Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) - 2.3.5. lyrics

“If a man lay down next to a great heap of corn Keeping watch, with a big stick, never daring As owner, though starving, to touch a grain, but fed Like a miser on bitter roots: if with a thousand jars, No say three hundred thousand, of Chian and vintage Falernian cellared away, he drank the most acid Vinegar: if at nearly eighty years old he lay On straw, while fine bedclothes were mouldering away In his trunk, being eaten by roaches and moths: Few it would seem would consider him mad, since most men Toss and turn gripped by a similar fever. Are you Guarding it for your son or some freedman, your heir, You poisonous old fool, so they can drink it? Or lest You run short? How tiny the sum you'd spend each day If you poured better oil on your salad, or on your hair That's matted and thick with dandruff. If anything will do, Why bother to lie and cheat and pilfer on every Hand? You, sane! If you took to throwing stones at the crowd, Or your own slaves you paid good money for, all the boys And girls would cry ‘madman' behind you: so is it sanity To strangle your wife or poison your mother? Well? No, true, you're not doing it in Argos nor with a sword, Murdering a mother as crazed Orestes k**ed his, And maybe you think he went mad after k**ing her, And wasn't demented before that by evil Furies, Before he warmed sharp steel in his mother's jugular? No, from the moment Orestes was considered Deranged, true, he did nothing you would condemn: He didn't dare to attack Pylades or his sister Electra With a steel blade, just abused them both, calling her A Fury, him what his glittering bile suggested.”