Indeed, his behavior is entirely predictable once his conservative orientation is understood. His selfishness is petty and ordinary, and more likely to inspire contempt than wariness.
Second, it is easy to overstate the differences between the aristocratic ethic and the democratic one. It is not as if aristocrats do not calculate or have no interest in money, just as it would be wide of the mark to suggest that democrats are indifferent to honor and sacrifice. Even Sophocles blurs the line between aristocrats and democrats. Every bit as self-centered as Odysseus, Ajax too works for himself by calculating that suicide can restore his honor and secure his destiny as a great warrior, whatever the consequences for anyone else. On the other side of the ledger, Odysseus still values honor. To reiterate, he elects to bury Ajax so as to not make enemies who might seek to shame him by denying him a proper burial. While his selfishness is noteworthy because it is enlightened and encourages compassion toward enemies, it is does not fully abandon the central value of aristocratic ethics.
Still, the two men reason from entirely different places. Ajax is narrowly focused on the value of his identity. He cares only about his aristeia, his being best on the battlefield, and defines himself solely by being superior to his peers. This superiority is his essence. It is, to borrow an epigram from Pindar, who Ajax is.35 In the text, it is described as his destiny. If he holds a “great deeds” ethic, the emphasis is on “deeds” plural. His superiority is not based on one flash-in-the-pan achievement; it is sustained superiority rooted in his superior nature. The idea is that he is great, not merely that he does great things. This is why he can only interpret his defeat to Odysseus as an insult and cannot negotiate or bargain with the Greek leadership to lessen his humiliation. When the leaders of the Greek army judge him less worthy of Achilles’ armor than Odysseus and Athena tricks him into slaughtering cattle instead of the leaders, they do more than defeat him in a contest or make him look silly. They insult his nature and debase his identity. Ajax is no longer a great warrior but rather a laughingstock; he is fit for shame, not honor. It is all the worse that he loses out to faithless Odysseus, who values expediency over nobility and represents a society that mocks his aristocratic values.36 The issue of identity is crucial, as it directly shapes how people experience honor and shame. As Bernard Williams observes, Ajax’s suicide is impossible to comprehend without understanding his identity as a hero. He is done in by his expectations of the world and its expectations of him.37 His whole identity is predicated on the idea that he is not supposed to experience shame. When he does, he ceases to be who he is. This is why Odysseus feels compassion for him, and why many of his supporters in the play are perplexed by his behavior. The former knows all too well the burdens of superiority while the latter do not.
Furthermore, the concerns Ajax has about his identity have implications that extend beyond his immediate community. His aim is not merely to attain glory but to attain eternal glory. True to the Homeric code, he desires kleos, or the glory that earns him the privilege of being sung about by the poets in a thousand years. Achieving aristeia promises immortality or at least some version of it. What matters is not so much how he fares in this world but how he is remembered by future ages. The temporal considerations of immortality escalate the importance of his identity, which lead him to one inescapable conclusion. By taking his own life, Ajax can erase his final days and reclaim who he is. He can fulfill his destiny. His premise is that he has been dishonored and shamed in this life. If he continues to live, he will always be dishonored. So, by killing himself, he reasons he can reclaim his honor. Once dead, provided that he receives a proper burial, he will be defined not by his interactions with Odysseus and Athena but by his true nature. He will be remembered as a great warrior, a noble soul who restored his identity by courageously confronting and conquering his disgrace. While his reasoning may seem strange to the modern mind and indeed to the democratic ethics of fifth-century Athens, it is perfectly consistent with his worldview.
Finally, the natural superiority Ajax displays paradoxically compels him to accept the limits of human agency in the earthly world. To further diminish his defeat to Odysseus and subsequent humiliation by Athena, he endeavors to disavow as much personal responsibility for his downfall as possible by blaming it on fate. There is in the play a curious distinction between destiny and fate: if his destiny is to be immortalized as a great warrior, his fate is to have an unhappy ending in earthly life. His destiny is who Ajax is, or his essence; his fate is what is predetermined to happen to him during the course of his life. He assumes his suffering at the hands of Odysseus and Athena was prescribed by fate, even though his arrogance invited Athena’s wrath. In fact, upon reflecting on his disgrace, he realizes that his name, Aias in Greek, means “lament.” Sure enough, his final hours on earth could only be described as lamentable. His destiny and fate are at thus at cross purposes. It is through suicide that Ajax preserves the former from the machinations of the latter. Destiny, then, protects Ajax against the vicissitudes of life and ensures that his failures do not undermine his claim to aristeia. It insulates him from the uncertainties of actual competitions and in its own way is a hedge against the possibility of failure.
By contrast, Odysseus’s motives and primary loves lack such specific content. All we know about Odysseus is that timé and kleos are not his overriding desires. He willingly sacrifices them to avoid their inverse. He seeks to protect his well-being and shuns disgrace, even if it lessens the value of his personality. But, the reader acquires little insight into his values other than that his preeminent concern is not how others view him or whether he will be glorified by future ages. Similar to classical utilitarianism, kleos is presumably just one of many preferences that he may wish to pursue. Consistent with the democratic ethic, he still honors things. He honors useful things, however, which may or may not include aristeia and kleos. Other than his dedication to self-interest, there is no absolutism in his thinking. He is simply prudent and calculating and is not uniformly focused on one good or desire. It is implied that he is sensitive to his various needs and weighs and balances them as situations require. If this means he cannot have eternal glory, he at least takes comfort in avoiding eternal disgrace. It is safer to go unsung. Furthermore, Odysseus rejects Ajax’s fatalism and the idea that either his destiny or his fate is predetermined. He defines himself solely by his earthly interactions and takes full responsibility for the meaning of his existence. If he cannot fully control his life, he nonetheless can influence how he is perceived and how the world treats him.
Odysseus and Amour de Soi-Même, Ajax and Amour-Propre
The similarities between Odysseus’s “work for himself” ethic and Rousseau’s amour de soi-même are obvious enough, especially if the former is compared to Dent’s expansive interpretation of the latter. According to Dent, amour de soi-même “signifies a concern, a care, to look to, guard, preserve and foster one’s own personal well-being, guided by a true and clear sense or idea of what the well-being of oneself comprises and requires.”38 Notably, it takes both nonreflective and reflective forms. The former is more primitive and represents an instinctual desire to survive. It lacks social awareness of and typically does not take into account other persons unless they are an immediate threat to survival. Reflective amour de soi-même, conversely, entails a deliberative attempt to ascertain well-being and does so in the context of one’s environment and how a person can thrive in that environment.39 It calculates well-being with reference to others. The only concern of Odysseus, of course, is his well-being. His concession that Ajax is his superior to him with regard to his aristeia, in fact, can be interpreted as an expression of reflective amour de soi-même. Odysseus understands that he must grant Ajax his due if he is going to secure his own well-being.
Dent’s distinction between unreflective and reflective amour de soi-même is also helpful for explaining why Rousseau would not be favorably disposed toward Odysseus. Rousseau knows that he cannot recreate the unreflective amour de soi-même of primitive humans and understands that the desire for well-being is too thin to serve as a moral psychology to support freedom in the modern world. If selfishness is relatively harmless in a life of solitude, it raises numerous problems in collective social living. Indeed, amour de soi-même is just as likely
