deaths around its walls. Hector had fallen by the sword of Achilles. Achilles himself had been struck with an arrow from the bow of Paris, guided by his enemy the Sun-god. Ajax, as we have seen, had slain himself in his despair. But the surviving chieftains maintained the war with the same obstinacy as before; and recently a new aspect had been given to the struggle. They had captured Helenus, son of Priam, endowed like Cassandra with the gift of prophecy; and from him they learned that an oracle had disclosed that Troy should never be taken but by the son of Achilles and with the bow of Hercules.
Accordingly, when the play opens, a Greek vessel has just reached Lemnos, bearing a deputation from the camp, to fetch Philoctetes and his fated arrows. At last in their own need the Greeks have bethought them of the comrade whom they had so cruelly deserted. And it is Ulysses, of all men,—Ulysses, by whose advice the unhappy man had been left behind,—who now comes to induce him—by persuasion if possible, by force if need be—to give the allies the aid of his weapons. Such an ambassador on such an errand would have seemed of all men the least likely to succeed. Sophocles probably did but take this part of the tale as he found it; and loyalty to the epic tradition, that no enterprise which required diplomacy, eloquence, or subtle device, could possibly be undertaken by the Greeks without the aid of "the man of many wiles," led the story-tellers, and Sophocles after them, to make him the envoy on this as on similar occasions. With him, however, is a comrade of a very different charac-
