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.
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 LydiaCroesus. is worried because his son is mute, the
king of PersiaArtaxerxes. because Clearchus is enlisting troops
for Cyrus, anotherDionysius the Younger. because Dion is holding whispered conversations with a few Syracusans, anotherAlexander.
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.
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?
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.