61 The ability to wait. Being able to wait is so hard that the greatest poets did not disdain to make the inability to wait the theme of their poetry. Thus Shakespeare in his Othello, Sophocles in his Ajax,21 who, as the oracle suggests, might not have thought his suicide necessary, if only he had been able to let his feeling cool for one day more. He probably would have outfoxed the terrible promptings of his wounded vanity and said to himself: "Who, in my situation, has never once taken a sheep for a warrior? Is that so monstrous? On the contrary, it is something universally human." Ajax might have consoled himself thus. 21. After Agamemnon awards Achilles' armor to Odysseus, Ajax, the hero of Sophocles' play, goes mad and charges a herd of sheep, thinking them soldiers. When he regains his sanity, he slays himself on his sword.
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