Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

	No good can come of having many lords;
	Let one alone be master, and let one alone be king,

said Ulysses in Homer, speaking in public. If he had said nothing more than

	No good can come of having many lords,

it would have been as well said as anything could be. But where logic required him to go on and say that the rule of many could not be good, since the power of even one man, the moment he takes the title of master, is harsh and unreasonable, he went and added, quite the reverse,

	Let one alone be master, and let one alone be king.

Perhaps we should excuse Ulysses. He may well have needed that kind of language at the time to put down a mutiny in the army, and he fitted his words, I think, more to the moment than to the truth. But to speak in earnest, it is an extreme misfortune to be subject to a master, since you can never be sure he will be good when it is always in his power to be bad whenever he likes; and to have several masters is to be extremely unfortunate as many times over as you have masters. I do not want to take up just now that well-worn question, whether the other forms of commonwealth are better than monarchy. Still, before asking what rank monarchy should hold among commonwealths, I should want to know whether it ought to hold any rank there at all; for a commonwealth is a public thing, and it is hard to believe there is anything public about a government in which everything belongs to one. But that question is saved for another time. It would need a treatise of its own, or rather it would drag every political dispute in along with it.

For now I should like only to understand how it can happen that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations sometimes put up with a single tyrant, who has no power but the power they give him; who can hurt them only so far as they are willing to bear it; who could do them no harm at all unless they would rather suffer it than stand up to him. It is a great thing, surely, and yet so common that we ought rather to grieve than to marvel at the sight of a million million men serving in misery, their necks under the yoke, not forced by some greater strength but somehow (it seems) enchanted and spellbound by the mere name of one man, whose power they have no reason to fear, since he is alone, and whose qualities they have no reason to love, since toward them he is inhuman and savage. Such is our weakness as men that we must often give way to force. We have to bide our time; we cannot always be the stronger. If a nation, then, is compelled by the force of war to serve one man, as the city of Athens served the Thirty Tyrants, we should not marvel that it serves, but lament the misfortune; or better still, neither marvel nor lament, but bear the evil patiently and keep ourselves for better fortune to come.

Our nature is such that the common duties of friendship take up a good part of our lives. It is reasonable to love virtue, to admire fine deeds, to acknowledge a kindness where we received it, and often to give up something of our own comfort to add to the honor and advantage of someone we love and who deserves it. And so, if the people of a country have found some great man who has proved to them, by the test of experience, his great foresight in protecting them, his great boldness in defending them, his great care in governing them; if from then on they grow tame enough to obey him, and trust him so far as to give him certain advantages, I am not sure it would be wise, since they take him from the place where he was doing good and promote him to one where he can do harm. But surely there could be nothing but kindness in not fearing harm from a man from whom one has received nothing but good.

But good God, what can this be? What are we to call it? What misfortune is this? What vice, or rather what wretched vice? To see an endless multitude of people not obeying but serving; not governed but tyrannized; with no goods, no kin, no wives, no children, not even their own lives that they can call their own! To suffer the plundering, the lechery, the cruelties, not of an army, not of a barbarian horde against which one would have to spend one's blood and life, but of one man alone; not of a Hercules or a Samson, but of one little man, and most often the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation; a man not used to the dust of battle, and scarcely even to the sand of the tournament; a man not able to command other men by force, but wholly taken up with serving, basely, the least little woman! Shall we call this cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve are cowards, worn out and spent? If two, if three, if four do not defend themselves against one, that is strange, but still possible; one could fairly say it was for want of heart. But if a hundred, if a thousand put up with one man, will we not say that they do not want to take him on, rather than that they dare not, and that it is not cowardice but contempt, or disdain? If we see not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred countries, a thousand cities, a million men, fail to attack one single man, from whom the best-treated of them all receives this harm, that he is a serf and a slave, what can we call that? Is it cowardice? Every vice has by nature some limit it cannot pass. Two may fear one, and perhaps ten may; but a thousand, a million, a thousand cities, if they do not defend themselves against one, that is not cowardice, for cowardice does not go that far, any more than valor stretches so far that one man alone can scale a fortress, attack an army, conquer a kingdom. What monstrous vice is this, then, that does not even deserve the name of cowardice, that can find no name vile enough for it, that nature disowns having made and the tongue refuses to name?

Set fifty thousand armed men on one side and as many on the other; draw them up for battle; let them come to grips, the one side free and fighting for their freedom, the other fighting to take it from them. Which would you guess will win? Which will go into the fight with more spirit: those who hope, as the reward for their pains, to keep their liberty, or those who can expect no other wages for the blows they give and take than the servitude of others? The first have always before their eyes the happiness of their past life and the hope of the same ease to come; they think less of what they must bear for as long as a battle lasts than of what they would have to bear forever, they, their children and all their posterity. The others have nothing to put heart into them but a little point of greed, which goes blunt the moment it meets danger, and which can never burn so hot that the smallest drop of blood from their wounds would not, it seems, put it out. Think of those famous battles of Miltiades at Marathon, of Leonidas at Thermopylae, of Themistocles at Salamis, fought two thousand years ago and still as fresh today in books and in men's memory as if they had been fought the day before yesterday, fought in Greece for the good of the Greeks and as an example to the whole world. What gave so small a people as the Greeks, not the power, but the heart to withstand such a weight of ships that the sea itself was heavy with them, and to defeat so many nations, so numerous that the whole Greek army could not have supplied captains for the enemy's armies, if not that on those glorious days it was not so much a battle of Greeks against Persians as a victory of liberty over domination, of freedom over greed?

It is strange to hear of the courage that liberty puts into the hearts of those who defend it. But what happens in every country, among all men, every day, that one man should hound a hundred thousand and rob them of their liberty, who would believe it if he only heard it told and did not see it? And if it happened only in foreign countries and far-off lands, and was reported to us, who would not think it more likely made up and invented than true? And this one tyrant needs no fighting, no defeating; he is undone all by himself, provided only that the country does not consent to its servitude. There is no need to take anything from him, only to give him nothing. There is no need for the country to put itself to the trouble of doing anything for itself, provided it does nothing against itself. It is the peoples themselves, then, who let themselves, or rather make themselves, be ridden, since by ceasing to serve they would be quit of it. It is the people who enslave themselves, who cut their own throats; who, having the choice of being serfs or being free, give up their freedom and take the yoke; who consent to their own harm, or rather go chasing after it. If it cost them anything to recover their liberty, I would not press them, though nothing should be dearer to a man than to restore himself to his natural right and, so to speak, to turn from a beast back into a man. But I do not even ask so much boldness of them. I allow them to prefer some sort of security in living wretchedly to a doubtful hope of living as they please. What? If to have liberty you need only desire it, if nothing is needed but a simple act of will, will any nation in the world be found that still thinks it too dear, when it could be won by a single wish, and that grudges the will it would take to recover a good it ought to buy back at the price of its blood, a good without which every man of honor must find life hateful and death a deliverance? Surely, just as a fire from a little spark grows great and keeps on gaining strength, and the more wood it finds the readier it is to burn, and yet, without anyone pouring water on it, simply because no more wood is put on, having nothing left to consume, it consumes itself and sinks down without any strength and is fire no longer: in just the same way, the more tyrants plunder, the more they demand, the more they ruin and destroy, the more one gives them, the more one serves them, the stronger they grow, and the fresher and fitter to annihilate and destroy everything; and if one gives them nothing, if one does not obey them, then without fighting, without striking a blow, they are left naked and undone and are nothing anymore, as a branch whose root has no more sap or nourishment withers and dies.

The bold, to win the good they seek, do not fear danger; the wise do not shrink from the labor; only the cowardly and the sluggish can neither endure the harm nor recover the good. They stop short at wishing for it. Their cowardice robs them of the strength to claim it, while nature leaves them the desire to have it. This desire, this will, is common to the wise and the foolish, to the brave and the cowardly, and makes them wish for every one of those things which, once gained, would make them happy and content. One thing alone is missing, and I cannot tell how nature fails men here so that they do not desire it: it is liberty, a good so great and so sweet that once it is lost every evil follows in its train, and even the good things that remain lose all their taste and savor, spoiled by servitude. Liberty alone men do not desire, and for no other reason, it seems, than that if they desired it they would have it; as if they refused to make this fine acquisition only because it is too easy.

Poor wretched peoples, senseless peoples, nations stubborn in your own harm and blind to your own good! You let the best and clearest part of your income be carried off before your eyes, your fields plundered, your houses robbed and stripped of the old furnishings your fathers left you. You live in such a way that you cannot boast that anything is your own, and it would seem that by now you would count it great luck to hold your goods, your families and your very lives on lease. And all this damage, this misery, this ruin comes to you not from your enemies, but from the enemy, yes, the very one you make as great as he is, for whom you go so bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies to death. The man who masters you so has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, and has nothing more than the least man among the great and countless number of our cities has, except the advantage you give him to destroy you. Where did he get so many eyes to spy on you, if you do not give them to him? How does he have so many hands to strike you with, if he does not take them from you? The feet he tramples your cities with, where does he get them, if they are not yours? How does he have any power over you, except through you? How would he dare to fall on you, if he were not in league with you? What could he do to you, if you did not harbor the thief who robs you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you and traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops so that he may lay them waste; you furnish and fill your houses to supply his plundering; you raise your daughters so that he may have something to glut his lust on; you raise your children so that, at the very best he could do for them, he may take them to his wars, lead them to the slaughter, make them the servants of his greed and the executioners of his revenge; you break your bodies with toil so that he may pamper himself in his delights and wallow in his filthy and base pleasures; you weaken yourselves to make him stronger and stiffer to keep you on a shorter rein. And from so many indignities, which the very beasts would either not feel or not endure, you can free yourselves if you only try, not to free yourselves, but simply to want to. Resolve to serve no more, and you are free. I do not ask you to push him or to shake him, only to stop holding him up, and you will see him, like a great colossus whose base has been pulled from under it, fall of his own weight and break to pieces.

But doctors rightly advise us not to lay a hand on wounds that cannot be cured, and I am not wise to want to preach about this to a people that long ago lost all consciousness, and whose sickness, since it no longer feels its pain, shows plainly enough that it is mortal. Let us look, then, by conjecture, and see if we can find how this stubborn will to serve has taken such deep root that it now seems as if even the love of liberty were not natural.

First of all, it is beyond doubt, I believe, that if we lived with the rights nature has given us and by the lessons she teaches us, we would be naturally obedient to our parents, subject to reason, and serfs to no one. As for the obedience that everyone, with no other prompting than his own nature, gives to his father and mother, all men are witnesses to it, each for himself. As for reason, whether or not it is born with us is a question the Academics have argued to the bottom and every school of philosophers has touched on. For now I do not think I go wrong in saying that there is in our soul some natural seed of reason, which, tended by good counsel and custom, flowers into virtue, and which, on the contrary, often cannot hold out against the vices that come upon it, and is choked and miscarries. But surely, if anything in nature is clear and evident, if there is anything to which no one may pretend to be blind, it is this: that nature, the minister of God and the governess of men, has made us all of the same form and, as it seems, in the same mould, so that we might all know one another as companions, or rather as brothers. And if, in sharing out the gifts she was giving us, she gave some advantage of her goods, of body or of mind, to some more than to others, still she never meant to put us into this world as into a closed field for single combat, and she did not send the strongest and the cleverest down here like armed brigands in a forest to ride roughshod over the weak. We must believe rather that in making the shares larger for some and smaller for others she wanted to make room for brotherly affection, so that it would have somewhere to be used, some having the power to give help and others the need to receive it. Since, then, this good mother has given us all the whole earth for a dwelling, has lodged us all, in a way, in the same house, has shaped us all on the same pattern, so that each of us could look at himself and almost recognize himself in the other; if she has given us all that great gift of voice and speech, so that we might come to know one another and be brothers all the more, and by the common and mutual declaration of our thoughts make a communion of our wills; if she has tried by every means to draw tight and close the knot of our alliance and society; if she has shown in all things that she wanted not so much to make us all united as all one: then there can be no doubt that we are naturally free, since we are all companions, and it cannot enter anyone's mind that nature put any of us in servitude when she put us all in company.

But in truth it is idle to debate whether liberty is natural, since no one can be held in servitude without being wronged, and nothing in the world is so contrary to nature, which is wholly reasonable, as injustice. It remains, then, that liberty is natural, and by the same token, in my opinion, that we are born not only in possession of our freedom but with the will to defend it. Now if by chance we have some doubt about this, and have so far degenerated that we cannot recognize our own goods, nor likewise our inborn affections, I shall have to do you the honor you deserve and set the brute beasts, so to speak, in the pulpit, to teach you your nature and condition. The beasts, so help me God, unless men play deaf too stubbornly, cry out to them: "Long live liberty!" Many of them die as soon as they are caught. As the fish gives up its life as soon as it leaves the water, so these give up the light and will not survive their natural freedom. If the animals had ranks among themselves, these would be their nobility. The others, from the largest to the smallest, put up such a fight with claws, horns, beak and feet when they are caught that they declare plainly enough how dearly they hold what they are losing; and then, once caught, they give us so many plain signs of knowing their misfortune that it is easy to see they are languishing rather than living, and that they go on with their lives more to lament the ease they have lost than to take any pleasure in servitude. What else does the elephant mean, when he has defended himself to the last of his strength and sees no way out, and is on the point of being taken, and drives his jaws against the trees and breaks his tusks, if not that his great desire to stay free, as he is, makes him clever and gives him the idea of bargaining with the hunters, to see whether he can go free at the price of his tusks, and whether they will take his ivory and let him pay that ransom for his liberty? We coax the horse from the day he is born to tame him to service, and yet we cannot flatter him so well that, when it comes to breaking him, he does not bite the bit and kick against the spur, as if (it seems) to show nature and to testify at least in that way that if he serves, it is not of his own will but because we force him. What, then, must we say?

	Even the oxen groan beneath the yoke,
	And birds complain inside the cage,

as I said once, when I was passing the time with our French rhymes; for I shall not be afraid, writing to you, Longa, to mix in some of my verses, which I never read to you without your making me quite vain of them by the show you put on of liking them. Since, then, all things that have feeling, as soon as they have it, feel the evil of subjection and run after liberty; since the beasts, which are made after all for the service of man, cannot grow used to serving without protesting their desire for the contrary: what mischance can it have been that could so denature man, the one creature truly born to live free, and make him lose the memory of his first state and the desire to take it back?¹

There are three kinds of tyrants. Some have their kingdom by the election of the people, others by force of arms, others by succession in their family. Those who have won it by the right of war behave there in a way that shows plainly they are, as the saying goes, in conquered country. Those who are born kings are not commonly much better; born and bred in the very lap of tyranny, they suck in the nature of the tyrant with their milk, and look on the peoples under them as their hereditary serfs, and according to the temper they most incline to, greedy or lavish, they treat the kingdom as their estate. The one to whom the people have given the state ought, it seems to me, to be more bearable, and so he would be, I believe, were it not that as soon as he sees himself raised above the rest, flattered by that something or other called greatness, he resolves never to budge from it. Commonly he means to hand on to his children the power the people entrusted to him, and once such men have taken up this idea it is strange how far they surpass the other tyrants in every kind of vice, and in cruelty above all, for they see no other means of securing the new tyranny than to draw servitude so tight and estrange their subjects so far from liberty that, fresh as the memory of it may be, they can make them lose it. To tell the truth, then, I can see some difference among them, but a choice among them I cannot see. The roads to the throne are different, but the way of reigning is almost always the same: the elected treat their peoples as if they had taken bulls to break; the conquerors make them their prey; the heirs mean to treat them as their natural slaves.

But speaking of that: suppose that some people were born today entirely new, neither used to subjection nor with a taste for liberty, who did not know what either one was, and hardly even the names; and suppose they were offered the choice of being serfs or living free, under laws they would agree on among themselves. There can be no doubt that they would far rather obey reason alone than serve a man, unless perhaps they were the people of Israel, who with no compulsion and no need at all made themselves a tyrant: a people whose history I never read without such great vexation that I almost become inhuman enough to rejoice at all the evils that came upon them for it. But surely all men, as long as there is anything of the man in them, must be one of two things before they let themselves be subjected: forced or deceived. They are forced by foreign arms, as Sparta and Athens were by the forces of Alexander, or by factions, as the government of Athens had earlier fallen into the hands of Pisistratus. By trickery they often lose their liberty, and in this they are not so often led astray by others as deceived by themselves. Thus the people of Syracuse, the chief city of Sicily (I am told they call it Saragousse today), hard pressed by wars and thinking of nothing but the danger of the moment, rashly raised up Dionysius, the first tyrant of that name, and gave him command of the army, and never noticed that they had made him so great that this fine fellow, coming home victorious as if he had conquered not his enemies but his fellow citizens, made himself from captain king, and from king tyrant. It is past belief how a people, once it is subjected, falls so suddenly into so deep a forgetfulness of its freedom that it cannot possibly wake up to win it back, and serves so freely and so willingly that one would say, to look at it, that it had not lost its liberty but won its servitude. It is true that at the beginning men serve under compulsion, conquered by force; but those who come after serve without regret and do willingly what their forebears had done because they had to. That is how it is: men born under the yoke, and then fed and brought up in bondage, look no further, and are content to live as they were born, and think they have no other good and no other right than what they found, and take the state they were born to for their nature. And yet there is no heir so wasteful and careless that he does not now and then run his eyes over his father's registers, to see whether he enjoys all the rights of his inheritance, or whether anyone has encroached on him or on his predecessor. But surely custom, which has great power over us in all things, has nowhere so much force as in this: in teaching us to serve and, as they say of Mithridates, who made himself used to drinking poison, in teaching us to swallow the venom of servitude and not find it bitter. No one can deny that nature has a large part in us, to draw us where she will and to make us, as we say, well born or ill born; but we must still admit that she has less power over us than custom, because our nature, however good, is lost if it is not tended, and upbringing always makes us after its own fashion, whatever that may be, in spite of nature. The seeds of good that nature puts in us are so small and slippery that they cannot bear the least shock of a contrary upbringing; they are harder to keep alive than to spoil: they degenerate, melt away and come to nothing, no more and no less than fruit trees, which all have some nature of their own that they keep well enough if they are left to grow, but give up at once to bear other fruits, foreign and not their own, according to how they are grafted. Herbs each have their own property, their nature and particular quality; yet frost, weather, soil or the gardener's hand add to their virtue or take from it a great deal, and a plant you have seen in one place you can hardly recognize in another. Whoever saw the Venetians, a handful of people living so freely that the worst of them would not want to be king of them all, so born and bred that they know no other ambition than to see who will take the best counsel and the most care to keep their liberty, so taught and formed from the cradle that they would not take all the rest of the happiness on earth in exchange for the least part of their freedom; whoever, I say, has seen those men, and then leaves them and goes to the lands of the one we call the Grand Signior, the Ottoman sultan, and sees people there who will have it that they were born only to serve him, and who give up their lives to keep up his power: would he think that these and the others had the same nature, or would he not rather believe that in leaving a city of men he had entered a park of beasts? Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, had raised, so they say, two dogs, both brothers, both suckled on the same milk, one fattened in the kitchen, the other trained in the fields to the sound of the horn and the hunting call; and wanting to show the people of Sparta that men are what their upbringing makes them, he set the two dogs in the middle of the marketplace, and between them a dish of soup and a hare. One ran to the dish and the other to the hare. "And yet," he said, "they are brothers." That man, then, with his laws and his civic order, raised and formed the Spartans so well that every one of them would rather die a thousand deaths than acknowledge any other lord than the king and reason.

I like to recall a conversation that once took place between one of the favorites of Xerxes, the great king of the Persians, and two Spartans. When Xerxes was making ready his great army to conquer Greece, he sent his ambassadors around the Greek cities to ask for water and earth: that was the Persians' way of summoning cities to surrender to them. To Athens and Sparta he sent no one, because of those whom Darius, his father, had sent there before: the Athenians and the Spartans had thrown some of them into ditches and others into wells, telling them to help themselves freely down there to water and earth to carry back to their prince. These people could not bear that anyone should touch their liberty with so much as a word. For having acted so, the Spartans knew that they had incurred the hatred of the gods, and above all of Talthybius, the god of heralds, and they decided, to appease them, to send Xerxes two of their citizens, to present themselves to him so that he might do with them as he pleased and pay himself back with them for his father's ambassadors whom they had killed. Two Spartans, one named Sperthias and the other Bulis, offered themselves of their own free will to go and make this payment. And go they did, and on the way they came to the palace of a Persian named Hydarnes, who was the king's lieutenant in all the cities of Asia along the sea coast. He received them with great honor and entertained them lavishly, and after much talk, one thing leading to another, he asked them why they so stubbornly refused the king's friendship. "Look at me, Spartans," he said, "and learn from me how well the king can honor those who deserve it, and believe that if you were his he would do the same for you: if you were his, and he knew you, there is not one of you who would not be lord of a city of Greece." "In this, Hydarnes," said the Spartans, "you can give us no good advice, because the good you promise us you have tried, but the good we enjoy you do not know: you have tasted the king's favor, but of liberty, what it tastes like, how sweet it is, you know nothing. If you had once had a taste of it, you yourself would advise us to defend it, not with spear and shield, but with our teeth and nails." Only the Spartan said what needed saying; but surely each of them spoke as he had been raised, for it could not be that the Persian should miss liberty, never having had it, nor that the Spartan should endure subjection, having tasted freedom.

Cato of Utica, while he was still a child and under the rod, often came and went in the house of Sulla the dictator, both because, given the place and family he came from, the door was never shut to him, and because they were close kin. He always had his tutor with him when he went, as children of good family usually do. He noticed that in Sulla's house, in his presence or with his consent, some were imprisoned and others condemned; one was banished, another strangled; one man asked for a citizen's property to be confiscated, another for his head; in short, everything went on there not as in the house of a city magistrate but as in the house of a tyrant over the people, and it was not a court of justice but a workshop of tyranny. Then this young lad said to his tutor: "Why don't you give me a dagger? I will hide it under my gown. I often go into Sulla's room before he is up, and my arm is strong enough to rid the city of him." There indeed is a saying that truly belongs to Cato: it was the first sign of the man he would be, worthy of his death. And yet, tell neither his name nor his country, tell only the deed as it happened, and the thing itself will speak, and anyone would guess, at a venture, that he was a Roman, born in Rome, and at a time when Rome was free. What is the point of all this? Not, certainly, that I think the country or the soil has anything to do with it, for in every land and under every sky subjection is bitter and it is sweet to be free; but because I am of the opinion that we should pity those who found the yoke on their necks when they were born, or else excuse them, or else forgive them, if, never having seen so much as the shadow of liberty, and never having been told of it, they do not see the evil of being slaves. If there were some country, as Homer says of the Cimmerians, where the sun shows itself otherwise than to us, and after shining on them for six months on end leaves them drowsing in the dark and does not come back to see them for the other half of the year, would those born during that long night, if they had never heard of the light, feel any wonder, or would they, never having seen the day, grow used to the darkness they were born in, without desiring the light? No one misses what he has never had; regret comes only after pleasure, and with the knowledge of evil there is always the memory of past joy. It is indeed the nature of man to be free and to want to be so; but his nature is also such that he naturally keeps the bent his upbringing gives him.

Let us say, then, that all the things a man is raised to and grows used to are, as it were, natural to him, but that only what his simple, unaltered nature calls him to is truly inborn: thus the first reason for voluntary servitude is custom. It is like the finest horses, which bite the bit at first and then play with it, and which, where not long ago they kicked against the saddle, now show themselves off in their harness and strut proudly under their armor. Men say they have always been subjects, that their fathers lived that way; they think they are bound to endure the evil, they persuade themselves by examples, and by the mere length of time they themselves make good the title of those who tyrannize them. But in truth the years never give a right to do wrong; they make the injury greater. There are always some, better born than the rest, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot keep from shaking it off; who never grow tame to subjection, and who, like Ulysses, who by sea and by land kept searching for a sight of the smoke from his own house, can never keep from thinking of their natural privileges and remembering their forebears and their first state. These are generally the ones who, with a clear understanding and a far-seeing mind, are not content, like the gross populace, to look at what lies before their feet, but look both behind and ahead and call back the things of the past to judge those of the time to come and to measure those of the present. They are the ones who, having heads well made by nature, have also polished them by study and learning. These men, even if liberty were wholly lost and gone out of the world, imagine it and feel it in their minds, and still savor it, and servitude is never to their taste, however finely it is dressed up.

The Grand Turk saw this clearly, that books and learning, more than anything else, give men the sense and understanding to know themselves and to hate tyranny; I hear that he has hardly any learned men in his lands, and wants none. Now commonly the good zeal and devotion of those who have kept, in spite of the times, their attachment to freedom remains without effect, however many of them there may be, because they do not know one another: under the tyrant, all liberty to act, to speak, and almost to think is taken from them; each of them is left alone with his own imaginings. Momus, the god of mockery, was not mocking too wildly, then, when he found fault with the man Vulcan had made, because Vulcan had not put a little window in his heart through which his thoughts could be seen. It has indeed been said that Brutus and Cassius, when they undertook the deliverance of Rome, or rather of the whole world, did not want Cicero, that great champion of the public good if ever there was one, to be of the party, and judged his heart too weak for so high a deed: they trusted his will, but they were not sure of his courage. And yet, if anyone will go through the deeds of past times and the old annals, he will find few or none who, seeing their country badly run and in bad hands, set out to deliver it with an intention good, whole and unfeigned, and did not succeed in the end, liberty herself putting her shoulder to the work to come into the light. Harmodius, Aristogeiton, Thrasybulus, the elder Brutus, Valerius and Dion, as they had nobly conceived it, carried it out with success; in such a case fortune almost never fails good will. Brutus the younger and Cassius did succeed in putting an end to servitude, but in bringing back liberty they died: not wretchedly (for what blasphemy would it be to say that there was anything wretched about those men, in their death or in their life?) but certainly to the great harm, the lasting misfortune and the utter ruin of the commonwealth, which was, it seems, buried with them. The other attempts made since then against the Roman emperors were only the conspiracies of ambitious men, who are not to be pitied for the troubles that came of them, since it is plain to see that they wanted not to take away the crown but to move it, meaning to drive out the tyrant and keep the tyranny. I myself would not have wanted such men to succeed, and I am content that they have shown by their example that the holy name of liberty must not be abused for a wicked enterprise.

But to come back to our subject, from which I had almost lost my way: the first reason why men serve willingly is that they are born serfs and raised as such. From this comes another: that under tyrants people easily become cowardly and effeminate. For this I am wonderfully grateful to Hippocrates, the grandfather of medicine, who noticed it and said as much in one of his books, which he entitles On Diseases. That man certainly had his heart in the right place in everything, and he showed it well when the Great King of Persia tried to draw him to his court with offers and great gifts, and he answered him frankly that it would be on his conscience to undertake to cure the barbarians who wanted to kill the Greeks, and to serve well, by his art, the man who was setting out to enslave Greece. The letter he sent him can still be seen today among his other works, and will bear witness forever to his good heart and his noble nature. It is certain, then, that with liberty valor is lost all at one stroke. Subject peoples have no eagerness and no fierceness in battle: they go to danger almost as if tied to it, and quite benumbed, only to get it over with, and they do not feel boiling in their hearts the ardor of freedom that makes men scorn peril and long to buy honor and glory by a fine death among their companions. Among free men it is a contest of who can do best, each for the common good and each for himself; they all expect to have their share in the evil of defeat or the good of victory. But enslaved peoples, besides this warlike courage, lose their liveliness in everything else as well, and have hearts that are low and soft and incapable of anything great. Tyrants know this well, and seeing their subjects take this bent, they help them along, to make them all the more slack.

Xenophon, a weighty historian and of the first rank among the Greeks, wrote a book in which he has Simonides talk with Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, about the miseries of the tyrant. The book is full of good and weighty counsel, which has, in my opinion, all the grace it could have. Would to God that every tyrant who ever lived had set it before his eyes and used it as a mirror! I cannot believe that they would not have recognized their warts and felt some shame at their blemishes. In this treatise he tells of the torment tyrants live in, who, doing harm to all, are forced to fear all. Among other things he says that bad kings use foreigners in their wars and hire them, not daring to put arms in the hands of their own people, whom they have wronged. (There have indeed been good kings who have had foreign nations in their pay, the French among them, and more in the past than today, but with another purpose: to protect their own people, thinking nothing of the cost in money so as to spare men. That is what Scipio, I believe, the great Africanus, meant when he said he would rather have saved one citizen than defeated a hundred enemies.) But it is quite certain that the tyrant never thinks his power secure until he has come to the point where he has no man of worth under him. We may rightly say to him, then, what Thraso in Terence boasts of having thrown in the face of the keeper of the elephants:

	You are a mighty man indeed,
	Because you have charge of the beasts.

But this trick of tyrants, of making their subjects brutish, can be seen nowhere more clearly than in what Cyrus did with the Lydians, after he had taken Sardis, the chief city of Lydia, and had taken Croesus, that fabulously rich king, at his mercy and brought him along with him. News was brought to him that the people of Sardis had revolted; he soon had them back under his hand; but not wanting either to sack so fine a city or to be forever put to the trouble of keeping an army there to hold it, he hit on a great expedient for making sure of it. He set up brothels, taverns and public games there, and had an ordinance proclaimed that the inhabitants were to make use of them. He found this garrison served him so well that never again did he have to draw a sword against the Lydians. These poor wretched people amused themselves inventing all sorts of games, so that the Latins took their word from them, and what we call pastimes they call ludi, games, as if they meant to say Lydi. Not all tyrants have declared so openly that they wanted to make their people effeminate; but in truth what that one ordered formally and in fact, most of them have pursued in secret. To tell the truth, it is the nature of the common sort, whose number is always greater in the cities, to be suspicious of the man who loves them and simple toward the man who deceives them. Do not think there is any bird more easily caught by the decoy, nor any fish that bites the hook sooner for the dainty of the worm, than all peoples are quickly lured into servitude by the least feather passed, as they say, before their mouths; and it is a wonderful thing that they let themselves go so quickly, if only someone tickles them. Theaters, games, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures and other such trash were for the peoples of old the baits of servitude, the price of their liberty, the tools of tyranny. These were the means, the practices, the lures the old tyrants had for lulling their subjects to sleep under the yoke. And so the peoples, made foolish, found these pastimes fine, and, amused by an empty pleasure that passed before their eyes, grew used to serving as simple-mindedly, but more harmfully, as little children who learn to read for the sake of seeing the bright pictures in illuminated books. The Roman tyrants hit on yet another device: to feast the people often, ward by ward, gulling that rabble as it needed to be gulled, for it gives itself up to the pleasures of the mouth more than to anything else. The shrewdest and most knowing of them would not have given up his bowl of soup to recover the liberty of Plato's republic. The tyrants handed out a quarter of wheat, a pint of wine and a sesterce, and then it was pitiful to hear them shout Long live the king! The blockheads did not see that they were only getting back a part of their own, and that the tyrant could not have given them even what they were getting back if he had not first taken it from them. A man who had picked up the sesterce today and gorged himself at the public feast, blessing Tiberius and Nero and their fine generosity, would tomorrow, forced to give up his goods to their greed, his children to their lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, say no more than a stone and stir no more than a stump. The common people have always been like this: they are wide open and dissolute to pleasures they cannot honorably accept, and insensible to wrongs and pains they cannot honorably bear. I do not see anyone now who, hearing of Nero, does not tremble at the very name of that vile monster, that foul and filthy plague of the world; and yet of that man, that firebrand, that butcher, that wild beast, it can truly be said that after his death, as vile as his life, the noble Roman people were so grieved by it, remembering his games and his feasts, that they were on the point of going into mourning for him. That is what Cornelius Tacitus has written, a good and weighty author and one of the most reliable. No one will find this strange, seeing what that same people had done before, at the death of Julius Caesar, who sent the laws and liberty packing. In that man there was nothing, it seems to me, of any worth, for his very humanity, which is so much preached, did more harm than the cruelty of the most savage tyrant who ever lived, since in truth it was that venomous sweetness of his that sugared servitude for the Roman people. But after his death that people, who still had his banquets in their mouths and the memory of his prodigality in their minds, vied with one another to pile the benches of the forum into his pyre, to do him honor and burn him to ashes, and then raised a column to him as to the Father of the People (so the capital read), and did him more honor, dead as he was, than they ought by right to have done any man in the world, unless perhaps to those who had killed him. Nor did the Roman emperors forget, as a rule, to take the title of tribune of the people, both because that office was held holy and sacred and because it had been established for the defense and protection of the people, and stood in the favor of the state. By this means they made sure that the people would trust them more, as if they would hear the name and never feel effects that were the very opposite. Those of today do not do much better: they commit hardly any wrong, even a grave one, without sending some pretty speech ahead of it about the public good and the common relief: for you know the formula well, Longa, which in some places they might use cleverly enough; but in most, surely, there can be no cleverness where there is so much impudence. The kings of Assyria, and after them those of the Medes, appeared in public as late as they could, to make the populace wonder whether they were something more than men, and to leave in that dream people who readily give their imagination free rein over things they cannot judge by sight. Thus the many nations that were a long time under that Assyrian empire grew used to serving through this mystery, and served the more willingly for not knowing what master they had, or hardly whether they had one at all, and all feared, on trust, a man no one had ever seen. The first kings of Egypt hardly ever showed themselves without wearing on their heads now a cat, now a branch, now fire; and by doing so, through the strangeness of the thing, they gave their subjects a certain reverence and wonder, where to people who were not too foolish or too enslaved they would have provided, in my opinion, nothing but amusement and laughter. It is pitiful to hear of how many things the tyrants of the past turned to profit to found their tyranny; of how many little means they made use of, having found that populace at all times made to their measure, so that they could not lay a net so badly that it would not come and be caught in it; a populace they have always deceived so cheaply that they never subjected it so much as when they mocked it most.

What shall I say of another fine fable that the peoples of old took for ready money? They firmly believed that the big toe of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, worked miracles and cured diseases of the spleen; and they embroidered the tale still further, saying that this toe, after the whole dead body had been burned, was found among the ashes, having come through the fire unharmed. That is how a foolish people makes up its own lies, so as to believe them afterward. Plenty of writers have set it down so, but in such a way that it is easy to see they gathered it from the gossip of the town and the idle talk of the populace. Vespasian, coming back from Assyria and passing through Alexandria on his way to Rome to seize the empire, worked wonders: he made the lame walk straight, he made the blind see, and did a whole heap of other fine things, in which anyone who could not see the trick was, in my opinion, blinder than those he healed. The tyrants themselves found it very strange that men could put up with one man doing them harm; they were eager to put religion in front of them as a bodyguard and, if it could be done, to borrow some sample of divinity to prop up their wicked lives. Salmoneus, then, if we believe Virgil's sibyl in his underworld, is paying for it now, for having mocked people so and having wanted to play Jupiter; and she saw him in the depths of hell,

	Suffering cruel torments for his wish to ape
	The thunders of the sky and fires of Jupiter.
	Upon four chargers he went riding, brandishing,
	High mounted, in his fist a great bright torch.
	Among the Grecian peoples, in the crowded market,
	Through the city of Elis he had marched on high,
	And, swaggering so, he dared to lay his hands
	On honor that belonged to gods alone.
	The madman, who the storm and matchless thunderbolt
	Would counterfeit with bronze, and with the fearful gallop
	Of horn-hoofed horses, counterfeit the Father almighty;
	Who soon thereafter, punishing this great wrong,
	Hurled, not a firebrand, not the flickering light
	Of a wax torch, with all its smoke and fume,
	And with the heavy stroke of a terrible storm
	He struck him down, his feet above his head.

If the one who was only playing the fool is so well treated down there now, I think those who have abused religion in order to be wicked find themselves there on still better terms.

Our own people sowed something of the same kind in France: the toads, the fleurs-de-lis, the holy ampulla and the oriflamme. For my part, however that may be, I will not disbelieve it, since neither we nor our ancestors have had any occasion until now to disbelieve it, having always had kings so good in peace and so valiant in war that, although they are born kings, it seems they were not made like the others by nature but chosen by Almighty God, before they were born, for the government and preservation of this kingdom. And even if that were not so, I still would not want to enter the lists to dispute the truth of our histories, or to pick them over so closely, so as not to take away this fine sport, where our French poetry will be able to fence to its heart's content: our poetry, which is now not just dressed up but, as it seems, made entirely new by our Ronsard, our Baïf, our du Bellay, who are advancing our language so far in this that I dare hope the Greeks and the Latins will soon have little advantage over us here except, perhaps, the right of the elder born. And surely I would do a great wrong to our rhyme (for I like to use that word, and it does not displease me, because although many have made it mechanical, I still see enough people able to ennoble it again and give it back its first honor), I would do it, I say, a great wrong to take away from it now those fine tales of King Clovis, in which I can already see, it seems to me, how pleasantly, how much at its ease the vein of our Ronsard will disport itself in his Franciade. I know his reach, I know his keen wit, I know the grace of the man: he will make as much of the oriflamme as the Romans made of their ancilia, the sacred shields,

	and the shields cast down from heaven,

as Virgil says; he will handle our ampulla as well as the Athenians handled the basket of Erichthonius; he will make our arms as famous as they made their olive tree, which they maintain is still in the tower of Minerva. Surely I would be outrageous to want to give the lie to our books and to go poaching on our poets' ground. But to get back to where, I do not know how, I had turned aside the thread of my argument: it has always been the case that tyrants, to make themselves secure, have tried to accustom the people not only to obedience and servitude toward them, but to devotion as well. What I have said so far, then, about what teaches men to serve more willingly, is of little use to tyrants except with the common, coarse people.²

But now I come to a point which is, in my opinion, the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny. Whoever thinks that halberds, guards and the posting of the watch protect tyrants is, in my judgment, badly mistaken. They make use of them, I believe, more for form's sake and as a scarecrow than because they put any trust in them. The archers keep out of the palace the ill-dressed who have no means, not the well-armed who could attempt something. Indeed, among the Roman emperors it is easy to count that fewer were ever saved from danger by their guards than were killed by their own archers. It is not the troops of horsemen, it is not the companies of foot soldiers, it is not arms that defend the tyrant. No one will believe it at first, but it is certainly true: it is always four or five who keep the tyrant, four or five who hold the whole country in bondage. It has always been so: five or six have had the tyrant's ear, and have come close to him of their own accord or been called by him, to be the accomplices of his cruelties, the companions of his pleasures, the panders of his lusts, and sharers in the proceeds of his plundering. These six school their chief so well that, for the sake of the partnership, he must be wicked, not only with his own wickedness but with theirs as well. These six have six hundred who prosper under them, and they do with their six hundred what the six do with the tyrant. These six hundred keep under them six thousand, whom they have raised in rank, and to whom they have given either the government of provinces or the handling of money, so that these may lend a hand to their greed and cruelty and carry it out when the time comes, and do so much harm besides that they can survive only in their shadow, and escape the laws and their penalties only through them. Great is the train that follows after that, and whoever cares to unwind this thread will see that not the six thousand, but the hundred thousand, but the millions, hold fast to the tyrant by this cord and make use of it, as Jupiter in Homer boasts that if he pulls the chain he will draw all the gods to himself. From this came the growth of the Senate under Julius Caesar, the creation of new ranks, the setting up of new offices: not, certainly, if you look at it rightly, a reform of justice, but new props of tyranny. In short, it comes to this, through the favors and the favors under favors, the gains and the gains on gains that are to be had from tyrants, that in the end there are almost as many people to whom tyranny seems profitable as there are to whom liberty would be welcome. Just as doctors say that in our body, if anything is corrupt, the moment anything stirs in some other place it goes straight to that rotten part, in the same way, the moment a king has declared himself a tyrant, all that is bad, all the dregs of the kingdom (I do not mean a heap of petty thieves and crop-eared rogues, who can do little harm or good in a commonwealth, but those who are stained with burning ambition and notorious greed) gather around him and hold him up, to have a share in the plunder and to be, under the great tyrant, little tyrants themselves. That is what great robbers and famous pirates do: some scout the country, others ride down travelers; some lie in ambush, others keep watch; some murder, others strip the bodies; and although there are ranks among them, and some are only lackeys and others chiefs of the band, in the end there is not one of them who does not get, if not a share of the main booty, at least some of the pickings. It is said that the Sicilian pirates not only gathered in such numbers that Pompey the Great had to be sent against them, but also drew into alliance with them a number of fine towns and great cities, in whose harbors they took shelter when they came back from their raids, and to whom they gave, in return, a share of the profit from fencing their plunder.

Thus the tyrant enslaves his subjects by means of one another, and is guarded by those he ought to guard himself against, if they were worth anything; and, as the saying goes, to split the wood, he makes wedges of the wood itself. There are his archers, there are his guards, there are his halberdiers. Not that they do not themselves suffer from him at times; but these men, lost and forsaken by God and men, are content to endure harm in order to do harm, not to the one who does it to them, but to those who endure it as they do and can do nothing about it. And yet, when I see these men who fetch and carry for the tyrant to do their own business out of his tyranny and the people's servitude, I am often amazed at their wickedness and sometimes sorry for their folly: for to tell the truth, what else is it to draw near the tyrant but to draw further back from one's liberty and, so to speak, to clasp servitude with both hands and embrace it? Let them set their ambition aside a little and unload themselves a little of their greed, and then let them look at themselves and know themselves, and they will see clearly that the villagers, the peasants, whom they trample underfoot as much as they can and treat worse than convicts or slaves, they will see, I say, that these, ill-used as they are, are nevertheless, compared with themselves, fortunate and in a way free. The farmer and the craftsman, however enslaved they may be, are quit of it once they have done what they are told; but the tyrant sees the others who are close to him begging and cadging for his favor. They must not only do what he says, but think what he wants, and often, to satisfy him, even anticipate his thoughts. It is not enough for them to obey him; they must also please him. They must break themselves, torment themselves, kill themselves with work on his business, and then take their pleasure in his pleasure, give up their taste for his, force their temperament, strip off their nature. They must watch his words, his voice, his signs and his eyes; they must have no eye, no foot, no hand that is not all on the watch to spy out his wishes and discover his thoughts. Is that living happily? Can that be called living? Is there anything in the world less bearable than that, I do not say for a man of spirit, I do not say for a man well born, but only for one who has common sense or, no more than that, the face of a man? What condition is more wretched than to live like this, with nothing of one's own, holding from another one's comfort, one's liberty, one's body and one's life?

But they want to serve in order to get wealth: as if they could gain anything that was their own, when they cannot even say that they belong to themselves. And as if anyone could own anything under a tyrant, they want to make goods their own, and do not remember that it is they who give him the strength to take everything from everyone and to leave nothing that can be said to belong to anybody. They see that nothing makes men subject to his cruelty like wealth; that there is no crime against him worthy of death but having the means; that he loves nothing but riches and destroys no one but the rich; and they come and present themselves, as before the butcher, to offer themselves to him so full and fattened as to make his mouth water. His favorites should think less of those who have made great fortunes around tyrants than of those who, after piling up wealth for a while, lost both their wealth and their lives there; less of how many others have grown rich in that service than of how few of them kept their riches. Search all the old histories, look at those within our own memory, and you will see quite plainly how great is the number of those who, having gained the ear of princes by bad means, either by putting their wickedness to use or by abusing their simplicity, were in the end brought to nothing by those same princes, who showed as much fickleness in casting them down as they had shown readiness in raising them up. Certainly, among the great number of people who have ever been close to so many bad kings, there have been few or almost none who did not at some time feel in their own persons the cruelty of the tyrant they had earlier stirred up against others. Most often, having grown rich in the shadow of his favor on the spoils of others, they have in the end made him rich with their own.

Even good men, if there is ever one to be found who is loved by the tyrant, however high they stand in his favor, however brightly virtue and integrity shine in them, virtue that wins some reverence even from the wickedest when they see it close at hand, even good men, I say, cannot last there; they must feel the common evil, and learn at their own cost what tyranny is. A Seneca, a Burrus, a Thrasea, that trio of good men: two of them were brought close to the tyrant by their ill fortune, which put the handling of his affairs into their hands; both were esteemed by him, both cherished, and one of them had even brought him up, and held that upbringing as a pledge of his friendship. Yet those three are witnesses enough, by their cruel deaths, of how little security there is in the favor of a bad master. And in truth, what friendship can one hope for from a man whose heart is so hard that he hates his own kingdom, which does nothing but obey him, and who, not even knowing how to love himself, impoverishes himself and destroys his own empire?

Now if anyone wants to say that those men fell into these misfortunes for having lived well, let him look boldly around Nero himself, and he will see that those who came into his favor and kept it by bad means did not last any longer. Who has ever heard of a love so abandoned, of an affection so stubborn? Who has ever read of a man so obstinately bent on a woman as he was on Poppaea? And afterward he poisoned her himself. Agrippina, his mother, had killed her husband Claudius to make room for him on the throne; to oblige him she had never hesitated to do or to suffer anything: and so her own son, her nursling, her emperor made by her own hand, after failing at it several times, at last took her life. There was no one then who did not say she had more than deserved that punishment, had it come from any hands but those of the man to whom she had given the empire. Who was ever easier to handle, simpler, or to put it better, more of a true simpleton than the emperor Claudius? Who was ever more under a woman's thumb than he was under Messalina's? In the end he handed her over to the executioner. Simplicity stays with tyrants, if they have it, in not knowing how to do good; but somehow in the end, when it comes to using cruelty, even toward those closest to them, whatever little wit they have wakes up for that. Common enough is the fine saying of that other one who, seeing the bare throat of his wife, whom he loved best and without whom it seemed he could not have lived, caressed her with this pretty speech: "This lovely neck will be cut the moment I give the word." That is why most of the tyrants of old were commonly killed by their greatest favorites, who, having come to know the nature of tyranny, could not feel as sure of the tyrant's good will as they were wary of his power. Thus Domitian was killed by Stephanus, Commodus by one of his own mistresses, Caracalla by order of Macrinus, and likewise almost all the rest.

The fact is that the tyrant is certainly never loved, nor does he love. Friendship is a sacred name, a holy thing; it is never found except between good men, and it takes hold only through mutual esteem; it is kept up not so much by favors as by a good life. What makes one friend sure of another is the knowledge he has of his integrity; the guarantees he has of it are his good nature, his faith and his constancy. There can be no friendship where there is cruelty, where there is disloyalty, where there is injustice; and among the wicked, when they come together, it is a conspiracy, not a company. They do not love one another, they fear one another; they are not friends, they are accomplices.

Now even if this were no obstacle, it would still be hard to find a sure love in a tyrant, because, being above everyone and having no companion, he is already beyond the bounds of friendship, which has its true quarry in equality and, never willing to limp, always goes on even feet. That is why there is (so they say) a certain good faith among thieves in dividing the booty, because they are peers and companions; and if they do not love one another, at least they fear one another, and do not want to lessen their strength by falling apart. But the tyrant's favorites can never have any security in him, inasmuch as he has learned from them that he can do anything, and that there is no right or duty that binds him, making it his rule to count his will as reason and to have no companion at all, but to be master of all. Is it not a great pity, then, that with so many plain examples before them, with the danger so present, no one is willing to learn wisdom at another's expense, and that of all the people who approach tyrants so willingly, not one has the good sense and the boldness to say to them what the fox, as the story goes, said to the lion who was playing sick: "I would gladly come to see you in your den; but I see plenty of tracks of beasts going in toward you, and of beasts coming back out I do not see a single one."

These wretches see the tyrant's treasures glittering and gaze in amazement at the rays of his splendor; and, lured by that brightness, they draw near, and do not see that they are putting themselves into the flame that cannot fail to consume them. Thus the foolish satyr (as the old fables tell) saw the fire Prometheus had found shining, and thought it so beautiful that he went to kiss it and was burned; thus the moth, hoping to enjoy some pleasure, flies into the fire because it shines, and learns its other power, the one that burns, as the Tuscan poet Petrarch says. But even supposing these minions escape the hands of the man they serve, they never escape the king who comes after him: if he is good, they must render their accounts and, at least then, answer to reason; if he is bad and like their master, he cannot fail to have his own favorites too, who are not in the least content to have the others' places in their turn unless, most often, they have their goods and their lives as well. Can it be, then, that anyone is found who, in such great peril and with so little security, will take that unhappy post, serving so dangerous a master at such cost? What pain, what martyrdom is it, God in heaven? To be busy night and day thinking how to please one man, and yet to fear him more than any man in the world; to have the eye always on the watch, the ear always listening, to spy out where the blow will come from, to discover the ambushes, to scent the ruin of one's companions, to notice who is betraying one; to smile at everyone and yet fear them all, to have no open enemy and no sure friend; always to wear a smiling face with a heart frozen with fear, to be unable to be glad, and not to dare to be sad!

But it is a pleasure to consider what comes back to them from this great torment, and what good they can expect from their pains and their wretched lives. The people, as a rule, do not blame the tyrant for the evil they suffer, but those who govern him. These are the men whose names the peoples, the nations, the whole world vying with one another, down to the peasants, down to the plowmen, all know; they spell out their vices, they heap on them a thousand outrages, a thousand insults, a thousand curses; all their prayers, all their vows are against them; every misfortune, every plague, every famine they lay at their door; and if they sometimes do them some outward honor, even then they are cursing them in their hearts, and hold them in greater horror than wild beasts. That is the glory, that is the honor they receive for their service from the people, who, if each of them had a piece of their bodies, would still not be, it seems to them, satisfied, nor half sated with their suffering. But surely, even after they are dead, those who come after are never so idle that the name of these people-eaters is not blackened with the ink of a thousand pens and their reputation torn apart in a thousand books, and their very bones, so to speak, dragged about by posterity, punishing them, even after their death, for their wicked lives.

Let us learn, then, at last, let us learn to do good. Let us lift our eyes to heaven, either for our own honor, or for the very love of virtue, or indeed, to speak in earnest, for the love and honor of Almighty God, who is the sure witness of our deeds and the just judge of our faults. For my part, I truly believe, and I am not deceived, since there is nothing so contrary to God, who is all bountiful and kind, as tyranny, that he keeps in store down below, set apart for tyrants and their accomplices, some particular punishment.