On the eclipse of Ajax as a most eligible suitor of Helen

Abstract

In fragments from Hesiodic poetry, we read that the hero Ajax was one of many heroes who converged on Sparta to compete with each other as rival suitors of a most eligible bride, Helen, daughter of Zeus. Some of these heroes came to Sparta in person, while others may have sent emissaries.Helen was being “given away” as a bride by not only her mortal would-be father Tyndareos but also by her semi-immortal twin brothers Kastor and Polydeukes (Castor and Pollux). Though Ajax entered the contest with impressive credentials that are described in some detail by the poetry, he was a loser in the competition—like all the other heroes competing to be chosen as the bridegroom for Helen. The one exception was Menelaos, brother of Agamemnon. As we read in the fragments from Hesiodic poetry, it had been decided that Menelaos must become the bridegroom of Helen. But we also read in these fragments that Achilles, if he had been a suitor of Helen, should have won the contest. Such a poetic declaration need not surprise us, since we read in the same set of Hesiodic fragments that Achilles would have been the most eligible of all suitors if he had wooed Helen. But the fact is, Achilles was not a suitor of Helen. Consequently, he was not even obligated to fight in the Trojan War, unlike all the suitors of Helen, who had all sworn an oath—it must have happened before Menelaos won Helen as his bride—to fight for the restoration of this bride, yes, to fight as a band of warriors united on behalf of the bridegroom who won Helen, whoever he might be, if any other man should ever dare to take her away from the chosen bridegroom. There is a familiar retelling of this myth about the Oath of the Suitors in the Library of “Apollodorus” (3.10.9), and we can find clear traces of the Oath in the Hesiodic fragments, but there remain many questions to be asked about the myth as myth. And my very first question is this: where is the poetic justice here? As we read in the Homeric Iliad, Achilles the Achaean was the very best of all the Achaeans who came to Troy in their quest to recover Helen after she had been taken away from Sparta and carried off to Troy by the Trojan prince Paris—this, despite the fact that Achilles was not even obligated by oath to be part of the Trojan War! And now a related question arises: who was the second-best of the Achaeans who came to Troy? The answer, as we also read in our Homeric Iliad, was Ajax. Well, then, why was it, really, that Menelaos and not Ajax had been chosen as the bridegroom of Helen? Were not Achilles and Ajax, as the best and the second-best of the Achaeans in our Iliad, the most eligible bridegrooms for that most eligible of brides, Helen? When we think of the idealized way these two Achaeans are pictured in the visual arts, we can see them as symmetrically bonded even in death, not only in life, as the most perfect specimens of male attractiveness. We can see such a picturing clearly in the illustration I have chosen for the cover of my essay here. But there is an eclipsing of Ajax, second-best of the Achaeans after Achilles, as the potentially most eligible suitor of Helen in both the Homeric and the Hesiodic traditions of poetry. So, I ask my first question again: is there any poetic justice in all this? My essay offers a guarded answer: there really is no justice to be seen here, and “our” poet knows it. Or, to say it another way, both “Homer” and “Hesiod” know it.