Are you right in your head, when you willfully commit a crime for empty titles?  And is your heart pure, while it is swollen with the vice?  If any person should take a delight to carry about with him in his sedan a pretty lambkin; and should provide clothes, should provide maids and gold for it, as for a daughter, should call it Rufa and Rufilla, and should destine it a wife for some stout husband; the praetor would take power from him being interdicted, and the management of him would devolve to his relations, that were in their senses.  What, if a man devote his daughter instead of a dumb lambkin, is he right of mind?  Never say it.  Therefore, wherever there is a foolish depravity, there will be the height of madness.  He who is wicked, will be frantic too:  Bellona, who delights in bloodshed, has thundered about him, whom precarious fame has captivated.

Now, come on, arraign with me luxury and Nomentanus; for reason will evince that foolish spendthrifts are mad.  This fellow, as soon as he received a thousand talents of patrimony, issues an order that the fishmonger, the fruiterer, the poulterer, the perfumer, and the impious gang of the Tuscan alley, sausage-maker, and buffoons, the whole shambles, together with [all] Velabrum, should come to his house in the morning.  What was the consequence?  They came in crowds.  The pander makes a speech:  “Whatever I, or whatever each of these has at home, believe it to be yours:  and give your order for it either directly, or to-morrow.”  Hear what reply the considerate youth made:  “You sleep booted in Lucanian snow, that I may feast on a boar:  you sweep the wintry seas for fish:  I am indolent, and unworthy to possess so much.  Away with it:  do you take for your share ten hundred thousand sesterces; you as much; you thrice the sum, from whose house your spouse runs, when called for, at midnight.”  The son of Aesopus, [the actor] (that he might, forsooth, swallow a million of sesterces at a draught), dissolved in vinegar a precious pearl, which he had taken from the ear of Metella:  how much wiser was he [in doing this,] than if he had thrown the same into a rapid river, or the common sewer?  The progeny of Quintius Arrius, an illustrious pair of brothers, twins in wickedness and trifling and the love of depravity, used to dine upon nightingales bought at a vast expense:  to whom do these belong?  Are they in their senses?  Are they to be marked With chalk, or with charcoal?

If an [aged person] with a long beard should take a delight to build baby-houses, to yoke mice to a go-cart, to play at odd and even, to ride upon a long cane, madness must be his motive.  If reason shall evince, that to be in love is a more childish thing than these; and that there is no difference whether you play the same games in the dust as when three years old, or whine in anxiety for the love of a harlot:  I beg to know, if you will act as the reformed Polemon did of old?  Will you lay aside those ensigns