and standing over others, who are, like so many Tantaluses, prohibited
by them from tasting the corn and fruits of their own ground and
drinking the wine of their own vintage. And as King Darius sent to
the city of Athens his lieutenants Datis and Artaphernes with chains
and cords, to bind the prisoners they should take; so these usurers,
bringing into Greece boxes full of schedules, bills, and obligatory
contracts, as so many irons and fetters for the shackling of poor
criminals, go through the cities, sowing in them, as they pass, not
good and profitable seed,—as did heretofore Triptolemus, when he went
through all places teaching the people to sow corn,—but roots and
grains of debts, that produce infinite labors and intolerable usuries,
of which the end can never be found, and which, eating their way and
spreading their sprouts round about, do in fine make cities bend under
the burden, till they come to be suffocated. They say that hares at
the same time suckle one young leveret, are ready to kindle and bring
forth another, and conceive a third; but the usuries of these barbarous
and wicked usurers bring forth before they conceive. For at the very
delivery of their money, they immediately ask it back, taking it up
at the same moment they lay it down; and they let out that again to
interest which they take for the use of what they have before lent.