Gallus

Lucian of Samosata

Selections from Lucian. Smith, Emily James, translators. New York; Harper Brothers, 1892.

Mikyllos Well then, Cock, since you have tried pretty much every life and been everything, kindly tell me now what the private life of the rich is

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and of the poor, too, to show me whether you are telling the truth when you declare me happier than the rich.

Cock Come, look at it in this way: To you war is of no great moment, or the report that the enemy is invading us. You do not worry lest they attack your farm, cut down your crops, trample your shrubberies under foot, or ravage your grapes. When the trumpet sounds, if, indeed, you hear it at all, the most you do is to look for a place of safety for yourself, where you may escape the danger. But the rich, in addition to their personal anxiety, have the misery of looking from the walls and seeing all they had on their estates driven or carried away. And if subsidies are needed, they alone are called upon, and if an army must go out they have the posts of most danger as generals or cavalry officers. But you have an osier-shield, you are well equipped and lightly armed, so that you can save yourself, and you are ready to feast in honor of the victory when the triumphant general sacrifices to the gods.

In peace, on the other hand, you are one of the people, and you enter the assembly and domineer over the rich. They tremble and crouch before you, and propitiate you with grants, slaving to provide you with baths and games and shows and the other things in abundance. But

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you, as auditor of the public accounts or examiner, rule them like a savage master, sometimes without even accounting for your acts. If it seems good to you, you shower down stones on them like hail with a free hand, or confiscate their property. You have no fear of the sycophant for your person, or of the robber lest he climb over the coping or burrow through the wall and steal your gold. And you need not trouble yourself with keeping accounts or dunning people or wrestling with those confounded stewards. No such cares tear you asunder. No; when you have finished a shoe and received your twenty cents for it, you leave your work towards nightfall, and, if you like, have your bath; then you buy a salt fish or some sprats or a handful of onions, and with this you make merry, singing most of the time, and philosophising with your good friend, poverty.

This kind of life makes you healthy and strong and hardens you against the cold, for you are so whetted on the grindstone of your hardships that you are a shrewd fighter against things that other people find irresistible. Of course, none of those distressing diseases come your way. If ever a light fever touches you, you give way to it for a little, but then you start up and forthwith shake off the trouble. It flees on the instant in terror when it sees that you are a cold-water drinker, and have said a long

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fare-ill to the doctor's visits. But those who have come to grief through indulgence have every evil under the sun gout and consumption and pneumonia and dropsy, for these are the offspring of those sumptuous dinners. Accordingly, some of them who fly high, like Ikaros, and get near the sun, not knowing their plumage is fastened with wax, fall occasionally head-foremost into the sea with a mighty splash. But those who follow Daedalos, and whose ideas are not too lofty, but so near the earth that the wax is sometimes wet with spray, these, for the most part, fly in safety.

Mikyllos That is to say, people of good common-sense.

Cock But the other sort, Mikyllos, make shameful shipwreck. When Kroisos's feathers are plucked the Persians laugh to see him mount the pyre. Dionysios, his kingdom lost, is seen teaching school in Corinth. He descended from such a throne as his to teach children to spell.

Mikyllos Tell me, Cock, when you were a king -for you say you were once even on the throne —what was your experience of that life? I suppose you were perfectly happy, for you had whatever is best of all good things.

Cock Do not remind me of that thrice unhappy time. As far as those external goods go that you speak of, I seemed indeed perfectly happy, but I had a thousand troubles within.

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Mikyllos What were they? This is astonishing, and I don't altogether believe it.

Cock I ruled over a large and fertile country, Mikyllos, fit to rank with the best for its population and the beauty of its cities. It was traversed by navigable rivers, and had a seaboard with good harbors. I had a large army, with welltrained cavalry, a considerable body-guard, a navy, untold treasure, quantities of gold plate, and all the rest of the royal mise en scène in profusion and excess. Whenever I went abroad the crowd saluted me, believing they beheld a god, and thronged on each others' heels to get sight of me; some would even mount the roofs and count it a great thing to have a clear view of my chariot, my robes, my outriders, and my escort. But I, conscious of my sorrows and agonies, made allowance for their ignorance and pitied my own case, which I compared with the colossal statues that Pheidias or Myron or Praxiteles wrought. Each of these, too, if you look at it from the outside, is a Poseidon or a Zeus of perfect beauty, made in gold or ivory, grasping the thunderbolt or the lightning or the trident in his right hand; but if you stoop and look inside you will see bars and bolts and nails piercing from side to side, and timbers and wedges and pitch and clay and a great many other things just as unsightly which are hidden there, to say nothing

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of the crowds of rats and mice that sometimes colonize them. Well, royalty is much like this.

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

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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

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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.

Mikyllos Probably this is all very true, Cock, but I will confess my case to you without shame. I am still unable to rid my mind of the longing I have had from childhood to be a rich man. In fact, the dream still stands before my eyes pointing to gold, and, most of all, it chokes me to think of that confounded Simon revelling in such goodfortune.

Cock I will cure you, Mikyllos. It is still

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night, so get up and come with me. I will take you to see Simon and into the houses of the other rich men, to show you how things are with them.

Mikyllos How can you? The doors are locked. You are not going to make a burglar of me, are you?

Cock Heaven forbid; but Hermes, whose sacred bird I am, bestowed on me this special gift: if my longest tail-feather, the one that curls because it is so soft, be-

Mikyllos But you have two like that!

Cock The man whom I permit to pluck the right hand one and keep it will be able to open any door and see everything, himself unseen, as long as I am willing.

Mikyllos I did not know, Cock, that you are a sorcerer, too. Now if you will give me this chance once, you will soon see all Simon's wealth transferred to this house; for if I can make my way in I will carry it off, and then he will have to come back to his lasts and nibble for a living.

Cock That is not permitted. Hermes commanded me, if the holder of the feather should do anything of the sort, to give the alarm and have him caught in the theft.

Mykillos That is a likely story! Hermes, a thief himself, begrudges theft to others! However, let us be off. I will keep my hands off the gold if I can.

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Cock First, Mikyllos, pluck the soft feather. What are you doing? You have plucked them both!

Mykillos To be on the safe side, Cock. And you will look better so. Your tail will be more symmetrical.

Cock All right. Shall we go to see Simon first, or some other millionaire ?

Mikyllos Oh, Simon, by all means, who thinks himself a greater man by two syllables now he is rich. Here we are already at his door. What must I do next?

Cock Touch the bolt with the feather.

Mykillos That's done. Gracious heaven, the door has opened as if with a key!

Cock Go in first. There, do you see him keeping vigil over his accounts?

Mikyllos Yes! by Zeus, with a feeble, ill-fed lamp. And he is pale, I don't know why, and he has fallen away to a skeleton. It must be from anxiety, for I never heard he was ill otherwise.

Cock Hear what he says. Then you will know why he is thus.

Simon So that seventy thousand dollars is pretty safely buried under the bed, and nobody at all knows about it; but I have an idea that Sosylos the groom saw me burying the sixteen thousand under the manger. Anyhow, he is forever about the stable now, though he was not so

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very careful or fond of his work before. And probably I am being plundered of a good deal besides this; for where did Tibios get the money for those large fish they say he bought yesterday, and those ear-rings for his wife, worth a dollar at least? It is my money they are snatching, unlucky wretch that I am! Even my plate is not safely stored, and there is so much of it! I am afraid a house-breaker will get it. A great many people envy me and plot against me, particularly my neighbor Mikyllos.

Mikyllos Yes, by Zeus! I am going off with a basin under my arm just as you did!

Cock Hush, Mikyllos, he will know we are here.

Simon The best plan is to sit up all night myself and look after everything. I will get up and make the round of the house. Who is that? I see you, you thief— Good heaven, you are only a pillar-that's all right. I will dig up my money and count it again, lest I overlooked any the day before yesterday. There, I hear some one coming to attack me again. Every one is besieging me and plotting against me. Where is my dagger? If I catch any one- Come, I must bury the money again.

Cock Such, Mikyllos, is the state of affairs with Simon. Let us be off to some one else while there is still a little of the night left.

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Mikyllos Poor devil, what a life he leads. May my enemies get rich like him! I want to give him one good thump and then go off.

Simon Who struck me? I am robbed, wretched man!

Mikyllos Bemoan yourself and lie awake, and stick to your gold till you turn to the color of it! Let us go, if you please, to see Gniphon, the money-lender. He lives near by. This door, too, opened of itself.

Cock See, he is awake with his cares like the other, calculating his interest with his fingers stiff already. He must soon leave all these behind and turn to a book-worm or a carrion-fly.

Mikyllos I see a wretched, senseless human being, whose life now is not much better than a worm's or a gnat's. He, too, is worn to the bone with his accounts.

Cock Well, now, Mikyllos, should you like to fall heir to all this, along with the wealth of Eukrates?

Mikyllos Heaven forbid, Cock. I would rather starve. Farewell to gold and dinners! I call five cents a better fortune than to be robbed by your servants.

Cock But for this time we must go home, for day is already beginning to break. You shall see the rest another time, Mikyllos.

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