Gallus

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

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

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

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

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.

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.