Bkiii:Xxiv Destructive Wealth

Though you’re richer than the untouched riches of Araby, than wealthy India, and you fill the land, and inshore waters, with your deposits of builders’ rubble: if dread Necessity fixes her adamantine nails in your highest rooftops, you’ll not free your spirit from fear, nor free your very being from the noose of death. Better to live like Scythians in the Steppes, whose wagons haul their movable homes, that’s custom, or the fierce Getae, whose unallocated acres produce their fruits, their harvests of rye, in common, where cultivation’s not decided for more than a year, and when one turn is done, it’s carried on by other hands, as a duty. There, as their own, the unselfish women raise those children who have lost their mothers: and the richly dowered wife never rules her husband, or believes in shining lovers. Their greatest dowry’s their parents’ virtue, and their own chastity, which is careful of another’s husband, in pure loyalty, sin is wrong and death’s its penalty. O whoever would end impious killing, and civil disorder, and would desire to have ‘City Father’ inscribed on their statues, let them be braver, and rein in unbridled licence, and win fame among posterity: since we, alas, for shame, filled with envy, hate chaste virtue, and only seek it when it’s hidden from our eyes. What use are sad lamentations, if crime is never suppressed by its punishment? What use are all these empty laws without the behaviour that should accompany them? if neither those parts of the Earth enclosed by heat, nor those far confines of the North, snow frozen solid on the ground, deter the trader, if cunning sailors conquer the stormy seas, if poverty, is considered a great disgrace, and directs us to do and to bear everything, and abandon the arduous paths of virtue? Let’s send our jewels, our precious stones, our destructive gold, to the Capitol, while the crowd applauds, and raises its strident clamour, or ship them to the nearest sea, as causes of our deepest ills, if we truly repent of all our wickedness. Let the source of our perverted greed be lost, and then let our inadequate minds be trained in more serious things. The inexperienced noble youth is unskilled at staying in the saddle, he fears to hunt, and he’s much better at playing games, whether you order him to fool with a Greek hoop, or you prefer forbidden dice, while his father’s perjured trust cheats his partner and his friends, hurrying to amass money for his unworthy heir. While it’s true that in this way his ill-gotten gains increase, yet there’s always something lacking in a fortune forever incomplete.