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language: ancient Greek (English tr. Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear)
country: ancient Greece
year: 5th century BCE
form: drama
genre(s): tragedy
dates read: 24.12.25
Sophocles’s Aias (tr. Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear) is my second experience with the Oxford University Press Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, which asks “translators who are themselves poets” to translate Greek tragedy. thus far I think they’re pretty good!
Golder and Pevear have rendered Aias in (mostly) a three-stress sprung rhythm, which I do love — they do a good job balancing a poetic register while also producing something extremely readable. I think this would be a great text to experience on the stage, purely on a linguistic-poetic level, with one signficant caveat to which I’ll return below.
the play itself narrates the suicide of Telamonian Aias/Ajax after the awarding of Achilles’s armor to Odysseus. it begins with Odysseus, guided by Athene/Athena, spying on Aias in the aftermath of a rampage where, deceived by Athene’s power, Aias believes he has slaughtered Agamemnon and Menelaos and tortured Odysseus, all of whom he sees as having wronged him by depriving him of the armor. when Aias comes back to himself he is, if anything, even angrier, humiliated by gods as well as men. his as-far-as-I-can-tell enslaved concubine Tekmessa tries to talk him out of any more drastic action, but Aias instead chooses to fall on his own sword, to reassert his honor in the only way he knows how against a world where everyone seems to be conspiring against him. Aias’s half-brother Teukros/Teucer arrives too late to save him and then, when confronted by Menelaos and Agamemnon demanding that Aias’s body be left to rot on the beach, gives an impassioned speech defending his brother’s honor and rejecting their authority. Odysseus arrives — surprisngly — to mediate, and is able to convince Agamemnon to allow the burial, but Teukros refuses to let Odysseus touch Aias’s body — as Golder puts it in his introduction, “Aias, even dead, is resolute in his hatred.”
I wouldn’t say that I loved this the way I loved Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay’s Oedipus the King. nonetheless, there are a lot of things I do like here. I am interested in the play’s negotiation of the relationship between the human and the divine. Aias’s refusal of divine assistance is, on one level, an affront to the gods — this is why Athene has turned against him — but through both his physical size and his attitudes his bodymind is also marked explicitly as somehow other-than-human:
He said
the gods strike down unwieldy
and outsized bodies, men grown
from the human branch who let
their minds go beyond the human.
it is this marked bodymind that makes Aias subject to divine punishment — a punishment that the play seems to regard as essentially unjust, though it acknowledges his “fault” (telling the gods that they should help others who needed their assistance more). Aias’s suicide is framed explicitly not as an illustration of the gods’ (or just Athene’s narrowly) power but rather as an escape from it:
But I will go to a bathing place
and the salt meadows to be cleansed
of this filth, and I may still escape
the weight of the goddess’s anger.
fascinating.
the big caveat here is the treatment of Tekmessa. to Golder and Pevear’s credit, the text does have her explicitly describe herself as a “slave” (and blame the gods for this!). later, though, we get the euphemistic “serving-girls”, and Teukros refers to Tekmessa as Aias’s “wife” — Golder and Pevear’s translation of Sophocles’s γυνή (l. 1169), which is literally “woman”, a translation that I think would be more apt / less deceptive here. this does, in fairness, reflect a larger issue with the play, which is the tension between Tekmessa’s initial bitterness about her unfree status and her affirmation that she loves and willingly obeys Aias. Medea or even Antigone this is not — if Tekmessa initially seems like she may have some conflicted feelings about the whole situation, she ultimately becomes (just) the devoted wife, eliding the fact that her unfree status makes her uniquely vulnerable in the aftermath of Aias’s suicide.
I do, though, think it’s very cool just from a structural perspective that Aias’s suicide is the middle of the play, which devotes more or less equal time to Aias’s initial lamentations and to Teukros’s arguments with Menelaos and Agamemnon. the second half of the play takes place in a scene dominated by Aias’s corpse, surrounded by the grieving Teukros, Tekmessa, and Eurysakes (Aias’s son); against this backdrop Menelaos and Agamemnon can, it seems to me, only seem cruel and vindictive, and even Odysseus’s attempt at peacemaking feels self-righteous and holier-than-thou — and, indeed, when Teukros denies him permission to help with the preparation of the body and the burial, Odysseus excuses himself from the funeral. so we are left with Teukros’s bitterness and grief; and unspeaking Eurysakes, lending his “small strength” to the burial; and the blood.
moods: dark, emotional, polemic, reflective