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Ajax of Cyprus

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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Son of Telamon, king of Cyprus, a legendary hero of ancient Greece. To distinguish him from Ajax, son of 011eus, he was called the "great" or Telamonian Ajax. In Homer's Iliad he is described as of great stature and colossal frame, second only to Achilles in strength and bravery, and the "bulwark of the Achaeans." He engaged Hector in single combat and, with the aid of Athene, rescued the body of Achilles from the hands of the Trojans. In the competition between him and Odysseus for the armour of Achilles, Agamemnon, at the instigation of Athene, awarded the prize to Odysseus. This so enraged Ajax that it caused his death ( Odyssey, xi. 541). According to a later and more definite story, his disappointment drove him mad; he rushed out of his tent and fell upon the flocks of sheep in the camp under the impression that they were the enemy; on coming to his senses, he slew himself with the sword which he had received as a present from Hector. This is the account of his death given in the Ajax of Sophocles (Pindar, Nemea, 7; Ovid, Met. xiii. 1). From his blood sprang a red flower, as at the death of Hyacinthus, which bore on its leaves the initial letters of his name AI, also expressive of lament (Pausanias i. 35.4). His ashes were deposited in a golden urn on the Rhoetean promontory at the entrance of the Hellespont. Like Achilles, he is represented as living after his death in the island of Leuke at the mouth of the Danube (Pausanias iii. 19.11). Ajax, who in the post-Homeric legend is described as the grandson of Aeacus and the greatgrandson of Zeus, was the tutelary hero of the island of Salamis, where he had a temple and an image, and where a festival called Aianteia was celebrated in his honour (Pausanias i. 35). At this festival a couch was set up, on which the panoply of the hero was placed, a practice which recalls the Roman lectisternium. The identification of Ajax with the family of Aeacus was chiefly a matter which concerned the Athenians, of ter Salamis had come into their possession, on which occasion Solon is said to have inserted a line in the Iliad (ii. 557 or 558), for the purpose of supporting the Athenian claim to the island. Ajax then became an Attic hero; he was worshipped at Athens, where he had a statue in the market-place, and the tribe Aiantis was called after his name.

Many illustrious Athenians - Cimon, Miltiades, Alcibiades, the historian Thucydides - traced their descent from Ajax. See D. Bassi, La Leggenda di Aiace Telamonio (1890); P. Girard, "Ajax, fils de Telamon," 1905, in Revue des etudes grecques, tome 18; J. Viirtheim, De Ajacis Origine, Cultu, Patria (Leiden, 1907), according to whom he and Ajax Oileus, as depicted in epos, were originally one, a Locrian daemon somewhat resembling the giants. When this spirit put on human form and became known at the Saronic Gulf, he developed into the "greater" Ajax, while among the Locrians he remained the "lesser." In the article Greek Art, fig. 13 (from a black-figured Corinthian vase) represents the suicide of Ajax.