Greek Drama · Part 8 · Sophocles · B2–C1
Sophocles: Philoctetes
Part 8 of Greek Drama: the Greeks abandoned Philoctetes on a desert island because of his terrible wound. Ten years later they need his magic bow to win the war, and Odysseus orders young Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, to get it by lying to him. Is it right to lie for the common good? Modals of obligation and moral argument (should, ought to, must, have to, be supposed to, it’s (not) right to), and the language of honesty and loyalty, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight’s play has no murder at all. It has three men on a desert island, and one question: is it ever right to lie? Sophocles wrote it at the age of almost ninety, and it won first prize.
A question for the philosophers, and for anyone who has ever been tempted.
And for the young, Philo. The hero is a boy of about seventeen, the son of Achilles, whose father always said he hated a liar as much as the gates of death. The boy is ordered to lie by the cleverest man in Greece. Tonight’s grammar is the grammar of what we must, should and ought to do.
The desert island of Lemnos, in the last year of the Trojan War
Philoctetes was a Greek hero who owned the bow and arrows of Heracles, which never missed. On the way to Troy, he was bitten by a snake, and the wound would not heal: it smelled so badly, and his cries of pain were so terrible, that the Greek leaders, on Odysseus’s advice, abandoned him while he slept on the uninhabited island of Lemnos. He lived there alone for ten years, in a cave, shooting birds to survive.
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