d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?

casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29

ELLA HASELSWERDT

Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of

Suffering in Sophocles’ Philoctetes*

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 compli-
cated 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.

Keywords: ecofeminism, ecocriticism, pharmacology, Lemnos, Pelasgians, tragedy, Lemnian

Earth, chorus, materialism, myth, Hephaestus, Polyphemus, smell, menstruation

*This article has benefitted from the generosity of many readers and interlocutors. I would like to
thank especially Brooke Holmes, Nancy Worman, Mathura Umachandran, Clara Bosak-Schroeder,
the Classics+ group at Cornell University, the Department of Classics at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, and two insightful anonymous readers.

Classical Antiquity. Vol. 42, Issue 1, pp. 87–120. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344(e)
Copyright © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.87
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
88 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

INTRODUCTION

In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna
Haraway describes the epochal coinage in her title as “a compound of two Greek
roots (khthon and kainos).”1 For Haraway, it is important to note that while kainos
carries the LSJ definition of “new” and “fresh,” at the same time “there is nothing
in times of beginnings that insists on wiping out what has come before, or, indeed,
wiping out what comes after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, of remembering,
and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be.” The multitemporal valence
of kainos bleeds into Haraway’s gloss on khthon: “Chthonic ones are beings of the
earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with
tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair. . . .
Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the
material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. . . . they writhe and lux-
uriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of
earth.”2
It is difficult to say whether the tricolon in the final sentence is an intentional
invocation of the eponymous Hippocratic treatise (De aere aquis et locis), which
infamously argues that human bodies and human character are shaped by the
respective climates that nurture them. While Haraway would not endorse the racist
environmental determinism of that text (a foundational document in the history of
orientalism, characterizing people from the east as soft, from the west as rugged),
she may be moved by one of its fundamental premises, namely that humans are
deeply implicated in, and impacted by, the non-human forces of the worlds that sur-
round them. Indeed, the project of Haraway’s book is to think through humanity’s
myriad entanglements with, and responsibility to, the planet’s countless other
inhabitants in the context of the climate crisis, exhorting us to consider the many
ways in which we are, and always have been, if not “posthuman” then “com-post,”3
part of an unruly but vital multispecies assemblage from which humanity, despite
its best efforts, cannot extract nor fully distinguish itself. Attentiveness to these
complications is one form of Haraway’s titular exhortation to “stay with the trou-
ble.” In this effort, as suggested by her gloss on kainos, we should look not only to
the present and the future, but also to the past.
Following Latour, Haraway wants us to tell “Gaia stories . . . in which ‘all the
former props and passive agents have become active without, for that, being part
of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.’”4 She elsewhere describes this

1. Haraway 2016: 2.
2. Haraway 2016: 2.
3. Haraway 2016: 11. Despite Haraway’s role in founding a major branch of posthuman inquiry
with her seminal 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she repeatedly rejects the term in favor of the
punny, more materially inflected “com-post.” For more on the concept of posthumanism and how it
has been taken up in classics, see Chesi and Spiegel 2019.
4. Haraway 2016: 40–41.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 89

mode of interpretation as “material-semiotic composting.”5 I argue that Sophocles’

tragedy Philoctetes, along with the broader mythic complex in which it operates,
and in a particular facet of its strange material afterlife, can be told as a “Gaia
story,” and that in doing so we are granted a clearer picture of the messy, dripping,
fluctuating (and ultimately, I will argue, feminine) subjectivities that are suppressed
and de-animated in the name of human—particularly elite, male, able-bodied,
un-racialized,6 human—exceptionalism.7
From a certain perspective, the Philoctetes may seem like a strange place to
turn for such a rich and wild story, full of complicated animacies and nonhuman
actors. Indeed, on some accounts, the play is most notable for what it lacks. Alone
among the tragedies of Sophocles, nobody dies over the course of the dramatic
action. Alone among the extant plays of the tragic corpus, no female characters are
featured in the dramatis personae. And while the play of course features a chorus,
that chorus’s role is, by many standards, greatly diminished. They sing only one
complete, uninterrupted stasimon (focused largely on the immediate dramatic con-
text) and they rarely appear to exceed the limits of their dramatic character, lead-
ing many to argue that in this play Sophocles adheres most closely to Aristotle’s
injunction that the chorus should συναγωνίζεσθαι, that is, participate directly in
the action like any other dramatic character (Arist. Poet. 1456a27).8 Rather than
offering the elevated, detached commentary that the tragic chorus is accustomed
to espouse, their interested motivations are readily discernible, though they are
variable: they alternately endeavor to follow Neoptolemus’ orders and to carry out
Odysseus’ master plan. It has been argued that via these innovations Sophocles
stages a sort of stripped-down, triangulated laboratory of heroic masculine ethics.
With the traditional focus on the interactions between the cunning Odysseus, the
naive and high-minded Neoptolemus, and the desperate Philoctetes, the play pres-
ents an uncluttered investigation of individual character and its limits.9
But in recent years, scholars have been more and more attuned to what Haraway
might call the “thick copresence” of the text,10 the ways that nonhuman actors play
a significant role in this dramatization of Philoctetes’ plight, and the way that his
own subjectivity is broken down and complicated by the extremes of his bodily

5. Haraway 2016: 31. See also Latour 2014, 2017.

6. In Western modernity, “white,” in Greek antiquity, “Greek,” though this is a vast oversim-
plification of an incredibly complex issue. For an introduction to ancient ethnicity, with a particular
lens on its relationship to the environment, see Futo Kennedy and Jones-Lewis 2016, with further
bibliography.
7. For an accessible overview of the various interrelated theoretical movements that comprise
“environmental humanities,” with further bibliography, see Bosak-Schroeder 2020: 28–31. See also
Schliephake 2017.
8. Goldhill 2012: 119–31.
9. For example, Kosak 1999 and 2006; Van Nortwick 2008; Goldhill 2012. This approach is
also exemplified in the play’s contemporary reception history, wherein Philoctetes is often cast as an
American war veteran suffering from PTSD, for example in Doerries’ “Theater of War” productions of
the play.
10. Haraway 2016: 4.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
90 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

suffering.11 I will elaborate on this work, further arguing that the three supposedly
absent or diminished elements (broadly figured as exploring the edges of animacy,
significant female-coded energies, and a chorus with conceptual, extra-dramatic
concerns) are not only present in the text (albeit subject to various degrees of sub-
limation) but are, in fact, essential to the play’s philosophical project. They all
weave together to create a world that envelops and intertwines with Odysseus’ plot
to extract Philoctetes from Lemnos and Sophocles’ plot to test the limits of heroic
ethics. This is apparent on the level of suffering, in stinking Philoctetes’ bizarre
positionality vis-à-vis his immediate surroundings, the way his human status is
constantly undermined by his nonhuman relationships. Recent theories of post-
humanism and new materialism which recognize the perspectives and agencies of
species and objects beyond the able-bodied elite male human, in particular those of
Jane Bennett and Mel Chen, will help clarify the relationship between the complex
web of relations immanent on the island of Sophocles’ text and Philoctetes’ com-
promised humanity.
But it is also apparent that the very setting of Lemnos plays a key role in
the drama’s conceptual project, on the level of Sophocles’ subtle engagement with
what might be considered the island’s mythic ecosystem; that is, Lemnos’ deep
association not only with Philoctetes himself but also with the god Hephaestus and
his malodorous forge, as well as the famous tale of the murderous (and, in some
versions, odiferous) Lemnian women. Mythologically speaking, Lemnos is a site
of disgusting, dangerous, and sterile femininity, of debilitating injury, and of narra-
tive stagnation, a sort of mythic toxic waste dump.
The stories that cluster around Lemnos are fundamental to what made it a place
in the ancient Greek mythic imagination, rather than simply an abstracted space in
which the central drama is staged.12 A space is an empty vessel, a set of physical
parameters that becomes a place via constant and evolving processes. As Arturo
Escobar describes, “place, body, and environment integrate with each other. . . .
places gather things, thoughts and memories in particular configurations. . . . place,
more an event than a thing, is characterized by openness rather than by a unitary
self-identity.”13 Similarly, Doreen Massey writes that “place is woven together out
of ongoing stories, as a moment within power-geometries, as a particular constel-
lation within the wider topographies of space, and as in process, unfinished busi-
ness.”14 While others have discussed the ways that Philoctetes is dehumanized by

11. Worman 2000; Korhonen and Ruonakoski 2017; Telò and Mueller 2018; Telò 2018;
Thumiger 2019.
12. The “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences is often traced to Lefebvre 1991
[1974]. See Soja 2008. For an overview of the methodology’s application in ancient Greek litera-
ture, with further bibliography, see Gilhuly and Worman 2014. For place-making in the Greek ethno-
graphic tradition, see Bosak-Schroeder 2020: 26–27. For the dramaturgical use of space in Sophocles’
Philoctetes, see Taplin 1987.
13. Escobar 2001: 143 as cited in Worman and Gilhuly 2014: 6.
14. Massey 2005: 131.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 91

his association with the physical landscape of Lemnos (most recently Thumiger,
who describes it as a process of “annihilation”)15 and some have noted the ways
that Philoctetes’ plight overlaps with other Lemnian tales,16 there is not yet a coher-
ent account of the ways that Sophocles brings these elements together: the ways
in which it is significant that it is a specifically Lemnian landscape that engulfs
and complicates Philoctetes’ personhood while compromising his animacy. In his
presentation of the tale of Philoctetes, Sophocles both draws on and participates in
this production of spatial meaning, and, I argue, this dynamic is worth bearing in
mind as one considers a play that perhaps features a more richly described land-
scape than any other extant Greek tragedy.17 Ecofeminist approaches, in particular
those articulated by Haraway and Anna Tsing, will aid in conceptualizing the ways
that the mythic and material ecologies intertwine. Sophocles’ attunement to and
participation in the place-making of Lemnos via his dramatization of the plight
of Philoctetes seems to take into account what Massey would term the contempo-
rary “power-geometries” between Athens as the locus of Aegean hegemony and
Lemnos as, effectively, an Athenian territory.18 Another myth operational in the
Lemnian substrate, about the Pelasgians, the treacherous, murderous indigenous
inhabitants of Lemnos who pose a direct threat to the Athenians, ties the other
underlying myths that inhere in Lemnos, including that of Philoctetes, to the polit-
ical circumstances of the late fifth century.19
The play simultaneously contrasts Philoctetes’ feminized narrative stagnation
with the island’s competing mythic association with metallurgy, weapon-making,
and masculine, heroic narratives. That is, Sophocles instrumentalizes the island
itself—in its mythic, material, and historical incarnations—to compromise
Philoctetes’ agency and to give his diminished animacy a markedly feminine cast;
he is relegated to the role of an indigenous inhabitant, simultaneously dangerous
and not quite fully human, a figure excluded from history’s grand narratives. As
a result, the spatiality of the play captures the ambivalences of coloniality, of the
occupation and consumption of a place and its people.
As Haraway says, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with;
it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with . . . what stories make worlds,
what worlds make stories.”20 I take this here as a reminder that a narrow focus
on the perspectives and actions of the central characters of an Attic tragedy can
elide the elaborate world-making the genre permits. Therefore, I will prioritize the​​​​​​​

15. Thumiger 2019.

16. Morin 2003 argues that Sophocles invokes Hephaestus but also Polyphemus. See also
Masciadri 2008, who undertakes a structuralist analysis of the myths associated with the island of
Lemnos.
17. Nooter 2012: 149n.11 with further bibliography.
18. McInerney 2021: 152.
19. See McInerney 2021, and further discussion below.
20. Haraway 2016: 12.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
92 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

perspectives of the play’s extended dramatis personae, looking beyond the conflict
between the three central men, instead engaging primarily with the play’s nonhu-
man actors and its often overlooked chorus, in particular its strange, abortive Hymn
to Gaia. In this brief stanza, the chorus invokes a syncretic complex of primordial
female goddesses along with the human and non-human inhabitants of the island,
and draws a distinction between the play’s masculine, teleological narrative—
all about domination, deception, violence, and forward progress—and the more
grounded, ruminative processes of staying with the trouble.
Ultimately, these interrelated theoretical frameworks help bring to light the
way Athenian tragedy in general weaves together perspectives, animacies, and sto-
ries that enact and make meaning out of encounters with various kinds of Others.
In this case, Sophocles maps myth, history, and materiality to invoke the ambiva-
lence with which an imperial power perceives places and peoples that it occupies
to extractive ends.
Stories have material consequences. I will argue that this is the case both
within the dramatic world of the play—where the dark Lemnian tales that saturate
Philoctetes’ site of abandonment play an active role in the decomposition of his
body and his subjectivity—and in the play’s aftermath, when clay from the island
of Lemnos is transmuted into a pharmakon that promises to cure the very ailments
that afflicted Sophocles’ hero, a product that will maintain some degree of popular-
ity for over a millennium. Thus, after emerging from the compost heap of a play, I
will briefly turn my attention to what we might term the play’s “pharmocological
reception,” wherein the humus of Lemnos becomes a commodity used to condition
and regulate leaky, fluctuating, hyperfeminized bodies, a phenomenon that retro-
actively renders Sophocles’ play impossible and (perhaps) irreversibly alters the
material landscape of the island off the coast of Asia Minor. Place, myth, and text
have a constantly evolving and mutually constitutive relationship, and the control
of the human body is inextricable from the control of the narrative.21 Just as land-
scapes must be understood as constructions shaped by and manifested in human
perception, so, too, are humans shaped by and manifested in the landscapes they
inhabit.
The “Gaia story” told by this play and its conceptual surrounds is not utopian,
or even comfortable. Philoctetes’ dense web of interrelations are rendered visible
only by his abject misery. What is valuable is that we are granted a glimpse at what
is suppressed, with great ideological effort, in the manufacturing of the indepen-
dent, individuated, hermetically sealed masculine subject: the tentacular entangle-
ments that lurk beneath, and that are always ready to reassert themselves when the
façade begins to crumble.

21. See Wynter 1971, a seminal essay on the relationship between human geographies and narra-
tive form.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 93

I. LEMNOS BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

It is not unusual for Attic tragedy to represent compromised human subjects.

Nancy Worman argues that Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all depict “modes
of embodiment as strangely other than the ‘normally’ human—as strained, alien-
ated, or perverted in relation to the affective and material situatedness of lived expe-
rience.” She goes on, “Dire exigencies may render the human body less substantial
and agential than a tapestry or a statue; alternatively, other objects, creatures, or
even places may be annexed to or exchanged for bodies, extending or collapsing
them spatiotemporally as well as existentially.”22 Often, these “dire exigencies” are
constituted by the imminence of or proximity to death. In the Philoctetes, unusually
(and uniquely in the surviving plays of Sophocles), no characters die. Nonetheless,
the play complicates the binary formulation of living and dead, animate and inan-
imate, in a manner that enacts the strangeness described by Worman. The play
achieves this effect in large part via the activation of the non-human ecologies of
the island.
Sophocles’ major innovation in his depiction of Lemnos is revealed in
Odysseus’ opening lines, where he declares the island “untrodden and uninhabited”
(ἄστιπτος οὐδ᾽ οἰκουμένη, Phil. 2). This markedly deviates from Homer’s descrip-
tion of the island as “well-built” in both the Iliad and the Odyssey (ἐυκτίμενον, Il.
21.40; Od. 8.283), and, more pointedly, from the lost earlier dramatizations of the
tale by Aeschylus and Euripides. The plays, according to Dio Chrysostom, featured
choruses of Lemnian inhabitants (Or. 52.7). But the lack of humans apart from the
play’s eponymous castaway serves to highlight the other vitalities that animate the
landscape. On the one hand, the island’s animals are elevated to the status of human
companions.23 Philoctetes describes them as a “society of hill-dwelling beasts” (ὦ
ξυνουσίαι / θηρῶν ὀρείων, Phil. 936–37). He even exclaims that he “would sooner
listen to [his] worst enemy, the snake who left [him] footless” (θᾶσσον ἂν τῆς
πλεῖστον ἐχθίστης ἐμοὶ / κλύοιμ’ ἐχίδνης, ἥ μ’ ἔθηκεν ὧδ᾽ ἄπουν, 631–32) than to
Odysseus: a clear case of hyperbole, but one that suggests a readiness to conceive
of nonhuman relations, be they characterized by companionship or enmity.
But beyond the anthropomorphization of Lemnos’ animals, the island harbors
a curious cast of traditionally inanimate characters who are granted greater agency
than that for which their ontological status typically allows. Particularly when
under extreme emotional duress, Philoctetes regularly apostrophizes the landscape,
the rocks and formations that surround him and constitute his world.24 “O shores,
o cliffs . . . o jagged rocks!” (ὦ λιμένες, ὦ προβλῆτες . . . ὦ καταρρῶγες πέτραι,
936–37); “O double-doored formation of rock!” (ὦ σχῆμα πέτρας δίπυλον, 952).

22. Worman 2021: 7.

23. For a more detailed discussion of the play’s treatment of animals, see Korhonen and
Ruonakoski 2017.
24. For more on Philoctetes’ apostrophes, see Nooter 2012: 124–46. See also Morin 2003: 390.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
94 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

Perhaps, though, apostrophe is not quite the right word, because, as the chorus
notes, the landscape answers back in the guise of Echo (189, 1460), rendering the
cries something of a dialogic exchange. At one point Philoctetes explicitly attri-
butes consciousness to the rocks: “O cavern of the hollow rock . . . you will be
aware of my death” (ὦ κοίλας πέτρας γύαλον . . . μοι / καὶ θνῄσκοντι συνείσῃ,
1081–85). The prefix συν- here resonates with the ξυν- of ξυνουσίαι, or “society,”
cited above: there is a constant sense of being-together, or being-with the land-
scape and its inhabitants. These two examples exhibit the social and epistemologi-
cal implications of a life lived with nonhuman others.
Many have noted that the bow of Heracles plays various agential roles through-
out the play. At times, it serves as a sort of prosthesis for Philoctetes, an extension
of his body; on lines 1004–1005, Telò and Mueller write that “the use of νευρά
(‘bowstring’), cognate with νεῦρον (‘nerve’), highlights the prosthetic function of
the bow.”25 The bow also serves as the very vital element that animates him: when
it has been taken away, he accusatorily exclaims that Neoptolemus has deprived
him of his life (ἀπεστέρηκας τὸν βίον τὰ τόξ᾽ ἑλών, Phil. 931). The weapon is
a companion that finds him food (287–89); and even, once stolen from him, an
autonomous entity capable of pitying its former companion, “a deliverer of affect,”
as Telò and Mueller put it (ὦ τόξον φίλον, ὦ φίλων / χειρῶν ἐκβεβιασμένον, / ἦ που
ἐλεινὸν ὁρᾷς, φρένας εἴ τινας / ἔχεις, τὸν Ἡράκλειον / ἄθλιον, 1128–32).26
Furthermore, the disease that haunts Philoctetes appears to have a mind of
its own, operating under its own volition, acting as a sort of cruel master of the
lonely man that he must satiate with his own flesh (βόσκων τὴν ἀδηφάγον νόσον,
313).27 He and the chorus speak of the νόσος that afflicts him as though it dwells
elsewhere on the island, and falls upon Philoctetes’ body only in moments of crisis
(ἥκει γὰρ αὐτὴ διὰ χρόνου, πλάνης ἴσως / ὡς ἐξεπλήσθη, νόσος 758–59). Related
to but distinct from this disease is Philoctetes’ poor foot, whom he also addresses
as an autonomous entity, alternately like a former friend who has turned enemy or
like a hapless, helpless companion (παπαῖ μάλ᾽, ὦ πούς, οἷά μ᾽ ἐργάσῃ κακά, 786;
ὦ πούς, πούς, τί σ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἐν βίῳ / τεύξω τῷ μετόπιν, 1188–90). At one point the chorus
describes his foot as ἔνθηρος (698), variously interpreted as louse-ridden (teeming
with beasts), somehow harboring the snake that bit it, or imbued with its own bes-
tial energies.28 Even Philoctetes’ very groans are granted vividness and vitality via
the synesthetic way that they are described by Neoptolemus and the chorus, as will
be discussed in further detail below.

25. Telò and Mueller 2018: 4. The authors argue that Sophocles’ Philoctetes is paradigmatic for
understanding “[t]he complexities of the tragic nexus of personhood and thingness” (3).
26. Telò and Mueller 2018: 4. For more on the intimate relationship between Philoctetes and his
bow, see Telò 2018; Worman 2021: 51.
27. For the agential nature of the disease in the play, with a particular focus on how the nosos
“infects” the play’s language, see Worman 2000.
28. Korhonen and Ruonakoski 2017.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 95

But amidst this vital crush, Philoctetes himself, the island’s lone human inhabi-
tant, is regularly characterized as somehow less than fully alive. His ontological sta-
tus fluctuates between categories. While recriminating Neoptolemus for attempting
to capture him, Philoctetes complains, “He is dragging me away as though I were a
strong man (ἄνδρ’ . . . ἰσχυρόν); he does not know that he is vainly killing a corpse
(νεκρόν), or a shadow of smoke, or a phantom” (946–47). Throughout the play, not
only does he suffer from his isolation and his disease; he constantly “perishes.”29
When he sleeps he is compared to a corpse (860–61). He repeatedly begs for the
dismemberment and destruction of his own body.30 He even claims that he does not
exist at all: “I am nothing” (1030). The language of the play, the way Philoctetes
describes himself and the way he is described by others, suggests that the social
death he suffers after his abandonment on the island and his exclusion from the
grand narrative of the Trojan War is somehow more than just a metaphor. He sums
it up well when he laments that he was left ἄφιλον ἔρημον ἄπολιν ἐν ζῶσιν νεκρόν
(1018). Jebb translates “friendless, helpless, homeless,—dead among the living.”31
It is important to note, however, that ἄπολις suggests not only homelessness, but
exclusion from society writ large; if, as Aristotle famously puts it, “man is a politi-
cal animal” (Pol. 1253a3), a man without a polis is no man at all, effectively dead.
Throughout his nine years of isolation, Philoctetes has existed in a liminal state, not
a corpse, but not fully alive either. These two observations, namely that Lemnos
teems with surprising subjects and that Philoctetes inhabits a space between life
and death, are deeply intertwined. To clarify, I turn briefly to two modern frame-
works that will be helpful in trying to understand this strange island community.

II. VIBRANT MATERIALISMS AND DEFLATED ANIMACIES

The unusual population of Sophocles’ Lemnos can be profitably understood

through the lens of two related trends in critical theory, both of which are concerned
with demonstrating that the distinction between life and death, otherwise formulated
as the distinction between animate and inanimate, is not so binary as it might ini-
tially appear. The “new materialist” approach argues simply that objects that appear
to be unliving, inert, can, under certain circumstances, wield very real power.32

29. “I was being destroyed” (διωλλύμην, 252); “dying out” (καταφθίνοντα, 266); bitten by a snake
that is a “man-killer” (ἀνδροφθόρου, 266–67); “I am perishing” (ἀπόλλυμαι, 311); “I am destroyed”
(ἀπόλωλ᾽, 1187); “I have been dead for a long time” (τέθνηχ᾽ ὑμῖν πάλαι, 1030).
30. “Strike my heel! Cut it off as quickly as possible! Don’t spare my life!” (πάταξον εἰς ἄκρον
πόδα‧ / ἀπάμησον ὡς τάχιστα‧ μὴ φείσῃ βίου, 748–49); “Take and burn [me] in a fire!” (συλλαβὼν
. . . πυρὶ . . . ἔμπρησον, 799–801); “I will hurl myself right away from this rock and bash my head on
the rock below!” (κρᾶτ᾽ ἐμὸν τόδ᾽ αὐτίκα / πέτρᾳ πέτρας ἄνωθεν αἱμάξω πεσών, 1001–1002); “I will
completely mangle my body, cut every joint with my own hand!” (κρᾶτ᾽ ἀπὸ πάντα καὶ ἄρθρα τέμω
χερί, 1207).
31. Jebb 2004: 163.
32. It is important to note that the “new materialist turn” is in many ways a rearticulation of vari-
ous indigenous animist philosophies in the idiom of Western philosophy. For more on the relationship
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
96 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

As articulated by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of

Things, “a lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured
less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are
assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.”33 In the Philoctetes, the titular
character’s isolation clears the stage, as it were, for the elevation of nonhuman
entities. For example, when Odysseus and Neoptolemus arrive at Lemnos, they
cannot enquire of the human inhabitants there to find their quarry (as they appear
to have done in earlier dramatizations of Philoctetes’ tale written by Aeschylus and
Euripides, in which Lemnos was inhabited). Instead, they look to the landscape
itself and the objects strewn around it. It has been noted that this approach is akin
to tracking an animal, another way that Philoctetes is dehumanized in the play. But
at the same time the power of the object is elevated. When they find Philoctetes’
cave, Neoptolemus describes a series of inanimate entities that he sees there: a bed
of leaves, a poorly crafted wooden cup, a set of flintstones. The climax of this list,
pus-stained rags drying in the sun, elicits a piteous exclamation from Neoptelemus:
ἰοὺ ἰού (38). Neoptolemus’ pity for Philoctetes is one of the primary motivators
of the play’s action, and the first hint of it is elicited by the sight of inanimate
bandages. In response to Neoptolemus’ description of the rags, Odysseus says that
this is “clearly” (σαφῶς, 40) where Philoctetes lives. Like Orestes’ lock of hair in
Aeschylus Choephoroi, an inanimate object precipitates a moment of recognition,
a key turning point in the plot.
While Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and related developments in the area of new
materialism are helpful in that they give us a way to understand how nonhuman
subjectivities might intervene in human affairs, there has also been increasing atten-
tion to the way that marginalized classes of humans in various contexts suffer from
what Mel Chen calls “deflated animacies.”34 Chen investigates the ways in which
racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies are treated as less than fully alive, and
therefore endowed with a diminished agential capacity. Chen’s animist framework
is rooted in linguistics. Every language is, in some way, governed by a hierarchy of
animacies, in which certain entities are capable of grammatically affecting others.
But for Chen, these hierarchies have consequences beyond the syntactical. They
“read this [grammatical] hierarchy . . . as naturally also an ontology of affect: for
animacy hierarchies are precisely about which things can or cannot affect—or be
affected by—which other things within a specific scheme of possible action.”35 A
society’s politics, its systems of power and epistemologies, are therefore reflected
in these linguistic hierarchies, which serve as a way of distinguishing those who

between indigenous “cosmovisions” and new materialism, see Bosak-Schroeder 2020: 28–31. For a
new materialist approach to Greek tragedy, see Bassi 2016, Mueller 2016, and Telò and Mueller 2018.
33. Bennett 2009: 21.
34. Chen 2012.
35. Chen 2012: 30.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 97

matter and those who matter less. Via Chen, we might better understand Sophocles’
depiction of Philoctetes by imagining the hero on
a reference cline (a graded linear scale) resembling “a great chain of being,”
an ordered hierarchy from inanimate object to plant to nonhuman animal
to human, by which subject properties are differentially distributed (with
humans possessing maximal and optimal subjectivity at the top). When
humans are blended with objects along this cline, they are effectively
“dehumanized,” and simultaneously de-subjectified and objectified.36
This “cline” helps illustrate the relationship between the elevated subjectivities of
Lemnos’ nonhuman inhabitants and the deflated subjectivity of Philoctetes him-
self. By initiating sociality with, for example, the cliffs and rocks of Lemnos,
Philoctetes is “blended” with inanimate objects, and his own animacy is
diminished. Furthermore, when he is acted upon by an inanimate object—when, as
discussed above, he is pitied by his bow—his animacy slides even further down the
cline, below, even, that of the inanimate weapon. This mismatch is reflected in the
way the plot of the drama unfolds. At the moment that the bow is snatched from
Philoctetes by Neoptolemus, it appears that Philoctetes’ prophesied role in ending
the Trojan War, his ability to intervene in human affairs, has also been snatched
away. Odysseus posits that the Greeks will be able to take Troy with the bow alone,
without the help of Philoctetes. The bow itself is, temporarily, granted greater agen-
tial capacity than its abject human owner. In this utterance, the material of the bow
is imbued with vitality, à la Bennett, and Philoctetes’ vitality is diminished, à la
Chen.
An interrelated ecology of affects animates and de-animates the play’s expanded
dramatis personae as the poem progresses. A syntactical improbability, namely an
inanimate object taking a person as a direct object, is reflected in the play’s social
reality. Philoctetes’ embeddedness in a network of variously animated nonhuman
entities determines, to some extent, the degree to which he is perceived as dead or
alive. And throughout the play, this determines the extent to which the characters of
the play consider him to be worthy of pity or subject to repulsion; that is, whether
he will be reintegrated into human society or kept on the outskirts.
But another set of latent actors lurk just beneath the surface of the play. In his
attention to the landscape of Lemnos, Sophocles also activates the island’s mythic
geography, which is itself imbued with layers of stories involving compromised
agency and female-coded toxicity, social isolation, and abjection. A consider-
ation of Lemnian mythography will serve to demonstrate the relationship between
Philoctetes’ compromised animacy and the feminine energies that circulate through-
out the play. That is to say, the setting for this complex ecosystem of animacies is
not a neutral one. In addition to the characters listed in the dramatis personae and

36. Chen 2012: 40.

 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
98 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

the inanimate inhabitants of the island that have been strangely brought to life, the
geography of Lemnos itself is animated by its mythical background. The material
ecology of the landscape that the play’s action inhabits intersects with the mythos
of the island as a place; and the mythic dynamics that inhere in Lemnos grant
Philoctetes’ diminished agency a very particular cast.

III. STINKING WOMEN AND LEMNIAN MYTHOGRAPHY

The setting of the island of Lemnos would have evoked a complex and inter-
locking web of associations for an ancient theatrical audience. On the one hand, the
island was an active trading partner with Athens, a bustling center of commerce,
abundant with contemporary sociopolitical significance, to which I will return at
the end of this section. At the same time, Lemnos as a place is saturated with mythic
content, some of it dramatized in the Philoctetes and some of it latent. The island
is the site of three major Greek mythic complexes, which feature significant con-
ceptual overlap. Sophocles references the other myths only glancingly, but multiple
points of connection between them suggest that he was operating within a concep-
tual cartography that would have been familiar to his audience. Just as Thebes was
a sort of fun-house mirror for Athens, a locus for working through political and
ideological problems at a safe distance,37 Lemnos seems to have acted as a site for
the disabled, the stinking, the stagnant; a place where narratives and creatures, both
mortal and divine, languish, a test-site for what happens when the forward thrust of
myth stalls out, and the messy, chthonic, feminine underbelly of the Greek imagi-
nation is on display.
Lemnos is, of course, the site of Philoctetes’ abandonment and suffering, not
only in Sophocles, but also earlier, including two treatments in epic. The first
lies within the Iliad’s catalog of ships (Il. 2.721–23). The Kypria also included
a version of the story, wherein, according to an argumentum of the lost poem,
Philoctetes was abandoned on Lemnos specifically on account of his bad smell
(διὰ τὴν δυσοσμίαν ἐν Λήμνῳ κατελείφθη, Kypria arg. 9). And as noted above,
Sophocles’ dramatization of Odysseus’ attempt to retrieve Philoctetes from
Lemnos was preceded by lost Euripidean and Aeschylean efforts. Sources differ
as to the precise location and cause of his wounding by the snake, some situating
the injury on the island of Tenedos, some on Lemnos itself, and some, including
Sophocles and Pausanius on a small island near Lemnos called Chryse, which will
later sink into the sea (Paus. 8.33.4). In Sophocles, Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes
that his wounding was a result of “divine fortune” (Phil. 1326). Hyginus claims
that Hera sent the snake to bite Philoctetes as punishment for his role in the cre-
mation of Heracles (Fab. 102).

37. As famously argued by Zeitlin 1990.

 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 99

The Olympian god Hephaestus, the only member of that elevated class of the
pantheon whose bodily integrity is consistently compromised, also spent nine years
abandoned on Lemnos, the same length of time as Philoctetes’ desertion. According
to the Iliad, the god landed on Lemnos when he was hurled from Olympus by Zeus,
when he attempted to defend Hera from Zeus’s violent advances. Like Philoctetes,
Hephaestus is described as χωλός (Soph. Phil. 486, 1032). While he does not suffer
from an actively festering wound, he is still porous: Hephaestus is the only one of
the Olympians who sweats, associating him with mortals degraded by hard labor.38
Note, too, that Neoptolemus observes sweat dripping over Philoctetes’ whole body
when he labors under an acute attack of his nosos (Phil. 823); Marie Delcourt calls
Philoctetes “un proche parent de l’Héphaïstos lemnien.”39
The Odyssey calls Lemnos the “land dearest to [Hephaestus]” (Hom.
Od. 8.284), and it was typically identified as the site of the god’s forge, likely due to
the steaming malodorous fumerole fields that characterize the island’s landscape.40
In Sophocles, Philoctetes himself not only invokes Hephaestian flames but also
explicitly identifies the forge with the island when he cries, “O Lemnian land and
the all-powerful Hephaestian flame!” (ὦ Λημνία χθὼν καὶ τὸ παγκρατὲς σέλας /
Ἡφαιστότευκτον, 986–87). Hundreds of years later, Galen would describe Lemnos
as a place that seemed as though it had been utterly burned up, a place where noth-
ing could grow, and would go on to assert that this must have been the reason why
Homer made Hephaestus fall on Lemnos (De simpl. med. 9.2). Galen’s connection
between Hephaestian industry and the barrenness of the landscape would seem to
indicate a prescient sense that by external intervention places could be destroyed
and rendered inhospitable to life.
But there is reason to think that the story most strongly associated with the
island in classical antiquity was that of the Lemnian Women. The tale loomed
large enough in the Greek mythic imagination that it was treated as proverbial
in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi, where the chorus sings that “Among crimes, that of
Lemnos is most notable / in story; it is lamented / as an abomination, and people
compare / any horror to the miseries of Lemnos” (631–34). Similarly, Herodotus
compares the wicked deeds of the Pelasgians on Lemnos (discussed further below)
to “the earlier one, when the women killed their husbands,” arguing that it was
because of these two incidents that throughout Hellas “all savage deeds are called
Lemnian” (τὰ σχέτλια ἔργα πάντα Λήμνια καλέεσθαι, Hdt. 6.139). Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides may all have staged tragedies dramatizing the tale, based
on titles that have been left behind: a Lemniai (or possibly Lemnioi) by Aeschylus,

38. Bremmer 2010: 193–208. Note, however, the investigation by Silverblank and Ward 2020,
which argues that some aspects of our impression of Hephaestus are colored by contemporary ableist
projections onto ancient sources.
39. For more on the relationship between the two figures, see Delcourt 1982 (quote at 183); Morin
2003; Schein 2013: 8.
40. Borza 2003.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
100 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

a Lemniai by Sophocles, and a Hypsipyle by Euripides, suggesting that the tragic

audience would have been primed to recall the proverbial crime. And so, despite the
fact that the story is not explicitly discussed in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, resonances
of it were likely close to the surface, and may have been immediately brought to
mind by Odysseus’ scene-setting mention of the island in the play’s second line.
The Lemnian Women are the shadowy female figures who lurk behind the all-male
cast, and compromise Philoctetes’ masculinity by association.
When it comes to the details of the story itself, there are multiple versions
dispersed across genres and time periods, the most extensive surviving narrative
appearing in Apollonius’ Argonautica (1.609–909). In all of the accounts, the
women of Lemnos succumb to a jealous rage and slay their husbands to occupy
the island alone, in what is often depicted as a sort of dystopic matriarchy. The bare
bones of this narrative, a tale of sex and murder, would seem on the surface to have
very little to do with the story of Philoctetes. But the Lemnian women described
by Apollodorus and Myrsilus of Methymna do share something notable with our
Sophoclean hero: all of them are afflicted with a vile stench, and their odor is one of
the primary reasons for their social isolation.41 In Apollodorus’ version, they spurn
the rites of Aphrodite, and she punishes them with the smell (1.9.17). Driven away
by the stench, their husbands instead have sex with Thracian war captives, and jeal-
ousy motivates the massacre. But according to Myrsilus of Methymna,42 the source
of their malodorousness is a φάρμακον cast upon them by Medea in revenge for
the affair between Jason and Hypsipyle, the leader of the Lemnian Women. What
remains constant across these various accounts is not the mechanisms of cause and
effect, but the story’s visceral, affective qualities. Whatever the source of the odor,
the affliction’s effect is to disrupt the women’s ability to participate in normal social
relations, to isolate and separate them. Burkert calls the time of matriarchal rule on
Lemnos a period of “abnormal, barren, uncanny life.”43 Sophocles’ dismissal of
any other human inhabitants on the island underscores Philoctetes’ isolation from
society and aligns him with the proverbial women.
In more than one seminal study of pollution and abjection,44 smell has been
identified as a quality that distinguishes the outcast, “an important component
evoked to discriminate bodies that were rejected from civilized society.”45 Like
sound, smell is largely a non-directive sense that breaches individual boundar-
ies: while one can strain to catch a whiff of a pleasant smell, or hold one’s nose

41. Whether this detail preceded Sophocles’ Philoctetes in a no longer extant account, or whether
the smell emerged only in versions of the story that emerged after the tragedy, is impossible to deter-
mine. My goal here is not to establish precedence of any of these tales or their characteristics, but rather
to note the conceptual connections between the stories over time.
42. As preserved in a scholium to Apollonius Rhodius: Jacoby 477 fr. 1A.
43. Burkert 2001: 69.
44. See, e.g., Kristeva 1980; Parker 1983.
45. Bradley 2014: 10.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 101

when assaulted by an unpleasant one, for the most part odors find our noses them-
selves, whether we are willing or not. Smell not only breaches boundaries between
human individuals, but confuses the boundaries between human and animal, as it
is often considered the most bestial sense. Animals are powerful smellers, in both
the transitive and intransitive sense of the word. The dead and the sick also stink.
Malodorousness associates humans with animals and corpses, and is therefore sug-
gestive of a deflated animacy. Anthropological, psychoanalytic, and cognitivist
approaches all lend this observation an air of universality.46 One indication that
such an account indeed holds true in the ancient Greek imagination—that smell
ranks near the bottom in the hierarchy of the senses—is that while the sense reg-
ularly appears (wafts forth?) in baser genres like Old Comedy, we are very rarely
given any direct indication of how anything smells in the more elevated genre
of tragedy outside of the play in question, with two notable, and perhaps rele-
vant, exceptions. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the guards complain about the stench of
Polyneices’ moldering, unburied body (412). And in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the
Pythia describes the Erinyes, vile and terrifying creatures representing a primor-
dial, violent, ur-female collective, as dripping and reeking (53–54). Philoctetes’
odoriferousness, then, should strike us as a particularly marked descriptor, one that
not only emphasizes his compromised animacy but strengthens his association with
the feminine as abject.
The stench that afflicts the Lemnian Women of myth has often been associ-
ated with a ritual that took place on the historical island as early as the classical
period.47 In this ritual, the women of the island were, once a year, deemed noi-
some and isolated for several days, after which the island was cleansed with fire.
Anthropological studies argue that this was a ritual purification of menstruation.
In this interaction between myth and ritual, the everyday horror of being a woman
with a porous, leaky body48 is conflated with a crime that none other can surpass
in wickedness, the subversion of domestic order and mass murder of the heads of
household.
Sophocles draws on all of these site-specific narratives of Lemnos in his pre-
sentation of the suffering Philoctetes. The hero is not only emasculated but depicted
as a repulsive, menstruating woman, one whose porous body transgresses boundar-
ies and therefore must be isolated and purified. As we know, he is afflicted with a
foul scent (δυσοσμίας, Phil. 876; κακῇ ὀσμῇ, 890–91; δυσώδης, 1032). He suffers
from a chronic, suppurating wound, the result of his body being penetrated by a
phallic serpent. The chorus describes “a hot gush oozing from his sores” (696–97).

46. See Douglas 1966; Kristeva 1980; and Curtis 2013, respectively.
47. Burkert 1970; Jackson 1990. See also Martin 1987, which discusses the ritual with regard to
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata but makes reference to the Philoctetes.
48. For the physiology of women in the Greco-Roman medical imagination as unruly, spongy,
and overly moist, see Carson 1990; Sissa 1990; Dean-Jones 1991; King 1994; and Holmes 2010:
185–86, with further bibliography.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
102 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

He leaves behind rags stained with bodily fluids (39).49 And his attacks come on
periodically (διὰ χρόνου, 758). Because of these symptoms he is forcibly expelled
from human society (265–68). Whenever his stink and the ooze from his wound
are mentioned in the play, it is to highlight his isolation, or to give a reason for it.
In the middle of the play, Philoctetes suffers from an acute crisis of his illness.
He begs Neoptolemus to burn him “in a fire called Lemnian” (τῷ Λημνίῳ τῷδ᾽
ἀνακαλουμένῳ πυρί, 800). The participle ἀνακαλουμένῳ renders the exclamation
an evocation of not just the physical island on which the two men are standing, but
the idea of that island and all that is associated with it. Richard Martin has con-
nected this plea with the Lemnian purification ritual;50 Philoctetes here begs not
only for death but for purgation, the cleansing of his body for the benefit of society.
In the play he is emasculated in a negative, privative sense—deprived of power,
heroic potential, an opportunity to lead—but is also actively feminized, rendered
noxious and polluted. It is not only Philoctetes’ diminished agency that is relevant
in his exclusion from society but also his disease’s elevated agency, which renders
Philoctetes himself toxic and infectious.
While this nexus of myth, ritual, and text invokes a femininity that operates on
the interconnected social and physiological levels, it is an oddly sterile kind of fem-
ininity. The woman-only society of Lemnian Women produces no children (nor, for
that matter, does Hephaistos). And while menstruation is a sign of potential fertility,
it is also a signal that conception has not taken place. Philoctetes the perpetual men-
struator has access to neither side of the coin when it comes to hetero-reproductive
futurity—neither kleos nor the bearing of children. To use Haraway’s phraseol-
ogy, Philoctetes “makes kin, not babies”; that is, develops relationships with his
non-human neighbors rather than participating in human reproduction.51
The complex of stories that cluster around this particular island suggest that
Lemnos evoked ideas of toxicity, social isolation, and abjection. Furthermore, the
areas where the Sophoclean account of Philoctetes and the myth of the Lemnian
Women overlap suggest that Philoctetes’ abjection had a particularly feminine cast.
In the previous section, it was noted that Sophocles’ Philoctetes is deeply embed-
ded in his environment, in the ecosystem of the island as it has been constructed in
Sophocles’ text. But I hope to have shown that this landscape is more than the sum
of its inhabitants and their natural features, more than simply animal, vegetable,
and mineral. Philoctetes’ embeddedness in the island of Lemnos manifests itself
not only in his more-than-human community, but also in the ways in which his

49. Thumiger 2019 argues that the suggestion Philoctetes himself is in charge of washing the rags
demotes him to the role of a woman or a house-slave.
50. Martin 1987: 95–96.
51. Haraway 2016, ch. 4. Lewis 2017 argues that this repeated exhortation, evidence of Haraway’s
increasing concern about the explosive expansion of the human population, represents a retreat from
Haraway’s long-standing commitment to Marxism and plays into the hands of a Malthusian eugenicist
politics, despite the critic’s insistence to the contrary.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 103

situation is implicated in the mythologies and imaginaries that cohere to construct

Lemnos as not only a geographic location but a conceptual place. In this play-
wright’s hands, Philoctetes is a site-specific installation. A clearer view of how the
play makes meaning out of these dynamics, and how they interact with the play’s
central dramatic muthos, will emerge by shifting to a choral perspective.

IV. A POLYPHONIC ASSEMBLAGE: THE CHORUS’S HYMN TO GAIA

In the previous sections I have argued that Sophocles’ Philoctetes does in

fact, in a certain sublimated sense, showcase both death and women, and that
variously animated, de-animated, and feminized entities exist in an ecosys-
tem of densely inter-implicated affective relations. The island of Lemnos serves
as a site for these relations, both in its material incarnation as landscape and in
its conceptual formation as a locus of a mythic web. It is, in a sense, a vision of
“nature”; but not a “nature” that is separate from mankind nor one that mankind
rules over.52 Lemnos, rather, bears some relation to Donna Haraway’s ecofeminist
vision of the Chthulucene, which “entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities
and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human,
other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.”53
The open-endedness and dynamically constituted nature of Lemnos as a site
makes the tragic chorus an ideal focalizer. As Donna Haraway argues, “it matters
which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually,
and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize
systems.”54 This is a plea, on Haraway’s part, for us to consider the perspectives
of nonhuman inhabitants of our ecosystems, to consider, say, our current climate
catastrophe through the eyes (as it were) of undervalued species like plankton and
bacteria. The tragic chorus, though, offers a similarly destabilizing perspective and
mode of expression. The chorus is a famously slippery subject. Just as the meaning
of a “place” is continuously being constituted by multiple intersecting and dynamic
factors, a tragic chorus is, in many ways, simultaneously constituting and constituted
by its surroundings. In their collectivity, their ability to move in and out of time,
space, and identity, to make surprising juxtapositions by drawing together disparate
materials, the chorus of tragedy might be described, to return to Haraway’s para-
digm, in terms of reaching, grasping tentacles. “The tentacular ones,” she writes,
“make attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a differ-
ence; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open
and knotted in some ways and not others.” They engage in what Haraway calls

52. For more on the long and complex philosophical genealogy of the concept of “nature” as a
realm distinct from mankind, see, e.g., Payne 2010 and Holmes forthcoming.
53. Haraway 2016: 101.
54. Haraway 2016: 101.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
104 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

“SF”: “science fiction and fantasy, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism,

and string figures.”55 To elaborate, “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the
patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone,
here, and yet to come.”56 It is possible to conceive of the project of a tragic chorus
as “SF” in Haraway’s sense, even Neoptolemus’ crew of dutiful soldiers.
When the chorus enters the scene that has been set by Neoptolemus and
Odysseus, they do not sing a proper parodos, but launch into a kommos in which
they make their obeisance to Neoptolemus known. But even in this dramatically
mundane entrance, they in many ways set the philosophical agenda of the play writ
large. Drawing from the sight of Philoctetes’ bivouac, they vividly and lyrically
imagine the life he must be leading, in more empathic and fully realized terms than
either Neoptolemus or Odysseus has mustered. They are the first to suggest that,
deprived of human companions, Philoctetes inhabits a community of non-human
entities on the island. They imagine him living among the beasts (στικτῶν ἢ λασίων
μετὰ / θηρῶν, Phil. 184–85) and speaking with Echo. And they set the affective
terms of the play. They are the first to introduce the concept of pity, which becomes
a touchstone explored throughout the drama. What happens to those who are grist
in the mill of larger mythohistorical systems? And how can we elicit pity for them
in a way that will lead to meaningful action? But to Neoptolemus, the inexorable
hands of the gods and of the expectation of mythic plot trump any sort of emotional
or affective scenario. This first attempt by the chorus to elicit pity from their master
is unsuccessful.
Throughout their opening interlude, the chorus repeatedly stresses the materi-
ality of language through word choice and imagery. They use the epithet τηλεφανής
(“visible from afar”) to describe Echo, a curious descriptor for one who is only
ever heard, not seen (189). A similar synesthetic description of Philoctetes’ own
voice follows, occupying an entire pair of strophic stanzas.57 Like the epithet they
give Echo, they describe Philoctetes’ far-off cry as something seen, something that
appears: προὐφάνη (203) and τηλωπόν (216). But vision is not the only surprising
sense employed in their account of Philoctetes’ distressed and distressing voice. It
is also described as something one can feel or touch—in fact, the chorus claims to
feel the voice as a physical assault. They first identify the cry as a κτύπος, a strik-
ing. When they sing, “It hits me, it hits me, his true voice!” (βάλλει βάλλει μ᾽ ἐτύμα
/ φθογγά, 205–206), they grant the voice agency and the ability to inflict physical
harm. The elevation of the voice as a subject is all the more acute when it is referred
to as a σύντροφος, “a companion of” or “one nourished with” Philoctetes (203).
These verses not only demonstrate the chorus’s role in animating otherwise inani-
mate entities; they also serve to reinforce the concrete, material nature of voice and

55. Haraway 2016: 150.

56. Haraway 2016: 101.
57. See Nooter 2012: 124–46 for more on the materiality of Philoctetes’ voice.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 105

language in the play writ large. They serve as a reminder that notwithstanding any
costuming or set design, the world of the drama is in fact made up only of a dense
ecosystem of words given voice. And the chorus themselves do not merely reflect
or comment upon the situation presented to them, but in fact play a major role in
singing the world of Lemnos into being, in fashioning what Haraway might call a
material-semiotic world.
Throughout the play the chorus continually evokes Philoctetes’ life-world in a
way that is more empathic and fully-realized than any other of the play’s figures,
including Philoctetes himself. Perhaps the most exemplary such moment comes in
the form of a sort of broken little ode—two short stanzas that respond metrically
to one another but that are separated by over a hundred lines of dialogue. The first
of these stanzas has excited a fair amount of interest and confusion. Neoptolemus
has just finished weaving a tall tale, a story meant both to explain his presence on
Lemnos and to draw Philoctetes into his sympathies by claiming common enemies,
namely Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus. The chorus interjects:
ὀρεστέρα παμβῶτι Γᾶ,
μᾶτερ αὐτοῦ Διός
ἃ τὸν μέγαν Πακτωλὸν εὔχρυσον νέμεις,
σὲ κἀκεῖ, μᾶτερ πότνι᾽, ἐπηυδώμαν,
ὅτ᾽ ἐς τόνδ᾽ Ἀτρειδᾶν
ὕβρις πᾶσ᾽ ἐχώρει,
ὅτε τὰ πάτρια τεύχεα παρεδίδοσαν,
ἰὼ μάκαιρα ταυροκτόνων
λεόντων ἔφεδρε, τῷ Λαρτίου,
σέβας ὑπέρτατον.
Soph. Phil. 391–402

Mountain-dwelling, all-nourishing Gā,

mother of Zeus himself
you who preside over the great Pactolus, flush with gold,
I called upon you then, mistress mother,
when all the insolence of the sons of
Atreus came against him,
when they handed over the arms of the father,
oh, blessed one who sits
upon bull-killing lions,
object of highest reverence to the sons of Lartius.
This brief stanza, a single sentence, is a prime example of the chorus behaving in
a “tentacular” mode, weaving through space and time to convene various human
and nonhuman assemblages. The chorus here invokes not only the earth deity Gaia
herself, but a syncretic complex of primordial female goddesses. The river Pactolus
in Asia Minor was the site of cult worship of Cybele, the Phrygian mother of the
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
106 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

gods.58 The chorus also gloss Gaia as “mother of Zeus”, entangling her with Rhea,
goddess of the flow, of mother’s milk and menstruation. There is evidence that
Lemnos itself was named after an alternate address for Cybele, grounding this
far-flung network of chthonic goddesses more securely in the island’s landscape: in
his geographical dictionary Ethnika, the sixth-century CE grammarian Stephanus
of Byzantium writes that the island of Lemnos took its name “from the great god-
dess, whom they call Lemnos.”59
Note that in addition to invoking multiple primordial female goddesses, the
brief stanza sets up a narrative characterized by explicitly differentiated gendered
terms. The chorus uses two patronymics to denote the major players in the fabula-
tion (Ἀτρειδᾶν, Λαρτίου), and the patriarchal origin of the arms is emphasized (τὰ
πάτρια τεύχεα). Within this single sentence, the masculine figures are situated as
players in a linear plot: the insolence of the sons of Atreus came upon Neoptolemus
when they gave Achilles’ arms to the son of Laertes. The male figures are exercising
their agency, creating a chain of cause and effect, careening towards a conflict that
will create a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The chorus distills the plot
provided by Neoptolemus down into terms that are nearly indistinguishable from
the plot into which he, Philoctetes, and Odysseus are about to embark. Replace
one proper name—Ἀτρειδᾶν with Ἀχιλῆος—and the plot stands as a summary
of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The insolence of the son of Achilles will come upon
Philoctetes (just as easily indicated with the deictic τόνδ’ as Neoptolemus) when he
hands over his father’s weaponry to the son of Laertes, an object of veneration. An
imaginary past is made to prefigure the immediate future. The chorus overlays the
landscape of Asia Minor onto the landscape of Lemnos, the fabricated past betrayal
involving the theft of Achilles’ holy arms onto the future betrayal involving the
theft of Philoctetes’ holy arms.
This contrasts with the depiction of the feminine woven throughout the ode.
The word μᾶτερ is used twice, stressing the matrilineal, matriarchal significance of
the goddesses invoked. It has been noted that the stanza bears some resemblance
to a formulaic invocation of a god and the request for divine favor.60 The goddess’s
name is given in the vocative, she is reminded of a prior interaction, and the verb
νέμω is used to describe her jurisdiction. But despite the fact that the stanza mirrors
this kind of formulaic request, the female goddesses invoked are not in fact asked
to intervene in the action in any way, either in the imagined story of the past or in
the dramatic context of the play in which the ode is delivered. They are simply
invoked, and via this invocation they enter the material ecology of the drama. The
chorus describes themselves calling upon Gaia before (ἐπηυδώμαν, 394) and they

58. Schein 2013: 192.

59. See also Burkert 1970: 4n.2. Fascinatingly, and in contrast, Chantraine’s Dictionnaire éty-
mologique de la langue grecque suggests that the name Lemnos may have been derived from a word
for medical bandages. Thanks to Debby Sneed for alerting me to this.
60. Schein 2013: 192; Ristorto 2016.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 107

call upon her now (ἰὼ μάκαιρα, 400). But the fact that the goddess(es) are consis-
tently characterized by the continuous aspect (νέμεις, 393; ἔφεδρε, 401) indicates
that the chorus is less concerned with action. It instead draws attention to the fact
that they are always present.
The two epithets applied to Gaia in the stanza’s opening further connect the
feminine to the landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants. The word ὀρεστέρος
(“mountain-dwelling”) is elsewhere applied to lions (Hom. Od. 10.212; Eur. Bacc.
1141), a boar (Eur. Or. 1460), snakes (Hom. Il. 22.93), and an undefined wild beast
(Eur. Hec. 1058)—never to humans, and only one other time to a god: Athena, in a
choral ode from Euripides’ Trojan Women (553). And παμβῶτις (“all-nourishing”),
a hapax legomenon, not only emphasizes the nourishing power of the earth that
has kept Philoctetes alive, but also brings humans and animals into community
together, joined by their reliance on the earth for food. Consider Haraway, elabo-
rating on the significance of the Chthulucene:
I am calling all this the Chthulucene—past, present, and to come. These
real and possible timespaces are not named after sf writer H. P. Lovecraft’s
misogynist racial nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference),
but rather after the diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces and
collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from
water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya,
Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene,
even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish rootlets, entangles myriad
temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assem-
blages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman,
and human-as-humus. Even rendered in an American English-language
text like this one, Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman, and all
their kin are some of the many thousand names proper to a vein of sf that
Lovecraft could not have imagined or embraced—namely, the webs of
speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and scien-
tific fact.61
The chorus’s invocation of Gaia is similarly bestial and beast-nourishing, chthonic,
syncretic, intertemporal, interspatial; in this brief stanza, far from merely “taking
the role of an actor,” to return to Aristotle’s injunction, the chorus constructs the
conceptual framework of the Philoctetes in miniature, and close attention reveals
that this framework differs when we expand our perspective on the play from a
focus on its bare muthos.
The ambivalence of the chorus’s depiction of Lemnos bears an interesting
resemblance to the sort of ecological assemblages that eco-feminist Anna Tsing

61. Haraway 2016: 101. See, again, Lewis 2017, who argues that Haraway’s invocation of
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is insidious, even though Haraway tries to disavow it.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
108 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

identifies as languishing in the margins of teleological histories of progress,

“disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together with-
out either harmony or conquest.”62 Refining the diffuse conceptual model of the
assemblage, Tsing presents us with the idea of a polyphonic assemblage, a refer-
ence to “music in which autonomous melodies intertwine.”63 Explaining why this
is an apt descriptor for the types of eco-assemblages that interest her, Tsing writes,
“When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to
pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony
and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed
to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage.”64
Greek tragedy is inherently multitemporal, as evidenced by its metrical het-
erogeneity, both between the stichic spoken dialogue and the sung choral odes and
between the vast array of lyric meters that comprise the odes themselves. But this
multitemporality goes beyond musical aesthetics. The aesthetic characteristics of
the choral ode, combined with the chorus’s curious subject position—both impli-
cated in the action and removed from it—allow them to manage multiple tempo-
ral modes at once. A close examination of their brief and strange Hymn to Gaia
demonstrates that the chorus’s temporal sensitivities are not relegated only to their
metrical virtuosity. In the ode, they interweave the play’s competing timelines—the
masculine-coded heroic narrative, a linear progression with the sack of Troy as its
telos, and the feminine-coded stagnation associated with the island’s mythic and
material ecologies. As Tsing puts it, “If history without progress is indeterminate
and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities?”65
Through their attunement to the polyphonic, disturbance-based ecology of
Lemnos, the chorus of the Philoctetes becomes a crucial affective conduit for the
meaning of the play.
Later in the drama, the chorus finally sings their only full, uninterrupted ode.
Here they vividly and with great empathy imagine Philoctetes suffering from an
acute and painful attack while mired in loneliness or despair. They go to muse:

There is no other among mortals whom I have heard of or have looked

upon who has met with a more hateful fate than this man, who, having
done nothing to anyone, committed no murder, but being a just man among
just men (ἀλλ᾽ ἴσος ἐν ἴσοις ἀνήρ), was perishing so undeservedly.
Soph. Phil. 681–90

62. Tsing 2015: 5.

63. Tsing 2015: 23.
64. Tsing 2015: 24.
65. Tsing 2015: 23.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 109

Of all of the play’s focalizers, the chorus most clearly articulates the injustice
that afflicts those who are grist in the mill of larger historico-mythical systems. I
will now consider how the extra-dramatic political context of the play’s produc-
tion might give some substance to its ruminations on history and inequality, with
recourse to two more latent myths.

V. PHILOCTETES THE INDIGENE

Despite the distance and mystery of Lemnos as portrayed by Sophocles, at the

time of the play’s first staging in 409 BCE there was in fact a sizable population
of Athenian Lemnians living on the island. Some colonists arrived in the early
fifth century after the island was captured by Miltiades, and the Athenians became
further entrenched with the establishment of a cleruchy there in the early 440s
BCE.66 Jeremey McInerney has recently argued that “the island was effectively
transformed into an Athenian territory in the fifth century, a process helped by the
subjugation, and demonization, of the local population.”67 A key element of this
discourse of othering was, according to McInerney, the story of the Pelasgians, the
island’s mythical indigenous inhabitants.68 According to Herodotus (6.136–40), the
Athenians claimed that the Pelasgians kidnapped Athenian girls who were under-
taking the rites of Artemis at Brauron, forcing them to come to Lemnos and serve
as their wives. After bearing children with the women, they noticed that boys with
Athenian mothers were powerful and haughty, and failed to assimilate with the
local population, maintaining their Athenian dialect and customs. Fearing a future
uprising, the Pelasgian men murdered the women and their sons, and thereafter
“neither the earth nor their wives nor their flocks bore fruit as they did before” (Hdt.
6.139.1). Some overlap with the tales related above will be immediately apparent;
once again, Lemnos is host to a gendered mass murder and yet another period of
“abnormal, barren, uncanny life.”
McInerney argues that Herodotus has the Athenians “portray the Lemnian
actions as yet another instantiation of Lemnia kaka, thereby configuring the cur-
rent seizure of the island as a corrective for atrocities committed by the Lemnians
recently as well as back in mythic times.”69 McInerney further claims that “[t]he
overwhelmingly negative associations of the Pelasgians served as a useful way of
demonizing the island’s indigenous inhabitants” and that the Athenian Hephaisteion

66. Parker 1994.

67. McInerney 2021: 152.
68. While it is generally agreed that the actual indigenous inhabitants of Lemnos were non-Greek,
very little is known about them. Some evidence intriguingly suggests that Iron Age inhabitants spoke
a language related to Etruscan. See Danile 2016.
69. McInerney 2021: 174.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
110 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

on the island depicted “celebrations of Athenian victories over treacherous, indig-

enous people.”70
To return to the Philoctetes, the way that the island of Lemnos is portrayed
looks increasingly like a colonial fantasy (and nightmare): the place is desolate,
pristine, and uninhabited, ripe for the taking, while somehow simultaneously over-
run with dangerous, savage, less-than-human figures. This rhetorical gesture is
analogous to the way that North America was (and in some contexts, continues
to be) portrayed to and imagined by white settlers.71 From this angle, Philoctetes
himself begins to look increasingly racialized, and Odysseus, in a familiar role,
resembles the consummate colonizer.72
Indeed, Bernadette Morin has argued that the Cyclopeia of Homer’s Odyssey,
Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus in Book 9, looms large in Sophocles’ play,
and documents multiple moments of close lexical overlap between the two.73
Though the action in the Homeric episode is situated on an unnamed island, not on
Lemnos, the tracking and tricking of the dangerous, inhuman Polyphemus strongly
resonates with Odysseus’ approach of the dangerous, hardly human Philoctetes.
Most notable for this discussion are the images that Odysseus uses to evoke, in
strikingly gruesome terms, his and his comrades’ violent blinding of Polyphemus,
permanently marking his body as that of a victim of a colonial incursion. He first
incapacitates the cyclops with unmixed wine, wielding the monster’s lack of
cultivation, and therefore moderation, against him. Odysseus then identifies in
the cave an enormous, roughly hewn olive-wood stake, which Polyphemus had
intended to use as a walking stick. Co-opting this object as a weapon, the sailors
plunge and twist it into Polyphemus’ eye, penetrating his prostrate body; Odysseus
describes the action as being like that of a drill that one would use in the process of
ship-building. As is the case in the descriptions of Philoctetes’ acute suffering, there
is a hot hemorrhage of blood (τὸν δ᾽ αἷμα περίρρεε θερμὸν ἐόντα, Od. 9.388; cf.
Soph. Phil. 825).74 Odysseus then moves to another image of skilled industry and
craftsmanship, this time invoking the Hephaestian trade of blacksmithing:
ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἀνὴρ χαλκεὺς πέλεκυν μέγαν ἠὲ σκέπαρνον
εἰν ὕδατι ψυχρῷ βάπτῃ μεγάλα ἰάχοντα

70. McInerney 2021: 177, 152.

71. See also Dougherty 2001: 130: “the primitive savagery of the Cyclopes . . . reminds us of
yet another New World scenario in which the fertility of the land is tempered by a sense of primi-
tivism rather than idealism and where the native occupants of the land are less than welcoming to
newcomers.”
72. Derek Walcott’s postcolonial novel Omeros (1990) anticipates this analysis, casting
“Philoctete” as a Caribbean fisherman descended from enslaved people. See Greenwood 2007 on
Caribbean “counter-readings.” In postcolonial reception of the Odyssey, Odysseus is often cast as a
colonizer; see, e.g., Greenwood 2009. For the relationship between Homer’s poem and the ancient
Greek practice of colonization, see, e.g., Dougherty 2001; Rinon 2007.
73. Morin 2003.
74. Morin 2003: 400.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 111

φαρμάσσων· τὸ γὰρ αὖτε σιδήρου γε κράτος ἐστίν

ὣς τοῦ σίζ᾽ ὀφθαλμὸς ἐλαϊνέῳ περὶ μοχλῷ.
Hom. Od. 9.391–94

As when a blacksmith dips an axe or an adze

in cold water, treating it, and it shrieks loudly,
for this, in turn, is the source of iron’s strength,
so did his eye sizzle around the olive-wood stake.
The continued assault on Polyphemus is thus assimilated to the production of
weapons and tools that in and of themselves allow continued dominance over oth-
ers and over the environment. These images have long been read in structuralist
terms, as de Jong puts it, exemplifying the poem’s “general theme of the victory
of culture over nature”:75 Odysseus approaches Polyphemus armed with technai
(shipbuilding and metalworking) and guile that overpower the barbarous cyclops.
Such readings support interpretations of the poem writ large, and this episode in
particular, as a document of archaic Greek colonization—and one that in its later
reception, from antiquity to modernity, will figure “the cyclops . . . [as] a reference
point for representations of otherness.”76
I argue further that a slippage emerges between these categories, as evidenced
by some slippage between the tenor and the vehicle of this simile, and that the
tension thereby produced lends further significance to the evocation of the episode
in the Philoctetes. While in the vehicle of the simile it is the sharp weapons and
tools that “cry out,” in the tenor it is the cyclops’ eye, rather than the stake, the
actual weapon, that makes noise: the eye “sizzles,” as though Polyphemus’ body
is being tempered. The slippage between the images also moves in the opposite
direction. The verb φαρμάσσω, a hapax in Homer, translated here as “treating,” is
not used elsewhere to describe the process of tempering heated metal; in later usage
it typically refers to the treatment of a human body with φάρμακα, carrying either
its ameliatorative valence as a medicine or its injurious valence as a poison. And
while ἰάχω does elsewhere refer to the resounding clang of metal, ἰάχοντα, often
translated here (and only here) as “hissing” or the like, can just as easily refer to
a human shout. As the wretched Polyphemus himself is crafted by metallurgical
technology, the axe and the adze take on characteristics of his suffering body. In
Odysseus’ confrontation with this island’s Other, he not only triumphs over the

75. See de Jong 2001: 243 on this passage, but the general idea goes back much further. See, e.g.,
Vidal-Naquet 1981 [1970].
76. Hardwick 1996: n.49, as cited by Schliephake 2019: 144. See also Dougherty 2001: 136–40,
who argues that the Phaeacians and the Cyclopes, both descendants of Poseidon, are exemplary of the
distinct kinds of “savege” barbarians a Greek oikist might expect to encounter. Schliephake argues
that “‘othering’ will . . . be seen as one of [the Odyssey’s] central poetic strategies, offering a complex
meditation of cultural identity and ethics,” and uses the blinding of Polyphemus as a key exemplum
(2019: 6).
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
112 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

monster but subjects his body to technological processing. In turn, the axe and the
adze are simultaneously stand-ins for this triumph and deeply entangled with the
pain and suffering of those who enable their production. Just as Sophocles takes
advantage of tragedy’s expressive capacity by employing choral aesthetics and a
choral perspective to stage such an encounter in the Hymn to Gaia, Homer accom-
plishes a similar effect via epic simile.
The Philoctetes draws from both archaic and contemporary paradigms about
confrontation with mysterious foreign others, but this approach hardly results in
imperial Athenian propaganda. The play recasts the traditional story of Philoctetes’
alienation from the Greek fleet as an ambivalent encounter with a frightening but
all-too-familiar creature, with his own ways of inhabiting his own world, who has
something needed in order to continue a quest for dominance. Of course, unlike
with the Pelasgians or Polyphemus, Philoctetes’ status as an indigene of Lemnos
is a temporary one, in that he begins, and will end, his life as a glorious Greek
hero. But by exploring what happens to a hero when his plot stalls out, Sophocles
experiments with eliciting pity for those who are excluded from, and inevitably
subjugated by, history’s grand narratives.

VI. LEMNIAN EARTH AND PHARMACOLOGICAL RECEPTION

Sophocles’ dramatic account intertwines the material and mythic ecologies of

Lemnos, an act of placemaking (or, in Haraway’s parlance, “worlding”) that, I have
argued, associates the island with a particular set of physiological and social mal-
adies. This setting is entangled with the depiction of Philoctetes’ suffering, unruly,
feminized, and racialized body. As it happens, a very similar set of maladies comes to
be associated with the island in the Greco-Roman medical tradition. One of our ear-
liest extant accounts of this phenomenon is in Pliny’s Natural Histories (ca. 79 CE),
where the polymath describes the healing properties of so-called Lemnian Earth:77

in medicina praeclara res habetur. epiphoras enim oculorum mitigat ac

dolores circumlita et aegilopia manare prohibet, sanguinem reicientibus
ex aceto datur bibenda. bibitur et contra lienum reniumque vitia et purga-
tiones feminarum, item et contra venena et serpentium ictus terrestrium
marinorumque.
Plin. HN 35.34

77. This account may be preceded by Pedanius Dioscorides’ De materia medica 5.97.1–2, where
the author particularly emphasizes Lemnian Earth’s capacity to serve as both a treatment and pro-
phylactic for venomous snakebites. All of the extant references to Lemnian Earth’s pharmacological
applications are preceded by Theophrastus’ Περὶ λίθων, where he discusses its use as a pigment, as
does Vitruvius in his De architectura.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 113

In medicine it is an exceptional substance. Used topically around the eyes

it relieves defluxions and pains, and staunches the discharge from eye
tumors; it is given for drink in vinegar in cases of vomiting or spitting
blood. It is also drunk for defects of the spleen and kidneys and for men-
struation (purgationes feminarum); and also as a remedy for poisons and
snake bites and the sting of sea serpents.
That is, by Pliny’s time, the very place-stuff of Lemnos, its distinctive red dirt,
has become a φάρμακον for controlling and domesticating the very kinds of bod-
ies that traditionally populated the island’s mythic ecology: those that are leaky,
porous, excessively feminized; those whose boundaries have been transgressed by
the incursion of a serpent, a liminal beast itself.78 It is impossible to know for cer-
tain the extent to which Sophocles’ version of the story of Philoctetes influenced
the conceptualization of the φάρμακον’s potential applications. But if we “read”
the drug as a sort of reception of the play, it would seem to corroborate the version
of the drama offered above: that of an ailing person, deeply implicated in the land-
scape they inhabit, dripping and feminized. And, as I will now argue, this pharma-
cological “reading” of the play is constructed in an imperial/extractive perspective
on the island and its resources, suggested in the previous section.
In his De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus, Galen
describes going to Lemnos to observe the extraction and processing of Lemnian
Earth and to procure some tablets for his own pharmacy:

The priestess collects this, to the accompaniment of some local ceremony,

no animals being sacrificed, but wheat and barley being given back to
the land in exchange. She then takes it to the city, mixes it with water so
as to make moist mud, shakes this violently and then allows it to stand.
Thereafter she removes first the superficial water, and next the greasy part
of the earth below this, leaving only the stony and sandy part at the bottom,
which is useless. She now dries the greasy mud until it reaches the consis-
tency of soft wax. Of this she takes small portions and imprints upon them
the seal of Artemis, namely the goat; then again she dries them in the shade
till they are absolutely free from moisture.79
Gal. De simpl. med. 9.2

Galen describes a process that consists of multiple steps that transform the sub-
stance from dirt into a branded product. Lemnian Earth appears to have been a par-
ticularly popular remedy, and one with tremendous staying power: the extraction
and circulation of the product continued through the Ottoman Empire, even into the

78. Jaronowski 2008; Hall and Photos-Jones 2008.

79. Translated by Brock 1929: 192.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
114 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

nineteenth century.80 But it was only one of dozens of “local specialties” espoused
by Greco-Roman physicians. Laurence Totelin argues that such products demon-
strate the links between “on the one hand, ethnicity and imperialism, and on the
other hand, elite consumption—and even consumerism—in the ancient world.”81
The procurement and consumption of products from around the empire was one
way of performing mastery and supremacy. In some respects, Lemnian Earth was
a true commodity, extracted, processed, and stamped with an advertisement.82 Its
curative powers were informed by, but ultimately alienated from, the island’s rich
mythic ecology, its polyphonic assemblage, and used to condition the bodies of the
elite. The long-standing popularity of the product ultimately situated the island’s
inhabitants in an extractive relationship with the land. It is perhaps worth noting
that when archaeologists A. J. Hall and E. Photos-Jones recently attempted to ana-
lyze samples of the soil from Lemnos to determine whether its medical potency is
articulable by contemporary scientific models, they found only scanty traces of the
famous red clay.83 The mythic ecology of the island has ultimately had a profound
impact on the place’s material reality, in both the short and the long terms.
Reciprocally, the commodification of Lemnos has a profound impact on
the narrative of Philoctetes. Coincident with the instrumentalization of Lemnian
material is a shift in the way that the figure of Philoctetes appears in accounts by
Roman imperial authors, perhaps most neatly represented by Philostratus’ Heroicus
(213–214 CE). There it is claimed that Philoctetes did not in fact suffer for the
entire period of his abandonment on Lemnos; rather:

ἰαθῆναι δὲ αὐτὸν αὐτίκα ὑπὸ τῆς βώλου τῆς Λημνίας, εἰς ἣν λέγεται πεσεῖν
ὁ Ἥφαιστος· ἡ δὲ ἐλαύνει μὲν τὰς μανικὰς νόσους, ἐκραγὲν δὲ αἷμα ἴσχει,
ὕδρου δὲ ἰᾶται μόνου δῆγμα ἑρπετῶν.
Philostr. Her. 28.5

He was healed immediately by the Lemnian Earth, onto which Hephaistos

is said to have fallen. It drives off diseases causing madness, clots blood,
and heals the bite of the watersnake, a particular kind of creeping creature.
The earth’s curative potential renders the story of the long-suffering Philoctetes
impossible. The hero was cured right away (αὐτίκα), an adverb that completely
obliterates Sophocles’ version of the tale. Philoctetes is no longer forced into

80. Jaronowski 2008. The goat seal for Artemis will eventually give way to the seal of the Ottoman
sultan, but the method of extracting and processing the clay seems to have remained much the same.
See Hall and Photos-Jones 2008: 1038–41 for later accounts.
81. Totelin 2015: 152.
82. Totelin 2015: 157–58. See also Nutton 1985 on the Greco-Roman drug trade.
83. Hall and Photos-Jones 2008: 1046.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 115

strange relationships with animate and inanimate creatures. He suffers only a pause
in achieving his heroic telos, the sacking of Troy.
The narrative implications of Lemnian Earth might be contrasted with those of
another local remedy, the φύλλον that grows on Lemnos in the dramatic world of
Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Early in the play, Odysseus hypothesizes that Philoctetes is
away from his bivouac seeking a pain-killing herb (45). Later, when Neoptolemus
has nearly succeeded in tricking Philoctetes into boarding his ship, Philoctetes
insists that he must return to his cave so that he can gather some items. When
Neoptolemus asks what the indigent man could possibly want that would not
already be available aboard the ships, Philoctetes replies that he needs his φύλλον,
that it “soothes” (πραΰνειν, 650) acute attacks. Unlike Lemnian Earth, the Lemnian
Herb does not provide a cure for Philoctetes’ affliction. Rather, it temporarily alle-
viates his pain without significantly altering his circumstances. Within the play the
only way through to an actual cure is an acquiescence to the teleological heroic plot
that Heracles offers Philoctetes ex machina at the play’s end, wherein it is prom-
ised that he will be fully healed at Troy. Either staying on Lemnos, or returning
home to Poeas, dooms Philoctetes to a lifetime of suffering where the only recourse
available is the temporary assuagement of pain provided by a plant that tethers him
perpetually to the landscape where the herb grows.
The rationalization of the myth exemplified by Philostratus’ version follows
inevitably on the commodification and instrumentalization of its setting. Elements
of Sophocles’ version are still present, interpolated into the material process of
extraction and in the substance’s interface with a particular kind of suffering body.
But this enactment of the story extricates Philoctetes from his entanglements with
the island’s material ecosystem, and the relationships involved instead become
characterized by alienation. Myth, landscape, body, and narrative are closely and
materially intertwined.

CONCLUSION: THE CUP AND THE BOW

The bow that Philoctetes inherited from Heracles is the most significant
object in the plot of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. It dictates the terms of Odysseus
and Neoptolemus’ approach of their abandoned comrade, and is the ultimate key
to Philoctetes’ destiny as a hero of the Trojan War. But there is another object,
far humbler, that is exemplary of the play’s shadow plot; or, perhaps we could
say, its Gaia story: “a cup of plain wood, the work of some shoddy craftsman”
(αὐτόξυλόν γ᾽ ἔκπωμα, φλαυρουργοῦ τινος / τεχνήματ᾽ ἀνδρός, 35–36). This item,
mentioned briefly above, is one element of the sad scene encountered by Odysseus
and Neoptolemus before the entrance of Philoctetes’ bivouac, and the detail with
which the cup is described adds an extra layer of pathos. It is crafted by human
hands, but barely so. Jebb suggests that the word αὐτόξυλον “means here, ‘of wood
not artistically treated’; the piece of wood remained as nearly in its original state
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
116 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

as was compatible with its serving for a cup” (2004: 12). The slightest human
intervention transforms the tree-stuff into a basic instrument of sustenance.84 To
push Jebb’s observation further, Philoctetes and the wood itself (αὐτο-) share in
the object’s creation, in its manifestation as a cup. The object is representative of
a synthesis of human technē and a tree’s natural properties, of a collaborative (if
not friendly) relationship between mankind and his others. That is, while the bow
will ultimately be Philoctetes’ ticket out of his current wretched circumstances, the
cup is exemplary of Philoctetes’ entanglement with his environment, his shared,
diminished, and complicated agency. From here, Sophocles will create and invoke
a set of circular, ruminative narratives that place the story of Philoctetes into con-
versation with an array of mythic systems, exploring the complex dynamics that
arise in the spaces between man and his environment, between Greeks and their
imagined Others.
To think further through the pairing of the cup and the bow in an ecocritical
context, we might turn to Haraway’s engagement with speculative writer Ursula K.
Le Guin and her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”85 As Haraway puts it,
“the thrall of the fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons” has tended to
define “earth history” from the very beginning, and this leads to particular kinds of
narratives: “a tragic story with only one real actor, one real world-maker, the hero,
this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the ter-
rible bounty.” Other narrative elements and entities are reduced to “props, ground,
plot, space, or prey.”86 In the Philoctetes, if you follow the bow you can follow the
plot. But what about the remainder?
What none of these heroes or their admirers want to admit, according to Le
Guin and Haraway, is that just as fundamental to human existence as a pointy
weapon is some means of carrying what one has gathered. We all know what kinds
of stories can be told with a weapon, but Haraway asks us to consider what kind can
be told with a cup, whose purpose is to collect and share rather than to dominate
and kill; that is, “stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal induction, of compan-
ion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying the world-
ing.”87 By momentarily privileging Philoctetes’ humble cup and all that it stands
for over his heroic bow, we can see more clearly the complex worlds that enable
but are typically repressed by a strict focus on plot and human character. Instead,
per Haraway once more, this perspective allows us to see how “becoming human,
becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—that is the side-winding,
snaky shape of becoming-with.”88 And we can see, also, how these cup-tales can

84. We might recall here Polyphemus’ walking-stick, a plain piece of wood he intended to use to
enable him to navigate his surroundings, eventually transformed into a weapon of conquest.
85. Le Guin 2019.
86. Haraway 2016: 38. See also Umachandran 2021.
87. Haraway 2016: 40.
88. Haraway 2016: 40.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 117

wield a profound material impact beyond a work’s original context and beyond its
literary reception. An ecocritical approach to Sophocles’ Philoctetes and its after-
life yields a steaming material-semiotic compost heap: messy and smelly but vital
with possibility.

University of California, Los Angeles

[email protected]

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bassi, K. 2016. Traces of the Past: Classics between History and Archaeology. Ann Arbor.
Bennett, J. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, N.C.
Borza, E. N. 2003. “Lemnos.” In S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow, eds., The
Oxford Classical Dictionary, 842–43. 3rd rev. ed. Oxford.
Bosak-Schroeder, C. 2020. Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek
Ethnography. Oakland.
Bradley, M. 2014. Smell and the Ancient Senses. New York.
Bremmer, J. N. 2010. “Hephaistos Sweats or How to Construct an Ambivalent God.”
In J. N. Bremmer and A. Erskine, eds., The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and
Transformations, 193–208. Cambridge.
Brock, A. J. 1929. Greek Medicine: Being Extracts Illustrative of Medical Writers from
Hippocrates to Galen. London.
Burkert, W. 1970. “Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire in Lemnos: A Study in Myth and
Ritual.” CQ 20.1: 1–16.
———. 1985. Greek Religion. Cambridge.
———. 2001. Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Chicago.
Carson, A. 1990. “Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire.” In F. I. Zeitlin,
J. J. Winkler, and D. Halperin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World, 135–70. Princeton.
Chen, M. Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham,
N.C.
Chesi, G. M., and F. Spiegel. 2019. Classical Literature and Posthumanism. London.
Curtis, V. 2013. Don’t Look, Don’t Touch: The Science behind Revulsion. Oxford.
Danile, L. 2016. “The Indigenous Culture of Hephaestia (Lemnos) at the Beginning of the
Iron Age: Ancient Sources, Mythical Tradition, and Archaeological Data.” In N. C.
Stampolidis, Ç. Maner, and K. Kopanias, eds., Nostoi: Indigenous Culture, Migration,
and Integration in the Aegean Islands and Western Anatolia during the Late Bronze
and Early Iron Age, 441–61. Istanbul.
Dean-Jones, L. 1991. “The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek
Science.” In S. B. Pomeroy, ed., Women’s History and Ancient History, 111–37. Chapel
Hill.
de Jong, I. J. F. 2001. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge.
Delcourt, M. 1982. Héphaïstos ou la légende du magicien. Paris.
Dougherty, C. 2001. The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s
Odyssey. Oxford.
Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
London.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
118 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

Escobar, A. 2001. “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies
of Localization.” Political Geography 20.2: 139–74.
Futo Kennedy, R., and M. Jones-Lewis, eds. 2016. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and
the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds. London.
Gilhuly, K., and N. Worman. 2014. “Introduction.” In K. Gilhuly and N. Worman, eds., Space,
Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, 1–20. Cambridge.
Goldhill, S. 2012. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford.
Greenwood, E. 2007. “Arriving Backwards: The Return of The Odyssey in the
English-Speaking Caribbean.” In L. Hardwick and C. Gillespie, eds., Classics in
Post-Colonial Worlds, 192–210. Oxford.
———. 2009. “A Tale of Two O’s: Odysseus and Oedipus in the Black Atlantic.” New West
Indian Guide 83.3–4: 281–89.
Hall, A. J., and E. Photos-Jones. 2008. “Accessing Past Beliefs and Practices: The Case of
Lemnian Earth.” Archaeometry 50.6: 1034–49.
Haraway, D. 1991 [1985]. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature, 149–83. London.
———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.
Hardwick, L. 1996. “A Daidalos in the Late-Modern Age? Transplanting Homer into Derek
Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version.” In L. Hardwick and S. Ireland, eds., Selected
Proceedings of the January Conference 1996: The Reception of Classical Texts and
Images, 232–62. Milton Keynes.
Holmes, B. 2010. The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in
Ancient Greece. Princeton.
———. Forthcoming. The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and the Concept of Nature in
Greco-Roman Antiquity. Chicago.
Jackson, S. 1990. “Myrsilus of Methymna and the Dreadful Smell of the Lemnian Women.”
ICS 15.1: 77–83.
Jaronowski, H. 2008. “‘An Earth by Any Other Name’: Pre-Ottoman Sources and Names
for Lemnian Earth.” Hellenica 58.1: 47–70.
Jebb, R. C. 2004. Sophocles: Plays, Philoctetes. London.
King, H. 1994. “Producing Women: Hippocratic Gynaecology.” In L. J. Archer, S. Fischler,
and M. Wyke, eds., Women in Ancient Societies, 102–114. London.
Korhonen, T., and E. Ruonakoski. 2017. Human and Animal in Ancient Greece: Empathy
and Encounter in Classical Literature. London.
Kosak, J. C. 1999. “Therapeutic Touch and Sophokles’ Philoktetes.” HSCPh 99: 93–134.
———. 2006. “The Male Interior: Strength, Illness, and Masculinity in Sophocles’
Philoctetes.” BICS 87: 49–64.
Kristeva, J. 1980. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New
York.
Latour, B. 2014. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45.1:
1–18.
———. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. C. Porter.
Cambridge.
Lefebvre, H. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford.
Le Guin, U. K. 2019. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. London.
Lewis, S. 2017. “Cthulhu Plays No Role for Me.” Viewpoint Magazine. May 8. https://view
pointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me.
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
ELLA HA SEL SWE R DT : Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering 119

Martin, R. P. 1987. “Fire on the Mountain: Lysistrata and the Lemnian Women.” ClAnt 6.1:
77–105.
Masciadri, V. 2008. Eine Insel im Meer der Geschichten: Untersuchungen zu Mythen aus
Lemnos. Stuttgart.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London.
McInerney, J. 2021. “Lemnos, Cimon, and the Hephaisteion.” ClAnt 40.1: 151–93.
Morin, B. 2003. “L’épopée homérique au service du personnage tragique: Polyphème,
Héphaïstos et Philoctète à Lemnos.” REG 116.2: 386–417.
Mueller, M. 2016. Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performace in Greek Tragedy.
Chicago.
Nooter, S. 2012. When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy.
Cambridge.
Nutton, V. 1985. “The Drug Trade in Antiquity.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
78.2: 138–45.
Parker, R. 1983. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford.
———. 1994. “Athenian Religion Abroad.” In R. Osborne and S. Hornblower, eds., Ritual,
Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis, 339–46.
Oxford.
Payne, M. 2010. The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination.
Chicago.
Rinon, Y. 2007. “The Pivotal Scene: Narration, Colonial Focalization, and Transition in
Odyssey 9.” AJPh 128.3: 301–334.
Ristorto, M. A. 2016. “Hymn to Gaia/Mother of the Gods (391–402) in Sophocles’
Philoktetes.” Phaos 16: 51–77.
Schein, S. L. 2013. Sophocles: Philoctetes. Cambridge.
Schliephake, C. 2017. “Introduction.” In C. Schliephake, ed., Ecocriticism, Ecology, and the
Cultures of Antiquity, 1–16. Lanham.
———. 2019. “Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey and the (Other) Mediterranean
Imagination.” In M. Brehl, A. Eckl, and K. Platt, eds., The Mediterranean Other – The
Other Mediterranean, 133–51. Leiden.
Silverblank, H., and M. Ward. 2020. “Why Does Classical Reception Need Disability
Studies?” Classical Receptions Journal 12.4: 502–530.
Sissa, G. 1990. “Le verginità materiale: Evanescenza di un oggetto.” Quaderni storici
25.75.3: 739–56.
Soja, E. W. 2008. “Vom ‘Zeitgeist’ zum ‘Raumgeist’: New Twists on the Spatial Turn.” In J.
Döring and T. Theilmann, eds., Spatial Turn: Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und
Sozialwissenschaften, 241–62. Bielefeld.
Taplin, O. 1987. “The Mapping of Sophocles’ Philoctetes.” BICS 34: 69–77.
Telò, M. 2018. “The Boon and the Woe: Friendship and the Ethics of Affect in Sophocles’
Philoctetes.” In M. Telò and M. Mueller, eds., The Materialities of Greek Tragedy:
Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 133–52. London.
Telò, M., and M. Mueller. 2018. “Introduction: Greek Tragedy and the New Materialisms.”
In M. Telò and M. Mueller, eds., The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and
Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 1–11. London.
Thumiger, C. 2019. “Animality, Illness and Dehumanization: The Phenomenology of Illness
in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.” In Chesi and Spiegel, 95–102.
Totelin, L. 2015. “The World in a Pill: Local Specialties and Global Remedies in the
Graeco-Roman World.” In R. F. Kennedy and M. Jones-Lewis, eds., The Routledge
 d from http://online.ucpress.edu/ca/article-pdf/42/1/87/778426/ca_42_1_87.pdf?casa_token=IWcWFPQvu9sAAAAA:tKUVUxB4q_PblyL7xGe02rv3F7r3DvTbOVVQiJnlsosQcGmd_Dcr99WviquE9enN44Pjd8EfMA by American School of Classical Studies at Athens user on 29
120 classical antiq uity Volume 42 / No. 1 / April 2023

Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds,
151–70. London.
Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton.
Umachandran, M. 2021. “Carrier Bag Theory of Queer Feeling, or, Coming to Critique.”
Keynote address presented at Queer and the Classical, Oxford, 20 February.
Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture.
Westport, Conn.
Vidal-Naquet, P. 1981 [1970]. “Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and
Mythical Meanings.” In R. L. Gordon, ed., Myth, Religion and Society: Structuralist
Essays by M. Detienne, L. Gernet, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet. Cambridge.
Walcott, D. 1990. Omeros. New York.
Worman, N. 2000. “Infection in the Sentence: The Discourse of Disease in Sophocles’
Philoctetes.” Arethusa 33.1: 1–36.
———. 2021. Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama. London.
Wynter, S. 1971. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou 5: 95–120.
Zeitlin, F. I. 1990. “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama.” In J. J. Winkler
and F. I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social
Context, 130–67. Princeton.