ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE may appear extremely militaristic to modern readers. From Homer onward war occupied a central place in oral culture and the extant literature. Fifth-century drama often dramatized wars or civil conflicts and their aftermath. War was often central to tragedy. At least twenty plots out of thirty-two extant plays revolve around wars or civil wars and their aftermath. These twenty plays were inspired by the Trojan War, the Theban cycle, and the Persian encounter. The ratio of war dramas and non-war plays does not change substantially even if we take fragments into consideration. For example, 47 percent of Sophocles’ plays were inspired by the TrojanWar, its antecedents, or its aftermath.2 Despite the fact that Sophocles’ Philoctetes is a play about war that portrays emergency (safety and rescue) wartime operations, very few scholars have accepted this perspective. The majority of scholars have viewed Sophocles’ Philoctetes as a play depicting the corruption of Athenian democracy and society and they have used it to “zoom in” on contemporary institutions5 and politicians (especially Alcibiades). This was due to the date of its production (409 BCE) and the internal political turmoil and polarization at that time. I would like to offer quite a different perspective on the play, keeping strictly to the military point of view (an army at war, warriors in action, win-or-die situation, supreme emergency). I will try to demonstrate that a substantial part, if

Only Deceit Can Save Us: Audience, War, and Ethics in Sophocles’ Philoctetes

This paper addresses the happy ending in Greek tragedy – viewed as the first audiovisual mass-culture manifestation –, connecting features specifically assigned to tragedy and melodrama, such as ex-machina endings and the Aristotelian alogon , pathos, tears and moans, which gave Plato the main reason to oppose that form of art.  Following Aristotle’s precepts in the Poetics , I will focus on the contradiction between chapters 13 and 14, in which he prescribes a happy and an unhappy ending. I have concluded that there is little difference between tragedy and melodrama as pertains to the exclusive features of Greek tragedy, but that there is a great difference when focusing on the features proposed by Aristotle, who therefore can not be held responsible for the shifting of tragedy towards melodrama.

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David Seale

Papers

The element of surprise in sophocles‘philoctetes1