Aias

Ajax the Great (AY-jaks), in Greek Αἴας (Aias), called Telamonian Ajax after his father and "the Great" to set him apart from the other, lesser Ajax, is the giant of the Greek army at Troy — the tallest and strongest of all the Achaeans, and by the reckoning of the Iliad itself the second-best warrior in the host, ranked behind only Achilles. Homer's fixed name for him is herkos Achaiōn, the "bulwark of the Achaeans": he is the living wall the whole army shelters behind, the defensive rock of the Greek line. He carries a shield like nothing else in the poem — a vast tower-shield of seven layers of ox-hide faced with bronze, so heavy it is a wall in itself — and he fights the way that shield suggests, not with the speed and fury of Achilles but with an immovable, grinding steadfastness that never breaks and never gives ground.

What sets Ajax apart from the other great figures at Troy is that he is the hero of raw human strength and courage, unhelped and unglamorous. Almost alone among the major fighters he has no divine parent watching over him, no goddess to snatch him from danger, no magic armour or lent gifts from the gods; where Achilles has Thetis and Athena, where Diomedes and Odysseus are steered and rescued by Athena, Ajax stands on his own two feet and his own two hands. He is not clever like Odysseus nor favoured like Achilles; he is plain, blunt, brave, and utterly reliable — the man you want beside you when the line is about to break. The Greeks admired him as the embodiment of the soldier's virtues: endurance, loyalty, and a courage that owes nothing to the gods.

And that is exactly why his end is so bitter. When Achilles is killed, his divine armour is offered as a prize to the best of the remaining Greeks, and the award goes not to Ajax, who had carried Achilles' body out of the fighting, but to Odysseus, who won it by the cleverness of his tongue. The injustice — as Ajax saw it — of being beaten by words rather than deeds broke the strongest man in the army. Maddened by Athena, he slaughtered the flocks of the Greek camp believing them to be his enemies, and when the madness cleared and he understood what he had done, the shame was more than he could bear, and he fell on his own sword. The steadfast man who never yielded on the battlefield was undone not by any Trojan spear but by dishonour, and his story became, for the Greeks, the great tragedy of the good soldier destroyed by a wound to his pride.

The son of Telamon, and the second-best of the Achaeans

Ajax was the son of Telamon, king of Salamis — the small island off the coast of Attica — and through Telamon he belonged to a great line of heroes: Telamon had sailed with the Argonauts and had joined Heracles in an earlier sack of Troy, and Ajax's cousin was Achilles himself, for their fathers Telamon and Peleus were brothers, both sons of Aeacus. (In one much-loved tradition, told by Pindar, when Heracles came to Telamon's house and prayed that his friend might have a son as tough as a lion's hide, an eagle — aietos — appeared as a favourable omen, and the child was named Aias for the bird.) From Salamis Ajax led twelve ships to the war, and from his first appearance Homer fixes his rank: he is, the poet says plainly, "far the best of the Danaans" after the peerless Achilles — the biggest, the strongest, and the surest of all the Greeks who fought at Troy, with a half-brother, the great archer Teucer, who fought at his side and sheltered behind his brother's huge shield.

The tower-shield of seven ox-hides

Ajax's defining object is his shield — and Homer describes it with unusual care, for it is unlike any other in the poem. It is a sakos ēüte pyrgon, "a shield like a tower": seven layers of tough bull's-hide built up one on another and covered over with an eighth layer of hammered bronze, made for him by the leatherworker Tychios of Hyle, "far the best of leather-cutters." Where the other heroes carry the round hoplite-style shield, Ajax bears this vast body-covering wall, and it shapes everything about how he fights. He does not dart and charge; he advances behind the shield like a moving rampart, covers his brother Teucer with it so the archer can shoot and duck back into safety, and stands over fallen men to guard their bodies. The shield is the man: the tower, the bulwark, the immovable defence. It is one of the most memorable pieces of equipment in all of Greek epic, and it makes Ajax the great defensive hero of the war, the one who holds rather than the one who breaks through.

The duel with Hector

(Iliad, Book 7.) When the Trojan champion Hector challenged any Greek to meet him in single combat, the best of the Achaeans held back, until shame drove nine of them to volunteer — and the lot, shaken in a helmet, leapt out marked with Ajax's sign. He armed and came on "like huge Ares," smiling a grim smile, and the Trojans' knees loosened at the sight of him; even Hector's heart beat faster. The two great men fought through the afternoon: they hurled spears that pierced shields, they cast great stones — Ajax heaving a boulder like a millstone that beat Hector to the ground, until Apollo set him on his feet again — and they drew their swords for close work. But neither could master the other, and as night came on the heralds of both sides stepped between them and stopped the fight, for "night is a good thing to obey." Then came one of the most chivalrous moments in Homer: the two enemies, having tested each other and found each other worthy, parted as friends and exchanged gifts — Hector gave Ajax his silver-studded sword, and Ajax gave Hector his war-belt of shining purple. (There is a dark irony the Greeks felt in the exchange, for later legend held that Hector was dragged behind Achilles' chariot by that very belt, and Ajax would fall upon that very sword.)

The bulwark at the ships

(Iliad, Books 13–16.) The heart of Ajax's Iliad is the desperate defence of the Greek camp. With Achilles withdrawn from the fighting in his anger, Hector and the Trojans drive the Achaeans back against their own beached ships and try to set them ablaze — and it is Ajax, above all others, who holds the line. He fights up and down the decks of the ships with a huge boarding-pike, striking down Trojan after Trojan as they swarm up, roaring at the Greeks that there is no wall behind them and no city to retreat to, that the sea is at their backs and their only safety is in their hands. In one unforgettable moment (Book 16) even Ajax at last is worn down — his great shield is beaten, the sweat pours from him, he can scarcely breathe, and Hector shears off the bronze head of his pike with a sword-stroke, leaving him thrusting with a bladeless shaft — and only then, seeing the fire finally reach the ships, does the whole tide of the war turn, for that is the moment Patroclus comes out to fight in Achilles' armour. Through the entire crisis Ajax is the last man to give ground and the one the poet holds up as the measure of steadfast courage: the bulwark that bent and would not break.

Guardian of the fallen — Patroclus and Achilles

Twice Ajax stands as the great defender of the dead, and it is one of the noblest things about him. When Patroclus is killed and the Trojans fight to seize his body and strip Achilles' armour from it, it is Ajax who bestrides the corpse "like a lioness over her cubs," covering it with his tower-shield and beating back charge after charge so that Patroclus can be carried from the field (Iliad 17). And when Achilles himself at last falls — shot, the later tradition says, by Paris's arrow guided by Apollo — it is again Ajax, in the fighting recounted in the Aethiopis and the Odyssey, who takes up the great task: he lifts the dead body of his cousin onto his own shoulders and carries it out of the press of battle while Odysseus turns and fights off the pursuing Trojans behind him. That shared rescue — Ajax bearing the body, Odysseus holding the rear — is the seed of the quarrel that destroys him.

The contest for the arms of Achilles

(Content note: this episode ends in madness and suicide.) After Achilles is dead, his divine armour — the god-forged panoply that Hephaestus had made — is to be given as a prize to the man judged the best of the remaining Achaeans, and two men claim it: Ajax, the strongest fighter left in the army and the one who had carried Achilles' body from the field, and Odysseus, the cleverest. To Ajax the case was self-evident: he was the greater warrior, and the prize for prowess should go by prowess. But the award was decided not by strength but by a vote — held, in the tellings, by the assembled Greeks or by a panel of judges, in some versions swayed by captured Trojan testimony about who had done Troy the most harm, in others quietly steered by Athena, who loved Odysseus — and the armour was given to Odysseus. Ajax had been beaten by words. To the plain, honest, immensely proud man who had never yielded a foot of ground and never asked the gods for help, to lose the prize of valour to a talker was an unbearable dishonour, a public verdict that he was second-best in the one thing that was his whole self. Something in him broke.

The madness and the slaughter of the flocks

This is the subject of Sophocles' great tragedy the Ajax, our fullest account. Consumed by rage and shame, Ajax resolved in the night to take his revenge in blood — to go out and kill the leaders who had wronged him, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and above all Odysseus. But Athena, protecting her favourites, threw a madness over his eyes: she turned his sight so that the herds and flocks of the army — the captured cattle and sheep penned in the camp — appeared to him as the men he hated. In his delusion Ajax fell upon the animals and butchered them, hacking and torturing them in the belief that he was slaughtering the Greek chieftains; he dragged a great ram back to his tent and flogged it, thinking it was Odysseus. Sophocles opens his play on this dreadful scene, with Athena calmly showing the deranged Ajax off to the horrified Odysseus as a lesson in how the gods can shatter the greatest of men — and Odysseus, to his credit, feels not triumph but pity, seeing in Ajax's ruin the fragility of all human greatness.

The suicide on his own sword

When the madness lifted and Ajax came to himself among the reeking carcasses, the horror of what he had done crashed down on him. He had not even managed his revenge; he had made himself a laughing-stock, a great warrior who had made war on sheep. The shame was total and, to his mind, beyond any washing-out but one. Despite the pleas of his captive-wife Tecmessa, who begs him to think of her and their little son Eurysaces, and despite the loyalty of the sailors of his Salaminian crew, Ajax resolves to die: for a noble man, he says, must either live well or die well, and there is no honour left to him living. He plants in the ground the very sword that Hector had given him in their exchange of gifts — the enemy's blade — and, with a last bitter speech, throws himself upon it, so that the point runs him through. The strongest man in the Greek army, whom no Trojan had ever brought down, dies by his own hand on his own sword, undone by dishonour. His half-brother Teucer arrives too late, and the play's end turns on a bitter dispute: Agamemnon and Menelaus want to leave the "traitor's" body unburied, and it is Odysseus — the man who had beaten him — who intervenes and insists that Ajax, for all his crime, was a great man and must be given honourable burial. So even his rites are wrung from the reluctant by the enemy who had been the cause of his fall.

The sullen shade in the underworld

(Homer, Odyssey 11.) The most haunting coda to the whole story comes in the Nekyia, Odysseus's visit to the land of the dead. Among the ghosts Odysseus sees the shade of Ajax, standing apart, and he tries to make peace — he speaks to him gently, grieving over the quarrel and the death it caused, calling the loss of Ajax a grief to the Achaeans equal to the loss of Achilles himself, and wishing the fatal contest for the arms had never been held. But the shade of Ajax answers not a word. Still nursing his wrath even in death, he turns in silence and walks away into the darkness of Erebus, among the other souls of the dead — refusing, beyond the grave, the reconciliation that the living Odysseus offers. It is one of the most powerful moments in all of Homer, the great silent turning-away, and it fixes Ajax forever as the image of a pride and a grievance that not even death can soften.

A note on the other Ajax

Ajax the Great must be kept clearly distinct from Ajax the Lesser, the son of Oïleus and leader of the Locrians — a wholly separate hero, smaller in stature, swift of foot, a fine spearman but a violent and impious man, notorious above all for dragging the prophetess Cassandra from the altar of Athena during the sack of Troy, a sacrilege for which the goddess destroyed him at sea on the voyage home. The two often fight side by side in the Iliad as "the two Aiantes," but they are unrelated, and their fates are opposite: the Telamonian is the great and honourable hero brought down by injured pride, while the Locrian is the lesser, godless man brought down by his own outrage.

The hero of Salamis

Ajax was worshipped as a hero — that is, with cult centred on his tomb and shrine and directed to a powerful dead man whose goodwill the living sought — and his cult was old, strong, and above all local to Salamis, the island his father ruled and which claimed him as its founding hero and eponym. On Salamis he was the great ancestral protector, honoured with a temple and a cult-image, and his family were remembered there: his son Eurysaces and his descendants (the Eurysakidai) were a recognised clan. His annual festival, the Aianteia, kept his memory with sacrifice, procession, and games. To the islanders Ajax was not a distant figure of epic but their own hero, the strong dead man who watched over the land.

Adopted by Athens — the tribe Aiantis and the eponymous hero

When Athens absorbed Salamis, it absorbed Ajax too, and made him one of its own. In the great reform of Cleisthenes (508/7 BC), when the Athenian citizen body was reorganised into ten tribes each named for a chosen hero, Ajax was made one of the ten eponymous heroes, giving his name to the tribe Aiantis — a striking honour, and one Athenians explained by saying it was fitting because Ajax had been a good neighbour who lived close by. His statue stood among the Eponymous Heroes in the Agora, the noticeboard of the whole city's public life. In this way the Salaminian hero became a fixture of Athenian civic religion, invoked, sacrificed to, and claimed as a patron by every member of his tribe.

The ghost at the battle of Salamis

Ajax's most famous intervention in historical times came, fittingly, at Salamis itself. Before the great sea-battle against the Persians in 480 BC, Herodotus tells us (8.64, 8.121), the Greeks prayed to the gods and called on the local heroes Ajax and Telamon for aid, and sent a ship to fetch the sacred images of the Aiacid heroes from Salamis and Aegina to fight beside them. When the Greeks had won their overwhelming victory in those very straits, they set aside three captured Phoenician triremes as thank-offerings — and one was dedicated to Ajax on Salamis. The hero was believed to have fought unseen for the Greeks in the waters off his own island, and the victory sealed his standing as a mighty defender of Greece.

The manner of his honours

As with other heroes, the cult of Ajax belonged to the earth and the tomb rather than the bright Olympian sky: offerings poured and burnt at his shrine, sacrifices at his festival, athletic and torch-race contests held in his honour, and the perpetual reverence of the clan and tribe that bore his name. He was the type of the great warrior-ancestor whose strength, the Greeks believed, still stood guard over the land that kept his memory — a hero honoured, as he would surely have wished, for the plain soldier's virtues of courage and steadfast defence.

A hero, honoured in the hero's key

Ajax is a hero rather than a god, and modern Hellenic practice honours heroes differently from the Olympians — not as deities who order the cosmos but as great and powerful ancestor-figures whose memory is kept and whose example is invoked. A devotee drawn to Ajax might honour him as a patron of courage, endurance, and steadfast loyalty — the immovable defender who never yielded, the man who guarded the bodies of the fallen and stood as the wall his comrades sheltered behind. Following the ancient shape of hero-cult, offerings to a hero are traditionally poured out at ground level rather than raised to the sky: a libation of wine given wholly to the earth, a candle lit in his memory, or the telling of his story are the simplest and most fitting tributes.

The tragedy that endures

More than through cult, Ajax lives on through the great tragedy of his fall. Sophocles' Ajax is one of the earliest surviving Greek tragedies and remains among the most performed and studied, precisely because its subject is so painfully modern: the good soldier destroyed not by the enemy but by dishonour, and — as many now read it — by something very like the moral injury and despair that can follow war. Productions of the play have been used in recent years in programmes with military veterans, who recognise in Ajax's story the shame, the sense of betrayal by one's own leaders, and the crushing weight that can drive a strong man to take his own life. The "bulwark of the Achaeans," undone by a wound no armour could stop, has become an enduring emblem of the hidden costs of war.

The name in the world

Ajax's name has passed far beyond myth. It is borne by the famous Amsterdam football club (AFC Ajax), by towns and ships and — most everyday of all — by a common household cleaning product, whose brand traded on the classical hero's reputation for strength ("stronger than dirt"). In English his story survives too in the image of the immense, blunt, powerful man of few words and unshakeable courage, and in the memory of that last great scene in the underworld — the wronged hero who turns away in eternal silence, refusing to the end the reconciliation offered by the man who bested him. Of all the figures at Troy, Ajax is remembered as the one who owed nothing to the gods and everything to his own strength, and who was broken at last not by any spear but by the loss of his honour.