When men are in the habit, Nicocles, of bringing to you kings garments or brass or wrought gold or other valuable things of the kind, of which they themselves have poor store but you have abundance, it is too clearly manifest to me that they are not making a present but are carrying out a commercial transaction, and that they sell their wares much more artfully than those who avowedly carry on trade.
Now, I thought that it would be the noblest and most profitable gift and one most becoming me to give and you to receive, if I were able to define what habits of life you should strive after and what [practices] you should abstain from, so as best to order both your state and your royal office. Private men have many things to educate them, especially the want of luxury, and the necessity of daily taking thought for their livelihood; next, the laws under which they happen in each case to be living, and further, freedom of speech and the power for friends to rebuke each other and for enemies to attack each other's faults without concealment; and besides these things, some of the poets also who have lived before us have left behind precepts showing how men ought to live; so that owing to all these influences it is likely that they will become better men.
