3
Courtly flatterers indeed, like to quail-catchers, by imitating the voices and assimilating themselves to the manners of kings, chiefly insinuate into their favors and entrap them by deceit; but it is not convenient for a statesman to imitate the people’s manners, but to know them, and make use of those things toward every person by which he is most likely to be taken. For the ignorance of men’s humors brings no less disorders and obstacles in commonweals than in the friendships of kings.
4
When therefore you shall have already gotten power and authority amongst the people, then must you endeavor to reform their disposition, treating them gently, and by little and little drawing them to what is better. For the changing of a multitude is a difficult and laborious work. But as for your own manners and behavior, so compose and adorn them, as knowing that you are henceforth to lead your life on an open stage; and if it is no easy task for you wholly to extirpate vice out of your soul, at least take away and retrench those offences which are most notorious and apparent. For you cannot but have heard how Themistocles, when he designed to enter upon the management of public affairs, withdrew himself from drinking and revelling, and fell to watching, fasting, and studying, saying to his intimate friends, that Miltiades’s trophy suffered him not to sleep. And Pericles also so changed himself, both as to the comportment of his body and his manner of living, that he walked gravely, discoursed affably, always showed a staid and settled countenance, continually kept his hand under his robe, and went only that way which led to the assembly and the senate. For a multitude is not so tractable as that it should be easy for every one to take it with safety, but it is a service much to be valued, if, being like a suspicious and skittish beast, it can be so managed that, without being frighted either by sight or voice, it will submit to receive instruction.
