In structure this play is perhaps the most interesting extant work of Sophocles. As elsewhere, we find a great simple character of vast will-power exposed to a strong temptation—Philoctetes confronted by the chance of healing, happiness, and glory, if only he will meet in friendship men whom he is determined to hate. But for once there is a secondary interest which is not purely secondary. Many will even find the development of Neoptolemus more impressive than the situation of Philoctetes. While the latter shows the heroic character as it appears after the experience of life, strong, reflective, sad, a little fierce if not soured, the other is the hero before such experience, eager and noble but too responsive to suggestion. Neoptolemus has just begun life, and his first task is to betray—for the public good, no doubt, but still to betray—a noble stranger who merits not only respect but instant pity and tendance. “Oh! that never had I left Scyros!” he exclaims. Life after all is not a blaze of glorious war as his father Achilles found it, but a sordid affair of necessary compromises. One of the most charming things in the drama is the clearness with which Philoctetes, in the midst of his rage, sees the tragedy of his youthful captor.[350] Confronted by the kindness of the youth, he reveals himself not as a mere savage, living only on thoughts of revenge; he becomes more flexible, open-hearted, almost sociable. So revealed, he is the direct cause of the change in Neoptolemus’ purpose. Beside these stands Odysseus, only less striking and equally indispensable. For a chief note of this drama is the skill with which the poet avails himself of the three actors, whose possibilities are here for perhaps the first time fully employed. It is easy, but mistaken, to label Odysseus as “the villain”. In reality he is the State personified. There is no modern reader who does not hate and contemn him, but it remains true that whereas Philoctetes whom we pity and Neoptolemus whom we love both take a strictly personal view, Odysseus at the risk of his life insists on pressing the claim of the community. It is necessary to Greece that Troy should fall. She can only fall through the arrows of Heracles. The man who owns them will assuredly not consent. It follows that he must be compelled to help, by force or guile. A conquering nation must have its Philip as well as its Alexander; Odysseus stands for facts which twenty years of the Peloponnesian war had driven home into Athenian minds. Neoptolemus is the type of many a young warrior who has learned with aching disgust that the knightly exploits which tales of Marathon had fired him to perform must be thwarted unceasingly by the politic meanderings of Nicias, by considerations of corn-supply, or the “representations” of some remote satrap.