18
I see all this, and am wondering what pleasure they find in life and what it is that they are distressed to lose. For example, if one considers their kings, who are counted most happy, quite apart from the instability and uncertainty of their fortune which you allude to, one will find that the pleasures which they have are fewer than the pains, for terrors, alarums, enmities, plots, rage, and flattery are with them always. I say nothing of sorrows, diseases, and misadventures, which of course dominate them without partiality; but when their lot is hard, one is driven to conjecture what the lot of common men must be.
19
Let me tell you, Hermes, what I think men and the whole life of man resemble. You have noticed bubbles in water, caused by a streamlet plashing down—I mean those that mass to make foam? Some of them, being small, burst and are gone in an instant, while some last longer and as others join them, become swollen and grow to exceeding great compass; but afterwards they also burst without fail in time, for it cannot be otherwise. Such is the life of men; they are all swollen with wind, some to greater size, others to less; and with some the swelling is short-lived and swift-fated, while with others it is over as soon as it comes into being; but in any case they all must burst.
19
Charon, your simile is every bit as good as Homer's, who compares the race of man to leaves.Iliad 6, 146.
