Shirt of Nessus

When Heracles puts it on, the Hydra's venom begins to cook him alive, and to escape this unbearable pain he builds a funeral pyre and throws himself on it.

Her plan was to pretend to defect and entice the Bishop with information about the city's defenses while giving him a handsome shirt soaked in poison.

Written for the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins, which Barth himself later ran, The Shirt of Nessus is in the form of a short novel or novella.

But the 'SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES' of the poet's Herakles in The Women of Trachis is a key or recognition of a double meaning that turns in the lock of the Nessus shirt."

In Hyam Plutzik's poem "Portrait", which appears in his collection Apples From Shinar, the poet writes of a Jewish-American character in the late 1950s who has successfully assimilated, and is able to "ignore the monster, the mountain—/A few thousand years of history."