The Great Soul Robbery in Sophocles' "Philoktetes"

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The Great Soul Robbery in Sophocles' "Philoktetes"Author(s): Norman AustinSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Fall, 2006), pp. 69-118Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29737303 .

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The Great Soul Robbery in Sophocles5 Philoktetes

NORMAN AUSTIN

Oatzzeyi: xfjv Oi^oKTT|TO\) ae hex

\j/\)%fiv orc?? ?oyo?o-iv ?kka?\|/?ic Aeycov

Odysseus: With your words

capture the mind?the very soul?of Philoktetes.

?Sophocles, Philoktetes 54-55,

Carl Phillips, tr. (Oxford 2003)

JTjLt lines 54-55 of the Philoktetes, Sophocles has Odysseus spell out for the young Neoptolemos the part that he is to play in ensnaring Philoktetes and bringing him

to Troy. These are among the most trenchant lines in the

play. They state in a single sentence the program of the

whole play and at the same time they take us directly into

the sophistic debates that were roiling Athens in the late fifth

century, thus informing us that at the heart of the play is the

intellectual crisis of Sophocles' own beloved Athens.1

Unfortunately, modern translations glide over the sentence

so smoothly that they scarcely convey any of the violence

compressed into the original Greek. As modernism demol?

ished the old poetic forms, the old poetic vocabulary was

banished along with the forms, and poetry aimed more for

the pedestrian style of prose. Breaking the old vessels, while

a liberation for poets, who could write about new experi? ences in a new way, was unfortunately a loss for translations

of the ancient Greek tragedies. Even in the dialogues, that

part mistakenly thought to be prose, Greek tragedy was

never prosaic as modern poetry is prosaic, or the modern

theater. In these lines, which Sophocles puts in the mouth of

Odysseus, Odysseus speaks not in the language of the street,

not, certainly, in any style resembling our contemporary ver?

nacular. He speaks in a poetic idiom so foreign to our mode

ARION 14.2 FALL 2006



70 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

of expression that translators search for some way to give us

some more comfortable equivalent.

Harold Bloom has written of the distinctive character of

the strong poet and of such a poet's burden to be a strong reader of his great precursor's work.2 He has argued that the

strong poet's reading of the precursor from whose shadow

he struggles to emerge will inevitably be a misreading, but

this is no different, he adds, than the practice of any reader

coming to a text: "Reading is a belated and all-but-impossi? ble act, and if strong is always a misreading. "3 At this late

date in the transmission of the Fhiloktetes, any reading must

be to some degree a misreading. Even a weak reading is a

misreading. Who can say what Sophocles really meant, or

how the spectators interpreted the play when they sat

through its performance in 409 bce? Some no doubt left the

theater satisfied with a reading that registered not the least

discomfort, while others might have taken from the same

performance a reading on which they obsessed for weeks to

come.4 If Sophocles was indeed a strong poet (and let us as?

sume the point for the moment), then our responsibility as

readers is to give his text the strongest possible reading that

his language and our temperament will allow, even at the

risk of a misreading. This sentence spoken by Odysseus in lines 54-55 takes us

directly into the core issue of the play. Yet it has another

claim on our attention since here in brief is the evidence of

Sophocles' originality in his treatment of the Philoktetes

myth. Each of the three great tragic poets produced his own

version of the drama. Aeschylus produced his Philoktetes

about 470 bce. Some forty years later, Euripides produced his version (431 bce), and some twenty years after that,

Sophocles entered his Fhiloktetes into the dramatic competi? tion of 409 bce.5 Each poet had to put his original stamp on

the old mythic material, but the stratagem that Sophocles in?

vented was an innovation qualitatively different from any

that Aeschylus or Euripides had introduced in their treat?

ment of the theme. It altered the nature of the drama forever.



Norman Austin 71

Sophocles is by general agreement a great playwright. But

we might argue that he is also a strong poet by Bloom's def?

inition. That definition, derived from Bloom's reading of

modern poets, perhaps cannot be applied whole cloth to the

tragic poets of ancient Greece, but the issue of the modern

poet's anxiety can illuminate similar anxieties in the ancient

poets in regard to their tradition. Ancient poetry was domi?

nated by an agonistic spirit that has hardly ever seen its

equal. Athlete competed with athlete, rhapsode with rhap?

sode, dramatist with dramatist, with all the competitions held as great public festivals. "Poetic strength," Bloom

writes, "comes not only from a triumphant wrestling with

the greatest of the dead, and from an even more triumphant

solipsism."6 Whether we can speak of the solipsism of an an?

cient poet as we might speak of a modern poet's solipsism, we can agree with Bloom that "influence-anxieties are em?

bedded in the agonistic basis of all imaginative literature."7

"Plato's contest with Homer is the central agon of Western

literature."8 But Plato was by no means Homer's only an?

tagonist in the classical period. The tragic poets' agon with

Homer was as central to their creative experience as Plato's

was to the development of his philosophical thought. Their

struggle with the master dramatist (as Plato was to name

him) took a different form, being the competition of poet with poet. Plato waged all-out war on Homer. Homer must

be eliminated; co-existence was impossible. The dramatists'

strategy was quiet assimilation; hence their anxieties escape the radar of the public gaze. Bloom makes an enigmatic ob?

servation that "influence-anxiety does not so much concern

the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem or essay

. . . the strong poem is

the achieved anxiety."9 As historians of literature, we are ac?

customed to detect within an ancient dramatist's work his

anxieties regarding his contemporary social issues. In the

Philoktetes these issues and the anxiety they arouse in

Sophocles are very plain to see. Yet if we think of Sophocles not only as teacher and statesman of his own time but as a




poet wrestling with his own poetic inheritance, speaking to

Homer no less than to his own fifth-century Athens, we de?

tect a different kind of conflict. We might even see his

Philoktetes as his "achieved anxiety" in relation to his great

precursor, Homer.

Homer was for the tragic poets of Athens their Bible, their

Milton, their Shakespeare all in one, Homer being an inclu?

sive name, given to many works now lost to us, and, more

broadly, meaning the whole epic tradition that the oral bards

had inherited from the Bronze Age. Aeschylus once called his

own dramas slices from Homer's great dinners.10 At the end

of the fifth century, when the glorious age of Athenian tragedy was drawing to its close, Sophocles was still looking for cuts

from that same High Table, still scanning Homer for some in?

cident from the edges of that tradition, which might be

worked up into an original play. The history of ancient Greek

tragedy was dominated by one single name: Homer. This was

influence-anxiety on a colossal scale.11 Even Milton and

Shakespeare, whether singly or jointly, did not lay so deep a

shadow over the British poets and dramatists who followed

them. The Homeric poems were first put into writing in the

eighth century bce, and three centuries later dramatists were

still obliged to search through the Homeric texts, and the

other texts of the epic tradition, for some plot appropriate to

their modern condition?we think of Aeschylus wanting to

comment on the founding of the Areopagus at Athens, and

needing to find his "source" in a tale extrapolated from the

Bronze Age myth of the antique House of Atreus. Even more

paradoxical, the world as represented in the Homeric epic and

myth was already obsolete when the oral performances were

transcribed into written texts. The social structures and their

mythological foundations (Achilles, for example, as the son of

a great goddess) reach back into the dim ancestral memory of

the Bronze Age. The Philoktetes myth, of a warrior en route

to war, bitten by a serpent guarding the shrine of some Asiatic

goddess, but also in possession of the numinous bow that

would spell the end of Troy, is as archaic, primitive even, as



Norman Austin 73

anything to be found in Greek mythology.12 Yet in Athens, where modern thinking had replaced the ancient aristocratic

hierarchies with democracy, the three greatest dramatists that

the Greek world had ever seen took it as a necessary condition

of their art to fit their modern themes into a primitive myth. It would be as if Arthur Miller were obliged to find his Willy Loman not in Brooklyn but on some obscure page of the Old

Testament. When Plato condemns the tragic poets for their

pernicious influence, he puts Homer at the head of the list, as

the most tragic of all the poets. Homer was the master with

whom every fifth-century dramatist was in direct competition.

Sophocles could not invent a new story, yet invention was re?

quired. Inventiveness had to be a matter of revision. That was

the challenge: to be utterly traditional, yet wholly original. But Homer was by no means the dramatist's only competi?

tor. Every tragedy performed in the Theater of Dionysus had

already emerged victorious in a vetting competition with the

other tragedies submitted for that year's festival. Once se?

lected for production by those chosen to judge the entries, the

play was officially authorized and funded, with a Chorus pro? vided by the city, and the choreography and dramaturgy di?

rected by the playwright himself. Then the play was judged a

second time, in the actual performance, by a different set of

judges, ten men chosen by lot who would witness the drama?

tist's whole trilogy and the other trilogies mounted by the

other poets on the same stage at that year's competition and

award the prizes for best performance of the year. Originality would be a primary criterion, but not cleverness. The

tragedies that have survived show that originality lay not in

gorgeous costumes or dazzling stagecraft, and only peripher?

ally in the plot. Spectacle, Aristotle is quick to remind us, is

not the primary ingredient of great tragedy. Rather, the issue

was how deep the artist's introspection into the conflicts

within the human soul.

The last, but certainly not the least, of the tragic poet's

competitions was with his precursors in the tragic art. What

a moment in the history of theater! Three Shakespeares in a




single century (with Aristophanes as the fourth, for comedy). Three Shakespeares?in competition with each other, al?

though not simultaneously (Aeschylus was dead before Eu?

ripides began his career in the theater), using the same

traditional material, submitting their dramas to the critical

judgments of their peers and the more motley judgments of

the average Athenian citizen, with the competition being less

about brilliance in the invention of plot or stage effects than

about matters of the soul. In the case of Sophocles' Philok?

tetes, Sophocles gave himself a monumental challenge, to be

judged equal, and preferably superior, to his two great pre? cursors in treating the same myth?Aeschylus (the Master!)

and Euripides (l'enfant terrible!). It was a strait jacket: to be true to Homer; indeed, not to

deviate a whit from the master's authority, but then to pres? ent for the competition of 409 bce an original drama on a

theme already produced on the same stage by two great po? ets. Again, tradition must be the overriding concern. Aeschy? lus had competed with Homer but without seriously

compromising the tradition. For Euripides, the stakes were

raised: he too had to be true to the tradition while competing with two great masters, Homer and Aeschylus. Now Sopho?

cles, coming in fourth, has to show himself the respectful fol?

lower of his great precursors, as mindful of the tradition as

they were, yet emerge as the champion, as the Original Poet?Bloom reminds us that every strong poet must be the

Original Poet. That Sophocles' Philoktetes is the only one of

the three plays to survive may be an accident of history. But

possibly Sophocles in the judgment of Time had proved him?

self more original than the others, and deeper in his psycho?

logical penetration.

History has bequeathed to us an extraordinary document,

which allows us to discern for ourselves Sophocles' originality

with some degree of confidence. Dio Chrystostomos ("The Golden Mouth") made a name for himself in the Greco-Roman

World at the end of the first century ce as a rhetorician, politi?

cian, and man of letters. He achieved distinction at the imperial



Norman Austin 75

court in Rome until he was banished by the emperor Domitian

for some political intrigue. But he was, for all his cosmopolitan

polish, a provincial gentleman, who had his home in far-off

Prusa, in Bithynia (the outer territories of the Empire), present

day Bursa in Turkey. Dio had in his library all three versions of the Philoktetes

play. One morning, feeling poorly, and with a chill in the air,

though it was still summer, he went through his normal

morning regimen?prayers, ablutions, several turns in his

carriage around the Hippodrome ("with the team moving as

gently and painlessly as possible")?then, having a light

breakfast, he retired to his library and gave himself the proj? ect to read all three plays, an occupation perhaps suggested to him by his own infirmity. He wrote an essay on that af?

ternoon's reading.^ Alas, his impressionistic remarks would

win him no appointment in any modern institution of higher

learning?we expect more of our learned readers today. But,

spare as it is, his essay is a gold mine?for such persons as

are still interested in the history of the Greek theater. With

his rudimentary remarks as our guide, we can see into the in?

tentions of each of the three poets, observing how they lean

into the tradition like sailors catching the wind, even as they tack against the tradition, revising it as they go.

A myth in itself is no more than a plot summary. A poet is

needed, a psychologist, who can intuit the passions implicit in the story line, or perhaps even invent those passions, and

transform the myth into tragedy. Aeschylus was the first to

exploit, or rather invent, the emotional ground of the

Philoktetes story. He intuited an agon in the myth, but it did

not lie on the surface, ready for the taking. To elicit that

agon from the myth, Aeschylus took one liberty with the

plot. It was a minor alteration, and did no violence to the

Homeric authority, yet it was so full of consequence that it

shifted the center of gravity of the story in perpetuity. The

first function of tragedy, as Aristotle understood it, is to

arouse anxiety. This anxiety depends on two factors: first, the pathos of the protagonist; then the emotional identifica




tion of the spectators as as they re-create in themselves the

suffering of the hero on stage.

Aeschylus found the necessary pathos in the figure of

Philoktetes, a man of heroic stature, wounded, expelled from

his community, suffering a terrible disease and a terrible iso?

lation. But the pathos of tragedy requires two persons, to

raise the anxiety from the purely personal and private pain to

public consciousness. Tragedy must have its protagonist and

antagonist. Philoktetes was the necessary protagonist, sup?

plied from the ancient myth, but the antagonist Aeschylus had to invent. The old myth, which spelled out the prophecy extracted by the Greeks from the Trojan seer Helenos, spoke of two men, Neoptolemos and Philoktetes. Both men were

required at Troy for the fall of Troy. Hence two missions

were sent out to bring them to Troy. Diomedes was sent to

Lemnos to fetch Philoktetes, Odysseus was sent on a separate mission to Skyros to fetch Neoptolemos.^ Aeschylus sagely revised this story, by dropping Diomedes from the Philoktetes

mission and transferring Odysseus from the Skyros mission

to head the Lemnos delegation. This was a canny move. Who

would imagine any great conflict arising between Diomedes

and Philoktetes? Diomedes was one of the least conflicting, least conflicted of the Greek heroes that ever sailed to Troy.

But with Odysseus sent in his place, possibilities for a monu?

mental crisis immediately suggest themselves.

The beauty of this innovation is that it respected the tradi?

tion even in its swerve from the tradition. Odysseus was al?

ready in the story, but in that other expedition to Skyros. It

was a simple matter to lift him from one episode and deposit him in the other. No one would notice, except perhaps

Diomedes, and his grumbles would pass unheard. No need

to invent a new character or a new plot. A small shift of the

characters, and ergo, it is the same story yet quite original. Even Homer could hardly fault this adaptation of his mate?

rial. No reason to censure the new poet for revisionism,

since replacing Diomedes with Odysseus in the Philoktetes

story is, in fact, more Homeric than Homer. Odysseus was



Norman Austin 77

the arch-diplomat. Who better to negotiate such a mission

requiring tact, delicacy and rhetorical polish? Sending

Odysseus to Lemnos would recall for the Athenian specta? tors the great scene in Iliad 9, when Odysseus is sent with his

two comrades to Achilles' tent in the dead of night, to nego? tiate with Achilles and have him give up his anger and rejoin his comrades on the battle front. But the old epic brings in

its train its own fund of anxieties. Who, thinking of Achilles

and Odysseus in Iliad book 9, would not remember the anx?

ieties of that Homeric epic? It was a sound intuition, for

Aeschylus to have the anxieties in the relations of Achilles

and Odysseus added subliminally from the epic tradition to

the pathos of his Philoktetes story. Depositing Odysseus into

the story, while it suggests diplomacy, also immediately arouses anxiety. How many victims had learned to fear and

hate Odyssean diplomacy? Once Aeschylus had introduced Odysseus into the Philok?

tetes drama, any version of the story without Odysseus would be unthinkable. When Sophocles makes Odysseus a

character in his version of the play, produced some sixty

years after Aeschylus' play, that is his tribute to the dramatic

skill of the master, though in his turn he was to re-write the

Odysseus part in such a way as to make the character for?

ever his own.

Forty years after Aeschylus' Philoktetes, Euripides decided

to challenge the master with his version of the drama, the

same old story but dramatized in a completely different

way.15 What could he do to put his signature on the script? He kept Odysseus in the plot, of course; that was de rigueur. He seems to have kept Diomedes in the story too, but with?

out troubling to give him a genuine part to play. But he

needed a new conflict. His novelty was to invent a Trojan

delegation, which arrives at Lemnos exactly at the moment

of Odysseus' arrival. In his revision, the Trojans, aware that

Helenos has divulged to the Greeks the information that will

bring about the fall of Troy, send a delegation posthaste to

Lemnos to head off their own catastrophe. Odysseus, sent to




Lemnos, already knows that a Trojan delegation is on its

way, and he must make haste to clinch the deal before the

Trojans upset the apple cart. Pitting Odysseus against the

most accomplished Trojan rhetorician?Webster suggests he

may have been Paris himself (who was to be the first victim

of that invincible bow)?with the fall of Troy as the subject matter of the debate?much scope for drama here. The two

delegates, Odysseus and Paris, arriving simultaneously,

plead with Philoktetes, each arguing for his own cause, with

Paris highlighting the advantages of the turncoat, which in?

cluded apparently the royal throne of Troy itself, not to

mention the sweetness of revenge, and Odysseus no doubt

striding back and forth and pounding the podium like a ver?

itable Demosthenes, arguing for honor, duty and the undy?

ing gratitude of his own people. Dio says of Euripides' version that it was more "political" (politikos). Undoubt?

edly, he must have been alluding to the formal debate in the

play between Odysseus and the Trojan delegate. Euripides had staged a scene much like those to be witnessed every day in the Athenian Assembly, with politicians of practiced rhetorical skills debating the issues of the day with much

flourish of political vocabulary. In the end, in Euripides' play Hellenism won out over Medism (assuming Euripides would

have re-cast the Greek-Trojan conflict of the Bronze Age as

the conflict of his own day, of the Greeks against the Medes

and Persians). Philoktetes routed the Phrygians off the

stage?"Phrygians" is Euripides' word, helping to equate

Trojans with the Medes?and then went compliantly with

Odysseus to Troy and so brought about the collapse of Asia.

To have Odysseus debate the issues with a Trojan delegate,

perhaps no less a person than Paris himself, before a

wounded and deeply conflicted Philoktetes, was a clever

irony. No doubt it would have much resonance in fifth-cen?

tury Athens, where Persia was still a day-to-day threat. Yet

there was something Mannerist about such a strategy.

Sophocles was more ingenious. His originality did not write

itself across the stage in banner headlines. It could pass as



Norman Austin 79

completely natural, hence more authentic than the Euripi dean strategy, truer to the Homeric tradition while at the

same time opening up the agon of tragedy to almost infinite

new possibilities in psychological depth and complexity. More traditional than Euripides, yet more original, Sopho?

cles would take the bare myth of a warrior wounded and

cast out by his comrades and exaggerate the pathos in sev?

eral different ways so as to make the protagonist all but psy?

chotic, and so take this pathology back its primal roots.

How ancient! How modern!

Sophocles too would keep Odysseus in the story; Odysseus was now the sine quo non in any version of the Philoktetes

drama. Who could imagine a Philoktetes without Odysseus

playing a leading role? But the part that Sophocles scripts for

Odysseus is so inventive that it drives the Philoktetes story off on an entirely new tangent. In fact, it also drives Odysseus clear off the stage, his tail between his legs.

Sophocles' Philoktetes has its defects. No one would argue

that it is his finest moment. Yet his Odysseus is a stroke of

genius. In comparison, Euripides with his bag of tricks seems

jejune. The first invention: Sophocles adds Neoptolemos to

the drama, sent to Lemnos with Odysseus to serve as his as?

sistant. The advantage of this move was that Neoptolemos was already in the Helenos prophecy. The myth spoke of no

specific bond between Philoktetes and Neoptolemos. They were living in two separate locations; two discrete delega? tions were sent out to fetch them to Troy; and once at Troy, each had his own moment of glory. But mixing Neoptolemos into the Philoktetes story has plausibility in its favor, "plau?

sibility" being in this context fidelity to the Homeric tradi?

tion. Who, hearing the name "Philoktetes," would not also

remember "Neoptolemos"? And vice versa. The two names

were already inseparable in the old prophecy. Furthermore, what more persuasive character for this drama, who more

Homeric than the son of Achilles, the living incarnation of

Achilles himself, "the best of the Achaeans," as he is recog?

nized in the Iliad}



8o THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

Inserting Neoptolemos into the drama was clever but not

radical. Sophocles could have chosen to have Odysseus and

Neoptolemos standing shoulder to shoulder, jointly pressing

Agamemnon's suit, each bringing his own perspective to

bear on the issue. This poet's genius was to take the hero's

burden from Odysseus' shoulders?the versatile and sea?

soned warrior?and put it squarely on the shoulders of

Neoptolemos. Now we can expect an agon such as neither

Aeschylus nor Euripides had dreamed of. Success depends

entirely now on an ephebe as yet untried in either the civic

or the military arts. Sophocles has the wit to begin the play as if Odysseus were the commander of the expedition, the

antagonist of the play. But Odysseus, it soon transpires, is

quickly relieved of his command, and comes to be the ad?

viser standing in the wings rather than the commander. By the end he is reduced to something less even than the subal?

tern. He is merely an intrusion. Tail between his legs is to

put the case in polite language. But if Neoptolemos is to be added to the plot, his presence

must be justified. First, we are to understand that the hatred

that Philoktetes bears toward Odysseus must be so intense

that Odysseus dare not show his face. This animosity was not

an ingredient in the original myth, since Diomedes, not

Odysseus, was the man sent to Lemnos to negotiate with

Philoktetes, and nothing was said of any animosity. Sopho? cles had taken this animosity as a motif from Aeschylus, and

Euripides had also made it an essential component in his

drama. But Aeschylus and Euripides had dealt with the prob? lem presented by Philoktetes' animosity each in his own way.

Aeschylus had Odysseus meet Philoktetes face to face, with?

out disguise, yet traveling under a false persona, presenting himself as hating Odysseus as much as Philoktetes did. That

Philoktetes would fail to see through the fiction and recog?

nize his great enemy might seem to us to stretch plausibility, but Dio argues that the passage of time and the ravages of

Philoktetes' disease might have dimmed Philoktetes' percep?

tion. Aeschylus was no realist, as even Dio admits, but Eu



Norman Austin 81

ripides was even less realistic. He fell back on the old Home?

ric trick of having Athena disguise Odysseus?another in?

stance of the poets' extreme dependency on Homer, even in

the poet who was considered by some the most rationalistic

of all the fifth-century playwrights. But Sophocles in this instance emerges as the best ratio?

nalist of the three. He has Odysseus kept out of sight alto?

gether, with Neoptolemos to stand in for him. Neoptolemos has never been seen by Philoktetes, hence his appearance will arouse no suspicion. On the contrary, he comes with the

finest credentials. As the son of Achilles, he will be wel?

comed wherever the name of Achilles is honored. What bet?

ter understudy could Odysseus have for this delicate

mission? Putting Neoptolemos into the drama adds a dis?

tinctly new element. The action of Odysseus must be at a

distance. His influence must be invisible and covert. He must

be absent in his presence, present in his absence.

Such a hall of mirrors brought Sophocles to the most in?

genious idea of all . . . the play within the playl Theatergo? ers in ancient Athens would have been prepared to enjoy the

spectacle of Sophocles corresponding through the play with

his great precursors?a bow to Homer here, here one to

Aeschylus, a nod to Euripides (all dead, of course, when this

play was produced). But we in our belatedness, to use

Bloom's terminology, cannot help but add Shakespeare to

our list of competitors. Sophocles' Odysseus is no Hamlet.

Quite the opposite, he is all enterprise. But all the same, here

he is, another Hamlet, inventing a play within the play "to

catch the conscience of the king" and ruining everything around him through his incompetence. This is the spectacu? lar news first announced in lines 54-55 of our text. A play

within a play is bewitching. It multiplies the mirrors of illu?

sion, collusion and delusion.16 We, seated on the upper

slopes of the amphitheater, may hiss at Odysseus in this play as he reveals, as he so often does, his baser nature. Yet, in?

veterate lovers of the theater as we are, we cannot but ad?

mire the adroit stagecraft of the multiple impersonations




thus introduced into this play. This is theater! The theater

that Plato loathed, it was so compelling. We take our seats, disposed to enjoy the spectacle of our

great Sophocles communing with his greater precursors. But

look, here is yet another dramatist, working from within the

play itself, creating the plot from the inside out?Odysseus first inventing a script and casting a part for himself, then

taking on the responsibilities of the coach?the didaskalos, as

the playwright was called in Athens, the "teacher," educating the ephebe who is to take the starring role in the play. We

cannot help but think of Sophocles reflecting on his own long and extraordinary career in the theater, starting out as an

ephebe chosen by some didaskalos to participate in his Cho?

rus, then to become in time didaskalos himself, first the com?

poser of the drama and then the coach, teaching the youths

assigned to him to become both actors and Chorus.J? Vidal

Naquet has written that embedded in the Philoktetes may be

an allusion to the ephebic military oath, and the ephebic ini?

tiation, when the young men were sent out on stealth mis?

sions to the outer perimeters of the Athenian territory.18 But

equally relevant for our reading of the play is the experience that would have been shared by a large number of Athenian

ephebes?their initiation as actors on the Athenian stage, whether as characters or as members of the Chorus.

And who is the character whom Neoptolemos will imper? sonate? Why, Odysseus himself. Of course! Neoptolemos

will be the diplomat, the charmer, the schemer, the trickster, the liar whose lies have the ring of truth; in short, the perfect

Odysseus, this youth who had never told a lie in his life. And

where does Odysseus go for the drama that he must com?

pose for his neophyte actor? Where else, but to Homer? The

story that Odysseus invents for Neoptolemos is an adapta? tion of the first great scene of the Iliad, when Achilles hurls

into himself into a self-destructive rage when Agamemnon threatens to take his captive girl Bris?is from him. Neoptole?

mos must impersonate his father, Achilles himself. But he

has already been assigned the Odysseus part, both the Odys



Norman Austin 83

seus of the Iliad sent to negotiate with Achilles in book 9 and the Odysseus of the Odyssey, the charming and inven?

tive liar. Neoptolemos, greenhorn though he may be, has

been given the chance of a lifetime in this acting school?to

impersonate the great director himself, to play Odysseus

playing Achilles.

But the best is yet to come. Odysseus, brilliant didaskalos, has the son of Achilles, all youthful enthusiasm and boyish

virtue, impersonate himself. "When Philoktetes asks you who you are," Odysseus instructs him, "tell him 'I am

Achilles' boy' That part must not be stolen from the story." This small pebble of truth must be the foundation for the

shining edifice of fraud that is to follow. Of course, when

Neoptolemos enters Odysseus' academy, he gives up honor

and virtue. They are superfluous in this academy. So he must

now impersonate the self that he would have been had he

not fallen under Odysseus' spell, playing the perfect gentle? man (kalos k'agathos in Greek) even as he desecrates the

very words. He must pretend to be the son of Achilles (in his

stage persona), but de facto he must be the son of Odysseus, a Telemachus standing shoulder to shoulder with his bril?

liant and wily father. As actor, Neoptolemos must be truly

Odyssean?playing both Odysseus and the one man in the

Greek army who hates everything and everybody that

Odysseus represents (plus also impersonating, in a sublimi?

nal way, Ajax, the other great hero who loathed Odysseus).

By this simple modification of the old traditional plot,

Sophocles has multiplied the conflicts within the single dra?

matic agon beyond anything in Aeschylus or Euripides.

Aeschylus created one conflict, between Odysseus and Philok?

tetes. Euripides created another conflict in the political debate

between Odysseus and the Trojans. But Sophocles so multi?

plies the conflicts we almost lose count?first the conflict be?

tween Odysseus and Neoptolemos; then another between

Neoptolemos and Philoktetes; another between Philoktetes

and Odysseus; and, finally, the individual conflicts of Philok?

tetes and Neoptolemos, each with and within himself. Neop




tolemos must simultaneously play both his better self and his

worse, his worse self impersonating his better self, two per? sonas in dire conflict. He must play the ever-scheming

Odysseus while impersonating both his father Achilles and

the honorable Ajax, two heroes above all scheming. So much for the program notes. Now to the text. Given

the sensuous texture and depth of meaning within the two

lines where Odysseus gives Neoptolemos his military orders, we owe it to Sophocles, the true didaskalos of this play, to

read the lines as if they were printed in Braille, our fingers

feeling our way word by word. We must invest them with at

least as much meaning as a great playwright put into them, even at the risk of overreach. Odysseus uses an image whose

boldness embarrasses us and we have the urge to dilute its

meaning. The urge must be resisted.

Odysseus' command to Neoptolemos is simple and direct:

THV OlX,OKTT|XO\) G? ?8? / \|fU%flV OTtCD? X?JOIGIV ?KK??\|/?l? ??

ycov, for which the simplest translation is "[see] how you will

steal Philoktetes; that is, his soul." The Lexicon gives us an

easy exit from the translator's predicament here, informing us that the verb ekklepto ("I steal") can be used to mean

"deceive." Jebb, in his note at line 57, notes that the simple verb klepto ("I steal") can mean "to act (or speak) a thing

fraudulently. "^ Translators mostly opt for the safe transla?

tion here, speaking of deceit, thus draining the metaphor of

its violence so that our fingers can pass over the words with?

out feeling the least perturbation. Phillips raises the heat

with his "capture": "you must capture the mind?the very soul?of Philoktetes."20 But "capture" connotes an open at?

tack, a manly form of conflict. Odysseus speaks of capture of a different sort. This is the Artful Dodger speaking. "Cap? ture" is too posh for his lips, whereas "rob" and "steal" are

his daily porridge. Let us be true to our calling as gravedig

gers and call a spade a spade. Odysseus, coaching this bright student who has just enrolled in his drama academy, sets the

tone from the very start: "You must rob Philoktetes of his

soul." A simple sentence?subject, verb, object?but with



Norman Austin 85

each element so fraught with meaning that the sentence is far

from simple to translate.

The Greek Lexicon is a monument of scholarship but in

scanning its entries we must be on guard against one major

pitfall. The Lexicon has simplified our labors by articulating seriatim the various meanings to be found in ancient Greek

for any particular entry. Once our eyes, scanning the Lexi?

con's fine print, reach the meaning that best suits the imme?

diate context of our reading, we gratefully take hold of the

authorized meaning and move on to the next word to be

wrestled with. In the case of these two verbs, kleptein and

ekkleptein, the entries are mercifully short, and we quickly arrive at the necessary meaning, "to deceive (a person)," or

"to tell a falsehood." Thanks to the imprimatur of the Lexi?

con, we are at liberty to drop from our minds the confusing

trope of a lie as a form of theft and so bypass the conun?

drum that Sophocles so carefully put in our path.

Odysseus, about to give Neoptolemos his orders, hesitates, to prepare Neoptolemos for the shock that is about to come:

"If you hear something new," he says to Neoptolemos, "it is

your duty?you owe it to your nobility?to obey those set in

command over you." The word "new" (kainon) is fraught with anxiety. It was the key term in the charge brought

against Socrates ten years after this play was produced, that

he was worshipping new gods and teaching new ideas.

"New" in that famous trial, as in this play too, means

strange, outlandish, horrifying. Hence Odysseus makes a

dramatic pause, staging a small arabesque to stress the tra?

ditional virtue of the ephebe's obedience to his elders.

The idiom is admittedly awkward for us since these verbs, the simple and the compound, when meaning "to deceive," have the person deceived as the direct object. Literally, a com?

mand to deceive a person would be "to steal" that person.

Webster, in his note on this passage, reads \|fi)%r|v here (in the

accusative case), as "external accusative"; that is, as the direct

object of the verb: "you are to steal (deceive) the psyche of

Philoktetes."21 He gives us other examples, which illustrate




the difficulty of treating these verbs in a literal way. Sopho?

cles, at Trachiniae 243, has "unless their plight deceives me"

(or, more literally, "steals me"). In another passage, at Ajax

189, Sophocles has people "stealing" the story (that is, telling a false story). We are likely to tie ourselves in knots if we want

to insist on "steal" as the correct translation in such contexts.

Nevertheless, a risk must sometimes be taken. Granting the

awkwardness, we can hardly suppose that the Athenians,

hearing Odysseus speak these words in the theater in 409

bce, simply wiped "theft" from their minds, as our modern

translations invite us to do. To drop "theft" from our transla?

tion is lose touch with a significant aspect of archaic Greek

thought?that the lie is a form of theft, grand larceny in this

case, given the political issues at stake.

The strongest reason to hold fast to the idea of theft in this

passage is for the color it gives to the character of Odysseus.

Up to line 54, Odysseus has played the traditional "Prolo?

gos," setting the scene, giving the necessary information for

Neoptolemos and for the theatergoers. But at this point he

shifts into his own role as a character in the plot. No longer the Announcer, he becomes Odysseus the Actor. Letters,

commenting on that lie that Odysseus invents for Neoptole?

mos, admits that it would shock us but would not offend the

Greeks.** Perhaps. But that is not the attitude with which we

should attend this performance. Certainly, the lie offends

Neoptolemos deeply and Odysseus must go to some lengths to argue that a lie, while ethically disgusting, in some con?

texts has its own necessity and that final victory will redeem

the disgrace and cancel the shame. Many factors in the play work to make Odysseus odious. This Odysseus is not the

charmer of the Odyssey. He is depraved. Lines 54-57 sound

the first notes of this theme. Odysseus, a thief himself, does

not stop at mere theft. He will take a virtuous youth and

steal his soul too, and teach him to become a thief like him?

self. Odysseus is Satanic.

Sophocles uses a number of strategies to develop this

theme of the Satanic Odysseus, pathologically depraved, both



Norman Austin 87

in himself and in his bloodline. In the other most significant use of the word psyche in the play, Philoktetes charges

Odysseus with having "an evil psyche," which hides and

peers through crevices, seeking some innocent youth whom

it might corrupt (lines 1013-15). Earlier in the same speech Philoktetes had accused Odysseus of "thinking nothing ei?

ther healthy or free," a man who would use Neoptolemos as

his siege tower, putting Neoptolemos forward and hiding be?

hind him as if Neoptolemos were his problema, his weapon of offense and defense. Neither healthy nor free: pathology and genetics compressed into a single formula.

For the meaning of "free" here (eleutheron, line 1006), we

retrace our steps back to lines 413-18. Philoktetes, learning from Neoptolemos that Achilles and Ajax, the greatest he?

roes of the Greek army, are both dead, while scoundrels like

Odysseus and Diomedes flourish, spits out a vituperative in?

sult at the very thought of Odysseus?"that fellow, fathered

by Sisyphos and bought by Laertes." Much loathing is com?

pressed into this insult. Sophocles has gone some distance to

ferret out the most disreputable account of Odysseus' birth

and to give it the ugliest interpretation.

"Bought" here is a crude pejorative for that customary and perfectly acceptable practice of a bride-price, paid by the groom to his prospective father-in-law. Helen was

bought in this way. In the contest for Helen, Menelaus won

her as his bride, so Hesiod reports, because he "paid" the

most.z3 Penelope was bought in the same way by Odysseus. No Greek ever thought of Helen or Penelope as "bought." Philoktetes takes us here to a story regarding the marriage of

Odysseus' parents, Antikleia and Laertes. We remember

them as two dear old souls from the Odyssey?Antikleia in

the underworld, dying prematurely in grief for her absent

son; and Laertes, slowly disintegrating in his untended gar?

den, dying slowly in his own way, also for the love of his son

Odysseus. These sentimental portraits are not the myth that

Philoktetes draws upon. The bride-price to which he refers,

paid by Laertes, the prospective bridegroom, to Autolykos




for the hand of his daughter Antikleia, renders the relation?

ship of husband and wife down to that of man and slave. It

does not improve this woman's status that her father was

Autolykos, prince of thieves and liars, clearly a shrewd ne?

gotiator in the present context.

The story gets worse. When Laertes, the foolish bride?

groom of our story, bought Antikleia, he must have believed

himself in possession of a virgin bride, only to discover that

she was no bride, but a woman already pregnant, with a

child fathered by that arch-trickster Sisyphos. To call

Sisyphos a prince of liars would be understatement. He was

one of the great sinners whom Odysseus saw in the under?

world, forever punished for his frauds and deceits in that

memorable scene, pushing that eternal rock up that eternal

mountain side. So Antikleia, whom we remember with af?

fection in the Odyssey, is here cast as slave, cheat, and

whore. Laertes would discover after his marriage that he had

bought not only a wife but unwittingly her bastard son?

and what a son! That is why, in Philoktetes' eyes, Odysseus could never think a single thought either healthy or free, be?

ing a slave and the son of a slave. The disease runs in his

blood. That is why he lurks in the shadows, like some pre Christian Satan, seeking whom he might corrupt, some gen? erous and noble youth to use as his instrument and decoy.24

At lines 446-52, asking about the notorious Thersites and

learning that he is still alive, Philoktetes reacts with a tirade

just this side of blasphemy, that the gods preserve the evildo?

ers while sending the virtuous to their deaths. We remember

Thersites from Iliad book 2, the ugliest man who ever came to

Troy, as the poem describes him, who hurls abuse at

Agamemnon for his mistreatment of Achilles. His misshapen

physique is described with a fond detail given to no other

character in the whole epic, whether beautiful or ugly. Why should Philoktetes need to introduce him into the discussion

in this play? He means nothing to Philoktetes and is superflu? ous to this play, except as a moral parable, that the mean and

ugly flourish while the beautiful die before their time. The ug



Norman Austin 89

liness of Thersites is yet another dark color that Sophocles ap?

plies to his portrait of Odysseus.25 Birds of a feather.

So much for the theft. Now for what Neoptolemos is to

steal from Philoktetes: his psyche. Translators shy away from

translating the word as "soul" here, mindful of the received

opinion, that psyche did not come to mean "soul" in our

modern sense before Plato, and thinking it an anachronism to

introduce "soul" into a context that antedates Plato's mature

theory of the soul by half a century and more. Phillips is pre?

pared to admit the word "soul" into his translation, albeit

hesitantly, softening its impact by calling it "mind" first, and

adding "soul" as it were a parenthesis. The default translation

here becomes "mind." But psyche in pre-Platonic thought was

never identical with "mind," though in time it comes to be as?

sociated with cognitive functions and emotional states. An?

cient Greek, from Homer to the classical period, has a

number of words to express cognition and emotions?think?

ing, perceiving, feeling, desiring and the like?but psyche is

not one of them, until it emerges as the chief vehicle of con?

sciousness in Plato. The commonest words for thought, or the

site where thought originates in the human anatomy, are nous

(mind) and phr?n, pi. phrenes (mind). But these are not what

Odysseus is after in Sophocles' play. We would be hard put to name any other single word in an?

cient Greek that has more profoundly influenced Western in?

tellectual and religious history than this word psyche. Already in Homer it was a privileged word, something quite distinct

from the organs of cognition and emotion. Its scope expanded in the archaic philosophers and the tragic poets, and even

more in Plato and Aristotle. From them the word passed to

the post-Aristotelian philosophers, thence to the Church fa?

thers, and most recently, in our time, into psychoanalysis, transmitted from century to century, gathering meanings as it

went. A word of such pedigree deserves our closer attention,

especially in this present context, where it signifies that for

which Philoktetes is willing to give up even his life.

Modern investigation into the history of the word begins




with the magisterial study by Rohde, first published in

1893.26 Rohde's objective was to trace the development of

the concepts contained in the word from its use in Homer to

its full flowering as the Platonic "soul" several centuries later.

In the Homeric epics, where we first encounter the word,

psyche has two discrete yet interrelated meanings, and this

dual nature remains within the word all through ancient lit?

erature. It can mean simply "life." As such, it can be fought

for, contested, put at risk, taken, as we too might speak of

taking a person's life. It is generally understood to be the

breath of life, whatever it is that animates the human being. As such, it is never said to do anything. It remains with and

within the person until the moment of death, at which point it vacates the body and flits down to the underworld, where

it continues a second kind of existence, no longer "life-force"

but now "shade" or "image" of the once-living person. In its

underworld existence, it is described as resembling smoke, or

as an eidolon, an image of the dead person, an after-image as

one of my students once described it.

From the ghost of Patroclus in the Iliad and the ghost of

Odysseus' mother in the Odyssey, we learn something of the

nature of the psyche once it has separated from the person's

body and been transformed from its former existence as

"life" into its new existence as "image." This eidolon looks

as the person looked in life yet is in effect bodiless. The body remained behind, as "corpse" (soma). The eidolon has no

bones, sinews, nerves, muscles, none of the parts and accou?

trements that constitute the body. It is two-dimensional. It

can be seen but not touched. The hand of a living person

passes through it as it would through a reflection. It has no

substance. It is an after-image, which does not even retain

anything of the living person's consciousness. It simply floats. Odysseus in the underworld discovers that the ei?

dolon of the seer Tiresias has been allowed to retain his con?

sciousness. But this was a special dispensation, given by Zeus himself. The other ghosts must drink fresh warm blood

poured out for them by Odysseus in order to recover their



Norman Austin 91

consciousness, but even then only temporarily.

Rohde, strongly influenced by the anthropology that dom?

inated cultural studies at the end of the nineteenth century,

placed great emphasis on the cults of the dead, finding many

parallels between such cults in ancient Greece and in the

primitive cultures being studied by anthropologists of his

day. One aspect of such cults, which Rohde saw with won?

derful clarity, was the belief in the ghost (the psyche in

Greek) as the person's double, a doppelganger. Needless to

say, popular thought, whether modern or ancient, is never

consistent in regard to death and the hereafter. At one mo?

ment this ghost is thought to be no more than an apparition. Yet at another moment, this apparition is thought to be po? tent with the living person's affections and desires, with the

power to visit misfortunes or blessings upon the living. Who

can forget the angry ghosts in Aeschylus' Eumenides, the

murdered mother's image multiplied a hundredfold, those

"Kindly Ones" dedicated to sheer, blind revenge on her hate?

ful, murderous son?

Rohde's discussion of the psyche as the person's double fo?

cuses mainly on it as ghost or image which survives the

death of the body. But its double nature is apparent in many different ways. Even in its relation to the living person, it

acts as a double. As the life-force permeating the whole liv?

ing person, but located in no organ or single part of the

body, it is in some sense the person's other self, the invisible

self that maintains the visible and palpable self in its living form. In its first duality, it has two kinds of existence, one as

the animating power of the living person, and a second exis?

tence, however vague and attenuated, after the body has be?

come a corpse. It is the only part or aspect of the human

being that can pass through the membrane between life and

death?a membrane otherwise totally impermeable. Even in

its most primitive usage, then, in Homer's inheritance from

the distant Bronze Age bards, it has multiple meanings?as

life, as a person's other self, as a person's truest self yet at the

same time nothing more than image and reflection. We are




tempted to call such an entity metaphysical except that

Homer knows nothing yet of a firm distinction between the

physical and metaphysical. But even in pre-theoretical Homer, the chief distinction of the psyche was its uncanny power to

maintain a person's life and then somehow to resist death, to

pass through death and find itself still alive on the other side, even if only as a shadow.

This fundamental duality in the nature of psyche provides the link between the psyche in Homer and as it came to be

defined by the later philosophers and those whom Rohde

calls "the theologians." In the Mystery cults, which Rohde

traces back to the Thracian cult of Dionysus, in Orphism and among the Pythagoreans, the concept began to take

hold of the psyche as more than just the life-force or the

ghost, as something close to the core of a person's being. The

Pythagoreans began to talk of the psyche as immortal, thus

bringing what was unconscious intuition in Homer into con?

scious theory. In 1955, Snell made another great contribution to this

subject in a book as rich in insight today as when it was first

published.2^ Where Rohde fastened on the anthropological

aspects, Snell's study belongs in the category of intellectual

history. His texts are taken from the philosophers and the

poets, particularly the tragic poets. Rosenmeyer translated

Snell's title as The Discovery of the Mind. No doubt he gave considerable thought to this translation, whether to translate

Geist in Snell's title as Mind or Soul. For some parts of

Snell's study, mind is probably the best choice, but for other

sections soul might be the preferable word. Snell himself

calls the Greek psyche both Geist and Seele; that is, now

mind, now soul. Snell's book could be subtitled, "The Dis?

covery of the Psyche as the Self. "

Snell sees a definitive shift in meaning from the Homeric

psyche to the psyche of the philosophers in Heraclitus, fr. 45:

"Proceeding by every path, you would never reach the limits

of psyche, so deep is its logos."zS The shift here is two-fold.

Snell writes of the shift from outwardness to inwardness, but



Norman Austin 93

equally significant is the shift in focus from the psyche as

ghost and image of the once-living person, to its function as

the very logos that structures that person's life. Homer has

no information at all about the psyche when it is the person's life-force. All the information in Homer about the psyche concerns its ghostly nature. But after Heraclitus, while the

word will always retain its meaning as ghost, the emphasis in the philosophers moves to psyche as the animating, or?

dering principle of the living person. The difficulty for us in

searching for the right synonym for this word in English is

that the word had no synonym even in Greek. That which

animated the living person and yet survived the death of the

body to serve as ghost, image, reflection, could not be ex?

pressed by any other Greek word, just as for us too the soul

can hardly be discussed except in tautology; that is, in the

language not of mind or body, but of soul. It is like the mind

but not the mind, like the body but not the body, and its

own unique properties are more interesting than any of

those that it seems to share with either mind or body. For Kahn, the importance of this fragment ( 16 in his num?

bering) is that here "the psyche for Heraclitus plays the role

of a 'first principle,' a Milesian arche." zv This helps us to

perceive that great divide between the old Homeric concept and the emerging, vastly expanding, philosophical meaning. This psyche has logos (unimaginable in Homer), and this lo?

gos is beyond our grasp. Kahn shares the common view that

logos in this fragment is to be taken as "measure," but since

we cannot discover its limits, it must be so profound as to be

"scarcely . . . distinct from the universal logos." This inter?

pretation, Kahn continues, helps us to understand another

fragment (28 in his numbering = D101): "By seeking for his

own self Heraclitus could find the identity of the universe, for the logos of the soul goes so deep that it coincides with

the logos that structures everything in the world."3? From

forlorn and vacuous ghost in Homer to the microcosmic

particle of the World Soul in Heraclitus?a seismic shift!

Not every scholar accepts Snell's reading of the fragment.




Marcovitch cautions us against the anachronism of imputing the body/soul dichotomy (soma/psyche) into Heraclitus'

thought. Heraclitus was still a materialist, as were all the

Milesian philosophers. The psyche, like everything else, arises from the physical elements, is constituted by the ele?

ments, and disintegrates back into the elements, in the per? manent cycle of change that is the foundation of Heraclitus'

cosmology. Marcovitch cannot accept the logos of this Her

aclitean psyche as infinite, no doubt because infinity would

be another anachronism. Taking logos as "measure," Mar?

co vich argues that it is not infinite, but "hidden and difficult

to be sought out. The soul's logos can be discovered, though not in the traditional way of searching.'^1

Granted, the rigorous dichotomy of somalpsyche had yet to be fully articulated in Greek philosophy. Yet the di?

chotomy certainly exists, even in Homer, albeit if only as a

poetic intuition. In Homer the body of a living person is

never called soma. Soma signifies the corpse. But the per? son's psyche never dies. It continues the person's existence,

however flimsy that existence might be. The cults of the

dead, which are clearly part of Homeric thought and prac?

tice, make the continuing existence of the ghost even more

apparent, being based on the belief that a person's psyche

possesses at least as much vigor and power as the person

possessed in life, and maybe more.

If we grant that Heraclitus did not yet have the vocabulary to signify the infinite in a rigorous mathematical way, surely he

is using a bold intuitive image to reach for the concept of the

infinite. It hardly matters whether Heraclitus would be pinned down on every point. Whether the human soul is material or

immaterial, whether it is limitless or its limits are hidden from

us; whether infinitely small or infinitely large, its measure and

structure exceeds the boundaries of human thought. This is no

physical organ, in the normal sense of the word.

More recently, Claus has applied the brake to the common

practice of treating the psyche as an organ of cognition in

pre-Socratic thought.32- Concerned that the literary testi



Norman Austin 95

mony does not support Rohde's argument for the develop? ment of the meanings of the word in the period between

Homer and Plato, Claus has made an exhaustive study of

the word in pre-Platonic literature, concentrating principally on non-philosophical, literary texts, focusing on the word

both in isolation from other words and in its relation to the

numerous words in Greek that refer to cognitive or emo?

tional processes. The psyche, Claus insists, can rarely be

identified in an unequivocal way as an organ or process of

cognition. Taking its essential meaning to be "life-force," he

argues that most usages in the pre-Platonic literature can be

traced to this root, other than when it is clearly referring to

the ghost or shade. In the pre-Platonic literature, Claus finds

that the meanings of psyche (in reference to it in the living

person) can be rendered down either to signify the "life

force" or to its function as a periphrasis for a person's name.

Homer has a number of such periphrastic constructions?

"the sacred might of Telemachus," for example, as one of

the formulas for "Telemachus." Tragedy uses a similar con?

struction with kara, "head." The most famous example oc?

cupies the first line of Sophocles' Antigone, when Antigone addresses her sister as "O dear head of my own sister Is

mene." Periphrasis is here so intricately embellished that it

defies translation. Jebb, in his edition of the play, saves us

from the risk of gibberish by eliminating that poor head, as

overburdened as it is under-qualified, and giving us a trans?

lation more attuned to our modern sentiments: "Ismene, my

sister, my own dear sister."33

Claus finds a similar periphrasis in Euripides' Hecuba

87-88, where Hecuba calls for "the divine psyche of He?

lenos [the Trojan seer], or Cassandra," to read her dream.34

Claus detects no difference between the periphrasis and the

simple name, between "the divine psyche of Helenos" and

"Helenos." Many instances of psyche in the tragic poets Claus reduces to this periphrasis, as no more than poetic clich?. Our example, at Philoktetes 55, could also be read in

this way, since the verb ekklept?, when meaning "deceive,"




can be followed by the person as direct object: Odysseus could have said to Neoptolemos, "you must steal (i.e., de?

ceive) Philoktetes." By this argument, adding psyche to the

formula has no other function but embellishment.

Claus brings a careful philological exactitude to a complex

topic. But there are problems inherent in reducing a very large number of instances of a complex word down to its simplest common denominator. The head, for example, had a special

significance in ancient Greek thought. When Antigone calls to

the dear head of her sister Ismene, we spare ourselves fatuous

smiles by rendering her extravagant periphrasis down to "Is?

mene," but what have we forfeited in the process? Our dainty

perambulation around her periphrasis leads us to avoid an?

other word in Antigone's address. She calls her sister au

todelphon, using the neuter case for the word. We take it as

no more than "sister," but its fuller significance is "from the

same womb." She is speaking of Ismene's head: it came from

that selfsame womb from which came Antigone's own head. I

read Antigone to mean here: "O beloved head, which

emerged from the same womb as my very own head." What

more beautiful way to describe both the absolute Other and

the linkage that joins each One with its Other? If metaphor is, as Aristotle argues, the chief glory of poetry, why should we

labor to erase it from our ancient poets?

Why should we assume that Hecuba's search for "the divine

psyche of Helenos," is only poetic flourish? Claus argues that

this noun-adjective combination (theian psych an, "divine psy?

che") "is not meant to signify a thoughtful connection of soul

and divinity."35 Why not? Pindar informs us that the psyche, while it dwells with us, can signal to us in our dreams, to

point out some impending crisis, because it is the part we have

received from the gods.36 If Pindar could speak of the psyche as divine and endowed with prophetic power, why assume

that Euripides could not be drawing on a similar belief?

Claus does well to caution us against seeing psyche in the

early literature as a word to express cognition. He brings considerable finesse to his analysis of the psychological com



Norman Austin 97

ponent in various instances of psyche in tragedy, but insists

that all these usages can be traced back to its original mean?

ing as "life-force." The point should be emphasized. In

Homer the psyche is credited with no cognitive functions, whether in the living person or as the person's ghost, except

in the strange case of Tiresias.37 It should therefore be care?

fully differentiated from all the words used to express men?

tal or emotional acts. Yet, when the focus shifts in literature

from the psyche as shade to psyche as the indwelling order?

ing and animating principle, it comes to be associated with

emotional states. It seems to be particularly susceptible to

pleasures and pains, especially erotic pleasures. Gorgias ar?

gues that it is profoundly influenced by speech and sight. 3 s It

is less an organ of cognition than a state of being.

Separating psyche from the words for cognition in no way diminishes it. On the contrary, it is to argue for its special status and its unique character. Even in Homer it holds a

privileged place, being both the life-force and that which

survives the death of the body and remains as a permanent reminder of that's person's life. "Life-force" and "ghost" are

two entirely different concepts, as radically opposed to each

other as real and imaginary, or material and non-material.

One can only exist in the absence of the other. Yet both are

contained in the same word in Homer, and both continue

their co-existence through the whole history of the word in

ancient Greek literature, like the twins Castor and Pollux; the one above ground while the other dwells below as his

shadow, the visibility of the one eclipsing the other.

Another problem in taking each instance of the word in

isolation from the broader context is that such a method

scarcely hints at the sheer abundance of this word's appear? ance in sixth and fifth century literature. It was nothing short of an explosion. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae gives us some 40 instances of the word psyche in Sophocles, not a

large number perhaps, until we recall that these are culled

from only seven plays and a few fragments. He is said to

have produced 123 plays. Extrapolating and projecting, we




might put the total occurrences in Sophocles at some 500 in?

stances. The surviving plays of Euripides give us some 187

instances, plus or minus. Projecting this percentage over his

total output, we might have another 500 instances. Aeschy? lus is a more difficult case. The TLG gives some 50 instances

for him, but most are in reference to the shade. In Sophocles and Euripides, in the majority of instances, the reference is

to the living person, not simply "life" or "ghost." The in?

creasing use of the word in the tragic poets is a remarkable

phenomenon. By contrast, the word scarcely appears in the

historians, Herodotus and Thucydides.39 The psyche was

not the subject of the historians' interest, but clearly it was

very much on the mind of the tragic poets, and ever more so

as the fifth century progressed. The TLG gives us 1,268 instances of psyche in Plato, an

enormous number, as we should expect in the first philoso?

pher to articulate a comprehensive theory of the soul. But put the two tragic poets together, and their usage, perhaps 1,000

times between them, begins to compare with Plato's. We

could draw a somewhat rudimentary graph of the increasing

usage of the word in the fifth century. The TLG gives us a

count of some 20,500 unique words in the whole Sophoclean

corpus (that is, the surviving plays and fragments). The pro?

portion of the uses of psyche to the total output would be ap?

proximately 1:500. In Euripides, the proportion becomes

1:185; in Plato, 1:40. Even without statisticians to draw us a

sophisticated mathematical graph, we can see the steep in?

cline of this curve from Sophocles to Euripides to Plato.

Surely, the sheer density represented by this curve has sig? nificance in and of itself. Sophocles may have used the word

some 500 times, and mostly, we might assume, to refer to

the living person. Euripides may have been even more partial to the word. The density of usage in the tragic poets surely

points to an almost obsessive preoccupation with the word

and its associated concepts. We might even infer that the

tragic poets were working their way to their own theory of

the soul. Defining the soul had become the intellectual exer



Norman Austin 99

eise of the age. In Sophocles and Euripides, the word is de?

cidedly "marked," to use the term of the Frankfurt linguists. The proliferation of the word in Sophocles and Euripides

suggests that Plato was bringing to its culmination a process

of introspective meditation on the psyche that was already a

significant project in the thinking of the greatest poets that

Athens was ever to know. We do well to recall that even for

Plato, the psyche had not become that completely personal,

idiosyncratic, individual entity that "soul" was to become in

post-Enlightenment thought.4? Santayana makes the point with his customary eloquence, that Plato's philosophy re?

mained always political: "To this descendant of Solon the

universe could never be anything but a crystal case to hold

the jewel of a Greek city."4l

Snell, tracing the development of "mind" in Greek litera?

ture, draws our attention to the significance of decision

making in Greek tragedy.42 In Homer, decisions, when

required, are brief and to the point. A warrior will debate in?

ternally two alternatives, each with its own hazard. The is?

sue is fairly simple. The warrior does not dally; he hesitates

for but a moment or two before choosing A over B, and then

he is back in the action. Unfortunately, Snell does not give

any consideration in this context to the great decision-mak?

ing scene in Iliad book 9, when the three ambassadors come

from Agamemnon to Achilles' tent to win a change of heart

in Achilles and have him consent to rejoin his comrades on

the battle line. Putting that scene aside, and the other great

decision-making scene, in Odyssey book 19, when Odysseus and Penelope stay up far into the night working to reach a

decision regarding the course of action for the next day, we

can concur that, in the Homeric poems, most of the time,

and especially in the Iliad, the emphasis is more on action

than on the cognitive processes that lead to action.

But the decision itself becomes the substance in tragedy; and decision-making, the action.43 Nowhere is this more

conspicuous than in Sophocles' Philoktetes, where there is

virtually no action at all, except the action of the mind



ioo THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

wrestling to reach a decision in a highly complicated situa?

tion, with great moral issues on every side. The play presents one simple objective: to get Philoktetes onto Odysseus' ship and on his way to Troy. This is not accomplished. Instead, at

the end, only a decision has been accomplished. But the con?

sequences of that decision will all take place off-screen. As

the curtain falls, Philoktetes is still on the island. True, he

has agreed to leave. He has sung his farewell hymn to Lem?

nos and is moving offstage now with Neoptolemos, follow?

ing the Chorus.

The "action," as Homer would understand action, is left

to our imagination. It will take place only when Philoktetes

has left the stage, and it will happen only in our mind after

the theater has gone dark. We would want several scenes

painted in gripping detail. First, the shipboard scene, with a

sullen Odysseus standing at the helm and a foul-smelling Philoktetes enthroned amidships as man of the hour. Next, the landing at Troy. Would Odysseus swagger as Philoktetes

had assumed? How would he signal that the mission was ac?

complished though he himself had been defeated? Then the

reconciliation scene between Philoktetes and his two arch?

enemies, those terrible sons of Atreus. Would they be gra? cious? Would he? Next, the great healing scene, when the

sons of Asclepius sing their incantation over that suppurat?

ing wound, and Philoktetes stands erect on his own two feet, a man again, free at last. And of course we want the Pindaric

moment of victory?the archer kneeling to draw the bow?

string on the great composite bow; the fatal arrow sped to

its mark; Paris is hit; he falls, and Troy falls with him. All

this, which would be the meat of the poem in the days of

oral composition, is to be merely inferred or imagined from

the decision-making process that occupies the play. Those

coming to this play to see action will be disappointed.44 The

action, such as there is, is to be seen in the comings and go?

ings of Odysseus and Neoptolemos, pacing back and forth

as it were, on and off the stage, making it visible that this is

the theater of the mind.



Norman Austin ioi

Surely, the shift in tragedy from the external stage to the

inner temple where we parade our thoughts and beliefs, con?

tributes, in part at least, to the steep incline in the use of the

word psyche in the two great dramatic poets. In Oedipus Rex 59-64, Sophocles has Oedipus say to his townsfolk: "I

know that you are sick, but none of you has a sickness like

mine. The pain that all of you suffer?that total sum of pain is passed onto one person, onto one person alone, onto him

and no one else. My psyche groans for you, for the city and

for me, all of us altogether." Surely, psyche here is not sim?

ply periphrasis for "myself." Sophocles wants us to feel

something in us that feels pain, our own and the pain of

those around us, a faculty of identification with another and

compassion for another's suffering. The psyche of Oedipus knows that he, the psyche's visible self, is sick and this psy? che suffers with and for the sick Oedipus. The Homeric psy? che is never said to suffer, except when consciousness is

temporarily restored to it with the blood of sacrifice.

Rohde argued that while psyche had come to mean soul in

the esoteric traditions, among the Orphies and Pythagore?

ans, that belief had not yet penetrated into the popular cul?

ture in the fifth century. Socrates, as Plato presents him to us

as he was in the last days of his life, seems to have no very decided ideas about the psyche. Whether it is mortal or im?

mortal seemed not to be a pressing issue for him. He was

content with the belief that in the hereafter he would be

among the blessed. As to immortality, he confessed igno?

rance, and true to his persona, where he knew nothing he

preferred not to theorize. Rohde surmised that Plato's theory of soul evolved in step with his evolving theory of Forms. As

Plato began to imagine the eternal Forms, he came to see

that within each human being must exist something like a

Form, an eternal Being, which could also transcend space

and time and so recognize and respond to the eternal Forms.

Burnet followed this line of argument with a significant es?

say published in 1916.45 He concurs with Rohde that

Socrates as represented in his last days seems to have had no



I02 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

coherent philosophical concept of the soul. Even so, as Bur

net shows, the psyche had great significance for Socrates. In

the Apology, Plato has Socrates tell the jurors at his trial that

if they were to promise him an acquittal, provided he agree to stop philosophizing (his word), he would never consent to

change his way of XiieM He would continue as he had al?

ways done, going around the city and exhorting his fellow

citizens to care for their soul. "Sir," he would say, "O best of

men, you who are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city and the most renowned for wisdom and strength?are you not ashamed to be concerned for wealth, how much you can

accumulate, and for reputation and status, but care nothing for thought itself, for truth or for the psyche, how it might be best?" Burnet can find no parallel for this image in the

pre-Socratic literature of the fifth century and before. If

these are indeed Socrates' words (and Burnet accepts them

as such), Burnet takes them to spell out a revolution in

thought: "Not only had the word \|A)%r| never been used in

this way, but the existence of what Socrates called by that

name had never been realized. "47 The care of the soul be?

comes a common trope in the fourth-century philosophical

texts, but the idea, as Socrates expressed it "must have come

as a shock to the Athenian of those days, and may have even

seemed not a little ridiculous. "48

If Sophocles and Euripides between them had already used

the word psyche perhaps a thousand times (admittedly an

extrapolation ex silentio) several decades before Plato put

pen to papyrus, it is hard to believe that the sophisticated Athenian whom Socrates badgers in his imaginary speech would have found Socrates' idea incomprehensible and silly. Socrates was not plying his trade in some backwater of the

Empire. He was speaking to the citizens of the city he calls

the most famous in Hellas for its sophia. Burnet finds but two instances?very interesting for our

purposes?in the pre-Platonic literature where psyche can be

taken to mean "character," and both are to be found in this

play, the Philoktetes. The first instance is at line 55, in our



Norman Austin 103

passage?the psyche to be stolen from Philoktetes. The sec?

ond is in line 1014, when Philoktetes accuses Odysseus to

his face of having an evil psyche, which lurks in hiding and

peers through cracks and crevices, seeking whom it may cor?

rupt. These instances, occurring in a play produced at the

end of the century, in Burnet's view prefigure the usage that

was to become commonplace a few decades later.49 But if

Sophocles could present on the popular stage the psyche as

"character," a person's essential ethos, why should Socrates'

exhortations to his fellow Athenians to care for their soul

seem so uncouth?

We may not find in the pre-Platonic literature the exact

parallel for Socrates' words in the Apology, but we have

enough instances to assure us that the care of the soul was

not an outlandish idea. Certainly, the Pythagoreans, with

their definition of soul as "harmony," would have been con?

cerned with the health of the soul. Their abstemious life?

style was not solely due to a horror of growing obese.

Heraclitus, too, we can assume, would care for his psyche,

given that it was stamped with sign of the universal Logos

(there was only one Logos in Heraclitus, not one logos here, another there). We can assume that Heraclitus was even fas?

tidious in matters of the soul, given his disgust for the wet

and sodden soul, and his admiration of the lucidity of the

dry soul.

For a change of tone, we turn to an haunting elegy attrib?

uted to the lyric poet Simonides, on the brevity of life.5? He

begins his meditation by recalling a line from Homer, "the

man from Chios."

This was the best thing the man of Chios ever said:

'As the generation of leaves, so it is with human kind.'

Few mortals take this in with their ears

and truly deposit it in their chests ("hearts").

In every human being is Hope.

It grows in the chests ("hearts") of the young.



I04 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

As long as someone possesses the lovely bloom of youth,

his spirit (thymos) is light. He thinks many impossible thoughts?

no expectation that he will ever grow old or die,

and in health no thought of sickness.

Fools, who hold this thought in their minds.

They know not how small is the time of life, how brief the bloom

of youth for beings bound for death.

But you?

you who know this,

approach life's terminus

with fortitude, and cherish

your psyche with good things.

One remarkable trait in this lovely poem is the number of

words that Simonides uses to express some aspect of intel?

lectual or emotional activity. He has "mind" (nous, phrontis, from phrenes). He speaks of the chest where Hope grows

(st?thos, which we translate as "heart"). He thinks of the

airy spirit (thymos) of the young person, lost in his own nar?

cissistic illusions. He distinguishes between the ears as the

external sense receptors, and the heart, where true knowl?

edge dwells. In the last section, where he turns from general reflections to a direct address to his imaginary listener, he

brings in another word of cognition: manthan? ("learn")?

"you have learned, and therefore know ..." Finally, after

this great emphasis on mind and spirit, and talk of ears that

hear but do not understand, he sums up the whole catalogue in a single word: psyche. And the message? It is positively Socratic: if you truly understand the brevity of life and the

folly of illusion, you will cherish your soul.

The participle that I have translated as "cherish" is from

the verb kharizomai, based on the noun kharis, "grace." The

verb, so richly textured, in its base meaning is to do someone

a favor, give a gift. Campbell translates it as "indulge," which

is certainly a kind of favor, but can we preserve in our trans



Norman Austin 105

lation the sense of "grace"? "Knowing the true nature of life, with its fleeting beauty and its narcissistic illusions," the poet counsels his listener, "be gracious to your soul." Socrates and

Simonides might have a disagreement as to the kind of goods to bestow upon the soul. But perhaps not. Simonides' poem

hardly belongs to the carpe diem school of lyric. It is not an?

other ditty on the rosebud theme. Being a Greek, and a poet, Simonides no doubt would have thought a symposium the

right kind of treat for his soul, with poets singing to each

other or chatting on themes now brittle, now grave, a slave

boy to serve the wine, a slave girl to dance and play the flute, and a leg of lamb for the stomach's sake. To be sure, this is

not a poem in praise of either church or chapel. Monasticism

was not in Simonides' program. But neither is this a poem in

praise only of the transitory pleasures of the moment. It is

philosophical, elegiac in the best sense of the term, somber

even its lightness, addressed to someone perhaps approach?

ing the end of his life, pessimistic, but in the Greek sense, without despair, but rather calling for a true understanding of

the transience of life's hopes, pleasures and illusions. Surely, the goods that would nourish this clear-sighted soul would be

at least as much philosophical as material.

The mind and its workings must have seemed strange to

the ancients but the psyche was more than strange. It was

daemonic, the signifier of every contradiction?to be every?

thing and nothing at the same time. To be of the body but

not of the body, to be alive in death and all but dead in life, to be visible and invisible. We find that mystical character of

the psyche in the Pythagoreans, in Heraclitus, but we can

feel it even in a prose work like The Encomium to Helen, at?

tributed to the rhetor Gorgias.51 This brief essay refers to the

psyche some 16 times, a notable fact in itself, and always in

reference to that indwelling entity which is subject to emo?

tion and persuasion. It is particularly susceptible to words

(logos), to sight, and to poetry (by which he would mean

music). It is that most inner part of Helen's being. Many times the author (let us assume, Gorgias) could have used



io6 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

one or another of the customary words to express cognition

or emotion, since he is talking of the persuasive effect of lan?

guage and music on what we would call the "mind," but he

seems by a strong instinct to avoid these words, in prefer? ence for psyche. The thought and the language are Platonic.

He talks of logos (speech) as a drug or as a wizard's skill, which can bewitch the psyche, inducing terror or delight. He

writes that logos can affect the disposition of the psyche in

the same way that drugs can affect the disposition of the

body. Psyche seems to be something other than mind, some?

thing more like disposition, mental and emotional constitu?

tion, or character. This is yet another text from the fifth

century where we can watch the author working towards his

own concept of soul. In the end, Gorgias offers no advice on

the care of the soul. Indeed, the argument is that the psyche is but clay in the potter's hand when the potter is a wizard

with words. But we certainly can infer from this speech that

Gorgias too, when he was not dazzling the Athenian public with his magic, in the privacy of his own home would have

thought of his psyche as something both precious and vul?

nerable.

History has given us two passages from Pindar where he

speaks of the psyche in ways that leave us in no doubt as to

his concern for its nature and destiny. At Olympian 2.53-83, Pindar dwells at an unusual length on the psyche, on death

and the hereafter. The ode was composed in 476 bce for

Theron, tyrant of Akragas in Sicily, for his victory in the

chariot race at the Olympian Games. It is thought that the

eschatology of this passage reflects Pythagorean ideas, since

Sicily in western Greece was strongly under the influence of

the Pythagoreans whose base was in Magna Graecia. Pindar

in this passage articulates three "post-mortem states. "5* Pin?

dar leads into the theme by speaking first of wealth,

"adorned with virtues," as the brightest star, a human's

strongest beacon. But, he continues, if the person has wealth

(hence, implicitly, virtue) and understands the future that the

powerless spirits of the dead ... As Willcock notes, Pindar



Norman Austin 107

never completes the apodosis of this sentence. It is swal?

lowed up into the sublime painting of the world of the psy?

che, as the psyche passes to and fro through the veil between

the here and the hereafter. The message of the apodosis is

woven into the painting, but clear enough for anyone to see,

that a man's wealth is no star, even when the man is of a dis?

tinguished family and tyrant of one of the greatest cities of

the known world?even so, the wealth is squandered if such

an owner gives no thought to his psyche as it is now and as

it will be in the hereafter.

Pindar paints his picture of the hereafter two times over.

He gives, in short, two paintings, whose landscapes some?

what overlap, yet each has its own distinctive features. In the

first painting, "the powerless minds of the dead," as Pindar

calls them, pass into the underworld, where a judge (un?

named) passes judgments on the wicked, speaking the word

of terrible Doom. But the good?"those who took their de?

light in fulfilling their oaths"?such people pass to a place of

serenity, marked by equinoctial weather, equal days and

equal nights, never troubling either earth or sea to eke out a

meager livelihood. There, in the company of the gods whom

they honored, those who were faithful to their oaths spend their time free of suffering, sorrow, tears, or labor.

Then, with hardly a semi-colon to mark the transition, Pin?

dar paints for us the second view of the hereafter, his focus

now on the transmigration of the psyche from this life to the

hereafter and back into this life again, presumably in a new

body. Those who complete the whole cycle?life to death to

life?three times, keeping their psyche free of all wrongdoing on both sides of the veil through that whole triple revolution, then go to the Island of the Blest. In a leap of the lyrical imag?

ination, Pindar gives us the best painting of Paradise that has

come down to us from pagan Greece. In a few lines, Pindar

has given us one of the earliest poems in our Western tradi?

tion on the journey of the soul, from this life to the next and

back again, both gathering impurities and being purged of

them, until at last, cleansed of all imperfections, the soul ar



io8 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

rives at bliss itself. Being a pagan, Pindar populates this

blessed state with the greatest heroes of his tradition. Christ?

ian apologists would have the pagan heroes removed and re?

placed with saints. The idea is much the same.

In another passage, a small fragment from one of his

Threnoi ("Dirges"), Pindar gives us in one lyrical condensa?

tion an image in which the psyche's many dualities are

nested one within the other. In this passage (fr. 131), Pindar

does not use the word psyche, but eidolon. But his descrip? tion of its nature clearly points to the psyche, and Plutarch,

who preserves the passage for us, clearly understood it in

that sense. The fragments, as mystical as anything to be

found on the soul in pre-Christian Greek, runs as follows:

All, by blessed fortune, come to the end, now freed from all labor.

Every person's body (soma) is obedient to all-powerful Death.

But the life lives on, as image (eidolon). For it alone

is from the gods.

It sleeps when the limbs are active

but to sleepers it points in many a dream

to some impending crisis,

whether foretelling pleasure or boding some hard challenge.

This Pindaric eidolon bridges every divide. It is and it is not.

It is divine, and it is only the image of the divine. It is where

the human and the divine intersect within the human being. It

passes from life to death, yet even in death it is alive. It is mere

image yet it is the living person. It works between sleep and

waking?one kind of work when it sleeps, and another when

it wakes. As image, it is the person absent; but as the guiding

principle of life, it is the very presence of the person. Being that particle of the divine within us, remaining intact through life and death, it stands at the gateway between the conscious

and the unconscious, endowed with the power to foresee our

future and with the language of dream, to warn us of some



Norman Austin 109

impending crisis or to lead us toward some pleasure. Ask the person in the street for his or her definition of

"soul," and after the first hums and haws we are likely to be

treated to a pastiche of received opinions, loosely derived

from Plato, Aristotle, the Apostle Paul, the learned doctor

Aquinas, and the reverend Billy Graham. Like art?we may not know how to describe it but we know it when we see it.

It is Wordsworth's thoughts too deep for tears, music too

deep for words. It is rapture, wholeness, harmony (the

Pythagorean definition). In Plato's cosmos, it is that Form

within us?Pindar's eidolon?which can apprehend the eter?

nal Forms. It is that moment in consciousness when dual?

ity?inner and outer, the now and the hereafter, the self and

the other, the human and the divine, the quick and the

dead?merges into a single vision.

We might find the situation not so different in fifth century Athens. Our person on the streets of Athens would not have

Plato to fall back on or the Church Fathers, but in his or her

gropings we might detect a trace of Pythagoreanism, a trace

of Pindar, a trace even of Simonides. Certainly, Gorgias must

have had his theory of the psyche, to give it so much atten?

tion in his Encomium. Pindar certainly had his theory, and

even Simonides, who could distinguish in his poetic way be?

tween mind, heart, spirit, and psyche. Sophocles would no

doubt have been hard put if we begged him for a definition.

He might give us a furrowed brow and a biting of the lips, with two or three desultory beginnings, before he hit upon some definition that might vaguely satisfy him. But theory he

must have had of some sort, this great lexicographer who

was one of the great teachers of Athens. A lover of words

gifted with such brilliance, craft, and introspection could

scarcely have used this one word psyche hundreds of times

over a long and glorious career without giving some pro?

longed thought to its nature and function. What if the

Philoktetes, taking the play as whole, were his theory of soul?

So, away, dull mind! Let us talk no more of the mind, ex?

cept it be the mind of Odysseus. Odysseus illustrates the



no THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

problem of confusing mind and soul. He has a good mind, none better. But what value is a mind when the soul is cor?

rupt? Once we can allow Sophocles to be talking of the soul, the play opens up like a symphony after the horn's first

haunting notes set the key and sound the theme. Of course!

What else is this play if not a drama of the soul, the agony of the soul beset by disease, anger, a career blighted and the

torture of indecision? The agon begins in the body but soon

passes from body to mind, and from mind to soul. Three

souls are at issue here: the soul of Philoktetes, the soul of

Neoptolemos, the soul of Odysseus. When Neoptolemos

naively accepts the authority of Odysseus in matters of the

soul, he cannot yet comprehend that he must first lose his

own soul, if he is to rob Philoktetes of his. Once he under?

stands the nature of the mission, as the corruption of his

own soul, he must rehabilitate his own soul so that he can

assist Philoktetes to rehabilitate his. Two noble souls are put at risk but both go through the trial and are redeemed. The

soul of Odysseus (as represented in this play) is past re?

demption because it was corrupt from the beginning. The

corruption was in the blood.

In any dramatic work, a character on stage speaks with

two voices. One is the voice of that persona speaking to the

other personas on stage, oblivious to us eavesdropping on

their conversation from our seats on the hillside across from

their stage. Odysseus, speaking to Neoptolemos, as one

stage persona to another, means deception. But Odysseus also speaks for Sophocles. Projecting through the masks of

his characters, but speaking over their heads, he addresses

his thoughts directly to us. We have no tool that can sim

plistically separate Sophocles' voice from the voice of his

personas, but surely in this play's attack on Odysseus?the

paradigm in the mythic tradition of Greece of "genius"?we must be hearing the anguish of the poet himself. A villain of

Satanic ambition makes for good melodrama, to be sure, but

the loathing for Odysseus, especially the contempt for his

vile birth, seems to go beyond strict dramaturgic necessity.



Norman Austin m

Sophocles and the fifth century were coevals; born in

497/6 BCE, he died in 406, at the ripe old age of ninety. He

saw and lived through the greatest moment in Athenian his?

tory. In 480, he was one of youths chosen to dance in the cel?

ebration of the astounding victory of the Athenians against the Persian armada at Salamis. In 441, he produced his

Antigone, thought by many to be one of his greatest master?

pieces, and one of the great masterpieces in the whole his?

tory of Western drama. At that same moment, the Parthenon

was rising above the city in brilliant slabs and blocks of mar?

ble. In the plastic arts, in the political arts, in the arts of the

mind, everywhere Athens was at the pinnacle of its power. The zenith of the poet's career coincided with the zenith of

Athenian power. He was not just an ordinary citizen watch?

ing the century unfold. He was actively involved in the life of

the city, and one of the great artists who made that moment

what it was.

But how different was the Athens Sophocles saw at the

end of his life. The full weight of the catastrophe, from

Salamis to Syracuse, had yet to be calculated. But Sophocles, a great artist experiencing his own city's rise and fall, must

have known he was living through a tragedy in the making. Athens was ruined. She had lost her soul. And who was to

blame? Sophocles, conservative and traditional as he was?

being a poet and not a philosopher?pointed the finger at

the new intellectuals of the day who had expropriated the ti?

tle of sophos ("wise"), which had once belonged to the po?

ets, and changed the word to mean not wise but "clever,"

sophisticated. This drama is the agon between two kinds of

sophia?the traditional sophia of poets and priests, speaking from the soul, against the new sophia, which to a poet like

Sophocles must have seemed the brilliance of a mind with?

out a conscience.53

The sophists boasted of their magic. They set themselves

up as teachers. Didaskalos, we recall, was once the title given to the playwright; but here was a new breed of teachers, pro?

fessing skepticism and the beautiful power of argument. Only




ten years after the Philoktetes was produced, the Athenian

citizens, many of whom must have witnessed this very play, sat in a theatrical performance of their devising, and con?

demned the most pious man in Athens to death for being? an Odysseus, the intellect corrupted and corrupting. The

charge that condemned Socrates to death could be summed

up in this one sentence of this play?Socrates had robbed the

young men of their soul. He certainly preached skepticism, even atheism, some people thought; and he enchanted the

young men with a new method of disputation that could de?

molish every ethical position of their forefathers.54

In the agon of this play between the wisdom of the ances?

tors and the sophism of the new intellectuals, sophistry

proves a dismal failure, both moral and pragmatic.55 The

collective health in this play?whether of army or city?de?

pends wholly on the intervention of a god, who in an in?

stant reverses the thrust of the whole afternoon's

performance. Herakles, coming down from heaven to give

guidance to Philoktetes, is a Christ-like figure. Or, if we pre?

fer, he is the Pindaric psyche, which once inhabited the hu?

man form and suffered every human frailty and indignity, but had been purified of its imperfections and then exalted

to Olympus, to dwell in bliss among the gods, now a god himself. Being both human and divine, Herakles is the me?

diator between Zeus, highest of the gods, and Philoktetes, who is the god's suffering servant, now reaping his reward

for holding fast to the integrity of his soul.

The epiphany of Heracles, which is the play's sudden de?

nouement, raises many issues, moral, political, and dra?

matic. Every generation of readers?in that small circle that

cares enough to follow the debate?will contribute its own

arguments and theories to the debate as to the virtue or fail?

ure of this blatant deus ex machina. Yet, whatever our inter?

pretations of this intervention, Sophocles clearly intended it

from the beginning. It does not happen as it were by acci?

dent, as if the poet had exhausted his ideas and needed to

finish the play before it ran overtime. The play is structured



Norman Austin 113

with Herakles as the final moment in the action. He is to be

the necessary agent who appears and speaks when all the

human contrivances have failed, when the god is the only

option left.

The human option, as presented by Odysseus, is horrify?

ing, more horrifying even than the odious Philoktetes. It

must be soundly defeated. "His must be the crown," Neop? tolemos says of Philoktetes, when Philoktetes falls asleep, and the Chorus sees an opportunity to take the bow and slip

away, leaving Philoktetes to die his death out of sight and

out of mind. Herakles, descending from the throne of his fa?

ther Zeus, declares the victory won: his is now the crown.

Philoktetes defended his soul even to the death against the

so-called wisdom of the new wizards. If Odysseus is the

mind, skating with such dash across the surface of things, Herakles is the soul.

NOTES

i. For longer discussion on this debate and its relation to this play, see

John Carlevale, "Education, Phusis, and Freedom in Sophocles' Philo

ctetes," Arion, 3rd series, 8.1 (2000), 26-60; Peter Rose, Sons of the Gods,

Children of the Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece

(Ithaca and London 1992), 306.

2. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford 1973, 1997) and A

Map of Misreading (Oxford 1975).

3. Bloom, A Map of Misreading (note 2), 3.

4. How the Athenians in the fifth century might have interpreted the

tragedies that they saw on the stage has emerged as a significant question in

recent years. See S. Goldhill, "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," in J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton

1990), 97-129; Malcolm Heath, "Sophocles' Philoctetes: A Problem Play," in Sophocles Revisited, J. Griffin, ed. (Oxford 1999), 137-60; Jasper Grif?

fin, "Sophocles and the Democratic City," in Sophocles Revisited (Oxford

1999)5 73_94- Griffin concludes that they could not have been looking for

"subtle hidden political messages" (91). Rather, the ancients like Gorgias and Plato talk of the audience at the theater as "emotionally swallowed up,

abandoning itself to the pleasure of sympathetic emotion with the sufferings of the characters." Such, we might conjecture, remains even to this day the

predominant response to the modern modes of entertainment. Very few

movie-goers who have not taken an academic course in film criticism have

the vocabulary to critique a film, other than to express pleasure or dis




pleasure with an episode or character, or to review the actor's roles in a pre? vious movie. The reception of a movie today is primarily emotional.

5. Euripides produced his Philoktetes in 431, as one play in the trilogy that included the Medea. See Carl Werner M?ller, Euripides: Philoktet: Tes?

timonia und Fragmenta (Berlin and New York 2000), 65.

6. Bloom, Map (note 2), 9.

7. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (note 2), xxiv.

8. Bloom, Anxiety (note 2), xxiv. E. A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cam?

bridge 1963), devotes his whole study of Plato to this agon.

9. Bloom, Anxiety (note 2), xxiii.

10. Athenaeus 8.347e.

11. Griffin, "Sophocles and the Democratic City" (note 4), 75-76 asks

why Attic tragedy, if it is so intensely political, as many modern scholars ar?

gue, would continue "to set its plays in the world of the old regal and aris?

tocratic heroes of the myths" and concludes (76) that the "ubiquitous

presence of the myths and their high-born people in the tragic theater of

democratic Athens does not seem to have presented contemporaries with

anything like the problem that it poses for modern scholars." True. But this

conclusion only evades the problem. Not only did these remarkably creative

poets of the fifth century use the epic and mythic material to the exclusion

of anything contemporary, they relied on this material in an almost slavish

way, episode by episode in their dramas. Surely we need to recall Havelock's

thesis here on the bitter struggle of Plato to free himself and his contempo? raries from Homer's narcotic influence. Plato fought against that narcotic

but in the case of the tragic poets, it functioned as a mechanism of internal

censorship, which would keep anything obviously modern out of the pic? ture. Aristotle in his Poetics 53a gives this interesting justification for plots taken from the old epic tradition: "At first poets used to pick out stories at

random; but nowadays the best are constructed around a few households,

e.g., about Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and

any others whose lot it has been to experience something terrible?or to

perform some terrible action" (Heath, trans.). But this justification is

scarcely sufficient to stop our questions. Why, we are tempted to ask, would

Greek myth be so saturated with terrible sufferings and horrifying actions, and why are such terrible experiences to be found only in the distant myth? ical privileged past of Homer and the epic mythology? Did no Athenian in

the fifth century suffer some terrible catastrophe or with the best of inten?

tions take some action that had unforeseen and catastrophic results? Why

Orestes, again and again? Why not invent some Willy Loman?

12. For some discussion of the primitive myth, see M?ller (note 5).

13. Dio Orations 52.

14. The exact terms of the prophecy that the Greeks extracted from He?

lenos cannot be accurately determined at this point. The Hypothesis to the

Philoktetes gives one version: "Ilium would be taken by the bow and ar?

rows of Herakles and by the son of Achilles. The bow and arrows were with

Philoktetes. Odysseus, being sent out from Troy, brought back both (that is,



Norman Austin 115

Philoktetes and Neoptolemos)." This hypothesis clearly reflects the version

of the prophecy as it was revised by Sophocles for this play. The brief sum?

mary that Proclus gives us of the Little Iliad implies that both Philoktetes

and Neoptolemos were mentioned in the prophecy, but suggests that

Odysseus fetches Neoptolemos from Skyros only after Philoktetes has al?

ready arrived at Troy and has killed Paris. See Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Hom?rica, H. G. Evelyn-White, ed. and trans., Loeb Classical Library.

(London and New York 1914), 510-11.

15. For an exhaustive study of the testimonia on Euripides' play, see

M?ller (note 5).

16. Mark Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role

Playing in Sophocles (Chapel Hill and London 1998), ioiff., who calls this

play-within-the play "metatheater," has many good observations on the am?

biguities engendered by this device, which entails deliberate play-acting on

the part of Odysseus, Neoptolemos, and the Chorus. In this play, only Philok?

tetes is not acting a part: he is throughout the play what he seems to be.

17. Ringer (1998), 106 reminds us that Aristophanes {Frogs 1054) calls

the tragic poets the "teachers of adults."

18. "Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Ephebeia," in Jean-Pierre Vernant

and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York

1988). Originally published in France in 1972. Note his page 169: in the

course of the play Neoptolemos "passes through the ephebic initiation." He

suggests that Herakles' words at the end of the play, when he commands

Philoktetes and Neoptolemos to stand by each other on the battlefront, re?

call the ephebic oath. He does not deal with the issue in this play, that the

ephebic initiation fails miserably. Neoptolemos repudiates his allegiance to

his military officer, Odysseus, and joins Philoktetes in a decision to give up

their military career, leave the Greek army, and return to Greece. Only the

intervention of Herakles prevents them from their military insubordination.

19. Sophocles, Philoctetes, R. C. Jebb, ed. (Cambridge 1932), 16.

20. Sophocles, Philoctetes, Carl Phillips, trans. (Oxford 2003).

21. Sophocles, Philoctetes, T. B. L. Webster, ed. (Cambridge 1970), n. at

line 55.

22. F. J.H. Letters, The Life and Work of Sophocles (London and New

York 1953), 28?

23. Hesiod. Opera: Catalogue of Women, R. Merkelbach and M. L.

West, eds. (Oxford 1970), fr. 204, pages 85-88.

24. But Neoptolemos himself, more generous than Philoktetes, murmurs

a modest defense of Odysseus at lines 385-88, when he shields Odysseus from the heaviest blame by calling him merely a subordinate carrying out

his masters' orders. Hugh Lloyd-Jones brackets these lines in his 1994 Loeb

edition, as being no doubt inconsistent with the general tenor of the con?

versation between Philoktetes and Neoptolemos.

25. Mary W Blundell, "The Moral Character of Odysseus in Philo?

ctetes^ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 28 (1987), 322, notes that

Thersites is introduced in a "way that strikingly confuses him with



ii6 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

Odysseus." J. Ceri Stephens, "The Wound of Philoctetes," Mnemosyne 48

(1955), 153-68, attempts to rehabilitate Odysseus, to some degree at least,

by arguing that the wound of Philoktetes was represented as so physically odious that Athenians would have found Odysseus' action in removing Philoktetes to Lemnos acceptable in the circumstances. But Stephens offers

no analysis of the numerous passages of the play that portray the ethos of

Odysseus as more odious than the wound of Philoktetes. It need hardly be

added that the Odysseus of this play is the polar opposite from the

Odysseus in Sophocles' Ajax. The sympathetic treatment of Odysseus in the

Ajax has been replaced here with a relentless odium.

26. Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of the Souls and the Belief in Im?

mortality among the Greeks, 8th ed., W B. Hillis trans. (London 1925: orig? inal publication, 1893).

27. Snell, Bruno. Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Hamburg 1948). Trans?

lated by T. G. Rosenmeyer as The Discovery of the Mind (Blackwell 1953).

28. Snell (note 27), 17.

29. Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge

1979), 128.

30. Kahn (note 29), 130.

31. M. Marcovich, Heraclitus: Greek Text with Short Commentary

(Merida, Venezuela 1967), 368.

32. David Claus, Toward the Soul: An inquiry into the Meaning of YYXH before Plato (New Haven and London 1981).

33. Sophocles, Antigone, R. C. Jebb, ed. (Cambridge 1900), note on line

1.

34. Claus (note 32), 69.

35. Claus (note 32), 69.

36. Pindar, fr. 131.

37. A. W H. Adkins, From the Many to the One (London 1970), 14-16, makes this point, that the psyche in Homer has "no specific mental or emo?

tional functions in life: it is simply that whose presence ensures that the in?

dividual is alive" (14).

38. Gorgias, The Encomium to Helen, D. M. MacDowell, ed. (Bristol

2003), ??8 ff. on the influence of logos on the psyche-, ?? 15-16 on the in?

fluence of sight.

39. Claus (note 32), 90-91. Herodotus has twenty-one instances of the

word, Thucydides only four.

40.1 am grateful to my colleague, Richard Newcomb, for this suggestion.

41. George Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York

1927), 27. He goes on to say (28) that the piety of Socrates and Plato was

"childlike and superstitious when it remained personal, but more often it

was expressly political and politic: they saw in religion a ready means of si?

lencing dangerous questions and rebuking wickedness. It was a matter of

moral education and police, and in no sense spiritual."

42. Snell (note 32), io2ff.



Norman Austin 117

43- T. G. Rosenmeyer, "Decision-Making," The Poetics of Therapy, Martha C. Nussbaum, ed., APEIRON 23 (1990), 194, distinguishes be?

tween "technical decisions" (contemplating two alternatives and choosing between them), and decisions that present great moral dilemmas. Technical

decisions, he argues, were "a subordinate feature in Greek drama," whereas

tragedy gives great attention to the "great moral dilemmas," which "look

upon action as shaped by good" (215).

44. A. J. A. Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge 1951), finds

the Philoktetes a weak play. His major criticism is that nothing happens. There is no drama, but only tricks to give the appearance of a drama in

process. Francis Ferguson, in the introductory essay to S. H. Butcher's trans?

lation of Aristotle's Poetics (New York 1961), reminds us that Butcher, bor?

rowing from Dante, defined Aristotle's "action" in tragedy as

"spirit-in-movement. "

45. John Burnet, "The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul," Proceedings of the

British Academy (1916), 235-59. Republished in Essays and Addresses

(London 1929), 126-62.

46. Plato Apology z^d-t.

47. Burnet (note 45), 139.

48. Burnet (note 45), 140.

49. Burnet (note 45), 156.

50. Simonides, eleg. 8, Greek Lyric, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, D. A.

Campbell, ed. and trans. (Cambridge 1991), 511.

51. Some scholars have argued against attributing this oration (or essay) to Gorgias, but the general opinion today seems now to favor Gorgias as

the author.

52. Pindar, Victory Odes, M. M. Willcock, ed. (Cambridge 1995), 137. Willcock gives an excellent resume of this passage, with discussions of the

relevant scholarship, and I draw here on his summary.

5 3. Attempts have been made to read this play as overt political allegory, with references implanted to specific historical events, either those in which

Sophocles himself might have participated, or others on which he might have had his own political convictions. In my reading of the play, it is cer?

tainly political?the playwrights could no more avoid thinking of the polis than Socrates could. But the political message is generalized to represent a

more universal human dilemma. The play seems not to be either pro- or

anti-democratic in any clearly delineated way. It takes the contemporary sit?

uation and removes it to the mythical realm. Its first focus is not on the

Athenian democracy, pro or con, but on the condition of the human soul.

For politics, the Athenians went to Aristophanes.

54. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Douglas Smith, trans.

(Oxford 2000), 73, on "the modern men, who . . . are continually surprised

by the fact that Aristophanes always presents Socrates as the first and high? est sophist."

55. Blundell (note 25), 328, suggests that Odysseus in this play "is not so

much a sophist as an embodiment of the kind of political opportunism for



ii8 THE GREAT SOUL ROBBERY

which some sophistic theories offered a conventional intellectual justifica? tion." Peter W Rose, "Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Teaching of the

Sophists," HSCP 80 (1976), 29-105, has presented an interesting thesis, that Sophocles had really thought through the anthropological ideas of the

sophists and had, in fact, structured his play around those conceptions. Even so, he admits that Odysseus, as a politician using the skills and argu?

ments of the sophists, is presented in a very negative light.



The Great Soul Robbery in Sophocles' "Philoktetes"

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