Posthomerica, Book 9 — Philoctetes Recalled from Lemnos

Reading Troy — chapter 33 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 9

Posthomerica, Book 9 — Philoctetes Recalled from Lemnos (Days after the death of Eurypylus; the ninth of the post-Iliadic books; the Greek camp, the open Aegean, and the rocky island of Lemnos)

The morning after Eurypylus's burial-by-the-Trojans, the Greek host gives Neoptolemus and Odysseus their final orders. Odysseus is to sail; Diomedes is to accompany him; the bow of Heracles in the hand of Philoctetes is the prophecy's prescription, and the prophecy is now both Greek and Trojan in origin. The captains feast and bless the embassy. The ship is launched. Quintus marks the day with one of his careful sea-similes — the keel cutting the wine-dark sea "as a plough cuts black earth in spring."

The voyage is rapid. Lemnos rises out of the sea on the second day. The ship beaches in a stony bay. Odysseus and Diomedes climb up through the heather and rocks toward the cave Philoctetes has lived in for nine years. They follow the path of his wound: arrow-killed birds and small game lie about, with the marks of his halting steps in the dust. The cave-mouth is a cleft in a black cliff above the sea. They find him at its entrance — gaunt, bearded, ragged in the skin of a stag, the divine bow of Heracles propped beside him, the quiver of envenomed arrows at his hip, his right foot bandaged with stinking leaves; the smell of his wound is the first thing the visitors register, and Quintus does not spare it.

The recognition is the book's emotional centre. Philoctetes does not at first know them; nine years of solitude have dimmed his eyes. When Odysseus speaks, the wounded man knows the voice and the bitterness erupts. He names Odysseus the man who marooned him; he names the Atridae the kings who consented; he names every Greek captain by his absence. Quintus gives him a long denunciation — Way's translation does it well, the cadence biblical, the catalogue of grievances tolled like bells. Philoctetes refuses to come. He will not aid the men who abandoned him.

The book's diplomacy is the cycle's most morally serious moment after the burial-dispute in Book 5. Odysseus answers in his careful register: he confesses the marooning was wrong; he names the necessity (a wound that no man could bear near him); he offers the prophecy as redemption — Troy cannot fall without the bow, and the bow cannot leave Lemnos without its owner. Diomedes adds nothing crafty; he stands in silent witness. The argument is repeated; Philoctetes refuses again. The two ambassadors retire to their ship to take counsel.

Quintus then introduces what Sophocles's Philoctetes invented and what Quintus inherits: the divine intervention. Heracles himself appears — not on stage exactly, but in a vision to Philoctetes in his cave at night. He commands the wounded man to go. The bow is Heracles's bow, and Heracles wishes it back in the war. Healing is promised. Philoctetes wakes shaking. At dawn he hails the ship from the cliff above the bay. The ambassadors return. The departure is silent; the cave is left behind; the bow comes down to the beach in its owner's hands.

The voyage back is uneventful. At the Greek camp Podalirius, son of Asclepius, has been waiting — Machaon's surviving brother, now the army's chief physician. He cleanses the foot, lays on it the herbs of Cheiron (taught to his father by the centaur), and the wound, festering for nine years, closes "as a cloud passes from the moon." Philoctetes embraces Agamemnon; the Atridae welcome him with gifts; Achilles's son meets him at the captains' tent, and the cycle's two new champions stand beside each other — the boy with his father's spear, the old archer with Heracles's bow. The day closes with a great feast. The book ends on a quiet note: Philoctetes asks to be taken to Achilles's tomb (he loved the father at the war's beginning); he and Neoptolemus stand together at the barrow at evening, the bow that will kill Paris lying between them on the stone.

Analysis

Quintus and Sophocles

Sophocles's Philoctetes was first performed in 409 BCE; Quintus wrote some six or seven centuries later. The play is the great surviving treatment of the recruitment-mission, and Quintus knows it. His Book 9 is not a paraphrase — he reshuffles the scene-list and tightens the moral debate — but it is in dialogue with the play. Sophocles famously substituted Neoptolemus for Diomedes as Odysseus's companion in order to dramatise the corruption of a young man by craft; Quintus restores the older tradition (Cypria, Little Iliad) of Odysseus-and-Diomedes. The choice matters: Quintus's Neoptolemus is the warrior who has just killed Eurypylus and visited his father's tomb; he is not available to be the morally innocent foil Sophocles needed. The Posthomerica's Neoptolemus is already a man.

The denunciation of Odysseus

Philoctetes's anger at Odysseus is the cycle's longest and best-organised speech of grievance. Quintus's Greek here is plain and weighty; Way's English rises to it. The catalogue of who abandoned the wounded man — Atridae, Diomedes himself (silently named), the Locrians, the Myrmidons — does not spare the absent or the present. Quintus is doing something unusual: he is allowing a minor figure to indict the cycle's central characters by name. The Iliad rarely allowed this; the Odyssey allowed it only in the underworld. Quintus's middle-Imperial Greek poetry seems freer with moral judgement than its archaic models, and Book 9 is one of the freest moments. The wound is metaphor for the wound the heroic code has done to its own.

Heracles's vision

The deus ex machina of Heracles appearing to Philoctetes is Sophocles's invention; in the Philoctetes the god comes at the very end as the only way to break the deadlock between Philoctetes's wounded pride and the army's prophetic need. Quintus inherits the device but does not repeat its stagecraft. His Heracles appears as a night-vision, briefly and without speech beyond the command; the moment is dignified rather than dramatic. The difference is that Sophocles needed Heracles to override Philoctetes against his own will; Quintus uses him to give Philoctetes a reason that Philoctetes can himself accept. Quintus's man wakes changed, not commanded. It is a less theatrical solution and probably a better one.

The healing of the wound

Podalirius's healing of the foot is the cycle's most precise piece of medical realism. Quintus names the herbs (he does not invent them; the centaur Cheiron's herbal is older than the Iliad), the technique of cleansing, the closing of the wound. The detail matters because the cycle has just lost Machaon (Posthomerica 6), and the surviving brother is now the practitioner who must make this scene work. The healing is not magical; it is competent. Quintus lets the cure happen because the army's primary surgeon has a brother who is its secondary surgeon. The realistic note is part of the Posthomerica's middle-Imperial sensibility — its willingness to admit that an army's medical corps is its bone.

The bow of Heracles

The bow Philoctetes carries is the bow Heracles gave him at his own death-pyre on Mount Oeta. The mythography is older than the Iliad. Philoctetes was the man who lit the pyre when no other Greek would (because lighting it sent Heracles to apotheosis, an act everyone feared to authorise); in payment Heracles bequeathed him the bow and the envenomed arrows dipped in the Hydra's blood. The bow's arrival at Troy thus completes a generational arc: it is the bow that took the older Troy under Heracles, returning to take the younger Troy under his archer-pupil. Quintus draws this arc lightly but lets the reader feel it. The two Trojan falls are linked by one weapon. The cycle's most ancient single object is now on the Greek beach.

Way at the cave

A.S. Way's translation of the cave-scene is among his best work in the Posthomerica. The smell of the wound, the visual squalor, the gaunt isolation of the marooned man — Way handles these unflinchingly, in plain English freed from his usual archaism. The biblical cadence returns for the denunciation-speech, which it suits. The healing-scene reverts to plain prose-of-the-action. Quintus's Greek shifts register similarly: realistic, indignant, then ceremonial. The translation tracks the original well in this book, which is not always true elsewhere. Book 9 is one of the Posthomerica's clearest demonstrations that Quintus is a real poet underneath the Loeb-era haze.

The two new champions

The book's quiet last image — Neoptolemus and Philoctetes standing together at Achilles's tomb with the bow between them on the stone — is the cycle's structural turning point. The Greek army now has both new champions: the spear and the bow. The Posthomerica's last five books will deliver, with this pair, what the Iliad's army could not: the city itself. Philoctetes will shoot Paris in Book 10. Neoptolemus will lead the men in the horse in Book 12. The two together will be the spearpoint of the sack in Book 13. Quintus has assembled them deliberately, and the last image of Book 9 is the assembly visible.

What to watch for

• Book 10 puts the bow to work: Paris dies by the arrow of Heracles. The killer of Achilles is killed by the weapon that killed the older Troy.
• Sophocles's Philoctetes (409 BCE) is the great alternative version. Compare its Heracles to Quintus's.
• The Cypria detail of Philoctetes's wounding (by a snake at the altar on Tenedos) is implied but not narrated by Quintus; the Iliad mentions it at 2.722.
• Podalirius will appear once more in the cycle, very briefly, as one of the warriors in the Wooden Horse (Posthomerica 12).

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book reaches back to the Iliad's catalogue of ships (Iliad 2.716-728), which named Philoctetes among the Greeks who came to Troy and at once explained his absence: "he lay on the island in fierce pain, the deadly snake-bite of a hydra-poisoned wound; the Argives were soon to remember him by their ships." The Iliad therefore plants the recruitment-mission as a future inevitability; Quintus is collecting on a nine-book-old promise. The bow of Heracles links the cycle's deepest history: Heracles sacked an earlier Troy in the generation before Priam, and his bow now returns to take the second Troy. Tlepolemus in Iliad 5.638-651 already told this back-story; Quintus completes it. The marooning of Philoctetes is older than the Iliad — the Cypria narrated it as the punishment for a wound that made the army unable to perform sacrifices (the smell unbearable at the altar); Quintus inherits the detail and stages the recriminations on it. Odysseus's confession of the marooning answers, across the cycle, his own role in the Iliadic conscience: in Iliad 14 he speaks the wisest words of the embassies; in Posthomerica 5 he wins arms and then saves Ajax's burial; in Book 9 he confesses a crime and persuades its victim. The cycle's most ambivalent character keeps being asked to do the ethical heavy work, and keeps doing it.

Forward echoes

Book 10 will make immediate use of what Book 9 retrieves: Philoctetes will shoot Paris with one of Heracles's envenomed arrows; Paris will die slowly, refused healing by his abandoned wife Oenone. The cycle's revenge-symmetry is being constructed: Apollo guided Paris's arrow to Achilles's ankle (Book 3); the bow of Heracles will guide Philoctetes's arrow to Paris (Book 10); the bow that took the older Troy will take the younger (Book 13). Book 12's Wooden Horse will list Philoctetes among its picked warriors. Book 13's sack will see him at the spearpoint. Sophocles's Philoctetes (409 BCE) sits between Quintus and the older tradition as the great middle term — the dramatic treatment that asks whether craft can be redeemed by truth, and that Quintus's Book 9 answers, in its quieter register, in the affirmative. Odyssey 3.190 will have Nestor speak briefly of Philoctetes among the war's survivors, mentioning that he reached home safely; the post-war prosperity of the man marooned for nine years is one of the cycle's quietest balancing-acts. Aeneid 3.401 will have Aeneas name Petelia in Italy, founded by Philoctetes — Virgil's quiet acknowledgement that the cycle's most wronged Greek had his own foundation-story, parallel to but separate from Aeneas's. The healing of Philoctetes by Podalirius foreshadows nothing in the cycle directly but stands as a small good-news event in a sequence otherwise governed by deaths; the next book begins by undoing it from the Trojan side, when Paris cannot find similar healing from Oenone.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Philoctetes — found in his cave on Lemnos after nine years; refuses, then yields to Heracles's vision; healed by Podalirius; takes his place beside Neoptolemus
• Odysseus — ambassador; confesses the marooning; argues the prophecy
• Diomedes — silent witness on the embassy; the Iliadic tradition's choice as Odysseus's companion
• Neoptolemus — at the camp; meets Philoctetes at the captains' tent; stands beside him at Achilles's tomb at evening
• Agamemnon — welcomes Philoctetes with gifts
• Menelaus — embraces the returning archer
• Nestor — speaks the formula of welcome at the captains' feast

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — Philoctetes loved him at the war's start; the two new champions visit his tomb together
• Paris — the bow now on the Greek beach will kill him in Book 10
• Helen — the war's nominal cause; the bow's arrival is the prophecy of her return
• Zeus — silent presider; the prophecy is his
• Calchas — Greek seer; gave the prophecy of Philoctetes that the embassy now executes
• Cassandra — her brother Helenus's parallel prophecy is part of what the Greeks learned; she watches from the city

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.