text:  [3] Need we say to the general reader that Oileus here alludes to the strife between Ajax and Ulysses which has furnished a subject to the Greek tragic poet who has depicted more strikingly than any historian that intense emulation for glory and that mortal agony in defeat which made the main secret of the prodigious energy of the Greek character? The poet in taking his hero from the Homeric age endowed him with the feelings of the Athenian republicans he addressed