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The first chapter of this book introduces the practical or organizational framework of classical tragedy staged on the prison islands of the Civil War (Makronisos, Trikeri, Aï Stratis). It also points to changes in the conditions of imprisonment in the various locales and over time and to differences in the treatment of men and women. This chapter also builds links forward and backward in time, which is essential for many reasons: the internees' classicizing performances of Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes and of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Persians complemented other choices of works, such as the patriotic Greek martyr‐dramas, well‐regarded foreign classics, and many native plays, comedies, and skits.

Chapter 2 discusses the productions of ancient drama that were staged on Makronisos: it presents a diptych of two productions that reveal different levels of involvement on the part of actors, artists, inmate observers—and the camp keepers. Our analysis of the Antigone production that the authorities both encouraged and advertised is followed by a discussion of a more “genuine” Philoctetes (both staged in 1948). The chapter also concentrates on the regime's attempted monopoly on language and culture and on its fascist‐style use of the classics for propaganda purposes. The chapter unmasks the dynamics with which the Right manipulated the terms of political and moral “salvation” and religious and civic restoration. Theater became another means to the prison administration's end of “forging” a public consensus about the “rehabilitation” work that it was directing on Makronisos.

The exile stage confronted actors, artists, and audiences with the modernist challenge to rethink the very means and methods of drama. The theater of the prison islands was intensely political for reasons of the real‐life ideological perspectives of its practitioners. Performance as a platform for political involvement reached its apogee for becoming performance of and for political beings again. Emphasizing political and material result more than performance style was a way for the inmate cast to present itself as a disciplined group that was still engaged in dissidence. The performers' choices, styles, and techniques helped them to maintain a sense of cultural belonging, professionalism, and integrity. Alexandrou's play delivers the darker side of the radical resistance that inspired most of the cultural activities described in the preceding chapters. This darker side is, however, a necessary complement to Chapters 1‐4 of this book, and it helps this study to strike a more objective balance.

This chapter examines the presentation by Sophocles of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. In Homer he is a flawless hero; in most other archaic poetry and art, he is mainly a perpetrator of atrocities; in the whole output of Aeschylus and Euripides he is never made a dramatic character at all. In Sophocles he is sometimes noble (The Scyrians, Eurypylus) and sometimes base (Hermione and probably Polyxena), far baser than he is made to seem in the corresponding Euripidean plays (Andromache, Hecuba) in which he does not appear. In Philoctetes, where his very presence is innovative, he gradually changes before our eyes from apprentice villain to true hero — but we are reminded at the end that he is destined not to maintain that standard.

This chapter explores Sophocles' Philoctetes, the most morally complex of all of his extant tragedies. Philoctetes involves the interrelation of three characters and, as such, presents an array of dilemmas and disagreements. The chapter focuses on each character in turn. Odysseus, it is argued, is more a reflection of his Homeric prototype than a villainous sophist. This is an assessment which has important implications for the rest of the play. Philoctetes is the monistic hero, moulded in the style of his Iliadic and Sophoclean predecessors and animated by hatred and anger. In this role, Philoctetes comes into conflict with Odysseus over the fate of the young Neoptolemus, a conflict which mirrors the ancient antithesis between Achilles and Odysseus. Neoptolemus undergoes a moral transformation through the course of the play, ultimately coming into conflict with both Odysseus and Philoctetes as he embraces a new kind of ethics that does not sit easily with the heroic code. Finally, the chapter contends that the play closes with a ‘double’ ending of sorts that perfectly highlights the impossibility of resolving singularly any of the conflicts at hand.

Chapter 1 considers the uncanny agency of weapons in Sophocles’ Ajax, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Heracles. On stage, the sword cues audience awareness of the intertextual factors conditioning the hero’s decision-making, forcing a reassessment of the Ajax’s rejection of suicide. His expressed desire to be rid of this weapon, which has brought him only pain and misfortune since the day he received it, gains in poignancy when Ajax is seen holding the weapon itself. A gift to Ajax originally from his enemy Hector, the sword continues to channel the animus of the unresolved duel they fought on Homer’s Trojan battlefield in the seventh book of the Iliad. The bow of Heracles in Philoctetes and the weapons in Euripides’ Heraclesprovide valuable comparanda for the animacy and entanglements of tragic weaponry.

The song to Hermias now takes center stage again, this time using its literary background to highlight the multiple generic stances adopted by the speaker. The song’s opening verses are examined in light of the rhetorical categories of ethos—the speaker’s character as projected by the poem—and pathos—the effects on the audience. A poem by Sappho and an Attic skolion are studied to show that Aristotle blended hymnic form with an old poetic game in which singers discoursed on what is “the finest thing” in life. This heritage suggests that the song’s ethos and pathos have much in common with contemporary protreptic literature. The traditional quality of such a poetic posture and the possibilities it offered for creative expansion and variation are brought out by comparing a very similar discourse on virtue in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

Chapter 1 looks at the 1816 company of exiles on the shores of Lake Leman (the threshold of the Shelleys and Byron’s Italian experience), and the Brownings’ delighted, bewildered entry into Pisa in 1846. The ideal of the intellectual group or circle is discussed in tandem with lamentations about the isolated, interior experience of banishment, and the unfamiliar texture of a new locale. Keeping mythic and material responses to exile in dialogue, the biblical book of Genesis and Sophocles’ tragedy of Philoctetes exemplify the polarities of solitary and communal exile

This chapter examines why Sophocles' presentation of his main character in his drama Philoctetes escaped ridicule, despite Sophocles painting his main protagonist in a repulsive manner. It argues that despite Philoctetes being portrayed in a repulsive manner, his integrity and the range of his language proved to be one of the greatest portrayals of a character in Greek tragedy. It adds that the versatility, range, and power, needed to play Philoctetes also effectively removed any opportunities of ridicule.

As they were incorporated into mythological plots, the choruses of classical Athenian tragedy took on fictional identities that departed from their status as performers in a celebratory communal ritual. In ‘The Nostalgia of the Male Tragic Chorus’, Sheila Murnaghan discusses tragic choruses portraying groups of men. These choruses often interact with the protagonists in ways that reflect contested, politically charged relations between leaders and followers. Choruses with tyrannical, self-interested leaders are more fully displaced from their underlying identities as joyful singers and dancers and more thoroughly oppressed by the conditions of their fictional roles, especially the debilitating effects of absence from home and old age. Choruses with good leaders are brought safely back from adventures abroad and may undergo an experience of rejuvenation that Greek culture associated with dancing and the influence of Dionysus.

The aim of this chapter is to reassess ‘Philoctetes’ (1963–5), one of the most important dramatic monologues in the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos’ collection The Fourth Dimension (1972), in the context of the western reception of Sophocles’ hero. Though it is difficult to categorize the richness and diversity of responses to Sophocles’ play, it could be argued that its reception centred around three major themes: pain, exile, and politics. The analysis of Ritsos’ poem offered here aspires to demonstrate how ‘minor’ literatures can enrich the worldwide reception of classical myths, and to assess whether the text is consistent with the three themes mentioned above or diverges from them in a significant way. It is indeed hard to align Ritsos’ ‘Philoctetes’ with one of the three major themes which dominate the modern versions of Sophocles’ hero. Hence, this chapter explores the poem’s complexities in the light of the other modern reworkings of the myth of Philoctetes and in the context of political developments in Greece during the 1960s. This dramatic monologue presents one of the best opportunities to reassess the extent to which Ritsos can be considered a politically committed poet.

This chapter examines Cassandra’s treatment of three Greek heroes to whom she awards limited local honors. Philoctetes is killed in a way that evokes his activities in the Trojan War, and honored in Italy in a manner far different than is imagined at the end of Sophocles’ eponymous play. Diomedes is treated as an analogue of Odysseus. By reconfiguring the transformation of companions into birds so that it occurs in his lifetime Cassandra augments his suffering, and although she treats him as a city-founder, she calls attention to the problematic relationship of his community to the native Italian population. Finally, Agamemnon’s death with Cassandra is predicted in a way that engages closely with the models of Homer and Aeschylus.

Although Neoptolemus’ trajectory in Philoctetes is often described as a rite of passage, this chapter argues that it is better understood in terms of a different topos, the Biou Hairesis, or Choice of Life. Having received a conventional heroic upbringing, Neoptolemus comes under the influence of two additional instructors, Odysseus and Philoctetes. Odysseus urges the young man to join him in duping and victimizing Philoctetes, while Philoctetes appeals to the noble nature Neoptolemus presumably inherited from his father Achilles. At first repelled but then persuaded by Odysseus’ sophistic argumentation, Neoptolemus ultimately defies the older man and refuses him his cooperation. While empathy for Philoctetes plays a role in his change of mind, his decisive concern is for his own reputation. The end of the play, however, raises the disquieting possibility that Neoptolemus has not made a lasting ethical choice.

This chapter particularly focuses on the duality of Heaney’s chorus, who are nominally the ancient sailors of the original, but use a diction and metaphoric landscape that places the play firmly in Heaney’s Ireland. We look not only at the literary and political implications of this, but specifically at the challenge it gives actors and directors working on the text. This chapter examines how the dual locus of The Cure at Troy works dramaturgically and visually, as an act of translation across time, space, and cultures, and the political questions the play raises by fusing chorus and God at the end of the play. As part of this exploration, the chapter charts Heaney’s journey to find a workable English verse line and metre for translating ancient drama, exploring his correspondence with Ted Hughes on the question. Furthermore, we look at the afterlife of The Cure at Troy, particularly revisions that Heaney has made when excerpts have been published in other contexts.

My final chapter considers a different type of minority community, US veterans. Although veterans today, particularly those with disabilities, are a minority population that comprises less than 1 per cent of the total population, in ancient Athens, veterans had a direct connection to ancient Greek drama, and the majority of the ancient playwrights and the audience would have had direct experience of combat. By focusing on Aquila Theatre’s A Female Philoctetes, and Outside the Wire’s Theater of War Ensemble’s reading of Sophocles’ Ajax, I explore the ways in which Greek drama can function to challenge the stereotype of the ‘disabled veteran’, but can also reinforce stereotypes about the members of this community, who struggle not only for equality but also with the process of reintegrating into civilian life.

The idealist philosophy of the tragic distinguishes between the truly tragic and the merely pathetic. The early modern poetics of tragedy, in contrast, elaborated Aristotle’s description of Sophocles’ Ajax as a simple pathetic tragedy. Trissino revived the species in his Sofonisba (1515), the first regular tragedy of the Renaissance, and from there it descended through masterpieces of the tragic repertoire, including Racine’s Bérénice (1670), Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), and Gluck’s Alceste (1767, 1776). The critical tide began to turn when Winckelmann stressed the reticence and moral resistance of Philoctetes and Laocoön. Soon all the major literary critics of the day (Schiller, Herder, Schlegel) were distinguishing the merely pathetic from the truly tragic, deeming pathos to be aesthetic only when it served as a portal to the noumenal realm.