Ajax- Greek HeroHero"Bulwark of the Achaeans"

Son of Telamon

Ajax's father Telamon had sailed with Heracles, fought beside him at the first sacking of Troy, and been first through the breach in Laomedon's wall. Ajax inherited that scale. In the Iliad, Homer gives him a shield of seven ox-hides layered with an eighth skin of bronze, and when he walked onto the field, he carried it like a wall. He led twelve ships from Salamis, a small contingent, but no Greek who saw him fight thought the number mattered.

The Greeks called him erkos Achaiōn, the bulwark of the Achaeans. Where Achilles had speed and divine blood, Ajax had mass and refusal. He never retreated. He never needed a god to save him from the field.

Ajax in Battle

When Hector and the Trojans drove the Greeks back to their ships, Ajax defended the fleet alone. He straddled the decks with a naval pike twenty-two cubits long, leaping from ship to ship, striking down every Trojan who came with torches. His voice carried across the beach, rallying men who had already turned to run.

He wounded Hector with a boulder and drove him from the field. When Diomedes took an arrow through the foot and Odysseus fell to a spear, Ajax covered the retreat alone. When fog covered the battlefield during the fight over Patroclus, he prayed to Zeus not for victory but for light. "Kill us in daylight," he asked, "if kill us you must." He held off the Trojan advance until the body could be dragged clear.

The Duel with Hector

Hector challenged any Greek champion to single combat. Nine heroes volunteered and marked their lots. When the lots were shaken in a helmet, Ajax's leapt out first. The Greeks were glad.

They fought with spears, then swords, then massive rocks. Hector's spear tore through the bronze and six folds of ox-hide, stopping at the seventh. Ajax's spear pierced Hector's shield and grazed his neck, drawing blood. As darkness fell, heralds stopped the combat. Ajax had the better of the exchange.

The duel ended with an exchange of gifts: Hector gave Ajax a silver-studded sword, and Ajax gave Hector a war-belt of purple. Both gifts would prove fatal. Achilles would drag Hector's corpse behind his chariot by that belt. Ajax would fall upon that sword.

The Judgment of Arms

When Achilles fell, Odysseus and Ajax fought their way to his body. Achilles in full armor weighed as much as two men, but Ajax lifted the corpse onto his shoulders and carried it from the field while Odysseus held off the attackers.

Then came the question of the armor Hephaestus had forged. Ajax's claim was plain: he was the strongest warrior left, Achilles' kinsman through Aeacus, the man who had carried the body from the field. Odysseus argued with the weapon he knew best. He had found Achilles disguised among the women of Skyros and brought him to the war. He had gone alone into Troy as a beggar and returned with intelligence. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Greek chiefs voted. Odysseus won.

Madness and Death

That night, Ajax resolved to kill the commanders who had wronged him. He took his sword and went into the darkness. But Athena clouded his mind. In Sophocles' Ajax, she describes the scene to Odysseus: Ajax slaughtered sheep and cattle through the night, bound rams and dragged them to his tent, convinced they were Agamemnon and Odysseus.

When dawn came, his sanity returned. He sat surrounded by carcasses, covered in blood, the mockery of the army. Tecmessa brought their son Eurysaces and begged him to live. Ajax took the boy, handed him the great shield, and told him to be worthy of it. Then he spoke of purification by the sea.

He went alone to a spot on the shore. He fixed Hector's sword in the ground, point upward, and spoke his last words: a farewell to the light, to Salamis, and to the plains of Troy. Then he threw himself on the blade.

Agamemnon and Menelaus refused him burial. Odysseus, the man Ajax had meant to kill, argued that to deny rites to such a warrior was to deny what bound them all. Ajax was buried with full honors.

The Shade and the Hyacinth

Where Ajax's blood soaked the ground, a hyacinth sprang up, its petals marked with letters resembling "AI AI," the Greek cry of grief.

When Odysseus descended to the underworld in the Odyssey, he found Ajax among the dead and tried to make peace. The armor was never worth his life, Odysseus told him. Ajax turned away without a word and walked into the darkness of Erebus.