Ajax

If you try to cure evil with evil you will add more pain to your fate.

Which would you choose if you could: pleasure for yourself despite your friends or a share in their grief?

It is a painful thing To look at your own trouble and know That you yourself and no one else has made it

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.

Shall not I Learn place and wisdom? Have I not learned this, Only so much to hate my enemy, As though he might again become my friend, And so much good to wish to do my friend, As knowing he may yet become my foe?

All things the long and countless years first draw from darkness, then bury from light; and there is nothing for which man may not look. The dreaded oath is vanquished, and the stubborn will.

heaviest of all woe Is theirs whose life is crushed beyond recall.

I pity him in his misery for all that he is my foe, because he is bound fast to a dread doom. I think of my own lot no less than his. For I see that we are phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows.

To look on self-wrought woes, when no other has had a hand in them- this lays sharp pangs to the soul.

Oft we know not till we see. Weak is human prophecy. Judge not, till the hour have taught thee What the destinies have brought thee.

For dullards know not goodness in their hand, Nor prize the jewel till ‘tis cast away.

For now I feel All we who live are but an empty show And idle pageant of a shadowy dream.

Tis hard for power to observe each pious rule.

I will screen my soul From reach of Pallas’ grievous wrath.

Say, can the mind be noble, where the stream Of gratitude is withered from the spring?

Shame on the wight who when beset with ill Cares to live on in misery unrelieved.

And with loudly waxing mirth Heaping insult on thy grief, Each who hears it glories more Than the tongue that told before.

Ath. I will confound his sense although he see.

That all our gathered spoil was reaved and slaughtered, Flocks, herds, and herdmen, by some human hand,

To stretch your life out when you see that nothing can break its misery is shameful – day after day moving forward or back from the end line of death. There’s no joy in that Any mortal who warms his heart over empty hopes is worthless in my eyes. Honor in life or in death; if a man is born noble, he must have one or the other.