Cedric Whitman

Sophocles

His slight to Athena was not hybris, but it symbolizes the point very nearly. Ajax was, and knew himself to be, inwardly stronger than all the external forces which might either help or threaten to destroy him. He could trust himself to be noble. But to the small people of the chorus, such self-sufficiency looks like hybris. They naturally fear such an attitude, for they do not trust their inner selves, and in defense they ally themselves with those elements in the world which try to make men less self-sufficient, and they term those elements 'the gods.'

The danger of hybris was always associated with greatness in the common mind, but there are kinds and degrees. Sophocles seems not to have interested himself in the simple folly of Croesus, nor in the sheer malign criminality of Clytemnestra, on whom vengeance was bound to fall. It was the answer of an older generation that behind every great man's fall lay the anger of some external god. Sophocles probed into the evil which comes of good, and it is in this category that the so-called hybris of Ajax belongs. Ajax was 'the greatest single hero of the Greeks who came to Troy, except Achilles,' and in that very greatness lay the necessity to behave as he did. His whole relationship with Athena illustrates merely the standard which Ajax held higher than safety. This was the really divine, demonic force at work. The heroic assumption means precisely this—the possession of a standard which becomes a kind of fatal necessity that drives toward self-destruction. It is this which made Achilles 'godlike' to Homer and which prompted the Ajax of Sophocles. The long-continued Wrath of Achilles might by some be called hybris, but it is also a defense of arete. It seems excessive and culpable only if one's standard is life and common sense; if one's standard is arete, it is an inevitable course. The true Greek hero raises the standard of his own excellence so high that he is no longer appropriate to life.

It was with no little insight that Professor Reinhardt fixed upon the isolation of the protagonist as the key to Sophoclean tragedy. But this isolation is not due to the gap between man and the gods. It is not because of the hero's helplessness and blindness that he cannot 'yield' to the world order. Rather it is his own clear vision which isolates the hero and creates a gap between him and the rest of humanity. His standard, his vision of himself, brings him near to the gods—near, and even into conflict with them. Indeed he is isolated, for he stands near the center of the world order, and far from the comrades who try to advise or comfort him. In Homer, Achilles' intimacy with the gods and their participation in his life constitute a kind of ratification and eternization of his character. In Sophoclean tragedy the two distinctive features of Hellenic heroism merge into one: the attendant deity becomes a symbol of the indomitable standard; or, perhaps better, the standard, too high for life, becomes an inner god. The result is a colossal tragic unity, whose essential characteristic is the greatness of man.

This, and no other, is the force which drives Ajax. It is this divinity he fosters when he spurns Athena. Once the heroic way is chosen, there can be no turning back, no yielding. In fact, for Ajax to take the chorus' advice, yield, stay in his tent and save himself, would have been the uttermost betrayal of his own best ideal and the most abysmal depth of moral defeat.