§ 1. All kinds of government, when they decline from their end and, through the fault either of those who rule or of those who obey, depart from justice, disturb the commonwealth
marvelously and generally drive it to utter destruction. Just as there are three legitimate forms of commonwealth, so there are likewise the same number of deviations from them. The abuse of royal power is tyranny; that of aristocracy, oligarchy; that of polity, democracy. No general name has been established for these three vices. It could be called “κακοπολιτεία,” the bad or corrupt administration of the commonwealth. Its definition is: “Ἀρχὴ πρὸς τὸ συμφέρον τῶν ἀρχόντων,” government which regards the utility of those who govern.
By the name “those who govern” I also understand those who are joined to the rulers. For many act tyrannically more for the sake of their relatives, sons, or a definite party within the commonwealth than for their own sake. Someone, therefore, will offer a fuller definition if he says: it is government which regards the utility of those who govern or of some party within the commonwealth. Sulla attempted to establish the resources of the nobility, Marius to protect the power of the common people, and Caesar his own good; no one regarded the good of the whole commonwealth. Nor was the disposition of the others who belonged to the parties any better. In secret they pursued plunder, proscriptions, the auction spear, and the destruction of their enemies; they pretended to seek the good of the commonwealth.
§ 2. Therefore, when the end of monarchy has been changed, tyranny is introduced in place of kingship. For it is “Τυραννὶς μοναρχία πρὸς τὸ συμφέρον τῷ μοναρχοῦντι,” monarchy directed toward the utility of the monarch. Aristotle makes three kinds of it in book 4 of the Politics, chapter 10: that of barbarians, that of the Aesymnetes, and the third, which is tyranny most of all, “ἀντίστροφος τῇ βασιλείᾳ,” that which is opposed to kingship. He rightly calls this tyranny most of all. For the other forms of command can be just, although rarely, because there have been very few holy kings who, governing all things according to their own judgment without law, did injury to no one.
§ 3. But the third kind of tyranny is the most grievous evil, a violent and widely extending evil. Its origin is manifold, but it can be referred to one of three kinds. For legitimate princes, having changed their conduct, often change into tyrants. Next, the powerful friends of princes rise against their own lords and seize the kingdom. Third, within a polity demagogues and fickle leaders of the people usurp tyranny over those whom they have deceived.
§ 4. The first and most ancient origin of tyranny, therefore, is the change of kings for the worse. Ambition, avarice, and lust are the companions and plagues of power. For just as there is scarcely any prince who at the beginning does not display mildness, clemency, and liberality, so, when their sovereignty has been established, very many put off the simulation of virtue, and many put off virtue itself. This change is familiar to human weakness, and power drives minds inclined toward worse things onward with great force.
If they do not know crimes, a kingdom will teach them.
Thus speaks Atreus while making his sons partners in his crimes. Hence it happens that, just as
The gentlest lot among kingdoms is under a new king,
so the saddest is under a tyrant who fears nothing and has been brutalized by flatteries. The force toward vices is great in a kingdom because license is great, truth is insolent, and evil is approved. Saul was called king by divine testimony and vote, and nevertheless power changed him and handed him over to Satan. Royal license finally destroyed the wisdom of Solomon after it had flourished for a long time. Asa, Amaziah, Joash, and others, driven sideways by fortune and felicity, did many things tyrannically, although their beginnings had been most illustrious.
Let us see foreign examples. Romulus, agreeable at the beginning, finally advanced to such insolence and cruelty that he was torn apart by the hands of the fathers. The Roman fathers themselves acted moderately as long as they restrained their desires through fear of the Tarquins; once the Tarquins had been removed, they began to oppress their own citizens. The decemvirs for writing the laws were able to simulate virtue for only one year.
Tiberius, the most profound master of simulation and dissimulation, for a long time refused to accept the sovereignty which he nevertheless exercised. He called it a great beast, a wretched and burdensome servitude. Nonetheless, having assumed the persona of a citizen, he conducted himself as though he were a private person. But with how great a savagery he afterward reigned is unknown to no one, so that this was deservedly proclaimed concerning him:
He has reigned with much blood, whoever came from exile to sovereignty.
For after mild beginnings, when his frenzy for slandering and accusing had blazed forth, his rule was nothing but a slaughterhouse of nobles, so that the event confirmed the foreboding of Augustus. Augustus pitied the Roman people, which would come under jaws that chewed so slowly. Suetonius, Tacitus, and others in their accounts of Tiberius.
Gaius was received with great joy; by every kind of popularity he conciliated the affections of human beings toward himself. He acquitted the condemned, restored exiles, and pardoned the accused. But a little later he migrated into his own character and showed how much the greatest vices could accomplish amid the greatest fortune.
Claudius, otherwise foolish and a block of wood, within a short time conciliated so much affection toward himself by affability and beneficence that, when he had set out for Ostia and it was announced that he had perished, the people did not cease to attack the soldiers as traitors and the senate as parricides with dreadful curses. But within a short time the most obtuse prince, and the most cruel through fear, paid the interest on that joy with great calamities.
The senate judged with the best right that Nero’s first words and deeds ought to be engraved upon columns of gold and silver, and not many princes attained the standard of his first five years. The vices of scarcely anyone surpassed the remainder of his life. Neither Galba nor Vitellius nor even Domitian had harsh beginnings. Diocletian, Maximian, and even Julian himself had bloodless beginnings to their reigns.
The dispositions of princes are therefore changed, and they involve first the commonwealth and then themselves in great disasters. Nor is it marvelous that they are changed, since everyone invites them to joyful and pleasant things, and few to honorable and harsh things. Yet leading men and the people are frequently at fault when by biting sayings, seditions, and conspiracies they exasperate princes and compel them to become estranged and then, under the pretext of guarding themselves, cruel. Many peoples would enjoy the kingdoms of benevolent princes if they could bear civilly, or overlook, their moderate vices which do not burst forth into the destruction of their subjects or public disgrace. While they censure and expose those vices in an importunate manner, they do not amend them but, like wounds that have been irritated, make them worse and estrange the prince from themselves.
§ 5. The second origin of tyrants comes from the sloth or indulgence of princes, when they place certain friends in charge of affairs, from which those friends arrive at such increases of power that they are now equal to princes, or even superior, and certainly stand upon a position too firm to be cast down. One may well marvel at the custom of kings and princes in fostering the excessive power of friends whom, after they have raised them almost to an equal summit, they begin to fear or envy and often even to hate.
Examples exist under almost all princes: Sejanus, Germanicus, Felix, Plautianus; but, to pursue better-known examples, Rufinus, Eutropius, Stilicho, Alaric, Aetius, Narses, Belisarius, and Aristonicus,
who, although they were powerful, offended the emperors and perished wretchedly or without glory. But if we look at tyrants, we shall learn that a great part of them arose from this source. Galba, Vitellius, Vespasian, Severus, Macrinus, Philip, Gaius, Diocletian, Julian, and more than a hundred tyrants who raged during their reigns began their tyranny from the power which they had received from the emperors, and they turned benefits toward overthrowing their benefactors.
Great danger always threatens princes from great men. Accordingly, the power of the prince, which in him is single and united, is soon divided by the prince among many equals. But if one man is second or third to the prince in dignity, his power must nevertheless be so moderated that he obtains from it more honor than strength. But if all things are conferred upon one man, justice is disturbed; people attribute to the prince the evils which that one man perpetrates; no one speaks his opinion freely. Since that one man is hated by many and is not ignorant of it, he attempts to overthrow many, to despoil the prince of friends, and to cast him into difficulties, so that he may now hold him bound and dependent. But how the prince should guard against this I shall say in its own place. For now the source and origin of tyrants is being shown.
Hence, therefore, many tyrannies have arisen, but peoples have nevertheless imposed more of them upon themselves. This was exceedingly customary in ancient times, as Aristotle teaches in book 5 of the Politics, chapter 10: “But the tyrant is taken from the people and multitude against noble and illustrious men, lest the people receive any injury from them.” This may be understood from events. For nearly all tyrants were made from fickle guardians and leaders of the people—if it is permissible to say it—having obtained trust among the people by falsely accusing and slandering distinguished and illustrious men.
In no other manner did Manlius and the Gracchi seek tyranny, and Marius and Caesar obtain it. And so it was in smaller sovereignties: Panaetius at Leontini, Cypselus at Corinth, Pisistratus at Athens, Dionysius at Syracuse, and, in later ages, many in the cities of Italy—Florence, Siena, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, and very many other cities—which were administered with much variation and lived under the most cruel demagogues until they were recalled to moderate and legitimate governments. For the most part, the people entangle themselves in their own evils. For when the people exalt citizens beyond what is just, after those men have obtained dominion, they oppress the same people contrary to right.
There are many signs by which we may distinguish a tyrannical principate from a legitimate one.
§ 6. The first is a simulation of virtues, especially justice and clemency. For although every tyranny is burdensome and hateful, one tyrant is nevertheless more humane than another; yet all display virtues which they do not possess, at least at some time. For men extremely wicked, like Nero, who boasted that no prince had known what was permitted to him, are rare. Therefore, whoever teaches a prince to simulate virtues and embrace vices is a detestable instructor of tyranny.
You will detect the simulation if tyrants display clemency and justice toward certain persons but employ cruelty and violence toward others. Andronicus Comnenus condemned those convicted of guilt without any distinction of dignities. His justice could have been praised if he had not himself inflicted the greatest injuries in the greatest matters. Alexander was sometimes merciful, but nevertheless killed a great part of his friends. How merciful did Caesar appear to Cicero? And yet he slaughtered one million one hundred thousand persons in a war which was not always necessary, but which he waged because he had been enticed by ambition and avarice.
The clemency of Octavian is praised because he pardoned Corocotta, a famous robber; but the proscription, which he exercised more bitterly than his colleagues, shows that he was cruel. So do the many knights sacrificed at the Julian altar, and that savage utterance with which alone he met those who begged him: “You must die.” Nero, when he was asked to sign the condemnation of two soldiers, said, “How I wish I did not know letters.” Shall we for this reason count among the merciful, on account of those years, this enormous and monstrous creature, mud kneaded with blood? If, therefore, we consider these things, we shall not readily believe those virtues to be genuine upon which fear, hope, and ambition sometimes impress their traces. For vices often produce imitations of virtues.
§ 7. The second sign of tyranny, as Aristotle says in book 5 of the Politics, chapter 11, is “Τὸ τοὺς ὑπερέχοντας κολούειν, καὶ τοὺς φρονηματίας ἀναιρεῖν”: to diminish eminent men and remove from the midst prudent men of great spirit. Thus Periander advised Thrasybulus when he cut off the taller ears of grain, and Tarquin advised his son by cutting off the poppy heads.
For magnates and tyrants possess a perpetual cause of contention. They exercise rivalry with one another as though they belonged to the same craft: tyrants [wish] to command by supreme right; the best men are unwilling to obey except in a civil manner. Accordingly, it is proper to tyranny to hate virtue, slaughter the brave, and envy everyone. The nobility experiences the cruelty of tyrants most of all. For cruelty consumed the Roman senate and the knights under nearly all the Roman emperors who reigned with much blood. Nor did counsels ever fail men so remarkably wicked. The varied deaths ordered for Regulus piecemeal seemed too laborious; he therefore advised Nero that the entire senate could be destroyed by a single word.
§ 8. The third indication of tyranny is to make subjects “μικροψύχους,” human beings of pusillanimous, servile, and abject spirit, lest anyone think about vindicating liberty. Hence so many deaths were ordered in the Roman commonwealth if anyone as a private person seemed to pursue greater things.
There are at this time two powerful monarchs, the king of the Spains and the emperor of the Turks. The diverse pursuits of each show the latter to be a tyrant and the former a legitimate king. The Spaniard, at very great expense, exercises his subjects in academies, commerce, the art of war, and navigation; he rouses them to great things and expends such great resources to nourish and strengthen their spirits, upon the dignity of princes and the splendor of the nobility. The Ottoman, however, oppresses so many peoples with ignorance, poverty, and servitude. He fattens the Timariots and Janissaries, as though they were his attendants, upon the spoils of provinces; nevertheless, he raises them toward nothing greater than the hope of daily plunder and pleasure, and holds them by this enticement of impunity, which is the enlistment-bounty of every most foul man. Accordingly, although he has many bold and rash soldiers, he nevertheless possesses no provident and brave commanders—indeed, not even soldiers, but slaves prodigal of their lives.
Nor do the princes of the Muscovites protect their sovereignty and authority in another manner. In order that their people may admire the prince alone, they permit no one to visit foreign regions, lest they return home more prudent and instructed than is expedient for so despotic a sovereignty. They admit no schools except those in which people learn to read and write; nor is it free from danger to have shown a desire to advance in letters. This is so that no one may be wiser than the prince or equal to him. Accordingly, when inquiry is made concerning a great and hidden matter, they say proverbially: “God knows this, and the Grand Duke.” It is therefore tyrannical for a ruler to claim for himself alone whatever a subject possesses that is ample, excellent, or beautiful, whether in movable things or even in talent and gifts of mind. Seneca
was in extreme danger because he seemed eloquent to Gaius. Another man was killed because he had turned eyes upon himself with more conspicuous clothing, another with the arrangement of his curls.
§ 9. The fourth sign of tyranny is what Aristotle calls “ἀδυναμία τῶν πραγμάτων,” the removal of the power to conduct affairs. For in this manner the tyrant judges himself secure: if no one is able to do anything, how will he overthrow the tyranny if he possesses no power in the commonwealth? Accordingly, a tyrant does not trust friends. He knows that although everyone wishes to extinguish tyranny, almost only friends are able to do it. Hence tyrants variously change, persecute, and kill them.
§ 10. The fifth sign is if they set subjects, friends, and princes against one another and render them mutually suspect. Aristotle, book 5 of the Politics, chapter 11, judges this useful to a tyrant: namely, if they agree badly among themselves, slander one another, if discords exist among friends, and citizens are alienated from the nobility. For since every tyranny is weak of itself—for tyranny is the vice and error of kingship—it is brief by its own nature. Consequently, it is supported and endures more by the dissensions and weakness of others than by its own strength. I shall show in its own place that this counsel is destructive. For now I present only the signs by which tyranny may be recognized.
§ 11. The sixth indication of tyranny is to raise ambitious, avaricious, and cruel human beings to honors and dignities, and then to strip those same persons of their goods and life. Tyrants employ wicked human beings like sponges: dry and thirsty, they immerse them in the resources and blood of the provinces; when full, they squeeze them and plunder under another’s name. Dionysius hung up full wineskins and threw away empty ones. What is more atrocious than the utterance of that beast who scarcely ever entrusted a magistracy to anyone without adding: “You know what we need,” and, “Let us bring it about that no one possesses anything”?
That tyranny extends widely throughout Turkey. For scarcely anyone is found richer than the pashas and beys; and nevertheless their goods pass to an heir only rarely, but generally return to the fisc. There are other things which good kings sometimes do rightly and which are not proper criteria of tyrants: for example, supporting foreign soldiers, being feared, employing scouts and Corycaean informers, exacting great taxes, and severely punishing transgressors. I shall treat of these in their own place.
§ 12. Would that, would that all men avoided tyranny and the tyrant as earnestly as they condemn them. If any thing is destructive to the world and burdensome to itself, it is tyranny. The condition of tyrants is laborious; their joy is rare, their rise unhappy, their end most wretched. For how few among them have completed life by their natural fate? Juvenal speaks truly in Satire 10:
To the son-in-law of Ceres without slaughter and a wound few kings descend, and tyrants by a bloodless death.
§ 13. The causes by which tyrants are removed through death are injustice, fear, and outrage, which Aristotle enumerates in book 5 of the Politics, chapter 5.
Turn your eyes around the whole world. Consider not those petty tyrants of towns—Alexander of Pherae, Dionysius of Syracuse, Phalaris of Acragas, Hanno the Carthaginian, Clearchus of Heraclea, Nabis the Chalcedonian, Hipparchus of Athens, the Pisistratids, and the Perianders—nor the poetic tyrants Diomedes the Thracian, Phineus, Eryx, Antaeus, Mezentius, and the Cyclopes. Rather, consider the great tyrants bearing the name of kings: the Antigonids, Seleucids, Antiochids, Perdiccases, Lysimachuses, Gaiuses, Neros, Vitelliuses, Galbas, Othos, Domitians, Commoduses, Maximini, Michaels, Phocases, Mauricii, and Aristonici. You will find that all continually passed their lives in fear; all feared those whom they terrified; fear returned upon its authors; and very many, although they lived fortified by swords and employed armies and citadels for their protection, perished by the sword or by a fouler death.
I have seen bloodstained leaders shut in prison, and the back of a powerless tyrant torn by a plebeian hand.
For just as a tyrant takes liberty and quiet away from everyone, so he takes security especially from himself. For how can he live peacefully, securely, and quietly when no one is secure because of his cunning, violence, and injustice, and everyone trembles beneath his blow? How fearful was Constantius Augustus after he had turned his paternal kingdom into a tyranny! Whatever made a noise, he judged to be directed toward the destruction of his safety. Marcellinus, book 14.
They themselves sometimes recognize their deserts. Thus Adonibezek, Judges 1:7: “Seventy kings, the extremities of their hands and feet having been cut off, gathered the remnants of food under my table. As I have done, so God has repaid me.” And Mauritius at Constantinople: “You are just, O Lord.”
This too is added to the wretchedness of tyrants: in whatever manner they are killed, even through fraud and injury, those who dared to do it nevertheless possess great praise among the wicked, even if they accomplished the deed through crime and contrary to the sanctity of an oath. This certainly pertains to the accumulation of their wretchedness: although their killing is unjust, it is nevertheless pleasing to many.
The prince of philosophers gives the cause in book 2 of the Politics, chapter 7: “Indeed, human beings inflict the greatest injuries because of immoderate desires, and not because of necessary things. For example, they seize tyranny and oppress the people with impious dominion, not so that they may avoid growing cold, but that they may fulfill their lusts with impunity. Therefore great rewards are proposed not for the man who kills a thief, but for the man who kills a tyrant.”
Nor is the sentiment of the nefarious attendants and ministers of a tyrant different. Dio narrates a bold deed of a senator concerning Caligula. After Gaius had been killed, the Praetorian soldiers, disturbed and running together, asked who had killed him. Valerius Asiaticus, a man of consular rank, calmed them contrary to expectation. For he ascended a high and elevated place and cried from it: “Would that I had killed him!” Stupefied by these words, they ceased to riot. The Praetorian soldiers—Gaius’s Praetorians, partners and instruments of all his crimes and participants in his lusts and plunder—moved by one utterance abandoned vengeance and showed by their action that he seemed to them to have been killed justly.
Therefore, since tyrants live, like lions, tigers, bears, and eagles, by mangling and plunder, and consequently know that they are exposed to the hatred of everyone and sought by the plots of everyone, after the likeness of wild beasts which love precipitous places and caves, they prepare citadels, camps, and arms by which they may be protected and conceal themselves as much as they can. They are equally hateful to God and human beings. Therefore even the man who kills them through crime is often pleasing to those who suffered injury.