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New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes
by
AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS
(Under the direction of Charles Platter)
ABSTRACT
As early as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, women were either recognized as “completed” by the
experience of marriage and motherhood or were perceived as “incomplete” if they failed to serve
in either of these capacities. Thus women in literature were often one portrayed as one of two
types, the parthenos (“unmarried woman,” “virgin”) or the gynē (“married woman”). In the
plays of Sophokles, however, women are often amalgams of the two types, with the traditional
characteristics of the virgin and the mother combining with and informing one another. It is my
intention to examine Sophokles’ transformative technique by analyzing the central female
characters of the Antigone and Trakhiniai—a virgin and a mother—to explore the changing
representation of women in fifth-century Athenian literature.
INDEX WORDS:
Sophokles, Sophocles, Women, Motherhood, Telos, Antigone, Antigone,
Trakhiniai, Trachiniae, Deianeira
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes
by
AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS
A.B., Baylor University, 2002
A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2004
© 2004
Amanda G. Seamans-Mathis
All Rights Reserved
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes
by
AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS
Electronic Version Approved:
Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
August 2004
Major Professor:
Charles Platter
Committee:
Nancy Felson
Naomi Norman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people deserve special thanks for helping and supporting me during the writing of this
thesis. It was during Dr. Nancy Felson’s Sophokles class in Spring 2003 that I began to
formulate ideas for my thesis, and she has helped me greatly in fixing problems with my various
writings. Dr. Naomi Norman has given me a fresh perspective on women in the ancient world
from an archaeological standpoint, a topic with which I was not familiar before performing
research for this thesis. Dr. Charles Platter, my head thesis adviser, has been very patient with
my (only occasional!) procrastination, and has helped me to formulate my ideas and turn them
into something more than random musings on Sophokles. Last but not least, my husband Sean
has very patiently listened to each and every one of my ideas—good and bad—before I put them
down on paper, and encouraged me throughout my process of writing.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................iv
CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
2
SOPHOKLES’ ANTIGONE.........................................................................................12
3
SOPHOKLES’ TRAKHINIAI.......................................................................................37
4
CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................75
WORKS CITED................................................................................................................................86
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
In the literature of archaic and classical Greece, there is a discernible pattern of defining
women by their relationships to men. In epic poetry, for example, Homer’s Penelope is
variously identified as the daughter of Ikarios (κούρη Ἰκαρίοιο, Odyssey 1.328), wife of Odysseus
(Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, Od. 1.363), and mother of Telemakhos (µῆτηρ ἐµή, Od. 1.344); in the
dramatic tradition, Sophokles’ Deianeira is the daughter of Oineus (πατρὸς . . . Οἰνέως, Trakhiniai
6), wife of Herakles (λέχος . . . Ἡρακλεῖ κριτὸν, Trakh. 27), and mother of Hyllos (δίδαξον, µῆτηρ,
Trakh. 64); and the female patients of the Hippocratic corpus are usually identified only by the
names of their male relatives, such as “the maiden daughter of Daitharses” (τῆι ∆αιθάρσεος
θυγατρὶ παρθένωι, Epidemics 1.16) or “the wife of Mnesistratos” (Μνησιστράτου γυναικί,
Epidemics 1.17).1 Repeatedly, women are identified as the daughters and brides, wives and
mothers of men, but even within these categories they are usually divided into one of two distinct
groups: as Ken Dowden has stated, “females may be parthenoi (maidens) or gynaikes
(matrons),” but rarely anything in between.2 This distinction is particularly evident in the
1
On the general silencing of women’s names in the Hippocratic corpus, see, e.g., Lesley Dean-Jones, “Medicine:
The ‘Proof’ of Anatomy,” in Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Elaine Fantham et al. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 183, on a deceased patient referred to as “the niece of Temenes”: “even when the
patient died (as in this case) the physician avoided using her name and referred to her by her relationship to a man.”
Indeed, throughout the Hippocratic corpus, there is only one female patient mentioned by name: Melidia, the subject
of case study 14 in Epidemics 1. The other four women cited as case studies in Epidemics 1 are referred to as “the
wife of” (cases 4, 5, 11) or just “the woman” (case 13). A similar phenomenon occurs in Athenian legal documents
of the period. According to David Schaps’ “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names” (CQ 27
[1977]: 323-30), the orators practiced “a deliberate avoidance of women’s names” (323), preferring instead “to call
[a woman] the relative of such-and-such man” (326). Women left unnamed “are generally ordinary women of the
citizen class” (326), but women who are named typically fall into three categories: “women of shady reputation,
women connected with the speaker’s opponent, and dead women” (328).
Ken Dowden, “Approaching Women through Myth: Vital Tool or Self-Delusion?” in Women in Antiquity: New
Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 46. Dowden’s analysis, like
mine, concerns primarily women of the upper class, since there is a relatively small amount of literature from the
archaic and classical periods concerning women of the lower classes. (The dichotomy given here could not, in any
2
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Homeric epics, in which the major female characters are typically either virgins (Nausikaä in the
Odyssey, Kassandra and Iphianassa in the Iliad) or mothers (Penelope, Arete, and the reclaimed
Helen in the Odyssey; Andromakhe and Hekabe in the Iliad), as if no transitional period between
virginity and maternity exists.
The telos gamou
Categorizing women by the dichotomy of maiden/matron, is, of course, inadequate, for
this sharp division of social roles allows no gap between marriageability and marriage, only an
abrupt transition from parthenos to gynē. In literature, this transition usually requires a
“definitive break from maidenhood”3 that is often quite dangerous, for it is at the moment of
marriage or, alternatively, defloration that a maiden is most susceptible to the effects of negative
forces such as physical mutation (Kallisto, Daphne), imprisonment/enslavement (Danaë,
Polyxena), rape (Kassandra by Aias, Helen by Theseus, Iole by Herakles), and even death
(Iphigeneia, Antigone, Glauke). A nubile girl’s increased susceptibility to destructive forces
renders virginity a time of crisis,4 and it is often portrayed as “a dangerous liminal state to be
passed through”5 and quickly resolved by marriage. Left unresolved, virginity can cause anxiety
as well as injury: in Odyssey 6, Alkinoös, father of the “untamed virgin” Nausikaä (παρθένος
ἀδµής, 6.109), understands his daughter’s sudden desire to go and wash the family’s laundry as
case, be applied to women classed as slaves, prostitutes, etc., and reflects only a literary, not a demographic,
scheme.)
3
Ibid., p. 55.
4
Matt Neuberg, “How Like a Woman: Antigone’s ‘Inconsistency,’ ” CQ 40.1 (1990): 67.
5
Simon Goldhill, “Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics,” in
Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p.
104.
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an indication of interest in and anxiety over a future marriage (6.66-67); Greek medical writers
of the fifth century BCE believed that “parthenoi who, despite being ripe for marriage, remain
unmarried” suffer from spells of choking and falling and an “erotic fascination with death” that
can only be cured by an expedient marriage and pregnancy.6
In addition to curing the ills of maidenhood, marriage also represents the “normal goal”
of a girl’s life, by which she may obtain “access to full femininity.”7 Marriage first appears as a
“goal,” the Greek telos, in Homer’s Odyssey, when Penelope describes how the goddess
Aphrodite raised the orphan daughters of Pandareos, and “went to great Olympos, to Zeus who
delights in thunder, to ask for the telos of blooming marriage for the maidens” when they
reached nubile age (εὖτ’ Ἀφροδίτη δῖα προσέστιχε µακρὸν Ὄλυµπον,/ κούρηις αἰτήσουσα τέλος
θαλεροῖο γάµοιο,/ ἐς ∆ία τερπικέραυνον, 20.73-75). The phrase telos gamoio—in later Greek, telos
gamou—“can be safely assumed to mean ‘realization (solemnization) of marriage,’ ”8 but it
undoubtedly carries a weightier meaning as well. According to F.M.J. Waanders’ study of the
primary meanings of telos in Greek literature, the word connotes both the “ ‘realization,
completion’ ” of the state of matrimony and the “ ‘(physical) completeness, maturity’ ” of the
bride.9 Thus what Aphrodite requests for Pandareos’ daughters is not only the fulfillment of
Helen King, “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women,” in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. Averil Cameron
and Amélie Kuhrt, revised edn. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), p. 114.
6
J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), p. 99.
7
F.M.J. Waanders, The History of ΤΕΛΟΣ and ΤΕΛΕΩ in Ancient Greek (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner Publishing
Co., 1983), p. 55.
8
9
Ibid., p. 233. Cf. the interpretation supplied by the Archbishop Eustathius in his twelfth-century commentary on
the Odyssey: Τέλος δὲ γάµου ἢ ὁ γάµος περιφραστικῶς ἢ ἡ τεκνοπιΐα (“the telos of marriage [means], periphrastically,
the wedding or the production of children”). See Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis, Commentarii ad Homeri
Odysseam, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960), ad loc. Od. 20.74.
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marriage, but also the fulfillment of femininity—physical completeness ensured by the sexual
aspect of the marital relationship and, ideally, the production of children.
In this system of thought, a woman either becomes complete through the experience of
marriage and motherhood or remains unfulfilled by failing to serve in either capacity. Thus a
particular plotline can be applied to the proper, or “normal” course of a female’s life in archaic
literature: when a parthenos reaches nubile age, she marries and has children, becoming, in the
process, a gynē, a complete woman. Deviations from this plotline signify a rupture in or
frustration of the normal story pattern, and often confirm the precariousness of the maiden’s
position: the daughters of Pandareos themselves, at precisely the moment when they should
achieve the telos gamou, are carried away by “seizing stormwinds” (ἅρπυιαι ἀνηρείψαντο, Od.
20.77) that “g[ive] them over into the care of the hateful Furies” (ἔδοσαν στυγερῆισιν ἐρίνυσιν
ἀµφιπολεύειν, Od. 20.77-78)—barren, sterile, and eternally virginal powers that “create sterility in
all of nature.”10 Whisked away by the winds, the maidens are prevented from making the
“normal” transition from parthenoi to gynaikes; like the Furies themselves, they will remain
incomplete, forever distinct from women like Penelope or Arete, who obtain completion through
marriage and motherhood.
Evaluating Women: Character Types
In addition to the classification of women as complete or incomplete, the archaic system
of representing the female contains certain subgroups that define the possible courses that a
female’s life may take. In literature, these courses attach themselves to certain character types
with underlying positive or negative values; the distribution of these character types is, in turn,
Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 159.
On the Furies as representatives of “negative virginity” and creators of sterility, see ibid., pp. 158-60.
10
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dependent upon the maiden/matron dichotomy. At the most basic level of interpretation, there
are two possible courses for the virgin, and at least three for the matron.11
The Maiden. Becoming married is, of course, the “normal” and positive course for the
life of the parthenos, for marriage ensures fulfillment not only of the telos gamou but also of a
girl’s femininity through the production of children. Since marriage is the primary goal of the
parthenos’ existence, it follows that she should look forward to its completion and even feel
some anxiety about it. Homer’s Odyssey provides an excellent example of the maiden waiting
for marriage in the figure of Nausikaä, the virgin princess whom Odysseus encounters after
being shipwrecked on the shores of her homeland. As Odysseus begins to entreat the girl for aid,
he expresses a wish that “the gods grant you whatever you desire in your heart, a husband and
household” (σοὶ δὲ θεοὶ τόσα δοῖεν ὅσα φρεσὶ σῆισι µενοινᾶις,/ ἄνδρα τε καὶ οἶκον, Od. 6.180-81).
From his point of view, as a Greek male, marriage must be on the young Nausikaä’s mind, and
his assumptions ultimately prove correct: after Nausikaä speaks with Odysseus, she wishes that
“such a man of the ones living here could be called my husband, and that it would please
[Odysseus] to stay here” (αἲ γὰρ ἐµοὶ τοιόσδε πόσις κεκληµένος εἴη/ ἐνθάδε ναιετάων, καὶ οἱ ἅδοι
αὐτόθι µἱµνειν, 6.244-45). Clearly, from the Homeric Greek’s perspective, marriage is the next
logical step in the nubile maiden’s process of maturation.
If the maiden does not marry at the right time, however, she stands in jeopardy of
following the second possible course open to her—death or destruction. As we have already
seen, unresolved maidenhood leaves the parthenos in a state of crisis, during which time she is
susceptible to any number of destructive forces that can, and usually do, prevent her from
marrying (and thereby attaining her life’s fulfillment). The most destructive of these forces is, of
I am not suggesting that these are the only courses open to female characters, but I have chosen these five for the
sake of relevance to the plays that I shall examine.
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course, death itself, which permanently and definitively severs the maiden from her potential to
experience marriage and motherhood. Nonetheless, there is an identifiable pattern in Greek
literature of viewing a maiden’s death as a marriage, a topos articulated most directly by the
archaic Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which recounts the abduction of the maiden goddess
Persephone.
According to the hymn, Zeus gave his daughter Persephone in marriage to his brother
Hades (δῶκεν, 3) without first consulting the girl’s mother, Demeter (νόσφιν ∆ήµητρος, 4).12 To
enact the wedding, Hades abducted the young maiden (ἁρπάξας, 19; κούρη, 8) and led her (ἦγε, 20)
to his underworld realm, where she became his wife (παρακοίτι, 343). Persephone, however, was
an altogether unwilling bride (πόλλ’ ἀεκαζοµένηι, 344), and Demeter secured her return, but not
before Hades “stealthily gave her to eat a honey-sweet food, a pomegranate seed” (αὐτὰρ ὅ γ’
αὐτὸς/ ῥοιῆς κόκκον ἔδωκε φαγεῖν µελιηδέα λάθρηι, 371-72), necessitating that she remain in the
underworld, as his wife, for a third of the year. The remainder of the year she was allowed to
spend with her mother, returning “from the misty darkness” of her husband’s kingdom (ἀπὸ ζόφου
ἠερόεντος, 402) to the earth above “whenever the earth bloom[ed] with all kinds of fragrant spring
flowers” (ὁππότε δ’ ἄνθεσι γαῖ’ εὐώδε[σιν] ἠαρινο[ῖσι]/ παντοδαποῖς θάλλει, 402-03).
For the parthenos who dies on the brink of marriage, death comes just as Hades came to
Persephone in the hymn: it takes her apart from her parents as well as the life that she would
have had as a wife and mother. The important difference, of course, is that the human girl who
becomes a “bride of death” will have no chance for future fertility. Unlike Persephone, whose
return to earth each spring brings agricultural abundance, the deceased parthenos will remain
forever barren, unfulfilled in her femininity by her failure to produce children.
References to line numbers follow the text in The “Homeric Hymn to Demeter”: Translation, Commentary, and
Interpretive Essays, ed. Helene Peet Foley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
12
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The Matron. For the female who successfully completes the transition from parthenos to
gynē, however, the experience of marriage opens out a new set of possible courses that are
applicable to her life as an adult woman. This second set of possibilities is significantly different
from that available to the maiden, and has a greater range of positive and negative values. All, of
course, depend upon the status of gynē, for the attainment of the telos gamou seems to bestow a
certain degree of subjectivity upon a female. Unlike the maiden, who typically does not choose
marriage or death of her own accord,13 the matron has the unique ability to determine which of
the paths she will follow.
The most positive example of womanhood is, of course, the devoted wife and mother,
who strives to maintain the oikos, “household” or “family unit,” the “conceptual center” of her
family.14 As the protector of her oikos, the devoted wife/mother usually acts in the capacity of
“[guardian] of the values of kinship and religion.”15 Thus, like Penelope of the Odyssey, who
preserves the safety and financial security of her oikos by steadfastly resisting her suitors during
Odysseus’ twenty-year absence, she may take action to protect her family’s assets. Or, like
13
The daughters of Pandareos, for example, are to be married by Aphrodite’s agency, not their own, when they are
swept (passively) away by the stormwinds. Likewise, the young Persephone does not choose to be married to
Hades, but descends “very unwillingly” (πόλλ’ ἀεκαζοµένηι, 344) to his underworld realm. Even Antigone, who acts
as the agent of her own death, commits suicide only after Kreon has denied her the possibility of marriage by
sentencing her to a virginal death.
On what constituted the Greek oikos, see Cynthia B. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 47: if we see the oikos as “a place around which were focused experiences of
living and dying, producing and reproducing, we might also justifiably understand oikos as meaning ‘household’—
implying the connection between the physical house and the things and people held and produced within it. Thus,
oikos has an inclusive sense which could embrace both persons and property. . . . But however we translate the
word, the activities and emotions that cluster around the oikos [sic] argue for our seeing it as the conceptual center
of the early Greek family. That is, early Greek family relations are essentially rooted in the relationships of house
and household.”
14
Bernd Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama,
ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 158. See also Dowden, “Approaching Women,” p.
52.
15
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Euripides’ Alkestis, she may sacrifice her own life to protect the sanctity of her household and
the continued existence of her family.
Considerably less than ideal is the adulteress/seductress, whose wayward behavior
typically divides or destroys the family unit. The most prominent examples of this type of
woman are the daughters of Tyndareos, Helen and Klytaimestra, who are perfect manifestations
of the archaic concept of the “bad” woman, the “woman who fails the requirement to support the
oikos.” 16 Helen’s adultery with Paris, the cause of the Trojan War, makes her “a power for
destruction in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (a Trojan horse all on her own) and in Euripides’ Troades
an inexcusable, unduly attractive criminal,” and her indulgent sexuality destroys the unity of
multiple oikoi.17
Klytaimestra’s adultery with Aigisthos, on the other hand, causes her to follow the third,
and last, possible course that I shall examine—that of the murderess. This type of woman offers
the most violent opposition to the positive values embodied by the devoted wife and mother.
She destroys the oikos with her own hand, while the adulteress/seductress, like Helen, usually
destroys it only indirectly, through the conflict that erupts over the sexual possession of her
body.18 The Klytaimestra of Aischylos’ Agamemnon, infinitely more evil than her sister Helen,
16
Dowden, “Approaching Women,” p. 50. On the division of women into “good” and “bad” in early literature,
Dowden states: “this compartmentalisation of women into good and bad reflects a very limited, and to our eyes
distinctive, view of their place. They are there to make an oikos work and the failure to do so may even be, as
Aeschylus depicts it in the Agamemnon, to lose the claim to womanhood, to live in some sort of no-woman’s land”
(51).
17
Ibid., p. 53.
On the contested female body, see, e.g., Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Toward an Anthropology of
Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975): PP; also Nancy Felson and Laura
Slatkin, “Gender and Homeric Epic” (forthcoming): “Structurally speaking, . . .we see that disputes among men—
whether allies or enemies—entail disputed traffic in women. If marriage is the peaceful exchange of women, war is
its violent counterpart.” For the consequences of disputed claims to women, see Victoria Wohl, Intimate
Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. xiv:
“The result of these failed transfers [of women between men] is catastrophic: the relationships between men that
18
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murders her husband, exulting in the shower of bloodshed, and rejoices at the news of her son’s
death. In the same category is Euripides’ Medeia, who murders her husband’s new bride, Glauke
(or Kreousa), as well as the girl’s father and her own two sons. She destroys both households
over which Jason presides in order to avenge her abandonment.
Changing Perspectives: Sophokles
By the classical period, the archaic method of conceptualizing and portraying women was
under close scrutiny. The development of Athenian drama into one of the central vehicles for
evaluating and readjusting the political and social status quo allowed for the interrogation of
traditional methods of characterization, and the tragedians themselves, acting as teachers of their
polis, began to portray women in a considerably different light. Women in the extant plays of
Aischylos, the earliest of the three major tragedians, show the most affinity with their archaic
models. Klytaimestra in the Agamemnon (produced c. 458 BCE), for example, can easily be
interpreted as a stereotypical “bad” woman, a “man-minded” adulteress (ἀνδρόβουλον, Ag. 11) and
a husband-killer, but, by the time of Sophokles, female characters begin to look very different
from their archaic precursors.
Indeed, the major female characters of Sophokles’ plays do not easily fit into the moulds
prepared for them by their predecessors, nor can they be definitively identified as the particular
“types” of women discussed above. The title character of Sophokles’ Antigone (produced c.
442/1 BCE)19 begins the play as a “normal” young woman on the verge of marriage, but she
should be cemented are instead sundered; the men who should be declared virile and heroic subjects are emasculated
and eviscerated; the social order that should be instituted is more often left in ruins.”
There seems to be a fairly general consensus among scholars on the dating of the Antigone to 442/1. See, e.g.,
Mark Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2: “Antigone is assigned
to 442 or 441 on fairly solid grounds, for one of three hypotheseis (‘summaries’ or ‘introductions’) contained in our
MSS of the play states (hypoth. 1.13-14), ‘They say that S[ophokles] was awarded the stratēgia in Samos after his
19
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willfully veers away from obtaining the telos gamou when she defies an edict of the king, her
uncle Kreon. Sentenced to death because of her disobedience, Antigone experiences a
frustration of the transition from parthenos to gynē, but Sophokles describes her virgin death as
if it were a wedding, complicating and problematizing the archaic division of the “complete” and
“incomplete” woman. In much the same way, Herakles’ wife Deianeira, in the Trakhiniai
(produced between 457 and 430?),20 conflates several of the archaic types used to identify
women. A devoted wife and mother, like Penelope, she reacts to Herakles’ introduction of a
second wife into the household by using what she believes to be a powerful love charm to secure
his affections. When the charm turns out to be a deadly poison, however, she becomes, like
Klytaimestra, a murderess who destroys the family unit and negates the telos gamou.
Clearly, Antigone and Deianeira do not conform to the set of conventional plots or
storylines associated with women in archaic literature. Antigone experiences both marriage and
death/destruction, and Deianeira is both a devoted wife/mother and a destructive murderess.
Neither is truly representative of the typical portraits of women in archaic literature. Hence, one
may ask, to what extent does Sophokles revise and reconstruct elements of the inherited literary
tradition? By analyzing the elements of conventional plotlines present in the Antigone and
Trakhiniai and their relationship to the dominant image systems of each play, I hope to show that
success with the production of Antigone.’ The Samian expedition took place in 441-40; and whether or not
[Sophokles’] election in fact owed anything to the popularity of Antigone, this explanation would hardly have been
advanced unless the play’s production was dated just a year or two later.” Patricia Johnson (“Woman’s Third Face:
A Psycho/Social Reconsideration of the Antigone,” Arethusa 30 [1997]: 394) places the play “in the 440s,” and Kirk
Ormand (Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999], p.
102) agrees with Griffith in dating the play to 442. Larry J. Bennett and William Blake Tyrrell (Recapturing
Sophocles’ “Antigone” [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998], p. 438), on the other hand,
disagree and date the play’s original production to 438.
The dating of the Trakhiniai has long been a source of contention among scholars. The broad date given above is
that of Easterling’s commentary: Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ed. P.E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), p. 23: “Any date between 457 and, say, 430 would not be implausible; many scholars nowadays would
prefer the earlier half of that period.” Hellmutt Flashar, Sophokles: Dichter im demokratischen Athen (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 2000), p. 80 proposes a date “zwischen 438 und 433,” and adds, “die Datierung ist unsicher.”
20
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Sophokles’ method of representing women marks a shift in the perception of the female in Greek
literature—one in which women serve as positive vehicles of reflection and change in a form of
literary expression that became an integral part of the discourse of the polis.
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CHAPTER 2: SOPHOKLES’ ANTIGONE
Set after the deaths of Oidipous and his mother-wife Iokaste, and the civil war that
claimed the lives of their two sons, Eteokles and Polyneikes, Sophokles’ Antigone details the
fatal conflict that arises between Oidipous’ daughter Antigone and her uncle Kreon. As the play
opens, Kreon has ascended the throne of Thebes, and has become the guardian (kyrios) of
Antigone and her sister, Ismene. As kyrios, he has betrothed Antigone to his own son, Haimon;
as king, he has declared that the body of Polyneikes be left unburied, as the body of a traitor.
Antigone, however, cannot bear this outrage and, in the play’s opening scene, expresses her
determination to bury Polyneikes’ corpse, on penalty of death.
Rather than simply a choice between possible actions, Antigone’s resolution is a decision
that radically alters her identity, for, by choosing to perform Polyneikes’ burial, she chooses
death over her impending marriage to Haimon. In so doing, she knowingly veers away from her
telos, and negates her potential to become a wife and mother. As a result, her failure to achieve
marriage and motherhood—the only avenues of fulfillment open to her by classical Greek
standards—relegates her to the status of an incomplete woman, whose very existence, as Michael
Zelenak bluntly states, “is meaningless, a total waste.”21
Sophokles captures the tension of Antigone’s conflicted position by employing language
and imagery derived from traditional gender ideology and the terminology of certain cultural
institutions, such as weddings and funerals, to describe Antigone’s gradual isolation from
society. After performing Polyneikes’ burial, she forfeits her chance to achieve social
integration through the experience of marriage and motherhood, but it is at this point that the
21
Michael X. Zelenak, Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 80.
-12-
language of the play becomes increasingly fraught with motifs of sexuality and marriage. In
fact, the strongest concentration of marriage imagery occurs just before Antigone is led to her
death, as if to suggest that death itself will provide the fulfillment denied her in life. As she goes
to her tomb, she is described as a “bride of death,” and Sophokles’ uneasy portrayal of her union
with Hades emphasizes the tension between the course that Antigone follows and the course of
the typical virgin’s story. Ultimately, the frustration that Antigone experiences serves to
interrogate the validity of archaic notions of female characters, and challenges the too-neat
dichotomy of maiden and matron, making Antigone a vessel for examining and reevaluating
previous methods of representing women.
Sophokles’ Antigone and the Expectations of telos
By classical period standards, attainment of the telos gamou and, through it, motherhood
is doubly important for Sophokles’ Antigone, who becomes an epiklēros (roughly translated as
“heiress”) after the deaths of her father and brothers. As an epiklēros —a woman whose father
has died, leaving no male offspring to continue his family line—she has the “sole responsibility”
of “ensur[ing] an heir for her father’s family” rather than her husband’s.22 According to
Athenian tradition, she should marry her nearest available, preferably paternal, relative, such as
an uncle or cousin, to keep from producing children with conflicting allegiances to two separate
oikoi. Thus Antigone should follow the path of the Odyssey’s Phaiakian queen Arete, who
Christina Elliott Sorum, “The Family in Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra.” CW 75 (1982): 204. For a detailed
description of the epiklēros and her social function, see Patterson, Family in Greek History, pp. 92-106. The term
epiklēros means “upon the [paternal] estate,” indicating that the heiress “stayed with or held onto her father’s
property instead of being married ‘out’ into another household” (92). As the heir to her father’s property, ‘[s]he
ought to produce children” so that her natal oikos “would continue to be a productive and reproductive unit” (99).
22
-13-
marries her paternal uncle, Alkinoös, when her own father dies “without sons in his halls” (τὸν
µὲν ἄκουρον ἐόντα . . . ἐν µεγάρωι, 7.64-65).23
Antigone’s situation, however, is complicated by the fact that her father, Oidipous, has
left no living male kin. In order to preserve the royal line, her maternal uncle Kreon betroths her
to his son Haimon. Since Antigone is, by definition, an epiklēros, the engagement is, as Charles
Segal has pointed out, “almost obligatory and certainly familiar procedure to an Athenian
audience.”24 Antigone is, at the beginning of the play, exactly where she is supposed to be in the
virgin’s story pattern—on the verge of attaining the marriage that will bring her sexual and social
completeness.
As Haimon’s fiancée, Antigone stands at a critical transitional juncture, balanced in the
“temporal gap” between parthenos and gynē, as the terms νυµφεῖα (“bride,” 568), µελλογάµος
τάλις (“betrothed bride,” 628-29), and µελλονύµφος (“about to wed,” 633) indicate. The word
nympheia itself—equivalent to the more common form nymphē—connotes a degree of
liminality, for it is applied only to “those in the ‘latent’ period stretching from marriageable to
married.”25 Mellonymphos also communicates a sense of Antigone’s precarious position, for she
is literally, “about to experience gamos,” the sexual union of the wedding night that will bring
about her physical completion as a woman.
On Arete as an epiklēros, see Patterson, Family in Greek History, p. 91: “From a later Greek legal point of view,
Queen Arete of Phaeacia can be considered a classic example of the heiress, an only daughter married to her father’s
brother, Alcinoos (Odyssey 7.54-66). She and her uncle Alcinoos are, or would have been in later inheritance law,
heirs to equal shares of the property of her paternal grandfather Nausithoos. Arete’s remarkable authority would
then from this perspective be that of the heiress—a woman who in classical times was caricatured as a monstrous
ruler of both husband and household.”
23
24
Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1981), p. 178; hereafter cited as Tr&C. Antigone’s betrothal is not unique to Sophokles. In Euripides’
Phoenissai, Eteokles, acting as Antigone’s kyrios, secures the promise of her marriage to Haimon by granting Kreon
rule over Thebes (Pho. 757-60, 944-46). In Euripides’ lost Antigone, Haimon and Antigone are married and have a
son, Maion. (See, e.g., Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” p. 9, n. 33.)
25
Helen King, “Bound to Bleed,” p. 112.
-14-
If Antigone is nearing the experience of gamos, it follows that the formal enguē, or
“engagement ceremony,” has already occurred, making her the “property” of her marital, rather
than natal, oikos.26 Her betrothal to Haimon makes her “his,” even if ceremony and sexual union
have not yet cemented the match and, as such, Antigone is at a critical junction, a transitional
phase in which she cannot maintain ties with her natal family but, simultaneously, cannot fully
participate in her marital family because she has not yet completed the gamos of her wedding
night. To both houses she is a µέτοικος (852, 862), a “resident alien” who is not fully integrated
into either sphere.27 She dwells in a sort of limbo between her birth family, on the one hand, and
her marital family, on the other, wherein she should obtain the status of a σύνοικος, a twofold term
meaning both a fully integrated “house-sharer” and someone in the state of consummated
marriage. Defiance of Kreon’s edict, however, complicates integration into her marital family.
According to the king’s proclamation, anyone caught burying Polyneikes’ body will suffer death,
and death will prevent Antigone from experiencing marriage and motherhood, the two factors
that will make her a complete woman. Ultimately, then, the virgin’s story pattern becomes
frustrated, as Antigone’s conflicting allegiances to her natal and marital families place her in a
precarious balance between the worlds of maiden (παρθένος) and of woman/wife (γυνή).
The process of becoming married in fifth-century Athens was actually tripartite, consisting of enguē
(“engagement”), ekdosis (the “giving away” of the bride), and gamos (“sexual union”). The enguē, literally “a
pledge put into [ἐν] one’s hand [γύαλον]” (LSJ 1), was “the promise made by the bride’s father [or his surrogate] to
the groom and then sealed by a handshake” (John H. Oakley and Rebecca H. Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens
[Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993], p. 10). It established the marriage contract and signified that
“the title to the woman [was] transferred” from her kyrios to her husband (James Redfield, “Notes on the Greek
Wedding,” Arethusa 15 [1982]: 186).
26
On the use of the term metoikos, see Richard Seaford, “The Imprisonment of Women in Greek Tragedy,” JHS 110
(1990): 79: “Antigone is to reside eternally with her natal family as an unmarried daughter; and yet, because she has
to undertake a bridal journey to arrive there, she will be a metoikos, someone who has moved in, who in a sense does
not belong. . . . In this way the temporary isolation normal in bridal liminality, between the parental and the marital
home, seems to be made permanent.”
27
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Defining Good and Bad through the Primacy of Kinship?
At the beginning of the play, Antigone attempts to solicit Ismene’s help for Polyneikes’
burial by making an emphatic appeal to the bonds of her natal family. When Ismene refuses,
however, Antigone quickly cuts all ties with her natal oikos, in a stark illustration of the
untenability of her position. Her first words effectively and perhaps hyperbolically portray the
closeness of her relationship to Ismene, whom she addresses in terms that focus exclusively on
parentage, and especially on motherhood:
ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσµήνης κάρα,
ἆρ’ οἶσθ’ ὅ τι Ζεὺς τῶν ἀπ’ Οἰδίπου κακῶν
ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῶιν ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ; 28
[O common head of Ismene from the selfsame womb, do you know which of
Oidipous’ misfortunes Zeus will not fulfill for us two, while we yet live?]29
Ant. 1-3
According to Antigone, she and her sister are not only κοινόν, “common” or “shared” (i.e., of
common/shared blood), but also αὐτάδελφον, “from the selfsame womb.”30 Her reference to their
“two brothers” (τὼ κασιγνήτω) at line 21 also indicates specifically matrilinear kinship: the term
κασίγνητος derives from “kásis ‘brother; sister’ . . . reinforced by a verbal adjective –gnētos,
All citations of the Antigone are from the Cambridge edition: Sophocles, “Antigone,” ed. Mark Griffith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
28
29
I have kept my translation of these first lines extremely literal in order to show the effect of the dual case and
matrilinear kinship terms.
30
The term autadelphon appears only at Ant. 1, 503, and 696 in Sophokles’ extant plays (Segal, Tr&C, p. 158). J.C.
Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles, Commentaries III: The “Antigone” (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), ad loc., proposes
that the term is “probably borrowed from Aesch[ylus] (Sept. 718, Eum. 89), not in Eur[ipides],” and remarks: “it is
significant that the first line of this play so heavily stresses the notion of blood-relationship. κοινὸν in itself means
‘related by consanguinity’ (perhaps here referring also to the special relation of their parents) and together with the
emphatic αὐτάδελφον . . . it is expressive of the nearness by close kinship which forms the starting-point of
Antigone’s desire to communicate with her sister.” For the derivation of the Greek term ἀδελφός, see Émile
Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1973), p.
173: the Indo-European term *bhrāter (“brother”) “denoted a fraternity which was not necessarily consanguineous.
The two meanings are distinguished in Greek. Phrā́ter was kept for the member of a phratry, and a new term
adelphós (literally ‘born of the same womb’) was coined for ‘blood brother.’ . . . Henceforward, the two kinds of
relationships were not merely distinguished but actually polarized by their implicit reference: phrā́ter is defined by
connexion with the same father, adelphós by connexion with the same mother.”
-16-
‘born of, birth,’ ”31 making Eteokles and Polyneikes Antigone’s literal “birth brothers,” just as
Ismene is her sister “from the selfsame womb.” Her desire to bury Polyneikes ultimately
represents a desire to “do honor to those from the same womb” (ὁµοσπλάγχνους σέβειν, 511), as
she herself states.32 It is “a form of kinship amity where the womb, the delphus, is the
touchstone,”33 whose power she invokes in recalling the (doubly) maternal relationship that she
shares with her siblings. Indeed, the kinship terms she uses make “kinship a function of the
female procreative power” and give “the decisive tie of blood not to the father’s seed . . . but to
the mother’s womb,” ultimately making the mother the critical link in creating and sustaining
familial bonds.34 The primary importance Antigone accords the maternal role may have special
resonance with her own social position as an epiklēros, the woman whose fertility should, ideally
anyway, reconstitute her fragmented natal oikos.
Although Antigone privileges the role of the mother and honors the womb by defining
kinship along the matriline, Ismene encourages compliance with the existing power structure,
exemplified by Kreon’s decree. She does not give primacy to the power of the womb, like her
sister, but to the power that men exercise over women, as her advice to Antigone clearly shows:35
31
Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, p. 178.
32
On the term ὁµοσπλάγχνος see ibid., pp. 183-84: “Homosplanchnos calls attention to the root meaning of the
familiar word for ‘brother,’ adelphos, from a– (‘same,’ equivalent to homo–) and delphus (‘womb,’ equivalent to
splanchna).” Within Sophokles’ Antigone, Antigone uses the terms αὐτάδελφος (1, 503), κασίγνητος (21, 870-71,
899, 915), ἀδελφός (46, 81, 517, 912), and ὁµοσπλάγχνος (511), but never φράτηρ. All of her kinship terms center on
maternal descent, perhaps appropriate for her incestuously related family: her mother, Iokaste, produced not only
Antigone and her siblings, but also Antigone’s father, Oidipous; thus Antigone, Ismene, Eteokles, and Polyneikes
are doubly descended “from the same womb.”
33
John D.B. Hamilton, “Antigone: Kinship, Justice, and the Polis,” in Myth and the Polis, ed. Dora C. Pozzi and
John M. Wickersham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 95.
34
Segal, Tr&C, pp. 183 and 184, respectively.
35
Even so, Ismene does recognize the extremely close kinship bond that she shares with Antigone, as indicated by
her reciprocal usage of the dual case. Ismene’s use of the dual, however, serves only to highlight their solitude and
helplessness in order to encourage compliance with Kreon’s decree.
-17-
ἀλλ’ ἐννοεῖν χρὴ τοῦτο µὲν γυναῖχ’ ὅτι
ἔφυµεν, ὡς πρὸς ἄνδρας οὐ µαχουµένα,
ἔπειτα δ’ οὕνεκ’ ἀρχόµεσθ’ ἐκ κρεισσόνων
καὶ ταῦτ’ ἀκούειν κἄτι τῶνδ’ ἀλγίονα.
ἐγὼ µὲν οὖν αἰτοῦσα τοὺς ὑπὸ χθονὸς
ξύγγνοιαν ἴσχειν, ὡς βιάζοµαι τάδε,
τοῖς ἐν τέλει βεβῶσι πείσοµαι· τὸ γὰρ
περισσὰ πράσσειν οὐκ ἔχει νοῦν οὐδένα.
65
[It is necessary to keep this in mind: first, that we two were born women, not
meant to fight against men; and second, that, on account of this, we are compelled
by the powerful to obey, both in these matters and in matters still more painful
than these. And so I—asking the gods below the earth to have mercy, since I
have been forced in these matters—shall obey those in power. For it makes no
sense to do superfluous things.]
Ant. 61-68
By reminding Antigone that “we two were born women,” whose very nature requires that they
not “fight against men” but “obey those in power,” Ismene evokes the “flat and stereotyped”36
response that a fifth-century audience would, perhaps, have expected. It is the “timid and
‘normal’ ”37 response of a woman who has spent her life almost entirely within the home under
the authority of a male guardian. (Ismene only ventures outside of the city gates in this scene
because Antigone has summoned her out—καί σ’ ἐκτὸς αὐλείων πυλῶν/ τοῦδ’ οὕνεκ’ ἐξέπεµπον, ὡς
µόνη κλύοις, 18-19—and, after her exit at line 99, she appears only once more in the play, in a
scene with Kreon, her kyrios.38) Her “typical” behavior contrasts sharply with Antigone’s strong
Marion B. Madison, “Mythic Force and Function in Sophocles’ Antigone,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1978, p. 47. Madison also states: “Ismene, in the traditional ‘female’ response, is willing to deny even her own
identity and integrity in order to win Creon’s acceptance” (102).
36
Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” p. 10. See also Helene Peet Foley, “Tragedy and Democratic Ideology,” in
History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1995), p. 148, n. 54: “Ismene’s initial stance on the place of women in a polis and on obedience to the city
anticipates that of Creon and echoes popular Attic views.”
37
The location of the play’s opening scene outside of the gates of Thebes has led many Antigone scholars to
pronounce that Antigone is, in some way, “unfeminine” because of her physical location in the “men’s sphere” in
this scene. But cf. P.E. Easterling, “Women in Tragic Space,” BICS 35 (1988): 22 on the location of the first scene:
“So far as Antigone herself is concerned, the emphasis is on the need for privacy, not on any sense of transgressing
boundaries, but perhaps we should recognise that for many people in the audience this might constitute a challenge
to ideas of the behaviour proper for a woman.”
38
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resolve to defy Kreon’s edict, and it appears, at first, that Ismene is preserving her “proper”
female role by encouraging compliance with Kreon’s edict. As the dialogue continues, however,
she recognizes that the decree “denies Antigone her traditional role in preparing her brother’s
corpse for burial.”39 That she asks the gods below—those now presiding over her father, mother,
and brothers—to “have mercy” on her indicates that she does, in fact, have a sense of obligation
(though she does not fulfill it) to Polyneikes and the infernal gods. She excuses herself on the
basis that she has “been forced in these matters,” but simultaneously concedes the validity of
Antigone’s resolution. By promising to keep silent about Antigone’s actions—“Tell no one
about this deed, but bury him in secret, and in this way I am with you” (ἀλλ’ οὖν προµηνύσηις γε
τοῦτο µηδενὶ/ τοὖργον, κρυφῆι δὲ κεῦθε, σὺν δ’ αὔτως ἐγώ, 84-85)—she not only expresses her
compliance but also recognizes that Polyneikes’ burial constitutes one of the “obligations she
owes categorically to her natal family.”40 Even so, she will not act with Antigone because, in her
view, the power of the womb does not supersede the already established male-female balance of
power.
Rush Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 61. For women’s traditional role in funeral ceremonies, see ibid., p. 22: “As
they did at weddings, women played the most significant role in mourning rituals, including washing, anointing,
dressing, crowning, and covering the body after adorning it with flowers. Prepared in this manner, the corpse was
‘laid out’ at the πρόθεσις (prothesis) on a ‘bed’ or ‘couch,’ κλίνη (klinē). . . . [O]nly the closest relatives (anchisteia)
tended the dead in this intimate way.” Antigone has already performed these rites for Oidipous, Iokaste, and
Eteokles, as she states at lines 900-02: “When you died, I washed you with my own hand and laid you out and
poured libations over your graves” (ἐπεὶ θανόντας αὐτόχειρ ὑµᾶς ἐγὼ/ ἔλουσα κἀκόσµησα κἀπιτυµβίους/ χοὰς ἔδωκα).
39
Rehm, Marriage to Death, p. 61. On the subject of Ismene’s compliance, see also Foley, “Tragedy and
Democratic Ideology,” p. 146, n. 11: “Ismene herself, who takes a traditional position on the limits women should
observe in a man’s world, acknowledges that, if it were not for Creon’s decree, the sisters ought to bury their brother
(65-68). This implies that as women they would have under other circumstances obligations in this matter on which
they should act.” And see P.E. Easterling, “Constructing Character in Greek Tragedy,” in Characterization and
Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 94: Ismene “does not
dispute the rightness of burying Polyneices; she simply regards it as bound to fail, because she and Antigone are
women, and those in control have greater power. . . . [B]ut she values what Antigone is trying to do.”
40
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Antigone, on the other hand, does not allow herself to be “forced” into neglecting the
obligations she owes to her brother. By deciding to defy Kreon’s edict, which has encroached
upon the usual “domain” of the female, Antigone determines to reinstate “the family and
religious laws” that have been violated by the terms of the decree.41 She champions “the world
of the family and its values,”42 but, ironically, cuts ties with Ismene to do so.
Antigone’s Isolation
Angry that Ismene refuses to uphold what they both recognize as a familial (and female)
obligation to their brother, Antigone breaks off contact with her sister. This rejection not only
signals a rupture between the dual “we” of line 21 and the clearly demarcated “I” and “you” of
Antigone’s speech at line 69, but also begins the process of gradual isolation, culminating in
death, that Antigone will experience:43
οὔτ’ ἂν κελεύσαιµ’ οὔτ’ ἄν, εἰ θέλοις ἔτι
πράσσειν, ἐµοῦ γ’ ἂν ἡδέως δρώιης µέτα.
ἀλλ’ ἴσθ’ ὁποία σοὶ δοκεῖ· κεῖνον δ’ ἐγὼ
θάψω . . .
70
[I would not encourage you, and, if you still wanted to do it, you would not do it
with my welcome. But be it as you think fit; and I shall bury him . . .]
Ant. 69-72
41
Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 159, continuing: “even the extraordinary women of classical
drama, as women, are not all that extraordinary. Rather, in many respects, even they strongly confirm the traditional
image. This is not only true of Aristophanes’ housewives Lysistrata and Praxagora, but also of Clytemnestra,
Antigone, and Deianira, of Medea and Phaedra, Electra and Hecuba.”
42
Ibid. See also Hamilton’s analysis, which identifies Antigone as “heroic” for performing Polyneikes’ burial:
“Antigone’s life, virginity, and death enlarge the values attached to kinship, setting before the fifth-century Greek
audience a woman who does not destroy but preserves and even reestablishes a just polis. . . . In a strange way, then,
she is heroic in stature, an image of equilibrium and dike ‘justice,’ but she also puts all women in their proper ritual
place within the new polis—and proclaims the power of the womb” (“Kinship, Justice,” p. 96).
Zelenak, Gender and Politics, p. 76 interprets Antigone’s isolation on the basis of her number of appearances in
the play: “The title character only appears in the prologue, two of the five episodes and one choral song. She exits
long before the end of the play (line 943), never to appear again. Her role is dwarfed in number of lines by Creon,
and she does not have a chorus sympathetic to her point of view. . . . Throughout the play, Antigone remains
isolated.”
43
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From this point on, Antigone no longer uses the dual when referring to her sister; all further
conversation between them is marked by the presence of men/de clauses and Antigone’s refusal
to “share” (᾿κοινωσάµην, 539) any of the blame for Polyneikes’ burial, in sharp contrast to the
unifying duals of the opening lines. As far as Antigone is concerned, “[s]he is, in a real sense—
since Ismene refuses the role—the last member of the autadelphoi, of the womb sharers,”44 who
can repair the broken familial unit by providing one of its members his proper burial rites.
In the process of reparation, however, Antigone succeeds in creating a rift with Ismene
that “comes to mark a shift of allegiance on Antigone’s part as she leaves the living kin for her
bond to the dead.”45 She proclaims this new “allegiance” in ambiguous terms that emphasize the
degree of her isolation:
φίλη µετ’ αὐτοῦ κείσοµαι, φίλου µέτα,
ὅσια πανουργήσασ’, ἐπεὶ πλείων χρόνος
ὃν δεῖ µ’ ἀρέσκειν τοῖς κάτω τῶν ἐνθάδε.
ἐκεὶ γὰρ αἰεὶ κείσοµαι·
75
[I will lie with him, loved one with loved one, having dared a righteous crime,
since the time is greater in which it is necessary to please those below than those
here. For I shall lie there always.]
Ant. 73-76
The apparent sexual connotations of these lines have created a number of problems for modern
scholars. Various studies have identified Antigone’s speech as “strangely erotic,”46 or even
indicative of a “transferred oedipal attachment” that gives Antigone’s relationship to her brother
“priority over her kinship attachments to her sister and uncle,” as if Polyneikes “were to be her
44
Hamilton, “Kinship, Justice,” p. 95.
45
Segal, Tr&C, p. 186.
46
Rehm, Marriage to Death, p. 59.
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husband in Hades.”47 The problem of interpretation is only compounded by the subsequent
association of “desire” with Antigone’s intentions. After she declares that she will “lie with”
Polyneikes, Ismene tells her, “you desire mad things” (ἀµηχάνων ἐρᾶις, 90), and the Chorus uses
the same terminology when, in response to Kreon’s command not to ally with anyone who
disobeys his edict, they assert, “There is no one so foolish that he desires to die” (οὐκ ἔστιν οὕτω
µῶρος ὃς θανεῖν ἐρᾶι, 220). In their respective speeches, both Ismene and the Chorus use the verb
ἐράω—often indicative of an explicitly sexual urge or desire48—to describe Antigone’s need to
perform Polyneikes’ burial. The use of this term, however, does not necessitate interpretation of
Antigone’s relationship with Polyneikes as “oedipal,” based on physical desire or erōs.49 The
Chorus, in fact, identifies Antigone’s “desire” as a desire for death, a symptom associated, in
fifth century medical texts, with “parthenoi who, despite being ‘ripe for marriage,’ remain
unmarried.”50 The only cure for her “erotic fascination with death,” according to the medical
writers, is “to marry as quickly as possible” in order to remedy the anxiety caused by her virginal
incompleteness, for “if [the afflicted maiden] become[s] pregnant, [she] will be healthy.”51
Antigone, however, will not marry. She will achieve her desired completion, but in death rather
47
Johnson, “Woman’s Third Face,” pp. 375 and 392, respectively.
Cf. the use of the denominative form, erōs, at lines 781-200 and its (specifically sexual) connection with a “wellwedded/bedded bride” (εὐλέκτρου νύµφας) and Aphrodite’s power of “seduction” (ἀπάτη).
48
That Antigone refers to Polyneikes as philos, in fact, argues against an oedipal interpretation, for the term reflects
not a sexual bond but “the entirely objective bond of reciprocal obligation; one’s philos is the man one is obliged to
help, and on whom one can (or ought to be able to) rely for help when oneself is in need” (Malcolm Heath, The
Poetics of Greek Tragedy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987], p. 74).
49
King, “Bound to Bleed,” p. 113. Kamerbeek, Plays III, ad loc. 73-75 also connects Antigone’s speech with a
“longing for death,” but attributes this longing to “her faithfulness and devotion to her kin, in life and in death,
which belong to her being.”
50
51
King, “Bound to Bleed,” p. 114.
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than in marriage and motherhood, and her language, like that of Ismene and the Chorus, looks
forward to the very moment of this completion, a death that will serve as her gamos.
Deviation from the “Normal” Plotline
After Antigone has been caught performing Polyneikes’ burial, the single action that
makes her achievement of the telos gamou impossible, images of marriage and sexuality begin to
surface with an increased frequency in the play. When the palace guard enters with Antigone in
tow, the repetition of the verb ἄγω—“to lead” (LSJ I.1) or, in the middle voice, “to marry” (LSJ
B.2)—implicitly introduces the theme of her wedding: the Chorus, prompted by the entrance of
Antigone and the guard, asks, “Are [the guards] leading you . . . and have they caught you in
your folly?” (ἄγουσι . . . καὶ ἐν ἀφροσύνηι καθελόντες; 382-83); the guard himself announces, “I
have come . . . leading this maiden, who was caught while arranging the tomb” (ἥκω . . . κόρην
ἄγων τήνδ’, ἣ καθηιρέθη τάφον/ κοσµοῦσα, 394-96); and Kreon asks, “But from where are you
leading this girl, and how did you catch her?” (ἄγεις δὲ τήνδε τῶι τρόπωι πόθεν λαβών; 401). The
emphasis on Antigone’s being “led” (ἄγουσι, ἄγων, ἄγεις) evokes the image of the exagōgē, the
procession in which a new bride was “led out” of her father’s house and transported to her
husband’s home. The guard’s action of leading Antigone back to the palace, the home of her
kyrios, however, constitutes an inversion of the normal public ritual, for, in a proper exagōgē, a
woman should be led away from her guardian’s home, not to it. Thus the result of Antigone’s
exagōgē is further isolation rather than social integration into her marital oikos. Her wedding
procession takes her back to the home of her kyrios, who will not allow her to marry.52
52
Seaford, “Imprisonment,” p. 78 writes of Antigone’s inverted wedding: “The funereal quality of the normal
wedding procession is here amplified not only by the fact that Antigone will actually die, but also by the fact that for
a girl to adhere permanently to her natal family is to deny the continuation of life through marriage.”
-23-
The type of anti-wedding that Antigone experiences in this scene creates a great deal of
tension in the normal virgin’s story pattern, as the language of the play attests. Immediately after
describing her reverse exagōgē, Sophokles begins to associate images of marriage and maternity
with the virginal Antigone, thereby revealing the friction between the “normal” girl’s movement
toward integration and renewal, through marriage and motherhood, and Antigone’s movement
only toward isolation and death. The perversion of Antigone’s expected development is
especially evident in the guard’s description of her capture, which begins with a comparison of
Antigone to a mother bird:
ἡ παῖς ὁρᾶται, κἀνακωκύει πικρᾶς
ὄρνιθος ὀξὺν φθόγγον ὥς, ὅταν κενῆς
εὐνῆς νεοσσῶν ὀρφανὸν βλέψηι λέχος·
[The child is seen, and she shrieks a shrill cry like that of a bitter bird when she
sees the bed of her nest orphaned, empty of its young.]
Ant. 423-25
It is, I think, significant that the guard describes Antigone as a mother directly after she has
participated in a sort of reverse wedding procession, for motherhood, in the normal story pattern,
is the ultimate goal of the telos gamou.53 That Antigone’s own telos is at issue here is made
explicit by the use of the words lekhos and eunē: Antigone shrieks like a bird that sees the “bed”
(λέχος) of its “nest” (εὐνή) empty, but both words for “bed” are terms specific to the “marriage
bed,” and the word lekhos can denote, by metonymy, “marriage” itself (LSJ 3; cf. Ant. 573).
Thus Antigone, doomed to eternal virginity, seems to become a mother and a sexual creature at
Marilyn A. Katz (“The Character of Tragedy: Women and the Greek Imagination,” Arethusa 27 [1994]: 93-94)
proposes that Antigone physically takes on the role of a mother in this scene: “In rendering Polyneices a symbolic
burial Antigone is carrying out a function which belongs precisely to the women of the family, to those closely
related to the dead or to those women over sixty, as other sources tell us. Antigone is thus affirming her feminine
identity, but she is acting as mother rather than as daughter. For tendance of the dead was the office of the mother in
particular, and the guard’s simile evokes the familiar paradigm.” Katz also states that Antigone “has precipitated
herself into a premature and surrogate maternity” because of her “fixation” with Polyneikes, making her rejection of
Kreon’s authority “not so much a refusal of male authority as it is an assertion of maternal rights” (94).
53
-24-
one and the same time, for she has a “marriage bed” (or “marriage”) that is “orphaned” and
“empty of its young.”
The mention of a “marriage bed” and “offspring” immediately after Antigone’s reverse
exagōgē places the entire scene of her capture in the context of an inverted wedding. In a normal
wedding ceremony, the bride is led to her husband’s home, where she experiences both the
marriage bed and children—the two factors that enable her to reach her telos—but Antigone
returns to the home of her kyrios, where her bed is forever “empty.” By performing Polyneikes’
burial, she severs a crucial link with Haimon, whose lekhos represents the only medium through
which she can achieve the telos gamou and her life’s fulfillment. The only remaining option for
achieving completion is death, life’s final goal, in which she will have neither a marriage bed nor
offspring, only an “emptiness” that can never be filled.
In addition to emphasizing Antigone’s incompleteness by portraying her as a mother, the
image of the bird serves to affirm Antigone’s status as a parthenos, an “untamed” woman often
likened to “a dangerous wild animal, whose wildness must be tamed by the yoke of marriage.”54
When the guard proclaims, “together we caught her” (σὺν δέ νιν/ θηρώµεθ’, 432-33), his use of the
verb theraō places the capture of Antigone the “bird” (ὄρνιθος) in the context of a hunt, making
her a beast (θήρ) to be captured, like “the tribe of light-minded birds and the races of field beasts”
(κουφονόων τε φῦλον ὀρ-/ νίθων . . . καὶ θηρῶν ἀγρίων ἔθνη, 342-44) whose subjugation is celebrated
in the Chorus’ Ode to Man (332-83). The linguistic link between the guard’s thērōmeth’ and the
Chorus’ thērōn, the denominative form of the verb, serves to characterize Antigone as one of the
Goldhill, “Character and Action,” p. 104. See also Ormand, Exchange and the Maiden, p. 89: “brides (as well as
grooms) are often said to be ‘yoked’ when they are married, and brides in particular are often associated with
horses.”
54
-25-
“beasts” (θηρῶν ἀγρίων, 344) captured by man—the traditional image of the parthenos tamed.55
This characterization is made more explicit in a line spoken by Kreon, who threatens to “break”
Antigone of her stubbornness: “But I know that even spirited horses are tamed by only a small
bit” (σµικρῶι χαλινῶι δ’ οἶδα τοὺς θυµουµένους/ ἵππους καταρτυθέντας, 477-78).56 The king’s
association of a “spirited horse” with Antigone calls attention to her identity as a parthenos, the
wild girl who must be “tamed” or “broken in” by a man to make her suited to civilized living.57
At the same time, it acknowledges her burgeoning sexuality, for, as a “spirited horse,” Antigone
becomes like the “Thracian filly” (πῶλε Θρηικίη, line 1), ripe for “the bit” (τὸν χαλινὸν, line 3), of
Anakreon 417, or one of the maiden chorus girls of Alkman 1, a “thunder-hoofed horse” (ἵππον . .
. καναχάποδα, lines 46-47) who possesses an enervating desirability (ἀλλ’ Ἁγησιχόρα µε τῆρει, line
77).58 She is “an object (at least potentially) of erotic desire,”59 and possesses, like Nausikaä of
See, e.g., Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “A Series of Erotic Pursuits: Images and Meanings,” JHS 107 (1987):
138: “In Athenian mentality, the capture of wild animals was generally associated with the erotic sphere”; and
Nancy Felson, Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press,
1994), p. 58 on the erotic implications of the hunting scene on the clasp that Penelope gives to Odysseus.
55
56
The image of the horse also recalls a passage from the Ode to Man, which describes how man “leads the shaggymaned horse and the tireless mountain bull under the neck-encompassing yoke” (λασιαύχενά θ’/ ἵππον ὑπαγάγετ’
ἀµφίλοφον ζυγὸν/ οὔρειόν τ’ ἀκµῆτα ταῦρον, 349-51). Since “brides (as well as grooms) are often said to be ‘yoked’
when they are married, and brides in particular are associated with horses,” the image of yoking the horse and bull
privileges the “vocabulary of erotic domination” and provides another referent for Kreon’s mention of the “spirited
horse” (Ormand, Exchange and the Maiden, pp. 88 and 89, respectively).
For this idea, see esp. Xenophon’s Oikonomikos 7 (composed in the early– to mid–fourth century BCE), wherein
Isomakhos explains how he began to educate his young wife about her household duties. Having explained that he
married her when she was “not yet fifteen years old” and that “before that she lived under much supervision, so that
she would see as little as possible, hear as little as possible, and say as little as possible” (ἣ ἔτη µὲν οὔπω πεντεκαίδεκα
γεγονυῖα ἦλθε πρὸς ἐµὲ, τὸν δ’ ἔµπροσθεν χρόνον ἔζη ὑπὸ πολλῆς ἐπιµελείας, ὅπως ὡς ἐλάχιστα µὲν ὄψοιτο, ἐλάχιστα δὲ
ἀκούσοιτο, ἐλάχιστα δ’ ἔροιτο; Oik. 7.5), Isomakhos says, “When she was tamed and domesticated enough to hold a
conversation, I questioned her. . . ” (ἐπεὶ ἤδη µοι χειροήθης ἦν καὶ ἐτετιθάσευτο ὥστε διαλέγεσθαι, ἠρόµην αὐτὴν, 7.10).
(The text of the Oikonomikos is that printed in Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, ed.
Sarah B. Pomeroy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994].)
57
58
The girls of Alkman’s choral songs are also referred to as horses at 1.59, where the author likens the beauty of two
maidens to a race between a Kolaxian and an Ibenian horse (ἁ δὲ δευτέρα πεδ’ Ἀγιδὼ τὸ ϝεῖδος/ ἵππος Ἰβηνῶι Κολαξαῖος
δραµήται), and 1.92, where the chorus leader is a “tracehorse” (σηραφόρωι). (For the texts of Anakreon and Alkman,
see David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry [London:
Bristol Classical Press, 1999].)
-26-
the Odyssey, an “untamed” (admēs) sexuality that should culminate in the sexual role she will
fulfill as a wife (damar, literally a “tamed” or “subdued” woman). The animal imagery used to
describe her, then, establishes her as a figure in transition, the parthenos who stands on the
threshold of attaining the telos gamou and the completion of her femininity. Yet, when her
marriage to Haimon is made impossible by the stipulations of Kreon’s edict, she must seek
another way to obtain this completion.
Preparing for Antigone’s “Marriage”
The course that Antigone will follow to attain her telos becomes clear when Kreon begins
to question her about Polyneikes’ burial. Indeed, as the quarrel over the morality of her actions
escalates, the focus of their dialogue gradually narrows in on Antigone’s upcoming death, which
is infused with sexual undertones:
Κρ. πορθῶν δὲ τήνδε γῆν· ὁ δ’ ἀντιστὰς ὕπερ.
Αν. ὅµως ὅ γ’ Ἅιδης τοὺς νόµους τούτους ποθεῖ.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Κρ. οὔτοι ποθ’ οὑχθρός, οὐδ’ ὅταν θάνηι, φίλος.
Αν. οὔτοι συνέχθειν ἀλλὰ συµφιλεῖν ἔφυν.
Κρ. κάτω νυν ἐλθοῦσ’, εἰ φιλητέον, φίλει
κείνους· ἐµοῦ δὲ ζῶντος οὐκ ἄρξει γυνή.
518
.
525
[Kr: But (Polyneikes died) laying waste this land; and (Eteokles was) the
one who stood up on its behalf.
An: Hades desires these rites nonetheless.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kr: An enemy is never a friend, not even when he dies.
An: It is not in my nature to join in hating but in loving.
59
Ormand, Exchange and the Maiden, p. 90.
-27-
Kr: Then go below and love them, if they must be loved; but a woman will
not rule while I am alive.]60
Ant. 518-19, 522-25
Still championing the power of the womb (ὁµοσπλάγχνους, 511), Antigone pronounces that she
was obligated to perform Polyneikes’ burial because “Hades desires these rites” (519), regardless
of her brother’s military affiliation. By using the verb ποθεῖ—a term usually specific to sexual
desire, the Greek erōs61—Antigone tinges her words with an explicitly sexual connotation, as if
the god Hades is, in fact, sexually desirous of the rites she performs for Polyneikes. The
assertion that her nature inclines more toward “loving” than “hating” also takes on a sexual tone
when combined with Kreon’s command to “go below and love them,” for Antigone’s “joining in
loving” will take place “below” the earth (κάτω), where the desirous (suggested by ποθεῖ)
underworld god awaits her.
Significantly, it is at this point that Antigone is first termed a “bride-to-be,” and a
profusion of sexual and marital images appropriate to the question of the telos gamou
immediately surfaces. The dialogue between Ismene and Kreon beginning at line 568, for
example, focuses exclusively on Antigone’s marriage and death:
Ισ.
Κρ.
Ισ.
Κρ.
Ισ.
ἀλλὰ κτενεῖς νυµφεῖα τοῦ σαυτοῦ τέκνου;
ἀρώσιµοι γὰρ χἀτέρων εἰσὶν γύαι.
οὐχ ὥς γ’ ἐκείνωι τῆιδε τ’ ἦν ἡρµοσµένα.
κακὰς ἐγὼ γυναῖκας υἱέσι στυγῶ.
ὦ φίλταθ’ Αἷµoν, ὥς σ’ ἀτιµάζει πατήρ.62
570
Kreon’s language at lines 524-25 also provides for the translation, “A woman will not rule me while I am alive,” if
the phrase ἐµοῦ δὲ ζῶντος is understood as the genitive object of the verb ἄρξει (LSJ II.1). “A woman will not rule
me” perhaps gives a better sense of the king’s fear of being bested by a woman, a sign “not of ‘normal’ masculine
attitudes but of his tyrannical behavior” (Easterling, “Women in Tragic Space,” p. 22).
61
The nominal and adjectival forms of ποθέω also convey a strictly erotic sense. See, e.g., Sappho 15b (πόθεννον . . .
ἔρον, “desired love”) and 94 LP (ἐξιής πόθον, “you would satisfy your longing”); Arkhilokhos 104 (δύστηνος ἔγκειµαι
πόθωι/ ἄψυχος, “I lie wretched, breathless with desire”).
60
62
Some manuscripts attribute line 572 to Antigone, and modern commentators are divided on the subject.
Kamerbeek, Plays III, ad loc. supports its attribution to Antigone merely on grounds that “[i]t is a gain in connection
with the latter part of the play if Antigone may once be allowed to give utterance to her love for Haemon,” a love
that “cannot be denied because otherwise [line] 570 becomes meaningless.” Cf., however, Griffith, Sophocles,
“Antigone,” ad loc.: “Assignment of speakers is problematic. . . . but both stichomythic economy and dramatic logic
-28-
Κρ.
Ισ.
Κρ.
Ισ.
[Is:
Kr:
Is:
Kr:
Is:
Kr:
Is:
Kr:
Is:
ἄγαν γε λυπεῖς καὶ σὺ καὶ τὸ σὸν λέχος.
ἦ γὰρ στερήσεις τῆσδε τὸν σαυτοῦ γόνον;
Ἅιδης ὁ παύσων τούσδε τοὺς γάµους ἔφυ.
δεδογµέν’, ὡς ἔοικε, τήνδε κατθανεῖν.
575
Will you really kill the bride of your own child?
Yes, the furrows of other women can be plowed.
But these (marriages will not suit) as well as this one suited him and her.
I hate wicked wives for sons.
O dearest Haimon, how your father dishonors you!
You pain me very much—you and your “marriage.”
Will you really rob your own son of this woman?
Hades is naturally the one who will stop these nuptials.
It has been decided, so it seems, that she is to die.]
Ant. 568-76
Kreon’s reply to Ismene’s question of whether he will really kill his son’s “bride” (νυµφεῖα)63 is
indeed marked “with matter-of-fact coarseness,” as Mark Griffith suggests,64 but it also
privileges the image of plowing that appears most explicitly in Menander’s betrothal formula,
wherein a bride is given to her husband “for the purpose of plowing legitimate children.”65
In any case, the topic of Antigone’s marriage is undoubtedly at issue here, for Kreon
speaks of “wicked wives” and the lekhos—here synecdochic for “marriage” itself—before he
demand that Ismene should speak all three lines. Many editors (beginning with the Aldine) have felt that the
passionate apostrophē (572, ὦ φίλταθ’ Αἷµων . . . ) comes most appropriately from his fiancée, Ant[igone], and that
τὸ σὸν λέχος (573) must be directed at her in response (‘your marriage’). However, a third speaker’s single-line
interruption of a two-person stichomythia would be highly unusual (unparalleled in S[ophokles]).”
63
The substantive adjective νυµφεῖα is unusual for “bride”; typically, it refers to the “nuptial rites” (cf. ἐπὶ νυµ-/
φείοις, “at my wedding,” 814-15) or the “bridal chamber” (cf. ὦ νυµφεῖον, “o bridal chamber,” 891; κόρης/ νυµφεῖον
Ἅιδου κοῖλον, “the maiden’s hollow bridal chamber of Hades,” 1204-05). Cf. Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” ad
loc.: “νυµφεῖα: here ‘bride’ (= νύµφην, cf. E[uripides] E[lectra] 481 λέχεα); more normal usage at 814, 891, 1205.”
64
Ibid., ad loc.
65
When Ismene states that Haimon and Antigone are more “suited” to one another than other possible mates
(ἡρµοσµένα, 570), her language actually plays off of two separate meanings of the verb ἁρµόζω, which “can mean
(transitive) ‘to betroth’ (cf. E[uripides] Pho[enissai] 491, LSJ s.v. 1.2), but also (intransitive) ‘to be suitable,’ ‘be
well adapted’ (cf. 1318, O[idipous] T[yrannos] 902, El[ectra] 1293)” (Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” ad loc.).
Her reply to Kreon thus places his reference to plowing in the context of marriage (i.e., “betrothal”), and, at the same
time, may indicate either “that Haimon and Ant[igone] are personally well-suited and in love, or that, as first cousin
of a fatherless and brotherless heiress, Haimon is the ‘most suitable’ husband for her: perhaps both” (ibid.).
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speaks of the gamos that he will not allow Antigone to achieve.66 Haimon’s entrance follows
closely upon this declaration, and it is perhaps with heavy irony that the Chorus heralds his
arrival in terms that focus on his upcoming marriage to Antigone:
ὅδε µὴν Αἵµων, παίδων τῶν σῶν
νέατον γέννηµ’· ἆρ’ ἀχνύµενος
τῆς µελλογάµου
τάλιδος ἥκει µόρον Ἀντιγόνης,
ἀπάτης λεχέων ὑπεραλγῶν;
630
[Indeed, here is Haimon, the youngest born of your children. Has he come
grieving for the fate of his betrothed bride Antigone, feeling much pain for the
deception of his marriage bed?]
Ant. 626-30
Again, Antigone is a “betrothed bride” (µελλογάµου/ τάλιδος, 628-29) and, again, the word λέχος
appears, but, in this case, its deception is significant. By placing ἀπάτης λεχέων in apposition to
µόρον Ἀντιγόνης the Chorus suggests that the two are synonymous, that the death of Antigone will
“cheat” Haimon of both his bride and his marriage/bed. When combined with Kreon’s words
that Hades will be the one to stop the union, the “deception” referred to becomes almost a
seduction, as if the god—who was earlier connected with “desire” (ποθεῖ, 519)—wishes to claim
Antigone for himself.67
The idea of Hades as a sort of alternative bridegroom to Haimon (himself called νύµφιος at
761) only intensifies in the ensuing exchange between Kreon and Haimon, in which Kreon offers
his son a piece of marital advice that culminates in a reference to marriage in Hades’ underworld
realm. “Send this child to marry someone else in Hades’ halls” (µέθες/ τὴν παῖδ’ ἐν Ἅιδου τήνδε
νυµφεύειν τινί, 653-54), he proclaims, but when Haimon voices his support of Antigone’s actions,
further conflict erupts:
66
I have translated γάµους as “nuptials” here, but it is properly the sexual union of the wedding night.
The term used here for deception, ἀπάτη, may indeed have the connotation of seduction. For ἀπάτη used in a
sexual sense, see Hera’s seduction of Zeus at Iliad 14.292-351, often referred to as the ∆ίος ἀπάτη.
67
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Κρ. ταύτην ποτ’ οὐκ ἔσθ’ ὡς ἔτι ζῶσαν γαµεῖς.
Αι. ἥδ’ οὖν θανεῖται καὶ θανοῦσ’ ὀλεῖ τινα.
[Kr: It is impossible that you will marry this girl while she still lives.
Ha: And so she will die and, in dying, she will kill another.]
Ant. 750-51
Haimon states quite pointedly that, if he cannot marry Antigone, he will go to the grave with her,
effecting their marriage in death. Kreon, however, does not—or cannot—understand his son’s
intentions; he does not believe that Haimon will persist in his efforts to marry Antigone because
Haimon is not the groom for whom he intends her. Indeed, the king expects that the unnamed
“someone else” of line 654 will become Antigone’s “groom,” whose identity now becomes clear:
ἄγων ἐρῆµος ἔνθ’ ἂν ἦι βροτῶν στίβος
κρύψω πετρώδει ζῶσαν ἐν κατώρυχι,
. . . . . . . . . . .
773
κἀκεῖ τὸν Ἅιδην, ὃν µόνον σέβει θεῶν,
αἰτουµένη που τεύξεται τὸ µὴ θανεῖν,
ἢ γνώσεται γοῦν ἀλλὰ τηνικαῦθ’ ὅτι
πόνος περισσός ἐστι τἀν Ἅιδου σέβειν.
780
[Leading her where the path is empty of mortals, I shall hide her in a rocky cave
. . . And then by asking Hades, whom she honors alone among the gods, she will
obtain not dying, I suppose, or she will at least finally learn that it is a superfluous
task to honor the things of Hades.]
Ant. 773-74, 777-80
Kreon’s mention of “leading” Antigone (ἄγων) introduces again the theme of her marriage, as if
he intends to lead her in a sort of ekdosis to the “rocky cave.” This procession, however, will not
secure her transfer from natal to marital oikos, but from the world of the living to the world of
the dead: the “path empty of mortals” suggests the path to the underworld, and the verb κρύπτω
denotes not only “hiding” but also “burying,” so that Kreon’s plan to seal Antigone in the cave
ultimately resembles the burial he performed for Eteokles at lines 23-25 (Ἐτεοκλέα µὲν, ὡς
λέγουσι, σὺν δίκηι . . . ἔκρυψε, “[Kreon] hid/buried Eteokles rightly, so they say”). The crucial
difference, of course, is that Antigone is not dead; Kreon intends her to go to the grave alive
-31-
(ζῶσαν), where he expects that she will commune with the underworld god (Ἅιδην . . . αἰτουµένη,
777-78) and somehow “obtain not dying.”68 But how can Antigone, sealed alive in a “rocky
cave,” not die? The answer undoubtedly involves her telos, as her final appearance in the play
confirms.
Antigone’s “Wedding”
Immediately before Antigone’s last entrance onstage, the Chorus sings a hymn to Eros
that focuses specifically—and surprisingly—on the erōs of marriage. The language of the hymn
centers, in particular, on the destructive power of desire, and its words resonate deeply with the
story of Antigone’s now-broken engagement to Haimon:
Ἔρως ἀνίκατε µάχαν,
Ἔρως, ὃς ἐν κτήµασι πίπτεις,
ὃς ἐν µαλακαῖς παρειαῖς
νεάνιδος ἐννυχεύεις,
φοιτᾶις δ’ ὑπερπόντιος ἔν τ’
ἀγρονόµοις αὐλαῖς·
καί σ’ οὔτ’ ἀθανάτων φύξιµος οὐδεὶς
οὔθ’ ἁµερίων σέ γ’ ἀνθρώπων, ὁ δ’ ἔχων µέµηνεν.
[strophe α
σὺ καὶ δικαίων ἀδίκους
φρένας παρασπᾶις ἐπὶ λώβαι·
σὺ καὶ τόδε νεῖκος ἀνδρῶν
ξύναιµον ἔχεις ταράξας·
νικᾶι δ’ ἐναργὴς βλεφάρων
ἵµερος εὐλέκτρου
νύµφας
. . . . . . . .
[antistrophe α
785
790
795
.
ἄµαχος γὰρ ἐµπαίζει θεὸς Ἀφροδίτα.
800
For the idea that this method of punishment constitutes a sacrifice, see, e.g., Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of
Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 31-32. Seaford,
“Imprisonment,” p. 82 compares it to “the famous punishment for the Vestals for sexual offences” at Rome, where
“the offending virgin is taken in a funereal procession for permanent confinement in a cell in the earth equipped with
a bed, a lamp, and some food (cf. S[ophokles] Ant. 807 ff., 774-5).”
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[Eros unconquerable in battle, Eros, you who fall upon the flocks, you who spend
all night on the soft cheeks of the young, and you who range about over the sea
and in country courtyards—none of the immortals can escape you, and none of
short-lived men, but the one who possesses you is insane.
You wrest aside the minds of the just to make them unjust, to their ruin. You
have also roused this kindred strife between men. And the manifest desire from
the eyes of a well-wedded bride wins out. . . . For the unconquerable goddess
Aphrodite is at play.]
Ant. 781-800
Strophe α clearly describes erōs as an invincible force that neither animals (κτήµασι) nor man nor
even the gods can escape, while antistrophe α is narrower in focus and is specific to the context
of erōs between Haimon and Antigone.69 “This kindred strife between men” can only mean the
quarrel that the Chorus has just witnessed between Kreon and Haimon, whose ordinarily “just”
minds have become “unjust” due to conflict over Haimon’s “well-wedded bride.”70 The “bright
desire” connected with this bride “wins out”—as the play’s audience has perhaps already sensed
after Haimon’s parting declaration that Antigone’s death will “kill another” (749)—and the
Chorus appropriately introduces Aphrodite, counterpart to Eros, immediately before announcing
the arrival of the “bride” (νύµφη) herself at line 800. Given that “the invocation of erōs is a
typical part of hymeneal celebrations” in Greek literature,71 it is easy to interpret the ode, with its
invocation of the divine forces of desire, as a sort of epithalamion for Antigone, who now stands
on the threshold of her telos.
See also Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” ad loc.: “The Chorus’ words [at 791-94] recall Kreon’s earlier
complaints about money (298-9) and about sex (648-9); so they seem to have Haimon primarily in mind, and rightly
so, for were Haimon not in love, his language [to Kreon at 751ff.] would have been milder, and his father more
receptive.”
69
70
Kreon is “unjust” for condemning Antigone, who is, according to Haimon, more “worthy of golden honor” (ἥδε
χρυσῆς ἀξία τιµῆς, 699) than death; Haimon is unjust, in his father’s eyes at least, both for being “ally to a woman”
(τῆι γυναικὶ συµµαχεῖ, 740) and for speaking so “threateningly” to his father (κἀπαπειλῶν, 752).
71
Goldhill, “Character and Action,” p. 102.
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The conflation of Antigone’s marriage with death only becomes more explicit in the
Chorus’ announcement of her arrival:
. . . ἴσχειν δ’
οὐκέτι πηγὰς δύναµαι δακρύων,
τὸν παγκοίτην ὅθ’ ὁρῶ θάλαµον
τήνδ’ Ἀντιγόνην ἀνύτουσαν.
805
[. . . but no longer am I able to hold back the streams of my tears, because I see
Antigone here, going toward the bedchamber where all must sleep.]
Ant. 802-05
As the “bedchamber” in which the gamos of a Greek marriage took place, the thalamos housed
the marital lekhos and was closely associated with the sexual act. That Antigone is now ready to
embark on her journey to the thalamos suggests that she is prepared to meet her groom and enter
the marriage bed. It is important to note, however, that Antigone’s thalamos will be the “rocky
cave” of which Kreon spoke in line 774, a place literally “sunken in the earth” or “underground”
(κατώρυξ), like Hades’ underworld realm.
Antigone, too, conflates the language of marriage and death in her response to the Chorus
as she cries out to them to watch her traveling her “final road” (τὰν νεάταν ὁδὸν, 807), a phrase
indicative of both actual death and the symbolic death of the virgin bride as she reaches the
gamos of her wedding night.72 The ensuing description of her journey to the “shore of Acheron”
72
The way in which Antigone addresses the Chorus—“look at me, citizens of my fatherland” (ὁρᾶτε µ’, ὦ γᾶς
πατρίας πολῖται, 806)—may also suggest a hymeneal context for the scene. The injunction to “look at” her may
function as a symbolic anakalyptēria (“unveiling”), the moment at which a Greek bride signaled the surrender of her
virginity to her groom by lifting her veil (see, e.g., Redfield, “Notes on the Greek Wedding,” p. 192). There is,
however, some division on the exact moment at which the anakalyptēria was performed. Among ancient sources,
Pherekydes (sixth c. BCE) and Hesykhios (fifth c. CE) record that the anakalyptēria took place on the third day of the
wedding celebration, yet it is unclear whether the bride unveiled herself in public or in private. Among modern
sources, Redfield suggests that it took place in public, after the wedding feast (“Notes on the Greek Wedding,” p.
192); Oakley and Sinos concede that “our sources are not consistent on the timing of the ceremony,” but suggest that
“since anakalyptēria gifts could be adduced in court as evidence that a woman was actually married, witnesses must
have been present, which would make the feast a suitable occasion for the ritual” (Wedding, p. 25). Rehm, on the
other hand, contends that the anakalyptēria took place in private, within the husband’s house, to signify the bride’s
consent to and readiness for gamos (Marriage to Death, p. 17). If the anakalyptēria did indeed take place in private,
as Rehm suggests, it is equally possible that Antigone’s unveiling occurs within the cave tomb (referred to as her
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indeed privileges the latter of these interpretations, as Antigone herself speaks of “wedding
songs” and her “marriage” to the Death god:73
. . . ἀλλά µ’ ὁ παγκοίτας Ἅιδας ζῶσαν ἄγει
τὰν Ἀχέροντος
ἀκτάν, οὔθ’ ὑµεναίων
ἔγκληρον, οὔτ’ ἐπὶ νυµφείοις πώ µέ τις ὕµνος ὕµνησεν, ἀλλ’ Ἀχέροντι νυµφεύσω.
810
815
[But Hades, who puts all to sleep, leads me, still living, to the shore of Acheron,
without a share in wedding songs. And not yet has any hymn hymned me at my
marriage; but I shall marry Acheron.]
Ant. 810-16
Hades’ action of leading Antigone to Acheron’s shore (ἄγει) duplicates the action of a groom
leading his bride by the wrist to their new home; in this case, however, the new “home” is the
shore of an underworld river, which will serve as Antigone’s thalamos. She “will marry
Acheron,” but this type of wedding will preclude the ceremony (νυµφείοις, 814-15) and
celebration (ὕµνος ὕµνησεν, 815-16) she would have experienced in her actual wedding to
Haimon. Thus the ode, in itself, functions doubly as a wedding song and funeral dirge as
Antigone prepares to meet Death—a sort of substitute “husband” for Haimon—and to enter the
cave that she recognizes as both “tomb” and “wedding-chamber” (ὦ τύµβος, ὦ νυµφεῖον, 891).
thalamos), after the official procession to it. (For a brief history of the debate over the time and place of the
anakalyptēria, see Rehm’s “Appendix A,” pp. 141-42.)
The marriage imagery is so strong in this scene that Bennett and Tyrrell (Recapturing Sophocles’ “Antigone,” pp.
99-100) interpret Antigone’s speech as an aural indication of a visual change in her appearance: “Nothing is said
about the actor’s costume except for its ‘noose of fine linen’ (βρόχωι µιτώδει σινδόνος, 1222), variously considered a
girdle, headband, or veil. Antigone herself, however, implicitly reveals what she is wearing, a violet-colored dress,
instantly recognizable from its color as a wedding dress. She has bound her hair up for her wedding and arranged a
veil over her face.” See also their article, “What is Antigone Wearing?” CW 85.2 (1991): 107: “Creon, Antigone’s
kyrios, refusing to marry her properly to Haemon, gives her to death. She goes to her groom fittingly attired, for
Antigone is wearing a wedding dress. Another costume would contravene the audience’s expectations inferable
from her evocation, the conventions of Sophocles’ medium, and his audience’s acculturation as Athenians and
Greeks.” Richard Seaford, “The Tragic Wedding,” JHS 107 (1987): 133 also states that “the presentation of the
death of Antigone as a wedding . . . is so pervasive that I believe that the attire in which she goes [to her cave-tomb],
and with which she hangs herself, is bridal.”
73
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Her declaration that a “god is putting [her] to bed” (µε δαί-/ µων . . . κατευνάζει, 833) evokes the
gamos of the wedding night,74 and ultimately completes the portrayal of her marriage to Death:
undoubtedly, Antigone’s death constitutes her telos, with a cave-tomb as the place of her
“perfection” and the god Hades himself as her “perfector.” The exact meaning of “the not
dying” to which Kreon referred at line 778 now becomes clear: because her death will be a
marriage, of sorts, to the death god, Antigone will “live” as his bride as a kind of Persephone
figure, “among neither the living nor the dead” (οὐ ζῶσιν, οὐ θανοῦσιν, 852)75—a metoikos isolated
from her birth family (that of Ismene) as well as her promised marital family (that of Haimon),
and banished to a living death in a cave where the “path is empty of mortals” (773).
74
The component parts of the verb κατευνάζω are the preposition κατά (“down”) and the noun εὐνή (“bed”), a term
often specific to the “marriage bed.” If we understand this meaning, Antigone is saying, in effect, that a god is
“bedding her down” in her marriage bed—i.e., effecting her telos through a sexual initiation like the gamos of the
wedding night. Other elements of sexuality and marriage are sprinkled throughout this scene, including: δάµασεν
(“subdue” or “tame,” 827), a verb often indicating sexual subjugation; the τριπόλιστον οἶκτον (“thrice plowed woe,”
859-60) of Antigone’s family; the κοιµήµατα (“sexual unions,” 864) of Oidipous and Iokaste; ἄγοµαι (“I am led,”
877, 939); ἄγει µε δὶα χερῶν (“he leads me by the hands,” 916); κατεζεύχθη (“she was yoked,” 947).
For a fuller account of Antigone as a Persephone figure, see Segal, Tr&C, pp. 179-83 and my “Conclusion,” pp.
77-78.
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CHAPTER 3: SOPHOKLES’ TRAKHINIAI
Unlike his Antigone, which concentrates on the frustration of the virgin’s story pattern,
Sophokles’ Trakhiniai shows a wife and mother, Deianeira, experiencing complications with her
status as a complete woman. In a lengthy opening monologue, Deianeira laments that Herakles
has been absent from their home in Trakhis for fifteen months. Concerned for his safety, she
follows the suggestion of her Nurse and sends her son Hyllos to discover Herakles’ whereabouts.
Just after Hyllos departs, a Messenger arrives with news that Herakles is safe and returning from
a military victory. The ensuing arrival of the herald Likhas, who has come to deliver a train of
captive girls to Deianeira, confirms his information. Among the girls is Iole, an Oikhalian
princess whom Herakles has sent home as a second wife. Threatened by the introduction of her
husband’s mistress into her home, Deianeira responds to Herakles’ “gift” of Iole with a countergift consisting of a robe anointed with what she thinks is a love charm. The charm, however,
turns out to be an insidious poison that brings Herakles to the brink of death. Faced with the
knowledge that she has caused her husband’s demise, Deianeira commits suicide.
From the play’s opening lines until her final exit to suicide, Deianeira is, above all, a
devoted wife and mother.76 Like Homer’s Penelope, her source of authority and, indeed, her
entire identity derive from these two roles, and Sophokles constantly affirms her status as a
complete woman by associating her with images of fertility and nurture. When she sends
Herakles the philter-infused robe, however, she engages in what is essentially an erotic agōn
with Iole, an uncharacteristically masculine action, and deviates from the expected plotline of the
devoted wife/mother story. By sending the deadly gift of the robe—itself reminiscent of the
On this, see also Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 161: “In the first scenes of the Trachiniae,
Sophocles carefully exposes the heroine’s total dedication to home and marriage (103 ff.).”
76
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poisoned robe that Medeia sends to Jason’s new bride—Deianeira unwittingly conforms to the
plot of the murderess, like Medeia or even Klytaimestra, rather than the devoted wife/mother.
When she learns that the gift of the robe has brought Herakles to the point of death and that she
has destroyed her marriage and family, however, she commits suicide by the sword, a manly
form of death that, paradoxically, reaffirms her complete devotion to home and family. “Veering
between the extremes of Penelope and Clytaemnestra, between passivity and aggressiveness,”77
Deianeira challenges the validity of the archaic system of typing women according to their
relative adherence to or deviation from established plotlines. Ultimately, the conflicting systems
of imagery that Sophokles employs to construct her character serve to examine her identity as a
woman by exploring how her actions affect the validity of the telos gamou and her existence as a
wife and mother.
A Girl’s Weakness, a Woman’s Power
As the play opens, Sophokles presents his audience with two separate portraits of
Deianeira—the mature wife and mother who has managed her oikos alone during Herakles’
fifteen-month absence, and the virgin girl who spent her youth in a state of complete helplessness
and fear. The juxtaposition of these two stages of Deianeira’s life effectively details her
transition from passive object to active subject, a transformation that seems to coincide with her
transition from maiden to wife/mother:
ἥτις πατρὸς µὲν ἐν δόµοισιν Οἰνέως
ναίουσ’ ἔτ’ ἐν Πλευρῶνι νυµφείων ὄκνον
ἄλγιστον ἔσχον, εἴ τις Αἰτωλὶς γυνή.
µνηστὴρ γὰρ ἦν µοι ποταµός, Ἀχελῶιον λέγω,
ὅς µ’ ἐν τρισὶν µορφαῖσιν ἐξήιτει πατρός,
. . . . . . . . . . .
77
Segal, Tr&C, p. 82.
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10
τοιόνδε ἐγὼ µνηστῆρα προσδεδεγµένη
δύστηνος αἰεὶ κατθανεῖν ἐπηυχόµην
πρὶν τῆσδε κοίτης ἐµπελασθῆναί ποτε.
χρόνωι δ’ ἐν ὑστέρωι µέν, ἀσµένηι δέ µοι,
ὁ κλεινὸς ἦλθε Ζηνὸς Ἀλκµήνης τε παῖς,
ὃς εἰς ἀγῶνα τῶιδε συµπεσὼν µάχης
ἐκλύεται µε· καὶ τρόπον µὲν ἂν πόνων
οὐκ ἂν διείποιµ’, οὐ γὰρ οἶδ’· ἀλλ’ ὅστις ἦν
θακῶν ἀταρβὴς τῆς θέας, ὅδ’ ἂν λέγοι·
ἐγὼ γὰρ ἥµην ἐκπεπληγµένη φόβωι
µή µοι τὸ κάλλος ἄλγος ἐξεύροι ποτέ. 78
15
20
25
[When I still lived in Pleuron in the halls of my father Oineus, I had the worst fear
of marriage, if any Aitolian woman did. For my suitor was a river god—
Akheloös, I mean—who, appearing in three forms, asked me from my father . . . .
Wretched, I always prayed that I would die before I ever came near this union.
But in time, and to my joy, the glorious son of Zeus and Alkmene came, who
freed me by falling into the contest of battle with (Akheloös). Yet I could not tell
of the manner of his labors, for I do not know. But whoever was sitting there,
unafraid of the sight, could tell you. For I sat stricken with fear that my beauty
would bring me pain.]
Trakh. 6-10, 15-25
Although her first suitor, Akheloös, is a rather monstrous figure, Deianeira’s transition from
girlhood to womanhood is quite “normal.” A parthenos at the time of her wooing, she
experienced a “fear of marriage” (νυµφείων ὄκνον, 7) that is, though extreme, representative of the
feelings of anxiety usually attributed to nubile girls in Greek literature. Like Nausikaä of the
Odyssey, she rejected the suitor who courted her at home, but was overjoyed at the advent of a
man from abroad who could save her from marrying the river god.79
The text is that of the Cambridge commentary: P.E. Easterling, ed., Sophocles, “Trachiniae” (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982; rpt. 1999).
78
Nausikaä expresses her hopes that the shipwrecked Odysseus will become her husband at Od. 6.244-45, and tells
Odysseus that the other Phaiakians will surely think that “he will be her husband” if he accompanies her to her
father’s palace (πόσις νύ οἱ ἔσσεται αὐτῆι, 6.277-78). According to Nausikaä, her neighbors feel that “it would be
better if she found herself a husband from elsewhere” (βέλτερον, εἰ καὐτή . . . πόσιν εὗρεν/ ἄλλοθεν, 6.282-83) since
she “rejects” her Phaiakian suitors (τούσδε γ’ ἀτιµάζει κατὰ δῆµον, 6.283).
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At the same time, it is clear that the young Deianeira did not have the potential to act “as
subject of her own narrative,”80 as she does as a married adult: her repulsive suitor Akheloös
asked her “from her father,” leaving the matter of her marriage a decision of the male realm, and
she, as the passive object of the river god’s desires, could only “pray to die” to avoid the union.81
Then Herakles “came,” in a sort of deus ex machina advent that marks him as a “glorious” savior
(κλεινὸς, 19), despite the fact that his presence actually furthered Deianeira’s objectification. Far
from freeing her, his entrance into the fray with Akheloös transformed Deianeira from a
resourceless maiden to a “much wooed” bride-prize (ἀµφινείκητον, 527) to be won “in the contest
of battle” (20) by the most worthy competitor.82 Without her suggestion, or even consent, both
contestants joined battle for purely physical reasons. According to the Chorus, the men
competed because they were “desirous of [Deianeira’s] bed,” with Kypris, the goddess of sexual
love, as their referee (ἴσαν ἐς µέσον ἱέµενοι λεχέων·/ µόνα δ’ εὔλεκτρος ἐν µέσωι Κύπρις/ ῥαβδονόµει
Victoria Wohl, Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1998), p. 22.
80
81
In this respect, Deianeira resembles any young Athenian woman of marriageable age in the fifth century, as
marriage, and especially the selection of a suitable husband, was generally left to the bride’s father or legal guardian.
Deianeira herself says that she became Herakles’ wife only after “her father’s sending” (τὸν πατρῶιον . . . στόλον/ ξὺν
Ἡρακλι τὸ πρῶτον εὖνις ἑσπόµην, 562-63) and through no agency of her own; Herakles, on the other hand, refers to
their marriage as an “alliance with Oineus” (τὸν Οἰνέως γάµον, 792), Deianeira’s father. For more on marriage and
Deianeira, see, e.g., Dorothea Wender, “The Will of the Beast: Sexual Imagery in the Trachiniae,” Ramus 3 (1974):
1-17. Wender analyzes Deianeira’s pre-marital anxiety especially well by examining the figure of Akheloös: “What
kind of monster [was he]? A river who took the form of (a) a bull (the masculine beast par excellence), (b) a
slippery (αἰόλος) coiling serpent (the male organ?) and (c) a bull-headed man, out of whose bushy (δασκίου) beard
flowed fountains of water (the water pouring out of a bush seems like another fairly transparent picture). Consider:
If any poet quite deliberately and ‘conceptually’ set out to represent male sexuality in fabulous form, as fantasied
[sic] by a frightened young girl, could he do better than this? . . . Achelous stands for any potent male, and his
multiple form is simply a fearful young girl’s fantasy of adult sex. In a sense, Deianeira is any sheltered, ignorant,
Athenian girl faced at much too young an age with the prospect of leaving her parent’s home forever, to be ruled by
a shaggy stranger, an adult male” (pp. 4-5).
The helpless bride prize is a particularly epic motif. Compare, e.g., the situation of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey:
beset with suitors in the absence of her husband, Penelope can only postpone, rather than refuse, marriage with one
of them. To forestall them, she announces that she will not wed until she finishes weaving a shroud for Odysseus’
father Laertes (2.99-102), which she then proceeds to weave by day and unweave by night. Likewise, after
Odysseus returns home, Penelope proposes a contest of strength (19.572-80), ostensibly to choose the most worthy
husband. The contest, however, ultimately serves as the means by which Odysseus and Telemakhos can slay her
suitors.
82
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ξυνοῦσα, 514-16); Deianeira herself had no hand in the outcome of the contest. Instead, she sat
“stricken with fear,” thinking only of the “pain” the contest might bring her (25). Fully aware
that “it [was] not her own actions, but an external quality over which she had no control—her
beauty—that ha[d] brought about this risk of pain,”83 she could not watch the battle that would
determine her life’s course. She was an object in the extreme, as the Chorus’ description of her
at lines 523-30 makes clear:
ἁ δ’ εὐῶπις ἁβρὰ
τηλαυγεῖ παρ’ ὄχθωι
ἧστο, τὸν ὃν προσµένουσ’ ἀκοίταν.
ἐγὼ δὲ θατὴρ µὲν οἷα φράζω·
τὸ δ’ ἀµφινείκητον ὄµµα νύµφας
ἐλεινὸν ἀµµένει < ∪ ‒ >,
κἀπὸ µατρὸς ἄφαρ βέβακεν
ὥστε πόρτις ἐρήµα.
525
530
[Beautiful and tender, she sat far off on a hill, waiting for the one who would be
her husband. But I speak as a spectator:84 the bride’s much-wooed beauty waited
pitiably, and she went far from her mother, like a lone calf.]
Trakh. 523-30
In the Chorus’ words, it was not Deianeira but her “much-wooed beauty” (or “much-wooed
face”) that waited for the winner of the contest.85 This beauty, the reason for the battle between
Christina Elliott Sorum, “Monsters and the Family: A Study of Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” Ph.D. diss., Brown
University (1975), p. 37.
83
The text of line 526 has been much debated: Easterling (Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc.) understands θατήρ (the
Doric form of θεατής, “spectator”), based on the emendation of Th. Zielinski (“Excurse zu den Trachinierinnen des
Sophokles,” Philologus 9 [1896]: 528-29, n. 5). The MS actually reads µάτηρ, but “I tell the story as her mother”
makes little sense, coming from a Chorus of maidens who are much younger than Deianeira. In defense of the MS
reading, J.C. Kamerbeek (The Plays of Sophocles, Commentaries II: The “Trachiniae” [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959], ad
loc.) translates the line, “I tell the story as my mother told me” (his emphasis), but there seems to be no context for
understanding a reference to the Chorus’ mothers. Zielinski’s θατήρ, on the other hand, picks up Deianeira’s own
language from the prologue: at lines 22-23 Deianeira states that only someone “who was sitting there unafraid of the
sight (θέας)” could speak of Herakles’ battle with Akheloös, and the Chorus, in their version of the battle, claims to
have a spectator’s knowledge (θατήρ/ θεατής). For an extensive catalogue of emendations to this line, see the edition
of Raffaele Cantarella, which cites twenty-five separate variations (Sophocles “Trachinias” [Naples: F.
Sangiovanni, 1926], ad loc.).
84
On the translation of ὄµµα (literally “eye”) as “beauty” or “face,” see A.A. Long, Language and Thought in
Sophocles (London: Athlone Press, 1968), pp. 101-02: “The lines are a dramatic reference back to Deianira’s own
report of her anxious attention on the outcome of the struggle, ἐγὼ γὰρ ἥµην ἐκπεπληγµένη φόβωι | µή µοι τὸ κάλλος
85
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Herakles and Akheloös, eclipsed even her identity as a “bride” (νύµφας, in an oblique case), and
she became merely the beautiful thing that each man coveted; she existed only as an object, with
no potential for subjectivity.
As a wife and mother, however, Deianeira attains the subject status that she lacked as a
maiden. Although it is true that “in her earlier life” she was “unable to control her surroundings,
caught up in a situation that [was] beyond her range and comprehension,”86 she experiences a
transition from complete objectivity to near-total subjectivity after her marriage, wherein she
becomes not only a wife and mother—a “complete” woman by classical standards—but also
head of her family’s household in Herakles’ absence. Her position over the household affords
her a degree of κράτος, “power” or “authority,” evinced perhaps most clearly by the manner in
which other characters address her: in direct speech she is ἄνασσα (“queen”) and δέσποινα/δεσπότις
(“mistress”), and the herald Likhas identifies her as κρατοῦσαν ∆ειάνειραν, Οἰνέως/ κόρην, δάµαρτά
θ’ Ἡρακλέους . . . δεσπότιν τε τὴν ἐµήν (“the woman in charge, Deianeira—Oineus’ daughter,
Herakles’ wife, and my mistress,” 405-07).
The title despoina (or despotis) suggests that Deianeira has a great deal of authority
within the oikos, not unlike Nausikaä’s mother, Arete, in Odyssey 7, whose honored position as
despoina grants her the authority to “dissolve quarrels even among men” (καὶ ἀνδράσι νείκεα λύει,
Od. 7.74) and to determine the fate of suppliants who come “to her high-beamed house and to
her fatherland” (οἶκον ἐς ὑψόροφον καὶ σὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν 7.75-77). Likhas’ identification of
Deianeira as kratousan, on the other hand, has a specific application to the power of a ruler
ἄλγος ἐξεύροι ποτέ (24-25). ὄµµα, like ὄψις, can stand for the face or the quality of the face and here it may be regarded
as a resumption of κάλλος. Sophocles isolates the beauty of Deianira by saying ‘the maiden’s face waits,’ just as he
calls attention to the appearance of Achelous by φάσµα ταύρου.”
Marsh McCall, “The Trachiniae. Structure, Focus, and Herakles,” AJP 93 (1972): 143. McCall’s interpretation,
unlike mine, uses Deianeira’s maiden helplessness as proof that she is “no Sophoclean heroine at all” (p. 155), but
an entirely passive, “monochromic” figure (p. 147) throughout the play.
86
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(anassa, in the Chorus’ words), for forms of the verb krateîn “define the status of the king and
. . . determine the attributes of basileía ‘kingship’” from Homeric Greek society onward.87 That
Likhas describes Deianeira as kratousan just prior to identifying her as “Oineus’ daughter,
Herakles’ wife,” however, suggests that her “power” stems from her relationship to the two
principal men in her life, her father and husband. Of these two relationships, Deianeira’s role as
Herakles’ wife undoubtedly gains her greater authority: “Oineus’ daughter” suffered from a total
lack of subjectivity, but “Herakles’ wife” is a mature and, in Likhas’ words, “authoritative”
woman vested with the task of running her husband’s oikos. Management of the household is, in
fact, so important a task that Herakles has left her an “old tablet inscribed with signs” (47, 156)
with which
. . . εἶπε µὲν λέχους ὅ τι
χρείη µ’ ἑλέσθαι κτῆσιν, εἶπε δ’ ἣν τέκνοις
µοῖραν πατρωίας γῆς διαιρετὸν νέµοι,
χρόνον προτάξας
[He told me what I must take as my marriage property and what share of their
father’s land he would distribute to the children as their inheritance, fixing the
time (for this) in advance.]
Trakh. 161-64
These instructions not only testify to Deianeira’s literacy—a quality that perhaps sets her apart
from the average Athenian housewife—but they are also, as Easterling notes, “testamentary.”88
That is, they identify Deianeira as the executor of Herakles’ will and necessarily place her in a
Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber & Faber Ltd.,
1973), p. 357. Benveniste also states that forms of the verb krateîn designate attributes of the Homeric warrior—
specifically the “two values of krátos, ‘superiority,’ in a trial of strength or skill and, more particularly, ‘power (of
authority)’ ”—and most often have the connotation “ ‘to have the advantage, triumph’ (Il. 5, 175; 21, 315);
secondly, ‘exercise power’ ” (p. 362), making kratos largely a male virtue.
87
88
P.E. Easterling, Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc.
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position of full power over her family’s assets, an authoritative position perhaps best illustrated
by her possession of a “seal” (σφραγῖδος, 615) used to authorize transactions.89
Agricultural Metaphor: The Limitation of Deianeira’s Power
Even as head of her household, Deianeira’s power extends only as far as that of the
typical fifth-century wife and mother.90 Despite the fact that she is Herakles’ “chosen wife”
(λέχος . . . κριτόν, 27), she does not have the power to keep him from his “labors” (πόνων, 21) or to
effect his return. Her kratos extends only as far as the domain of the household; she is anassa
and despoina/despotis only over the oikos, which is, in essence, her “world.”91 Not surprisingly,
then, her language throughout the play is marked with images of nature and sexuality that
ultimately serve to underscore her “life-giving and life-sustaining functions as the keeper of the
house.”92 Even when lamenting her inability to restrain/retain Herakles, Deianeira expresses her
anxieties in terms specific to motherhood:
. . . λέχος γὰρ Ἡρακλεῖ κριτὸν
ξυστᾶσ’ ἀεί τιν’ ἐκ φόβου φόβον τρέφω,
κείνου προκηραίνουσα· νὺξ γὰρ εἰσάγει
καὶ νὺξ ἀπωθεῖ διαδεδεγµένη πόνον.
κἀφύσαµεν δὴ παῖδας, οὓς κεῖνός ποτε,
γήιτης ὅπως ἄρουραν ἔκτοπον λαβών,
130
Segal, TR&C, p. 68 notes that Deianeira’s seal acts as “the proof of her fidelity as the guardian of the house,”
because a wife’s seal is, by definition, “the token that assures the safekeeping of the wife’s interior realm—and
perhaps also by extension the wife’s sexuality, that other aspect of the ‘property’ of the house.”
89
90
On the idea of Deianeira as a “typical” woman, see also Wender, “Will of the Beast,” p. 2: “Until her suicide,
Deianeira is merely a recognizable fifth-century Athenian woman, dependent, domestic, submissive, timid,
secretive, ‘good,’ and depressed. It is as if Sophocles had chosen to write a tragedy around Ismene or Chrysothemis,
rather than Antigone and Electra. For this reason (that Deianeira is a real Athenian woman and not a heroic figure
of tragedy) I believe the Trachiniae comes closer than either the Oresteia or the Medea to a real examination of the
fundamental social and sexual problems of men and women.”
I take this term from Charles Segal, “Sophocles’ Trachiniae: Myth, Poetry, and Heroic Values,” YCS 25 (1977):
123.
91
92
Ibid., p. 126.
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σπείρων µόνον προσεῖδε κἀξαµῶν ἅπαξ.
τοιοῦτος αἰὼν εἰς δόµους τε κἀκ δόµων
αἰεὶ τὸν ἄνδρ’ ἔπεµπε λατρεύοντά τωι.
. . . . . . . . . .
ἡµεῖς µὲν ἐν Τραχῖνι τῆιδ’ ἀνάστατοι
ξένωι παρ’ ὰνδρὶ ναίοµεν, κεῖνος δ’ ὅπου
βέβηκεν οὐδεὶς οἶδε· πλὴν ἐµοὶ πικρὰς
ὠδῖνας αὑτοῦ προσβαλὼν ἀποίχεται.
135
140
[Since being united to Herakles as his chosen wife, I always rear fear after fear,
worrying for him. One night ushers in distress, and another drives it away in turn.
And we have had children whom he has seen only once, at sowing and at reaping,
like a farmer in possession of a distant field. This sort of life always sends my
husband to and from the house in service to someone. . . . We live here in Trakhis,
exiles among a foreign people, but no one knows where he has gone. But he is
gone, and has cast on me bitter pangs for him.]
Trakh. 27-35, 39-42
Deianeira “rears” fear as she would “rear” a child, while the “bitter pangs” Herakles has cast on
her approximate those “pangs” she has experienced in bearing their children. She herself has
become a “field” that Herakles visits only on occasion, to “sow” and to “reap”—to engage in
intercourse or to see the birth of a child conceived on his last visit. As a result, their relationship
is like that of a farmer who has “taken” (λαβών) a faraway field;93 Deianeira’s position is
marginal, at best, to her husband.
Because Deianeira cannot effect Herakles’ return, she “destroys her heart” (θυµοφθορῶ,
142) with worry for him, and explains her sufferings to the Chorus of Maidens by comparing
their “young life” (144) to her identity as a wife and mother:
93
The participle has some sense of violence: forms of λαµβάνω occur also at 259 to describe Herakles’ sudden
“mustering” of an army (στρατὸν λαβὼν ἐπακτὸν) and at 1225-26 in Herakles’ command to Hyllos not to let another
man “take” Iole (µηδ’ ἄλλος ἀνδρῶν τοῖς ἐµοῖς πλευροῖς ὁµοῦ/ κλιθεῖσαν αὐτὴν ἀντὶ σοῦ λάβηι ποτέ) as his lover/wife.
This second instance is particularly apt for comparison with the occurrence of λαβὼν at line 32, for both forms of the
verb connote a specifically sexual violence: Herakles, in effect, enjoins Hyllos not to let another man “take” Iole as
he himself previously “took” Deianeira—as a bride prize captured and made to lie “next to [his] side.” For
Deianeira’s possible use of λαµβάνω in a sexual sense, see Richard Seaford, “Wedding Ritual and Textual Criticism
in Sophocles’ ‘Women of Trachis,’ ” Hermes 114 (1986): 55. Deianeira’s phrase “until she becomes a wife instead
of a maiden, and takes (λάβηι) her share of worries in the night” (Trakh. 148-49) contains “a faint but pathetic
secondary allusion to the wedding night (λάβηι).”
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πεπυσµένη µέν, ὡς ἀπεικάσαι, πάρει
πάθηµα τοὐµόν· ὡς δ’ ἐγὼ θυµοφθορῶ
µήτ’ ἐκµάθοις παθοῦσα, νῦν δ’ ἄπειρος εἶ.
τὸ γὰρ νεάζον ἐν τοιοῖσδε βόσκεται
χώροισιν αὑτοῦ, καί νιν οὐ θάλπος θεοῦ
οὐδ’ ὄµβρος οὐδὲ πνευµάτων οὐδὲν κλονεῖ,
ἀλλ’ ἡδοναῖς ἄµοχθον ἐξαίρει βίον
ἐς τοῦθ’, ἕως τις ἀντὶ παρθένου γυνὴ
κληθῆι, λάβηι τ’ ἐν νυκτὶ φροντίδων µέρος,
ἤτοι πρὸς ἀνδρὸς ἢ τέκνων φοβουµένη·
τότ’ ἄν τις εἰσίδοιτο . . .
κακοῖσιν οἷς ἐγὼ βαρύνοµαι.
145
150
[You are here, I guess, because you have learned of my suffering. But may you
never learn, yourself suffering, how I am destroying my heart; but now you are
inexperienced (of it). For a young life is nourished in its own places, and neither
the heat of the (sun), nor the rain, nor any of the winds disturbs it, but it spends its
life untroubled in its pleasures until this point: when a girl is called “wife” instead
of “maiden,” and she takes her share of worries in the night, fearing either for her
husband or for her children. Then someone could see . . . with what misfortunes I
am weighed down.]
Trakh. 141-52
In these lines, Deianeira traces the process of the young girl’s maturation to wife and mother in
the same agricultural imagery that she used to identify herself as Herakles’ “field.” The crucial
difference between the girl and the woman, she says, is that a girl’s “young life” flourishes in a
secluded place, without the intrusion even of natural forces (sun, rain, wind), while the wife can
fulfill her role only by the intrusion of an external force, a “farmer” (γήιτης, 32) to tend and
cultivate the “field” (ἄρουραν, 32). This “farmer,” the husband, brings worries and the burden of
children, which Deianeira conflates by using the verb βαρύνοµαι, with its double meaning of “be
weighed down with” and “be pregnant with” (LSJ 1). If we understand the latter of these two
meanings, Deianeira’s complaint is essentially that Herakles has left her “pregnant” with worries
or misfortunes, which cause her “bitter (labor) pangs” (41-42) in his absence.94
See also Loraux, The Experiences of Tiresias, p. 39: “[Deianeira] carries inside her the paradoxical and painful
birthing of Herakles.”
94
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Clearly, for Deianeira, the “pleasures” (ἡδοναῖς, 147) of youth end with the responsibilities
of marriage (148-50), which her nostalgic look at the meadow of maidenhood ultimately
characterizes as unavoidable. The secluded and sheltered meadow must inevitably be trampled
by an intruder—like the mountain hyacinth of Sappho’s epithalamion95—and its fallow land
must be “sown” (33) by the “farmer” (32) as a consequence of time’s forward momentum.96
Deianeira thus warns the Chorus of Maidens—as yet “untried” of her “sufferings” (143)—that
they will inevitably experience her pains. Her image of the meadow, which likens the maidens
to uncultivated land lying in wait for a farmer (i.e., husband), “combines the security of virginal
innocence with the promise of sexual readiness and marriage,”97 ultimately suggesting that the
transition from parthenos to gynē must happen for the maidens of the Chorus as it did for
Deianeira, and that they, like her, will conceive, bear, and “rear” anxieties after experiencing
marriage and motherhood.
Moreover, the maidens’ passive existence in a sheltered, secluded environment—like
young Deianeira “in the halls of (her) father” (6)—renders them defenseless against the intrusion
Sappho’s epithalamion (fr. 105c LP) identifies the loss of virginity with the trampling of a flower in a field: οἴαν
τὰν ὐάκινθον ἐν ὤρεσι ποίµενες ἄνδρες/ πόσσι καταστείβουσι, χάµαι δέ τε πόρφυρον ἄνθος (“as shepherds tread down the
hyacinth in the mountains with their feet, and on the ground the purple flower. . .”). The lyric poet Ibykos also
identified maidenhood with a scene of untouched nature; fr. 286 PMG refers to “the inviolate garden of the Maidens”
(Παρθένων/ κᾶπος ἀκήρατος, 3-4). Among Sophokles’ contemporaries, Euripides used the metaphor of the uncut
meadow to represent youth’s virginal innocence at Hippolytos 73-81.
95
For the concept of time in Deianeira’s speech, see Segal, TR&C, p. 84: “These lines in their pathos and beauty
depict a woman caught, as she knows, within the onward-moving cycle of life looking back longingly toward a
protected inner world which, like the Homeric Olympus, is free of generation, time, and change.”
96
Maryline Parca, “Of Nature and Eros: Deianeira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” ICS 17.2 (1992): 180. See also pp.
177-79 for the sexual connotation of Deianeira’s lines: “The natural setting of lines 144-47 conveys the image of a
locus amoenus, a place traditionally well-shaded, well-watered, and free from windy blasts. This bucolic setting is
frequently used in archaic poetry, both in epic and iambo-lyric, as conventional accompaniment to erotic situations,
whether explicit or not. . . . The concomitant reference to a secluded place, absence of scorching sun, rain and wind
storms calls to mind a place where virginity could come to an end. A sense of latent fertility pervades the passage.
First, θάλπος θεοῦ contains a literal reference to the sun and conveys a metaphorical allusion to the ‘heat of desire.’
As the warmth of the sun helps the plant to grow and ripen, so does the passion of love transform the maiden into a
potential lover, ripe for marriage and sexual life.”
97
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of external forces, especially the advent of the farmer/husband.98 Deianeira’s metaphor, with its
implicit identification of marriage as the transformation from virgin meadow to cultivated
farmland, illuminates the inherent problem of female subjectivity: the maiden Chorus is, by
nature, helpless and entirely passive like the untouched meadow, while she herself, as a wife and
mother, has “produced” children (κἀφύσαµεν, 31—another agricultural metaphor), but only by the
occasional intervention of Herakles, who appears “at sowing and at reaping, like a farmer in
possession of a distant field” (32-33). She has become a complete woman, by classical
standards, and has attained some measure of authority within the realm of the oikos, but remains,
despite all of her household kratos, only a distant possession, as unable to influence Herakles’
return as the field is the farmer’s.
The Sending of Hyllos
By having Deianeira declare her helplessness in the play’s opening monologue,
Sophokles aligns her with the figure of the devoted wife and mother, as exemplified by Homer’s
Penelope. Like Penelope, Deianeira “holds out alone in the house during her husband’s long
absence,”99 and spends her nights worrying (προκηραίνουσα, 29) and tearfully longing for his
return (πανδάκρυτ’ ὀδύρµατα, 50).100 She cannot envision taking action even to discover Herakles’
whereabouts, and reacts with “surprise” when her Nurse asks, “Mistress Deianeira, . . . how is it
that you are abounding in children, but do not send one of them to seek out your husband—
98
See also Seaford, “Wedding Ritual,” p. 53: “The bride-to-be still in the bosom of her family is like a young animal
with its mother or a plant in a secluded place. Each is, in a sense, χώροισιν αὑτοῦ. . . . But if the original audience
was familiar with this kind of image in songs performed at weddings, then for them the image would have been rich
and poignant because it evoked the familiar emotions of the wedding.”
99
Segal, Tr&C, p. 82.
100
Cf. Penelope’s tearful longing for Odysseus’ return, even in the twentieth year of his absence: κλαῖεν ἔπειτ’
Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, ὄφρα οἱ ὕπνον/ ἥδυν ἐπὶ βλεφάροισι βάλε γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη (Od. 1.363-64).
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especially Hyllos, for whom it is right?” (δέσποινα ∆ειάνειρα, . . . πῶς παισὶ µὲν τοσοῖσδε πληθύεις,
ἀτὰρ/ ἀνδρὸς κατὰ ζήτησιν οὐ πέµπεις τινά,/ µάλιστα δ’, ὅνπερ εἰκός, Ὕλλον, 49, 54-56).101
When Hyllos arrives only a moment later, the dialogue in which he engages with his
mother reveals why Deianeira has not yet considered sending him to “seek out” his father:
∆Η. σὲ πατρὸς οὕτω δαρὸν ἐξενωµένου
τὸ µὴ πυθέσθαι ποῦ ᾿στιν αἰσχύνην φέρειν.
ΥΛ. ἀλλ’ οἶδα, µύθοις εἴ τι πιστεύειν χρεών.
∆Η. καὶ ποῦ κλύεις νιν, τέκνον, ἱδρῦσθαι χθονός;
ΥΛ. τὸν µὲν παρελθόντ’ ἄροτον ἐν µήκει χρόνου
Λυδῆι γυναικί φασί νιν λάτριν πονεῖν.
∆Η. πᾶν τοίνυν, εἰ καί τοῦτ’ ἔτλη, κλύοι τις ἄν.
65
70
[De. With your father gone for so long, it brings shame for you not to know where
he is.
Hyl. But I know where he is, if it is right to trust in rumors.
De. And where on earth, my child, have you heard he is?
Hyl. They say that he has worked as a slave to a Lydian woman since last plowing
season.
De. Surely one could hear anything (and believe it), if he really endured this.]
Trakh. 65-71
In his opening words, the adolescent Hyllos “appears almost as a child,”102 asking his mother to
“teach” him—a request that confirms Deianeira’s position of authority over her household and
children—but the ensuing dialogue proves that she lacks agency in the world outside of her
home. The “rumors” Hyllos cites, for example, appear to be common knowledge, but Deianeira
seems to be completely ignorant of them.103 Not only does she ask her son if he has “heard”
where Herakles is (68), but she also expresses a degree of shock at his response (71).104 Then,
On Deianeira’s reaction, see Easterling, Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc. 61-62: Deianeira’s exclamation that
“words fall well even from the lowborn, it seems” (ὦ τέκνον, ὦ παῖ, κἀξ ἀγεννήτων ἄρα/ µῦθοι καλῶς πίπτουσιν, 61-62)
expresses, through the particle ἄρα, “a hint of surprise.”
101
102
Segal, Tr&C, p. 81.
103
The words µύθοις (67), κλύεις (68), φασί (69), κλύοι (71), κλύω (72), ἀγγέλλεται (73), and φασίν (74) all denote
specifically aural perception, and perhaps indicate how widespread the rumor has become.
Cf. Easterling, Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc.: “D[eianeira]’s comment registers shock, and perhaps bitterness:
this punishment was a shameful disgrace.”
104
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almost immediately, she turns the conversation to private, rather than public, matters, asking
whether Hyllos knows of the “trustworthy prophecies” that Herakles left her at his last departure
(ἆρ’ οἶσθα δῆτ’, ὦ τέκνον, ὡς ἔλειπέ µοι/ µαντεῖα πιστὰ . . . ; 76-77). Hyllos, however, proves to be
as “ignorant” of Herakles’ domestic instructions (τὸν λόγον γὰρ ἀγνοῶ, 78) as Deianeira is of
prevailing public rumor. He has knowledge of his father’s outdoor world, but she knows only
what Herakles has left her “in the house” (ἐν δόµοις/ λείπει παλαιὰν δέλτον, 156-57).
The limitation of Deianeira’s knowledge to the bounds of the oikos is necessarily
predicated upon the confinement of her authority to the household sphere. (Herakles, by
contrast, exists in the world outside of the oikos and exerts authority both abroad, through his
military prowess, and at home, through the “old tablet” left to Deianeira.) Deianeira’s decision
to send Hyllos, still a “child” under her charge (ὦ τέκνον, ὦ παῖ, 61),105 to find and retrieve
Herakles essentially constitutes an attempt to extend her household kratos to the public world to
which her husband belongs. Until this point, she has been the subject of her own narrative, but
she now attempts to become subject of her husband’s as well and, in the process, exits from the
indoor realm of the female to join the oudoor realm of the male. In doing so, she deviates from
the example of the ideal wife set by Homer’s Penelope, who yields to the authority (κράτος, Od.
1.359) of her adolescent son, and takes no action to secure her husband’s return.106 Even so,
105
Cf. the Nurse’s reference to Hyllos as τἀνδρὶ at line 60, as well as Herakles’ reference to him as ἀνὴρ ὅδ’ at line
1238.
106
In terms of establishing a mother-son balance of power, the scene between Deianeira and Hyllos could be
construed as the exact opposite of the exchange between Penelope and Telemakhos in Odyssey 1. When Penelope
enters the hall where her suitors are feasting to rebuke the bard Phemios, Telemakhos reproaches her, making it
clear that she is attempting to exert authority where she has none:
“ἀλλ’ εἰς οἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ’ αὐτῆς ἔργα κόµιζε,
ἱστόν τ’ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀµφιπόλοισι κέλευε
ἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι. µῦθος δ’ ἄνδρεσσι µελήσει
πᾶσι, µάλιστα δ’ ἐµοί· τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ’ ἐνὶ οἴκωι.”
Ἡ µὲν θαµβήσασα πάλιν οἶκόνδε βεβήκει·
παιδὸς γὰρ µῦθον πεπνυµένον ἔνθετο θυµῶι.
-50-
360
Deianeira is no “bad” wife, as Sophokles is careful to show throughout the following scenes of
the play.
The Likhas Scene: Reprimand and Reciprocity
Before Hyllos can return with word of his father, a Messenger appears to announce that
Herakles is making his way to Trakhis and that Likhas, Herakles’ personal herald, will soon
arrive with official news of his return. The Messenger’s assurance that Herakles is “alive and
triumphant” (καὶ ζῶντ’ . . . καὶ κρατοῦντα, 182) elicits a joyous response from Deianeira and the
Chorus, and the latter begins to sing a hymn celebrating the reunion of husband and wife. When
Likhas arrives with a train of Oikhalian captives, however, Deianeira cuts short the Chorus’ song
in order to ask the herald what news he brings.
In reply, Likhas insists that he has “done well” (καλῶς/ πράσσοντ’, 230-31) and that he
should “be welcomed” (ἀνάγκη χρηστὰ κερδαίνειν ἔπη, 231) for his services, but he fails to
attribute the proper amount of respect to Deianeira.107 Instead of addressing her as anassa or
despoina—as the Chorus, Nurse, and Messenger do—he calls her merely gynai (“lady,” 230,
251), making Deianeira only a “woman” rather than a “mistress” or “queen.” By omitting
Deianeira’s unquestionably higher rank, Likhas, identified as a “household servant” (οἰκεῖος) at
ἐς δ’ ὑπερῶι’ ἀναβᾶσα σὺν ἀµφιπόλοισι γυναιξὶ
κλαῖεν ἔπειτ’ Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, ὄφρα οἱ ὕπνον
ἡδὺν ἐπὶ βλεφάροισι βάλε γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη.
[“But go into the house and attend to your work, the loom and the distaff, and bid your serving
women to ply their work. Speech is the concern of all men, but especially mine, for the power in
this house is mine.”
She went back into the house amazed, for she placed her son’s prudent speech within her
heart. And when she had gone upstairs with her serving women, she wept for Odysseus, her own
dear husband, until gray-eyed Athena shed sweet sleep over her eyes.]
Odyssey 1.356-64
See also Wohl, Intimate Commerce, p. 29: Likhas “makes no overt recognition of her status, and her (presumed)
authority over him” in this scene.
107
-51-
line 757, succeeds in aligning the scene’s power structure along a sexual, rather than social, axis,
and causes Deianeira to bow to the authority he wields as a male herald carrying her (supermale) husband’s message. She questions none of his details, but hears his entire speech with
“joy” (τέρψις ἐµφανὴς, 291; χαίροιµ’, 293).
Despite her obvious delight at the news of Herakles’ well being, Deianeira begins to feel
some measure of apprehension as she reviews the train of captive maidens. Filled with a
“terrible pity” (οἶκτος δεινὸς, 298), she looks over “these ill-fated girls, homeless and fatherless
wanderers in a strange land” (ταύτας . . . δυσπότµους ἐπὶ ξένης/ χώρας ἀοίκους ἀπάτορας τ’
ἀλωµένας, 299-300), but reserves her deepest pity (πλεῖστον ὤικτισα, 312) for the “noble” Iole
(γενναία, 309). Impressed that “she alone knows how to behave” (φρονεῖν οἶδεν µόνη, 313), she
asks Iole herself, and then Likhas, for her name and lineage, suspecting that she is of noble
blood. Iole, however, does not answer, and Likhas merely replies, “How would I know? Why
would you ask me?” (τί δ’ οἶδ’ ἐγώ; τί δ’ ἄν µε καὶ κρίνοις; 314). Unsatisfied, Deianeira questions
the herald once more, but he continues to insist that he can give her no answers:
∆Η. µὴ τῶν τυράννων; Εὐρύτου σπορά τις ἦν;
ΛΙ. οὐκ οἶδα· καὶ γὰρ οὐδ’ ἀνιστόρουν µακράν.
∆Η. οὐδ’ ὄνοµα πρός του τῶν ξυνεµπόρων ἔχεις;
ΛΙ. ἥκιστα· σιγῆι τοὐµὸν ἔργον ἤνυτον.
∆Η. εἴπ’, ὦ τάλαιν’, ἀλλ’ ἡµὶν ἐκ σαυτῆς· ἐπεὶ
καὶ ξυµφορά τοι µὴ εἰδέναι σέ γ’ ἥτις εἶ.
ΛΙ. οὔ τἄρα τῶι γε πρόσθεν οὐδὲν ἐξ ἴσου
. . . . . . . . . . . .
ἡ δέ τοι τύχη
κακὴ µὲν αὕτη γ’, ἀλλὰ συγγνώµην ἔχει.
∆Η. ἡ δ’ οὖν ἐάσθω . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
πρὸς δὲ δώµατα
χωρῶµεν ἤδη πάντες, ὡς σύ θ’ οἷ θέλεις
σπεύδηις, ἐγὼ δὲ τἄνδον ἐξαρκῆ τιθῶ.
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320
327
332
[De. Is she not a daughter of kings? Did Eurytos have a daughter?
Li. I don’t know; I didn’t inquire a great deal.
De. Do you not have her name from one of her companions?
Li. Not in the least. I did my work in silence.
De. Tell me, poor girl—straight to me from you—since it is a misfortune not to
know who you are.
Li. She will not speak a word on par with (how she spoke) before . . . . Her fate
is certainly bad, but it deserves forbearance.
De. Well then, let her be . . . . and let us all go inside, so that you may hurry
wherever you want, and I may arrange the things within sufficiently.]
Trakh. 316-34
Her attempts to question Likhas and Iole unsuccessful, Deianeira relents when the herald
suggests that she indulge Iole’s silence. Thereafter, she is content to let Likhas return to
Herakles and the male realm outdoors, while she puts in order “the things within”—
incorporating into her oikos the Oikhalian girls, whom she accepts with no further questions.
Before Deianeira can enter the house with Likhas and the captive maidens, however, the
Messenger blocks her path (τοῦ µε τήνδ’ ἐφίστασαι βάσιν; 339), requesting, “wait here a bit first,
so that you might learn . . . whom you are leading inside” (αὐτοῦ γε πρῶτον βαιὸν ἀµµείνασ’, ὅπως/
µάθηις . . . οὕστινάς γ’ ἄγεις ἔσω, 335-36). Because he professes to have “full knowledge” (πάντ’
ἐπιστήµην, 338) of the information that Deianeira has just tried to obtain from Likhas, she is
immediately receptive to his claim (τί δ’ ἐστί; 339), and bids him to tell her what he knows (χὠ
λόγος σηµαινέτω, 345; τί φήις; σαφῶς µοι φράζε πᾶν ὅσον νοεῖς, 349). His answer is not pleasant:
Herakles did not sack Oikhalia to exact revenge on King Eurytos for causing his enslavement to
Omphale, as Likhas implied. Rather, “Eros alone of the gods enticed him to undertake this
campaign . . . : when [Herakles] did not persuade her father [Eurytos] to give him his daughter so
that he could have her as a secret wife, . . . he marched against her fatherland . . . and killed the
king, her father, and sacked her city” (Ἔρως δέ νιν/ µόνος θεῶν θέλξειεν αἰχµάσαι τάδε,/ . . . ἡνίκ’
οὐκ ἔπειθε τὸν φυτοσπόρον/ τὴν παῖδα δοῦναι, κρύφιον ὡς ἔχοι λέχος,/ . . . ἐπιστρατεύει πατρίδα . . .
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[κτείνει τ’ ἄνακτα πατέρα] τῆσδε, καὶ πόλιν/ ἔπερσε, 354-65).108 He then sent the girl home to
Deianeira, but “not to be a slave” (οὐδ’ ὥστε δούλην, 367), as Likhas claimed (κτῆµα κριτόν, 245).
Instead, “warmed with desire” for her (οὐδ’ εἰκός, εἴπερ ἐντεθέρµανται πόθωι, 368), Herakles will
take her as a second “wife.”109
Upset by this news, Deianeira is not sure how to react (ποῦ ποτ’ εἰµὶ πράγµατος; 375), but
desires to hear more, and asks the Messenger pointedly about Iole:
∆Ε.
ἆρ’ ἀνώνυµος
πέφυκεν, ὥσπερ οὑπάγων διώµνυτο,
ἡ κάρτα λαµπρὰ καὶ κατ’ ὄµµα καὶ φύσιν;
ΑΓ. πατρὸς µὲν οὖσα γένεσιν Εὐρύτου ποτὲ
Ἰόλη ᾿καλεῖτο, τῆς ἐκεῖνος οὐδαµὰ
βλάστας ἐφώνει δῆθεν οὐδὲν ἱστορῶν.
380
[De. Is she—so bright in her beauty and appearance—really nameless, as the one
who led her here swore?
Me. The offspring of Eurytos, she was once called Iole, whose origins (Likhas)
didn’t speak of because, of course, he made no inquiries.]110
Trakh. 377-82
108
The term λέχος literally means “bed,” and here connotes the purely physical, and ultimately violent, intentions of
Herakles; clearly, he wanted Iole only for her sexual worth. Cf. also Deianeira’s reference to herself as the hero’s
λέχος κριτόν (27) immediately after the tale of his victory over Akheloös.
109
The Messenger’s term λέχος could mean simply “bedmate,” but Likhas admits at line 429 that Iole has come to be
a δάµαρ, a “wife”—the same term used to address Deianeira as “Herakles’ wife” at line 405. The parallelism
suggests to me that Herakles has sent Iole to fulfill the same position as Deianeira, but this point has been much
contested. J.K. MacKinnon (“Heracles’ Intention in His Second Request of Hyllus: Trach. 1216-51,” CQ n.s. 21.1
[1971]: 33-41), perhaps the strongest opponent of Iole as “wife,” has argued that the phrase οὐδ’ ὥστε δούλην “surely
. . . does not mean that she is more than a slave concubine,” because “no marriage . . . could take place between a
slave and a free person” (p. 34). He also contends that “although in Sophocles the word [δάµαρ] is used normally of
a legitimate wife, it cannot indicate this at Trach. 428 and 429” (p. 35); cf., however, the definition of δάµαρ in LSJ,
which lists only “wife” and “spouse” as possible meanings. MacKinnon also seems to have forgotten that Iole is not
a mere slave but a “noble” princess (γενναία, in Deianeira’s description at 309) captured by Herakles in a show of
martial prowess—much like Deianeira herself. For a complete rebuttal of MacKinnon’s argument, see Charles
Segal, “Bride or Concubine? Iole and Heracles’ Motives in the Trachiniae,” ICS 19 (1994): 59-64; and esp. p. 61 on
γενναία and its implications for Iole’s status.
110
The Messenger’s words are heavily ironic here. Note also how his entire exchange with Deianeira repeatedly
uses the vocabulary of Likhas’ claims in order to refute them: ἱστορῶν (382) corresponds to Likhas’ ἀνιστόρουν (317);
Likhas’ γυναικῶν ὧν ὁραῖς ἐν ὄµµασιν (241) becomes [Ἰόλην] ὡς ὁραῖς (365) in the Messenger’s speech; Likhas’ πόλις
δὲ δούλη (283) contrasts with the Messenger’s οὐδ’ ὥστε δούλην (367); the Messenger says that Likhas speaks οὐδὲν
. . . δίκης ἐς ὀρθόν (346-47), while he speaks τό δ’ ὀρθόν (374); Likhas’ οὐδαµὰ (323) corresponds to the Messenger’s
οὐδαµὰ (381).
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Having received confirmation of her suspicions about Iole, Deianeira is reduced to a state of
indecision and must rely on the Chorus for advice. To her admission of uncertainty, the maidens
of the Chorus suggest, “Go and question the man, since he would quickly tell the truth if you
were willing to press him” (πεύθου µολοῦσα τἀνδρός, ὡς τάχ’ ἂν σαφῆ/ λέξειεν, εἴ νιν πρὸς βίαν
κρίνειν θέλοις, 387-88), advice that Deianeira apparently intends to follow (ἀλλ’ εἶµι· καὶ γὰρ οὐκ
ἀπὸ γνώµης λέγεις, 389). Curiously, however, she fails in her task, and the Messenger must step
forward to force Likhas to tell the truth:111
∆Ε. ἦ καὶ τὸ πιστὸν τῆς ἀληθείας νεµεῖς;
ΛΙ. ἴστω µέγας Ζεύς, ὧν γ’ ἂν ἐξειδὼς κυρῶ.
∆Η. τίς ἡ γυνὴ δῆτ’ ἐστὶν ἣν ἥκεις ἄγων;
ΛΙ. Εὐβοιίς· ὧν δ’ ἔβλαστεν οὐκ ἔχω λέγειν.
ΑΓ. οὗτος, βλέφ’ ὧδε. πρὸς τίν’ ἐννέπειν δοκεῖς;
. . . . . . . . . . . .
ΛΙ. πρὸς τὴν κρατοῦσαν ∆ηιάνειραν, Οἰνέως
κόρην, δάµαρτά θ’ Ἡρακλέους, εἰ µὴ κυρῶ
λεύσσων µάταια, δεσπότιν τε τὴν ἐµήν.
ΑΓ.
. . . λέγεις
δέσποιναν εἶναι τήνδε σήν;
ΛΙ.
δίκαια γάρ.
ΑΓ. τί δῆτα; ποίαν ἀξιοῖς δοῦναι δίκην,
ἢν εὑρεθῆις ἐς τήνδε µὴ δίκαιος ὤν;
ΛΙ. πῶς µὴ δίκαιος;
. . . . . . . . . . . .
ΑΓ. οὔκουν σὺ ταύτην, ἣν ὑπ’ ἀγνοίας ὁραῖς,
Ἰόλην ἔφασκες Εὐρύτου σπορὰν ἄγειν;
. . . . . . . . . . . .
οὐκ ἐπώµοτος λέγων
δάµαρτ’ ἔφασκες Ἡρακλεῖ ταύτην ἄγειν;
ΛΙ. ἐγὼ δάµαρτα; πρὸς θεῶν, φράσον, φίλη
δέσποινα, τόνδε τίς ποτ’ ἐστὶν ὁ ξένος.
ΑΓ. ὃς σοῦ παρὼν ἤκουσεν ὡς ταύτης πόθωι
πόλις δαµείη πᾶσα, κοὐχ ἡ Λυδία
πέρσειεν αὐτήν, ἀλλ’ ὁ τῆσδ’ ἔρως φανείς.
ΛΙ. ἅνθρωπος, ὦ δέσποιν’, ἀποστήτω. τὸ γὰρ
νοσοῦντι ληρεῖν ἀνδρὸς οὐχὶ σώφρονος.
400
405
410
420
430
435
See also Wohl, Intimate Commerce, p. 29: “In the confrontation that follows the revelation of the Messenger,
Deianeira’s social status becomes a focal issue in the attempt to force the truth from Lichas.”
111
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∆Ε. µή, πρός σε τοῦ κατ’ ἄκρον Οἰταῖον νάπος
∆ίος καταστράπτοντος, ἐκκλέψηις λόγον.
οὐ γὰρ γυναικὶ τοὺς λόγους ἐρεῖς κακῆι,
οὐδ’ ἥτις οὐ κάτοιδε τἀνθρώπων ὅτι
χαίρειν πέφυκεν οὐχὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἀεί.
440
[De. Will you give me the whole truth?
Li. Great Zeus be my witness (that I will tell you) whatever I know.
De. Who, indeed, is the woman whom you have led here?
Li. A Euboian. But from whom she’s descended I can’t say.
Me. You there! Look here! To whom do you think you’re speaking?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Li. To the woman in charge, Deianeira—Oineus’ daughter, Herakles’ wife, and,
unless my eyes deceive me, my mistress.
Me. . . . Did you say she’s your “mistress”?
Li. That’s right.
Me. Really? What punishment would you deem right if you were found to be
untruthful to her?
Li. How have I not been truthful?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Me. Didn’t you keep saying—regarding this woman, the one whom you’re
looking at in ignorance—that you were leading the daughter of Eurytos?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Speaking under oath, didn’t you keep saying that you were leading this
woman to be a wife to Herakles?
Li. I said “wife”? By the gods, mistress, tell me who this stranger is.
Me. One who was present and heard you (when you said) how the whole city was
destroyed because of Herakles’ desire for this girl, and how the Lydian
(queen) didn’t sack it, but his manifest desire for (Iole) did.
Li. Mistress, let this man leave. Talking idly with someone who is insane is not
for a sane man.
De. Don’t, by Zeus who thunders over Oita’s high glens, hide the truth. You’re
not telling lies to an ignoble woman or one who doesn’t know that men are
not made to take pleasure in the same things always.]
Trakh. 398-412, 419-20, 427-40
Deianeira’s attempts to get the truth from Likhas—her questions at lines 398 and 400—are no
more successful than her first, when she decided to let Likhas “hurry wherever [he] wished”
while she “arranged the things within” (332-34). She does not “press” him, as the Chorus
suggests, but feebly asks for the truth, thereby failing to exert the authority that her higher social
position should grant her. She still speaks to the herald as a “woman,” rather than as a “queen”
or “mistress,” and it takes the Messenger’s intervention to reestablish Deianeira’s position in the
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social, rather than sexual, hierarchy.112 After the Messenger forces Likhas to admit that
Deianeira is, indeed, “the woman in charge” (κρατοῦσαν, 404), he begins to address her as
despoina (“mistress”) rather than merely gynai (“lady”), and admits that Herakles has, indeed,
sent Iole home to be another spouse.
The Threat of Iole
After Likhas reveals Iole’s true identity and Herakles’ reason for sending her to Trakhis,
he begins to fear that Deianeira will not, after all, “let her be” (328) and accept her into the oikos.
Seeking assurance of Iole’s saftey, he requests of Deianeira, “Bear with this woman and plan to
have spoken the words that you said about her unalterably” (καὶ στέργε τὴν γυναῖκα καὶ βούλου
λόγους/ οὓς εἶπας ἐς τήνδ’ ἐµπέδως εἰρηκέναι, 486-87). When Deianeira replies that she intends to
care for the girl (φρονοῦµεν ὥστε ταῦτα δρᾶν, 490), her measured response makes the herald’s fears
seem ungrounded, but is there really no reason to feel apprehension for Iole’s safety? Literary
precedent suggests that Likhas’ fears are entirely valid, for many elements of the scene of Iole’s
reception bear resemblance to those of Klytaimestra’s infamous reception of Kassandra in
Aischylos’ Agamemnon (produced c. 458 BCE).113
On this idea, see also Wohl, Intimate Commerce, p. 30: “Although Deianeira’s status is an important factor in her
power relation with the herald . . . she is unable or unwilling to use it to her advantage. Perhaps she is caught
between two conflicting sets of rules: those of status and those of femininity. As a queen, she might assert her status
over the herald, but as a woman, and especially as a woman speaking publicly with men, she concedes her social
advantage.”
112
113
For the resonance of the Deianeira-Iole scene with the encounter of Klytaimestra and Kassandra, see, e.g.,
Kamerbeek, Plays II, p. 14: “It is very probable that Sophocles intended Deianeira’s manner towards Iole to be a foil
to Clytaemestra’s towards Cassandra; his Deianeira, indeed, seems to have been conceived as a marked contrast to
Agamemnon’s vindictive wife. We have to take into account, it is true, the fact that Deianeira in introducing her
rival into the house with pity and love is ignorant of the real state of affairs, as Clytaemestra is not, but even when
she does know all she does not form any designs against Iole’s person.” Segal, Tr&C, pp. 82-83 also discusses
similarities between Deianeira and Klytaimestra, but not at length.
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In both plays, a husband introduces a female sexual partner, acquired by his martial
prowess, into his oikos, where he expects his wife to see to her integration. The legitimate wife
then confronts her rival directly and issues her inside her house. By casting Iole’s reception in
the same circumstances as Kassandra’s, Sophokles draws on his audience’s knowledge of the
Klytaimestra-Kassandra story to create an expectation of disaster. Within the play itself, Likhas
seems to have a similar recollection, for his request that Deianeira keep her word about caring
for Iole is indicative of a fear that Deianeira, like Klytaimestra, the quintessential “bad” woman,
will harm her younger rival. Both the audience and Likhas are led to feel that Deianeira has the
potential to become a “bad” woman, but their expectations are foiled when Deianeira proves to
be Klytaimestra’s exact opposite: where Klytaimestra is sure to remind Kassandra of her slave
status (σ’ ἔθηκε Ζεὺς . . . κοινωνὸν εἶναι χερνίβων, πολλῶν µέτα/ δούλων, Ag. 1036-38), Deianeira
recognizes Iole’s nobility (Trakh. 309); Klytaimestra is intensely jealous of and angry with
Kassandra (Ag. 1440-47), while Deianeira insists that she cannot be angry with Iole (Trakh. 44548); Klytaimestra accepts Kassandra into her house only to murder her, but Deianeira takes care
to see that Iole “does not receive from [her] another pain in addition to her own misfortunes”
(µηδὲ πρὸς κακοῖς/ τοῖς οἷσιν ἄλλην πρός γ’ ἐµοῦ λύπην λάβηι, Trakh. 330-31).
Even so, Deianeira cannot keep the “fears” that she expressed in the play’s prologue from
resurfacing (φόβου φόβον τρέφω, 28; cf. φοβοῦµαι, 550), and her unquestioning acceptance turns
quickly to dread. When she thought that Iole was only a “nameless” slave (ἀνώνυµος, 377), she
was able to accept her into her oikos without fear of losing her own status. Now that she knows
Iole has come to be a second “wife” (δάµαρ, 428, 429), however, she stands in jeopardy of losing
a measure of her household kratos to her younger rival. The bitterness she feels over this
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challenge to her position surfaces only after Likhas has already taken the captive maidens,
including Iole, into the house, and Deianeira must face the problem of cohabiting with her:
κόρην γὰρ, οἶµαι δ’ οὐκέτ’, ἀλλ’ ἐζευγµένην,
παρεισδέδεγµαι, φόρτον ὥστε ναυτίλος,
λωβητὸν ἐµπόληµα τῆς ἐµῆς φρενός·
καὶ νῦν δύ’ οὖσαι µίµνοµεν µιᾶς ὑπὸ
χλαίνης ὑπαγκάλισµα· τοιάδ’ Ἡρακλῆς,
ὁ πιστὸς ἡµῖν κἀγαθὸς καλούµενος,
οἰκούρι’ ἀντέπεµψε τοῦ µακροῦ χρόνου.
ἐγὼ δὲ θυµοῦσθαι µὲν οὐκ ἐπίσταµαι
νοσοῦντι κείνωι πολλὰ τῆιδε τῆι νόσωι·
τὸ δ’ αὖ ξυνοικεῖν τῆιδ’ ὁµοῦ τίς ἂν γυνὴ
δύναιτο, κοινωνοῦσα τῶν αὐτῶν γάµων;
ὁρῶ γὰρ ἥβην τὴν µὲν ἕρπουσαν πρόσω,
τὴν δὲ φθίνουσαν· ὧν ἀφαρπάζειν φιλεῖ
ὀφθαλµὸς ἄνθος, τῶν δ’ ὑπεκτρέπει πόδα.
ταῦτ’ οὖν φοβοῦµαι, µὴ πόσις µὲν Ἡρακλῆς
ἐµὸς καλῆται, τῆς νεωτέρας δ’ ἀνήρ.
ἀλλ’ οὐ γάρ, ὥσπερ εἶπον, ὀργαίνειν καλὸν
γυναῖκα νοῦν ἔχουσαν·
540
545
550
[I have received this maiden—no, no longer a maiden, I think, but an experienced
woman—as a sailor receives cargo, a merchandise destructive to my wits. And
now we two await (one) embrace under a single blanket. Herakles, whom I have
called a “faithful” and “good” man, has sent such a reward for my housekeeping
in exchange for his long absence. I do not know how to be angry at him, since he
has been sick with this very disease many times, but as for living in the same
house with her—what wife could bear it, sharing the same embraces? I see her
youth creeping forward, but mine fading away. The eye loves to pluck that kind
of blossom, but from this kind (a man) turns away. So I fear these things: that
Herakles will be called my “husband” but the younger girl’s “man.” But wait—as
I have said, it is not good for a sensible woman to be angry.]
Trakh. 536-53
Throughout this speech, Deianeira consistently refers to herself in terms that devalue her position
in the oikos. The simile of the sailor, for instance, undercuts her agency and authority, and
suggests that Iole’s arrival has limited the scope of her kratos: if Deianeira had actually received
Iole as a “slave” and Herakles’ “gift” (δῶρα, 494), she would have had the girl at her disposal in
her capacity as mistress of the house; since, however, Deianeira has received Iole “as a sailor
receives cargo,” she cannot dispose of her, but can only ensure her delivery to Herakles, Iole’s
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intended recipient. At the same time, Deianeira’s comparison to a sailor metaphorically reduces
her social rank, making her a common laborer rather than a queen. The issue of her status is also
at stake when she refers to the sending of Iole as the “payment for (her) housekeeping” (οἰκούρια,
542), for the girl becomes her reward for services rendered, making Deianeira a lowly wagelaborer in her own home.
Clearly, Deianeira knows, and resents, that the acceptance of Iole will cause her to lose
much of the authority she has as Herakles’ wife. Even now she is powerless to keep the girl
from his bed, though sexual replacement is perhaps the least of her worries. While she obviously
resents that Iole’s integration will force them to await Herakles “two under one blanket” (53940),114 she also reasons that Herakles has “married” many women before (ἔγηµε, 460)115 and that
she has never blamed them, just as she “does not know how to be angry” (i.e., cannot be angry)
at Herakles now (543-44). It is not sharing a bed but “sharing a house” (ξυνοικεῖν, 545) with Iole
that she cannot bear.
114
Deianeira’s image distorts a common poetic scene of lovers’ harmonious intimacy. See, e.g., Arkhilokhos’
“Cologne Epode”: παρθένον δ’ ἐν ἄνθε[σιν/ τηλ]άεσσι λαβὼν/ ἔκλινα· µαλθακῆι δ[έ µιν/ χλαί]νηι καλύψας, αὐξέν’
ἀγκάληισ’ ἔχων (“Taking the virgin, I laid her down in the blooming flowers, and, covering her with a soft blanket, I
held her neck in my arms,” 42-45); and Asklepiades A.P. 5.169.3-4: ἥδιον δ’ ὁπόταν κρύψηι µία τοὺς φιλέοντας/ χλαῖνα,
καὶ αἰνῆται Κύπρις ὑπ’ ἀµφοτέρων (“It is sweet whenever one blanket covers two lovers and Kypris is agreed upon by
them both”). On this, see also Parca, “Of Nature and Eros,” p. 187: “Spread over both his wife and his new lover
the cloak of Heracles turns into a monstrous parody of the cover which traditionally effected the lovers’ seclusion
and constituted the emblem of their indivisible intimacy.” Interestingly, Parca finds linguistic similarities between
Deianeira’s speech and that of the narrator in the “Cologne Epode,” and concludes that the parallels mark Deianeira
not only as a “tired lover” (p. 182) but also as a “possible” analogue to Neobule” (p. 182, n.38).
115
While the verb γαµεῖν primarily denotes “to marry; to take to wife” (LSJ I.1), it can also be used “of mere sexual
intercourse, take for a paramour” (LSJ I.2). The latter is, of course, the sense here, although Trakhiniai 460 and
1139 “are the only passages in Sophocles where gamos or gamein means ‘sexual union’ and not ‘marriage proper’
(cf. 504, 546, 792). Where gamein is used in this primarily sexual sense, it generally refers to illicit or violent union,
e.g. Aegisthus’ ‘marrying Agamemnon’s wedded wife’ (Odyssey 1.36), or Agamemnon’s ‘forced, dark wedding’ of
Cassandra (Euripides, Troades 44), or Apollo’s rape of Creusa (Euripides, Ion 10-11). Even in the two passages in
the Trachiniae, the context makes clear the special sense given to the word. The forcing of language corresponds to
the forcing of the institution itself. Heracles’ lust imposes on the house two gamoi and two damartes; the result is
its destruction by the poison of the beast who himself attacked the marriage” (Segal, Tr&C, pp. 75-76).
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While this logic may seem skewed to a modern reader, it is actually quite sound when
considered in tandem with classical Greek conceptions of marriage and the wife’s role therein.
When Deianeira refers to “sharing a house with” Iole, she uses the verb ξυνοικεῖν/συνοικεῖν, the
term generally used to define a legitimate Greek marriage. Rather than refusing to “share a
house,” Deianeira is refusing to “share a marriage” with Iole, for “to συνοικεῖν with another
woman would be to deny her own marriage in a basic sense, by ‘sharing it.’ Deianeira’s point is
that married people are supposed to be exclusively ‘sharing a house.’ ”116 In light of
Demosthenes’ definition of the wife’s role in “marriage” (τὸ συνοικεῖν)—“to produce legitimate
children and to be a faithful guardian of the household goods”117—Deianeira’s point is quite
valid. Iole’s integration as a full σύνοικος, a “house-sharer” and second “wife” (δάµαρ, 428, 429),
will make her role exactly analogous to Deianeira’s, with the expectations of “produc[ing]
legitimate children” and being “a faithful guardian of the household goods.” Both women
cannot fulfill the same role equally and simultaneously; one wife must outrank the other and be
Kirk Ormand, “More Wedding Imagery: Trachiniae 1053 ff.,” Mnemosyne 46 (1993): 225. See also Segal,
Tr&C, p. 76: “The gamoi [of line 546] might mean merely the physical union of 460, like the embrace of 540. But
the juxtaposition with ‘sharing a house’ suggests rather that Deianeira is thinking of marriage in its most exclusive
sense, her rights as the damar within the house.” Despite the fact that ξυνοικεῖν typically denotes marriage, many
Trakhiniai scholars reject the notion that it is her marriage about which Deianeira is concerned. R.P. WinningtonIngram (Sophocles: An Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 80), for instance, claims
that “[i]t is not the house but the bed which she is asked to share”; and MacKinnon (“Heracles’ Intention,” p. 38)
goes so far as to say that Deianeira “can mean only ‘living together in the same house,’ with no possibility of
reference to marriage,” though he does not explain his reasoning.
116
117
For the Greek text, see Demosthenes, Orations III, ed. W. Rennie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953):
τὸ γὰρ συνοικεῖν τοῦτ’ ἔστιν, ὃς ἂν παιδοποιῆται καὶ εἰσάγηι εἴς τε τοὺς φράτερας καὶ δηµότας τοὺς υἱεῖς,
καὶ τὰς θυγατέρας ἐκδιδῶι ὡς αὑτοῦ οὔσας τοῖς ανδράσιν. τὰς µὲν γὰρ ἑταίρας ἡδονῆς ἕνεκ’ ἔχοµεν, τὰς
δὲ παλλακὰς τῆς καθ’ ἡµέραν θεραπείας τοῦ σώµατος, τὰς δὲ γυναῖκας τοῦ παιδοποιεῖσθαι γνησίως καὶ
τῶν ἔνδον φύλακα πιστὴν ἔχειν.
[This is “marriage”: to have children and to introduce one’s sons to the members of the phratry
and of the deme, and to betroth one’s daughters as one’s own to their husbands. We have
prostitutes for the sake of pleasure, and concubines for the daily care of the body, but wives for
producing legitimate children and for having a faithful guardian for the household goods.]
Against Neaira 122
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identifiable as the one mother of Herakles’ legitimate heirs.118 Deianeira is thus “less worried
about Heracles’ erotic inclinations toward other women, and more motivated by her dynastic
concerns over her future position in her husband’s household” and is “only threatened when he
brings a new bride into their home at Trachis—into the very heart of her own domain.”119
Homeric Economics: anti dōron dōra and Deianeira’s agōn
Because Deianeira cannot bear to experience the reduction of household kratos that will
come with the integration of Iole, she decides to take action to restore her slipping authority,
against her own admonishment that “whoever stands against Eros, like a boxer [sparring] at close
quarters, is not thinking well” (Ἔρωτι µέν νυν ὅστις ἀντανίσταται,/ πύκτης ὅπως ἐς χεῖρας, οὐ καλῶς
φρονεῖ, 441-42). As part of her plan, she invites the herald Likhas indoors, “so that you may bear
the letter of my words and take these things as well—the gifts which it is right [for me] to give in
exchange for [Herakles’] gifts. For it is not right that you should depart empty-handed, since you
came here with a great procession” (ὡς λόγων τ’ ἐπιστολὰς φέρηις,/ ἅ τ’ ἀντὶ δώρων δῶρα χρὴ
προσαρµόσαι,/ καὶ ταῦτ’ ἄγηις, 493-96). The idea of reciprocity, of giving “gifts in exchange for
gifts” (ἀντὶ δώρων δῶρα, 494) is important for establishing Deianeira’s current authority as well as
ensuring its continuance into the future, for, as Gayle Rubin has stated,
This concept surfaces a number of times in Greek tragedy. In Euripides’ Hippolytos, for example, the Nurse tells
Phaedra, Theseus’ wife, that her death will “betray” her children because it will enable Hippolytos, Theseus’ bastard
son, to become “ruler over [her] legitimate children” (σοῖς τέκνοισι δεσπότην . . . νόθον φρονοῦντα γνήσι’, 308-09).
Alkestis also, on her deathbed, begs her husband Admetos, “Keep [our children] masters in my house, and do not
marry again” (τούτους ἀνάσχου δεσπότας ἐµῶν δόµων/ καὶ µὴ ᾿πιγήµηις, 1304), indicating that the second wife’s
children would take priority over hers.
118
119
Christopher A. Faraone, “Deianira’s Mistake and the Demise of Heracles: Erotic Magic in Sophocles’
Trachiniae,” Helios 21.2 (1994): 120. See also pp. 121-22: “Her concern is a domestic one, a dynastic one—one
might even call it a political one—but it is certainly not an erotic one, except insofar as Heracles’ sexual preference
threatens her position in the oikos. In fact the main motivation for her subsequent actions is fear—a fear of being
ignored or abandoned, a fear which haunts her throughout the play.”
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the significance of gift giving is that it expresses, affirms, or creates a social link
between the partners of an exchange. Gift giving confers on its participants a
special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. One can solicit a friendly
relationship in the offer of a gift; acceptance implies a willingness to return a gift
and confirmation of the relationship. Gift exchange may also be the idiom of
competition and rivalry.120
By participating in a reciprocal exchange with Herakles, Deianeira both marks herself as his
equal and establishes herself as an active participant in an exchange that will, ideally, “bestow
equal benefits upon both parties” involved.121 By doing so, she takes part in the very system that
served, from the time of Homer onward,122 as a primary means of maintaining amiable
relationships between persons of roughly equal status. She intends to use this system much as
Homer’s Penelope does when she gives Odysseus a clasp to secure his cloak. A “gift from wife
to husband,” Penelope’s clasp “binds Odysseus, reminding him of Penelope’s claims, claims that
. . . he implicitly acknowledges,”123 just as Sophokles’ Deianeira hopes to use the gift of the robe
to secure her claims on Herakles. Ideally, Herakles’ acceptance of the robe should imply a
willingness to return the gift sought by Deianeira—Herakles’ unswerving affection—and should,
at the same time, serve as an acknowledgment of the validity and sanctity of their relationship.
Deianeira’s gift, however, is also intended to end the agonistic love rivalry that develops between
herself and Iole.
120
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” p. 172.
Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), s.v. “reciprocity (Greece).” Reciprocity also “aimed at the forging of binding
relationships between status equals, from which a long series of unspecified acts of assistance could be expected to
follow.” See also Wohl, Intimate Commerce, p. 25: “The transaction into which Deianira enters with her anti dōron
dōra is no commonplace trade but rather a gift exchange, a prestigious reciprocal exchange between two equal and
generally elite individuals.”
121
122
“Reciprocity was one of the central issues around which the moral existence of Homeric heroes revolved . . . In
the poems, it is consistently implied and sometimes plainly stated that a gift or service should be repaid with a
counter-gift or a counter-service” (OCD, s.v. “reciprocity”).
123
Felson, Regarding Penelope, p. 30.
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Immediately after Deianeira speaks of “gifts in exchange for gifts,” she retreats into the
house with Likhas, and the Chorus of maidens remains onstage to retell the tale of her wooing.
Ironically, they begin with an assertion of Kypris’ “great strength” (µέγα σθένος, 497), just after
Deianeira has decided to reclaim Herakles from Iole, and just before the tale of Herakles’ desiredriven battle with Akheloös (ἱέµενοι λεχέων, 514). Deianeira’s and Herakles’ struggles with the
powers of love thus serve as virtual bookends to the Chorus’ affirmation of Kypris’ strength—a
significant placement that suggests an equivalence between Deianeira’s plan to displace Iole and
Herakles’ efforts to defeat Akheloös. Deianeira becomes, by comparison, Iole’s love rival, and
Herakles the bride(groom) prize of their antagonism, just as Deianeira had been the prize of
Herakles’ battle with Akheloös in her youth. By taking action to suppress Herakles’ erōs for
Iole, she begins to resemble not only the “boxer against Eros” mentioned at lines 441-42, but
also a competitor in an epic-heroic agōn to win (back) her husband. In the latter case, the
language of Homeric combat prevalent in the Chorus’ description of the Herakles-Akheloös
contest can also be applied to Deianeira,124 who actively marks her entry into the epic world of
reciprocal exchange and agonistic rivalry with the phrase ἀντὶ δώρων δῶρα.
That Deianeira has, in fact, entered the epic-heroic world becomes all the clearer when
she reenters the stage after the choral ode. Although the Chorus’ tale ends with a description of
the young Deianeira as completely helpless (“like a lone calf,” 530), the mature Deianeira now
On this, see Easterling, Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc.: “The style is distinctly elevated . . . This impression is
reinforced by the use of Homeric language, often in non-traditional ways (e.g. ἀµφίγυοι 504) and of words which do
not occur elsewhere in extant Greek (τινάκτορα, πάµπληκτα, παγκόνιτα, ῥαβδονόµει, ἀνάµιγδα, ἀµφίπλεκτοι, ὀλόεντα,
ἀµφινείκητον).” M. Davies, Sophocles, “Trachiniae” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), ad loc. 497-530 notes “the
abundance of Homeric words (504 ἀµφίγυοι and 523 εὐῶπις are ἅπαξ in tragedy).” (Also, both Easterling and Davies
compare Trakh. 504-06 to Il. 1.8-9.) Kamerbeek, Plays II, identifies many Homeric qualities in these lines: κατέβαν
(504) is an “old Homeric form”; ποταµοῦ σθένος (507) is reminiscent of Iliad 18.607’s ποταµοῖο µέγα σθένος
Ὠκεανοῖο; εὐῶπις (523—only in Sophokles of the tragedians) describes Nausikaä at Od. 7.113; παλίντονα (572)
occurs at Od. 21.2; ὑψίκερω (508) is used of a deer at Od. 10.158; Sophokles’ reference to Herakles’ λόγχας (572)
indicates “two spears, as is the custom with the epic heroes.” The phrase Κρονίδαν ἀπάτασεν (500) may also contain a
Homericism, a veiled allusion to the ∆ίος ἀπάτη of Iliad 14.
124
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enters the stage speaking of “what I devised with my hands” (χερσὶν ἁτεχνησάµην, 534), and
proceeds to tell the Chorus’ maidens that she has a solution that will “bring [her] release”
(λυτήριον, 554). This solution involves “the old gift” (παλαιὸν δῶρον, 555) of the centaur Nessos,
which she has kept “hidden in a bronze urn” (λέβητι χαλκέωι κεκρυµµένον, 556) ever since she,
“while still a girl, took it from the blood [that dripped] from shaggy-chested Nessos as he died”
(παῖς ἔτ’ οὖσα τοῦ δασυστέρνου παρὰ/ Νέσσου φθίνοντος ἐκ φονῶν ἀνειλόµην, 557-58). She explains
further that, when she first followed Herakles home as his “wife” (εὖνις, 563), Nessos, helping
her to cross the River Euenos, touched her “with wanton hands” (ψαύει µαταίας χερσίν, 565),
causing her to scream. Herakles responded by shooting the centaur with an arrow dipped in the
poisoned blood of the Lernaian hydra. Stricken through the lungs, Nessos fell and, with his
dying breath, told Deianeira how she could “benefit” (ὀνήσηι, 570) from his death:
. . . παῖ γέροντος Οἰνέως,
. . . . . . . . . . .
ἐὰν γὰρ ἀµφίθρεπτον αἷµα τῶν ἐµῶν
σφαγῶν ἐνέγκηι χερσίν, ἧι µελαγχόλους
ἔβαψεν ἰοὺς θρέµµα Λερναίας ὕδρας,
ἔσται φρενός σοι τοῦτο κηλητήριον
τῆς Ἡρακλείας, ὥστε µήτιν’ εἰσιδὼν
στέρξει γυναῖκα κεῖνος ἀντὶ σοῦ πλέον.
569
575
[Child of aged Oineus, . . . if you take in your hands the blood clotted around my
wounds, where the nursling of the Lernaian hydra has dipped its black-galled
arrows, you will have this as a charm for Herakles’ heart, so that he will not look
upon another woman and love her more than you.]
Trakh. 569, 572-77
Trusting him, the young Deianeira did as he said and preserved the charm. Ironically, she now
intends to use it as an object of reciprocal exchange, but takes no thought of what reciprocal
service Nessos was trying to render with his “gift” (555), the “charm” intended exclusively for
Herakles. If Herakles “gave” Nessos death by shooting him with a poisoned arrow, it should,
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perhaps, be expected that the centaur will respond in kind, but Deianeira does not suspect him of
malice and applies the charm as instructed:
τοῦτ’ ἐννοήσασ’, ὦ φίλαι, δόµοις γὰρ ἦν
κείνου θανόντος ἐγκεκληιµένον καλῶς,
χιτῶνα τόνδ’ ἔβαψα, προσβαλοῦσ’ ὅσα
ζῶν κεῖνος εἶπε· καὶ πεπείρανται τάδε.
κακὰς δὲ τόλµας µήτ’ ἐπισταίµην ἐγὼ
µήτ’ ἐκµάθοιµι, τάς τε τολµώσας στυγῶ.
φίλτροις δ’ ἐάν πῶς τήνδ’ ὑπερβαλώµεθα
τὴν παῖδα καὶ θέλκτροισι τοῖς ἐφ’ Ἡρακλεῖ,
µεµηχάνηται τοὖργον, εἴ τι µὴ δοκῶ
πράσσειν µάταιον· εἰ δὲ µή, πεπαύσοµαι.
580
585
[Remembering this, my friends—for it has been well hidden in the house since
(Nessos) died—I anointed this robe, applying everything as he told me while he
was still alive. These things have been prepared. But may I never become skilled
in or learn of acts of wicked daring; I hate women who dare. But this deed has
been done in hopes that I can defeat this girl by the use of charms and spells on
Herakles—unless it seems I am doing something rash. If I am, I shall stop.]
Trakh. 578-87
Clearly, Deianeira does not mean to harm Herakles with the gift of the robe; instead, she means
to use it to “defeat” Iole (584), her rival for “Herakles’ heart” (575-76), her use of the verb
ὑπερβάλλειν connoting an agonistic context.125
The nature of Deianeira’s agōn with Iole, however, is vastly different from that of male
rivalries. Instead of using brute force (like Herakles against Akheloös) or martial skill (like
Herakles against Nessos), she uses the inherently “female” weapons available to her. The robe
that she anoints with Nessos’ supposed love charm is a product of her own hands, her “skill” as a
Perhaps the best example of the verb ὑπερβάλλειν in an agonistic setting occurs at Il. 23.842-47, where it defines
the action of a throwing contest at the funeral games of Patroklos: τὸ τρίτον αὖτ’ ἔρριψε µέγας Τελαµώνιος Αἴας,/ χειρὸς
ἄπο στιβαρῆς, καὶ ὑπέρβαλε σήµατα πάντων./ ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ σόλον εἷλε µενεπτόλεµος Πολυποίτης . . . παντὸς ἀγῶνος
ὑπέρβαλε (“Third in turn, huge Telamonian Aias threw [the weight] from his stout hand and overthrew the marks of
all [the other competitors]. But when Polypoites, stubborn in battle, took up the iron . . . he prevailed over the entire
contest”). Victoria Wohl also concludes, in Intimate Commerce, that Deianeira’s use of ὑπερβάλλειν marks her as an
agonistic competitor: “Deianira . . . tries to participate actively in the agōn and gift exchange. She imagines herself
in an agōn with Iole, a competitor for the prize of Heracles. She uses the love potion in the hope that it will allow
her to defeat Iole (ὑπερβαλώµεθα, 584-85). . . . Deianira enters into the fray, thus laying claim to a place in the eroticagonistic triangle” (p. 23).
125
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weaver (χερσὶν ἁτεχνησάµεν, 534; πέπλον/ δώρηµ’ ἐκείνωι τἀνδρὶ τῆς ἐµῆς χερός, 602-03). At the
same time, it exists as a physical manifestation of her mental “cunning” (ἡ δολῶπις Οἰνέως κόρη,
1050) and ability to “devise” trickery (µεµηχάνηται, 586; ποίαις ἐνέγκοι τόνδε µηχαναῖς πέπλον,
774)—the devices traditionally used by female characters from the beginning of Greek literature.
Ever since Penelope’s trick of the shroud, “cunning is the quintessential female weapon, and ever
since Penelope, the means of female cunning are the loom and its products.”126 So Klytaimestra
ensnared Agamemnon with a “net” (ἀµφίβληστρον, Ag. 1382), a “woven robe of the Furies”
(ὑφαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων, Ag. 1580), and Medeia chose a poisoned robe as the instrument of
her revenge on Jason’s new bride.127 The poison used to infuse the robe, like the charm that
Deianeira uses, “is of course, the negative side of [women’s] other important female activities,
cooking and nursing.”128 Despite entering into the masculine world of exchange and
competition, then, Deianeira uses the resources of her femininity. She reacts to an encroachment
upon her “domain,” her marriage and family, “within the boundaries of her domain and with her
own female means”:129 she has kept Nessos’ charm “in the inmost corner” of the house (ἐν µυχοῖς
σώιζειν ἐµέ, 686), and anoints the robe “in the house with a piece of wool stored in the house”
126
Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 159.
127
The words used to describe and define Deianeira’s gift are very similar to those used of Klytaimestra’s net and
Medeia’s poisoned robe. At Trakh. 1051-52 Herakles refers to the robe as a “woven net of the Furies” (Ἐρινύων/
ὑφαντὸν ἀµφίβληστρον), a phrase that resembles the description of Klytaimestra’s “net” (ἀµφίβληστρον, Ag. 1382) as a
“woven robe of the Furies” (ὑφαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων, Ag. 1580). (In tragedy, the word ἀµφίβληστρον is unique to
the Agamemnon and the Trakhiniai.) Also, Deianeira’s robe, designed to reunite husband and wife, is repeatedly
termed a peplos, like the garment that Medeia sends as a wedding gift to Jason’s new bride.
128
Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 159.
129
Ibid., p. 162.
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(ἔχρισα µὲν κατ’ οἶκον ἐν δόµοις κρυφῆι/ µαλλῶι, 689-90); the wool itself is from “the domestic
flock” (κτησίου βοτοῦ, 690).130
Using only the resources available to her within the boundaries of the oikos, Deianeira
prepares the charm and seals it in a casket. To ensure its delivery to Herakles alone, she instructs
Likhas not to open it, saying that she has made a vow to “show [Herakles] to the gods as a new
sacrificer in a new garment” (φανεῖν θεοῖς/ θυτῆρα καινῶι καινὸν ἐν πεπλώµατι, 612-13) in thanks
for his return homeward. When Likhas departs to deliver the garment, however, Deianeira
discovers that the wool with which she applied the charm, long kept “out of the sunlight”
(ἀλαµπὲς ἡλίου, 691), has dissolved in the light of the sun’s rays (ἀκτῖν’ ἐς ἡλιῶτιν, 697), leaving
only “foaming clots” on the ground (θροµβώδεις ἀφροί, 702). Immediately, she realizes that
Nessos “charmed” her (ἔθελγέ µ’, 710), and that her efforts to save her marriage will actually
destroy it. Inevitably, the robe, intended for Herakles’ use as a sacrificial garment, will melt, just
as the tuft of wool did, when Herakles exposes it to the light and heat of the sacrificial fire.
Kratos Destroyed: Hyllos Rejects Deianeira
As soon as Deianeira discovers that she “has done a terrible deed” (ὁρῶ δὲ µ’ ἔργον δεινὸν
ἐξειγασµένην, 706) by following the advice of the “deceptive” centaur (ἔθελγέ µ’, 710), Hyllos
enters with word of his father. His report begins, however, with an exculpation of his mother:
ΥΛ. ὦ µῆτερ, ὡς ἂν ἐκ τριῶν σ’ ἓν εἱλόµην,
ἢ µηκέτ’ εἶναι ζῶσαν, ἢ σεσωµένην
ἄλλου κεκλῆσθαι µητέρ’, ἢ λώιους φρένας
τῶν νῦν παρουσῶν τῶνδ’ ἀµείψασθαί ποθεν.
130
735
I am not convinced by Segal’s interpretation of this line: “The wool with which the robe is anointed comes from
the ktesion boton (690), the flock which is also part of the property of the house. This application of the love
charm/poison, however, destroys the distinction between inner and outer. Deianeira reaches from the secrecy (689)
of the interior space of the house to the domain outside, the flocks which, strictly speaking, lie under the man’s
rather than the woman’s care” (Tr&C, p. 64). The wool may originally come from the flocks outside, but Deianeira
specifically states that it was “stored inside,” i.e., in her domain.
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∆Ε. τί δ’ ἐστίν, ὦ παῖ, πρός γ’ ἐµοῦ στυγούµενον;
ΥΛ. τὸν ἄνδρα τὸν σὸν ἴσθι, τὸν δ’ ἐµὸν λέγω
πατέρα, κατακτείνασα τῆιδ’ ἐν ἡµέραι.
740
[Hyl. Oh, mother! How I would have chosen one of three things for you: either
that you were no longer living; or that, still alive, you were called someone
else’s mother; or that you had long ago gotten a better mind in exchange for
the one you have now!
De. My child, what is there, on my part, (that is) hateful?
Hyl. Know that, on this day, you have killed your husband—no, I mean my
father.]
Trakh. 734-40
Hyllos’ scornful accusation displaces Deianeira from her position in the oikos. He wishes that
she were either “dead” or “someone else’s mother,” and further isolates her by describing
Herakles as “your husband—no, I mean my father.”131 His emphatic rephrasing cancels
Deianeira’s position as both wife and mother, and simultaneously suggests that she is worthy to
fulfill neither role.132
Hyllos’ invective against Deianeira only increases as he begins to relate how her “gift,
the deadly robe” (δώρηµα, θανάσιµον πέπλον, 758) melted onto Herakles’ body, attacking it “like
the venom of a hateful viper” (ἐχθρᾶς ἐχίδνης ἰὸς ὣς, 771). In addition to describing the poison’s
effects, he reports Herakles’ verbal reaction, an attack against Deianeira that leaves her further
debased: “dwelling on his ill-mated union with you and his alliance with Oineus, [he said] how
he got [them] as the ruin of his life” (τὸ δυσπάρευνον λέκτρον ἐνδατούµενος/ σοῦ τῆς ταλαίνης, καὶ τὸν
Οἰνέως γάµον/ οἷον κατακτήσαιτο λυµαντὴν βίου, 791-93). Herakles’ descriptions of his marriage as
I follow the suggestion of Bruce Heiden (Tragic Rhetoric: An Interpretation of Sophocles’ “Trachiniae,”
Hermeneutic Commentaries, vol. 1, ed. Pietro Pucci [New York: Peter Lang, 1989], p. 109) for this translation,
taking δὲ “as a strong adversative rather than a copulative particle,” as in Deianeira’s speech at lines 536-37 (“I have
received this maiden—no, no longer a maiden, I think, but an experienced woman”). Cf. Kamerbeek’s (inferior)
explanation that the “tension” of the lines caused by the positioning of τὸν δ’ ἐµὸν λέγω/ πατέρα suggests that “it is
perhaps best to assume that λέγω has no bearing on the construction” (Plays II, ad loc.).
131
On this, see, e.g., Philip Holt, “The Imagery of Sophokles’ Trachiniai,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1976, p.
186: Hyllos “invokes the language of parenthood to emphasize Deianeira’s failings as a mother (as he sees them)
and to read her out of the family.”
132
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“ill-mated” and his wife as his “ruin” (echoed now by Hyllos) attack Deianeira in both her sexual
and nurturing capacities by implying that she is both a bad lover and the destroyer, rather than
the sustainer, of her oikos.133 To Herakles, she has failed in her role as wife; to Hyllos, on the
other hand, she has failed as a mother, as his final reproach indicates:
ΥΛ.
τοιαῦτα, µῆτερ, πατρὶ βουλεύσασ’ ἐµῶι
καὶ δρῶσ’ ἐλήφθης, ὧν σε ποίνιµος ∆ίκη
τείσαιτ’ Ἐρινύς τ’, εἰ θέµις γ’ ἐπεύχοµαι·
θέµις δ’, ἐπεί µοι τὴν θέµιν σὺ προύβαλες,
πάντων ἄριστον ἄνδρα τῶν ἐπὶ χθονὶ
κτείνασ’, ὁποῖον ἄλλον οὐκ ὄψει ποτέ.
ΧΟ. τί σῖγ’ ἀφέρπεις; οὐ κάτοισθ’ ὁθούνεκα
ξυνηγορεῖς σιγῶσα τῶι κατηγόρωι;
ΥΛ. ἐᾶτ’ ἀφέρπειν·
. . . . . . . . . .
ὄγκον γὰρ ἄλλως ὀνόµατος τί δεῖ τρέφειν
µητρῶιον, ἥτις µηδὲν ὡς τεκοῦσα δρᾶι;
810
815
[Hyl. Such things, mother, you have been caught planning and doing against my
father. May avenging Justice and Fury pay you back for them, if what I
pray is right. But it is right, since you gave me the right (to pray it) when
you killed the best man of all those on the earth, such as you will never see
again.
Ch. Why do you creep off in silence? Don’t you know that you argue for your
accuser’s case by being silent?
Hyl. Let her creep off . . . for why should she keep, in vain, the honored name of
mother when she doesn’t at all act like a mother?]
Trakh. 807-18
Convinced that his mother intended to kill his father—as Klytaimestra did Agamemnon—Hyllos
denounces Deianeira as a guilty murderess, becoming, in the process, much like Aischylos’
Orestes, who kills his mother to avenge his father’s death. Although Hyllos does not go so far as
to murder his mother, he effectively disowns her, calling her “unworthy of the honored name of
mother,” and forces her to give up her identity as wife and mother. Stripped of the roles that
133
Both δυσπάρευνον and λέκτρον signify a “bed.” Considering Herakles’ tendency to view women functionally as
“beds” in this play (κριτὸν λέχος; κρύφιον λέχος; εὖνις), his denunciation of Deianeira with the words δυσπάρευνον
λέκτρον is very harsh indeed; it negates her entire reaon for existence, as far as he is concerned.
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have brought her honor and authority, Deianeira has nothing left but “shame,” and she “creeps
off in silence” to exercise the only kratos that she has left—the power over her own life.
A Warrior’s Death
Soon after Deianeira’s silent exit, the Chorus members hear a groan from within the
house (862-64), and see Deianeira’s aged Nurse hurrying toward them (868-70). To their
incredulity, she announces that Deianeira is dead, and proceeds to relate the details of her
suicide:
ΤΡ. βέβηκε ∆ηιάνειρα τὴν πανυστάτην
ὁδῶν ἁπασῶν ἐξ ἀκινήτου ποδός.
. . . . . . . . . .
αὑτὴν διηίστωσε <‒ ∪ ‒ ∪ ‒ >
ΧΟ. τίς θυµός, ἢ τίνες νόσοι,
τάνδ’ αἰχµᾶι βέλεος κακοῦ
ξυνεῖλε; πῶς ἐµήσατο
πρὸς θανάτωι θάνατον
ἀνύσασα µόνα στονόεντος ἐν τοµᾶι σιδάρου;
. . . . . . . . . . .
ΤΡ. αὐτὴ πρὸς αὑτῆς χειροποιεῖται τάδε.
. . . . . . . . . . .
ΧΟ. καὶ ταῦτ’ ἔτλη τις χεὶρ γυναικεία κτίσαι;
875
881
885
891
[Nu. Deianeira has traveled the last of all journeys without moving a foot.
. . . . . . . . . . .
She has completely destroyed herself.
Ch. What impulse—or what sickness—killed her, on the point of a dire blade?134
How did she, by herself, devise death upon death with a stroke of mournful
iron?
. . . . . . . . . . .
134
There is a slight anachronism in these lines. As the text stands, the Chorus knows that Deianeira has stabbed
herself (883-84) nearly fifty lines before the Nurse mentions a “sword” (930). To mitigate this discrepancy,
Easterling (Sophocles, “Trachiniae,” ad loc.) proposes “a lacuna in the area between 878 and 882,” while L.D.J.
Henderson (“Sophocles Trachiniae 878-92 and a Principle of Paul Maas,” Maia 28 (1976): 23) more specifically
posits “a lacuna in 881 in the form < – | X – U – > in which the Nurse names the weapon used by her mistress,” such
as <φασγάνου τοµῆι> or <ἀµφήκει ξίφει>. Henderson’s solution both provides a reference for the Chorus’ αἰχµᾶι and
fills out an otherwise incomplete line of iambic trimeter (cf. 889 and 891).
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Nu. She did these things herself, by herself and with her own hand.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Ch. Could a woman’s hand dare to do these things?]
Trakh. 874-98
The Chorus’ astonishment that “a woman’s hand” could “dare” to perform the “violent act”
(ὕβριν, 888) carried out by Deianeira emphasizes the masculine nature of her death. Instead of
the typical “female” suicide by hanging,135 she pierces her body “with the point of a dire blade,”
a painful and bloody form of self “slaughter” (νεοσφαγής, 1130) that is reminiscent both of
Eurydike’s death in the Antigone (σφάγιον, 1291) and the warrior Aias’ suicide in Sophokles’
Aias (νεοσφαγής, Aias 898). Her death is thus a “transgendered” death—simultaneously woman’s
and warrior’s—but her motivations are entirely feminine, as the Nurse explains:
ἐπεῖ παρῆλθε δωµάτων εἴσω µόνη
καὶ παῖδ’ ἐν αὐλαῖς εἶδε κοῖλα δέµνια
στορνύνθ’, ὅπως ἄψορρον ἀντώιη πατρί,
κρύψασ’ ἑαυτὴν ἔνθα µή τις εἰσίδοι,
βρυχᾶτο µὲν βωµοῖσι προσπίπτουσ’ ὅτι
γένοιντ’ ἔρηµοι
. . . . . . . . . . .
αὐτὴ τὸν αὑτῆς δαίµον’ ἀνακαλουµένη
καὶ τὰς ἄπαιδας ἐς τὸ λοιπὸν ϯοὐσίαςϯ.
ἐπεῖ δὲ τῶνδ’ ἔληξεν, ἐξαίφνης σφ’ ὁρῶ
τὸν Ἡράκλειον θάλαµον εἰσορµωµένην.
. . . . . . . . . . .
ὁρῶ δὲ τὴν γυναῖκα δεµνίοις
τοῖς Ἡρακλείοις στρωτὰ βάλλουσαν φάρη.
ὅπως δ’ ἐτέλεσε τοῦτ’, ἐπενθοροῦσ’ ἄνω
καθέζετ’ ἐν µέσοισιν εὐνατηρίοις
καὶ δακρύων ῥήξασα θερµὰ νάµατα
ἔλεξεν· ‘ὦ λέχη τε καὶ νυµφεῖ’ ἐµά,
τὸ λοιπὸν ἤδη χαίρεθ’, ὡς ἔµ’ οὔποτε
δέξεσθ’ ἔτ’ ἐν κοίταισι ταῖσδ’ εὐνάτριαν.’
135
900
905
910
915
920
Sophokles’ Antigone and Iokaste end their lives by the noose, as does Euripides’ Phaedra; the latter playwright’s
Helen, on the other hand, merely contemplates the act. Loraux (Tragic Ways, p. 10) adds Leda to this list, and
concludes: “Hanging was a woman’s death. As practiced by women, it could lead to endless variations, because
women and young girls contrived to substitute for the customary rope those adornments with which they decked
themselves and which were also the emblems of their sex, as Antigone strangled herself with her knotted veil.”
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τοσαῦτα φωνήσασα συντόνωι χερὶ
λύει τὸν αὑτῆς πέπλον, ὧι χρυσήλατος
προύκειτο µαστῶν περονίς, ἐκ δ’ ἐλώπισεν
πλευρὰν ἅπασαν ὠλένην τ’ εὐώνυµον.
κἀγὼ δροµαία βᾶσ’, ὅσονπερ ἔσθενον,
τῶι παιδὶ φράζω τῆς τεχνωµένης τάδε.
κἀν ὧι τὸ κεῖσε δεῦρο τ’ ἐξορµώµεσθα,
ὁρῶµεν αὐτὴν ἀµφιπλῆγι φασγάνωι
πλευρὰν ὑφ’ ἧπαρ καὶ φρένας πεπληγµένην.
925
930
[When she went into the house alone and saw her son making a hollow bed in
the courtyard, so that he could go back to meet his father, she hid herself inside,
so that no one could see her. Falling at the household altars, she moaned that they
were empty . . . crying out for her own fate and for her properties, which would be
childless in the future.
When she stopped this, I saw her rush suddenly into Herakles’ bedroom . . .
and I saw her spreading bedclothes on Herakles’ bed. When she finished this, she
leaped up and sat in the middle of the bed. Breaking into hot streams of tears, she
said, “O my bridal bed and wedding chamber, farewell forever, since you will
never again receive me as a partner in intercourse!”
When she had cried out these things, she loosened her robe with a violent
hand, at the place where a golden brooch lay over her breasts, and she laid bare
her whole left side and her left arm. And I ran as quickly as I could, and told her
son while she was devising these things. And in the time that I rushed there and
back here,136 we saw that she had struck herself in the side, under the liver and
midriff, with a double-edged sword.]
Trakh. 900-05, 910-31
The “hollow bed” (κοῖλα δέµνια, 901) that Deianeira sees Hyllos preparing is at once funereal and
sexual. Its emptiness recalls the emptiness of the grave,137 but it is also analogous to the
“marriage bed” (δεµνίοις, 915) that Deianeira has shared with Herakles—the locus of both
intercourse and procreation. Once central to Deianeira’s identity as a wife and mother, the bed
now emblemizes her isolation as she realizes that it will “never again receive [her] as a partner in
intercourse” and, consequently, that her oikos will be “childless in the future.” In a final show of
136
The phrasing of this line is extremely condensed, as the Nurse uses one verb (ἐξορώµεθα) to indicate two actions
performed by two different people. For the sense, see Kamerbeek, Plays II, ad loc.: “τὸ κεῖσε (my running to Hyllos)
καὶ τὸ δεῦρο (our return to the bridal room).”
Cf. Antigone 1205, where the play’s Messenger reports Antigone’s suicide in the cave tomb, her νυµφεῖον Ἅιδου
κοῖλον; and Euripides Alkestis 897-98, where Admetos desires to lie with his dying wife in a τύµβου τάφρος κοίλη.
137
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devotion to the roles that she has cherished in life, she makes Herakles’ bed for the last time as if
preparing for intercourse, in a grim, erotic parody of her wedding night. In the middle of
“Herakles’ bedroom” on “Herakles’ bed,” she undresses and plunges what is undoubtedly
Herakles’ sword into her naked body.138 The resulting wound is thus a sexual wound, but it is
also a wound that aligns her very closely with the Homeric warrior. She stabs herself “under the
liver and midriff,” the very place to which warriors often receive death-dealing blows,139 and
with a φάσγανον, the same type of weapon used by Aias in his own, violent suicide (Aias 834).
At the same time, however, her method of suicide prizes her role as mother by reenacting the
blood and pain of childbirth.140 Paradoxically, then, she reclaims the role of mother that Hyllos
denied her by killing herself in the manner of a heroic warrior; she cannot live without a husband
or children, and, in order to regain them, she “contrives” (τεχνωµένης, 928—a woman’s skill) a
death worthy of both woman and warrior.
138
The sword as a phallic symbol is a common trope in Greek literature. See, e.g., Hugh Parry, “Aphrodite and the
Furies in Sophocles’ Trachiniae,” in Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher, ed. Martin
Cropp, Elaine Fantham, and S.E. Scully (Alberta: The University of Calgary Press, 1986), p. 109: “Frequently in
Greek thought and art the phallic sword or spear points to an ambiguity that mediates between erôs as life-enhancing
and erôs as deadly. The earliest example in literature is Odysseus’ attack on Circe, a threat to kill by the sword that
transforms itself into sexual intercourse (Od. 10.293-6).”
Homeric warriors receive blows to the liver and/or midriff at Il. 11.579, 13.412, 17.349, 24.212; and Od. 9.301
and 11.578. The φάσγανον is also a particularly epic weapon, cited nearly 30 times in the Iliad and Odyssey. On
Deianeira’s method of suicide and its implications in Greek thought, see Loraux, Experiences of Tiresias, pp. 29-30:
“[W]hen Euripides’ Suppliants state that they have carried children ‘beneath their livers,” . . . it is a way for women
to position themselves with respect to the universe of the warrior. . . . [M]edical writings refer to the critical state of
the woman who has been wounded in the liver during childbirth, because wounds to the liver are included among
those that bring death. A wound to the liver is first and foremost a man’s wound. The Homeric warrior, the strength
of his knees broken, is wounded in the liver, beneath the diaphragm; adversaries like to aim their blows at the liver;
and a man or woman who kills herself in a manly way thrusts the blade into the liver. Thus . . . the signs of war are
at the very heart of what the Greeks have to say about motherhood.” See also ibid., p. 264, n. 168: “Outside tragedy
everything returns to its proper place, and Deianeira meets with a woman’s death when she hangs herself (Diodorus
4.38.3; Apollodorus 2.7.7).”
139
For this idea, see Loraux, Tragic Ways, p. 15: “a suicide that shed blood was associated with maternity, through
which a wife, in her ‘heroic’ pains of childbirth, found complete fulfillment.”
140
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CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION
As part of a public ritual honoring the god Dionysus, tragedy “validate[d] the social
order” of fifth-century Athens, yet it “also ha[d] the peculiarity of calling into question the
normative codes” of that order by breaking down its “familiar patterns.”141 It was the goal of the
tragedians to “challenge the audience’s preconceptions of how things were (and how they might
be) by manipulating elements of [their] society,”142 and, as a result, tragedy created a world in
which perversions of the political, social, or sexual orders challenged the set of circumstances or
values perceived as “normal.” Women, who existed in Greek society at the margins of these
orders, naturally became ideal figures for investigating established systems of values.
Even in the plays of Aischylos, the earliest of the three major tragedians, strong female
figures like Klytaimestra and the Danaids dominate the political, social, and even sexual orders,
creating an inversion of the normal, male-dominated system of fifth-century Athens. Many of
Aischylos’ women, however, can be identified, to some degree, as female “scare figures.” His
Klytaimestra, for example, arguably the most “masculine” of women on the tragic stage,143 is an
embodiment of evil, an adulterous and murderous “female tyrant.”144 Where Homer has
described her, through the figure of Nestor, as a woman “of good sense” (φρεσὶ γὰρ κέχητ’
ἀγαθῆισι, Od. 3.266) who was “overcome” by the persuasion of Aigisthos (δαµῆναι, Od. 3.269),
the true murderer of Agamemnon (Ὀρέστης/ . . . κατὰ δ’ ἔκτανε πατροφονῆα,/ Αἴγισθον δολόµητιν, ὅ
141
Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1986), pp. 24-25.
142
Rehm, Marriage to Death, p. 140.
143
Cf. my “Introduction,” pp. 8-9 on Klytaimestra as ἀνδρόβουλον (Ag. 11).
144
Loraux, Experiences of Tiresias, p. 190.
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οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα, Od. 3.306-08), the Klytaimestra of Aischylos’ Oresteia is a self-motivated
murderess who gains and consolidates her power through the complete suppression of the male
sex. In the absence of her husband, Agamemnon, she rules supreme, her “effeminate” (γύναι, Ag.
1625) lover, Aigisthos, at her side. When Agamemnon at last returns, she murders him, in a
shocking perversion of her duties as wife,145 and thereby secures her position of power. Then,
after slaying her husband, she rejoices at a rumor of the death of her son, Orestes, the only
obstacle to her continued rule. Throughout the Oresteia, Klytaimestra is wholly and elementally
evil, a “viper” (µύραινά γ’ εἴτ’ ἔχιδν’, Cho. 994) who destroys the oikos, like the stereotypical
“bad” women of archaic literature.
Sophokles’ women, on the other hand, cannot be so easily identified as “good” and “bad”
figures. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, his Antigone and Trakhiniai contain portraits
of women that do not readily conform to archaic methods of portraying female characters, with
their too-neat division between maiden and matron and their use of generalized plotlines.
Rather, Sophokles’ artful conflation of different archaic story patterns or character types
questions traditional representations of women, ultimately denying credibility to character typing
by archaic standards.
145
On Klytaimestra’s “abandonment of the female role,” see also Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” pp.
160-61: “Instead of washing the home-coming husband, she kills him. Instead of making love to him, she rejoices”
and describes, with a clearly sexual allusion, how the fallen Agamemnon “struck me with a dark shower of bloody
dew, spraying out a sharp stream of blood” (κἀκφυσιῶν ὀξεῖαν αἵµατος σφαγὴν/ βάλλει µ’ ἐρεµνῆι ψακάδι φοινίας δρόσου,
Ag. 1389-90).
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A Second Look at Sophokles’ Antigone
As the maiden who undergoes a “wedding” to the death god, Sophokles’ Antigone
experiences marriage, the “normal goal” of a girl’s life, and death/destruction, the most extreme
perversion of this goal, at one and the same time. Like the daughters of Pandareos in the
Odyssey, she deviates from the plotline of the typical virgin’s story (virginity → marriage and
children), but, unlike them, her death is figured as an alternative fulfillment of the telos gamou.
Indeed, by sentencing Antigone to death, Kreon means to punish her with a “cruel curtailment
and perversion of all the sexual and maternal desires that should be expected of a woman,”146
but, instead of keeping her from marriage, he sends her to a death that is a marriage. Sealed in a
“tomb” that doubles as her “bridal chamber” (ὦ τύµβος, ὦ νυµφεῖον, Ant. 891), Antigone becomes
a “bride of death, a double of the goddess Persephone, whose privileged position as Hades’ wife,
according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, gained her “the greatest honors among the immortal
[gods]” (τιµὰς δὲ σχήσησθα µετ’ ἀθανάτοισι µεγίστας, 366). Antigone’s status as the death god’s
bride, however, leaves much room for ambiguity. On the one hand, if Antigone is an analogue
of Persephone/Kore, she should be “condemned to eternal childishness and childlessness,”147
with no opportunity to achieve full social integration through maternity. On the other hand, as
the death god’s bride, Antigone should receive some measure of integration, as the figures
compared to her near the end of the play seem to indicate: as she goes to her death, Antigone
compares herself to Niobe, and the Chorus finds similarities between Antigone and Danaë,
Lykourgos, and Kleopatra. Interestingly, each mythical figure to whom Antigone is compared is
146
Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” p. 52.
147
Ibid., p. 62.
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a parent, and Niobe, Lykourgos, and Kleopatra all suffer the loss of their children.148 In these
latter comparisons, then Antigone becomes almost a double of “the grieving figure of the Great
Mother”; she is projected “as the mater dolorosa as well as the maiden wedded to Hades” in a
seemingly “illogical union of opposites.”149 The maiden, however, “is also the mother at an
earlier stage,”150 so that Antigone experiences a sort of reverse maturation: figures as a mother in
the performance of Polyneikes’ burial (cf. the image of the mother bird at Ant. 423-25 and my
“Chapter 2,” p 24-26) and in the similes near the end of the play, Antigone enacts the role of
mother before she becomes a bride. Consequently, her wedding to Hades completes the process
of her maturation, and she must, after her bridal journey to Acheron, meet her natal family as a
metoikos (852, 862).
If Antigone’s death does, indeed, constitute her initiation into womanhood, it must not be
a punishment but a “profit,” as she refers to it at lines 461-64: “But if I die before my time, I say
it is a profit to me. For how could anyone who lives amid as many misfortunes as I do not carry
away profit when he dies?” (εἰ δὲ τοῦ χρόνου/ πρόσθεν θανοῦµαι, κέρδος αὔτ’ ἐγὼ λέγω./ ὅστις γὰρ ἐν
πολλοῖσιν ὡς ἐγὼ κακοῖς/ ζῆι, πῶς ὅδ’ οὐχὶ κατθανὼν κέρδος φέρει;). The “misfortunes” that
Antigone has experienced include, of course, the issue of her brother’s unburied corpse (ἄθαπτον
νέκυν, 467), the object of Kreon’s edict, which Antigone considers a violation of divine law (cf.
Ant. 453-57 and my “Chapter 2,” pp. 27-28). In effect, she states that it would not benefit her to
live in a society in which Kreon’s idea of justice prevails over the precepts of divine law,
precepts that uphold the sanctity of familial rather than political bonds.
148
Niobe’s children are slain by Apollo and Artemis; Lykourgos, maddened by Bacchic frenzy, kills his own
children; and Kleopatra, abandoned by her husband, has two sons who are blinded by their stepmother.
149
Segal, Tr&C, p. 180.
150
Ibid.
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Antigone herself, by giving primary importance to the matriline, insets matrilinear
kinship ties into the set of bonds whose sanctity is supported by the gods. Kreon, however,
rejects her claims and continues to downplay familial bonds in favor of political ones (cf. his
implicit identification of Eteokles as φίλος and Polyneikes as ἐχθρόςat line 522; and my “Chapter
2,” pp. 27-28), Antigone’s death sentence constituting his most fervent rejection of the values
that she espouses. When Antigone achieves, in Hades’ divine realm, the integration denied her
in the human realm, however, it becomes clear that her assertion of the rights of (specifically
matrilinear) kinship is valid: Antigone dies a quasi-heroic death in her cave-tomb, while Kreon is
ultimately emasculated, left weeping over the bodies of his wife and son, the heir who would
have ensured the continuity of the family line as well as its political rule.
On a larger scale, the conflict between Kreon and Antigone in Sophokles’ play can be
viewed as a conflict between the values of polis (city-state) and oikos (household, family), with
Kreon standing for the values of the state and Antigone standing for those of the home.
“Conflict between family obligations and the demands of the larger community” was, in fact,
“especially acute and clearly defined in fifth-century Athens,”151 particularly after the institution
of Perikles’ citizenship law in 451/50 BCE. This law “narrowed the conditions for Athenian
citizenship by limiting it to those born of two Athenian parents,” making it the prerogative of the
Athenian polis to “[restrict] the autonomy of the household, both internally and in its marital
relations, in a manner which defined the category of citizenship.”152 As a result of Perikles’
legislation, matrilinear kinship became greatly important in determining the composition of the
citizen body; not only the father’s but also the mother’s status was suddenly determinant of a
151
Griffith, Sophocles, “Antigone,” p. 48.
152
Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-state (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), p. 208.
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child’s social standing. Thus when Sophokles has his Antigone insistently “define kinship in
terms of the womb”153 he touches on issues particularly relevant to Athenian society of the
440’s: his Antigone not only argues against the pronouncement in Aischylos’ Agamemnon
(produced c. 458 BCE) that “the one called mother is no parent of her child,” but she also asserts
that women have a place in constituting the kinship bonds necessary to establish and maintain a
legitimate oikos. A cautionary figure, she warns against the dangers of allowing the state too
much authority over the home (and vice versa). By portraying Kreon’s demise as the direct
result of his failure to recognize the validity of Antigone’s claims about the rights inherent in
familial (and especially maternal) bonds, Sophokles ultimately advocates a fair balance between
the values of polis and oikos, and his portrayal of Antigone’s integration, even in death, attests to
the importance of the woman’s role in constituting and maintaining a healthy polis.
The Trakhiniai Revisited
As the devoted wife and mother who becomes a murderess when she inadvertently kills
her husband, the character of Sophokles’ Deianeira conflates two types of women that were
separate and distinct in archaic literature. Trying to be a Penelope, a “good” wife awaiting
Herakles’ return, Deianeira becomes, in the eyes of her husband and son, a Klytaimestra or a
Medeia when her attempts to regain Herakles’ affections prove fatal. Like Klytaimestra and
Medeia, she reacts against her husband’s introduction of a mistress as a second “wife” (δάµαρ,
Trakh. 428, 429) into her home, and, like them, she uses a garment, a product of the female task
of weaving, as her medium of action. (The respective garments used by Aischylos’
Klytaimestra, Euripides’ Medeia, and Sophokles’ Deianeira are all peploi; Deianeira’s is
153
Segal, Tr&C, p. 183. See also my “Chapter 2,” pp. 16-20.
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poisoned, like Medeia’s, and is “woven of the Furies,” like Klytaimestra’s.) Unlike either
Klytaimestra or Medeia, however, Deianeira does not willfully do violence to the members of
her oikos; in fact, the very thought that she has destroyed, rather than preserved, her household
prompts her to commit suicide, in a final demonstration of her total dedication to home and
family. Her death in “Herakles’ bedroom” (Trakh. 913), on “Herakles’ bed” (Trakh. 915-16)
affirms her dedication to her role as Herakles’ wife, while the action of penetrating her body
“under the liver and midriff” (Trakh. 931) with Herakles’ sword emphasizes her devotion to
motherhood. She strikes herself in the place where Homeric warriors receive deadly wounds, but
it is also the place where, for a woman, the womb is located. By driving Herakles’ sword into
her womb, she strikes at the very place where Herakles’ infidelity has most harmed her—her
identity as a woman, as defined by her fulfillment of the telos gamou through motherhood.
Unlike Klytaimestra, then, whom the god Apollo ultimately judges to be “no parent of her child”
(οὐκ ἔστι µήτηρ ἡ κεκληµένη τέκνου/ τοκεύς, Eumenides 658-59),154 Deianeira’s role in Herakles’
death does not affect her devotion to home and family, but strongly and undeniably affirms it. In
Sophokles’ portrayal, she does not prove to be not a “bad” woman, but a “good” one who makes
a tragic error in judgment—by trying to save her family, she unwittingly destroys it.
Although the dramatic details of Sophokles’ Trakhiniai are significantly different from
those of his Antigone, Sophokles undoubtedly uses Deianeira’s plight, like Antigone’s, to
illuminate aspects of the polis-oikos conflict. But while the Trakhiniai is clearly more of a
“domestic” tragedy than the Antigone, its central action still evolves out of a male’s unwarranted
intrusion into the usual “domain” of the female.155 Instead of the tyrannical king who allows the
154
Although Apollo generalizes his argument to include all women, not exclusively Klytaimestra, he necessarily
implicates her when he uses the argument to acquit Orestes of her death.
155
Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 159.
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demands of the state to inhibit familial obligations, however, the Trakhiniai has at its center the
thoughtless husband, Herakles, who allows his own hyper-masculine sexuality to encroach upon
the sanctity of his marriage and family.
When Herakles sends the young war captive, Iole, home to Deianeira to be his second
wife (δάµαρ, Trakh. 428, 429), he violates the marriage bond that he shares with Deianeira and
endangers her status within the household. As a wife and mother, Deianeira is, as Likhas admits,
“the woman in charge” (κρατοῦσαν ∆ηιάνειραν, Trakh. 407); she wields certain amount of power
(kratos) within her oikos, but the presence of Iole jeopardizes her position of authority.
Consequently, she acts out of “dynastic concerns”156 to protect the unity and continuity of the
oikos that she has established with Herakles, as his legitimate wife. To do so, she anoints a robe
(peplos), woven by her own hand (χερσὶν ἁτεχνησάµεν, 534; πέπλον/ δώρηµ’ ἐκείνωι τἀνδρὶ τῆς ἐµῆς
χερός, Trakh. 602-03), with Nessos’ supposed love charm and sends it to Herakles, in hopes that
“with charms and spells [she] may be able to overcome the girl [Iole]” and reclaim her position
within the oikos.
It is significant that Sophokles chooses a peplos as the medium of Deianeira’s action, for
it is not only a “wedding gift par excellence” in literature, but also an important ritual garment in
Athenian society. Used in many transitional rites, such as weddings and funerals, the peplos was
also the garment presented each year to Athens’ tutelary deity, Athena Polias, to secure her favor
and protection for the city. Thus the gift of a robe would have had special resonance with an
Athenian audience, whose members would have witnessed the yearly dedication of a peplos to
Athena at the Panathenaic festival.
A gift intended to propitiate the goddess and elicit her protection, the peplos was also a
product of the loom, with close ritual ties to the female realm. To begin production of Athena’s
156
See Faraone, “Deianira’s Mistake,” p. 120, and my “Chapter 3,” pp. 57-62.
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robe, four young girls known as arrephoroi, aged seven to eleven, “were chosen to commence
the weaving,” but they passed the task on to a group of specially chosen maidens (parthenoi) of
roughly nubile age, who finished the work under the direction of the priestess of Athena
Polias.157 This priestess also presided over proteleia sacrifices, performed just before marriage,
and “received a payment from the father for the birth of a child,” making her the overseer not
only of the young children and nubile maidens chosen for the weaving of the peplos, but also of
the rites performed prior to marriage and after childbirth.158 The task of directing the production
of the peplos for Athena Polias, then, was especially significant, for the weaving process, in
itself, symbolically encapsulated, by the transfer of the robe from children to adolescent girls to
the matronly figure of the priestess, the “normal” or idealized course of female development:
virginity → marriage and children.
As a gift from the women’s realm to the protectress of the city, the peplos ensured female
participation in a rite designed to secure the goddess’s favor for the whole of the city. A physical
manifestation of women’s work within the oikos, the robe guaranteed the security of the polis,
and thereby created a balance between the public and private realms. Thus Deianeira’s poisoned
peplos, for the fifth-century Athenian, would have signified an imbalance between the world of
the oikos and that of the polis. A gift produced, stored, and anointed within the house by
Deianeira in her capacity as “mistress of the house” (despoina), the “deadly robe” (θανάσιµον
πέπλον, Trakh. 758) enters into the distant world of military violence and victory, of which
157
Matthew Dillon, Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 58.
158
Inscriptional evidence shows that the priestess of Athena Polias was often a wife and mother herself. On this,
see, e.g., Dillon, Girls and Women, p. 78: “No celibacy was required of the woman priest of Athena Polias serving
this most virgin of goddesses; the statue base for Lysimache, who served the goddess for sixty-four years, mentions
that she had four children. Other women priests of Athena Polias at Athens certainly did have children. . . . In
another instance, a decree praises the husband of a woman priest of Athena Polias and awards him an olive crown.”
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Herakles is a part. The destructive effects it has on Herakles serve as a warning about the
violation of the rights of the oikos by external factors.
Conclusion
Because the respective experiences of Antigone and Deianeira cause their lives to deviate
from the conventional plot elements used to construct female characters in archaic literature,
both women can be seen as figures of change. Distinctly different from their stereotypical
precursors, they provide the audience with a means of examining and reevaluating previous
methods of conceptualizing and thinking about women. Compared with the negative, willfully
destructive figures found in Hesiod’s “beautiful evil” Pandora (καλὸν κακὸν, Theogony 585),
Aischylos’ “man-minded” Klytaimestra (ἀνδρόβουλον, Ag. 11), or even Euripides’ vindictive
Medeia, Sophokles’ Antigone and Deianeira are decidedly more positive figures of womanhood.
Although they both subvert values perceived as normal in the political, social, and sexual orders
of fifth-century Athenian society, they are not, in the end, “bad” women.
As tragic characters, Antigone and Deianeira necessarily participate in a form of art that
functioned as one of the central vehicles of evaluating and readjusting the political and social
status quo at Athens. In this context, it is significant that they pose challenges to the traditional
ways of conceptualizing and representing women in their own voices (albeit as interpreted by a
male playwright) and with their own actions, for it seems to suggest that “women’s perspectives
and positions . . . were central to those challenges.”159 In a society that, for the most part,
marginalized women, excluding them from any action of political moment,160 women’s
159
Rehm, Marriage to Death, p. 137.
160
In classical Athens, a woman, “whatever her status as daughter, sister, wife or mother, and whatever her age or
social class, [was] a perpetual minor” (John Gould, “Law, Custom, and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of
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appearance in tragedy as central figures around whom important issues—such as conflict
between male and female, polis and oikos—revolve is indeed significant. Sophokles’ women, in
particular, are of special importance because, as we have seen throughout the preceding chapters,
they are the first female figures to walk the tragic stage who do not conform to the stereotypical
representations of their archaic models (Aischylos’ women included). Nonetheless, I am not
suggesting that Sophokles was some sort of proto-feminist, or that he created Antigone and
Deianeira to “champion the women’s cause” or “plead the female case” for the establishment of
women’s rights in fifth-century Athens.161 Rather, I propose that Sophokles deliberately
problematized and conflated the established modes of conceptualizing women in order to present
his female characters as positive vehicles of reflection, whose tragic losses constitute a lens
through which Athens’ political and social problems—particularly the ever-present conflict of
polis vs. oikos—could be viewed and perhaps even changed.
Women in Classical Athens,” JHS 100 [1980]: 43). She was virtually always under the protection of an
authoritative male figure—a father, kyrios (“legal guardian,” usually her father’s closest male relative), or
husband—and was excluded from all political rights and duties: “Women had no right to vote, to speak, or even to
be present in the ekklesia [“assembly”]. Formally speaking, they were not a part of the polis, for women were not
entered in the register of the deme nor were they, in all probability, registered as members of the phratry”
(Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” p. 151). Instead, women had a kind of “latent” citizenship that
“consisted in the capacity to bear children who would be citizens” (Raphael Sealey, Women and Law in Classical
Greece (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 14).
161
Seidensticker, “Women on the Tragic Stage,” pp. 166 and 167, respectively.
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