With the Trojan War won, the Greeks’ last great hero, Aias, has suddenly become obsolete. The world is changing-as he witnesses when the armor of his fallen cousin Achilles is awarded not to him but to his crafty comrade Odysseus. When Aias swears vengeance, the goddess Athena clouds his mind with madness-and when his senses clear, he discovers that men he believed he fought and murdered were only the helpless animals and defenseless herdsmen seized by his own army as spoils of war. Shamed beyond redemption, Aias takes his own life, an act that leaves his friends and fellows to cope with the realities of his burial, the shock of his downfall, and the questions of whether a warrior can ever return from the wars that define his life.

In Aias, Sophocles challenges his society’s ideals of heroism, exposing the unseen costs of war upon those who fight and those who are left behind. In this masterful translation, James Scully brings readers and actors inside the drama, enabling an exploration of these same issues within our modern cultural context-and offering a text that allows the emotions and arguments of Sophocles’ era to strike a chord with a contemporary audience.