Gain and Loss of an Empire

For when, with the help of ten thousand talents, we were not able to retain our empire, how can we acquire it in our present state of poverty, especially since we are now addicted, not to the ways of life by which we gained it, but to those by which we lost it? Isocrates.  On The Peace.  Speech 8.  Section 69.

Image: Tarcisius by Alexandre Falguiere, 1868, photographed at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, France.