This enigmatic doctrine also applies to and helps to explain Sophocles’ feelings about Oedipus. It applies all the more to the hero of the next to last play he wrote, Philoctetes.
The story of Philoctetes is a strange tale that is not included in any other ancient work. He was known as the greatest Argive archer, having inherited the bow of Heracles from his father. He was drafted by Agamemnon for the expedition against Troy, but on the way he was bitten by a snake and left behind, deserted on an island. His wound won’t heal and the smell of it is unbearable to his companions. However, a seer tells the Argives that without Philoctetes’ magic bow they will never conquer the Trojans, so Odysseus and Diomedes return to the island.
The action of the play takes place on this lonely island, where the hero ekes out a meager existence with the terrible recurrent pain of his wound to remind him of his hatred of the men who used to be his friends. The deceit of Odysseus in obtaining the bow is brutal and cruel, but the play ends happily when Philoctetes relents and forgives his erstwhile friends and Odysseus, in a rare moment of sentimentality, gives him back his bow. Together the three depart for Troy once more, to end the war.
The idea of the indispensable man with the magic instrument—the bow—and the frightful wound inspired the critic Edmund Wilson’s book, The Wound and the Bow. Wilson found Freudian psychological depths in the Sophoclean idea. The artist, Wilson said, is often a man like Philoctetes who possesses a gift of immense value but suffers from an incurable psychic wound, a neurosis that can only find relief in artistic creation. It’s true that many great writers, painters, composers, and others have been men and women apart, living lives filled with suffering on lonely islands of their own making and finding their only happiness in their art. We must always invade their loneliness, Wilson said, and at the end they can obtain some kind of peace.
Philoctetes thus becomes the symbol of artists everywhere. The theory is credible, I think, all the more because it extends to Oedipus as well, and perhaps to Antigone—to the protagonists of how many other Sophoclean plays we cannot tell, since most of the rest of the one hundred and twenty or so he wrote are lost. Oedipus, too, has both a wound (his crimes, which are a pollution) and a bow (the divine blessing that will descend on the place of his death).
In these two plays, and perhaps in others, was Sophocles consciously suggesting something about art and even about himself? We can’t tell, of course, and in the end it doesn’t matter. The greatest works of art almost always have more in them than the artist meant to put there.
EURIPIDES
484?–406 BCE
Alcestis
Medea
Hippolytus
Bacchantes
The Trojan Women
Iphigenia Among the Taurians
Euripides was an enigma to his contemporaries, and he remains an enigma today. Aristotle said he was “the most tragic of poets,” which in the context was high praise indeed. Socrates never went to the theater unless a play of Euripides was being presented, and he would walk all the way to Piraeus to see it. But Aristophanes and the other comic poets never ceased to ridicule Euripides for his background (his mother was supposed to have been a greengrocer who sold inferior lettuces) and for his supposed lack of a sense of humor, and for this or some other reason he had difficulty winning prizes in the dramatic competitions. He presented plays for fourteen years before he ever won a prize, and he was often defeated by inferior playwrights in the years thereafter. Nevertheless, he acquired a great reputation while alive and an even greater one after his death. He was called “the philosopher of the stage,” and more of his works survive than of any other classical dramatist because they were so often copied down by teachers and students. Altogether, as I say, he was and is an enigma. Many readers do not understand him to this day.
Euripides was born in Athens about 484 BCE and died in Macedonia in 406. Nineteen of his plays are extant, out of a total of perhaps eighty-five that he wrote. All are worth reading and seeing performed if you have a chance to do so, but some are better than others. Of special interest are the six plays listed above.
Of the plays that survive, Alcestis is the earliest, though it is not a particularly early play in the works of Euripides. Nevertheless, it seems less mature than some of the others—but more playful.
Early in the fifth century BCE, when tragedy was new, playwrights were required to present four plays on a single theme: three tragedies and a “satyr play” or farce. By the time Euripides was composing Alcestis, for the Great Athenaeia in 438, these requirements had been dropped, so Alcestis is probably a self-contained work. The custom at the time was for the playwright to choose a particular mythical subject or story and write a play about it that adhered more or less closely to the original theme. The basic events could not change, but many minor changes could be made; modifications of emphasis could add up to a substantial alteration of the story’s meaning.
In this case, the myth was an old one to the effect that Admetus, an ancient king of Pherae, was informed by Apollo that he would have to die unless he could find someone to die for him. He asked his wife, Alcestis, to do so. She agreed, but at the last moment was saved from death by the intercession of the hero Herakles. A simple story, suggesting the early Greek notion of the responsibilities of a faithful wife, but Euripides made a very different thing out of it. He was fascinated by these questions: What kind of man would ask his wife to die for him? Wouldn’t a husband ask someone else, his parents for example, instead? Why did Herakles save Alcestis, and how?
The long conversation in the play between Admetus and his parents is both funny and sad. They deserve him as a son, and he them as parents. The contrast with the nobility of Alcestis is stark. Herakles comes to the house while preparations are being made for her death, but Admetus tells Herakles nothing of this. He is torn between conflicting religious obligations: one to his wife, the other to his guest. He is a good man according to Greek cultural beliefs, which held that a guest was sacred because he might be sent by Zeus, king of the gods. Admetus is brokenhearted but feels he has no other choice.
Herakles, who is drunk, discovers what is happening and, because he loves both Admetus and Alcestis, he sets out for Hell to bring Alcestis back. He wrestles with Death and rescues the wife of his friend, and all ends happily. Except that it doesn’t.
He returns with a woman who is wearing a veil that covers her face. Is she Alcestis—or is she another young woman who can take her place in Admetus’s bed and as the mother of their children? Herakles refuses to say who she is. He forces Admetus to accept her—which he does, although he’s not certain. But Admetus has sworn an oath that he will never take another wife, and when he reaches for the veil he is astonished—but Euripides leaves us to guess. The woman turns her back on the audience, and we are left to ponder the end of the story.