Theognis of Megara

667-682
If I had money, Simonides, as I have had in time past,
I could without embarrassment consort with the great.
But as it is, I know a man, and he passes me by. Dumb
stand I, for poverty, though I know as much as the rest
even now. So it is. We are swept with the wind, white sails lost
out from the Melian Sea, on into the gloom of the night.
The men are unwilling to bail any more. The sea washes over
the bulwarks on either side, and barely and in distress
we keep afloat. But some are at work. They have put down the noble
helmsman, who know his business well, and kept a good watch.
All discipline is gone, and they plunder the cargo at random,
nor is there any fair division made for the lot.
The base hands and the porters control, the great are beneath them.
I am afraid. I think the sea will swallow our ship.
Let this be my secret cipher addressed to the nobles;
but even the base man, if he is clever, can see what it means.

699-718
For the multitude of mankind there is only one virtue:
Money. And there was no good found in anything else,
not if you had the resource of Sisyphos, Aiolos’ son,
who by the crafty guile in his mind came up out of Hades
and flattered the Queen of the Dead into letting him go,
Persephone, who dim’s men’s mind with the water of Lethe;
and to this day no other man has made such an escape,
once the darkness of death has closed in a vapor about him,
once he has taken his way to the shadowy place of the dead
and gone on through the black gates which shut the protesting
souls of dead men in and will not let them go free;
yet Sisyphos was a hero who came back even from that place
into the light of the sun through the resource in his mind;
not if you could be false and make falsehood look like honesty,
not if you had fair speech like Nestor the almost-divine,
not if in the speed of your feet you outran the flying
Harpies or the North Wind’s two sons in the storm of their feet.
None of these; but all men must understand when I tell them:
Money, and nothing but Money, holds all the power in the world.

Translated by Richard Lattimore in Greek Lyrics.