Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
In the contrast between the "Philoctetes" and the "Prometheus" is condensed the contrast between Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Again, if Self-Control makes a man apt to abide by all opinions without exception, it may be bad, as suppose the case of a false opinion: and if Imperfect Self-Control makes a man apt to depart from all without exception, we shall have cases where it will be good; take that of Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, for instance: he is to be praised for not abiding by what he was persuaded to by Ulysses, because he was pained at being guilty of falsehood.
'Let us then restore the ancient glories of the Greek drama. Let us give them a trilogy of Aeschylus or Sophocles. 'Too calm, my dear madam. The Eumenides might do certainly, or Philoctetes, if we could but put Philoctetes to real pain, and make the spectators sure that he was yelling in good earnest. 'Disgusting! 'But necessary, like many disgusting things. 'Why not try the Prometheus?
Here was the house of Ajax Telamon who reigned in sea-girt Salamis, here that of god-like Philoctetes: much-counseling Odysseus dwelt just across the way, and the corner residence was fair-haired Agamemnon's: in the moonlight Jurgen easily made out these names engraved upon the bronze shield that hung beside each doorway.
There he stayed with the flaming robe burning into him, and he begged of those who passed to fire the pile that his end might come more quickly. None would fire the pile. But at last there came that way a young warrior named Philoctetes, and Heracles begged of him to fire the pile. Philoctetes, knowing that it was the will of the gods that Heracles should die that way, lighted the pile.
I was in the theatre, but not in the First Consul's box, and I observed, as all present must have done, the eagerness with which the audience applied to Napoleon and the King of Etruria the line in which Philoctetes says "J'ai fait des souverains et n'ai pas voulu l'etre." The application was so marked that it could not fail to become the subject of conversation between the First Consul and me.
In May, 1797, the purchase was made, but by this time work on 'Wallenstein' had completely stagnated and other interests were at the fore. He was back among the Greeks. Renewed study of Sophocles, particularly of the 'Trachiniae' and the 'Philoctetes', had convinced him that everything hinges upon the invention of a poetic fable.
These three plays constitute, on the whole, the greatest performance of Sophocles, though in detached parts they are equalled by passages in the "Ajax" and the "Philoctetes." V. The "Oedipus Tyrannus" opens thus. An awful pestilence devastates Thebes.
Would that fate had spared it to us! The slight mention which some old grammarians have made of it affords us no ground for concluding how the poet had handled his subject; but of this I feel certain, that Laocoön would not have been drawn more stoically than Philoctetes and Hercules.
But, in the quiet of my own little grass-plot, when the moon, at its rising, finds me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand, I often wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking