Chapter 20. How Unworthy and Ruinous It Is for the Unjust to Find Favor With the King

¹ Such a king, then, does not know where in the world those who pursue virtue spend their time, nor does he grant them so much as a passing glance. But men who are conspicuous workshops of every kind of wickedness—these he honors with high office, showers with gifts, and sets loose upon the cities as merchants of unjust gain and purveyors of filthy profit; and he permits them to butcher the sheep, so long as they bring him the fattest cuts, and he mixes together all things divine and human, provided only that he receives his coin. I hesitate myself to name such a man; the Persians would have called him a peddler, as they once called Darius so. But perhaps he is not even a peddler—for that word, however lacking in dignity, is at least a most humane one—but rather a robber and a murderer, and, if I may say so, a thrice-accursed wretch, since his only aim is profit, achieved by murdering others, and by contriving hardship for his subjects so that he himself may indulge his pleasures without restraint.