Among the difficulties of detail which the subject presented to a dramatist, not the least was that of the supposed ‘love-charm.’ The operation of the hydra's venom, like that of the poison in the wound of Philoctetes, is supernatural. Since, however, an innocent yet deliberate human agent intervenes between Nessus and Heracles, the poet was compelled to treat the incident with circumstance, and to invest it with just enough probability for the purpose of scenic effect. Sophocles has managed this by a simple but skilful device. He merely makes an assumption which no spectator would pause to examine. ‘The hydra's venom was such that
exposure to heat must call it into activity.’ All is then easy. Nessus tells Deianeira that his gift, this infallible love-charm, must be kept in a cool and dark place. She tells us how scrupulously she had observed this rule. She impresses it upon Lichas. The spectator knows that the robe is to be worn for the first time on an occasion of
burnt sacrifice; and his anxiety is awakened.
It is interesting to compare this episode with the parallel
Comparison with the Medea. |
one in the
Medea, where Glaucè, Jason's new bride, is burnt to death by the magic agency of the robe and diadem which Medea, the injured wife, had given her. We see at once that Euripides had a far easier task than Sophocles. No third person, no innocent yet deliberate agent, intervenes between Medea and Glaucè. The gifts come to Glaucè directly from the hands of the mighty enchantress; and they had come to the enchantress from her grandsire, the Sun-god himself.
The garment of Heracles, like that of Glaucè, has naturally
been claimed for the wardrobe of the solar myth. It is the glow which enwraps the dawn or the sunset. Then Iolè is ‘the violet cloud’ who is to marry the rising sun (Hyllus), when his precursor (Heracles) has sunk to rest upon a flaming couch. The servitude to Omphalè is the apparent descent of the sun (Heracles) from the zenith to the horizon. Deianeira is the darkness which awaits him in the west. Thus to explain a story of varied human pathos, is at least to begin at the wrong end: it is to suppose myth-makers so intent on the sunrise and the sunset that men and women interested them primarily as symbols of those phenomena. Even the more limited theory, that Heracles was evolved from some older solar divinity, ill agrees with the central point of the fable,—promotion, painfully won, from earth to heaven. Later Greeks identified their Heracles, in certain aspects, with Melkarth, the sun-god of Tyre: some moderns have derived him from Izdubar, the solar hero of ancient Babylon
1. In both cases the analogy is confined to details: the essence of the Greek myth remains distinct.
