Introduction
Ajax, son of Telamon and king of Salamis, was renowned as the physically strongest and most steadfast of the Achaean warriors at Troy, often paired with (and contrasted against) the cunning of Odysseus.
Family
- Father: Telamon
The Contest for the Armor
After Achilles's death, his magnificent armor, forged by the god Hephaestus, was offered as a prize to the Achaean warrior judged most valuable. Ajax, who had carried Achilles's body from the battlefield, expected to win it, but the armor was instead awarded to Odysseus by vote (or, in some versions, by Trojan captives' testimony). Humiliated, Ajax fell into a murderous rage against his own allies and, upon recovering his senses and realizing what he had done, took his own life — a tragedy dramatized in Sophocles's Ajax.
As with all figures of Greek heroic legend, sources diverge on many particulars; the account above follows the most widely transmitted classical tradition.