Elaborate marble plaque depicting Ajax of Telamon, the hero of the Trojan War. Ajax was the son of Telamon, king of Salamis. After Achilles, he was the mightiest of the Greek heroes in the Trojan War. (find out more about Achilles…) Ajax was a huge man, head and shoulders larger than the other Greeks, enormously strong but somewhat slow of speech. In the Iliad, he is often called the “wall” or “bulwark” (herkos) of the Greeks. When Achilles had withdrawn from the fighting at Troy, it was Ajax who went forth to meet Hector in single combat; by the time darkness fell the fight was still a stalemate, but Ajax had wounded Hector without sustaining injury himself.
