# CHAPTER 39 — The Same Circumstances Are Often Seen Among Different Peoples

Anyone who studies current and ancient affairs will easily recognize that the same desires and humours exist and have always existed in all cities and among all peoples. Thus, it is an easy matter for anyone who examines past events carefully to foresee future events in every republic and to apply the remedies that the ancients employed, or if old remedies cannot be found, to think of new ones based upon the similarity of circumstances. But since these considerations are ignored or misunderstood by those who read, or they are understood but are not recognized by those who govern, it always follows that the same conflicts arise in every era.

After 1494 when the city of Florence lost part of its empire, such as Pisa and other regions, it was forced to wage war against those who had occupied them. Since those who occupied them were powerful, it followed that a great deal was spent on war, which bore little fruit: these expenditures produced a great many heavy taxes, and heavy taxes produced countless squabbles among the people; and since this war was administrated by a magistracy of ten citizens, called the Ten of War, the masses began to hold them in contempt, as if they had been the cause of both the war and its cost, and they began to convince themselves that if they removed that magistracy the war would end, so that when it was time to select new members, instead of making new appointments they allowed the magistracy to lapse and entrusted their affairs to the Signoria. * This decision was so disastrous that it not only failed to end the war, as the masses were persuaded it would, but once it removed the very men who had been administering the war with prudence, so much disorder followed that, besides Pisa, they lost Arezzo and other places, so that after the people had realized their mistake and saw that the cause of the disease was the fever and not the physician, they re-established the magistracy of the Ten. * This same dissatisfaction arose in Rome against the institution of the consuls, for when the people saw that one war followed another, allowing them no rest, they ought to have realized that this sprang from the ambition of Rome’s neighbours who wished to overcome them but, instead, they believed that this sprang from the ambition of the nobles, who wished to take the people outside Rome under the leadership of the consuls in order to oppress them where they had no one to defend them, since inside the city the nobles were unable to punish the plebeians, who were defended there by the authority of the tribunes. For this reason, they thought it necessary either to abolish the consuls or to regulate their power in such a way that they would have no authority over the people either inside or outside the city. The first to attempt to pass such a law was a certain Terentillus, a tribune: * he proposed that five men should be appointed to study the consuls’ power and to limit it. This greatly angered the nobility, who felt that the majesty of their authority was in complete decline, to the extent that the nobility no longer held any rank at all in the republic. Nevertheless, the stubbornness of the tribunes was such that the consular title was abolished, and after some other laws had been passed, the people were finally satisfied with the appointment of tribunes with consular powers rather than consuls, so much greater was the people’s hatred of the consuls’ title than of their actual authority. And so they went on in this way for a long period of time, but finally they recognized their error, and just as the Florentines went back to the Ten, so they re-created the consuls. *