#unfortunatley the iliad does not make their relationship clear at all and you gotta look at supporting texts and then read between the line

[baejax-the-great]

So baejax was an actual dude?

😂

Ajax the Greater is a (mostly) mortal man of Greek legend. I started calling him Baejax as a joke.

Whether the cast of the Iliad were actual dudes is up for debate, but their legend has lasted three thousand years and their stories have been told and told over again, so Ajax the character has enough reality conferred to him by collective imaginations that his historical realness isn't important to me.

As a character of legend, I find Ajax fascinating both in his persistence-- it's a name that most people are familiar with even if they don't know anything of his myth (maybe because there is a household cleaner named after him in my country, among other things)-- and in how little people actually know of his story. I find the second part especially interesting because as the second strongest of the Greeks, he was overshadowed at every turn by Achilles, and once Achilles died, rather than rising to the occasion and finishing the assault of Troy, Ajax died immediately after, ignobly.

Now Achilles chose to go to Troy and die in glory in order to gain immortality through epic poetry, and he succeeded in that. We all know his name and some version of the story. Ajax? Not so much. There weren't any prophecies about him, and his death was completely unnecessary and, in my opinion, tragic. I also think most people (including Sophocles) got his death wrong, but it makes sense to me that this overshadowed man's memory would be warped and incorrect because that is what he wanted in the end--to be forgotten.

Ajax's enduring legacy has been his size and his stupidity. He carried a great shield that nobody other than him except Achilles could lift. He was the tallest of the Greeks by an entire head. And he has been called all sorts of names over time, including Shakespeare's "beef-witted."

I've read the Iliad. I've read the play "Ajax." I've read academic papers about him and looked at ancient art, and I simply don't find much evidence supporting him as an imbecile. This seems to me more of a stereotype than anything--big, dumb, friendly man who can't do anything right dies stupidly and needlessly.

He wasn't simple. He wasn't stupid. He was a tragic figure. And for better or worse, I love him.