A Happy Ending and A Happy New Year!

After this last tempestuous year, I am delighted to pick up my pen and return to the Britannica 10-year reading program. All-in-all, I am pleased with the project’s progress as I again tuck into the Great Books of Western Civilization repast.

2011 begins with Sophocles’ play Philoctetes (pronounced fil-ahk-tee-teez). This play has a HAPPY ENDING!! (WOOHOO!!) I was giving up hope of getting to read anything but murdering moms and mutilated animals.

 

Greek tragedians liked to awkwardly comment at family gatherings

Overview:

The character Philoctetes is a decent but unlucky Greek aristocrat that is bitten by a holy snake after bumbling into a sacred grove.

Chorus: But I know of no other, by hearsay, much less by sight, of all mankind whose destiny was more his enemy when he met it than Philoctetes’, who wronged no one, nor killed but lived, just among the just, and fell in trouble past his deserts. (680)

Not only was he pitiable, he showed enormous humanity by mourning for others. His long life of suffering was highlighted by a latent empathy for others.

Sidenote: Sacred groves were easy to bumble into because they were often unmarked.

One of these trees is holy and guarded by a snake ::SURPRISE::

The snake’s holy superpower? Leaving a venomous bite that neither healed nor killed its victim. Philoctetes was condemned to live out his life with a smelly, puss dripping and useless leg that gave him fits of agony and fainting spells.

::I PROMISE this ends well::

In fact he was so repugnant that his fellow Greeks, spearheaded by Odysseus, stranded him on the desert island of Lemnos with nothing but his magical bow and arrows.

Chorus: With no one to care for him…but bewildered and distraught at each need. God pity him, how has he kept a grip on life? pp. 202

Oedipus of the lily-white conscience continues with the plan to destroy Troy until the seer Helenus announces that Troy will only fall to Philoctetes and the magic bow in his possession. Oedipus hightails it back to Lemnos and hatches a plan to steal the bow and leave the stranded man to certain starvation.

 

The only thing I hate more than snakes is Odysseus!

Even in ancient Greece it was rare to possess a magical bow and arrows. Philoctetes received them from a dying Heracles (the Greek Hercules) for the favor of lighting his funeral pyre. (All explained in my previous blog post)

But how to steal a magic weapon? Odysseus calls on Achilles’ son Neoptolemus (pronounced nee-op-TALL-uh-mus) to trick the stranded man into an unguarded friendship and snatch it. Neoptolemus, being an honorable aristocrat, is scandalized by the tricky plan but eventually is talked into it.

 

Achilles does not approve

Philoctetes is overjoyed to see another human, loved Achilles, and finds a seemingly common ground with the youth in their mutual hatred of Odysseus.

Neoptolemus: They needed brazen faces for their answer: “Son of Achilles, all that your father had, all else, is yours to take, but not his arms. Another man now owns them, Laertes’ son (Odysseus).”

Neoptolemus promises to remove the exile from Lemnos and give safe passage back to Greece . Philoctetes’ joy turns to a fearful seizure that ends in a faint. He gives Neoptolemus the bow for safe-keeping. Odysseus takes the bow and Philoctetes wakes to become distraught over the turn of events.

Odysseus taunts the poor exile. Neoptolemus is disgusted and gives the bow back. Philoctetes in turn reluctantly agrees to sail to Troy but is understandably hurt and mistrusting. The spirit of Heracles appears and tells them that Zeus’s will is for Philoctetes to be healed so he can raze Troy.

All ends well, unless you are a Trojan, and the play ends in a rousing “onward to a new adventure”.

Hurrah!

There are two weighty themes that will be explored more. The first is the difficulty of releasing the old pain of our current state for the new and unpredictable pain that may occur from attempting to make a better life. The second is the difference in Sophocles and Aeschylus’s disagreement about what suffering produces.

A final post will lay out my burgeoning (and grounded) dislike of Odysseus, a man who resembles Captain Hammer.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!