Tecmessa is one of the loveliest creations of Sophocles; there clings about her a silvery charm which is strangely refreshing amid the turbid grandeur of the play. Tenderness, patience, courage—these are commonplace enough upon the stage; yet Sophocles has made of them something frail but indestructible, and touched her with his own greatest charm—an unearthly eloquence of which we shall speak later:— ἀλλ’ ἴσχε κἀμοῦ μνῆστιν. ἀνδρί τοι χρεὼν μνήμην προσεῖναι, τερπνὸν εἴ τί που πάθοι.[304] When Ajax is dead, it is she, not Teucer (as Ajax had hoped) who finds the body, and this marvel of quiet tenderness gleams forth again. She hardly laments at all; the chorus who accompany her are more moved. So accustomed is she to sorrow and self-repression that grief is her natural element; she utters a few quiet words of noble pity, and when the sailors press forward to view the dead she gently says “ye must not look on him,” and covers the body with a robe. Her self-command is so absolute that it can bend; she will even say “Alas! What shall I do?” when confronted with a mere perplexity about the removal of the corpse. Teucer is Ajax himself without the madness and the illumination; he stands in the same relation to his half-brother as Mark Antony in Shakespeare to Julius Cæsar; he is an ideal presenter of Ajax’ claims if they are to be presented at all to people like Menelaus and Agamemnon. Menelaus is more active in debate, more brilliantly vulgar, than his brother, who wisely takes his stand upon general principles, and hardly mentions at all the decision not to bury Ajax. Agamemnon is conscious of his weak position; finally, he succeeds in retiring without complete loss of dignity. Odysseus is apparently intended as the antithesis to Ajax—discreet, forgiving, and impressed by the power of Heaven. Though but a sketch, he is a striking figure; after all the anguish and outcry, it is the normal man who emerges as the pivot of events and saves the situation. The Salaminian sailors offering no special features, there remains only Athena, who dominates the “prologue”. In contrast with the fully-developed beings whom we have studied in the _Oresteia_ she is amazingly crude. The fact is that we ought not to consider her “character” at all. She is simply divine punishment roughly (but not casually) personified and given the name Athena. She gloats over the madman whom even the mortal standing beside her pities, and the only lesson she draws for him is that men must shun pride. It is natural, but useless, to call her a fiend; she serves merely as the visible and audible symbol that Heaven punishes haughty independence of spirit. That instead of mere evolutions of puppets we have a striking drama is due simply to the fact that Sophocles is interested far more in Ajax than in the goddess.