THE AIAS OF SOPHOKLES

INTRODUCTION

The Aias of Sophokles is a remarkable and puzzling play. The Aias is the only extant Greek tragedy that has a change of scene and onstage violence, and the only one in which the Khoros exits before the final exodus. Furthermore, the hero kills himself at verse 865 with another 550 verses remaining in the play. This fact has given rise to a fierce debate among scholars as to the merit and nature of the construction of the play. Some justify the last half of the play as part of the dramatist’s purpose in canonizing Aias a cult hero. Others compare the debate with that in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Still others claim that Sophokles sought merely to lengthen his play and thereby dissipated the tragic tension and bored his audience. These generally label the Aias a "diptych" and lament Sophokles’ lapse of taste. None can deny that Sophokles succeeded in making us identify with a man whose actions should offend our sense of propriety. We cannot help being struck by the greatness of Aias despite the fact that he has acted meanly. Despite objections to the contrary, the last 550 lines are very engaging and beautiful, and Aias, even in death, remains a commanding presence.

Before considering these problems in greater detail, a few historical notes would seem in order to put these problems in perspective. In the first place, Sophokles was not a beginner at writing plays when he composed the Aias. This is not the product of an immature talent. The earliest production date suggested by scholars for the Aias is 450. Sophokles was by this time 46 years old, and had won his first victory at the City Dionysia in 468. Moreover, Sophokles did not compose his tragedies with undue haste. He averaged only one trilogy every two years, and of the thirty-one trilogies he wrote, eighteen were awarded first place. He never placed third. His contemporaries held his work in high esteem, including his work on this play.

A reassessment of Twentieth Century critics’ judgements seems in order. It is my actor’s bias that the single overriding criterion should be stageworthiness. My personal experience in production has demonstrated, closet-reading objections to the contrary notwithstanding, that The Aias is stageworthy.

I would further posit the not-too-daring notion that the Greeks were more creative and pragmatic in the 5^th C than the Hellenes. Nothing so stifles creativity as "rules." Goethe’s assertion that true genius lies in its ability to create within constriction would not be supported by the Hellenes who ceased creating dramatic poetry once they carved their performance space in stone. It is not a far-fetched assumption to say that the Greeks preserved especially those plays that required a beautiful skene house since they had built one. If that is the case, then the preservation of The Aias is all the more remarkable and speaks very highly of the regard in which it must have been held.

The worship of Aias as a cult-hero was already established. Aeschylus had earlier addressed himself to the Aias myth in a trilogy, which is sadly lost. There are several versions of the myth, the least sympathetic of which Sophokles chose as his point of departure. According to this version, the arms of Achilles, after his death, were claimed both by Aias and by Odysseus and were awarded to the latter. In a jealous rage, Aias attempted to avenge himself by slaughtering the Achaean chieftains in their beds by stealth, but was rendered mad by Athena and slaughtered cattle and sheep instead. Then he committed suicide and was denied normal burial.

Burial rites were very important to the Greeks, and a subject important to Sophokles. Without proper burial, the Greeks believed, a soul could not pass over to the other side and find solace. Sophokles was to use this belief with agonizing poignancy as a theme in his Antigone, produced at most ten years after the Aias. It must have been close to his heart.

Finally, the performance space itself has an important impact on any script. A play intended for the screen is markedly different from one intended for a huge proscenium, is different from one intended for the round etc. Most of what is taught about the ancient Greek stage is based on the remains of Fourth Century Greek buildings. In fact, Sophokles did not write his plays for the stone edifice envisioned by those who have gazed on the foot of the Akropolis. Rush Rehm asserts that the ancients thought of their theatre "more as a space than as a building." Modern scholars like David Wiles and Oliver Taplin are convinced that no permanent skene-house was built until after the Periclean period. An objective reading of The Aias supports that view.

Suppose there were no skene-house at Athens in 450. A large empty space at the foot of the impressive hill where citizens and visitors could congregate would be available for the ritual singing and dancing of the dithyrambs on the second day of the great festival. There would be ample time overnight to erect whatever was required by the five comedies which followed on the third day. Likewise, there would be ample time to make whatever "scenic" changes would be required by the tetralogies presented on the fourth, fifth and sixth days. The Aias needs only a large tent and an open beach. The view from the hillside would take care of the latter, and what could be simpler than erecting a large tent for the former? The scene change, however is another matter. To be visually appropriate for so large a space, the tent must have been a very large affair. A careful examination of Fiechter’s excavations of the site and his reconstruction of the earliest configuration of Dionysus Eleutherea (illustrated above and below) would indicate that there was a sharp drop off of four feet or more on the "upstage" side of the playing area. Surely the Greeks, who were masters of sailing the Mediterranean by this time, could devise a means of efficiently striking a tent and stowing it behind such a four-foot drop-off, out of sight of the theatron. But what of the appearance of Athena? It is significant that she appears only at the beginning of the play. It would not be unreasonable to speculate that, while there was no foundation for a crane-like mechane, there would be ample room for a temporary structure behind the tent, perhaps involving rigging similar to a large circus tent.. And there would be ample time to strike this rigging out of sight of the theatron behind the tent during the scenes following Athena’s departure.

The play opens outside Aias’ tent, with Athena gloating over what she has done to Aias. Odysseus is searching for him, sword in hand, yet baffled at his motives for so wildly assaulting the flocks. Athena admits that she "held his hand in check, by casting on his eyes/ Unnatural visions, obsessions joyful and past healing," and offers to show Odysseus his would-be assassin "and his mad sickness, so you/Can broadcast this unseemly news/ Up and down the barracks of the Greeks." Odysseus is aghast at the idea, preferring that Aias remain inside, but the goddess literally orders him to remain and look on his enemy, and she summons Aias from his tent. Aias emerges praising the goddess who has betrayed him. She taunts the unwitting Aias, questioning him as to the extent of his victories over the Achaean chieftains. In his madness, he modestly asserts that he has triumphed over his enemies and when cruelly questioned about Odysseus, whom he cannot see, boasts with manic pride, Odysseus’ "back will turn a bloody red from the whipping/ I shall give him. Then he dies!" He is indeed a pitiful spectacle. Even Odysseus pities him for "this wretched state, enemy or not:"

Through it all, Athena is an awesome and despicable goddess. Some critics who favor the view that the Aias is a well-unified argument supporting the establishment of Aias, the man, as daimon or cult-hero, claim that it is the will of Athena that provides this unity. In their view, her will is indeed the theme of the play, for while it causes the fall of Aias, it also ensures that he should have honor after death. These critics argue that Odysseus, acting under the influence of Athena and as the agent of her will, returns in the end of the play to vindicate the memory of Aias through an act of divine mercy.

I fail to see the validity of this view. As we have already seen, Odysseus is horrified at the thought of seeing Aias in the first place. It is only after she orders him to, that he sees the pitiful spectacle the goddess had caused. Nowhere in the opening scene does she say or even impoly that it is her will that Aias be forgiven after his death, but rather warns darkly, "Do you see, Odysseus, how great the power of the gods?" When Odysseus argues in favor of the burial of Aias, it is his own argument. Just as he pitied Aias in his blindness in life, so he can show mercy to him in death. Athena states clearly her position that "the gods love the man/ Who lives his life in seemly order…" Agamemnon rightly says of Odysseus’ argument in favor of burial, that it smacks of "instability." And he insists, "Let me say, then this was your doing, not mine." Thus Odysseus is not obeying the will of Athena at all, but his own sense of morality. "For whom shall I toil, if not myself?" he asks.

Still, this whole argument disregards the middle of the play, concentrating as it does on the first 133 lines and the closing 126. Satisfying as it seems on structural grounds, the argument ignores several important structural elements. In the first place, Aias himself only mentions Athena explicitly twice after the first scene. He does not elaborate on her injustice to him either time. It is remarkable that he refrains from any diatribe against the goddess whatever even though he knows that she is responsible for his disgraceful circumstance. Sophokles allows him only one brief invective: "…Zeus’ Gorgon-faced daughter…Hard lady!" Hard indeed. The main thrust of the argument of the middle section of the play is the humiliation and subsequent suffering of the man. On a more general level, the theme of this central section could be said to be acceptance of reversal and suffering. Tekmessa’s utterly beautiful speech in which she tells of her own misfortunes, misfortunes which may be considered as more serious than Aias’, underscores the human necessity to bear reversal. Both Aias and Tekmessa invoke Zeus, not Athena, in this section of the play. Yet this god never shows his face. If this play were truly a "religious" debate on the relative merits of Athena and Zeus, some mention of this theme would certainly have been made of it.

Instead the argument turns to pity. Tekmessa begs Aias to pity her state if he should die; the Khoryphaios echoes her

Superficially, Aias seems to ignore this plea, but on a more profoundly human level, he exercises a sort of clumsy pity by framing his intentions in ambiguous terms. He s thus able to leave, knowing full well what he is going to do, without occasioning an unpleasant and noisy scene. In any case, no one is waxing eloquent about obedience to Athena, or any of the other gods. The argument for structural unity, then, breaks down if we choose Athena as the unifying element.

One unifying factor overlooked by most critics is the theme of pity. Professor Kitto oversimplifies this point by assigning it totally to Odysseus. He notes that from the time of his exit to his re-entrance, he is referred to a half a dozen times. He is thus, "kept prominently before our notice." Six mentions in roughly a thousand lines of verse is hardly sufficient for Odysseus to be "prominent." The theme of pity, however, is almost constantly in our minds. We pity Aias the moment we see him in his madness; we pity him even more when he regains his senses. Aias himself indulges in monumental self-pity:

Tekmessa and the khoros ask Aias for his pity. The thread carries through until at last the argument turns from pity to being moved by honor:

If we were called on to pity Aias at the last, there would be something inherently distasteful in it. Pitying a tragic figure somehow cheapens him if the pity is extreme. It borders on feeling "sorry" for him in a melodramatic sense. It is a great credit to Sophokles’ artistry that our feeling for Aias never become trivial or unmanly. We pity Aias as we do Coriolanus, not as we do Steinbeck’s Lennie.

Is the play, then, a "diptych?" Did Sophokles, as his detractors say, seek to prolong the play and succeed only in boring them? It must be admitted that the concluding 550 lines at least appear on the page anti-climactic, following as they do, the unusual devices of 1) a change of scene and 2) an act of violence onstage. If, as Anouilh so eloquently contends in his Antigone, "argument is kingly, it’s gratuitous," it seems to follow the dramatic action of this play rather weakly. Our emotions should be satisfied with the ritual cleansing the death by suicide of Aias provides.

If the play is indeed a diptych, then it must have two themes. Professor Bowra claims that the two themes were, first, the fall of Aias; and second, the "rehabilitation" of his character after death. This approach certainly describes the play very well, but as A. J. A. Waldock points out, "It would have been a very dull spectator, who, called away from the theatre at the point where the hero dies, had failed to take with him a strong impression that Aias was noble." Aias is indeed noble. We have watched him attain nobility before our eyes. When we first see him, he is the pathetic victim of a maliciously capricious goddess. Next, we see hem lamenting his state as soon as his sanity is restored. As soon as his blindness leaves him, he realizes how humiliating his condition is and instantly craves death rather than live with mockery and indignity. He is rather mean and selfish at this point, wildly moaning, and blustering in his rage. But we see a gradual change come over him and he gathers a moral strength to match his physical strength. Whereas, when we first see him, he is begging the khoros to help him affect his own death, by the end of the scene, he has resolved to do it the most noble way—by killing himself with the same hand that brought about his ruin. When the scene shifts to the beach where Aias will kill himself, the man has changed along with the scenery. His suicide is not a frantic or petulant act of a weak man unable to endure mockery, it is rather the ennobling act of a calm man who has faced his end bravely and without bitterness. If the purpose of the second half of the play is to "rehabilitate" the character of Aias, we could rightly accuse Sophokles of overstating his case. In a sense, however, Aias achieves an Aristotelian tragic recognition after his first mad desire for death, which grows into his composed suicide. If we view the first part of the play as the personal growth of a man into a tragic hero, then the undignified debate between Agamemnon, Menelaos and Odysseus could be viewed as the public growth of his character. This neatly explains the structure, but hardly dispenses with the boredom.

I believe there is another explanation for this unusual structure. Despite Professor Kitto’s assertion that the final scenes are "irrelevant" to a tragedy of character," I believe the final scenes underscore the tragic-heroic character of Aias. If we accept the fact that Aias at his death has achieved tragic proportions, then the possibility of desecrating his corpse becomes a terrifying prospect of universal importance. It is one thing to leave Polynices rotting on a hillside for the good of Thebes. It is quite another to desecrate Aias for no good reason other than spite. Sinning, but also sinned against, as he dies, Aias asks Zeus, to get word to Teukros that

It is a small request nearly denied him. We cannot help being apprehensive when Teukros admonishes Tekmessa: "Go, be quick! Everyone enjoys the chance/To mock his enemy when he lies dead upon the ground." These fears darken when the Koryphaios announces Menelaos’ approach:

Fear becomes outrage as Menelaos unjustly proclaims: "You, sir! Do not touch that corpse/ Nor ready it for burial. Leave it as it is."

This argument, thus, takes on a great dramatic tension. Aias’ fate is out of his hands as it was in the beginning. He is being acted upon by outside forces in death, just as he was when he slaughtered cattle instead of his enemies. Up to and including his death, Aias has been punished in proportion to his flaw. Now his is truly worthy of our pity since this final desecration would be disproportionately harsh and undeserved. There must be great relief when Odysseus, acting almost as a deus ex machina, effects Aias’ proper burial. At issue is not some great moral issue about the value or quality of mercy or even pity. The central concern is not whether a "noble" man should act nobly and bury his enemy, but the specific question of Aias’ burial. As he worked on the translation, Professor Barthelmess was struck by the immediacy of the presence of Aias’ corpse during the entire agon. The physical presence of his corpse in the theatre is impossible to ignore even though it can be in the closet. Aias himself is the unifying factor of the play. His mute presence in death is much greater than a half-dozen references to Odysseus.The final scenes are compelling because we are concerned with the ultimate fate of the hero.

While the Aias remains a remarkable and puzzling play, its very uniqueness is its greatest strength. Carefully analysed, the play is shown to be stageworthy and well crafted. The true critic is one drawn to analysis rather than finding fault. The characterizations--especially Aias and Tekmessa--are superb. If the play is a diptych, it is nonetheless unified by an overriding concern for the central character. Our pity for Aias is deepened by the essential nobility of his character.The play is truly compelling because it's stageworthiness transcends its literary excellence.