The Cock (21-25)

Mikyllos

Well then, Cock, since you have tried pretty much every life and been everything, kindly tell me now what the private life of the rich is

and of the poor, too, to show me whether you are telling the truth when you declare me happier than the rich.

Cock

Come, look at it in this way: To you war is of no great moment, or the report that the enemy is invading us. You do not worry lest they attack your farm, cut down your crops, trample your shrubberies under foot, or ravage your grapes. When the trumpet sounds, if, indeed, you hear it at all, the most you do is to look for a place of safety for yourself, where you may escape the danger. But the rich, in addition to their personal anxiety, have the misery of looking from the walls and seeing all they had on their estates driven or carried away. And if subsidies are needed, they alone are called upon, and if an army must go out they have the posts of most danger as generals or cavalry officers. But you have an osier-shield, you are well equipped and lightly armed, so that you can save yourself, and you are ready to feast in honor of the victory when the triumphant general sacrifices to the gods.

Cock

In peace, on the other hand, you are one of the people, and you enter the assembly and domineer over the rich. They tremble and crouch before you, and propitiate you with grants, slaving to provide you with baths and games and shows and the other things in abundance. But

you, as auditor of the public accounts or examiner, rule them like a savage master, sometimes without even accounting for your acts. If it seems good to you, you shower down stones on them like hail with a free hand, or confiscate their property. You have no fear of the sycophant for your person, or of the robber lest he climb over the coping or burrow through the wall and steal your gold. And you need not trouble yourself with keeping accounts or dunning people or wrestling with those confounded stewards. No such cares tear you asunder. No; when you have finished a shoe and received your twenty cents for it, you leave your work towards nightfall, and, if you like, have your bath; then you buy a salt fish or some sprats or a handful of onions, and with this you make merry, singing most of the time, and philosophising with your good friend, poverty.

Cock

This kind of life makes you healthy and strong and hardens you against the cold, for you are so whetted on the grindstone of your hardships that you are a shrewd fighter against things that other people find irresistible. Of course, none of those distressing diseases come your way. If ever a light fever touches you, you give way to it for a little, but then you start up and forthwith shake off the trouble. It flees on the instant in terror when it sees that you are a cold-water drinker, and have said a long

fare-ill to the doctor's visits. But those who have come to grief through indulgence have every evil under the sun gout and consumption and pneumonia and dropsy, for these are the offspring of those sumptuous dinners. Accordingly, some of them who fly high, like Ikaros, and get near the sun, not knowing their plumage is fastened with wax, fall occasionally head-foremost into the sea with a mighty splash. But those who follow Daedalos, and whose ideas are not too lofty, but so near the earth that the wax is sometimes wet with spray, these, for the most part, fly in safety.

Mikyllos

That is to say, people of good common-sense.

Cock

But the other sort, Mikyllos, make shameful shipwreck. When Kroisos's feathers are plucked the Persians laugh to see him mount the pyre. Dionysios, his kingdom lost, is seen teaching school in Corinth. He descended from such a throne as his to teach children to spell.

Mikyllos

Tell me, Cock, when you were a king -for you say you were once even on the throne —what was your experience of that life? I suppose you were perfectly happy, for you had whatever is best of all good things.

Cock

Do not remind me of that thrice unhappy time. As far as those external goods go that you speak of, I seemed indeed perfectly happy, but I had a thousand troubles within.

Mikyllos

What were they? This is astonishing, and I don't altogether believe it.

Cock

I ruled over a large and fertile country, Mikyllos, fit to rank with the best for its population and the beauty of its cities. It was traversed by navigable rivers, and had a seaboard with good harbors. I had a large army, with welltrained cavalry, a considerable body-guard, a navy, untold treasure, quantities of gold plate, and all the rest of the royal mise en scène in profusion and excess. Whenever I went abroad the crowd saluted me, believing they beheld a god, and thronged on each others' heels to get sight of me; some would even mount the roofs and count it a great thing to have a clear view of my chariot, my robes, my outriders, and my escort. But I, conscious of my sorrows and agonies, made allowance for their ignorance and pitied my own case, which I compared with the colossal statues that Pheidias or Myron or Praxiteles wrought. Each of these, too, if you look at it from the outside, is a Poseidon or a Zeus of perfect beauty, made in gold or ivory, grasping the thunderbolt or the lightning or the trident in his right hand; but if you stoop and look inside you will see bars and bolts and nails piercing from side to side, and timbers and wedges and pitch and clay and a great many other things just as unsightly which are hidden there, to say nothing

of the crowds of rats and mice that sometimes colonize them. Well, royalty is much like this.

Mikyllos

But you have not told me what the clay and bolts and bars of royalty are, nor the nature of that mass of unsightly things. To be stared at when you drive out, and to rule so many people, and to be saluted like a god, may justly be likened to the great statue, for they are both well-nigh divine. But tell me now, what is inside the colossus?

Cock

Where shall I begin? With the fears and frights and suspicions? The hatred and plots of those about the king? The scanty sleep, and that with one eye open, that these leave him? The troubled dreams, the tangled schemes, the hopes that never come to pass? Or the press of business, the audiences, the decisions, the going out to war, the orders to be given, the treaties to be made, the accounts to be kept?. This will not suffer a king to have any pleasure, even in his dreams, but he alone must keep watch for all and feel a thousand cares.

For sweet sleep held not Agamemnon, son of

Atreus, revolving many things in his mind,

though all the Achaians were snoring. Kroisus was troubled because his son was deaf, Artaxerxes because Klearchos hired himself to Cyros, another ruler because Dion whispered in the ears of some of the Syracusans, and another because Parmenion was praised. Ptolemy made Perdikkas wretched, and Seleukos did the same for Ptolemy. There are other sources of trouble, too: love won by force, a mistress that bestows her favors elsewhere, rumors of sedition, two or three of the body-guard whispering together. Worst of all, a king must hold his nearest and dearest in the greatest suspicion, and be ever expecting an ill turn from them. This one died of poison by his son's hand; that one actually was killed by his beloved; a third, perhaps, was snatched by a like manner of death.