shable.

When I saw all this, the life of man came before me under the
likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshaled by Chance, who
distributed infinitely varied costumes to the performers. She would
take one and array him like a king, with tiara, body-guard, and crown
complete; another she drest like a slave; one was adorned with beauty,
another got up as a ridiculous hunchback: there must be all kinds in
the show. Often before the procession was over she made individuals
exchange characters; they could not be allowed to keep the same to the
end; Croesus must double parts and appear as slave and captive;
Maeandrius, starting as slave, would take over Polycrates'[118]
despotism, and be allowed to keep his new clothes for a little while.
And when the procession is done, every one disrobes, gives up his
character with his body, and appears, as he originally was, just like
his neighbor. Some, when Chance comes round collecting the properties,
are silly enough to sulk and protest, as tho they were being robbed of
their own instead of only returning loans. You know the kind of thing
on the stage--tragic actors shifting as the play requires from Creon
to Priam, from Priam to Agamemnon; the same man, very likely, whom you
saw just now in all the majesty of Cecrops or Erechtheus, treads the
boards next as a slave, because the author tells him to. The play
over, each of them throws off his gold-spangled robe and his mask,
descends from the buskin's height, and moves a mean ordinary creature;
his name is not now Agamemnon son of Atreus, or Creon son of
Menoeceus, but Polus son of Charicles of Sunium, or Satyrus son of
Theogiton of Marathon. Such is the condition of mankind, or so that
sight presented it to me.

_Philip._ Now, if a man occupies a costly towering sepulcher, or
leaves monuments, statues, inscriptions behind him on earth, does not
this place him in a class above the common dead?

_Menippus._ Nonsense, my good man; if you had looked on Mausolus[119]
himself--the Carian so famous for his tomb--I assure you, you would
never have stopt laughing; he was a miserable unconsidered unit among
the general mass of the dead, flung aside in a dusty hole, with no
profit of his sepulcher but its extra weight upon him. No, friend,
when AEacus gives a man his allowance of space--and it never exceeds a
foot's breadth, he must be content to pack himself into its limits.
You might have laughed still more if you had beheld the k