על יוסף ז׳On Joseph 7
א׳
1[32] Further, he is quite properly said to assume a coat of varied colours, for political life is a thing varied and multiple, liable to innumerable changes brought about by personalities, circumstances, motives, individualities of conduct, differences in occasions and places.
ב׳
2[33] The pilot is helped to a successful voyage by means which change with the changes of the wind, and does not confine his guidance of the ship to one method. The physician does not use a single form of treatment for all his patients, nor even for an individual if the physical condition does not remain unaltered, but he watches the lowering and the heightening of the strain, its alternations of fullness and emptiness and all the changes of symptoms, and varies his salutary processes, sometimes using one kind and sometimes another.
ג׳
3[34] And so too the politician must needs be a man of many sides and many forms. He must be a different man in peace from what he is in war, another man as those who venture to oppose him are few or many, resisting the few with vigorous action but using persuasion in his dealings with the many, and when danger is involved he will, to effect the common good, outstrip all others in his personal activity, but when the prospect is one of labour merely he will stand aside and leave others to serve him.
ד׳
4[35] Again it is rightly said that this person is sold, for when the would-be popular orator mounts the platform, like a slave in the market, he becomes a bond-servant instead of a free man, and, through the seeming honours which he receives, the captive of a thousand masters.
ה׳
5[36] Again, he is also represented as the prey of wild beasts, and indeed the vainglory which lies in ambush and then seizes and destroys those who indulge it is a savage beast. Once more his purchasers sell him again, for politicians have not one but a multitude of masters who buy them one from another, each waiting to take his turn in the succession, and those who are thus sold again and again like bad servants change their masters, because, capricious and fitful in character as they are and ever hankering after novelty, they cannot endure their old lords.