and serve the function of their place; ’tis so much to be a king, that this alone remains to them.  The outer glare that environs him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there repelled and dissipated, being filled and stopped by this prevailing light.  The senate awarded the prize of eloquence to Tiberius; he refused it, esteeming that though it had been just, he could derive no advantage from a judgment so partial, and that was so little free to judge.

As we give them all advantages of honour, so do we soothe and authorise all their vices and defects, not only by approbation, but by imitation also.  Every one of Alexander’s followers carried his head on one side, as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew they were as purblind as he.  Hernia itself has also served to recommend a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master hated his wife, Plutarch—­[who, however, only gives one instance; and in this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]—­has seen his courtiers repudiate theirs, whom they loved; and, which is yet more, uncleanliness and all manner of dissoluteness have so been in fashion; as also disloyalty, blasphemy, cruelty, heresy, superstition, irreligion, effeminacy, and worse, if worse there be; and by an example yet more dangerous than that of Mithridates’ flatterers, who, as their master pretended to the honour of a good physician, came to him to have incisions and cauteries made in their limbs; for these others suffered the soul, a more delicate and noble part, to be cauterised.

But to end where I began:  the Emperor Adrian, disputing with the philosopher Favorinus about the interpretation of some word, Favorinus soon yielded him the victory; for which his friends rebuking him, “You talk simply,” said he; “would you not have him wiser than I, who commands thirty legions?” Augustus wrote verses against Asinius Pollio, and “I,” said Pollio, “say nothing, for it is not prudence to write in contest with him who has power to proscribe.”  And they were right.  For Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poesy and Plato in discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be sold for a slave into the island of AEgina.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE

’Tis a custom of our justice to condemn some for a warning to others.  To condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says,

[Diogenes Laertius, however, in his Life of Plato, iii. 181, says
that Plato’s offence was the speaking too freely to the tyrant.]

for what is done can never be undone; but ’tis to the end they may offend no more, and that others may avoid the example of their offence:  we do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.  I do the same; my errors are sometimes natural, incorrigible, and irremediable:  but the good which virtuous men do to the public, in making themselves imitated, I, peradventure, may do in making my manners avoided: