This poem takes place towards the end of the Metamorphoses, and at the end of the Trojan war, as the first story in book 13, in between Nestor and After the Fall. The previous book mainly deals with the siege of Troy and the following book mainly deals with the aftermath of the Trojan war. The war is being fought on the request of Meneleus, brother to Agamemnon (who is the King of the Greeks), after his wife, Helen, is taken from him by Trojan Prince Paris, after making a deal with the Greek god Aphrodite. The war raged in a 10 year siege of Troy before Ulysses (Known to the Greeks as Odysseus) devised a plan to enter the city, hidden inside a giant wooden horse. During the siege, the legendary hero Achilles was slain by Paris with an arrow through the namesake tendon. Ulysses, and Ajax, the strongest remaining warriors, recover the body and Achilles’s famous arms and armor forged by the god Hephaestus, prompting a contest judged by the Greek chieftains in order to decide who should receive the armor. Ajax begins by calling Ulysses a coward and suggests that at least if he, the strongest warrior among the Greeks, were not to receive the arms, that they should at least go to Ulysses friend Diomedes. Ulysses responds by reminding that he is the most intelligent among all the Greeks, and that no-one else is contesting for the armor because they know it to be true. The part I choose to focus on is the final part of his speech. The eloquence of his speech convinces the chieftains to give Ulysses the armor, which drives Ajax to kill himself. The namesake metamorphoses happen when a purple flower sprouts up in the spot where Ajax dies, similar to the spartan Hyacinthus. The event is best known in Ovid’s version of the story, but a similar version of the death of Ajax exists in the Little Iliad, a part of the Epic Cycle, a collection of ancient Greek poetry. In that version, Ajax also dies by suicide but after going mad with rage and slaughtering his own cattle. Another version exists in Sophocles play Aias, in which Ajax (also after losing the contest of arms to Ulysses) is driven mad by Athena after she tricks him into believing he’s killed the other Greeks. While the specificities as to the death of Ajax differ, most of the tellings all agree upon the fact that Ulysses, through his eloquence, wins the contest, ultimately leading Ajax to commit suicide. The characters of Ulysses and Ajax of course are well known in many mythological texts, the most well known being Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey.