The Commonwealth of Oceana [90]
greater, as we look nearer; for the effects that proceed from fortune, if there be any such thing, are like their cause, inconstant. But there never happened to any other commonwealth so undisturbed and constant a tranquillity and peace in herself as are in that of Venice; wherefore this must proceed from some other cause than chance. And we see that as she is of all others the most quiet, so the most equal commonwealth. Her body consists of one order, and her Senate is like a rolling stone, as was said, which never did, nor, while it continues upon that rotation, never shall gather the moss of a divided or ambitious interest, much less such a one as that which grasped the people of Rome in the talons of their own eagles. And if Machiavel, averse from doing this commonwealth right, had considered her orders, as his reader shall easily perceive he never did, he must have been so far from attributing the prudence of them to chance, that he would have touched up his admirable work to that perfection which, as to the civil part, has no pattern in the universal world but this of Venice. "Rome, secure by her potent and victorious arms from all external causes of commotion, was either beholden for her peace at home to her enemies abroad, or could never rest her head. My lords, you that are parents of a commonwealth, and so freer agents than such as are merely natural, have a care. For, as no man shall show me a commonwealth born straight that ever became crooked, so no man shall show me a commonwealth born crooked that ever became straight. Rome was crooked in her birth, or rather prodigious. Her twins, the patrician and plebeian orders, came, as was shown by the foregoing story, into the world, one body but two heads, or rather two bellies; for, notwithstanding the fable out of AEsop, whereby Menenius Agrippa, the orator that was sent from the Senate to the people at Mount Aventin, showed the fathers to be the belly, and the people to be the arms and the legs (which except that, how slothful soever it might seem, they were nourished, not these only, but the whole body must languish and be dissolved), it is plain that the fathers were a distinct belly, such a one as took the meat indeed out of the people's mouths, but abhorring the agrarian, returned it not in the due and necessary nutrition of a commonwealth. Nevertheless, as the people that live about the cataracts of Nilus are said not to hear the noise, so neither the. Roman writers, nor Machiavel the most conversant with them, seem among so many of the tribunitian storms to hear their natural voice; for though they could not miss of it so far as to attribute them to the strife of the people for participation in magistracy, or, in which Machiavel more particularly joins, to that about the agrarian, this was to take the business short, and the remedy for the disease. "A people, when they are reduced to misery and despair, become their own politicians, as certain beasts, when they are sick, become their own physicians, and are carried by a natural instinct to the desire of such herbs as are their proper cure; but the people, for the greater part, are beneath the beasts in the use of them. Thus the people of Rome, though in their misery they had recourse by instinct, as it were, to the two main fundamentals of a commonwealth, participation of magistracy and the agrarian, did but taste and spit at them, not (which is necessary in physic) drink down the potion, and in that their healths. For when they had obtained participation of magistracy it was but lamely, not to a full and equal rotation in all elections; nor did they greatly regard it in what they had got. And when they had attained to the agrarian, they neglected it so far as to suffer the law to grow obsolete; but if you do not take the due dose of your medicines (as there be slight tastes which a man may have of philosophy that incline to atheism) it may chance to be poison, there being a like taste of the politics that inclines to confusion, as appears in the institution of the Roman tribunes, by which magistracy