Mention was made above (p. vii) to the role of pity and fear in Athenian tragedy. There can have been few plays in which such notions were engendered to a greater extent than in Sophocles' Ajax. But before we can indulge in any micro-political analysis of the play, we need to know when it was first performed.

Today, “general opinion among scholars … favours a date in the later 440's” for Ajax. This assertion is becoming gradually more muted – “all we can say in the present state of the evidence is that nothing contradicts a date in the 440s, but that certainty is impossible”, or “the dating of Sophocles' play to the early 440s – if correct” – but it is the brave critic who disregards the consensus that Ajax is relatively early and who rejects the scholarship that has been devoted to a study of supposed Sophoclean stylistic development. The study of style, it should be said, is not always helpful; indeed it can be positively misleading. That it plays such a prominent role at all is due to misplaced respect for J. J. Winckelmann, concerning whose contribution to science Wilamowitz unwittingly gave the game away in stating: