§ 1. We call sedition, as it were, a separation or secession, when one part of the state rises against another part or against the prince; the Greeks call it στάσιν. It is a great evil and more calamitous than war. For the members of one body, which cannot be safe unless by agreement, clash among themselves and destroy themselves by their mutual pressure. Indeed, greater crimes are committed in sedition than in war. And so, in the judgment of all wise men, nothing is more detestable than civil war. Its causes are various, but the principal one is that civil hatreds are most bitter; for they seem to be stirred by great causes, and when they have grown strong, they are little removed from madness. Indeed, we openly say that those who rage against their own members are mad. And so kindred battle lines, when brothers and parents are on opposing sides, clash more fiercely. Hence even fables have handed down that the most burning hatreds were fraternal; hence the banquets of Thyestes and the smoke of the Theban funeral pyres tending in opposite directions; hence the deaths of Turkish brothers, now as if by law. With an external enemy the contest is about liberty, glory, and resources; with a citizen, about life.
Let the antiquity of Roman history be consulted. They received conquered enemies into the city, sent them under the yoke, and sold them into slavery; and when they exercised cruelty, they struck them down with axe or sword. But in civil war the conquered man counted it a gain if he were permitted to die without tortures and insults. They very often spared the leaders and kings of enemies; they killed their own commanders after torture and abused their corpses with every kind of mockery. Civil madness has given the world no example, so far as I remember, more horrible than that concerning Andronicus. Nicetas describes the history in Book I:
“And so Andronicus, having been captured, is cast into the fortress of Anemas with two heavy chains fitted with iron clasps placed upon his proud neck, and laden with fetters, as it is customary for captives to be treated. When he is brought in that condition to Isaac, he is assailed with insulting words, slapped, struck upon the nostrils, plucked by the beard, beaten out of his teeth, and torn by the hair. Publicly exposed to the mockery of all, he is even beaten with fists by women, especially by those whose husbands he had either killed or blinded. Then, after his right hand had been cut off, he is taken back into the same fortress without food, without drink, without any service from anyone. After some days, his other eye having been put out, he is set upon a mangy camel and led through the forum in the semblance of a triumph, his smooth bald head like a dry oak and barer than an egg, clothed in a short tunic—a pitiable spectacle which could draw streams of tears from eyes not inhuman.
“But the most foolish and wanton inhabitants of the city—especially tailors, leather-workers, artisans, and the filthy rabble hanging about the marketplace, like flies in springtime flying to milk-pails and rich cups—paid no regard to the fact that only the day before yesterday he had been emperor, adorned with the royal diadem, praised, celebrated, and adored by all, and that they had attested by the most sacred oath their fidelity and goodwill toward him. Rushing upon him with savage minds and without any reason, they omitted no evil by which they might wickedly afflict Andronicus. Some drove keys into his head; others defiled his nostrils with dung; others squeezed upon his face sponges fouled with the excrement of men and beasts; others assailed his parents with obscene words. There were also those who pricked his sides with spits, and certain more shameless men, hurling stones, called him a rabid dog. A certain shameless harlot, having snatched from the kitchen a pot full of boiling water, poured it upon his face. Finally, there was no one who did not harm Andronicus.
“Thus, after he had been led ignominiously into the theater in that ridiculous triumph and taken down from the wretched camel, they suspended him by his feet, tied with a rope, beside two little columns upon which a stone rests above, near a bronze she-wolf and hyena which stand with necks bent as though roused to rush one against the other. Having suffered so many evils and six hundred others which we have passed over, he nevertheless still bore the evils inflicted upon him with a noble spirit; and turning, with his mind unimpaired, toward the crowd pouring in while he lay there, he said nothing other than: ‘Lord, have mercy; and why do you break a bruised reed?’ But the utterly mad crowd of people did not spare the most afflicted Andronicus even then, after he had been suspended by his feet. Having torn away his bonds, they maltreated his genitals, and a certain wicked man drove a long sword through his throat as far as his intestines. Two men of Latin stock, leaning with both hands upon their swords, drove them into his buttocks in order to try which was sharper, glorying in dexterity of stroke. After so many hardships and disasters he ended his life with difficulty, his right hand brought painfully to his mouth, so that many thought that he was sucking from it the warm blood still dripping from the recent wound.”
§ 2. This also shows the cruelty of civil wars in many ways: all the consolations of the victor are removed by his fear and hatred. In external wars the usefulness of slavery blunts the edge of cruelty; for men prefer to have from their enemies slaves, cultivators of fields, and superintendents subject to works rather than to tread upon corpses. And so avarice, by preserving men as slaves, makes those live to whom mercy does not grant life. Civil wars know no slavery. They station Persians and Getae at the wine-cups, make Ethiopians hall-servants, and Alemannic horsemen walk before the carriage; but no service of a captured citizen is valued: death alone renders the victor secure. He is not even sold abroad to enemies, because so long as he lives he is not believed likely to remain quiet. Hence Marius stained with civil blood; hence the Sullan vengeance, which was more ruinous than if the crimes had been left unpunished. Lucan, Book II:
The remedy exceeded measure and followed too far those hands which led men to death: the guilty perished; but when now only the guilty could survive, then liberty was given to hatreds, and wrath, released from the reins of the laws, raged.
§ 3. Enemies are often accustomed to spare nobility and virtue. The cause is twofold. For either they pity the common lot of human affairs and judge that those whom they understand to have fallen back from the highest fortune to the lowest should be treated more gently. Nebuchadnezzar indeed admitted conquered kings to his table, and advanced Daniel and his companions, the sons of captive nobles, to honors. Alexander ordered the conquered Porus to reign; after consoling the daughters and mother of Darius, he ordered them to hope for a marriage not beneath their dignity. The Romans afterwards found those same nations to be their most faithful allies which they had had as their most hostile enemies.
Seneca, Book II On Anger, chapter 34, exhorts one by this consideration to conquer anger; but it is accustomed to avail in the case of an enemy, not in the case of a citizen: “Whom does the Roman people have as more faithful allies than those whom it had as its most obstinate enemies? What would the empire be today if a salutary providence had not mingled the conquered with the conquerors? Someone will be angry; do you, on the contrary, challenge him with benefits. The quarrel falls away at once when deserted by the other side. Unless there is an equal opponent, there is no fight. If the contest is maintained on both sides, the better man is he who first withdraws his foot; he who conquered is conquered. He struck you: withdraw. For by striking back you will give him both occasion and excuse for striking more often; you will not be able to tear yourself away when you wish. Would anyone wish to strike an enemy so heavily that he left his hand in the wound and could not draw himself back from the blow? Yet anger is such a weapon: it is scarcely drawn back.”
The other cause is that many, revering the virtue of enemies, have granted life to those from whom they received the greatest disasters. The madness of civil wars is inflamed by these good qualities. No one is judged more hostile to nobles and the rich than a conquered citizen; proscription is especially aimed at them, and riches are an incitement to the slaughter of citizens. In sedition they persecute virtue as though it were sorcery. Sedition persecutes the Catuli, Ciceros, Antonii, and Catos; the Clodii and Curiones enjoy security. The cause is that, where enmities and hatreds have occupied the mind, where spirits have been embittered by mutual injuries, nothing is easily believed or said except what is effective for increasing enmities. For those citizens whom men think their enemies they also judge to be injurious, and therefore unjust and impious. With this opinion another is joined: namely, that no pest is more effective for doing harm than a familiar enemy. And so whatever good appears in a citizen they suspect to be an instrument for harming themselves.
§ 4. Military discipline is utterly destroyed, since in both battle lines there are acquaintances and blood-relations, rewards for corruption, and fraud unpunished on both sides. The faith of citizens and country-dwellers is unstable in every kind of contract: for if a man does not wish to pay a debt or wishes to deny a deposit, he will migrate to the opposing camp, where he will be secure. The cause of so great an evil is that the generals can neither govern the soldier nor moderate victory, being beholden to every most loathsome man. Thus the Caesarian soldiers sing:
Caesar was my leader in the waters of the Rhine; here he is my comrade: the crime which stains them makes them equal.
The soldier Gaius Antonius did not obey Augustus after Augustus had despised the Senate. Obedience must be given to those through whom he conquered. “Caesar demands money from me? Why rather than I from him? Did he conquer without me? Indeed, he was not even able to do so. I brought to him the cause of civil war; I proposed ruinous laws; I bore arms against the consuls and commanders of the Roman people, against the Senate and Roman people, against our ancestral gods, altars and hearths, against the fatherland. Did he conquer for himself alone? Since the crime is common, why should the booty not be common?” You demanded justice. Augustus was compelled to give Cicero to Antony, and Antony to give his maternal uncle to Augustus, because neither conquered without the other. Lepidus also, the last of the triumvirs, gave his brother Lucius to his enemies. In the civil war of his sons Suleiman purchased for a price the death of the one who had fled, although it would scarcely have befitted so great an emperor to purchase only his life with money.
Nor is it wonderful that they give up their own people. Sedition is strong against every affection—of parents, sons, and brothers. To this pertains that famous fable about two enemies, one of whom was sitting in the prow and the other in the stern. When the ship was being torn apart by a storm and he learned from the shipmaster that the prow would sink first, the one who was sitting in the stern rejoiced because he would behold the destruction of his enemy.
§ 5. Finally, the end of wars and seditions is destruction through tyranny or an external enemy. There is scarcely any nation so small that it is conquered by an enemy unless it wears itself down by tumult and factions. There is no need of examples: the whole world is an example, so much so that crafty warriors especially desire discord among their enemies. Nor do men escape from sedition as warriors—a fact which has generally deceived the authors of tumults. For he who is keenest at stirring up sedition is useless in war. Few can fight; anyone can conspire. In contention the most cowardly prevails; in battle, the brave. And this is the reason why sedition, when a beginning has been made, grows most swiftly: because quarrels are intensified by the vilest and most worthless men, but when the true enemy is present, all flee away.
But if their strength is not worn away and consumed by an external enemy, nevertheless civil victory, after the war is already ended, rages more cruelly while enmities live on. When the Marian party despaired not only of victory but even of safety, they filled all things with slaughter of their own men and of others. Then Sulla entered the city as victor—Augustine says in Book III, chapter 28 of The City of God—who, while no longer war but peace itself was raging, had laid low in the public way seven thousand infantrymen gathered from every quarter and unarmed, not by fighting but by ordering it. In the whole city, moreover, every Sullan partisan struck whomever he wished. Hence the deaths could not be numbered at all, until it was suggested to Sulla that some men ought to be allowed to live, so that there might be persons over whom those who had conquered could exercise command.
Then at last, when the license of cutting throats which was being sown madly here and there had been restrained, that tablet was posted with great rejoicing which contained up to two thousand men of both distinguished orders—the equestrian, namely, and the senatorial—who were to be killed and proscribed. The number saddened; the limit consoled. Nor was there so much grief because so many were being slain as there was joy because the rest did not fear. But in the case of certain of those who had been ordered to die, even that cruel security of the rest groaned at the exquisite forms of death. For the hands of men tearing at one man rent him apart without iron; men tore a living man more savagely than beasts are accustomed to do, and the corpse was cast away. Another, with his eyes put out and his limbs amputated piece by piece, was compelled amid such tortures to live for a long time—or rather, to die for a long time. Certain noble cities also were put up for auction as if they were country estates. One entire city, as though a single defendant were ordered to be led away, was ordered to be slaughtered.
These things were done in peace after war, not that the victory to be obtained might be hastened, but lest the victory obtained be despised. Peace contended with war in cruelty, and conquered. For war laid low armed men; peace, disarmed men. War existed so that the man who was struck might strike if he could; peace, not so that the man who had escaped might live, but so that in dying he might not resist. Sedition, therefore, is a great evil and—what must be lamented—also frequent and customary.