I’ll try and stay current and catch up later on any plays I miss in Amateur Reader’s AncientGreek-a-Thon at Wuthering Expctations. Up this week is Ajax, Sophocles’ earliest (probably) surviving play, first performed in the 440s BCE.

Ajax has long been a character that intrigued me. In The Iliad he performs great feats, yet is constantly frustrated by the gods in his duels with Hector. The hoplōn krisis (judgment for the arms and armor of Achilles) is in lost works of the Epic Cycle regarding the Trojan War, describing how Odysseus wins Achilles’ armor instead of Ajax. (Hoplōn Krisis is also the name of a lost play by Aeschylus.) These lost works in the Epic Cycle have conflicting actions in Ajax’s response to not winning the armor, but they all lead to Ajax’s suicide. Ajax is usually portrayed as envious and characterized with some sort of blindness (figurative or literal). In a few of Pindar’s odes, the poet adds ineloquence to Ajax’s flaws. The dead hero is shown in Hades in The Odyssey, still nursing a grudge against Odysseus and refusing to talk to him. Thus we have an ambivalent or flawed hero, recognized for his greatness in battle but judged harshly for actions outside of war.

Sophocles begins the play with Athena revealing to Odysseus what she has done to Ajax, who had vowed to kill all the Greek leaders who dishonored him by giving Achilles’ armor to Odysseus. Athena deflected Ajax’s wrath by casting a spell upon him where the hero mistakes nearby farm animals for the Greek leaders he loathes. Odysseus recounts the reports that Ajax was seen leaving the scene with a “sword still wet with blood,” the animals and their guards all slaughtered. There is a recurrent theme of a diseased Ajax, blinded by this spell of Athena.

I’ll have more about this when I post on a couple of books by Bernard Knox, but Sophocles often centers his dramas on a strong-willed, intransigent individual. These characters are not always admirable. “Sophoclean heroes” share this same temperament, which is often condemned morally and intellectually. More on that later, but Ajax will be a good introduction to a Sophoclean hero.

Athena, with Odysseus looking on, reveals herself to Ajax, who brags to the goddess that he has killed the Athenian generals who slighted him. He has Odysseus tied up in his tent, ready to be whipped and killed (in reality, probably just a sheep tied to the tent-pole). Odysseus, who constantly calls Ajax his enemy, pities Ajax’s lunacy. “I think of him, yet also of myself; / For I see the true state of all us that live— / We are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.” In just a few lines, Sophocles has changed what should be a humorous humiliation to a recognition about humanity’s frailty. Athena emphasizes how humans are playthings of the gods, picking and choosing the mortals they want to humiliate.

The Chorus of mariners adds to the sympathy for Ajax. Tecmessa, a Trojan woman and Ajax’s “spear-won bride,” reveals that Ajax has come to his senses and agonizes over his mad acts. Strongly hinting at suicide, Ajax rails against the unfairness that has turned him from a champion to an outcast, all because his achievements were pushed aside for “a man of most dishonest mind.” What to do? He can’t go home without the honors due him. The gods and the Greeks hate him. He could rush the walls of Troy, but such a suicidal mission would appease the wrong people. No, better to “nobly live or nobly die.”

Tecmessa upbraids Ajax, telling him she had been born free but was now a slave. And when Ajax dies, she and her child will be sold to someone else. Ajax storms off, reproaching Tecmessa and the Chorus, but soon returns in a more reflective mood. His speech sounds soothing, but everything has a second meaning. The audience knows how this will end. Ajax’s death speech shows him to be thoughtful and eloquent, far from how Pindar portrays him, but then that’s really Sophocles, isn’t it? There’s no forgiveness for his enemies, instead blaming “Atreus’ sons” for his ruin and cursing them just before his death.

We’re just past halfway in the play and Ajax has committed suicide. So what are we to do for the remainder of the play? Well, we have the discovery of Ajax’s body and the grief from the Chorus and Tecmessa (some lovely lines from her). Then a debate by the Greek leaders on what to do with Ajax’s body. Menelaus and the other leaders want to leave Ajax’s body where it is, unburied and untouched except for the sea birds who will feed on it.

John Moore, the translator who provides the introduction to the University of Chicago Press edition I read, calls the debate of how to handle Ajax’s burial a “disastrous lowering of tone,” a diminishment to the tragedy. OK, it’s obviously going to be less dramatic than what has happened so far, but I think the debate covers some of the central points Sophocles wanted to convey in this play.

Menelaus argues that Ajax turning on them was worse than what any Trojan could have done, showing no duty to follow orders from superiors. He goes beyond the recent treachery and stresses that the need for community trumps a hero’s exploits, the good of the city (and the Greeks) is greater than personal honor. This is a Homeric hero arguing against Homeric hero-ing. That time has passed, and there’s no place in a Greek city for someone like Ajax.

Teucer, Ajax’s half-brother, has a scathing reply for Menelaus, telling him that Ajax funded his own trip and owed nothing to Menelaus. There’s a nice dig about the whole trip being over Menelaus not being able to hold on to his wife, too, while declaring he will bury his brother. “Don’t outrage the dead,” is his bottom line. Agamemnon chimes in with further attacks on Ajax and Teucer, although most of it has to do about Teucer’s mother (who was a Trojan princess, captured by Heracles and given to Telamon). Teucer reminds Agamemnon that as a descendent from the house of Atreus he may not want to focus on bloodline.

Odysseus steps in and argues for burying Ajax. The man who Ajax swore to whip and kill and who saw his enemy at his lunatic worst argues for honoring him, or at least not dishonoring him. Odysseus wins the argument, more or less, and Ajax is buried. Odysseus, known for scheming and deception (we’ll see that side of him in Sophocles’ Philoctetes), comes off as a compassionate, generous person. Ajax goes from powerful soldier (never bending a knee to the gods) to murderous lunatic to noble character. Even so, Menelaus has made it clear that there is no room in Greece anymore for someone like Ajax. As I think with most of these plays, it would be interesting to see how this play fit in with the other two presented at the same time and see if there was an overarching theme.

Links:

The Center for Hellenic Studies project of Reading Greek Tragedy Online has a video reading and discussing Sophocles’ Ajax.