Bene est, cui deus ..

   ..

   

   I don't have hives of bees from Calabria

   Busily making their honey just for me;

   I don't have jars of rare Laestrygonian wine

   Slowly maturing itself only for me;

   I have no Gallic pasturelands where sheep

   Are growing their wool exclusively for me ..

Every morning, now, when I have to awaken to read that someone has been celebrating the greed of Mitt Romney, I can't help but be grateful to have been raised another way. It will be a long, grueling year with illiterates of humility, demanding. Demanding, demanding. It's their pitch that makes their agony so exquisitely base. One can't remark on them every day, one can't allow them to dedicate one to the narrow rut of their clamour. But we know now, how they will run. They will prey on the pervasiveness of greed. Greed will be the engine but parsimony their cover, for the fero-cious villainy they crave to perpetrate. Yet only the mercy of their defeat could limit their suffering, to say nothing of ours.

For the 1st of February, and implicitly for the first day of every month this year, I will love that this was shared with me:

Watchdogs watching, thick tower walls, oak doors,

Such things would have been quite sufficient to keep

The lovers of Danaë from getting in

By night to where she was, locked up from them.

But Jupiter and Venus only laughed,

Because they knew the way to get in was easy:

Jupiter had but to turn himself into gold.

Gold loves to get itself past sentinels

And loves to make its way through solid rock.

Gold has more power than Jupiter's lightning bolts.

Gold brought the house of the Argive prophet down;

Gold given by Philip of Macedon opened the gates

Of cities and made its way beneath the thrones

Of mighty kings, and thus their thrones fell down.

The more the money grows the more the greed

Grows too; also the anxiety of greed.

Maecenas, glory of simple knighthood, this

Is the reason I myself was always afraid

Of too much ambition and of rising too high.

The more a man can do without, the more

The gods will do for him. So, empty-handed,

Deserting the camp of the rich, I seek the camp

Of those who ask for little, and thus I am

A more impressive master of all the wealth

I happily have contempt for than if I

Were that poor thing belittled by his riches,

Hiding away in his storehouse everything garnered

From the rich Apulian fields his peasants till.

The splendid lord of the riches of Africa

Mistakenly thinks he's better off than I,

With my little farm whose crops I'm certain of,

And my quiet little stream of pure brook water.

Quamquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes,

nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora

languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis

crescunt vellera pascuis,

I don't have poverty, either, to worry about,

And if I were in need of anything more,

I know Maecenas would not deny it to me.

The less I want the more I seem to have.

It's better than if I owned what Midas owned,

Combined with everything that Croesus ownded.

Want much, lack much. That man has just enough

To whom the gods have given just enough.

Horace

Odes

  III, 16

David Ferry

  Translator

op. cit.