why should it not be readier for every one of them to say, I hate this
man, and desire to do him a diskindness, but the love of my country
has greater power over me? For not to condescend to be reconciled to
an enemy for those very causes for which we ought to abandon even a
friend, is even to extremity savage and brutish. But far better did
Phocion and Cato, who grounded not any enmity at all on their political
differences, but being fierce and obstinate only in their public
contests not to recede from any thing they judged convenient for the
state, did in their private affairs use those very persons friendly and
courteously from whom they differed in the other. For one ought not to
esteem any citizen an enemy, unless it be one like Aristion, Nabis, or
Catiline, the disease and plague of the city: but as for those that
are otherwise at discord, a good magistrate should, like a skilful
musician, by gently setting them up or letting them down, bring them to
concord; not falling angrily and reproachfully upon those that err, but
mildly reprehending them in such like terms as these of Homer’s,