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    Philoktetes
    Philoktetes
    Philoktetes
    Ebook117 pages58 minutes

    Philoktetes

    By Gregory McNamee and Sophocles

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateApr 2, 1970
    Philoktetes
    Author

    Gregory McNamee

    Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of more than forty books, among them Gila: The Life and Death of an American River, Updated and Expanded Edition (UNM Press). He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

    Read more from Gregory Mc Namee

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      A new translation of the old play, this is rendered in modern English, including modern slang. While keeping the basic storyline intact, it loses most of its original poetry. The goal here was plainly to make it more accessible to modern readers who don't want to work too hard at their literature. The ease of reading does not make up for the loss of the ancient sound. The story is another stage in the Trojan war, of a Greek hero left by his shipmates to die of his wounds on a deserted island; now the Greeks want his weapons, which were left with him, and they determine to get them back by deceit or force. A concise telling, not a lot of wasted time, and an interesting legend.
    • 4/5
      Almost one of the all-time great dramatizations of the wounded heart and psyche. Philoctetes is rejected by his fellows for the stinking wound that he incurs committing an act of kindness that no one else will (lighting Heracles’s funeral pyre); he is exiled to an island, Homo sacer, anti-sirene, to writhe alone and scream and hear his screams echo from the cliffs, mocking his solitude, his lost humanity. But then they need him! And he can speak to people again! And then he’s a person again! And he weeps when Neoptolemus finds him and just sits with him for a while. But it's all a trick—sleazy Odysseus wants his mighty bow for the war effort; and while that hurts, it also puts him in the position fantasized about by everyone who ever felt alone and unloved: the one who can tell them to fuck off and have them beg him to come back and say a hundred times how sorry they are. But just like in real life, they don’t give any more of a shit than they ever did; rather than beg, they trick him again, hurt him once more, compound his trauma. It’s an unresolvable knot, and the play shows that so well—which is why it’s such a shame when Heracles deus ex machinates in to tell Mr Moral High Ground to fucking get in the boat and go kill Paris already. Cheap, I mean by “a shame.” Probably there’s some Greek drama rule why that ending is better and not worse that Aristotle could explain to us, but Aristotle’s not here right now and so this play gets a perhaps unnecessarily punitive four stars.
    • 2/5
      This short play did not really do it for me. The themes expressed, as well as the plot and character development, were not to my liking and seemed to be sorely lacking. These reasons are why I give it it's low ranking.

      2 stars.
    • 4/5
      Philoctetes is the story of the moaning hero that Odysseus left on an island but has returned to with Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) to retrieve the bow. In convincing Neoptolemus to take part in his ploy: "I well know, my son, that by nature thou are not apt to utter or contrive such guile; yet, seeing that victory is a sweet prize to gain, bend they will thereto; our honesty shall be shown forth another time. Son of brave sire, time was when I too, in my youth, had a slow tongue and a ready hand: but now, when I come forth to the proof, I see that words, not deeds, are ever the masters among men."

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    Philoktetes - Gregory McNamee

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Philoktetes, by Sophocles

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    ** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below ** ** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. **

    Title: Philoktetes

    Author: Sophocles

    Translator: Gregory McNamee

    Posting Date: April 14, 2013 [EBook #806] Release Date: First Posted: Last Updated:

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHILOKTETES ***

    SOPHOKLES

    PHILOKTETES

    Translated by Gregory McNamee

    Originally published by Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend,

    Washington) in 1986.

    Copyright (c) 1986, 1997 by Gregory McNamee

    All Rights Reserved

    This translation is made in loving memory of Scott Douglas

    Padraic McNamee (1963-1984)

    Todavia

    Estoy vivo

    En el centro

    de una herida todavia fresca.

    —-Octavio Paz

    INTRODUCTION

    When Sophokles produced the Philoktetes in 408 B.C., three years before his death at the age of ninety, the ancient story of the tragic archer, abundantly represented in Greek literature, achieved a dramatic and psychological sophistication of a kind never before seen on the classical stage: the theater of violent action and suddenly reversed fortunes (the Oresteia, Ajax, Hippolytos) gave way, for a brilliant moment, to a strangely quiet, contemplative drama that centered not on deeds but ideas, not on actions but words.

     Foremost among Sophokles's concerns in the play, one that demanded such thoughtful consideration, is the question of human character and its origins. Indeed, the Philoktetes might well be regarded as the first literary expression of what has been termed the nature-nurture controversy, a debate that continues to rage in the closing days of the twentieth century. In his drama, Sophokles places himself squarely among those who hold that one's character is determined not by environment or custom but by inborn nature (physis), and that one's greatest dishonor is to act, for whatever end, in ways not consonant with that essence.

     The tale itself, reached in medias res, is uncomplicated: Philoktetes, to whom the demigod Herakles bequeathed his magical bow, is recruited by the Achaean generals to serve in the war against Troy. On the way to the battle, Philoktetes, in the company of Odysseus and his crew, puts in at a tiny island to pray at a local temple to Apollo, the god of war. Wandering from the narrow path to the temple, Philoktetes is bitten by a sacred serpent, the warden of the holy precinct. The wound, divinely inflicted as it is and not admitting of mortal healing techniques, festers; and Philoktetes fills his companions' days with an unbearably evil stench and awful cries. His screams of agony prevent the Greeks from offering proper sacrifices to the gods (the ritual utterance eu phemeton, from which our word euphemism derives, means not speak well, as it is sometimes translated, but keep silent, in fitting attitude of respect). Finally, in desperation, Odysseus—never known as a patient man—puts in at the desert island of Lemnos and there casts Philoktetes away.

     Ten years of savage warfare pass, whereupon a captured Trojan oracle, Helenos, reveals to the Greeks that they will not be able to overcome Troy without Philoktetes (his name means lover of possessions) and his magical bow. Ordered to fetch the castaway and escort him to the Greek battlefield, Odysseus, in keeping with his trickster nature, commands his lieutenant, Neoptolemos, the teenaged son of the newly slain Achilles, to win Philoktetes over to the Greek cause by treachery, promising the bowman a homeward voyage, when in truth he is to be bound once again into the service of those who marooned him. Neoptolemos is surprised at this turn of events, for until then he had been promised that he alone could finish his father's work and conquer Troy. Nonetheless, he accepts the orders of Odysseus and the Atreids, Agamemnon and Menelaos.

     Here lies the crux of the tale, for Neoptolemos learns through the course of the Philoktetes that he is simply unable, by virtue of his noble birth, to obey the roguish Odysseus's commands: his ancestry and the nature it has given him do not permit him to act deceitfully, no matter what profit might tempt him. Odysseus, on the other hand, cannot help but behave treacherously, for in Sophokles's account it is in his base, slavelike nature to do so. The resolution of Neoptolemos's conflict—and for all his ambivalence, the young man is the real hero of the story—forms the dramatic heart of the play.

     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

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