Emily Katz Anhalt has taught undergraduates for nearly 40 years, and never before, she reports in this issue, has she seen such a crisis in mental health, with students who are poorly rested, unable to concentrate, and prone to feelings of sadness, fury, and despair. Well, times are tough. And college sophomores aren’t the only ones these days suffering from sustained anxiety. Anhalt, however, believes that all of us can learn to cope with the adversity in our lives by embracing the humanities: “Literature, history, philosophy, and art carry us beyond ourselves and our own limited experience and timespan, empowering us to assess and benefit from the achievements, suffering … and errors of people—real and fictional—throughout the ages.”
During the early days of the pandemic, while others were discovering The Decameron and The Plague, I found myself rereading Sophocles’s Philoctetes, about the great archer rendered lame by the bite of a venomous snake. So putrid is Philoctetes’s wound, so stark are his resulting episodes of madness that Odysseus abandons him on the deserted island of Lemnos before continuing on to the war with Troy. Philoctetes does not deserve this fate. That he is merely the victim of bad luck is one reason why Sophocles’s portrait of isolation and loneliness, of what it might be like to die alone, seemed all the more relevant in those early Covid days.
When the Greeks realize that Philoctetes and his fabled bow are needed to vanquish the Trojans, cunning Odysseus must bring him back (or, at the very least, steal his bow), enlisting young Neoptolemus to aid in the deceit. But after witnessing one of Philoctetes’s venom-induced episodes, Neoptolemus regrets taking part in the scheme. Stirred by compassion, compelled to do the just thing, he risks ruin to tell Philoctetes the truth, thus becoming the architect of the wounded archer’s redemption. As Philoctetes reminds him (in David Greene’s translation), “You are not bad yourself; by bad men’s teaching / you come to practice your foul lesson.” Here, then, is a reminder from the fifth century BCE of how an individual can resist the unjust orders of those in power to follow a moral, compassionate course—a lesson worth learning in this or any time.
