Such was the ferocity of barbarian kings when in anger — men who had had no contact with learning or the culture of letters. But I shall now show you a king from the very bosom of Aristotle, even Alexander, who in the midst of a feast with his own hand stabbed Clitus, his dearest friend, with whom he had grown up, because he withheld his flattery and was reluctant to transform himself from a Macedonian and a free man into a Persian slave. Lysimachus, likewise a familiar friend, he threw to a lion. Though Lysimachus escaped by some good luck from the lion’s teeth, was he therefore, in view of this experience, a whit more kind when he himself became king? Not so, for Telesphorus the Rhodian, his own friend, he completely mutilated, and when he had cut of his ears and nose, he shut him up in a cage as if he were some strange and unknown animal and for a long time lived in terror of him, since the hideousness of his hacked and mutilated face had destroyed every appearance of a human being; to this were added starvation and squalor and the filth of a body left to wallow in its own dung; furthermore his hands and knees becoming all calloused — for by the narrowness of his quarters he was forced to use these instead of feet — his sides, too, a mass of sores from rubbing, to those who beheld him his appearance was no less disgusting than terrible, and having been turned by he punishment into a monster he had forfeited even pity. Yet, while he who suffered these things was utterly unlike a human being, he who inflicted them was still less like one.