In the Library
Philoctetes
Sophocles, 409 BCE
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 50 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Lewis Campbell (1906)
- Chapters
- Chapters 6
- Length
- Length 12k words
£1.99
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Words and not deeds give mastery over men.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles
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Prometheus Unbound
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley picks up Prometheus chained to his rock, another wounded sufferer who will not yield to the power that put him there, and imagines the day the chains fall.
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich does the same thing, but the screaming happens behind a bedroom door, and the people who cannot bear it are family.
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About the book
The search party finds a cave with two mouths, a bed of leaves, a wooden cup some untaught hand has carved, and rags stiff with what has been draining from a wound for ten years. Philoctetes was put ashore on Lemnos because his snakebite had gone septic and his screaming was spoiling the army's sacrifices, and the ships sailed on to Troy without him. Now a prophecy says Troy cannot fall without his bow, so Odysseus comes back, bringing Achilles' young son and a story to tell him. Sophocles does something here that almost nothing else in Greek drama attempts: he puts a body in real pain on the stage and lets it howl, writing the cries into the verse. The play's true battlefield is the boy, whose conscience turns slower and more honestly than any argument in the theatre. Written when Sophocles was nearly ninety, it asks what is owed to a man everyone agreed to throw away.