gh. Let him
to whom fate, fortune, or his own effort has given this enough, desire
no more. If the liquid stream of Fortune should gild him, it would make
his happiness nothing greater, because money cannot change his nature.
To the man who has good digestion and good lungs and is free from gout,
the riches of a king could add nothing. What difference does it make to
him who lives within the limits of nature whether he plow a hundred
acres or a thousand?

As with the passion of greed, so with anger, love, ambition for power,
and all the other forms of desire which lodge in the human heart. Make
them your slaves, or they will make you theirs. Like wrath, they are all
forms of madness. The man who becomes avaricious has thrown away the
armor of life, has abandoned the post of virtue. Once let a man submit
to desire of an unworthy kind, and he will find himself in the case of
the horse that called a rider to help him drive the stag from their
common feeding-ground, and received the bit and rein forever.

So Horace will enter into no entangling alliances with ambition for
power, wealth, or position, or with the more personal passions. By some
of them he has not been altogether untouched, and he has not regret; but
to continue, at forty-five, would not do. He will be content with just
his home in the Sabine hills. This is what he always prayed for, a patch
of ground, not so very large, with a spring of ever-flowing water, a
garden, and a little timberland. He asks for nothing more, except that a
kindly fate will make these beloved possessions forever his own. He will
go to the ant, for she is an example, and consider her ways and be wise,
and be content with what he has as soon as it is enough. He will not
enter the field of public life, because it would mean the sacrifice of
peace. He would have to keep open house, submit to the attentions of a
body-guard of servants, keep horses and carriage and a coachman, and be
the target for shafts of envy and malice; in a word, lose his freedom
and become the slave of wretched and burdensome ambition.

The price is too great, the privilege not to his liking. Horace's prayer
is rather to be freed from the cares of empty ambition, from the fear of
death and the passion of anger, to laugh at superstition, to enjoy the
happy return of his birthday, to be forgiving of his friends, to grow
more gentle and better as old age draws on, to recognize the proper
limit in all things:

"H_eal