For if any should have the wish and the power to pattern their lives upon such examples, they might themselves pass their days in the enjoyment of high repute and render their own countries happy and prosperous. Now I have expressed myself as to the kind of auditors I would pray that I might have for what I shall say, but I am afraid that were I given such an audience I might fall far below the subject upon which I am to speak. Nevertheless, in such manner as I can I shall attempt to discourse upon it.

The fact, then, that our city was governed in those times better than the rest of the world I would justly credit to her kings, of whom I spoke a moment ago. For it was they who trained the multitude in the ways of virtue and justice and great sobriety and who taught through the manner of their rule the very truth which I shall be seen to have expressed in words after they had expressed it in their deeds, namely, that every polity is the soul of the state, having as much power over it as the mind over the body. For it is this which deliberates on all questions, seeking to preserve what is good and to avoid what is disastrous,Repeated from Isoc. 7.14. and is the cause of all the things which transpire in states.

Having learned this truth, the people did not forget it on account of the change in the constitution, but rather gave their minds to this one endeavor before all others: to obtain as their leaders men who were in sympathy with democracy, but were possessed of the same character as those who were formerly at the head of the state; and not unwittingly to place in charge of the whole commonwealth men to whom no one would entrust a single detail of his private interests;Cf. Isoc. 8.13, 133.

and not to permit men to approach positions of public trust who are notoriously depraved; and not even to suffer men to be heardCf. Isoc. 8.3 and note. who lend their own persons to base practices but deem themselves worthy to advise others how they should govern the state in order to advance in sobriety and well-being, or who have squandered what they inherited from their fathers on shameful pleasures but seek to repair their own fortunes from the public treasurySee Isoc. 8.124 and note., or who strive always to speak for the gratification of their audience but plunge those who are persuaded by them into many distresses and hardships;

on the contrary, they saw to it that each and everyone should look upon it as his duty to debar all such men from giving counsel to the public, and not only such men, but those also who assert that the possessions of the rest of the world belong to the state but do not scruple to plunder and rob the state of its legitimate property, who pretend to love the people but cause them to be hated by all the rest of mankind,

and who in words express anxiety for the welfare of the Hellenes but in fact outrage and blackmail and make them so bitter against usCf. Isoc. 15.318. that some of our states when pressed by war would sooner and more gladly open their gates to the besiegers than to a relief force from Athens. But one would grow weary of writing were he to attempt to go through the whole catalogue of iniquities and depravities.

Abhorring these iniquities and the men who practise them, our forefathers set up as counsellors and leaders of the state, not any and everyone, but those who were the wisest and the best and who had lived the noblest lives among them, and they chose these same men as their generals in the fieldCf. Isoc. 8.54. and sent them forth as ambassadors, wherever any need arose, and they gave over to them the entire guidance of the state, believing that those who desired and were able to give the best counsel from the platform would, when by themselves, no matter in what regions of the world or on what enterprise engaged, be of the same way of thinking.

And in this they were justified by events. For because they followed this principle they saw their code of laws completely written down in a few days—laws, not like those which are established to-day, nor full of so much confusion and of so many contradictions that no one can distinguish between the useful and the useless, but, in the first place, few in number, though adequate for those who were to use them and easy to comprehend; and, in the next place, just and profitable and consonant with each other; those laws, moreover, which had to do with their common ways of life having been thought out with greater pains than those which had to do with private contracts, as indeed they should be in well regulated states.See Isoc. 7.39.