A CORRUPT PEOPLE COMING INTo THEIR LIBERTY CAN MAINTAIN ItSELF FREE ONLY WItH THE GREATEST Difficulty

I judge that it was necessary that Kings should be eliminated in Rome, or [else] that Rome would in a very short time become weak and of no valor; for considering to what [degree of] corruption those Kings had come, if it should have continued so for two or three successions, [and] that that corruption which was in them had begun to spread through its members; [and] as the members had been corrupted it was impossible ever again to reform her [the state]. But losing the head while the torso was sound, they were able easily to return to a free and ordered society. And it ought to be presupposed as a very true matter that a corrupted City which exists under a Prince, even though that Prince with all his lives [family] may be extinguished, can never become free; and that rather it should happen that one Prince destroy the other, for [these people] will never be settled without the creation of a new Lord, who by his goodness together with his virtu will then keep them free: but that liberty will last only during his life time, as happened at different times in Syracuse to Dion and Timoleon, whose virtu while they lived, kept that City free: but when they died, it returned to the ancient Tyranny. But there is no more striking example to be seen than that of Rome, which after the Tarquins had been driven out, was able quickly to resume and maintain that liberty; but after the death of Caesar, Caligula, and Nero, and after the extinction of all the line of Caesar, she could not only never maintain her liberty, but was unable to reestablish it. And so great a difference in events in the same City did not result from anything else other than [the fact that] the Roman People in the time of Tarquin was not yet corrupt, and in the latter time [Caesar’s] it became very corrupt. For to keep her sound and disposed to keep away from Kings at that time, it was enough to make them swear that they should never consent that any of them should ever reign in Rome; but in the time of the other [Caesar] the authority of Brutus with all the Eastern legions was not enough to keep her disposed to want to maintain that liberty which he, in imitation of the first Brutus, had restored to her. Which resulted from that corruption which the party of Marius had spread among the people, at the head of which was Caesar, who was able so to blind the multitude that they did not recognize the yoke which they themse............