Philoktetes

GREGORY McNAMEE
Tucson, Arizona
October 1986

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This translation is based principally upon the Greek text and notes established by T.B.L. Webster in his edition of the Philoktetes (Cambridge University Press, 1970), a model of classical scholarship in every detail.
I am indebted to many friends for their help in the course of preparing this version. Jean Stallings first introduced me to the play in the original Greek; with her, Timothy Winters and Richard Jensen helped guide me through the intricacies of the text. Melissa McCormick and my family, as always, offered indispensable encouragement. I am especially grateful to Scott Mahler, Stephen Cox, and above all Thomas D. Worthen for their critical readings of the manuscript in various drafts. Last, I am grateful to Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, vortices of imagination, without whose efforts this book would not be.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Odysseus
Chorus
Trader (Spy)
Neoptolemos
Philoktetes
Herakles

ODYSSEUS

This is the shore of jagged Lemnos, a land bound by waves, untrodden, lonely. Here I abandoned Poias's son, Philoktetes of Melos, years ago. Neoptolemos, child of Lord Achilles, the greatest by far of our Greek fighters, I had to cast him away here: our masters, the princes, commanded me to, for disease had conquered him, and his foot was eaten away by festering sores. We had no recourse. At our holy feasts, we could not reach for meat and wine. He would not let us sleep; he howled all night, wilder than a wolf. He blanketed our camp with evil cries, moaning, screaming.

But there is no time to talk of such things: no time for long speeches and explanations. He might hear us coming and foil my scheme to take him back.

Your orders are to serve me, to spy out the cave I found for him here—- a two-mouthed cave, exposed to the sun for warmth in the cold months, admitting cool breezes in summer's heat; to the left, nearby it, a sweet-running spring, if it is still sweet. If he still lives in this cave or another place, then I'll reveal more of my plan. Listen: both of us have been charged with this.