Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata

Plutarch

Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. III. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931 (printing).

When Thrasyllus the Cynic asked him for a shilling, he said That is not a fit gift for a king to give. And when Thrasyllus said, Then give me two hundred pounds, he retorted, But that is not a fit gift for a Cynic to receive. [*](The story ist old more fully in Moralia, 551 E, and by Seneca, De beneficiis, ii. 17. 1.)

When he sent Demetrius his son, with many

ships and forces, to make the Greeks a free people, he said that his repute, kindled in Greece as on a lofty height, would spread like beacon-fires through out the inhabited world. [*](Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, chap. viii. (892 B), where the phraseology is slightly different.)