[19] Once, at least, in modern literature the story of Philo-
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ctetes has been treated with a really classical grace. The mind of Fénelon was in natural sympathy with the spirit of ancient Greek poetry; and the twelfth book of the
Télémaque, where Philoctetes relates his fortunes to Telemachus, is marked by this distinction. Fénelon varies the earlier part of the legend, following a version which is given by Servius
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. Heracles, when about to perish on Mount Oeta, wished that the resting-place of his ashes should remain unknown. Philoctetes swore to keep the secret. Odysseus afterwards came in search of Heracles, and at last prevailed on Philoctetes to reveal the spot,—not, indeed, by words, but by stamping upon it. It was for this that Philoctetes was punished by the gods. One of the arrows of Heracles—tinged with the venom of the Lernaean hydra—dropped from his hand, and wounded the offending foot. For almost all that part of the story which passes in Lemnos, Fénelon has closely followed the play of Sophocles. Many passages are translated or paraphrased with happy effect. He wished, however, to present the father of Telemachus in a more favourable light; and so it is Odysseus, not Neoptolemus, who restores the bow.
‘Farewell, thou promontory where Echo so often repeated
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my cries’—says the Philoctetes of Fénelon,—true to the text of Sophocles. The
Télémaque appeared in 1699. More than half a century later, these laments of Philoctetes became the starting-point of a discussion destined to have fruitful results. Winckelmann, speaking of the Laocoon, had observed that the marble indicates no loud cry, but rather ‘a subdued groan of anguish’: ‘Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles.’ Lessing, in his
Laocoon (1766), pointed out that the Philoctetes of Sophocles shrieks aloud, and that Heracles, in the
Trachiniae, does the same. ‘The ancient Greek uttered his anguish and his sorrow; he was ashamed of no mortal weakness.’ If, then, the poet expresses the cry of bodily pain, while the sculptor refrains from expressing it, the reason must be sought in the different conditions of the two arts. At the time when Lessing wrote, the general tendency of contemporary taste was in agreement with the view on which Cicero insists, that any outward manifestation of pain is unworthy of a great mind, and that a wrong had been done to the heroic character by those poets who had permitted their heroes to utter lamentations
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. This maxim is exemplified in the tragedies of the stoic Seneca, whose persons are forcibly described by Lessing as ‘prize-fighters in buskins
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’: it had also been observed on the classical stage of France.
In a passage of excellent criticism,—which has lost nothing of its value because it closed the aesthetic controversy which it concerns,—Lessing shows how Sophocles, in the
Philoctetes, has reconciled the necessary portrayal of physical suffering with the highest requirements of tragic art. He takes up three points. (1) The nature of the suffering itself. The wound is a divine punishment, and there is a supernatural element in its operation: ‘a poison worse than any to be found in nature’ vexes the victim. Then this affliction is joined to other evils,—solitude, hunger, hardship. (2) The expression of the suffering. It is true that, in the scene where Philoctetes utters his cries of pain (vv. 730 ff.), he believes that he is about to be rescued from Lemnos: his anguish, there, is physical only. But these cries are wrung from him by extreme torment, despite his efforts to stifle them (vv. 742 f.). They detract nothing from the heroic firmness of his character,—displayed not only in the strength of his attachments, but also (as ancient Greeks would deem) in the fixity of his resentments. ‘And then we are asked to suppose that Athenians would have scorned this rock of a man, because he reverberates to waves which cannot shake him
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!’ (3) The effect of this expression upon the other persons. As Lessing acutely remarks, the dramatic inconvenience of a hero who cries aloud from bodily pain is that such a cry, though it need not excite contempt, seems to demand
more sympathy than is usually forthcoming. Sophocles has forestalled this difficulty ‘by causing the other persons of the drama to have their own interests.’ That is, when Philoctetes shrieks, the mind of the spectator is not occupied in gauging the precise amount of sympathy shown by Neoptolemus, but rather in watching how it will affect his secret purpose. ‘If Philoctetes had been able to hide his suffering, Neoptolemus would have been able to sustain his deceit... Philoctetes, who is all nature, brings back Neoptolemus to his own nature. This return is excellent, and the more affecting because it is the result of pure humanity.’
The last words allude to a French drama in which a different
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motive had been employed. Châteaubrun, in his
Philoctète (1755), had given the hero a daughter named Sophie, who (with her
gouvernante) visited Lemnos; and the romantic passion with which Sophie inspired Neoptolemus became his chief reason for assisting her father. Two other French dramas of the same title, those of Ferrand (1780) and La Harpe (1781), are noticed by M. Patin
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; but a comparative respect for the example of Sophocles is the highest merit which he ascribes to either.
Introduction to Commentary on Sophocles: Philoctetes. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. 1932.
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Funding provided by National Endowment for the Humanities.