The Absence of Middle Way and Tragic Love in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis

Abstract

Sophocles creates a model for human suffering caused by tragic love in Women of Trachis. He places emphasis on the wisdom of the golden mean (中庸之道) in the play. Yeats called the wisdom reconciliation; Zisi, Confucius’s grandson, called it the middle way. Heracles, the protagonist of this play, lived a heroic life completing ‘The Twelve Labors.’ However, he finally met tragic death because of Deianeira’s jealousy. The tragedy is the result not of her mistake but of his unharmonious life. The lovers did not live in harmony with each other: they divided themselves into a subject and an object. When two energies collide with each other, it amounts to a tragic life. This example highlights wisdom of the middle way, the harmony between man and Nature, man and the Universe, spirit and body, subject and object. Neither Deianera nor Heracles lives rightly following the middle way, because of their jealousy and anger. Both suffer from their imbalance and must purify themselves in death.