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SophoclesAjax
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Themes
Reversal of Fortune
The unknowability of the gods, their plans, and their intentions is a theme across Athenian tragedy that reflects the unpredictability of life. Since no one can know the gods’ long term plans for certain until they come to pass, pity for human suffering can be understood as a form of piety. Pity itself had a divine manifestation: the goddess Eleos.
Annual festivals in honor of the gods were the settings at which tragedies were performed in competition. Three playwrights were chosen ahead of time to produce three tragedies and one tragicomic satyr play, with a jury selected to pick a winner. This performance context is an essential component of interpreting the playwright’s characterizations of the gods. It is possible that the ancients did not ‘believe’ in the gods but submitted to and accepted them as a feature of life, in the way modern readers accept gravity, thunderstorms, and emotional overwhelm. Virtually everything that humans experience had, in ancient Greek cosmology, a sacred counterpart, from love (Aphrodite), rage (Ares), and peace (Eirene) to delusion (Atê), rumor (Phêmê), and family (Hestia). This can help access why Sophocles (and other ancient poets) portrays gods behaving in ways that moderns would consider negative but that ancients simply accepted as facets of human experience that span the spectrum of emotion, from joy to grief.
Tecmessa provides arguably the most poignant expression of this when she urges Ajax to accept his fate, as she has accepted hers. Her reversal of fortune was dramatic: She was a noblewoman one day and a captive slave the next, and the man to whom she is enslaved is the man who robbed her of her prior status. Ajax’s arc is also one of reversed fortune. He was the second-best warrior among the Greeks, offering his life to bring the war to an early end by facing Hector in single combat and defending the Greek ships when threatened with extinction, until a series of events left him without honor and identity. His grief and rage then led to the destruction of the army’s herds, making him an enemy of his formerly nearest and dearest comrades.
Agamemnon and Menelaus also undergo reversals of fortune at different points in Trojan war narrative. Agamemnon, the vaunted leader of the expedition to Troy, eventually ends up dying at the hands of his wife and her lover. Menelaus was the husband of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world and a daughter of Zeus, until she is brought to Troy, leaving Menelaus disgraced. Across his journey home, Odysseus undergoes changes of fortune, from a celebrated warrior to a ‘nobody,’ without identity or place. When he does return to his home on Ithaca, it is in disguise, as an itinerant beggar, and he must fight to regain his place as husband, father, son, and king.
The pervasive instability and mutability of human existence can explain why Odysseus declines Athena’s offer to mock his enemy in his vulnerability and why he argues in favor of allowing Ajax to be buried. Odysseus recognizes that success and good fortune are ephemeral, here one moment and gone the next.
Importance of Social Bonds and Pity
Reversals of fortune involve dramatic changes of identity—Tecmessa going from royal to enslaved, Ajax going from dearest friend to detested enemy—is largely conferred through one’s social connections, including family, friends, and place of origin. Ajax explores the ways human lives are interconnected and interdependent as well as the fragility and mutability of these bonds.
The theme is announced at the beginning of the play as Odysseus regards Ajax, once his friend, then his enemy, now an object of pity in his maddened state. Odysseus’s relationship to Ajax has changed, raising the question of how to respond to changes of this kind. At the end of the play, a provisional answer, via Odysseus’s debate with Agamemnon is with empathy, what the ancient Greeks called eleos, mercy/pity.
Pity is what Tecmessa asks of Ajax when she entreats him to rise out of his despair and live up to his responsibility to her and Eurysaces, as well as all the friends and family who depend on him. A boy without his father is left without his greatest protector, a point that is also made in the Iliad by Hector’s wife, Andromache, as she reflects on how his absence will affect their son. Like Tecmessa, who faces with Ajax’s death the threat of sexual violence and enslavement for a second time, Andromache is also left vulnerable after her husband’s death. Ajax’s loss will also leave his mother grieving in old age, without her greatest comfort. The Chorus will lose their leader and become vulnerable to the resentment and censure of the other Greeks. The implication is that they will be held responsible for Ajax’s disastrous slaughter of the army’s herds. Similarly, Teucer and Ajax’s father, Telamon, will hold Teucer responsible for his brother’s death, since siblings are meant to protect each other.
In Athenian tragedies, as in epic, subjectivity is communal. Each human life is conceived of as a single thread that the Fates weave, and the significance of that life is revealed in its social context. Ajax’s decision to end his life is, in part, a rejection of his social bonds and responsibilities. In the process, he becomes the most pitiable thing that one could be in this world: an individual.
Inflexibility Versus Adaptability
Ajax could be said to have two climactic moments: the suicide of Ajax and the debate between Agamemnon and Odysseus at the end of the play. Ajax’s suicide is brought on by his inability to adapt to his suffering, something that aligns him with Achilles and Agamemnon. All three of these heroes are portrayed as inflexible at various points both within the play and in the larger narrative of Trojan war mythology, in contrast to Odysseus, who exemplifies adaptability. None of the inflexible heroes survive the war or its immediate aftermath. Achilles charges into battle knowing that it will mean his death; Ajax kills himself, and Agamemnon is killed upon returning home. Odysseus, however, survives the war, his long and difficult journey home, and threats to his household on Ithaca.
Ajax’s inflexibility has a useful place on the battlefield. Throughout the war, he is consistently steady and dependable, a rock on whom his comrades can always rely. His shield embodies his protectiveness. In the Iliad, Ajax uses it to protect his brother and his fellow warriors, as Ajax himself functions as a kind of protective wall for everyone who is nearest and dearest to him. This same quality becomes a liability, however, when taken to excess, as is always a potentiality with heroes, due to their intensity, superhuman strength, and closeness to the gods.
The debate between Agamemnon and Odysseus at the end of the play speaks to the tension between these two qualities: inflexibility and adaptability. The fates of these two heroes after the war consistently function as oppositions: Agamemnon who strides home expecting honors but is killed versus Odysseus who slinks home in disguise, revealing himself to one person after another slowly, after testing each one’s loyalty to him. Given that Odysseus’s adaptability (and submission to Athena’s guidance) is the quality that enables his survival, his judgment to allow Ajax’s burial is significant, potentially an invitation to read adaptability as an appropriate virtue that enables mortals to make peace with their suffering and with each other. Odysseus can advocate for Ajax’s burial because he has made peace with the hero, but Ajax can never achieve this. In the Odyssey, he refuses to speak to Odysseus during his visit to the Underworld, still nursing his grief and rage. Given Odysseus’s closeness with Athena, in the play and in the mythic narratives generally, adaptability may also be seen as an expression of piety, a sign of one’s submission to the gods’ will.
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