Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 34. He adds: “Through this continuous reinvention of language, the Poets are inviting us to take up again the task of questioning and reconstructing the World and of the horizons of the entities in which we calmly and continuously thought we lived.” 2. Dio Chrys., Discourse 52. Chapter 1. The Problem of Translation 1. Quoted in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 11. 2. Ibid., 12. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Ibid., 268. 5. Ibid., 270. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 271–73. 8. Ibid., 273. 9. Ibid., 14. 10. Hippoc., De morbo sacro. I am grateful to my colleague William Mullen for bringing this text to my attention. 11. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. 12. See Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 147–65, for his essay “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare.” 13. Ibid., 152, 154. 14. Ibid., 157. 15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273. 16. Ibid., 111. 17. Ibid., 12. 223 18. All quotations of the play are from H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson’s edition of the plays of Sophocles. 19. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 79. 20. Frame, Myth of Return. 21. For a very perceptive study of Sophocles’ use of language, see Budelmann , Language of Sophocles, esp. 93–132 on the Philoctetes. 22. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” 49–50. 23. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 408. Chapter 2. The Strong Poet 1. Bloom, Agon. 2. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, xxiii. 3. Ibid. 4. Ath., Deipnosophists I.20e. Some have claimed, however, that Sophocles did not dance in the nude but in his cloak. 5. Ibid. 6. On this poem, see Austin, “Theocritus XVI.” 7. Nagy, Best of the Achaeans, 18. 8. Havelock, Preface to Plato, chap. 2. Plato’s quarrel with Homer has been much discussed since Havelock. For an overview and his own interesting perceptions , see Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, chap. 2, “The Greeks: Plato’s Contest with Homer.” 9. Borges, “Pierre Menard,” 51. 10. Ibid., 50–51. 11. On the toxic effect of the competition, see Slater, Glory of Hera. 12. Nietzsche, “Homeric Contests,” 38. 13. Ibid., 37. 14. See Goldhill, “Language of Tragedy,” 55, on the chor¯egos; Easterling, “Form and Performance,” 153, on the actors. 15. Cartledge, “Deep Plays,” 14. “The competitive element which was implicit in all forms of Greek poetic activity grew in proportion as art became the centre of public life and the expression of the whole political and intellectual outlook of the age. Accordingly, it reached its highest point in drama” (Jaeger, Paideia, 1:268). 16. Pl., Symp. 175e, 194b. 17. Goldhill, “Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” 55. 18. Jaeger writes of this continuous process of competition of the dramatic poets that it “made taste extraordinarily sensitive to any falling off in the great tradition and to any diminution in the power and depth of the influence which tragedy exercised” (Paideia, 1:268–69). Herington notes that the competitive pressures of the “song culture” of archaic Greece “may be partly responsible for the extraordinary combination of vitality and technical excellence which 224 Notes to pages 13–22 amazes us in the archaic poems that reached the Alexandrian library” (Poetry into Drama, 62–63). 19. Arist. Poet. 1451b. 20. Ibid. 21. Herodotus, Historiae, 5.67. 22. Sheppard, “Attic Drama in the Fifth Century,” in Cambridge Ancient History , 5:129. Easterling argues that the Athenian theater involved displacement, in time and place, because the issues explored were explosive enough to provoke violent reactions “if the audiences were not kept aware of the essentially metaphorical status of everything enacted before them” (“Form and Performance ,” 172). 23. See Oxford Classical Dictionary (1949), 282, “Dio Cocceianus.” 24. Dio Chrys., Or. 52. 25. Ath., Deipnosophists 8.39. 26. On this ideology, see Hall, Inventing the Barbarian. 27. See Stanford, Ulysses Theme, on the different approaches to the character of Odysseus over the centuries. 28. Odysseus is “in many respects a degenerate descendant of the Homeric hero” (Knox, Heroic Temper, 124). See also Kirkwood, “Persuasion,” 430; Craik, “Philoctetes,” 26. 29. Rose, “Sophocles’ Philoctetes”; also Rose, Sons of the Gods, 56–57. 30. Cf. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 296: Philoctetes’ life is bounded by “the hostile sea on one hand and the wild rocky terrain where he hunts on the other, both spaces beyond the pale of civilization.” 31. Herington makes good observations on what he calls “the forests of myths,” in...