[16] A few words must be added concerning the topography of the play
1
. Mount Hermaeum, which re-echoed the cries of Philoctetes, may safely be identified with the north-eastern promontory of Lemnos, now Cape Plaka. His cave was imagined by the poet as situated in the cliffs on the north-east coast, not far south of Hermaeum (
cp. 1455
ff.), and at some height above the shore (v. 1000: cp. v. 814). The east coast is probably that on which the volcano Mosychlus (visible from the cave) once existed; and the islet called Chrysè lay near it. Philoctetes describes Lemnos as uninhabited (v. 220), and as affording no anchorage (v. 302). This raises a curious point as to the degree of licence that a dramatist of that age would have allowed himself in a matter of this sort,—and as to the choice which he would have made between two kinds of improbability. In the time of Sophocles, Lemnos had long been a possession of Athens, and it was a fact familiar to Athenians that the island possessed excellent harbours on every side except the east. Then, if an Athenian audience were required to suppose that, in the heroic age, Lemnos was a desert island, they would at once remember the ‘well-peopled’ Lemnos of the
Iliad. Hence, the simplest supposition—viz., that Sophocles chose to make Lemnos desolate for the nonce—is not really so easy as it might appear. One asks, then, did he mean us to remember, here also, the maimed condition of Philoctetes, who could not move many yards from his cave in the eastern cliffs? The centres of population, in ancient times, were on the west and north coasts. The area of Lemnos has been computed as about a hundred and fifty square miles, or nearly the same as that of the Isle of Wight
2
. It would not, then, be absurd to suppose that, even in the space of many years, no Lemnian had chanced to find that particular spot, at the extreme verge of a desolate region, in which the sick man was esconced.
Introduction to Commentary on Sophocles: Philoctetes. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. 1932.
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