Sophocles' Ajax - The Destruction of a Greek Hero Sophocles' Ajax, written around 440 BC, deals with the destruction of the Greek hero Ajax, who is sometimes considered the greatest warrior of the Trojan War, second only to Achilles. Ajax, driven mad by the goddess Athena, slaughtered the herds of Greek cattle, thinking they were Greeks, to avenge them for giving Achilles' armor to Odysseus instead of him. Only after he came to his senses did he realize that he had fallen from grace and committed suicide. The work continues, however, addressing his burial, in which Teucer, Ajax's half-brother, and Ulysses argue with two supreme kings, Agamemnon and Menelaus, about whether Ajax has the right to burial. Throughout the play until his death, Ajax is the central character, undergoing a sad change from a proud, mad madman to a sane, shameful man, whose only hope for honor is suicide. As the play opens, Ajax himself was a "powerful figure, dominant over others, but limited and essentially selfish" (xii). His madness brought on by Athena had left him completely helpless, although he falsely believed that Athena had helped him to massacre the Greeks. The mightiest of warriors, even Odysseus, commented that he had seen no one equal in skill, power and courage to what Ajax had shown. However, his eyes darkened with deadly delusions, he was in the hands of the gods, although he was so arrogant that he did not even realize it. He did not know that, as Odysseus states, he was a "puppet" in their hands: I pity him, reduced to this, Caught in the grip of such a painful fate... . ....... half of the paper ... your father was" (17). But from his words to the gods as he was dying, it was obvious that he had undergone a metamorphosis from the beginning of the play, in which he was excessively proud, forgetting that he could be controlled by fate, until his death, where he succumbed to the gods, fully aware that fate was in their hands. In conclusion, Ajax, I believe, was a noble character, even if he had one tragic flaw, his arrogance. Of course, everyone has a certain arrogance in a certain way of life, however, Ajax chose to show it, but he nobly accepted the consequences of his actions ended his life in what he believed was the honorable method and, until the end, he He behaved as a hero would during his time. Works Cited Sophocles Four Plays by Sophocles New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.