he eastern magnificence in which you were
born, because this flatters your vanity and reminds you, each time you
gaze upon it, that you are wealthy and powerful--you commanded your
architect to set aside simple grandeur, and to build this gaudy
monstrosity, which is no more like the banqueting-hall of a Pericles than
I or you, Cleopatra, in all our finery, are like the simply clad gods and
goddesses of Phidias. I mean not to offend you, Cleopatra, but I must say
this; I am writing now on the subject of harmony, and perhaps I shall
afterwards treat of justice, truth, virtue; although I know full well
that they are pure abstractions which occur neither in nature nor in
human life, and which in my dealings I wholly set aside; nevertheless
they seem to me worthy of investigation, like any other delusion, if by
resolving it we may arrive at conditional truth. It is because one man is
afraid of another that these restraints--justice, truth, and what else
you will--have received these high-sounding names, have been stamped as
characteristics of the gods, and placed under the protection of the
immortals; nay, our anxious care has gone so far that it has been taught
as a doctrine that it is beautiful and good to cloud our free enjoyment
of existence for the sake of these illusions. Think of Antisthenes and
his disciples, the dog-like Cynics--think of the fools shut up in the
temple of Serapis! Nothing is beautiful but what is free, and he only is
not free who is forever striving to check his inclinations--for the most
part in vain--in order to live, as feeble cowards deem virtuously, justly
and truthfully.

"One animal eats another when he has succeeded in capturing it, either in
open fight or by cunning and treachery; the climbing plant strangles the
tree, the desert-sand chokes the meadows, stars fall from heaven, and
earthquakes swallow up cities. You believe in the gods--and so do I after
my own fashion--and if they have so ordered the course of this life in
every class of existence that the strong triumph over the weak, why
should not I use my strength, why let it be fettered by those
much-belauded soporifics which our prudent ancestors concocted to cool
the hot blood of such men as I, and to paralyze our sinewy fists.

"Euergetes--the well-doer--I was named at my birth; but if men choose to
call me Kakergetes--the evil-doer--I do not mind it, since what you call
good I call narrow and petty, and what you call evil is the f