Philoctetes

Homer's catalogue of ships makes Philoctetes the leader of seven ships from Methone, Thaumacia, Meliboea and Olizon, each rowed by fifty men skilled with the bow. By the time the catalogue is told, he is not at Troy. The Iliad says he lay suffering on sacred Lemnos, where the Achaeans had left him with an evil wound from a deadly water-snake. The poem adds that the Argives would soon remember him. In the Odyssey, Odysseus admits that only Philoctetes beat him with the bow at Troy, and Nestor lists him among the chiefs who came home safely.

The bow came from Heracles. Ovid's Metamorphoses says that when the dying hero built his pyre on Mount Oeta, he told Philoctetes to put a torch to it and take his bow and quiver in return. Apollodorus's Library tells it differently: no one would light the pyre until Poeas, Philoctetes's father, passed by looking for his flocks, and it was Poeas who received the bow. The arrows carried a poison of their own. Apollodorus says Heracles had dipped them in the gall of the Hydra.

Apollodorus's Epitome describes the wound. On the voyage to Troy, while the Greeks sacrificed to Apollo, a water-snake came from the altar and bit Philoctetes. The sore would not heal and its stench became unbearable. On Agamemnon's orders, Odysseus put him ashore on Lemnos with the bow, and he lived by shooting birds. In Sophocles's Philoctetes he has survived there ten years in a cave, dragging his foot to fetch water and firewood, and cursing the sons of Atreus and Odysseus.

Then the Greeks learned they needed him. Apollodorus says the seer Calchas told them Troy could not be taken without the bow and arrows of Heracles. Odysseus sailed to Lemnos with Diomedes, got the weapons by craft, and persuaded Philoctetes to come. At Troy the physician Podalirius cured him, and he shot Paris, whom Apollodorus calls Alexander. In Sophocles, the god Heracles appears at the end and gives the same orders: go to Troy, be healed, kill Paris with my bow, and sack the city.

Sophocles's Philoctetes is the fullest surviving telling. Odysseus brings Achilles's young son Neoptolemus and has him win the wounded man's trust with a false story. During an attack of pain, Philoctetes hands the boy his bow for safekeeping. Neoptolemus then turns against the lie and gives the bow back. When Odysseus steps in, Philoctetes aims an arrow at him, and Neoptolemus stops the shot. Only the appearance of Heracles persuades Philoctetes to sail for Troy.

Writers placed the bite in different spots. Sophocles's Neoptolemus says Philoctetes came too near the serpent that guards the roofless sanctuary of Chryse, and Philoctetes says the fleet reached Lemnos from sea-washed Chryse. Pausanias knew Chryse as an island a short sail from Lemnos where the accident was said to have happened, and says the sea later swallowed it. Apollodorus's Epitome sets the snakebite at a sacrifice to Apollo, told just after the Greeks land on Tenedos. Hyginus's Fabulae says the snake struck on Lemnos itself, sent by Juno, the Roman Hera, because Philoctetes alone had dared to build Heracles's pyre.

His return home was told in more than one way. The Odyssey has Nestor say he reached home safely. A later tradition preserved with Apollodorus's Epitome says he was driven to Campania in Italy, fought the Lucanians, settled at Crimissa near Croton and Thurium, and dedicated his bow in a sanctuary of Apollo the Wanderer. Pausanias saw a painting at the gateway to the Athenian Acropolis that showed Odysseus on Lemnos taking away the bow of Philoctetes.

Disney's 1997 animated film Hercules borrows the name for an entirely different figure. Its Philoctetes, called Phil and voiced by Danny DeVito, is a crotchety old satyr, half man and half goat, who trains heroes including Achilles and Hercules. The ancient Philoctetes is a mortal archer, not a satyr. In the ancient story the debt runs the other way: Philoctetes inherits the hero's bow, and in Sophocles the deified Heracles guides him.