Posthomerica, Book 5 — The Judgement of the Arms; the Suicide of Ajax

Reading Troy — chapter 29 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 5

Posthomerica, Book 5 — The Judgement of the Arms; the Suicide of Ajax (Day after the funeral games; the fifth of the post-Iliadic books; the Greek camp's assembly-ground and Ajax's tent)

The morning opens on the held-back prize. The armour of Achilles — Hephaestus's panoply, the shield Iliad 18 burned thirty lines of fire to describe — lies on display at the centre of the Greek assembly. Thetis announces the contest. The arms will go to whichever Greek "served her son best in the hour of his death." Two contenders rise: Ajax the Greater and Odysseus. The Iliad's two surviving champions of the wartime army, the two who together fought the Trojans off Achilles's corpse in Book 3, the spear-and-the-tongue, the Telamonian and the Ithacan. Quintus stages the speeches.

Ajax goes first, blunt and aggrieved. He recites his service in the formulaic register: the bulk of the corpse-rescue was his, he held the line at the ships in Iliad 15, he stood alone against Hector in the Iliad 7 duel. He speaks "as men of his nature do," straight as a cast spear; he sneers at Odysseus's tongue, names him a coward at heart, recalls him stripping the dead Dolon in the dark of Iliad 10. He ends with a claim of pure kinship — he is Achilles's cousin by blood; Odysseus is no kin at all.

Odysseus answers in the register he was bred to. He concedes Ajax's strength and then disarms it. Strength alone never took a city; counsel did. He recalls his own service — the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9, the night-raid that took Rhesus's horses, the binding of Helenus's prophecies, the journey to Scyros to fetch Achilles in the first place. He reminds the host that the armour was forged by Hephaestus at Thetis's prayer; that gift of art belongs not with brute force but with the mind that uses force well. He sits down. The Greek captains vote.

Trojan captive women are called to judge — Quintus's most striking innovation. Hera intervenes through them; their voices give the arms to Odysseus. Ajax leaves the assembly without speaking. He goes to his tent. Athena, whom Quintus shows as still angered by Ajax's old refusal of her help in the field, sends madness on him. He takes his sword. He goes out into the dark and falls upon the Greek flocks — sheep, oxen, dogs — believing them his enemies. He slaughters them through the night, dragging "rams as if they were the Atridae," lashing a tethered bell-wether he takes for Odysseus. Dawn lifts the cloud from his eyes. He sees the bloody field, sees what he has done, understands that he is now both dispossessed of honour and ridiculous. He plants the sword Hector once gave him — point upward in the earth — and falls on it. "The earth drank up his blood."

Teucer, his half-brother, finds the body at sunrise. The lament that follows is the cycle's deepest. Teucer reproaches the Greek host; he reproaches Odysseus; he reproaches the gods. Tecmessa, Ajax's concubine, comes from the tent with the boy Eurysaces and lays the child on his father's body. Agamemnon and Menelaus would deny him burial — a refusal the Sophoclean Ajax would two centuries later turn into its great moral problem — but Odysseus, in a turn that Quintus paints as conscience rather than craft, speaks for the rites. The body is washed. The pyre is built. The host buries Ajax in a coffin rather than burning him — Quintus follows the older epic tradition that suicides were not given to the flame. The book closes with Teucer raising the barrow, the captives keening, the camp diminished by another tower of itself. The arms of Achilles are now Odysseus's; he will wear them at the sack.

Analysis

The trial Quintus inherits

The judgement of the arms is older than any surviving text. The lost Aethiopis placed it after Achilles's death; the lost Little Iliad of Lesches built its whole first movement around it; Pindar (Nemean 7, Nemean 8) condemned the verdict in his own voice as Greek dishonesty crushing Telamonian honour; Sophocles's Ajax is the great surviving dramatic treatment. Quintus is consciously the last entry in a thousand-year tradition. What he does — and the choice is striking — is stage the trial as a formal agōn of two speeches before a jury, in the manner of Athenian forensic oratory. This is anachronism with a point: Quintus is reading the death of Ajax as a courtroom defeat, the moment where the rhetorical world of the polis overtakes the warrior world of the Iliad. The Telamonian Ajax loses because oratory has been invented.

The Trojan jury

Quintus's strangest innovation is the composition of the jury. The Greek captains do not vote among themselves. Captive Trojan women — slaves, the bereaved, the wives of the men these heroes killed — are called to judge "which of the two had hurt Troy more." Hera arranges this through them; their voices give the prize to Odysseus, on the grounds that they fear his cunning more than Ajax's strength. The detail comes from a scholion on Aristophanes Knights and from late mythography; Quintus may have invented its full staging. It is mordant. The men who killed their husbands will now choose between them, and they choose the more dangerous. The Iliadic warrior-economy of face-to-face combat is here judged from the underside it leaves behind.

Ajax's speech, Odysseus's speech

Quintus gives Ajax the better material and the worse delivery. Every claim Ajax makes is Iliadically true: he did hold the line at the ships in Iliad 15; he did duel Hector to a draw in Iliad 7; he is Achilles's cousin by Telamon-and-Peleus. His failure is rhetorical. He cannot organise the truth into shape; he sneers when he should persuade; he ends on a snarl. Odysseus's speech is shorter, smoother, and economical with the truth. He does not deny Ajax's strength; he reorganises it into a subordinate category and elevates his own counsel above it. The contrast is what Quintus wants: in this new world a true claim badly made loses to a half-true claim well made. The verdict is unjust by the older code and just by the newer one. The whole of Greek tragedy will be written in this gap.

Athena's grudge

Quintus's Athena is not Sophocles's mocking goddess; she is colder. The Iliad's Ajax once refused her help in the field, choosing to fight without her — Quintus puts this old refusal at the root of the madness she sends. Her revenge is theological as well as personal: she punishes the warrior who would not be helped. The detail matters because it locates Ajax's destruction not only in the judgement (which men gave) but in the religious posture of his life (which the goddess remembered). Quintus's Ajax is destroyed by his own ferocious integrity twice over — first by his refusal to flatter the host, then by his refusal, long before, to accept divine help.

The cattle-slaughter and the suicide

The madness sequence is one of Quintus's set-pieces. The cloud Athena throws on Ajax's eyes lets him see the host's flocks as the host themselves; he kills sheep believing them men, drags a bell-wether by the horns believing it Odysseus, harangues a tethered ram he takes for Agamemnon. Way's late-Victorian English gives this an almost grotesque sublimity — "and he smote, and slew, and shouted, knowing not." The dawn-recovery scene that follows is the deeper cut: a hero whose entire identity is the dignity of his strength wakes to find he has used it on livestock. The suicide is therefore not a defeat of strength; it is the only act of strength available to a man who has been emptied of meaning. He sets Hector's sword — the gift exchanged in the Iliad 7 duel — point upward in the earth and falls on it. The cycle's two great single-combat opponents kill each other after both are dead.

The burial dispute, and Odysseus's turn

The dispute about whether Ajax should be buried is the kernel of Sophocles's Ajax, written some five centuries before Quintus. Sophocles gives the central reversal to Odysseus, who argues against Agamemnon and Menelaus for the rites. Quintus preserves this. The man whose tongue destroyed Ajax in the morning saves his honour in the evening. It is one of Quintus's quieter ethical moves: he refuses the simple reading that would make Odysseus a villain. The Posthomerica's Odysseus is the same instrument that the Aethiopis knew and that the Odyssey will turn back into a hero — the man whose mind is bigger than any single virtue and who is therefore capable of both the small treachery and the large justice.

Way's blank verse and the dignity of suicide

A.S. Way's translation rises here. The death-scene in his 1913 English has the slow King-James cadence of formal liturgy; he avoids the trap of Victorian moralising and gives the suicide its weight. The line "he plunged the steel into his mighty heart" is not great verse, but it is the right register — flat, factual, the action of a man whose words are done. Quintus's own Greek is dense with formulaic patches around the death; Way slows them into something close to elegy. It is a moment where the translation rescues the original.

What to watch for

• Book 6 introduces Eurypylus, the new Trojan champion who fills the gap Hector left.
• Teucer goes home to Salamis after the war; his father Telamon will banish him for failing to bring Ajax's body back. Sophocles's Teucer (lost) treated this.
• The arms Odysseus wins here are the arms he will be wearing in the cycle's most visible portrayal of him — but Odyssey 11 says Ajax's shade in the underworld will not speak to him. Quintus has set up that silence.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Every element of Ajax's defeat is laid in earlier books. The arms in dispute are the arms Hephaestus forged in Iliad 18 at Thetis's prayer; Patroclus wore them as Achilles's substitute in Iliad 16 and lost them to Hector; Achilles wore them through the killing of Hector in Iliad 22; the body in them was fought over in Posthomerica 3 with Ajax himself as the chief defender. The sword Ajax falls on is the sword Hector gave him in the Iliad 7 duel-exchange, when the two champions parted alive and exchanged tokens "that they might say in time to come, the two men strove and yet parted in love." The Iliadic token of friendship becomes the suicide-instrument. Athena's anger reaches back to a moment outside the Iliad's frame but inside its world — Ajax's old refusal to be helped by her in battle, a refusal Quintus inherits from the Aethiopis tradition. Odysseus's rhetorical victory replays the Iliadic embassies that already showed his tongue as the army's instrument (Iliad 1's containment of Achilles's quarrel; Iliad 9's persuasion failing on Achilles; Iliad 19's mustering of the army to fight again). The Iliad's contrast of speech and strength, never decided, is decided here.

Forward echoes

The Odyssey carries this book's silence with it. Odyssey 11.541-565, the Nekyia, is the cycle's most charged forward echo: when Odysseus tries to speak to Ajax's shade in the underworld, the shade turns away in silence and walks off into the dark with the other dead. Quintus has constructed this book to make that silence audible. The arms Odysseus wins here are still his when the cycle's later texts pick him up — though by Sophocles's Philoctetes and by the Little Iliad tradition Neoptolemus is given them once he arrives in Posthomerica 7, since they were his father's; Quintus seems to leave the ambiguity. The Trojan-captive jury seeds the cycle's later concern with captive women as moral witnesses — Andromache's bitter prophecy in Aeneid 3, the slaughtered Polyxena of Posthomerica 14, the chorus of Trojan widows in the Posthomerica's sack-book. The burial dispute that Odysseus settles will be replayed in Aeneid 11 over the body of Pallas (with full rites granted) and again, terribly, at the close of the Aeneid, where Aeneas refuses Turnus the mercy Odysseus here gave Ajax — the same ethical question, the opposite answer. Sophocles's Ajax is the great middle term between this book and the Aeneid's last lines: the question of whether an enemy's body deserves rites is one of the cycle's deepest threads, and this book is where it first becomes a problem. Teucer's exile by Telamon — set up here, narrated in the lost Nostoi and in Sophocles — is the cycle's quietest nostos-failure: a man who fought ten years at Troy and is forbidden his home for surviving his brother.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Ajax Greater — claims the arms with the speech of strength; loses; struck mad; slaughters the flocks; falls on Hector's sword at dawn
• Odysseus — claims the arms with the speech of counsel; wins; later argues for Ajax's burial against the Atridae
• Thetis — announces the contest at the assembly; lays out Hephaestus's panoply
• Athena — sends the madness; her old grievance against Ajax pays itself out
• Hera — moves the Trojan captive jury to vote against Ajax
• Agamemnon — presides over the judgement; would deny Ajax burial; overruled
• Menelaus — seconds Agamemnon in denying the rites; accepts the reversal

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — the dead man whose armour is the prize; his cousin Ajax dies for failing to win it
• Hector — gave Ajax the sword in the Iliad 7 duel-exchange; the sword is now what kills him
• Hephaestus — forged the arms in dispute; the work of his hand becomes the wedge that cuts the army
• Patroclus — wore these arms when Hector killed him; the long history of the panoply is the contest's silent third party
• Neoptolemus — the rightful heir to his father's armour, not yet arrived; Book 7 will bring him
• Teucer — Ajax's half-brother (note: distinct from Ajax the Lesser) — finds the body, raises the barrow, will be exiled by Telamon for surviving
• Eurypylus — the next Trojan champion; arrives in Book 6 into the gap Ajax's death now widens

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.