“If a man lay down next to a great heap of corn
Keeping watch, with a big stick, never daring
As owner, though starving, to touch a grain, but fed
Like a miser on bitter roots: if with a thousand jars,
No say three hundred thousand, of Chian and vintage
Falernian cellared away, he drank the most acid
Vinegar: if at nearly eighty years old he lay
On straw, while fine bedclothes were mouldering away
In his trunk, being eaten by roaches and moths:
Few it would seem would consider him mad, since most men
Toss and turn gripped by a similar fever. Are you
Guarding it for your son or some freedman, your heir,
You poisonous old fool, so they can drink it? Or lest
You run short? How tiny the sum you'd spend each day
If you poured better oil on your salad, or on your hair
That's matted and thick with dandruff. If anything will do,
Why bother to lie and cheat and pilfer on every
Hand? You, sane! If you took to throwing stones at the crowd,
Or your own slaves you paid good money for, all the boys
And girls would cry ‘madman' behind you: so is it sanity
To strangle your wife or poison your mother? Well?
No, true, you're not doing it in Argos nor with a sword,
Murdering a mother as crazed Orestes k**ed his,
And maybe you think he went mad after k**ing her,
And wasn't demented before that by evil Furies,
Before he warmed sharp steel in his mother's jugular?
No, from the moment Orestes was considered
Deranged, true, he did nothing you would condemn:
He didn't dare to attack Pylades or his sister Electra
With a steel blade, just abused them both, calling her
A Fury, him what his glittering bile suggested.”