Not only fire and water, goods and lands, “but life itself depends on the nod of a most insolent conqueror.” Such is their slavery: their lives and souls depend on his arrogant will and command. He is a tyrant who ruins everything wherever he goes, so that a historian complains: “If a former inhabitant saw these places now, he would not recognise them; if a traveller or stranger saw them, his heart would grieve at the sight.”

Where, as Aristotle observes, “new exactions, new burdens are imposed,” new demands and burdens fall on people every day—like those described by Zosimus in book 2, so grievous “that husbands prostituted their wives and fathers their children to pay the collectors from the earnings,” and so on—they must be discontented. “Hence the groans and weeping of cities,” as Cicero says: hence those complaints and tears of cities, and “poor, miserable, rebellious, and desperate subjects,” as Hippolytus adds.

And as a discerning countryman of ours observed not long ago in his survey of the great Duchy of Tuscany, the people lived in deep grievance and discontent, as their many open complaints made clear. “The state was like a sick body that had recently taken medicine, whose humours had not yet settled properly, and which had been so weakened by purging that nothing was left but melancholy.”

Where rulers and potentates are unrestrained in lust, hypocrites, pleasure-seekers, religious only in appearance—“What is more fragile than hypocrisy?” What is so brittle and insecure? What more quickly overthrows their power than their roaming, raging desires for their subjects’ wives and daughters, to say nothing worse? Those who should “carry the torch before others,” leading the way in every virtuous action, often lead them instead into every kind of wrongdoing and debauchery, bringing calamity upon their countries.

“And they themselves are often ruined, banished, or murdered through a conspiracy of their subjects,” as were Sardanapalus, Dionysius the Younger, Elagabalus, Periander, Peisistratus, Tarquin, Timocrates, Childeric, Appius Claudius, Andronicus, Galeazzo Sforza, Alessandro de’ Medici, and others.

Where rulers or great men are malicious, envious, factional, ambitious rivals, they tear a commonwealth apart. Like so many Guelphs and Ghibellines, they disturb its peace and, by killing one another, let it bleed to death. Our histories are all too full of such barbarous cruelties and the miseries that follow them.

Where they are like so many horse-leeches, hungry, grasping, corrupt, greedy, “slaves to avarice,” ravenous as wolves—for, as Cicero writes, “Whoever governs benefits others, and whoever tends cattle should serve their welfare”—or where they put private advantage before the public good. For, as was said long ago, “Private interests always obstruct public ones.”

Or where they are uneducated, ignorant, untrained practitioners of politics, “where ability, virtue, and knowledge are lacking” (Aristotle, Politics 5.8), wise only by inheritance and holding authority through birthright, favour, wealth, or titles: there must be something wrong, a grave defect. For, as an ancient philosopher affirms, such men are not always qualified. “Out of countless people only a few are senators; of those few, fewer are good; and of that small number of honourable, good, and noble men, few are learned, wise, sensible, and competent to discharge such offices.” The result must be the disorder of the state.

For as the rulers are, so are the people: “As the king, so the flock.” What Antigonus rightly said long ago remains true: “Whoever educates the king of Macedon educates all his subjects too.” He who teaches the king of Macedon teaches all his subjects. For rulers are the mirror, school, and book Where subjects’ eyes learn, read, and look.

Examples of vice at home corrupt us More swiftly and quickly, entering our minds With powerful authorities behind them. Their examples are the first to be followed, their vices the first to be adopted. If rulers are profane, irreligious, lecherous, extravagant pleasure-seekers, factional, greedy, ambitious, and uneducated, most of the common people will be so too: idle, wasteful, lustful, drunken, and therefore poor and needy. (“Poverty produces civil strife and wrongdoing”: for poverty breeds sedition and villainy.)

They are ready on any occasion to mutiny and rebel; always discontented, complaining, muttering, and resentful; prone to every outrage, theft, treason, murder, and upheaval; in debt, schemers, cheats, outlaws, “ruined in reputation and way of life.” An ancient political writer had this maxim: “The poor and wicked envy the rich, hate good men, detest the present government, wish for another, and want everything turned upside down.” When Catiline rebelled at Rome, he gathered such a company of debauched rogues: these were his intimates and accomplices. Such, for the most part, have been your rebels in every age—Jack Cade, Tom Straw, Kett and his companions.

Where people are generally disorderly and quarrelsome, where there are many disputes, many laws, many lawsuits, many lawyers, and many physicians, this clearly signals a disordered, melancholy state, as Plato maintained long ago. For where such men swarm, they will create more work for themselves and make a political body sick that would otherwise have been healthy.

It is a general evil in our times, an unnoticed plague; never have there been so many of them. They “have now multiplied like locusts,” says Mat. Geraldus, himself a lawyer: “They are not the fathers of their country but its plagues, and mostly an arrogant, wicked, greedy, quarrelsome breed.” “A purse-milking nation,” and so on: a nation that milks purses, a noisy company, vultures in gowns, “who live on injustice and the blood of citizens”; thieves and breeding grounds of discord.

Worse than any roadside extortioners: hawks for gold, borers after gold, money-hooks, bounty-hunting informers, court-grabbers, courtroom bells, human monsters, fraudulent dealers, and so on. They profess to make peace but are the very disturbers of our peace: a company of irreligious Harpies, scraping, grasping bailiffs. I mean our ordinary hungry pettifoggers, “courtroom ranters”; meanwhile I love and honour all good laws and worthy lawyers, who are so many oracles and pilots of a well-governed commonwealth.

Without skill or judgement, they do more harm, as Livy said, “than foreign wars, famine, or disease”—than sickness, wars, hunger, diseases—and “bring almost unbelievable destruction upon a commonwealth,” says Seyssel, a celebrated civil lawyer formerly in Paris. Just as ivy embraces an oak until it has eaten out its heart, so they treat the places where they live. No advice, no justice, no speech is to be had “unless you have first soothed him”: he must constantly be paid, or he is as mute as a fish. You would do better opening an oyster without a knife.

“Believe one who knows,” says John of Salisbury. “I have fallen into their hands a thousand times, and harsh Charon, who never spared anyone, is far more merciful than they.” I speak from experience: I have been among them a thousand times, and Charon himself is gentler than they are. He is content with his single payment, but they keep multiplying theirs; they are never satisfied.

Besides, they have “harmful tongues,” as he calls them, “unless you bind them with silver cords”: they must be paid to say nothing, and receive more for keeping quiet than we can for saying our best. They speak pleasantly to their clients and invite them to dine; but, as he goes on to say, “Of all injustice, none is so pernicious as that of people who strive to appear honest precisely when they are most deceitful.”

They profess to be peacemakers and “to support the cases of the lowly,” helping them obtain their rights; “they champion the afflicted.” But it is all for their own advantage, “to empty the purses of the wealthier.” They plead for poor people without charge, but use them only as decoys to catch others.