course I should never have followed, had it been necessary for me to die or even to become monarch ten thousand times.  This policy I adopt for my own good and for that of the city.  I myself have undergone both labors and hardships and I can no longer hold out either in mind or in body.  Furthermore I foresee the jealousy and hatred which rises in the breasts of some against the best men, and the plots which result from those feelings; and for that reason I choose rather to be a private citizen with glory than to be a monarch in danger.  And the public business would be managed much better if carried on publicly and by many people at once than if it were dependent upon any one man.

[-9-] “For these reasons, then, I supplicate and beseech all of you both to commend my course and to cooeperate heartily with me, reflecting upon all that I have done for you in war and in government.  You will be paying me all the thanks due for it by allowing me now at last to lead a life of quiet.  Thus you will come to know that I understand not only how to rule but to be ruled, and that all commands which I have laid upon others I can endure to have laid upon me.  I must surely expect to live in security and to suffer no harm from any one by either deed or word, such is the confidence (based upon the consciousness of my own rectitude) that I have in your good-will.  I may of course meet with some catastrophe, as happens to many; for it is not possible for a man to please everybody, especially when he has been involved in so great wars, some foreign and some civil, and has had affairs of such magnitude entrusted to him:  yet even so, I am quite ready to choose to die as a private citizen before my appointed time rather than to become immortal as a sole ruler.  That very circumstance will bring me fame,—­that I not only murdered no one in order to hold possession of the sovereignty but even died untimely in order to avoid becoming monarch.  The man who has dared to slay me will certainly be punished by Heaven and by you, as took place in the case of my father.  He was declared to be equal to a god and obtained eternal honors, whereas those who slew him perished, the evil men, in evil plight.  We could not become deathless, yet by living well and by dying well we do in a sense gain this boon.  Therefore I, who possess the first requisite and hope to possess the second, return to you the arms and the provinces, the revenues and the laws.  I make only this final suggestion, that you be not disheartened through fear of the magnitude of affairs or the difficulty of handling them, nor neglect them in disdain, with the idea that they can be easily managed.