This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
[5]
Passing on, then, to the sixth, Alexander asked how a man could be most loved; ‘If,’ said the philosopher,
‘he is most powerful, and yet does not inspire fear.’ Of the three remaining, he who was asked how one might become a god instead of man, replied:
‘By doing something which a man cannot do’; the one who was asked which was the stronger, life or death, answered:
‘Life, since it supports so many ills.’ And the last, asked how long it were well for a man to live, answered:
‘Until he does not regard death as better than life.’ So, then, turning to the judge, Alexander bade him give his opinion. The judge declared that they had answered one worse than another.
‘Well, then,’ said Alexander,
‘thou shalt die first for giving such a verdict.’
‘That cannot be, O King,’ said the judge,
‘unless thou falsely saidst that thou wouldst put to death first him who answered worst.’
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1919. 7.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.