For since he quelled the might of Iphitus,
We here in Trachis[121] dwell, far from our home,
Dependent on a stranger, but where he
Is gone none knoweth....
These fifteen months he hath sent me not one word.
If it be objected that bondage or temporary exile was not the ‘pollution’ penalty for wilful murder, we may reply that while in Homer, and perhaps also in Sophocles, the slaying of Iphitus is presented as wilful murder, we learn from other sources that Hercules slew Iphitus under the influence of frenzy. According to another version of the story, it was in Lydia, not in Trachis, that Hercules went into bondage. Moreover, Hercules was not an ordinary, real, historical man, and the multitudinous legends which hang around him render him a very unsafe basis of illustration for the operation of any law, human or divine!
The main theme of this play is the death of Hercules, which, by a tragic irony, was caused by poison concealed in a garment which his spouse Deianira had sent him in the belief that the garment would act as a love-charm. Subjectively, the heart of Deianira was pure from guilt, and ultimately, but too late, her innocence was vindicated by a discovery of all the facts. The poison of the fatal garment[122] was traced to the Centaur Nessus, who had assured Deianira that it was a charm for waning love. The dying Hercules sees in the fatal gift the work of destiny, and his son Hyllus proclaims the innocence of Deianira[123]:
She erred with good intent. The whole is said.
The suicide of Deianira prevents us from witnessing the ‘forgiveness’ of the dying Hercules, the ‘release,’ as it were, which the revelation of her innocence would have evoked. Instead we hear him utter,[124] while still he believes her guilty, a ‘curse’ such as in historical Attica would have declared her ‘polluted’ by blood-guilt and would have compelled her, if she did not prove her innocence, to become an exile or to die: