"
I see, methinks, the character of an Anti-Paul, who became all
things to all men, that he might destroy all; who only wanted the
assistance of fortune to have been as great as his friend Caesar
was, a little after him. And the ways of Caesar to compass the same
ends--I mean till the civil war, which was but another manner of
setting his country on fire--were not unlike these, though he used
afterward his unjust dominion with more moderation than I think the
other would have done. Sallust, therefore, who was well acquainted
with them both and with many such-like gentlemen of his time, says,
"That it is the nature of ambition" (Ambitio multos mortales falsos
fieri coegit, etc.) "to make men liars and cheaters; to hide the
truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in
their mouths; to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of
their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help
of good will." And can there be freedom with this perpetual
constraint? What is it but a kind of rack that forces men to say
what they have no mind to? I have wondered at the extravagant and
barbarous stratagem of Zopirus, and more at the praises which I find
of so deformed an action; who, though he was one of the seven
grandees of Persia, and the son of Megabises, who had freed before
his country from an ignoble servitude, slit his own nose and lips,
cut off his own ears, scourged and wounded his whole body, that he
might, under pretence of having been mangled so inhumanly by Darius,
be received into Babylon (then besieged by the Persians) and get
into the command of it by the recommendation of so cruel a
sufferance, and their hopes of his endeavouring to revenge it.
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