Philoctetes

Overview

Produced in 409 BCE, when Sophocles was about eighty-seven, and it won first prize. He had perhaps four years to live and wrote Oedipus at Colonus after it.

Sixteen hundred lines, three speaking characters and a chorus of sailors, set on an uninhabited island. There is no crime in the past to be uncovered, no family curse, and nobody dies. Almost everything that happens is a conversation.

The story comes from the epic cycle rather than Homer: on the way to Troy, Philoctetes was bitten by a snake at a shrine, and the wound would not heal and stank so badly, and his cries were so disruptive to the sacrifices, that the Greeks put him ashore on Lemnos while he slept and sailed on. He has been there ten years, alone, living on the birds he shoots with the bow of Heracles, which Heracles gave him for lighting his funeral pyre.

Now Troy is still standing, and a captured prophet has said that it will fall only to Philoctetes and that bow. So the men who abandoned him have to bring him back.

Aeschylus and Euripides both dramatised this, and we have a comparison from Dio Chrysostom: in both earlier versions Odysseus came in disguise and the chorus was made of Lemnian natives. Sophocles made two changes that are the whole play. He made the island uninhabited, so that Philoctetes has been utterly alone. And he invented Neoptolemus.

What happens

The plan. Odysseus and Neoptolemus arrive at the cave. Odysseus explains the job: Philoctetes hates him personally and would shoot him on sight, so the boy must do it. Neoptolemus is to pretend he has quarrelled with the Greeks over his father’s armour, which was awarded to Odysseus, and is sailing home in disgust, and so win the sick man’s confidence and get the bow.

Neoptolemus objects, not on prudential grounds but flatly: he would rather fail honourably than win by cheating, and it is not in his nature. Odysseus does not deny that this is his nature. He asks him to lend himself for one short shameless day and be called virtuous ever after, and adds that the prize is victory. The boy agrees.

The deception. Philoctetes comes out, hearing Greek spoken for the first time in ten years, and the scene is almost unbearable: he is starved for news, asks after men who are dead, and cannot stop talking. Sophocles gives him a long description of his life, the food, the rags, the way he crawls to get water, and the cries that nobody hears.

Neoptolemus performs the false story well. Philoctetes begs to be taken home, invoking his father and his gods, and Neoptolemus agrees. A member of the crew arrives disguised as a merchant, according to the plan, with manufactured news designed to hurry them along.

The wound. As they prepare to leave, the pain returns. This is one of the most extraordinary sequences in Greek drama: Philoctetes cries out, asks Neoptolemus to cut off his foot, gives him the bow to hold, makes him swear not to leave him, and then falls into the deep sleep that follows an attack.

The chorus tells Neoptolemus that they have the bow, the man is asleep, and they should go. He refuses, saying the god said the man must come with it and the bow alone is useless, which is the first crack.

Philoctetes wakes and is overwhelmed with gratitude that the boy did not abandon him while he slept, as everyone else did.

The reversal. Neoptolemus cannot do it. He breaks off in the middle of a sentence, says that everything is loathsome when a man abandons his own nature, and tells the truth: they are taking him to Troy.

Philoctetes’ response is total. He demands the bow back, curses him, and refuses absolutely to go to Troy and help the men who threw him away, even to be cured, even if it means dying on the island. His argument is not that the prophecy is false but that he does not care about it.

Odysseus appears and the argument becomes three-sided. He asserts the state’s need, the army’s interest, and divine will. Philoctetes tries to throw himself off the cliff and is stopped.

Neoptolemus, having heard all of it, gives the bow back. Odysseus threatens to report him to the whole army, and he says let him.

Then the boy tries persuasion instead: he tells Philoctetes honestly that the wound came from the gods, that Asclepius’ sons at Troy will heal it, that he will win the greatest glory, and that clinging to a self-chosen ruin is not endurance. It is the best speech in the play, and Philoctetes refuses.

So Neoptolemus keeps his promise. He agrees to take him home to Malis, which means abandoning the expedition, betraying the army, and losing the war, and they start for the ship.

Heracles. The god appears above. He tells Philoctetes that this is Zeus’ will: go to Troy, be healed by Asclepius’ son, kill Paris, and take the city, and remember reverence toward the gods when you sack it. Philoctetes obeys at once, without argument, and says farewell to the island in a lyric of real tenderness.

How to read it

Read the argument between Odysseus and Neoptolemus in the opening scene as the statement of the problem, and then check every later scene against it. Odysseus is not a caricature: the prophecy is true, Troy must fall, thousands of men are waiting, and the sick man’s consent cannot be had honestly.

Watch where Neoptolemus turns. It is not a single moment of conscience. He hesitates when he first hears the plan, refuses to steal from a sleeping man, breaks during the gratitude, and finally confesses. Sophocles is showing character resisting instruction over time.

Notice that the play makes you smell the wound. The disgust is not incidental; it is why he was abandoned and it is what the audience is asked to overcome.

Take Philoctetes’ refusal seriously. Neoptolemus offers him health, honour and the end of his misery, and he says no. A man can be so wronged that the wrong becomes his identity, and the play knows this is destructive and also knows he has earned it.

Then think hard about Heracles. The deus ex machina reverses in twenty lines an impasse that took sixteen hundred to build. Some read it as a cheat, some as the only thing that could break a genuine deadlock, and some as Sophocles admitting that human argument cannot solve what human betrayal created.

Keep 409 BCE in view. Athens had suffered the Sicilian disaster, endured an oligarchic coup the year before, and was full of men arguing that necessity justified expediency. A play in which a young man refuses to be useful on those terms was not an abstract exercise.

Questions it raises

• Odysseus offers one shameless day for a lifetime of honour. What is wrong with the offer, and can you say why without simply asserting it?
• The prophecy is true and Troy must fall. Does that justify the deception?
• Neoptolemus gives the bow back knowing it loses the war. Is that virtue or self-indulgence?
• Philoctetes refuses a cure to keep his grievance. Is his refusal admirable, understandable, or both?
• The wound disgusts everyone. What is the play saying about how communities treat what repels them?
• Does Heracles solve the problem or dissolve it? What would the play mean if he never appeared?