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Where shall I begin? With the fears and frights and suspicions? The hatred and plots of those about the king? The scanty sleep, and that with one eye open, that these leave him? The troubled dreams, the tangled schemes, the hopes that never come to pass? Or the press of business, the audiences, the decisions, the going out to war, the orders to be given, the treaties to be made, the accounts to be kept?. This will not suffer a king to have any pleasure, even in his dreams, but he alone must keep watch for all and feel a thousand cares. For sweet sleep held not Agamemnon, son of Atreus, revolving many things in his mind, though all the Achaians were snoring. Kroisus was troubled because his son was deaf, Artaxerxes because Klearchos hired himself to Cyros, another ruler because Dion whispered in the ears of some of the Syracusans, and another because Parmenion was praised. Ptolemy made Perdikkas wretched, and Seleukos did the same for Ptolemy. There are other sources of trouble, too: love won by force, a mistress that bestows her favors elsewhere, rumors of sedition, two or three of the body-guard whispering together. Worst of all, a king must hold his nearest and dearest in the greatest suspicion, and be ever expecting an ill turn from them. This one died of poison by his son's hand; that one actually was killed by his beloved; a third, perhaps, was snatched by a like manner of death.
