But to end where I began: the Emperor Adrian, disputing with the
philosopher Favorinus about the interpretation of some word, Favorinus
soon yielded him the victory; for which his friends rebuking him, "You
talk simply," said he; "would you not have him wiser than I, who commands
thirty legions?" Augustus wrote verses against Asinius Pollio, and "I,"
said Pollio, "say nothing, for it is not prudence to write in contest
with him who has power to proscribe." And they were right. For
Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poesy and Plato in
discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be
sold for a slave into the island of AEgina.




CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE

'Tis a custom of our justice to condemn some for a warning to others. To
condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says,

[Diogenes Laertius, however, in his Life of Plato, iii. 181, says
that Plato's offence was the speaking too freely to the tyrant.]

for what is done can never be undone; but 'tis to the end they may offend
no more, and that others may avoid the example of their offence: we do
not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him. I do the same; my
errors are sometimes natural, incorrigible, and irremediable: but the
good which virtuous men do to the public, in making themselves imitated,
I, peradventure, may do in making my manners avoided: