アイアスの自殺 : ソポクレスと叙事詩

Abstract

In a tragedy by Sophocles, Ajax falls upon a sword set in the ground and kills himself. His death is not reported by a messenger, as is usual for representing bloody scenes in Attic tragedies, but takes place before our eyes. We may explain the reason for this unusual manner from the tragedian's purpose of renovating epic tradition. His renovation was in three ways. 1. That Ajax competed with Odysseus for the arms of Achilles and deprived of his honour killed himself , was narrated in the cyclic epics, the Aethiopis and Little Iliad. Sophocles took the subject matter from the epics. But he did not follow the epic version in two points; invulnerability of Ajax's body and the quarrel between Odysseus and Ajax, both of which Aeschylus adopted in his trilogy. It was to make his hero's mind concentrated on death that Sophocles neglected or put omitted from his drama the episodes. 2. Sophocles constructed two scenes (the family scene in the first epeisodion and the last speech to the gods) on the model of the famous passages in the Iliad (Hector's farewell to his family in Book 6 and Achilles' lamentation on the seashore in Book 1) . His purpose was to emphasize the tragic situation of Ajax by contrast with those of the other epic heroes. 3. Ajax is full of bloody and horrible scenes; Ajax sitting among the slaughtered cattle in the first half of the drama and in the second his body lying with its blood gushing upwards. So the suicide acted on the stage was a climax of the terrifying images. Sophocles, instead of a messenger's speech, which is a form of epic, has created his own form of representation that dramatic literature has.