Sophocles: 'Philoctetes'

 Philoctetes, who owned the wondrous bow of Heracles, was headed for Troy with the Greek army when he stumbled into the unmarked shrine of a god and was bitten by a snake. The wound wouldn’t heal. The odor and the cries of pain made him an outcast.

He had done nothing consciously wrong. But his shipmates wanted nothing to do with him and left alone him on the island of Lemnos. It’s convenient, when you are trying to get away from people who need help, to believe that they’ve offended the gods and brought wrath down on themselves.

Odysseus was the trickster who engineered the abandonment Philoctetes. Almost 10 years later, Odysseus was sent to get him back when a prophecy came down that Troy would not fall without the magical bow. The prophecy said the gods would arrange for the healing of the wounded bowman.

Since Philoctetes naturally wanted to put an arrow in Odysseus, Odysseus recruited young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to help. The lad was ordered to trick Philoctetes onboard a ship.

The story is how Neoptolemus, in trying to obey orders, came to see the cruelty inflicted on the outcast. He saw that Philoctetes was so wounded he was unwilling to resume normal life — the life of a social animal among other human beings.

David Grene, the translator, said this in his introduction:

It is perhaps the most modern in feeling of all Sophocles’ tragedies, and Sophocles is the most modern, the nearest to us, of the three Greek tragedians.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says this is New Tragedy — something closer to the realism of modern drama.

The action of the drama is invested with a new reality; it is being made for its own sake: there is no tragic background of Unwritten Law or the frailty of man to colour the scene. The Philoctetes is not precipitated out of some universal tragic concept. Sophocles is now interested, not possessed; his creations are not symbols … but figures whose importance is strictly limited to the play in which they appear.

The poetry is wonderful. Here’s Neoptolemus arguing that Philoctetes must give up his anger and return to society:

The fortunes that the Gods give us men

we must be under necessity.

But men that cling willfully to their sufferings

As you do, no one may forgive or pity.

Your anger has made a savage of you.

And here’s Philoctetes, explaining why he will never go back:

It is not the sting of wrongs past

but in what I must look for in the wringers to come.

Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once

have learned from it to be evil in all things.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Philoctetes is on pp. 315-26. The quotation is on p. 318.

Philoctetes, translated by David Grene, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 189-254. The quotations are on pp. 190, 248 and 249.