“Have an eye to the lives of others, but do not carry your investigations unpleasantly close.  Decide cases which are brought before you by outsiders, but do not pretend to notice conduct that receives no outspoken censure from any one, except irregularities not consonant with public interest.  The latter ought to be properly rebuked, even if no one has aught to say against them.  Other private failings you ought to know, in order to avoid making a mistake some day by employing an assistant unsuitable for a particular duty:  do not, however, take individuals to task.  Their natures impel many persons to commit various violations of the law.  If you make an unsparing campaign against them, you might leave scarcely one man unpunished.  But if you humanely mingle consideration with the strict command of the law, you may perhaps bring them to their senses.  For the law, though necessarily severe in its punishments, can not always conquer nature.  Some men, if permitted to think they are unobserved, or if moderately admonished, improve, some through shame at being discovered and others through fear of failure the next time.  Whereas when they are openly denounced and throw compunction to the winds, or where they are chastised beyond measure, they overturn and trample under foot all law and order and obey slavishly the impulses of their nature.  Therefore it is not easy to discipline all of them nor is it fitting to allow some of them to continue publicly their outrageous conduct.

“This is the way I advise you to treat people’s offences, except the very desperate cases:  and you should honor even beyond the deserts of the deed whatever they do rightly.  In this way you can best make them refrain from baser conduct by kindliness and cause them to aim at what is better by liberality.  Have no dread that either money or other means of rewarding those who do well will ever fail you.  I think those deserving of good treatment will prove far fewer than the rewards, since you are lord of so much land and sea.  And fear not that any who are benefited will commit some act of ingratitude.  Nothing so captivates and conciliates any one, be he foreigner or be he foe, as freedom from wrongs and likewise kindly treatment.

[-35-] “This is the attitude which I urge you to assume toward others.  For your own part allow no extraordinary or overweening distinction to be given you through word or deed by the senate or by anybody else.  To others honor which you confer lends adornment, but to your own self nothing can be given that is greater than what you already have, and it would arouse no little suspicion of failure in straightforwardness.  None of the ordinary people willingly approves of having any such distinction voted to the man in power.  As he receives everything of the kind from himself, he not only obtains no praise for it but becomes a laughing-stock instead.  Any additional brilliance, then, you must create for yourself by your good deeds.  Never permit gold