Living end: Heracles' Fate in Women of Trachis

λείπου μηδὲ σύ, παρθέν᾽, ἀπ᾽ οἴκων, 

μεγάλους μὲν ἰδοῦσα νέους θανάτους, 

πολλὰ δὲ πήματα καὶ καινοπαθῆ,

κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς.

And you, maiden, do not be left at the house. 

You have seen immense, shocking death, 

with sorrows great in number and strange. 

And in all of them there is nothing that is not Zeus.

The entrance of Heracles in Women of Trachis is an image of the supine hero at his most  weak, vulnerable moment. We never see him in his prime. Imagine an American superhero in a film that presents only the moment of his impotent, agonizing death. The sole reason we remember our heroes (or go to the box office) - their immortal deeds and abilities - is absent. Imagine Superman reduced to an unrecognizable hulk, crying out in frustrated, mystified anger. Helpless, then dead.

As his flesh is being eaten away, Heracles evokes his former role, struck by the seemingly intimate absurdity of how he was brought down:

Not spearmen on the battlefield, nor the Giants' earth-born army, nor the might of savage beasts, [1060] not Hellas, nor the land of the barbarian, nor any land which I came to purify has ever done this to me. No, a woman, a weak woman, born not to the strength of man, all alone has brought me down without a stroke of the sword!

His helplessness tempts us to write Heracles off as a has-been, no longer capable of acting, of doing anything worthwhile for or in the world to which he had so long labored to bring vital order.

The word he chooses has more than order in it. He says καθαίρων ἱκόμην - "I came to purify." καθαίρων carries the root sense of "cleanse," but connotes a purging act that carries an ethical, and thus sacred, mode of action. He had a job to do, as the son of Zeus. His career, all of it, was Zeus, and now this unintelligible turn defies understanding -- why does his Father allow this?

It would be very 20th Century of us to adopt the approved smartass attitude. Hyllus speaks with seeming anger of the lack of compassion of the gods. But the story of Heracles deliberately addresses that apparent inference, that glib assumption that the existence of incomprehensible suffering is a sure sign that we humans are essentially alone. (One might ask a confirmed atheist if that conviction requires god to not exist, or simply to not care about us.)

Heracles would of course be a great hero if we only remembered him for his accomplishments of strength and cunning, but he would not be a tragic hero. Sophocles is adding another dimension - one which he clearly feels is necessary for his Athenian audience to understand, ponder, and remember.

Why does he want us to ponder this dimension of the strongest human being's career? Throughout the play we have been hearing (from Deianira, mostly) that one bears an innocence, and ignorance, of the suffering of others until one experiences it for oneself. That would suggest that the gods might not have much understanding of mortal slings and arrows.

Labors of Heracles, 3rd c. CE

But Heracles is that nearly immortal being who, at the last, is consumed by an extraordinary experience of mortality. But why, if the gods do not understand or care about what we suffer, would Zeus have prophesied in advance all that's happening to his beloved son?

Perhaps we need to look past the spectacle of violent pain to examine how Heracles handles it. At first he is loudly complaining and vengeful, seeking to kill Deianira. But he moves on to other tasks, which he makes Hyllus swear to perform before telling him what they are. They are not trivial: Enabling the death of his father, and marrying his father's new chosen queen. It is the allegedly Oedipal desire of all sons that the father here is imposing upon his beloved son.

It would be consistent with the thinking of the hero to make this demand upon Hyllus only if he saw in it a reflection of his own response to his father's imposed word. For he now understands that his fate was foretold by his father; his fate "is" Zeus - and this, as unintelligible as it is, he now sees summoning him to duty.

He has broken the world he was supposed to cleanse:

• broken his first family with Megara and her children; 
• broken his marriage to Deianira, and 
• broken the world of Eurytus, killing his son and raping his daughter. 

The temptation to curse Zeus and die might be quite powerful. Or to order Hyllus to kill Iole and all her people. Or, to seize the throne of Trachis. But this is not what Heracles does. Instead, he makes a last stab at mending things. Hyllus must marry Iole - an unthinkable thing for all - the request causes Hyllus to doubt his father's sanity (which in turn awakens Heracles' torment). Yet in one stroke, it gives both children status as heirs of Heracles, gives legal protected status to those children of the next generation he cares most about, and creates a protective dynastic order. It is an act that might seem baffling or strange to all, but in its effects, it authors a remnant saved from a broken world.

Asking his own son to prepare his pyre and to set it ablaze - this too suggests a duty that is unthinkable. Hyllus agrees to prepare the pyre, but not to light it, and Heracles agrees. That task will fall to Philoctetes. The entire series of commands up to the blaze is like the charm of Nessus, only here, perhaps, a countercharm.

The question of whether Heracles "knows" that his fate is to undergo apotheosis is undecidable - the play offers no indication (other than the negative -- Heracles promises to come back from "below" to curse Hyllus of that possibility, which is no assurance of anything).

Heracles steels his "tough soul" to undergo death. Only the actual experience of death will decide whether Hyllus is a polluting murderer (as the boy himself believes (1028-29)), or a healing physician, as Heracles claims. Death swallows infinite pain, but is this all the healing one can hope for? It is our fate to not know our fate until it has happened to us - as Deianira says at the very beginning of the play:

λόγος μέν ἐστ᾽ ἀρχαῖος ἀνθρώπων φανείς, 

ὡς οὐκ ἂν αἰῶν᾽ ἐκμάθοις βροτῶν, πρὶν ἂν 

θάνῃ τις, οὔτ᾽ εἰ χρηστὸς οὔτ᾽ εἴ τῳ κακός: 

There is an ancient word people tell

that none can judge the life of any man

for good or bad until that man is dead;

The fate of Heracles demonstrates that ancient word (λόγος) with the deadbolt force of a syllogism. No one knew better than Deianira how powerless we are to know, before our end, our end. Heracles orders his own death believing he is fulfilling a foretold fate, as the son of the highest god, but not knowing what that fate might be. It is left to Hyllus to offer, as the only true thing that can be said, the hypothesis that all these ancient words did not lack sense.

The first word of the play is "λόγος"; the last is "Ζεύς." If the alpha and omega of the Women of Trachis are one, if the play trues its circle, then Heracles and Hyllus are dutiful in believing they are on sacred ground. Are they obeying the cathartic will of Zeus, or collaborating in a primal act of patricide? If the former, the career of Heracles ends with a final heroic purgation. If not, it's the most polluting act of murderous nihilism. Heracles is borne off alive. Until his end, can one say?

There is nothing here that is not Zeus.

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.

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.