3.5
But the virtues of these men, even down to their ultimate and minute differences, show that their natures had one and the same stamp, shape, and general colour; they were an equal blend, so to speak, of severity and kindness, of caution and bravery, of solicitude for others and fearlessness for themselves, of the careful avoidance of baseness and, in like degree, the eager pursuit of justice. Therefore we shall need a very subtle instrument of reasoning, as it were, for the discovery and determination of their differences.
4.1
That Cato’s lineage, then, was illustrious, is generally admitted, as will be said later; but Phocion’s, as I judge, was not altogether ignoble or lowly. For had he been the son of a pestle-maker, as Idomeneus says, then Glaucippus the son of Hypereides, in the speech wherein he collected countless evil things to say against him, would not have omitted his mean birth; nor would Phocion have lived on so high a plane or enjoyed so sound an education as to have been a pupil of Plato when he was still a stripling, and later a pupil of Xenocrates, in the Academy, and to have cultivated the noblest behaviour from the very beginning.
