For they did not slight the commonwealth, nor seek to profit by it as their own
 possession, nor yet neglect it as the concern of others; but were as careful of the public
 revenues as of their private property, yet abstained from them as men ought from that to
 which they have no right. This artificial paragraph is
 closely paralleled in Isoc. 7.24 and in Isoc. 3.21 . Nor did they estimate well-being by the standard of money,
 but in their regard that man seemed to have laid up the securest fortune and the noblest
 who so ordered his life that he should win the highest repute for himself and leave to his
 children the greatest name; neither did they vie with one another in temerity, nor did they cultivate recklessness in
 themselves, but thought it a more dreadful thing to be charged with dishonor by their
 countrymen than to die honorably for their country; and they blushed more for the sins of
 the commonwealth than men do nowadays for their own. The reason for this was that they gave heed to the laws to see that they should be exact
 and good—not so much the laws about private contracts as those which have to do with men’s
 daily habits of life; for they understood that for good and true men there would be no
 need of many written laws, Cf. Isoc.
 7.41 . This part of the Panegyricus has much in common with the pictures of the
 old democracy in Athens drawn in the
 Areopagiticus and the Panathenaicus . but that if
 they started with a few principles of agreement they would readily be of one mind as to
 both private and public affairs. So public-spirited were they that even in their party struggles they opposed one another,
 not to see which faction should destroy the other and rule over the remnant, but which
 should outstrip the other in doing something good for the state; and they organized their
 political clubs, not for personal advantage, but for the benefit of the people. Political parties and clubs of that day are here no doubt
 idealized to point the contrast to the selfish intrigues of the present. Cf. Isoc. 4.168 and Thucydides’ picture of the evils of faction,
 Thuc. 3.82 . These clubs, whatever they may have been in
 the Golden Age, were later sworn enemies of popular government and the centers of
 oligarchical conspiracies. See Thuc. 8.54 ; and Aristot. Ath. Pol. 34 . 
 In the same spirit they governed their relations with other states. They treated the
 Hellenes with consideration and not with insolence, regarding it as their duty to command
 them in the field but not to tyrannize over them, desiring rather to be addressed as
 leaders than as masters, and rather to be greeted as saviors than reviled as destroyers;
 they won the Hellenic cities to themselves by doing kindness instead of subverting them by
 force,