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314
Introduction
ment when he has recovered his reason, and gradually becomes aware of
what he has done. Later in the play his very inner being is revealed in
his long speech to the Chorus composed of his followers. He preserves a
magnificent ambiguity, so that they are comforted, yet there can be no
doubt that the peace he seeks is the peace of death. The poet puts the
finishing touches upon his portrait in Ajax's final speech before his death,
where he calls down curses upon his enemies, but implicit in his words,
here and in the former speech, is the thought that death, evil though it be,
is the only solution for him, the only way whereby he can assume the
responsibility for what he has done.
Critics have argued that the remaining third of the play after Ajax's
death, in which the question at issue is whether or not his body shall receive
ritual burial, does not grow naturally out of what has preceded. In
attempting to meet this criticism, we must not forget that great importance
was attached to the funeral rites among the Greeks, who believed
that only by proper burial would the soul after death be freed from an
eternity of homeless wandering. That the Greeks were preoccupied with
this question is attested by the frequency with which the theme appears
in their dramas. For example, Sophocles has made it central in his Antigone,
In the Ajax, though perhaps the play's total artistic integration
may leave something to be desired, the last part basically coheres with
the earlier sections of the play because only by proper burial can Ajax
as a person be worthily rehabilitated according to the Greek view. The
final scenes of the Ajax are therefore necessary, to save the play from
ending on a note of complete despair, which is never characteristic of true
tragedy.