Hyginus
Translated by R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, 2007
In his Fabulae, the Latin writer Hyginus (64 BC–AD 17) reduced hundreds of ancient myths to a paragraph or two each. The Fabulae may lack the colour of the Greek epics and tragedies, but they provide useful overviews of their plots. The playwright Sophocles had written at length of the wretched plight of the Greek warrior Philoctetes in a tragedy in the fifth century BC. The story is set during the Trojan War and brings home just how unsympathetically the ancients looked upon physical disabilities.
When Philoctetes, the son of Poeas and Demonassa, was on the island of Lemnos, a snake bit him on his foot. This snake had been sent by Juno, who was angry at him because he was the only one who had the nerve to build a pyre for Hercules when he discarded his human body and was made immortal. In return for his service, Hercules bequeathed to him his divine arrows. But when the Achaeans could no longer put up with the foul odor that was coming from the wound, on King Agamemnon’s orders he was abandoned on Lemnos along with his divine arrows. A shepherd of King Actor named Iphimachus, the son of Dolopion, found him abandoned and took care of him. Later it was revealed to the Greeks that Troy could not be taken without Hercules’ arrows. Agamemnon then sent Ulysses and Diomedes to find him. They convinced him to let bygones be bygones and help them sack Troy, and they took him back to Troy with them.