Philoctetes

Philoctetes is a master archer who, during the Trojan War, is bitten by a snake and cursed with a foul-smelling, incurable wound. Odysseus abandons him on the island of Lemnos with a bow given to him by Heracles as his only companion. Ten years later, a prophecy reveals to the Greeks that Philoctetes and his legendary bow will be necessary to win the Trojan War. This forces Odysseus and Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, to embark on a quest to retrieve him from his exile on Lemnos. Both Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote plays entitled Philoctetes, but only Sophocles' version survives. It was first performed in 409 BC, and its performance won first prize. Torn between loyalty, honor, and deception, Philoctetes is a gripping meditation on what it costs to win a war. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)