Chorus
If only you both had the sense to exercise self-restraint!
[1265]
There is no better advice that I could give you two.
Teucer
Teucer
My, how quickly gratitude to the dead seeps away from men and is found to have turned to betrayal, since this man no longer offers even the slightest praise in remembrance of you, Ajax, even though it was for his sake
[1270]
you toiled so often in battle, offering your own life to the spear! No, your assistance is dead and gone, all flung aside!
Full and foolish talker, do you no longer remember anything of the time when you were trapped inside your defenses,
[1275]
when you were all but destroyed in the turn of the battle and he, he alone came and saved you at the moment when the flames were already blazing around the decks at your ships' sterns and Hector was leaping high over the trench towards the vessels?
[1280]
Who averted that? Was it not Ajax who did it, the one who, you say, nowhere set foot where you were not? Well, do you grant that he did his duty to you there? And what about when another time, all alone, he confronted Hector in single combat according to the fall of the lots, and not at anyone's command?
[1285]
The lot which he cast in was not the kind to flee the challenge; it was no lump of moist earth, but one which would be the first to leap lightly from the crested helmet! It was this man who did those deeds, and I, the slave, the son of the barbarian mother, was at his side.
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Sophocles. The Ajax of Sophocles. Edited with introduction and notes by Sir Richard Jebb. Sir Richard Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1893.
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