Self-command
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
govern yourself · power to let all that alone · rule over your desires · self-command · self-control · sensible and temperate · slave to no pleasure · sobriety · temperance · temperate
in the texts
To Nicocles
Self-command is the king's mastery over pleasure, desire, and license, treated as prior to and exemplary for rule over subjects.
Govern yourself no less than your subjects, and consider that you are in the highest sense a king when you are a slave to no pleasure but rule over your desires more firmly than over your people.
on the contrary, let your own self-control stand as an example to the rest, realizing that the manners of the whole state are copied from its rulers.
Do not show yourself ambitious for those things which lie within the power of base men also to achieve, but show that you pride yourself on virtue, in which base men have no part.
Cyropaedia
Virtue of controlling appetites, desires, and conduct in war and at meals.
but just as good horsemen do not lose their self-command when on horseback but can ride along and at the same time see and hear and say whatever they should, so also the educated Persians think that at their meals they ought to show themselves sensible and temperate;
But the high-minded and the good, though they also have a desire for money and good horses and beautiful women, have the power to let all that alone so as not to touch anything beyond the limit of what is right.
He noticed further about them that they asked one another such questions as people are more pleased to be asked than not, that they indulged in such banter as is more agreeable to hear than not;