Yea, For Thou Art Breaking the Slumber of My Plague

Women of Trachis (The Trachiniae) is by no means Sophocles' most famous tragedy today (Antigone and the two Oedipus plays, particularly Oedipus Rex, are much more widely read), but it's my favorite for some reason. And not just because Ezra Pound published a, shall we say "creative" translation of it, and I happen to be a Pound fan. It really is an amazing play, full of great lines like the one I used for the title of the post. But at the end of the post I'll get to something I'd never really thought about the play until now. First, a short summary.

The story is pretty simple. Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans) is always out fighting and conquering people, and his wife Deïanira isn't happy about it. One day, while Heracles is still out doing his fighting thing, one of his servants brings home several women as slaves that Heracles had captured in his last conquest. One of the women, Iole, is strikingly beautiful, and is "conspicuous among" the others. Deïanira soon learns that the whole reason Heracles had conquered the women's land was to obtain Iole. This of course makes Deïanira jealous, and she decides to use a love spell that had been given to her by a centaur who had, as she was going to marry Heracles, captured her. Heracles heard her cry when the centaur grabbed her, and killed the centaur with an arrow. The centaur then said:

If thou gatherest with thy hands the blood clotted round my wound, at the place where the Hydra, Lerna's monstrous growth, hath tinged the arrow with black gall,- this shall be to thee a charm for the soul of Heracles, so that he shall never look upon any woman to love her more than thee.

He tells her exactly what she has to do, and so when she finds out about Iole, she makes a robe from the blood, and then sends it to Heracles with the instructions that the robe shouldn't be in sunlight, and only Heracles can wear it.

Soon after sending the robe, Deïanira starts to feel guilty, and throws the remaining centaur blood away, out into the sun, where it immediately begins to boil. She realizes the centaur tricked her, but it's too late, Heracles put the robe on, and was badly burned. Deïanira kills herself out of guilt, and Heracles' suffering is so great that he ends up having himself burned to death. Not a happy ending, but then again, it is a tragedy.

I told you all of that, to tell you this. The last lines of Women of Trachis seems like an ancient Greek version of the "Problem of Evil." Here are the lines (from R.C. Jebb's prose translation, which you can read here, and from which I took the above quote as well; emphasis is mine):

Lift him, followers! And grant me full forgiveness for this; but mark the great cruelty of the gods in the deeds that are being done. They beget children, they are hailed as fathers, and yet they can look upon such sufferings. No man foresees the future; but the present is fraught with mourning for us, and with shame for the powers above, and verily with anguish beyond compare for him who endures this doom.

Maidens, come ye also, nor linger at the house; ye who have lately seen a dread death, with sorrows manifold and strange: and in all this there is nought but Zeus.

Apparently even the Greeks were in need of theodicy.