Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/149

 DEMETRIUS. 141 open, accessible manners. One day when an old wo- man had assailed him several times in the road and importuned him to hear her, after he had told her he had no time, " If so," cried she, " you have no time to be a king." And this reprimand so stung the king that after thinking of it a while he went back into the house, and, setting aU other matters apart, for several days to- gether he did nothing else but receive, beginning with the old woman, the complaints of all that would come. And to do justice, truly enough, might well be called a king's first business. " Mars," as says Timotheus, " is the tyrant;" but Law, in Pindar's words, the king of all. Homer does not say that kings received at the hands of Jove besieging engines or ships of war, but sentences of justice, to keep and observe; nor is it the most warlike, unjust, and murderous, but the most righteous of kings, that has from him the name of Jupiter's '• familiar friend " and scholar. Demetrius's deUght was the title most un- like the choices of the king of gods. The divine names were those of the Defender and Keeper, his was that of the Besieger of Cities.* The place of virtue was given by him to that which, had he not been as ignorant as he was powerful, he would have known to be vice, and honor by his act was associated Avith crime. While he lay dangerously ill at Pella, Pyrrhus pretty nearly over- ran all Macedon, and advanced as far as the city of Edessa. On recovering his health, he quickly drove him out^ and came to terms with him, being desirous not to employ his time in a string of petty local conflicts with a neighbor, when all his thoughts were fixed upon another design. This was no less than to endeavor the recovery ef Zeus ; Poliorcetes that of Deme- ceive from Jupiter, is from Achil- trius. Jupiter's "familiar friend" les's oath by his staft". Iliad, 1, is Minos. The passage about sen- 238.
 * Polieus and Poliuchus those tences of justice, which kings re-