# 29. That the Faults of Peoples are due to Princes68

Princes ought not to complain of any fault committed by the peoples whom they govern, because such faults are due either to their negligence or to their being themselves sullied by similar defects. Those who talk about the peoples of our day being given up to robbery and similar vices, will find that they are all due to the fact that those who ruled them behaved in like manner. The Romagna, before Pope Alexander VI got rid of the lords who ruled it, exemplified the very worst types of behaviour, for it was apparent to every one that every least occasion was followed by killings and wholesale rapine. It was the wickedness of the princes that gave rise to this, not the wicked nature of man, as people said. For the princes who were poor, yet desired to live like rich men, of necessity had frequent recourse to robberies of one kind or another. One of the dishonourable means they adopted, was to make laws forbidding this action or that. They were then the first to provide occasion for the non-observance of these laws, but never punished the delinquents until they saw that a considerable number were involved in the same predicament. They then had recourse to punishment, not out of zeal for the laws they had made, but out of cupidity, that they might collect the fines imposed.

This gave rise to numerous inconveniences, of which the worst was that it impoverished the people without amending them, and that those who were impoverished sought to get the better of their weaker brethren. It was in this way that there arose all the evils mentioned above, and it was the prince who was responsible for them. That this is so Titus Livy shows in the account he gives of the Roman legates who took the gifts of booty from Veii to the temple of Apollo. They were captured by corsairs of Lipari in Sicily, whither they were taken. When Timasitheus, their leader, heard what the gifts were for, whither they were going and who had sent them, though a native of Lipari, he behaved as if he was a Roman, pointing out to the populace that it was impious to seize such gifts; with the result that, with everybody’s consent, he let the legates go with all they had with them. The comment made by the historian is this: ‘Timasitheus instilled religion into the masses, who always resemble their ruler.’ This is confirmed by a remark of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who says:

What the prince does the many also soon do,

For to their eyes the Prince is ever in view.