for which perhaps the owner paid three hundred thousand sesterces, or more.  What does it signify, whether you live on what was paid for the other day, or a long while ago?  He who purchased the Aricinian and Veientine fields some time since, sups on bought vegetables, however he may think otherwise; boils his pot with bought wood at the approach of the chill evening.  But he calls all that his own, as far as where the planted poplar prevents quarrels among neighbors by a determinate limitation:  as if anything were a man’s property, which in a moment of the fleeting hour, now by solicitations, now by sale, now by violence, and now by the supreme lot [of all men], may change masters and come into another’s jurisdiction.  Thus since the perpetual possession is given to none, and one man’s heir urges on another’s, as wave impels wave, of what importance are houses, or granaries; or what the Lucanian pastures joined to the Calabrian; if Hades, inexorable to gold, mows down the great together with the small?

Gems, marble, ivory, Tuscan statues, pictures, silver-plate, robes dyed with Getulian purple, there are who can not acquire; and there are others, who are not solicitous of acquiring.  Of two brothers, why one prefers lounging, play, and perfume, to Herod’s rich palm-tree groves; why the other, rich and uneasy, from the rising of the light to the evening shade, subdues his woodland with fire and steel:  our attendant genius knows, who governs the planet of our nativity, the divinity [that presides] over human nature, who dies with each individual, of various complexion, white and black.

I will use, and take out from my moderate stock, as much as my exigence demands:  nor will I be under any apprehensions what opinion my heir shall hold concerning me, when he shall, find [I have left him] no more than I had given me.  And yet I, the same man, shall be inclined to know how far an open and cheerful person differs from a debauchee, and how greatly the economist differs from the miser.  For there is some distinction whether you throw away your money in a prodigal manner, or make an entertainment without grudging, nor toil to accumulate more; or rather, as formerly in Minerva’s holidays, when a school-boy, enjoys by starts the short and pleasant vacation.

Let sordid poverty be far away.  I, whether borne in a large or small vessel, let me be borne uniform and the same.  I am not wafted with swelling sail before the north wind blowing fair:  yet I do not bear my course of life against the adverse south.  In force, genius, figure, virtue, station, estate, the last of the first-rate, [yet] still before those of the last.