’She calls me:  ought I to obey her call,
Or end this long infliction once for all? 
The door was shut:’tis open:  ah, that door! 
Go back?  I won’t, however she implore.’ 
So he.  Now listen while the slave replies,
And say if of the two he’s not more wise: 
’Sir, if a thing is senseless, to bring sense
To bear upon it is a mere pretence;
Now love is such a thing, the more’s the shame;
First war, then peace, ’tis never twice the same,
For ever heaving, like a sea in storm,
And taking every hour some different form. 
You think to fix it? why, the job’s as bad
As if you tried by reason to be mad.’

“When you pick apple-pips, and try to hit
The ceiling with them, are you sound of wit? 
“When with your withered lips you bill and coo,
Is he that builds card-houses worse than you? 
Then, too, the blood that’s spilt by fond desires,
The swords that men will use to poke their fires! 
When Marius killed his mistress t’other day
And broke his neck, was he demented, say? 
Or would you call him criminal instead,
And stigmatize his heart to save his head,
Following the common fallacy, which founds
A different meaning upon different sounds?

“There was an aged freedman, who would run
From shrine to shrine at rising of the sun,
Sober and purified for prayer, and cry
’Save me, me only! sure I need not die;
Heaven can do all things:’  ay, the man was sane
In ears and eyes:  but how about his brain? 
Why, that his master, if not bent to plead
Before a court, could scarce have guaranteed. 
Him and all such Chrysippus would assign
To mad Menenius’ most prolific line.

“’Almighty Jove, who giv’st and tak’st away
The pains we mortals suffer, hear me pray!’
(So cries the mother of a child whose cold,
Or ague rather, now is five months old)
’Cure my poor boy, and he shall stand all bare
In Tiber, on thy fast, in morning air.’ 
So if, by chance or treatment, the attack
Should pass away, the wretch will bring it back,
And give the child his death:  ’tis madness clear;
But what produced it? superstitious fear.”

Such were the arms Stertinius, next in sense
To the seven sages, gave me for defence. 
Now he that calls me mad gets paid in kind,
And told to feel the pigtail stuck behind.

H. Good Stoic, may you mend your loss, and sell
All your enormous bargains twice as well. 
But pray, since folly’s various, just explain
What type is mine? for I believe I’m sane.

D. What? is Agave conscious that she’s mad
When she holds up the head of her poor lad?

H. I own I’m foolish—­truth must have her will—­
Nay, mad:  but tell me, what’s my form of ill?