The Complete Essays (135 page)

I never say anything to one side which I cannot say to the other when the time comes, merely changing the emphasis a little. I bring only such information as is already available, or indifferent or useful to all in common. There is no advantage whatsoever for which I would permit myself to lie to them.

I scrupulously conceal whatever has been entrusted to my silence, but I take care to have as little as possible to conceal. Guarding the secrets of princes when it is not your job to do so is far too much bother. The bargain I am prepared to offer is that, as long as they make few confidences to me, they can certainly place full confidence in whatever I bring with me.

I have always known more about such things than I wanted to. [C] Open talk opens the way to further talk, as wine does or love. [B] Phillipides replied wisely to King Lysimachus who asked him, ‘Which of my possessions shall I share with you?’ – ‘Whatever you like, provided it be none of your secrets.’
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I know that everyone rebels if the deeper implications of the negotiations he is employed on are concealed from him and if some ulterior motive is secreted away. Personally I am glad if princes tell me no more than they want me to get on with; I have no desire that what I know should impede or constrain what I have to say. If I have to serve as a means of deception let at least my own conscience be safeguarded. I do not want to be judged so loyal and loving a servant that I would be good for betraying any man. If a man does not keep faith with himself he can pardonably not do so to his master. But these princes will not accept half a man and despise services limited by conditions. There is no other remedy than frankly to state where your boundaries lie: only to Reason should I be a slave – and I can barely do that properly. [C] They are also wrong to require a free man to be as abjectly bound to their service as a man they have bought and made, or whose fate is expressly and individually tied to theirs. [B] Our laws have freed me from great anguish: they have chosen my party for me and have given me a master: all other superior authority is related to the authority of that law; all other obligations are restrained by it. That does not mean that if my affections inclined to the other side that I would immediately lend it my support: our wills and desires are laws unto themselves but our actions must accept law as ordained by the State.

This way of mine of proceeding jars a bit with our customs; it is not made to achieve great effects nor to endure very long. Innocence herself could not have commerce among us without deception, nor do her business without lying. So public employments are not for my game-bag. Whatever my profession requires of me in such matters I provide in the most private way I can. As a boy I was immersed in politics right up to my ears: it succeeded all right, but I quickly struggled free. Subsequently I have often got out of such engagements, rarely accepted them and never begged for them; I keep my back turned towards ambition – not perhaps like oarsmen who actually proceed backwards but in such a way that my not having embarked upon such a career is less due to my resolve than to my good fortune. For there are paths which are less inimical to my taste and more in conformity with my capacities: if Fortune had ever summoned me to follow those paths towards political service and advancement in worldly renown I know that I would have skipped over my reasoned opinions and followed her.

Those who counter what I profess by calling my frankness, my simplicity and my naturalness of manner mere artifice and cunning – prudence rather than goodness, purposive rather than natural, good sense rather than good hap – give me more honour than they take from me. They certainly make my cunning too cunning. If any one of those men would follow me closely about and spy on me, I would declare him the winner if he does not admit that there is no teaching in his sect which could counterfeit my natural way of proceeding and keep up an appearance of such equable liberty along such tortuous paths, nor of maintaining so uncompromising a freedom of action along paths so diverse, and concede that all their striving and cleverness could never bring them to act the same. The way of truth is one and artless: the way of private gain and success in such affairs as we are entrusted with is double, uneven and fortuitous.

I have often seen that counterfeit artful frankness in practice: it is most often unsuccessful. It readily recalls that donkey in Aesop which, to rival the dog, went and gaily threw both its forefeet round its master’s neck: but for such a welcome the wretched donkey received twice as many blows as the dog did caresses.
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[C]
‘Id maxime quemque decet quod est cujusque suum maxime.’
[What best becomes a man is whatever is most peculiarly his own.]

[B] I do not want to deprive wiliness of its rank: that would be to misunderstand the world. I know that it has often proved profitable and
that it feeds and maintains most of the avocations of men. Some vices are legal, just as some deeds are good or pardonable yet illegal. That justice which of itself is natural and universal is ordered differently and more nobly than that other sort of justice, which is [C] particular to one nation and [B] confined by our political necessities. [C]
‘Veri juris germanæque justifiæ solidam et expressam effigiem nullam tenemus; umbra et imaginibus utimur.’
[We possess no expressly sculptured portrait of true Law and absolute Justice: we enjoy mere sketches and shadows];
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[B] so that when Dandamys the Wise heard accounts of the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes, he said that they were in every way great personalities, except for their being too subject to venerating the Law: for, to support Law with its authority, true virtue must doff much of its original vigour; and many vicious deeds are done not merely with the Law’s permission but at its instigation:
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[C]
‘Ex senatusconsultis plebisque scitis scelera exercentur.’
[There are crimes authorized by decrees of the Senate and by plebiscites.] [B] I adopt the ordinary usage which differentiates between things useful and things decent and which leads to certain natural functions, which are not merely useful but necessary, being termed indecent or foul.

But let us get on with exemplifying treachery.

Two pretenders to the kingdom of Thrace had fallen into a quarrel over their claims. The Emperor stopped their coming to blows; but one of them, under the pretext of a meeting to establish loving harmony between them, arranged for his rival to feast in his house; he then had him imprisoned and killed. Justice required that the Romans should avenge this crime, but difficulties lay in doing so the normal way: what the Romans could not legally achieve without the hazard of war they therefore undertook to do by treachery. They could not do so ‘honourably’, but they did so ‘usefully’. A certain Pomponius Flaccus was deemed the very man for the job; he ensnared that other pretender with feigned words and assurances and, instead of the honour and favour which he promised him, he dispatched him to Rome bound hand and foot. Here we have one traitor betraying another, which goes against the usual pattern, for traitors are full of mistrust and it is hard to catch them out by cunning like their own – witness the painful experience we have just had.
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Let whoever will be a Pomponius Flaccus – and there are plenty who
would. In my case my word and my bond, like all the rest, form limbs of our commonwealth: they are best employed in serving the State. I take that as granted. But if I were commanded to assume responsibility for the Palace of Justice and its pleas I would reply: ‘I know nothing at all about such things’; if commanded to oversee a corps of pioneers I would say: ‘I am called to play a more honourable role.’ Similarly if anyone should wish to employ me to tell lies, to be treacherous or to perjure myself in some important cause (not to mention assassinations or poisonings), I would say, ‘If I have robbed anyone or stolen anything, send me rather to the galleys.’ It is licit for a man of honour to speak as the Spartans did when, defeated by Antipater, they were agreeing terms with him: ‘You may command us to accept conditions which are as grievous and as damaging as you please: but you will waste your time if you command us to accept shameful and dishonourable ones.’
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Each of us ought to have sworn to himself the oath which the kings of Egypt made their judges solemnly swear: that as judges they would never stray from their conscience for any command which even they their kings might give.

There are such evident signs of disapprobation and ignominy in those other commissions; the one who gives them to you is condemning you and, if you grasp it aright, is giving it to you as an accusation and a punishment. The more the affairs of State are mended by your exploit, the worse it goes for your own affairs: the better you do, the worse it is. And it would not be for the first time if the very man who set you the task chastised you for doing it – not without some appearance of justice.

[C] In some particular case betrayal of trust may be excusable, but only when used to betray and punish another betrayal of trust. [B] There are plenty of treacherous deeds which have been not only disowned but punished by the very ones on whose behalf they were perpetrated. Who does not know the judgement which Fabricius pronounced against the physician of Pyrrhus?
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But further still, there are cases when the very one who ordered the deed has exacted rigorous revenge on the man whom he employed to do it, disclaiming to have had such authority and power and disowning so abandoned a servility and so cowardly an obedience.

A Russian duke called Jaropelc bribed an Hungarian nobleman to betray the King of Poland, Boleslaus, either by killing him or by providing the Russians with the means of doing him some resounding harm. That Hungarian acted the honest man and devoted himself to the service of that king; he succeeded in becoming one of his advisers – among the most trusted. Taking advantage of this and choosing an opportune moment when his master was absent, he betrayed Wielickzka to the Russians; that great and flourishing city was entirely burnt and sacked by them; not only did they slaughter the entire population of whatever age or sex but also a large number of noblemen from the surrounding area whom he had assembled there with that end in view.

Jaropelc, his vengeance and his anger assuaged – and they were not unjustified, since Boleslaus had greatly injured him in a similar manner – was satiated by the fruits of that treacherous deed. He came to reflect on its naked, simple ugliness, seeing it with a saner vision no longer obscured by passion; he was seized with so great revulsion and remorse that he put out the eyes of the perpetrator, cut off his tongue and gelded him.
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Antigonus persuaded the Argyraspidian guards of his adversary Eumenes (who was their Captain-General) to betray him to him. No sooner did he have him killed after being delivered into his power than he himself desired to become the agent of divine Justice in punishing so loathsome a crime; he gave written orders for those guards to be handed over to the Provincial Governor, expressly commanding him to wipe them out, making their end as horrible as he could. Out of that great multitude not one ever breathed again the air of Macedonia. The greater the service they had done him, the more wicked he judged it to be and the more punishable.

[C] The slave who betrayed the hiding-place of his master Publius Sulpicius was set free, in accordance with the promise of Sylla’s proclamation; but in accordance with State policy, freeman as he was, he was cast down from the Tarpeian Rock. They have such men hanged with their gains slung in a purse round their necks: they first fulfil their secondary, special sort of promise, and then they fulfil the general one, the primary one.
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Mahomet II, jealous of his power in accordance with his family tradition, wanted to rid himself of his brother. He employed one of his officers to do so, who choked him by forcing him to imbibe a great quantity of water all at once. After this was done Mahomet II, to expiate the crime, handed the
murderer over to the dead man’s mother – they were brothers only by their father. She, in his presence, slit open the murderer’s bosom and, hot with passion, fumbled inside, tore out his heart and threw it to the dogs.
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And our own King Clovis had the three servants of Cannacre hanged after they had betrayed their master: yet he had bribed them to do so. [B] Even worthless men find it pleasant, once they have profited from a vicious deed, to go and quite safely fasten upon it some mark of goodness and of justice, as though their conscience wished to make up for it and put things right. [C] To which may be added the fact that the agents of such horrific wickedness are a reproach to them: so they seek through their deaths to smother any knowledge witnessing to such conspiracies.

[B] Now even if it should happen that you do get a reward so as not to deprive
raison d’état
of so extreme and desperate a remedy, the one who rewards you will not fail to regard you as a man accursed and abominable – unless that is he is one himself. And he will think you a bigger traitor than does the man you betrayed; for he proves the malevolence of your heart at the touchstone of your hands, with no possible denial or objection. He exploits you just as we do those degraded men, Public Executioners of High Justice – an office as useful as it is shameful.

Apart from the baseness of such commissions, there is the prostitution of your conscience. Since the daughter of Sejanus was a virgin and therefore not punishable by death according to a specific judicial formula in Rome, in order to have scope to apply the law she was raped by the hangman before he strangled her: not merely his hand but his mind was the slave of the interests of State.
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