Gallus

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 2. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915.

MICYLLUS Well then, cock, as you have tried almost every existence and know everything, please tell me clearly about the life of the rich and the life of the poor, each by itself, so that I may learn if you are telling the truth when you declare that I am happier than the rich.

COCK Well now, look at it this way, Micyllus. As for you, you are little concerned about war if you hear that the enemy is approaching, and you do not worry for fear they may lay your farm waste in a raid or

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trample down your garden or cut down your grapevines; when you hear the trumpet, at most you simply consider yourself and where you are to turn in order to save yourself and escape the danger. The rich, however, not only fear for themselves but are distressed when they look from the walls and see all that they own in the country harried and plundered. Moreover if it is necessary to pay a special tax, they alone are summoned to do so, and if it is necessary to take the field, they risk their lives in the van as commanders of horse or foot, whereas you, with but a wicker shield, have little to carry and nothing to impede your flight, and are ready to celebrate the victory when the general offers sacrifice after winning the battle.

In time of peace, on the other hand, being one of the voters, you go to the assembly and lord it over the rich while they quake and cringe and seck your good will with presents. Besides, it is they who toil that you may have baths and shows and everything else to your heart’s content, while you investigate and scrutinize them harshly like a master, sometimes without even letting them say a word for themselves; and if you choose you shower them generously with stones or confiscate their properties. And_ you do not dread an informer, nor yet a robber who might steal your gold by climbing over the coping or digging through the wall; and you are not bothered with casting up accounts or collecting debts or squabbling with your confounded agents, and thus dividing your attention among so many worries. No, after you have finished a sandal and received your pay of seven obols, you get up from your bench toward evening, take a bath if you choose,

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buy yourself a bloater or sprats or a bunch of onions, and have a good time, singing a great deal and philosophizing with that good soul, Poverty.

So in consequence of all this you are sound and strong in body and can stand the cold, for your hardships have trained you fine and made you no mean fighter against adverse conditions that scem to the rest of the world irresistible. No chance that one of their severe illnesses will come near you: on the contrary, if ever you get a light fever, after humouring it a little while you jump out of bed at once, shaking off your discomfort, and the fever takes flight immediately on seeing that you drink cold water and have no use for doctors’ visits. But the rich, unhappy that they are—what ills are they not subject to through intemperance? Gout and consumption and pneumonia and dropsy are the consequences of those splendid dinners.

In brief, some of them who like Icarus fly high and draw near the sun without knowing that their wings are fitted on with wax, now and then make a great splash by falling head-first into the sea, while of those who, copying Daedalus, have not let their ambitions soar high in the air but have kept them close to earth so that the wax is occasionally wet with spray, the most part reach their journey’s end in safety.

MICYLLUS You mean temperate and sensible people.

COCK But as for the others, Micyllus, you can see how sadly they come to grief when a Croesus with his

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wings clipped makes sport for the Persians by mounting the pyre, or a Dionysius, expelled from his tyrant’s throne, turns up in Corinth as a schoolmaster, teaching children their a, b—ab, after holding sway so widely.

MICYLLUS Tell me, cock, when you were king—for you say you were once on a time—how did you find that life? You were completely happy, I suppose, as you had what is surely the acme of all blessings.

COCK Don’t even remind me of it, Micyllus, so utterly wretched was I then; for although in all things external I seemed to be completely happy, as you say, I had a thousand vexations within.

MICYLLUS What were they? What you say is strange and not quite credible.

COCK I ruled over a great country, Micyllus, one that roduced everything and was among the most noteworthy for the number of its people and the beauty of its cities, one that was traversed by navigable rivers and had a sea-coast with good harbours ; and I had a great army, trained cavalry, a large bodyguard, triremes, untold riches, a great quantity of gold plate and all the rest of the paraphernalia of rule enormously exaggerated, so that when I went out the people made obeisance and thought they beheld a god inthe flesh, and they ran up one after

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another to look at me, while some even went up to the house-tops, thinking it a great thing to have had a good look at my horses, my mantle, my diadem, and my attendants before and behind me. But I myself, knowing how many vexations and torments I had, pardoned them, to be sure, for their folly, but pitied myself for being no better than the great colossi that Phidias or Myron or Praxiteles made, each of which outwardly is a beautiful Poseidon or a Zeus, made of ivory and gold, with a thunderbolt ora flash of lightning or a trident in his right hand ; but if you stoop down and look inside, you will see bars and props and nails driven clear through, and beams and wedges and pitch and clay and a quantity of such ugly stuff housing within, not to mention numbers of mice and rats that keep their court in them sometimes. That is what monarchy is like.

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

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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,
  1. 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[*](Croesus.) is worried because his son is mute, the king of Persia[*](Artaxerxes.) because Clearchus is enlisting troops for Cyrus, another[*](Dionysius the Younger. ) because Dion is holding whispered conversations with a few Syracusans, another[*](Alexander.) 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

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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

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

MICYLLUS No doubt that is true, cock. But as to myself, I am not ashamed to tell you how I feel. I am not yet able to unlearn the desire of becoming rich that [have had since my boyhood. My dream, too, still stands before my eyes displaying its gold; and above all I am choking with envy of that confounded Simon, who is revelling in so many blessings.

COCK I will cure you, Micyllus. As it is still night, get up and follow me; I will take you to visit Simon and to the house of the other rich men, so that you may see what their establishments are like.

MICYLLUS How can you do it when their doors are locked? You aren't going to make me be a burglar ?

COCK Not by any means. But Hermes, to whom IT am consecrated, gave me this privilege, that if my longest tail feather, the one that is so pliant that it curls—

MICYLLUS You have two like that.

COCK It is the one on the right, and if I permit any man to pull it out and keep it, that man, as long as I choose, can open every door and see everything without being seen himself.

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MICYLLUS I didn’t realize, cock, that you yourself were a conjurer. Well, if you only let me have it, you shall see all Simon’s possessions brought over here in a jiffy: Pl slip in and bring them over, and he will once more eat his leather as he stretches it.[*](The ancient shoemaker held one side of the leather in his teeth in stretching it. Cf. Dentibus antiquas solitus producere pelleset mordere luto putre vetusque solum—.Martial 9, 73. ) COCK That is impossible, for Hermes ordered me, if the man who had the feather did anything of that sort, to uplift my voice and expose him.

MICYLLUS It is hard to believe what you say, that Hermes, himself a thief, begrudges others the same privilege. But let’s be off just the same ; I'll keep my hands off the gold if I can.

COCK First pluck the feather out, Micyllus . . . What's this? You have pulled them both out !

MICYLLUS It is safer to do so, cock, and it will spoil your beauty less, preventing you from being crippled on one side of your tail.

COCK All right. Shall we visit Simon first, or one of the other rich men?

MICYLLUS No: Simon, who wants to have a name of four syllables instead of two, now that he is rich. Here we are at the door already. What shall I do next?

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COCK Put the feather to the lock.

MICYLLUS Look at that now! Heracles! The door has opened just as it would toa key!

COCK Lead on. Do you see him sitting up and figuring ?

MICYLLUS Yes, by Heaven, beside a dim and thirsty lamp ; he is pale for some reason, cock, and all run down and thin; from worrying, I suppose, for there was no talk of his being ill in any other way.

COCK Listen to what he is saying and you will find out how he got this way.

SIMON Well, then, that seventy talents is quite safely buried under the bed and no one else knows of it; but as for the sixteen, I think Sosylus the groom saw me hiding them under the manger. At any rate he is all for hanging about the stable, though he is not particularly attentive to business otherwise or fond of work. I have probably been robbed of much more than that, or else where did Tibius get the money for the big slice of salt fish they said he treated himself to yesterday or the earring they said he bought for his wife at a cost of five whole drachmas ?_ It’s my money these fellows are squandering, worse luck! But my cups are not stored in a safe place, either, and there are so many! I’m afraid someone may burrow under the wall and steal them: many envy me and plot against me, and above all my neighbour Micyllus.

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MICYLLUS Yes, by Heaven, I’m just like you and go away with the dishes under my arm!

COCK Hush, Micyllus, for fear he may find out that we are here.

SIMON At any rate it is best to stay awake myself and keep watch. I'll get up from time to time and go all about the whole house. Who is that? I see you, burglar . . . oh! no, you are only a pillar, it is allright. Ill dig up my gold and count it again, for fear I made a mistake yesterday. There, now, somebody made a noise: he’s after me, of course. I am beleaguered and plotted against by all the world. Where is my sword? If I find anyone ... Let us bury the gold again.

COCK Well, Micyllus, that is the way Simon lives. Let’s o and visit someone else while there is still a little of the night left.

MICYLLUS Unfortunate man, what a life he leads! I wish my enemies wealth on those terms! Well, I want to hit him over the head before I go.

SIMON Who hit me? I’m being robbed, unlucky that I am !

MICYLLUS Groan and lie awake and grow like your gold in colour, cleaving fast to it! Let’s go and see Gnipho the money-lender, if you don’t mind. He

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too lives not far off. This door has opened to us also.

COCK Do you see him awake with his worries like the other, computing his interests and wearing his fingers tothe bone? And yet he will soon have to leave all this behind and become a beetle or a gnat or a dogfly.

MICYLLUS I see an unfortunate, senseless man who even now lives little better than a beetle or a gnat. And how completely run down he is from his computations ! Let’s go and see another.

COCK Your friend Eucrates, if you like. See, this door has opened too, so let’s go in.

MICYLLUS All this belonged to me a little while ago.

COCK Why, are you still dreaming of your wealth? Do you see Eucrates and his servant, old man as he is. . .?

MICYLLUS Yes, by Heaven, I see lust and sensuality and lewdness ill befitting a human being ; and in another quarter I see his wife and the cook . . .

COCK How about it? Would you be willing to inherit all this too, Micyllus, and have all that belongs to Eucrates ?

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MICYLLUS Not on your life, cock! [I starve first! ‘To the deuce with your gold and your dinners ; two obols is a fortune to me in comparison with being an easy mark for the servants.

COCK Well, the day is just breaking, so let’s go home now ; you shall see the rest of it some other time.