23
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 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.
23
That is to say, people of good common-sense.
23
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.
24
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.
24
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.
24
What were they? This is astonishing, and I don't altogether believe it.
