SOURCE: Scodel, Ruth. “Sophocles and Athens” and “Against Time and Chance: Ajax.” In Sophocles, pp. 1-26. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Scodel describes the society Sophocles lived in and its history, presents a character study of Ajax, and analyzes the dual themes of hybris and sophrosyne in the play.]

THE FIFTH CENTURY

The name of Sophocles is indelibly associated with Athens at the height of her glory. Like the sculptures of the Parthenon, his plays are symbols of Athenian greatness. This symbolic quality is at least partly justified. Sophocles' career coincided closely with the height of Athenian power, and he was active in his city's service. His work as a poet is central within the flowering of thought and literature whose focus was Athens. At least a brief outline of the busy history of Athens in the fifth century b.c. is thus important for any study of the tragedian.¹

When Sophocles was born, around 496, Athens, though not a backwater, was neither an intellectual center nor a great power within the Greek world. She was one among the Greek city-states of the Greek mainland and islands, the coasts of Asia Minor and the Black Sea, southern Italy and Sicily. On the mainland, Sparta was more powerful by far, and all the little states of the Aegean were dwarfed by the Persian Empire to the east. But Athens's cultural life had been fostered by the tyrant Pisistratus and his sons, and in 508-6 a democracy had been established in the midst of inner turmoil and Spartan intervention. Athens and its countryside, Attica, was organized by local wards, the demes, each joined with demes in other parts of Attica so that ten tribes were formed, none with a regional base. The chief magistrates, the archons, were elected from the two highest of four property classes, and after their year in office became members of the Council of the Areopagus. A second council (Boule), the Council of Five Hundred, was chosen by lot from an elected pool, and prepared business for the assembly of all adult male citizens.

This newly democratic Athens had its first great triumph in 490. Eight years before, Athens and Eretria, on the nearby island of Euboea, had sent help to the Ionian Greek cities who were in revolt against the rule of Persia. Now the Persian Empire sought to avenge itself in a punitive expedition. Eretria was sacked, and the Persians invaded Attic territory on the coast, at Marathon. The Athenians sought help from Sparta; but the Spartans came too late, and the Athenians won a complete victory on their own. The victory greatly boosted Athenian self-confidence and prestige. Around 487 the election of archons was changed, so that they were chosen by lot from an elected pool, like the Council; this change naturally weakened both the archonship itself and the Areopagus, the most aristocratic institutions. The people were beginning to feel their strength. From now on the most powerful office in Athens was the generalship; a board of ten, one from each tribe, was elected annually.

In 483 a great find of silver was made at Laurium in Attica, and the brilliant Themistocles, who envisioned Athens as a seapower, persuaded the people not to distribute the money among the citizens, but to build a new fleet. In 480 the new warships proved themselves, for the Persians returned under the personal command of King Xerxes. This was no mere punitive strike: the aim was the conquest of Greece. The great Persian army, both land and sea forces, invaded from the north, and the first attempts of the allied Greeks to stop them failed. The Athenians abandoned their city and moved their dependents to the island of Salamis; the city and its temples were ravaged by the invaders. But Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into offering battle in the narrow strait between Salamis and the mainland, where greater numbers were less of an advantage, and the Greeks, with the Athenians the backbone of the fleet, won a spectacular victory. The Persians retreated. Though they invaded again the following year, they were again defeated, this time on land at Plataea, while a Greek force was again victorious at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor, freeing the Greek cities there. But Sparta was not eager to pursue such overseas operations; Athens was. In 478/7 a large number of Asiatic and island cities formed the Delian League under Athenian leadership as a perpetual alliance against the Persians. Larger cities were to contribute ships to the allied fleet, smaller ones money. The treasurers, Hellenotamiae, were Athenian officials.

This league was the basis of the Athenian Empire. Gradually fewer and fewer states provided ships, and with the tribute Athens developed her own navy. Rebellious allies were reduced to subjection to Athens. At the same time, when the power of the city rested in the common sailors, the power of the common people could not be withstood. In 462 the Aeropagus was stripped of all its powers except that of trying homicide cases. In 457/6 the archonship was opened to the third property class. And at some time in this period came the most famous innovation of Athenian democracy: pay for public offices and for the jurymen on the very large panels which tried the endless flood of new litigation. Thus it became possible for the poor to participate in government not only in law, but in fact. Through the middle years of the fifth century the leader in both imperial policy and domestic reform was Pericles.

This close contemporary of Sophocles (born around 495) was a remarkable leader: personally austere, he succeeded in dominating the people rather than being dominated by them, so that Thucydides says (2.65.9) that his government was “in name a democracy, but in fact the rule of the first man.” He was associated with the philosopher Anaxagoras and the sculptor Phidias. In 447 he served as building commissioner for the new temple of Athena Polias, the Parthenon; the allied tribute paid for the glorification of Athens through the temples whose ruins now adorn the Acropolis.

The growth of Athenian power naturally alarmed Sparta, head of the Peloponnesian League of mainland states. When war began in 431, Pericles was confident: while Sparta could invade and ravage Attica, the citizens could retreat into the fortified city and conduct operations by sea. But in 430, plague broke out in the overcrowded city. Morale temporarily collapsed. Pericles was removed from office and fined, then restored; he died in 429, and his successors lacked his restraint. Demagoguery came into flower. In 425 Athens achieved a brilliant success at Pylos, and Sparta sued for peace, but Athens refused. In 424 Athens met with severe losses, and a year's truce followed; in 422 peace became possible when both Sparta's most brilliant general, Brasidas, and the chief popular leader at Athens, Cleon, were killed. Even this peace was no real peace; not all Sparta's allies accepted it, and anti-Spartan intrigue continued. In 416 Athens committed the most notorious atrocity of the period, attacking the neutral island of Melos, and, when the island refused submission, killing its male population and enslaving the women. In the following year the Athenians, asked for help by Segesta in Sicily, conceived the grand scheme of conquering the island, and sent a large and badly mismanaged expedition. In 413 the force was utterly destroyed; the loss was catastrophic.

Meanwhile Sparta recommenced operations in Attica, and with the help of subsidies from the Persians built a fleet. The enemies of democracy had their chance; after the disaster special commissioners were appointed. Athens held on through 412, using a reserve fund established by Pericles to rebuild, but in 411 the coup took place. Many of the lower classes were away with the fleet on Samos; a double revolution was planned for both Athens and Samos. The oligarchs held a campaign of intimidation. There were two main groups: one favored a government of all those rich enough to serve in the infantry, the other sought control for itself, a small band of conspirators. The moderates were bribed with the promise of a change in Persian policy and help for Athens. A Council of Four Hundred, the oligarchs and their supporters, was formed, but it was soon overthrown when it failed to meet its promises. The moderate government which followed lasted less than a year, for new successes by the fleet revived the strength of the popular party. Athens, weary as she was, continued to fight, and even rejected an offer of peace after the Athenian victory in the naval battle of Arginusae in 406. But the following year the fleet was surprised at Aegospotami on the Hellespont, and Athens was blockaded. Sophocles was fortunate: he died in 406 or the following year, and did not see the final surrender of Athens in 404.

THE DRAMATIC FESTIVAL

The earliest origins of tragedy are controversial and obscure, but fortunately of little relevance for Sophocles. By the time he came to know tragedy, it was a highly developed, though still young art. Tragedy formed a part of the celebration of the Great or City Dionysia, a festival organized by the tyrant Pisistratus, in the spring month of Elaphebolion (usually in March).² Tragedy was thus created in a public and sacred context. This element should not be exaggerated, however. It is difficult for a native of modern, secular society to imagine how permeated was ancient Greek life by religion, and equally difficult for an heir of the Judeo-Christian tradition to sense the complex nature of archaic and classical religion. Separation of church and state was unimaginable, for the welfare of the city depended on the goodwill of the gods; at the same time a glorification of the city's gods could also be a glorification of the city itself. Piety and patriotism were often united. Further, the center of Greek religion was in cult, not faith; a matter of daily practice, not dogma or sacred books. Practically all slaughter of domestic animals was sacrificial, so that any feast was a sacred occasion, while sacred occasions were welcome chances for a feast. Pericles in the Funeral Oration put in his mouth by Thucydides (2.38) calls the Athenian festivals and competitions “relaxations for the mind” and praises Athens for celebrating more of them than other cities. A less secular mind would have called them also the proof of Attic piety, but holy day and holiday cannot fully be distinguished.

The basis of tragedy is the union of two kinds of poetry. Spoken verse belongs chiefly to actors, sung verse to the chorus. The basic pattern of a drama is that a scene spoken by actors ends with an exit, and a song divides the episode from the next, which is opened by an actor's entrance.³ This pattern, however, is open to much variation. The chorus enters the orchestra—its “dancing space”—early in the play, and rarely exits before the end. A chorus has a composite personality; when a chorus participates in a spoken exchange, the chorus-leader speaks on its behalf. In the tragedy Sophocles knew as a child, there were only two actors, who wore lifelike masks. By changing mask and costume an actor could play different characters, while a character without a speaking part in a given scene could be played by an extra. Extras also accompanied royal characters as attendants. The early tragic stage was simply an open place for dancing, but the Sophoclean tragedies were performed before a stage-building with a central door, representing the tent of Ajax or the cave of Philoctetes. The subject matter was heroic legend or, occasionally, contemporary history. Tragedy was governed by a stylistic decorum which provided great events with a grand style, but only real vulgarity was absolutely excluded, and language could range from the almost colloquial to the grandiose. Tragedy was performed before a huge audience (perhaps fifteen thousand) in the open air; it was expected to treat major issues, religious, ethical, and in the widest sense political.

Tragedies were performed in competition. The archon in charge of the festival “granted a chorus” to the three tragedians he chose from those who applied; these received state-paid actors, while the expense of the chorus was carried by wealthy citizens as a kind of income tax. This man, the choregus, could increase his prestige by being lavish. The poet produced his own play; each produced three tragedies and an afterpiece called a satyr-play from its chorus of beast-men. Each poet's production was on a separate day, starting early in the morning; this made possible the Aeschylean tetralogy, three tragedies telling one story and the satyr-play a lighthearted version of the same theme.

Unfortunately, we have no play of Aeschylus early enough to represent the tragedy Sophocles first knew, nor is any surviving play of Sophocles early enough to show obvious Aeschylean influence. Sophocles is credited in the tradition⁴ with introducing the third actor, which first appears in Aeschylus's Oresteia of 458; if this is true, Sophocles must have had considerable influence even as a young poet. The same source credits him with inventing “scene-painting”: while nothing approaching a realistic set was ever used, the erection of a permanent stage-building as a backdrop may have inspired more scenic elaboration. These hints at development are important less for themselves than because they show how the rules of tragedy were not inflexible.

SOPHOCLES' LIFE

Sources for the life of Sophocles are anecdotal and unreliable.⁵ The surviving ancient biography is a curious mixture of inferences from the poetry itself, naive belief in jokes from comedies, folklore, and genuine information. For Sophocles few dates of production are given, unfortunately, so that his artistic career cannot be traced in detail, but we do have at least some idea of his public life.

While the sources differ as to the date of his birth, the 496 of the Parian Marble (a chronological inscription listing events down to 264 b.c.) or 495/4 of the biography would be appropriate. His deme was Colonus, just outside Athens, and although deme membership was hereditary and thus not proof of origin, this was probably his native place. His family was certainly wealthy, and he is said to have studied music with a famous teacher, Lamprus. His first victory came in 468 with a tetralogy including the Triptolemus; Triptolemus was a hero associated with the Eleusinian mysteries, and the play's theme may have struck a note of patriotic piety. Ajax and Women of Trachis may have been written in the fifties or forties.

In the year 443/2 Sophocles enters history: a Sophocles of Colonus, (almost certainly the poet), is listed on the inscribed tribute lists as a Hellenotamias. This was a major state office, requiring financial responsibility (probably restricted to the highest property class), but not usually a political stepping-stone.⁶ That Sophocles held it shows both the respect in which he was held and his dedication: though most of the minute work was doubtless performed by the clerk, the task of the treasurer must have been time-consuming. His holding the post also suggests that he supported Athenian imperial policy. In 441/40, Sophocles served as general in the war against Samos, which had rebelled. According to the ancient prefatory note to Antigone, he was elected because of popular admiration of this play. The story may not be true, but the dates of plays were known (Aristotle had collected them in his Didascaliae), so that at least the chronology may be right; we know, however, that Euripides was victorious in 441. Antigone is therefore tentatively dated to 442, although Sophocles would have had a busy time of it. The story is not impossible. At the time of the elections, the Athenians would not have expected the Samians to revolt, and might have chosen to honor the poet in this way; but Sophocles seems in general to have been a very popular man.

As general, he sailed to collect a squadron from Lesbos, and was entertained by the Athenian “honorary consul” on Chios. Some anecdotes of this visit were recorded by Ion of Chios, a contemporary poet, in his Visits, and for once, at least, the gossip is believable and comes from a source close to the subject: Ion describes some literary joking about a handsome serving boy, and Sophocles' success in obtaining a kiss—he claimed, according to Ion, to be a better “strategist” than Pericles thought. Ion remarks that Sophocles said and did much that was witty while drinking, “but in politics he was no cleverer nor more efficient than any upper-class Athenian.” All this rings true—the tone of friendly banter is in place, and the charm is mentioned in the biography and accords well with the epitaph he is given in Aristophanes' Frogs, where in the year after his death he is called eukolos: easygoing or good-natured (line 82).

In 421 Aristophanes' Peace (697 ff.) shows another, obscure side. He is said to have “become Simonides”—a poet famed for avarice—and it is said that “being old and rotten, for profit he would sail on wicker-work.” The line parodies a proverb Sophocles used in a drama, but its meaning is far from clear. In the following year the cult of Asclepius was brought to Athens, and Sophocles entertained the god, in the form of his sacred snake, while his shrine was built; the poet was already, apparently, the priest of an obscure healing hero associated with Asclepius, Halon. He also composed a paean to Asclepius. As a reward for his service he was given a cult of his own under the name of Dexion, the Receiver.⁷ In 412 he was one of the special commissioners, probouloi; Aristotle⁸ mentions an occasion when, challenged by the oligarch Pisander as to whether he had not voted for the establishment of the Four Hundred, he replied that he had, “for there was nothing better to be done.” It may not be a coincidence that his only firmly dated play, Philoctetes of 409, depicts the political world as deeply corrupt.

Though stories of his quarreling with his sons are likely to be fiction, his two marriages need not be doubted; his son Iophon had his first tragic victory in 435, while from another marriage he had a son, Ariston, whose son the younger Sophocles was also a tragedian. Of Sophocles' old age we have a near-contemporary anecdote in Plato's Republic (329B-C): asked by someone whether he was still capable of intercourse with a woman, Sophocles replied, “Speak no ill-omened word! I have escaped from it with joy, as if I'd run away from an insane and wild master.”

After his death in 406, the comic poets call him lucky. Aristophanes' Frogs praises his good nature, and Phrynichus (T. 105 Radt) speaks of his happiness in writing so many fine tragedies and dying before he endured any evil (a reference to the fall of Athens). His genius did not fail him to the end, for his last surviving work, Oedipus at Colonus, was produced only posthumously.

What emerges from the biography is a coherent picture of a highly urbane man, and a meticulous artist. According to the Byzantine encyclopedia Suda he composed a prose work On the Chorus; whether or not this is true, the conversation recorded by Ion shows his self-consciousness in art, and we are told that he increased the number of chorus members from twelve to fifteen. He won eighteen victories at the Dionysia, and probably others at a lesser festival, the Lenaea, where tragic competitions were held from about 440 on. The ancient scholars of Alexandria knew 130 plays, but considered seven of these spurious. We are told that he was never third in the competition. Both his piety and his public service was conspicuous, but this does not prove that he was serenely faithful in religious belief or simple in his contemplation of life.

INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS

During Sophocles' lifetime, an intellectual revolution took place. At its center were the Sophists, professional teachers of success in public life, but other intellectuals also participated.⁹ Inherited wisdom was challenged in almost every area; the common elements in every field are rationalism and relativism. Success demanded rhetoric, and sophistic rhetorical training involved the ability to argue both sides of any question, arguments from probability in preference to reliance on facts, and self-conscious attention to language. A sophistically trained speaker could “make the worse argument the better”: the technique revealed the ambiguity of the relation between language and truth.

The distinction between physis (“nature”) and nomos (“custom”) was essential to much fifth-century debate. A growing ethnographical literature—represented for us by the work of Sophocles' friend Herodotus—showed how different were different human societies. But if customs varied so widely, local custom lost its simple authority. Furthermore, sophistic theorizing argued that instead of having degenerated from the Golden Age of mythology, humanity had begun in a condition of savagery, and had progressed through technical advances and the development of social life. The antithesis between nature and custom was explored in many directions: political theory, based on ideas of government as a social contract or agreement among men, and on comparison among different forms of government, was developed; on the darker side, the antithesis was exploited by those who were hungry for power to dismiss the claims of justice as “merely” conventional. All kinds of social distinctions were opened to question, once nature and convention were separated: the upper-class Greek's superiority to the lower classes, slaves, women, and foreigners could be doubted and debated.

Natural philosophers were also active; the philosopher Anaxagoras, a friend of Pericles, gave the true cause of eclipses and used a famous meteorite fall to support his argument that the heavenly bodies were stones heated by friction. Such theorizing seemed to many people to undermine religion, and the Sophists contributed to overturning traditional belief by including the origins of belief in gods in the history of human culture. Nothing was immune to discussion or accepted without question. The most famous statement of the period is the Sophist Protagoras's “Man is the measure of all things—of how those that exist exist, and how those that do not exist do not exist.” This is not a vague humanistic boast, but the declaration of a subjective philosophy in which reality depends on individual perceptions. If I feel cold, but you feel warm, it is both warm and cold. While the details of Protagoras's views are difficult to reconstruct, to ordinary people he must have seemed to be dissolving the stable world into a meaningless riot of perceptions and opinions.

The Clouds of Aristophanes (ca. 417), a satire of Socrates, shows how intellectual life appeared to the popular mind. Some of the jokes are at the expense of the countryman who comes to Socrates for help in escaping his debts: he has never seen a map, and thinks Sparta should be moved farther away. The Socrates of the play, in accordance with a theory identifying the substance of mind with air, hangs in a basket so as to think better. He gives explanations of weather which ignore the gods, and has replaced Zeus (whose name in the gentive case is “Dios”) with the Vortex (“Dinos”). His teaching includes metrics and grammatical problems. He can make the worse argument the better, and the Unjust Argument, who inhabits his school, urges the student to “follow nature” by committing adultery. When the countryman's son has been trained in Socrates' school, he beats his father and defends the practice by analogy with roosters.

Athens was at the center of the new thought. At the age of fifty-five Sophocles composed an ode to the historian Herodotus (fr. 5 West), who around this time joined the colony of Thurii, founded under Pericles' inspiration in 443 and given its law-code by Protagoras. Sophocles several times shows his familiarity with Herodotus's work; for example, in Oedipus at Colonus (337-41) Oedipus says that his sons follow Egyptian customs. Another poem (fr. 1 West) begins with a joke about the difficulty in putting the name of the philosopher Archelaus into verse; Archelaus was a follower of Anaxagoras who concerned himself with issues of nomos and physis. There is no doubt that Sophocles knew the thought of his day. His plays, however, unlike those of his younger contemporary Euripides, do not often refer explicitly to currently debated topics. The “Ode on Man” of Antigone (332-75) gives a sophistic account of human progress; in Philoctetes the protagonist's life on a desert island is modeled on that of primitive man. In Oedipus the King (583-602) Creon uses arguments from probability to prove that he would not have wanted to overthrow Oedipus. The speech helps characterize Creon as a cautious and reasonable man, lacking the grandeur of Sophocles' main characters. In Antigone, when the heroine argues that “unwritten ordinances” from Zeus commanded her to bury her brother (450-70), the speech may arise from a current debate on whether universal, unwritten laws govern humanity in addition to local codes, but the speech is not primarily an entry in this debate, but an affirmation of Antigone's belief that the gods require her deed. In Ajax, Menelaus sneers at Teucer as an archer instead of a hoplite, who fought at close quarters (1120), while Agamemnon calls him a bastard of a non-Greek mother (1228-34). Euripides would have had the characters debate whether these judgments had a real basis or were foolish conventions; Sophocles uses them to characterize his actors but does not explore them in general terms. The Sophoclean drama, with its intense concentration on individuals and their actions, was not suited to generalizing argument.

In Oedipus the King, Oedipus's intellectual self-confidence reflects the spirit of the sophistic age. The world of the drama, however, is not the comprehensible and lucid order imagined by philosophers; neither is it the chaos of the Euripidean stage, where traditional certainties have been abolished and nothing has replaced them. The characters of Sophocles live in a traditional order, in which the authority of the gods is unquestioned and the characters live by inherited aristocratic values. But this order is presented at its most complex and problematic. While Oedipus the King rejects the tendency to treat all problems as rationally soluble, it offers no banal alternatives. Instead of looking at traditional belief from the outside, Sophocles presents tragic situations which test it on its own terms. Although the intellectual crisis of the fifth century only occasionally appears openly on the Sophoclean stage, the challenge it offered to the inherited view of the universe and humanity's place in it added intensity to his portrayal of the difficulties and mysteries that view implied.

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THE MYTH AND THE CHARACTER

Ajax was a great hero of the Trojan War, second only to Achilles, according to Homer's Iliad (2. 768-69). When Achilles was slain, his armor was offered as a prize for the best of the other Greeks; but it was awarded to the crafty Odysseus instead of Ajax. Ajax killed himself. This is the simplest form of the myth behind Sophocles' drama, as the story appears, for example, in the Odyssey, where Odysseus, visiting the Underworld, sees the shade of Ajax, and speaks apologetically of the Judgment as an expression of divine hostility to the Greeks. Ajax, however, refuses to answer (11. 540-65).

There were different versions of how the arms were awarded and how Ajax met his death. The Odyssey mentions “the children of the Trojans and Pallas Athena” (11. 547): in one of the post-Homeric epics known collectively as the Epic Cycle, spies overheard two Trojan girls comparing Ajax and Odysseus; one praised Ajax for rescuing the body of Achilles, but the other, inspired by Athena, said that “even a woman could carry a burden.”¹⁰ For the older contemporary of Sophocles, the lyric poet Pindar, Ajax, who lost in a secret ballot of the Greeks through being no rhetorician, exemplifies the destructive power of envy and ignorance.¹¹ While both Homer and Pindar mention only the suicide, the Cycle included the story of how Ajax went mad in his grief over the loss of the arms and slaughtered the cattle the Greek army had gathered as booty. Unfortunately, Aeschylus's treatment of the theme in his trilogy about Ajax is not known.¹²

Outside the story of his death, however, we have a clear picture of Ajax in the Homeric poems. He is the great hero of defense, characterized by his huge shield, and he is the only major hero who is never directly helped by a god. In Iliad 7 he fights a formal duel with the Trojan leader, Hector, and when night parts them (Ajax having the advantage) they exchange gifts, Ajax giving a shield-strap and Hector a sword. In the ninth book, Ajax is the third member of an embassy sent to persuade Achilles, who has withdrawn from battle because he is angry at King Agamemnon, to return. Odysseus lists the gifts Agamemnon offers, and is rebuffed. Old Phoenix, Achilles' tutor, invokes honor, and is told not to serve Agamemnon. Ajax speaks briefly and from the heart. Achilles is cruel to reject his friends; and to Ajax Achilles answers that the speech is after his own heart, though anger prevents him from yielding. There is an affinity between these two, which Sophocles will exploit. But Ajax is always the defender of the values of loyalty and friendship in the poems, constantly encouraging his comrades as he fights alongside his illegitimate brother, the archer Teucer. He also delivers one of the most moving prayers in Greek literature.¹³ Supernatural darkness covers the battlefield, so that Ajax, defending the body of dead Patroclus, cannot find anyone to deliver a message to Achilles, and cries: “Father Zeus, save the sons of the Achaeans from this cloud / And make clear air; permit us to see. Kill us in the light, if that is your will.”

THE PLOT

The play begins at daybreak, with the goddess Athena greeting Odysseus outside Ajax's tent. Odysseus is tracking the killer of the Greek cattle, and Athena confirms that this is indeed Ajax. In his anger over the Judgment, Ajax set out by night to murder Odysseus and the leaders of the army, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Athena, however, drove him mad, so that he attacked the cattle. She calls Ajax out, after making Odysseus invisible. He congratulates her on her help, and he glories in his success. At present he is torturing Odysseus before killing him; Athena objects to this, but he insists. The goddess points the moral of the display. No one was more foresighted than Ajax or better at acting appropriately, but the power of the gods has reduced him to this. She warns the pity-filled Odysseus not to be boastful toward the gods or proud because of strength or wealth, for a single day can change everything for mortals: “The gods love the self-restrained, and hate the bad” (133).

Man and divinity exit, and the chorus enters. These are followers of Ajax from his native island of Salamis (politically part of Attica). They are confused by what they have heard, and hope that Ajax will come forth to dispel their fears. But Tecmessa, the concubine of Ajax, emerges instead (200). She describes the events of the previous night and morning: his night exit, his return with the cattle, his conversation with nothing at the door, and his recovery of reason, which has plunged him into deepest grief. Cries come from within, and the doors open to reveal Ajax among the cattle (346).¹⁴ He laments his humiliation and sees the hand of Athena. In a long speech he deliberates: his name (which resembles the Greek “alas”) has proven true. Achilles would have awarded him the arms. Hated by both gods and army, he must find a way to die honorably without helping his enemies. Tecmessa tries to calm him, citing her own endurance of fortune (she is a captured princess) and the evil that will befall her if Ajax dies. He is unmoved, and sends for his son. He envies the child's innocence. But the true son of Ajax will not fear the blood of the cattle. Ajax prays that his son will be luckier than he, but otherwise like him. He goes inside, refusing to soften (595).

The chorus sings of longing for Salamis and the coming grief of Ajax's parents. But Ajax emerges, and speaks of the power of time (646-92). Natural forces yield to each other, and he too feels pity. In a meadow he will purify himself and hide his sword, with which he slew the cattle; no good has come to him from the Greeks since Hector gave it to him. For the future, he will know how to revere the sons of Atreus (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and yield to the gods, as winter yields to summer, sleep to waking. He too will be self-restrained, sophron. He will be aware that friends and enemies may change places. Telling Tecmessa to pray that his wish be accomplished, he exits, and the chorus sings in joy. But now a messenger enters (719), to say that Teucer, who had been away on a raid, has returned. The Greeks met him with hostility, but the prophet Calchas in friendship warned him that Ajax must stay indoors one day, while the anger of the goddess lasts. He twice offended Athena: on leaving Salamis he ignored his father's advice to seek victory with the gods' help, for even a weakling could win if gods aid him—he could win alone; and when Athena came to encourage him in battle, he told her to help others, for his place in the battleline would not break.

All exit to find Teucer and Ajax. Ajax enters alone—the scene has become the meadow by the sea (815). He fixes the sword in the earth and prays that Teucer prevent his body from being thrown to the dogs and birds, that he have an easy journey to the Underworld, that the Furies avenge his death, and that the Sun tell his parents. He falls on the sword, and chorus and Tecmessa enter to find him and lament. Teucer enters (974) and foresees how his father will blame him for his brother's death.¹⁵ Ajax, he says, was slain by the dead Hector through the sword, as Hector was dragged to his death, tied to Achilles' chariot by the strap given him by Ajax. He sends Tecmessa to bring the child.

Menelaus enters to forbid the burial of Ajax (1047). As Ajax was excessive, so now it is his turn to be proud, and he will rule at least the dead Ajax. Teucer denies that Ajax was subordinate to Menelaus. The two wrangle over the justice of the award of arms and whether the gods would want Ajax to be buried, and the scene ends with the two exchanging threatening insults thinly disguised as fables. Tecmessa returns, and she and the boy sit as suppliants by the body. The chorus sings again of the misery of the war, even worse now without Ajax.

Agamemnon enters (1226), denying that Ajax was a greater warrior than himself, and calling Teucer a bastard, a slave, and a barbarian (his mother was a Trojan captive). Order will disappear if he gives way to such a one. Teucer names Ajax's greatest deeds, which Agamemnon could not equal, and evokes Agamemnon's barbarian ancestry and adulterous mother. As violence threatens, Odysseus enters (1318), and argues for Ajax's burial. He was the best of the Greeks, and excellence overcomes hate; to insult the dead is impious, and Odysseus sees that no mortal should dishonor the dead. Agamemnon gives way as a favor to Odysseus, though he insists as he exits on his hatred for Ajax; Odysseus wishes to join in Ajax's funeral. Teucer praises him while cursing Atreus's sons, but shrinks from allowing Odysseus to help in preparing Ajax for burial, lest the dead be displeased. The play ends as Ajax is carried off in procession.

AJAX AND THE ILIAD¹⁶

The Ajax of this play is not a character with whom we find it easy to feel sympathy. His willingness to murder because his honor has been slighted is not the result of his madness, for the madness was the divine mechanism which frustrated his intention. In the play he first appears carrying the whip with which he has been torturing a ram he thinks is Odysseus, while his second entry is made sitting in a pool of bloody corpses. He is harsh toward Tecmessa. Yet with the horror generated by the spectacle of Ajax is a genuine pity. The audience is directed to pity Ajax from the first by the response of Odysseus. From the initial exchange with Athena we know that Odysseus and Ajax are enemies, so that his response is defined as that of a hostile observer. When the goddess makes Odysseus invisible, and calls Ajax forth in order that Odysseus may tell the Greeks what he has seen (66-67), Odysseus is made, in effect, the audience for a play-within-a-play, whose reaction is a guide. When, therefore, he rejects Athena's suggestion that he laugh at his humiliated enemy, as Ajax laughs over his imagined victim Odysseus, and instead announces his pity (121), we cannot but realize that pity is the human response to such a sight. Ajax is gleefully cruel, but we cannot be certain how much of this is his madness, how much the real Ajax; the intent to murder need not imply this horrible gloating. And Athena is even crueller than Ajax, playing with her victim's belief that she is his ally. The end of the scene defines the earlier Ajax in terms which establish him as a model: inferior to none in either foresight or in ability to perform appropriate action. The latter term suggests a great deal: the excellence of Ajax was not apparently confined to war, nor was it a simple, heroic, inflexibility. To do what the occasion demands encompasses the whole of arete, the aristocratic ideal of excellence in every sphere. It is surely deliberate that Athena's description of what Ajax was echoes, in its division of good sense and proper action, Hector's praise of Ajax as both sensible and mighty at the end of their inconclusive duel in the Iliad (7. 288-89). This encounter, with its air of chivalry, may symbolize what Ajax was; yet he and his brother regard that very chivalry, marked by the exchange of gifts between the two enemies, as a cause of the downfall of Ajax.

In the first part of the play, the issue of the attempt to kill the chiefs is suppressed. Ajax himself does not regret it, but is grieved only by his humiliating failure. Such revenge, which requites a mere insult with death, belongs to the Homeric world. It is not, however, a goal we would associate with Homer's Ajax, but with his Achilles, whose anger is so strong that it does not allow him to accept the convincing plea of Ajax. In the initial quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad, the king announces that he will take Achilles' prize of honor to replace his own, which he is being forced to surrender. Achilles draws his sword, hesitating whether to kill Agamemnon or restrain himself, when Athena appears to restrain him, invisible to all but himself (1. 188-218). Yet his rage fulfills itself by a withdrawal from battle which leads to the deaths of his own comrades. It is this anger which Sophocles has given his hero, and he relies in part on the sympathy the epic has already created for the excessive and destructive rage of Achilles to define his protagonist. There is a certain rightness in Achilles' arms serving to motivate an anger like his own. But Achilles had divine support in his wrath; Athena stopped him by a promise of future compensation. Athena had a grudge against Ajax, and her intervention was disastrous for him. Gods, however, generally intervene only in accordance with human character, so that Ajax's suffering cannot simply be blamed on Athena: it is notable that he tried to take his revenge at night, by craft—a method which violated his own nature.

When the revenge is finally argued by Teucer against Agamemnon and Menelaus, the kings weaken their own case by themselves seeking revenge on the dead Ajax. They also assert their own authority, describing Ajax as a disobedient subordinate. Teucer answers that Ajax came to Troy in obedience to his oath, not to Menelaus or for Helen's sake (1097-1114). This is the oath of Helen's suitors, wherein all promised to defend the man chosen to marry her (Menelaus, as it turned out). Teucer's claim is evidently based on Achilles' statement in the same scene of the Iliad already echoed (1. 149-71) that he owes no obedience to Agamemnon; he came to Troy as a favor to him, and will not remain to be dishonored. Again there is a similarity and a difference. Achilles did not take the oath—he was only a child when Helen was married—and came to Troy to seek glory for himself. Hence the argument is sounder for him than for Ajax. Yet Teucer recalls the truth that the chiefs in Homer are only primi inter pares; Agamemnon is commander in chief and leads the largest contingent, but he is not the overlord of the other kings.

Ajax is thus set against the Homeric Achilles, as he is against the former self evoked at the close of the prologue. Homer's Ajax, the loyal defender with the great shield, often seems remote from Sophocles' character, though the Sophoclean Ajax has done the deeds recounted of him by Homer; the profound attachment to the community is inverted, appearing only as resentment of that community's failure to honor him. The isolation of Ajax is underlined by the third of the Homeric reminiscences, in which Ajax is shadowed by Hector. The scene in which Ajax bids farewell to his son (545-77) is obviously modeled on the famed passage in the sixth book of the Iliad in which Hector says good-bye to his wife and son. Each detail is a careful contrast. Hector's child cries in fear at his father's helmet, while Ajax is sure that his son will not fear the gore with which he is spattered, and apparently he does not. Hector prays that his son be like him among the Trojans, and that someone say “He is by far better than his father”; Ajax prays only that his son be luckier than himself, but otherwise the same. Hector foresees evil for his wife and child, while Ajax is confident that Teucer will protect his. Ajax is prouder than Hector. But perhaps more important is the contrast in situation. Hector is the father of a legitimate child within a stable, though threatened city. He goes to his death for his honor but also in defense of his home. Ajax is far from his native land—the chorus constantly expresses homesickness—and isolated from the only community he has, the army. His child is the son of a captive. Hence he is both fiercer and yet closer to his son than Hector: he envies the boy his lack of understanding. When the child grows up, he must show his father's enemies who he is, but in the meanwhile let him “feed on light breezes.” Hector imagines the mother's rejoicing when her son comes from battle with bloody spoils, while Ajax sees him as his mother's joy in the immediate future (559). Hector's prayer assumes Troy's survival, despite his presentiments, and is not fated to be fulfilled. Ajax is more realistic, in spite of his perhaps misplaced confidence in Teucer.

HYBRIS AND SOPHROSYNE

One last Homeric echo stands out among these complex recollections: the remarks of Ajax which precipitated Athena's anger are evidently based on the boast of the protagonist's namesake, the Lesser Ajax, at Odyssey 4. 504. This echo, however, can only be understood in the context of the themes of hybris and sophrosyne, which some scholars have tried to make the center of the play, while others have largely ignored them. Ajax was guilty of pride toward the goddess (hybris), thus showing his lack of the virtue of self-restraint and good sense, sophrosyne. His destruction is the inevitable result of his offense; he is an object-lesson in conventional Greek morality. This is one interpretation of the play, and the work does, in two passages, directly invite this interpretation: the theme is too explicit to be ignored, yet too confined to dominate.¹⁷

The first of these passages is, of course, the end of the prologue, where Athena points the moral of Ajax's fall. Odysseus's pity defines mortals as “images” or “shadows” without substance: this attitude of helplessness before divine power is the essence of sophrosyne. Athena then warns him not to be proud toward the gods because of might or money. The gods love those who have sophrosyne but hate the kakoi, the bad. The exact application of this moral is hard to define. Ajax, whose fall proves divine power, ought to be the figure described—Odysseus is being warned against Ajax's sins. But the lines do not completely fit him. He has boasted of strength, we will later learn, but was not an especially wealthy hero. Odysseus was not one of the richest leaders at Troy either, so that this feature is not there as a special warning to him. Furthermore, the man of sophrosyne is not usually the opposite of the kakos. The latter term implies the lack of aristocratic virtue or stature—low birth, cowardice, and meanness of spirit are components of kakia. Ajax's offenses against sophrosyne, however, are excesses of aristocratic pride. The only sense in which he could easily be called “base” is in reference to his present degradation as a mad outcast, and if that is the sense the statement means nothing: it is obvious that “the gods hate the miserable,” for they would not be miserable otherwise. Rather, the moral is inspired by Ajax, but not confined to his case or even put in a form that closely fits him. It tells Odysseus what he can learn from Ajax's fall, without saying very much about Ajax's own case, and through its reference to the arrogance of wealth prepares for the sons of Atreus, who exemplify the arrogance of wealth and power. Odysseus is the prudent man, whom the gods love, and the sons of Atreus may well be base men, whom they hate. Ajax is neither one nor the other; the gods have punished him, but the prologue leaves his final relation to them in doubt.

Although it is clear from the prologue that Ajax must have committed some offense of pride against the gods, what he did is not specified until the messenger's speech. We then learn that he rejected the gods' help. There is no doubt that this was impious, but it should be judged by comparison with the model of Ajax's sin: the Lesser Ajax boasted that he had escaped the sea against the will of the gods. Sophocles' Ajax does not suggest that the gods can be defied, but desires a success which is owed not to them, but to his inherited excellence, his physis. Ironically, he has for once accepted the help of Athena in the attack on the chiefs, to his ruin; he cannot, in fact, accept divine help and live. Yet if we look at the position of the messenger's speech, Athena's anger becomes mysterious. Ajax has left after the speech which convinces his friends that he has softened (the “deception-speech”). Now the messenger says that he may be saved if he is kept within, for the anger of the goddess will only last one day. Ajax has claimed that he will “purify” himself and escape the anger of the goddess (656). If her anger is to last only one day, it appears that he will escape her anger truly, but in death. We do not know how Athena's anger affects Ajax, for his death is entirely sane, but Ajax sees his death as a reconciliation with the gods, and the reconciliation is successful. It is not an atonement, and Ajax is not penitent: his suicide is what he chooses, and it also solves the gods' hostility. In fact, the messenger ensures that the friends of Ajax will find him before his enemies, and thus helps grant the prayer Ajax has not yet made.

Ajax says in the “deception-speech” that he will learn sophrosyne (677), and evokes the cycles of nature as a model for his learning to yield. In some sense, death renders him sophron and thus, perhaps, loved instead of hated by the gods. In the second part, Menelaus calls on cyclic order to defend his own arrogance and impiety (1087-88): “Formerly this man was blazing and full of hybris, but now I am proud.” The chorus immediately points out how illogically he blames Ajax for a hybris he imitates. Agamemnon likewise misapplies the morality of restraint in arguing that Teucer's defense of the dead Ajax is hybris (1258) and that he must learn sophrosyne (1259); his sophrosyne is slavery, and his dismissal of Ajax as “a shadow by now” is controverted by Odysseus's recognition in the prologue that all men are shadows. And Odysseus, in the end, shows that he has understood what sophrosyne means, when he insists on the burial of Ajax in recognition of the common human condition. Thus the theme binds the opening and conclusion: Odysseus gains from the sight of the madness of Ajax that understanding of human weakness which enjoins the decent treatment of Ajax dead.

UNITY

Sophrosyne is one of several themes which bind together the halves of a drama whose unity is much disputed. For many, the play loses tension once Ajax is dead.¹⁸ However we decide the question of its unity, the structure must be recognized. All three early Sophoclean tragedies—Ajax, Trachiniae, and Antigone—can be called “diptychs,” plays which are formed of two readily distinct parts. In the case of Ajax, this division is highly formalized.

In only one other surviving Greek tragedy do we have a change of scene and an exit and reentrance of the chorus, Aeschylus's Eumenides. In Ajax, the chorus exits after the messenger-speech, and the stage is bare. When Ajax enters, the scene has become a lonely place by the shore, while the following monologue is exceptional, since very rarely, except in a prologue, does an actor deliver a speech truly alone. His speech is followed by the reentry of the chorus, as if the play were beginning again. Ajax thus not only has two dramatic parts, one treating the process which leads to the protagonist's death, the other to his burial, but two formal parts. Even if we regard this structure as a mistake aesthetically, the second half is not just an epilogue: we are encouraged to see it as almost a new play. Yet it should be noticed that the second half begins with the suicide of Ajax, not after it; his speech is both the conclusion of the first section and the opening of the second. This “bridge” speech is therefore critical to understanding the relation between the first and second halves.

Why, then, a second drama devoted to the burial of Ajax? To say that Greeks cared deeply about the burial of the dead is a commonplace, true but not really an explanation. A further issue has often been raised in the case of Ajax, who was a hero at Athens. A hero, hērōs, in the Greek sense of the word is a dead person with power to help or harm the living, particularly in the area of his grave.¹⁹ Heroes had to be propitiated by offerings at their graves, for they were dangerous when not placated. Although many of the epic heroes were also cult heroes, not all were, and many cult heroes had no legend. Many indeed were nameless—the discovery of an already ancient tomb could lead to a cult of the anonymous hero buried there. One of the ten Athenian tribes was named after Ajax, and he was supposed to have given his help during the battle of Salamis. The burial of Ajax may have appealed to Attic patriotism. Many critics have argued that Ajax has to be “rehabilitated” by the dispute over burial in order to satisfy Athenian sensibilities. But there is no evidence that human virtues were expected of a hero, nor is patriotic sentiment enough to justify the elaboration of the second part.

But the cult of Ajax is important. Just after his entrance, Teucer sends Tecmessa to fetch Ajax's son (985-89). When the two enter, after the dispute with Menelaus, he places them by the corpse as suppliants (1168-84), and this tableau stands in the background throughout the final scene. The suppliant, like the hero, has a defined place in Greek religion; by carrying certain tokens and performing specific actions he puts himself under divine protection, so that injury to him is sacrilege. In this scene the corpse of Ajax plays the role of an altar or sacred place, and the locks of hair dedicated in mourning replace boughs or fillets. The suppliancy is intended to give Ajax the protection of the suppliants and yet to give the suppliants his protection: his burial is endangered, and yet his body is treated as though he were already a hero, with the ability to shelter a suppliant.²⁰ Ajax seems to be at once the utterly vulnerable mortal and, in some sense, the powerful presence below. But this paradox leads to another which has already been mentioned, that the burial of Ajax is not brought about by Teucer or by the suppliants, but by Odysseus: yet the education of Odysseus is itself the work of the spectacle of Ajax provided by Athena. The hint of divine protection given by the tableau is true in another sense, and when Ajax in his madness calls Athena his “ally” in the prologue the irony is highly complex: by no means his ally in the form he thinks, she is in fact his ally in arousing the pity of Odysseus. The drama is about Ajax, living and dead, in relation to men and to gods.

VISION

The prologue establishes a complex relationship of vision and invisibility. Athena is invisible to Odysseus, but there is no sign that Ajax does not see her.²¹ On the other hand, Ajax is prevented from seeing Odysseus. When the events of the prologue are described by Tecmessa, it is clear that she saw nothing but shadows (301) and thought Ajax was speaking to himself. That Odysseus, the favorite of the goddess, does not see her, implies that the actual sight of the goddess is perhaps to be avoided; Ajax is intimate with the divinity, but this intimacy is his destruction. Yet it is a real intimacy. The final words of Ajax in the prologue are a request that Athena always be such an ally to him (116-17), and the messenger-speech, which gives her wrath a place among the causes of his death, marks the fulfillment of his request. Recovering from his madness, he fully knows what part Athena has played (401-3, 450-56). But he does not know that Odysseus is not mocking (379-81). Odysseus has contact with the divine only insofar as the gods can bring him to an understanding of humanity. Ajax is close to the gods, but has no understanding of other men; he misjudges Odysseus, overestimates Teucer, and surprises himself.

At 589-90 Ajax insists that he owes the gods nothing, and warns Tecmessa that she is a fool if she thinks she can educate him now (594-95). He is resolved on suicide. Yet when he emerges from his tent at the opening of the next scene (646) he has, to his surprise, changed: he now feels pity for his wife and child. In the great “deception-speech” he continues to speak of his death, but in very different terms. It now appears as an attempt at reconciliation with the gods and as a purification rite; Tecmessa and the chorus imagine, as they are surely intended to imagine, that Ajax has abandoned his purpose. This speech has caused much controversy.²² Many critics have been unwilling to believe that Ajax intends deceit, arguing that this deceit is contrary to his nature; so it is, but he has already left that nature in the crafty attack on the chiefs. On the other hand, many have asked why, if he seeks to deceive, he uses language which barely conceals the truth. Two answers may be given to this question: both that the equivocation of the speech does represent an important inner truth—death is a reconciliation with the gods—and that prophetic speech is a characteristic of those near death, so that he is almost incapable of saying anything which is not, in some sense, true—the riddle of his words is akin to the riddles of an oracle.²³ The speech is extremely difficult not only because its significance lies on so many levels but also because it is not entirely coherent.

Ajax speaks of going to the bathing-places by the sea in order to purify himself and escape the goddess's wrath. There he will hide the sword Hector gave him, for no goodwill has come to him from the Greeks since he received it. He will learn to yield to the gods and revere the sons of Atreus. Snowy winter gives way to summer, night to day, and he too will learn sophrosyne. From now on he will hate an enemy only to the extent of realizing he may become a friend, and vice versa; all this will come out well. And they may hear that Ajax is saved. That Ajax sees his death as a purification is understandable. But he also links it with the cycles of change in nature, even including sleep, which loosens the one it has bound. Ajax is in one sense yielding to change, accepting it as the way of the world, and the images he chooses for change recognize it as benign. But his death will not place him among ever-recurring cycles, but rather give him permanence. He will no longer interfere with the sons of Atreus, and he is certainly giving way to the gods, since he thinks they wish his death, and that he is thus acting in harmony with them. But how will he revere the sons of Atreus, whom he curses just before his death? The word is surely sarcastic, and the line ambiguous even within an ambiguous speech; “I will learn to revere them,” he says—but the dead learn nothing, and the Greek verb can equally mean “learn how to”—the curse is perhaps the form of reverence appropriate to them. Yet in this same speech Ajax claims to understand that both friendship and enmity are unstable, even as he blames his trouble with the Greeks on the sword he received from Hector. The sword is evidently the symbol of unalterable hostility. Hector and Ajax, in exchanging gifts, acted as though hatred could be limited and did not even preclude a certain friendship, and both were destroyed by the exchange, as we later learn from Teucer. So to reconcile the sword with Ajax's words on friendship is not easy: perhaps the principle of restrained friendship and enmity is true, but not for Ajax; his friendship with an enemy led to hatred between himself and his former friends. Or it may be true, but only in a world Ajax wishes to leave. His statement that “for most, friendship is an unsafe harbor” (682-83) points to the future friendship of Odysseus—he will find a harbor in a friend he thought an enemy.

The deception-speech is the center of the play. Ajax must die, for he cannot live in humiliation and remain Ajax. In this speech he transforms his death from a rejection of the changefulness of human life to an acceptance of it, from the result of being hated by the gods to an acceptance of them. He goes to die, not in the darkness of the tent, but in the light. His comment on being saved is prophetic. The following messenger-speech confirms the meaning of his choice. Calchas says that Ajax may live if he can be kept within his tent this one day, while Athena is angry. The prophecy comes too late to save Ajax in the sense in which salvation is understood by the messenger (779). But it makes the self-chosen death of Ajax also the fulfillment of Athena's anger, and makes it clear that he will be, in some sense, saved, for her anger will not outlast the day. His decision to leave the tent, which required that his definition of his choice serve to deceive his followers, is shown to represent the only way he could die. The prophet raises the possibility that Ajax might live, but life is not what Ajax wants, and the prophecy shows that he has known without being told how to obtain the death desired. Moreover, the same speech in which Calchas depicts the limited anger of the goddess shows the rage of the Greeks, and Calchas in no way implies that Ajax will certainly survive if he lives through this day: both Ajax and his followers anticipate the worst at the hands of the army, and the messenger-speech, describing Teucer's hostile reception, shows that this is reasonable. Ajax dies while his death still belongs to the gods. The death of Ajax is caused by Athena and by the dead Hector, but these are causes of his choice. And in his last speech, his vision becomes effectual prayer.

THE SECOND PLAY

The second half of the play makes sense only in the context of the harmony between Ajax and his goddess-destroyer. The final speech of Ajax (815-65) is mainly a series of prayers. He asks Zeus that Teucer may be the finder of his body, so as to save him from being thrown to scavenger animals, and to Hermes for a quick death; he asks the sun to report his death to his parents. He also calls on the spirits of vengeance, the Furies, to attack the sons of Atreus and the armies. The prayer to the sun cannot be answered within the play. But the answering of the other prayers is the impulse of the second half of the drama. Ajax has a special power to bless and curse, but the flawed and mortal Ajax does not leave the drama. As with his death, events following the death of Ajax have both natural and supernatural motivations.

The prayer for Teucer's rapid arrival is fulfilled, but although Ajax can pray effectually, he does not guess that Teucer may not be able to protect him. At Odysseus's entry, it appears that Teucer may die in defense of his brother without saving him. But in debating Agamemnon and Menelaus on their own terms, crudely but effectively, he causes them to damn themselves ethically, and creates a tumult which prompts Odysseus's entrance. He also builds the tableau which hints at Ajax's heroic power; yet this tableau has no visible effect on the action. The burial of Ajax is secured on the purely human level, by the intervention of a humane Odysseus. But we know that his humanity is the result of what a goddess shows him in the prologue, and the apparently ineffectual efforts of Teucer may play a hidden part.

Conspicuously, Odysseus is absent from the final curse of Ajax, although Ajax does not know that Odysseus will help him: the curse, like the deception-speech, is mysteriously guided. Odysseus also finally bestows on Ajax the praise for lack of which he died: he states that, after Achilles, he was the best of the Greeks (1340-41), and so symbolically retracts the Judgment of the Arms. This shift marks how the second half of the play recalls the essence of what happened before it began. The sons of Atreus try to dishonor Ajax, and in their debate with Teucer both reveal the impossibility of fair judgment from such men and also further confirm the accuracy of the dead man's curse. Agamemnon and Menelaus are virtually identical characters. Menelaus insults Teucer as a bowman; Agamemnon, as a bastard; Menelaus speaks of Ajax as if he had been a common soldier instead of a king, Agamemnon as if the deeds of Ajax did not surpass his own. The tension is higher in the second dispute not because the arguments are at a higher level, but because the suppliant tableau now stands behind the disputants, a reminder at once of the common humanity of the dead and of the potential power of Ajax. When the drama ends with the funeral procession, the prayers of Ajax have been fulfilled. The sons of Atreus have shown themselves more given to hybris than was Ajax, and so promised the fulfillment of the curse—which is duly repeated by Teucer (1389-92). Odysseus is not allowed to join in the actual preparation of the body for burial, but he will join in the funeral itself. Ajax cannot be brought back into the human community; but what is best in the human world will attend him with respect.

Notes

1. This bare sketch inevitably distorts much that is complex and controversial; the reader should consult such standard works as J. B. Bury, A History of Greece, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin's, 1951) or N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 332 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).

2. On the festivals and the technicalities of classical performance, see A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). There is a fine brief introduction to the theater in O. Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1-21.

3. On the structure of tragedy see the work of Taplin cited in the preceding note. In referring to the choral personality, I do not distinguish between lines spoken by the chorus-leader alone and songs sung by the group; my use of the singular for “the chorus” and the plural for “the elders” or the like does not reflect any difference in how the chorus is actually working in any passage.

4. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a.

5. All the evidence for Sophocles' life is collected in Radt, Fragmenta, pp. 29-95 (“Testimonia,” abbr. T). The biography itself is translated in M. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 160-63 (discussion of the biography pp. 75-87). The anecdotes from Ion of Chios survive in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus (13.603E ff.). Other interesting anecdotes survive in Plutarch (Life of Cimon 8.7 and Life of Pericles 8.5).

6. See V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954), pp. 120-36.

7. This story is open to some doubt. Many poets' legends include cultic elements. Sophocles was famous for his piety, and his paean to Asclepius (fr. 737, PMG) connected him with that god. His last play concerned a hero, Oedipus, and poets were often imagined to have prophesied their own fates. Thus, there is a basis on which the story could have been invented. The hero Dexion certainly existed; inscriptions of the third century b.c. attest to his worship. His identification with Sophocles, however, is possibly a later fiction.

8. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1419a 25.

9. An excellent introduction to these issues is W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971; reprint of A History of Greek Philosophy (1969), vol. 3, pt. 1).

10. Little Iliad, fr. 2.

11. Nemean 7. 24-30; 8. 22-27.

12. P. 106 15-23, Aethiopis fr. 2, Ilias Parva frs. 2, 3 Allen; (English translation) pp. 509, 513 Evelyn-White for the Cycle.

13. Iliad, 17. 645-57. Apparently Ajax's burial was a source of contention already in epic. One known detail of Aeschylus's treatment is interesting: Ajax was invulnerable, and the messenger who describes his suicide says that a goddess helped him find the spot where he could be wounded (fr. 292 Mette, 41 Smyth).

14. Ajax probably appeared on the eccyclema, a wheeled platform used to display interiors, but the use of this device in the fifth century is controversial.

15. Teucer, subject of another Sophoclean play (frs. 576-79, Radt), was forced to leave home, and founded the city of Salamis on Cyprus.

16. See G. M. Kirkwood, “Homer and Sophocles' Ajax,” Classical Drama and its Influence, ed. M. J. Anderson (London, 1963), pp. 51-70.

17. The emphasis given these lines and the messenger-speech divides “orthodox” critics from “hero-worshippers”: a brilliant “orthodox” treatment is that of R. I. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, an Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 12-13, 40-41—his Ajax is a megalomaniac even when sane; on the other side, critics such as R. Lattimore, The Poetry of Greek Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1958), pp. 72-74, stress the lack of integration of the hybris-theme into the play.

18. So the ancient commentator (scholiast) on 1123: “Trying to make the drama longer he became insipid and lost the tragic emotion.”

19. The best introduction to hero-cult is still E. Rohde, Psyche, trans. W. B. Hilles (1925; reprint ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 115-55. I am especially indebted to P. H. Burian, “Supplication and hero cult in Sophocles' Ajax,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972):151-56.

20. The complexity of who protects whom may have been increased by the fact that Eurysaces himself had a shrine in Athens (Pausanias 1.35.3 and inscriptions of the fourth century b.c.); he was the subject of a Sophoclean tragedy whose plot is unknown (223 Radt, the only fragment, is a single word).

21. Commentators differ on Athena's invisibility. Odysseus says (14-17) that he easily knows her voice even when he does not see her; I do not see the point of this if she is visible to him. Nonetheless she should be standing close to him (I compare Iliad, 2. 172-83).

22. Fairly close to my opinion is O. Taplin, “Yielding to Forethought: Sophocles' Ajax,” in Arktouros: Hellenic Studies presented to Bernard M. W. Knox (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), pp. 122-30, but he sees as Ajax' conscious decision what I see as intuition. For a very different interpretation, see B. Knox, “The Ajax of Sophocles,” in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979). (This essay was first published in 1961.) 125-60.

23. Twice in the Iliad (16. 852-54; 22. 358-60) characters have a prophetic gift at death; Socrates refers to the phenomenon in the Apologies of both Plato (39C) and Xenophon (30).

Editions and Abbreviations

Sophocles: R. C. Jebb. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Individual plays, 1883-96; reprinted, 1902-8; text without translation and commentary reprinted 1897; full reprint, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1966.

Fragments: S. Radt. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta IV: Sophocles. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980 (Radt).

Editions of Other Authors

Aeschylus: H. J. Mette. Die Fragmente der Tragödien des Aischylos. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959 (Mette). English translation in: H. W. Smyth. Aeschylus ii. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1926. Reprint 1957 with a supplement by H. Lloyd-Jones (Smyth).

Bacchylides: B. Snell and H. Maehler. Bacchylidis Carmina cum Fragmentis. Leipzig: Teubner, 1970 (Snell-Maehler).

Elegiac and Iambic Poets: M. L. West. Iambi et Elegi Graeci. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 (West).

Epic Cycle: T. W. Allen, Homeri Opera V. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912 (Allen). English translation: H. G. Evelyn-White. Hesoid, Homeric Hymns, and Homerica. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1914 (Evelyn-White).

Hesoid: R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 (Merkelbach-West).

Lyric Poetry: D. Page. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 (PMG).

Pindar: B. Snell and H. Maehler, Pindari Carmina cum Fragmentis. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1971-75. (Snell-Maehler). Vol. 1: Epinicians; Vol. 2: Fragments.