δύσοργος, naturally prone to anger: ἐν γήρᾳ βαρύς, choleric, irritable, in his old age. For this sense of “βαρύς”, see on O. T. 673.—Ajax himself felt that, if he went home disgraced, he could not confront his father (462). πρὸς οὐδὲν, ‘at nothing,’—without cause: cp. 40 “πρὸς τί;” 971 “πρὸς ταῦτα.” εἰς ἔριν θυμούμενος, lit. ‘growing wroth unto quarrelling,’ i.e., so as to provoke a quarrel. 1019 Join ἀπωστὸς with γῆς: cp. O. T. 641“γῆς ἀπῶσαι πατρίδος”, ib. 670 “γῆς..ἀπωσθῆναι.” ἀπορριφθήσομαι, ‘cast off’ by his father: cp. O. C. 1383“σὺ δ᾽ ἔρρ᾽ ἀπόπτυστός τε κἀπάτωρ ἐμοῦ”. The fulness of phrase is like that in 830 “ῥιφθῶ ..πρόβλητος”. In the Teucer of Pacuvius, fr. 19 (ed. Ribbeck), Telamon says to Teucer, Te repudio nec recipio: naturam abdico: facesse, i. Pacuvius probably used the lost “Τεῦκρος” of Sophocles, which dealt with the hero's expulsion from Salamis by Telamon. The reference to the subject here may be compared with that in the O. C.(1410) to the theme of the Antigone, and with the allusion in the Philoctetes (1437) to the theme of the poet's lost play, ‘Philoctetes at Troy.’
This text is part of:
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, with critical notes, commentary, and translation in English prose. Part VII: The Ajax. Sir Richard C. Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1907.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.