The Bow on Lemnos
Sophocles' Philoctetes · Odysseus, who once marooned Philoctetes, now that Troy can't fall without his bow
Ten years ago a man on the way to the war was bitten on the foot. The wound would not close, it stank, and he screamed in a way that made the sacrifices impossible. So the fleet put him ashore on an empty island while he slept and sailed without him, and the man who gave that order is the one standing on the beach now.
He has been alive here for ten years on birds he shot with his bow, dragging the foot.
The army has just learned it cannot take Troy without that bow.
He will not hand it over. He will shoot the moment he recognizes the voice. So the plan is a young man he has never met (the son of a dead hero, who has an honest face and no history here) who will befriend him, offer him passage home, and take the bow while he sleeps or trusts.
The young man has asked, in front of everyone, whether they could not simply tell him the truth and ask.
Take it by the trick
Tell him the truth and askOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Odysseus went with the deception, and Sophocles then spends the play watching it fail: the young man, Neoptolemus, carries it out, gets the bow, and cannot live with it. He gives it back, in front of Odysseus, and the scheme collapses. The play ends only because the god Heracles appears and simply tells Philoctetes to go to Troy, which is the tradition's way of admitting that nothing the men on that beach did could resolve it. Sophocles wrote this around 409 BC, near the end of a long war his own city was losing, and it is one of several plays in which Odysseus (the Greek who thinks) is written as the villain.
The philosophers weigh in
Take it"The boy's conscience cost the army the bow and gave Philoctetes nothing he did not already have. Ten years on that rock were the crime. Refusing the trick does not undo a single one of them."
Ask him"There is a difference between harm you foresee and harm you use as the instrument. Here the man's trust is the instrument. That is not a hard case; it is the clearest one there is."