# CHAPTER 25 — Whoever Wishes to Reform a Long-Established State in a Free City Should Retain At Least the Appearance of Its Ancient Ways

Anyone who desires or tries to reform the government of a city in a way that is acceptable and capable of maintaining it to everyone’s satisfaction will find it necessary to retain at least the semblance of its ancient customs, so that it will not seem to the people that its institutions have changed, though in fact the new institutions may be completely dissimilar from those of the past, because men in general live as much by appearances as by realities: indeed, they are often moved more by things as they appear than by things as they really are. For this reason the Romans, recognizing this necessity at the beginning of their free way of life, created two consuls instead of a single king but wanted them to have no more than twelve lictors to avoid surpassing the number of those who attended the king. Besides this, an annual sacrifice was made in Rome that could be offered only by the king in person, and since the Romans did not wish the people to go wanting for any of their ancient customs in the absence of a king, they created a leader for this sacrifice whom they called the king of the sacrifice, and they placed him under the authority of the high priest, so that in this way the people came to be satisfied with that sacrifice and never had reason, for lack of it, to desire the return of the kings. This should be observed by all those who wish to abolish an ancient way of life in a city and guide it to a new and free way of life: since what is new may change men’s minds, you must arrange it so that these alterations retain as much of the ancient ways as possible, and if the number, authority, and terms of office of the magistracies differ from those of the ancient ones, they should at least retain their titles. And as I have said, anyone who wishes to institute a body politic, whether a republic or a kingdom, should observe this, but anyone who wishes to create an absolute authority, a form the authors called tyranny, must create everything anew, as will be explained in the following chapter.