PROFESSOR JEBB'S AJAX OF SOPHOCLES.*

THIS completes Professor Jebb's edition of the seven extant plays of Sophocles, though we are promised yet another

volume, dealing with the Fragments,—and the Fragments give ample scope for the editor's learning and felicitous ingenuity. To suppose that the last word has been said about Sophocles is of course absurd. Still Professor Jebb has left very little for those that come after to glean. It is indeed currently said in academical circles, and that not cnore than half in joke, that the completeness of the Pro- fessor's edition, so thorough is the exegesis, so harmonious and masterly the translation, has tended to encourage the study of Euripides. It is almost useless for an examiner to set even the most crucial passage out of Sophocles. The diligent student produces a paper in which the literary merit and accurate learning of Professor Jebb are more or less perfectly reproduced.

The Ajax has often been criticised as failing in dramatic

force, because the great catastrophe, the death of the hero, -occurs when the play is little more than half through. He falls on his sword at the end of his soliloquy (line 865), and

there are nearly six hundred more lines to come before the chorus winds up the action of the drama with the reflection that whatever may lie open to man's vision, the future is always hidden. Professor Jebb's answer to this is to be found

in a highly interesting exposition of the relation of the hero to the Athenian people. He was one of the ten eponymous

heroes of the ten Athenian tribes ; that which bore his name enjoyed special honours. What interested the audience was the question whether this patron saint of the city, so to speak, was reconciled to heaven. He had, in intention at least, com- mitted a great crime. To avenge a private wrong, he had meditated the slaughter of his fellow-countrymen. In just punishment for this, the leaders of the host had pronounced

4apon him the well-merited sentence that his body was not to receive the customary honours. Was this sentence to be carried out ? If it was, the dead man would lie under a per- petual ban, and 80 lying he could not rightly fill the place of

a national hero :—

"The Athenian feeling would be analogous to that of a inedimval audience witnessing a drama which concerned the life .of a canonised saint, in which the doubtful issue was whether the powers of evil would succeed in making him commit some sin which would doom his soul beyond the hope of pardon. Such an audience would have followed, with a like depth of interest, the process by which the wiles of the tempter were defeated at the moment when they seemed about to triumph, and the man emerged at the end, notwithstanding weaknesses and lapses, as a worthy object of religious veneration."

And this is what happens to Ajax. Odysseus, who is, as Professor Jebb says," thelhuman exponent of Athena's spirit," intervenes. Whatever wrong the dead warrior might have meditated, he had been, says his advocate, a great champion, a strong bulwark of the Greek host. By this moderation, this willingness to forget his own enmities, Odysseus turns the scale; Agamemnon yields, not very graciously indeed, but yields. The body is to be buried with due ceremony, and Ajax is consecrated as a hero.

It is impossible not to feel, if this contention is correct, how mechanical was the character of Greek piety. Nothing could be leas edifying, so to speak, less like the repentant soul that seeks reconciliation with an angry heaven, than Ajax in his last moments. Even the Greek feeling of the lawfulness of revenge must have found something unseemly in the prayer that the Furies may desolate the army,—a prayer which it seems to us over-subtle to interpret as an additional curse on the chiefs, who would be desolated by the loss of their host.

The speaker could hardly have had such a thought. Let the Kings perish first, let the whole army follow them, was his aspiration. It is true that in a sense the thought of the Kings stricken through their people is " thoroughly Homeric," but it is the poet's conception of the government of the

• Sophacles : the Plane and Froomente. With Critical Notes, Zoe., by R. C. Jebb, Litt.D. Part VII.: The Ajax. Cambridge Cuivers.ty

world. The overwhelming rage of the dying hero demands a simpler explanation. The arms of Achilles are wrongfully adjudged to another. He cannot survive the insult, but prays that all who are concerned in it Xing and common folk alike, may perish together.

Professor Jebb discusses with great acuteness the difficult questions that arise out of the famous speech in which Ajax announces, under the semblance of resignation to the divine will and to the commands of lawful superiors on earth, his settled purpose to die. That he was deceiving his hearers seems certain, though some critics have denied it. It is a more serious question whether the resignation was feigned or not. Professor Jebb thinks that it was not. He yielded to the gods in accepting the lesson that a man must not have thoughts too high for his mortal condition. He yielded to the Atreidae by recognising "his offences against social order in failing to reverence their station." This submission he justifies by a sublime illustration drawn from the elemental powers of creation. The editor continues : "To employ imagery so solemn and so beautiful for the purpose of pointing mere mockery would be incongruous and repulsive." It may be so. But may we not quote as an instance in point the series of images by which the murderess Clytemnaestra describes the blessedness of the married state ?

Professor Jebb's commentary has all the acuteness and exactness which we expect to find in it. In this same speech, to take an illustration ready to our hand, how simple is his method of disposing of a long-standing difficulty ! Ajax, after listening to Tecmessa's appeal, says :—

"Kay) 74, irTa Dt!e' hcatyripovv.76.7-€, Bacp5 aiSnpos 6s, iOnN6venv errtlna wpbs Tf10-SET7JC7L,YallCO'S'" A great controvery once raged about the second line. Was iron softened by dipping in water ? Was it not rather hardened ? One disputant would alter gapii into tgat'iv?, (a furnace) ; the other suggested Ul/thy (whetted) for igoa:ohy. Neither emendation was at all satisfactory, but the difficulty vanishes when when we connect the clause sago?; uaripo; 15; with what goes before: "1 who was so wondrous firm,—yea, as iron tempered in the dipping."

Altogether the edition is fully up to the high standard set by the editor himself in his earlier work. More it is needless to say.