Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ajax.
The gallery
Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game (Vatican Amphora, Side A)
Exekias, c. 540-530 BC
Signed by the great Athenian potter-painter Exekias, this Attic black-figure belly amphora carries on Side A the most celebrated image of Ajax in all of ancient art: the two foremost Greek warriors of the Trojan War, Achilles at left and Ajax (Aias) the son of Telamon at right, lean over a low table absorbed in a quiet game of dice, spears still in hand and shields propped behind them. Tiny inscriptions name the heroes and even record their throws, while the helmeted Achilles calls 'four' and the bareheaded Ajax answers 'three.' Dated to about 540-530 BC, the scene fuses stillness and latent menace, a private moment of camaraderie shadowed by the deaths that await both men. The vase was found at Vulci in Etruria and is preserved in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco of the Vatican Museums (inv. 16757).
Ajax Carrying the Dead Achilles (Black-figure Amphora, Side A)
Antimenes Painter, c. 520-510 BC
On the principal face of this Attic black-figure amphora, Ajax the Great strides forward beneath the limp, fully armed body of Achilles, whom he hoists across his shoulders to rescue the fallen hero's corpse from the Trojan battlefield. The rescue of Achilles' body, a deed that Ajax shared with Odysseus, was a favorite subject of Archaic vase painters because it dramatized Ajax's role as the bulwark of the Greek army. Attributed to the Antimenes Painter and dated to about 520-510 BC, the vessel renders the strain of the burden in the bent legs and lowered head of Ajax. It is held in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (inv. 48.17).
The Suicide of Ajax (Boulogne Amphora)
Exekias, c. 540 BC
In one of the most psychologically charged scenes of Greek vase painting, Exekias shows Ajax not in the act of dying but in the lonely preparation for it: the hero kneels in concentration, planting his sword upright in a mound of earth so that he may fall upon it. Driven mad with shame after the arms of the dead Achilles were awarded to Odysseus rather than to him, Ajax here fixes the blade with grim deliberation, his armor and shield set aside beside the date palm that frames the field. Painted about 540 BC on an Attic black-figure amphora, this image rejects the gore of the death itself in favor of the terrible quiet that precedes it. The vase is preserved in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Boulogne-sur-Mer (inv. 558).
Sorrowful Ajax
Asmus Jacob Carstens, c. 1791
The German Neoclassical draftsman Asmus Jacob Carstens portrays Ajax the Great in the depths of his despair, seated and brooding after losing the contest for Achilles' armor to Odysseus, the prelude to the madness and suicide that end his story. Carstens, who built his art on the heroic vocabulary of antiquity and admired Greek vase painting and ancient sculpture, isolates the monumental figure to concentrate on inward suffering rather than outward action. Executed about 1791, the drawing translates the tragic Ajax of Sophocles into the austere, sculptural line of late eighteenth-century classicism.
On screen
Troy
Wolfgang Petersen
Petersen's Ajax is the towering bulwark of the Greek camp — Telamon's son as pure force, before the quarrel over Achilles' arms that the film leaves offstage.
Helen of Troy
Robert Wise
Wise's epic keeps Great Ajax among the Greek champions at the wall — the shield of the Achaeans in CinemaScope bronze.
The Trojan Horse
Giorgio Ferroni
Ferroni's peplum keeps Ajax among the warriors who take Troy — the Telamonian giant in the Italian sword-and-sandal cycle of the war.
In music & on stage
In play
Ajax
Sophocles
Sophocles' tragedy of the arms contest and the hero's suicide — madness, shame and the burial quarrel that made Great Ajax a cornerstone of Western drama.
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's Troy play gives Ajax the loud, thick-witted champion — the bulwark as comic foil before the war's bitter end.