Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

Preface

Preface I first read Sophocles’ Philoctetes at the beginning of my professional career, while I was a graduate student at Berkeley. At that time I thought of the play as an antique, interesting but certainly enigmatic, something like a fragment of a pediment from some archaic temple. Several decades later, at the end of my career, I chose the play as the text in the last undergraduate class in Greek that I would teach at the University of Arizona. Then I discovered with some amazement that it was altogether modern. At this point when, with a maturer vision, I read Odysseus’ words in the prologue of the play, where he explains to Neoptolemus that Philoctetes’ screams, provoked by his snakebite, were so horrendous , so sacrilegious, that they prevented his fellow warriors from performing their religious rituals, I was electrified, as if I had touched a live wire. When I was a graduate student, the frontal lobotomy and electric shock were medically approved therapies for silencing a person’s pain, therapies as much for the benefit of the patient’s friends and family no doubt as for the patient. But at that time I was too little experienced in either life or literature to see that Philoctetes’ expulsion from his community could be a trope for our modern therapeutic practices. I had yet to learn that now as in Sophocles’ time decorum remains high among the religious virtues. Philoctetes’ excommunication is not the only modern element of the play. Equally modern is the metastasis of his disease from the body to the soul, as also the absolutism of his will, his defiant fixation on his anger and his sickness, his refusal to make the smallest compromise in the direction of health if such compromise is to include forgiveness of his enemies for the harm they have inflicted upon him. This is a story told and retold every day in every therapist’s clinical practice. ix Two years after I had read the play with the students in the classics program at the University of Arizona, I taught the play again, now in translation, in a course offered in the Humanities Seminars program at that university. The participants in the Humanities Seminars are members of the wider community, many of them retired but others still active in their profession, and all interested in lifelong learning. I devoted the full ten weeks of the seminar to the play, taking the participants through it section by section and explicating the English translations with my own hermeneutic interpretations of the Greek text. In the fifth week, midway through the seminar and at the exact midpoint of the play, when Philoctetes falls into his epileptic-like seizure and utters the hellish sound for which he had been excommunicated ten years earlier, I was gripped by fierce abdominal pains, which necessitated an immediate rendezvous with the nearest emergency room. I was hospitalized for the next six weeks and was sent from one hospital to the next in search of the specialist with the right equipment, the right diagnosis, the right medication that could restore me to health. At several moments in that long pilgrimage, the prognosis was dire indeed , and I owe thanks to the many friends in my Tucson community and across the continent whose visits, cards, phone calls, and prayers, whether raised in temple, chapel, or church, surrounded me with tender affection and walked me back from the grave. When recuperating at the house of my friend Bob Byars in the last days of my ordeal, I awoke one morning with a dream still strong in my memory, which had me writing a book about the play. My friend, told of this dream, immediately produced some sharpened pencils (my preferred writing instrument) and supplied me with a lined, yellow pad. With these in hand, I walked with slow and tentative steps (after six weeks spent in hospital beds) to the nearest Starbucks coffee shop, where I put down on paper the first words of what would eventually issue into this book. Plato condemned ancient tragedy as pathological—poets representing characters behaving in pathological ways and thus encouraging the spectators to indulge in similar pathologies. For Plato, the ideal tragedy would focus only on the ideal hero, acting only in ideal ways. He had a great antipathy to tragedy because the tragic vision insists on an axiom that was anathema to him, that human suffering is at the very center of the cosmic design. Needless to...