A play of extraordinary brilliance and power, Philoctetes is here taken outside the chronological order, in which it lies between Electra and the Coloneus. There were special reasons for taking those two plays together. Are there features which, as some feel, separate Philoctetes from other extant plays of Sophocles? After all, if (unlike Electra and the Coloneus) the play has no Erinyes, yet the lasting effects of a cruel act are displayed. There is a hero who shares many characteristics with other Sophoclean heroes; the pathos – and the rhetoric – are unsurpassed; there is human pity, and irony, and other Sophoclean themes in plenty. If the ending is ‘happy’, so in some strange sense are the endings of Electra and the Coloneus, though it may be remarked that here the final solution is not marred by an ambivalent matricide or a parental curse. The absence of death and disaster from the outcome do not necessarily deprive the play of tragic quality, though they affect its tone.

Odysseus, and with him the young Neoptolemus, have been sent to bring Philoctetes to Troy. Philoctetes, inheritor of Heracles' infallible bow, had been jettisoned by the Greeks ten years before upon the desert island of Lemnos, but a prophetic utterance has now revealed that his presence is necessary if Troy is to be captured. How is he to be brought? By force? By persuasion? By craft? Odysseus, for good reasons, opts for craft and enlists the services of Neoptolemus. But is it Philoctetes who is needed or merely the bow? What did the prophet say? While Philoctetes holds the bow, the question is academic, since the bow cannot come without its owner.