Heracles Character Analysis

Heracles is the Greek god of strength and heroes. According to Greek myth, Heracles was a mortal Greek hero before he was deified. Heracles wanted to be placed on a funeral pyre while he was still alive in order to end his suffering more quickly, but no one would light the fire except for Philoctetes. To reward Philoctetes for his good deed, Heracles gifted Philoctetes his unerring bow and arrows, which keep Philoctetes alive while he is marooned on the island Lemnos and will later win the Trojan War by killing Paris. Philoctetes has a special connection to Heracles, and he invokes his name multiple times throughout the play. In the closing scene, Heracles appears from the heavens and convinces Philoctetes and Neoptolemus to go to Troy to sack the city and end the war. Heracles’s fortuitous arrival at the end of Sophocles’s play is an example of the popular Greek literary convention known as the deus ex machina, in which an unsolvable problem is solved by an unlikely occurrence written specifically to solve said problem. However, the appearance of Heracles also underscores Sophocles’s central argument that it is much nobler to sacrifice one’s own desires for the greater good. Had Heracles not arrived and convinced them otherwise, Philoctetes would have allowed his grudge against Odysseus and Atreus’s sons to keep him from going to Troy, and Neoptolemus would have remained true to his moral compass and kept his promise to take Philoctetes home to Greece. Without Heracles, Philoctetes and Neoptolemus would not have gone to Troy, and all Greeks would have suffered in the continuation of the Trojan War.