Seul contre tous : autour du conflit entre Ajax et Ulysse pour les armes d’Achille

Athenian painters were not interested in depicting the civic procedures introduced by Athenian democracy to avoid or resolve conflicts. Images of violent citizens do exist, but it is not possible to determine why this violence erupted. I therefore propose to take a closer look at the conflict between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles’ weapons. The corpus consists of a few red-figured Attic cups from the early 5th century BC, one side of which depicts Ajax and Odysseus physically separated by their companions - an episode not attested to in the ancient texts – while the other shows the vote to choose between the two heroes. The series of images highlights the patterns used by the painters to depict the containment of physical violence and then allows us to understand the voting scene in this context, its implications for Ajax and, ultimately, its significance for the Athenians.