Listen: you have your health
and enough to live on? What else can you want?
You are one of the lucky few
and ought to enjoy it.
Life, if you aren't sick or destitute,
is good, but we waste our time
in this golden sunshine looking
always to someone else and thinking,
"he must be happy".
It's not so.
The rich are never content.
They want as fervently as we do,
more, more.
It's how men are made.
They want what they don't have,
whatever is hard to attain,
and they spend their strength
reaching out, mostly for baubles and toys,
wealth and power.
But these are trivial things,
and the bone yards are full
of utter non-entities
who had more than their share.
Virtue is different, difficult, real:
those who have earned that have it forever,
in life and after, forever.
True distinction, fame, glory,
that never dies.
Bacchylides (500 B.C. ?)
