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Updated: June 5, 2025
And Heracles forgot Iole, the childlike maiden whom he had seen in Oichalia. He made himself a suitor for Deianira, and those who protected her were glad of Heracles's suit, and they told him they would give him the maiden to marry as soon as the mourning for Prince Meleagrus and his uncles was over. Heracles stayed in Calydon, happy with Deianira, who had so much beauty, wisdom, and bravery.
She was to gather up some of the blood that flowed from him; his blood, the centaur said, would be a love philter, and if ever her husband's love for her waned it would grow fresh again if she gave to him something from her hands that would have this blood upon it. Deianira, who had heard from Heracles of the wisdom of the centaurs, believed what Nessus told her.
The servant of Deianira who had carried him the fatal shirt, and who wished to solace him in his pain, he seized as she approached him and flung headlong into the sea, where she was changed into a rock that long, so runs the legend, kept its human form. But at length the majesty and the courage of the hero asserted themselves, and, although still in agony, his madness left him.
At the end of his three years' slavery he could come back to Calydon and wed Deianira. And so Heracles and Deianira were parted. He was sold as a slave in Lydia; the one who bought him was a woman, a widow named Omphale. To her house Heracles went, carrying his armor and wearing his lion's skin.
He had married a nymph named Deianira, and was taking her home, when he came to a river where a Centaur named Nessus lived, and gained his bread by carrying travellers over on his back. Hercules paid him the price for carrying Deianira over, while he himself crossed on foot; but as soon as the river was between them, the faithless Centaur began to gallop away with the lady.
How else could we endure to contemplate the failure and destruction of a Lear, a Wallenstein, a Deianira, an Antigone? Here our attempts to extract philosophy out of the Tristan drama must cease.
Heracles and Deianira wed, and they set out for Tiryns, where a king had left a kingdom to Heracles. They came to the River Evenus. Heracles could have crossed the river by himself, but he could not cross it at the part he came to, carrying Deianira. He and she went along the river, seeking a ferry that might take them across.
Thinking this she poured Nessus's blood over the robe. Heracles was in Oichalia when the messengers returned to him. He took the robe that Deianira sent, and he went to a mountain that overlooked the sea that he might make the sacrifice there. Iole went with him. Then he put on the robe that Deianira had sent. When it touched his flesh the robe burst into flame.
She took a phial and let the blood pour into it. Then Nessus plunged into the river and died there as Heracles came up to where Deianira stood. She did not speak to him about the centaur's words to her, nor did she tell him that she had hidden away the phial that had Nessus's blood in it.
What words does Sophocles here put in his mouth, in his Trachiniæ? who, when Deianira had put upon him a tunic dyed in the centaur's blood, and it stuck to his entrails, says,
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