From Lemnos to Lebanon: Meir Wieseltier’s The Temptation of Philoctetes between Greek Tragedy and Israeli War Discourse

Recorded in 1985 for Kol Israel, Meir Wieseltier’s poetical radio play The Temptation of Philoctetes is an uncompromising critique of Israel’s Israeli war discourse in the wake of the First Lebanon War (1982). In this paper, I argue that this play is the result of the encounter of multiple texts, historical contexts, and genres.

First, beyond the apparent model of Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, I contend that in The Temptation of Philoctetes Wieseltier weaves together two other texts, one extant and one lost: Sophocles’ tragedy is contaminated with Euripides’ lost tragedy of the same title, which we know in its general outline from Dio Chrysostom’ Oration 52. By expanding the number of characters of the play, Wieseltier underscores the intergenerational conflict regarding the belligerent stance of Israel.

Secondly, Wieseltier’s continuous dialogue with Greek culture and with Homer’s Iliad as a war epic, intersects here the Peloponnesian War as a mirror for Israel’s wars. Just as much as Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Philoctetes can be read as a response to the then current war between Athens and Sparta, Wieseltier offers an artistic response to the First Lebanon War. In the mirror of the timeless myth and of the historical context of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ tragedies, Wieseltier not only exposes the emptiness of any bellicose rhetoric – but particularly indicts the Israeli establishment by weaving into the myth the slogans of the Israeli war discourse.

Thirdly, Wieseltier writes a “play of voices” for the radio, mixing the traditional tragic genre with the features of a radio play. While Wieseltier joins other Israeli playwrights such as Levin and Sobol in turning to Greek tragedy as a way to condemn the war, by changing genre and medium Wieseltier enables his unforgiving critique of the Israeli war discourse to reach a much broader audience.