Volu m e I - Purdue University Calumet

Once he tired of the slaughter, he tied up the surviving
Sheep and cows and dragged them back to his camp
As if he had captured men, not horned beasts.
Now he is torturing them, tied up in his tent.
I will show you the state of his sickness
So you will tell everything to your fellow Greeks.
Be strong; stay and see him for yourself.
You’ve nothing to fear; I’ll avert his eyes--
He will never know that you are here (Sophocles 6).
Athena has physically blinded Ajax to the world around him and has made him go mad entirely. Ajax is
mad to the point of believing that the Greek cattle are in fact his fellow Greek soldiers and even his highest
commanders. Athena later explains to Odysseus that gods can do what they wish, when they wish,
including staying a mortal’s eyes to the point of mental mania and physical blindness to the world around
him. Athena had previously explained that this is exactly what she had done to Ajax.
In the passage above, Athena says that Odysseus has nothing to fear in Ajax, because she has blinded him
to the point of not being able to see Odysseus. However, Ajax is indeed dangerous enough that Athena had
to stay his eyes in order that he cannot see the true form of the cattle, but rather see them as his fellow
Greeks. Sophocles chose to portray the need of changing the faculties of Ajax to the point of the physical
rather than the mental. The physical transformation that Sophocles forces on his character requires that he
compensate with changing his mental faculties as well, thus making him mad once he figures out that he was
physically blind.
Once Ajax is made aware of what exactly he has done, and maybe even exactly why he has done it, he
becomes almost remorseful to point that he called himself a “pitiable man” (Sophocles 20). Only a few lines
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