“For I see the true state of all us that live—
We are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.”
After finishing Ajax, I was amazed at how relevant the story was to our own times. Here was a hero who potentially went on a killing spree.
Ajax, the hero of the Trojan War, a “bulwark of the Achaeans,” has been dishonored by Agamemnon by rewarding Achilles’s armor to Odysseus. In a rage, Ajax sets off to murder his comrades, including Agamemnon, Menelaus, and especially Odysseus. The goddess Athena intervenes and protects these men by driving Ajax mad, driving him to slaughter and torture flocks of sheep instead.
I thought about mass shootings by our own veterans: the Sutherland Springs shooting in 2017 that left 26 people dead, a shooting at Luby’s Cafeteria in California in 1991 killing 23 people, and the U.T.-Austin tower shooting where a former U.S. marine killed 14 people. In these tragedies, topics covered were gun law, PSTD, and mental health.
The Greeks, however, ask what is honorable and civilized. Who are we as a people and what actions reflect civility and honor. Is the agency in ourselves or in the hands of fate and the gods?
The play opens with invisible Athena, patron goddess of Athens, explaining the situation to Odysseus. She then lifts the fog of madness from Ajax. In horror, and a gruesome scene, we see the carnage. He decides suicide is the only honorable response. The rest of the play is an argument to decide to dishonourably expose his body for the birds or let his brother honor in burial.
If we were Athenians in the 441 BCE, we would expect to see a strong, brave Ajax. We would think of him as a fellow Athenian from Salamis, the island where the Athenians in 480 defeated Xerxes and the invading Persians. Athens in the succeeding years begins to lead the The Delian League and build an an Athenian empire.
Why would Sophocles select this moment? Why not the glorious warrior of the Iliad, instead of his madness and suicide? Part of the answer rests in Sophocles warning what happens when brutality goes unchecked. Odysseus at the end of the play shows a more balanced approach:
“Nevertheless,
In spite of his enmity, I cannot wish
To pay him with dishonor, or refuse
To recognize in him the bravest man
Of all that came to Troy, except Achilles.
It would be wrong to do him injury;
In acting so, you’d not be injuring him—
Rather the gods’ laws. It’s a foul thing to hurt
A valiant man in death, though he was your enemy.”
This play’s relevance to today by asking deep, challenging, reviling and often chilling questions, continue to engage us to explore our own tragedies. The reader’s response is to reflect and find better answers to help avoid mistakes of the past.