Sophocles

“ You will see a cave with two mouths.
That is his house.
That is his rocky sleeping-place.
CHORUS Where is he now, the unlucky man?
NEOPTOLEMOS It is clear to me that he claws his way to find food nearby. He struggles now to bring down birds with his arrows, to fuel this wretched way of life. He knows no balm to heal his wounds.
CHORUS I pity him for all his woes, for his distress, for his loneliness, with no countryman at his side; he is accursed, always alone, brought down by bitter illness; he wanders, distraught, thrown off balance by simple needs. ”

“ The gods must surely hate me for not even a rumor to have come to Greece of how I live here. The wicked men who abandoned me keep their secret, then, and laugh, while the disease that dwells within me grows, and grows stronger. My son, child of great Achilles, you may yet have heard of me somehow: I am Philoktetes, Poias's son, the master of Herakles's weapons. Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Odysseus marooned me here, with no one to help me, as I wasted away with a savage disease, struck down by a viper's hideous bite. ”

“ Ancestral land and you gods who look on mortal crimes, take vengeance on these men when the time is right, take vengeance on them all, if you pity me. If I could see them die, then I could also dream that the sickness within me has fled my body.
CHORUS He is bitter, this stranger; his words are, too, for they do not bend to suffering.
ODYSSEUS There is no time to say the things I should, and there are many things I could say to him. Just this: I am a man who responds to occasion and adapts himself to the situation. In times of crisis among good and just men, I can be the noblest-minded of all. ”

“ CHORUS The gods' will brought you down, not guile,
not tricks in which I have had a hand.
Let loose your hatred, set aside your curses.
I have only the fear that you'll refuse my friendship.
PHILOKTETES He sits laughing on the shores of the wine-dark sea. He holds in his hands the bow that sustained me, which no mortal but I had ever touched. Beloved bow, made by caring hands, the prize of Herakles, who'll never use you again, if you could see, you would pity me. You have a new master, a guileful man. He will bend you now. ”

“ You will win the prize of glory from the armies and spoils of war that you will take home to Poias your father, and Oeta your country. Take some of those spoils and make an offering on a pyre in commemoration of my bow.
Son of Achilles, hear me too. You alone are not strong enough to conquer Troy, not without this man, nor he without you. You must act like two lions in a pride, guarding each other as you hunt. I will send Asklepios to Troy to heal his disease. Troy will fall twice before my bow. Remember this, though: when you go to sack Troy, stay holy. Zeus puts everything else below that. ”

“ Savage Chryse set these sufferings on him, the share of sufferings he must now endure. His torments are not random. The gods, surely, must heap them on him, so that he cannot bend the invincible bow until the right time comes, decreed by Zeus, and as it is promised, Troy is made to fall.
CHORUS Be quiet, boy.
NEOPTOLEMOS What is it?
CHORUS A clear groan—- the steadfast companion of one walking in pain. Where is it? Now comes a noise: a man writhes along his path, from afar comes the sigh of a burdened man—- the cry has carried. ”

“ ODYSSEUS And what else? Is there nothing more inside the cave?
NEOPTOLEMOS A wooden mug, carelessly made, and a few sticks of kindling.
ODYSSEUS So this is the man's empty treasure-vault.
NEOPTOLEMOS Look here. Rags lie drying in the sun, full of pieces of skin and pus from his sores.
ODYSSEUS Then clearly he still lives here. He can't be far off. Weakened as he is by long years of disease, he can't stray far from home. He is probably out scratching up a meal or an herb he knows will relieve his pain. ”

“ My eyes, can you bear to see me living alongside those who tried to kill me, the Atreids and that bastard Odysseus? I worry not about the evils they have done, but the evils they will do as these things unfold. Once men have learned to hatch evil crimes, they cannot help but be criminals again.
I wonder, and I keep on wondering. You should not be going off to Troy, and you should keep me from going there. Those men have wronged you, robbed you of your father's weapons. Will you still help them, and make me do the same? No. Take me home as you have promised, and then stay in Skyros. ”

“ He is inside his cave. He is not walking abroad to his panpipe's doleful song, like a shepherd wandering with his flocks. Rather he has bumped his wounded leg and shouts as if to someone far away, as if to someone he has seen at the harbor. The cry he makes is terrible. ”

“ Look how dangerously we mortals live, experiencing good, experiencing evil. If you are out of harm's way, expect horrible things, and when you live well, take extra care lest you be caught napping and be destroyed.
CHORUS Take pity on him, lord. He has told us of many horrible torments. May such troubles fall on none of my friends. If, lord, you hate the terrible Atreids, put their treatment of him to your advantage. I would carry him, as he has asked, away with you on your swift-running ship, fleeing the gods' cruel punishment. ”

“ May the gods help you all.
PHILOKTETES Isn't it shameful, boy, that Odysseus thinks his words are wondrous enough to persuade me to let him cart me back to Troy, and parade me too before the whole Greek army? I would sooner trust my enemy, the viper that bit me and crippled me at Chryse. Let him try what he will, now that I know he's coming. Let us go now, boy, and hope that a great seaswell will rise and crest and keep our ship from Odysseus's. To be quick at the right occasion, you know, makes for untroubled sleep when work is done. ”

“ Instead he will take me to Troy. He gave me his hand and then robbed me of my holy bow, Herakles's bow, the son of Zeus's, to hold it up to the Greeks and boast that he had taken it from a strong opponent, that he had taken it from his prisoner. He is killing someone who is already dead, a corpse, a smoky shadow, a ghost. ”

“ PHILOKTETES You there, you strangers: who are you who have landed from the sea on an island without houses or fair harbor? From what country should I think you, and guess it correctly? You look Greek to me. You wear Greek clothes, and I love to see them. I want to hear you speak my tongue. Do not shun me, amazed to face a man who has become so wild. ”

“ No evil man has died. The gods, it seems, must care for them well. It pleases them to keep villains and traitors out of death's hands; but they always send good men out of the living world. How can I make sense of what goes on, when, praising the gods, I discover that they're evil?
NEOPTOLEMOS For my part, Philoktetes, I will be more cautious. I'll keep watch on the Atreids and on Troy from afar. I will have no part of their company, where the worse is stronger than the better, where noble men die while cowards rule. I shall not acquiesce to the will of such men. ”

“ When I came to Troy, they heaped dishonor on me, after Achilles had met his death in battle....
PHILOKTETES Tell me no more until I am sure I've heard rightly: is Achilles, son of Peleus, dead?
NEOPTOLEMOS Yes, dead, shot down by no living man, but by a god, so I've been told. He was laid low by Lord Apollo's arrows.
PHILOKTETES The two were noble, the killer and the killed. I am not sure what to do now—- to hear out your story or mourn your father.
NEOPTOLEMOS It seems to me that your woes are enough without taking on the woes of others. ”

“ Odysseus follows the orders of many, and he has done this in obedience to his friends.
PHILOKTETES O birds, o beasts that feed upon the hills, you no longer need run away from my cave. I no longer have my killing weapons. Come down. The time is right for you to feed on my ravaged, quivering body; I will soon die. How can I keep myself alive? Who can live on breezes and not earthly food?
CHORUS By the gods, if you still hold the gods in respect, come to a stranger who approaches with good heart. Think closely of what you are doing. It is up to you to flee your destruction. ”

“ You must be like your father, and not in strength alone.
If any of this sounds strange to you,
no matter. You must still serve those who are over you.
NEOPTOLEMOS What must I do?
ODYSSEUS Entangle Philoktetes with clever words. In order to trick him, say, when he asks you, "I am Achilles's son"—there's no lie in that— say you're on your way back home, that you have abandoned the Greeks and all their ships, you hate them so. Speaking to him piously, as though to the gods of Olympos, tell him they convinced you to leave your home, by swearing that you alone could storm Troy. ”

“ I have cursed you many times before, but the gods have granted me nothing I want, and so you live happily, while I live in this pain, and you and the Atreids mock my anguish, those two generals, for whom you perform this deed. You were yoked to the cause by deceit and force, while I willingly went with my seven ships, willingly to dishonor and my own destruction, to being cast away on this lonely shore. You say they did it, and they blame you.
Why must you take me? I am nothing. For you, I've been dead for years. ”

“ There is no anchorage here, nor any place to land, profit in trade, and be received. Intelligent people know not to come here, but sometimes they do, against their will. In the long time I have been here, it was bound to happen. When those people put in, they pitied me—- or pretended to, at least—-and gave me new clothes and a bit of food. But when I asked for a homeward passage, they would never take me with them.
It is my tenth year of hunger and the ravaging illness
that I feed with my flesh.
The Atreids and Odysseus did this to me.
May the Olympian gods give them pain in return. ”

“ He has found the son of a great man, who will himself be great, when this is over. Our lord will carry him over the seas, after these ten years, to his father's home in the land of the nymphs of Malia, by the banks of sweet-running Spercheios, where Herakles the archer ascended to Olympos, bronze-armored, engulfed in holy fire, there above the hills of Oeta. ”

“ But I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes, who killed no one, nor robbed, but lived justly, a fair man to all who treated him fairly, and who fell into evils he did not deserve. ”

“ Edmund Wilson, in his famous essay "The Wound and the Bow," sought to read the Philoktetes as Sophokles's universal statement on the role of the artist in society: wounded, outcast, lacking some inner quality that might permit him or her to engage in the mundane events of life. Whatever the considerable merits of Wilson's analysis, argued with great sophistication and learning, in the end to read the bowman as a suffering artist seems more an act of anachronistic self-projection than the drama will admit. ”

“ There was a seer from a noble family, one of Priam's sons, in fact, called Helenos. He was captured one night on a reconnaissance by Odysseus himself, who bears all our curses as a badge of dishonor. Odysseus tricked him, and paraded him before the whole Greek army. Helenos then poured out a flood of prophesy, especially about Troy, and how the Greeks would never take it until they were able to persuade Philoktetes to come to their aid, after he had been rescued from this place. The minute Odysseus heard him say this, he promised to fetch this man, either by persuasion or by force. ”

“ The second motivation may have been Sophokles's scorn for the rising generation of Athenian aristocrats, trained by a herd of eager, expensive philosophers—those whom Sokrates reviled in his Apology—in the arts of sophistry and corruption. These young men, the scions of reputedly noble families, quickly proved themselves to be willing to bring their city to ruin rather than surrender any of the privileges of their class ”

“ But the son of Tydeus, and Odysseus, whom Sisyphos, I have heard, sold to Laertes, they who merited death are still alive.
NEOPTOLEMOS You are right, of course. They are flourishing.
They live in high glory among the Greeks. ”

“ Kenneth Rexroth has written that in Sophokles's work "men suffer unjustly and learn little from suffering except to answer unanswerable questions with a kind of ultimate courtesy, an Occidental Confucianism that never pretends to solution. ”