I have set myself to write on mercy, Nero Caesar, that I might in a manner serve as a mirror and show you to yourself as one about to arrive at the greatest pleasure of all. For although the true reward of good deeds is to have done them, and no prize worthy of the virtues lies outside the virtues themselves, still it is a delight to inspect and walk all round a good conscience, then to cast one’s eyes upon this vast multitude — discordant, factious, ungovernable, as ready to riot for another’s ruin as for its own should it break this yoke — and to speak thus with oneself: "Is it I, of all mortals, who have found favor and been chosen to act on earth in the gods’ stead? I am the arbiter of life and death for the nations; what lot and standing each man holds is laid in my hand; what Fortune wills to grant each mortal she pronounces through my mouth; from our answer peoples and cities take their grounds for rejoicing; no part anywhere flourishes save by my will and favor; these so many thousands of swords, which my peace holds in check, will be drawn at my nod; which nations are to be uprooted, which transported, which granted liberty, which stripped of it, which kings are to become slaves and whose heads are to be ringed with the royal honor, which cities are to fall and which to rise — this is mine to decree. In so vast a command over things, no anger has driven me to unjust punishments, no youthful impulse, no recklessness of men and contumacy — which has often wiped patience even from the most tranquil breasts — no, nor that dread relish for displaying power through terror, grim but frequent in great empires. With me the sword is sheathed, nay buried, and the cheapest blood is spared with the utmost thrift; no one, though he lack all else, fails of favor with me under the name of man. Severity I keep hidden, but mercy ready to hand; I keep watch on myself as though I were to render account to the laws, which I have summoned out of neglect and darkness into the light. By one man’s first youth I have been moved, by another’s last; one I have pardoned for his rank, another for his lowliness; whenever I found no ground for pity, I spared myself. Today I stand ready, if the immortal gods should demand a reckoning of me, to render up the human race entire." This you can boldly proclaim, Caesar — that all which has come into your trust and keeping is held safe, that nothing is taken from the commonwealth by you, whether by force or by stealth. You have coveted a praise most rare and granted to no princeps before now: innocence. Your labor is not wasted, nor has that singular goodness of yours met with thankless or grudging appraisers. Gratitude is rendered you; no single man was ever so dear to a single man as you are to the Roman people, their great and lasting good. But you have laid upon yourself a mighty burden: no one now talks of the deified Augustus, nor of the early days of Tiberius Caesar, nor seeks outside you a model for you to wish to imitate; your principate is gauged by its own foretaste. This would have been hard had that goodness of yours not been natural to you but taken up for the occasion. For no one can wear a mask for long, and feigned things quickly fall back into their own nature; but those that have truth beneath them, and that, so to speak, grow up out of solid ground, with time itself advance into something greater and better. The Roman people were venturing a great hazard while it was uncertain which way that noble nature of yours would turn; now the public prayers are safe. For there is no danger that a sudden forgetting of yourself should seize you. Too much good fortune does indeed make men greedy, and desires are never so temperate as to halt at what has come to them; men step from great things to greater, and clasp the most outrageous hopes once they have won the unhoped-for; yet from all your citizens now this confession too is wrung — that they are happy, and that nothing can now be added to these blessings save that they be everlasting. Many things force them to this confession, the slowest of any in man: a deep, abounding security, a justice set above all wrong; before their eyes hovers the most joyful form of a commonwealth, which lacks nothing of the fullest liberty save the license to perish. But above all an equal admiration of your mercy has reached greatest and lowest alike; for of other goods each man feels or expects more or less in proportion to his own fortune, but from mercy all hope the same; nor is there anyone so well pleased with his own innocence that he does not rejoice that mercy stands within sight, ready for human errors.

I know there are some who think mercy props up every worst man, since it is superfluous except after a crime, and this virtue alone goes idle among the innocent. But first of all, just as the use of medicine is honored among the sick and yet has its honor among the healthy too, so mercy, though it is the deserving of punishment who invoke it, the innocent also revere. Next, it has its place even in the person of the innocent, since at times fortune stands in the place of fault; nor does mercy succor innocence only, but often virtue, since by the condition of the times certain deeds fall out which might be punished though praised. Add that a great part of mankind is such as could return to innocence if the penalty were remitted. Yet it is not fitting to pardon at large; for where the line between bad and good is removed, confusion follows and an outbreak of vices; therefore a moderation must be applied that knows how to tell the curable natures from the desperate. One must keep a mercy neither promiscuous and common nor cut short; for to pardon all is as cruel as to pardon none. We ought to hold the mean; but since a right tempering is hard, whatever is going to be more than fair, let it weigh down on the more humane side.

But these things will be better said in their own place. Now I shall divide this whole matter into three parts. The first will be of remission; the second, which is to show the nature and habit of mercy — for since there are certain vices that counterfeit the virtues, they cannot be told apart unless you have stamped on them the marks by which they are known; in the third place we shall ask how the mind is led to this virtue, how it makes it firm and makes it its own by use. That no virtue suits man better, since none is more humane, must be agreed not only among us, who would have man seen as a social animal born for the common good, but even among those who give man over to pleasure, whose every word and deed looks to their own advantage; for if he seeks calm and leisure, he has lit in this virtue upon something native to his nature, which loves peace and holds back the hands. Yet of all men mercy befits none more than a king or princeps. For great strength is then a glory and an ornament if its power is salutary; for a force strong only to harm is a plague. That man’s greatness alone is stable and well-founded whom all know to be as far above them as he is for them, whose care they daily find keeping watch over the safety of each and all, at whose coming they do not scatter as though some evil or noxious creature had darted from its lair, but as to a bright and beneficent star they vie to fly. Most ready to throw themselves before assassins’ blades for him, and to lay their bodies beneath if a road to his safety must be built through human slaughter, they wall his sleep with nightly watches, fling themselves about his flanks to defend them, and set themselves against the perils that rush upon him. This concord of peoples and cities in so protecting and loving their kings, in flinging away themselves and their own wherever the ruler’s safety has called, is not without reason; nor is it self-contempt or madness when so many thousands take the sword for one head and ransom one life with many deaths — sometimes the life of an old and feeble man. As the whole body is the servant of the mind, and though it is so much larger and so much more splendid, while the mind stays hidden, thin, and uncertain in what seat it lurks, yet the hands, feet, and eyes do its business, this skin guards it, at its bidding we lie still or run about restless; when it has commanded — if it is a grasping master — we ransack the sea for gain, if an ambitious one, long since we have thrust our right hand into the flames or of our own will leapt into the earth — so this measureless multitude, ringed about one soul, is ruled by its breath and bent by its reason, and would crush and break itself by its own strength were it not held up by counsel.

While the king is safe, all keep one mind; once he is lost, they break their faith. This fall will be the ruin of the Roman peace, this will drive so great a people’s fortune into collapse; this people will be clear of that danger just so long as it knows how to bear the reins — which if ever it shall break, or, once they are shaken off by some chance, shall not suffer to be set back upon it, then this unity and this fabric of the greatest empire will spring apart into many pieces, and the end of ruling for this city will be the very end of obeying. Therefore it is no wonder that princes and kings, and the guardians of the public order by whatever other name they go, are loved beyond even private ties; for if to sound men public things stand above private, it follows that he too is dearer toward whom the commonwealth turns itself. For long ago Caesar so clothed himself in the commonwealth that neither could be drawn off without the ruin of both; for he needs strength, and it needs a head.

My discourse seems to have drawn rather far from its purpose, but by Hercules it presses the very point. For if — as it has so far been gathering — you are the mind of your commonwealth and it your body, you see, I think, how necessary mercy is; for you spare yourself when you seem to spare another. And so even citizens to be condemned are to be spared, no otherwise than failing limbs, and if ever there is need to let blood, the hand must be held back, lest it cut deeper than necessity asks. Mercy, then, as I was saying, is according to nature for all men indeed, yet most becoming to commanders, the more it has among them to preserve, and in the greater field it shows. For how little harm does a private man’s cruelty do! The savagery of princes is war. And since among the virtues there is concord, and none is better or more honorable than another, still one is fitter for certain persons. Greatness of soul becomes any mortal, even him below whom there is nothing; for what is greater or braver than to beat back ill fortune? Yet this greatness of soul has freer room in good fortune, and is better seen on the tribunal than on the level ground. Mercy, into whatever house it has come, will render it happy and tranquil, but in a palace, the rarer it is, the more wonderful. For what is more worth the telling than that a man whose anger nothing withstands, to whose graver sentence even those who perish assent, whom no one will interrupt — nay, if he has blazed up too hotly, no one will even plead against it — should lay a hand upon himself and use his power for the better and gentler course, thinking this very thought: "To kill against the law anyone can; to save, no one but I"? A great fortune becomes a great soul, which, unless it has lifted itself up to that fortune and stood higher than it, drags it too down to the ground; but it is the property of a great soul to be calm and tranquil and to look down from above on injuries and affronts. It is womanish to rave in anger; it belongs to beasts, and not the noble ones, to gnaw and press the fallen. Elephants and lions pass by what they have struck down; dogged persistence is the ignoble creature’s. Savage and inexorable anger does not become a king, for he stands not much above the man with whom he makes himself level by being angry; but if he grants life, if he grants standing to men in peril and deserving to lose it, he does what is permitted to none but the master of affairs; for life is taken even from a superior, never given save to an inferior. To save is the property of a surpassing fortune, which is never more to be looked up to than when it has fallen to it to be able to do what the gods do, by whose benefit we are brought into the light, the good as much as the bad. So let the princeps, laying claim to the mind of the gods, gladly look upon some of his citizens because they are useful and good, and leave the rest to make up the number; let him be glad that some exist, and endure that others do.

Consider: in this city, where the throng, pouring without break through its widest streets, is crushed whenever something has blocked it to slow its course like a rushing torrent, where the seats of three theatres are demanded at one time, where is consumed whatever is ploughed in all the lands — consider how great the solitude and desolation would be if nothing were left but what a severe judge would acquit. How few of the examining magistrates are there who are not caught by the very law under which they hold the inquiry? How few accusers are clear of fault? And I do not know whether anyone is harder to grant a pardon than he who has more than once deserved to seek one. We have all sinned, some in graver things, some in lighter, some of set purpose, some driven by chance or swept off by another’s wickedness; some of us have stood too little bravely in good resolves, and lost our innocence unwilling and still clutching it; nor have we merely transgressed, but to the very end of our days we shall transgress. Even if anyone has now so cleansed his mind that nothing can any longer trouble it or deceive it, still it is by sinning that he has come to innocence.

Since I have made mention of the gods, I shall set up for the princeps the best pattern, to which he should be shaped: that he wish himself to be toward his citizens such as he would wish the gods toward himself. Is it then expedient to have divinities inexorable to sins and errors, expedient that they be hostile to the point of utter ruin? And what king will be safe whose limbs the soothsayers shall not have to gather up? But if the gods, placable and fair, do not at once pursue the misdeeds of the powerful with thunderbolts, how much fairer is it that a man set over men wield his command with a mild spirit, and consider which state of the world is more pleasing and fairer to the eye — a clear and pure day, or one in which all is shaken with crash upon crash and fires flash here and there? And yet the face of a quiet and orderly rule is none other than that of a clear and shining sky. A cruel reign is troubled and dark with shadows, and amid men who tremble and start at a sudden sound not even he is unshaken who throws all into disorder. Private men are more readily forgiven for avenging themselves stubbornly; for they can be hurt, and their pain springs from the wrong; and besides they fear contempt, and not to have paid back those who hurt them looks like weakness, not mercy. But he for whom revenge is easy wins, by letting it go, the sure praise of gentleness. For those set in a low place it is freer to ply the hand, to quarrel, to run into a brawl and indulge the bent of one’s anger; among equals the blows are light; but in a king even an outcry and the intemperance of words is beneath his majesty.

You think it a hard thing that the freedom of speech is snatched from kings, which the humblest possess. "That," you say, "is slavery, not empire." What? Do you not find that it is empire for us, slavery for you? Other is the condition of those who lie hidden in a crowd they never rise above, whose very virtues must struggle long to appear and whose vices have their darkness; your deeds and words rumor catches up, and therefore none have more to care what fame they bear than those who, whatever they have earned, are going to have a great one. How many things are forbidden you, which are permitted to us by your gift! I can walk alone in any quarter of the city without fear, though no companion follow, though there be none at home, no sword at my side; you must live armed amid your own peace. You cannot stray from your fortune; it besets you, and wherever you come down it follows with great pomp. This is the slavery of the highest greatness — not to be able to grow smaller; but this necessity you share with the gods. For them too the heaven holds bound, nor is it more granted them to come down than it is safe for you; you are fixed to your pinnacle. Our stirrings few feel; we may come forth and withdraw and change our dress without the public’s knowing; you can no more lie hidden than the sun. Much light is about you, all eyes are turned upon it. You think you come forth? You rise. You cannot speak but that the nations everywhere take up your voice; you cannot be angry but that all things tremble, since you can crush no one without all that is around him being shaken. As thunderbolts fall to the peril of few, to the fear of all, so the chastisements of great powers terrify more widely than they harm — and not without cause; for in one who can do all, men reckon not how much he has done, but how much he may do. Add now that, while endurance of the injuries he has taken makes a private man readier to take more, for kings a surer safety comes of gentleness, because frequent vengeance crushes the hatred of a few but goads that of all. The will to rage ought to fail before the cause does; else, just as trees lopped short sprout again with many a branch, and many kinds of plant are cut back that they may rise the thicker, so a king’s cruelty swells the number of his enemies by removing them; for the parents and children of the slain, and their kinsmen and friends, step into each one’s place.

How true this is, I would have an example from your own house remind you. The deified Augustus was a mild princeps, if one begins to reckon him from his principate; in the days of the common commonwealth he did indeed wield the sword. When he was of the age you now are, having passed his eighteenth year, he had already hidden daggers in the bosom of friends, had already by ambush sought the side of Mark Antony the consul, had already been a colleague in proscription. But when he had passed his fortieth year and was staying in Gaul, information was laid before him that Lucius Cinna, a man of dull wit, was framing a plot against him; it was told both where and when and how he meant to make the attempt; one of the accomplices was the informer. He resolved to avenge himself on the man, and ordered a council of friends to be called. The night was restless for him as he turned over that a noble youth — innocent of all but this — the grandson of Gnaeus Pompey, was to be condemned; he could no longer bring himself to kill one man, he for whom Mark Antony had dictated the edict of proscription over dinner. Groaning, he let fall now one utterance, now another, each at war with the last: "What then? Shall I let my own assassin walk about secure while I am in dread? Shall he go unpunished — who sought my head vainly through so many civil wars, unharmed through so many sea-fights, so many land-battles, and now, when peace has been won by land and sea, has resolved not to kill but to sacrifice me?" (for it had been settled to set upon him as he sacrificed). Then, after an interval of silence, he raged at himself in a far louder voice than at Cinna: "Why do you live, if it is to the interest of so many that you perish? What end will there be of punishments, of blood? I am a head set out for noble striplings to whet their swords on; life is not worth so much, if to keep me from perishing so many must be destroyed." At last his wife Livia broke in upon him: "Will you," she said, "admit a woman’s counsel? Do what physicians do, who, when the usual remedies do not answer, try their contraries. By severity you have so far profited nothing; Salvidienus was followed by Lepidus, Lepidus by Murena, Murena by Caepio, Caepio by Egnatius, to say nothing of the others whom it shames us to have dared so much. Now try how clemency answers you; pardon Lucius Cinna. He is caught; now he can do you no harm, and he can do your fame good." Glad to have found an advocate, he gave his wife thanks, ordered word sent at once to the friends he had summoned to council, and called Cinna alone to him; and dismissing everyone from the chamber and ordering a second chair set for Cinna, he said: "This first I ask of you: that you not break in while I speak, that you not cry out in the middle of my words; you shall be given free time to speak. I, Cinna, when I had found you in the enemy’s camp — made my enemy not only but born so — saved you and made over to you the whole of your patrimony. Today you are so prosperous and so rich that the conquered are envied by their conquerors. When you sought a priesthood I gave it you, passing over many whose fathers had soldiered with me; though I have so deserved of you, you have resolved to kill me." When at this word he cried out that such madness was far from him: "You do not keep faith, Cinna," he said; "it was agreed you should not break in. You are preparing, I say, to kill me"; and he added the place, the confederates, the day, the order of the ambush, to whom the steel had been entrusted. And when he saw him fixed in dismay and now silent, not by the compact but from conscience: "With what intent," he said, "do you do this? That you yourself may be princeps? By Hercules, it goes ill with the Roman people if nothing but I stands in the way of your ruling. You cannot guard your own house; lately in a private suit you were beaten by a freedman’s influence; so plainly there is nothing easier for you than to call Caesar into court. I give way: if I alone block your hopes, will Paulus and Fabius Maximus and the Cossi and the Servilii bear with you, and so great a column of nobles who flaunt no empty names but are men that do honor to their own ancestral images?" Not to take up a great part of the volume by repeating his whole speech (for it is agreed he spoke more than two hours, drawing out this penalty with which alone he meant to be content): "Your life, Cinna," he said, "I give you a second time — before to an enemy, now to a plotter and parricide. From this day let friendship begin between us; let us strive which of us keeps the better faith — I in having given you your life, or you in owing it." After this he gave him, unasked, the consulship, complaining that he did not dare to stand for it. He had him for his most friendly and most faithful friend, was his sole heir, and was never again the mark of any plot from anyone.

Your great-great-grandfather spared the conquered; for had he not spared them, over whom would he have ruled? Sallustius and the Cocceii and the Deillii and the whole cohort of the first admission he enrolled from his adversaries’ camp; already he owed to his own mercy the Domitii, the Messalae, the Asinii, the Cicerones — whatever was the flower of the state. How long he suffered Lepidus himself to live! For many years he bore with his keeping the insignia of a princeps, and let the office of pontifex maximus pass to himself only when the man was dead; for he chose to have it called an honor rather than a spoil. This mercy led him to safety and security; this made him welcome and well-favored, though he had laid his hand on the necks of a Roman people not yet broken in; this even today secures him a fame that scarcely serves princes while they live. We believe him a god, and not because we are bidden to; we confess that Augustus was a good princeps, that the name of parent well suited him, for no other reason than that even his own affronts — which are wont to be bitterer to princes than injuries — he prosecuted with no cruelty; that he laughed at the abusive things said of him; that he plainly paid a penalty himself when he exacted one; that those whom he had condemned for adultery with his daughter, so far from killing, he gave passports on dismissing them, that they might be the safer. This is to pardon: to know that there will be many who will be born on your side and will gratify you with another’s blood — not only to grant safety, but to guarantee it.

These things Augustus did as an old man, or with his years already sloping into age; in his youth he was hot, blazed with anger, did much on which he turned his eyes back unwilling. No one will dare to set the deified Augustus against your gentleness, even were he to bring an old age more than ripe into contest with the years of your youth; granted he was moderate and merciful — yes, after the sea of Actium was stained with Roman blood, after the fleets, his own and others’, were broken in Sicily, after the Perusine altars and the proscriptions. But I, for my part, do not call weary cruelty mercy. This, Caesar, is the true mercy that you display, which began not from penitence for savagery, which has no stain, which has never shed a citizen’s blood; this, in the greatest power, is the truest temperance of soul and a love of the human race as of oneself — not corrupted by any greed, by any rashness of nature, by the examples of earlier princes, into testing by trial how much is permitted against one’s own citizens, but blunting the edge of its own command. You have furnished, Caesar, a state unbloodied; and this, on which you have gloried with a great soul — that you have sent forth not one drop of human blood in the whole world — is the greater and more wonderful in that the sword was never committed to anyone so early. Mercy, then, makes men not only more honorable but safer, and is at once the ornament of empires and their surest preservation. For what is the reason why kings have grown old and handed down their realms to children and grandchildren, while a tyrant’s power is a thing accursed and brief? What lies between a tyrant and a king — for the show of fortune and the license is the same — except that tyrants are savage for pleasure, kings only for cause and from necessity?

"What then? Do not kings too commonly kill?" But only when public advantage persuades it; to tyrants savagery is dear at heart. Now a tyrant differs from a king in deeds, not in name; for both Dionysius the Elder can rightly and deservedly be preferred to many kings, and what forbids that Lucius Sulla be called a tyrant, for whom only the lack of enemies set an end to killing? Granted he came down from his dictatorship and gave himself back to the toga, yet what tyrant ever drank human blood so greedily as he who ordered seven thousand Roman citizens to be butchered, and who, sitting hard by at the temple of Bellona and hearing the outcry of so many thousands groaning under the sword, said to the terrified senate: "Let us about our business, conscript fathers; a few seditious men are being killed by my order"? In this he did not lie; to Sulla they seemed few. But of Sulla hereafter, when we come to ask how one should be angry with enemies — above all if citizens, torn from the same body, have gone over to the enemy’s name; meanwhile this, which I was saying: mercy makes the breach between king and tyrant great, though each alike is walled about with arms. But the one has arms which he uses for the bulwark of peace, the other to keep down great hatreds by great fear — and not even those hands to which he has trusted himself does he look upon without dread. He is driven by contraries into contraries; for since he is hated because he is feared, he wishes to be feared because he is hated, and uses that accursed verse which has cast many headlong — "Let them hate, so they fear" — ignorant how great a madness arises once hatreds have grown past measure. For tempered fear restrains men’s minds; but unremitting and keen fear, bringing them to the brink, rouses the prostrate to boldness and urges them to try everything. So a line strung with feathers may pen wild beasts; but let a horseman behind them assail those same beasts with darts, they will try flight through the very things they fled, and trample their terror underfoot. The keenest courage is that which last necessity hammers out. Fear ought to leave something secure, and hold out much more of hope than of peril; otherwise, when one who keeps still is threatened with as much as the bold, it becomes a pleasure to rush on dangers and squander a life not one’s own.

To a placid and tranquil king his own auxiliaries are faithful, as men he uses for the common safety, and the soldier takes pride (for he sees himself spending his pains on the public security) and bears every toil gladly, a parent’s guardian; but that bitter and bloodthirsty one his own escort must needs find a burden. No one can have ministers of good and faithful will whom he uses as on the rack and on irons made ready for death, to whom he flings men no otherwise than to beasts — himself more wretched and anxious than all the accused, since he fears men and gods as witnesses and avengers of his crimes, and is brought to such a pass that he cannot change his ways. For cruelty has this among its other and worst evils: one must persist in it, and no way back to better things lies open; for crimes must be guarded by crimes. And what is unhappier than the man for whom it is now necessary to be wicked? O pitiable creature — to himself, at least! For others it would be a sin to pity him, who has wielded power by slaughter and plunder, who has made all things suspect to himself, abroad and at home alike, who, fearing arms, flees to arms, trusting neither the faith of friends nor the love of his children; who, when he has looked round on what he has done and what he means to do, and has laid open a conscience full of crimes and torments, often fears death, more often longs for it, more hateful to himself than to those who serve him. On the contrary, the man whose care is for the whole, who guards some things more, some less, who nourishes no part of the commonwealth but as his own, leaning toward the gentler course, and, even when chastisement is of use, showing how unwillingly he sets his hand to the harsh remedy — in whose mind is nothing hostile, nothing savage, who wields his power calmly and to good purpose, longing to win his citizens’ approval for his commands, holding himself happy enough if he has made his fortune the public’s, affable in speech, easy of access and approach, lovable in the look that most binds peoples to him, ready to meet fair desires and not bitter even to the unfair — he is loved, defended, worshiped by the whole state. Men say of him in secret the same they say in the open. They long to raise children, and the barrenness that public ills had decreed is unbarred; each man doubts not that he will deserve well of his own children, to whom he has shown such an age. This princeps, safe by his own benefaction, needs no guards; he keeps arms for ornament.

What, then, is his office? That of good parents, who are wont to chide their children now coaxingly, now with threats, and at times to admonish even with blows. Does anyone in his senses disinherit a son at the first offense? Unless great and many wrongs have overcome his patience, unless what he fears is more than what he condemns, he does not come to the decisive pen; he tries many things first, to call back a doubtful nature now set in a worse place; once it is given up for lost, he tries the last resorts. No one reaches the exacting of punishments but he who has used up the remedies. What a parent must do, the princeps too must do, whom we have called Father of his Country, led by no empty flattery. For the other surnames were given for honor: we have called men the Great and the Fortunate and the August, and have heaped upon ambitious majesty whatever titles we could, paying these as tribute to such men; but Father of his Country we named him, that he might know there is given him a father’s power, which is the most temperate of all, taking thought for the children and setting its own concerns after theirs. Slow let a father be to cut off his own limbs, and, even when he has cut them off, eager to call them back, and in the cutting let him groan, having wavered much and long; for he is close to condemning gladly who condemns quickly; close to punishing unjustly who punishes too much.

Tricho, a Roman knight, within our own memory, because he had killed his son with floggings, the people stabbed with their styluses in the forum; scarcely did the authority of Augustus Caesar wrest him from the hands of fathers and sons alike, all set against him. Tarius, who had condemned his son when, after a trial, he was caught in a plot of parricide, everyone looked up to, because, content with exile — and a soft exile — he confined the parricide at Massilia and furnished him as much yearly as he had been wont to furnish him while guiltless; this liberality brought it about that, in a state where a patron is never lacking to the worse sort, no one doubted that the accused had been justly condemned, since the father who could not hate him had been able to condemn him. By this very example I shall give you one whom you may match, a good princeps against a good father. When Tarius was about to try his son, he called Caesar Augustus into his council; Caesar came to private household gods, sat down, was a part of another man’s council, did not say: "No, rather let him come to my house" — for had that been done, the inquiry would have been Caesar’s, not the father’s. The case heard and everything sifted — both what the young man had said for himself and the charges by which he was arraigned — he asked that each write down his own sentence, lest that of all become what had been Caesar’s; then, before the tablets were opened, he swore that he would not enter upon the inheritance of Tarius, a man of means. Someone will say: "With a petty soul he feared lest he seem to wish to open a place for his own hope by the son’s condemnation." I judge otherwise; any of us ought to have had confidence enough, against malignant opinions, in a good conscience, but princes must grant much even to report. He swore he would not enter on the inheritance. Tarius indeed on the same day lost a second heir too, but Caesar bought the freedom of his own verdict; and after he had proved his severity disinterested — which a princeps must always see to — he said the son should be banished to wherever should seem good to the father. He decreed no sack, no serpents, no prison, mindful not of the one on whom he was sentencing but of him in whose council he sat: he said a father ought to be content with the mildest kind of penalty in the case of a son, a young stripling driven into that crime, in which — what came next to innocence — he had borne himself timidly; the son must be removed from the city and from his father’s eyes.

O man worthy that fathers should call him into their council! Worthy to be set down co-heir with innocent children! This mercy becomes a princeps; wherever he has come, let him make all things gentler. Let no one be so cheap to a king that the king does not feel his perishing, whatever part of the empire he be. For great commands let us look to smaller ones for our example. There is not one kind of ruling: the princeps rules his citizens, the father his children, the teacher his pupils, the tribune or centurion his soldiers. Will not that man be thought the worst of fathers who curbs his children with ceaseless blows for the lightest of causes? And which teacher is the worthier of the liberal studies — he who will flay his pupils if their memory has failed them or if an eye too little nimble in reading has stuck, or he who would rather mend and teach by admonition and a sense of shame? Give me a savage tribune or centurion: he will make deserters — who are nonetheless pardoned. Is it then fair that a man be commanded more harshly and hardly than dumb animals are? And yet a horse the master skilled in breaking does not terrify with frequent blows; for it will turn skittish and stubborn unless you soothe it with a coaxing touch. The same does that huntsman, both he who trains the whelps to follow the trail and he who uses the now-practiced hounds to start or run down the game: he neither threatens them often (for he will crush their spirits, and whatever is of good breed will be ground small by a degenerate trembling) nor grants them the license to roam and stray at large. Add to these the slower-going beasts of burden, which, though born to insult and miseries, are yet, by too much savagery, driven to shake off the yoke.

No animal is more fractious, none to be handled with greater art, than man; none to be more spared. For what is more foolish than to blush to vent one’s wrath on beasts of burden and on dogs, while man is in the worst condition under man? We treat diseases and are not angry; and yet this too is a disease of the mind: it asks a soft medicine, and a healer not at all hostile to the sick. It is a bad physician who despairs, the better not to cure: the same he ought to do, in those whose mind is afflicted, to whom the safety of all is handed over — not to throw hope away quickly, nor pronounce the mortal signs; let him wrestle with the vices, resist, reproach some with their disease, beguile some with a gentle cure, the quicker and better to heal them by the cheating remedies; let the princeps take care not only for health but for an honorable scar. A king has no glory from a savage chastisement (for who doubts that he can?), but on the contrary the greatest, if he holds in his force, if he has snatched many from another’s anger and spent his own on none.

To command slaves with moderation is a praise. Even with a chattel one must weigh, not how much it may suffer unpunished, but how much the nature of the just and good allows you — a nature that bids you spare even captives and those bought with a price. How much more justly does it bid that free men, freeborn, honorable, be not abused as chattels but treated as those whom you outstrip in degree, and whose service has not been handed to you but their guardianship. Slaves may flee to the statue for asylum; though against a slave all things are permitted, there is something which the common law of living things forbids to be permitted against a man. Who did not hate Vedius Pollio worse than his own slaves did, because he fattened his lampreys on human blood and ordered those who had given him any offense to be flung into the pond of — what else to call them? — serpents? O man worthy of a thousand deaths, whether he threw slaves to be devoured by the lampreys he meant to eat, or fed those lampreys only that he might feed them so! As cruel masters are pointed at through the whole state, and are hateful and detestable, so the wrong of kings reaches wider, and their infamy and hatred is handed down through the ages; how much better it had been not to be born than to be counted among those born for the public harm!

No one will be able to think out anything more becoming to a ruler than mercy, in whatever manner and by whatever right he be set over the rest. The fairer and more magnificent we shall confess it to be, the greater the power in which it is shown — a power which ought not to be harmful, if it is framed to the law of nature. For nature devised the king, as one may learn both from other animals and from the bees; whose king has the most ample cell, in the midmost and safest place; besides, he is exempt from labor, an exactor of others’ labor, and, the king once lost, the whole disperses; nor do they ever brook more than one, and they seek the better by combat; besides, the king’s form is striking, unlike the rest in both size and sheen. But in this above all is he marked off: bees are the most prone to anger and, for the measure of their bodies, the most pugnacious, and leave their stings in the wound; the king himself is without a sting. Nature would not have him savage, nor have him seek a vengeance that would cost dear, and took away his weapon and left his anger unarmed. This is a mighty pattern for great kings; for it is nature’s way to school herself in small things and to scatter the least proofs of the vastest matters. Let us be ashamed not to draw our manners from these tiny creatures, since a man’s mind ought to be the more measured the more violently it can harm. Would that the same law held for man, and that his anger were broken together with its weapon, and it were not permitted to harm more than once, nor to work out hatreds by another’s strength! For fury would tire easily, if it satisfied itself by itself and poured out its force at the risk of death. But not even now is its course safe; for it must fear just as much as it wished to be feared, and watch the hands of all, and reckon itself a mark even at the hour when it is not being stalked, and hold no moment free of fear. Does anyone bear to lead such a life, when he might handle the salutary right of power harmless to others, and for that very reason secure, with all men glad? For he is mistaken, whoever thinks a king is safe there where nothing is safe from the king; security must be bargained for with mutual security. There is no need to raise citadels high upon the heights, nor to wall up hills steep to climb, nor to cut away the flanks of mountains, to hedge oneself with manifold walls and towers: mercy will keep a king safe in the open. There is one impregnable rampart — the love of citizens. What is fairer than to live with all men wishing it, and offering up their vows under no watcher? That, if his health has tottered a little, men’s hope is roused and not their fear? That nothing is so precious to anyone that he would not gladly exchange it for the safety of his protector? O surely that man, whose lot it is that he owes it to himself, too, to live; who by ceaseless proofs of his goodness has shown that the commonwealth is not his but he the commonwealth’s. Who would dare to frame any peril for this man? Who would not wish, if he could, to turn even ill fortune away from him, under whom justice, peace, chastity, security, dignity flourish, under whom a wealthy state abounds in a plenty of every good? Nor does it look upon its ruler with any other mind than that with which, if the immortal gods should grant the power of seeing them, we should gaze, revering and worshiping. But what of it? Does not he hold the place next to them who bears himself after the gods’ nature, beneficent and bountiful and powerful for the better? This it befits him to aspire to, this to imitate: to be held the greatest in such a way that he be at once held the best.

From two causes a princeps is wont to punish: if he avenges either himself or another. I shall first treat of that part which concerns himself; for it is harder to keep measure where vengeance is owed to one’s own pain than where it is owed to example. It is needless in this place to warn him not to believe lightly, to shake out the truth, to favor innocence, and to know — that it may appear — that the case of the man in peril is no less at stake than the judge’s; for this belongs to justice, not to mercy. Now we urge him that, when manifestly hurt, he keep his mind in his own power, and remit the penalty if he safely can, or, if not, temper it, and be far more easily entreated in his own wrongs than in others’. For just as he is not great-souled who is liberal with another’s goods, but he who gives to another what he takes from himself, so I will call merciful not the man easy-handed in another’s pain, but him who, though harried by his own goads, does not leap forth, who grasps that it is the mark of a great soul to bear injuries at the height of power, and that nothing is more glorious than a princeps wronged with impunity.

Vengeance is wont to furnish two things: either it brings solace to him who has taken the wrong, or it brings security for the time to come. A princeps’ fortune is too great to need solace, and his power too plain to seek for itself, by another’s hurt, a name for strength. This I say when he has been attacked and outraged by inferiors; for if he sees beneath him men he once held as equals, he is sufficiently avenged. A king is killed even by a slave, by a serpent, by an arrow; but no one has saved a man save one greater than the man he saved. Let him therefore use with high spirit so great a gift of the gods, the power of granting and taking away life. Over those especially whom he knows to have once held a height level with his own, having won this arbitration he has filled his vengeance full and accomplished as much as was enough for a true penalty; for he has lost his life who owes it, and whoever, hurled down from on high to his enemy’s feet, has waited on another’s verdict over his head and kingdom, lives to the glory of his preserver, and by surviving confers more on that man’s name than if he had been taken out of sight. For he is a standing spectacle of another’s worth; in a triumph he would have passed by quickly. But if his kingdom too could safely be left with him and set back where it had fallen from, the praise of the man rises with a vast increase, who was content to take from a conquered king nothing but glory. This is to triumph even over one’s own victory, and to bear witness that among the conquered he found nothing worthy of the conqueror. With citizens, and with the obscure and lowly, one must deal the more moderately the less it is worth to have crushed them. Some you would gladly spare; from avenging yourself on some you would turn in disdain, and the hand must be drawn back no otherwise than from small creatures that foul you in the crushing; but with those who are to be saved or punished before the eyes of the state, one must use the occasion for a mercy that is marked and seen.

Let us pass to the wrongs of others, in avenging which the law has pursued these three ends, which a princeps too ought to pursue: either to mend the man he punishes, or by his penalty to make the rest better, or, the bad removed, that the rest may live more secure. The men themselves you will mend more easily with a lighter penalty; for he lives more warily who has something sound still left him. No one spares a standing once lost; it is a kind of impunity to have no room left for punishment. But the morals of a state are better set right by sparing in chastisement; for a multitude of offenders makes a habit of offending, and the brand is the less heavy which a crowd of condemnations lightens, and severity, whose greatest remedy is to be rare, loses its authority by constant use. A princeps establishes good morals for his state and washes its vices away if he is patient of them — not as though he approved, but as though he came to the chastising unwilling and with great torment. The very mercy of the ruler makes men ashamed to sin; a penalty appointed by a gentle man seems far the heavier.

Besides, you will see that those things are often committed which are often avenged. Your father within a five-year span sewed up more men in the sack than we have heard were sewn up in all the ages before. Far less did children dare to venture the ultimate impiety so long as the crime was without a law. For with the highest prudence those loftiest men, most versed in the nature of things, chose to pass a crime by as a thing incredible and set beyond all daring, rather than, by avenging it, to show that it could be done; and so parricides began with the law, and the penalty showed them the deed: filial duty stood in the worst case once we saw the sacks more often than the crosses. In a state where men are rarely punished, a consensus toward innocence is formed, and it is indulged as a public good. Let a state believe itself innocent, and it will be; it will be the angrier at those who break from the common temperance, if it sees they are few. It is dangerous, believe me, to show a state how many the bad are.

A motion was once made in the senate, that slaves be marked off from the free by their dress; then it appeared how great a danger hung over us, if our slaves should begin to count us. Know that the same is to be feared if no one is pardoned: it will soon appear by how much the worse part of the state outweighs the rest. Many punishments are no less disgraceful to a princeps than many funerals to a physician; the one who rules more loosely is the better obeyed. By nature the human mind is contumacious, and strains toward the contrary and the steep, and follows more readily than it is led; and as generous and noble horses are better managed with an easy rein, so a voluntary innocence follows mercy by its own impulse, and the state holds it worth keeping for itself. More, then, is gained by this road.

Cruelty is an evil least human, and unworthy of so mild a spirit; it is a beast’s madness to take joy in blood and wounds and, throwing off the man, to cross over into a forest creature. For what difference is there, I ask you, Alexander, whether you throw Lysimachus to a lion, or tear him yourself with your teeth? That maw is yours, that ferocity yours. O how you would wish you had claws of your own, and that gape of yours wide enough to swallow men! We do not ask of you that this hand, the surest ruin of your friends, be salutary to anyone, that this fierce spirit, the insatiable bane of nations, be sated this side of blood and slaughter; it is called mercy now, when, to kill a friend, the executioner is chosen from among men. This is why savagery is above all to be loathed: that it passes first beyond the usual bounds, then beyond the human, hunts up new punishments, summons its wit to contrive instruments by which pain may be varied and drawn out, and revels in men’s miseries; then that dire disease of the mind reaches its uttermost madness, when cruelty has turned into pleasure and it is now a joy to kill a man. Close on such a man’s back follow estrangement, hatreds, poisons, swords; he is assailed by as many perils as he is himself the peril of many, and is hemmed in sometimes by private plots, at others by a public panic. For a slight and private ruin does not stir whole cities; what has begun to rage far and reaches for all is struck at from every side. Tiny serpents pass unmarked and are not hunted by the public; once one has overpassed its usual measure and swollen into a monster, once it fouls the springs with its spittle and, where it has breathed, scorches and blasts whatever it has crossed, it is shot at with ballistas. Little evils can give us the slip and get clear away; the huge are met head-on. So one sick man does not even throw a household into uproar; but when frequent deaths have shown a plague is here, there is the outcry of the state and flight, and hands are stretched threatening against the very gods. Under some single roof a flame has shown: the household and neighbors carry water; but a vast fire that has already eaten through many houses is smothered by pulling down part of the city.

Even the cruelty of private men slaves’ hands have avenged at the sure peril of the cross; the cruelty of tyrants whole nations and peoples — both those it had for victims and those over whom it hung — have set out to root up. Sometimes a tyrant’s own guards have risen against him, and turned upon him the treachery and impiety and ferocity, and whatever else they had learned from him. For what can anyone hope from the man he has taught to be wicked? Wickedness does not long stay obedient, nor sin only so far as it is bidden. But suppose cruelty to be safe — what sort of reign is it? Nothing but the look of captured cities and the terrible faces of public dread. All things mournful, trembling, in confusion; the very pleasures are feared; men do not go to banquets secure, where the tongue must be anxiously guarded even when drunk, nor to shows, out of which matter for accusation and peril is sought. Though they be mounted at great expense and with kingly resources and the choicest names of artists, yet whom would games please in a prison? What an evil it is, good gods, to kill, to rage, to take delight in the clank of chains and in lopping off the heads of citizens, to spill much blood wherever one has come, to terrify and put to flight by one’s very look! What other life would there be, if lions and bears reigned, if power were given to serpents and to every most noxious creature? Those things, void of reason and condemned by us on the charge of monstrousness, hold off from their own kind, and even among wild beasts a likeness is safe; but the rage of these men spares not even their own kin, but holds the foreign and their own in one account, the more whetted the more it exercises itself. From the slaughter of single men it creeps to the destruction of nations, and counts it power to throw fire on roofs and to draw the plough over ancient cities; and to have one or another killed it reckons too little imperial; unless at one and the same time a herd of wretches has stood under the blow, it thinks its cruelty cramped into a line. That felicity is to give safety to many, and to call men back to life from death’s very edge, and to earn by mercy the civic crown. No ornament is worthier of a princeps’ pinnacle, or fairer, than that crown won for citizens saved — not arms stripped from a beaten foe, not chariots reddened with barbarian blood, not the spoils won in war. To save by the herd and in the mass — this is a divine power; to kill many and without distinction is the power of conflagration and of collapse.

That I should write on mercy, Nero Caesar, one utterance of yours above all drove me, which I remember to have heard, not without admiration, when it was spoken, and afterward to have told to others — a noble utterance, of great soul, of great gentleness, which, neither composed nor framed for others’ ears, broke out on a sudden and brought your goodness into the open, at strife with your own fortune. When your prefect Burrus, an excellent man, born for you as princeps, was about to punish two brigands, he was pressing you to write down against whom, and for what cause, you wished punishment to fall; this, often put off, he urged should at last be done. When, unwilling himself, he had brought out and was handing to you, unwilling, the sheet, you cried: "Would I did not know my letters!" O utterance worthy that all the nations should hear it that dwell within the Roman empire, and those that lie near it of doubtful liberty, and those that raise themselves against it by force or by spirit! O utterance to be sent into an assembly of all mortals, upon whose words princes and kings should swear! O utterance worthy of the public innocence of the human race, to which that ancient golden age should be given back! Now indeed it were fitting that men should consent to the just and good, the lust for another’s goods driven out — from which springs every evil of the soul — and that piety and integrity, with faith and modesty, should rise again, and the vices, having abused a long reign, give place at last to a happy and unspotted age.

This shall come to pass — it is a joy, Caesar, in great part to hope and to trust it. That gentleness of your soul will be handed on and spread little by little through the whole body of the empire, and all things will be shaped into your likeness. From the head comes sound health: thence all things are brisk and erect, or sunk in languor, as their mind lives or withers. There will be citizens, there will be allies worthy of this goodness, and into the whole world upright morals will come back; everywhere your hands will be spared. Suffer me to linger here a little longer — not to flatter your ears (for this is not my way; I had rather offend with truths than please by flattery); what then is it? Besides that I wish you to be as intimate as may be with your own good deeds and words, so that what is now nature and impulse may become judgment, I turn this over with myself — that many utterances, great but detestable, have made their way into human life and are commonly bandied about as famous, like that "Let them hate, so they fear," to which the Greek verse is twin that bids the earth, when its speaker is dead, be confounded with fire, and others of this stamp. And somehow, in a savage and hateful matter, men’s wits have given their vehement and stirred sentiments a happier turn of speech; I have heard as yet no spirited word from a good and gentle soul. What then? That rarely, unwilling, and with great hesitation, you must yet sometimes write that which has made letters hateful to you — but, as you do, with great hesitation, with many delays.

And lest the specious name of mercy deceive us somewhere and lead us into its contrary, let us see what mercy is, and of what sort, and what bounds it has. Mercy is the temperance of the mind in the power of taking vengeance, or the gentleness of a superior toward an inferior in the fixing of penalties. It is safer to set out several definitions, lest one alone fail to take in the matter and, so to speak, be nonsuited on a technicality; and so it may also be called an inclination of the mind toward gentleness in exacting a penalty. That definition will find contradictions, though it comes nearest the truth, if we should say mercy is a moderation that remits something of a deserved and owed penalty: it will be cried back that no virtue does anyone less than is owed. And yet all understand mercy to be that which bends short of what might deservedly be appointed.

The unskilled think severity its contrary; but no virtue is contrary to a virtue. What, then, is set against mercy? Cruelty, which is nothing other than a harshness of mind in exacting penalties. "But some exact no penalties and yet are cruel — like those who kill men unknown and met by chance, not for profit but for killing’s sake, and, not content to slay, run savage, like that Busiris and Procrustes and the pirates who flog their captives and set them living on the fire." This is cruelty indeed; but since it neither follows upon vengeance (for it has taken no hurt) nor is angry at any offense (for no crime went before), it falls outside our definition; for the definition comprised an unrestraint of mind in exacting penalties. We can say this is not cruelty but ferocity, to which savagery is a pleasure; we can call it madness: for the kinds of it are various, and none surer than that which comes to the killing and mangling of men. Those, then, I shall call cruel who have a cause for punishing but no measure — as in the case of Phalaris, who, they say, raged not indeed against innocent men, but beyond the human and the credible measure. We can dodge the quibble and define it so: cruelty is an inclination of the mind toward the harsher course. This mercy thrusts away, bidding it stand far off from her; with severity she keeps company. It is to the point to ask here what pity is; for most men praise it as a virtue and call a good man one who pities. This too is a fault of the mind. Both lie on either side of severity and of mercy, the two we ought to shun; for through the show of severity we fall into cruelty, through the show of mercy into pity. In the latter the error is run at a lighter peril, but the error is equal — a departure from the truth.

Therefore, as religion worships the gods and superstition violates them, so all good men will show mercy and gentleness but will shun pity; for it is a fault of a petty soul that gives way at the sight of others’ ills. And so it is most familiar to the worst sort: there are old women and silly females who are stirred by the tears of the most guilty, who, if it were allowed, would break the prison open. Pity looks not to the cause but to the fortune; mercy joins itself to reason. I know that among the unskilled the sect of the Stoics is in ill repute as too hard and likely to give kings and princes the least good counsel; it is thrown in its teeth that it denies the wise man pities, denies he pardons. These sayings, set down by themselves, are odious; for they seem to leave no hope to human errors, but to bring every fault to punishment. But if that be so, what science is this, that bids us unlearn our humanity and shuts the surest harbor against fortune — the harbor of mutual aid? Yet no sect is kindlier and gentler, none more loving of men and more attentive to the common good, so that its declared aim is to be of use and help, and to take thought not for itself alone but for all and each. Pity is a sickness of the mind at the sight of others’ miseries, or a sadness drawn from others’ ills, which it believes fall upon the undeserving; but sickness does not light upon the wise man; his mind is serene, and nothing can happen to overcast it. Nor does anything so become a man as a great soul; but the same cannot be at once great and mournful. Grief crushes minds, casts them down, draws them tight; this will not befall the wise man even in his own calamities, but he will beat back all fortune’s anger and break it before himself; he will keep ever the same face, placid, unshaken — which he could not do if he let sadness in.

Add that the wise man both foresees and holds his counsel ready; but never does the clear and pure flow from the turbid. Sadness is unfit for discerning matters, thinking out the useful, avoiding the perilous, weighing the fair; therefore he does not pity, since that is not done without a misery of the mind. All else that they who pity wish to do, he will do gladly and with lifted soul: he will come to another’s tears, but not into them; he will give his hand to the shipwrecked, lodging to the exile, an alms to the needy — not that insulting alms which the greater part of those who wish to seem pitiful fling down, loathing those they help and fearing to be touched by them, but as man gives to man out of the common store; he will give a son back to a mother’s tears and bid the chains be loosed and take a man from the gladiators’ school and bury even a guilty corpse, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind and his own unaltered face. The wise man, then, will not pity but will succor, will profit, born for the common help and the public good, of which he will give each man his share. Even to the unfortunate, and to those needing reproof and amendment, he will extend his goodness in due proportion; but the afflicted and those who struggle under chance he will help far more gladly. As often as he can, he will throw himself in to stay fortune’s hand; for where shall he better use his wealth or strength than in setting up again what mischance has thrown down? He will not cast down his look or his spirit at any man’s withered estate, or ragged leanness, or old age propped on a staff; but he will profit all the worthy and, in the gods’ own manner, look kindly upon the unfortunate. Pity is next of kin to misery; for it has something of it and draws from it. You may know those eyes to be weak that themselves run at another’s bleared eyes, just as — by Hercules — it is a disease, not mirth, ever to laugh with the laughing and to stretch one’s own mouth at everyone’s yawn; pity is a fault of minds too frightened of misery, which, if anyone demands it of the wise man, comes near to demanding lamentation, and groans at the funerals of strangers.

"But why will he not pardon?" Come now, let us settle here too what pardon is, and we shall know it ought not to be granted by the wise man. Pardon is the remission of a deserved penalty. Why the wise man ought not to grant this, those whose business it is render the reason at greater length; I, to speak briefly, as in another’s case: "Pardon is given to him who ought to have been punished; but the wise man does nothing he ought not, omits nothing he ought; and so the penalty which he ought to exact he does not remit. But that which you wish to win through pardon, he will grant you by a more honorable road; for the wise man will spare, will take counsel, will set right; he will do the very same he would if he pardoned, and yet will not pardon, since he who pardons confesses he has left undone something that ought to have been done. One man he will admonish with words only and lay no penalty on, seeing his age open to amendment; another, plainly weighed down by the odium of his crime, he will bid go safe, because he was deceived, because he slipped through wine; enemies he will let go unharmed, sometimes even with praise, if for honorable causes — for faith, for a treaty, for liberty — they were summoned to the war. All these are the works not of pardon but of mercy. Mercy has free judgment; it judges not by the formula but by the equitable and good; it may acquit, and may assess the suit at whatever it will. It does none of these as though it had done less than is just, but as though what it has resolved were the most just of all. But to pardon is not to punish one whom you judge ought to be punished; pardon is the remission of an owed penalty. Mercy grants this first — that those whom it dismisses it pronounces to have deserved nothing further; it is fuller than pardon, more honorable. The dispute, as I hold, is about a word; about the thing there is agreement. The wise man will remit much, will save many of unsound but curable nature. He will be like good husbandmen, who tend not the straight and tall trees only; to those, too, that some cause has bent they set props by which to straighten them; others they prune, lest the branches weigh the height down; some, weak from the fault of their soil, they nourish; to some, laboring under another’s shade, they open the sky. He will see by what method each nature is to be handled, by what means the crooked may be drawn to the straight."

On mercy, too, Seneca framed for princes a compendious set of chapters, in which he loved a brevity not obscure, that it might not weary men taken up with great affairs to read them. These, then, undertaken for you and to you, do you take up, and call to mind what long ago you learned of yourself and through yourself. They are few: It belongs to mercy to take something from the avenging sentence. Whoever leaves no charge unpunished, himself transgresses. It is a fault to prosecute a fault to the full. He proclaims himself pitiless to whom whatever is permitted is also pleasing. It is a glorious virtue in a princeps to punish short of what is permitted. It is virtue to be dragged to vengeance by necessity, not to come to it by will. Something great and divine has the savor of a merciful man when he is wronged. Likewise: A good princeps punishes no one without pain, proscribes no one without grief. A good princeps so pursues the crime that he remembers the man he punishes is a man.