[60]
Again, the expenditure of money is better justified1
when it is made for walls, docks, harbours, aqueducts, and all those works which are of service to
the community. There is, to be sure, more of present
satisfaction in what is handed out, like cash
down; nevertheless public improvements win us
greater gratitude with posterity. Out of respect
for Pompey's memory I am rather diffident about
expressing any criticism of theatres, colonnades, and
new temples; and yet the greatest philosophers do
not approve of them—our Panaetius himself, for
example, whom I am following, not slavishly translating, in these books; so, too, Demetrius of
Phalerum, who denounces Pericles, the foremost
man of Greece, for throwing away so much money
on the magnificent, far-famed Propylaea. But this
whole theme is discussed at length in my books on
“The Republic.”
To conclude, the whole system of public bounties
in such extravagant amount is intrinsically wrong;
but it may under certain circumstances be necessary
to make them; even then they must be proportioned
to our ability and regulated by the golden mean.
1 Lavish expenditure on public works.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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