ling
light. The senate awarded the prize of eloquence to Tiberius; he refused
it, esteeming that though it had been just, he could derive no advantage
from a judgment so partial, and that was so little free to judge.

As we give them all advantages of honour, so do we soothe and authorise
all their vices and defects, not only by approbation, but by imitation
also. Every one of Alexander's followers carried his head on one side,
as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his
presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew
they were as purblind as he. Hernia itself has also served to recommend
a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master
hated his wife, Plutarch--[who, however, only gives one instance; and in
this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]--has seen his
courtiers repudiate theirs, whom they loved; and, which is yet more,
uncleanliness and all manner of dissoluteness have so been in fashion; as
also disloyalty, blasphemy, cruelty, heresy, superstition, irreligion,
effeminacy, and worse, if worse there be; and by an example yet more
dangerous than that of Mithridates' flatterers, who, as their master
pretended to the honour of a good physician, came to him to have
incisions and cauteries made in their limbs; for these others suffered
the soul, a more delicate and noble part, to be cauterised.

But to end where I began: the Emperor Adrian, disputing with the
philosopher Favorinus about the interpretation of some word, Favorinus
soon yielded him the victory; for which his friends rebuking him, "You
talk simply," said he; "would you not have him wiser than I, who commands
thirty legions?" Augustus wrote verses against Asinius Pollio, and "I,"
said Pollio, "say nothing, for it is not prudence to write in contest
with him who has power to proscribe." And they were right. For
Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poesy and Plato in
discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be
sold for a slave into the island of AEgina.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE

'Tis a custom of our justice to condemn some for a warning to others. To
condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says,

[Diogenes Laertius, however, in his Life of Plato, iii. 181, says
that Plato's offence was the speaking too freely to the tyrant.]

for what is done can never be und