Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

11. The Exodos (Verses 1218–1471)

11 The Exodos (Verses 1218–1471) Great minds against themselves conspire And shun the cure they most desire. Henry Purcell, Dido and Aeneas T he exodos (English “exodus”) is the final section of a Greek tragedy, the exit.1 Aristotle defines it as that part of the drama after the last choral ode. “Exit” seems an inappropriate description for a passage extending over some 250 verses. This exodos looks more like a fourth episode; it brings all three actors on stage for extended dialogues, and the chorus is given only the last three verses to give the play its benediction (vv. 1469–71). In the kommos just concluded, the chorus had introduced selfconsciousness into the dialectic of the play, but it merely broached the idea. Enter now Neoptolemus to reclaim the responsibilities that he had passed to the chorus when he exited the theater at the end of the third episode. Odysseus follows him in anxious pursuit. “Will you not explain ?” he calls after Neoptolemus as they arrive in the theater again. “Why have you turned around and are speeding on this path with such furious energy?” Odysseus applies the adjective palintropos (“turning back,” v. 1222) to describe Neoptolemus in this question. Classical scholars can hardly see the word without sensing an intimation of polutropos (much-turning), used of Odysseus in the first verse of the Odyssey. In this play, however, Odysseus, famous as the master of versatility, has become the man fixed in one attitude while his young 176 cadet has become, it seems, polutropos. We also hear in palintropos the resonance of the word palintonos (stretched back on itself), which Heraclitus had used to describe the harmony of opposites—“when the thing that differs from itself also agrees with itself, like the back-stretched fitting together [palintropos harmonia] of the bow and lyre.”2 Neoptolemus explains his “turning back”: “I go to undo the hamartia that I committed in the past” (v. 1224). Odysseus is appalled: “What you say is horrifying [deinon ge ph¯oneis]. What hamartia was that?” (v. 1225). We are bemused to hear Odysseus, the rhetorician, now accusing his protégé of being “formidable in speaking.” In the prologos Odysseus had coached Neoptolemus in the art of words, but now the youth has found his own voice and the first word he utters in his own voice is the verb hamartan¯o, “I have sinned.” That is the fearsome word now hanging in the air. Odysseus in his stunned reply employs the noun itself, hamartia. Hamartia? What hamartia? The reversal of the play turns on this word. Aristotle introduced the word hamartia into our vocabulary, and it has been a staple of critical theory ever since.3 But the word was not common in ancient Greek, and it occurs only rarely in the extant tragedies; after all, the tragic heroes are not usually able to discern their hamartia until it is too late to undo the consequences.4 In this play, however , the character himself identifies his own hamartia and is given time to undo his mistake. It is yet another signifier that identifies Neoptolemus as a tragic hero. Philoctetes’ hamartia is necessary to the play, but the hamartia of Neoptolemus is equally important and equally necessary. It is not merely incidental to the play; rather, it is the motive that drives the whole plot. When Odysseus asks Neoptolemus, “What hamartia?” Neoptolemus replies: “The one when I obeyed you and the whole army” (v. 1226). The sophisma laid out in the prologos is the hamartia of this play. Both Neoptolemus and Philoctetes face their own crisis of conscience, and each character’s crisis mirrors the other’s. The hamartia of each must be recognized, identified, and corrected so that the two, chastised and purified, can be united to become those two lions whom Heracles describes at the end of the play, going out on the hunt together. Under further interrogation Neoptolemus explains to Odysseus that he intends to give the bow back to Philoctetes since he obtained it by ugly and unjust means. Odysseus is astounded, seeing the very success of the mission slip through his hands. To his incredulous questions Neoptolemus replies like a teacher instructing one of his less intelligent The Exodos 177 students: “Must I repeat the same words two and three times?” (v. 1238). Odysseus, flailing for his lost authority, resorts to an outright threat: “There is one who...