# Posted 2:42 PM by Patrick Belton  

SOPHOCLES AND POLITICS: Over the weekend, Rachel and I stayed in on Saturday night and read to each other the penultimate Sophoclean tragedy, Philoctetes. (Yes, this is how married nerds spend their weekends; Sophocles's final work, incidentally, was his more widely read Oedipus at Colonus, to which Philoctetes bears resemblance). I had been thinking at length lately on how best to begin approaching issues of ethics and statecraft, and on reading this neglected play of Athens's greatest tragedian, I was struck by how appropos it was to modern issues of state morality. Indeed, Philoctetes (and here is one translation) is at its core a play of statecraft, revolving around strikingly topical questions such as the morality of deception and covert action in service of a nation's security (even a spy appears, briefly), the moral validity of raisons d'etat, and the legitimate claims owed to chains of command by an officer of the state. It bears, I think, further reflection.

The titular Philoctetes, once the greatest of Greek archers and second to none in nobility of character, has for ten years been abandoned by his countrymen Achaians after his accidental trespass and subsequent snakebiting in a religious sanctuary on the island of Chryse. In consequence of this mishap he is banished and becomes an instantly recognizable as a sort - in Seamus Heaney's gloss, "the wounded one whose identity has become dependent upon the wound." We meet him rag-dressed after a decade's exile, inaugurated when Odysseus abandoned him sleeping on the shores of the desolate island Lemnos. After the snakebiting, his wounds had brought Philoctetes such pain that due to his "savage and ill-omened" cries, his companions could not pour libations or conduct sacrifices in peace. And so he is abandoned through trickery; and so, with the Chorus, we come upon him ten years after his abandonment,

of illustrious race,
Yet here he lies, from every human aid
Far off removed, in dreadful solitude,
And mingles with the wild and savage herd;
With them in famine and in misery
Consumes his days, and weeps their common fate,
Unheeded, save when babbling echo mourns
In bitterest notes responsive to his woe.

The play's main tension begins nearby, where the wily general Odysseus (registering an early anti-Odyssean tradition in which the Homeric hero's deceptiveness receives much less sympathetic treatment than that to which we are accustomed) is conferring with young Neoptolemus, the late Achilles's noble, battle-untried son. We meet them as Odysseus is justifying to his charge why the young man must convince Philoctetes, through lies and ruse, to return with the Greeks to the battlefields of Troy. This deed is necessary because the seer Helenus, son of Priam, had prophesised Troy would be secure until Philoctetes arrived on the scene; hearing this, the joint commanders of the Greek armies, Agamemnon and Menelaus, dispatched Odysseus and his soldiers to retrieve Philoctetes and his bow - and thereby setting our plot in motion.

Odysseus realized that the archer whom for the common good he betrayed would murder him on sight given the chance, and so dispatches young Neoptolemus to by ruse disarm the afflicted archer so the Greeks could compel him to accompany them to Troy. In justifying his actions to his junior officer, Odysseus presents several arguments to Neoptolemus. His first is premised on state morality (duty) and the chain of command (compliance) - "Reflect that 'tis thy duty to comply." His second is the broader compulsion of the state, justified by the security imperatives it faces:

Say what thou wilt, I shall forgive,
And Greece will not forgive thee if thou dost not;
For against Troy thy efforts are all vain
Without his arrows.

His final appeal, though, is not ultimately to patriotic duty, but to vanity and pride:

I know thy noble nature
Abhors the thought of treachery or fraud.
But what a glorious prize is victory!

Concluding, Odysseus stresses the aberrant, temporary nature of the deceitfulness that the state is compelling upon Neoptolemus:

Therefore be bold; we will be just hereafter.
Give to deceit and me a little portion
Of one short day, and for thy future life
Be called the holiest, worthiest, best of men.

However, the noble nature of Achilles, living in his son, rebels against deceipt, and cries out for an honest contest among equals -

What open arms can do
Behold me prompt to act, but ne'er to fraud
Will I descend. Sure we can more than match
In strength a foe thus lame and impotent.
I came to be a helpmate to thee, not
A base betrayer; and, O king! believe me,
Rather, much rather would I fall by virtue
Than rise by guilt to certain victory

The pivotal interchange in the dispute which ensues is Neoptolemus's question, "And thinkst thou 'tis not base / To tell a lie then?"; to which Odysseus's response is, as it must be, "Not if on that lie / Depends our safety."
 
Before proceding to the unplaying of the covert action itself, we might pause to consider what has taken place. First, we see the state giving, in order to preserve itself, to one of its citizens the right to violate its laws and its decent standards of conduct. The wilyness and deceptiveness of Odysseus, now forced by command and conjolance upon his charge, is from the perspective of Athens a black art forgiveable when the survival of the state is in question, but out of place at home in the peacetime councils and life of the democracy. Second, this dispensation here has become a command - conveyed and made attractive with appeals to patriotism, personal glory, and compulsion (familiar components in the recruitrment of agents even in today's clandestine tradecraft) - but at the same time, a military command given from a senior officer to a junior, who with his soldierly status has accepted the impositions on his individual capacities for moral choice of the military chain of command. Third, when the individual threatens the communal good, that of the state, the Greek polity selects its own self-preservation- whether by deceitfully banishing the unlucky hero far from Greek civilization ("Alas, poor soul," says the Chorus, "that never in ten years' length / enjoyed a drink of wine"), or then by deceitfully compelling his disarmament and forcible return. Sophoclean morality condemns, after all, hubris above all - thus the unseemly pride of Creon in Antigone, or perhaps that of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex - because through it, the individual threatens the good of all Athens.

This much, at least, from Odysseus's perspective. Yet thankfully Sophocles also permits us to see things from the perspective of Neoptolemus: here we come across a talented junior officer for whom the concept of deceiving others - that is, acting under a cover, hiding the true state of affairs (hence our covert, the old French past participle of cuvrir, to cover) - reaches beyond the unaesthetic to the unethical. Neoptolemus's unease with deceipt in the service of a state's survival is not impossible to understand - his code, after all, is heroic, not conniving; it privileges means, not ends; it is ultimately Kantian, not utilitarian. But while gentlemen who, with Secretary Stimson, do not relish the thought of opening the mail of other gentlemen may perhaps nonetheless be forgiven for opening that of tyrants and murderers, the noble character of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, does not even allow us that much: for noble Achilles's son would seek to struggle honestly and win nobly, or nobly be defeated. The tension between the general of covert artistry and the noble lowly officer is left pending rather than resolved by Neoptolemus's brief acquiescence, and Odysseus departs from the scene, calling both on Hermes, god of trickery, and on Athena, goddess of Athens.

Thus, shortly after, Neoptolemus presents himself under cover to Philoctetes and genuinely pities and befriends the lonely accursed archer, and begins to shake loose his cover when he directs the Spy (a largely gratuitous character who briefly appears) to speak openly to them both, commanding him: "Hide nothing then." And after only a short period further - feeling pity for the abandoned cripple as well as the pull between the heroic code and the shadowy efficacy of Odysseus - he chooses to honor the code of Athenian heroism and tells all, hoping to continue following the chain of command and compel Philoctetes's forcible transportation to the fields of Troy, but now to do so openly and without deception in his application of coercion:

I can no longer hide
The dreadful secret from thee; thou art going
To Troy, e'en to the Greeks, to the Atreidae.
PHILOCTETES
Then am I lost,
Undone, betrayed. Canst thou, my friend, do this?
Give me my arms again.
NEOPTOLEMUS
It cannot be.
I must obey the powers who sent me hither; justice enjoins- the common cause demands it

Unfortunately, Neoptolemus's moment of moral clarity then disintegrates somewhat into the muddled inclarity of a therapy-session. We anticipate, even, catharsis by group hug:

Alas!
What shall I do? Would I were still at Scyros!
For I am most unhappy.

At which point, the session is disrupted by the arrival of Odysseus - who now justifies his actions of compulsion, now no longer covert, by reference to gods' compulsion rather than merely that of the state and men:

Know, great Zeus himself
Doth here preside. He hath decreed thy fate;
I but perform his will.
PHILOCTETES
Detested wretch,
Mak'st thou the gods a cover for thy crime?
Do they teach falsehood?
ODYSSEUS
No, they taught me truth,
And therefore, hence- that way thy journey lies. Pointing to the sea

The gods thus demand it - but, this far, only in Odysseus's mouth, although we have no reason to believe that he and his own commanders are acting in bad faith in keeping with their information at hand and their special responsibility for the Greeks' security. But now Neoptolemus makes his existential choice worthy of the Sartrean French wartime student, and disobeying his general, returns to the crippled archer the bow which was, on his deserted island, his livelihood:

NEOPTOLEMUS
I come
To purge me of my crimes.
ODYSSEUS
Indeed! What crimes?
NEOPTOLEMUS
My blind obedience to the Grecian host
And to thy counsels.

Yet he keeps Philoctetes from slaying Odysseus and permits the latter to escape, for the moment striking out as an independent actor, capable of rendering himself on one side or the other as compelled by the dictates of moral choice. Whereupon Neoptolemus then seeks, though vainly, through speech to make common cause with both the archer and his commanders, and compel Philoctetes to Troy by force of arguments rather than violence; in other words, he becomes a diplomat:

PHILOCTETES An idle tale
Thou tellst me. surely; dost thou not?
NEOPTOLEMUS I speak
What best may serve us both.
PHILOCTETES But, speaking thus,
Dost thou not fear the' offended gods?
NEOPTOLEMUS Why fear them?
Can I offend the gods by doing good?

Having foresworn force or the arts of deception to impose the Greeks' will on Philoctetes, however, Neoptolemus finds that relying on argument he is powerless to compel the crippled archer to Troy. And so, noble Neoptolemus is ultimately rendered in a position of incontrovertible tension between moral commitments.

The resolution of the tension is ultimately by deus ex machina - quite literally, as Heracles then appears, and directs Philoctetes and Neoptolemus to Troy where the two will slay Paris and where Philoctetes will be healed - and this because Sophocles could not in the end answer the question which he himself had posed: how one might reconcile irreconcilably conflicting duties to the state, to the gods, and to human pity and benevolence. The appeal to divine intervention brought Aristotles's scorn upon this play, and subsequent critics have tended to follow his impulse here. Well enough, we might ask, that the gods appear to the agonizing noble pair, resolving their tormenting pulls between human benevolence and the needs of the state - but where are those of us left to whom Heracles does not deign to appear?

The gods themselves must intervene to solve this dilemma. But perhaps - perhaps - Sophocles's play contains a meaning missed by Aristotle and academics following in his path; perhaps this can be read differently, to say that only divine intervention can justify the commission of intrinsically unethical acts to serve a public good. This may not be my answer - I believe, for instance, with John Lewis Gaddis that espionage serves an important good of stability, assuring antagonists of one another's peaceable intentions when, as during the Cold War, their talk in each others' ears is cheap. But I do believe, however, that this is ultimately the answer which is Sophocles's. And as to my knowledge no more compelling treatment in literature, whether classical or modern, of the ethical dilemmas inherent in covert acts of state than this play from the Athenian golden age, we who might argue for more expansive notions of raison d'etat, if only toward murderers and terrorists rather than gentlemen, would do well to measure and tune our arguments against Sophocles's tragedy.
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