[4] Before the age of the Attic dramatists, the Ajax
1
legend received some further developments which were probably unknown to the Cyclic poets. One of these was the enrolment of Ajax among the Aeacidae. The
Iliad bestows the name of
Αἰακίδης
on two persons only,—Peleus, the son, and Achilles, the grandson, of Aeacus. The logographer Pherecydes
2
(
circ. 480 B.C.) made Telamon the son of Actaeus and Glaucè, a daughter of the Aeginetan hero Cychreus,—recognising no tie, except friendship, between Telamon and Peleus. According to another legend, however, both Peleus and Telamon were sons of Aeacus by Endeïs
3
(
Ἐνδηΐς
=
ἔγγαιος
or
ἔγγειος
, from the Doric
δᾶ
=
γῆ
). The cult of Aeacus, son of Zeus, had its chief seat in the island called after his mother, the nymph Aegina. Telamon and Ajax belonged to Salamis. By making Telamon and Peleus brothers, the Aeginetans linked their local hero with the others. This engrafting of Telamon and his son on the Aeacid stock had gained general acceptance before the fifth century B.C. The sculptures of Athena's temple at Aegina date from the period of the Persian wars. On the east pediment Heracles and Telamon were the prominent figures; on the west, Ajax was seen defending the corpse of Achilles. Herodotus
4
says that when the Greeks had resolved, just before the battle of Salamis, ‘to invoke the Aeacidae as allies,’ they called on Ajax and Telamon to come to them from Salamis itself, but sent a ship to Aegina to summon ‘Aeacus and
the other Aeacidae’ (
i.e., Peleus, and his son Achilles; Phocus, and his sons Crisus and Panopeus). The passage has an especial interest as showing that, though Ajax had now been thoroughly adopted into the Aeacid cult of Aegina, this had been done without weakening the immemorial tradition which made Salamis his home.Another addition
5
to the Ajax legend—worthy of notice, since Aeschylus used it—is that which made the hero invulnerable. This was borrowed from the story of Achilles,— which, indeed, influenced at several points the later development of the Ajax-myth: and it served also to connect Ajax with Heracles. In Pindar's fifth Isthmian ode, Heracles, the guest of Telamon at Salamis, prays that his host may have a son, as ‘staunch of frame’ as the hide of the Nemean lion which he himself is wearing
6
. From some such germ grew the story that Ajax had been born before the arrival of Heracles, who wrapped the child in the lion-skin, making him invulnerable, except in one place which the hide had not covered
7
. This legend is unknown to the
Iliad
8
; but in Plato's time it was generally current
9
.
Introduction to Commentary on Sophocles: Ajax. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. 1900.
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Funding provided by National Endowment for the Humanities.