§ 1. Gratitude is akin to faith, just as not to acknowledge a benefit, or to repay it with evil deeds, is a kind, as it were, of perfidy. It belongs to a great spirit to be grateful.
For—as you say—all foolish men are wicked; but he who has one vice has them all; and all men are foolish and wicked; therefore all men are ungrateful. What, then? Is reproach not directed against the human race from every side? Is it not a public complaint that benefits have perished, and that there are very few who do not in turn deserve most wickedly of those who have deserved well of them? And there is no reason for you to suppose that this is only our murmuring, since we count as most wicked and depraved whatever has fallen short of the rule of right. Behold, I know not what voice is sent forth, not secretly from the house of the philosophers but from the midst of the assembly, to condemn peoples and nations:
No guest is safe from guest; no father-in-law from son-in-law; even the favor of brothers is rare. The husband threatens the destruction of his wife, and she of her husband.
This is already something more: benefits have been turned into crime, and the blood of those for whom blood ought to be shed is not spared. We pursue benefits with sword and poisons. To lay hands upon the fatherland itself and to crush it with one’s own fasces is power and dignity. Whoever has not stood above the commonwealth thinks that he stands in a humble and abject place. Armies received from it are turned against it, and this is the commander’s address: “Fight against your wives; fight against your children; assail altars, hearths, and household gods with arms. You who, not even when about to triumph, ought to enter the city without the Senate’s command, and for whom, as you led back a victorious army, a senate-house would be provided outside the walls—now, after citizens have been slain, drenched in kindred blood, enter the city with standards raised. Let liberty grow mute among the military standards; and let that people, conqueror and pacifier of nations, now that wars have been removed far away and every terror suppressed, be besieged within its walls and dread its own eagles.”
Coriolanus is ungrateful—dutiful too late and after repentance for his crime. He laid down his arms, but laid them down in the midst of parricide. Catiline is ungrateful. It is too little for him to capture the fatherland unless he overthrows it, unless he sends cohorts of the Allobroges against it, unless an enemy summoned from beyond the Alps satisfies ancient and innate hatreds, and Roman leaders pay to Gallic tombs the funeral rites long owed them.
Gaius Marius is ungrateful: brought from the soldier’s boot to the consulship, unless he equals Roman funerals with Cimbrian slaughters, unless he not only gives the signal for civil destruction and butchery but is himself the signal, he will perceive his fortune to have been insufficiently changed and restored to its former place.
Lucius Sulla is ungrateful: he healed the fatherland with remedies harsher than its dangers. After he had walked through human blood from the citadel of Praeneste all the way to the Colline Gate, he produced other battles and other slaughters in the city. He butchered two legions crowded into a corner—cruelly, after victory; impiously, after a pledge of faith—and devised proscription. Great gods! A man who killed a Roman citizen received impunity and money, and almost a civic crown.
Gnaeus Pompey is ungrateful. In return for three consulships, three triumphs, and so many honors, which for the greatest part he had seized prematurely, he returned this gratitude to the commonwealth: he introduced others also into possession of it, as though he would diminish the odium of his own power if what ought to have been lawful to no one had become lawful to several. While he desired extraordinary commands, while he distributed provinces so that he might choose them, while he so divided the commonwealth among the triumvirs that nevertheless two parts were in his own house, he reduced the Roman people to such a state that it could not be safe except by the benefit of servitude.
Ungrateful was Pompey’s own enemy and conqueror, who turned the war from Gaul and Germany round upon the city; and that friend of the plebs, that popular man, placed his camp in the Circus Flaminius, nearer than Porsena’s had been. He did indeed moderate the right and cruelty of victory; he fulfilled what he used to say: he killed no one except an armed man. What then? Others wielded arms more bloodily, yet, when at last they were sated, cast them aside. He quickly sheathed the sword but never put it down.
Antony was ungrateful toward his dictator, whom he pronounced to have been killed lawfully, and whose killers he sent away to provinces and commands; but after the fatherland had been torn by proscriptions, incursions, and wars, after so many evils he assigned it not even to Roman kings, so that the city which had restored full right, liberty, and immunity to the Achaeans, Rhodians, and very many renowned cities would itself pay tribute to eunuchs.
The day will fail one who enumerates the ungrateful, even to the final destructions of the fatherland. It will be equally immense if I begin to run through how ungrateful the commonwealth itself has been toward its best and most devoted men, and how it has sinned no less often than sin has been committed against it. It sent Camillus into exile; it dismissed Scipio. After Catiline, Cicero was exiled, his household gods overthrown, his goods plundered; everything was done that Catiline would have done if victorious. Rutilius bore as the price of his innocence that he lay hidden in Asia. The Roman people denied Cato the praetorship and utterly denied him the consulship.
We are publicly ungrateful. Let each man question himself: there is no one who does not complain of someone as ungrateful. Yet it cannot happen that all complain unless complaint must be made concerning all. Therefore all are ungrateful. Only that? All are covetous too, all malicious, and all timid—those especially who appear bold. Add that all are ambitious and all impious. But there is no reason for you to be angry. Pardon them: all are insane.
I do not wish to recall you to uncertainties, so as to say: “See how ungrateful youth is.” Who does not desire his father’s last day, provided he is innocent; await it, provided he is moderate; think of it, provided he is dutiful? How rare is the man who fears the death of the best wife without also calculating it? For what litigant whom you have defended, I ask, has the memory of so great a benefit lasted beyond the next few matters?
This often applies to princes and commonwealths, among whose errors, among others, it is not the least to return either no gratitude or evil gratitude to those who have deserved well. How much detriment the commonwealth has incurred from this matter is taught both by the nature of the thing and by these examples. Nor is it wonderful that the commonwealth is ungrateful toward citizens who have deserved well of it, and that others in turn are ungrateful toward it, because no one is sufficiently grateful to God for so many goods.
§ 2. The Romans were ungrateful toward those who had deserved well of them: they drove Tarquinius Collatinus into exile solely from hatred of his name; they compelled Valerius to incur danger on account of the house erected on the Velia; they were either cruel or unjust toward Manlius, Camillus, Scipio, and Cicero. The Athenians were no less so. Through the barbarous law of ostracism they were the most ungrateful of all nations; among them great benefits were a matter of certain danger. This arose precisely from the fact that, since they had endured many grave tyrants—men whom before they had regarded as renowned, beneficent, and popular—they thereafter began to distrust everyone equally. The Lacedaemonians were no milder; the Carthaginians were the cruelest of all and the most ungrateful toward their generals.
§ 3. The vice of ingratitude extends widely, so much so that an Italian asks whether princes or the people are customarily more ungrateful. I would prefer their morals to be such that one could instead ask whether the people or princes are customarily more grateful. He concludes that ingratitude arises from avarice and ambition, and then from suspicion; that the people are never ungrateful from avarice, and much more rarely than princes from suspicion. But I can by no means approve these things as prudently said.
For an avaricious people frequently, through desire for money, deprives brave men who expend themselves for their fatherland of a just honorarium. Amid their very dangers, while Philip carried around the terror of war and deceit, the Athenians not only sat idle in the theater, but also judged that the naval fund should be spent as payment for the theater. The Romans appointed a day for Camillus to stand trial, as though he had distributed the Veientine booty inequitably. Whence came so great an injury against so great a man, unless from avarice? How great were the contests which the Agrarian Laws stirred up at Rome, by which the revenues, the sinews of the commonwealth, were cut? That avarice, moreover, not only took away the donatives of commanders and the rewards of armies, but wore down the commonwealth more than the wars themselves. Thus even the people are ungrateful from avarice.
And they are so all the more because the optimates will not easily consent to great advantages for one citizen who has deserved splendidly; for what is given extraordinarily to one is withdrawn from his colleagues. But ungrateful citizens envy the wealth of their preservers after receiving safety, although they have received life and wealth from those same men.
The people are not customarily ungrateful from ambition, indeed, because they are not customarily a competitor for great deeds and rewards
but, because they are governed and, as it were, animated by a few men, they are led by the ambition of those men. Popular leaders and demagogues, moreover, are accustomed to envy renowned men, detract from their praises, and exercise rivalries and hostilities. Scipio sails to Africa and undergoes dangers; meanwhile the ungrateful Senate and ungrateful people listen to Cato barking against his greatness. Thus by another’s ambition,
As wood movable by another’s sinews is led.
In place of ambition, however, the people possess the implanted poison of envy. They are so imbued with it that they cannot bear those who have deserved best, and they grieve more that the faculty of doing good remains to great men than they rejoice in the benefit. Then the people are not only an unfit but also a malevolent assessor of benefits. For since individuals care little for the commonwealth, they value no benefits highly unless private advantages are joined to them; and nevertheless, when they have obtained those advantages, they expect more or complain that greater ones have been given to others. But the highest ingratitude is not to acknowledge a benefit.
Nor is it true that the people do not have many causes for suspicion. Athenian, Corinthian, and Roman history teaches the contrary. The people, who for the most part are ignorant of the sequence of the deed, suspect plots against liberty, embezzlement, judgments, and all matters. But princes, since an account is customarily rendered to them personally for the most part, have knowledge of all things. Nowhere are the people more moderate, more cultivated, and more fitted for magistracies than in the free cities of the Empire. Yet a hundred years ago most cities rose up from suspicions against the senate, and some also shed blood. Today many harbor grave suspicions concerning senators and would demand accounts if they did not remain quiet out of regard for a greater power.
§ 4. Princes, however, have a twofold condition. Some possess a single principality and have neighboring enemies or rivals. If they have a renowned commander in war, fortified by victory and the favor of provincials, they easily suspect and fear him. The reason is that such commanders almost equal the prince and, if they wish, will either betray him to the enemies or themselves succeed him. These princes are customarily ungrateful through suspicion, and often even wish death upon their commanders to their own ruin. This is all the more so if they perceive that their own resources are slender in comparison with so great a name.
Others are very powerful and possess many provinces, governors, and viceroys. Such princes are rarely ungrateful through suspicion, because even the most renowned commanders stand far below the greatness of their lords. Thus envy is not customarily dominant in such men either. Then a probable fear never arises from a commander’s perfidy, because he has neither the strength nor the spirit, after occupying the tyranny of one province, to rouse the entire body of the kingdom against himself. Although these things are so, nevertheless both the people and the prince frequently sin in this matter. Gratitude, however, procures friends and preserves the commonwealth.
§ 5. For, first, it is of great importance that gratitude be laid up for those who have deserved well of the commonwealth. An ungrateful prince will scarcely retain good men, and never men of great spirit. If you are ungrateful for the great labors of any citizen whatsoever, you will not only have him as a mortal enemy, but will also blunt the industry of others and bring it about that they look elsewhere and seek where they may bestow their benefits better and with hope of advantage. For in truth:
τὴν εἰς ἀτιμίαν ὀλιγωρίαν οἱ φιλότιμοι, καὶ οἱ ἐπιεικεῖς φέρουσι βαρέως.
Those desirous of honors, and prudent men, bear it heavily when they are neglected through contempt. The deeds of great men when left without honor have brought on immense calamities. Coriolanus pressed his ungrateful fatherland with siege; Carbo attacked it through barbarians; Narses imposed the Lombards upon Justinian. Boniface, count of Africa, brought in the Vandals. For those who, after their illustrious labors, the dangers they have encountered, and the fidelity they have expended together with their blood, experience the dispositions of princes or of the commonwealth as estranged from them—if they are strong in resources and tenacious of their dignity—generally devise something so as to take care (as Octavian used to say) that they cannot be removed. And so they conciliate to themselves the spirits of the soldiers, conspire with neighbors and sometimes with enemies, occupy fortifications, and avenge the contempt shown them. What ambition does in frivolous men, indignation does in others. Accordingly, from the ingratitude of princes and commonwealths many pernicious tyrannies have arisen. And certainly, even if a prince’s ingratitude is not a just cause of rebellion, yet among the common people it is a plausible one, and favor is shown to an injured man who pursues his injuries. And this is all the more so because ingratitude is a shameful vice. Herodian says truly:
Καὶ τὰ μὲν δεινὰ τῷ ἔργῳ ἀεὶ μνημονεύεται. Τὸ γὰρ λυπῆσαν δυσέξαλειπτον· τὰ δὲ χρηστά, ἅμα τῇ ἀπολαύσει, καὶ τὴν περὶ αὐτῶν μνήμην συναναλίσκει.
The memory of grievous things that have happened always remains; for whatever causes sorrow is erased with difficulty, but the memory of benefits is consumed together with their enjoyment.
They oppress those by whose labor they were freed from fear, and begrudge them the fruit of their labors. For after the daughters of Jerusalem sing, “Saul has slain a thousand, and David ten thousand,” the safety of the whole kingdom, when joined to the praise of the bravest man, is now unwelcome. Saul is therefore angry with David, all of whose benefits were burdens to him, whose punishment he counted as gain. He disdains to appear to have been affected by a benefit, as though he were the lesser man, and—as is characteristic of raging men—he does not forgive the benefit. He overturns all the benefits and remembers only that he has been placed second. Nor is it wonderful that men are moved when they behold new tablets drawn up concerning benefits, a thing most pernicious to states; God himself detests forgetfulness of benefactors. After God, the Israelite people owed life and liberty to Moses. “I see,” says God, “that this people is stiff-necked. Let me alone, that my wrath may be angry against them and I may destroy them; and I will make you into a great nation.” But the mildest of mortals, forgetful of his own dignity, intercedes for the ungrateful. If those stiff necks had obtained another prince, they would have lain crushed in the very desert among thorns and thistles. Joash removed from their midst Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada, to whose father he owed his life, his kingdom, and piety more excellent than life and kingdom—so much more powerful was one unjust offense than a kingdom bestowed. Thus nothing grows old more quickly than a benefit. From this, great disasters flowed into that commonwealth.
Augustus often considered returning command to the people, but examples of an ungrateful people frightened him. He had read, in a deserted town, the epitaph of the elder Africanus, who had restored the commonwealth by conquering Carthage: “Ungrateful fatherland, you shall not even have my bones.” He knew that Africanus’s brother Scipio Asiaticus, after he had filled his fatherland with the riches of the most opulent part of the world, was ordered to be led to prison as one accused of embezzlement. There came to his mind the unworthy death of the younger Africanus, which found no avenger in the Forum. The speech of Publius Lentulus was in men’s hands, in which he reproached the people for ingratitude and prayed to the gods that he might never return to his fatherland; and he died in Sicily. He also knew that Cicero had been driven out, that slight gratitude had been shown to Pompey, and that death had even been inflicted upon Caesar. And so, from fear of ingratitude, he retained the scepter and, under the most savage tyrants,
brought it about that Rome should serve.
The Roman people owed much to those men because they did not think about avenging the old wrongs; for what could those men not have done—supreme commanders of their own times—if they had gone over even to enemies who were not strong? Sertorius taught what they could have done; the tyrants who followed taught it. Greece’s greatest men were Solon, Miltiades, Aristides, Themistocles, Alcibiades, and Phocion. All of them were, as Themistocles used to relate, plane trees beneath which the people took refuge when a storm raged, but which they abandoned when the sky was clear. And although no one avenged his injuries, yet if Themistocles had preferred to pour out his fatherland’s blood rather than drink bull’s blood, he would have destroyed the three foul beasts of Athens: the owl, the dragon, and the disorderly people. Therefore those men perceived that their beneficent deeds perished, and they drew others back from benefits. For he who bestows upon the ungrateful sends benefits into a perforated cask, while there are as many cracks in the commonwealth’s cask as there are forgetful, ungrateful, and malicious souls.
When Pythius, the son of Atys, had won Xerxes over by means of an army, money, and obedience, Xerxes overturned all those benefits when Pythius asked that, out of five sons, he might be permitted to retain one as a consolation for his old age—and he lost him. For Xerxes, provoked, immediately commanded that Pythius’s eldest son, whom the unhappy love of his father had desired, be cut through the middle. Nor did he wish his cruel ingratitude to be concealed, for he ordered the parts of the corpse to be set out on either side of the road so that the army might pass through their midst. I judge Xerxes to have been conquered on that day on which, by this mournful proof, he displayed an ungrateful spirit to so many peoples whom he could scarcely bind to himself by benefits. For who would take up arms for such a monster? Who would not believe that it would go well with the human race if so malignant a spirit were removed from its midst? Pindar said too little:
Παλαιὰ μὲν εὕδει χάρις, ἀμνήμονες δὲ βροτοί.
Ancient gratitude indeed sleeps, but mortals are forgetful.
He said too little, I say: new, fresh, flourishing, and living gratitude sleeps; and men are not merely unmindful, but do not even feel gratitude. Emperor Frederick complained that men were made faithless by benefits. It is so, because great benefits furnish an opportunity for displaying faithlessness. The ungrateful man therefore turns the poison upon himself while he alienates everyone from himself. “To this ungrateful man,” says Seneca in Book IV On Benefits, “who is a defrauder of benefits and whose spirit has fallen wholly in this direction, no one will give a benefit any more than he will entrust money to a bankrupt or commit a deposit to a man who has already denied several deposits.”
§ 6. Therefore let the prince be grateful, and the commonwealth grateful; but let it bestow gifts in such a manner that it makes no one an object of fear to itself. Let it give quickly and honorably, and let its gifts be lasting and splendid. But those who receive should know that they owe not only gratitude, but also a lawful use of the benefit, so that they may turn it toward the safety and liberty of the commonwealth. Meanwhile, let princes consider as addressed to themselves what Seneca admonishes in his book On Benefits:
“There is no reason, however, why the multitude of the ungrateful should make us slower to deserve well. For first—as I have said—we increase that multitude ourselves; then, not even sacrilegious men and those who neglect the immortal gods deter the gods from this so lavish benignity. They employ their own nature and assist all things, and among them even the wicked interpreters of their gifts. Let us follow them as guides, so far as human weakness permits: let us give benefits, not put them out at interest. He deserves to be deceived who, when he gave, thought about receiving back. ‘But it turned out badly.’ Both children and spouses have disappointed our hope; nevertheless we both rear children and marry, and we are so persistent against experience that, though conquered, we return to wars, and, though shipwrecked, to the seas. How much more fitting it is to persist in giving benefits! If anyone does not give because he has not received back, he gave in order to receive, and makes a good case for the ungrateful, for whom it is shameful not to repay if they are also permitted to do so. How many are unworthy of the light? And nevertheless the day arises. How many complain that they were born? Nevertheless nature begets new offspring and permits even those who would prefer not to have existed to exist. It is the property of a great and good spirit not to pursue the fruit of benefits but the benefits themselves, and even after wicked men to seek a good man.”