Phocion.—­True; but no obligation can lie upon a citizen to seek a public charge when he foresees that his obtaining of it will be useless to his country.  Would you have had me solicit the command of an army which I believed would be beaten?

Aristides.—­It is not permitted to a State to despair of its safety till its utmost efforts have been made without success.  If you had commanded the army at Chaeronea you might possibly have changed the event of the day; but, if you had not, you would have died more honourably there than in a prison at Athens, betrayed by a vain confidence in the insecure friendship of a perfidious Macedonian.

DIALOGUE XXXII.

MARCUS AURELIUS PHILOSOPHUS—­SERVIUS TULLIUS.

Servius Tullius.—­Yes, Marcus, though I own you to have been the first of mankind in virtue and goodness—­though, while you governed, Philosophy sat on the throne and diffused the benign influences of her administration over the whole Roman Empire—­yet as a king I might, perhaps, pretend to a merit even superior to yours.

Marcus Aurelius.—­That philosophy you ascribe to me has taught me to feel my own defects, and to venerate the virtues of other men.  Tell me, therefore, in what consisted the superiority of your merit as a king.

Servius Tullius.—­It consisted in this—­that I gave my people freedom.  I diminished, I limited the kingly power, when it was placed in my hands.  I need not tell you that the plan of government instituted by me was adopted by the Romans when they had driven out Tarquin, the destroyer of their liberty; and gave its form to that republic, composed of a due mixture of the regal, aristocratical, and democratical powers, the strength and wisdom of which subdued the world.  Thus all the glory of that great people, who for many ages excelled the rest of mankind in the arts of war and of policy, belongs originally to me.

Marcus Aurelius.—­There is much truth in what you say.  But would not the Romans have done better if, after the expulsion of Tarquin, they had vested the regal power in a limited monarch, instead of placing it in two annual elective magistrates with the title of consuls?  This was a great deviation from your plan of government, and, I think, an unwise one.  For a divided royalty is a solecism—­an absurdity in politics.  Nor was the regal power committed to the administration of consuls continued in their hands long enough to enable them to finish any difficult war or other act of great moment.  From hence arose a necessity of prolonging their commands beyond the legal term; of shortening the interval prescribed by the laws between the elections to those offices; and of granting extraordinary commissions and powers, by all which the Republic was in the end destroyed.