The Instructor 3.4.30

as if they had their bile living in their nostrils. The more refined of these women keep Indian birds and Median peacocks, and recline with pointed-headed creatures, playing, delighting in dwarfs as monsters; they laugh when they hear of Thersites, but they themselves, buying costly Thersiteses, pride themselves not on their husbands but on these, who are “a burden to the earth.” They overlook a self-controlled widow, who is worth far more than a Maltese lapdog, and pass by a righteous old man, more seemly, I think, than a monster bought with money. They will not take in an orphan child, these women who keep parrots and curlews; they expose the children born at home, and take in the young of birds, preferring irrational creatures to rational ones. They ought rather to support old men who profess self-control, more handsome, I think, than apes, and able to utter something better than nightingales. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these,” he says, “you did it to me.” But these women, on the contrary, have preferred ignorance to self-control, turning their property into stone in pearls and Indian emeralds; and they squander and throw away their money on fading dyes and slaves bought with money, like fattened hens scratching the dunghills of life. “Poverty humbles a man,” it says; he calls stinginess poverty, by which the rich are poor in giving, as though they had nothing.