Sophocles' Ajax and the Heroic Values of the Iliad

Abstract

From a careful and persuasive analysis of Sophocles' debt in the Ajax to Homer's picture of Hector and Andromache's farewell in Iliad 6, P. E. Easterling concludes that in the Ajax ‘we have the paradox of an author's distinctive originality finding expression through his reading of another's work’. In what follows I wish to show that the validity of this statement extends to an aspect of the play which is touched upon by Easterling (indeed in an illuminating way), but which I would like to single out for special attention: the preoccupation with the problem of what constitutes noble action, or, in the play's own terminology, what is the nature of εὐγένεια.