Giacomo Loi (Johns Hopkins University)
A Lost Tragedy for a Lost War? Receiving Euripides’ Lost Philoctetes
My paper aims to address, by way of a case study, a seemingly paradoxical question: is it possible to ‘receive’ a lost text? Why modern authors should turn to an ancient text that is lost, and what are the conditions of such encounter? Gabriel 2022 thoroughly examined the dynamics of ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘untimely modernity’ inherently attached to the reception of Euripides in the last two centuries, detailing the ways in which professional classicists and authors have turned to Euripides as an author ‘near’ to the social problems and crises of his times – an interpretation that made him a natural go-to author to address contemporary problems. It is in this broader intellectual context that one should read Yaari 2018’s emphasis on the existence of an intense Euripidean reception in the Hebrew-language theatrical expressions of opposition to the First Lebanon War (1982) in Israel. In this paper, taking into account the historical context of the 1980s as well as Gabriel’s theoretical underpinnings, I explore the dynamics of reception, contamination, and originality in the previously unexamined 1985 poetical radio play “The Temptation of Philoctetes” by Israeli poet Meir Wieseltier.
First of all, I contend that in The Temptation of Philoctetes Wieseltier weaves together Sophocles’ extant Philoctetes with another text, namely Euripides’ lost tragedy of the same title. The revealing detail of such contamination lies in the characters of the play: while mostly preserving Sophocles’ characters, Wieseltier recovers Diomedes’ presence from the lost Euripidean tragedy, which we know in its general outline from Dio Chrysostom’ Oration 52.
Secondly, I investigate the reasons behind Wieseltier’s choice of contamination. I argue that by expanding the mythical characters present in the play, the author aims to underscore the intergenerational conflict surrounding the belligerent stance of Israel in Lebanon. While this aspect is present in Sophocles’ tragedy, Wieseltier expands the number of generations at play in order to mirror the conflict as it developed within Israeli society of his time. Indeed, each character represents one generation, as one can argue from Wieseltier’s written version of the drama.
Thirdly, I argue that Wieseltier brings together Sophocles’ and Euripides’ tragedies as responses to the Peloponnesian War. By contaminating the two texts, in turn, the author aims to offer a response to the Lebanon War by exposing the emptiness and ultimate lies of any bellicose rhetoric. While echoing the lost and extant tragedies he contaminates, Wieseltier specifically indicts the Israeli war discourse by weaving its slogans into the mythical plot.
In sum, in this paper I aim to demonstrate how Wieseltier’s contamination of extant and lost intertexts not only re-imagines the stance and features of a lost text, but rather shapes the plot and, therefore, the meaning of the text.