1. O men, I have wearied of a people
Whose neighborhood I see as one of life's calamities,

2. A suckling wolf-cub along with a contending swine,
Scorpions, demons, and snakes lively with evil.

3. What do you think of people whose best livelihood
Is revealing defects - they called them trusts?

4. Once I thought myself a head but they made me
Their tails in office.

5. Thanks be to God - how many wonders time brings
And how affairs and states shift and change!

6. While you see a man on a lofty, splendid dune,
Suddenly he's gone from it, to a ditch and ruin.

7. Look neither at a mind nor manners -
Ancestors are twins to foolish acts.