Background: the story belongs to the Trojan Cycle. Philoctetes sailed for Troy with seven ships (see Iliad 2, 721-725). On the way, while acting as guide for his fellow Greeks, he was bitten by a snake on the island of Chryse. The wound festered. His cries of pain made it impossible for the Greeks to offer sacrifice. The rancid odor of his foot, furthermore, was annoying to his compatriots. While he was asleep, Odysseus conveyed him to the island of Lemnos [actually a well-inhabited place, but depicted by Sophocles as a desert isle]. There he lived in a cave, relying on the unerring bow and arrows of Heracles until the tenth year of the war. But the Greeks knew from an oracle that the bow of Heracles was needed to take the city and so they must now try to bring back Philoctetes.

Questions and topics to think about

• -notice the interest in place (the setting, Philoctetes' home, Troy)
• -why does Sophocles change the setting (from inhabited to desert island), breaking with Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides?
•  -the character of Neoptolemus: when do you feel he is right?
•  -pain and pity: the continuous display of suffering: how does this compare to other plays of Sophocles? Is there ever a time you want Philoctetes to go to Troy?
•  -isolation of Philoctetes: how are the expectations of the Greeks deceived? What do they expect him to be like after ten years of loneliness?
• -connections between Heracles and Philoctetes
• -nostou, return (in the last line): to what does this word refer (the trip home or the return to Troy)?
• -what was the historical situation in Athens in 409?
• -do you want Philoctetes to go to Troy? The most exciting part of the play is the point when both Neoptolemus and Philoctetes say no, no, we won't go! The two men who together took Troy are saying No to that tradition. What is the choice? Will the tradition be undone or will the world Philoctetes made for himself (around his purulent foot) be undone? Compare with the impossible possibility in the Iphigenia at Aulis.
• -how is the war presented in this play?
• -who is left at Troy now: mostly shabby men. Men can refuse to cooperate in shabbiness. Who are Philoctetes' enemies?
• -what do you think of Philoctetes' moral victory over Neoptolemus? Are you pleased when Philoctetes remakes Neoptolemus, when he takes his lies and turns them into truth?
• -how are we to accept the deus ex machina in this play? Does it confirm the tradition? Does it suggest that the honor and goodness of Philoctetes are not viable, that a good man cannot be integrated into the world of expediency without the jarring voice of the deus ex machina? Does the world belong to Odysseus and the Atridae [and to Neoptolemus who changes his mind every time he talks to an older man]?