Characters
- Ajax — loses the arms; maddened; suicides on Hector’s sword
- Eurysaces — young son of Ajax and Tecmessa (Sophocles)
- Hector — former duel-partner; his sword becomes Ajax’s suicide weapon (background)
- Odysseus — wins Achilles’ arms; later advocates Ajax’s burial (Sophocles)
- Pallas — proposes the arms as prize
- People of Crisa — sways the judgment; deludes Ajax (Sophocles)
- Tecmessa — captive wife/concubine of Ajax; pleads in Sophocles
- Teucer — half-brother; fights for burial rights
- Thyestes — Atreidae opposed to Ajax’s burial until persuaded
Places
- Achaean camp at Troy — judgment of the arms; slaughter of the flocks
- Hades — *Odyssey* 11 encounter of shades (forward Homeric witness)
- Hut and shore of Ajax’s contingent — madness aftermath and suicide
- Salamis — Ajax’s home (invoked by chorus)
Themes
Narrative
Thetis set Achilles’ divine arms as the prize for the best of the Achaeans. Ajax son of Telamon and Odysseus competed. In the cyclic and Apollodorean line the Greeks (or Trojan prisoners voting under Athena’s influence) awarded the arms to Odysseus. Ajax, dishonored, went mad with rage. Sophocles shows Athena turning his sight so that he butchers sheep and cattle, believing them Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, and the army. When reason returned, shame crushed him. Despite Tecmessa’s pleas and the chorus of Salaminian sailors, he fixed Hector’s sword—once a guest-gift from the duel—in the earth and fell upon it.
Teucer fought to bury his half-brother against Menelaus’s and Agamemnon’s ban; Odysseus, in Sophocles’ close, argues for burial and softens the Atreidae. The *Little Iliad* begins from this quarrel’s outcome: Odysseus holds the arms; Ajax is dead; Odysseus will next fetch Philoctetes (or, in variant order, Neoptolemus). Homer’s underworld scene confirms the wound: Ajax alone of the great dead will not speak to Odysseus, still angry over the judgment of the arms.