PETA would not approve of Sophocles’s play “Ajax”.
Good afternoon wonderful people of blogland! A new week brings a new topic! Next on the Great Books of the Western World reading list are the lesser known works of Sophocles: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra and Philoctetes.
Today we talk about Ajax and being glad that he mistakenly slaughtered animals instead of his intended target – the human Odysseus.
Ajax opens the morning after the titular character went on a rampage and slaughtered the flocks and herdsmen of the Greek army. (The Greeks were still at Troy at the time of the attack.) Ajax had intended to kill the noblemen leaders of the army, specifically Menelaus and Odysseus, because they rigged a vote against him.
There is some pretty gruesome language involving what he did to the animals.
Tecmessa (Ajax’s wife-slave from Troy):
He brought those bound beasts home!
And some he slew on the the tent’s floor
Cleanly with a neck-cut; others he hacked asunder
With slashes at their ribs. But two special
White-footed rams he lifted up, shore of
One’s head and the tip of it’s tongue, and cast them from him;
The other he bound upright against a pillar,
Seized a stout length of harness, made from it
A singing whip, two-thonged, to lash him with,
And, mid blows, poured forth such awful curses
As no man, but some demon, must have taught him.
Eeeew…
There are many moments in the play where people thank the gods that animals were killed instead of humans. This goes against PETA’s firm belief that all animal and human life is equal.
PETA would not approve this message or the cruelty to animals.
From the PETA website: As PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk has said, “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. Each one values his or her life and fights the knife.”
So, what do you think? Are you glad Ajax slaughtered animals instead of the Greek army? Was it equal?
