1.9
Next, let us consider his sayings, seeing that the souls of other kings and potentates betray their conditions and inclinations by their expressions. Antigonus the Aged, having heard a certain poet sing before him a short treatise concerning justice, said, Thou art a fool to mention justice to me, when thou seest me thundering down the cities belonging to other people about their ears. Dionysius the Tyrant was wont to say that children were to be cheated with dice, but men with oaths. Upon the monument of Sardanapalus this inscription is to be seen:— All I did eat and drink, and all that lust To me vouchsafed, I have; all else is gone. What now can a man say of these apophthems, but that the first denotes injustice and immoderate desire of sovereignty; the next impiety; and the third sensuality? But as for the sayings of Alexander, set aside his diadem, his claimed descent from Ammon, and the nobility of his Macedonian extraction, and you would believe them to have been the sayings of Socrates, Plato, or Pythagoras. For we omit the swelling hyperboles of flattery which poets have inscribed under his images and statues, studying rather to extol the power of Alexander than his moderation and temperance; as, for example,— The statue seems to look to Jove and say, Take thou Olympus; me let Earth obey! and that other,— This is Alexander the son of Jove.
