Sophocles is one of the great tragedians of Ancient Greece. Living in Athens during its ‘golden age’ in the fifth century BC, he wrote over 120 plays, of which only seven have survived to the present day.
This book, printed at Paris in 1586, contains a Latin translation of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. The play tells the story of an event in the Trojan War where Odysseus and Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, attempted to bring the disabled archer Philoctetes to Troy.
Philoctetes had received Heracles' bow after being the only man who would light his funeral pyre. The power of this bow would help the Greeks to defeat Troy but on his initial journey to the city, Philoctetes was bitten on the foot by a venomous snake. Such was the pain and the smell of the poison that he was abandoned on the island of Lemnos to suffer alone. After a decade of inconclusive fighting, Odysseus decided to retrieve Philoctetes who was initially reluctant to trust him, Odysseus being the man who had left him at Lemnos. After several arguments and the intercession of the now divine Heracles, Philoctetes returned to Troy where his foot was cured and he used the bow to turn the war in the favour of the Greeks, killing the Trojan prince Paris with a poisoned arrow in the process.
The play is a moral one, emphasising the meanings of trauma and morality in different circumstances as well as the struggle between the rights of an individual against the rights of the many. Philoctetes was written towards the end of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the themes raised in the play were of significance to a public weary of the conflict.