The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sophocles · a tragedy for performance · some fourteen hundred lines · produced at the City Dionysia, Athens, 409 BC, where it won first prize · scored on Sophocles’ Greek, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, with Grene’s translation and Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb for sense
Mode
Tragedy of intrigue and of a change of mind; a play in which no one dies
Mythos
The wound that will not heal and the bow that cannot miss, held by one man; the community’s indispensable gift fused to what it cannot bear; the son choosing which father he will have
Phase
Ten years after the abandonment, one day at the cave: the lie told, the bow given, kept and returned, and a god at the close
Presentation
Drama for the Athenian festival, on three speaking actors; a prologue, a lyric entry in dialogue with the chorus, episodes, a lyric to Sleep, a long lament of Philoctetes with the chorus, and an epiphany of Heracles; no woman appears or speaks
Register
From the plotting of the prologue and the comedy of a disguise to cries that leave the metre, the hymn to Sleep, the god’s prophecy and the farewell to an island
Scale
Three men on an empty island, with the army, the war at Troy and the purpose of the gods turning on who holds one object
Governing Proposition
The Greeks at Troy left Philoctetes on Lemnos with a wound that would not heal, and ten years on they learn that they cannot take Troy without him and the bow of Heracles he carries. Odysseus brings the son of Achilles to win him by a lie. The young man tells it, holds the bow in his hands, and cannot go on; he gives it back, and agrees to take the wronged man home, and a god stops them both. The wager of the play is that a just cause cannot be served by a lie without corrupting the one who tells it, that a wronged man’s resentment, however just, becomes its own wound, and that a community lives off the sufferer it has cast out.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on an empty shore. Odysseus has come back to Lemnos, to the island where the Greeks put Philoctetes ashore ten years before on their way to Troy, because his wound would not heal and the army could not bear it. Now an oracle of Helenus says that Troy will not fall without him and the bow he carries, the bow of Heracles. Odysseus has brought the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, to win him, by a lie.
The prologue sets the lie and the young man’s reluctance in one exchange. Neoptolemus answers first with his nature: “ephyn gar ouden ek technēs prassein kakēs”
“I was born to do nothing by base craft” (88). Then with his choice, before the action has begun: “boulomai d’, anax, kalōs / drōn examartein mallon ē nikan kakōs”
“I would rather fail acting nobly than win acting basely” (94 to 95). The young man goes, all the same, to tell the lie. The rest of the play shows him fail to hold to what he said, and then hold to it.
Sophocles found this story staged twice before him. Aeschylus and Euripides had each written a Philoctetes, Euripides in 431 BC, and both are lost but for fragments; Dio Chrysostom’s fifty-second oration compares the three, and is the source for what Sophocles changed. In the others Odysseus went himself, with Diomedes in Euripides, and the chorus were men of Lemnos. Sophocles adds Neoptolemus, so that the play becomes the making of a young man’s character under pressure, and he empties the island, so that ten years of abandonment are total. The chorus are Neoptolemus’ own sailors, drawn into the deception as his men.
Movement II
The cave is found before its owner: the rags drying in the sun, the wooden cup, the signs of a man who lives by what his bow can bring down. When Philoctetes comes, he comes as a voice and a body first, and he tells the stranger everything: the bite, the stench, the cries that made the army put him ashore, the years alone with the birds and beasts he hunts and the sea. His account of his abandonment and of his life with the bow is plain and exact, and the play lets it run, more than once. The audience lives inside this man for most of what follows.
Neoptolemus tells his story in return, and wins his trust with it and with the promise of passage home. The bow is the reason for everything, and the play makes its history part of the myth: it was Heracles’, given to Philoctetes for lighting his pyre, and it has never missed. The army that needs the bow cannot bear the wound. The community’s indispensable gift is fused to what it finds unbearable, and Edmund Wilson would make of that the type of the artist in The Wound and the Bow (1941). The play had already built the pattern, in a man who stinks and cannot be done without.
Then the Merchant comes, one of Neoptolemus’ sailors in disguise, sent by Odysseus to play a part. He is an actor inside the play, and the audience watches him act and knows, while Philoctetes believes him; his story tells Philoctetes that he is hunted by the very men he is now trusting. The scene looks like an excursus and is the turn of the screw. It makes the young man’s lie, now told to someone who thanks him for it, harder to hold.
Movement III
The attack comes on the way to the ship. Philoctetes has hidden his pain to keep his rescuer, and he cannot hide it longer. The cries break out of the verse altogether, sounds that the metre cannot hold, and the line is given over to the body. He asks to have the foot cut off. He gives the bow into Neoptolemus’ keeping, and falls asleep. The disease has done what the plot was arranged to do: the bow is in the young man’s hands, and its owner cannot stop him.
Lessing opened the Laokoon (1766) on these cries, and the question they put has not closed. A Greek hero screams, on stage, at length. The play does not make a sublime of suffering by restraining it; it makes the height out of the body’s failure to be restrained, and out of what the cries do to the one who hears them. Whether Neoptolemus’ pity was already there at his entry, or is born here, is one of the questions the scholarship still argues.
The chorus sing in place of an ode, and what they sing is a prayer: “Hypn’ odynas adaēs”
“Sleep, who knows no pain” (827). It is the play’s still centre. The theft could be done: the bow lies in a stranger’s hand beside a sleeping man who trusted him. Neoptolemus does not move.
Movement IV
Philoctetes wakes and finds his friend still there, and is grateful. That is the dreadful height of the play, and it is quiet. Neoptolemus cannot go on lying. He asks, again and again, what he should do, and then he tells the truth: he is taking Philoctetes not home but to Troy. He keeps the bow. The play, which began with a young man choosing his nature, now shows him caught between two fathers, the dead Achilles whose honour he came to inherit and the living Odysseus who taught him to win it by a lie.
Odysseus enters exactly as Neoptolemus is about to give the bow back, and takes the matter in hand. The iambic line breaks between the speakers as the alliance breaks: each crisis is two men talking with a third threatening, on three actors handled with a command the late Sophocles has made fluid. Philoctetes laments with the chorus at length, refusing persuasion, choosing his island and his wound over the men who made them. The lament is grand in grief, and long.
Then the young man comes back, with Odysseus behind him, and returns the bow. Odysseus enters again as he does, and is thwarted. The right end, Troy, had been sought by the wrong road and has failed. Neoptolemus agrees to take Philoctetes home to Greece, as he first promised: the right road to the wrong end. A man of integrity and a man of grievance have each won, and Troy, and the purpose of the gods, has lost. Human action has reached a deadlock it cannot break.
Movement V
Heracles appears. The god whose bow this was, and whose pyre it once lit, speaks to the man he gave it to, and persuades rather than compels, as Odysseus never could. He tells Philoctetes that he will be cured at Troy, and charges the two men to go together, “hōs leonte synnomō”
“like two lions ranging together” (about 1436). He tells them to keep reverence for the gods. The deus ex machina is required, not appended: it answers exactly the problem the action has made.
It answers with a doubleness the play does not resolve. The device belongs to Euripides’ late plays, and Sophocles uses it so that the human verdict stands: the young man did right, the wronged man did right, and they were stopped. Whether Heracles reconciles that outcome or overrides it, and whether a fifth-century audience saw the epiphany as grace or as cancellation, is still argued. The change of register from an exhausted human scene to a god’s prophecy is the widest leap in the surviving Sophocles; the law it obeys is that the gods’ purpose is real and must be met freely, and the play holds to that law only as an argument.
Philoctetes yields, and before he sails he says goodbye to the island: to the cave, the nymphs of the meadows, the sea-beaten headland. The man who refused to leave his wound leaves it with a farewell, in anapaests. The play that sent a young man to win by a lie ends with the lie undone, the bow in the hands of the man it belongs to, and two men going to the war side by side. No one has died. The whole action has been a change of mind.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to cut. The prologue sets the lie and the young man’s reluctance in one exchange. The Merchant’s scene, which looks like an excursus, turns the screw: it tells Philoctetes he is hunted by the very men he is now trusting, and makes the lie unbearable to hold. The attack of the disease is the hinge on which the bow passes to Neoptolemus; without it the deception would succeed by plot instead of failing by pity. Each passage of the bow, given, kept and returned, is a required step. Held below 9.0: the abandonment is retold more than once, and the oracle’s terms (the bow, or the man?) are stated variously, so that some exposition seems placed for the plot’s convenience.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, that a just cause cannot be served by a lie without corrupting the one who tells it. Odysseus holds the opposite, and the young man answers before the action begins: “boulomai d’, anax, kalōs / drōn examartein mallon ē nikan kakōs”
“I would rather fail acting nobly than win acting basely” (94 to 95). The play then shows him fail to hold to it, and hold to it. Second, that a wronged man’s resentment, however just, becomes its own wound and keeps him from the cure. Beside both, it discloses the community’s use of the sufferer it has cast out. Held off the top because the second truth is resolved by a god rather than by the man.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height comes at intervals, and from the body. A man who has hidden his pain to keep his rescuer breaks into cries that leave the metre, asks to have the foot cut off, hands over the bow and falls asleep. The chorus then sing to Sleep, “Hypn’ odynas adaēs”
“Sleep, who knows no pain” (827), the play’s still centre, while the bow lies in a stranger’s hand and the theft could be done. The waking, with Neoptolemus unable to go on lying, is the dreadful height, and it is quiet. The farewell to Lemnos lifts the whole into elegy. Held below 9.0 because long stretches are argument and plotting, and the lament with the chorus, grand in grief, runs long.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built. The wound that will not heal and the bow that cannot miss belong to one man; the army that needs the bow cannot bear the wound, and so the community’s indispensable gift is fused to what it finds unbearable. Edmund Wilson made of it the type of the artist in The Wound and the Bow (1941), but the play already builds the pattern. The bow was Heracles’, given for lighting his pyre, and it passes from hand to hand as a trust, so that holding it is a moral act. The son of Achilles chooses which father he will have: Achilles, Odysseus or Heracles. Particular throughout: the stink, the rags drying in the sun, the wooden cup. Held a step from the top because the epiphany states the resolution rather than letting the action carry it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is exact and known: Aeschylus and Euripides had both staged the fetching of Philoctetes, Euripides in 431 BC, and both plays are lost but for fragments. Dio Chrysostom’s fifty-second oration compares the three, and shows Sophocles’ departures. He adds Neoptolemus, so that the play becomes the making of a young man’s character under pressure; he empties Lemnos, so that ten years of abandonment are total; and he makes the plot fail, then makes a god undo the failure, using the device of Euripides’ late plays with a doubleness that leaves the human verdict standing. The stake: a tragedy in which no one dies and nothing happens but a change of mind. It won the prize. Held below 9.0 because the swerve stays within tragedy’s late repertoire.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. This is theatre about deception, built of deceptions staged: the Merchant is an actor sent by Odysseus to play a part, and the audience watches Neoptolemus play his, and knows. The bow is the drama’s single object and its argument; whoever holds it on stage holds the moral initiative, and the audience sees it pass. The iambic line breaks between speakers in the crises as the alliance breaks and reforms, and the cries put the body outside the verse. The god appears exactly where a man of integrity and a man of grievance have each won, and Troy has lost. In narrative this would be a turn of plot; on stage it is a question about what the gods’ order costs.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: the questions have been argued through the modern scholarship and remain open. Whether Neoptolemus’ pity is already there at his entry or is born in the attack; whether the oracle requires the bow or the man, and whether the inconsistency is design or carelessness; whether Heracles reconciles the human outcome or overrides it, and whether the first audience saw grace or cancellation; how a play of 409, the year after the oligarchic revolution, with Alcibiades’ recall in the air, reads politically. Lessing opened the Laokoon (1766) on Philoctetes’ cries. Formal depth yields too, in the bow’s passages and the young man’s repeated question what he should do. Held a little below 9.0: the centre is narrower than the Tyrannus’s, and the questions cluster.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century, with Aeschylus and Euripides on the same subject. The force is high. The play reorganised what tragedy could make its matter: a character changing under pressure, with the change itself as the action, and a sufferer whose interior the audience inhabits for most of the play. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and narrower than the force, since tragedy as a living form had little time left to follow it; later antiquity cited it in Dio’s comparison; and the modern reach is literary and critical rather than generative: Fénelon’s episode in Télémaque, Lessing, Gide’s Philoctète (1899), Wilson’s essay, Heiner Müller’s Philoktet (1965), Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990). It redirected the reading of suffering and art more than it redirected drama.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival across millennia is demonstrated: the text is whole, one of the seven plays of the Sophoclean selection, carried through the Byzantine manuscripts with the tenth-century Laurentian codex at the head of the tradition, and read without a break of loss since antiquity. The form is entirely legible, with no part missing. Its presence is continuous in the Greek curriculum of the West; it has been translated many times and staged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Charged on presence, not on form: it stood outside the Byzantine school selection of Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus, and so was read less in the schools of Byzantium; and in modern teaching and staging it stands well behind the Tyrannus and Antigone.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Sophocles at his latest and most fluid. Three actors are handled so that the decisive scenes are two-handed with a third threatening; the Merchant’s scene plays to a double audience; Odysseus enters exactly as Neoptolemus is about to return the bow, and then again as he does. The metre is made to break under pressure: cries outside the line, the line split between speakers in the quarrels, lyric dialogue in place of formal choral odes, so that the chorus is drawn into the action as the young man’s sailors, complicit. Philoctetes’ account of his abandonment and his life with the bow is plain and exact. The music of the lyric is unheard here and neither credited nor charged. Held below the top: the oracle’s exposition is uneven, and Odysseus is thinner as a voice than the two he works on.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Odysseus’ prologue of method and Heracles’ epiphany. The law of the play is that ends do not justify means, and that the gods’ purpose is real and must be met freely. Odysseus seeks the right end by the wrong road and fails; Neoptolemus takes the right road to the wrong end, home to Greece, and is stopped; Heracles joins right end to right road by persuading, not compelling, as Odysseus never could. On that reading the play holds, and the range is real: the comedy of a disguise, physical agony, elegy. But the reading is argued, not obvious, and the epiphany’s change of register, from a human scene of exhausted decision to a god’s prophecy and a farewell in anapaests, is the widest leap in the surviving Sophocles.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a single play of three men on an island can hold, and not charged for being one play. Consciousness is there, in Philoctetes’ ten years alone with himself and Neoptolemus’ divided mind; the body, in the wound and the stench, more than in any other Greek tragedy; the state and the army, in the sons of Atreus, the war and the uses of a man by his community; father and son, in Achilles’ absence from every choice his son makes; the sacred, in the oracle of Helenus, Heracles and the bow as a divine gift; the natural order, in the island, the birds and beasts he lives by, the sea. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what it does not hold: women, the household, labour beyond survival, the city as a place.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Made at 9.2 and The Living Form at 9.0. A text whole across some twenty-four centuries; a construction in which three actors, a disguise and metre that breaks under pressure carry a play about lying staged as plays within a play; and a form in which the moral initiative is an object, the bow, that the audience sees pass from hand to hand.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by what one play of three men on an island leaves out: women, the household, labour beyond survival, the city as a place. Among the gated axes, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: high force, a reorganisation of what tragedy could make its matter, with a reach that is literary and critical more than generative, since tragedy had little time left to follow it. Next, The Sublime, The Swerve and The Inner Law at 8.7: height at intervals, a swerve within tragedy’s late repertoire, and the joint at the epiphany.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 falls short by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate, at 8.8, also stands below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Philoktētēs), scored as the surviving Greek text for performance, on the Oxford Classical Text of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson: one tragedy, produced at the City Dionysia in 409 BC, in the archonship of Glaukippos, when Sophocles was about eighty-seven; the ancient hypothesis records that it won first prize. The text survives whole, one of the seven plays of the Sophoclean selection, with the tenth-century Laurentian codex at the head of its manuscript tradition. It is not scored with the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, which are known from fragments and from Dio Chrysostom’s fifty-second oration. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Sophocles’ Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with an English rendering beneath that keeps close to the Greek; references are to the standard line numbers. Translations · David Grene’s (Chicago, 1957), as English verse, for how the play carries into English; Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb (1994), close to the Greek, for sense. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the play. The metres can be judged here only in outline, and the music and dance of the lyrics are beyond this reading; they are neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the play’s exact length in lines, the line boundaries of its scenes and songs, the words of Odysseus on shame in the prologue, the wording of the farewell to Lemnos, an ancient critic’s naming of a Philoctetes among tragic subjects, and the play’s recent use in performances for soldiers, are not given.