of ‘Orientalism’, and, characteristically, a blend of fascination, contempt and misunderstanding has accompanied the concept of magic ever since its inception.

Indeed, the authors go on:

Early on Greek authors used the term mágos, a direct loan from Old Persian maguš, not only as a designation for Iranian experts in religious matters, but also as a pejorative term for ritualists whose practices, in the author’s view, lack piety. Derived from mágos, the term mageía soon ubiquitously carried the same polemical connotation. Usually it served as a derogatory label for ritualistic activities that are, by using this designation, characterized as obscure, irrational and impious. Ultimately, in this line of argument, mageía is a powerful deception performed by shrewd practitioners on their immature, credulous victims.

This is not to say the Greeks didn't enjoy elaborate narratives involving magic. But if we think of a character like Circe in the Odyssey, we find a localized "shrewd practitioner" whose powers are not unlimited, and in fact are thwarted by Odysseus with the help of a counter-charm Homer calls moly. For the Greeks, the world was shaped less by rote charms and more by relations between humans and the gods.

One can almost feel the Greek contempt for the roteness of magic formulae. To succeed, a charm does not depend upon anything other than the proper repetition of a series of actions. One need not know chemistry or science, one simply (mindlessly) follows a set of instructions, with the idea that a certain result is guaranteed.

We might suggest a basic distinction here between a charm and a scientific experiment. If one is applying knowledge of materials, of chemical properties, to discover new facts about the world, and follows a set of procedures to that end, this is cognitive: one learns something about the properties of materials and about the world.

But if one simply follows instructions that purport to convey power, or perform some act, there is no burden of inquiry, no yield of discovery. Rather, there's mere repetition of a set of actions. If the actions are properly executed, they produce an effect - somehow. A charm is a technique -- a power that can be accessed by anyone who can access designated materials and follow a set of scripted actions. It's dark technology, causation divorced from any understanding of its nature.

The only thing is, from the standpoint of an outside observer, it might be difficult to tell whether someone is working a charm or performing a scientific experiment -- they share a good deal of external attributes, even as the thinking and intent behind them can be entirely distinct. These happen to be the alternatives embodied in our two Centaurs: Chiron the wise teacher of science and medicine, and Nessus, persuasive Hydra-bile salesman.

The next post will look at a few more aspects of the charm motif in The Women of Trachis.

Deianira and erotic alchemy

Deianira's opening speech in Women of Trachis is a powerfully compressed reminiscence of a married woman in the prime of life. Exiled thanks to her husband's horrific act of violence against Iphitus, she looks back to when as a young girl, already the object of desire by the ancient bull-dragon-River God Achelous, she experienced a nightmarish dread of marriage (and of erotic desire), and a kind of dreamlike salvation through the mighty arms of Heracles.

The surfacing of those early fears leads to ruminations on what it's like to be married to a kind of superman action figure always away, always on call. Heracles is hounded by Hera, exploited by Eurystheus, dominated by Omphale, and about to be destroyed by Deianira, who speaks of her man as the sole guarantor of her and her children's lives and happiness.

Trachis opens at ground level, exposing the roots of men and women, the latent terrors and erotic alchemy that make it possible for a young virgin to be attractive to an ancient shape-shifting god who's the scariest thing imaginable to her; etching as well the status of a woman, a centripetal home-maker (and fertile seedbed) yoked to a potent wandering Punisher who is subject in turn to the inestimable enmity of the most powerful goddess.

ἐγὼ γὰρ ἥμην ἐκπεπληγμένη φόβῳ 

μή μοι τὸ κάλλος ἄλγος ἐξεύροι ποτέ. 

But I was struck with terror,
lest my beauty should win me torment in the end.

Right from the start, Sophocles enmeshes us in a web of opposites that repel and attract. Deianira's word for being "struck" is ἐκπλήσσω:  It carries the sense of being driven out of one's senses by shock, fear, or amazement; panic-struck. It means can also mean: seized with desire, love-struck. 

The opening of Women of Trachis is seething with latent forces, desires, and fears, some of the deepest known to women and to men. Torment and beauty sit at the root of Deianira's and Heracles' world. One might describe such an opening, in short, as over-sexed.

Erotic spells, potions, curses, and mojo

As the Nurse and Phaedra continue to talk about how to resolve Phaedra's plight -- her passion for Hippolytus -- in a way that does not involve her death, the Nurse alludes to the potency of verbal spells:

There are incantations, and words that charm: something will turn up to cure this love. [480]

εἰσὶν δ᾽ ἐπῳδαὶ καὶ λόγοι θελκτήριοι:
φανήσεταί τι τῆσδε φάρμακον νόσου. 480

A little while later, she says she suddenly remembers she has a drug in the house. She has already described Phaedra's condition as νόσος - which can mean literal sickness, as well as a bane, or madness, so thinking of a medicine is perfectly understandable. But it does shift the kind of magic from words to things:

Nurse 

I have love-medicine (θελκτήρια ἔρωτος) [510] within the house—I just thought of it this very moment—that will free you from this malady without disgrace to you or harm to your mind, if only you do not flinch. 

***We must get some token from the man you love, a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, [515] then compound from the twain a single blessing.*** 

Phaedra 

This drug (φάρμακον), is it an ointment or a potion? 

Nurse 

I know not: strive for benefit, not lore.

Note the lines above in italics are omitted in Grene's edition, but are found in Kovacs on Perseus. To complicate matters, Richard Hamilton's Bryn Mawr edition has "word" (logos) instead of "lock of hair" (πλόκον). He assumes it would be a magic word identifying Hippolytus.

Phaedra asks about the medicine. But for the Nurse, once it's a question of a potion, ointment, or compound, bothering to understand what it is becomes pointless. All that matters is what it does.

There seems a certain incoherence here. The Nurse's words lead us to think she intends some magic drug or object. Yet in the next scene, the first thing we learn when, mediated by Phaedra, we overhear the Nurse talking to Hippolytus is that she has revealed to him Phaedra's passion for him. We never hear the Nurse's exact words, or learn why she tells him, and we also do not hear her extracting his oath of silence. We the audience have auditory gaps in our understanding. This will probably merit some attention further on. The seeming inconsistency might explain why Grene omits the lines that introduce thingly magic entirely. 

For now I just want to point to some of the thinking about ancient love spells, charms, and the like, since these modes of trying to cause someone to fall in love, or to fall out of love with someone else (separation spells), seem to go back as far as language and inscriptions can take us. 

Christopher Faraone associates much erotic incantation with the form of the curse. "What I discovered was that most of the technologies that are used in spells for throwing erotic passion into someone are borrowed from the realm of cursing," he says in an interview.

Eleni Pachoumi surveys several kinds of spells in this article. Some are supposed to lead the loved one to the lover; others unbind them from those they currently love. She also speaks of defixiones -- curse tablets in which a god or gods are asked to do harm to someone.

[Update: Here's a note on two medieval love charms.]

Incidentally, it is gratifying to see articles like Pachoumi's published in an open access format, rather than behind the accursed paywalls of JSTOR, Project MUSE, or others.

Here's an ancient curse - the words and translation are here:

Horace's very funny satire I.8, has Priapus as a half-carved block of wood recounting how he was forced to confront two witches invading Maecenas's garden.

While Horace was having his laugh, credence in the power of lotions, powders and potions that attract, separate, or destroy is alive and well in the world of love, magic and commerce:

Lucky Mojo

Another look at Milton on church and state

Theo Hobson, John Milton’s vision:

It is far more accurate to say that Milton was a key founder of the American liberal tradition, than of the British one. This is not just because of his republicanism: even more important to him than republicanism was his aversion to religious establishment. During the interregnum (1649-60) he worried that England's revolution was uncertain until Oliver Cromwell had clearly separated church and state, and instituted an explicitly secular liberal state (which Cromwell never quite did). This was the ideological obsession of Milton's life.

So if Milton were to revisit us today he would not rejoice at the progress of liberty since his death. He would be depressed to see that the country of his birth retains a monarchy, and even more so an established church. 

via wood s lot

Latter-Day Athenian

Here's the article on Machiavelli noted by Mussy:

The Florentine

The man who taught rulers how to rule.

by Claudia Roth Pierpont