reverenced all
the world and would never say a shameful word to any man or woman or do
a shameful deed. [28] He looked for this because he saw that, apart
from kings and governors who may be supposed to inspire fear, men will
reverence the modest and not the shameless, and modesty in women will
inspire modesty in the men who behold them. [29] And his people, he
thought, would learn to obey if it were plain that he honoured frank and
prompt obedience even above virtues that made a grander show and were
harder to attain. [30] Such was his belief, and his practice went with
it to the end. His own temperance and the knowledge of it made others
more temperate. When they saw moderation and self-control in the man who
above all others had licence to be insolent, lesser men were the more
ready to abjure all insolence of their own. [31] But there was this
difference, Cyrus held, between modesty and self-control: the modest
man will do nothing shameful in the light of day, but the man of
self-control nothing base, not even in secret. [32] Self-restrain, he
believed, would best be cultivated if he made men see in himself one who
could not be dragged from the pursuit of virtue by the pleasure of the
moment, one who chose to toil first for the happy-hearted joys that go
hand-in-hand with beauty and nobleness. [33] Thus, being the man he
was, he established at his gates a stately company, where the lower gave
place to the higher, and they in their turn showed reverence to each
other, and courtesy, and perfect harmony. Among them all there was never
a cry of anger to be heard, nor a burst of insolent laughter; to look at
them was to know that they lived for honour and loveliness.

[34] Such was the life at the palace-gates, and to practise his nobles
in martial exercises he would lead them out to the hunt whenever he
thought it well, holding the chase to be the best training for war and
the surest way to excellence in horsemanship. [35] A man learns to keep
his seat, no matter what the ground may be, as he follows the flying
quarry, learns to hurl and strike on horseback in his eagerness to bring
down the game and win applause. [36] And here, above all, was the field
in which to inure his colleagues to toil and hardship and cold and heat
and hunger and thirst. Thus to this day the Persian monarch and his
court spend their leisure in the chase. [37] From all that has been
said, it is clear Cyrus was convinced that no one has a right to