Once in a while, a first-rate modern poet comes to the rescue of an ancient Greek tragedy, managing to make its people talk again like real people and its songs sound again like real songs. This wonderful thing happened a generation ago to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, when Robert Fitzgerald (to whose memory, most fittingly, the present book is dedicated) published his translation of it in the Chicago Complete Greek Tragedies. Now it has happened to that other masterpiece of Sophocles’ extreme old age, the Philoctetes. Both plays are of exceptional power and beauty, even for Sophocles. Both stand apart from all other surviving Greek tragedies in that they explore a kind of heroism which a modern can immediately, instinctively believe in and learn from—the heroism of the outcast from society, physically maimed, clothed in tatters, with nothing left to him in this world but his own fierce spirit. It is truly a matter for rejoicing that both are now available to English-speaking playgoers and readers, in versions that sing.

Most educated people know something of Oedipus and the plays about him; but the lone play about Philoctetes that has reached us from classical times may need some introduction for its own sake, if one is to grasp what an exciting literary and theatrical event this new version is. There is much in the Philoctetesthat simply has no parallel in extant Greek drama, and only remote parallels in the drama of post-classical Europe. One