Philoctetes

The archer and the snake

Philoctetes, son of Poeas, is a Greek archer who sails for Troy. He carries the bow that once belonged to the hero Heracles. In the Iliad, Homer’s epic of the war, the Catalogue of Ships lists the forces that sail. It gives Philoctetes seven ships, each with fifty oarsmen who are also trained archers. Homer calls the Greeks Achaeans.

Philoctetes never reaches the fighting. Apollodorus, an ancient writer who retold the Greek myths, explains why. During a sacrifice to the god Apollo, a water-snake comes out from the altar and bites him. The wound will not heal, and the army can no longer bear its smell. Agamemnon, one of the Greek commanders, orders Odysseus to put him ashore on the island of Lemnos with the bow of Heracles.

Left behind on Lemnos

The two accounts agree on what follows. Philoctetes stays on Lemnos while the fleet sails on without him. Homer says he lies there in great pain from the water-snake’s bite, and that a man named Medon leads his men in his place. Homer adds that the Achaeans will soon remember their absent leader. The army can replace him as a commander, but it misses his archery.

The playwright Sophocles imagines his life there in the play Philoctetes. He lives in a cave with two mouths. It has a sunny seat for winter and a cool passage for summer. Inside are a rough wooden cup and cloth for dressing a wound. Philoctetes has built a life around his pain and around the bow, which lets him shoot birds for food.

The return for the bow

Troy still stands. A prophecy says the city cannot fall without the bow of Heracles, so the Greeks must go back.

Apollodorus and Sophocles send different men. In Apollodorus, Odysseus returns with Diomedes. He gets the bow by a trick and persuades Philoctetes to sail.

Sophocles sends Odysseus with Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, and makes the archer’s consent the heart of the play. At the start, Odysseus lands on a headland of Lemnos and tells Neoptolemus to look for the cave. He remembers leaving Philoctetes there on the orders of the commanders. The wounded man’s cries had broken into every libation, an offering of wine poured out to the gods, and every sacrifice in the camp.

The trick

Odysseus does not plan to ask Philoctetes to rejoin the army. He wants Neoptolemus to win the man’s trust and take the bow. The plan treats the weapon the Greeks need and the man they abandoned as two separate things.

Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes that he too has been wronged by the Greek commanders. The lie works because both men have reason to resent Odysseus. Philoctetes puts the bow in his hands.

Then Odysseus appears and claims both the archer and the weapon for Troy. He threatens force if Philoctetes will not come willingly. The bow is gone, but the wounded man still refuses to help the people who left him.

Neoptolemus gives back the bow

Neoptolemus turns back. He tells Odysseus he means to undo his mistake and return the bow, because he got it in a disgraceful and unjust way. Odysseus argues that the weapon was won through his plan. Neoptolemus answers that justice matters more than cleverness.

Returning the bow does not settle the larger question. Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes that the sons of Asclepius, a healer, can cure him at Troy, and that he is fated to take the city with them. Philoctetes still chooses to go home. Neoptolemus agrees to take him there, even though it means defying the Greek army.

By now the play has turned down both of the ways Odysseus offered. The trick won the bow but not his willing help. Force could move his body, but it could not make him accept the men who hurt him.

Heracles decides it

As the two men prepare to leave, Heracles appears above the stage. He is the bow’s former owner, and he orders Philoctetes to sail to Troy. There Asclepius will heal the wound, Philoctetes will kill Paris with an arrow, and he and Neoptolemus will take the city together.

Heracles also binds the two warriors to each other. He says neither can conquer Troy without the other, and he compares them to two lions guarding the same prey. Philoctetes accepts the order. He says farewell to Lemnos and leaves the cave.

In Sophocles, the bow does not go to Troy without its owner. The plan of Odysseus fails because it treats Philoctetes as separate from his weapon. The archer sails only once he holds the bow again and hears the command from Heracles himself.