XXI. Again, when people disregard everything that is morally right and true, if only they may secure power thereby, #(3) Pompey,# are they not pursuing the same course as he[BR] who wished to have as a father-in-law the man by whose effrontery he might gain power for himself? He thought it advantageous to secure supreme power while the odium of it fell upon another; and he failed to see how unjust to his country this was, and how wrong morally. #(4) Caesar.# But the father-in-law himself used to have continually upon his lips the Greek verses from the Phoenissae, which I will reproduce as well as I can--awkwardly, it may be, but still so that the meaning can be understood: "If wrong may e'er be right, for a throne's sake Were wrong most right:--be God in all else feared!"[BS] Our tyrant deserved his death for having made an exception of the one thing that was the blackest crime of all. *83* Why do we gather instances of petty crime--legacies criminally obtained and fraudulent buying and selling? Behold, here you have a man who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! #Even to gain a throne by moral wrong is not expedient.# The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious. But if anyone agrees that it is not morally right to be king in a state that once was free and that ought to be free now, and yet imagines that it is advantageous for him who can reach that position, with what remonstrance or rather with what appeal should I try to tear him away from so strange a delusion? For, oh ye immortal gods! can the most horrible and hideous of all murders--that of fatherland--bring advantage to anybody, even though he who has committed such a crime receives from his enslaved fellow-citizens the title of "Father of his Country"[BT]? #Identity of expediency and moral rectitude.# Expediency, therefore, must be measured by the standard of moral rectitude, and in such a way, too, that these two words shall seem in sound only to be different but in real meaning to be one and the same. *84* What greater advantage one could have, according to the standard of popular opinion, than to be a king, I do not know; when, however, I begin to bring the question back to the standard of truth, then I find nothing more disadvantageous for one who has risen to that height by injustice. For can occasions for worry, anxiety, fear by day and by night, and a life all beset with plots and perils be of advantage to anybody? "Thrones have many foes and friends untrue, but few devoted friends,"