The Complete Essays (153 page)

Even munificence is not truly resplendent from a sovereign’s hands: it more rightly belongs to private citizens; for strictly speaking a king has nothing which is properly his own: even his person belongs to others. [C] Sentences are not passed in the interests of the judge but of the plaintiffs. We never appoint our superiors for their own advantage but for that of their inferiors; we appoint a doctor for his patients not for himself. All public offices, like all professional skills, aim at something beyond themselves:
‘nulla ars in se versatur’
[no art is concerned with itself].
¹⁵

[B] That is why those tutors of youthful princes who pride themselves on impressing upon them that there is virtue in lavishness, who exhort them not to know what it means to reject anything and to hold that money is never better spent than when given away (teaching, greatly honoured, I know, in my own lifetime), are either thinking more of their own good than that of their own master or else they do not know what they are talking about. It is all too easy to stamp ideas of generosity on a
man who has the means of fulfilling them with other people’s money. [C] And since generosity is measured not against the gift but the means of the giver, in such powerful hands it always proves useless. To be generous, they discover, they have to be prodigal. [B] So it is not highly honoured compared to the other kingly virtues: it is, said Dionysius the Tyrant, the only virtue to be fully compatible with tyranny itself.
¹⁶
I would rather teach a king this line from one ancient ploughman:

that is, ‘If you want a good crop, you must broadcast your seed not pour it from your sack.’
¹⁷
[C] Seed must be drilled not spilled. [B] So when a king has to make gifts or, to put it better, has to make payments to so many persons for services rendered, he should distribute royally but advisedly. If a prince’s generosity is indiscriminate and immoderate I would like him better as a miser.

It is in justice that kingly virtue seems mainly to consist. And what most distinguishes a king is that kind of justice which is the companion of generosity; kings readily dispense all other kinds of justice through intermediaries: that one they reserve to themselves.

Liberality without moderation is a feeble means of acquiring good-will, since it offends more people than it seduces. [C]
‘Quo in plures usus sis, minus in multos uti possis. Quid autem est stultius quant quod libenter facias, curare ut id diutius facere non possis?’
[The more people you have helped by it, the fewer you can help in the future… Is there a greater folly than doing something you like in such a way that you can do it no longer?]
¹⁸
[B] And if it is exercised without due regard for merit, it embarrasses the recipient, who receives it without gratitude. There have been tyrants who have been sacrificed to the people’s hatred by the very men they have unjustly advanced, since [C] men of that sort [B] reckon that
¹⁹
they can insure their possession of ill-gotten gains by showing hatred and contempt for the one they got them from; in that way they seek to placate the judgement and opinions of the people.

The subjects of a prince who is lavish in giving become lavish in their demands. They base their assessments not on reason but example. We
certainly ought often to blush at our shamelessness. We are already overpaid by just standards once the reward is equal to our services. Do we owe nothing to our princes by natural obligation? If our prince meets our expenses he has already done a great deal. Should he contribute to them, that is enough: anything above that is called a bounty: as such it cannot be demanded. (The very word liberality has the sound of liberty.) By our fashion there is no end to it: goods already received do not figure in our accounts: we only love future liberality. So the more a prince exhausts his wealth in giving, the poorer he is in friends. [C] How could he possibly slake desires which grow bigger the more he pours wealth into them? The man whose thoughts are set on getting thinks no longer of what he has got. The property of covetousness is, above all, ingratitude.
²⁰

The example of Cyrus would not fit in badly here to serve our kings today as a touchstone for discovering whether their gifts are well or ill bestowed (and to show them that that Emperor distributed his gifts better than they do; by their extravagance they are reduced to raising loans from subjects unknown to them or from those whom they have harmed rather than from those whom they have helped, receiving ‘gratuities’ from them which have nothing gratuitous about them but the name). Croesus reproached Cyrus for his bounty, calculating what his treasure would have amounted to if he had restrained his hands a little more. Cyrus sought to justify his liberality: so he dispatched messengers all over the place to those magnates of his empire whose interests he had individually advanced, begging each of them to help him with as much money as they could for some urgent need and to write to him disclosing the amount. When all the letters of credit were brought to him, none of his friends had reckoned that it was enough to offer merely as much as they had received from his munificence but included much of their own wealth. He found that the sum amounted to far more than Croesus’ economies. Whereupon Cyrus said to him, ‘I love riches no less than other princes do; if anything I am more sparing. You can see by what little outlay I have acquired the countless riches of so many friends, and how much better Chancellors of the Exchequer they are than hired men would be with no bonds of affection, and how my wealth is better lodged with them than in my own treasure-chests, calling down upon me the hatred, envy and contempt of other princes.’
²¹

[B] The Roman Emperors justified the lavishness of their public games
and parades by the fact that their authority in some ways depended (in appearance at least) on the will of the people, who had ever been accustomed to be courted by such extravagant spectacles. Yet it was private citizens who had encouraged this custom of pleasing their fellow-citizens and their equals with such a profusion of magnificence drawn mainly from their own purses. It took on a quite different savour when their masters came to imitate them. [C]
‘Pecuniarum translatio a justis dominis ad alienos non debet liberalis videri.’
[Taking money from rightful owners and giving it to others ought not to be regarded as liberality.]
²²
When his son assayed winning the support of the Macedonians by sending them gifts, Philip reprimanded him in a letter with these words: ‘What? Do you desire that your subjects should consider you not their King but their bursar? If you want to seduce, seduce them by deeds of virtue not by deeds of your purse-strings.’

[B] Yet there was beauty in providing a great quantity of mature trees, with thick green branches, and in planting them beautifully and symmetrically in the arena to make a great shady forest, and then, on the first day, in releasing within it a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand wild boars and a thousand deer and in handing it over to the populace to pillage; then, on the following day, in killing off before them a hundred full-grown lions, a hundred leopards and three hundred bears; then, on the third day, in having three hundred pairs of gladiators fight to the finish, as did the Emperor Probus.
²³
Beautiful too to see those great amphitheatres incrusted on the outside with marble and decorated with works of art and statuary, the inside gleaming with rare and precious stones –

Baltheus en gemmis, en illita porticus auro
[Here is the circular partition clad in gems; here, the portico, daubed with gold]

– with all the sides surrounding that vast space completely encircled from top to bottom with sixty to eighty tiers of seats, also of marble, covered with cushions –

exeat, inquit,
Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri,
Cujus res legi non sufficit;

[‘Shame him out’, they say: ‘he has only paid for the cheapest seats, not for the cushioned ones of the knights]

– where you could seat a hundred thousand men in comfort; beauty, too, to have the base of the arena where the games took place dug up and divided into caverns representing lairs which spewed forth the animals destined for the spectacle; subsequently to flood it with a deep sea of water, sweeping along many a sea-monster and bearing armed warships to enact a naval engagement; then, thirdly, to flatten it and drain it out afresh for the gladiatorial combats; and then, for the fourth act, to strew it, not with sand but with vermilion and aromatic resin in order to prepare upon it a formal banquet for that infinite crowd of people – the final scene on one single day!

Quoties nos descendentis arenæ
Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terræ
Emersisse feras, et iisdem sæpe latebris
Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro.
Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra
Contigit, æquoreos ego cum certantibus ursis
Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum,
Sed deforme pecus
.

[How often have we beheld a section of the arena drop down, forming a gaping chasm from which emerged wild beasts and whole forests of golden trees with barks of saffron! Not only have we seen the denizens of the forests in our amphitheatres but sea-beasts set in the midst of fighting bears and those monstrous hippopotamuses honoured by the name of ‘river-horses’.]

Sometimes they produced in the arena a great mountain covered with green trees, many bearing fruit, and a river running from its summit as from the source of a flowing stream. Sometimes they had a great ship sail into the arena; it opened up and fell apart automatically, spewed forth from its belly four or five hundred beasts of combat, reassembled itself unaided and vanished from sight. Sometimes down there in the arena they produced fountains and water-jets which spouted immensely high, sprinkling perfume over that vast multitude. To protect themselves from the hot weather they caused that immense area to be covered either with awnings of purple needlework or with variously coloured silks, which they drew or withdrew at will:

Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole,
Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes
.

[Although the fierce sun beats down on the amphitheatre they draw back the awnings whenever Hermogenes appears.]
²⁴

Even the netting erected in front of the crowd to protect them from the ferocity of the wild beasts once they were loosed was plaited with gold:

auro quoque torta refulgent
Retia
.

[The very nets glisten with woven gold.]

If anything can justify such excesses, it is the cases where the amazement was caused not by the expense but by the originality and ingenuity.

Even in vanities such as these we can discover how those times abounded in more fertile minds than ours. The same applies to that sort of fertility as to any other which Nature produces. Which is not to say that she then employed her utmost forces.
²⁵
[C] We cannot be said to progress but rather to wander about this way and that. We follow our own footsteps. [B] I am afraid that our knowledge is in every sense weak; we cannot see very far ahead nor very far behind; it grasps little, lives little, skimped in terms of both time and matter.

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Multi, sed omnes illachrimabiles
     Urgentur ignotique longa
Nocte
.

[Great heroes lived before Agamemnon; many they were, yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.]

Et supera belium Trojanum et funera Trojœ,
Multi alias alii quoque res cecinere poetœ
.

[Before the Trojan War and the death of Troy many other poets have sung of other wars.]
²⁶

[C] And while on this subject I think we should not reject the testimony
of Solon’s account of how he had learned from the priests of Egypt the long history of their State and their way of teaching and preserving the history of other peoples:
‘Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et temporum, in quam se injiciens animus et intendens ita late longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat in qua possit insistere: in hac immensitate infinita vis innumerabilium appareret fomarum.’
[If we were vouchsafed a sight of the infinite extent of time and space stretching away in every direction, and if our minds were allowed to wander over it far and wide, ranging about and hastening along without ever glimpsing a boundary where it could halt: from such an immensity we would grasp what almighty power lies behind those innumerable forms.]
²⁷