So long indeed as there shall be no hardship so intolerable in our opinion as to force us to abandon life, let us, no matter what our station in life may be, keep ourselves from anger. It is harmful for all who serve. For any sort of chafing grows to self-torture, and the more rebellious we are under authority, the more oppressive we feel it to be. So a wild beast by struggling but tightens its noose; so birds by trying in their alarm to get free from birdlime, smear all their plumage with it. No yoke is so tight but that it hurts less to carry it than to struggle against it. The only relief for great misfortunes is to bear them and submit to their coercion. But though it is expedient for subjects to control their passions, especially this mad and unbridled one, it is even more expedient for kings. When his position permits a man to do all that anger prompts, general destruction is let loose, nor can any power long endure which is wielded for the injury of many; for it becomes imperiled when those who separately moan in anguish are united by a common fear. Consequently, many kings have been the victims now of individual, now of concerted, violence, at times when a general animosity had forced men to gather together their separate angers into one. Yet many kinds have employed anger as if it were the badge of real power; for example Darius, who after the dethronement of the Magian7 became the first ruler of the Persians and of a great part of the East.8 For after he had declared war on the Scythians who were on his eastern border, Oeobazus, an aged noble, besought him to use the services of two of his sons, but to leave one out of the three as a comfort to his father. Promising more than was asked, and saying that he would exempt all three, Darius flung their dead bodies before their father’s eyes — for it would have been cruelty if he had taken them all with him! But how much kinder was Xerxes! For he, when Pythius, the father of five sons, begged for the exemption of one, permitted him to choose the one he wished; then he tore into halves the son who had been chosen, and placing a half on each side of the road offered the body as an expiatory sacrifice for the success of the army. And so the army met the fate it deserved. Defeated, routed far and wide, and seeing its own destruction spread on every side, between two lines of the dead bodies of its comrades it trudged along.