contrast between the powerful, unyielding hero, whose on-stage body is the focus of the dramatic action,
and the lesser men who engage in a dispute, the techniques of which were familiar to Sophocles’ audience
from the debates in their contemporary, democratic assembly. Ajax is, in a sense, a throwback to the
vanished days of the heroic past, familiar from Homer’s epics. Indeed, Ajax bears a resemblance to
Homer’s Achilles: Both men are bitterly enraged at Agamemnon because they feel slighted by their
commander; both men endanger their fellow soldiers as a result of their rage; and the death of both men
arises from the sequence of events set in motion by their furious response to Agamemnon’s slight.
Achilles’ death does not form part of the action of the Iliad (although his imminent death is hinted at
repeatedly), and Homer’s epic poem ends with Achilles and Agamemnon reconciled. Ajax, on the other
hand, can never be reconciled with a former enemy, and this uncompromising attitude makes him typical
of Sophoclean heroes, who are at once admirable because of their steadfast adherence to principle and
unwelcome members of a community because of their total self-reliance. In the case of Ajax, this self-
reliance contributes significantly to his doom. In the course of the play, it is revealed that, in the past,
Ajax had boasted that he was quite capable of winning glory on the battlefield without any assistance
from the gods and, on another occasion, when the goddess Athena had stood by his side and urged him on,
Ajax had told her to go and stand beside some lesser warrior who might be in greater need of her help.
This was what caused Athena to madden Ajax, so that he slaughtered livestock instead of attacking his
enemies, thereby incurring humiliation beyond bearing.
Sophocles would have been quite capable of treating the tragedy of Ajax exclusively in terms of Ajax’s
character, without any recourse to the supernatural. But the gods are a traditional feature of Attic drama,
which is performed at a festival in honor of the god Dionysus. The gods occasionally appear as characters
in the drama, and in fact Athena appears briefly in the opening scene of Sophocles’ Ajax. In another of
Sophocles’ tragedies, the Electra, the gods are conspicuously absent. Electra was produced many years
after Ajax, toward the end of Sophocles’ long career. It dramatizes the same events that formed the plot of
Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, namely the return of Orestes from exile, his reunion with his sister
Electra, and his murder of Clytemestra and her lover. But, while the main character of Aeschylus’ play
was Agamemnon’s son Orestes, Sophocles’ play focuses, as its title indicates, on Orestes’ sister.
Although Electra is a woman and therefore, according to ancient Greek thinking, weaker than a man and
less capable of independent action, she is a typical Sophoclean hero and has much in common with
Sophocles’ Ajax. She is isolated not only by circumstances but by deliberate choice. It has been some
years since the murder of Agamemnon, and Electra has incurred the hatred of her mother by refusing to
allow Clytemestra to forget the heinous nature of her crime in murdering her husband. In Aeschylus’
treatment of the story, Clytemestra herself had sent the child Orestes away at the time of the murder, but in
Sophocles’ version it is Electra who saved her younger brother by sending him to another city, in the
hopes that he would grow up to avenge their father’s death. Electra now spends her time impatiently
awaiting Orestes’ return, disappointed that he apparently does not share her decisiveness and her
eagerness for revenge.
“What could you possibly have been relying upon to arm yourself with such audacity and invite me
to be your helper? Are you blind? You’re a woman, not a man, and your strength is nothing compared
to our enemies’. Upon them fortune smiles day after day but on us she turns her back and leaves us
cold. How then could we contrive to overpower so potent a foe and hope to escape disaster? Take
care that we not make a bad situation worse if someone so much as hears our words!” (Sophocles,
Electra 995–1004, Chrysothemis trying to restrain Electra)