Achelous and the Divine in Sophocles' Trachiniae

Naomi Rood

Colgate University

Discussed in the prologue (lines 9-14) and in the first Stasimon (497-530), the river god Achelous is prominent in Sophocles' Trachiniae but not in the scholarship on the play.  Attention to this neglected figure can reveal much about various characters and concepts in the play which he reflects in different ways: his rival Herakles, Nessus the centaur, and, of course, the divine.  This paper focuses on the last of these – on how Achelous illuminates the play's subtle representation of the nature of divinity.

In the ancient world Achelous was the river god par excellence.  As such, he incarnated not only the particular river, Achelous, in northwestern Greece, but the concept of liquid generally (Gardner, P. 1878. "Greek River Worship," Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature. 11:185).  From his connection to liquid, Achelous was associated with Dionysus, the god of wine (Isler, H. P. 1970. Acheloos. Francke Verlag Bern. 113-20.).  Sophocles invokes this association between Achelous and Dionysus in the forms the river god takes in his courtship of Deianeira: a serpent and a bull (cf. Bacchae 100-2, 618, 920-22, 1017-18, cf. 519-25). 

This paper will argue the following points concerning the Trachiniae's presentation of the divine:

• The predominant imperative that the dynamic and multiform river god imparts is that of change (Gardner 178).  Deianeira begins the play by challenging the ancient proverb that recognizes that the life of man changes over time. Similarly, she goes on to describe her resistance to the shifting river god. 
• Deianeira's rejection of Achelous' courtship constitutes a rejection of divinity, not unlike the circumstance that opens Euripides' Bacchae (cf. Heiden, B. 1989. Tragic Rhetoric. An Interpretation of Sophocles' Trachiniae. NY. 27).  Similarly, the unfolding action of the Trachiniae consists of the working out of the god's vengeance.
• The play's overt – and oblique – mention of Dionysus articulates the role of divinity therein.  When Deianeira recognizes the deadly potency of the pharmakon which she applied to the robe for Herakles, she compares its effect to the residue of a libation to Dionysus: "And from the earth where it [the powder from the disintegrated lock of wool] was strewn, clots of foam seethed up, as when the rich juice of the blue fruit of the vine of Bacchus is poured upon the ground" (701-4; tr. Jebb).  Implicit in Deianeira's comparison is the traditional analogy between liquid and life, its absence and death.  With the pouring away of liquid, what remains is just the reminder of its absence – the foam.  Deianeira, in her rejection of the divine, can be said to have squandered the god's offer of life and its dynamism.  Yet her image suggests further that even when pouring out liquid in service to the god, deathliness can ensue.  The divine in Sophocles' Trachiniae thus offer but do not assure the blessing of vitality.  For the life force itself, as manifest in Achelous, is a shifting, mobile force of instability.  This is the divinity that the play teaches us to recognize and accept.