Character Index | Proverb Index
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| Character Index | Proverb Index |
A Lion had come to the end of his days and lay sick unto death at the mouth of his cave, gasping for breath. The animals, his subjects, came round him and drew nearer as he grew more and more helpless. When they saw him on the point of death they thought to themselves: "Now is the time to pay off old grudges." So the Boar came up and drove at him with his tusks; then a Bull gored him with his horns; still the Lion lay helpless before them: so the Ass, feeling quite safe from danger, came up, and turning his tail to the Lion kicked up his heels into his face. "This is a double death," growled the Lion.
Townsend version
A lion, worn out with years and powerless from disease, lay on the ground at the point of death. A Boar rushed upon him, and avenged with a stroke of his tusks a long-remembered injury. Shortly afterwards the Bull with his horns gored him as if he were an enemy. When the Ass saw that the huge beast could be assailed with impunity, he let drive at his forehead with his heels. The expiring Lion said, "I have reluctantly brooked the insults of the brave, but to be compelled to endure such treatment from thee, a disgrace to Nature, is indeed to die a double death."
L'Estrange version
A lion that in the days of his youth and strength, had been very outrageous and cruel, came in the end to he reduced by old age, and infirmity, to the last degree of misery, and contempt: insomuch that all the beasts of the forrest; some out of insolence, others in revenge, some in fine, upon one pretence, some upon another, fell upon him by consent. He was a miserable creature to all intents and purposes; but nothing went so near the heart of him in his distress, as to find himself batter'd by the heel of an asse.
Moral
A Prince that does not secure friends to himself while he is in power and condition to oblige them, must never expect to find friends, when he is old and impotent, and no longer able to do them any good. If he governs tyrannically in his youth, he will be sure to be treated contemptuously in his age; and the baser his enemies are, the more insolent, and intolerable will be the affront.
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Tom Simondi, All Rights Reserved