Deianira's Guilt

Everyone already knows the story and understands from the beginning what she will do and that she thereby wreaks the greatest rain utterly without blame.

Tycho von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles, 148

The protagonist of Trachiniae is virtually fixed in modern interpretation as the long-suffering housewife who meant no harm. In this regard Tycho's assumption is shared by most scholars: Sophocles' Deianira is guiltless from the outset; for she slays Heracles unwittingly, by the wiles of Nessus and not by her own intent. Tycho himself assumed that Deianira the innocent was well known to an ancient audience long before Sophocles elevated her from bystander to protagonist.¹ More recently, scholars have argued that Sophocles invented Deianira's innocence: she was known from saga as a vindictive murderess, and the character in Trachiniae reversed the expectations of the audience. By either theory Sophocles' Deianira is an innocent victim of schemes that others devised—this at least is a given, that "everyone knows." Whatever Sophocles has done to shape the story, his protagonist remains a blameless instrument of the god's impenetrable design.²

This essay challenges the cardinal assumption that Sophocles' Deianira is guiltless in the eyes of the ancient audience. For the modern reading proceeds invariably from the notion that she is blameless because she acts without malice: evil intention is the measure of culpability, and Deianira did not intend to kill. But the Athenians approached such cases with a different moral calculus: the criterion of murder is knowledge of the lethal effect, not the specific intent to kill. Deianira emerges in Trachiniae as a figure endowed with innocent intentions but burdened with guilty knowledge. And by complicating her predicament in this way, Sophocles gives her story a profoundly different shape.

In the first section we extricate Sophocles' innovation from the interwoven traditions. Since the 1940s, some scholars have argued that Deianira the innocent suddenly appears in Trachiniae without any precedent in the art and literary remains before Sophocles. By this theory, Bacchylides' dithyramb portraying Deianira as an innocent victim of ineluctable divinity (c. 16) is drawn from the dramatic model of Trachiniae itself. But as we shall see, Bacchylides' tale is not without context in earlier representations, and Sophocles seems to have departed from this earlier tale of innocence to implicate our protagonist by her own machinations. For Bacchylides' character received the fatal cloak ready-made and then acted in ignorance of its deadly effect. But Sophocles' character must use a cloak of her own making and she knows the nature of its power.

As we see in section 2, the first half of the play emphasizes this complication—that she acts without intending to kill, but not without awareness that her magic will endanger her husband. Here we consider the evidence on how such therapies were supposed to work, and how guilt was assessed for the inevitable casualties. The record of erotic magic confirms that the wife's charm upon her husband typically worked by toxic effect. And we have consistent evidence in Antiphon and Aristotle that the criterion of guilt in law and popular reasoning was precisely the question of knowledge, not whether the accused intended but whether she recognized the threat to life and limb.

This is not to say that Sophocles' Deianira is denied redemption for her innocent intentions. Hyllus forgives her on that account. But, as we see in section 3, that forgiveness provokes the conflict that dominates the latter part of the play. The son acquits his mother by the standard of acceptance that governs close kin in the oikos, but the father condemns her by the stricter standard that governs disputes among the menfolk in agora and assembly. In obedience to that "noblest law" that the son must follow the father, the boy coming of age must come to terms with this adversarial standard. The ephebe's dilemma that concludes the play is thus created by the new characterization that Sophocles has given Deianira with the cloak of her own devising, innocent in her intentions but guilty by reason of her knowledge.

§1.

Deianira is a...