Beneath a shepherd’s prudent care, there thrived a profitable flock of sheep.
The king himself was much impressed. “Such diligence deserves a wider scope. Come, leave your lambs, and tend instead to men. I’ll make a judge of you!”
It came to pass. And, though he had but small experience (sheep, and dogs, and wolves were all he knew; a hermit, too), he had, this shepherd-judge, good sense; the rest of what he needed came with time.
The hermit he had known then came one day to doomsay. “Trust no kings!” he cried. “Their favor is precarious, a slippery, tricksy perch. I say this as a friend: Illustrious heights precede unseemly falls!”
His hearer laughed, which caused the hermit grief.
“How foolish courtly life has rendered you already. You remind me of that blind man who mistook a snake, by cold made torpid, for a whip. —‘Good God!’ a passerby exclaimed. ‘Why carry that abhorrent, baleful thing? Get rid of it!’ —‘What thing? My whip?’ —‘Don’t tell me that you use as whip a snake!’ —The blind man scoffed. ‘I lost my whip; and now I’ve found a better one. You’re only envious.’ However, soon the snake awoke, and bit the fool, who died. For you a viler fate than death awaits.”
“What’s worse than death?”
The hermit shook his head, and muttering said, “Untold calamities . . .”
He wasn’t wrong. The judge soon found himself the victim of concerted slander, hatched by a cabal of palace vermin, who suborned denunciations from the folks disgruntled by his judgements.
“He,” they claimed, “built mansions with our money!”
So the king investigated; and he found the judge lived modestly.
“He’s filled that chest,” they next alleged, “with priceless gems, ill-gotten all!”
The shepherd-judge himself unlocked the chest, confounding thus their machinations. For inside were but a tattered cloak, a cap, a sack, and crook.
“My treasure true,” he said, “which never drew upon me grudgeful lies. I take you up again, and leave, as though I wake from out a dream, this dreadful court. Your majesty, forgive this outburst. I foresaw, it seems, this downfall when I dared to scale the summit.” (Thus advice ignored late cloaks itself as wisdom.) “Who, I ask, is free of all ambition?”
There’s indeed a pair of demons that deprave our hearts, unseating from our minds our reason. Of the two, Ambition’s even worse than Love.