The Tale of the Two Tunics1
(Cyrus's Lesson on the Relativity of Justice)
(From Xenophon’s Cyropaedia)
I ONCE GOT A FLOGGING for not deciding correctly. The case was like this: a big boy with a little tunic, finding a little boy with a big tunic on, took it off him and put his own tunic on him, while he himself put on the other’s. So, when I tried their case, I decided that it was better for them both that each should keep the tunic that fitted him. And thereupon the master flogged me, saying that when I was a judge of good fit, I should do as I had done; but when it was my duty to decide whose tunic it was, I had this question, he said, to consider—whose title was the rightful one; whether it was right that he who took it away by force should keep it, or that he who had it made for himself or had bought it should own it. And since, he said, what is lawful is right and what is unlawful is wrong, he bade the judgment always render his verdict on the side of the law. It is in this way, mother, you see, that I already have a thorough understanding of justice in all its bearings; and,” he added, “if I do require anything more , my grandfather here will teach me that.”
“Yes, my son,’ said [Cyrus’s mother, Mandane]; “but at your grandfather’s court they do not recognize the same principles of justice as they do in Persia. For he has made himself master of everything in Media, but in Persia equality of rights is considered justice. And your father is the first one to do what is ordered by the State and to accept what is decreed, and his standard is not his will but the law. Mind, therefore, that you be not flogged within an inch of your life, when you come home, if you return with a knowledge acquired from you grandfather here of the principles acquired not of kingship but of tyranny, one principle of which is that it is right for one to have more than all.”
(Cyrus the Great’s conversation with his mother, Mandane, regarding the Case of the Two Chitons, and her observations about the differences between Persian and Median concepts of Justice.)
Endnotes
1 Xenophon, Cyropaedia (Walter Miller, trans.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 41, 43. ⇑
