The Women of Trachis — or more properly, the Girls of Trachis — looks backward to a work of Aeschylus, and forward to one of Euripides. All three, the Oresteia, the Trachiniae, the Medea, are tragedies about the sexes.

The Trachiniae reminds us of the Oresteia in the following points: Heracles, like Agamemnon, has been away for a long time, on ‘men's business’. He brings home a concubine, Iole, as Agamemnon brings Cassandra. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, comments on the silence of the captive girl. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, causes the death of her husband. Deianeira has a son Hyllus who, like Orestes, is loyal to his father and outraged by his father's murder. There the similarity ends. Although Heracles is not totally unlike Agamemnon, Deianeira could hardly be more different from Clytemnestra: she is feminine and passive, gentle with Iole, whose silence she understands, and she kills her husband accidentally, from love, not hatred. Hyllus, too, is different from Orestes: even when he thinks Deianeira has wilfully murdered his father, the worst treatment he can conceive for her is banishment with his curse. In the Oresteia, gods are ever-present, and appear in person on the stage to effect the happy conclusion of the trilogy.

Ovid tells us everything in the first poem. Love poetry requires a lover. Experience and involvement are essential ingredients of this poetry. The subjective nature of elegy is critical.

Cupid poises his bow: the picture is breath-catchingly drawn. After the crisp unfolding of the earlier part of the poem, these lines hang in suspense. We feel the suspended moments as the bow bends and the string tightens, as the arm steadies, takes aim and lets fly:

questus eram, pharetra cum protinus ille soluta
legit in exitium spicula facta meum
lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum
‘quodque canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus.’

There is also the careful selection of the correct arrow and Cupid's statement, its effortful staccato imitating his physical tensing and swift release.

Like the previous speakers of Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes Eros in terms of his own profession, even endowing it with his personal image. His hiccups are programmatic, creating laughter; they are strategic too, enabling him to speak after Doctor Eryximachus, whose pretensions to scientific mastery of the various ‘erotic sciences’ he is bound to undercut. Indeed, just before he speaks, he states his purpose. It is to ‘make laughter’. He is not afraid of saying something comical, ‘for that would be clear gain, the native business of our Muse’, but of saying something ridiculous, of being laughed at, not with. The preliminary skirmish, so like a comic proagon, shows confidence and skill; a major competitor, and a dangerous one, has entered on the scene.

Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda,

sive in Hyrcanos Arabasve molles,
seu Sagas sagittiferosve Parthos,
sive quae septemgeminus colorat aequora Nilus,

sive trans altas gradietur Alpes,
Caesaris visens monimenta magni,
Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor ultimosque Britannos,

omnia haec, quaecumque feret voluntas
caelitum, temptare simul parati,
pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta.

cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens;

nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.

(Furius and Aurelius, companions of Catullus, whether he will make his way into the farthest Indi, where the shore is beaten by the far-resounding eastern wave, or into the Hyrcani or the soft Arabians, whether to the Sagae or arrow-bearing Parthians, whether into the waters which sevenfold Nile dyes, whether he will cross over the lofty Alps, viewing the memorials of mighty Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, bristling water and remotest Britons — all these things, prepared to test together whatever the will of the gods shall bring: announce a few words to my girl, words not pleasant. Let her live and flourish with her adulterers, whom three hundred at once she holds in her embrace, loving no one of them truly, but again and again breaking the strength of all. And let her not look for my love, as before, which by her fault has fallen like a flower of the remotest meadow after it has been touched by a passing plough.)