S4, Episode 3: The Heroic Age Maxim Two Ways

[00:00:00] Kayla: Hello, and welcome back to Musings in Greek Literature, Season 4, Episode 3. My name is Kayla, and I’ll be the host of today’s episode, joined by Megan as co host. Today, we will be looking at Sophocletus Ajax, lines 1226 1298, in order to examine how power structures of the Heroic Age They roll in the way characters speak to each other, and how this relates to Sophocles critique of the heroic age maxim, [speaking Greek].

Treat your friends well, and your enemies poorly. And at the end of the episode, I’ll talk more about my experience of teaching the class for a day. So, first, here’s a recap of what happens in the play. Telamonian Ajax, a Greek warrior at Troy, has attempted to slaughter his fellow Greeks following the contest for Achilles arms, which he lost to Odysseus.

The goddess Athena made him attack animals instead of the Greeks, blinded by madness. Soon, he realizes his mistake and vows to end his own life, completing this after a final goodbye to his wife and son, the former of whom desperately wants him to stay alive, but arrives at his death scene too late.

Ajax’s brother, Tukor, has arrived to the Greek camps in order to take care of Ajax’s son as per his final wishes. Tukor laments his brother’s death for a brief moment before the sons of Atreus, Menelaus, and Agamemnon each arrive before Tukor. Tukor and the Atreidae argue about what to do with Ajax’s dead body.

Tukor wants to bury it, as burial was an important and sacred right to the Greeks, which guaranteed their passage into the underworld. But on the other hand, the Atreidai don’t want to bury it, as a punishment for Ajax’s attempted murder against the Greeks. The passage we’re focusing on today features Agamemnon’s and part of Tukor’s speeches to each other.

Now, let’s take a look at Agamemnon’s speech, which comes first in the play. The main area of interest in Agamemnon’s dialogue is his constant use of ad hominem attacks on Tukor and his lineage, as he says in lines 1228 1231, [speaking Greek] Hu as translated by Golder and Kevar from 1999 from which all English translations will be taken. Do you think you can talk so boldly against us and go and punished slaves son? No doubt if your mother was noble, you’d boast even higher, prancing around on the tips of your toes. What does all this defiance amount to?

A nobody defending nothing. So in this passage, Agamemnon insults Tucker on the basis of his mother’s slave status. Here’s another example of an ad hominem attack, which comes in lines 1257 1258.

[speaking Greek] Behind all this outrage and lad talk, what is there? A man who’s no more than a shadow. Agamemnon directly insults him by calling him nothing, not even a shadow, as well as using these long verb forms in line 1258. [speaking Greek]. And as well as in lines 1262 and 1263 at the end of this speech, Agamemnon insults him.

[speaking Greek] I can learn nothing from your way of talking. Such barbarous speech is foreign to my ears. So Agamemnon consults his way of speaking as the son of a slave woman. And ad hominem attacks are woven throughout all of Agamemnon’s speech here.

One thing that was pointed out in class that I hadn’t even realized beforehand was that Agamemnon is likely attacking Tucker so harshly because he has the social status to do so. As you’ll see in Tucker’s speech, he doesn’t start with ad hominem attacks on Agamemnon’s character, so Agamemnon has a much greater social license to get away with such attacks.

Megan, is there anything you’d like to add about his speech?

[00:04:02] Megan: Yeah, so one thing that we were talking about in class with Agamemnon’s speech is how it is generally structured based off of ring composition, specifically with how Agamemnon starts out referencing to her status as the son of a barbarian mother, and then he You circles back around to that at the end of his speech.

At the beginning starts by insulting his lineage, and then towards the middle he starts talking about the individual values and roles of the community as a whole. And then, like I said, at the end he goes back to attacking Tughr as an individual based on his, his status. So what we talked about in class was how ring composition is a very typical way for ancient authors to organize their texts.

It kind of signals to the audience that somebody is approaching the end of their speech because they’re recycling the things that were at the beginning.

[00:04:49] Kayla: Yeah. So I think all of this really relates to Sophocles goals for this play. Pygmimnon holds up this heroic age maxim, as I mentioned in the introduction, and it’s treating your friends well and enemies poorly.

So not only does he display the old heroic moral code through his license to say whatever he wants to Tikur because of his position as the leader of the Greeks at Troy, but he also doesn’t want to bury Ajax’s body now that he has become an enemy. He wants to treat Ajax poorly because he’s his enemy.

However, we will see Tukor, and although not in this episode, Odysseus, subvert this maxim by wishing to bury Ajax despite his attempted attack against the Greeks. One thing we also mention in class is that there’s sort of a flip of the heroic age maxim. MacMimnon finds Ajax as his enemy because Ajax has treated him poorly.

Using the maxim not only as a code of morality and ethical behavior, but also as a way to identify who is your friend and who is your enemy. So now I want to talk a little bit more about Tukor’s speech, which stands in stark contrast with Agamemnon, namely in the fact that he doesn’t start hurling out insults immediately, as I mentioned earlier.

So, what do you think of this?

[00:05:57] Megan: I think that here, this is like, once again, just a way that Sophocles is trying to talk about how the heroic age maxim is ultimately bad, as seen through Agamemnon’s speech, because he starts just throwing insults at the beginning. That’s one of the examples of how This, uh, maxim doesn’t actually end up working out that well since, you know, Tukor doesn’t have the social status to go back and insult Agamemnon, so he’s not able to talk in the same way Agamemnon was talking to him.

He has to go about his speech differently, and he has to go about it with speaking more directly on the maxim versus Tukor. Through an insult.

[00:06:37] Kayla: Yeah, so Ker speech is very different from Agamemnon’s, at least at the start. Obviously, he doesn’t start with an insult on an Agamemnons lineage, although we’ll see he ends there.

We see ker first appeal to all the good age X did for the Greeks and lines 1266 to 1271 [speaking Greek] Ah, a man dies and how quickly all gratitude fades and is lost in betrayal.

Oh, Aeis, you count for nothing in this man’s memory, though you laid your life out so often toiling with your spear for him. It’s all gone, all thrown away now. So Tukor starts by saying that Agamemnon doesn’t give Ajax the respect he deserved, and then appeals to what Ajax has done for the Greeks, namely risking his life to fight, even when his opponent is Hector, the greatest warrior among the Trojans.

Funnily enough, as I said above, Tukor does have some ad hominem attacks in his speech, but they’re mainly saved for the end, and they’re a direct rebuttal to what Agamemnon said earlier. Tukor basically says, you’re insulting me for my lineage, your dad fed his brother with his own children, and your mom was an adulterer.

So, Megan, do you have anything to say about that?

[00:08:06] Megan: Yeah, it is interesting how Tooker, he generally is trying to appeal more to the good that Ajax had done, and he’s trying to show how that reflects the heroic age maxim, and he’s mostly relying on the fact that Agamemnon should be treating Ajax’s body well, because Ajax isn’t an enemy, but In saying that, I’m not saying that, you know, Tucker himself is trying to uphold the heroic age maxim, but he is using it to try to convince Agamemnon to bury Ajax’s body.

And then like you said, that’s not the only thing he does. He does go on to defend himself a bit towards the end, basically to, against the attacks on his lineage that Agamemnon was shooting at him.

[00:08:48] Kayla: Yeah, and like you said earlier, he couldn’t start off with it. He didn’t have the social license to do so, but he, he was able to fit that in there at the end, which I think is kind of funny, but yeah, I think you’re right.

And it’s also especially important to put this speech and its historical context. So Sophocles lived in Athens throughout the fifth century. And the Ajax was likely one of his first plays, which was probably written in the mid 5th century. And that’s just around the time after the Persian War. So during Sophocles lifetime, Athens was a nascent democracy, but it really only achieved democracy in the late 6th century, which was maybe a decade before Sophocles was born.

And Sophocles had witnessed a change between a moderate democracy to a more radical democracy following the Persian War. So I think the struggle between Agamemnon and Tucker really reflects the struggle between an aristocracy or maybe a tyranny even, and the demos, which is the Greek term for the common people, or the masses, which is where we get democracy.

And I think that represents the Atreidae in the upholding of an older moral code, and Tucker, Odysseus in the subversion of an older moral code, respectively. So I think it’s especially poignant when you consider that Tucker appeals to communal values. He says, look what good things Ajax did for the Greeks as a whole.

I mean, he fought Hector for us and he was really excited to fight Hector, which reflects a sense of community that is an important factor in the classical Athenian ideal of the Deimos.

[00:10:08] Megan: Yeah, I think you’re exactly right about what you were saying with it, their struggle kind of reflecting a struggle between a tyranny and a democracy, essentially.

We saw a lot through this play, and we talked about it a lot in class, how the Traedi kind of represent this idea of like, An overarching ruler, which Ajax for sure did not appreciate. And it was a struggle throughout the whole thing. Like we fought for you. We didn’t have to, but we, we stood there and we fought in your war that had nothing to do with us.

So one of the general arguments that’s brought up again and again is we should at least give Ajax this proper burial because he fought for you when he didn’t have to. And he was there for the Greeks as a whole, even though he may have it. Gone against you in the end or later on. That’s not speaking to all of the good deeds that he did all of the ways that he fought for you.

So I think it is really important to have that historical context in the back of our minds when we’re reading these plays, because It adds to the story as a whole, and it makes more sense why there’s certain narratives being told, especially in to the audiences of whatever time period it’s being performed in.

[00:11:19] Kayla: Yeah, I think the thing that makes me really want to talk about this is that a few weeks ago I was in my Athenian Democracy class, which is open to non classics majors. And one non classics major was giving a presentation on an article that uses Sophocles’s Antigone to make an argument about free speech in classical Athens.

He asked us, do you think it’s fair to use fictional literature as historical evidence? And I just really wanted to say, what piece of fictional literature doesn’t have some sort of a reflection of the time period in which it was written, especially in the field of classics where so often we have so little evidence that many of our arguments are tenuous at best.

And we really need to capitalize on any connections like this that we can make. So in AJAX, I think these connections are pretty readily apparent.

[00:12:00] Megan: Yeah, we definitely have to fully be able to take apart the text that we are given since, like you said, we’re so limited in the text that we do have. And even with modern day stories, you know, people are constantly picking them apart to try to get as much as they can out of it because an author isn’t.

Writing separate from the time that they’re living and they’re writing as things are going on around them and they’re being influenced by the world and what’s going on around them. So it’s definitely very evident in their works that certain aspects of the world are impacting them and influencing their work.

So, yeah. Yeah, I agree. It’s, it’s very important to think of that and necessary as a Classics major or someone just interested in Classics to be able to pull apart those works.

[00:12:46] Kayla: To wrap up, in this section we talked about the difference between Agamemnon and Tucker’s speeches. Namely that Agamemnon has a lot of ad hominem attacks on Tucker’s character because of his social license to do so, and Tucker appeals to a common good.

Both of these reflect different aspects of the heroic age maxim, which either uphold it or subvert it. And this can be expanded to Classical Athens, as Tucre represents the struggle of the Deimos to gain and maintain power for itself, as opposed to an aristocracy that had dominated Athens before it achieved democracy in the late 6th century.

And if you want more information on democracy in Classical Athens, you should read Mogan’s Herman Hansen’s Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, which gives a really good overview of the historical context of democracy, as well as how democracy functions in Classical Athens.

Before we wrap up this episode, I want to talk for a few minutes about my experience teaching the class. If y’all didn’t already know, part of this assignment is to teach the class and then record this podcast episode as a way to reflect on our assigned material and experiences. So when I first found out that we were tasked with teaching the class, I was actually really excited.

For a long time, I’ve been aware of the fact that teaching someone else is the best way to master a concept. I actually remember when I was a freshman in high school and I heard rumors about our school’s AP Calculus teacher. He was absolutely notorious for not only being a small Vietnamese man who pronounced cheez its like Jesus because he would regularly give students food, especially if they had to stay after school with him for calculus, but also for being a great teacher.

And the one thing he did to set him apart from everyone else was make students teach material to other students. So fast forward to my senior year, just after our first calculus test, he pulled about a quarter of the students in the class aside into the closest teacher lounge, myself included. Handed us back our tests and said something along the lines of, I know each of you can get a 5 on the AP exam.

We’re going to go over the answers to questions you missed, and then you’re going to review the test with the other students. So for the next few days, I was the leader of a group of about three students, and I was teaching them the concepts they missed on their tests. And I did get a 5 on the AP exam, just like he said, by doing this method.

So needless to say, when I saw this assignment, I knew it would be pretty helpful to me. Especially since I’m considering pursuing a teaching certification. Even though I came up with my plan 12 hours before I taught, I really felt like I had a great lesson. I just wish I had had more time in class to talk about the interpretation of the speeches rather than just the translation.

But as a whole, I felt like I was really able to blend the translation of the passage with the understanding of the themes and ideas behind the passage. I was even surprised by the fact that I learned something about the passage from the students I was teaching. As I mentioned this earlier in the episode, one of our grad students made a comment about the fact that Tukor didn’t start his speech with an insult to Agmemnon, because he didn’t have the social status to act that way towards his superior, and I found it really insightful.

Another part of my teacher of that I wasn’t super confident about was the grammar of the passages I chose. Again, since I hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare in advance, there were some parts of the passage where I didn’t understand the grammar, although I could understand what the Greek was trying to say.

Thankfully, that’s why we have Dr. Beck. She answered a lot of my questions while we were translating, and a lot of the other students as well. I also circumvented this slightly by making students translate in a group, so that a lot of their grammar questions could be answered by their peers as opposed to having me answer everything, so when they came to translate in front of the class, they would feel more confident and comfortable in translating without issue.

Overall, I felt like this was a great opportunity to get a feel for teaching and being the person in the room with the authority of the material, the one who knows it best. Going forward, I’m very excited to learn more pedagogy methods, especially in languages classes such as these. I’m really grateful to Dr.

Beck both for the opportunity to experiment in the classroom and to be in this class that has been so much more than traditional higher level Greek and Latin classes. Thank you all so much for listening. My name is Kayla, and this was season 4, episode 3 of Musings in Greek Literature. My co host Megan will be back as the host of the next episode to talk more about Odysseus role in this play and transition into our discussions of the Philoctetes, which is the next text we’re reading.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment or a review to let us know. Otherwise, we’ll see you in the next episode.