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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Clemency, Book One
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On Clemency, Book One

Book One

1 I have undertaken to write on clemency, Nero Caesar, so that I might in some fashion serve as a mirror and show you to yourself as one who is about to arrive at the greatest of all pleasures. For although the true reward of right actions lies in having done them, and there is no price worthy of the virtues outside the virtues themselves, still it is a delight to look into a good conscience and examine it from every side, and then to cast one’s eyes over this vast multitude, discordant, seditious, unruly, ready to leap up for the ruin of others and of itself alike if it should break this yoke, and to speak thus with oneself: “Have I of all mortals found favor and been chosen to act on earth in the place of the gods? I am the arbiter of life and death for the nations. What lot and station each man shall have is placed in my hand. What Fortune wishes to grant to each mortal, she proclaims by my mouth. From my answer peoples and cities take their reasons for gladness. No region anywhere flourishes except by my will and favor. These many thousands of swords, which my peace holds in check, will be drawn at my nod. Which nations shall be utterly destroyed, which transplanted, which shall be given freedom and which robbed of it, which kings shall become slaves and whose heads shall be crowned with the royal diadem, which cities shall fall and which shall rise: this is mine to decree. In this vast power over all things, I have not been driven to unjust punishments by anger, nor by the impulse of youth, nor by the recklessness and defiance of men, which has often wrung patience even from the calmest hearts, nor by that glory, dreadful but common among great empires, of displaying power through terror. With me the sword is sheathed, no, it is bound fast; I am sparing to the utmost even of the meanest blood; there is no one, though he lack every other claim, who does not find favor with me for the mere name of human being. Severity I keep hidden, but clemency I keep girded and ready. I watch over myself as though I must render an account to the laws, which I have called forth from neglect and darkness into the light. I have been moved by one man’s youth and by another’s old age; I have spared one man for his rank and another for his lowliness; whenever I found no reason for pity, I spared for my own sake. Today, if the immortal gods should call me to account, I am ready to render them the human race, counted out in full.”

You can proclaim this boldly, Caesar: that everything which has come under your trust and protection is kept safe, and that nothing is taken from the state by you, either by force or by stealth. You have coveted the rarest of praises, one granted to no emperor before you: innocence. Your labor is not wasted, nor has that singular goodness of yours met with ungrateful or spiteful judges. Gratitude is returned to you; no single man was ever so dear to another single man as you are to the Roman people, its great and lasting good. But you have laid a huge burden on yourself. No one speaks any longer of the deified Augustus or of the first years of Tiberius,1 nor looks for a model outside you that he would want you to imitate; your reign is judged by the sample it has already given. This would have been hard if that goodness of yours were not natural but put on for the occasion. For no one can wear a mask for long; things feigned soon fall back into their own nature, while things that have truth beneath them, and that grow, so to speak, out of solid ground, advance with time itself to something greater and better.

The Roman people ran a great risk while it was uncertain which way that noble nature of yours would turn. Now the prayers of the public are safe; for there is no danger that a sudden forgetfulness of yourself will seize you. Too much good fortune, it is true, makes men greedy, and desires are never so moderate that they come to a stop at what they have obtained; the step is from great to greater, and those who have gained what they never hoped for embrace the most reckless hopes. Yet now all your citizens are compelled to confess both that they are fortunate and that nothing more can be added to these goods, except that they should last forever. Many things drive them to this confession, which of all confessions a human being is slowest to make: a deep and abundant freedom from care, and justice placed above every wrong. Before their eyes hovers the happiest form of commonwealth, which lacks nothing for the fullest freedom except the license to destroy itself. Above all, admiration for your clemency reaches the highest and the lowest equally. Other goods each man feels or expects, greater or smaller, in proportion to his own fortune; from clemency all hope for the same thing. And there is no one so pleased with his own innocence that he is not glad to see clemency standing in view, ready for human errors.

2 I know, however, that there are some who think that clemency props up the worst men, since it is useless except after a crime, and this alone of the virtues has nothing to do among the innocent. But first of all, just as medicine, though its use is among the sick, is held in honor among the healthy too, so clemency, though it is invoked by those who deserve punishment, is revered by the innocent as well. Next, it has its place in the case of the innocent too, because at times misfortune stands in the place of guilt; and clemency comes to the aid not only of innocence but often of virtue, since the conditions of the times bring about certain deeds that can be punished even while they are praised. Add that a large part of mankind could return to innocence if punishment were remitted. Yet it is not fitting to pardon indiscriminately; for when the distinction between bad men and good is removed, confusion follows and an outbreak of vices. A moderation must therefore be applied that knows how to tell curable natures from those past hope. Clemency should be neither promiscuous and common nor cut off altogether; for to pardon everyone is as much a cruelty as to pardon no one. We must keep to the mean; but since the right balance is hard to strike, whatever is going to exceed the fair amount should tip toward the more humane side.

3 But these things will be better said in their place. For now I shall divide this whole subject into three parts. The first will concern the remission of punishment. The second will show the nature and character of clemency: for since there are certain vices that imitate virtues, they cannot be told apart unless you stamp on them marks by which they can be distinguished. In the third place we shall ask how the mind is led to this virtue, how it makes the virtue firm and by practice makes it its own.

It must be agreed, not only among us, who wish man to be seen as a social animal born for the common good, but also among those who give man over to pleasure, whose every word and deed looks to their own advantage, that no virtue of all is more fitting for a human being, since none is more humane. For if man seeks quiet and leisure, he has found in this virtue one suited to his nature, a virtue that loves peace and holds back the hand. Yet of all men clemency befits none more than a king or an emperor. For great strength is an honor and a glory only if its power is a saving power; to be strong for harm is a pestilent force. That man’s greatness alone is stable and well founded whom all know to be as much for them as above them, whose care they find every day keeping watch over the safety of each and of all, at whose approach they do not scatter as if some evil or noxious beast had sprung from its lair, but rush eagerly toward him as toward a bright and beneficent star. They are most ready to throw themselves before the daggers of assassins on his behalf and to lay their bodies beneath him, if his road to safety must be paved with a slaughter of men. They guard his sleep with watches through the night, they surround him and defend his flanks, they set themselves against the dangers that rush upon him.

It is not without reason that peoples and cities agree in thus protecting and loving their kings, and in flinging themselves and all they have wherever the safety of their ruler has required it. Nor is it contempt for oneself, or madness, for so many thousands to take the steel for one head, and by many deaths to ransom one life, sometimes that of an old and feeble man.

The whole body serves the mind; and though the body is so much larger and so much more splendid, while the mind remains hidden, slight, and uncertain in what seat it lurks, yet hands, feet, and eyes do its business, this skin protects it, at its command we lie still or run restlessly about; when it has given the order, if it is a greedy master, we search the sea for gain, if it is ambitious, we have long since thrust our right hand into the flames or leapt of our own will into a chasm in the earth. In the same way this vast multitude, surrounding one life, is ruled by his spirit and guided by his reason, and it would crush and break itself by its own strength if it were not sustained by his wisdom.

4 So it is their own safety they love when they lead ten legions at a time into battle for one man, when they rush to the front line and turn their breasts to wounds so that their emperor’s standards may not be turned in flight. For he is the bond that holds the commonwealth together, he is the breath of life that these many thousands draw; by themselves they would be nothing but a burden and a prey if the empire were robbed of that intellect.

“While the king is safe, all are of one mind;
once he is lost, they break faith.”2

Such a disaster would be the end of the Roman peace; it would drive the fortune of so great a people to ruin. This people will be free from that danger just so long as it knows how to bear the reins. But if ever it tears them off, or, once some accident has shaken them loose, will not let them be put back, this unity and this fabric of the greatest of empires will fly apart into many pieces, and the end of this city’s rule will come with the end of its obedience. It is no wonder, then, that emperors and kings, and the guardians of the public order under whatever other name, are loved beyond even private ties; for if to sensible men public interests come before private ones, it follows that he too is dearer on whom the whole commonwealth turns. Long ago the emperor so clothed himself in the commonwealth that the two could not be pulled apart without the ruin of both; for he needs its strength, and it needs a head.

5 My discourse seems to have wandered rather far from its purpose, but, by Hercules, it is pressing hard on the matter itself. For if, as the argument so far has established, you are the mind of your commonwealth and it is your body, you see, I think, how necessary clemency is: you are sparing yourself when you seem to be sparing another. Even citizens who deserve censure must therefore be spared, just like ailing limbs; and if ever blood must be let, the hand must be held back so that it does not cut deeper than is necessary. Clemency, then, as I was saying, is in accord with nature for all men, but it is most becoming in emperors, because they have more to save and it shows itself on a larger field. How little harm private cruelty does! The savagery of emperors is war. Now although there is concord among the virtues, and none is better or more honorable than another, still some suit certain persons better. Greatness of mind befits any mortal, even one below whom there is nothing; for what is greater or braver than to beat back bad fortune? Yet this greatness of mind has more room in good fortune, and is seen better on the tribunal than on level ground.

Clemency will make any house it enters happy and tranquil, but in a palace it is the more wonderful for being rarer. For what is more memorable than this: that a man whose anger nothing blocks, whose heavier sentences even those who perish assent to, whom no one will interrupt, whom indeed, if he has blazed up too fiercely, no one will even dare to entreat, should lay a restraining hand on himself and use his power for the better and gentler course, thinking this very thought: “Anyone can kill against the law; no one but I can save”? A great fortune befits a great mind; and unless the mind raises itself to that fortune and stands above it, it drags the fortune too down to the ground. It is the mark of a great mind to be calm and tranquil and to look down from above on wrongs and offenses. It is womanish to rage in anger; and it is the way of beasts, and not even noble ones, to bite and worry those who are down. Elephants and lions pass by what they have struck down; persistence belongs to the ignoble beast. Savage and inexorable anger does not become a king, for he does not rise much above the man to whom he makes himself equal by being angry. But if he grants life, if he grants rank to those who are in danger and deserve to lose it, he does what no one may do but the master of the world; for life can be taken even from a superior, but it is never given except to an inferior. To save is the privilege of a lofty fortune, which is never more to be looked up to than when it has the good luck to be able to do what the gods do, by whose benefit we are brought into the light, the good and the bad alike. Let an emperor, then, claiming for himself the mind of the gods, look gladly on some of his citizens because they are useful and good, and leave others to make up the number; let him rejoice that some exist, and put up with others.

6 Think of this city, where a crowd flowing without a break through the widest streets is crushed whenever anything gets in the way to check its course, as of a rushing torrent; where seats are demanded in three theaters at the same time; where whatever is plowed in all the lands of the earth is consumed: think what a solitude and a wasteland it would be if nothing were left but what a severe judge had acquitted. How few of the presiding judges are not liable under the very law by which they conduct the inquiry? How few accusers are free of guilt? And I rather think that no one is harder about granting pardon than the man who has more often deserved to ask for it. We have all done wrong, some gravely, some more lightly, some by design, some driven by chance or carried away by another’s wickedness; some of us have stood too weakly by good resolutions and lost our innocence against our will and while trying to hold on to it. And not only have we done wrong; we shall go on doing wrong to the end of our lives. Even if someone has already cleansed his mind so well that nothing can trouble or deceive him any longer, still he has arrived at innocence by way of wrongdoing.

7 Since I have mentioned the gods, I shall do best to set this up as the model on which an emperor should shape himself: he should wish to be to his citizens what he would wish the gods to be to him. Is it to our advantage, then, to have deities inexorable toward sins and errors, deities hostile to the point of our final ruin? And then what king will be safe, whose limbs the soothsayers will not be gathering up? But if the gods, who can be appeased and are fair, do not at once pursue the offenses of the powerful with their thunderbolts, how much fairer is it that a man set over men should exercise his power with a gentle mind, and consider which state of the world is more pleasing and more beautiful to the eyes, a calm and clear day, or one when everything shakes with crash on crash and fires flash on this side and that! And yet the look of a quiet and orderly reign is no other than that of a calm and shining sky. A cruel reign is stormy and dark with shadows; among men who tremble and start in terror at a sudden sound, not even he who throws everything into turmoil is left unshaken. Private persons are more easily pardoned for avenging themselves stubbornly; for they can be hurt, and their pain comes from a wrong. They fear contempt besides, and not to have paid back those who hurt them looks like weakness, not clemency. But he for whom vengeance is easy wins, by passing it by, sure praise for gentleness. Those placed in a humble station are freer to use their fists, to go to law, to rush into a brawl, and to indulge their anger; between equals, blows are light. In a king, even shouting and intemperate words do not befit his majesty.

8 You think it hard that kings should be robbed of the freedom to speak as they please, which the humblest have. “That,” you say, “is slavery, not command.” What? Do you not find that the command is ours and the slavery yours? The condition of those who lie hidden in a crowd they never rise above is different: their virtues must struggle long before they are seen, and their vices have darkness to hide them. Your deeds and words are caught up by rumor, and so no one should care more about the reputation he has than those who, whatever reputation they have earned, are bound to have a great one. How many things are not allowed to you which, thanks to you, are allowed to us! I can walk alone in any part of the city without fear, though no companion follows me, though I keep none at home, though I have no sword at my side; you must live armed in your own peace. You cannot stray from your fortune; it besieges you, and wherever you come down, it follows you with great pomp. This is the slavery of supreme greatness, that it cannot become smaller; but this very necessity you share with the gods. For heaven holds them too in bondage, and it is no more granted to them to come down than it is safe for you: you are fastened to your summit. Few notice our movements; we may go out, withdraw, and change our dress without the public taking note; you can no more hide than the sun can. There is much light about you, and all eyes are turned upon it. Do you think you are going out? You are rising. You cannot speak without the nations everywhere catching your voice; you cannot be angry without everything trembling, since you cannot strike anyone down without shaking whatever is around him. As thunderbolts fall to the danger of few but to the fear of all, so the punishments of great powers terrify more widely than they harm, and not without cause; for in one who can do anything, men consider not how much he has done but how much he is going to do. Add now that private men are made more open to receiving wrongs by their endurance of wrongs received, whereas for kings freedom from care is surer through gentleness, because frequent vengeance crushes the hatred of a few and provokes the hatred of all. The will to rage ought to give out before the cause does. Otherwise, just as trees that are cut back sprout again with many branches, and many kinds of crops are cut down so that they may come up thicker, so royal cruelty increases the number of its enemies by removing them; for the parents and children of those who have been put to death, and their relatives and friends, step into the place of each one.

9 How true this is I wish to remind you by an example from your own family. The deified Augustus was a mild emperor, if one begins to judge him from the start of his reign; but in the time when the commonwealth was shared, he wielded the sword. When he was the age you are now, just past his eighteenth year, he had already hidden daggers in the clothing of his friends, had already sought by treachery the life of the consul Mark Antony, had already been a partner in the proscription.3 But when he had passed his fortieth year and was staying in Gaul, information was brought to him that Lucius Cinna,4 a man of dull wits, was laying a plot against him. He was told where, when, and how Cinna meant to attack him; one of the accomplices was the informer. Augustus resolved to take vengeance on him and ordered a council of his friends to be called. He spent a restless night, thinking that he must condemn a young man of noble birth, blameless but for this, the grandson of Pompey; he to whom Mark Antony had once dictated the edict of proscription over dinner could not now bring himself to kill one man. Groaning, he uttered from time to time words of every kind, contradicting one another: “What then? Shall I let my assassin walk about free of care while I am anxious? Shall he go unpunished, then, who has resolved, now that peace has been won on land and sea, not to kill but to sacrifice this head of mine, a head sought in vain in so many civil wars, unharmed in so many battles by sea and by land?” (For he had planned to attack him while he was sacrificing.) Then, after a silence, he raged at himself, in a much louder voice than he had at Cinna: “Why do you live, if so many have an interest in your death? What end will there be to punishments? To bloodshed? I am a head set out for young nobles to sharpen their swords on. Life is not worth so much, if so much must be destroyed so that I may not perish.” At last his wife Livia broke in. “Will you take a woman’s advice?” she said. “Do what doctors do: when the usual remedies fail, they try the opposite. So far you have gained nothing by severity. Salvidienus was followed by Lepidus, Lepidus by Murena, Murena by Caepio, Caepio by Egnatius,5 not to mention others whose daring is a shame to speak of. Now try how clemency turns out for you: pardon Lucius Cinna. He has been caught; he can no longer harm you, but he can help your reputation.” Glad to have found an advocate, he thanked his wife, then at once ordered word to be sent to the friends he had summoned to his council that it was called off, and sent for Cinna alone. He sent everyone out of the room, had a second chair set for Cinna, and said: “The first thing I ask of you is not to interrupt me while I am speaking, not to cry out in the middle of what I say; you will be given time to speak freely. Cinna, when I found you in the camp of my enemies, not made my enemy but born one, I saved you; I let you keep your whole inheritance. Today you are so fortunate and so rich that the victors envy the vanquished. When you sought a priesthood, I gave it to you, passing over many whose fathers had served with me. And though I have deserved this of you, you have resolved to kill me.” When at these words Cinna cried out that such madness was far from him, Augustus said: “You are not keeping your word, Cinna; we agreed that you would not interrupt. You are preparing, I tell you, to kill me.” He added the place, the accomplices, the day, the plan of the ambush, and to whom the dagger had been entrusted. And when he saw him with his eyes fixed on the ground, silent now not because of their agreement but because of his conscience, he said: “With what purpose are you doing this? To become emperor yourself? By Hercules, it goes badly with the Roman people if nothing but I stands in the way of your ruling. You cannot look after your own house; just recently, in a private lawsuit, you were beaten by the influence of a freedman. So it is that nothing comes easier to you than pleading against the emperor! Tell me: if I alone stand in the way of your hopes, will Paulus put up with you, and Fabius Maximus, and the Cossi and the Servilii, and that great column of nobles who do not parade empty names but bring honor to their ancestral masks?”

Not to take up a large part of this volume by repeating his whole speech (for it is agreed that he spoke for more than two hours, drawing out this punishment, the only one he meant to be content with), he said: “Cinna, I give you your life a second time: the first time as an enemy, now as a plotter and a parricide. From this day let friendship begin between us; let us compete to see whether I have given you your life in better faith or you owe it in better faith.” Afterward he offered him the consulship of his own accord, complaining that Cinna did not dare to stand for it. He found him his most devoted and most loyal friend, and Cinna made him his sole heir. No one ever again plotted against Augustus.

10 Your great-great-grandfather pardoned the conquered; for if he had not pardoned them, whom would he have ruled? Sallustius, the Cocceii, the Dellii, and the whole company first admitted to his morning levee he recruited from the camp of his adversaries.6 The Domitii, the Messallae, the Asinii, the Ciceros, all that was the flower of the state, he owed to his clemency. Lepidus himself: how long he let him take to die! For many years he put up with his keeping the insignia of a leading man, and he did not allow the office of chief pontiff to pass to himself until Lepidus was dead; for he preferred that it be called an honor rather than a spoil. This clemency brought him to safety and freedom from care; this made him welcome and popular, although he had laid his hand on the necks of the Roman people before they had been broken to the yoke; this still wins him a renown such as hardly serves emperors while they live. We believe that he is a god, and not as though we had been ordered to. We confess that Augustus was a good emperor and that the name of parent suited him well, for no other reason than this: that he did not pursue with any cruelty even insults to himself, which sting emperors more than wrongs do; that he smiled at abuse spoken against him; that he plainly suffered when he inflicted punishment; that he was so far from killing those he had condemned for adultery with his daughter that he sent them away and gave them passes so that they might travel more safely.7 This is pardon: when you know there will be many who will grow angry on your behalf and do you a favor with another’s blood, not only to grant safety but to guarantee it.

11 This was Augustus as an old man, or when his years were already turning toward old age. In his youth he was hot, he blazed with anger, he did many things on which he looked back with reluctant eyes. No one will dare to compare the deified Augustus with your gentleness, even if he matches an old age more than ripe against your youthful years. Granted that he was moderate and clement: yes, after the sea at Actium was stained with Roman blood, yes, after fleets, his own and his enemy’s, were wrecked off Sicily, yes, after the altars of Perusia and the proscriptions.8 But I do not call weary cruelty clemency. This, Caesar, is true clemency, the clemency you display, which did not begin from remorse for savagery: to have no stain, never to have shed a citizen’s blood. This, in the greatest power, is the truest self-control of mind, and a love of the human race that embraces it as itself; a love not corrupted by any desire, by any rashness of temper, or by the examples of earlier emperors, into testing by experiment how far it may go against its citizens, but one that blunts the edge of its own power. You have given us, Caesar, a state unstained by blood; and this boast you made with a great spirit, that in the whole world you have not shed a drop of human blood, is all the greater and more wonderful because no one was ever entrusted with the sword at an earlier age.

Clemency, then, makes rulers not only more honorable but safer; it is at once the ornament of empires and their surest safety. For why is it that kings have grown old and handed down their kingdoms to children and grandchildren, while the power of tyrants is accursed and short? What difference is there between a tyrant and a king (for the outward show of their fortune and their license is the same), except that tyrants rage for pleasure, and kings only for a reason and from necessity?

12 “What then? Do kings not kill too?” They do, but only when the public good persuades them that it must be done; tyrants delight in savagery. And a tyrant differs from a king in deeds, not in name. For Dionysius the Elder can rightly and deservedly be ranked above many kings,9 and what prevents us from calling Lucius Sulla a tyrant, whose killing was ended only by a shortage of enemies? Though he stepped down from his dictatorship and returned to the toga, what tyrant ever drank human blood as greedily as he did, who ordered seven thousand Roman citizens to be butchered, and who, sitting nearby in the temple of Bellona and hearing the outcry of so many thousands groaning under the sword, said to the terrified senate: “Let us attend to business, conscript fathers; a handful of rebels are being put to death on my orders”?10 In this he did not lie: to Sulla they seemed few. But of Sulla presently, when we ask how one should be angry with enemies, especially when citizens torn from the same body have passed over to the name of enemy. Meanwhile, as I was saying, clemency makes the difference between a king and a tyrant a great one, though each is no less fenced about with arms. But the one has arms that he uses to protect the peace; the other uses them to hold down great hatreds by great fear, and he cannot look free of care even on the very hands to which he has entrusted himself. He is driven from one contrary to another: since he is hated because he is feared, he wishes to be feared because he is hated, and he takes up that accursed line which has sent many headlong, “Let them hate, so long as they fear,”11 not knowing what rage arises when hatreds have grown beyond measure.

For fear in moderation restrains men’s minds; but fear that is constant and sharp and threatens the worst rouses even the prostrate to boldness and urges them to try everything. So wild beasts may be kept penned in by a cord hung with feathers; but let a horseman attack them from behind with darts, and they will try to escape through the very things they had shied away from, and trample their fear underfoot. The fiercest courage is the one that utmost necessity hammers out. Fear must leave men some freedom from care, and hold out much more hope than danger; otherwise, when a man who keeps quiet has as much to fear as one who acts, he is glad to rush into danger and to spend his life as if it were another’s.

13 A calm and tranquil king has auxiliaries he can trust, since he uses them for the common safety; and the soldier, proud because he sees that he is serving the public security, gladly endures every toil as the guardian of a father. But the harsh and bloodthirsty king is bound to be a burden to his own guards. No one can have servants of good and loyal will whom he uses as instruments of torture, like the rack and the irons made ready for killing, to whom he throws men as if to wild beasts. Such a king is more troubled and anxious than any defendant, since he fears gods and men as witnesses and avengers of his crimes, and he has been brought to the point where he is no longer free to change his ways. For this, among other things, is the very worst feature of cruelty: it must persist, and no way back to better things lies open; crimes must be protected by crimes. And what is more unfortunate than the man who now must be wicked? O how pitiable he is, to himself at least! For it would be a sin for others to pity him, a man who has used his power for murder and plunder, who has made everything suspect to himself, both abroad and at home, who fears arms yet takes refuge in arms, who trusts neither the loyalty of friends nor the devotion of his children; who, when he has looked around at what he has done and what he is about to do, and has laid bare his conscience, full of crimes and torments, often fears death and more often longs for it, more hateful to himself than to those who serve him. On the other hand, consider the king who cares for the whole, who protects some parts more and some less but cherishes every part of the commonwealth as part of himself; who leans toward the milder course, and even when punishment is useful shows how unwillingly he puts his hand to a harsh remedy; in whose mind there is nothing hostile, nothing wild; who exercises his power calmly and for the good of all, eager to have his commands approved by his citizens; who thinks himself abundantly fortunate if he has shared his good fortune with the public; affable in speech, easy of approach and access, lovable in the countenance that most wins the hearts of peoples, inclined to grant fair requests and not harsh even toward unfair ones: such a king is loved, defended, and revered by the whole state. Men say the same things about him in private as in public. They are eager to raise children, and the childlessness that public ills imposed comes to an end; no one doubts that he will have deserved well of his children by showing them such an age. This emperor, safe through his own benefits, has no need of guards; he keeps arms for ornament.

14 What, then, is his duty? The duty of good parents, who are accustomed to rebuke their children sometimes gently, sometimes with threats, and at times even to admonish them with blows. Does any sane man disinherit his son for the first offense? Unless great and many wrongs have overcome his patience, unless what he fears is greater than what he condemns, he does not set his pen to the decisive document. First he tries many means to call back a character that wavers and has already slipped into a worse state; once it is past hope, he tries the last resort. No one comes to exacting punishment until he has used up the remedies. What a parent must do, an emperor must do too, whom we have called Father of his Country, not led on by empty flattery. Other surnames were given as honors: we have called men the Great, the Fortunate, and the August, and heaped on their ambitious majesty every title we could, granting them this much; but we called him Father of his Country so that he might know that the power given him was a father’s power, which is the most restrained of all, caring for its children and putting its own interests after theirs. Let a father be slow to cut off his own limbs; even when he has cut them off, let him wish to put them back; and in the cutting let him groan, after long and much hesitation. For he who condemns quickly is close to condemning gladly, and he who punishes too much is close to punishing unjustly.

15 Within our memory, a Roman knight named Tricho, because he had flogged his son to death, was stabbed with writing styluses by the people in the Forum; the authority of Augustus Caesar barely rescued him from the hostile hands of fathers and sons alike. Tarius caught his son in a plot to kill him and, after examining the case, condemned him; and everyone admired him because, content with exile, and a comfortable exile at Marseilles, he kept the parricide there and paid him the same yearly allowance he used to give him while he was guiltless. This generosity brought it about that, in a city where the worse cause never lacks an advocate, no one doubted that the accused had been justly condemned, since he had been condemned by a father who could not hate him.

From this very example I shall give you a good emperor to compare with the good father. When Tarius was about to try his son, he invited Caesar Augustus to his council. Augustus came into a private household, sat beside him, and took part in another man’s council. He did not say, “No, let him come to my house”; had that happened, the trial would have been the emperor’s, not the father’s. When the case had been heard and everything examined, both what the young man had said in his own defense and the charges against him, he asked each man to write down his verdict, so that it might not become everyone’s verdict because it had been the emperor’s. Then, before the tablets were opened, he swore that he would not accept the inheritance of Tarius, who was a wealthy man. Someone will say: “It was small-minded of him to fear that he might seem to be clearing the way for his own hopes by the son’s condemnation.” I think the opposite. Any one of us ought to have enough confidence in a good conscience against spiteful opinions; but emperors must yield much even to reputation. He swore that he would not accept the inheritance. Tarius did, it is true, lose a second heir on the same day; but the emperor bought the freedom of his own vote. And after he had proved that his severity was disinterested, which an emperor must always take care to do, he said that the son should be banished to wherever the father thought fit. He did not decree the sack, or the serpents, or prison,12 mindful not of whom he was passing judgment on but of whose council he was sitting in. He said that a father ought to be content with the mildest kind of punishment for a young son who had been led into that crime and had acted in it timidly, which was the next thing to innocence; that the son ought to be removed from the city and from his father’s sight.

16 O worthy man, for fathers to call into their councils! O worthy man, for them to write in as co-heir with innocent children! This is the clemency that befits an emperor: wherever he comes, let him make everything gentler.

Let no one be so cheap in a king’s eyes that the king does not feel his loss; whatever he is, he is a part of the empire. Let us take an example for great powers from lesser ones. There is more than one kind of command: an emperor commands his citizens, a father his children, a teacher his pupils, a tribune or a centurion his soldiers. Will he not seem the worst of fathers who keeps his children in check with constant beatings even for the slightest causes? And which teacher is more worthy of the liberal studies: the one who flays his pupils if their memory fails them or if their eye, not nimble enough in reading, stumbles, or the one who prefers to correct and teach by admonition and by appeal to their sense of shame? Give me a savage tribune or centurion: he will make deserters, and deserters who are pardoned for it all the same. Is it at all fair for a human being to be ruled more harshly and more severely than dumb animals are ruled? Yet a trainer skilled in breaking horses does not terrify a horse with frequent blows; for it will grow timid and stubborn unless you soothe it with a coaxing touch. The hunter does the same, both the one who teaches puppies to follow a trail and the one who uses dogs already trained to rouse or pursue game: he does not threaten them often (for that will crush their spirit, and whatever good breeding they have will be worn away by a cringing fear), nor does he give them license to wander and roam about at will. You may add to these the beasts of burden that move rather slowly, which, though born to abuse and misery, are driven by too much savagery to throw off the yoke.

17 No animal is more difficult, none needs to be handled with greater skill, than man, and none should be spared more. For what is more foolish than to be ashamed to vent one’s anger on beasts of burden and dogs, and yet to have man live under man on the worst of terms? We treat diseases and are not angry with them; yet this too is a disease, a disease of the mind; it calls for gentle medicine and for a healer who is not in the least hostile to the patient. It is a bad doctor who despairs so as to spare himself the cure. In the case of those whose minds are afflicted, the one to whom the safety of all has been entrusted must act the same way: he must not quickly throw away hope or pronounce the signs fatal. Let him wrestle with the vices and resist them; let him reproach some with their disease, and deceive others with a gentle cure, to heal them more quickly and better with remedies they do not notice. Let the emperor take care not only for their recovery but also for an honorable scar. A king gets no glory from savage punishment (for who doubts that he is able to inflict it?), but, on the contrary, the greatest glory if he holds his power in check, if he has rescued many from the anger of others and sacrificed none to his own.

18 To rule slaves with moderation is praiseworthy. Even with a slave one must consider not how much he can be made to suffer without punishment to you, but how much the nature of right and fairness allows you, which bids us spare even captives and those bought for a price. How much more justly does it bid us not to abuse free men, freeborn men, respectable men, as if they were chattels, but to treat them as those whom you surpass in rank, and whose guardianship, not whose slavery, has been handed to you! Slaves may take refuge at a statue; though everything is permitted against a slave, there is something that the common law of living beings forbids to be permitted against a human being. Who did not hate Vedius Pollio13 worse even than his own slaves did, because he fattened his lampreys on human blood and ordered those who had offended him in anything to be thrown into his fishpond, which was nothing but a pond of serpents? O man worthy of a thousand deaths, whether he threw his slaves to be devoured by lampreys he meant to eat, or kept the lampreys only so as to feed them on such food!

Just as cruel masters are pointed out all over the city and are hated and detested, so the wrong done by kings spreads more widely, and their infamy and the hatred of them are handed down through the ages. And how much better it would have been never to be born than to be counted among those born to be a public evil!

19 No one will be able to think of anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency, however he has come to be set over others and by whatever right. We shall admit, of course, that it is the more beautiful and splendid the greater the power in which it is displayed, a power that ought not to be harmful if it is ordered by the law of nature. For Nature devised the king, as we may learn from other animals, and from bees in particular. Their king has the largest cell, in the middle and safest spot; besides, he is free from work, as overseer of the work of others; and when the king is lost the whole swarm breaks up. Nor do they ever tolerate more than one, and they seek out the better by fighting. Further, the king is conspicuous in appearance, unlike the rest both in size and in sheen. But in this above all he is distinguished: bees are most irascible and, for the size of their bodies, most combative, and they leave their stings in the wound; the king himself has no sting. Nature did not wish him to be savage or to seek a vengeance that would cost him dear, and she took away his weapon and left his anger unarmed.

This is a mighty model for great kings; for it is Nature’s custom to exercise herself on small things and to bring forth lessons for very great matters in the least. Let us be ashamed not to learn our ways from tiny creatures, since the mind of man ought to be the more restrained the more violently it can harm. Would that man were under the same law, that anger broke along with its weapon, that one could not harm more than once nor work out one’s hatreds through the strength of others! For frenzy would soon tire if it had to satisfy itself by its own effort, and if it poured out its force at the risk of death. But even as things are, that course is not safe. A man who takes it must fear as much as he wished to be feared, watch everyone’s hands, believe himself attacked even at moments when no one is reaching for him, and have no moment free from fear. Can anyone bear to live such a life when he could exercise the power that is his by right as a saving power, harmless to others and therefore free of care himself, while all rejoice? For a man is mistaken if he thinks that a king is safe where nothing is safe from the king; freedom from care must be bargained for by granting freedom from care in return. There is no need to build citadels raised on high, or to fortify hills steep to climb, or to cut away the sides of mountains, or to fence oneself in with many walls and towers: clemency will keep a king safe in the open. The one impregnable fortification is the love of the citizens.

What is more beautiful than to live with all men wishing you to live, and offering their vows without a guard standing over them? To have men’s fear aroused, not their hope, if your health falters a little? To know that no one has anything so precious that he would not wish to give it in exchange for the safety of his protector? What a man he is, whose lot is such that he owes it to himself, too, to stay alive! In this he has proved by constant evidence of his goodness that the commonwealth is not his, but he is the commonwealth’s. Who would dare to devise any danger for such a man? Who would not wish, if he could, to turn even Fortune aside from him, under whom justice, peace, chastity, freedom from care, and dignity flourish, under whom a wealthy state abounds in plenty of all good things? It looks on its ruler with no other feeling than that with which we would look on the immortal gods, venerating and worshiping them, if they granted us the power to see them. And what then? Does he not hold the place next to them who conducts himself in keeping with the nature of the gods, beneficent and generous and powerful for good? This is what it is fitting to aim at, this to imitate: to be held the greatest only in such a way that you are held the best at the same time.

20 An emperor usually punishes for one of two reasons: to avenge either himself or another. I shall first discuss the part that concerns himself; for it is harder to keep moderation when vengeance is owed to one’s own pain than when it is owed to example. It is needless here to warn him not to believe readily, to shake out the truth, to favor innocence, and to know, and let it be seen that he knows, that the case concerns the man on trial no less than the judge; for this belongs to justice, not to clemency. What we now urge on him is this: when he has plainly been wronged, let him keep his mind under control, and remit the punishment if he can safely do so, if not, moderate it, and be far more easily entreated in wrongs done to himself than in wrongs done to others. For just as it is not the man who is generous with another’s property who shows greatness of mind, but the man who takes from himself what he gives to another, so I shall call clement not the man who is easygoing about another’s pain, but the man who, though goaded by his own stings, does not leap out; who understands that it is the mark of a great mind to endure wrongs in the height of power, and that nothing is more glorious than an emperor wronged with impunity.

21 Vengeance usually accomplishes one of two things: either it brings comfort to the one who has received the wrong, or it brings freedom from care for the future. An emperor’s fortune is too great to need comfort, and his strength too evident to seek a reputation for strength from another’s harm. I mean when he has been attacked and injured by inferiors; for if he sees beneath him those whom he once held as equals, he is avenged enough. A king can be killed by a slave, by a serpent, by an arrow; but no one has ever saved anyone without being greater than the one he saved. The man who has the power of giving and taking away life ought, then, to use this great gift of the gods with a great spirit. Especially in the case of those whom he knows to have once held a height equal to his own, when he has gained this power over them he has fulfilled his vengeance and accomplished all that true punishment requires. For he has lost his life who owes it; and whoever has been cast down from on high at his enemy’s feet and has waited for another’s sentence on his life and his kingdom lives on to the glory of his savior, and adds more to his name by remaining unharmed than if he had been removed from sight. For he is a lasting spectacle of another’s virtue; in a triumph he would quickly have passed by. If, besides, his kingdom too could safely be left in his hands, and he be restored to the place from which he had fallen, the praise of the man who was content to take nothing from a conquered king but glory rises by an immense increase. This is to triumph even over one’s own victory and to bear witness that one found among the conquered nothing worthy of the victor. With citizens, and with the unknown and the humble, one must deal the more moderately the less it means to have struck them down. Some you may gladly spare; on some you may disdain to avenge yourself, and you must draw your hand back from them as from small creatures that soil the hand that crushes them. But in the case of those who will be spared or punished before the eyes of the whole city, the opportunity for a clemency that will become known must be seized.

22 Let us pass to wrongs done to others. In avenging these the law has pursued three aims, which the emperor too ought to pursue: either to reform the man it punishes, or to make others better by his punishment, or to let the rest live more free of care by removing the wicked. You will reform the offenders themselves more easily with a lighter punishment; for a man lives more carefully when he has something left intact. No one spares a standing that is already lost; it is a kind of impunity to have no room left for punishment. But the morals of a state are better corrected by sparing use of punishment. For a multitude of wrongdoers creates a habit of wrongdoing, and a brand is less heavy when a crowd of condemnations lightens it; and severity, by being constant, loses its authority, which is the chief source of its healing power. The emperor establishes good morals in the state and washes away vices if he is patient with them, not as though he approved of them, but as one who comes to chastise unwillingly and in great torment. The very clemency of a ruler makes men ashamed to do wrong; a punishment seems much heavier when it is fixed by a gentle man.

23 Besides, you will see that the crimes most often committed are those most often punished. Your father14 sewed more men into the sack within five years than we are told were sewn into it in all the ages before. Children were much less bold to commit the ultimate crime as long as the crime had no law. For the greatest of men, who best understood the nature of things, in their supreme wisdom preferred to pass it over as a crime beyond belief and beyond the reach of daring, rather than to show, by punishing it, that it could be done. And so parricides began with the law, and the punishment showed them the deed. Filial devotion was at its lowest once we saw more sacks than crosses. In a state where men are rarely punished, a consensus for innocence forms, and it is cherished as a public good. Let a state think itself innocent, and it will be; it will be angrier with those who fall away from the common decency if it sees that they are few. It is dangerous, believe me, to show a state how far the wicked outnumber the rest.

24 A proposal was once made in the senate that slaves should be distinguished from free men by their dress; then it became clear how great a danger would threaten if our slaves began to count us. Know that the same is to be feared if no one is pardoned: it will soon be clear how far the worse part of the state outweighs the rest. Many executions are no less disgraceful to an emperor than many funerals to a doctor; the one who rules more gently is better obeyed. The human mind is stubborn by nature, straining against opposition and toward what is hard, and it follows more readily than it is led. And just as well-bred and noble horses are better guided with an easy rein, so innocence follows clemency of its own will and by its own impulse, and the state thinks clemency worth preserving for itself. More, therefore, is achieved by this way.

25 Cruelty is an evil least of all human and unworthy of so gentle a mind. It is the rage of a wild beast to delight in blood and wounds, to cast off the human being and change into a creature of the woods. What difference does it make, I ask you, Alexander, whether you throw Lysimachus15 to a lion or tear him with your own teeth? That lion’s mouth is yours, that fierceness is yours. Oh, how you would wish that you yourself had those claws, that you yourself had those jaws, wide enough to devour men! We do not demand of you that this hand, the surest death of your friends, should bring safety to anyone, that this fierce mind, the insatiable evil of nations, should be sated short of blood and slaughter; it is already called clemency when, to kill a friend, an executioner is chosen from among men. This is why savagery is above all to be abhorred: it passes first the usual bounds, then the human ones; it searches out new punishments, calls ingenuity to its aid to devise instruments by which pain may be varied and prolonged; it takes delight in the ills of men. Then that dreadful disease of the mind reaches the last degree of madness, when cruelty has turned into pleasure and killing a man has become a joy. Swift and close behind such a man follow revulsion, hatreds, poisons, swords. He is assailed by as many dangers as the many to whom he himself is a danger, and he is beset sometimes by private plots, at other times by a public uprising. For a slight and private harm does not stir whole cities; what has begun to rage far and wide and attacks everyone is pierced from every side. Little snakes escape notice and are not hunted down by the public; but when one passes the usual size and grows into a monster, when it poisons springs with its spittle, scorches whatever it breathes on, and crushes everything in its path, it is attacked with catapults. Petty evils can trick us and get away; great ones are met head-on. So one sick man does not disturb even his own household; but when frequent deaths have made it clear that there is a plague, the city cries out and flees, and men shake their fists at the gods themselves. A flame appears under some single roof: the household and the neighbors pour on water. But a vast fire that has already devoured many houses is smothered by pulling down part of the city.

26 The cruelty even of private men has been avenged by the hands of slaves, at the certain risk of the cross. Tyrants have been set upon for destruction by nations and peoples, both those who suffered the evil and those whom it threatened. Sometimes their own guards have risen up against them and practiced on them the treachery, the impiety, the fierceness, and whatever else they had learned from them. For what can anyone hope for from a man he has taught to be wicked? Wickedness does not stay a servant for long, nor does it sin only as much as it is ordered to. But suppose cruelty is safe: what is its reign like? Nothing other than the look of captured cities and the terrible faces of public fear. Everything is gloomy, fearful, confused; pleasures themselves are feared. Men do not go free of care to banquets, where even when drunk they must anxiously guard their tongues, nor to the shows, where material for charges and danger is hunted out. Though the games are staged at great expense, with royal wealth and the choicest names among the performers, who can enjoy games in prison?

What an evil this is, good gods, to kill, to rage, to delight in the clank of chains and to cut off the heads of citizens, to shed much blood wherever one goes, to terrify and put to flight by one’s mere appearance! What other life would there be if lions and bears ruled, if power over us were given to serpents and to every most noxious animal? Those creatures, though without reason and condemned by us for the crime of brutality, spare their own kind, and likeness is a safeguard even among wild beasts. But the rage of these men does not hold back even from their own kin; it treats strangers and its own alike, and the more it exercises itself, the more it is roused. Then from the murder of individuals it creeps on to the destruction of nations, and it thinks it a mark of power to throw fire on roofs and to drive the plow over ancient cities. To order the death of one man or two it considers hardly worthy of an emperor; unless a herd of wretches stands under the blow at one and the same time, it thinks its cruelty has been reduced to the ranks.

That is good fortune: to give safety to many, to call them back to life from death itself, and to earn the civic crown by clemency. No ornament is more worthy of an emperor’s high station, or more beautiful, than that crown given for saving citizens:16 not enemy arms stripped from the conquered, not chariots stained with the blood of barbarians, not spoils won in war. This is godlike power, to save men in crowds and on behalf of the public; to kill many without distinction is the power of fire and collapse.

Notes

  1. 1. Tiberius, emperor AD 14–37, whose first years of rule were remembered as moderate.

  2. 2. Virgil, Georgics 4.212–213, on bees and their king.

  3. 3. Mark Antony was consul in 44 BC; the proscriptions of 43 BC were issued by Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus.

  4. 4. The conspirator was Gnaeus Cornelius Cinna Magnus, grandson of Pompey through his mother and consul in AD 5; Seneca calls him Lucius.

  5. 5. Salvidienus Rufus, Marcus Lepidus (son of the triumvir), Varro Murena, Fannius Caepio, and Egnatius Rufus were all put to death for plots against Augustus.

  6. 6. Augustus was Nero’s great-great-grandfather through Nero’s mother, Agrippina. Sallustius Crispus, Cocceius Nerva, and Quintus Dellius had come over from the side of his enemies; the morning levee was the formal call clients and friends paid a great man at dawn, admitted in ranks.

  7. 7. Augustus’s daughter Julia was banished in 2 BC; most of the men accused with her were exiled.

  8. 8. The naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (31 BC); the sea war against Sextus Pompey off Sicily (38–36 BC), in which Octavian lost fleets to storms and battle; and the siege of Perusia (41–40 BC), after which Octavian was said to have sacrificed captives at an altar to the deified Julius.

  9. 9. Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse 405–367 BC.

  10. 10. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, dictator 82–79 BC. After his victory at the Colline Gate in 82 BC he had several thousand prisoners killed while he addressed the senate in the temple of Bellona.

  11. 11. A line from the Atreus of the tragic poet Accius.

  12. 12. The penalty for parricide: the condemned man was sewn into a leather sack with a dog, a cock, a monkey, and a serpent and thrown into the water.

  13. 13. Publius Vedius Pollio, a wealthy knight and friend of Augustus (d. 15 BC).

  14. 14. The emperor Claudius, Nero’s adoptive father.

  15. 15. Lysimachus, one of Alexander’s officers and later king of Thrace; the story that Alexander had him thrown to a lion was current in antiquity.

  16. 16. The civic crown, a wreath of oak leaves, was awarded for saving the life of a fellow citizen in battle.