Sophocles' The Women of Trachis11, however, is exclusively concerned with the tragic drama that occurs in the mortal realm, devoid of any cosmic support. The work, like Heracles, can be divided into two parts. Unlike Heracles, however, Heracles' world is divided not so much into microcosmic and macrocosmic, but into masculine and feminine. This division is causal and serves to highlight the tension between the domestic world that values ​​emotion, empathy and feeling and the heroic world that defends duty, honor and glory. Despite the obvious causality, however, the work is marked by the apparently implausible deaths of Heracles and Deianeira, highlighting the illogical aspect of the set of male and female relationships even outside the outbreak of the inexplicable cosmic event. In both works, the Herculean body is the site of a feminine tension in which the female struggle to be cast aside is foregrounded. In Sophocles' play, Heracles acts like Lycus, ravaging a foreign land to marry the king's daughter. Heracles' inability to be reintegrated into society due to his insatiable appetite for women causes endless problems for Deianeira, as she is left at home desolate with desire... like the sad nightingale” (107-8) in a “strange family” (41) for “fifteen months… without news” (46). While the Euripidean hero “is honorable and, as the play unfolds, increasingly an identifiable man”, “Sophocles' suffering hero is repellent as well as distant” (12 Silk)12. While Heracles dramatizes the hero's pathos, then, Women of Trachis sees how the selfish character of the Herculean hero can inflict suffering on the female realm by providing the audience with a point of sympathy from the female perspective. Like Her...... middle of paper....... While Women of Trachis addresses the position of the feminine in a male-dominated warrior society on a microcosmic level, Heracles also highlights the feminine perspective, only on a macrocosmic level . Both works, therefore, foreground the pathos of the individual in the grip of forces beyond his control as conflicting realms meet and explode. Heracles' body, being a liminal space where the definitions of the cosmic and the divine are blurred, is where the individual's broader struggle takes place. Unlike Heracles, however, The Women of Trachis proposes the idea that humanism cannot save the day unless the very definitions of what it means to be heroic are changed to take into account the young, the defenseless and of women. In order for the king to be a true king, he must leave behind his heroic and divine self and “choose (Amphitryon) (as his) father” (1265).