The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sophocles · a tragedy for performance · 1,420 lines · Athens, date unknown, usually placed among Sophocles’ earliest surviving plays · scored on Sophocles’ Greek, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, with Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb for sense
Mode
Tragedy of honour, madness and shame, in two parts: the hero’s last day to his death, and the quarrel over his body
Mythos
The bulwark of the Achaeans, last man of the old size; Hector’s sword and Ajax’s belt exchanged as gifts of enemies; the sevenfold shield passed to the son named for it; the man become a hero of Attic cult
Phase
One day: the madness shown, the tent opened, the farewells and the speech on time, the death on the shore, then the burial fought for and won
Presentation
Drama for the Athenian festival; a prologue, a sung entry of the chorus, episodes and odes; a chorus that leaves the stage mid-play and returns, and a change of scene; 1,420 lines in the standard numeration
Register
From a goddess’s cold display and the cry of a man come to his senses, through the speech on time and the farewell to the light, to the small, hard rhetoric of the generals and the insults of the quarrel
Scale
One man on one day, with his wife, his son and his half-brother, the army and its law, Salamis and Athens, the gods and the seasons all turning on what he is owed
Governing Proposition
The bulwark of the Greek army at Troy, the last man of the old size, has lost the judgement of the arms of Achilles; Athena sends a madness on him, and he slaughters the army’s cattle. He comes to his senses among the carcasses, sees what he has done, and kills himself. The play then goes on over his body until the man he hated most wins him a grave. The wager of the play is that the code which made a man great becomes, when the world changes under it, the instrument of his ruin, and that the only fit answer to the ruined great man is to know that one is mortal oneself.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on an enemy at the door. Ajax has lost the judgement of the arms of Achilles, and Athena has sent a madness on him; he has slaughtered the army’s cattle, and he is in his tent among them. The goddess brings Odysseus, the man Ajax hates most, to look at him. She calls the madman out to be seen, and the scene has three persons in it: a god, an enemy and a man who does not know where he is.
The scene is dreadful: a goddess parading a deranged man for his enemy’s instruction. When she has shown him, she turns to Odysseus. “horais, Odysseu, tēn theōn ischyn hosē?”
“do you see, Odysseus, how great is the strength of the gods?” (118). The lesson is plain, and it is not the one a reader expects. Odysseus has been shown his enemy humbled, and what he feels is pity.
“horō gar hēmas ouden ontas allo plēn / eidōl’ hosoiper zōmen ē kouphēn skian”
“for I see that we who live are nothing but images, or an empty shadow” (125 to 126). He sees himself in the man Athena is mocking. She gives him the law that goes with the sight: think no proud word against the gods, since a day lays low and raises up all human things. The prologue has set the play’s two poles, the hero who will not bend and the man who has learned that he is mortal. The play will hold the two apart until the end.
Movement II
The chorus are sailors of Salamis, Ajax’s own men; Tecmessa is the captive woman of his household and the mother of his son. Then the tent is opened on him, sane, among the slaughtered beasts. He hears his name in the cry of woe (430 onward), and the moment is terror at the edge of the absurd: the man whose name was a boast now finds it a lament. The madness has passed. What is left is the shame, and the world that will laugh at him.
He reasons it through, with his absent father Telamon before his mind, and will not live in disgrace. “all’ ē kalōs zēn ē kalōs tethnēkenai / ton eugenē chrē”
“the noble man must live well or die well” (479 to 480). Tecmessa answers him with the other side of his code: the dependence of a captive woman, and of his son, on the man who means to die. Her plea turns Andromache’s words to Hector in the sixth book of the Iliad into a captive’s argument, and it tells what his honour costs the people who live under it.
He does not answer her. He asks for his son. Eurysaces is brought to him, and the father who has been among the carcasses asks that the child be lifted to him. He gives the boy the sevenfold shield, the one he was named for: the name means “broad shield”. “ō pai, genoio patros eutychesteros, / ta d’ all’ homoios”
“child, may you be luckier than your father, and in all else like him” (550 to 551). The future has been handed on. He has silenced Tecmessa with a proverb, and goes back into the tent.
Movement III
He comes out again, and speaks as if he has changed. “hapanth’ ho makros kanarithmētos chronos / phyei t’ adēla kai phanenta kryptetai”
“long and countless time brings all unseen things to birth and hides what has appeared” (646 to 647). Winter yields to summer, night to day, and he speaks as a man who will yield in his turn. The speech is the height of the play and one of the heights of Greek verse.
The sword is Hector’s gift, and he calls it what it has been to him: “echthrōn adōra dōra”
“the gifts of enemies, no gifts” (665). Whether the speech is a lie to free him from his friends, a truth, a self-deception, or a vision of the world of change that he sees whole and refuses, the play never says. The chorus believe it. Released from their fear, they break into a song and dance of joy. It is the pacing of a master: the joy stands a moment before the news.
A Messenger comes from the camp with the prophet Calchas’s word: Athena’s anger lasts this one day. He comes too late. Ajax has already gone. The law that the goddess gave Odysseus in the prologue is stated a second time, as a prophecy, and the speech on time had stated it a third, as the law of the seasons. The chorus and Tecmessa leave the stage to search for him, and the stage is empty.
Movement IV
The scene moves to a lonely stretch of shore. Ajax has planted the sword in the earth of Troy, and he speaks over it (815 to 865). He says farewell to the light, to Salamis and to Athens, and to the springs and rivers of Troy that fed him. It is a second summit, and it is spoken alone.
He dies in view. The chorus have been sent off, and no messenger reports it: the empty stage gives the death a solitude that a report could not. The form has been cleared for it, and the clearing is the argument. Ended here, the play would be a tragedy of honour and madness, and it would know only what Ajax knows. It does not end here. The hero is dead a little past three fifths of the way, and roughly the last two fifths are spent over his body.
The chorus come back in two halves, searching, and Tecmessa finds him. Teucer, his half-brother, comes too late and laments, and he completes the tally of the gifts. Hector was dragged by the belt Ajax gave him; Ajax has died on the sword Hector gave him. The exchange of enemies is closed in two objects. Teucer’s lament earns its place. What follows is the question the first part could not ask.
Movement V
Menelaus comes to forbid the burial, in the name of the army’s law and its rank. Teucer answers him in kind, and the quarrel drops toward the near comic, archer against spearman, insult against insult. The rhetoric of Menelaus is small by design, since he is a smaller man, and in places it is merely small. The play has asked what a man like Ajax is owed, and only his enemies can put that question.
Then Agamemnon comes and makes the same case in the same terms, and Teucer answers him as he answered his brother. Here the play runs its argument twice, where once would have carried it, and the form for a time becomes a container for argument. But the doubling shows something too. The code Ajax died for is in the hands of lesser men, and the army’s law and the hero’s honour cannot both rule. Neither side can end it.
Odysseus ends it. The man Ajax hated most is the only one able to give him his due, and he persuades Agamemnon to let the body be buried. Whether his pity is moral insight or prudence, the play leaves open. He learned in the prologue that we who live are images or an empty shadow, and he is the one who can act on it. The play closes with the procession to the grave, which Athens honoured as a hero’s: Ajax was the eponym of one of the ten Attic tribes, and the man has passed into cult.
Act III · The Twelve
The first three fifths are as tight as anything in Greek drama. Every scene closes a door on Ajax: Athena’s display ends his honour, the opened tent ends his concealment, Tecmessa’s plea ends his last argument for living, the son takes the shield and with it the future, and the speech on time ends the chorus’s watch. Nothing can be lifted out. The test bites in the last part. The burial quarrel is required, since the play asks what a man like this is owed and only his enemies can put the question. But it is put twice: Menelaus and then Agamemnon make the same case in the same terms, and Teucer answers both in kind. One of the two scenes could be compressed without the argument losing a step.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The play states a condition that holds: the code that made a man great becomes, when the world changes under it, the instrument of his ruin, and the only answer to the ruined great man is to know that one is mortal oneself. Odysseus says it in the prologue, looking at his enemy: “horō gar hēmas ouden ontas allo plēn / eidōl’ hosoiper zōmen ē kouphēn skian”
“for I see that we who live are nothing but images, or an empty shadow” (125 to 126). Ajax’s maxim, that the noble man must live well or die well, is set against Tecmessa’s account of what his honour costs those who live under it. The shame after violence done in a fog of the mind is exact. Held off the top because the burial debate argues its truth more than it shows it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation comes often and at full height. The prologue is dreadful, a goddess parading a deranged man for his enemy’s instruction: “horais, Odysseu, tēn theōn ischyn hosē?”
“do you see, Odysseus, how great is the strength of the gods?” (118). The cry of woe turned into the hero’s own name (430 onward) is terror at the edge of the absurd. The speech on time is the height of the play and one of the heights of Greek verse, with winter yielding to summer and night to day. The suicide speech, the sword planted in Trojan earth, the farewell to the light, to Salamis and Athens and the rivers of Troy, is a second summit. The rate falls after it: the quarrel scenes do not rise, and that holds the axis off the top.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Ajax is the bulwark of the Achaeans, the last man of the old size, and the play makes the archetype bear weight through its objects. The sword is Hector’s gift, “echthrōn adōra dōra”
“the gifts of enemies, no gifts” (665), and Teucer completes the exchange: Hector was dragged by the belt Ajax gave him, and Ajax dies on Hector’s sword. The sevenfold shield passes to the son named for it, Eurysaces, “broad shield”. The burial founds a grave the Athenians honoured as a hero’s, Ajax being the eponym of one of the ten Attic tribes, so the second half builds the passage from man to cult. He stays particular, a husband who silences a woman with a proverb and a father who asks for his child. Held a step below the top because Homer supplies much of the archetype ready made.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is epic: the judgement of the arms, the madness and the suicide were known from the epic cycle, and Aeschylus had made a trilogy of the story, which is lost. The departures are large and cost something. The hero dies in view, alone, after the chorus has been sent off; the scene shifts; the death comes at about three fifths, and the play goes on for some five hundred lines over the corpse; and the speech on time gives the audience a hero who may be lying, and never says. The cost is on record: for two centuries the play has been charged with a broken back, which is what a real wager earns. Held off the higher figures because the frame is the one Aeschylus used, prologue, episodes, odes and a divine cause.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Ended at the suicide, the play is a tragedy of honour and madness, and it knows only what Ajax knows. Run on over the body, it knows what he could not: that the code he died for is now in the hands of lesser men, that the army’s law and the hero’s honour cannot both rule, and that the man he hated most is the only one able to give him his due. The death at the middle of the action is the instrument of that knowledge, not an accident of plotting. The empty stage, the chorus gone, gives the suicide speech a solitude no messenger’s report could. Charged: the doubled quarrel turns the last movement for a time into a container for argument, and the form there carries less than it does before.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. The speech on time has been read for two centuries as a lie, as a truth, as self-deception, and as a speech in which Ajax understands the world of change and refuses it; the play gives no line that settles it, and a reader who returns finds it changed. Athena (justice, cruelty, or the order of things), Tecmessa’s standing, whether Odysseus’s pity is moral insight or prudence, whether the burial vindicates Ajax or tames him: each is open in the text, and the scholarship on the play is long and still moving. There is formal depth too, in the echoes of the prologue’s seeing across the whole play. Held a tenth below the very top only because the questions gather in one speech and one debate.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century and, through it, the drama of Europe. The force is high. The play gives the fullest early form of what would be called the Sophoclean hero, the man who will not yield, alone against friends, gods and time, and it makes a suicide in view and a drama after the hero’s death into usable possibilities. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is narrower than the force. The type passed into the tradition chiefly through Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone; the later Ajaxes, Ovid’s debate over the arms and the Ajax of Troilus and Cressida, come from the epic story more than from this play; and the play’s return to the stage is recent. Its place in the Byzantine schools kept it read, but it redirected less than its two famous siblings.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over millennia, and the text survives whole and read without a break. It was one of the three plays of Sophocles read in the Byzantine schools, with Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus, and so it comes down in a large manuscript tradition with its scholia; the text is sound apart from ordinary local corruption, with no substantial lacuna and no added ending of consequence. The form is whole, with no lost part that carried meaning. Its presence has been continuous in reading and teaching since antiquity. Charged against it: on the modern stage it was rarer than Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone for most of the last two centuries, and its revival is of recent decades. That bears on presence, not on form or fabric, and places it at the foot of the band for a whole text of this age.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The construction is masterly: the prologue’s three-way scene of god, enemy and madman; the tent opened on the slaughter; the pacing that lets the speech on time release the chorus into a dance of joy a moment before the Messenger arrives too late; the clearing of the stage for the death; the halves of the chorus searching. The iambic speeches are among the finest in the language: the speech of the cry and the name, the speech on time, the suicide speech, and Tecmessa’s plea, which turns Andromache’s words in the sixth book of the Iliad into a slave’s argument. The stichomythia is sharp in the quarrels. Charged: the rhetoric of Menelaus and Agamemnon is small by design, and in places merely small; the second half is competent where the first is incomparable.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Athena’s cold display of the madman in the prologue and Odysseus’s plea over the body at the end. One law governs both, and Athena states it herself to Odysseus: think no proud word against the gods, since a day lays low and raises up all human things. Calchas’s prophecy that her anger lasts this one day says it again, and the speech on time says it a third time, as the law of the seasons. The ending obeys it: the man who learned it at the start is the one who can act on it. The range is wide, from madness and domestic pleading to cosmic lyric, the death and a legal quarrel. Charged: the quarrel drops toward the near comic, archers against spearmen, and strains the single physics more than it extends it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged as a single play of 1,420 lines, at its own scale, it holds a great deal and holds it together: the gods and their justice; the mind deranged and the mind in shame; the family, wife, son, half-brother and the absent father Telamon; the household of a captive woman; the army as a polity, with law, rank and the right of burial; war and what it leaves; the city, Salamis and Athens and the cult the burial founds; and the natural order, the sea, the seasons and the light. All of it passes through one man’s last day. What holds it at the foot of the twelve is that form: a single tragedy cannot hold labour, history or the breadth of a society as a novel can.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.5, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.0. A text whole and read without break for millennia, carried by its place among the three plays of the Byzantine schools; a speech on time that has been argued over for two centuries and that no line of the play settles; and a making that clears the stage for the death and sets the speech on time a moment before the news that undoes it.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, held by the form: a single tragedy of one man’s last day cannot hold labour, history or the breadth of a society. The Inevitable at 8.4, held by the quarrel put twice, Menelaus and then Agamemnon in the same terms. Among the gated axes, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: high force as the first full form of the Sophoclean hero, with a reach narrower than that force, since the type passed on chiefly through <i>Oedipus Tyrannus</i> and <i>Antigone</i>.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The aggregate, at 8.8, also stands below the summit’s 9.0, so the play would stand in Tier IV with every condition met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sophocles’ Ajax (Aias), scored as the surviving Greek text for performance, the whole play as transmitted in the medieval manuscripts and printed in the Oxford Classical Text of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson: one tragedy of 1,420 lines in the standard numeration, with no substantial lacuna and no added ending of consequence. It is not scored with any other play of Sophocles. Its date is unknown. It is usually placed among Sophocles’ earliest surviving plays, about the 440s BC, but that placing rests on style and dramaturgy, not on any record, and is uncertain. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Sophocles’ Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with an English rendering beneath that keeps close to the Greek; references are to the standard line numbers. Translations · Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb (1994), close to the Greek, for sense; John Moore’s version in the Chicago series edited by Grene and Lattimore, as English verse, for how the play carries into English. Neither is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the play. The lyric metres, the music and dance of the odes are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the exact boundaries of the scenes and odes, whether any other surviving tragedy shows its hero’s death by his own hand, and the names in the play’s modern scholarship, are not given.