For Neoptolemus, the awareness that he can choose to act justly is as painful as Philoctetes’ attack: he uses the same expression, papai, to signal the agony of recognized agency.
I believe that the “stark fictions” of the Greeks challenge their audience to just such difficult reflections on the causes of disaster: is the cause immutable necessity, or is it malice and folly? Where should we draw the line between the one and the other? We gain understanding from the subtle and frequently indeterminate way in which tragedies pose that question, and from the challenges they give us to confront the role of blameworthy agency even in something that seems as natural as breathing. We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change. (In 415 B.C.E., the year that Euripides’ Trojan Women was produced, the Athenians killed all the male citizens of the rebellious colony Melos and enslaved the women and children.)
In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.
In our contemporary world, in which it is a good assumption that most of the starvation and much of the other misery we witness is the result of culpable negligence by the powerful, metaphysical resignation would, again, be relatively good news, letting the powerful off the hook. But the truthful news of Greek tragedy, for us, as for the Athenians, is far worse than that: for the bad news is that we are as culpable as Zeus in the Trachiniai, and the Greek generals in The Trojan Women, and Odysseus in Philotetes, and many other gods and mortals at many times and places — unless and until we throw off our laziness and selfish ambition and obtuseness and ask ourselves how the harms we witness might have been prevented. As Philoctetes knew, pity means action: intervention on behalf of the suffering, even if it is difficult and repellent. If you leave out the action, you are an ignoble coward, perhaps also a hypocrite and a liar. If you help, you have done something fine.