On the Life of a Man occupied with Affairs of State, or on Joseph (246-250)

So they one after another began to pour forth praises of him without ceasing, and panegyrized him with unmodified encomium, each relating some different circumstance to his credit, one extolling his forgiving spirit, another his affection towards his family, and another his acuteness; and the whole company of them extolled his piety, and attributed to God the happy end to which everything had been brought, and being no longer melancholy or out of humour at the unexpected events which befell them, on their first arrival or at their original difficulties;

they also praised his excessive patience and fortitude, combined with modesty, when he, who had experienced such vicissitudes of fortune, neither when he was a slave, allowed himself to say a single word to the injury of his brothers, as having sold him, nor, when he was led away to prison, did he in his

but kept silence as if he had no knowledge of the cause of the events that had happened to him. Nor again, when he was interpreting the dreams either to the eunuch or to the king, which was a favourable occasion for relating his own story, did he ever say a word about his own nobility of birth, nor yet when he was appointed lieutenant of the king, and received the superintendence and government of the whole of Egypt, even with the view of not being thought an ignoble and obscure person, but one who was really descended of noble ancestors, not a slave by nature, but one who had been exposed to intolerable treachery, and calamities at the hands of persons from whom he was least entitled to expect it.

Moreover in addition to all this, great praise was bestowed on his affability and courtesy; for being acquainted with the insolence and rudeness of other governors, they marvelled at the absence of pretence and display which they saw in him, and they admired his kindness too, who, though the moment that he beheld them after their first journey he might have put them to death, or on the last occasion either, merely by refusing to supply them with food when oppressed with hunger, was not content with not punishing them, but even gave them necessary food gratuitously as though they had been persons worthy of favour, ordering the price they had paid to be restored to them:

and all the circumstances of their treachery towards him, and of their selling him, were so wholly concealed from, and unknown to any one, that the magistrates of the Egyptians sympathised with him in his joy, as if this was the first occasion of the brothers of the governor having arrived; moreover they invited them to hospitality, and made haste to relate their arrival to the king, and everything everywhere was full of joy, no less than would have been the case if the plain had suddenly become fertile, and the famine had changed into abundance.