4
It is not as it has often before been with others; it is not a simple tyranny and a single slavery that we have endured, nor a single master’s caprice that we have borne. Nay, of all those who have ever experienced such adversity we alone had two masters instead of one and were torn asunder, unlucky folk! between two sets of wrongs. The elder man was more moderate by far, less acrimonious in his fits of anger, less hasty in his punishments, and less headlong in his desires, because by now his age was staying the excessive violence of his impulses and curbing his appetite for pleasures. It was said, indeed, that he was reluctantly impelled to begin his wrongdoings by his son, since he himself was not at all tyrannical but yielded to the other. For he was excessively devoted to his children, as he has shown, and his son was all the world to him; so he gave way to him, did the wrongs that he bade, punished the men whom he designated, served him in all things, and in a word was tyrannised by him, and was mere minister to his son’s desires.
