Hiero

Simonides, the poet, once paid a visit to Hiero, the despot. When both found time to spare, Simonides said: Hiero, will you please explain something to me that you probably know better than I? And pray what is it, said Hiero, that I can know better than one so wise as yourself?

I know you were born a private citizen, he answered, and are now a despot. Therefore, as you have experienced both fortunes, you probably know better than I how the lives of the despot and the citizen differ as regards the joys and sorrows that fall to man’s lot.

Surely, said Hiero, seeing that you are still a private citizen, it is for you to remind me of what happens in a citizen’s life; and then, I think, I could best show you the differences between the two.

Well, said Simonides, taking the suggestion, I think I have observed that sights affect private citizens with pleasure and pain through the eyes, sounds through the ears, smells through the nostrils, meat and drink through the mouth, carnal appetites—of course we all know how.

In the case of cold and heat, things hard and soft, light and heavy, our sensations of pleasure and pain depend on the whole body, I think. In good and evil we seem to feel pleasure or pain, as the case may be—sometimes through the instrumentality of the moral being only, at other times through that of the moral and the physical being together.