ink that the being in a court
(however virtuous one's conduct, however free one's language there) is
slavery. But I was taught by my great master, the incomparable Socrates,
that the business of true philosophy is to consult and promote the
happiness of society. She must not, therefore, be confined to a tub or a
cell. Her sphere is in senates or the cabinets of kings. While your
sect is employed in snarling at the great or buffooning with the vulgar,
she is counselling those who govern nations, infusing into their minds
humanity, justice, temperance, and the love of true glory, resisting
their passions when they transport them beyond the bounds of virtue, and
fortifying their reason by the antidotes she administers against the
poison of flattery.

_Diogenes_.--You mean to have me understand that you went to the court of
the Younger Dionysius to give him antidotes against the poison of
flattery. But I say he sent for you only to sweeten the cup, by mixing
it more agreeably, and rendering the flavour more delicate. His vanity
was too nice for the nauseous common draught; but your seasoning gave it
a relish which made it go down most delightfully, and intoxicated him
more than ever. Oh, there is no flatterer half so dangerous to a prince
as a fawning philosopher!

_Plato_.--If you call it fawning that I did not treat him with such
unmannerly rudeness as you did Alexander the Great when he visited you at
Athens, I have nothing to say. But, in truth, I made my company
agreeable to him, not for any mean ends which regarded only myself, but
that I might be useful both to him and to his people. I endeavoured to
give a right turn to his vanity; and know, Diogenes, that whosoever will
serve mankind, but more especially princes, must compound with their
weaknesses, and take as much pains to gain them over to virtue, by an
honest and prudent complaisance, as others do to seduce them from it by a
criminal adulation.

_Diogenes_.--A little of my sagacity would have shown you that if this
was your purpose your labour was lost in that court. Why did not you go
and preach chastity to Lais? A philosopher in a brothel, reading
lectures on the beauty of continence and decency, is not a more
ridiculous animal than a philosopher in the cabinet, or at the table of a
tyrant, descanting on liberty and public spirit! What effect had the
lessons of your famous disciple Aristotle upon Alexander the Great, a
prince far more capable o