Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and offered the unrivalled panoply, which Hephsestos had forged and wrought for him, as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when Athene, together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which of the two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in favor of the former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and humiliation : in a fit of phrenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for the men who had wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.[1]
Odysseus now learnt from Helenus son of Priam, whom he had captured in an ambuscade,[2] that Troy could not be taken unless both Philoktetes,and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, could be prevailed upon to join the besiegers. The former, having been stung in the foot by a serpent, and becoming insupportable to the Greeks from the stench of his wound, had been left at Lemnus in
- ↑ Argument of Æthiopia and llias Minor, and Fragm. 2 of the latter, pp. 17, 18, Duntz.; Quint. Smyrn. v. 120-482; Horn. Odyss. xi. 550: Pindar, Nem. vii. 26. The Ajax of Sophokles, and the contending speeches between Ajax and Ulysses in the beginning of the thirteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, are too well known to need special reference.
The suicide of Ajax seems to have been described in detail in the Æthiopis: compare Pindar. Isthm. iii. 51, and the Scholia ad loc., which show the attention paid by Pindar to the minute circumstances of the old epic. See Fragm. 2 of the 'ttw Hepoif of Arktinus, inDdntz. p. 22, which would seem more properly to belong to the Ethiopia. Diktys relates the suicide of Ajax, as a consequence of his unsuccessful competition with Odysseus, not about the arms of Achilles, but about the Palladium, after the taking of the city (v. 14).
There were, however, many different accounts of the manner in which Ajax had died, some of which are enumerated in the argument to the drama of Sophokles. Ajax is never wounded in the Iliad : Æschylus made him invulnerable except under ths armjits (see Schol. ad Sophok. Ajac. 833) the Trojans pelted him with mud TGJf papijdEiy iiir!) TOV Ttfaov (Schol Iliad, xiv. 404). - ↑ Soph. Philokt. 604,
diKaf fiedeif. Eustathius (ad Dionys. Perieget. 307) give.? the story of his having followed Iphigeneia thither : compare Antonin. Liberal. 27. Ibykus represented Achilles as having espoused Medea in the Elysian Field (Idyk. Fragm. 18. Schneidewin). Simondes followed this story (ap-Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 815).
