[10] The scene is laid before the house at Trachis.
Deianeira is alone with a female slave, an old and attached domestic, who has been the nurse of her children. Communing with her own thoughts, rather than directly addressing her attendant, the wife of Heracles recalls the sorrows which have been her portion from youth upwards,—culminating now in a terrible anxiety concerning her absent lord. It is fifteen months since he left home; but no tidings have come from him. And she feels almost sure that something is amiss, when she thinks of a certain tablet which he left with her...
Here the aged Nurse ventures to interpose. Deianeira has several sons; why should not one of them,—Hyllus, for example, the eldest,—go in search of his father?
Just then Hyllus himself is seen approaching, and in haste; for he has news to tell. Heracles is, or soon will be, in Euboea, warring against Oechalia, the city of Eurytus. During the past year he has been in servitude to Omphalè, a Lydian woman.
Deianeira then tells her son the purport of the tablet to which she had previously alluded. It contains an oracle, which shows that this war in Euboea must decide the fate of Heracles; he will die; or he will thenceforth live in peace.
Hyllus at once resolves to join his father in Euboea, and departs for that purpose.
The Chorus now enters: it consists of fifteen Trachinian maidens, full of kindly sympathy for the Aetolian princess
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whom a strange destiny has brought to dwell among them. Invoking the Sun-god, they implore him to reveal where Heracles now is. Deianeira, they hear, is pining inconsolably. Fate vexes, while it also glorifies, her husband; but he is not suffered to perish. Let her keep a good courage: sorrow comes to all mortals, but joy also, in its turn; and Zeus is not unmindful of his children.
Deianeira sadly replies that the young maidens cannot
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measure such trouble as hers; may they ever be strangers to it! But they shall know her latest and worst anxiety. When Heracles left home, he told her that, if he did not return at the end of fifteen months, she must account him dead. He even explained how his property was to be divided in that event. But, if he survived the fifteenth month, then he would have a peaceful life. Such was the teaching of an oracle which he had written down at Dodona. And the fulfilment of that oracle is now due ...
A Messenger is seen coming; the wreath on his head betokens glad tidings. Heracles lives, is victorious, and will soon come home. Lichas, the herald, has already arrived; but the excited Trachinians, thronging around him, have retarded his progress towards the house.
With an utterance of thanksgiving to Zeus, Deianeira calls upon the maidens of the Chorus and the maidens of her own household to raise a song of joy.
The Chorus respond with a short ode, in the nature of a
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paean.
Before it ceases, Lichas is in sight; a train of captive Euboean women follows him.
In reply to the eager questions of his mistress, Lichas says that Heracles is now at Cape Cenaeum in Euboea, engaged in dedicating a sanctuary to Zeus. These maidens are captives, taken when Oechalia was destroyed: Heracles chose them out ‘for himself and for the gods.’
And then Lichas tells how Heracles has been employed during the past fifteen months; how, for a year, he was the slave of Omphalè; and how, when freed, he avenged that disgrace upon its ultimate author, Eurytus. Heracles himself, the herald adds, will soon arrive.
Deianeira rejoices, though a shadow flits across her joy as she looks at the ill-fated captives: may Zeus never so visit
her children!
Among these captives, there is one who strangely interests her; the girl's mien is at once so sorrowful and so noble. She questions her; but the stranger remains silent. ‘Who is she, Lichas?’ But the herald does not know,—indeed, has not cared to ask. Deianeira then directs him to conduct the captives into the house.
She herself is about to follow him, when the Messenger, who had first announced the herald's approach, begs to speak with her alone.
He tells her that Lichas has deceived her. The mysterious maiden is no other than Iolè, the daughter of Eurytus. A passion for Iolè was the true motive of Heracles in destroying Oechalia. Eurytus had refused to give him the maiden. Lichas himself had avowed this to the Trachinians.
Lichas now re-enters, to ask for Deianeira's commands, as he is about to rejoin his master in Euboea. Confronted with the Messenger, and pathetically adjured by Deianeira, he confesses the truth. Heracles has an absorbing passion for Iolè; and, indeed, he gave no command of secrecy. But Lichas had feared to pain his mistress: let her pardon him; and let her bear with Iolè.
Deianeira requests Lichas to accompany her into the house. He is to take a message from her to Heracles, and a gift.
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In the ode which follows, the Chorus celebrates the resistless power of Love,—the power which now threatens Deianeira's peace, and which, in long-past days, brought Heracles to contend for her with Acheloüs. The short but vivid picture of that combat has a singular pathos at this moment of the drama.
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Deianeira reappears. She has had time now to feel what it will be to live under the same roof with the young and beautiful girl to whom her husband has transferred his love; but she harbours no angry or cruel thoughts. Her sole wish is to regain the heart of Heracles. And a resource has occurred to her. Long ago, when Heracles was taking her from Aetolia, they came to the river Evenus, where the ferryman, the Centaur Nessus, carried her across. He insulted her, and Heracles shot him with an arrow. As he lay dying, he told her that, if she wished to possess a love-charm by which she could always control the love of Heracles, she had only to collect some of the blood from his wound. She had done so, and had preserved her treasure, according to the Centaur's direction, in a place secluded from the warmth of sun or fire. She had now applied this lovecharm to the inner surface of a festal robe, which she will send as her gift to Heracles. She brings with her a casket, in which she has placed the robe.
Lichas appears, ready to depart, and receives the casket, sealed with Deianeira's signet. She had vowed, she tells him, to send her lord this robe, whenever she should hear of his safety, in order that he might wear it on the day when he made a thank-offering to the gods. Therefore Heracles must not put it on, or produce it, before that day.
The herald promises fidelity, and departs.
In a joyous strain, the Chorus express their bright hope.
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The dwellers on the coasts and hills of Malis will soon welcome the long-absent hero; and he will come home full of rekindled love for his true wife.
But Deianeira now returns to them in an altered mood. A
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strange thing has happened. In applying the love-charm to the robe, she had used a tuft of wool, which she had then thrown down in the courtyard of the house. After a short exposure to the sun's heat, this tuft of wool had shrivelled away, leaving only a powder. And she remembers that the arrow which slew Nessus was tinged with a venom deadly to all living things. She fears the worst. But she is resolved that, if any harm befalls Heracles, she will not survive him.
The Trachinian maidens are speaking faint words of comfort, when Hyllus arrives from Euboea.
He denounces his mother as a murderess. He describes how Heracles, wearing her gift, stood forth before the altar; how, as the flames rose from the sacrifice, the robe clung to him, as if glued, and spasms began to rend his frame; how, in the frenzy of those awful agonies, he slew Lichas; and how, at last, he was laid in a boat, and conveyed to the shore of Malis. He will soon be at the house,—alive, or dead.
The son ends with terrible imprecations on his mother. She goes into the house without a word.
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‘Behold,’ cry the Chorus, ‘how the word of Zeus has been fulfilled; for the dead do indeed rest from labour.’ The malignant guile of Nessus has found an unconscious instrument in Deianeira. And the goddess Aphroditè has been the silent handmaid of fate.
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A sound of wailing is heard within: the aged Nurse enters. Deianeira has slain herself with a sword; bitterly mourned, now, by her son Hyllus, who has learned, too late, that she was innocent.
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The Trachinian maidens, afflicted by this new calamity, are also terrified by the thought that they must soon behold the tortured son of Zeus. Footsteps are heard; men, not of Trachis, are seen approaching, the mute bearers of a litter: is Heracles dead, or sleeping?
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As the mournful procession enters, Hyllus, walking beside the litter, is giving vent to his grief, while an old man, one of the Euboeans, is vainly endeavouring to restrain him, lest his voice should break the sick man's slumber.
Heracles awakes. At first he knows not where he is; then his torments revive, and he beseeches the bystanders to kill him; he craves that mercy from his son; he appeals for it to Zeus and to Hades. And then, in a moment of respite, his thoughts go back on his past life,—so full of suffering, yet a stranger to such anguish as this; so full of victories, and yet doomed to end in this defeat at the unarmed hand of a false woman.
A pause permits Hyllus to announce his mother's death, and to assert her innocence. In using the supposed love-charm, she was obeying the dead Nessus.
Those words send a flash of terrible light into the mind of Heracle<*>. The oracle at Dodona had foretold the time of his ‘release.’ A still earlier oracle had foretold the manner of his death; namely, that he was to be slain by the dead. The time and the agency coincide. This, then, was the promised ‘release.’ The oracles are fulfilled. He sets himself to prepare for death, —now seen to be inevitable and imminent.
He commands that he shall be carried to the summit of Mount Oeta, sacred to Zeus, and there burned alive. Hyllus is constrained to promise obedience,—making, however, the condition that he himself shall not put hand to the pyre
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. A second behest is then laid upon him. He shall marry Iolè. In this also he is forced to yield,—calling on the gods to witness that he submits to a dying father's inexorable will.
All has now been made ready. Heracles summons the forces of that ‘stubborn soul’ which must upbear him through the last of his ordeals. In the words which close the play, Hyllus gives utterance to the deepest and bitterest of the feelings inspired by his father's cruel fate. Heracles dies forsaken by Zeus. For here, as in the
Iliad, there is no presage of his reception among the gods.
The bearers lift their burden, and set forth for Oeta; while the maidens of the Chorus pass from the house of mourning to their own homes in Trachis.
Introduction to Commentary on Sophocles: Trachiniae. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. 1932.
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