[21] Such was his method with the truants; with those who came forward he felt, since he was their rightful leader, that he could best incite them to noble deeds by trying to show that he himself had all the virtues that became a man. [22] He believed that men do grow better through written laws, and he held that the good ruler is a living law with eyes that see, inasmuch as he is competent to guide and also to detect the sinner and chastise him. [23] Thus he took pains to show that he was the more assiduous in his service to the gods the higher his fortunes rose. It was at this time that the Persian priests, the Magians, were first established as an order, and always at break of day Cyrus chanted a hymn and sacrificed to such of the gods as they might name. [24] And the ordinances he established service to this day at the court of the reigning king. These were the first matters in which the Persians set themselves to copy their prince; feeling their own fortune would be the higher if they did reverence to the gods, following the man who was fortune's favourite and their own monarch. At the same time, no doubt, they thought they would please Cyrus by this. [25] On his side Cyrus looked on the piety of his subjects as a blessing to himself, reckoning as they do who prefer to sail in the company of pious men rather than with those who are suspected of wicked deeds, and he reckoned further that if all his partners were god-fearing, they would be the less prone to crime against each other or against himself, for he knew he was the benefactor of his fellows. [26] And by showing plainly his own deep desire never to be unfair to friend or fellow-combatant or ally, but always to fix his eyes on justice and rectitude, he believed he could induce others to keep from base actions and walk in the paths of righteousness. [27] And he would bring more modesty, he hoped, into the hearts of all men if it were plain that he himself reverenced all the world and would never say a shameful word to any man or woman or do a shameful deed. [28] He looked for this because he saw that, apart from kings and governors who may be supposed to inspire fear, men will reverence the modest and not the shameless, and modesty in women will inspire modesty in the men who behold them. [29] And his people, he thought, would learn to obey if it were plain that he honoured frank and prompt obedience even above virtues that made a grander show and were harder to attain. [30] Such was his belief, and his practice went with it to the end. His own temperance and the knowledge of it made others more temperate. When they saw moderation and self-control in the man who above all others had licence to be insolent, lesser men were the more ready to abjure all insolence of their own. [31] But there was this difference, Cyrus held, between modesty and self-control: the modest man will do nothing shameful in the light of day, but the man of self-control nothing base, not even in secret.