Ajax

Also Known As: Greek Aias, Αἴας; also Ajax the Great, Telamonian Ajax, Aias Telamonios, to distinguish him from Ajax son of Oileus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Enormous physical strength and unbreakable defensive stamina, carried behind a shield of seven oxhides faced with bronze that no Trojan weapon ever fully pierced.
Role in Mythos: He is the bulwark of the Greek army at Troy, the man who holds the line when the ships are burning and Achilles will not fight.
Relation to Humans: He is a mortal king of Salamis who fights and dies entirely as a man, without divine rescue, and the Greeks who came after him treated that as the point. Salamis kept his cult, Athens named a tribe after him, and the fleet that fought the Persians in his home strait called on him by name before the battle.

The shield came first. Before the man, before the voice, the Trojans on the plain would see a wall of oxhide and bronze coming at them at walking pace, and they knew exactly who was behind it. Seven layers of bull’s hide, stitched by a leatherworker called Tychius out of Hyle, with an eighth skin of hammered bronze laid over the top. It stood taller than most men and covered its owner from throat to ankle. Homer calls it a tower, and that is not flattery. It was a piece of architecture that had learned to walk.

Ajax, son of Telamon and lord of the Salaminian contingent, was the biggest man in the Greek army and the second best fighter in it, and he seems to have carried both facts without much fuss. He was head and shoulders above every other Achaean. He is the one Homer sends forward when the situation is bad, and there is a particular rhythm to his appearances: things fall apart, the line bends, and then a slab of bronze arrives and the line stops bending.

His birth already had a joke folded into it. Heracles, on a visit to Telamon on Salamis, poured a libation and asked Zeus for a brave son for his host. Zeus sent an eagle across the sky as the sign, and since the Greek for eagle is aietos, Heracles told Telamon to name the boy Aias. A later strand of the story goes further and has Heracles wrap the infant in the skin of the Nemean lion, which is supposed to have made him proof against wounds except where the folded hide left a gap. Homer knows nothing of this and does not need it. In the whole of the Iliad, across every mass engagement and every duel, Ajax is not once wounded, and no god fights at his shoulder the way Athena fights at Diomedes’ or Apollo at Hector’s. He simply does not go down.

There is a moment in the seventh book that shows what he was for. The Greeks draw lots to see who will face Hector in single combat, and the lot jumps out for Ajax, and he grins about it, telling the others to pray quietly so the Trojans do not hear. Then the two of them go at each other until it is too dark to see. Hector’s spear drives through six of the seven hides and stops at the seventh. They are still standing when the heralds part them, and the thing they do next is stranger than the fight: they swap gifts. Hector hands over his sword. Ajax gives him a purple sword-belt. Two men who have spent the afternoon trying to kill each other agree, in effect, that it was a good afternoon.

Later, with the Trojans among the beached ships and fire in the rigging, he fights along the decks with a boarding pike more than thirty feet long, moving from stern to stern and roaring at the Greeks that there is no wall behind them and nowhere to run. He hauls Patroclus’ body out from under the Trojan spears with Menelaus while the arrows come in. The smell of pitch and burning timber, the wet weight of a dead friend, the deck slick underfoot. That is the last clear image of him working.

What killed him was an argument. Achilles died and his armour, forged by a god, was put up as a prize, and the Greek command awarded it to Odysseus instead. Ovid stages the whole contest as a pair of speeches, Ajax offering his scars and his record, Odysseus offering everything else, and the vote goes the way votes usually go when one side is better at talking. Ajax went to his tent to think about murder. He came out at night with a sword, and Athena put a fog across his eyes, so that the Greek commanders he cut down in the dark were the captured cattle and sheep of the army herds. He dragged one ram back to his tent and tied it to a post and flogged it, believing he was flogging Odysseus.

Then the fog lifted and he stood in the daylight among the carcasses. His captive Tecmessa, who had borne him a son, begged him not to leave them unprotected. He handed the boy his shield, told them where he was going in words that meant something other than what they seemed to mean, and walked down to the shore. He planted Hector’s sword upright in the sand and fell on it. There is no gentler way to put it: the finest defensive fighter in the Greek army was destroyed by a committee.

The Greeks did not burn him. He is the one hero at Troy whose body went into the ground rather than onto a pyre, buried at Cape Rhoeteum on the Hellespont, though the sources disagree about the details and some of them put his ashes in a golden urn instead. Where his blood soaked the sand, the story says a dark red flower came up marked with the letters AI, which are the first two letters of his name and also the sound a Greek makes when he is grieving. In the underworld, when Odysseus comes down and tries to make peace with him, the shade of Ajax says nothing at all and walks away into the dark. It is the most famous silence in Greek literature and it has never needed a translation.

His strength was never in doubt and never quite enough. He could hold a position longer than any man alive, take the worst of a fight and stay upright, and shelter his half-brother Teucer behind the shield while the archer stepped out, loosed, and stepped back in. The gap in him was that he had no answer to anything that was not a fight. Cunning beat him. Persuasion beat him. He measured himself entirely by the honour other men handed him, and when they handed it to someone else there was nothing underneath to stand on. Salamis went on sacrificing to him for centuries, the Athenians named the tribe Aiantis after him, and when the Persian fleet came into his own strait the Greeks called on Ajax and Telamon before they rowed out. He got everything he wanted, roughly a generation too late to enjoy it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ajax in Greek mythology?

Ajax, known in Greek as Aias, was the king of Salamis and one of the leading Greek warriors at Troy, described by Homer as the largest and strongest of the Achaeans after Achilles. He is called the bulwark of the Greek army because his role was to hold the line in the worst fighting, especially the defence of the beached ships. He is also called Ajax the Great or Telamonian Ajax to separate him from Ajax son of Oileus, a different and much less admirable figure.

How did Ajax die?

Ajax killed himself by falling on his sword after the armour of the dead Achilles was awarded to Odysseus rather than to him. Maddened by Athena, he had slaughtered the army’s captured livestock believing them to be the Greek commanders who had slighted him, and when his sanity returned he could not live with the disgrace. The sword he used was the one Hector had given him after their duel.

What was Ajax’s shield made of?

Ajax carried a body-length shield built from seven layers of oxhide with a facing of bronze, made by a leatherworker named Tychius of Hyle. Homer compares it to a tower, and it was large enough to cover Ajax completely and to shelter his half-brother Teucer, who shot arrows from behind it. In the duel with Hector, the Trojan’s spear drove through six layers and stopped at the seventh.

Was Ajax invulnerable?

Homer never says so, and in the Iliad Ajax simply survives every fight without being wounded, without any god intervening on his behalf. A later tradition explains this by having Heracles wrap the infant Ajax in the skin of the Nemean lion, leaving him proof against weapons except where the hide did not cover him. The older and more widely told version needs no magic at all, which is part of why the character works.

Why did Ajax and Odysseus quarrel?

They competed for the armour of Achilles after his death, and the Greek leadership awarded it to Odysseus. Ajax believed the prize was his by right of his battlefield record and his closeness to Achilles, whose body he had helped recover, while Odysseus won by argument. The dispute is the subject of Sophocles’ tragedy Ajax and of a long set-piece debate in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.