A Soldier's Play

Sophocles' Ajax and the moral injury of war

Ajax carries the body of Achilles off the field of battle. Note the hero’s strong, upright stance in contrast to the limp, dangling feet and hair of his dead comrade.

Please note that this post focuses on mental illness and suicide, both in ancient stories and among American combat veterans.

I once had the remarkable experience of reading Greek tragedy with a group of clinical psychiatrists. They taught me that as strange as these plays are, with their vengeful gods and bloody-minded mortals, they are not disconnected from the reality of psychiatric illness. As we read one bleak story after another, they nodded in recognition: there were the wounds that create the narcissist parent, there the personality warped by constant pain or grief; there was the father who could never be pleased; and there, above all, was generational trauma in the guise of a family curse stemming from an ancestor’s crime.

When I was preparing to write about Ajax, I remembered that another clinical psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, gained insight into his patients’ illness from his reading of the Iliad. In the early 1980s, Dr. Shay was working at a VA clinic in Boston. His patients were combat veterans of the Vietnam War, all of them diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. By chance, Shay had read all of Homer, and as he listened to his patients’ stories, he began to see undeniable connections to their experience and the Iliad. The eventual outcome was a groundbreaking book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Here’s an excerpt from the article that seeded his book.

Vietnam Veterans with severe post-traumatic stress disorder often report the following combat experiences: a leader’s betrayal of “what’s right,” lost responsiveness to claims outside a tiny circle of combat-proven comrades, grief and guilt for a dead special comrade, lust for revenge, renunciation of homecoming, feeling “already dead,” going berserk, dishonoring the enemy, and atrocities. These elements are all in Homer’s Iliad account of Achilles, allowing the reader to witness them as they happen, so to speak.

Dr. Shay has also written about Sophocles’ Ajax. The hero has suffered, in Shay’s words, an undoing of character through moral injury, a term he coined. Moral injury in combat veterans begins with the “betrayal of what’s right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation.” He goes on to say:

How does Moral Injury, as I have defined it, change someone? It deteriorates their character; their ideals, ambitions and attachments begin to change and shrink. Both flavors of moral injury destroy the capacity for trust. When social trust is destroyed, it is replaced by the settled expectancy of harm, exploitation, and humiliation from others. With this expectancy, there are few options: strike first, withdraw and isolate oneself from others, or create deceptions, distractions, false identities to forestall what is expected.*

Ajax moves in exactly this trajectory from the moment of betrayal to the hero’s loss of social trust, and, in Shay’s powerful and chilling words, “the settled expectancy of harm, exploitation, and humiliation from others.”

As the play opens, Troy hasn’t yet fallen, but it will. Ten years of siege warfare have caused the deaths of countless men on both sides, and just days before, Achilles has been killed in battle. He was the greatest of those who came from all over the Greek world to sack the kingdom. Ajax was second only to Achilles in battle. He far exceeded him in dependability — Achilles sulks in his tent for most of the Iliad — but they were not rivals.

What were they doing at Troy for so long? The war was an adventure of revenge, a.k.a. righting a perceived wrong. The Trojan prince Paris had sailed to Sparta and visited the court of King Menelaos and his queen Helen. Whether the most beautiful woman in the world jumped into Paris’ arms or was pushed onto his boat by Aphrodite is uncertain, and it doesn’t matter. To be stripped of a prize, especially one like Helen, is a crime and a betrayal of a host’s trust. No punishment could be too harsh.

Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon became the commanders in chief of the expedition to bring Helen home. They enlisted all the kings and chiefs of the Hellenic world, most of whom had been her suitors.

The combined armies will loot Troy’s riches, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and sail home to their various kingdoms and wives, not all of whom are happy to see them. Mind you, the Trojans had plenty of chances to hand Helen back, but they chose not to.

The Iliad is not a glorification of war, and it never minimizes the price of revenge or glory. Neither does Greek tragedy. Ajax is also a drama of revenge for being deprived of a rare and precious object — the dead Achilles’ armor, this time — but it’s more than that. Ajax lays bare the the Homeric heroes’ ethical code: death before dishonor, no matter who will suffer, no matter whose death it may be: enemy, stranger, loved one, oneself. Destruction follows the Homeric hero like a faithful dog.

In tragedy as in the Iliad, revenge always ends in disaster for everyone involved – except, of course, for the gods. They love revenge. They encourage it or punish it, depending on whose side they’re on. When offended, they destroy humans for even the most accidental of insults, just to let everyone know who’s got the power, as if that message needed reinforcing. Then they go back to Olympus and companionably enjoy their nectar and ambrosia, while, as Homer tells us, “laughter unquenchable” rings through the halls.

Sophocles’ audience knew the Iliad and the Odyssey and all the surrounding tales now lost to us without needing instruction. To be a Hellene – what Greeks called themselves – was to have grown up with the tragic songs of Troy, and Odysseus’s ingenious victories. And so they knew Ajax, the soundest of men. His epithet in the Iliad was ‘the bulwark of the Achaeans’ (the Homeric name for what we call the combined Greek forces).

He carries a huge, heavy shield that only he can lift, eight ox hides thick. He saves wounded comrades by covering them with that shield and bringing them to safety. When Achilles was killed by the Trojan archer Paris, it is Ajax who carries his body off the field of battle. Ajax once saved Odysseus, also a character in our play. No one was as clever as Odysseus, but Ajax was recognized as the greater warrior by far.

A Homeric hero’s armor was more than protection, and never standard issue. The warriors of the Iliad wore distinctive, identifying armor made especially for them or handed down from their fathers. When a hero died in battle, his killer tried to strip the armor from the body and take it home as a trophy to hang in his hall. The dead warrior’s allies tried just as hard to keep that from happening. Preventing the enemy from stripping the armor off a fallen comrade was second in importance only to keeping the corpse from being despoiled.

The Iliad ends before the death of Achilles. Sophocles’ play picks up after he’s been killed. Here’s what the original audience knew already.

Odysseus wrested Achilles’ spectacular armor from enemy hands while Ajax carried his corpse from the field. The god Hephaestus had made it especially for Achilles at the request of his divine mother Thetis. The description of the shield, complete with tiny moving figures showing scenes of wartime and peace, is one of the most famous passages in the Iliad.

Now, the armor of a fallen warrior would customarily go to his son, or be given back to his father. In this case, however, that custom was not observed; we aren’t told why. Ajax assumes that it will go to him, the greatest warrior now that Achilles is dead. Instead, the Greek generals, Agamemnon and his brother Menelaos, agree that the armor should go to Odysseus.

The legends vary – some say that Agamemnon and Menelaos plotted with Odysseus, and some say that Odysseus rigged the vote. No one familiar with Homer would be surprised either way. Agamemnon is a terrible person and a worse commander; Menelaos does whatever his brother says; and Odysseus is a code of ethics unto himself. (In the Odyssey, when the hero visits the Underworld, the shade of Ajax refuses to speak to him.)

Reasonable assumption or no, when Ajax finds out that he won’t be getting the armor, reason flees him. To deprive a Greek hero of what he thinks is his due is as great an insult as an attempted assassination. To be treated in this way by one’s allies is nothing short of betrayal, and betrayal is at the broken heart of this play.

The perpetrators – Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Odysseus – have to die. They’ve made themselves Ajax’s enemy, and he will not let them think they can get away with that. So he decides to kill those who he thinks betrayed and disrespected him. At least, he thinks he has been betrayed; but when we are hurt, angry, and exhausted, whatever we think is our truth.

As he approaches the tents of his enemies by night, the goddess Athena drives him mad. Odysseus is her favorite human. She won’t let him be harmed or deprived of Achilles’ armor. What’s more, Ajax had once told her in battle that he didn’t need her help; she should assist someone who needed it. Greek gods are even touchier than Greek heroes, if that’s possible, and they prefer their revenge cold. She wants to shame Ajax, and make an example of him.

Everything I’ve told you up to this point has taken place before the play begins.

As Ajax opens, the Athenian audience sees an actor dressed as their patron goddess Athena. She stands on a raised platform above the stage floor on what was called the god walk. She is in Ajax’s encampment, although he is offstage in his tent, and we will hear him before we see him. Athena’s favorite, Odysseus, enters cautiously. Athena calls to him. He can’t see her, only hear her. She teasingly asks him what he’s hunting, as if she doesn’t know.

He tells her that something terrible happened in the night: a man attacked the army’s common herds, butchered them where they stood, killed the stockman, and left leading some animals still alive. Odysseus has come to see if the rumor is true, that it was Ajax who committed this savagery, for he was seen running through camp with a bloody sword.

Athena tells Odysseus that the rumor is true, and what’s more, that she’s responsible. She knew (we don’t know how) that Ajax planned to kill Odysseus and the generals at night, alone. Just as he reached their encampment, she drove him mad, so that he went into the pen where the livestock were penned, thinking that they were his former comrades. She appeared to him, urging him on. Cheered by this divine support, he dragged more animals to his tent for further torment, thinking in his madness that they were the chiefs who had betrayed him.

She calls to Ajax, still offstage, to come out of his tent, reminding him that she is his ally. Now we see him for the first time. He’s covered in blood, possibly carrying a whip. Athena congratulates him and cheers him on. The depth of Ajax’s delusion is terrible. The goddess asks, Did you bathe your sword in the blood of the Greeks? Are the sons of Atreus (Menelaos and Agamemnon) dead? Do you have Odysseus? Ajax answers her questions joyfully: yes, yes, yes — but Odysseus isn’t dead yet. Oh, please don’t torture him! she says. Ajax regrets that he must. Oh well, if it makes you happy, go ahead.

Aristotle famously wrote that tragedy should evoke feelings of compassion and horror (often mistranslated as ‘pity and fear’). This scene alone has that effect on me. I’ve never seen Ajax performed — it’s seldom done — but somehow I am able to hear Athena’s laughter as if I were standing in the wings.

Athena’s beloved Odysseus doesn’t share her dreadful delight. She’s puzzled that he has shrunk back in horror. Why doesn’t he want to laugh at the man who planned to kill him, who thinks he’s killing him at this moment? Is he afraid?

Odysseus responds:

Even though he hates me, all the same

I feel compassion for him. Seeing him

Chained to a dreadful delusion, I know

It could just as easily be me.

For I see that all who live are merely

Phantoms and flickering shadows.

This is not the Odysseus we know.

It seems likely that those watching the play in mid-5th century BC would have felt some compassion for Ajax as well. Like Sophocles himself, many were combat veterans. Who better to know that war can change even the steadiest of men? War makes it impossible, sometimes, to do anything but fight. Their wartime skills of hypervigilance and speedy reaction to perceived threats can’t be shut off. Something like this is what happens to Ajax.

As the drama unfolds, we will be asked to feel yet more compassion for Ajax; but as we will see, Sophocles doesn’t make it easy for us to feel that way. As for the surprisingly compassionate Odysseus: his famous talent for manipulating the emotions of others will for once be put to honorable use.

In my next post, we’ll meet the mother of Ajax’s child, Tecmessa; the chorus of soldiers who sailed with Ajax from Salamis and fought under his command; and his small son. Ajax so closely identifies himself with his armor that he named the boy Eurysakes, ‘broad shield.’ Then we’ll see Ajax brought back to his senses so that he see what he’s done — the final touch of Athena’s punishment.

Find out more about Dr. Shay’s important work: The Shay Moral Injury Center | Jonathan Shay] .