Ajax is never wounded in the Iliad, yet he lost the one contest that mattered
Second only to Achilles among the Greeks at Troy, Ajax fought Hector to a standstill, held the ships almost single-handed and carried Achilles' body off the field. He lost the dead hero's armour to Odysseus's smoother tongue, and the humiliation destroyed him. Athenian statesmen later boasted of descending from him.
Ajax, son of King Telamon of Salamis and cousin of Achilles, was the giant of the Greek army, nicknamed its bulwark. Homer gives him a shield of seven cowhides faced with bronze, and he is the only leading fighter on either side who receives no real help from the gods and is never wounded. Unusually for a Homeric champion he is mainly defensive, guarding the camp, the ships and fallen comrades, often with his archer half-brother Teucer shooting from behind his shield.
His duels with Hector are the high points. In Book 7 the two fight most of a day until heralds acting for Zeus call a draw, and they swap gifts: Ajax hands over a purple war-belt and receives a silver-studded sword. Later, when the Trojans storm the beached fleet, Ajax leaps from deck to deck with a huge spear holding them off, before Zeus's favour for Hector forces him back and one ship burns. He also joins the embassy that fails to coax the sulking Achilles back to battle.
The ending comes after the Iliad. When Paris kills Achilles, Ajax recovers the body while Odysseus covers him, and both then claim the armour Hephaestus forged. Odysseus argues better, Athena helps him, and the council awards it to him. In Sophocles' tragedy, Athena clouds Ajax's mind so that he slaughters sheep believing them to be the Greek commanders; waking to his disgrace, he takes his own life with Hector's sword. When Odysseus later meets his shade in the underworld, Ajax turns away without a word.
His cult outlived the myth. Salamis honoured him with a temple and the Aianteia festival, and once Athens controlled the island, Solon allegedly slipped a supporting line into the Iliad. Cimon, Miltiades, Alcibiades and Thucydides all claimed Ajax as an ancestor. Since 2001 the archaeologist Yannis Lolos has been excavating a Mycenaean palace of perhaps 30 rooms on Salamis that he links to Ajax's family.
Source: Ajax the Great
