Diogenes.—­A little of my sagacity would have shown you that if this was your purpose your labour was lost in that court.  Why did not you go and preach chastity to Lais?  A philosopher in a brothel, reading lectures on the beauty of continence and decency, is not a more ridiculous animal than a philosopher in the cabinet, or at the table of a tyrant, descanting on liberty and public spirit!  What effect had the lessons of your famous disciple Aristotle upon Alexander the Great, a prince far more capable of receiving instruction than the Younger Dionysius?  Did they hinder him from killing his best friend, Clitus, for speaking to him with freedom, or from fancying himself a god because he was adored by the wretched slaves he had vanquished?  When I desired him not to stand between me and the sun, I humbled his pride more, and consequently did him more good, than Aristotle had done by all his formal precepts.

Plato.—­Yet he owed to those precepts that, notwithstanding his excesses, he appeared not unworthy of the empire of the world.  Had the tutor of his youth gone with him into Asia and continued always at his ear, the authority of that wise and virtuous man might have been able to stop him, even in the riot of conquest, from giving way to those passions which dishonoured his character.

Diogenes.—­If he had gone into Asia, and had not flattered the king as obsequiously as Haephestion, he would, like Callisthenes, whom he sent thither as his deputy, have been put to death for high treason.  The man who will not flatter must live independent, as I did, and prefer a tub to a palace.

Plato.—­Do you pretend, Diogenes, that because you were never in a court, you never flattered?  How did you gain the affection of the people of Athens but by soothing their ruling passion—­the desire of hearing their superiors abused?  Your cynic railing was to them the most acceptable flattery.  This you well understood, and made your court to the vulgar, always envious and malignant, by trying to lower all dignity and confound all order.  You made your court, I say, as servilely, and with as much offence to virtue, as the basest flatterer ever did to the most corrupted prince.  But true philosophy will disdain to act either of these parts.  Neither in the assemblies of the people, nor in the cabinets of kings, will she obtain favour by fomenting any bad dispositions.  If her endeavours to do good prove unsuccessful, she will retire with honour, as an honest physician departs from the house of a patient whose distemper he finds incurable, or who refuses to take the remedies he prescribes.  But if she succeeds—­if, like the music of Orpheus, her sweet persuasions can mitigate the ferocity of the multitude and tame their minds to a due obedience of laws and reverence of magistrates; or if she can form a Timoleon or a Numa Pompilius to the government of a state—­how meritorious is the work!  One king—­nay, one minister or counsellor of state—­imbued with her precepts is of more value than all the speculative, retired philosophers or cynical revilers of princes and magistrates that ever lived upon earth.