# CHAPTER XXIX —_That the Faults of a People are due to its Prince._

CHAPTER XXIX.—_That the Faults of a People are due to its Prince._


Let no prince complain of the faults committed by a people under his
control; since these must be ascribed either to his negligence, or to
his being himself blemished by similar defects. And were any one to
consider what peoples in our own times have been most given to robbery
and other like offences, he would find that they have only copied their
rulers, who have themselves been of a like nature. Romagna, before
those lords who ruled it were driven out by Pope Alexander VI., was a
nursery of all the worst crimes, the slightest occasion giving rise to
wholesale rapine and murder. This resulted from the wickedness of these
lords, and not, as they asserted, from the evil disposition of their
subjects. For these princes being poor, yet choosing to live as though
they were rich, were forced to resort to cruelties innumerable and
practised in divers ways; and among other shameful devices contrived by
them to extort money, they would pass laws prohibiting certain acts,
and then be the first to give occasion for breaking them; nor would
they chastise offenders until they saw many involved in the same
offence; when they fell to punishing, not from any zeal for the laws
which they had made, but out of greed to realize the penalty. Whence
flowed many mischiefs, and more particularly this, that the people
being impoverished, but not corrected, sought to make good their
injuries at the expense of others weaker than themselves. And thus
there sprang up all those evils spoken of above, whereof the prince is
the true cause.

The truth of what I say is confirmed by Titus Livius where he relates
how the Roman envoys, who were conveying the spoils of the Veientines
as an offering to Apollo, were seized and brought on shore by the
corsairs of the Lipari islands in Sicily; when Timasitheus, the prince
of these islands, on learning the nature of the offering, its
destination, and by whom sent, though himself of Lipari, behaved as a
Roman might, showing his people what sacrilege it would be to intercept
such a gift, and speaking to such purpose that by general consent the
envoys were suffered to proceed upon their voyage, taking all their
possessions with them. With reference to which incident the historian
observes: “_The multitude, who always take their colour from their
ruler, were filled by Timasitheus with a religious awe._” And to like
purport we find it said by Lorenzo de’ Medici:—

“A prince’s acts his people imitate;
For on their lord the eyes of all men wait.”[17]


 [17] E quel che fa il signer, fanno poi molti;
 Chè nel signer son tutti gli occhi volti.
(_La Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo._)