Greek Drama · Part 6 · Sophocles · B2
Sophocles: Ajax
Part 6 of Greek Drama: Ajax, the greatest Greek warrior after Achilles, loses the contest for Achilles’ armour to Odysseus. In his rage and shame he is driven mad, and when he recovers, he cannot live with what he has done. But the play’s last hero is unexpected: Odysseus, his rival, who insists that his enemy must be buried with honour. The third conditional and regret (if he hadn’t…, he would have…; should have), be ashamed of / proud of, and the language of honour and generosity, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria. The play includes Ajax’s death, which is told briefly and without detail.
We begin Sophocles with a hero you met in the Iliad: Ajax, the giant with the great shield, the wall of the Greeks. After Achilles died, his famous armour was to go to the best of the Greeks. Ajax was sure it would be him. The judges chose Odysseus.
Ajax thought the same, Marcos, and what he did next destroyed him. This is a hard play: it is about shame, and about a great man who could not bear it. But it ends with one of the most generous acts in Greek drama, by the man he hated most. Tonight’s grammar is the grammar of regret.
The Greek camp at Troy, after the death of Achilles
Sophocles (about 497–406 BCE) wrote more than a hundred and twenty plays, won first prize perhaps twenty-four times, and never came last. Seven of his tragedies survive; three of them, the Theban plays, are in our Oedipus series. Ajax is probably one of the earliest.
After the death of Achilles, the Greek leaders awarded his armour to Odysseus rather than to Ajax. Furious at the insult to his honour, Ajax set out by night to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. The goddess Athena sent madness on him, and he slaughtered the army’s cattle and sheep instead, believing they were his enemies. When he came to his senses, surrounded by dead animals and laughed at by the camp, he was overwhelmed with shame. His companion Tecmessa…
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