Abstract
Amongst the legendary heroes who appear in leading roles in the surviving plays of Sophocles, it is noteworthy that Oedipus, Ajax and Heracles all received some form of divine worship in Attica, not to mention localities more readily associated with each of them. Sophocles is not unaware of this aspect of each of these figures, but where the future prospect of their cult is alluded to in the plays, such allusions are not always prominent or explicit; though the future cult of the Oedipus of the Oedipus Coloneus is crucial for the play, it is only directly mentioned in a few passages, while the Ajax of Ajax is seen as a future receiver of cult only in a single unusual scene of supplicating his dead body, and it is unclear in the Trachiniae whether the audience is intended to supply a future cult on Oeta and apotheosis for Heracles. I should here like to argue that in Philoctetes Sophocles again consciously employs a hero destined to receive worship after his death, and that this is subtly suggested at the end of the play.
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