[2] The whole passage
1
evidently presupposes some well-known work or works in which the contest for the arms had been related more at length. The scholiast says that ‘the story comes from the Cyclic poets
2
.’ There are two poems, and two only, which are known to have contained that story. One is the
Aethiopis, by Arctînus of Miletus, which may be placed about
776 B.C. The other is the
Little Iliad, which in later antiquity was commonly (though not universally) ascribed to Lesches
3
, of Pyrrha, near Mitylene, and of which the approximate date is
700 B.C.
In the
Aethiopis, which contained the death of Achilles, Ajax played a foremost part in rescuing the corpse from the Trojans— an episode imitated from the fight over the body of Patroclus in the
Iliad. As to the manner in which Arctînus conceived the contest for the arms, only two details are known. (1) After the award, Podaleirius—the physician, skilled in diagnosis of obscure ailments, as his brother Machaon was the great surgeon—perceived a fierce light in the eyes of Ajax, and a weight upon his spirit, which were the precursors of the end:—
ὅς ῥα καὶ Αἴαντος πρῶτος μάθε χωομένοιο ὄμματά τ’ ἀστράπτοντα βαρυνόμενόν τε νόημα
4
. (2) Arctînus described Ajax as killing himself ‘about dawn
5
’— doubtless on the morning after the award. There is no reason to think that Arctînus mentioned that delusion of Ajax by Athena which caused his slaughter of the cattle. The scanty evidence rather suggests that the rage in the hero's soul was not expressed in any deed of violence, but that he passed in seclusion, perhaps within his tent, the few hours of darkness between his defeat and his death
6
. It is highly probable that the older and simpler form of the Ajax-myth knew nothing of his insane onslaught on the cattle, by which Athena averted his vengeance from the Greek chiefs. The motive of his suicide, in this older version, seems to have been simply resentment at the award— not that feeling combined with a sense of disgrace incurred by his own action. Such is certainly the impression given by the passage in the
Odyssey
7
. It is given also by Pindar, when he says, ‘The Danaoi paid court to Odysseus by secret votes, and Ajax, robbed of the golden arms, wrestled with death
8
.’ Pindar agrees with Arctînus in saying that Ajax died about dawn—a coincidence which can hardly be accidental
9
.There is another point, however, in which it seems probable that they diverged. According to Pindar, the Greek chiefs were the judges in the contest for the arms. This account, which Sophocles follows, is fitted to win sympathy for Ajax, who appears as a victim of jealousy and of ingratitude on the part of men who had the best reason to know that he was second only to Achilles. But the
Odyssey testifies to that other version according to which the judges were ‘the children of the Trojans and Pallas Athena.’ The words of the scholiast
10
there deserve attention:—‘The story is from the Cyclic poets. Agamemnon, on his guard against seeming to favour either of the competitors for the arms of Achilles, brought some Trojan prisoners, and asked them by which of the two heroes they had been more injured,’ etc. There is no reason to doubt that the scholiast knew of this account as given in some poem (or poems) of the Epic Cycle. There is no warrant for assuming that he invented this statement to explain the verse on which he was commenting. But the
Aethiopis and the
Little Iliad are, so far as we know, the only Cyclic poems to which his allusion could refer. And in the
Little Iliad the award of the arms was decided, not by Trojan prisoners in the Greek camp, but (as will be seen presently) by Trojan opinion reported from Troy itself. Presumably, then, it was in the
Aethiopis that the Trojan prisoners acted as judges. Since that poem dated from the earlier part of the eighth century (
circ. 776 B.C.), the verse in the Nekyia of the
Odyssey,
παῖδες δὲ Τρώων δίκασαν καὶ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη
, may have been founded upon it. The Nekyia is, in great part, older, probably, than 800 B.C., but unquestionably received some additions in the course of the eighth and seventh centuries. It is not necessary, however, to suppose that the Nekyia was here indebted to the
Aethiopis. Both may have used some older source now unknown. When the Homeric poet associates ‘Pallas Athena’ with the Trojan judges, he need not be understood as conceiving that she actually presided over the award,—as in the
Eumenides she presides at the first session of the Areiopagus,—but merely that she influenced the minds of the arbiters. Introduction to Commentary on Sophocles: Ajax. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. 1900.
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