Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Philoktetes
    Philoktetes
    Philoktetes
    Ebook117 pages58 minutes

    Philoktetes

    By Gregory McNamee and Sophocles

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview
    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

    Related to Philoktetes

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy

      Nov 8, 2019

      “Tragedy is democracy turning itself into a spectacle,” and anyone with Twitter will concur with that observation of Critchley’s. The post The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      Towards What?

      Mar 1, 2019

      Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. Riverhead Books, 2018, $26.00 cloth. OF THE deep and manifold fascinations to be found in Chris Marker’s 1983 docu-essay Sans Soleil, one of the chief formal characteristics to which my mind r

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Odyssey and the Other

      Nov 14, 2017

      The Odyssey and the Other
      6 min read

    • Article

      There Is A Lushness To This Expanded Letters

      Jan 25, 2024

      THE PUBLICATION OF LETTERS BY twentieth-century scholars is an uncommon enterprise, especially when they are issued by a trade press. But then Tolkien was an uncommon scholar. “I was brought up on the Classics,” he recalled later in life, “and first

      4 min read

    • Article

      Life Versus Learning: A Battle Of The Titans

      Nov 30, 2023

      TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines

      4 min read

    • Article

      Breathless

      May 12, 2022

      Breathless
      6 min read

    • Article

      Conquering Hell

      Nov 11, 2021

      Heaven and Hell have always been located in the human mind, along with God and the Devil, but the mind is a vast country, full of strange dreams and unaccounted things. The post Conquering Hell appeared first on The Millions.

      17 min read

    • Article

      Cosmic Puzzle-pieces Come Together In Masterly ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’

      Sep 28, 2021

      Anthony Doerr, author of “All the Light We Cannot See,” plots a tale that soars across centuries in “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”

      2 min read

    • Article

      Veering Off The Old Beaten Track

      Sep 7, 2023

      New Global Pathways ed. Dawn Keetley & Ruth Heholt University of Wales Press 2023 Pb, 280pp, £50, ISBN 9781786839794 Perhaps of all the literary, cinematic and stylistic manifestations of the “dark arts”, only Film/Roman Noir rivals folk horror in th

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Grueling, Painful, Beautiful Fiction of László Krasznahorkai

      Aug 8, 2017

      To misread Krasznahorkai as merely, or primarily, a political writer is to risk squandering the profoundly personal nature of his stories. More tragically, it is to foist a kind of sloppy activist, and determinately secular métier onto one of contemp

      9 min read

    • Article

      Thick as Thebans

      Mar 25, 2021

      Thick as Thebans
      6 min read

    • Article

      On Pandemic and Literature

      Mar 12, 2020

      Narrative can preserve and remake the world as it falls apart. Such is the point of telling any story. Illness reminds us that the world isn’t ours; literature let’s us know that it is—sometimes. The post On Pandemic and Literature appeared first on

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Trojan War Museum

      Jul 29, 2019

      The Trojan War Museum
      15 min read

    • Article

      Theatre Props and Civic Identity in Athens, 458-405 BC

      Jan 23, 2023

      ISBN: 978-1350186477 Bloomsbury (2020) - £28.99 www.bloomsbury.com Modern society is all too aware of the potential that the arts have for exploring contemporary identities and politics. Comedians have always been pointing to the contradictions in pe

      3 min read

    • Article

      We Should All Be Reading Ancient Poetry Right Now

      Aug 2, 2018

      In 1942, the classicist Edith Hamilton acknowledged the “dark spots” which encroach upon the worlds of Greek myth. Reading ancient poetry today makes you realize how those dark spots have grown. They may be sinister, but like black holes, they suck y

      3 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Mar 1, 2022

      Table Talk
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Devil Strides Our Countryside

      Jan 26, 2023

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Jeremy Harte Reaktion Books 2022 Hb, 296pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781789146509 One of the most beloved of Doctor Who stories has long been 1971’s “The Daemons”. Over the cou

      15 min read

    • Article

      King, God, Smart-Ass Author: Reconsidering Metafiction

      Oct 21, 2019

      Ed Simon draws on Daffy Duck, classic literature, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and more to redraw the rigid limits of metafiction and postmodernism. The post King, God, Smart-Ass Author: Reconsidering Metafiction appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    Reviews for Philoktetes

    3.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 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.
    • 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
      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.
    • 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."

    Book preview

    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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1