Chapter Three
The Wounded Savior

The eminent philosopher Dio of Prusa, known as Chrysostom ("the Golden Mouth"), could pride himself on being one of the leading Greek intellectuals of his time. He was personally acquainted with the emperor Trajan, who listened with patience and incomprehension to the stream of wisdom that the great man poured into the imperial ear. A century later the biographer Philostratus accorded Dio Chrysostom an ample biography in his collected Lives of the Sophists , even though, by Philostratus's own admission, Dio was not a sophist. Few today would contest that Dio ranks among the truly representative figures of the late first and early second centuries of the Christian era. His personal opinions are always bound to be of some interest.^[1]

It so happens that, when Dio was a guest at the villa of an evidently affluent Roman friend, he woke up one morning feeling rather frail (for reasons he does not divulge). After rising to face the rigors of the day, he took a few turns in a chariot in his host's private hippodrome, oiled and washed himself, and then settled down to read some tragedies. What he chose were three plays

about Philoctetes, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.^[2] Dio indulged in the pleasing fantasy that he might be, as it were, a judge in a dramatic competition of the fifth century B.C. , appraising the relative merits of these three dramas from the greatest of the classical Greek dramatic poets. That they were all on the same theme gave special point to the comparison. Unfortunately, modern readers are not in a position to repeat Dio's experiment, since the works by Aeschylus and Euripides no longer survive, although some fragments as well as the observations of Dio permit us to have a sense of what those works were like.^[3] The Philoctetes by Sophocles does, however, survive, and it remains today perhaps the most intensely personal and moving of all Greek tragedies.

Philoctetes figures only a few times in the Homeric poems,^[4] but it is clear that the later epics gave him more attention. In the fifth century B.C. the outlines of his career were obviously well known to all cultivated Greeks. The epics and plays had established him as a significant figure in the mythology that was, for the Greeks, history at the same time. Philoctetes had once gone forth with the Greek expedition to Troy after rendering a signal service to Heracles on his last day of mortality. It was Philoctetes who put the torch to the pyre on which Heracles was cremated, and in

grateful anticipation of this selfless act Heracles had turned over to him his unerring bow. Through immolation Heracles escaped the poison of Deianira's robe and became divine.

Philoctetes acquired the bow that no enemy could avoid. He thereby became a desirable member of any military expedition, but unfortunately his relations with Odysseus were bad. That notoriously wily Greek managed to expel Philoctetes from the Greek expedition after he had been bitten by a snake while sacrificing at a shrine of Chryse on the island of Tenedos in the Aegean. The snakebite caused a wound that would not heal, and the smell, as well as the lamentations, of Philoctetes sufficed to persuade the Greeks to abandon him on the desolate island of Lemnos. There he remained for nearly the entire duration of the Trojan War. But ten years later the Greeks learned through a captured Trojan prophet that Troy could only be taken with the bow of Philoctetes and, in most versions of the story, in the presence of Philoctetes himself.^[5]

This suffering pariah, abandoned by his own people and wracked by a suppurating wound that would never dose, had already become in the fifth century a powerful symbol of the salvation that man by his own folly puts out of his reach and must struggle somehow to regain. The Athenians saw Sophocles' play for the first time in 409, when Alcibiades, now far away, seemed to hold the secret of restoring their fortunes after the disaster of the Sicilian expedition. For Sophocles himself Philoctetes is a man whose very loneliness and agony serve to inspire the young son of Achilles, Neoptolemos, and to transform his character. Unlike the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, which were both written much earlier than Sophocles' work, this is essentially a

drama of the impact of suffering on the mind of a young man. At the beginning of the play Odysseus persuades the youth to trick Philoctetes in order to recover the bow and his person. But by befriending him and observing his excruciating pain, by hearing his ear-splitting cries and smelling the foul odors of his wound, Neoptolemos comes to realize the wrong he has committed in joining in an act of deception. He resolves, to Odysseus's horror, to turn back the bow that Philoctetes, in a moment of terrible pain, had entrusted to him because he honestly believed the boy a friend. There are few plays in which suffering holds center stage for so long as it does in Sophocles' Philoctetes .^[6]

Presumably this was the reason that Dio Chrysostom, while admiring the language of Sophocles and the tragic power of his play, found Aeschylus and Euripides more congenial. Both were more directly concerned with the knotty political problem of abducting a savior who was unaware that he was a savior. Euripides' play, produced for the first time in 431 and obviously exuding the atmosphere of Periclean Athens, was, according to Dio, a highly political work that effectively fostered virtue in the reader. Odysseus appeared as a loyal and energetic patriot, taking on one dangerous mission after another for the common good in a spirit of public involvement that echoed Pericles' funeral oration as we know it from the pages of Thucydides. Dio liked Euripides' play so much that he not only described it in his comparative essay on the three plays; he also drafted a prose paraphrase of the whole opening scene. This survives to give us a dear picture of the characters of Odysseus and Philoctetes in Euripides.^[7] The invalid exile clearly accepted

the same premises of political involvement as Odysseus himself and claimed that his wound was nothing less than the result of an effort to make a sacrifice on behalf of the entire Greek army. The suffering of Philoctetes was manifestly of far less interest to Euripides than to Sophocles. At the end of Dio Chrysostom's paraphrase Philoctetes is made to observe that, although his pain had been unendurable at the start, it was now, after nine years, not so bad any more.

It is a rare privilege to be able to look at these three plays through the eyes of a leading Greek intellectual of the Roman imperial period. His fascination with the Philoctetes story is obvious. We cannot simply assume that he picked up the nearest book rolls in his host's villa on that day when he was feeling somewhat fatigued. Philoctetes, the wounded savior, meant something to Dio and to his world. By exploring the fabrications to which this classic myth was subjected over many centuries from Sophocles to Dio and beyond, we can see why. Then, as now, a pariah who embodied salvation was an irresistible paradox.

In the classical Greek world nobody was sacrosanct, certainly not the figures of mythology. We cannot be surprised to find that there are even traces of a considerable comic literature on this figure as well as several other lesser tragedies.^[8] The general tenor of the comic treatment of Philoctetes is probably well represented by some unattributed verses in the writings of one of Dio Chrysostom's great contemporaries, Plutarch. A speaker is made to say, "What young maiden, what young virgin would have you, Philoctetes? You are unfortunately not marriageable."^[9]

But such crude lines as these simply ring changes on the familiar story.

The first truly creative invention applied to the Philoctetes legend can be observed in the third century B.C. , in the relatively early Hellenistic period. Someone had the completely original idea of taking Philoctetes to Italy after the conclusion of the Trojan War. This piece of patent fiction imposed upon a quasihistorical myth introduces a shipwreck on Philoctetes' way back to Greece after the death of Paris and the Greek victory at Troy. The boat with Philoctetes ends up on the Italian coast in Campania, where he founds a number of cities, including Krimissa, Chone, and Makalla. The great savior erects a temple to Apollo, dedicates his bow to the god, and ultimately dies in combat on Italian soil. All this looks very much like an effort to coopt Philoctetes for the cause of the new Roman state.^[10] After all, the Greeks had treated him badly, by leaving him on the island of Lemnos for nine years and then trying by deceit to steal both him and his bow. As the legendary descendants of the Trojans, the Romans would have had good reason to feel some sympathy for this Greek, even if his bow ultimately brought an end to their city in Asia Minor.

The story of Philoctetes in Italy appears at some length in two major verse writers whose relations to each other are regrettably impossible to establish with any certainty. But it is likely that the little epic entitled Philoctetes by Euphorion of Chalkis was the first work to incorporate this late and last phase

of Philoctetes' career.^[11] A repetition of this material in the obscure poem known as the Alexandra and ascribed to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron probably belongs to a somewhat later date in the third century than the poem of Euphorion.^[12] There is a knotty problem here, but on present evidence we have good reason to think that Lycophron was writing in the early third century, even though the extensive account he gives of Romulus and Remus, Aeneas, and the foundation of Roman power seems wholly incompatible with such an assumption.^[13] Similarly the parallel with Euphorion on the Philoctetes story contributes to disturbing a postulated early third-century date for Lycophron. Were one to imagine, as some have, that passages such as these are all interpolations in an earlier poem, one would soon discover that the Alexandra is more interpolation than original. That would obviously not be a satisfactory situation. But fortunately, for our purposes, the exact relation of Euphorion to Lycophron is irrelevant to the general point that Philoctetes becomes important to Roman Italy by the third century B.C .

Sometime in the following century one of Rome's greatest dramatic poets, Accius, wrote a tragedy in Latin on Philoctetes.^[14] From the extant fragments it is impossible to be certain to what extent, if any, Accius was following one or another of the great

Greek tragedians (or even one of the lesser ones), but there is a strong possibility that his account exploited the new Italian connection of the savior. At least one fragment might possibly evoke the shipwreck that Euphorion described in lines of his little epic that are still extant.^[15] It is also likely that Accius drew at least some parts of his play from Euripides, who introduced an embassy from Troy to make the case against Odysseus in the presence of Philoctetes: one of the fragments of Accius's drama suggests that the argument between the Trojans and Odysseus was rehearsed in the Latin play.^[16] But of one characteristic of Accius's treatment we can be in no doubt, for we have an extended discussion of it by Cicero in both the Tusculan Disputations and the De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Limits of Good and Evil ).^[17] Accius clearly put Philoctetes on the stage crying out in pain as he suffered from the seizures that regularly afflicted him every time the never-dosing wound began to throb, burst, and flow with blood.

Just as in Sophocles' play, the Philoctetes of Accius fills his desert island with desperate cries of pain: "Iaceo in tecto umido, / Quod eiulatu, questu, gemitu fremitibus / Resonando mutum flebilis voces refert." ("I lie in a damp abode, which echoes from its silent walls the tearful cries, with lamentation, wailing, groaning, and roaring.")^[18] Cicero's discussion of Philoctetes' cries re-

veals explicitly, and for the first time, a deeply rooted Roman aversion to the spectacle of uncontrolled grief, especially in a man. The Stoics would not, of course, have approved, and their view of the endurance of pain proved very congenial among the Romans. Even, it would seem, some Greeks of the classical age took a dim view of unrestrained masculine emotion. An extant fragment of Euripides' play shows that it was political activity on behalf of one's city that surely established your credentials as a man, or, as Dio put it in his paraphrase of the passage, to be "really" a man.^[19] Sitting on his island of Lemnos, Philoctetes clearly did not measure up. In the Tusculan Disputations and the De Finibus Cicero was concerned to advocate self-control and the restraint of emotions. Philoctetes, and implicitly those who watched him on the stage, violated Roman decorum. In the De Finibus Cicero elaborated his point as follows: "There are certain precepts for courage (one might even say laws), which forbid a man to behave like a woman in grief. Accordingly we must judge disgraceful—not grief itself, for sometimes that is indeed necessary—but filling the rocks of Lemnos with the foul clamor of a Philoctetes.... Let us rather say: it is disgraceful, it is unmanly to be weakened by grief, to be broken by it, or to succumb to it."^[20]

By the late republic, the time of Cicero, Philoctetes had become a symbol of masculine weakness, of effeminacy, of the failure of a man to endure with courage as a man. This new interpretation of Philoctetes' suffering was soon translated into learned fiction and witty epigrams. The town of Makalla, which Philoctetes was said, according to the more recent legends, to have founded in Italy, was now said to have taken its name from Philoctetes' committing effeminate acts in it. This is a word play by met-athesis on , "to be softened; to be effeminate," and the name of the place, Makalla.^[21] In the early imperial period the epigrammatist Martial turned out an epigram on Philoctetes, characterized as mollis or "soft."^[22] Roman correctness destroyed the heroic suffering of this great figure and turned him into a target of sexual jokes. But Philoctetes was far too strong in legend to be diminished by this kind of conservative moralizing. The very point on which Cicero faulted Philoctetes, his unrestrained crying out in pain, proved more than a millennium later to be the provocation for one of the most incisive writings of modern times on ancient taste and on Philoctetes in particular.

In the eighteenth century the German critic Gotthold Ephraem Lessing rose to the defense of both Philoctetes and Sophocles against the strictures of Cicero and others like him, including Adam Smith and a long-forgotten French dramatist, Chateaubrun, of the seventeenth century. In his great treatise Laokoön , on the limits of painting and poetry, Lessing undertook to refute Winckelmann's view of Greek art as an expression of noble simplicity and quiet greatness ("edle Einfalt und stille Gröb e"). For Lessing the Laocoön statue symbolized precisely the opposite characteristic in ancient art, a willingness to show

extreme emotion and not to be afraid of tears and cries of anguish. Lessing discussed Sophocles' Philoctetes at length in order to demonstrate the centrality of the hero's pain to a proper understanding of the work. In doing this he picked up the parallel that Winckelmann had drawn between Laocoön and Philoctetes: "Laocoön suffers," wrote Winckelmann (as quoted by Lessing), "but he suffers like Sophocles' Philoctetes. His wretchedness goes to our soul, but we would wish to be able to bear our wretchedness like this great man."^[23]

Lessing emphasized the arousal of pity and sympathy at the horrifying spectacle of someone in pain, someone who did not bear suffering nobly but screamed against it. He denounced Adam Smith for considering it unseemly to display suffering and admirable to contain it. He subjected the playwright Chateaubrun to a vigorous attack for equipping Philoctetes with plenty of company on his island as well as young Neoptolemos with a wife. Lessing excoriated modern Europeans—"we Europeans, more sensitive inhabitants of a cleverer age"—because courtesy and decency forbade cries and tears.^[24] For Cicero he had nothing but contempt. Of Cicero's advocacy of Stoic endurance of physical pain he wrote: "One would think that he [Cicero] wanted to train a gladiator, so zealous is he against the external expression of pain" ("Man sollte glauben, er wolle einen Gladiator abrichten, so sehr eifert er wider den äub erlichen Ausdruck des Schmerzes").^[25] Lessing went on to stress the Romans' enthusiasm for gladiatorial sport: their pleasure would be impaired, he suggested, if the gladiators were to show signs of

physical pain. To this taste Lessing even ascribed the failure of Seneca's tragedies, peopled, in his view, by "pugilists in the cothurnus" ("Klopffechter im Kothurne").^[26]

By the time of the Roman empire it was apparent that the Philoctetes story required further revision, and the writers of mythical fiction soon provided it. The newly fabricated history of the Trojan War, ascribed to the allegedly pre-Homeric Dictys of Crete and made known miraculously in the reign of Nero, presents a wholly sanitized Philoctetes, suitable for Romans of all ages. In the second book of his Trojan War Dictys presents Philoctetes as sacrificing at the temple of Apollo Smintheus in Asia Minor at the beginning of the Trojan expedition.^[27] The classical legend, of course, had him at a temple of Chryse, but there is little doubt that the association of Philoctetes with the temple of Apollo in Italy must have led someone, the author of the Dictys story or someone before him, to bring Philoctetes and Apollo together at this early stage. Chryse is now metamorphosed into a priest of Apollo by the name of Chryses. Philoctetes is duly bitten by the snake, which Odysseus kills.^[28] Then follows the most remarkable rewriting of the story. Philoctetes, we are told, is removed with a small band of associates to the isle of Lemnos in order to be cured. A shrine of Vulcan there was said to have priests who were particularly skilled in the healing of snakebites.^[29] We may perhaps surmise that Lemnos has been assimilated in this instance with the famous healing island of Cos.

This transformation of the legend has thus eliminated altogether the traditional reasons for removing Philoctetes—his cries of pain and the odor of the wound. He is assigned companions, and healing is the sole motivation for the Greek action. Even at the time of the bite, according to Dictys, Odysseus is alerted to what has happened by a clamor that is raised (clamore sublato ), not by the stricken Philoctetes himself but rather by the people who were standing around and became alarmed. In other words, Dictys's recreation of the story introduces a Philoctetes who conforms perfectly to the Roman standard of masculinity. Nowhere in the remaining books of Dictys's work does Philoctetes violate this norm, although the author acknowledges that his healing did not come as rapidly as expected. He continues to be weak (invalidus ) and limping (neque satis firmo gressu , "and with an insufficiently firm step").^[30]

As far as we can tell, this sanitized portrait of Philoctetes was introduced as a part of the Homeric revisionism in the Neronian period. It did not go away. It echoed the moral standards of the Graeco-Roman world of the time. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations , particularly thanked his teacher Apollonius, a Stoic philosopher from Chalcedon, for instilling in him an indifference to pain, loss, and disease: "to maintain a similar demeanor in every circumstance []—in sharp pain, upon the loss of a child, or in protracted illness."^[31] Even Marcus's contemporary the valetudinarian sophist Aelius Aristides subscribed to a proverb, first quoted by Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium , that a man who has been bitten by a snake will talk only to those who have also been bitten by a snake—for they alone can understand him. The proverb alludes clearly to Philoc-

tetes, as Aristides observes in one of the two places where he quotes it, and it was therefore apt for Plato to give it to Alcibiades—in view of the connection between the two figures in 409.^[32] The saying suggests the futility of displaying one's feelings before anyone who cannot comprehend them. Aristides fully accepted this wisdom and poured out his heart only in the Sacred Discourses , to his healing god Asclepius.

A century and a half after Dictys, when the sophistic writer Philostratus composed his imaginary dialogue on ancient heroes, he presented what we might call the imperial Philoctetes in an even more dramatically improved image. In the dialogue, known as the Heroikos , a vine dresser in the Troad declares that he has learned the truth about Philoctetes from the long-dead Protesilaus, now resurrected and engaging in amiable discourse in the vineyards of Asia Minor. Protesilaus can assure the vineyard worker, who in turn assures his interlocutor from Phoenicia and, naturally, the readers of the Heroikos , of the following corrections in the story of Philoctetes.^[33] First, no priest had ever prophesied that Troy could be taken only by the bow of Philoctetes and in his presence. The consequence of denying the prophecy is that Odysseus would no longer have any cause to engage in trickery to remove Philoctetes. Second, according to Protesilaus, Philoctetes was definitely not alone on the island of Lemnos: it was, as indeed both Aeschylus and Euripides had portrayed it, inhabited. Third, and very important, Philoctetes was actually cured on the island of Lemnos before he departed for Troy. Fourth, and perhaps most important, Philoctetes stoically endured his pain and never gave vent to unseemly cries of lamentation. It was the mud of Lemnos, we are told, that had a miraculous healing effect

on Philoctetes' wound, driving out the disease and stopping the flow of blood. Hence, when the hero went to Troy, he was neither ailing () nor like someone who had been sick (). Inasmuch as, according to this version, the healing took place immediately upon his arrival on Lemnos, we are left to wonder what kind of a life Philoctetes passed there for the nine or so years before he returned to Troy.

The systematic elimination of the unseemly and unmanly tradition of Philoctetes' agony seems to have been accompanied, in the Roman imperial age, with philosophical reflections on the artistic representation of pain. Several references in Plutarch as well as three epigrams in the Palatine Anthology all make plain that there had been famous depictions of Philoctetes in both painting and sculpture. Already in the Flavian period, as Lessing was the first to observe, the Elder Pliny had made reference to a sculpture by Pythagoras of Rhegion, before which, according to Pliny, spectators themselves seemed to feel the pain of Philoctetes' wound.^[34] The realistic depiction of a man in pain was, however, very different from hearing him react to that pain, either in reality or in the theater. Among the topics discussed in his table conversations, Plutarch introduced the problem, which was as old as Plato, of emotions felt upon beholding the diseased or dying. We certainly do not take any pleasure in looking at them or hearing them, but Plutarch noted rightly that we do take pleasure in the artistic representation of them.^[35] It was important to recognize that what makes these representations acceptable is the distance that the artistic medium puts between the reality of

suffering and ourselves. In other words a sculpture of Philoctetes in agony, such as that by Pythagoras of Rhegion, or a painting, such as the great one by Parrhasius, commemorated in an epigram (and mentioned by Plutarch in another passage),^[36] gives us Philoctetes suffering in silence. His cries cannot be heard. That is dearly why Plutarch and others found them acceptable. Yet, as the epigrammatists bear ample witness, part of the fascination of these works of art was the closeness that the spectator felt to the real thing. You could almost feel his pain. For those with the sensibilities to accept it, you could almost hear Philoctetes cry.

For Lessing's understanding of Greek culture that posed something of a problem: He argued persuasively against Winckelmann that the audible expression of strong emotion is an integral part of Sophocles' play and that Cicero's repudiation of such expression represented later morality, introduced by the Stoics and championed by the Romans. But in terms of art—and we should remember that Lessing's treatise is on the limits of art and poetry—Winckelmann may well have been right in insisting on the silence of Laocoön in the famous sculpture. Lessing wanted to hear that terrible cry, whereas Winckelmann perceived it as no more than a sigh. The impact of the long-lost sculptures and paintings of Philoctetes must have been, in some way, rather similar to the impact of the extant Laocoön. Plutarch's observation would seem to apply to it as well as to the Philoctetes piece. We would not want to hear the cries or smell the wound, but we do appreciate looking at a magisterial representation of suffering. This is not exactly what Lessing set out to demonstrate. But then Plutarch was far closer in his outlook to Cicero than to Sophocles, and it was to Sophocles that Lessing appealed for the truly Greek point of view. In the Roman imperial age, the Sopho-

clean manner was, as Dio Chrysostom proves, admired but not altogether acceptable or even welcome. It was too disturbing.

It was perhaps because of this distancing of the suffering of Philoctetes that another aspect of the hero's career took on a new importance in the second century of the Christian era. He had ignited the pyre that consumed the earthly remains of Heracles and consigned that great hero to perpetual divinity. Liberation by death had a long and distinguished tradition in classical antiquity, extending back at least as far as Empedocles' leap into Mount Aetna. The Indian Brahman Calanus, in the entourage of Alexander the Great, had had himself burned alive and, it may be noted, won the admiration of Cicero two centuries later because he, like other Brahmans, was consumed by the flames sine gemitu —without uttering a sound.^[37] But in the Roman imperial period the self-immolation of the Indian sage Zamarus in the days of Augustus was the best remembered until the spectacular demise of the philosopher Peregrinus in the year 165.^[38] This eccentric philosopher and wise man, with an unparalleled taste for the theatrical, had himself burned up before a crowd of spectators who assembled for the occasion after the Olympic games. As Lucian reports, in what is generally agreed to be a largely historical account, Peregrinus made a speech before his fiery demise. It is dear that the model of Heracles and Philoctetes was foremost in his mind: "One who has lived like Heracles should die like Heracles and be commingled with the aether. I want to help mankind by showing them the way to

despise death. Therefore, everyone should become my Philoctetes" ( ).^[39]

Here Peregrinus casts himself in the role of a helper of mankind, but it is only through the agency of Philoctetes that he can enact the salvation and divinization of his patron, Heracles. There is certainly an element of mockery when Lucian reports that Peregrinus urged all people to join in burning him up by all becoming Philocteteses, but the emphasis on divinity through death is very striking. Peregrinus sees himself as helping to destroy the fear of death. He does this by rejoicing in his self-destruction. There is no lamentation or wailing here, only exaltation and the injunction for others to do likewise. But he needs a Philoctetes—or rather many Philocteteses—to achieve his goal. Philoctetes' role in liberating Heracles through death showed him as a savior even before he became the savior of Troy. Heracles bequeathed him the bow for his service, and this naturally strengthened the Greek expedition at the beginning as well as saved it at the end.

In this way the second century enriched the soteriology of the Philoctetes story. But it did so by drawing out implications that Dio Chrysostom had already seen in the Euripidean (and for the Roman world the most accessible) version of the story in classic tragedy. As we have seen, both Odysseus and Philoctetes represented themselves in their opening exchange as men who had dedicated themselves to public service. It was this, as Odysseus said, that made a man really a man. In the original words of Euripides, which happen to survive, "We honor those who strive and accomplish something more, and we consider them men in our city" (). In the para-

phrase by Dio, "We all admire the illustrious people and those who dare to grasp at more, and we consider them truly men" ()^[40] . Philoctetes responds to this later by saying that he had suffered his terrible wound at the altar of Chryse while sacrificing in the common cause.^[41]

The parallelism of the claims of Odysseus and Philoctetes is sharply underscored by Dio Chrysostom in his paraphrase. He makes Philoctetes use precisely the same phrase as Odysseus had used at the very beginning. Both men are made to say that they have acted on behalf of the common salvation and victory ().^[42] Since Dio's paraphrase is exactly that and demonstrably not a literal or even a close reproduction of Euripides' own words, we may assume that this is not the phrasing of Euripides himself. Nor indeed is it likely to be, since this is an expression that is very much a part of the official ideological language of the Roman state. Dio must have chosen his periphrasis carefully. Many inscriptions of widely different dates and provenances with the Greek phrase or the Latin equivalent pro salute et victoria establish the formal character of the phrase. Examples may be cited from Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Algeria.^[43] Normally the phrase is used to designate a dedication on behalf of the salvation and victory of an emperor or emperors. Here Dio varies the expression to make it apply to the Greeks or, by extension, mankind in general—. It is, at one and the same time, an expression of Euripides' sentiment and a re-

flection of Roman imperial ideology. It demonstrates the immediate relevance of the Philoctetes story for the political life of the Graeco-Roman world.

The story of Philoctetes in this era can be seen, therefore, as illustrating the whole problem of sacrificing oneself for a greater good. As Peregrinus said, every human being should become a Philoctetes. He himself died to instruct mankind. Philoctetes had suffered excruciating torment. Although he had formerly cried out in terrible pain, the morality of the Graeco-Roman world gradually silenced his cries and left only the image of suffering courageously endured. All these great themes, articulated and developed from the time of Nero and Dictys well into the third century, Ought now to guide us surely and unerringly to a better understanding of the way in which the Greeks and Romans of this period responded to an extraordinary story that came out of Palestine in the middle of the first century.

A man of flesh and blood, who laid claim to divinity, sacrificed himself, it was said, for the good of mankind. But Jesus, unlike Peregrinus, cried out upon the cross where he met his terrible death: Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? —"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"^[44] So direct and uncontrolled an expression of grief was, as we have come to see, utterly at variance with the standards of the Graeco-Roman society in which and by which Jesus was crucified. We should now not be surprised to find that it was this all-too-human response that sufficed to convince Lucian's contemporary Celsus of the weakness and even effeminacy of Jesus Christ. Because of Celsus's observations in his treatise the True Discourse , the third-century apologist Origen was obliged to take up the whole question of Jesus's toleration

of pain. If Jesus were in any sense divine, Celsus argued that whatever was done to him would have been neither painful nor grievous. He went on to ask, "Why does he utter loud laments and wailings, and why does he pray that he may avoid the fear of death, saying something like this: 'Oh Father, if this cup could pass by me'?"^[45] As Origen was alert to point out, Celsus misquoted the original text from Matthew, nor did the Gospels ever say that Jesus explicitly "uttered wailings."^[46] But that Jesus cried out, no one could deny.

Philoctetes provides a polytheistic mirror for the Christian passion. The weakness and implicit hypocrisy in Jesus's conduct, as it appeared to Celsus, became even more important in pagan polemic as Christianity gathered strength. Nowhere was it so sensationally represented as at the end of the satiric dialogue on the Caesars by the emperor Julian. There Jesus appears as completely wanton, inviting all murderers, rapists, and other sacrilegious persons to have their crimes washed away.^[47] Curiously the weakness of the hero Philoctetes also reappears at almost the same time in the writings of the Christian Ausonius, who invokes him as a paradigm of solitary vice in one of those obscene poems of which his classical training had made him a master.^[48]

If later polytheists took no pride in Philoctetes, they could be moved by his suffering—when he suffered in silence, as he did in painting and sculpture. In the Roman imperial period, the Stoic

doctrine of the endurance of pain, as expressed by Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and others, had utterly transformed the howling and malodorous hero that Lessing admired in Sophocles' play. For the postclassical period, which was also the period of the Laocoön group, Winckelmann was surely right. The surviving epigrams on representations of Philoctetes in art (three in Greek, one in Latin) all stress the artist's depiction of pain, but none mentions any sign of crying out. The poets say that spectators can almost feel Philoctetes' pain, but never that they almost hear his cries. The epigrammatist Julianus wrote: "I know Philoctetes when I look on him, for he makes manifest his pain to all, even to those who gaze on him from a distance. He is all shaggy like a wild man; look at the locks of his head, squalid and hard-colored. His skin is parched and shrunken to look at, and perchance feels dry even to the finger's touch. Beneath his dry eyes the tears stand frozen, the sign of sleepless agony."^[49]

Philoctetes' rage, his running sore, his wild hair, his skin, even frozen tears in his dry eyes, all receive admiring comment. But for the viewer Philoctetes clearly suffers in silence. It was in this way that he could be accepted as a savior. The Greeks and the Romans of the early centuries of the Christian era had made their savior in their own image and likeness.