Aias

Sophocles

• Éditeur: Harper Perennial
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062132154
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Arte dramático antiguo y clásico

AIAS, translated by award-winning poet James Scully, is one of Sophocles's seven surviving works, and one of the most celebrated plays of ancient Athens.

Still powerful and remarkably timely thousands of years after its creation, Aias is the moving story of a soldier returning home victorious from the Trojan War, only to discover he has lost his life's purpose. This is Sophocles, vibrant and alive, for a new generation.

AIAS

INTRODUCTION

ACHILLES IS DEAD

Achilles is dead. Aias, the next greatest warrior, should inherit his armor, but Agamemnon and Menelaos award it to Odysseus. Enraged, Aias sets out to kill them, but Athena deludes him into slaughtering the war spoil of the Greek army: defenseless sheep, goats, oxen, and herdsmen. When Aias realizes what he has done, his shame is irremediable. He does then what no Greek hero ever does. He kills himself.

Heroic Aias epitomizes the aristocratic ethos of the Homeric world. Sophocles’ play, however, was conceived four hundred to five hundred years after Homer’s time, in the challenged democratic ethos of fifth-century BCE Athens. To Athenians, Aias’s life was legendary. Roughly 10 percent of the population revered him as an ancestor. Homer shows him saving the Greek forces many times over. Accordingly—an occupational hazard of Greek warriors—he’s full of himself. His lack of sôphrosunê, the wisdom to understand and accept his own limits and those of life itself, looms huge. When realization does come, it’s too late. The “savage discipline” he learned as a warrior is so ingrained it has become his nature. He cannot choose to act outside it. He may regain his honor only by killing himself. Yet when he does do that—though he had seemed to be the center of the world, the focus of everyone’s consciousness, their hopes and fears—the world doesn’t end. Against all expectations, the play goes on over his lifeless body, which must be dealt with.

Aias’s family and his sailor warriors are regrouping, preparing the body for burial. First Menelaos and then Agamemnon intervene, both insisting the remains be left as carrion for scavengers. Teukros argues with each in turn—until Odysseus arrives and pressures Agamemnon into letting the burial proceed. The obvious question is, why was it necessary to dwell, at such extraordinary length, on the conditions of Aias’s burial?

Let’s go back a bit. Between Aias’s death and the discovery of his body, the Chorus, divided into two search parties, stumble about, disoriented, calling out to one another. Within this ‘hole in time’ (literally, a historical void), the play undergoes a defin...