# CHAPTER 5 — What Causes a King to Lose a Kingdom of the Hereditary Kind

After Tarquinius Superbus had killed Servius Tullius, who left no heirs, he came to possess his kingdom in security, since he did not have to fear those things that had harmed his predecessors. Although his method of occupying the kingdom had been extraordinary and detestable, nevertheless, if he had observed the ancient practices of the other kings, he would have been tolerated, and would not have stirred up the senate and plebeians against him to take away the state from him. He was not, therefore, driven out because his son Sextus raped Lucretia, but because he had broken the laws of the kingdom and governed it tyrannically, after taking from the senate every kind of authority and transferring it to himself; and the affairs that had been carried on in public places with the approval of the Roman senate came to be carried on in his palace, bringing blame and envy upon him, in such a way that in a brief time he stripped Rome of all the liberty she had maintained under the other kings. Nor did it suffice him to make the Fathers his enemies, for he aroused the people against him as well, exhausting them with hard labour of a kind completely different from that in which his predecessors had employed them. Thus, when Rome was full of his cruel and proud acts, he had already disposed the hearts and minds of all the Romans to rebellion whenever the occasion arose. If the incident involving Lucretia had not occurred, then as soon as another such incident had come about it would have produced the same result, because if Tarquinius had lived like the other kings and his son Sextus had committed that crime, Brutus and Collatinus would have appealed to Tarquinius for vengeance against Sextus and not to the Roman people. Princes should know, therefore, that they begin to lose the state the moment they begin to break the laws and those ways and customs that are ancient and under which men have lived for a long period of time. If, after being deprived of the state, they ever become so prudent that they recognize how easily principalities are held by those who receive wise counsel, their loss will become even more painful and they will condemn themselves to a greater penalty than any to which others might condemn them, because it is much easier to be loved by good men than by wicked ones and to obey the laws rather than to take control of them. If they want to understand the method they must employ in accomplishing this, they need endure no other labour than to select as their mirror the lives of good rulers, such as Timoleon of Corinth, Aratus of Sicyon, and others like them, in whose lives they would discover so much security and satisfaction on the part of the ruler and the ruled alike that they would have a desire to imitate them, being able easily to do so for the reasons given. When men are governed well, they do not seek, nor do they desire, any other liberty: this was true of the peoples governed by the two men named above, whom they compelled to be princes as long as they lived, even though they tried on many occasions to return to private life.

And because in this and the two preceding chapters we have discussed the humours stirred up against rulers and the conspiracies carried out by the sons of Brutus against their native city as well as those against Tarquinius Priscus and Servius Tullius, it does not seem to me to be beyond our subject to discuss them in detail in the following chapter, since they are matters worthy of being noted both by rulers and by private citizens.