Cruelty is an evil thing befitting least of all a man, and is unworthy of his spirit that is so kindly; for one to take delight in blood and wounds and, throwing off the man, to change into a creature of the woods, is the madness of a wild beast. For what difference does it make, I beg of you, Alexander, whether you throw Lysimachus34 to a lion, or yourself tear lion to pieces with your teeth? That lion’s maw is yours, and yours its savagery. How pleased you would have been had its claws been yours instead, and yours those gaping jaws, big enough to swallow men! We do not require of you that that hand of yours, the surest destruction of familiar friends, should save the life of any man, that your savage spirit, the insatiate curse of nations, should sate itself with anything short of blood and slaughter; we call it now a mercy if to kill a friend the butcher is chosen among mankind. The reason why brutality is most of all abhorred is this: because it transgresses first all ordinary, and then all human, bounds, searches out new kinds of torture, calls ingenuity into play to invent devices by which suffering may be varied and prolonged, and takes delight in the afflictions of mankind; then indeed the dread disease of that man’s35 mind has reached the farthest limit of insanity, when cruelty has changed into pleasure and to kill a human being now becomes a joy. Hot upon the heels of such a man follow loathing, hatred, poison, and the sword; he is assailed by as many perils as there are many men to whom he is himself a peril, and he is beset sometimes by the plots of individuals, at times, indeed, by an uprising of the community. For whole cities are not roused by the trivial, destruction of single individuals; but that which begins to rage widespread and aims at all becomes the mark of every weapon. Tiny snakes pass unnoticed and no organized hunt is made for them; but when one exceeds the usual size and grows into a monster, when it poisons springs with its venom, with its breath scorches and destroys, then, wherever it advances, it is attacked with engines of war. Petty evils may elude us and escape, but we go out against the great ones. So, too, one sick person causes no confusion even in his own household; but when repeated deaths show that a plague prevails, there is a general outcry and flight of the community, and threatening hands are lifted toward the gods themselves. If a fire is discovered beneath some single roof, the family and the neighbors pour on water; but a widespread conflagration that has now consumed many homes is put down only by the destruction of half the city.