These young men, the scions of reputedly noble families, quickly proved themselves to be willing to bring their city to ruin rather than surrender any of the privileges of their class; they argued that greatness of character was the exclusive province of the aristocracy to which they belonged, and that no common-born man (women did not enter into the question) could ever hope to be more than a vassal, brutish by nature and situation; and they governed Athens accordingly, destroying the constitutional foundations of the city and inaugurating the reign of terror of the Thirty Tyrants, under whose year-long rule some 1500 Athenian democrats, the noblest minds of a generation, were executed. For Sophokles, these actions, from which Athens was never able to recover, made it abundantly clear that one's social class had nothing whatever to do with greatness of character--quite the reverse, it must have seemed; but by the time he had crafted the Philoktetes, the humane, mature culture that Sophokles represented so well had been condemned to death by its own children. Kenneth Rexroth has written that in Sophokles's work "men suffer unjustly and learn little from suffering except to answer unanswerable questions with a kind of ultimate courtesy, an Occidental Confucianism that never pretends to solution. The ages following Sophokles have learned from him the definition of nobility as an essential aristocratic irony which forms the intellect and sensibility." The Philoktetes stands as a splendid application of that ultimate courtesy, addressing timeless problems with a depth of emotion and tragic beauty that is unrivalled in the literature of the stage. (In particular, Sophokles's use of the chorus as the tormented inner voice of conscience is without peer.) It stands as one of the great accomplishments of the Greek mind, a striking depiction of the human soul's rising above seemingly insurmountable hardships to manifest its nobility. One of the fundamental documents in the history of the imagination, Philoktetes is alive, and it speaks to all of us. GREGORY McNAMEE Tucson, Arizona October 1986 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This translation is based principally upon the Greek text and notes established by T.B.L. Webster in his edition of the Philoktetes (Cambridge University Press, 1970), a model of classical scholarship in every detail. I am indebted to many friends for their help in the course of preparing this version. Jean Stallings first introduced me to the play in the original Greek; with her, Timothy Winters and Richard Jensen helped guide me through the intricacies of the text. Melissa McCormick and my family, as always, offered indispensable encouragement. I am especially grateful to Scott Mahler, Stephen Cox, and above all Thomas D. Worthen for their critical readings of the manuscript in various drafts. Last, I am grateful to Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, vortices of imagination, without whose efforts this book would not be. DRAMATIS PERSONAE