First, the great speech of Ajax (646-92), ‘‘perhaps the most rhetorical speech in Sophocles’’ (Fraenkel 1977, 20), full of stunningly honed gnomai (maxims) - and of their antithetical juxtaposition with the catastrophic particularities. No viewer of this play could doubt that this is a critical moment. Ajax dominates the stage. His thoughts and his language have an intensity that, even in a play of extreme suffering and passion, is unmatched. Part of the point is indeed the contrast with the pettiness of the formal speech that follows, with the contemptible rectitudes of Agamemnon and Menelaus as they confront Teucer (Reinhardt 1979, 31-32; cf. Knox 1961, 2, 28). There is no more genuine contact between two speakers in those agones than there is in the self-absorbed language of Ajax, and the world is by then a smaller place.
Interpretation is of course deeply controversial (the debate is summarized by, for example, Winnington-Ingram 1980, 46 n. 107; Segal 1981, 432-33 n. 9; Garvie 1998, 184-86; Hesk 2003, 74-103). Yet the nature of that scholarly dispute is itself suggestive, for so many of the problems come from the fact that this is logos, deeply powerful, articulated, thoughtful logos - but it is rhetoric with a difference, for it is barely communication. Indeed, what sort of performance is Ajax putting on - is it a performance at all? Is it a ‘‘deception speech,’’ as it has so often been called? ‘‘Deception’’ implies an intended effect on a hearer: but it is not clear that Ajax is thinking of his hearers at all. It indeed has many of the marks of a soliloquy (Knox, 1961, 12-14); yet that is not clearly right either, as by the end he addresses Tecmessa (‘‘You, wife, go in,’’ 683-86) and the chorus (‘‘And you, my comrades,’’ 687); even at the beginning he is aware of Tecmessa’s presence (‘‘this woman here,’’ 652). Fraenkel 1967, 82-83, and Battezzato 1995, 92-104, compare and contrast similar mixes of‘‘soliloquy’’ and awareness of audience - a ‘‘quasi-monologue,’’ as Fraenkel puts it. Yet this is still a very strange form of communication, if it is communication at all. He muses rather than informs. Even if in some way he responds to Tecmessa’s earlier arguments (Gill 1996, 204-16), even as he acknowledges her presence, he does not seem to be talking to her at all.
I, who then bore so much, like iron in the dipping, have been unmanned in what I say
[and also ‘‘in the edge of my resolve,’’ for stoma is ambiguous] by this woman here: I feel
Pity at leaving her a widow, and my child an orphan, among my enemies. (650-53)
Only ‘‘in what I say,’’ and ‘‘unmanned’’ dismisses this new register even as he adopts it; and the language also leaves it unclear if his ‘‘pity’’ is leading him to relent or not. Language is as slippery and ambiguous as it was with the nurse, but with a very different effect. We knew that the nurse was aiming her rhetoric at Phaedra and to have a particular effect, but we are much less clear about Ajax. If his language is riddling, is that because of any concern for his listeners, or indeed because of anything in his own mind at all? Or are there wider forces at play, toying with him and his language just as they toy with Oedipus’ riddling speech at Oedipus the King 216-75?
Scholars also debate (or used to) a more fundamental question of his psychology too: has he changed his mind about suicide (so, for example, Bowra 1944, 39-40)? But, as so much discussion of tragic psychology, these debates have centered too much on motives and intentions. From Seven against Thebes and Libation Bearers onwards, much of the most interesting tragic psychology centers on what a person knows and understands, and the same is true here. Not unlike the Achilles of the Iliad, Ajax may have been led by his sufferings to a deeper understanding of the human condition - but what that understanding implies for what he is to do is a different question.
It is a question, though, that matters not just to scholars but to people in the play, above all to Tecmessa and the chorus. The audience in the theater may or may not wonder if Ajax intends to deceive; if they do, they are unlikely to be able to give a confident answer. But they are certainly aware that those listeners are deceived, that they get their man wrong. Ajax asks rhetorical questions: ‘‘How shall we not learn the lesson to be sensible (sophronein)?’’ (677: Knox 1961, 16-17). Earlier, ‘‘And so [toigar] in future [or ‘‘for the rest''] we will learn to yield to the gods, and revere the Atreids. They are the leaders, so we must yield to them. What else?’’ (666-67).4 But what are the answers? The reason why we call such questions ‘‘rhetorical’’ is that they are for effect on a listener, who can immediately supply the answer: but here we have already seen that communication is skewed, and the speaker of such a rhetorical tour-de-force seems almost unaware that an audience is there. And is the answer to those questions so clear? The listeners in the play, Tecmessa and the chorus, take him as implying that he will live on, and are indeed deceived: that is the reason for their joy and relief (683-718, esp. 693, 716-18; 743-44, 787-88, 807). Yet the listeners in the theater, the audience, are surely not so taken in. The ironies and double meanings of the speech may initially be genuinely puzzling, and the audience may not be clear how to take them (though they will surely notice that the double meanings are there); that may help the audience to understand that the onstage listeners can be so misled. But already at 667, quoted above, the verbs are reversed, so that ‘‘revere,’’ a word more naturally used of the gods, is applied to the Atreids (as the scholiast remarks: Knox 1961,16); when used of mortals, it should encompass ‘‘admiration of authority which one regards as legitimate; it responds to the value of the powerful person, not simply to the fact of his power’’ (Cairns 1993, 207). That makes it even harder to think that Ajax might ever be willing to bow to these men of power whom he despises - unless that single act of ‘‘yielding’’ is by taking his own life. The emphatic toigar at the beginning of that sentence - ‘‘a strong logical force’’ (Denniston 1954, 565), i. e., ‘‘of course it follows that...’’- tells the same way: does the need for submission really follow so clearly, any more than with Medea’s angry ‘‘And so [toigar] you have made me the envy of many Greek women in return for this’’ (Euripides, Medea 509-10)? By the end of the speech the implications are clear enough. Ajax instructs Tecmessa to pray for ‘‘what my heart desires’’ (686; cf. 967-68); ‘‘I will go where I must make my way’’ (690). The audience knows what that journey must be; Tecmessa and the chorus do not. They care too much to understand. Skewed communication, indeed.
So one of our three directions, to the listener, is certainly out of kilter; another, to the speaker’s own mindset, is enigmatically thought-provoking. Yet in our third direction it points to so many things that are right, and truths of which even Ajax is now convinced. It is indeed rhetoric that maps closely onto something in the play. This talk of change reflects the reality of the world all too closely: changes in seasons and changes in life such that even the greatest must bow to them. The imagery too - of hard and soft, of iron, honor, light and dark, cold and warm, storm and calm, sleep and waking, trusty havens - again echoes motifs that cut through the whole play, recurring in speaker after speaker.5 Like the nurse in Hippolytus (446-50) and like real-life speakers (for example, Demosthenes 9.69, 18.194, 19.136; [Demades] 1.1, 1.54), Ajax develops analogies with the natural world; the difference is that the nurse’s analogies seem false, yet these appear all so true. ‘‘He utters not a single word of actual falsehood’’ (Segal 1981, 114; cf. Dale 1969, 155). Ajax has indeed been brought low from a great height; that this could happen to anyone is an insight that Odysseus shares in the play, and in Odysseus’ case fundamentally shapes the way he responds to the predicament (esp. 118-26, 1332-73). If Ajax sees a world of change but cannot live in it or persuade himself to answer ‘‘yes’’ to those rhetorical questions, that relation of words to speaker’s mentality illuminates his psychology in ways which cut much deeper than any question of whether he ‘‘intends’’ to deceive.
World History
