44. Original
The
more you read, don't you just wonder if there is
anything left to say? Do you ever think to yourself:
'Every idea I have seems to have been done before.'
Do you find yourself thinking that only the boring ideas are left –
and that's because they are boring and you're wasting
your time?
Here's a gruesome idea. Your hero is defeated by poison. The poison is the sperm of one of his enemies – previously defeated, of course – come back to haunt him in a particularly disgusting way.
That's a pretty impressive narrative idea in itself. Sophocles inherited it from Homer (or perhaps from older legends in a more elusive oral tradition). But in The Women of Trachis, Sophocles ratchets it up further.
Heracles (known to the Latin world as Hercules) crosses a river with the aid of a centaur, Nessus. The centaur goes back for Heracles' wife Deianeira and attempts to rape her. Heracles kills the centaur with an arrow from his bow, poisoned with the gall of the many-headed Hydra. The dying centaur tells Deianeira to collect blood from the wound as it will serve her in the future as a love potion with which to control Heracles' affections.
Some time later, at home is Trachis, Deianeira learns that Heracles is courting another woman. She sends a messenger to him with a tunic, made by her own hand, smeared with the corrosive blood of the centaur.
Heracles puts on the tunic – which instantly begins to eat his flesh. He dies in prolonged agony.
Now, there were about 500 years from Homer to Sophocles. And Homer's reputation must have been somewhere in orbit, much higher even than Shakespeare's exalted position in our contemporary literary firmament. But Sophocles didn't let it worry him.
Someone's done it before? Don't let it worry you.
Twist it tighter.
