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 putting an end to my pains?  She has excluded me; she recalls me:  shall I return?  No, not if she would implore me.”  Observe the servant, not a little wiser:  “O master, that which has neither moderation nor conduct, can not be guided by reason or method.  In love these evils are inherent; war [one while], then peace again.  If any one should endeavor to ascertain these things, that are various as the weather, and fluctuating by blind chance; he will make no more of it, than if he should set about raving by right reason and rule.”  What—­when, picking the pippins from the Picenian apples, you rejoice if haply you have hit the vaulted roof; are you yourself?  What—­when you strike out faltering accents from your antiquated palate, how much wiser are you than [a child] that builds little houses?  To the folly [of love] add bloodshed, and stir the fire with a sword.  I ask you, when Marius lately, after he had stabbed Hellas, threw himself down a precipice, was he raving mad?  Or will you absolve the man from the imputation of a disturbed mind, and condemn him for the crime, according to your custom, imposing, on things named that have an affinity in signification?

There was a certain freedman, who, an old man, ran about the streets in a morning fasting, with his hands washed, and prayed thus:  “Snatch me alone from death” (adding some solemn vow), “me alone, for it is an easy matter for the gods:”  this man was sound in both his ears and eyes; but his master, when he sold him, would except his understanding, unless he were fond of law-suits.  This crowd too Chrysippus places in the fruitful family of Menenius.

O Jupiter, who givest and takest away great afflictions, (cries the mother of a boy, now lying sick abed for five months), if this cold quartan ague should leave the child, in the morning of that day on which you enjoy a fast, he shall stand naked in the Tiber.  Should chance or the physician relieve the patient from his imminent danger, the infatuated mother will destroy [the boy] placed on the cold bank, and will bring back the fever.  With what disorder of the mind is she stricken?  Why, with a superstitious fear of the gods.

These arms Stertinius, the eighth of the wise men, gave to me, as to a friend, that for the future I might not be roughly accosted without avenging myself.  Whosoever shall call me madman, shall hear as much from me [in return]; and shall learn to look back upon the bag that hangs behind him.