Letters

For such purposes, then, these are pretty well all my necessary requirements at the present time. And should any further expense, private or public, be incurred owing to my visit to your court, we must do as I said before: I must strive hard to keep the expense as low as possible, and if ever that is beyond my power, the charge must fall upon you. In the next place, as regards the spending of your own money at Athens, I have to tell you, first of all, that, contrary to what we supposed, you have not a single friend who will advance money in case I am required to spend something on furnishing a chorus or the like; and further, if you yourself have some urgent affair on hand in which prompt expenditure is to your advantage, whereas it is to your disadvantage to have the expenditure deferred until the arrival of a messenger from you, such a state of affairs is not only awkward but reflects also on your honor. And in fact I discovered this myself when I sent Erastus to Andromedes the Aeginetan—from whom, as a friend of yours, you told me to borrow what I needed; as I wished to send you also some other valuable items which you had written for. He replied—naturally enough, as any man might—that when, on a previous occasion, he had advanced money on your father’s account he had had difficulty in recovering it, and that he would now loan a small amount but no more. That was how I came to borrow from Leptines; and for this Leptines is deserving of praise, not that he gave it, but that he did so readily, and plainly showed his friendship and its quality in all else that he did or said regarding you. For it is surely right that I should report such actions, as well as the opposite kind, to show what I believe to be each man’s attitude towards you. However, I will tell you candidly the position with regard to money matters; for it is right to do so, and, moreover, I shall be speaking from experience of your court. The agents who bring you the reports every time are unwilling to report anything which they think entails an expense, as being likely to bring them odium. Do you therefore accustom them and compel them to declare these matters as well as the rest; for it is right that you should know the whole state of affairs so far as you can and act as the judge, and not avoid this knowledge. For such a course will best serve to enhance your authority. For expenditure that is rightly laid out and rightly paid back is a good thing—as you yourself maintain and will maintain—not only for other purposes but also for the acquisition of money itself. Therefore, do not let those who profess to be devoted to you slander you before the world; for to have the reputation of being ill to deal with is neither good for your reputation nor honorable. In the next place I shall speak about Dion. Other matters I cannot speak of as yet, until the letters from you arrive, as you said; with regard, however, to those matters which you forbade me to mention to him, I neither mentioned nor discussed them, but I did try to discover whether he would take their occurrence hardly or calmly, and it seemed to me that if they occurred it would cause him no small vexation. As to all else Dion’s attitude towards you seems to me to be reasonable both in word and deed.