{"title":"Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering in Sophocles’ Philoctetes","authors":"Ella Haselswerdt","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.87","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.87","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"CLASSICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation.
从某些方面来说,索福克勒斯的《菲罗克忒忒》最引人注目的是它所缺乏的东西:在现存的阿提卡悲剧中,唯独没有女性的人物形象;在索福克勒斯现存的戏剧中,唯独没有人物死亡;而合唱的作用则相对减弱,这与亚里士多德在《诗学》中提出的合唱应该扮演演员角色的要求最为一致。但是,从生态批评女性主义和充满活力的物质主义的角度来看,尤其是唐娜·哈拉威、陈美尔、简·班尼特和安娜·青的作品,这部戏剧的景观——利姆诺斯岛——变得栩栩如生;它充满了女性的能量,以及妥协和复杂的动物,而合唱则是一个移情的焦点和世界的建设者。本文认为,除了赋予岛上的物质生态系统以活力之外,索福克勒斯还赋予了利姆诺斯的神话生态系统以活力,其中最著名的是臭名昭著的、凶残的、散发恶臭的利姆尼亚女人的故事。所有这些因素结合在一起,把菲罗克忒忒斯描绘成一个卑贱、不育的月经者。此外,副歌部分简短而奇特的《盖娅赞美诗》(Hymn to Gaia)概括了全剧在男性化、英雄化、目的论叙事与女性化、原始化、兽性的利姆诺斯世界之间的张力。这些动态通过五世纪的雅典殖民,土著Lemnian Pelasgians的故事,以及对奥德赛的Cyclopeia的殖民阅读的镜头进一步考虑。最后,本文探讨了文本、景观和身体之间密切的、相互构成的关系,通过在古代晚期流行的莱姆尼安大地的药理应用,用于治疗其他疾病,包括蛇咬伤和月经。