Two things may dignity and power do, if they come to the unwise.  It may make him honorable and respectable to other unwise persons.  But when he quits the power, or the power him, then is he to the unwise neither honorable nor respectable.  Has power, then, the custom of exterminating and rooting out vices from the minds of great men and planting therein virtues?  I know, however, that earthly power never sows the virtues, but collects and gathers vices; and when it has gathered them, then it nevertheless shows and does not conceal them.  For the vices of great men many men see; because many know them and many are with them.  Therefore we always lament concerning power, and also despise it, when we see that it comes to the worst, and to those who are to us most unworthy.

Every virtue has its proper excellence; and the excellence and the dignity which it has, it imparts immediately to every one who loves it.  Thus, wisdom is the highest virtue, and it has in it four other virtues; of which one is prudence, another temperance, the third is fortitude, the fourth justice.  Wisdom makes its lovers wise, and prudent, and moderate, and patient, and just; and it fills him who loves it with every good quality.  This they who possess the power of this world cannot do.  They cannot impart any virtue to those who love them, through their wealth, if they have it not in their nature.  Hence it is very evident that the rich in worldly wealth have no proper dignity; but the wealth is, come to them from without, and they cannot from without have aught of their own.  Consider now, whether any man is the less honorable because many men despise him.  But if any man be the less honorable, then is every foolish man the less honorable, the more authority he has, to every wise man.  Hence it is sufficiently clear that power and wealth cannot make its possessor the more honorable.  But it makes him the less honorable, when it comes to him, if he were not before virtuous.  So is also wealth and power the worse, if he who possesses it be not virtuous.  Each of them is the more worthless, when they meet with each other.

But I can easily instruct you by an example, so that you may clearly enough perceive that this present life is very like a shadow, and in that shadow no man can attain the true good.  If any very great man is driven from his country, or goes on his lord’s errand, and so comes to a foreign people, where no man knows him, nor he any man, nor even knows the language, do you think his greatness can make him honorable in that land?  Of course it cannot.  But if dignity were natural to wealth and were its own, or again if wealth were the rich man’s own, then it could not forsake him.  Let the man who possessed them be in whatsoever land he might, then his wealth and his dignity would be with him.  But because the wealth and the power are not his own, they forsake him; and because they have no natural good in themselves, they go away like a shadow or smoke.  Yet the