6
Put confidence in me, then, and you shall receive places of authority in my government, if you forsake your national ordinance,
7
and, conforming to the Greek mode of life, alter your rule, and revel in youth's delights.
8
For if you provoke me by your disobedience, you will compel me to destroy you, every one, with terrible punishments by tortures.
9
Have mercy, then, upon your own selves, whom I, although an enemy, compassionate for your age and comeliness.
10
Will you not reason upon this—that if you disobey, there will be nothing left for you but to die in tortures?
11
Thus speaking, he ordered the instruments of torture to be brought forward, that very fear might prevail upon them to eat unclean meat.
12
And when the spearman brought forward the wheels, and the racks, and the hooks, and catapeltae, and caldrons, pans, and finger-racks, and iron hands and wedges, and bellows, the tyrant continue:
13
Fear, young men, and the righteousness which ye worship will be merciful to you if you err from compulsion.
14
Now they having listened to these words of persuasion, and seeing the fearful instruments, not only were not afraid, but even answered the arguments of the tyrant, and through their good reasoning destroyed his power.
15
Now let us consider the matter: had any of them been weak-spirited and cowardly among them, what reasonings would they have employed but these?
16
O wretched that we are, and exceeding senseless! when the king exhorts us, and calls us to his bounty, should we not obey him?