seven by Sophocles that have survived, and we refer to them, as they were referred to already in antiquity,
as Oedipus Tyrannus (or Oedipus the King) and Oedipus at Colonus. These are only two of the well
over one hundred dramas that Sophocles composed. One of the reasons Sophocles was so prolific is that
he lived a long and successful life, being born in the middle of the first decade of the fifth century and
dying in the middle of the last. His first entry into the tragic competition, in the days when Aeschylus was
still at the peak of his creative powers, is said to have won first prize, and he went on to win first prize at
the Dionysia on more occasions (18) than any other tragic poet.
“His words to me were few, but he kept repeating, ‘Woman, women gain glory by keeping their
mouth shut!’ Chastened, I held my tongue and he rushed outside, alone. What he did there I cannot
tell, but he came back in, leading his captives: tethered oxen, herd-dogs, and wooly plunder. He
beheaded some and he slit the throat of others, pulling their heads back, and then butchered the
carcasses. Others still he kept in bondage, tormenting them as though they were men.” (Sophocles,
Ajax 292–300, Tecmessa describing Ajax’s deranged behavior)Sophocles did not share Aeschylus’ fondness for producing four plays connected in plot and theme.
Instead, each of Sophocles’ tragedies is self-contained and unrelated to the other dramas that he wrote for
the same year’s competition. (As it happens, three of Sophocles’ surviving tragedies, the two Oedipus
plays and Antigone, dramatize a sequence of events in the same family and the three plays are
occasionally today produced in conjunction, but Sophocles wrote them for three festivals in widely
separated years.) Further, each of Sophocles’ surviving tragedies concentrates on a single individual
whose extraordinary strength of character and unwillingness to compromise isolates him or her from the
remaining cast of characters. Typical of Sophocles’ approach to tragic composition is his Ajax, which
dates from the 450s or 440s BC and is perhaps his earliest surviving play. (Sophocles wrote another
tragedy of the same title, about another man named Ajax, but since that play has not survived we can
simply refer to the surviving play as Ajax, with no further qualification.) The play is set during the Trojan
War, with characters that were familiar to the audience from the Homeric poems. Ajax, who appears
frequently in the Iliad, was the most accomplished Greek warrior at Troy, with the exception of Achilles.
Sophocles’ play takes place at a point in the war after Achilles has been killed in battle. The magnificent
armor that was made for Achilles by the god Hephaestus has been awarded, not to Ajax, but to Odysseus.
Ajax is convinced that he deserved to receive the armor himself and that Odysseus had used underhanded
means to influence the process by which the award was made, a process that, the play suggests, involved
something resembling democratic balloting. Because of what he regards as a humiliating slight to his
standing as the foremost Greek warrior, Ajax goes into a violent rage and attempts to kill Odysseus and
the leaders of the Greek army, Agamemnon and Menelaus. But the goddess Athena has so unhinged Ajax’s
mind that, instead, he binds, tortures, and slaughters some of the army’s livestock, thinking they are his
human enemies.