If I meet you with my hair cut by an uneven barber, you laugh [at me]:  if I chance to have a ragged shirt under a handsome coat, or if my disproportioned gown fits me ill, you laugh.  What [do you do], when my judgment contradicts itself? it despises what it before desired; seeks for that which lately it neglected; is all in a ferment, and is inconsistent in the whole tenor of life; pulls down, builds up, changes square to round.  In this case, you think I am mad in the common way, and you do not laugh, nor believe that I stand in need of a physician, or of a guardian assigned by the praetor; though you are the patron of my affairs, and are disgusted at the ill-pared nail of a friend that depends upon you, that reveres you.

In a word, the wise man is inferior to Jupiter alone, is rich, free, honorable, handsome, lastly, king of kings; above all, he is sound, unless when phlegm is troublesome.

* * * * *

EPISTLE II.

TO LOLLIUS.

He prefers Homer to all the philosophers, as a moral writer, and advises an early cultivation of virtue.

While you, great Lollius, declaim at Rome, I at Praeneste have perused over again the writer of the Trojan war; who teaches more clearly, and better than Chrysippus and Crantor, what is honorable, what shameful, what profitable, what not so.  If nothing hinders you, hear why I have thus concluded.  The story is which, on account of Paris’s intrigue, Greece is stated to be wasted in a tedious war with the barbarians, contains the tumults of foolish princes and people.  Antenor gives his opinion for cutting off the cause of the war.  What does Paris?  He can not be brought to comply, [though it be in order] that he may reign safe, and live happy.  Nestor labors to compose the differences between Achilles and Agamemnon:  love inflames one; rage both in common.  The Greeks suffer for what their princes act foolishly.  Within the walls of Ilium, and without, enormities are committed by sedition, treachery, injustice, and lust, and rage.

Again, to show what virtue and what wisdom can do, he has propounded Ulysses an instructive pattern:  who, having subdued Troy, wisely got an insight into the constitutions and customs of many nations; and, while for himself and his associates he is contriving a return, endured many hardships on the spacious sea, not to be sunk by all the waves of adversity.  You are well acquainted with the songs of the Sirens, and Circe’s cups:  of which, if he had foolishly and greedily drunk along with his attendants, he had been an ignominious and senseless slave under the command of a prostitute:  he had lived a filthy dog, or a hog delighting in mire.