Book 2
Hellenistic Cicero, Marcus Tullius LatinWhen all were burning with eagerness to hear, Scipio began to speak thus: "This is a saying of old Cato—whom, as you know, I loved beyond all others and most greatly admired, and to whom, by the judgment both of each of my fathers and by my own zeal, I gave myself wholly from my youth; whose discourse could never sate me. So great was the man's experience of public affairs, which he had conducted both at home and on campaign with the greatest skill and likewise for the longest time; and there was measure in his speaking, a charm mingled with weight, and the highest zeal both for learning and for teaching, and a life thoroughly accordant with his words.
He was wont to say, for this reason, that the constitution of our state excelled all other states: because in those others there had generally been single men, each of whom had established his own commonwealth by his laws and institutions—as Minos among the Cretans, Lycurgus among the Lacedaemonians, and among the Athenians, whose constitution had very often been changed, now Theseus, now Draco, now Solon, now Cleisthenes, now many others; and at last, when it was now bloodless and prostrate, the learned man Demetrius of Phalerum propped it up—whereas our own commonwealth was framed not by the genius of one man, but of many, nor in the lifetime of a single man, but over several ages and generations. For he used to say that no genius so great had ever existed, that nothing should escape it, nor could all the geniuses brought together into one foresee so much at one time as to embrace all things without the practice and the lapse of time.
Wherefore, as he was wont, so now shall my discourse trace the origin of our people; for I gladly use even the word of Cato. And I shall more easily attain what is proposed, if I show you our commonwealth being born, and growing, and come to maturity, and now firm and robust, than if I myself, as Socrates does in Plato, should fashion some imaginary state of my own."
When all had approved this, "What have we," he said, "as the beginning of a constituted commonwealth, so clear and so well known to all, as the founding of this city, set on foot by Romulus? Who, born of his father Mars (for let us grant the report of men—especially one not only of old standing, but also wisely handed down by our ancestors, that men well-deserving of the common good should be thought to be of divine descent, and not only of divine genius)—he, then, as soon as he was born, with his brother Remus, is said to have been ordered by Amulius, king of Alba, through fear of the overthrow of his kingdom, to be exposed by the Tiber; in which place, when he had been suckled at the dugs of a beast of the woods, and shepherds had taken him up and reared him in rustic ways and toil, he is reported, when he had grown up, to have so excelled the rest both in bodily strength and in fierceness of spirit, that all who then dwelt in those fields where this city now stands obeyed him willingly and with a glad heart. When he had offered himself as their leader with their forces—to come now from fables to facts—he is said to have crushed Alba Longa, a city strong and powerful in those times, and to have slain King Amulius.
Having won this glory, he is said first to have thought of founding the city under the auspices and of establishing a commonwealth. As for the site of the city, which must be most diligently provided for by him who tries to plant a lasting commonwealth, he chose it with incredible advantage. For he did not bring it down to the sea—which, with that band and those forces, was most easy for him—so as to advance into the territory of the Rutuli and the Aborigines, or himself to found a city at the mouth of the Tiber, in which place King Ancus many years later led out a colony; but this man, with surpassing foresight, perceived and saw that maritime sites are not the most advantageous for cities founded in the hope of lasting long and of empire; first, because maritime cities are exposed not only to many dangers, but also to hidden ones.
For the mainland gives warning beforehand, by many signs and by a kind of crash and the very sound, of the approach of enemies, whether expected or even sudden; nor indeed can any enemy come flying by land, but that we may know not only that he is, but also who he is and whence. But that maritime and naval enemy can be present before anyone can suspect he is coming; nor indeed, when he has come, does he show beforehand who he is, or whence he comes, or even what he wants; in short, not even any mark can be discerned or judged, whether he be at peace or an enemy.
There is, moreover, in maritime cities a certain corruption and degeneration of manners; for they are mingled with new tongues and ways of life, and there are imported not only foreign wares, but also foreign manners, so that nothing can remain unspoiled in the institutions of the fathers. Now those who inhabit such cities do not cling to their own seats, but are forever snatched far from home by winged hope and imagining; and even when they remain in body, yet in mind they are exiles and wanderers. Nor indeed did any thing more overthrow both Carthage and Corinth at last—long shaken—than this straying and dispersal of the citizens, who, through the desire of trade and seafaring, had forsaken the cultivation of their fields and of arms.
Many incitements too to luxury, ruinous to states, are furnished by the sea, things either taken or imported; and the very pleasantness of the place has many enticements of the passions, either costly or slothful. And what I said of Corinth, I know not but that one might most truly say of all Greece; for the Peloponnese itself is almost wholly in the sea, nor, save the Phliuntians, are there any whose fields do not touch the sea; and outside the Peloponnese, only the Aenianes and the Dorians and the Dolopians are away from the sea. What shall I say of the islands of Greece? which, girt by the waves, almost float themselves together with the institutions and manners of their states.
And these things indeed, as I said above, belong to old Greece. But of the colonies led out by the Greeks into Asia, Thrace, Italy, Sicily, Africa, which is there—save the one Magnesia—that the wave does not wash? Thus a kind of shore of Greece seems woven, as it were, upon the fields of the barbarians; for of the barbarians themselves none were formerly maritime, save the Etruscans and the Carthaginians—the one for the sake of trade, the other of piracy. The cause of the evils and the changes of Greece is plain, namely those faults of maritime cities which I touched on briefly a little before. Yet in these faults there is that great convenience: that whatever is produced anywhere may come by sea to the city you inhabit, and that what its own fields bring forth they can carry and send to whatever lands they will.
How, then, could Romulus more divinely both embrace the advantages of the sea and avoid its faults, than by setting the city on the bank of a perennial river, of even flow and widely flowing into the sea? whereby the city might both receive from the sea what it lacked, and give back what it had in excess; and by the same river both draw to itself by sea the things most necessary for food and life, and receive them brought in from the land—so that even then he seems to me to have divined that this city would one day afford a seat and a home for the highest empire; for hardly could any city set in any other part of Italy more easily have held this so great a power.
As for the city's own native defences, who is so heedless as not to have them noted and clearly known in his mind? whose line and circuit of wall was defined by the wisdom both of Romulus and of the other kings, on every side by steep and broken hills, so that the one approach, which lay between the Esquiline and Quirinal mount, was girt, by the casting up of a vast rampart, with a most enormous ditch; and the citadel, thus fortified, rested upon its steep encircling and as it were sheer rock, so that even in that dreadful time of the Gauls' coming it remained unharmed and untouched. And he chose a place both abounding in springs and, in a pestilent region, healthful; for there are hills which, while they themselves are blown through, bring shade to the valleys.
And these things indeed he accomplished very swiftly; for he both established the city, which he bade be named Rome from his own name, and, to strengthen the new state, followed a plan that was new and somewhat rustic, but worthy of a great man and already then far-foreseeing, for the fortifying of the resources of his kingdom and his people: when he bade the Sabine maidens, sprung from an honourable station, who had come to Rome for the sake of the games—which he had then for the first time instituted to be held yearly in the circus, at the festival of Consus—be carried off, and placed them in marriage in the most distinguished families.
For which cause, when the Sabines had made war upon the Romans, and the contest of battle had been varied and doubtful, he struck a treaty with Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, the matrons themselves who had been carried off entreating it; by which treaty he both admitted the Sabines into the citizenship, with sacred rites shared in common, and joined his own kingdom with their king's.
And after the death of Tatius, when all dominion had fallen back to him—although together with Tatius he had chosen into the royal council leading men (who were called, for the affection borne them, the fathers), and had divided the people, in his own name and in Tatius's and in that of Lucumo, who as Romulus's ally had fallen in the Sabine battle, into three tribes and thirty curias (which curias he named by the names of those Sabine maidens who, having been carried off, afterward became suppliants for peace and for the treaty)—yet, although these things had been so arranged while Tatius lived, nevertheless, after he was slain, Romulus reigned far more by the authority and counsel of the fathers.
And in doing this he first saw and judged the same thing that Lycurgus a little before had seen at Sparta: that states are then better governed and ruled by a single command and royal power, if to that force of sovereignty be joined the authority of every best man. And so, propped and fortified by this counsel and as it were senate, he both waged many wars with his neighbours most successfully, and, though he himself carried home from the spoil nothing to his own house, did not cease to enrich the citizens.
Then—that whereby we hold today, with great safety to the commonwealth—Romulus paid the utmost heed to the auspices. For he both founded the city under the auspices, which was the beginning of the commonwealth, and, in establishing all public affairs, co-opted augurs, one from each tribe, who should be at his side in the auspices; and he held the plebs distributed into the clientships of the leading men (of how great use this was, I shall see later); and by the imposing of fines in sheep and oxen (because then wealth was in cattle and in the possession of lands, whence men were called moneyed and rich), and not by force and punishments, he coerced them.
And when Romulus had reigned thirty-seven years, and had brought forth these two excellent bulwarks of the commonwealth, the auspices and the senate, he attained so much that, when the sun was suddenly darkened and he did not appear, he was thought to have been placed in the number of the gods—an opinion which no mortal could ever attain without the extraordinary glory of virtue.
And this is the more to be wondered at in Romulus, because the others who are said to have been made gods from men lived in less learned ages of mankind, so that the way of inventing was easy, since the unlearned were readily impelled to believe; whereas we discern that the age of Romulus was less than six hundred years ago, when letters and learning were already of old standing, and all that ancient error sprung from the uncultivated life of men had been done away. For if, as is investigated in the annals of the Greeks, Rome was founded in the second year of the seventh Olympiad, the age of Romulus fell in that era when Greece was already full of poets and musicians, and less credence was given to fables save concerning ancient matters. For a hundred and eight years after Lycurgus set himself to write laws, the first Olympiad was established, which some, by an error of the name, think was established by that same Lycurgus; and as for Homer, those who put him latest set him about thirty years before the age of Lycurgus.
[Augustine, City of God, 22.6] . . . rudely; but this age, now polished, especially mocking all that cannot be, rejects it.
. . . his grandson, as some have said, by a daughter. And in the same year in which he died, was born Simonides, in the fifty-sixth Olympiad; so that it may the more easily be understood that the immortality of Romulus was believed in at a time when the life of men was already of long standing and well handled and known. But surely so great was the force of genius and virtue in him, that that was believed of Romulus, on the word of Proculus Julius, a rustic man, which for many ages before men would have believed of no other mortal; who, at the prompting of the fathers—that they might thereby turn from themselves the odium of Romulus's death—is said to have declared in the assembly that Romulus had appeared to him on that hill which is now called the Quirinal; that he had charged him to ask the people that a shrine be made to him on that hill; that he was a god and was called Quirinus.
Do you see, then, that by the counsel of one man a people was not only brought into being, nor left wailing as in its cradle, but already grown up and almost come to manhood?" Then Laelius: "We see it indeed, and that you have entered upon a method of discussion that is new, found nowhere in the books of the Greeks. For that prince of writers, than whom in writing none was more excellent, took for himself a plot of ground on which to build a state at his own discretion—splendid indeed, perhaps, but far removed from the life and the manners of men;
while the rest discoursed, with no fixed model or form of a commonwealth, about the kinds and the principles of states. You seem to me likely to do both: for you have so begun, that you prefer to attribute to others what you yourself discover, rather than, as Socrates does in Plato, to fashion it yourself; and you bring back to a principle even those matters of the city's site which were done by Romulus by chance or necessity; and you discuss, not in wandering speech, but fixed upon one commonwealth. Wherefore go on, as you have begun; for I seem already to foresee, as you pursue the remaining kings, a kind of perfected commonwealth."
"Therefore," said Scipio, "when that senate of Romulus, which was composed of the best men, to whom the king himself had granted so much that he wished them to be named fathers and their children patricians, attempted, after the death of Romulus, to rule the commonwealth itself without a king, the people did not endure it, and through longing for Romulus did not cease afterward to clamour for a king; whereupon those leaders prudently devised the new method, unheard of among other peoples, of entering upon an interregnum, so that, until a sure king should be declared, the state should neither be without a king nor under one king for long, nor should it come to pass that anyone, by power grown inveterate, should be either slower to lay down his command or better fortified to hold it.
At which time, indeed, that new people yet saw what escaped the Lacedaemonian Lycurgus, who held that a king was not to be chosen—if indeed this could have been in Lycurgus's power—but to be had, of whatever sort he might be, provided only he was begotten of the stock of Hercules; whereas those countrymen of ours, even then rustic, saw that royal virtue and wisdom, not lineage, ought to be sought.
And since report bore that Numa Pompilius excelled in these, the people itself, passing over its own citizens, with the fathers as its authors, took to itself a king of foreign birth, and summoned that Sabine man to Rome from Cures to reign. When he had come hither, although the people had ordered by the curiate assembly that he be king, yet he himself carried a curiate law concerning his own command; and seeing the Roman men inflamed, by the institution of Romulus, with warlike pursuits, he judged that they should be recalled a little from that habit.
And first he divided man by man among the citizens the fields which Romulus had taken in war, and taught them that, without plundering and spoil, they could abound in all advantages by tilling the fields; and he instilled in them the love of ease and peace, by which justice and good faith most easily grow strong, and under whose patronage above all the tilling of fields and the gathering of crops is protected. And the same Pompilius, having discovered greater auspices, added two augurs to the former number, and set five pontiffs from the number of the leading men over the sacred rites; and the minds of men, burning with the habit and desire of war, he softened by setting forth those laws which we have in our records, and by the ceremonies of religion; and he added besides the flamens, the Salii, and the Vestal virgins, and most reverently established all the parts of religion.
As for the sacred rites themselves, he willed that their performance be careful, their apparatus very easy; for he established many things that must be thoroughly learned and observed, but those without expense. Thus to the cultivation of religion he added labour, but took away cost; and the same man devised markets, games, and all occasions of gathering and of festal assembly. By instituting these things he recalled to humanity and gentleness the minds of men, already grown savage and fierce through the pursuits of war. So when he had reigned thirty-nine years in the utmost peace and concord (for let us follow above all our own Polybius, than whom none was more diligent in investigating dates), he departed from life, having confirmed two things most splendid for the long endurance of the commonwealth—religion and clemency."
When Scipio had said this, "Is it true," said Manilius, "Africanus, that it has been handed down to memory that this king Numa was a disciple of Pythagoras himself, or at least a Pythagorean? For we have often heard this from our elders, and so understand it to be commonly thought; and yet we do not see it sufficiently declared by the authority of the public annals." Then Scipio: "It is false, Manilius," he said, "the whole of it; nor only invented, but invented ignorantly and absurdly; for those are the things not to be borne in a falsehood, which we discern not only to be invented, but not even to have been able to happen. For Pythagoras is found to have come to Sybaris and Croton and those parts of Italy in the fourth year of the reign of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus; for the sixty-second Olympiad marks both the beginning of Superbus's reign and the coming of Pythagoras.
From which it may be understood, the regnal years being reckoned, that it was about a hundred and forty years after the death of Numa that Pythagoras first touched Italy; nor has this ever been in any doubt among those who have most diligently traced the annals of the times." "Immortal gods," said Manilius, "how great and how inveterate is that error of men! And yet I gladly endure that we have been instructed not by arts brought from over the sea or imported, but by native and home-bred virtues."
"Nay, you will learn that far more easily," said Africanus, "if you behold the commonwealth advancing and coming to its best condition by a certain natural path and course; indeed, by this very thing you will hold the wisdom of our ancestors worthy of praise, in that you will understand that many things taken even from elsewhere were made far better among us than they had been where they were brought from and where they first arose; and you will understand that the Roman people grew strong not by chance, but by counsel and discipline—nor yet with fortune opposing."
King Pompilius being dead, the people, an interrex proposing it, created Tullus Hostilius king in the curiate assembly; and he, after the example of Pompilius, consulted the people curia by curia concerning his own command. His glory in military matters was surpassing, and great were his deeds of war; and the same man both built and walled, from the spoils, the comitium and the senate-house, and established the law by which wars should be declared—a thing most justly invented by him and sanctioned with the fetial rite, that every war which had not been announced and declared should be judged unjust and impious. And, that you may turn your minds to how wisely already our kings saw this, that certain things must be granted to the people (for many things must be said by us on that subject), not even the royal insignia did Tullus dare to use save by command of the people. For that twelve lictors with the rods might go before him . . .
. . . for the commonwealth does not creep, but flies into its best condition, your discourse being set on foot." Scipio: "After him, Ancus Marcius, grandson of Numa Pompilius by a daughter, was made king by the people, and likewise carried a curiate law concerning his own command. When he had subdued the Latins in war, he admitted them into the citizenship; and the same man joined the Aventine and the Caelian mount to the city, and the lands he had taken he divided, and all the maritime forests which he had taken he made public, and at the mouth of the Tiber he founded a city and strengthened it with colonists. And so, when he had reigned twenty-three years, he died." Then Laelius: "That king too is to be praised; but Roman history is obscure, since of that king we have the mother, but know not the father." Scipio: "It is so," he said; "but of those times scarcely anything is illustrious save the names of the kings.
But at this point the state seems first to have become more learned by a certain engrafted discipline. For there flowed into this city, not some thin little brook, but a most abundant river of those disciplines and arts. For they report that there was a certain Demaratus of Corinth, easily the first of his own state in honour and authority and fortune; who, when he could not endure Cypselus the tyrant of the Corinthians, is said to have fled with great wealth and to have betaken himself to Tarquinii, a most flourishing city of Etruria. And when he heard that the domination of Cypselus was being confirmed, that free and brave man forsook his country and was received as a citizen by the Tarquinians, and in that state set up his dwelling and his seat. There, when of a Tarquinian matron he had begotten two sons, he educated them in all the arts according to the discipline of the Greeks . . .
. . . having been easily received into the citizenship, on account of his refinement and learning he was made so intimate with King Ancus that he was thought a partaker of all his counsels and almost a sharer of the kingdom. There was in him, besides, the highest courtesy, the highest kindliness in helping, aiding, and defending all citizens, and in giving freely too. And so, on the death of Marcius, by the votes of all the people Lucius Tarquinius was created king; for he had so inflected his name from the Greek name, that in every kind of thing he seemed to imitate the custom of this people. And when he had carried a law concerning his own command, first he doubled that former number of the fathers, and called the ancient fathers those of the greater clans, whom he asked their opinion first, and those admitted by himself those of the lesser.
Then he established the cavalry after this fashion, which is retained even to this day; nor could he change, though he wished, the names of the Titienses and Ramnenses and Luceres, because Attus Navius, an augur of the highest glory, was not the author for him. And I observe that the Corinthians too were once diligent in assigning public horses and in maintaining them by taxes on orphans and widows. But yet, adding to the former squadrons of the knights a second number, he made twelve hundred knights and doubled the number. Afterward he subdued in war the Aequi, a great and fierce people threatening the affairs of the Roman people; and the same man, when he had driven back the Sabines from the walls of the city, routed them with his cavalry and conquered them in war. And we have it that the same king first held the great games which are called the Roman games, and vowed, in the Sabine war, in the very battle, a temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest to be built on the Capitol; and that he died when he had reigned thirty-eight years."
Then Laelius: "Now that saying of Cato becomes more certain, that the constitution of a commonwealth is the work neither of one time nor of one man; for it is plain how great an accession of good and useful things is made in each single king. But there follows one who, of all, seems to me to have seen most in the commonwealth." "It is so," said Scipio. "For after him Servius Tullius is reported first to have reigned without the command of the people; whom they say was born of a slave woman of Tarquinii, having been conceived of a certain client of the king. When, brought up among the number of the servants, he stood by at the king's banquets, the spark of his genius did not lie hidden, which already then shone forth in the boy; so skilful was he in every office and in every word. And so Tarquinius, who then had very young children, so loved Servius that he was commonly held to be his son; and he educated him with the greatest zeal in all those arts which he himself had learned, after the most exquisite custom of the Greeks.
But when Tarquinius had perished by the treachery of the sons of Ancus, and Servius, as I said before, had begun to reign not by command but by the will and concession of the citizens—because, when Tarquinius lay sick of his wound and was falsely said to be alive, Servius, having administered justice in the royal array, and freed debtors with his own money, and showing great courtesy, made it appear that he gave judgment by command of Tarquinius—he did not commit himself to the fathers, but, Tarquinius being buried, himself consulted the people concerning himself, and being bidden to reign, carried a curiate law concerning his own command. And first he avenged in war the wrongs of the Etruscans; from which, when . . .
. . . eighteen with the highest census-rating. Then, separating a great number of knights from the whole sum of the people, he distributed the remaining people into five classes, and divided the elder from the younger, and so arranged them that the votes should be in the power not of the multitude, but of the wealthy; and he took care—what must always be held to in a commonwealth—that the most should not have the most power. This arrangement, were it unknown to you, I should unfold; but as it is, you see that the principle is such that the centuries of the knights, with their six votes, and the first class, with a century added which was given to the carpenters for the highest service of the city, hold eighty-nine centuries; to which, if out of the hundred and four centuries (for so many remain) only eight be added, the whole force of the people is completed; and the much greater remaining multitude of ninety-six centuries was neither shut out from the votes, lest it be arrogant, nor too powerful, lest it be dangerous.
And in this matter he was careful even in the very words and names: for whereas he called the wealthy assidui from giving the as, those who brought to their census either no more than fifteen hundred asses, or nothing at all beyond their own person, he named proletarii, so that from them, as it were, offspring—that is, as it were a progeny of the state—seemed to be expected. But of those ninety-six centuries, in any one century there were then more men counted than almost in the whole first class. Thus no one was forbidden the right of suffrage, and he had most power in the voting whose greatest interest it was that the state should be in its best condition. Moreover, by the accensi velati, the trumpeters, the horn-blowers, the proletarii . . .
[Nonius, p. 342M] . . . that a commonwealth is established in the best condition which, blended in due measure of those three kinds—the royal, the aristocratic, and the popular—does not provoke by punishment the savage and fierce spirit.
. . . sixty-five years older, in that it was founded thirty-nine years before the first Olympiad. And that most ancient Lycurgus saw nearly the same things. And so that equability, and this threefold kind of commonwealth, seems to me to have been common to us with those peoples. But what is proper to our commonwealth—than which nothing can be more splendid—that I will pursue, if I can, more closely; and it will be of such a sort that nothing like it is to be found in any commonwealth. For these things which I have so far set forth were so mingled, both in this state and in that of the Lacedaemonians and of the Carthaginians, that they were in no way tempered.
For in a commonwealth in which there is one man of perpetual power, especially royal, although there be in it also a senate—as there was at Rome when there were kings, as at Sparta under the laws of Lycurgus—and although there be some right of the people too, as there was under our kings, yet that royal name stands out, nor can a commonwealth of this kind not both be and be called a kingdom. And that form of state is most changeable for this cause: that, hurled headlong by the fault of one man, it most easily falls into the most ruinous part. For the royal kind of state in itself is not only not to be blamed, but I am inclined to think it far to be preferred to the other simple kinds, if I should approve any simple kind of commonwealth at all—but only so long as it keeps its own condition. And that condition is, that the safety and the equability and the ease of the citizens be ruled by the perpetual power and justice and all the wisdom of one man. Much, in general, is lacking to that people which is under a king, and chiefly liberty—which lies not in having a just master, but in having none . . .
. . . they bore. For indeed that unjust and bitter master was for some while attended by prosperous fortune in his doings. For he both conquered all Latium in war, and took Suessa Pometia, a city opulent and crammed with wealth; and, enriched with the greatest spoil of gold and silver, he discharged his father's vow by the building of the Capitol, and led out colonies, and, after the manner of those from whom he was sprung, sent magnificent gifts, as it were libations of the spoils, to Apollo at Delphi.
Here now will be turned that cycle, whose natural motion and revolution learn to recognize from the beginning. For this is the chief thing in civil prudence—in which all this our discourse is engaged—to see the paths and turnings of commonwealths, that, when you know whither each thing inclines, you may be able either to hold it back or to meet it beforehand. For that king of whom I speak, first, stained with the murder of an excellent king, had not a sound mind; and since he himself feared the utmost punishment for his crime, he wished himself to be feared; then, propped by victories and riches, he exulted in insolence, and could govern neither his own manners nor the lusts of his household.
And so, when his elder son had offered violence to Lucretia, daughter of Tricipitinus, wife of Collatinus, and the modest and noble woman had, for that wrong, punished herself with death, then a man pre-eminent in genius and virtue, Lucius Brutus, threw off from his fellow citizens that unjust yoke of harsh servitude. And though he held no office, he sustained the whole commonwealth, and was the first in this state to teach that, in the preserving of the citizens' liberty, no man is a private man. By his initiative and leadership the state was roused, both by this recent complaint of the father and kinsmen of Lucretia, and by the recollection of the pride of Tarquinius and of the many wrongs both of himself and of his sons, and it ordered the king himself, an exile, and his children, and the whole house of the Tarquins, to be banished.
Do you see, then, how from a king there arose a master, and how, by the fault of one man, the kind of commonwealth was turned from good into worst? For this is that master of the people whom the Greeks call a tyrant; for they will have him to be a king who takes thought, as a parent, for his people, and preserves those over whom he is set in the best possible condition of living—a truly good kind of commonwealth, as I said, but yet inclined and as it were prone to the most ruinous condition.
For as soon as this king bends himself into a more unjust domination, he becomes straightway a tyrant, than whom no living thing more foul, more hideous, more hateful to gods and men can be conceived; who, though he is in shape a man, yet by the monstrousness of his manners surpasses the most savage beasts. For who would rightly call that man a man, who wishes for himself no fellowship of law with his fellow citizens, no, no fellowship of humanity with the whole race of men? But there will be for us another fitter place of speaking on this kind, when the matter itself shall have admonished us, to speak against those who, even when the state was already freed, sought after dominations.
You have, then, the first origin of a tyrant; for this name the Greeks willed to be that of an unjust king; but our people called all those kings who held sole and perpetual power over peoples. And so both Spurius Cassius and Marcus Manlius and Spurius Maelius are said to have wished to seize the kingship, and lately Tiberius Gracchus . . .
. . . Lycurgus called the elders gerontes at Lacedaemon—too few of them, indeed, twenty-eight, in whose hands he wished the chief counsel to be, while the king held the chief command; whence our people, following and interpreting that same thing, named those whom he had called old men the senate, as we have said Romulus did when the fathers had been chosen; yet there stands out and is pre-eminent the force, the power, and the name of the king. Impart even to the people some share of power, as did both Lycurgus and Romulus; you will not sate it with liberty, but you will kindle in it the desire of liberty, when you have given it but a taste of power; yet always will that fear impend, lest the king, as for the most part happens, prove unjust. Fragile, then, is that fortune of a people which is set in the will or the manners, as I said before, of one man.
Wherefore let this be the first form and aspect and origin of a tyrant, found by us in that commonwealth which Romulus founded under the auspices—not in that which, as Plato wrote, Socrates himself depicted for himself in that threefold discourse; so that, as Tarquinius, having gained no new power, but using unjustly that which he had, overthrew this whole kind of royal state, let there be set against him another, good and wise and skilled in the advantage and dignity of the citizens, as it were the guardian and steward of the commonwealth; for so let him be called, whoever shall be the director and helmsman of the state. See that you recognize this man; for he it is who by counsel and effort can protect the state. And since this name is as yet less worn in our discourse, and the kind of this man must be handled more often in the rest of our speech . . .
. . . he sought out, and he wrought a state to be wished for rather than to be hoped for—the smallest he could make it, not such as could exist, but one in which the principle of civil things might be discerned. But I, if in any way I can attain it, will strive, by the same principles which he saw, not in the shadow and image of a state, but in the greatest commonwealth, so to touch the cause of each public good and ill as with a wand. For when those royal forty years and a little more than two hundred had passed, with the interregna, and Tarquinius had been expelled, so great a hatred of the royal name held the Roman people as the longing for Romulus had held them after his death, or rather his departure. And so, as then they could not bear to be without a king, so, Tarquinius being driven out, they could not bear to hear the name of king. Here, when the opportunity . . .
53fr. [Nonius, 526M] . . . And so that splendid constitution of Romulus, when it had stood firm for about two hundred and twenty years . . .
. . . that whole law was abolished. With this mind our ancestors then both expelled the innocent Collatinus, through the suspicion of kinship, and the rest of the Tarquins, through the offence of the name; and with the same mind Publius Valerius both first ordered the rods to be lowered, when he had begun to speak in the assembly, and brought his own house down beneath the Velia, after he perceived that, because he had begun to build in a higher place of the Velia, in that very spot where King Tullus had dwelt, the people's suspicion was being stirred; and the same man—in which Publicola was most himself—carried to the people that law which was the first passed in the centuriate assembly, that no magistrate should put to death or scourge a Roman citizen against his appeal.
That appeal lay even from the kings the pontifical books declare, our augural ones too signify, and likewise that it is permitted to appeal from every judgment and penalty the Twelve Tables indicate in several laws; and the fact that it is handed down to memory that the decemvirs, who wrote the laws, were created without right of appeal, shows clearly enough that the other magistrates were not without appeal. And the consular law of Lucius Valerius Potitus and Marcus Horatius Barbatus, men wisely popular for the sake of concord, sanctioned that no magistrate be created without right of appeal; nor indeed did the Porcian laws, which are three, of the three Porcii, as you know, bring anything new save the sanction.
And so Publicola, that law concerning appeal having been carried, at once ordered the axes to be taken from the rods, and the next day chose Spurius Lucretius as his colleague in his stead, and, because he was older, bade his own lictors pass over to him, and was the first to establish that the lictors should walk before the single consuls in alternate months, lest there should be more insignia of command in a free people than there had been under a kingdom. No mean man was this, as at least I understand it, who, by granting the people moderate liberty, the more easily held fast the authority of the leading men. Nor do I now without cause chant to you these things so old and so obsolete, but in illustrious persons and times I define examples of men and of affairs, toward which the rest of my discourse may be directed.
The senate, then, held the commonwealth in this condition in those times, so that in a free people few things were done through the people, most by the authority and institution and custom of the senate; and the consuls held a power annual only in point of time, but in its very kind and right royal. And that which was, for keeping the power of the nobles, the very greatest, was vehemently retained: that the assemblies of the people should not be ratified, unless the authority of the fathers had approved them. And in these very times a dictator too was instituted, about ten years after the first consuls, Titus Larcius; and this new kind of command seemed nearest to the likeness of a king. But yet all the highest matters were held by the leading men with the greatest authority, the people yielding; and great things in those times were waged in war by the bravest men endowed with the highest command, dictators and consuls.
But that which the very nature of things compelled to come about—that the people, freed from kings, should claim a little more right to itself—came to pass after no long interval, in about the sixteenth year, in the consulship of Postumus Cominius and Spurius Cassius; in which there was perhaps a want of reason, but yet the very nature of commonwealths often overcomes reason. For hold fast this, which I said at the outset: that unless there be in a state this balanced compensation of right and of duty and of office—so that there be enough of power in the magistrates, of authority in the council of the leading men, and of liberty in the people—this unchangeable condition of the commonwealth cannot be preserved.
For when the state had been shaken by debt, the plebs first occupied the Sacred Mount, then the Aventine. Nor indeed did the discipline of Lycurgus hold even those Greek men in those reins; for at Sparta too, in the reign of Theopompus, there are likewise five whom they call ephors, and in Crete ten who are called cosmoi, set up against the kingly power, as the tribunes of the plebs against the consular command.
There had perhaps been some reason for our ancestors of remedying that debt—a reason which neither had escaped Solon the Athenian not long before, nor, somewhat later, our senate, when, on account of the lust of one man, all the bonds of the citizens were freed and the binding of debtors thereafter ceased; and always for this class, when the plebs, weakened by expenses through a public calamity, was failing, some relief and medicine has been sought for the safety of all. That counsel being then passed over, a cause arose for the people, two tribunes of the plebs being created through sedition, that the power and authority of the senate might be lessened; which yet remained weighty and great, with the wisest and bravest men guarding the state both by arms and by counsel, whose authority most flourished, because, though they far surpassed the rest in honour, they were inferior in pleasures and scarcely superior in wealth; and each man's virtue was the more welcome in the commonwealth, because in private matters they most diligently protected the single citizens by their service, their counsel, their substance.
In which condition of the commonwealth, Spurius Cassius, who was contriving to seize the kingship—flourishing in the highest favour with the people—a quaestor accused; and him, as you have heard, when his father had said that he had found him guilty in that fault, the people yielding, he put to death. And welcome too was that law, about the fifty-fourth year after the first consuls, concerning fine and pledge, which Spurius Tarpeius and Aulus Aternius, consuls, carried in the centuriate assembly. Twenty years after, because Lucius Papirius and Publius Pinarius, censors, in exacting fines, had diverted from private men into the public store a great quantity of cattle, a light valuation of beasts in the matter of fines was established by the law of the consuls Gaius Julius and Publius Papirius.
But some years before, when the highest authority was in the senate, the people suffering it and obedient, a plan was entered upon, that both the consuls and the tribunes of the plebs should abdicate their magistracy, and that decemvirs of the greatest power, without appeal, should be created, who should both have the highest command and write the laws. And when they had written ten tables with the highest equity and prudence of the laws, they substituted for the following year other decemvirs, whose good faith and justice were not praised in like manner. Yet out of that college there is that signal praise of Gaius Julius, who, when a noble man, Lucius Sestius, in whose chamber he said a dead man had been dug up in his presence, though he himself had the highest power, because being a decemvir he was without appeal, nevertheless demanded sureties, because he said he would not neglect that splendid law which forbade the life of a Roman citizen to be decided save in the centuriate assembly.
A third decemviral year followed, when the same men were in office and had not wished to substitute others. In this condition of the commonwealth—which I have already often said cannot be lasting, because it was not balanced toward all the orders of the state—the whole commonwealth was in the hands of the leading men, the most noble decemvirs being set over it, no tribunes of the plebs set against them, no other magistrates joined, no appeal to the people left against death and scourging.
Therefore, from the injustice of these men, there suddenly arose the greatest disturbance and the change of the whole commonwealth; who, two tables of unfair laws being added, by which—the very intermarriages which are wont to be granted even to peoples severed from one another—these men sanctioned by a most inhuman law that the plebs should not have them with the fathers (which afterward was abrogated by the Canuleian plebiscite), presided over the people in every command lustfully and bitterly and greedily. Well known, of course, is that affair, and celebrated in very many monuments of letters: when a certain Decimus Verginius, on account of the intemperance of one of those decemvirs, slew with his own hand his maiden daughter in the forum, and, mourning, fled to the army which was then at Algidus; and the soldiers forsook that war which was on their hands, and first occupied in arms the Sacred Mount, as had been done before in a like cause, then the Aventine . . .
63fr. [Philargyrius, Servius, on Georgics 3.125] . . . Lucius Quinctius having been named dictator.
When Scipio had said these things, and, all being silent, the rest of his discourse was awaited, then Tubero: "Since these our elders ask nothing of you, Africanus, you shall hear from me what I find wanting in your discourse." "By all means," said Scipio, "and gladly indeed." Then he: "You seem to me to have praised our own commonwealth, when Laelius had asked of you not about our own, but about every commonwealth. Nor yet have I learned from your discourse by what discipline, by what manners or laws we may establish or preserve that very commonwealth which you praise."
Here Africanus: "I think there will soon be for us, Tubero, a fitter place of discoursing about establishing and preserving states; but concerning the best condition I judged that I had sufficiently answered what Laelius had asked. For first I had defined by number three approvable kinds of states, and three ruinous ones, as many, contrary to those three; and that no one of them was the best in itself, but that there excelled the single kinds that which had been moderately tempered out of the three first.
And as for my having used the example of our own state, that availed not for defining the best condition (for that could be done without an example), but that in the greatest state it might be discerned in fact what that was which reason and discourse described. But if you seek the very kind of the best condition without the example of any people, we must use the image of nature, since this image of a city and a people . . .
. . . whom I have long sought and to whom I desire to come." Laelius: "A prudent man, perhaps, you seek?" Then he: "That very man." Laelius: "You have, from these very men who are present, a fair store—or, indeed, to begin with yourself." Then Scipio: "And would that there were such, in proportion, out of the whole senate! But yet that man is prudent who, as we have often seen in Africa, sitting upon a huge and vast beast, coerces and rules the beast whithersoever he will, and by a light admonition, not by force, bends that wild creature." Laelius: "I know it, and, when I was your legate, I often saw it." Scipio: "Therefore that Indian or Carthaginian coerces a single beast, and that one tame and accustomed to human ways; but in truth that which lies hidden in the minds of men, and that part of the mind which is called reason, frenzies and tames not one beast nor an easy one to subdue—if ever it accomplishes that, which it very rarely can. For both that fierce thing must be held in check . . .
[Nonius, 300M] . . . which is fed with blood, which so exults in all cruelty that it is scarcely sated with the bitter deaths of men.
[Augustine, City of God, 2.21] . . . of things most unlike sounds in concert; and what harmony is called by musicians in song, that in a state is concord, the tightest and best bond of safety in every commonwealth; and this without justice can in no way exist.
. . . to be full of justice. Then Scipio: "I assent indeed, and I declare to you that there is nothing we should think yet said about the commonwealth, nor whereby we may advance further, unless it be confirmed not only that that is false, that without injustice it cannot be carried on, but that this is most true, that without the highest justice a commonwealth can in no way be governed. But, if it please you, thus far for this day; let us put off the rest (for enough remains) until tomorrow." And when this had so pleased them, an end of discussing was made for that day.