How a Classical Homer occasionally downgrades the heroic glory of Ajax in order to save it: Part 3

Abstract

Here in Part 3 of my three-part essay, I take up the argument I introduced at the end of Part 2 (Nagy 2021.06.01, linked here): in “our” Iliad and in “our” Odyssey, the heroic glory of Ajax needs to be safeguarded—but it cannot be completely vindicated. (Hereafter, I will stop using quotation marks in referring to these two epics, which I have also been calling, in Parts 1 and 2, the “Classical” Homer.) In line with the overall argumentation in Parts 1 and 2 of my essay, I elaborate here in Part 3 on the idea of Homeric “downgrading,” as signaled in the overall title of all three parts. For the hero Ajax, the essentials of such downgrading are starkly apparent: in our Iliad, Ajax must be second-best of the Achaeans, taking second place to Achilles, but he cannot be allowed to become best of the Achaeans after Achilles falls in battle—at least, he cannot be awarded such a status in our Odyssey, where Odysseus himself must emerge as the best of the Achaeans. Such a downgrading of Ajax in both the Iliad and the Odyssey will lead to despair, which in turn will lead to suicide within a space of time that intervenes between these two epics. The despair is viewed retrospectively in Odyssey 11.469–470 and 550–55, where we read about an encounter in Hadēs between the visiting Odysseus and the ghost of Ajax. And, as we will see, the same despair is already viewed prospectively in the Iliad, which tells of a nightmarish mist enveloping in its grim darkness this most sadly underrated hero. Such dark imagery must have taken hold of the Athenian poet and dramatist Sophocles when he created his tragedy named after Ajax, and, further, this tragedy surely invaded the soul of a painter like Henry Fuseli, who pictures a Sophoclean Ajax in his darkest moments of despair, sadly unresponsive to his dear Tecmessa and to the loving couple’s helpless child.