I feel for example on 134-5 he should have pointed to the first line of Philoctetes or Od 1.50 rather than the more prosaic Il.2.557.
I’m guessing he adduces Il.2.557 as establishing Ajax’s association with Salamis already in Homer. Phil.1 or Od.1.50 would be quite irrelevant to that. You might have wished him to adduce those verses
as well (and to make something of the fact that unlike Philoctetes or Odysseus Ajax is
not trapped on the island, perhaps?), but you can’t seriously think that he should have pointed to those other verses
rather than to Il.2.557.
He seems to ignore the possibility of reading Ajax as a dialogue with epic.
I’m sure he does not, though it may well be that he has reservations about the idea of a “dialogue,” on the grounds that epic is not in a position to talk back. That’s to say, he thinks more in terms of literary
reception (by Sophocles) than of two-way literary
interaction. We might not like that (though I myself think it’s a perfectly tenable position to take) and consider it a deplorably oldfashioned point of view (after all, it was almost a century ago that T.S. Eliot pointed out that the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past), but for the Oxonian Finglass to react against the Cantabrigian Goldhill is something we ought to be able to take in our stride without getting in too much of a tizzy about it.
Politics. I certainly agree there’s a political dimension to the play. How could it be otherwise?, as I think I remarked before. But I think that to view it exclusively or even predominantly in political terms would do less than justice to the play. There are so many other aspects to it. And before positing that the original audience would have identified with the chorus of Salaminian mariners (a surprisingly antiquated and limited approach for you to take) we’d have to factor in contemporary relations between Athens and Salamis (but we don’t even know when the play was written), the social and political status of the poor sods who manned Athenian triremes, the almost worshipful attitude of the Ajax’ sailors to their lord, and much else besides. Quite apart from the fact that the audience members, whether or not they'd ever served on a warship, know they’re watching a Sophoclean tragedy about Ajax. In other words, we should beware of being too simplistic, and of forcing the play into a political straitjacket.
But I guess we're now finally done with the first 200 lines.