# CHAPTER 7 — To What Degree Public Indictments Are Necessary in a Republic to Maintain Its Liberty

Those who are set up in a city as the guardians of its liberty cannot receive a more useful and necessary authority than the power to indict citizens before the people or some magistrate or council when they commit any kind of offence against free government. This institution has two extremely useful effects upon a republic. The first is that, for fear of being accused, the citizens do not engage in attempts upon the government, and if they do make such attempts, they are immediately suppressed without respect for who they are. The second is that it provides a release for those humours * that arise within cities in one way or another against certain citizens, for when these humours have no legal form of release, they resort to illegal means that bring about the ruin of the whole republic. Thus, there is nothing that makes a republic so stable and steady as organizing it in such a way that the variability of those humours that agitate the republic has a means of release that is instituted by the laws. This can be demonstrated through many examples, and especially through the one Livy cites concerning Coriolanus, where he says that at a moment when the Roman nobility was irritated with the plebeians, because they believed the plebeians had too much power as a result of the creation of the tribunes who used to defend them, and Rome, as it happened, was suffering from a great scarcity of food, causing the senate to send for grain from Sicily, Coriolanus, enemy of the popular faction, advised that the time had come to punish the plebeians and to take away the authority they enjoyed at the expense of the nobility by keeping them hungry and by not distributing the grain to them; when his advice reached the ears of the people, they were so indignant against Coriolanus that they would have murdered him in a riot at the exit of the senate if the tribunes had not summoned him to appear and to plead his case. * Concerning this incident, what was said above should be noted, that is, how useful and necessary it is for republics to provide through their laws a means of venting the anger the multitude feels toward an individual citizen, because when such legal means are not available, they will resort to illegal ones, and without any doubt the latter produce much worse effects than the former.

For this reason, when a citizen is oppressed by legal means, even if this does injury to him, little or no disorder in the republic follows, because the enforcement is not accomplished with private or foreign forces which are the ones that ruin free societies, but it is done with public forces and institutions which have their specific limits, nor do they go far beyond them to anything that would ruin the republic. With respect to corroborating this opinion with examples, I think it will suffice for me to mention that of Coriolanus from the ancients, from which anyone can judge how much evil would have befallen the Roman republic had he been put to death in a riot, because this would have given rise to a case of individuals harming individuals, the kind of injury that generates fear; fear seeks protection, for which partisans are procured; out of partisans factions are born in cities, from which arises their destruction. But since the affair was handled by those who had the authority to do so, all those evils that could have arisen from handling it with private authority were avoided.

We have seen in our own times what changes occurred in the republic of Florence when the multitude was unable to vent its animosity in a legal fashion against one of its citizens, as happened when Francesco Valori, * who was like the prince of the city, came to be considered by many as ambitious and as a man who wished with his audacity and courage to rise above the laws of civil society, and in the absence of any way to resist him in that republic except by a sect * contrary to his own, it came about that since he feared only extraordinary measures, he began to cultivate supporters who would defend him; on the other hand, those who opposed Valori, lacking a legal method of repressing him, thought about employing illegal means to the point that they turned to arms. Thus, where he might have been opposed through legal means and his power destroyed with damage to him alone, they were obliged to destroy it by illegal means, which resulted in damage not only to him but also to many other noble citizens.

In support of the above conclusion, it is also possible to cite an incident that likewise occurred in Florence in connection with Piero Soderini, * which came about entirely because that republic lacked any method of bringing an indictment against the ambition of powerful citizens. It is not sufficient to indict a powerful citizen before eight judges * in a republic; judges must be many in number, because the few always act in the interest of the few. Hence, if such methods had existed in Florence, either the citizens would have brought an indictment against Soderini had his conduct been bad, and through this means without bringing in the Spanish army, they would have given vent to their animosity, or, had his conduct not been bad, they would never have dared to work against him for fear of being charged themselves, and in either case the appetite that was the reason for the conflict would thus have disappeared. Hence, it is possible to conclude this much: that whenever we see foreign forces called in by a faction of men who live in a city, we can believe that this situation finds its origins in that city’s bad institutions, since it does not possess within its walls any institution that permits the venting of the malignant humours born in men without resorting to illegal means; full provision is made for this by instituting a system of public indictments before a large number of judges and by giving these indictments sufficient status. These measures were so well organized in Rome that during the many conflicts between the plebeians and the senate, neither the senate nor the plebeians nor any private citizen sought to avail themselves of outside forces, because by having a remedy at home, there was no need to seek it outside. Although the examples above are more than sufficient to demonstrate this, I nevertheless want to cite another, related by Livy in his history. * He reports that in Chiusi, a most noble city of Etruria in those times, a certain Lucumo raped the sister of Arruns, and when Arruns was unable to avenge himself because of the rapist’s power, he went off to find the Gauls, who then ruled the area today called Lombardy, and urged them to come armed to Chiusi, showing them how with profit to themselves they could compensate him for the injury he had received: if Arruns had seen that he could avenge himself through the city’s institutions, he would not have sought out the barbarian forces. * But just as these public indictments are useful in a republic, so false accusations are useless and harmful, as we shall discuss in the following chapter.