26
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 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?
26
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.
