The Dream, or the Cock (25-27)

MICYLLUS

You haven’t yet told me what the clay and the props and bars are in monarchy, nor what that “quantity of ugly stuff” is. [ll grant you, to drive out as the ruler of so many people amid admiration and homage is wonderfully like your comparison of the colossus, for it savours of divinity. But tell me about the inside of the colossus now.

COCK

What shall I tell you first, Micyllus? The terrors, the frights, the suspicions, the hatred of your

associates, the plots, and as a result of all this the seanty sleep, and that not sound, the dreams full of tumult, the intricate plans and the perpetual expectations of something bad? Or shall I tell you of the press of business, negotiations, lawsuits, campaigns, orders, countersigns, and calculations? These things prevent a ruler from enjoying any pleasure even in his sleep; he alone must think about everything and have a thousand worries. Even in the case of Agamemnon, son of Atreus,

Sweet sleep came to him not as he weighed in his mind many projects,

Iliad10, 3-4 though all the Achaeans were snoring! The king of Lydia[*] is worried because his son is mute, the king of Persia[*] because Clearchus is enlisting troops for Cyrus, another[*] because Dion is holding whispered conversations with a few Syracusans, another[*] because Parmenio is praised, Perdiccas because of Ptolemy, and Ptolemy because of Seleucus. And there are other grounds for worry too, when your favourite will have nothing to do with you except by constraint, when your mistress fancies someone else, when one or another is said to be on the point of revolting, and when two or three of your guardsmen are whispering to one another. What is more, you must be particularly suspicious of your dearest friends and always be expecting some harm to come from them. For example, I was poisoned by my son, he himself by his favourite, and the latter no doubt met some other death of a similar sort.

MICYLLUS

Tut, tut! What you say is dreadful, cock. For

me, at least, it is far safer to bend over and cobble shoes than to drink out of a golden cup when the health that is pledged you is qualified with hemlock or aconite. The only risk I run is that if my knife should slip sideways and fail to cut straight, I might draw a little blood by cutting my fingers; but they, as you say, do their feasting at the peril of their lives and live amid a thousand ills beside. Then when they fall they make no better figure than the actors that you often see, who for a time pretend to be a Cecrops or a Sisyphus or a Telephus, with diadems and ivory-hilted swords and waving hair and gold-embroidered tunics; but if (as often happens) one of them misses his footing and falls down in the middle of the stage, it naturally makes fun for the audience when the mask gets broken to pieces, diadem and all, and the actor’s own face is covered with blood, and his legs are bared high, so as to show that his inner garments are miserable rags and that the buskins with which he is shod are shapeless and do not fit his foot. Do you see how you have already taught me to make comparisons, friend cock? Well, as for absolute power, it proves to be something of that sort. But when you became a horse or a dog or a fish or a frog, how did you find that existence?

COCK

That is a long story you are starting, and we have not time for it just now. But to give the upshot of it, there is no existence that did not seem to me more care-free than that of man, since the others are con- ‘ formed to natural desires and needs alone; you will not see among them a horse bailiff or a frog informer

or a jackdaw sophist or a mosquito chef or a libertine cock or any of the other modes of life that you men follow.