Ajax by Sophocles, translated by Francis Storr
We do not know much about wars, about fighting wars, about serving in wars, in the Western world. Our ancestors did, but we do not. Even the supposedly ruinous and costly and manpower-intensive conflicts of the post-9/11 War on Terror were not deeply and really felt by those living in the participating countries – unless, of course, they lived in the countries where the wars were actually being fought.
As American soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines are fond of saying, ‘we went to war; America went to the mall.’ How can anyone deny the truth in that?
There’s only so much that the art of past ages can do to illuminate the present. We sometimes think otherwise, but we’d be wrong. There are some truths that many would call eternal and others self-evident. But they are not the only things people grapple with – so much of that, so much of human experience, depends upon a kind of context.
But the idea of struggling for a decade to attain a military objective, being thwarted by brutal, cruel reality and even, it seems, by the gods, is something more people than might be expected can, as it were, relate to.
We’ve all been there.
The Ajax story is part of the Homeric legend, although as Francis Storr makes clear in his notes to the play, there are things here that Homer never says, and there are things in Homer that are not attended to here. Such is the nature of legendary tales. They flow freely from mouth to ear to mouth, from fireside to fireside. They disappear and re-emerge. They differ in the telling; they are remade; they resurge when time calls them from the vasty deep. For all manner of reasons.
We know, because it is clear, that Ajax’s skills and prowess are not only his glory but are his weakness, too. He believed he deserved the arms, and also the honours, of the great, now-dead Achilles; but they are given to Odysseus, the wily Odysseus, by trickery instead. Ajax’s attempt at revenge is confounded by the goddess Athena, who convinced Ajax through a vision that he is killing his enemies when he is instead slaying mere sheep and cattle.
Then the waking sleeper revives. He sees what he has done: it is property damage, not the murder he wished he was committing. Only suicide, Ajax decides, can remove the terrible dishonour of what it is he has done.
Less of this play than might be expected is spent on the attempts by Ajax’s slave wife Tecmessa and the play’s own chorus to dissuade Ajax from doing what he is intent on doing. Will you not make me a widow, and your own son and orphan? Tecmessa laments. Ajax is not moved.
Ours is not a society which esteems suicide, unless performed by a doctor – then it’s wonderful and there are no downsides. So it might be hard to see much sense in Ajax as he rushes forth, calling upon death, urging it on, defying the gods to stop him from doing what he says he must. He is just mad, we might say – and it is true that Ajax has been driven mad. More than once, he has been driven mad. But there is that old classical death wish, the desire to end one’s life dramatically, with great elegance or drama, that some even in this safety-first modern world might hear, might scent faintly on the breeze.
After all, it’s not so bad a thing. It’s not so bad a thing. We have all had those thoughts.
So out Ajax goes, with his great sword, to do away with himself. But as he does, a messenger arrives and says, quite conveniently for the narrative, that in fact, Ajax’s departing to kill himself is foretold to be a terrible thing, a bitter thing, a thing still possible to prevent. Those who can must scramble out to find him, to prevent the awful deed. But they are too late. Ajax’s wife finds him pinned almost to the ground by his sword, stone dead, his earthly clay cold to the touch.
They have failed in their bid to stop the suicide.
But their suffering is not at an end. Menelaus, the Spartan king, arrives and says, in prissy and unconvincing ways, that Ajax must be denied an honest burial. It would profane the army to do so; the gods would not stand it. He bleats and storms and disgraces himself. Eventually, Menelaus leaves, but is replaced in argument by Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans and brother of the departed Spartan king. He makes the same points, tediously so, until he is interrupted of all people by Odysseus, Ajax’s former enemy.
Wily Odysseus asks Agamemnon be pragmatic. Permit the man to be buried.
‘Thou bidst me then permit the burial?’ Agamemnon asks.
Yes, says Odysseus, ‘for I too shall come to need the same.’ That’s good stuff.
Think for a second of the state and its desires.
The state wishes to punish and to restrain behaviour of this kind. It is not in the state’s interests that warriors like Ajax act up, even if led to madness by the cruel, conniving gods.
And the state must also punish suicides, must make them ridiculous, despised, leave them unmourned. There is a certain blunt utilitarianism in that, just as so many religious customs – including taboos on suicide and self-mutilation – are possibly at their roots simple practical tips in running a society or clan, maintained with the force of holy law.
As Menelaus says, ‘Dread in its proper season and degree / Must be maintained.’ It has its social uses. As do the stories of all tragedy, on the stage or in life.