Although Sophocles adheres to the traditional outline of myth, he adds several new features (Rose 1995, 63-64). The audience is offered competing criteria for the army’s decision to award the arms of Achilles to Odysseus: moderation, physical strength, obedience to laws. The poet also emphasizes Ajax’s madness. The most pronounced departure from Homer’s picture of Ajax is to put him in command of sailors - and not particularly brave ones at that - an innovation reminiscent of Aeschylus’ treatment of Agamemnon. Repeated references to Salamis strengthen the connection to the navy (Rose 1995, 69-71).
As the tragedy moves from the indictment of Ajax to his defense, Sophocles gradually rehabilitates the warrior in anticipation of his final victory, the awarding of burial to his corpse. Whereas the prologue presents Ajax’s madness as a moral flaw and punishment for immoderate behavior, by the end of the tragedy he seems a victim of the arbitrary exercise of divine power. Although Ajax is initially isolated from his society, his ‘‘insane isolation...is finally transformed into a stirring evocation of his unique lonely stance as defender’’ (Rose 1995, 69).
In the poet’s attempts ‘‘to square the logic of the myth with the logic of [the] apologia’ Rose identifies silences that point to contradictions in Athens itself. Sophocles’ association of Ajax with ‘‘both the human rootedness of Hector and the absolutist isolation of Achilles’’ (64) draws the audience back toward the mythic world of Homer. At the same time, his command of sailors would have reminded the fifth-century audience of themselves and of the great aristocratic generals responsible for repelling the Persians and for the prosperity that the expansion of the empire brought their city. In the last third of the play, Sophocles blurs the tension between the demos and aristocracy by emphasizing the meanness and tyrannical behavior of the Atreidae in contrast to Ajax. ‘‘Big’’ men, such as Ajax, after all, are needed to protect the ‘‘little’’ (158-59) from the likes of Agamemnon and Menelaus. At the end of the play Ajax - or rather the idea of Ajax - inspires his illegitimate half-brother Teucer to imitate his behavior and defy the Atreidae. Thus Sophocles offers ‘‘a process of the democratization of an aristocratic ideal’’ (Rose 1995, 77).
World History
