A Conversation with Cronus (28-30)

Take the noisy complaints you made to me just now, that they gorged on pork and cakes in the feasting—what do they amount to? Both of them are perhaps sweet and not disagreeable for the moment, but in the aftermath the matter is turned right round. Then, whereas you will get up on the next day without the headache their drinking gives them and the foul, smoky belching from over-fullness, they not only have the pleasure of all this but having spent most of the night in debauchery with boys or women or in any way their lechery takes them, without difficulty they pick up consumption or pneumonia or dropsy from their excessive indulgence. Again, would you find it easy to point out one of them who was not absolutely pale, looking very much like death? Or one who reached old age on his own feet and not carried on four men’s backs, all gold on the outside, but with his inside cobbled like the costumes in tragedy, patched up out of quite worthless rags? You paupers never taste or feed on fish, true enough, but don’t you see that you’ve no acquaintance with gout or pneumonia either, or of anything else that they catch for some other reason? Yet even they themselves don’t find it pleasant eating this food every day beyond what they want of these dishes; no, you’ll see them sometimes with a better appetite for vegetables and thyme than even you have for hare and pork.

I say nothing of the other things that worry them—a licentious son, a wife in love with a servant, a loved one who yields because he has to and not because he

In fact most of what they have you would find they get on your account, not for their own use, but to impress you poor people.

This, then, is the advice I give you, knowing both ways of life as I do. And it is right that during the festival you should remember that after a little time you must all depart from life, the rich giving up their wealth and you your poverty. But I shall write to them as I promised and I know they will not despise my words.