Read this if you…
- love Hercules as a character, (who doesn't?)
- loved the oedipus trilogy, and are now going for Sophocles deep cuts
- like ironic tragic climaxes
Skip this if you…
- haven't read oedipus trilogy to decide if you like sophocles
The 
Take
Solid play about wife of Hercules wanting him too bad. Not bad not bad. Poetic that her love was what was killing him
The lineage through Women of Trachis
- The Odyssey by Homer. Women of Trachis built on it. - Sophocles built this tragedy on a shameful episode the *Odyssey* records — Heracles killing Iphitus, the guest he should have protected - That epic crime becomes the play's quiet engine; the *Women of Trachis* leans on Homer's account to set its irony cutting - Read the Odyssean passage first and you feel the trap Sophocles is springing
Depicted in Art
The centaur Nessus gallops across the river bearing Deianira off; her arms thrown back in panicked protest as her drapery billows behind.
Guido Reni, 1621
Mannerist tableau — Hercules grips the wounded centaur by the hair as Deianira stands beside them, the three bodies interlocked against an almost neutral ground.
Bartholomäus Spranger, 1582
Hercules, wracked by the poison, climbs his own funeral pyre on Mount Oeta and lifts his face to the sky as the flames begin.
Guido Reni, 1620
Hercules writhes alone against a black ground, clawing at the flaming shirt of Nessus that has fused to his skin; the centaur dies in the distance.
Francisco de Zurbarán, 1634
Black-figure scene on the neck of a funerary amphora — Herakles plants his foot on the kneeling centaur and grips his hair, sword drawn; names inscribed beside each figure.
-620
Nessus rears in mid-stride with Deianira twisting away from his grasp; Hercules is glimpsed across the river drawing his bow.
Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, 1755
Recommended Editions
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Harvard University Press · 1994
Lloyd-Jones's Loeb Sophocles, facing-page Greek. Deianira's terrible innocence and Heracles' poisoned-shirt death both land with the precision the play needs.
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Notable Quotes
The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.
Screen & Stage
Also adapted: Cruel and Tender (2004, stage)
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- George Frideric Handel, composer, 1685-1759: Handel's musical drama Hercules turns Sophocles' Women of Trachis into one of his darkest secular oratorios, with Dejanira's jealousy and collapse at the center.
- Ezra Pound, Modernist poet, 1885–1972: "the highest peak of Greek sensibility registered in any of the plays that have come down to us."
- T.S. Eliot, poet & critic, Nobel laureate, 1888–1965: "His handling of the verse, especially the chorus of the play, seem to me to be masterly."
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