f 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 of your disease, your rollers, your mantle, your
mufflers; as he in his cups is said to have privately torn the chaplet
from his neck, after he was corrected by the speech of his fasting
master? When you offer apples to an angry boy, he refuses them: here,
take them, you little dog; he denies you: if you don't give them, he
wants them. In what does an excluded lover differ [from such a boy];
when he argues with himself whether he should go or not to that very
place whither he was returning without being sent for, and cleaves to
the hated doors? "What shall I not go to her now, when she invites me of
her own accord? or shall I rather think of pu