their money bags to guard them, I was enabled to throw off the
prevailing shackles of avarice by my long and carefully reasoned love of
generosity. Consequently my munificence appeared to me to be all the
more worthy of praise, inasmuch as I was drawn to it by reason and not
by any sudden impulse.

Again, I also felt that I was promising not mere games or gladiatorial
shows, but an annual subscription for the upbringing of freeborn youths.
The pleasures of the eye and ear never lack eulogists; on the contrary,
they need rather to be put in the background than in the foreground by
speakers: but to obtain volunteers who will undertake the fatigue and
hard work of self-culture, we have not only to offer rewards but to
encourage them with the choicest addresses. For if doctors have to coax
their patients into adopting an insipid but yet wholesome diet, how much
the more ought the man who is giving his fellows good advice to use all
the allurements of oratory to make his hearers adopt a course which,
though most useful, is not generally popular? Especially is this the
case when we have to try and convince men who have no children of the
value of the boon which is bestowed on those who have, and to induce all
the rest to wait patiently till their turn comes to receive the benefit
now given to a few, and in the meantime show themselves fit recipients
for it. But just as then, when we wished to explain the meaning and
bearing of our bounty, we were studying the common good and not seeking
an opportunity for self-boasting, so now in the matter of publication we
are afraid lest people should think that we have had an eye not so much
to the benefit of others as to our own glorification. Besides, we do
not forget how much better it is to seek the reward of a good action in
the testimony of one's conscience than in fame. For glory ought to
follow of its own accord, and not to be consciously sought for; nor,
again, is a good deed any the less beautiful because owing to some