you might injure your friends, either then or now, but that in war you
might have the skill to make the bodies of living men your targets. So
also we taught you the arts of deceit and craft and greed and
covetousness, not among men it is true, but among beasts; we did not
mean you ever to turn these accomplishments against your friends, but
in war we wished you to be something better than raw recruits."

[30] "But, father," Cyrus answered, "if to do men good and to do men
harm were both of them things we ought to learn, surely it would have
been better to teach them in actual practice?"

[31] Then the father said, "My son, we are told that in the days of
our forefathers there was such a teacher once. This man did actually
teach his boys righteousness in the way you suggest, to lie and not to
lie, to cheat and not to cheat, to calumniate and not to calumniate,
to be grasping and not grasping. He drew the distinction between our
duty to friends and our duty to enemies; and he went further still; he
taught men that it was just and right to deceive even a friend for his
own good, or steal his property. [32] And with this he must needs
teach his pupils to practise on one another what he taught them, just
as the people of Hellas, we are told, teach lads in the wrestling-
school to fence and to feint, and train them by their practice with
one another. Now some of his scholars showed such excellent aptitudes
for deception and overreaching, and perhaps no lack of taste for
common money-making, that they did not even spare their friends, but
used their arts on them. [33] And so an unwritten law was framed by
which we still abide, bidding us teach our children as we teach our
servants, simply and solely not to lie, and not to cheat, and not to
covert, and if they did otherwise to punish them, hoping to make them
humane and law-abiding citizens. [34] But when they came to manhood,