Community and Tragedy: One and the Same?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. If Philoctetes has “offended the divine” (100), it is Apollo only; Athena and Hermes are on the Greek side. The formidable enemy god Phoebus Silverbow was patron of Troy and of Trojan archer Prince Paris; moreover, as all who knew the Iliad were aware, Apollo had a favorite priest named Chryses and cult at the place named Chryse, where a preternaturally venomous snake bit the greatest of Greek bowmen, rendering him hors de combat for nine years. When he finally gets to Troy, Philoctetes will kill Paris with a bowshot, the beginning of the end for Priam’s city. If the snake is associated with “city,” as Badger argues (100f.), it is no Greek one, and hardly the Greek camp!

2. Which surprisingly omits important books on Sophocles by Simon Goldhill, Bernard Knox, and Cedric Whitman and an especially pertinent one by Josh Beer: Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).