Ajax the Lesser

Ajax the Lesser, son of Oileus, is the Locrian captain at Troy who drags Cassandra from Athena's temple and drowns for his sacrilege. Swift-footed and deadly with the spear, second in speed only to Achilles, he brings the goddess's anger down on the whole Greek fleet.

In the Iliad he leads forty ships of Locrians. He is called the Lesser to tell him apart from Ajax the Great, son of Telamon, beside whom he often fights: Homer describes him as small, wearing a linen corslet, but unmatched among the Greeks with the spear and in chasing down fleeing men. At the funeral games for Patroclus he is about to win the footrace when Athena makes him slip in the dung of the sacrificed cattle; Odysseus takes first prize, and Ajax gets up spitting and complains that the goddess cares for Odysseus like a mother.

During the sack of Troy, as the lost epic of the Sack of Ilion told it, he tears Cassandra away from the wooden image of Athena she is clinging to, dragging the statue along with her; later authors such as Apollodorus say that he raped her in the sanctuary. The Greeks want to stone him for the sacrilege, but he escapes by taking refuge at the goddess's own altar.

His death comes on the voyage home. In the Odyssey his ship is wrecked, but Poseidon brings him safe to the rocks of Gyrae; there Ajax boasts that he has escaped the sea in spite of the gods, and Poseidon splits the rock with his trident and drowns him. Virgil and Apollodorus say that Athena first struck his ship with a thunderbolt, and Apollodorus adds that Thetis buried his body on Myconos. The Locrians paid for his crime for centuries, sending maidens to serve in Athena's sanctuary at Troy as an oracle had ordered, yet they still honored him as their hero: Conon says they left an empty place for him in their battle line.