Philoctetes Today: Suffering, Forgiveness, and the Question of Community
Jason Schlude for the Avon Hills Salon
Year after year, we all face serious headwinds in our lives, political and personal—the kind that rip tears from our eyes and drag them into the depressions of our temples.
In this landscape shaped by the inhospitable, we need stories that help us to understand how the world works and what is at stake. Perhaps even stories that heal. But often healing can come only in what we do with the story, not in the tale itself.
Once there was a young man—let’s call him Philoctetes, as the ancient Greeks did 2500 years ago—who faced what seemed an impossible choice: to remain on a deserted island, propped up on a rotting foot, surviving as a desperate animal would, or to live in a community, knowing that what you offer will relieve it from hardship, recognized as heroic.
“Impossible?” you wonder. “Hardly.”
Yet it was impossible for Philoctetes. Only a god could tip the scales, providing a resolution that illuminates a path forward in human experience. Something all good myths do.
Philoctetes was a young man, called to war in that greatest of wars, as the poet Homer understood it: the Trojan War, which brought Greeks like Philoctetes to besiege the city of Troy. The goal: to retrieve Helen, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta, abducted by Paris, son of king Priam of Troy. Many, of course, contended that Helen went of her own free will. But details like that were flexible and debated when it came to the world of myth. And whatever historical events lay behind the Trojan War (there was certainly some Trojan war—or rather, Trojan wars, plural, as Hittite documents attest), the myth of Helen and Paris is what remains for us.
It is a story as captivating as it is valuable for understanding the humanity we share.
Leading the Greeks was the brother of Menelaus, king Agamemnon of Mycenae (or Argos—once more, you can take your pick in this mythic landscape). Among his soldiers was Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors. And there was Odysseus, too, the clever king of Ithaca, who knew how to handle just about any problem that life (or the gods) threw in his path. Indeed Odysseus devised the stratagem to end the Trojan War. After a ten-year war that left many dead, including Achilles killed by Paris, and the rest stranded in stalemate, Odysseus thought up the “Trojan horse,” a mysterious wooden horse jampacked with Greek warriors hiding inside and left to rest on Troy’s beach. Really, it was mysterious only to the Trojans. In the wake of the Greek boats appearing to sail for home, they decided it was an offering to the gods and dragged it (and their doom) within their walls. They only had time for a final party, thinking war was past, when in fact its final act merely awaited their subsequent drunken slumber.
Yet Philoctetes was the (often forgotten) keystone for this final victory. His story, variously told, was recounted by several Greek writers, but only that of the playwright Sophocles survives.
As it turned out, initially at least, Philoctetes didn’t make it far in the war. Before the Greeks arrived at Troy, he was critically wounded. Island hopping from Greece to Asia, the Greeks put in at one location, no doubt seeking to supply their convoy. There a poisonous snake guarding the shrine of Chryse sunk its fangs into his foot. The result was a stubborn wound ringed with rotting flesh and discharging blood and puss. The pain was unbearable.
It was a wound everyone suffered. The stench of dead tissue and infection violated the nose. Even if you distanced yourself from Philoctetes, howls of the wounded soldier still haunted you. War is like that. It is creative with its destruction. And it is hard to ignore.
Whatever sympathy there was for Philoctetes soon evaporated. War is a physical and mental game—and good morale contributes to success. But it was impossible for the Greek army to psych itself up in the midst of this human suffering.
Agamemnon and Menelaus made the call: put in on a new island, the island of Lemnos, and abandon the man—and then keep sailing to Troy. Odysseus was given the task to execute, and he did so coolly. Given the island was abandoned, they all must have imagined it was a potential death sentence. But they had to be practical, they decided.
Fast-forward now ten years. For the length of that period after the Greeks reached Troy, they gained little more than a beachhead and at times risked losing even that. Achilles was dead, shot in the heel by a poisonous arrow from the bow of Paris. The situation looked dire...
But for one prophecy, recently revealed, offering a way out. The fates had it that the Greeks could still take Troy. As a first step, however, Philoctetes had to be on-hand with his bow—a bow that previously belonged to Heracles. Philoctetes took possession of it after he participated in an assisted suicide of the Greek hero; he struck the match that sent Heracles’ funeral pyre into a wild fury, relieving him from a poisoned state and purifying him for a new life as a god on Mount Olympus. There he lived on as one of the few mortals to achieve immortality. The bow then was a powerful weapon. And the Greeks needed it—and its caretaker, Philoctetes.
There was a problem, as we know: they left the hero for dead on Lemnos.
But prophecies are prophecies. There is no getting around them for the Greeks.
Agamemnon and Menelaus decided to send in the best they had: Odysseus, plus their own secret weapon, Neoptolemus, son of the now dead Achilles. While we could expect Philoctetes to kill Odysseus on sight, if he had the chance, he would not recognize Neoptolemus, whom he had never met before. What is more, he loved Achilles, as nearly all Greeks did. All that needed to happen, as the experienced Odysseus explained to the young man, was a lie. With Odysseus offstage, Neoptolemus had to gain Philoctetes’ trust by cursing Agamemnon and crew and then promise to take the wounded veteran home. Instead, the boat would go to Troy.
As often in Greek myth, these characters offer different choices for consideration. Neoptolemus must decide between honesty and pragmatism. At first, he followed Odysseus’ instructions—and to great effect. Philoctetes was overjoyed to return home to his father. And in agony from his still festering foot, he handed the bow of Heracles over to Neoptolemus for safekeeping while he passed out to escape the pain. When he awoke, he expected to embark on the long-awaited journey. But instead he came to a new realization. Soon after he re-opened his eyes, Neoptolemus’ ethical character could no longer maintain his guile. He revealed all to Philoctetes, who found in the truth a new level of indignity and wrath.
This brings us to a second choice—one for Philoctetes. His became a decision all human beings face at different junctures in their lives and at different scales.
Should Philoctetes stay on his island or reunite with his people?
Now we understand why this choice appeared impossible.
On the one hand, we have a soldier critically injured and abandoned by his generals out of convenience. For ten years he was made to live in the most demeaning circumstances: in a cave for shelter, on a pile of leaves, preying on whatever creatures he could take while lame and in constant pain from an unhealing wound, surrounded by rags caked with blood, puss, and decaying tissue, verging on madness from physical and psychological trauma, and isolated, with beasts and rocks for conversation partners.
What is more, when sailors stopped at the island, which happened from time to time, they would promise to give Philoctetes transport home, only to find his burden too great to bear. Rather than real transport from his misery, they would throw scraps of food his way as they ran in the other direction to board their boats and flee. In other words, Philoctetes was abandoned not once—but over and over and over again. To stay on the island was to embrace this insult of a life. Alone.
What of the alternative? If he went to Troy with Odysseus and Neoptolemus, he would find resources to finally heal his snake bite and physical pain. In addition, he would use Heracles’ bow to bring the Greeks victory, cementing his own glory as a warrior and savior for the ages. And afterwards, he could expect to live the rest of his days in community.
But there was a snag. To go to Troy was to further the cause of Agamemnon and Menelaus. To pull them from their disgrace and elevate them as victors over the Trojans. It was a choice to swallow the extreme injustice previously inflicted and to move on. It also brought a potential risk of suffering future injustice; could not the Greek leadership renew its abuse?
In essence, Philoctetes had to decide what was more important: to live in search of revenge, angry, and alone, or to forgive injustice and rejoin community.
It’s a choice that can operate on multiple levels and in multiple forms. What should a wounded human being do when society turns its back and then magically reappears to help—perhaps, at least in part, to its own benefit? Or what about at the community level? What if a country meets a devastating attack, heinously suffering the loss of numerous innocents, and then opts for a swift response that slides from the understandable into its own avalanche of injustice, whatever the increasing isolation? Can we imagine a state in which the citizen body is so divided by mutual injury (real and imagined) that only a politics of polarity is possible? Can the landscape between the poles be so stretched and desolate that one refuses to make the journey even to visit the other side, forsaking neighbors, friends, even family?
When pressed to make up his mind, Philoctetes astonishingly opted for lonely wrath—to hell with his enemies, whatever the consequences. Just anger was preferable to unjust forgiveness.
Of course, we know the story did not end this way. The Greeks won the Trojan War through the ruse of the Trojan horse. How did they finally achieve their objective then?
After Philoctetes decided to remain on Lemnos, he made a last-ditch effort to secure some escape. He tried to convince Neoptolemus to turn his back on the Greeks and to take Philoctetes home, as he originally and deceitfully promised. Initially, Neoptolemus was resistant but then appeared willing.
Before the deal could be sealed, however, Heracles decided to leave Olympus and visit Lemnos, providing the necessary end. In short, he told Philoctetes he had to go to Troy and help to bring the Greeks victory. What do you do when the deus ex machina shows up and tells you what to do? You do it. So, too, did Philoctetes. He sailed to Troy. He used the bow of Heracles to kill Paris. And that opened the way to victory—via the Trojan horse.
Though 2500 years old, the myth of Philoctetes speaks to us with clarity and insight, even if it does not reveal how exactly we will reach our ends. As often with Greek myth, it refuses to make decisions for the audience; that is their responsibility. What it highlights brilliantly is how anger and a search for revenge can be a lonely enterprise. It breeds alienation and division; it can leave one alone and make life hardly worth living. The alternative, forgiveness, can be a path to community—but it is terribly difficult to do when the injustice runs deep. It borders on the humanly impossible, a miracle, an intervention of a god.
When we recognize the elements of Philoctetes’ predicament in our own lives, we must not forget that our lives have their own possibilities. When we see a Philoctetes today, we can listen, bear witness to the suffering, refuse abandonment, and seek to genuinely help. When we each become a Philoctetes, well, that offers its own challenge and opportunity. We can hope and pray for the strength to forgive. For that forgiveness is a key to community—what all human beings need at a fundamental level. And in it is a transcendence that elevates.