Ajax T and Athena B
Had Sophocles been around today and were he to be asked to write a play about the Turnbull-Rudd-Swann tragedy, he’d tell you he’s already done so and he’d show a copy of his “Ajax.” The play, written some 2,500 years ago, includes a fake email and a ute.
And hubris, of course, arrogance in English, which is the fatal flaw that is obdurately attached to power. All power held by mortals.
Menelaos’ little domestic problem (unfaithful wife; but that’s another long story) launched 1,000 ships and started a war with Troy, one that lasted ten years. Nobles and heroes from both sides died during it in the most noble and heroic ways and by the end of it, the end of that particular war, there were no heroes left standing on the Trojan side. Not only all the heroes were dead but even the humblest male was slaughtered, including a baby boy, Hector’s child, Astyanax, who was thrown to his death from the peaks of Troy’s tall towers.
Some heroes on the Greek side, though, survived. Not all. Their greatest in fact, fleetfooted Achilles was killed by an arrow shot by Paris but guided by Aphrodite. The Atreus brothers, Menelaos and Agamemnon, as well as Odysseus were still alive.
So was Ajax.
But Ajax was seething with implacable anger. A contest was conducted as to who should inherit the biggest prize of them all: Achilles’ armour. Odysseus won.
Odysseus was Ajax’s enemy, even though both fought on the same side. Ajax was the roaring bull, the mighty brawn of the fleet, Odysseus was the clever man, the cunning man who, you might remember, was the one who –with some help from the goddess Athena- devised the Trojan horse, the hollow horse that brought the end of the war. A sly and cowardly trick, that one, (ask Virgil) the sort that Ajax would never think of nor would wish to have any part of. His was the way of the sword and of his massive built. A bulwark against the enemy. He boasted to the goddess Athena who came to help him, once. He frowned at her angrily and sent her away:
“Athena, you go and help the other Greeks. Where I stand no enemy will trespass” l.775
Hubris, you see, obdurately attached to power.
He had come to Troy, not under the command of Agamemnon but with his own men, a Commander himself. He was not obliged to obey any of Agamemnon’s rules. More power, more vulnerable to the dangers of hubris, you see.
So, when Achilles’ ute, I mean, armour, was handed over to Odysseus, Ajax was furious; so furious that he decided to rush over to the Greek camp and kill all the leaders of the expedition, more importantly, Odysseus. That man had to die! All these men were now his enemies!
His brain is all in flames with hatred and determination – and with a bullish brawn that left no room in there for thinking, for planning, for checking out the territory. That’s how Odysseus would have behaved.
The play, “Ajax” in fact, begins with Odysseus scouting outside Ajax’s tent, wondering what’s going on inside that tent, what all that noise was about, thinking, planning, following footprints, like a wise hunter. The exact opposite of how Ajax went about his job. Lindsay Tanner described him very well: “like a bull out of the gate,” he said last night (22.06.09) on ABC’s Late Line. Precisely. That was Ajax.
So, there was Ajax, a blazing brain, outside the camp of the Greeks, ready to rush in and begin the slaughter of his enemies, when suddenly the goddess Athena, (who loved Odysseus) appeared before him. She hands him an e-mail. “This way,” she said to him, after addling his brain and she guides him next door to the pen where the sheep were kept. Crazed Ajax, thinks these are the Greek soldiers and begins the slaughter. He kills relentlessly and then drags the reminder to his tent. He has a particular plan for one of them. A poor ram becomes Odysseus and Ajax ties him to a post and “tortures” him in preparation for the kill.
The screaming of the poor animals and the heaving groans of Ajax bring Odysseus around to the tent carefully examining the place. Athena appears and she explains what she had done for him. Then she makes Odysseus invisible and calls Ajax out of the tent.
When the hero comes out, his body drenched in blood, the goddess asks him, “Are the men dead?” The language is a gem for those who study Sophoclean literature. A brilliant irony on the “men” not being men.
Ajax answers, “yes, they are dead.”
Then she reveals to him that the e-mail was a fake and then re-jigs his brain.
Ajax looks around him, his mind now, more or less intact and the shame he feels is horrible. Far too horrible. He couldn’t possibly face his father back home, nor his younger brother, Teucer, or his baby son, Eurysaces (by a captive Trojan woman, Tecmessa), nor any other mortal, for that matter. In his world one lived only if one’s reputation allowed it.
He turns to his sailor/soldiers:
Ajax:
Oh my friends! My sailors, my only true and loyal friends!
Look what a black tempest has broken over my head!
I’m drowning in huge waves. They’re gathering high all about me! (l. 349 )
The importance of his reputation, the story that people will be telling about him once he’s dead, weighs on him as it weighed upon all ancient Greek mortals.
Ajax:
If all my glorious past is gone, my friends, gone like these slaughtered animals, and all I’ll be remembered for is having so mindlessly chosen to slaughter these innocent beasts, then let the whole army raise their swords and strike me dead! (l410 ff)
There was only one way to wash this unbearable shame that would be attached to his story.
He asks for the help of his friends:
Ajax:
My sea mates! Experts of the sea! We’ve worked the oars together, you and I! Come, my friends! You, my good sea mates are the only ones who can help me now! You and you alone! Come, my friends! Come and kill me! Kill me like I’ve killed these animals! (L358ff)
But they refuse to help him
He still had the sword that Hector gave him. A huge, unerring sword (another lovely ironic story). He told everyone that he was going somewhere, to some untrodden and desolate place where he could bury this honourable weapon, lest it fell in dishonourable hands. Eventually we discover, of course, that this untrodden and desolate place was his own body. Far from the Greek camp, he finds a rocky mount where he jams the sword’s handle between some rocks and then falls upon its point.
Typical of Sophocles’ genius for irony, we see that the only one who would allow Ajax’s body to be buried, (instead of being left to rot in dishonour and be deprived of a spot in the underworld) was Odysseus. This hero had learnt his lesson about hubris.
Will Turnbull learn about hubris? Or has he not committed any?
Did Costello do an Athena? Grech, perhaps? Or was all this the work of a certain little man who lost his seat not long ago?
Odysseus, of course, gained the wrath of Poseidon and didn’t get home for another ten years. I certainly hope that this little e-mail doesn’t keep Rudd and Swann away from the House for ten years!
Some other ancient said once, “nothing is new on the face of the earth and in the ways of men and gods.”
Anatomou
(with apols for the pic…. to Sophocles)
