by Sophocles
god of the star-filled sky.
Be sure of this one thing—though I’m nothing,
though I can’t walk a step—she, she who did this
will feel my stony hand, even now, even now.
Let her come here. She’ll show the world
that in my death, as in my life, I punish evil.
LEADER
What a disaster. There’s nothing
but mourning ahead for Greece 1260
if she must lose this man.
HYLLOS
Father, let me speak while you’re quiet.
I know your pain’s unbearable, but listen.
I ask for no more than you owe me.
Take my advice. Be calm. Cool your anger.
If you rage, you will never learn why
your hunger for vengeance is wrong.
Why your hatred has no cause.
HERAKLES
Say your piece, then be still. I’m in too
much pain to make sense of your riddles. 1270
HYLLOS
I want to tell you how my Mother is.
And that she never willed the wrong she did.
HERAKLES
You worthless son! You’re brave to use
her name in my presence, the mother
who murdered—me—your father.
HYLLOS
There’s something else about her you must know.
HERAKLES
Tell me her past crimes. Speak of them.
HYLLOS
Her acts today will speak to you.
When you’ve heard them, judge her.
HERAKLES
Go on.
But don’t disgrace yourself or betray me. 1280
HYLLOS
She is dead. Killed just now.
HERAKLES
Who killed her? Incredible! You couldn’t
have given me more hateful news.
HYLLOS
She killed herself. With her own hand. No one else’s.
HERAKLES
(raising his right arm)
It should have been this hand. She deserved this hand!
HYLLOS
You wouldn’t hate her—if you knew.
HERAKLES
Wouldn’t hate her? If I knew what?
HYLLOS
Her good intentions hurt you—that’s the truth.
HERAKLES
Her “good intention” to kill me?
HYLLOS
When she saw the woman who’s in our house, 1290
she used love medicine to keep you. It went wrong.
HERAKLES
And who in Trakhis has a drug so potent?
HYLLOS
Years back, the centaur Nessus
gave it to her—told her this drug
would make your passion burn again.
HERAKLES
O what a miserable creature I am!
I’m finished. Finished! For me
there will be no more sunlight.
This is my ruin. I know where I am.
Your father’s life is over, Son. 1300
Gather all of my children here.
Bring unlucky Alkmene too—her coupling
with Zeus, my father, came to nothing—
so all of you can learn, from my
dying mouth, what oracles I possess.
HYLLOS
Your mother is not here. She’s at Tiryns
on the seacoast, where she’s been living.
She’s taken some of your children, to raise
them there. Your other children are in Thebes.
Those of us left—we’ll do what you ask. 1310
Tell me your wishes. I’ll carry them out.
HERAKLES
Listen to my orders. Here is your chance
to show what you’re made of.
To prove you’re my son.
I learned long ago from my father
I would be killed by no creature who breathes—
but only by a dead beast from Hades. So
that centaur killed me—the dead kill the living—
just as the voice of Zeus had sworn to me.
Now hear how one old prophecy 1320
makes sense of an even older one,
the one I brought home from the grove
of the Selloi—mountain people who still
sleep on the ground—a prophecy
made by an oak tree of my father’s,
an oak which spoke every language.
This oak whispered to me
that at the very hour
through which we now live,
I would be set free at last 1330
from my life of hard labor.
I thought that meant
good times would come,
but those words meant
no more than this:
that I would die now.
The dead do no work.
Son, since those old words are coming true,
you must help me. Don’t obstruct me, don’t
force me to use harsh words. Help me willingly— 1340
because you’ve learned the best law there is:
fathers must always be obeyed.
HYLLOS
Father, I am alarmed at where your talk
is taking us, but I’ll do all you ask.
HERAKLES
First, put your right hand in mine.
HYLLOS
Why are you forcing me to pledge this way?
HERAKLES
Give me your hand—now! Don’t refuse me.
HYLLOS
(reaching out to his father)
Here, take my hand. I can’t refuse you.
HERAKLES
Swear by the head of Zeus, my father. Swear.
HYLLOS
Swear to do what? What am I promising to do? 1350
HERAKLES
You’re promising me to do what I ask.
HYLLOS
I promise you. I swear this before Zeus.
HERAKLES
Ask Zeus to crush you if you break your word.
HYLLOS
I so pray. Zeus won’t punish me. I’ll keep my word.
HERAKLES
You know Mount Oita, whose peak is sacred to Zeus?
HYLLOS
Yes. I’ve gone there often to sacrifice.
HERAKLES
Carry me there, with your own hands,
helped by what friends you need.
Cut down a great oak, cut wild olive limbs.
Bed my body down on these branches. 1360
Then set them on fire with a flaming pine torch.
No tears. Don’t sing hymns of mourning.
No, do not weep. Do it this way
because you are my son.
If you fail, I’ll wait in Hades
to curse you through eternity.
HYLLOS
Father! What are you asking? You force me to do this?
HERAKLES
I ask you to do what must be done. If you can’t
do it—go be some other man’s son. You’re not mine.
HYLLOS
Father, why this? You’re asking me 1370
to be your killer, to curse myself with your blood.
HERAKLES
I don’t ask that. I ask you to heal me,
to be the one healer who can cure my pain.
HYLLOS
How does setting fire to your body cure it?
HERAKLES
If burning me appalls you, do the rest.
HYLLOS
I’ll take you there—I can at least do that.
HERAKLES
And will you build the pyre just as I asked?
HYLLOS
I will, but not with my own hands. Others will build it.
I’ll do everything else. You can trust me.
HERAKLES
That will be more than enough. 1380
You do a great thing for me, Son.
But there’s one small thi
ng more I ask.
HYLLOS
Ask it. I’ll do it. Nothing is too great.
HERAKLES
Do you know the girl whose father was Eurytus?
HYLLOS
You mean Iole.
HERAKLES
You know her. This is what I charge you
to do, my son. When I’m dead, if you would
honor the oath you swore to Zeus,
make her your wife. Do not disobey me.
No other man must marry this woman 1390
who shared my bed. No one but you, Son.
Marry her. Agree to it. You obeyed me
on the great things. If you fight me
on this minor one, you will lose
all the respect you have earned.
HYLLOS
How can I rage at a sick man? But who
could stand what this sickness does to his mind?
HERAKLES
You refuse to do what I ask.
HYLLOS
She caused my mother’s death and your disease.
How could any man choose her— 1400
unless the Furies left him insane?
She’s my worst enemy.
How could I live with her?
Better to die.
HERAKLES
I’m dying, and he scorns my prayer.
You can be sure, my son, that the gods’ curse
will hound your defiance of my wishes.
HYLLOS
No, you are going to show us
how cursed you already are.
HERAKLES
You! You are waking up my rage! 1410
HYLLOS
There’s nothing I can do. There’s no way out.
HERAKLES
Because you’ve chosen not to hear your father.
HYLLOS
Should I listen, and learn blasphemy from you?
HERAKLES
It isn’t blasphemy for a son
to make his dying father glad.
HYLLOS
Do you command me as your son?
Do you make it my duty to you?
HERAKLES
Son, I command you. May the gods judge me.
HYLLOS
Then I’ll do it. Can the gods condemn me
if I do this out of loyalty to my father? 1420
The gods know—it is you who have willed this.
HERAKLES
In the end, Son, you do what’s right.
Now make good on your words.
Put me on the pyre before the pain comes
searing back. Lift me up. The only cure
for Herakles’ pain is Herakles’ death.
HYLLOS
You’ll have your wish.
Nothing stands in its way.
Your will prevails.
HERAKLES
Now you, my own hard-bitten soul— 1430
before my sickness attacks again—
clamp my mouth shut like a steel bit
so not one scream escapes your stony grip.
Do this harsh work as though it gives you joy.
The Soldiers lift the stretcher and carry it toward the mountain with the CHORUS and then HYLLOS following in a cortege.
HYLLOS
Lift him up, friends. Forgive me
for what I am about to do.
But look at the cruelty of what
the ruthless gods have done
to us—the gods whom we call
our fathers, whose children we are— 1440
and yet how coolly they watch us suffer.
No one foresees the future,
but our present is awash with grief
that shames even the gods, and pain
beyond anything we can know
strikes this man who now meets his doom.
Women, don’t cower in the house.
Come with us. You’ve just seen death
and devastating calamity, but
you’ve seen nothing that is not Zeus. 1450
HYLLOS and the Soldiers lift and carry the hero offstage toward the mountain.
Philoktetes
INTRODUCTION
SOPHOCLES AT 87
Philoktetes. First performed in 409 BCE, when Sophocles was 87 years old.
Philoktetes—with a festering, god-given wound in his foot—has been abandoned on the desolate island of Lemnos by the Greeks under Odysseus. They couldn’t stand the stench, nor his screams of pain. That was ten years ago. Since then, they’ve learned they can’t take Troy without Philoktetes and the bow given to him by Herakles—nor without Neoptolemos, son of the dead Achilles. Yet Philoktetes would rather kill Odysseus than return to Troy. It’s up to Neoptolemos, inveigled by Odysseus, to trick Philoktetes into returning. Odysseus, an opportunistic character representing the Greek army, will use any means to carry out his mission. Philoktetes and Neoptolemos, however, are constantly at sea: shifting and re-shifting amidst mixed feelings, deceptions, suspicions, and qualms as they struggle with themselves and their obscurely evolving relationship.
There are many plays within this play. Philoktetes and Neoptolemos are driven not only by unbidden psychologies but by their through lines: the specific ends they want to achieve. With the scenario given him by Odysseus, Neoptolemos is caught between playing a character, a curtailed version of himself, and being his own person. He has a tenuous grip on his role. That, plus pressure from the nakedly visceral Philoktetes—by turns friendly, even fatherly, and bitterly hostile—will wear him down. Remarkably, there are no offstage events in this pressure cooker of a play. Everything happens in the moment, up close and personal. (The false Merchant and his tale are themselves an event, not the report of one.) Once Odysseus’s hooks are set—in Neoptolemos and, through him, in Philoktetes—there’s no let up.
Philoktetes is a discarded veteran of the Trojan War. He is as well a generic old man—sick, smelly, cantankerous, a burden abandoned in a seemingly blank space. Yet he isn’t expendable. The Greeks can’t win the war without him. Further, it seems elders in general are socially necessary. Curious about former comrades, Philoktetes asks if the “old and honest” Nestor is still alive—adding, with the hated sons of Atreus in mind: “He’s the one / could baffle their schemes with wise advice” (471–472). He wonders what future may be envisioned without the ‘good’ people—the likes of Nestor, or the dead Achilles and Aias. “What’s to be our outlook on life / when they’re dead, and Odysseus, / who should be dead, isn’t!” (478–480).
The novice Neoptolemos and the old hand, Philoktetes, occupy the opposite poles of a historical-cum-cultural continuum that is rediscovering itself over a dead space: the ‘deadness’ is not Lemnos, however, but the cynical, soulless present of Odysseus.1 Objectively, Odysseus does have the right end in view. The goal to unite Neoptolemos, Philoketes, and Herakles’ bow to capture Troy and so end the war is beyond question in this play. But Odysseus’s crudely instrumentalist means lack the cultural and historical integrity, the broth of trust, needed to achieve that end.
Philoktetes’ affliction is intolerable. His intransigence, exasperating. He wants to be cured but refuses to be cured—wants to leave Lemnos but refuses to leave—if that means returning to the Greek camp at Troy. On the face of it, his stubbornness doesn’t make sense. Yet sense is also made extratextually. Brecht noted that production, unlike scripting, is risky. No one can predict how the ‘acting out’ will turn out. There are tones of voice, timings, silences. And bodies. Here there’s extraordinary emphasis on the raw physicality of Philoktetes: from the crudity of his utensils to the stench haunting his every appeal for passage home to Oita. His eyeballs roll up into his head. His frequent outbursts, his screams, are not notational or formulaic but spontaneous and unbridled. Or, worse, gagged on themselves. These too make sense, but transmitted somatically rather than conceptually. It comes in shock waves of extra-textual information. As these weigh in, his obstinacy, the most ‘senseless’ thing about him, accumulates yet another kind of sense. Bu
t to get it we need the kinesthetic, blow-by-blow feel of being Philoktetes, whose deepest wound is not in his body but in his spirit. What rationality or sensibleness is sufficient to cure that?
Given his awful solitude, not hearing another human voice, Philoktetes has vested the island, parts of his own body, and aspects of his affliction with vital existences of their own: his suppurating foot, his eyes, the intermittent fever: “this wandering disease [that] comes to me / when it’s tired wandering, / and having had enough / it goes away” (832–836). Birds, cliffs, cave, breaking waves, nymphs of marshy meadows—all these and more he grants the feeling life of. That is, he accepts that they have their own conscious existence, independent of him. This is sometimes taken as personification, yet is the antithesis of that. It stems not from anthropomorphism but something akin to animism—a relation to the natural world that respects the self-driven integrity of that world. Here it also testifies to the uncanny power emanating from the root being of this ancient world and its Dionysian drama. Grasping that, we may appreciate the generative power Philoktetes draws from a natural world that would otherwise, without the fuming gravitas of his passion, lapse into the unredeemed desolation of Lemnos. His immense will to live has vitalized what others, who have not lived his life, see only as a dead land. Now, having made a life on Lemnos—however poor and hard that life is—Philoktetes’ decision not to go back to Troy makes a counterintuitive, but not incomprehensible, sense.2
Nevertheless, socially, and therefore humanly, his decision not to return to Troy is the wrong one. Self-preoccupied after so many years struggling to stay alive, utterly alone, he cannot come to the right, civically called-for decision: to rescue the Greek forces that betrayed and abandoned him. It takes Herakles to socialize (in the technical sense of ‘civilize’ or de-individualize) the grounds Philoktetes stands on—and to give those grounds staying power by historicizing them. Herakles’ bow testifies to their mutual history. It was Philoktetes who lit the funeral pyre when Herakles, writhing in agony from the poisoned shirt given him by Deianeira, could find no one else willing to do it. If Herakles is a deus ex machina he is, as well, an all-too-human hero out of Philoktetes’ past, when Herakles himself was desperate for help, and Philoktetes gave it.