Sophocles’ Ajax

In order to illustrate how values are embedded, manipulated, and contested in the action of a single play, I conclude with a brief discussion of Sophocles’ Ajax. The atmosphere in this play is one of bitterness and retaliation of the sort that arises when former philoi feel themselves betrayed and regard each other as echthroi. Menelaus, Teucer, and Odysseus all trace this situation to the judgment that awarded Achilles’ arms to Odysseus (1052-54, 1132-35,1336-37); for Ajax’s side, however, it was the judgment itself that constituted the betrayal, and for their opponents Ajax's reaction to that judgment. In keeping with this disagreement about ‘‘who started it,’’ each side sees as hubris what the other sees as retaliation (Ajax: 153, 196, 367, 382, 454, 955-62, 966, 969-71; the Atreidae: 1061, 1081, 1087-88, 1258, cf. 1320). Hubris thus emerges as a term one applies polemically to the behavior of one's opponents and not to one's own, but the similarity of the conduct of both parties is underlined by Tecmessa's report (303-4) of Ajax's deluded exultation in ‘‘all the hubris he'd gone and paid out against them,'' a pregnant phrase which seems to encompass the idea that Ajax has reacted with hubris in retaliation for hubris suffered (see Garvie 1998, ad loc). The parallelism is confirmed when Menelaus justifies his own ‘‘thinking big’’ (meg’ au phrono) as requital for Ajax’s hubris at 1087-88, and the chorus-leader immediately accuses him of hubris in turn (1092).

This reciprocity of harm for harm is endorsed by the goddess, Athena, when she invites Odysseus to rejoice in his enemy’s humiliation (79). But Odysseus does not rejoice; instead, he feels pity (121-26), because the pattern of alternation that has so reduced the once resourceful Ajax (118-19) is for him a sign of the ephemerality that he and Ajax share with all human beings. The theme of alternation permeates the play (Garvie 1998, 15). Broadly speaking, its lesson is sOphrosune, yet this sOphrosune is presented in multiple perspectives. For Athena, Ajax’s downfall justifies human sophrosune in the face of divine power (127-33), and without this Ajax was kakos (‘‘bad,’’ i. e., without aretO, 132-33). For Tecmessa, changes of fortune are harsh, but must be accepted, as she has accepted her own enslavement, enforced by the superior power of the gods and Ajax himself (485-90). For Menelaus, alternation implies a balance of offence and punishment that should promote sophrosunO, a sense of shame, respect for authority, and avoidance of hubris as the mainstay of civic and military order (1073-86), while for his brother the reduction of Ajax to a mere ‘‘shadow’’ means that his supporters ought to show sophrosune rather than hubris (1257-59). Ajax himself apparently accepts that the mutability of friendship and enmity requires a recognition of divine and human authority that he too describes as sophrosune (66683), before confirming his implacable hatred of his enemies in the prayer to the Erinyes that precedes his suicide (835-44). In this he contrasts profoundly with Odysseus, who not only accepts (1359) but also exemplifies (1377) that mutability, intervening in an exchange of insult for insult (1320, 1324) to manifest the sophro-sune called for by the chorus-leader (1264), affirming (in 1319, 1340, 1355, 1357, 1380) the arete of Ajax that had been denied by Athena and Menelaus (133, 1071), and confirming, in a speech that portrays the denial of burial as dishonorably depriving a good man of the honor he deserves (1332-45), the view of Teucer and the chorus that it was hubris (1091, 1151, 1385, 1391-92, cf. 1306-7). Thus the soephrosunee of Odysseus effects a positive alternation in the fortunes of Ajax, an alternation reflected in the way that the action is framed by Odysseus' initial pity at Ajax's fall and final affirmation of his aretee. Ironically, it is another's soephrosunee that restores the fortunes of a man who rejected soephrosunee and could not bear to live on until his fortunes might change (473-74).

The play illustrates the importance ofcontext and presentation for our understanding of the ethical dimension of tragedy. In the abstract, Menelaus' account of the need for discipline and respect for authority (1071-86) and Agamemnon’s insistence that majority decisions must be accepted (1242-49) draw on aspects of democratic ideology that an Athenian audience could be expected to endorse, yet these are contemptible characters. Equally, to think more than mortal thoughts (758-61, 777) and reject divine assistance (762-77) - that is, to manifest the hubris of disregarding divine time (see Fisher 1992, 325, against Garvie 1998, 196) - could be represented as a grave and dangerous offence. Here it is an aspect of the genuine preeminence of an extraordinary human being, a preeminence that is consolidated in the hero-cult that begins to take shape toward the end of the play (Burian 1972, Henrichs 1993b). Most strikingly of all, Sophocles effaces the enormity of Ajax’s intention to slaughter his comrades in revenge for an apparently legitimate decision: this intention is mentioned in the prologue (40-65), and Ajax never regrets it (387-91, 447-49, 454-55), but the real emphasis is on the humiliating diversion of his revenge onto the sheep and cattle (141-53, 182-91, 214-44, 284-327, 364-67, 372-76), so that, with the sympathy of both his friends and his enemy, Odysseus, Ajax appears as a victim rather than a perpetrator, and the negative construction of his actions as hubris (1061) is postponed until after his death, to be advanced by a character who is himself bent on hubris (see Heath 1987b, 173, 200). The raw material for characterizing Ajax as a hubristic, impious criminal and the Atreidae as defenders of essential civic and military institutions is there in the play, but the poet chooses not to present it in that way.

The relation between the diverging outlooks of Ajax and Odysseus is central to the play’s ethical dialectic. Odysseus’ excellence (arete) is confirmed by Teucer at 1381 and 1399; yet the aim of this arete is to reaffirm that of Ajax (see esp. 1380), and the two forms of excellence could not be more diametrically opposed. For Ajax, the shameful is to live with the disgrace of failure (473-74), the requirement of nobility to live or die ‘‘honorably’’ (kalos, 479-80) by showing oneself to be ‘‘not gutless’’ (471-72); for Odysseus, what is kalon is to recognize that there are limits to hatred, retaliation, and the pursuit of one’s own advantage (1347, 1349), limits imposed by a concept of dike (1335, 1342, 1344) that demands that one respect (aideisthai, 1356) the arete and time of others (1339-42, 1345, 1355-57). Ajax lives by the strict reciprocity that demands that you treat others as they have treated you; Odysseus extends this principle into a version of the Golden Rule, that you should treat others as you would like to be treated yourself (123-26, 1365).

Yet there are also similarities between the two men. Though their conceptions of the honorable differ, each has internalized its imperatives. While Ajax imagines his father, Telamon, as unable to look him in the eye if he returns ‘‘naked without a prize of excellence’’ (462-66), it is clear that he has set his father up as a standard to aspire to (434-40, 464-65, 470-72; see Williams 1993, 85). Odysseus equally uses the language of honor and shame in a context that highlights his commitment to internalized standards. He is not impartial with regard to Ajax - he was his enemy and he hated him (1347, 1355, 1357, cf. 78, 122) - so it is all the more remarkable that he overcomes his partiality to insist that Ajax receive the recognition that his aretee deserves. The values to which Odysseus subscribes are traditional and traditionally expressed, but his courage in acting on them in a context in which all others accept a strict polarity of friendship and enmity shows that one can be so committed to one’s values that one will uphold them without consideration of personal bias or others’ opinion.

If Odysseus’ values endorse their opposite, the self-assertive arete of Ajax, then the independent Ajax is not as independent as he thought (Winnington-Ingram 1980, 60-61); his burial, his posthumous fame, and his cult are assured only by someone who embraces the other-regarding aspects of honor to which he himself gave little consideration; Ajax’s confidence that his dependants will be provided for (560-70) is justified only by the intervention of Odysseus as the embodiment of that mutability of friendship and enmity that Ajax found so intolerable. Agamemnon resembles Ajax in rejecting that mutability (1360), allowing burial out of deference toward his friend, Odysseus, while maintaining his hatred for his enemy, Ajax (1370-73). The polarity is also maintained by Teucer’s rejection, as displeasing to the deceased (1393-95), of Odysseus’ offer to take part, as a philos, in the burial of Ajax (1376-80). Odysseus is as isolated at the end of the play as Ajax was at the beginning (see Garvie 1998 on 1384). Though it may be true that the play makes a case for both Aiantean and Odyssean forms of excellence in fifth-century society (Garvie 1998, 16), it offers no easy answers as to how these are to be reconciled; it is not Ajax or Odysseus but the Atreidae whose values take account of ‘‘society.’’ Both self-assertion and sOphrosune appear in good and bad guises, and the positive form of the one not only defines, but also negates that of the other. The dialectic into which the values of this play are drawn well illustrates our inability to elucidate the ethical dimension of tragedy by applying a ready-made template of‘‘what the Athenians believed.’’