Materials
Life of the Warrior
Ancient Greece and Rome, as classicist David Konstan notes, were cultures where war was a permanent condition of life and no citizen escaped the duty of military service. Classical drama and heroic poetry represent combat experience in ways that continue to move contemporary audiences.
Homer knew what war was about and wrote for an audience that did as well. While the U.S. has been waging war nonstop for fifteen years since the September 11th, 2001 attacks, only 2% of Americans have experienced the Afghanistan or Iraq conflicts as members of the U.S. military.
One strand of our discussions with veterans this year, then, will examine ancient Greek narratives about how people behave under the stress of war: these texts will include Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Herakles and Hecuba.
Sophocles’ Tragedy Philoctetes
• Link to or download a free audio recording of the play on librivox.org: https://librivox.org/philoctetes-by-sophocles/%C2%A0
• Watch an excellent dramatic reading of the play on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPqbcceDF0Y
Synopsis of the Story
At the beginning of the play Philoctetes is a Greek warrior who has been marooned for ten years on the island of Lemnos. The Greek commanders abandoned him there after he was bitten by a poisonous snake and his wound caused a putrid smell and loud, anguished wailing. Philoctetes has survived partly with the help of a special bow he received from Herakles in return for a favor, but a prophecy reveals that Greek victory at Troy relies on Philoctetes and his bow. So now that the Greeks have learned that Philoctetes and his bow are crucially necessary to win the war against Troy, they return to the island to take Philoctetes and his bow.
Odysseus enlists the young warrior Neoptolemus, son of the dead hero Achilles, to befriend the hostile Philoctetes and steal his bow. Since trickery and deception go against Neoptolemus’ noble nature and principles, he initially balks at Odysseus’s mission for him, but he is persuaded by Odysseus’s argument that the end justifies the means in that in performing this act he will spare many from suffering by ending the Trojan War. Odysseus’s plan involves manipulating Philoctetes as a tool of the common good, but once Neoptolemus meets the suffering, abandoned warrior, he finds it increasingly difficult to dehumanize, deceive and cheat Philoctetes. As Neoptolemus lies to Philoctetes and gains his trust, he feels ever more keenly how his behavior violates his own moral code.
No longer capable of carrying on the deception, Neoptolemus reveals his real purpose to Philoctetes and hopes to persuade Philoctetes to come willingly. How will it all work out? Can Neoptolemus repair the moral injury done to Philoctetes in the betrayal of his trust, and the moral injury done to himself in having violated his own moral code?
Historical Context for Play
As Sophocles composed and staged Philoctetes in 409 BCE, Athens was in its twenty-second year of the Peloponnesian War. Although he set the action in the distant past of the Trojan War, he was writing about conditions and dilemmas of war that his audience knew all too well.
Euripides’ Tragedy of Herakles
Two, excellent, recent translations of the play are available in:
* Robert Emmet Meagher, Herakles gone mad: rethinking heroism in an age of endless war (Olive Branch Press, 2006)
* Euripides, Grief Lessons: Four Plays, Anne Carson, translator (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).
What happens when battle-hardened fighters return home, and adjust to peacetime life amidst their families?
Synopsis of the Story
At the beginning of the play, Amphitryon, Herakles’ father, explains that he, his daughter-in-law Megara, and the children she has had with Herakles are to be killed by Lykos, the tyrant who has usurped power in Thebes. Herakles has been away from home, performing the labors assigned to him by Eurystheus. Just when the situation seems hopeless, Herakles appears, and when Lykos arrives to kill his family, Herakles slays Lykos instead.
At this point, Iris, the messenger of the gods, and Lyssa (Madness personified) descend and announce that on Hera’s orders they are going to drive Herakles mad. His behavior appears haphazard and crazed to bystanders. Herakles hallucinates and imagines that he has driven in a chariot to Argos, where he will take vengeance on Eurystheus, the jealous and tyrannical king who sent him on his many hazardous labors. Under the impression that he is in Eurystheus’s palace and that his father and children are those of Eurystheus, he kills his wife and children . Herakles ends up slaughtering his own family, the very people he had intended to save from Lykos’s vengeance.
When he awakens and becomes aware of what he has done, he contemplates committing suicide, but at this point his comrade Theseus arrives. Theseus had come to help Herakles against the tyrant Lykos in return for the great service Herakles did in rescuing Theseus from the Underworld. Theseus reminds Herakles of his generous, heroic deeds and persuades him to leave Thebes and take asylum with him. Herakles survives.
Discussion
• Should we see Herakles as an example of combat trauma?
* What causes Herakles’ inability to distinguish between those dear to him and his adversaries?
• Link to or download a free audio recording of the play on librivox.org: https://librivox.org/hecuba-by-euripides/
• See an interview by journalist Bill Moyers with Martha Nussbaum about her book on Greek tragedy, in which she discusses Hecuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWfK1E4L--c
Themes
The central concerns of this play are the nature of good character and its vulnerability when trust is violated.
Synopsis of the Story in the Play
The play begins after the city of Troy has fallen to the Greeks and the Trojan queen Hecuba has been taken captive. The Greek conquerors decide that they must sacrifice a Trojan princess at the tomb of Achilles, their greatest warrior. Hecuba does everything she can to save her daughter Polyxena from being sacrificed to the enemy, and is tremendously embittered by the callousness of her Greek conquerors, but Polyxena dies in a human sacrifice at the tomb of Achilles. Nevertheless, the courage and dignity with which Polyxena goes to her death cheers Hecuba. Impressed by Polyxena’s grace, Hecuba takes consolation in the thought that the nobility of some human beings can survive the corrupting forces of war and violence, and she resolves to stay on the moral high ground above her enemies. The captive Trojan queen frames this thought in a memorable comparison of human nature to a plant:
Is it not strange
That a bad ground blessed with good weather will bring forth good crop,
And good soil deprived of what it needs gives bad fruit,
But with human beings
A scoundrel produces a scoundrel every time,
And a good man a good man.
Adverse conditions do not spoil a decent human nature. (lines 582-588)
The proposition that Hecuba advances here is that human nature is stable, unlike the natural environment, which is subject to poor or benevolent conditions. Unlike a plant that wilts and declines in poor soil or weather conditions, Polyxena’s noble nature thrives even in adversity. Philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum argues that the playwright Euripides sets up a philosophical proposition here that will be tested in the subsequent action of the play. That test follows swiftly with Hecuba’s discovery of the death of another child, her youngest son, Polydorus, who had been sent away to Thrace into the protection of a friend and ally, Polymestor. Unlike Polyxena who is killed by Hecuba’s longtime enemies, the Greeks, Polydorus is killed by a friend into whose protection he had been sent. In contrast to the Trojan princess Polyxena’s maturity, Polydorus was a young, vulnerable child. Polymestor had been entrusted with treasure as an inheritance for Polydorus, but now with the defeat of the Trojans, he seizes the treasure for himself and has the boy killed and his body thrown into the sea. Washed up onto the shore, and brought to Hecuba, the corpse of her defenseless, dead child confronts her with the betrayal of her supposed ally, Polymestor. Hecuba finds that she cannot accept this loss as she had been able to come to terms with Polyxena’s death. The unexpected treachery and betrayal of trust by a friend, a person to whom she had entrusted her youngest child and last hope for her family’s survival, drives her to an obsession for revenge. This in turn leads Hecuba to use her supposed friendship with Polymestor to entrap and murder him and his two young children. What has happened here to Hecuba’s notion of an unchangeable, noble human nature that could withstand adversity? What does the conclusion of Euripides’s play suggest about this notion?
Discussion
• Why is Hecuba’s response to the death of her son Polydorus so different from her response to the death of Polyxena?
• Why does she become obsessed with and committed to revenge against Polymestor?
• What does the conclusion of the play suggest about Hecuba’s notion that humans’ moral nature is stable?