Sophocles: ‘Ajax’

 A tip about Sophocles’ play Ajax: It’s not really about Ajax, who kills himself halfway through the play. It’s also not about Odysseus, who is onstage at the beginning and end of the play. It’s about the contrast between the two.

That’s how professor H.D.F. Kitto reads it. With that insight, you can see things in Sophocles’ gorgeous poetry that you might otherwise miss.

Ajax was, except for Achilles, the Greek’s greatest warrior. He was the bravest. He was indifferent to his own hardships and sufferings, which is a virtue — but he was also indifferent to the sufferings of his men, which is not.

That’s the flaw: Ajax didn’t really empathize with others, so he didn’t understand them. He couldn’t understand Odysseus or his success. When the top honor was given to Odysseus rather than to Ajax, Ajax could think of no reason why Odysseus was deserving. The only reason something like that could have happened was that Odysseus was dishonest — the competition was rigged.

By contrast, Odysseus could empathize with Ajax. He understood Ajax was a superb warrior. Odysseus was empathetic and sympathetic. When Ajax suffered, Odysseus felt pity.

Kitto says Sophocles is relentlessly moral. His point is that one of these ways of living is better than the other.

Among my favorite lines are these, spoken by Odysseus as he thinks of Ajax:

Yet I pity

His wretchedness, though he is my enemy,

For the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him.

I think of him, yet also of myself;

For I see the true state of all of us that live —

We are dim shapes, no more, and weightless shadow.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Ajax is on pp. 124-9. 

Ajax, translated by John Moore, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-62. The quotation is on p. 13.