Minor Dialogues, Together With the Dialogue on Clemency
was the first ruler of the Persians and of the greater part of the
East: for when he declared war[4] against the Scythians who bordered
on the empire of the East, Oeobazus, an aged noble, begged that one
of his three sons might be left at home to comfort his father, and
that the king might be satisfied with the services of two of them.
Darius promised him more than he asked for, saying that he would
allow all three to remain at home, and flung their dead bodies
before their father’s eyes. He would have been harsh, had he taken
them all to the war with him. How much more good-natured was
Xerxes,[5] who, when Pythias, the father of five sons, begged for
one to be excused from service, permitted him to choose which he
wished for. He then tore the son whom the father had chosen into
two halves, placed one on each side of the road, and, as it were,
purified his army by means of this propitiatory victim. He therefore
had the end which he deserved, being defeated, and his army scattered
far and wide in utter rout, while he in the midst of it walked among
the corpses of his soldiers, seeing on all sides the signs of his
own overthrow.
XVII. So ferocious in their anger were those kings who had no
learning, no tincture of polite literature: now I will show you
King Alexander (the Great), fresh from the lap of Aristotle, who
with his own hand while at table stabbed Clitus, his dearest friend,
who had been brought up with him, because he did not flatter him
enough, and was too slow in transforming himself from a free man
and a Macedonian into a Persian slave. Indeed he shut up {136}
Lysimachus,[6] who was no less his friend than Clitus, in a cage
with a lion; yet did this make Lysimachus, who escaped by some happy
chance from the lion’s teeth, any gentler when he became a king?
Why, he mutilated his own friend, Telesphorus the Rhodian, cutting
off his nose and ears, and kept him for a long while in a den, like
some new and strange animal, after the hideousness of his hacked
and disfigured face had made him no longer appear to be human,
assisted by starvation and the squalid filth of a body left to
wallow in its own dung! Besides this, his hands and knees, which
the narrowness of his abode forced him to use instead of his feet,
became hard and callous, while his sides were covered with sores
by rubbing against the walls, so that his appearance was no less
shocking than frightful, and his punishment turned him into so
monstrous a creature that he was not even pitied. Yet, however
unlike a man he was who suffered this, even more unlike was he who
inflicted it.
XVIII. Would to heaven that such savagery had contented itself with
foreign examples, and that barbarity in anger and punishment had
not been imported with other outlandish vices into our Roman manners!
Marcus Marius, to whom the people erected a statue in every street,
to whom they made offerings of incense and wine, had, by the command
of Lucius Sulla, his legs broken, his eyes pulled out, his hands
cut off, and his whole body gradually torn to pieces limb by limb,
as if Sulla killed him as many times as he wounded him. Who was it
who carried out Sulla’s orders? who but Catiline, already practising
his hands in every sort of wickedness? He tore him to pieces before
the tomb of Quintus Catulus, an unwelcome burden to the ashes of
that gentlest of men, above which one who was no doubt a criminal,
yet nevertheless {137} the idol of the people, and who was not
undeserving of love, although men loved him beyond all reason, was
forced to shed his blood drop by drop. Though Marius deserved such
tortures, yet it was worthy of Sulla to order them, and of Catiline
to execute them; but it was unworthy of the State to be stabbed by
the swords of her enemy and her avenger alike. Why do I pry into
ancient history? quite lately Gaius Caesar flogged and tortured
Sextus Papinius, whose father was a consular, Betilienus Bassus,
his own quaestor, and several others, both senators and knights,
on the same day, not to carry out any judicial inquiry, but merely
to amuse himself. Indeed, so impatient was he of any delay in
receiving the pleasure which his monstrous cruelty never delayed
in asking, that when walking with some ladies and senators in his
mother’s gardens, along the walk between the colonnade and the
river, he struck off some of their heads by lamplight. What did he
fear? what public or private danger could one night threaten him
with? how very small a favour it would have been to wait until
morning, and not to kill the Roman people’s senators in his slippers?
XIX. It is to the purpose that we should know how haughtily his
cruelty was exercised, although some one might suppose that we are
wandering from the subject and embarking on a digression; but this
digression is itself connected with unusual outbursts of anger. He
beat senators with rods; he did it so often that he made men able
to say, “It is the custom.” He tortured them with all the most
dismal engines in the world, with the cord, the boots, the rack,
the fire, and the sight of his own face. Even to this we may answer,
“To tear three senators to pieces with stripes and fire like criminal
slaves was no such great crime for one who had thoughts of butchering
the entire Senate, who was wont to wish that the Roman people had
but one neck, that he might concentrate {138} into one day and one
blow all the wickedness which he divided among so many places and
times. Was there ever anything so unheard-of as an execution in the
night-time? Highway robbery seeks for the shelter of darkness, but
the more public an execution is, the more power it has as an example
and lesson. Here I shall be met by: “This, which you are so surprised
at, was the daily habit of that monster; this was what he lived
for, watched for, sat up at night for.” Certainly one could find
no one else who would have ordered all those whom he condemned to
death to have their mouths closed by a sponge being fastened in
them, that they might not have the power even of uttering a sound.
What dying man was ever forbidden to groan? He feared that the last
agony might find too free a voice, that he might hear what would
displease him. He knew, moreover, that there were countless crimes,
with which none but a dying man would dare to reproach him. When
sponges were not forthcoming, he ordered the wretched men’s clothes
to be torn up, and the rags stuffed into their mouths. What savagery
was this? Let a man draw his last breath: give room for his soul
to escape through: let it not be forced to leave the body through
a wound. It becomes tedious to add to this that in the same night
he sent centurions to the houses of the executed men and made an
end of their fathers also, that is to say, being a compassionate-minded
man, he set them free from sorrow: for it is not my intention to
describe the ferocity of Gaius, but the ferocity of anger, which
does not merely vent its rage upon individuals, but rends in pieces
whole nations, and even lashes cities, rivers, and things which
have no sense of pain.
XX. Thus, the king of the Persians cut off the noses of a whole
nation in Syria, wherefore the place is called Rhinocolura. Do you
think that he was merciful, because he did not cut their heads off
altogether? no, he was delighted at {139} having invented a new
kind of punishment. Something of the same kind would have befallen
the Aethiopians,[7] who on account of their prodigiously long lives
are called Macrobiotae; for, because they did not receive slavery
with hands uplifted to heaven in thankfulness, and sent an embassy
which used independent, or what kings call insulting language,
Cambyses became wild with rage, and, without any store of provisions,
or any knowledge of the roads, started with all his fighting men
through an arid and trackless waste, where during the first day’s
march the necessaries of life failed, and the country itself furnished
nothing, being barren and uncultivated, and untrodden by the foot
of man. At first the tenderest parts of leaves and shoots of trees
relieved their hunger, then hides softened by fire, and anything
else that their extremity drove them to use as food. When as they
proceeded neither roots nor herbs were to be found in the sand, and
they found a wilderness destitute even of animal life, they chose
each tenth man by lot and made of him a meal which was more cruel
than hunger. Rage still drove the king madly forwards, until after
he had lost one part of his army and eaten another he began to fear
that he also might be called upon to draw the lot for his life;
then at last he gave the order for retreat. Yet all the while his
well-bred hawks were not sacrificed, and the means of feasting were
carried for him on camels, while his soldiers were drawing lots for
who should miserably perish, and who should yet more miserably live.
XXI. This man was angry with an unknown and inoffensive nation,
which nevertheless was able to feel his wrath; but Cyrus[8] was
angry with a river. When hurrying to besiege Babylon, since in
making war it is above all things important to seize one’s opportunity,
he tried to ford the wide-spread river Gyndes, which it is hardly
safe to {140} attempt even when the river has been dried up by the
summer heat and is at its lowest. Here one of the white horses which
drew the royal chariot was washed away, and his loss moved the king
to such violent rage, that he swore to reduce the river which had
carried off his royal retinue to so low an ebb that even women
should walk across it and trample upon it. He thereupon devoted all
the resources of his army to this object, and remained working until
by cutting one hundred and eighty channels across the bed of the
river he divided it into three hundred and sixty brooks, and left
the bed dry, the waters flowing through other channels. Thus he
lost time, which is very important in great operations, and lost,
also, the soldiers’ courage, which was broken by useless labour,
and the opportunity of falling upon his enemy unprepared, while he
was waging against the river the war which he had declared against
his foes. This frenzy, for what else can you call it, has befallen
Romans also, for G. Caesar destroyed a most beautiful villa at
Herculaneum because his mother was once imprisoned in it, and has
thus made the place notorious by its misfortune; for while it stood,
we used to sail past it without noticing it, but now people inquire
why it is in ruins.
XXII. These should be regarded as examples to be avoided, and what
I am about to relate, on the contrary, to be followed, being examples
of gentle and lenient conduct in men who both had reasons for anger
and power to avenge themselves. What could have been easier than
for Antigonus to order those two common soldiers to be executed who
leaned against their king’s tent while doing what all men especially
love to do, and run the greatest danger by doing, I mean while they
spoke evil of their king. Antigonus heard all they said, as was
likely, since there was only a piece of cloth between the speakers
and the listener, who gently raised it, and said “Go a little {141}
further off, for fear the king should hear you.” He also on one
night, hearing some of his soldiers invoking everything that was
evil upon their king for having brought them along that road and
into that impassable mud, went to those who were in the greatest
difficulties, and having extricated them without their knowing who
was their helper, said, “Now curse Antigonus, by whose fault you
have fallen into this trouble, but bless the man who has brought
you out of this slough.” This same Antigonus bore the abuse of his
enemies as good-naturedly as that of his countrymen; thus when he
was besieging some Greeks in a little fort, and they, despising