FREE ESSAY ON HOMER'S AJAX

HOMER'S AJAX

The relevance that the themes of tragedy could have to issues affecting the city-state
even in plays whose plots had ostensibly nothing to do with life in a polis shows up
clearly in Sophocles' play entitled Ajax, presented in the early 440s B.C. The play bore
the name of the second-best warrior (Achilles had been preeminent) in the Greek army that
besieged Troy in the Trojan War. When his fellow Greek soldiers voted to award the armor
of the dead Achilles to the wily Odysseus instead of himself, Ajax went on a berserk
rampage against his former friends which the goddess Athena thwarted because Ajax had
once rejected her help in battle. Disgraced by his failure to secure revengeAjax
committed suicide. Odysseus then stepped in to convince the Greek chiefs to bury Ajax
despite his attempted treachery because the future security of the army and the
obligations of friendship demanded that they obey the divine injunction always to bury
the dead. Odysseus' arguments in favor of burying Ajax anachronistically treat the army
as if it were a polis, and his use of persuasive speech to achieve accommodation of
conflicting individual interests to the benefit of the community corresponds to the way
in which disputes in the polis were supposed to be resolved.