(I earnestly desire to fulfil your hopes of me even as you express them in your letter, but I am afraid I shall fall short of them, since the expectations you have raised both in the minds of others, and still more in your own, are beyond my powers. There was a time when I believed that I ought to try to rival men who have been most distinguished for excellence, Alexander, for instance, or Marcus;(371) but I shivered at the thought and was seized with terror lest I should fail entirely to come up to the courage of the former, and should not make even the least approach to the latter’s perfect virtue. With this in mind I convinced myself that I preferred a life of leisure, and I both gladly recalled the Attic manner of living, and thought myself to be in sweet accord with you who are my friends, just as those who carry heavy burdens lighten their labour by singing.(372) But by your recent letter you have increased my fears, and you point to an enterprise in every way more difficult. You say that God has placed me in the same position as Heracles and Dionysus of old who, being at once philosophers and kings, purged almost the whole earth and sea of the evils that infested them. You bid me shake off all thought of leisure and inactivity that I may prove to be a good soldier worthy of so high a destiny. And besides those examples you go on to remind me of law‐ givers such as Solon, Pittacus, and Lycurgus, and you say that men have the right to expect from me now greater things than from any of these. When I read these words I was almost dumbfounded; for on the one hand I was sure that it was unlawful for you as a philosopher to flatter or deceive; on the other hand I am fully conscious that by nature there is nothing remarkable about me—there never was from the first nor has there come to be now,—but as regards philosophy I have only fallen in love with it (I say nothing of the fates that have intervened(373) to make that love so far ineffectual). I could not tell therefore how I ought to interpret such expressions, until God brought it into my mind that perhaps by your very praises you wished to exhort me, and to point out how great are those trials to which a statesman must inevitably be exposed every day of his life.)