WHEN Thetis decided to award the arms of Achilles to the most courageous Greek left alive before Troy, only Ajax and Odysseus, who had boldly defended the corpse together, dared come forward to claim them. Some say that Agamemnon, from a dislike of the whole House of Aeacus, rejected Ajax’s pretensions and divided the arms between Menelaus and Odysseus, whose goodwill he valued far more highly; others, that he avoided the odium of a decision by referring the case to the assembled Greek leaders, who settled it by a secret ballot; or that he referred it to the Cretans and other allies; or that he forced his Trojan prisoners to declare which of the two claimants had done them most harm. But the truth is that, while Ajax and Odysseus were still competitively boasting of their achievements, Nestor advised Agamemnon to send spies by night to listen under the Trojan walls for the enemy’s unbiased opinion on the matter. The spies overheard a party of young girls chattering together; and when one praised Ajax for bearing dead Achilles from the battlefield through a storm of missiles, another, at Athene’s instigation, replied: ‘Nonsense! Even a slave-woman will do as much, once someone has set a corpse on her shoulders; but thrust weapons into her hand, and she will be too frightened to use them. Odysseus, not Ajax, bore the brunt of our attack.’
b. Agamemnon therefore awarded the arms to Odysseus. He and Menelaus would never, of course, have dared to insult Ajax in this manner had Achilles still been alive: for Achilles thought the world of his gallant cousin. It was Zeus himself who provoked the quarrel.
c. In a dumb rage, Ajax planned to revenge himself on his fellow Greeks that very night; Athene, however, struck him with madness and turned him loose, sword in hand, among the cattle and sheep which had been lifted from Trojan farms to form part of the common spoil. After immense slaughter, he chained the surviving beasts together, hauled them back to the camp, and there continued his butcher’s worth. Choosing two white-looted rams, he lopped off the head and tongue of one, which he mistook for Agamemnon, or Menelaus; and tied the other upright to a pillar, where he flogged it with a horse’s halter, screaming abuse and calling it perfidious Odysseus.
d. At last coming to his senses in utter despair, he summoned Eurysaces, his son by Tecmessa, and gave him the huge, sevenfold shield after which he had been named. ‘The rest of my arms will be buried with me when I die,’ he said. Ajax’s half-brother Teucer, son of Priam’s captive sister Hesione, happened to be away in Mysia, but Ajax left a message appointing him guardian of Eurysaces, who was to be taken home to his grandparents Telamon and Eriboea of Salamis. Then, with a word to Tecmessa that he would escape Athene’s anger by bathing in a sea pool and finding some untrodden patch of ground where the sword might be securely buried, he set out, determined on death.
e. He fixed the sword-the very one which Hector had exchanged for the purple baldric-upright in the earth, and after calling on Zeus to tell Teucer where his corpse might be found; on Hermes, to conduct his soul to the Asphodel Fields; and on the Erinnyes, for vengeance, threw himself upon it. The sword, loathing its task, doubled back in the shape of a bow, and dawn had broken before he contrived to commit suicide by driving the point underneath his vulnerable arm-pit.
f. Meanwhile Teucer, returning from Mysia, narrowly escaped murder by the Greeks, who were indignant at the slaughter of their livestock. Calchas, having been granted no prophetic warning of the suicide, took Teucer aside and advised him to confine Ajax to his hut, as one maddened by the wrath of Athene. Podaleirius son of Asclepius agreed; he was as expert a physician as his brother Machaon was a surgeon, and had been the first to diagnose Ajax’s madness from his flashing eyes. But Teucer merely shook his head, having already been confirmed by Zeus of his brother’s death, and went sadly out with Tecmessa to find the corpse.
g. There Ajax lay in a pool of blood, and dismay overcame Teucer. How could he return to Salamis, and face his father Telamon? As he stopped, tearing his hair, Menelaus strode up and forbade him to bury Ajax, who must be left for the greedy kites and pious vultures. Teucer sent him about his business, and leaving Eurysaces in suppliant’s dress to display locks of his own, Teucer’s, and Tecmessa’s hair, and so guard Ajax’s corpse-over which Tecmessa had spread her robe-he came crying before Agamemnon. Odysseus intervened in the ensuing dispute, and not only urged Agamemnon to permit the funeral rites, but offered to help Teucer carry them out. This service Teucer declined, while acknowledging Odysseus’s courtesy. Finally Agamemnon, on Calchas’s advice, allowed Ajax to be buried in a suicide’s coffin at Cape Rhoeteum, rather than burned on a pyre as if he had fallen honourably in the battle.
h. Some hold that the cause of the quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was the possession of the Palladium, and that it took place after Troy had fallen. Others deny that Ajax committed suicide, and say that since he was proof against steel, the Trojans killed him with lumps of clay, having been advised to do so by an oracle. But this may have been another Ajax.
i. Afterwards, when Odysseus visited the Asphodel Fields, Ajax was there only ghost who stood aloof from him, rejecting his excuses that Zeus had been responsible for this unfortunate affair. Odysseus had by that time wisely presented the arms to Achilles’s son Neoptolemus; while the Aeolians who later settled at Troy say that he lost them in a shipwreck as he sailed home, whereupon by Thetis’s contrivance the waves deposited them beside Ajax’s tomb at Rhoeteum. During the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, high seas washed open the tomb and his bones were seen to be of gigantic size, the knee-caps alone being as big as a discus used by boys for practising for the pentathlon; at the Emperor’s orders, they were at once reinterred.
j. The Salaminians report that a new flower appeared in their island when Ajax died: white, tinged with red, smaller than a lily and, like the hyacinth, bearing letters which spell Ai! Ai! (‘woe, woe!’). But it is generally believed that the new flower sprang from Ajax’s blood where he fell, since the letters also stand for Aias Aiacides, ‘Ajax the Aeacid’. In the Salaminian market place stands a temple of Ajax, with an ebony image; and not far from the harbour a boulder is shown on which Telamon sat gazing at the ship which bore his sons away to Aulis.
k. Teucer eventually returned to Salamis, but Telamon accused him of fratricide in the second degree, since he had not pressed Ajax’s claim to the disputed arms. Forbidden to land, he pleaded his case from the sea while the judges listened on the shore; Telamon himself had been forced to do the same by his own father Aeacus, when accused of murdering his brother Phocus. But as Telamon had been found guilty and banished, so also was Teucer, on the ground that he had brought back neither Ajax’s bones, nor Tecmessa, nor Eurysaces; which proved neglect. He set sail for Cyprus, where with Apollo’s favour and the permission of King Belus the Sidonian he founded the other Salamis.
l. The Athenians honour Ajax as one of their eponymous heroes, and insist that Philaeus, the son of Eurysaces, became an Athenian citizen and surrendered the sovereignty of Salamis to them.
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1. Here the mythological element is small. Ajax was perhaps shown on some Cyprian icon tying the ram to a pillar; not because he had gone mad, but because this was a form of sacrifice introduced into Cyprus from Crete.
2. Homer’s hyacinth is the blue larkspur-hyacinthos grapta-which has markings on the base of its petals resembling the early Greek letters AI; it had also been sacred to Cretan Hyacinthus.
3. The bones of Ajax reinterred by Hadrian, like those of Theseus, probably belonged to some far more ancient hero. Peisistratus made use of Ajax’s alleged connection with Attica to claim sovereignty over the island of Salamis, previously held by Megara, and is said to have supported his claim by the insertion of forged verses into the Homeric canon (Iliad, Aristotle: Rhetoric; Plutarch: Solon). Aia is an old form of gaia (‘earth’), and aias (‘Ajax’) will have meant ‘countryman’.
4. To kill a man with lumps of clay, rather than swords, was a primitive means of avoiding blood guilt; and this other Ajax’s murder must therefore have been the work of his kinsmen, not the Trojan enemy.
5. That Odysseus and Ajax quarrelled for the possession of the Palladium is historically important; but Sophocles has carelessly confused Great Ajax with Little Ajax.
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