§ 1. Parsimony, which the Greeks call φειδὼ, remains joined to liberality by a perpetual bond; indeed, it is the fountain and sinew of liberality. It is a rich and present revenue, a short road to wealth for private persons, and a most honorable road to supreme power for a prince and a commonwealth. I do not define it by the sordidness of certain men, which disgraces even private persons. I detest the Phasaelites and the Sidetans, the extremes among the Pamphylians, because they gave occasion to a proverb. Nor do I judge that Fabricius, cooking a turnip more for a display of glorious sordidness than from political moderation, acted rightly. Blessed are those who have held the mean. Let the commander’s table be furnished with liberal and manly parsimony; let tribunes, centurions, and every very brave man be invited as testimony to fidelity and valor. Let no prince imitate those things which the Romans themselves preferred to admire rather than follow. Nor are these precepts of the times but of nature, which placed majesty in a prince together with liberality. Pyrrhus, a commander of such great prudence and of such great armies, at the same period treated his own men with liberal magnificence and was a match for the Romans.
Parsimony, therefore, is the virtue by which men acquire property, preserve what has been acquired, increase it, and restore it, by a lawful and honorable measure and toward a good end. In this no less does the splendor of liberality shine forth than in conferring gifts. Nor, among the people, is the esteem of parsimony which retains less than that of liberality which expends. Its end is not only that the treasury may be equal to expenditures and that the province may have a reserve fund laid up against the uncertainties of the times, but also that it may not be necessary to oppress any of the subjects with tributes. This benefit extends widely, for it is conferred upon all from whom nothing is taken away. Then, a prince will never be poor if he is sparing. It is agreed that in our own time many ecclesiastical and secular princes have gathered great riches from provinces of moderate size not only without vexing their people, but have also restored many towns, villages,
monasteries, and churches. Certainly the Most Reverend Julius, Bishop of Würzburg, after endowing the academy, furnishing a distinguished and wealthy poorhouse, and building and restoring citadels, monasteries, and churches, left the commonwealth in the best condition; and yet he did not manage its economy unbecomingly and displayed magnificence in many things.
§ 2. Therefore let the first consideration make the prince sparing, not avaricious. Long experience has taught that nothing illustrious has been accomplished except by sparing men. For although Caesar and Alexander were prodigal at the beginning, they nevertheless acted thus, especially in civil wars, from necessity, not from liberality or prodigality. It is more difficult to retain command than to acquire it: it is seized by force, but retained by justice, industry, parsimony, and a treasure stored away for uses. Alexander was avaricious, not sparing, and sometimes prodigal; nevertheless he attempted to establish his kingdom by riches and parsimony. Certainly he retained much from the spoils of the East: his noble but unfortunate defendant objected to him that thirty thousand mules carried captive gold for him. Caesar, now victorious, demanded money back from Antony; and when Antony indignantly said, “Money from me, Caesar? Did he conquer without me? Why do I not rather demand it from him?” Caesar compelled him to pay. Nero, after pouring out his resources, turned to rapine. And he taught that what Timotheus once reproached Aristophon with was most true: “For him to whom nothing is enough, nothing is shameful.” He must take from another who cannot borrow from himself—that is, from parsimony. For this counsel from Socrates was also given to kings, although it was spoken to Aeschines as a private man: παρ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ δανείζεσθαι, “to borrow at interest from oneself.” Poverty will halt at whatever place frugality has taken its stand.
§ 3. The second rule of parsimony is that they not give where they ought not, but give where giving is required. How many errors are committed in this matter I shall say elsewhere, when I teach my prince to gather riches. Now I admonish that much is often given to the devil, little to Christ. Let us listen instead to the discourse of the bishop and martyr of Carthage, in his book On Works and Alms:
“Let each man place before his eyes the devil springing forth into the midst with his servants—that is, with the people of perdition and death—and, with Christ himself present and judging, challenging the people of Christ to an examination of comparison and saying: ‘For those whom you see with me, I neither received blows nor endured scourges, nor bore the cross, nor poured out blood, nor redeemed my household at the price of suffering and gore; but neither do I promise them the heavenly kingdom nor call them back anew to paradise with immortality restored. And what precious gifts, what great gifts, sought by what excessive and long labor, they procure for me with the most costly preparations, either pledging or selling their property to procure the gift! And unless the presentation turns out honorably, they are cast out with abuse and hissing and are sometimes almost stoned by popular fury.
“‘Show your gift-givers to be such men, O Christ: admonished by your precepts and about to receive heavenly things in return for earthly ones, those rich men, those men overflowing with abundant resources. In the Church, with you presiding and looking on, do they present a gift of this kind, their property pledged or sold—indeed, transferred to the heavenly treasuries by a change of possession for the better? In these fleeting and earthly gifts of mine, no one is fed, no one clothed, no one sustained by the solace of any food or drink. All things perish amid the fury of the one presenting them and the error of the spectator, through the prodigal and foolish vanity of pleasures which frustrate. There, in your poor, you are clothed and fed; you promise eternal life to those who work, and scarcely are your men, who are honored by you with divine recompenses and heavenly rewards, made equal to mine, who are perishing.’”
§ 4. Amid such great preparations, how often is hunger imposed upon the poor? Indeed, the poor are bought so that they may be torn apart, as the cruelty of the amphitheater commanded to be done. But since both parsimony and prodigality are discerned in various things, profusion must be avoided by a prince in absolutely all of them. For if, by the law of the Twelve Tables, the administration of a patrimony is taken away from a prodigal no less than from a madman, who would bear a king prodigal of his own peoples? Who would wonder at sedition amid such contempt of the subjects? Antiochus was prodigal of riches and contemptuous toward his own people. “It happened,” 2 Maccabees 4:30, “that the Tarsians and Mallotians raised a sedition because they had been given as a gift to the concubine of King Antiochus.”
The frugality of others consists in their table, as did that of Severus, of whom Lampridius says: “This was his daily provision for a banquet: thirty sextarii of wine for the whole day; thirty pounds of fine bread; fifty pounds of the bread which followed, for distribution. For from his own hand he always gave the attendants at the banquet both bread and portions either of vegetables, meat, or legumes, behaving with altogether elderly maturity as the father of a household. Thirty pounds of different meats were also prescribed, and there were chickens and eggs; a goose was also employed on feast days. On the Kalends of January, however, and on the festivals of the Mother of the Gods, the Apollinarian Games, the banquet of Jupiter, the Saturnalia, and feast days of this sort, a pheasant was served, and sometimes even two were set out, with two chickens added. He had a hare daily and game frequently, but divided it with his friends, and especially with those whom he knew not to have it of themselves. Nor did he send any of such gifts to rich men, but always received them from those men. He had daily four sextarii of millet without pepper, and two with pepper.”
§ 5. The prodigality of others was immense, as the same author relates monstrous things of Antoninus Heliogabalus. “He had couches made of solid silver, both dining-couches and bedroom-couches. He quite often ate, in imitation of Apicius, the heels of camels, combs cut from living chickens, and tongues of peacocks and nightingales, because whoever ate these was said to be safe from epilepsy. He also presented to the courtiers immense feasts filled with the entrails of mullets, the brains of flamingos, eggs of partridges, brains of thrushes, and heads of parrots, pheasants, and peacocks. Indeed, he ordered so many beards of mullets to be presented that he served them in place of cress, parsley, bean-plants, and fenugreek in full bean-dishes and platters—a thing especially astonishing. He fed dogs with the livers of geese.” What will you do with this monster, to whom so many things that would cause harm—indeed, so many evils—were pleasing?
§ 6. Some have exhausted themselves by the prices of clothing, something frequent among private persons. Gaius Caligula, the heir of the most avaricious Tiberius, poured out everything in every manner. “He put on no garment twice,” says Suetonius, Chapter III. “He gambled at dice for four hundred thousand sesterces on a single throw. He fished with a gilded net, with cords woven of purple and scarlet. He is said never to have made a journey with fewer than one thousand carriages, with silver shoes for his mules, muleteers clothed in Canusian cloth, and a band of litter-bearers and runners adorned with bracelets and trappings.” What ornament must we believe to have been absent, if not the necks but the hooves of asses were shod underneath with silver?
The prince will take the greatest care that citizens not burden themselves by the expense of dinners or clothing. From this come many destructions of souls. Thus Propertius once sang:
The matron walks forth clothed in the wealth of her descendants, and draws the spoils of our reproach across our faces.
The luxury of clothing is very often derived from the wages of a prostitute. Spartan matrons dressed modestly; harlots splendidly.
Caligula used to boast, repeatedly saying, “A man ought to be either frugal or Caesar.” Indeed, for several days he scattered coins of no moderate sum from the roof of the Basilica Julia among the plebs. He also built Liburnian ships of cedar, with jeweled sterns, many-colored sails, great spaciousness for baths,
porticoes, and dining rooms, and also with a great variety of vines and fruit-bearing trees, in which, reclining at table by day amid choruses and symphonies, he might traverse the shores of Campania. I judge that not even infinite worlds could suffice for this man, for there is no bottom to infinite greed.
What wonder is it that, after such great luxury, Galba’s frugality in diet and his parsimony in making expenditures, as Plutarch relates, were imputed to him as sordid vices when he obtained command? For empty opinion accompanied his moderation and temperance.
Many in former times poured out everything upon mimes, human monstrosities, and parasites. Aurelian is no less to be blamed than the gullet of the man whom he fed deserves to be consigned to Orcus. These are the words of Victor: “But in a wondrous manner he delighted in mimes; and he was delighted most vehemently by Phagon, who ate so much that in one day before his table he ate an entire boar, one hundred loaves, a ram, and a little pig; and, with a funnel applied, drank more than a large jar.”
§ 7. Some men’s structures have exhausted all their wealth. What wonder?
Rome will become a house; migrate to Veii, Quirites.
Rome when burned gave the greedy and needy monster an opportunity to plunder the provinces, while money was sought for the imperial city.
The prince will attend diligently to what must be given and when his hand must be drawn in. Witty and urbane was Alfonso’s reply to a prodigal knight who asked for gifts inopportunely and repeatedly: “I shall sooner make myself poor than make you rich.” But sumptuary laws, economy, and the other matters must be treated minutely and individually when I discuss wealth.
§ 8. At this point I admonish that whatever is conferred upon the wretched and needy contains a promise not only of eternal life but also of temporal life. “Therefore,” says Daniel 4:24, “O king, let my counsel be pleasing to you, and redeem your sins with alms and your iniquities with mercies toward the poor; perhaps he will forgive your offenses.” And the liberal king: “Blessed,” says Psalm 40:1, “is he who understands concerning the needy and the poor; on the evil day the Lord will deliver him. May the Lord preserve him and give him life, and make him blessed upon the earth, and not deliver him into the soul of his enemies. The Lord will bring him aid upon the bed of his sorrow; you have turned all his couch in his infirmity.”
Tiberius replied excellently to Sophia, an avaricious and scheming woman, that he in no way obstructed the advantages of the treasury who assisted the poor and redeemed captives. Divine liberality showed this also by a distinguished miracle, when the treasure of Narses the eunuch was disclosed. This happened in the year of Christ 582, by which God adorned liberality toward the poor with so illustrious a testimony.
Radegund, the captive Thuringian and wife of Chlothar, experienced no lesser beneficence: when from a vessel of eight modii, as the history calls it, she drew forth wine for the poor, the cup was always full. It pleased God to give to the most holy queen material equal to her spirit. When Gualbertus had distributed grain from the third hour all the way to the ninth, supplements were given by a hidden power so that abundant produce filled the granary. Greatest in this virtue, as always, was Flavius Constantine, who by a law promulgated in the year 322 commanded that the poor be fed from the public granaries. O God, how far did that soul then differ from the ancient executioners, who bought the poor for the sword, the mines, naval combats, and wild beasts? The same liberality was in his son Constans, who sent Paul and Macarius through Africa with alms; and by that liberality he raised up the Church, oppressed by the Donatists, something that until then had been attempted in vain by so many laws.
He who is God, rich toward all, is never conquered by human liberality; and I judge that there is no one to whom what he has expended toward his neighbors with a benign spirit has not been repaid with much interest. Saint Germanus, as Constantius the priest relates in his life, had ordered three gold pieces to be given to beggars. The deacon—as the spirits of ministers are solicitous—had expended two; but a little afterward two hundred were returned to the holy bishop. It was signified by an oracle that there would have been three hundred, so that a hundredfold might be returned even in this life, if the deacon’s avarice, by retaining one, had not lost one hundred.
Therefore, care of the poor is a support of the kingdom; but the care is twofold: first, that they not be the prey of the rich; second, that they be enriched by the commonwealth and the prince. Euphemianus, the parent of Saint Alexius, was of a noble and truly Roman spirit. If ever he had been less benign toward the poor, as a severe exactor of liberality he thought that the accounts stood against himself, and, prostrate upon the ground, cried out with voice and tears: “I am not worthy to walk upon the earth of my God.”
§ 9. Prostrate your heart before your God, O prince, from whose single, brief, and slight pleasure—better omitted—a thousand poor persons could have been refreshed. See also whether your delights have been collected from the sweat of a thousand poor persons. Weigh in your spirit not what great men do, but what ought to be done.