Have you been reading much lately? Stephen McEwen certainly has. In ‘The Book I Read’, he tells you which classic tomes you should be turning your attention to in lieu of – well, actually, we can’t put the usual X Factor joke in here, because it’s finished for this year. Bloody Matt Cardle. In this installment – Philocetes.
‘Strangers! Who are you? Why has your ship landed here?’
Despite the fact that we know that Sophocles wrote 123 plays in his lifetime, of which only 7 have survived in complete form, it is still easy to forget that he wrote no more than the Theban plays, concerned only with the fate of Oedipus and his family. However, fortunately for us, ‘Philoctetes’ did survive, yet is canonically made to pale in comparison, in terms of reception and appreciation, even though it won first place at the Dionysian festival in 490 BC (Ancient Greece’s answer to the Oscars). Set during the Trojan War, the play tells the story of Philoctetes, who is endowed with a magical bow, bestowed upon him by his immortal friend Heracles (better known as Hercules); while setting off on campaign against Troy, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake, his wound leaves him in constant pain and he curries disfavour amongst his fellow soldiers for his incessant wails of suffering, and, rather grotesquely, the smell which the rotting wound emits. True to typical Classical compassionate form, Ulysses decides to abandon Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos, where he has remained alone until the start of the play. His imposed solitude and island-imprisonment come to an end when the seer Helenus prophesises that Troy will only fall to the Greeks when Philoctetes and his bow come to Troy, and it is the dramatic trajectory of the play which covers Ulysses’ return to the island, with the young and naïve Neoptolemus, to try and recover the bow from a man made barely human through his suffering.
With this basic concept providing a narrative backbone to the text, Sophocles is able to use the characters – and the rather extreme situation in which they find themselves – in order to discuss ideas which are of interest to him. Language is of primary concern in this text, not merely lexis and its formulation into syntax, or even Ancient Greek heptameter, which is lost to us in translation anyway. It is language as a social and moral concept, vehicle and arbiter which is important to each character. Ulysses, wily and unscrupulous as ever, is a master of language, its manipulation and its effects; the dehumanized Philoctetes (in many ways, similar to Shakespeare’s Caliban), devoid of the socializing human effect of language, is reduced to a pile of rags and a bow, essentially reduced to a noun, a thing; finally, Neoptolemus finds himself somewhere in between, a linguistic tabula rasa, there to be either influenced and moulded by Ulysses decisions, or affected by Philoctetes’ raw suffering. Language in the text creates social and personal identity and relations, it is essentially, not only what makes us human, but the very way in which he can communicate that humanity.
Despite the lack of attention granted to the text, its posthumous reception illustrates the power and efficacy of its message and story, centuries after its initial creation. It has been translated by notable writer in the 20th century, such as Heiner Müller, André Gide, and Seamus Heaney, and like Aeschylus’ ‘Persians’, is rather striking to consider in terms of its reception and, perhaps more importantly, of modern conflict and war. The Philoctetes Project in New York holds readings of the play in order to inform young practitioners of the medical profession about pain communication and management, and the text was used in a 2008 conference, focused on finding new ways to help US Marines recover from post-traumatic stress in the Gulf. Even though Philoctetes himself is stripped of the power of language with which Ulysses attempts (again) to manipulate him, his voice and pain still speak to us now.
