Abstract
This chapter explores classical Mediterranean thought on suffering through a detailed examination of one Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in which both moral philosophy and medicine also feature. Suffering in this play has no inherent metaphysical or ethical status, but it does raise the rather practical as well as ethical question of how other human beings can and should respond to the sufferer—examining in close detail how an individual’s acute suffering deforms his everyday life and his relationships with his or her community and showing how very differently individuals respond to the suffering of others. It even asks the proto-Utilitarian question of whether the suffering of a single individual should be allowed to outweigh the interests of the whole community. There is perhaps no other artwork that explores so intensely the problem which incurable suffering presents to the community to which the sufferer belongs.
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Notes
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- 3.
On ancient asceticism see Perkins (1995).
- 4.
Machaon, the archetypal surgeon, and his brother, who represented medicine and pharmacology.
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For a brilliant comparative study of the metaphors for pain in ancient Greek and contemporary English, see Budelmann (2010).
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- 7.
See Hall (2004, pp. 11–12), with Fig. 2. The production was entitled Philoktetes Variations, directed by KanRitsema, and performed at the Kaaitheater. Vawter’s naked body, covered with purple Kaposi rash, ‘spoke a more forceful language than his and his fellow actors’ words’, according to Laermans (1994, p. 68).
- 8.
See http://www.philoctetesproject.org/pdf/Philoctetes_Project.pdf.
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Hall, E. (2012). Ancient Greek Responses to Suffering: Thinking with Philoctetes. In: Malpas, J., Lickiss, N. (eds) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_13
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