We have only recently begun to talk about mental illness as a society, which can lead to the illusion that it is a new phenomenon. In the same way that laypeople observe the uptick in early diagnoses of autism and blame vaccines for them, many people blame modern social ills for mental illness. We must have more stressful jobs, or perhaps we live in communities that are uniquely unsafe, or perhaps we are overwhelmed by the amount of information that bombards us. Others will say that people are becoming weaker, less capable of dealing with the problems of the world. They will say that our modern comforts have made us fragile and unable to accomplish the kinds of feats our ancestors did. But both of these arguments are fundamentally wrong. Mental illness is not a new phenomenon by any means.
Normally it's hard to diagnose someone who lived a long time ago with a mental disorder (or, for that matter, a physical one). But Sophocles gives us a clear-cut example of what we would now call PTSD in his play Ajax. Sure, he uses the figure of Athena in order to induce the disorder: but she can be removed from the play entirely and the story still makes sense. Sophocles simply had to provide a cause for Ajax's madness that his audience would understand. The story takes place after the Trojan War: a ten year long conflict, where rests from the chaos of battle were few and far between. Ajax has fought bravely and well for ten years, only to find that there is no glory in war. What will Salamis, where his father is King, have when Ajax returns that it does not already have? So, he tries to win Achilles' armor to take home as a trophy for his city. When that doesn't work, Ajax slowly spirals into violence and then suicide. Some of the clear symptoms of PTSD that Ajax exhibits include: obsessive thought patterns and behavior, inexplicable mood swings, paranoia, a psychotic break, self-loathing and suicidal ideation. Now, Sophocles was writing this story centuries later: during the Peloponnesian war. Clearly, he was arguing against going to war, by bringing up it's consequences. Athena is the goddess of strategy and a warrior goddess: she is simply a metaphor for the war itself. In Ancient Greek theology however, it is typically Apollo or Dionysus who causes madness, not Athena. Sophocles' audience would have immediately been intrigued by this choice. He knew he was writing for discerning theatergoers: the only thing the citizens of ancient Athens liked more than watching a play, was arguing about it. To portray Ajax's disorder with such clarity, Sophocles must have either suffered it himself or known someone who did.
That should not be a surprise either: all citizens of Athens were required to fight whenever the city voted to go to war. This was a measure to ensure that men did not go to war too eagerly: there was no getting out of fighting it. But, this was a warrior culture: this measure in no way prevented people from voting for wars that were in the city's interest. Athens had recently fought a very long drawn-out and costly war, with the Achaemenid Empire. Now, conflict brewed between them and their erstwhile allies-the Spartans- over trade matters. The machinations of Pericles' adoptive son Alcybiades were putting the city on edge. That is the context that framed the actor who played Ajax for the first time in the great amphitheater in Athens.
We do not know if this was the first, second or third of the tragedies that Sophocles presented that day, alongside a comic play. But we can imagine his audience, with gyros in one hand and wine in the other, watching with growing horror as this terrible drama unfolds. We can imagine men crying, seeing their own pain or that of their loved ones played out on the stage. Perhaps we could even imagine them shouting at Ajax to stop his behavior, even though they know how the story ends. We can imagine women setting aside their meals, as the horror of this story unfolds: not wanting to eat or drink while Ajax suffers. It isn't a tragedy in the conventional or Aristotelian sense: where the hero's flaws inevitably lead him into darkness no matter how mightily he struggles against his fate. Here, Ajax does not struggle. He is lead to his death by his own desires, like a cow to the slaughter. We would perhaps call it horror, if it were written today. Ajax is not a hero, he is the protagonist of a story that is set up to critique his behavior. The message of the story is "don't be like Ajax".
But it is not an individually directed message: Greek society was fundamentally one that valued the community over the individual. This is a message directed at the community, the polis, as a whole. Ajax is the inevitable product of war: his madness is caused by Athena, a representation of war as a concept. He, like all of the Homeric heroes, is a representation of his city. It is the responsibility of the community, not of the individual, to prevent this kind of disaster. Ajax cannot prevent his madness, it was caused by a goddess. But the war could never have happened. This is an anti-war story.
There was no medicine available in the ancient world for PTSD, no professional therapy. The only responses available were acceptance, and prevention. War drives men mad, vote no on the war. The message would have been very clear to Sophocles' original audience. But the genius of this play, is that it speaks to the warrior experience. It's not an outsider scolding the military for their actions while they enjoy the benefits of those actions. It's a war story told by a veteran that speaks to a warrior's heart. Every man in that audience had probably seen a friend or relative go into this destructive spiral: some of them had probably seen a suicide similar to that portrayed in this play before. Now they're having to decide whether to go into the mouth of the beast again, and maybe whether to send their sons into it. Sophocles wants them to go to the vote knowing exactly what they are signing up for. His prediction is chillingly accurate. The Peloponnesian War slowly destroyed Athens, as it compromised more and more of it's democratic values for the sake of short-term money-making. By the time the Spartans showed up at their doorstep, Athens was a hollow shell of it's former self.
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