The Pandora Puzzle: The Dynamics of Myth

 "There is no such thing as an authoritative, final version of a myth."

Dale Woodiel

Harvard University

Almost a century ago, in volume 20 of The Journal of Hellenic Studies, published in London in 1900, a Cambridge University classicist, a Miss Jane E. Har­rison, introduced an article entitled "Pandora's Box" with the following statement:

No myth is more familiar than that of Pandora, [and] none perhaps has been so completely misun­derstood. Pandora is the first woman, the beautiful mischief: she opens the forbidden box, out comes every evil that flesh is heir to;  hope only remains . . . The box of Pandora is proverbial, and that is the more remarkable as she never had a box at all. [1]

    This comment addresses not only what Harrison sees as an example of mistaken iconography in the Pandora myth, but also, in its substance, it addresses directly the dynamics [2] of the myth's evolution: its origins, its variations of content and format, and its significance at any point along its evolutionary journey.

Harrison's point, of course, is that the container mentioned in the earliest written account of the Pandora story, that in Hesiod's Works and Days, is a pithos (W&D 94) - a very large storage jar, not a small box (pyxis) as it would later become. Such pithoi, generally more than

four feet high and two feet wide, were placed partially buried in cellars and used by the ancient Greeks for storing oil or wine or grain. [i]  Every other classical and medieval writer who told the story of Pandora mentions a pithos, with a mega poma, a large lid, just as Hesiod had (W&D 94). The earliest refer­ence to Pandora's Box yet identified is in Erasmus' Adagiorum Chiliades Tres published in 1508.[ii]

Today, the icon of the box of Pandora has become so fixed that to anyone other than a group of classicists a reference to Pandora's "jar" sounds strange. Even the magnificent exhibit that opened last fall at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore devoted to women in classical Greece was billed as "Pandora's Box. [iii] Har­rison, however, was unable in 1900 to accept such mislabeling as inevitable. Such a mistake was for her a vital error of the sort that would "breed the corruption of a total mythological misconception."[iv] Convinced by depictions on a variety of fifth-century vases [v] that the Pandora story was an etiological myth originally associ­ated with the Athenian festival of the Pithoigia, Harrison understandably saw such a critical alteration of icono­graphy as severing forever Pandora's distinction as an Earth Goddess.[vi]

If one sets aside the specifics of Harrison's argu­ment, her charge related to "the corruption of a total mythological misconception" introduces an important question regarding the dynamics of myths. Is it pos­sible to have a "misconception" of a myth? Does not such a phrase have almost oxymoronic overtones? Is not the assumption of versions a part of the definition of a myth? Assuming Erasmus altered Hesiod's version of this old story, as he obvious did, so what? To be bound to the generally-perceived "original" version found in Hesiod is to ignore the dynamics at work in the evolution of such a myth - the cultural, social, and even political forces that have influenced its transforma­tions over the centuries.

In fact, the alterations in a very old Pandora story (or stories) which Hesiod himself made in his Works and Days go far beyond a single substitution of icono­graphy such as a large jar for a small chest. Not only does he drastically revise one or more older stories, including perhaps the one to which Harrison holds allegiance, but he delivers it (or them) to us in frag­ments.[vii]  Such variations and revisions are inevitable in the life of a myth with the inherent richness of the Pandora story.

It is important to remember that the story of Pro­metheus or Persephone or Oedipus that one finds in the anthologies of Joseph Campbell or Michael Grant or Robert Graves did not originate with Homer and Hesi­od. In fact, it could be said that Hesiod and Euripides and Robert Graves engaged in similar activities, only at different moments in history. The work of Albert Lord and other scholars of the oral tradition has shown that what might be called "creative embellishment" has always been an essential characteristic of the art of the "singers of tales."[viii] Richmond Hathorn, in the preface to his Greek Mythology, warns his readers they will be disappointed with his volume if they expect to find in it the original or the authoritative ancient form of a myth. "There is," says Hathorn, "no such thing as an authoritative, final version of a myth. And in the case of the original form, we either do not have it or do not know it if we do. "[ix]

We have traditionally looked to Hesiod for the Pandora story because it is in his poems that it first appears in Greek, fragmented and confused as it is therein. In the Theogony, generally believed to be the earlier of the two poems, an account is given of the creation of the first woman, a "beautiful evil" (585), but the name Pandora is not mentioned and there is no mention of a jar.

According to this account, Zeus had ordered Pro­metheus chained to a rock at the mercy of a liver-de­vouring eagle for no reason other than he found Prome­theus clever and unruly and "full of various wiles" (Th. 511). After Prometheus had been released by Heracles and Zeus' wrath somewhat abated, Prometheus de­ceived Zeus in the division of the sacrifice. In retalia­tion for this elaborate deception Zeus then withheld fire from mortals, only to have it cleverly stolen by Pro­metheus and carried away in a hollow fennel stalk. "Forthwith," says Hesiod, "he [Zeus] made an evil thing for men as the price of fire" (570).

Zeus' creation, in the form a beautiful, shy maiden, elaborately adorned by Athena and lovely in every outward respect, would inwardly be a "beautiful evil" (kalon kakon) filled with "sheer guile, not to be with-stood by men" (Th. 589). From this creation would spring "the race of women and female kind" (590), whose nature would be to do mischief and who would tend to live like drones off the toil of others. Further­more, if the dreadful burdens brought by the creation of woman was the first evil, the second was that the man who "avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years" (603-6).

The version of Pandora's story in the Works and Days, although much more elaborate, is similarly intro­duced, but in this case not only are Athena's gifts of skills in needlework and weaving bestowed on the creature, but also Hermes' gifts of a shameless mind and deceitful nature, and Aphrodite's gifts of "cruel longing and cares that weary the limbs" (W&D 60-69). The creation is named Pandora, meaning the ''all-en­dowed," or perhaps "she to whom all gifts are given," and at Zeus' direction she is presented as a gift to Epimetheus, the slow-witted "after-thinking" brother of the clever Prometheus. Unlike the version in the Theogony, however, this is not the end of the story; this is not to be just a tale of a bad joke played by an all­ powerful god on a mentally-challenged Titan. Instead, at this point in his story Hesiod abruptly introduces a dramatic action which leaves us with a number of puz­zling questions.

After a description of a prior Eden-like existence in which hard work was not required of men to survive and in which the general evils of this world did not exist (W&D 90 ff.), we are told that this newly created woman removed the lid from a large jar, releasing countless plagues and diseases and other evils into the world. Furthermore, by the will of Zeus, we are told, only Hope (Elpis) remained within "in an unbreakable home under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door [because) the lid of the jar stopped her" (94-99). The tale ends, as it does in the Theogony, with the reminder, lest we forget, that "there is no way to escape the will of Zeus" (105).

This account is most intriguing for what it fails to reveal: What is this large jar? Was it a part of the gift? Why and by whose direction were the evils placed in­side, and why were they released? Is this action intend­ed as yet another illustration of the dangers of human curiosity, like that of the biblical Eve to which it has been inevitably compared?[x] Was Pandora told specifi­cally not to open the jar? And in exactly what respect is hope (Elpis) to be viewed as an evil? A common­sense reading of the text suggests the answers to such questions were in other stories which would have been instinctively familiar to Hesiod's audience. We, whose knowledge is confined to Hesiod's version and its derivatives, can only speculate.

Some scholars believe that a second-century CE ac­count of the myth by the fabulist Babrius more clearly reflects the older Pandora story than "the one forced upon posterity by Hesiod.[xi] In his fifty-eighth fable, Babrius offers a drastic contrast to Hesiod's version by placing man (anthropos) in the role of Pandora and in­cluding in the vessel only Goods rather than Evils:

Zeus assembled all the goods in the vessel and gave it sealed to man; but man, unable to restrain his eagerness to know, said, 'What in the world can be inside?' And, lifting the lid, he set them free to return to the houses of the gods and to fly thither, thus fleeing heavenwards from the earth. Hope alone remained. [xii]

      This version of the story is obviously clearer and more logical than Hesiod's version. Furthermore, its implications about the dangers of impatience and reck­less curiosity are appropriate to Hesiod's stated pur­pose, the instruction of his wayward brother, and, most significant, it places Elpis in an understandable context. Although, due to a human action, the Goods have been forfeited, Hope remains. It is interesting to note that slightly earlier mythologists such as Apollodorus and Hyginus [xiii] confine their accounts of the story to the cre­ation of the first woman, eliminating completely the jar and Pandora's evil aspect. [xiv]

It has been acknowledged from the beginnings of modern scholarship, certainly from the era of Jane Harrison and Sir James Frazer onward, that fifth-cen­tury pottery and other archeological evidence depict Pandora as an Earth-goddess, indeed the Mother of Life, whose reputation might logically have flourished with the beginnings of agriculture - an age, as Michael Grant puts it, when "woman, with her unaccountable phenomena personifying life, was mysterious and awe-­inspiring [and] fertility was the community's most highly prized value.” [xv]Pandora should, therefore, be perceived as "the all-giver," rather than "the one to whom all is given."

The validity of this way of conceiving Pandora's role has been greatly enhanced in this century by re­search which displays convincing parallels between the Pandora story and Babylonian creation stories. Myths such as the Enuma Elish and Enki and the Pickaxe depict, among other creations, the fashioning of man­kind from water and dirt, and a tradition in which man is said to have shot up like a plant from the ground through a hole made by the god Enlil.[xvi]Such works substantiate the long held assumption that the Pandora story had been associated with the myth of creation in the ancient Near East long before the time of Hesiod.

As fascinating as such studies might be, however, attempting to solve the Pandora puzzle, or to fix any myth absolutely, is inevitably disappointing and frustrat­ing until one faces the fact that it cannot be done, though it must be acknowledged that some mythologists such as the late Jean-Pierre Vernant have been impres­sive in their attempts. But while Vernant sees the com­bined versions of the myth in Hesiod as defining the new and permanent quality of human life, even he is compelled to conclude that the combination of elements "embedded at the core of the myth" comprise "a web of interrelations so dense as to be inextricable.”[xvii] Indeed, it is this denseness, this amazing web of parallels and opposites and counterbalances that has obviously sustained the myth over the millennia.

It is instructive in any attempt to analyze the Pan­dora story to recognize that the format of the Works and Days, apart from its specific treatment of the Pan­dora myth, is closely modeled on the "wisdom" or in­structional texts of the ancient Near East which tradi­tionally included a long list of admonishments and "shall nots" compiled by a father or a king in hopes that his son or his heir would grow up to be a hard-working responsible adult.[xviii] The recipient of the admonitions in this case is Hesiod's lazy and deceitful brother Perses. Hesiod obviously used the Pandora myth in the Works and Days to support the over-riding theme of the poem: Life is hard; evils in many forms pervade our lives; and hard work is required to survive-truths not unlike those parents attempt to impress upon their children even today as they emerge from their age of innocence.

In his Theogony Hesiod had used the myth of Pan­dora to explain the creation of women and the reason for their duplicitous nature. In the Works and Days it serves to explain why man must struggle unrelentingly to survive in a world plagued by labor and disease. But, why, one is compelled to ask, the ambiguous and absurd portrayal of woman as the cause? "A person who ascribes all evil to one segment of the human spe­cies is not a rational thinker," charges one critic, "but [rather] a person possessed by an emotion so violent that it exceeds an objective correlative.[xix]

Because logical analysis of such a story is out of the question, an answer, if there is to be one, must be found in the symbolic sense to be gleaned from the story: from the pithos itself, from which the evils now in the world originally emerged, and from Elpis which remains inside. Over-riding both the pithos and Elpis­ - or one might better say embodied in both - is the sym­bol of woman herself.

A number of interesting hypotheses have been set forth providing possible reasons for Hesiod's radical redefinition of woman. It has been suggested that Hesiod's transformation of Pandora the Earth goddess to that of the beautiful curious woman bent on mischief is an act of "theological animus," an almost necessary gesture amidst a transition from matriarchal to patriar­chal theology in the ancient world.[xx] A number of socio-economic reasons have also been suggested relat­ed to changes in agricultural methods and shifts in population growth in the centuries before Hesiod.[xxi] Yet, regardless of the cause, the ultimate result (in league, of course, with the Garden of Eden myth of the ancient Hebrews) was the encoding of misogyny as a characteristic of western culture, the effects of which remain relevant even to the present day.

Although obviously fascinated by the Pandora story, Hesiod's view of woman is ambiguous at every turn, and his complex and apprehensive view of femi­nine nature is difficult to explain. One critic sees it serving "as a focus for his anxiety about life in gener­al.[xxii] Another more Freudian critic has equated Hesi­od's attitude with that of a troubled young idealist who, discovering that reality perverts his every ideal, dream an explanation-not unrelated, of course, to the woman who has abandoned him after bringing him into the world.[xxiii]

Although Hesiod makes much in the Theogony of woman's liability as a drone on man's economy, he also grudgingly admits that a woman is a necessity for a man to have around in his old age, a statement which seems to acknowledge the convention that a wife would inevitably be much younger than her husband, as well as the fact that she would also be required to produce a child or children who would assist in their father's care as well. Therefore, one must again ask, how can the vital source of children be connected with evil?

Perhaps a partial answer can be found in the un­known potential which a child symbolizes and the hope with which each child is associated by its parents from the moment of its birth. Here the way one defines Elpis is critical. Elpis is generally defined as a neutral "expectation," neither necessarily good or bad, perhaps a combination of "hope" in a conventional sense com­bined with fear. Froma Zeitlin, however, suggests that Elpis functions as yet another ambiguous human un­certainty about the future that  is "good if it inspires men to work and assure their livelihood, to fill their [pithoi] with grain, bad if it lulls an idle man into illu­sory expectations for the future. But," she continues, "taken as an image that embodies an idea, the Elpis that is left in the jar most closely corresponds to the child (or the hope of the child) residing in its mother's womb."[xxiv]

Zeitlin goes on to review the historical correlation of the womb with a container or jar in both ancient medical and philosophical texts, citing Hippocrates and later anatomists as likening a woman's uterus to an upside-down jar. Continuing the analogy by equating Pandora's removal of the jar's seal or lid as the breach­ing of her virginity, Zeitlin sees the closing of the jar upon Elpis, which remains inside, as the beginning of pregnancy. [xxv] Hope remains within "in the form of the expectations for the child to be.[xxvi] As interesting as Zeitlin's analysis is, however, it appears, even to her, incomplete and unsatisfying. The ambiguous quality of Elpis leaves us in a muddle.

If Elpis has been placed in the jar, is it to be con­sidered an evil? If so, why does it not come out with the other evils? Better: why does Zeus leave it inside? Is it, asks one critic, "the one good that Zeus allows humans to mitigate the curse of Pandora? If it is the mitigating factor, why is hope confined to the urn? Is this to say that not even hope is allowed us, that the human condition is hopeless? Or is Pandora offering us hope as the last and greatest of all evils? Is Pandora holding out hope, or withholding hope?"[xxvii] For every critical point of view on a given aspect of the story - ­every icon, every symbolic action, every lesson to be derived-one can easily find an opposite point of view.

In the context of Norman Austin's assertion that Hesiod's interpretations of the Pandora story "have the mysteriously logical quality of the completely irratio­nal,[xxviii] I am persuaded by the arguments that suggest the two versions are simply variants of the same arche­typal myth, both etiological, which combine into an explanation for the cause of evil - i.e. the necessity for human labor - in the world. As in the myth of Eve in the Garden of Eden, Hesiod's male mind finds in the duplicity of women both evil's symptom and its cause. [xxix] And the pessimism which Jane Harrison identified a hundred years ago is for unexplainable reasons the dominating tone in his narrative.[xxx]

The Pandora puzzle, unlike the jig-saw types famil­iar to us, does not really contain all the pieces required for satisfactory completion, a fact which in the opinion of the critic M. L. West should come as no surprise to us. We are, he says, after all, "in a myth, not a gro­cer's shop." This myth, he continues, is "about the origins of hardship and of hope-amid-hardship.

Such questions do not have easy answers.

So, while one might not come away from the Pan­dora myth, every piece having fallen into its proper place, many of the major pieces of its puzzle can be identified, and some of the key sections of the total pic­ture are revealed. Ultimately, aided by West's friendly admonition, one retains a dream-like mosaic of percep­tions and insights about the human condition from which can be derived myriad interpretations - precisely what one expects from the best of the ancient myths.

[The research for this essay was completed during the 1995-96 academic year in residence as a Visiting NEH Teacher Scholar at Harvard University.  It was presented at the 1996 spring conference of the Classical Association of New England and later published in the New England Classical Journal.]

END NOTES:

---

[i] E. Harrison, JHS 20 (1900) 99. 

[ii] I use the word dynamics here to describe the forces at work in any complex matter, not to suggest the evolution of myths is governed by the fixed or natural laws of physics, although there clearly are interesting similarities.

[iii]  It was in a large pithos (dolium in Latin) that the Cynic Oiogenes was said to have been residing when he had his famous encounter with Alexander. Pithoi were also used as coffins and by the Romans as public urinals.

[iv]D and E. Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York 1956) 15-16. Harrison ([above, note 1) 100) had attributed the error in translation to Giraldus Lillius' Historiarum Deorum Syntagma published in 1580.
  

[v]E.D. Reeder, Pandora: Women in Classical Greece (Baltimore 1995) contains aan introduction to the exhibit and a  selection of relevant essays in addition to a carefully documented catalogue of the exhibition.

[vi] Harrison (above, note 1) 100.

[vii] See Reeder (above, note 5) 277-286.

[viii] Harrison (above, note 1) 101;  J. E. Harrison, Prolegomenal 10 the Study of Greek Religion (Princeton 1991) 276 ff.

[ix] See Th. 570-590, W&D 57-101.

[x]  A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge 1960) 13-29.

[xi] R.Y. Hathorn, Greek Mythology (Beirut 1977) ix.

[xii] For early references see Panofsky (above, note 4) 11 ff. For a more contemporary assessment of the Eve-Pandora parallels see Norman Austin's Meaning and Being in Myth (University Park and London 1990).

[xiii] Panofsky (above, note 4) 6.

[xiv] Quoted in Panofsky (above, note 4) 8, from Babrii Fabulae

Aesopeae, ed. O. Crusius (Leipzig 1897) no. 58.

[xv] Apoliodorus, Bibliotheca 1.7.1-2; Hyginus, Fabulae 144

[xvi] In his account Apollodorus allows that Pandora and Epime­theus' daughter Pyrrha married Prometheus' son Deucalion. After surviving the flood (which Zeus sends to end the Bronze Age) by floating in a chest, the couple re-populate the earth by tossing stones over their heads. Hers become women; his become men (1.7.2).

[xvii]M. Grant, Myths of the Greeks and the Romans [4](Cleveland 1962) 145.

[xviii]  For detailed analyses of such parallels and Hesiod's origins

in the Near East see P. Walcot's Hesiod and the Near East (Cardilf 1966) 55-79 and C. Penglase's Greek Myths and Mesopotamia (London 1994) 197-229.

[xix] J.P. Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, tr. 1. Lloyd (New York 1980) 197.

[xx] For thorough treatment of "wisdom" elements in Works and Days see the "Prolegomena" and the "Commentary" in M. L. West's Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford 1978).

[xxi] Austin (above, note 12) 75.

[xxii] Harrison, Prolegomena (above, note 8) 285.

[xxiii] See L. S. Sussman's "Workers and Drones: Labor, Idleness and Gender Definition in Hesiod's Beehive" in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers ed. by 1. Peradotto and J.P. Sullivan (Albany 1984) 79-93.

[xxiv] P. A. Marquardt, "Hesiod's Ambiguous View of Woman," CP 77 (1982) 283-291.

[xxv]  Austin (above, note 12) 68 If.

[xxvi]In Reeder (above, note 5) 49-56.

[xxvii]Zeitlin (above, note 26) 53.

[xxviii] It is interesting to note that even today pregnant women are said, in the vernacular, to be "expecting."

[xxix] Austin (above, note 12) 66.

[xxx] Austin (above, note 12) 75.

[xxxi] Austin (above, note 8) 284

[xxxii] Harrison, Prolegomena (above, note 8.

[xxxiii] West (above, note 28) 169.

Heroic Companionship

Heroic Companionship:

 The Quality of Philia in Sophocles' Philoctetes

Dale P. Woodiel

University of Hartford

In his introduction to his translation of Euripides' Heracles, William Arrowsmith (53 ff.) suggests that "the heavy yoke of necessity," which Heracles must bear as a result of Hera's intervention, is made endurable by a "yoke of love," philia or friendship, "which lies close to, if it does not usurp, the instinct for survival."

The theme of philia -- friendly love, affec­tion, or friendship --is manifest in Euripides' Heracles.  Theseus, whom Heracles has rescued from the underworld, is introduced by Euripides in the role of a faithful and wise friend who is willing to risk everything to return the friend­ship shown him by Heracles. "I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old," says Theseus, "a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief' (1223-25, trans. Arrowsmith).

Theseus goes on to counsel Heracles that though his agonizing fate is a result of Hera's actions, the gods, though powerful, are flawed as men are. His advice is to be patient and not to yield to grief.  Heracles responds to the offer of friendship and agrees to accompany Theseus to Athens.

In this token rejection of the power of the gods and the substitution of the love and friend­ship of human beings, Euripides appears to be treading on new philosophical ground and to be advocating something akin to heroic human­ism. That the gods will forever be effecting their wills on mortals is taken for granted, but the emphasis in Heracles is on the

human will, the power of human interdependence and friend­ship, and the ability of this power to ease the "burden of necessity" imposed by the gods from time to time on all mortals. "The man," Hera­cles says in his final lines, "who would prefer great wealth or strength more than love, more than friends, is diseased of soul" (1425-26).

It is this emphasis on the role of intense friendship -- what Charles Segal (292) has termed "heroic companionship" -- that figures so prominently in Sophocles' penultimate drama, the Philoctetes.

Almost a generation after the presentation of Euripides' Heracles, Sophocles was, at the age of 87,[i] to win first prize with the presentation of his Philoctetes, which, like Heracles, is distin­guished by its humanistic characterization. It likewise utilizes the theme of philia, and more than incidentally, perhaps, it introduces the voice of Heracles as the deus ex machina, a dra­matic intervention that alters the outcome of the conflict.

An analysis of the Philoctetes will reveal in Sophocles' Neoptolemus a humanistic charac­terization that echoes, and develops consider­ably, that of Euripides' Theseus. It is Neoptole­mus, the still-young son of Achilles, who accom­panies Odysseus to Lemnos in search of the abandoned Philoctetes. [ii] However, unlike The­seus with regard to Heracles, Neoptolemus' demonstrations of friendship are not motivated by obligation. Rather, he defies Odysseus and befriends Philoctetes because of his nature, his sense of justice, and, most important, his sense of integrity (arete).  More specifically, he does not wish to be perceived or remembered as a liar. "What do you bid me do," he asks of Odysseus early in the play, "but to tell lies (pseude legein)?"[iii]  Like his famous father Achilles, and quite unlike Odysseus, Neoptolemus professes "a natural antipathy" to achieving his ends "by tricks and stratagems" (87-88).  Clearly, he is motivated by other forces than duty.

Though the figure of Philoctetes, famous in Greek mythology as the befriender of Heracles at his death,[iv] is generally seen by critics as the hero of Sophocles' play, the role of Neoptolemus is central both to the action and the theme (Kitto, 297).

In Greek legend the characters of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus are connected, of course, as the key players in the destruction of Troy.[v]  The Trojan seer Helenus, son of Priam and brother of Hector and Cassandra, reveals to the Greeks the two conditions that must be met in order for the Greeks to be victorious: Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, must be brought into the battle and

Philoctetes must be brought to the war from his exile on the island of Lemnos along with the bow of Heracles.

In one sense, the actions of  Neoptolemus parallel those of a traditional hero who, because of a flaw in judgment, falls into a shameful scheme of deceit, only to become aware of his er­ror and rise to a position of even greater strength and stature. While in the prologue he appears dutiful and at the service of whatever Odysseus orders, Neoptolemus is soon plagued by reserva­tions. "Ensnaring the soul of Philoctetes with words" goes against the grain.[vi]  Eventually, however, he suppresses his better nature and lies convincingly to Philoctetes -- to the extent, in fact, that Philoctetes, at the onset of a great seizure of pain, actually gives him the famous and powerful bow of Heracles, the obtaining of which was the major objective of Neoptolemus' and Odysseus' venture.  However, it is this act of trust that shocks N eoptolemus into the aware­ness of his dreadful error and compels him to return the bow, forget Troy, and agree to take the old warrior home. "All is disgust," he says, "when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it" (902-3).

By his ultimate decision to return Philoctetes to his home, not to Troy, and by re­sponding to his nature (physis), the son of Achilles is sacrificing his opportunity for honor (time) and glory (kleos) as one of the victors at Troy, and he is, at the same time, defying what he knows to be the will of the gods -- that Philoctetes be taken to Troy with the bow of Hera­cles. Neoptolemus, unlike Euripides' Theseus, does not question whether the judgment of the gods is flawed; he merely responds to his natu­ral inclinations toward fairness and honesty, to the "noble nature" of the son of Achilles -- the powers of philia. In a contemporary context, such actions might be understood to reflect Neoptolemus' sense of character.

For the Sophoclean hero, such suffering arises from his struggle to maintain a personal sense of arete, as opposed to a more public sense of renown (time). King Oedipus' persistence in identifying the murderer of Laius and Antigone's insistence on honorable burial for both of her brothers come to mind as Sophoclean actions that verify personal conviction rather than public postures.

It has been asserted that the Sophoclean hero "stands or falls by his arete." When his -- or her in the case of Antigone -- sense of arete is threat­ened, the personal struggle begins, but when the choice is between duty or what is required by his environment on the one hand and his integrity on the other, "the hero at once realizes that the inward excellence of his personality is his most precious possession" (Opstelten, 89).

Nevertheless, all human attempts at persua­sion fail in this case. It is left to the gods, or the god-like powers of Heracles, to persuade. It is in the process of failing to persuade Philoctetes to return willingly to Troy and in his vow to return him to his home in the name of honor and friendship that Neoptolemus displays, so to speak, his humanistic heroism. Such is his na­ture, a quality that he has inherited from his famous father.

Neoptolemus, like Achilles, possesses a fundamental sense of integrity that casts him immediately into direct opposition to Odysseus.[vii] Unlike wily Odysseus, Neoptolemus does not hold that an end justifies the means used to achieve it.  Personal integrity and "heroic com­panionship" are considered above all else. It is the representation of this aspect of Neoptolemus' character, his "nonacceptance of the world" (Segal, 318), originally exemplified by his fa­ther in Homer's Iliad, that makes Sophocles' portrayal of Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes unique.

Of course, Neoptolemus (whose Greek name means "one new to battle and debate") is young and inexperienced and understandably vulner­able to the direction and influence of Odysseus; one senses that this is the first real test of his arete, and when tested it fails him. Yet, he is able to rise above his mistake, and in the end he reacts not as the warrior son of Achilles bent on achieving kleos at the sack of Troy but as a sym­pathetic human being reacting out of pity and a sense of justice. His ultimate concern is for the welfare of Philoctetes, another human being (and now friend) who has been wronged. At the same time, he wishes to right his own wrongs by restoring his sense of integrity through an ex­pression of genuine friendship.[viii] He had given his word. Consequently, when his efforts of "friendly persuasion" fail to convince Philoctetes, he is willing to forget Troy and the future of the Greek army, and, for that matter, the stipulations of the prophecy, in order to honor Philoctetes' request to be returned to his home. These are the actions of a character unique in Greek drama.

The origins of the qualities apparent in Neoptolemus, values that arise in the oikos in love of friendship and family relationships, so obviously interesting to Sophocles, can, not surprisingly perhaps, be found in the attitudes of the gods regarding guest friendship depicted in the Homeric epics.  Odysseus’ treatment in the house of Alcinous (as depicted in Odyssey 7-12) and the encounter between Diomedes and Glaucon (6.120 ff.) in the Iliad are two apt examples.

It is particularly noteworthy that, after all of Achilles' agonizing introspection and subse­quent maniacal venting of his wrath, his final gesture in the Iliad is a humane one, which re­flects both his sense of inner excellence and his sense of familial friendship: the releasing to old Priam of the body of Hector for burial (Mandel, 117). In the final lines of the Iliad we see in Achilles an emerging change in the nature of the hero, one less obsessed with desire for glory and one more characterized by inner qualities. Achilles is the forerunner of this type that we see in the Philoctetes in his son Neoptolemus. Achilles lives on in Neoptolemus, who repre­sents, to a degree, a moral advance, a hero more given to pity and sacrifice.

So, in the end, in his expression of true friendship, Neoptolemus places himself in di­rect conflict with the gods as well as the state. He is not worried about the gods. "How shall I avoid the blame of the Greeks?" he asks Philoctetes (1406). "I shall be there with the bow of Hera­cles," the old warrior replies. It is, then, this conflict between the individual and the state that was uppermost, perhaps, in Sophocles' mind during his last days.[ix]  This brings us back to Theseus and Heracles and the "burden of neces­sity."

Necessity is a fact of life that does not al­ways appear to be just. Early in the play Neop­tolemus uses "necessity" as his justification for wanting Philoctetes to leave with him. "Necessity, a great necessity, compels it. Do not be angry" (923-4). He means that the gods have decreed as much, and the gods will have their way in the long run.  Further, life's processes, including the decisions of the gods, are often in­human and apparently unjust. Yet, when con­fronted with breaking his word, Neoptolemus is struck with "a terrible compassion," a change of heart, which will eventually lead him to reject the forces behind this "great necessity."

What Sophocles is suggesting, of course, is the concept of individual conscience, that al­lows itself the freedom to respond from a sense of philia rather than mere duty, a view that would still, one critic has put it, be "fresh, controver­sial, and dangerous when Thoreau voiced it again after too many centuries of silence" (Mandel, 119).

As Sophocles neared the end of his long and productive life, he was apparently still manipu­lating the themes that had interested him in the Ajax and the Antigone and certainly the Oedipus Tyrannus, his earliest plays. "What," he seems to be asking, "are the limits of the human will in the shadow of the everpresent power of the gods?" While he would seem to agree with Socrates that "the unexamined life is not worth living," that one has a duty to extend his human will to its limit, he seems clearly resigned to the inevitability that the gods will have the final say.

Therefore, for Sophocles the fate of man is to work his will as best he can in response to "the burden of necessity" presented by the existence of the gods. Unlike her sister Ismene,  Antigone feels justified in dying for a sacred principle be­cause she is confident she has fulfilled the will of the gods. Oedipus is heroic in his faithfulness to the gods despite the fact that they have doomed him in response to his having exemplified the finest of human attributes. Only by the intro­duction of the deus ex machina is Neoptolemus relieved of what one anticipates would have been the inevitable retribution of the gods for his re­jection of their will and the substitution of his own.

We are faced at the end of the Philoctetes with the undeniable reality that the will of the gods must be fulfilled. This is more or less the natu­ral order of things. However, we are left also with the appealing power of Neoptolemus' deci­sion. For Neoptolemus, as for Euripides' Hera­cles, it is philia that makes necessity endurable.

It is Philoctetes himself who anticipates the best of all possible fates in his farewell lines to the island, which has been his prison for so long:

I had never hoped for this.

Farewell Lemnos, sea-encircled,

blame me not but send me on my way

with a fair voyage to where a great destiny carries me, and the judgment of friends,

and the all-conquering

Spirit who has brought this to pass. (1464-68)

[Originally published in the New England Classical Newsletter & Journal Volume XVIII May 1991 Number 4]

Bibliography

Arrowsmith, William, trans., Euripides' Her­acles, University of Chicago, 1952.

Kitto, H. D. F., Greek Tragedy, New York, 1954. Mandel, Oscar, Philoctetes and

        the Fall of Troy, University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

Opstelten, J. C., Sophocles and Greek Pessimism, trans. by J. A. Ross,

      Amsterdam, 1952.

Segal, Charles, Tragedy and Civilization, Har­vard University Press, 1981.

End Notes

     [i] Sophocles' final play was to be Oedipus at Colonus, in which he recounts the death of Oedipus. (Colonus, incidentally, was Sophocles' birthplace.) In his Philoctetes he had returned to a character in some ways similar to the Oedipus of the Oedipus Tyrannus, unjustly condemned and heroic in his stubborn persistence. Critics con­tinue to speculate about possible relationships between Sophocles' advanced age at the time his last plays were written and the themes of those plays. (See David Grene's Reality & the Historic Pattern, Chicago, 1967.)

[ii]  Various versions of the story suggest that Diomedes was sent from Troy to fetch Philoctetes and Odysseus was sent to fetch Neoptolemus. Other versions (including Euripides' version) suggest that they were both sent to fetch Philoctetes. According to Sir James Frazer, the translator of Apollodorus, Sophocles is alone in placing Neoptolemus with Odysseus on the is­land mission: "However, while Sophocles di­verges from what seems to have been the usual story by representing Neoptolemus instead of Diomedes as the companion of Ulysses on this er­rand, he implicitly recognizes the other version by putting it in the mouth of the merchant (Philoctetes, 570-597). (The Library of Apol­lodorus, trans. by Sir James Frazer: Putnam, 1921, pp. 222-3.)

[iii] In the typical spirit of the Greek warrior Neop­tolemus is not opposed -- at this point in the play--to taking Philoctetes by force. Lying, however, is another matter.

[iv] In Seneca's Hercules on Oeta there is an excellent account of the dialogue between Philoctetes and Heracles at Heracles' funeral pyre. It should also be noted that in the midst of one of his dreadful attacks of pain, Philoctetes asks Neoptolemus to take up his body and "burn it on what they call the Lemnial fire," reminding him that he had once had the resolution to honor such a request from Heracles only to be given his bow in return for the favor.

      [v] One cannot for long consider Neoptolemus as the noble son of Achilles befriending Philoctetes without remembering him within the broader myth. One must remember that he and Philoctetes do, indeed, become the heroes at the fall of Troy and that it is this same Neoptolemus who echoes his father's actions in another way. Although Achilles gives up Hector's body to old Priam, it is not before he has dragged it about be­hind his chariot in full view of Hector's family and friends. Neoptolemus is to show the same brutality in his merciless slaughter of the young son of Priam at the family altar in Priam's pres­ence. When in his last wrathful gesture the old king attempts to kill his son's slayer, Neoptole­mus lops off Priam's head with his sword.  Priam's decapitated body is dragged by Neop­tolemus to the tomb of Achi1ies and left there to rot.

      [vi] It is interesting to speculate as to Sophocles' ap­parent interest in what might be termed "aristocratic inheritance" or "inherited arete": Creon accuses Antigone of being just like her stubborn father, and Neoptolemus is constantly being identified by Philoctetes as reflecting his father's noble nature.

      [vii] In the Iliad it is Achilles who says to Odysseus when he and others have come attempting to per­suade him: "For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another" (9.312-13). ".

[viii]  Neoptolemus looks upon his act of deception as a failure or a fault (hamartia). Lattimore          trans­lates the word as "sin," which has an unmistak­able Christian overtone.

      [ix] One could, of course, argue that this action is not motivated by friendship but is merely a response to the "not unworthy" ransom offered by Priam. However, Priam appeals to Achilles to "remember [his] own father" who is old like him, and Achilles weeps in "a passion of grieving for his own father," as well as for his friend Patro­clus. Also, Achilles' wish to keep this action se­cret from Agamemnon might be considered fur­ther indication of his personal motivation as a "son" to a "father.”