1.9
And, in the second place, let us examine his sayings too, since it is by their utterances Cf.Moralia, 172 d. that the souls of other kings and potentates also best reveal their characters. The elder Antigonus remarked to a certain sophist who put in his hands a treatise on justice, You are a fool to say anything about justice when you see me smiting other peoples cities. The despot Dionysius remarked that one should trick children with dice, but men with oaths.Attributed elsewhere to Lysander: cf. Moralia, 229 b, and the note (Vol. III. p. 373). Upon the tomb of Sardanapalus Cf. Palatine Anthology, vii. 325; xvi. 27: a full list of citations portraying Sardanapalus in ancient popular philosophy is given by W. Capelle, Hermes, lx. p. 394; see also W. Headlam, Journal of Philosophy, xxvi. p. 98. is written. These are still mine - what I ate, and my wanton love - frolics. Who would not own that by these several sayings are revealed Sardanapalus’s love of pleasure, Dionysius’s impiety, and Antigonus’s injustice and greed? But if you subtract from Alexander’s sayings his crown, his relationship with Ammon, and his noble birth, they will appear to you as the utterances of a Socrates or a Plato or a Pythagoras. Let us, then, pay no heed to the proud boasts which the poets inscribed upon his portraits and statues, studying, as they were, to portray, not Alexander’s moderation, but his power: Eager to speak seems the statue of bronze, up to Zeus as it gazes: Earth I have set under foot; Zeus, keep Olympus yourself. Cf. 335 b, infra; T. Preger, Inscriptiones Graecae Metricae (1891), pp. 183-187. The epigram is more completely given in the Anthology, xvi. 120, where it is attributed to Archelaüs or Asclepiades. Probably, as Ouvre has seen, it belongs to the latter. And another man makes Alexander say, I am the son of Zeus. Cf.Life of Alexander, chap. xxvii. (680 f). These expressions, then, as I have said, the poets addressed to Alexander in flattery of his good fortune.
