The Athenian Aesklepion and the End of the Philoctetes

Despite the setting of Sophocles’ Philoctetes on the isolated, barren island of Lemnos, far from anything resembling a polis, many different scholars have concluded that this work has something to do, however elusive it might ultimately be, with the nature of the Athenian polis late in the Peloponnesian War. My contribution to clarifying this relationship will be to reexamine the text’s discourse of healing and cure in the light of the associations between disease, social strife and the cult of Asclepius, the figure who, according to Heracles at the end of the drama, will finally cure Philoctetes, and whose temple had recently been constructed next to the Theater of Dionysus as a result of the plague during the 420s. Sophocles’ vision of social healing stresses the need to reintegrate the aristocratic mode into society, as part of a fundamentally democratic concern for the mixed or balanced polity. The engagement of Sophocles’ Philoctetes with the Athenian cults of Athena, Heracles and Asclepius and with the topography of the Acropolis provides the key to this interpretation.