11
Certainly the office of king, the most perfect and the greatest of all political offices, has the most cares, labours, and occupations. At any rate Seleucus, they used to tell us, constantly repeated that if people in general knew what a task it was merely to read and write so many letters, they would not even pick up a crown that had been thrown away. And Philip, we are told, when he heard, as he was on the point of encamping in a suitable place, that there was no fodder for the beasts of draught, exclaimed: O Heracles, what a life is mine, if I must needs live to suit the convenience even of my asses! There is, then, a time to advise even a king when he has become an old man to lay aside the crown and the purple, to assume a cloak and a crook, and to live in the country, lest it be thought, if he continues to rule when his hair is grey, that he is busying himself with superfluous and unseasonable occupations. But if it is not fitting to say this about an Agesilaüs or a Numa or a Dareius, let us neither remove a Solon from the Council of the Areopagus nor a Cato from the Senate on account of old age, and let us not advise a Pericles to leave the democracy in the lurch. For anyhow it is absurd that a man when he is young should prance (about upon the platform and then, after having poured out upon the public all those insane ambitions and impulses, when the age arrives which brings wisdom through experience, should give up public life and desert it like a woman of whom he has had all the use.
