The Cock (25-26)

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.

Mikyllos

That will do! These are horrible things you tell me of. To my mind, then, it is a good deal safer to sit stooping over one's last than to drink from a golden goblet if the lovingcup is mixed with hemlock or aconite. The only danger I run is of cutting my fingers so that they bleed for a moment, if my knife should slip aside and run out of the straight groove. But they, by your story, feast on deadly food, surrounded by a thousand evils. Then, when they fall from power, they are more like the tragic actors than anything else, whom you may see often with diadems, and ivory-hilted swords, and waving hair, and gold-sprinkled cloaks, as long as they are Kekrops or Sisyphos or Telephos. But if one of them steps into a hole, as often happens, and tumbles down in the middle of the stage, see how

the spectators laugh at the broken mask and diadem, and the actor's own bleeding head, and his legs bared so that you can see the wretched rags under his robe, and the straps that hold on his shapeless and ill-fitting buskins. You see how I have learned the art of simile from you already, my best of cocks! But we have seen what royalty is like; when you became a horse or a dog or a fish or a frog, how did you enjoy that sort of life?

Cock

You raise a great question, and this is not the time to discuss it. But to put it in a nutshell, every one of those lives, in my judgment, is freer from care than the human life, being measured only by the physical desires and needs. You will never find among the animals a horse who is a tax-gatherer, or a frog who is a spy, or a jackdaw who is a sophist, or a mosquito who is a cook, or a cock who is a libertine, or any other evil life you can think of.