Well and wisely, Conscript Fathers, did our ancestors ordain that the beginning of speaking, like the beginning of acting, should be taken from prayers — since men can begin nothing duly, nothing with foresight, without the aid, the counsel, the honor of the immortal gods. By whom should this custom be observed more fittingly than by a consul, or when should it be practiced and honored more rightly than when, at the bidding of the senate and the authority of the commonwealth, we are summoned to render thanks to the best of princes? For what gift of the gods is more excellent or more beautiful than a prince pure and holy and most like the gods themselves? And had it still been in doubt whether the rulers of the earth are given by chance and accident or by some divine power, it would yet be clear that our prince was appointed by heaven. For he was found and chosen not by the hidden power of the fates, but by Jupiter himself, face to face and in the open: among the altars and shrines, and in the very place where that god sits as manifest and present as the sky and the stars. The more fitting and dutiful is it, then, to pray to you, Jupiter Best and Greatest, once the founder, now the preserver of our empire, that a speech worthy of a consul, worthy of the senate, worthy of the prince may fall to me; that in all I say liberty, good faith, and truth may stand fast; and that my rendering of thanks may be as far from the appearance of flattery as it is from compulsion.

For my part I judge that not the consul only, but every citizen, must strive to say nothing of our prince that might seem capable of having been said of another. So let those utterances depart and withdraw which fear once wrung from us: let us say nothing such as we said before, for we suffer nothing such as before; let us not proclaim of our prince in public what we proclaimed before, for neither do we say in private what we said before. Let the difference of the times be marked in our speeches, and from the very manner of our thanksgiving let it be understood to whom, and when, the thanks were rendered. Nowhere let us fawn upon him as upon a god, nowhere as upon a divine power: for we speak not of a tyrant but of a fellow citizen, not of a master but of a father. He counts himself one of us, and excels and stands out the more for thinking himself one of us; nor does he remember less that he is a man than that he presides over men. Let us therefore understand our blessings, and prove ourselves worthy of them in the using, and consider again and again how unworthy it would be to render greater deference to princes who delight in the servitude of their citizens than to those who delight in their liberty. And the Roman people indeed keeps its discernment among princes: with the same chorus with which a little while ago it hymned another as handsome, it now proclaims this one bravest; and with the shouts with which it once praised another’s bearing and voice, it praises this one’s devotion, restraint, and gentleness. And we ourselves — is it the divinity of our prince, or his humanity, his temperance, his easy grace, that we all, as love and joy have prompted, are wont to celebrate? And what is so much the mark of a citizen, so much of a senator, as that surname Best which we have added — a title the arrogance of earlier princes has made peculiar and proper to this one? How shared it is, how even-handed, that we proclaim We are fortunate, he is fortunate; and with answering vows entreat May he do these things, may he hear these things, as though we would not say it unless he had done it. At which words he is suffused even with tears and a deep modesty. For he recognizes and feels that they are said to the man, not to the prince.

Therefore the measure we all kept in that sudden warmth of devotion, let us each keep too, and with deliberation; and let us know that there is no kind of thanks more sincere or more welcome than that which rivals those acclamations which leave no time for contrivance. For my own part, I shall labor to lower my speech to the modesty and moderation of the prince, and I shall weigh no less what his ears can bear than what is owed to his virtues. Great and unwonted is the glory of a prince to whom, about to render thanks, I fear not so much that he will think me sparing in his praises as that he will think me excessive. This is the care, this the one difficulty that besets me: for to render thanks to one who deserves them is easy, Conscript Fathers. There is no danger that, when I speak of his humanity, he will believe his pride reproached; when of his frugality, his extravagance; when of his clemency, his cruelty; when of his generosity, his greed; when of his kindness, his spite; when of his self-restraint, his lust; when of his industry, his sloth; when of his courage, his cowardice. Nor do I even fear that I shall seem grateful or ungrateful according as I say enough or too little. For I observe that even the gods themselves take pleasure not so much in the careful prayers of their worshippers as in their innocence and holiness, and that he is held more welcome who brings into their shrines a pure and chaste mind than he who brings a studied hymn.

But the senate’s decree must be obeyed, by which it was resolved, for the public good, that through the consul’s voice, under the head of a thanksgiving, good princes should recognize what they were doing, and bad ones what they ought to do. This is now the more customary and necessary because our father restrains and suppresses private acts of thanks, and would interpose against the public ones too, if he allowed himself to forbid what the senate commands. In both, Caesar Augustus, you show moderation: that elsewhere you do not suffer thanks to be rendered you, and that here you suffer it. For this honor is paid not by yourself to yourself, but by those who render it. You yield to our feelings: we must proclaim your gifts, and you must hear them. Often, Conscript Fathers, I have silently turned over in my mind what manner of man, and how great, he ought to be by whose sway and nod the seas, the lands, peace, and wars are governed; and yet, as I imagined and shaped a prince whom a power matched with the immortal gods would befit, it never occurred to me even in a wish to conceive one like him whom we see. One man shone in war but went dim in peace; another the toga adorned, but not arms also; this one courted reverence by terror, that one love by humanity; this one lost in public the glory he had sought at home, that one lost at home the glory he had won in public. In short, until now no one has arisen whose virtues were not marred by some neighboring vice. But to our prince what concord, what harmony of all praises and all glory has fallen! So that nothing is taken from his severity by his cheerfulness, nothing from his gravity by his frankness, nothing from his majesty by his humanity. And his firmness of body, his tall stature, the nobility of his head and the dignity of his face, the unbowed ripeness of his years, and — not without some gift of the gods — the hair adorned by the hastened marks of age to swell his majesty: do they not, far and wide, proclaim the prince?

Such he had to be whom not civil wars nor a commonwealth crushed by arms, but peace, and adoption, and the divine powers at last entreated back to the earth had given. Or was it right that there should be no difference between an emperor whom men had made and one whom the gods had made? Their judgment and favor toward you, Caesar Augustus, shone forth at once, when you were setting out to the army, and by an unwonted sign. For other princes the abundant blood of victims, or the sinister flight of birds, announced to those who consulted them; but you, as you climbed the Capitol after the custom, the shout of the citizens met as already prince, though they did not so intend it. For all the crowd that had beset the threshold, when the doors were thrown open at your entrance, hailed as emperor — as it then supposed, the god, but, as the outcome taught, you. Nor was it taken otherwise by all. For you yourself were unwilling to understand it: you refused to rule, refused — which was the mark of one who would rule well. And so you had to be compelled. But compelled you could not be, save by the danger of the fatherland and the tottering of the commonwealth. For you were resolved not to take up the command unless it had to be saved. Wherefore I think that very madness and uprising in the camp arose because your modesty had to be overcome by great force and great terror. And just as whirlwinds and storms set off the calm of sea and sky, so I would believe that that tumult went before to heighten the grace of your peace. The mortal condition has these turns, that adversity is born of prosperity and prosperity of adversity. God hides the seeds of both, and for the most part the causes of goods and ills lie concealed beneath a contrary face.

A great disgrace, indeed, was stamped upon the age, a great wound dealt to the commonwealth: an emperor, and father of the human race, besieged, taken, shut in; the power of saving men torn from that gentlest of old men; and snatched from a prince the most blessed thing in the principate — that he is forced to nothing. Yet if this was the one means that might bring you to the helm of the public safety, I am near to crying out that it was worth the price. The discipline of the camp was corrupted, that you might come to be its corrector and amender; the worst example was brought in, that the best might be set against it; in short, a prince was forced to kill those he would not, that he might give a prince who could not be forced. Long ago, to be sure, you deserved to be adopted; but we should not have known how much the empire owed you, had you been adopted earlier. The time was awaited in which it would stand clear that you had not so much received a benefit as conferred one. The shaken commonwealth fled to your bosom, and the empire, crashing down upon the emperor, was handed to you by the emperor’s own voice. You were implored by adoption and summoned, as great generals of old were wont to be recalled from foreign and outland wars to bring help to the fatherland. Thus son and father, in one and the same moment, rendered each other the greatest of services: he gave you the empire, you gave it back to him. You alone, then, in this age, by accepting so great a gift made an even return for it — nay, you laid the giver under obligation besides; for once the empire was shared, you grew the more anxious, he the more free of care.

O new and unheard-of road to the principate! It was not your own desire, your own fear, but another’s good and another’s dread that made you prince. Though you may seem to have attained what is loftiest among men, yet happier was the lot you left behind: under a good prince you ceased to be a private man. You were taken up into a partnership of labors and cares, and it was not the glad and prosperous side of that station, but its hard and harsh side, that drove you to take it up. You took up the empire after another had come to regret taking it up. Between the adopted and him who adopted there was no kinship, no tie, save that each was best — the one worthy to be chosen, the other to choose. And so you were adopted, not, as one and another before you, to gratify a wife. For it was not a stepfather but a prince that took you for a son, and in the same spirit the deified Nerva became your father as he was the father of all. Nor is it fitting that a son be taken up otherwise, if he be taken up by a prince. Are you, when about to make over to one man the senate and people of Rome, the armies, the provinces, the allies, to take your successor from a wife’s lap? to seek the heir of the highest power only within your own house? not to cast your eyes round the whole state, and count him your nearest, him your most closely bound, whom you find the best, whom you find most like the gods? He who is to rule over all ought to be chosen out of all. For it is not a master for your slaves that you, as emperor, are about to give — so that you might rest content with an heir as if by necessity — but a prince for the citizens. It is a proud and kingly thing, unless you adopt the man who, it is agreed, would have ruled even had you not adopted him. This Nerva did, judging it to make no difference whether you have begotten or chosen, if children are adopted as much without judgment as they are born — save only that men bear with a more even mind a prince whom another has begotten unhappily than one whom he has chosen badly.

Carefully, then, he avoided this hazard, and took into his counsel not the judgments of men only, but of the gods as well. And so your adoption was carried out not in a bedchamber but in a temple, not before the marriage couch but before the couch of Jupiter Best and Greatest — that adoption on which at last was founded not our servitude, but our liberty and safety and security. For the gods claimed that glory for themselves: theirs the work, theirs that command; Nerva was but the minister, and in adopting you he obeyed as much as you, who were being adopted. A laurel had been brought from Pannonia — the gods so contriving — that the emblem of victory might grace the rising of an unconquered emperor. This the emperor Nerva had set in the lap of Jupiter, when suddenly, greater and more august than his wont, having summoned an assembly of men and of gods, he took you for his son — that is, for the one help of his weary fortunes. Thereupon, as though he had laid down the empire — in what security, in what glory rejoicing (for how little it matters whether you lay the empire down or share it, save that this is the harder course?) — leaning on you as though you were at his side, supporting himself and the fatherland upon your shoulders, he grew strong again with your youth, your strength. At once all the tumult subsided. This was the work not of the adoption, but of the adopted; and Nerva would have acted rashly indeed had he adopted another. Have we forgotten how lately, after an adoption, sedition did not cease but began? That adoption would have been a goad to wrath and a torch of tumult, had it not lighted upon you. Or is it in doubt that, for an emperor who had lost his hold on men’s reverence to be able to give the empire, it was brought about by the authority of him to whom it was given? At once a son, at once a Caesar, soon Emperor, and partner in the tribunician power — all alike, and all at once you were made: things which lately a true father conferred only upon a single, second son.

A great sign this of your moderation, that you were approved not only as successor to the empire, but as its sharer and partner too. For a successor must be had, even if you would not; a partner need not be had, unless you will. Will posterity believe that a man born of a father patrician and consular and triumphal, while he commanded an army most brave, most numerous, most devoted to him, was made emperor not by the army? that to the same man, while he governed Germany, the name of Germanicus was sent from here? that he himself did nothing toward being made emperor, did nothing but deserve and obey? For you obeyed, Caesar, and came to the principate by compliance, and nothing was done by you with a more submissive spirit than that you began to rule. Already a Caesar, already emperor, already Germanicus — absent and unaware, and, after such great names, so far as your own intent went, a private man. It would seem much were I to say: you did not know you would be emperor — you were emperor, and did not know you were. But when the messenger of your fortune came to you, you would indeed have preferred to be what you had been, but the choice was not free. Would you not obey — a citizen the prince, a legate the emperor, a son the father? Where then is discipline? where the custom handed down from our ancestors, of taking up with an even and ready mind whatever charge the emperor lays upon you? For what if he should assign you provinces after provinces, wars after wars? You would think he could use the same right, when he recalls you to the empire, that he used when he sent you to the army; and that it makes no difference whether he bids you go as a legate or come back as a prince, save that the glory of obedience is the greater in what one less desires.

The authority of him who gave the command was heightened by the very fact that his authority had been brought to the utmost peril; and that you should think obedience the more due to him who commanded was brought about by this — that by others he was obeyed the less. Besides this, you heard the consent of the senate and the people. That judgment, that choice, was not of Nerva alone. For men everywhere were seeking this same thing in their prayers; he only seized it first by a prince’s right, and was the first to do what all were going to do. Nor, by Hercules, would the deed please all so greatly, had it not pleased them before it was done. But with what restraint, good gods, did you govern your power and your fortune! An emperor in titles and images and standards, but in modesty, in labor, in watchfulness a general and a legate and a common soldier — when already you marched at a great pace before your banners and your eagles, and claimed for yourself from that adoption nothing but a son’s devotion, a son’s obedience, and prayed for that name a long life and a long glory. The providence of the gods had carried you to the first place; you still wished to halt in the second, and even to grow old there: you seemed to yourself a private man, so long as there was an emperor, and another than you. Your prayers were heard, but only so far as it was good for that best and holiest old man, whom the gods claimed for heaven, lest after that divine and immortal deed he should do anything mortal. For to so great a work this reverence was owed — that it should be his last, and its author be consecrated at once, so that one day, among those who came after, it might be asked whether he had done that deed already as a god. Thus he was the father of all by no title more than by being yours. Great glory, and great renown: when he had proved abundantly how well the empire sat upon your shoulders, he left the lands to you, and you to the lands — dear to all, and to be longed for by this very thing, that he had taken care he should not be longed for.

Him you honored first with tears, as befitted a son, then with temples — not in imitation of those who did this same thing, but in another spirit. Tiberius consecrated Augustus to heaven, but to bring in the charge of treason; Nero consecrated Claudius, but to mock him; Titus consecrated Vespasian, and Domitian Titus — but the one that he might seem the son of a god, the other that he might seem a god’s brother. You set your father among the stars not to terrify the citizens, not in insult to the divine powers, not for your own honor, but because you believe him a god. This is a lesser thing when it is done by men who think themselves gods too. But though you worship him with altars, with sacred couches, with a priest of his own, yet by nothing more do you both make and prove him a god than by being such a man yourself. For in a prince who, having chosen his successor, has yielded to fate, the one and surest proof of his divinity is a good successor. Has any arrogance, then, come to you from your father’s immortality? Do you emulate those latest princes, made idle and proud by their parents’ divinity, rather than the old and ancient ones, who won this very empire that enemies had lately invaded and held in contempt — seeing that there was reckoned no surer mark of an emperor beaten and put to flight than that a triumph should be held? And so they had taken heart and shaken off the yoke; no longer did they contend with us for their own liberty, but for our servitude; nor did they enter even a truce save on equal terms, and dictated their own laws where they should have received ours.

But now terror and dread have returned to them all, and the wish to do as they are bidden. For they see a Roman general, one of those old and ancient ones to whom the title of commander was given by plains heaped with slaughter and seas stained with victories. So we receive hostages, we do not buy them; nor do we bargain with huge losses and immense bribes for the right to have conquered. They ask, they beg; we grant, we refuse — both alike out of the majesty of empire: those who have gained their request give thanks; those to whom it is denied do not dare complain. Would they dare, who know that you took your post against the fiercest of peoples at the very season most friendly to them and hardest for us — when the Danube joins its banks with ice and, hardened with frost, carries vast wars upon its back; when savage tribes are armed no more by their weapons than by their own sky, their own climate? But once you were close at hand, as though the turns of the seasons had been reversed, they were kept shut in their lairs, while our columns rejoiced to range along the banks, to use the enemy’s own opportunity if you allowed it, and to carry the barbarians’ winter back upon the barbarians.

Such is the reverence you command among the enemy: what among the soldiers? What admiration, and how did you win it? When they bore hunger with you, thirst with you; when in that drill upon the plain you mingled an emperor’s dust and sweat with the squadrons of the soldiers, differing from the rest in nothing but strength and excellence; when in free combat you now brandished your weapons hand to hand, now caught those brandished against you, keen and glad at the valor of your men whenever a heavier blow fell on your helmet or your shield — for you praised those who struck, and urged them to be bold, and bold they now were — when, as watcher and umpire of the men joining the contests, you matched the arms, tested the weapons, and, if anything seemed too hard for the one who took it, brandished it yourself. And what of when you brought comfort to the weary, help to the sick? It was not your habit to enter your own tent until you had first gone round your comrades’, nor to give your body rest except after all the others. For this an emperor would not seem to me worthy of admiration, were he such a man among the Fabricii and the Scipios and the Camilli; for then the ardor of imitation, and always some better man, would have kindled him. But after the pursuit of arms had been transferred from the hands to the eyes, from labor to pleasure; after it was no longer some veteran, graced with the mural or the civic crown, who attended our drills, but a Greekling instructor — how great a thing it is, alone of all men, to delight in the ancestral way and the ancestral courage, and with no rival and no model to vie with oneself, to contend with oneself, and, as he alone commands, so to be the only one who deserves to command!

Were not these your cradle, Caesar, and your first schooling — when, scarcely more than a boy, you swelled your father’s glory with a Parthian laurel and already then earned the name of Germanicus; when, heard of from close at hand, you curbed the ferocity and pride of the barbarians with great terror, and joined Rhine and Euphrates by the fame of the admiration you stirred; when you traversed the world no more on foot than in men’s praises, always greater and more renowned among those whom you reached afterward? And as yet you were not emperor, not yet the son of a god. Germany, indeed, is fenced and sundered by very many peoples, by the almost endless waste of the land that lies between, and then by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and other mountains immense — unless they be set beside these. Through all this distance, while you led your legions, or rather (such was your speed) swept them along, you never once looked round for carriage or horse: this last, unburdened, followed with the rest, not as a support for the march but as an ornament, of no use to you save when, on a day of halting in camp, you stirred up the nearby plain with your briskness, your galloping, your dust. Am I to marvel at the beginning of your toil, or its end? It is much that you persevered; yet more that you did not fear you might prove unable to persevere. Nor do I doubt that the man who had summoned you from Spain itself, amid those German wars, as his strongest reinforcement — himself idle, and even then, when he had need of others’ valor, envious of it — conceived an admiration of you, not without a certain fear, as great as that which the son of Jupiter, unconquered ever and untiring after savage labors and harsh commands, would bring back to his own king; while in expedition upon expedition you were found worthy of yet another charge.

As tribune, in years still tender but with a man’s firmness, you traversed the most far-flung lands — Fortune even then forewarning you to learn thoroughly, and long, what you would soon have to teach. For not content to have merely glimpsed a camp and passed, as it were, through a brief term of service, you so played the tribune that you might at once be a general, and have nothing left to learn at the time for teaching. Through ten campaigns you came to know the ways of peoples, the lie of regions, the advantages of ground, and the varied temper of waters and skies, until you grew used to bearing them as your native springs and native stars. How often you changed your horses, how often your worn-out arms! A time will come, then, when our descendants will long to look upon — and to hand down for the looking to their own children — what plain drank up your sweat, what trees screened your rest, what rocks your sleep, what roof, in short, you filled as its great guest: just as then to you yourself the hallowed footprints of mighty generals were pointed out, in those same places. But this is for the future. At present, any soldier of a little longer standing is reckoned by this, that he had you for a comrade-in-arms. For how few there are whose comrade you were not before you were their emperor! Hence it is that you call almost all of them by name, that you recount the brave deeds of each; nor do they have to count up for you the wounds they took for the commonwealth — you who were at once their praiser and their witness.

But more to be proclaimed is your moderation — that, nursed on the glories of war, you love peace; and that, though your father held a triumph and a laurel was dedicated to Capitoline Jupiter on the day of your adoption, you do not therefore seek triumphs at every opportunity. You neither fear wars nor provoke them. It is a great thing, Emperor Augustus, a great thing to stand on the bank of the Danube with a triumph assured if you cross, and yet not to long to fight it out with men who decline the fight — the one achieved by courage, the other by moderation. For that you yourself are unwilling to fight is moderation; your courage ensures that your enemies too are unwilling. The Capitol, then, will one day receive not mimic chariots, nor the shams of a counterfeit victory, but an emperor bringing back true and solid glory — peace, tranquillity, and submission so openly confessed by the enemy that there was no one left to conquer. This is fairer than all triumphs. For we have never had cause to win a victory, save when contempt for our empire had brought it on. But if any barbarian king should go so far in insolence and frenzy as to earn your wrath and indignation, then — though a sea lie between, or measureless rivers, or a sheer mountain defend him — he shall find all these so prone, so yielding to your valor, that he will think the mountains have sunk, the rivers run dry, the sea been cut off, and that it is not our fleets but the very land that has been launched against him.

Already I seem to behold a triumph laden not with the spoils of provinces and gold wrung from allies, but with the enemy’s own arms and the chains of captured kings. I seem to recognize the mighty names of their generals, and bodies not unworthy of the names. I seem to gaze on the floats heaped with the monstrous exploits of the barbarians, and each captive following his own deeds with bound hands; then you yourself aloft, pressing on in your chariot upon the backs of the conquered nations, and before the chariot the shields that you yourself have pierced through. Nor would the spoils of honor be wanting to you, should any king dare come within your reach and not shudder at the volley — not of your weapons only, but of your very eyes and menaces — flung across the whole field, with your whole army set against him. By your recent moderation you have earned this: that whenever the dignity of the empire compels you to wage or to ward off a war, you may seem to have conquered not in order to triumph, but to triumph because you have conquered.

One thing brings another to my mind. For how splendid it is that you revived the discipline of the camp, fallen and snuffed out, after you had driven off the evil of the former age — sloth, and insolence, and the disdain of obedience. It is now safe to earn reverence, safe to earn affection; and no commander fears either that his soldiers do not love him, or that they do. And so, alike untroubled by offense and by favor, they press on with the works, attend the drills, and make ready arms, walls, men. For our prince is not the kind to think that what is made ready against the enemy threatens and is aimed at himself — the conviction of those who, while doing the deeds of an enemy, lived in fear. They, accordingly, rejoiced that the soldier’s pursuits grew numb, that not their spirits only but their very bodies went slack, that even their swords were dulled and blunted by neglect. And our generals feared the snares not so much of foreign kings as of their own princes, and dreaded the hands and the steel not so much of the enemy as of their fellow soldiers.

It is the nature of the stars that the rising of a stronger dims the small and faint; in like manner, at the emperor’s coming the dignity of his legates is put in shadow. You, however, were greater than them all — yet greater without diminishing any: each man kept the same authority in your presence as in your absence; nay, to most of them reverence had even accrued from this, that you too showed them reverence. And so, dear alike to highest and lowest, you had so blended the emperor and the comrade-in-arms that you both quickened the zeal and toil of all, like a taskmaster, and lightened it, like a partner and ally. Happy those whose loyalty and diligence were proved not through go-betweens and interpreters, but by you yourself — and not by your ears but by your eyes! They so won you that even when absent you would trust no one about the absent more than yourself.

Now the longing of the citizens called you back, and love of the fatherland outweighed the affection of the camp. From there your journey was calm and unassuming, plainly that of a man returning from peace. Nor indeed shall I count it among your praises that no father, no husband dreaded your coming: chastity, in others affected, is in you inborn and native, and among the things you cannot set to your own credit. No uproar in requisitioning transport, no fastidiousness about lodgings; the same rations as the rest; and besides, a retinue girded and obedient — you would say that some great general, and you above all, was going out to the armies: so little, or at most so little, was the difference between an emperor already made and one soon to be. How unlike, of late, the passage of that other prince! — if passage it was, and not a ravaging, when he drove off his hosts’ cattle, and everything to right and left was scorched and ground down, as though some violence, or those very barbarians he was fleeing, had fallen upon it. The provinces had to be persuaded that that progress had been Domitian’s, not a prince’s. And so, not so much for your own glory as for the common good, you set out by edict what had been spent on each of you. Let an emperor grow used to casting up accounts with the empire: let him go out, let him come back, as one who will render a reckoning; let him declare by edict what he has spent. So it will come about that he does not spend what he would be ashamed to declare. Besides, let the princes to come know — like it or not — and, with the two examples set before them, remember that men will form their guess about their characters according as they choose the one course or the other.

Did you not, for so many and so great services, deserve some new honors, some new titles? Yet you even refused the name "Father of the Fatherland." How long our struggle with your modesty! how slowly we won! That name, which others took on the very first day of their principate, like the names of Emperor and Caesar, you put off until you too — the most sparing appraiser of your own benefits — would confess that you now deserved it. And so to you alone of all men it fell to be Father of the Fatherland before you were made so; for you were such in our hearts, in our judgments. Nor did it matter to the public devotion what you were called — save that it seemed ungrateful to itself if it called you Emperor and Caesar rather than Father, when it found you a father. And that name — with what kindness, with what indulgence you exercise it! how you live with your fellow citizens, as a father with his children! how, returned an emperor though you had gone out a private man, you recognize them and are recognized! You think us the same, yourself the same: equal to all, and greater than the rest only by so much as you are better.

And first — what a day that was, on which, awaited and longed for, you entered your city! And this very thing, that you entered it — how marvelous, how glad! For your predecessors used to be carried and conveyed in — I do not say in a four-horse chariot and with white horses, but on the shoulders of men, which was more arrogant still. You, raised above the others and loftier by your bodily height alone, celebrated a triumph not over our endurance, but over the arrogance of princes. And so neither age held anyone back, nor ill health, nor sex, from filling their eyes with the unwonted sight. Little children learned to know you, young men pointed you out, old men marveled; the sick too, defying their doctors’ orders, crept out at the sight of you, as though toward health and recovery. Hence some declared they had lived long enough, now that they had seen you, now that they had you back; others, that there was now more reason to live. Women, too, were then visited by the deepest delight in their own fruitfulness, when they saw for what prince they had borne citizens, for what emperor soldiers. You might have seen the roofs crammed and groaning, and not even a vacant spot that could hold more than a suspended, unsteady foothold; the streets choked on every side, and a narrow path left for you; the people eager on this side and that, everywhere equal joy and equal shouting. The joy at your coming was taken up by all as equally as you came for all; and that very joy grew with your entrance, and swelled, almost, at every step.

It pleased all that you received the senate with a kiss, as you had been dismissed with a kiss; that you marked out the distinguished men of the equestrian order by the honor of their names, with no prompter; that you all but greeted your clients unbidden, and added certain marks of familiarity. More pleasing still, that you walked slowly and calmly, as far as the crowd that gazed back at you allowed; that the throng who met you stood close about you too — nay, you above all; that from the very first day you trusted your side to everyone. For, not hemmed in by a band of bodyguards, but encircled on all sides now by the flower of the senate, now of the equestrian order, according as the one or the other kind of crowd had prevailed, you followed your own lictors, silent and quiet; for the soldiers differed in nothing from the common people in dress, in calm, in restraint. But when you began to climb the Capitol, how glad to all was the memory of your adoption! how special the joy of those who had first hailed you emperor in that same place! Nay, I would believe that your own god took a special pleasure in his handiwork. Indeed, as you set foot in the very prints where your father had stood when about to bring forth that mighty secret of the gods, what joy among the bystanders! how fresh the shout! how like that earlier day was the day this one had begotten! how all was full of altars, august with victims! how the prayers of all were gathered for the safety of one! — since they understood that, in what they prayed for you, they were praying for themselves and their children. From there you went to the Palatine, but with such a look, such moderation, as though you were making for a private house; the rest went each to his own household gods, to renew the pledge of his joy where there is no compulsion to rejoice.

An entrance of that kind would have burdened another; you grow daily more admirable and better — such, in the end, as other princes only promise that they will be. You alone, then, are commended and enlarged by the passage of time. For you have joined and blended the most opposite things: the assurance of one who has long ruled, and the modesty of one just beginning. You do not press down to your feet the embraces of your fellow citizens, nor return a kiss with your hand. There remains to the emperor the same kindness of face as before, the same modesty of the right hand. You used to walk on foot; you walk still. You rejoiced in labor; you rejoice still. And all those things about you are the same: Fortune has changed nothing in you yourself. When the prince passes through a public place, one is free to stop, to come toward him, to walk with him, to pass him by; you walk among us, not as though you were granting a favor; and you give free access to yourself, not so as to lay us under obligation. Whoever has come up clings to your side, and each man’s own modesty, not your pride, sets an end to the talk. We are ruled by you, indeed, and subject to you, but in the way that we are subject to the laws. For they too govern our desires and appetites, yet they dwell with us and among us. You stand out, you excel, as office and power do — things that are above men, indeed, yet are men’s own. Before you, princes, out of disdain for us and a kind of fear of equality, had lost the use of their feet. Them, then, the shoulders and necks of slaves bore above our faces; but you, your fame, your glory, the devotion of your citizens bear above the very princes; you the ground itself lifts to the stars — ground so common, and the prince’s footprints mingled with ours.

Nor do I fear, Conscript Fathers, that I may seem too long, when it is most to be wished that the things for which thanks are rendered to a prince should be many — things it would be more reverent to keep whole and untouched for your own reflection than to graze piecemeal and in brief; because it generally follows that the matters one passes over in silence seem as great as in truth they are. Unless, indeed, it suits to touch lightly on these: the tribes enriched, and a largess given to the people — and given in full, though the soldiers had received only part of their bounty. Or is it the mark of an ordinary spirit to pay in ready money rather to those to whom it might the more easily be refused? Though in this difference too the principle of equality was kept. For the soldiers were made equal to the people in that they received a part, but received it first; the people to the soldiers in that they received later, but received the whole at once. And with what generosity it was distributed! what care you took that no one should be left without a share in your bounty! It was given to those who, after your edict, had been entered in place of names struck off; and even those to whom it had not been promised were made equal to the rest. One man was kept away by business, another by ill health, this one by the sea, that one by rivers in flood; and it was looked to and provided that no one should lose by being sick, or busy, or, in short, far off: let each come when he would, let each come when he could. It is magnificent, Caesar, and like you, to draw the most far-flung lands near, as it were, by the genius of your munificence, and to contract immense distances by your generosity; to step between men and mischance, to face down fortune, and to strive with all your might that no one of the Roman commons, when you gave the largess, should feel he had been a mere man rather than a citizen.

As the day of the largess drew near, the swarms of infants and the people-to-be would watch for the prince’s going out in public and beset the streets. It was the parents’ task to show off their little ones and, perching them on their shoulders, to teach them flattering words and coaxing cries; and the children gave back what they were prompted. And most of them dinned at the prince’s deaf ears with prayers that came to nothing, and, not knowing what they had begged for, were put off — unaware of what they had failed to win — until they should be old enough to understand. You did not even endure to be asked, and although it was the gladdest thing for your eyes to be filled with the sight of Roman offspring, you nonetheless ordered them all to be received and registered before ever they saw or approached you: so that from infancy onward they might know a public father by the gift of their rearing; might grow at your cost, who were growing for you, and on your maintenance come to serve in your pay, and all owe to you alone as much as each owed his own parents. Rightly, Caesar, do you take up at your own expense the hope of the Roman name. For to a great prince, one who will deserve immortality, no kind of outlay is worthier than what is spent upon posterity. The rich are urged to rear children by huge rewards, and penalties to match; for the poor to raise theirs, there is one means only — a good prince. Unless he cherishes, fosters, and embraces with a generous hand the children begotten in reliance on him, he hastens the fall of the empire, the fall of the commonwealth, and protects the nobles in vain while the commons are neglected — like a head failing on a wasted body and ready to totter under an unsteady weight. It is easy to guess what joy you felt when the shout of parents, children, old men, infants, and boys received you. This first cry of the little citizens steeped your ears — to whom, being about to give maintenance, you granted this greatest boon, that they need not ask. Yet above all is this, that you are such a man that under you it is a pleasure, and a profit, to rear children.

No parent now dreads anything for his son but the turns of human frailty; nor is the prince’s wrath reckoned among the incurable diseases. It is a great spur to raising children, to rear them in hope of maintenance, in hope of largesses; greater still, in hope of liberty, in hope of security. And so, let a prince bestow nothing, provided he take nothing away; let him not feed them, provided he does not kill them — and there will be no lack of men who long for sons. On the other hand, let him bestow and take away, feed and kill: he will soon have brought it about that all men regret not only their offspring, but themselves and their parents. Wherefore in all your liberality I would praise nothing more than that you give the largess from your own purse, the maintenance from your own; and that under you the children of citizens are not, like the whelps of wild beasts, reared on blood and slaughter; and — what is most welcome to those who receive it — that they know what is given them was torn from no one, and that, while so many are enriched, the prince alone has been made the poorer; though not even he, in fact. For he whose own is whatever belongs to all has himself as much as all together.

Your manifold glory calls me elsewhere — yet elsewhere? as though I had already revered and marveled enough that you poured out so much money, not, conscious of some disgrace, to turn rumor away from hounding it, nor to hold men’s sad and gloomy talk in check with a gladder subject. You bought off no guilt by the largess, no cruelty by the maintenance; nor was your motive for doing good that you might have done your ill deeds unpunished. By that outlay love was sought, not pardon; and the Roman people withdrew from your tribunal bound to you, not appeased. For you offered the largess, glad to the glad, untroubled to the untroubled; and what princes used before to throw to the swelling tempers of the commons to soften their hatred of themselves, you gave to the people as innocently as the people received it. A little short of five thousand free-born children there were, Conscript Fathers, whom our prince’s liberality sought out, found, and enrolled. These, a reserve for wars, an ornament of peace, are fed at public expense, and learn to love their fatherland not only as a fatherland, but as a nurse. From these the camps, from these the tribes will be filled; from these will one day be born those who have no need of maintenance. May the gods grant you, Caesar, the length of life you deserve, and keep in you the spirit they have given; and how much greater a throng of infants you will see registered, again and again! For it grows and increases daily — not because children are dearer to their parents, but because citizens are dearer to their prince. You will give largesses, if you wish; you will furnish maintenance, if you wish: yet they are born because of you.

I count the abundance of the grain supply as the equal of a perpetual largess. The care of this once added no less to Pompey’s glory than canvassing driven from the Campus, the enemy swept from the sea, and East and West traversed by his triumphs. Yet Pompey acted with no more public spirit than our father, who by his authority, his counsel, his good faith opened up the roads, threw open the harbors, gave back highways to the lands, the sea to the shores and the shores to the sea, and so mingled diverse peoples in commerce that whatever was grown anywhere might seem to have been grown for all. Is it not given us to see how, with wrong to no one, every year overflows for our use? For the harvests are not snatched as from enemy soil, doomed to rot in the granaries, carried off while the allies cry out in vain. They themselves bring down what the earth bore, what the season nourished, what the year yielded; nor, crushed by new levies, do they fall short of the old tribute. The treasury buys whatever it appears to buy. Hence the supplies, hence a grain-price on which buyer and seller can agree; hence plenty here, and famine nowhere.

Egypt so prided herself on feeding and swelling the seed that she owed nothing to rains and sky; for, watered always by her own river, and wont to grow rich by no other kind of water than what it had borne down, she clothed herself in such crops that she vied with the most fertile lands, as though she would never yield to them. She dried up, by an unlooked-for drought, to the very injury of barrenness, because a sluggish Nile had raised itself from its channel slowly and faintly — though even then to be ranked among great rivers. Hence a great part of the land, used to being flooded by the spreading river, glowed white with deep dust. In vain then did Egypt long for clouds and look up to the sky, when the very father of her fruitfulness, shrunken and meager, had penned in that year’s richness by the same straits that penned in his own. For that wandering river, when it spreads, had not only halted short of the line of hills it always claims, but even over the low, water-holding ground had drawn itself off in a gentle, soft retreat, ebbing away, and had not yet added enough watered land to the parched. And so the region, cheated of its flood — that is, of its plenty — called on Caesar’s help as it is wont to call on its own river; and its span of misfortune lasted no longer than the time to report it. So swift, Caesar, is your power, and your goodness so evenly bent on all things and so ready, that for those who suffer anything too sad in your age, it is enough for their remedy and rescue that you should know of it.

For my part I pray fertile years and kindly lands for all nations; yet I could believe that through this plight of Egypt Fortune wished to try your powers and to wait upon your vigilance. For since you deserve all things prosperous everywhere, is it not plain that, if anything adverse falls out, matter and a field are spread open for your praises and your virtues — since prosperity proves men fortunate, but adversity proves them great? It had long been a common saying that our city could not be fed and sustained but by the wealth of Egypt. That windy and insolent nation took pride in it — that, though we were the conquering people, it nonetheless fed us, and that in its river, in its ships, lay either our plenty or our famine. We have poured back upon the Nile its own stores: it has taken back the grain it had sent, and carried home again the harvests it had carried off. Let Egypt learn, then, and believe it by the proof, that she furnishes us not sustenance but tribute; let her know that she is not necessary to the Roman People, and serve us all the same. After this, if it will, let the Nile keep to its own channel and hold a river’s measure: this is nothing to the city, nor even to Egypt — except that thence the ships go out empty and void and like those returning, while hence they go full and laden and such as are wont to come; and, the office of the sea reversed, let it be from this side rather that favoring winds and a short passage are sought. It would seem strange, Caesar, if the city’s grain supply had not felt an idle Egypt and a slackened Nile; yet by your resources, by your care, it overflowed even thither, so that it was proved at once both that we can do without Egypt, and that Egypt cannot do without us. It would have been all over with that most fertile nation, had it been free: it was ashamed of an unaccustomed barrenness, and blushed at the famine no less than it was tortured by it — when by you, alike, its needs and its shame were relieved. The farmers stood amazed at full granaries they had not themselves filled, wondering from what fields that harvest had been brought up, or in what part of Egypt was another river. Thus by your benefaction the soil was not grudging; and the Nile, compliant, has often flowed more bountifully for Egypt, but never more bountifully for our glory.

How it gladdens us now that all the provinces have come into our trust and dominion, since we have been granted a prince who could carry the earth’s fruitfulness now here, now there, as the time and the need required, and carry it back again — who could feed and protect a nation sundered from us by the sea, as though it were some part of the Roman people and commons! And the kindness of heaven, indeed, is never so great as to enrich and cherish all lands at once: he, for all alike, if not barrenness itself, yet drives out the evils of barrenness; he, if not fruitfulness itself, yet brings in the goods of fruitfulness; he, by alternating convoys, binds East to West, so that what is grown anywhere and what is sought, all nations may take in turn from one another, and may learn how much better it is, for those who serve, that there be one whom they serve than a freedom at odds with itself. For when the goods of all are kept apart, each man’s own ills fall upon him alone; but when they are shared and mingled, the ills of individuals reach no one, while the goods of all belong to all. But whether there is some divinity in lands, or some guardian spirit in rivers, I pray both that soil and that very river that, content with this kindness of the prince, it lay up the seed in a soft lap and give it back manifold. We do not, for our part, demand interest; yet let it think it owes payment, and atone for one year’s broken faith through all the years and all the ages after — the more so because we do not exact it.

The interests both of citizens and of allies have been satisfied. Then a show was given neither nerveless nor lax, nor such as would soften and break the spirits of men, but such as would kindle them to noble wounds and the contempt of death — since even in the bodies of slaves and criminals one could discern the love of praise and the desire for victory. And then what generosity, what fairness he showed in the giving of it — untouched by every partiality, or above it! What was asked for was granted; what was not asked for was offered. He pressed it on us unbidden, and prompted us to want more; and even so, more came unlooked-for, more on the sudden. And then how free the enthusiasms of the spectators, how safe their applause! No one was charged with disloyalty, as the custom had been, for having hated a gladiator; no one, turned from spectator into spectacle, paid for his wretched pleasures by the hook and the flames. Mad was that other, and ignorant of true honor, who gathered up charges of treason in the arena, and construed it that he was scorned and held in contempt unless we worshipped even his gladiators — that in them he was being reviled, that his divinity, his godhead, was being outraged; for he reckoned himself the equal of the gods, and his gladiators the equal of himself.

But you, Caesar, what a fair spectacle you gave us back in place of that abominable one! We saw the trial of the informers, as of footpads, as of brigands. They had beset not the wilderness, not the highway, but the temple, but the forum: no will was safe any longer, no standing certain; neither childlessness availed nor children. The greed of princes had swollen this evil. You turned your eyes upon it, and as before you had restored peace to the camps, so afterward you restored it to the forum; you cut out the inward malady, and with foreseeing severity took care that a state founded upon the laws should not seem overthrown by the laws. Therefore, though both your fortune and your generosity have offered us sights to behold — as indeed they have: now the mighty strength of men and matching spirits, now the savagery of wild beasts, now an unknown tameness, now those hidden and secret riches that under you first became common to all — yet nothing was more welcome, nothing more worthy of the age, than that it fell to us to look down from above on the upturned faces of the informers and their wrenched-back necks. We knew them and took our fill, as, like victims to atone for the public anxiety, above the blood of the guilty they were led off to slow torments and heavier punishments. They were heaped into ships hastily got together, and given over to the storms. Let them go, let them flee the lands they had laid waste with their informing; and if the waves and gales had kept any back upon the rocks, let him dwell on bare crags and an inhospitable shore: let him lead a hard and anxious life, and, having left the security of the whole human race behind his back, mourn.

A sight to be remembered: a fleet of informers given over to every wind, forced to spread its sails to the storms and to follow the angry waves onto whatever rocks they bore them. It was a pleasure to watch from the very harbor the ships scattered in a moment, and at that very sea to render thanks to the prince who, his own clemency kept whole, had committed the vengeance of men and of lands to the gods of the sea. How much the difference of the times could do was then most fully known, when to the very rocks to which before each most innocent man had been nailed, now each most guilty was nailed; and when a throng of informers now filled all the islands that lately a throng of senators had filled — men whom you have curbed not for the present only but forever, shut up in that encircling snare of punishments. Do they set out to snatch others’ money? Let them lose what they have. Are they eager to drive men from their hearths? Let them be cast out from their own. And let them not, as before, hold up that bloodless and iron brow to be wounded in vain by the brand, and laugh at their own marks; but let them look on losses matched to their reward, and have hopes no greater than their fears, and dread as much as they were dreaded. With a great spirit, indeed, the deified Titus had looked to our security and our vengeance, and for that was made equal to the gods; but how much more worthy of heaven will you one day be, who have added so many things to those for which we made him a god! And this was the harder, in that the emperor Nerva — most worthy of you as his son and his successor — after he had built some great additions onto Titus’s edict, seemed to have left you nothing; yet you devised so many things, as though before you nothing had been found out. How much credit each of these, dealt out singly, would have added to you! But you poured them all out at once, as the sun and the day come forth not in some part but whole and all at once, and not for one or another but for all in common.

How it gladdens us to behold the treasury silent and at peace, and such as it was before the informers! Now it is that temple again, now truly a god — not the stripping-house of citizens, the savage receptacle of bloody plunder, and, in all the world, until now the one place where, under the best of princes, the good were no match for the bad. Yet the honor of the laws remains, and nothing has been torn away from the public good: no penalty has been remitted to anyone, but vengeance has been added; and this alone is changed, that now it is not the informers but the laws that are feared. But perhaps you do not restrain the fiscus with the same severity as the treasury. Nay, with severity all the greater, in proportion as you believe more is permitted you in your own affairs than in the public ones. It is said to your agent, and even to your procurator: "Come into court; follow me to the tribunal." For a tribunal too has been devised for the principate — equal to the rest, unless you measure it by the greatness of the litigant. Lot and urn assign a judge to the fiscus; one may reject him, one may cry out: "This man I will not have, he is timid and understands too little the blessings of the age; that man I will not have, because he loves Caesar too stoutly." The principate and liberty use the same court. And — this is your chief glory — more often than not the fiscus loses, whose cause is never bad except under a good prince. Great is this merit; greater that you keep such procurators that, for the most part, your citizens would prefer no other judges. And the litigant is free to say: "I do not wish to choose him." For you attach no compulsion to your gifts, knowing that this is the sum of a prince’s benefactions — if one is also free not to use them.

Most of the empire’s burdens have forced taxes to be set up — for the common good, indeed, but at the cost of injury to individuals. Among these the Twentieth was devised, a tax tolerable and easy for outside heirs alone, but heavy for those within the family. And so it was laid upon the one and remitted to the other; since it was plain with what grief men would bear — or rather would not bear — to have something stripped and scraped from goods they had earned by blood, by kinship, in short by the sharing of the family rites, and which they had received never as another’s and merely to be hoped for, but as their own and always possessed, and to be passed on in turn to the next of kin. This mildness of the law was kept for old citizens; the new — whether they had come into citizenship through the Latin right or by the prince’s favor — unless they had at the same time obtained the rights of kinship, were held most foreign to those to whom they had been most closely joined. Thus the greatest benefit was turned into the gravest injury, and Roman citizenship was like a thing of hatred, discord, and bereavement, when it tore apart the dearest pledges of affection, though the love of those concerned stood unbroken. Yet there were found men in whom there was so great a love of our name that they thought Roman citizenship well purchased not only at the cost of the Twentieth but even at the loss of their kinship ties; though to these above all it ought to have come free, by whom it was prized so dearly. Therefore your father ordained that, for what passed from a mother’s goods to her children, or from children’s goods to the mother — even if, on acquiring citizenship, they had not received the rights of kinship — they should not pay the Twentieth upon it. The same exemption he granted to a son in a father’s goods, provided only he had been brought back into the father’s power: judging that it was shameless and insolent and almost impious for the tax-farmer to thrust himself into these relations, and that the holiest bonds could not be sundered — with the Twentieth, as it were, stepping between — without a kind of sacrilege; that no tax was worth so much as to make children and parents strangers.

So far he: more sparingly, perhaps, than befitted the best of princes, but not more sparingly than the best of fathers, who, about to adopt the Best, did this too as a most indulgent parent — content to have tasted certain things, or rather to have pointed the way, he reserved for his son a broad and almost untouched field for doing good. At once, then, your generosity built upon his gift, so that, just as a son was exempt in a father’s estate, so a father should be exempt in a son’s, and should not, at the very moment he ceased to be a father, lose this too — that he had been one. Nobly done, Caesar, that you do not suffer the tears of parents to be taxable. Let a father possess his son’s goods without diminution, and take no partner in the inheritance who has no part in the grief; let no one summon a fresh and stunned bereavement to a reckoning, or force a father to learn what his son has left behind. I magnify the prince’s gift, Conscript Fathers, when I show that there is reason in his generosity. For ambition and ostentation and prodigality, and anything rather than generosity, is what that must be reckoned in which there is no reason. Worthy, then, of your mildness, Emperor, to lessen the injuries of bereavement, and not to suffer anyone, having lost a son, to be afflicted besides with another grief. Even so it is a thing miserable enough — a father sole heir to his son: what if he should receive a coheir not from his son? Add that, since the deified Nerva had ordained that children should be freed from the obligation of the Twentieth in a father’s goods, it was fitting that parents should obtain the same exemption in their children’s goods. For why should greater honor be paid to descendants than to forebears? or why should the same equity not run backward too? You indeed, Caesar, removed that proviso — "provided only the son had been in his father’s power" — regarding, I suppose, the force and law of nature, which has always bidden children be under their parents’ authority, and has not, as among beasts so among men, given power and command to the stronger.

And not content to have taken the first degree of kinship from the Twentieth, he exempted the second as well, providing that a brother in a sister’s goods, and conversely a sister in a brother’s, and a grandfather and grandmother in a grandson’s and granddaughter’s, and they in turn, should be kept exempt. To those too, to whom Roman citizenship had been opened through the Latin right, he granted the same, and joined them all in mutual rights of kinship — together and equally and after the manner of nature — rights which earlier princes were eager to be petitioned for one by one, not so much with a mind to grant as to refuse. From which one may understand of what kindness, of what greatness of spirit it was, to gather and bind together scattered and, so to speak, mangled family lines, and to bid them, as it were, be born again; to bestow what used to be denied, and to grant to all what individuals had often failed to win; and finally to snatch from himself so many occasions for favors, so abundant a store for laying men under obligation and claiming their gratitude. It seemed to him unworthy, I believe, that what the gods had given should be sought from a man. You are sisters and a brother, grandfather and grandsons: why, then, should you ask to be what you are? You are so to yourselves. What more? In keeping with his moderation in all else, he thinks it no less invidious to give an inheritance than to take one away. Gladly, then, take up offices, take up citizenship: this breaking-off of kinship will abandon no one, like a stripped and severed trunk; all will enjoy the same bonds of affection as before, but more honored. Nor even will a remote and now failing degree of kinship be compelled to pay the Twentieth on any amount whatever. For the common parent of all has fixed a sum that can bear the tax-farmer.

A small and slender inheritance will be free of the Twentieth’s burden; and, if a grateful heir so wishes, the whole of it may serve the tomb, the whole the funeral. No watcher, no censurer will stand by. To whomever a modest sum has come from someone’s estate, let him hold it untroubled and possess it in peace. Such is the law of the Twentieth as laid down, that one cannot come into its peril except by wealth. Inequity has been turned into thanksgiving, injury into a wish: the heir prays that he may owe the Twentieth. It was added that those who, for such causes, owed the Twentieth up to the day of the edict, but had not yet paid it, should not pay. But not even the gods can give help for the past: you, however, gave help, and provided that each man should cease to owe what he would not afterward have owed. You brought it about, by the same stroke, that we should not have had bad princes; and with what genius — if nature allowed it — how gladly would you have poured back blood and goods to all those plundered, all those butchered! You forbade the exaction of what had begun to be owed in an age not your own. Another might rage at the defaulters, and punish their slowness in paying with a fine of double or even fourfold: you judge there is no difference in injustice between exacting what ought not to have been owed and ordaining that it be owed.

You will bear with a consul’s care and concern, Caesar. For as I consider that you, one and the same man, have remitted contributions, paid the donative, offered the largess, driven off the informers, and eased the taxes, you seem to me one who must be asked whether you have reckoned the empire’s revenues well enough, or whether a prince’s frugality has such power that, of itself, it suffices for so many outlays, so many disbursements. For what is the reason that to others — though they seized everything and kept what they seized — all things failed, as if they had seized nothing, while to you, though you bestow so much and take nothing away, all things are left over? Princes have never lacked men to attend the interests of the fiscus stubbornly, with grave brow and gloomy frown; and the princes themselves were greedy and rapacious of their own accord, and had no need of teachers; yet they always learned more from us, against ourselves. But to your ears the way is barred to all flatteries, and most of all to the greedy ones. And so they are silent and at rest; and since there is no one to be persuaded, there are none to persuade. Whence it comes that, though we owe you very much for your own character, we owe you yet more for ours.

Both fiscus and treasury were enriched not so much by the Voconian and Julian laws as by that singular and unique charge of treason — the charge of those who were free of any charge. The fear of this you have utterly removed, content with a greatness that none lacked more than those who claimed majesty for themselves. Good faith has been restored to friends, devotion to children, obedience to slaves: they fear, they obey, and they have masters. For now it is not our slaves who are the prince’s friends, but we; nor does the father of the fatherland think himself dearer to others’ chattels than to his own citizens. You have freed all men of the household accuser, and by a single watchword of the public safety put an end to that — so to speak — servile war, in which you did no less for the slaves than for the masters. For the masters you made safe, the slaves you made good. Meanwhile you do not wish to be praised; nor perhaps are these things to be praised: yet they are welcome to those who recall that other prince who suborned slaves against their masters’ lives, and himself pointed out the charges he would then punish as though they had been formally laid — a great and unavoidable evil, to be undergone by each man as often as anyone kept slaves resembling the prince’s.

In the same class must be placed the fact that our wills are safe, and that one man is not heir to all — now because he is named in them, now because he is not. You are not called in by forged or unjust documents. No man’s anger, no man’s undutifulness, no man’s madness takes refuge with you; you are not named because another has given offense, but because you yourself have deserved it. You are written in by friends, passed over by strangers; and there is no difference between a private man and a prince, except that now you are loved by more — for you also love more. Hold this course, Caesar, and it will be proved by experience whether it is not more fruitful and more abundant for a prince — not in praise only, but in money — if men wish to die with him as their heir than if they are forced to. Your father gave away much, and you yourself have given. Suppose one prove too little grateful: still there remain those who enjoy his goods, and from them nothing comes back to you but glory. For a grateful debtor makes generosity more pleasant, an ungrateful one makes it more illustrious. But who before you preferred that praise to money? How few of the princes counted as their own, even in our patrimonies, so much as what had come from their own? Did not the gifts of the Caesars, like those of kings, resemble hooks smeared with food and snares covered with bait, since — as though swallowed up in and entangled with private fortunes — they carried back with them whatever they had touched?

How profitable it is to have come to the enjoyment of prosperity through adversity! You lived among us, you were in danger, you feared — such was then the life of the innocent. You know, and have learned by experience, how greatly bad princes are loathed even by those who make them bad. You remember what you used to wish for with us, what you used to complain of. For you bear yourself as prince by the judgment of a private man — nay, you prove yourself better than the other you used to pray for. And so we have been so steeped in this that we, whose highest wish was once a prince better than the worst, can now endure none but the best. There is no one, then, so ignorant of you, so ignorant of himself, as to covet that place after you. It is easier for a man to be able to be your successor than to wish to be. For who would willingly take up the mass of your cares? who would not shrink from being compared with you? You yourself have learned by experience how burdensome it is to succeed a good prince, and you used to offer this as an excuse to the one adopting you. Or are these small and easy things to rival — that no one now buys his safety with disgrace? All have their life safe, and the dignity of their life; nor is he now thought prudent and wise who passes his days in the shadows. For under a prince the rewards of the virtues are the same as in freedom, and the wage of good deeds is not from conscience alone. You love the steadfastness of citizens, and upright and vigorous spirits you do not, as others did, crush and press down, but cherish and raise up. It profits men to be good — whereas once it was enough and more if goodness did no harm: to such you offer honors, to such priesthoods, to such provinces; these flourish in your friendship, these in your esteem. By that reward of integrity and industry the like-minded are spurred on, the unlike are drawn in; for the rewards of the good and the bad make men good and bad. So few are strong enough in character that they do not seek or shun the base and the honorable according as it has turned out well or ill; the rest, when the wage of toil is given to idleness, of vigilance to sleep, of thrift to extravagance, chase after those very arts by which they see others have got on, and wish to be, and to seem, such as those men are — and in the wishing, they become so.

And earlier princes indeed — your father excepted, and besides him one or two (and I have said too many) — took pleasure rather in the vices of citizens than in their virtues: first, because each man is pleased by his own nature in another; then, because they thought those more patient of servitude who deserved to be nothing but slaves. Into the laps of these they heaped everything; but the good, hidden away in idleness or neglect and as it were buried, they brought out into the light of day only by informings and perils. You choose your friends from the best; and, by Hercules, it is just that those should be dearest to a good prince who were hateful to a bad one. You know that, as despotism and the principate are different in their nature, so a prince is dearer to none than to those who most resent a master. These, then, you advance, and display as a sample and pattern of what manner of life, what kind of men, please you; and for this reason you have not yet taken up the censorship or the prefecture of morals, because you choose to test our characters by benefits rather than by remedies. And besides, I do not know whether a prince does not contribute more to morals by suffering men to be good than by compelling them. Pliable, we are led in whatever direction by the prince, and, so to speak, we follow. For we desire to be dear to him, to be approved by him — which the unlike will have hoped for in vain; and by this constancy of compliance we come to the point that nearly all men live by the character of one. Moreover, it is not so perversely arranged that we who can imitate a bad prince cannot imitate a good one. Only go on, Caesar, and your purpose and your acts will have the force and effect of a censorship. For a prince’s life is a censorship, and a perpetual one: to it we are directed, to it we turn; and we have need not so much of command as of example. For fear is a faithless teacher of the right. Men are better taught by examples, which have this good in them above all, that they prove that what they enjoin can be done.

And what terror could have availed to do what reverence for you has done? Someone once prevailed on the Roman people to suffer the spectacle of the pantomimes to be abolished — but did not prevail on them to wish it. You were asked for what another compelled, and what had been compulsion began to be a favor. For it was demanded of you, to abolish the pantomimes, with no less unanimity than of your father, to restore them. Both rightly: for those whom a bad prince had abolished ought to be restored, and, once restored, to be abolished. For in those things which are well done by bad men this rule must be kept: that it appear the author displeased, not the deed. And so that same people, once the spectator and applauder of a stage-struck emperor, now in the matter of the pantomimes too turns away from and condemns effeminate arts and pursuits unbecoming to the age. From which it is plain that the common crowd too takes the discipline of its princes, since all have done a thing that, done by one alone, would be the strictest severity. All honor to this glory of gravity, Caesar, by which you have brought it about that what before was force and command should now be called morals. They have chastised their own vices, the very men who deserved chastising; and the same were the correctors who were to be corrected. And so no one complains of your severity — and complaint is free. But since it is so arranged that men complain of no prince less than of the one of whom it is most permitted, in your age there is nothing in which the whole race of men does not rejoice and take delight. The good are advanced; the bad — and this is the most peaceful condition of a state — neither fear nor are feared. You heal men’s errors, but only when they beg it; and to all whom you make good you add this praise — that you should not seem to have compelled them.

What of the life, what of the morals of the young — how royally you shape them! What honor you show to the masters of eloquence, what regard to the teachers of wisdom! How, under you, learning has recovered breath and blood and a fatherland — learning that the savagery of former times punished with exile, when a prince conscious of every vice in himself banished the arts that are enemies to vice, no more out of hatred than out of awe. But you hold those same arts in your embrace, before your eyes, in your ears. For you perform whatever they teach, and you love them as much as you are approved by them. Is there anyone who has professed the studies of humane learning who does not, among all your qualities, praise above all the easiness of access to you? With a great spirit, indeed, your father had inscribed this citadel — before you, the princes — with the name of "A Public House"; yet in vain, had he not adopted one who could dwell in it as in a public place. How well it agrees with your character, that inscription! and how you do everything as though no other had inscribed it! For what forum, what temples are so unbarred? Not the Capitol, not the very seat of your adoption, is more public, more everyone’s. No barriers, no graded humiliations; whereas before, when a thousand thresholds had been passed, beyond them was always something harsh and obstructing. Great is the peace before you, great behind you, but greatest of all close at hand: everywhere such silence, so deep a modesty, that from the prince’s house to humble household gods and a narrow hearth are carried back examples of restraint and calm.

And you yourself — how you receive all, how you wait upon them, how you pass a great part of your days, amid so many cares of empire, as though at leisure! And so we gather, not as at other times astonished, nor as though by tardiness we were going to risk our lives, but untroubled and cheerful, when it suits us. And though the prince admits us, there is sometimes something that keeps us at home as more pressing: we are always excused to you, and never have to make our excuse. For you know that each man does himself a service in seeing you, in attending you; and so the more freely and the longer you offer the abundance of this pleasure. Nor do flight and desolation follow your levees. We linger, we stay, as in a common house — the house which lately a most monstrous beast had fortified with the utmost terror, when, shut up as in some den, it now licked the blood of its kin, now sallied forth to the slaughter and butchery of the most illustrious citizens. Horror and threats hovered at the doors, and equal fear for those let in and those shut out. And besides, the man himself was terrible to meet and to look upon: arrogance on his brow, anger in his eyes, an effeminate pallor over his body, on his face a shamelessness suffused with a deep flush. No one dared approach or address him, forever courting darkness and seclusion, never coming forth from his solitude except to make a solitude.

Yet he, within the very walls and ramparts by which he seemed to guard his own safety, shut up with himself treachery and ambush and the god who avenges crimes. Vengeance pushed aside and broke through the guards, and burst in through narrow and barred approaches no otherwise than through open doors and inviting thresholds; and far from him then was his divinity, far those secret chambers and savage retreats into which he was driven by fear, by arrogance, and by hatred of men. How much safer now, how much more secure is that same house, since it is defended not by the watches of cruelty but of love, not by solitude and bars but by the throng of citizens! Do we learn anything, then, by experience — that the most faithful guard of a prince is his own innocence? This is the unapproachable citadel, this the impregnable fortification: to have no need of fortification. In vain will he have girded himself with terror who has not been hedged about with love; for arms are provoked by arms. But do you spend only the serious parts of your days in our sight and company? Is not the same crowd, the same sociability, present at your relaxations? Is not your food always set in the midst, your table always shared? Is there not mutual pleasure in our dining together? Do you not draw out talk and return it? Does not your humanity lengthen the very time of your banquets, though frugality would shorten it? For you do not, gorged before midday with a solitary meal, loom over your guests as their watcher and noter; nor, yourself full and belching among the fasting and empty, do you set out — or rather throw down — food you would scorn to touch, and then, having barely endured that arrogant pretense of dining together, betake yourself again to a secret gluttony and a hidden luxury. Therefore it is not the gold, nor the silver, nor the choice contrivances of your dinners that we marvel at, but your sweetness and your charm — of which there is no surfeit, since all is genuine and true and graced with dignity. For neither the mysteries of some foreign superstition nor obscene wantonness wanders about the prince’s table, but a kindly welcome, and gentlemanly jests, and respect for learning. Hence your sleep is sparing and short, and no time is more cramped, in your love for us, than that which you pass without us.

But while we enjoy your possessions as sharers, how much our own, how truly ours are the things we ourselves have! For you do not, having driven out the former owners, enclose every pool, every lake, every woodland too, in a boundless estate; nor do rivers, springs, and seas serve the eyes of one man. There is something that Caesar may look upon and not call his own; and at last a prince’s empire is greater than his patrimony. For he carries back much from his patrimony into the empire — things which earlier princes seized, not that they might enjoy them themselves, but that no one else might. And so into the footprints and seats of the nobles there move owners that are their equals, and the dwellings of the most illustrious men are no longer worn down by a slave for their tenant, nor fall into foul ruin. One may behold most beautiful houses, their neglect wiped away, enlarged and flourishing. Great is this merit of yours, not toward men only but toward the very buildings: to stay their collapse, to drive out desolation, to rescue from destruction great works in the same spirit in which they were raised. Mute indeed they are, and without soul, yet they seem to feel and rejoice that they shine, that they are thronged, that at last they have come to have a knowing master. There is carried about, under Caesar’s name, a huge list of things for sale — so detestable is the greed of that other, who coveted so much when he had so much to spare. Then it was fatal, in the prince’s eyes, that this man had a more spacious house, that one a more charming villa. Now the prince seeks owners for these very things, and brings them in himself: those very gardens of some great emperor of old, that suburban estate that was never any man’s but Caesar’s, we bid for, buy, and fill. So great is the prince’s kindness, so great the security of the times, that he judges us worthy of a prince’s possessions, and we do not fear that we seem worthy of them. And indeed you not only offer your citizens the chance of buying, but bestow and give away all the most delightful things: you give away, I say, the very things into which you were chosen, into which you were adopted; you transfer what you received by men’s judgment, and you believe nothing more your own than what you hold through your friends.

The same man is as sparing in building as he is careful in preserving. And so the roofs of the city are not, as before, shaken by the hauling of monstrous stones. Houses stand secure, and the temples no longer totter. It is enough for you, and more than enough, that you have succeeded a most frugal prince; you prefer to cut back and lop off something from what that prince left as though necessary. Besides, your father withdrew from his own use what the fortune of empire had given; you withdraw from your own what your father had. But how magnificent you are toward the public! Here porticoes, there shrines are hurried on with a hidden speed, so that they seem not finished but only transformed. Here the vast flank of the Circus rivals the beauty of the temples — a seat worthy of the people that has conquered the nations, and itself no less worth seeing than the things that will be watched from it; worth seeing both for its general aspect and because the place of commons and prince has been made equal. For through all its extent there is one face, all continuous and equal, and the platform is no more Caesar’s own as he watches than what he watches is his own. Your citizens, then, will be free to gaze at one another; it will be granted them to see not the prince’s box but the prince himself, sitting in public, among the people — the people to whom you have added five thousand seats. For you had enlarged its number by the easiness of your largess, and had ordered a greater number to be enrolled for the future, on the credit of your generosity.

Had another furnished but one of these things, his head would long since have been crowned with rays, and a seat in the midst of the gods would stand for him in gold or ivory, and he would be invoked with more august altars and larger victims. You enter the shrines only to worship; your highest honor is to keep watch before the temples and to be set as a border upon their doorposts. So it comes that the gods keep for you the highest height among men, since you yourself do not aspire to the rank of the gods. And so we see in the vestibule of Jupiter Best and Greatest one statue of you, or two, and that of bronze. But a little while ago all the approaches, all the steps, and the whole precinct shone — or rather were defiled — here with gold, there with silver, when the images of the gods were soiled, mingled with the statues of an unclean prince. And so those bronze and few statues remain, and will remain as long as the temple itself; but those golden and innumerable ones made atonement, by their overthrow and ruin, to the public joy. It was a delight to dash those most arrogant faces to the ground, to set upon them with the sword, to rage with axes, as if blood and pain would follow each blow. No one was so restrained in his joy and his late-come gladness as not to feel it like a kind of vengeance to behold mangled limbs, severed members, and at last the grim and horrid images carried off and melted in the flames, so that out of that terror and menace they were transformed by fire into the use and pleasure of men. With like reverence, Caesar, you suffer thanks for your goodness to be rendered not before your Genius, but before the godhead of Jupiter Best and Greatest: that we owe to him whatever we owe, that your well-doing is the gift of him who gave you to us. Before, indeed, the huge herds of victims along the Capitoline way, intercepted as it were in great part, were forced to turn aside from the road, when the most savage master’s most monstrous image was worshipped with as much blood of victims as he himself poured out of human blood.

All that is said, or has been said, by me of other princes, Conscript Fathers, tends to this: to show how the morals of the principate, corrupted and depraved by long habit, our father reshapes and corrects. Otherwise nothing is praised gratefully enough without comparison. Besides, this is the first duty of loyal citizens toward the best of emperors: to pursue those unlike him. For he will not have loved good princes enough who has not hated bad ones enough. Add that there is no fuller or more far-reaching merit of our emperor than that it is safe to assail bad princes. Or has Nero, but lately avenged, slipped from our grief? He would have allowed, I suppose, Nero’s fame and life to be picked at — he who avenged his death — and would not have taken as said against himself what was said of one so like him. Wherefore I, Caesar, rank among all your gifts, and set before many, this: that it is permitted us both to take vengeance daily, for the past, on bad emperors, and to forewarn future ones by the example — that there is no place, no time, in which the shades of deadly princes may rest from the curses of posterity. Therefore let us bring forth the more steadfastly both our griefs and our joys, Conscript Fathers: let us rejoice in the things we enjoy, let us groan over the things we used to suffer. Both must be done together under a good prince. Let our private talk do this, our conversations this, our very thanksgivings this; and let them remember that a living emperor is most praised when his predecessors, who deserved otherwise, are censured. For when posterity is silent about a bad prince, it is plain that the present one is doing the same things.

And what place was left untouched by wretched flattery, when the praises of emperors were celebrated even at the games and the prize-contests, were danced, and were broken up, to every mockery, with effeminate voices, tunes, and gestures? But this was shameful: that at one and the same time they were praised in the senate and on the stage, by an actor and by a consul. You have removed the arts of the stage far from your worship. Therefore serious songs honor you, and the eternal honor of the annals, not this brief and shameful proclamation; nay, the very theaters will rise to do you reverence with all the greater unanimity, the more the stage falls silent about you. But why do I wonder at this, when even the honors that we offer you, you are wont either to taste most sparingly or to refuse altogether? Before, nothing so common, so trifling was done in the senate that those whose turn it was to give an opinion did not dwell upon the praises of the princes. We would be consulted about enlarging the number of gladiators, or about founding a guild of craftsmen; and, as though the boundaries of empire had been extended, now we would dedicate huge arches and inscriptions overtopping the gables of temples, now even months — and not single ones — to the name of the Caesars. They allowed it, and rejoiced, as though they had deserved it. But now which of us, as though forgetful of the matter under debate, wastes the duty of giving his opinion on the honoring of the prince? This steadfastness of ours is the praise of your moderation: we comply with you in this, that we come into the senate-house not for a contest of flatteries but for the use and office of justice, meaning to repay this favor to your candor and your truthfulness — that we believe you wish what you wish, and do not wish what you do not wish. We begin from that point, and leave off at that point, from which, under another prince, one could not begin, and at which one could not leave off. For others too declined many of the honors decreed them; but no one before was so great that he was believed to have wished them not decreed at all. Which I reckon more splendid than all inscriptions, since your name is carved not on beams or stones, but on the monuments of eternal praise.

It will go down through the ages that there was a prince to whom, flourishing and alive, never any but modest honors, and more often none at all, were decreed. And indeed, if we should wish to vie with the constraint of former times, we shall be beaten: for pretense is more ingenious at devising than truth, servitude than liberty, fear than love. And since all novelty has long since been used up by flattery, no new honor is left for you, save that we should sometimes dare to be silent about you. Come — if at any time our devotion has broken silence and overcome your modesty, what things, and of what kind, we decree, you do not refuse! — so that it may appear you reject the greatest honors not out of pride and disdain, you who do not scorn the lesser. This is more beautiful, Caesar, than if you refused them all: for to refuse them all belongs to ambition; to moderation belongs to choose the most sparing. By which restraint you take thought both for us and for the treasury: for us, in that you free us from all suspicion; for the treasury, in that you set a limit to its expenses, as one who will not refill it, when exhausted, with the goods of the innocent. And so your images stand, of the kind that were once dedicated to private men for outstanding services to the commonwealth. Caesar’s statues are seen of the same material as those of the Bruti, of the Camilli. Nor does the cause differ. For they drove kings and a conquering enemy from the walls; he wards off and drives away kingship itself, and whatever else captivity breeds, and holds the seat of a prince that there may be no place for a master. And to me, as I regard your wisdom, it seems less strange that you either decline or temper those mortal and perishable honors. For you know where a prince’s true, where his everlasting glory lies; where are the honors over which neither flame nor age nor successors have any power. For arches and statues, altars too and temples, oblivion demolishes and darkens, and posterity neglects and picks at; but on the other hand a spirit that despises ambition, and tames and bridles boundless power, flourishes by very age, and is praised by none more than by those who least need to praise it. Besides, as soon as anyone has become prince, his fame is at once — good or bad is uncertain, but at all events eternal. Not lasting fame, then, which awaits a prince whether he will or no, but good fame is to be desired; and that is prolonged not by busts and statues, but by virtue and merits. Nay, even these lighter things — a prince’s form and figure — the favor of men expresses and keeps better than gold or silver. Which falls to you indeed lavishly and abundantly, whose most joyful face and lovable countenance sits in the mouth, the eyes, the heart of all the citizens.

I believe you have noted, Conscript Fathers, that for some time now I do not pick out what I shall report: for my purpose is to praise the prince, not the prince’s deeds. For many praiseworthy things even bad men do; but the man himself cannot be praised unless he is the best. Wherefore no glory of yours is greater, august emperor, than that those who render you thanks have nothing to veil, nothing to leave out. For what is there in your principate that anyone’s proclamation ought to leap over or sail past? What moment — nay, what point of time — is either barren of benefit or empty of praise? Are not all things such that he will seem to have praised you best who has narrated most faithfully? Whence it comes that my speech is spread out almost to infinity — and I am not yet speaking of two years. How many things I have said of your moderation, and how many more yet remain! Such as this: that you accepted a second consulship because the prince and father conferred it. But after the gods transferred to you the sum of empire, and the power over all things, and over yourself as well, you refused a third consulship, though you could have played so good a consul. It is great to defer an honor; greater, to defer glory. Shall I admire the consulship you held, or the one you did not accept? — the one you held not in this leisure of the city, in the inmost bosom of peace, but hard by the barbarian nations, as those used to do whose custom it was to change the bordered toga for the general’s cloak, and to follow unknown lands with victory. Beautiful for the empire, glorious for you, when allies and friends came to you in their own country, in their own dwellings. A fair sight, a consul: after many ages, a tribunal built of green turf, girt about with the honor not of the fasces only, but of javelins and standards. The varied dress of the petitioners, their discordant tongues, and speech seldom without an interpreter, swelled the majesty of the one presiding. It is magnificent to render justice to citizens; what then, to enemies? Splendid to press a fixed corner of the forum with the curule chair; what then, to press vast plains with it, and a victor’s footprint? To overhang menacing riverbanks, safe and at peace; what then, to despise the barbarians’ roar, and to curb a hostile terror by the display not so much of arms as of togas? And so they hailed you emperor — not before your images, but you yourself, present and listening; and the name that others earned by conquering enemies, you earned by despising them.

This is the praise of the consulship you held; that of the one you deferred is this — that, still at the beginning of your principate, as though already excused from honors and sated with them, you refused the consulship which new emperors used to transfer to themselves though it was destined for others. There was even one who, at the end of his principate, wrested away and snatched a consulship which he himself had given and which had already been held in great part. This honor, then, which princes both at their beginning and at their ending so covet that they take it away, you — when it was free and vacant — yielded to private men. Was a third consulship invidious for you, or a first for a prince? For the second you entered upon as emperor, yet under an emperor; and nothing can be credited in it, either to your honor or as an example, save obedience. But truly — in a state that has seen men consul five times, and even six (not those who were created by force and riot when liberty was already expiring, but men to whom, set aside and absent, consulships were carried out to their estates) — in this state did you, the prince of the human race, refuse a third consulship as too burdensome? Is the Augustus, the Caesar, the Father of the Fatherland so much more moderate even than the Papirii and the Quinctii? But those the commonwealth summoned. What of you? Does not the same commonwealth summon you? not the senate? not the consulship itself, which seems to be lifted up and enlarged upon your shoulders?

I do not summon you to the model of him who, by continuous consulships, had made a kind of long, undivided year; I compare you with those who, it is certain, as often as they were consuls, did not do it for themselves. There was in the senate a man thrice consul, when you were refusing a third consulship. Our agreement had laid upon your modesty some burdensome thing — that you, a prince, should be consul as often as a senator of yours; with excessive modesty you would have refused that even as a private man. Or does the son of a consular and triumphal father climb, when he is made consul a third time? Was this not owed him? not earned by the mere splendor of his line? It fell, then, to private men to open the year and unlock the calendar; and this too was a sign of liberty restored, that a consul should be other than Caesar. So, when the kings were driven out, the free year began; so, when servitude was once expelled, it brought private names into the calendar. Wretched in their ambition, who were always consuls just as they were always princes! Though it can seem not ambition so much as envy and spite — to possess all the years, and to hand on that highest glory of the purple only after it has been plucked and stripped of its bloom. But shall I admire first your magnanimity, or your modesty, or your kindness? It was magnanimity to abstain from an honor always sought; modesty, to yield it; kindness, to enjoy it through others.

But now it is time for you to do a service to the consulship itself, so that, by taking it up and holding it, you may make it greater and more august. For to keep declining it has an ambiguous, or rather that other interpretation — as though you thought it beneath you. You indeed refused it as the greatest of things; but you will be able to persuade no one of this unless you also, at some time, do not refuse it. When you decline arches, when trophies, when statues, indulgence must be granted to your modesty — for those, indeed, may well be dedicated to you; but when we ask that you take up and hold the consulship, we ask that you teach future princes to renounce idleness, to put off their pleasures for a little — for a little, and at least for the briefest time, as though roused from that sleep of good fortune — to put on the bordered toga which, when they could bestow it, they have seized; to climb the curule chair which they keep others from; in short, to be what they coveted, and not to wish to be made consuls only in order to have been so. You held a second consulship, I know: that one you can charge to the armies, to the provinces, even to the other nations — you cannot charge it to us. We hear, indeed, that you discharged every duty of a consul — but we only hear it. You are said to have been most just, most humane, most patient — but you are only said to. It is fair that we should sometimes trust our own judgment, our own eyes, and not always report and rumor. How long shall we, absent, rejoice over one absent? Let us be allowed to test whether that very second consulship has brought you any arrogance. An intervening year has much power in changing the characters of men, more in those of princes. We have learned, indeed, that to one who has any virtue, all the virtues belong; yet we long to test whether now too a good consul and a good prince are one and the same thing. For besides that it is hard to hold two powers at once, and those the highest, there is also some difference between them, since it befits a prince to be as like a private man as possible, but a consul to be as unlike one as possible.

And I see that the chief reason for refusing the consulship last year was this — that you could not hold it while absent; but now that you are restored to the city and to the public prayers, in what could you better prove what things, and how great, were those we longed for? It is too little that you come into the senate-house, unless you also summon it; that you attend the senate, unless you also preside; that you hear those giving their opinions, unless you also call upon them in turn. Do you wish to restore at last that most august tribunal of the consuls to its own majesty? Then mount it. Do you wish reverence to stand firm for the magistrates, authority for the laws, restraint for petitioners? Then approach it. For just as it would matter to the commonwealth, were you a private man, whether it had you only as consul or as senator too, so know that it now matters whether it has you only as prince or as consul too. To these so many and so great reasons, though our prince’s modesty struggled hard, it nevertheless at last gave way. But how did it give way? Not to make himself like private men, but to make private men equal to himself. For he accepted a third consulship in order to give it. He knew the moderation of men, he knew their modesty — that they would not endure to be consuls a third time except along with one thrice consul. This was once granted, though sparingly, to the allies in war, the partners in danger; which you have bestowed on extraordinary men, who had deserved well and bravely of you indeed — but deserved it in the toga. You are bound by the care of each, by the vigilance of each, Caesar. But in a prince it is rare, and almost unheard of, that he should think himself under obligation, or, if he does, that he should love it. You owe, then, Caesar, and you pay. But when you make men thrice consul, you seem to yourself not a great prince, but a not-ungrateful friend. Nay, even quite modest services of citizens you exalt to something greater by the power of your fortune. For you bring it about that each man seems to have done you as great a service as he has received from you. What shall I pray for this kindness? Except that you may always put others under obligation, and be put under obligation yourself; and that you make it uncertain whether it is more profitable for your citizens to owe you, or to have done you a service.

For my part I seemed to behold that ancient senate, when, with one thrice consul sitting by, I saw a consul-designate for the third time being asked his opinion. How great were they then, and how great you! It happens, indeed, that bodies, however lofty and high, set beside taller ones, shrink; and likewise that the highest dignities of citizens are, as it were, lowered by comparison with your eminence, and the nearer they have climbed toward your greatness, the more they seem to have descended from their own. Yet you have set them, though you could not make them your equals even when you wished, so high that they were seen as far above the rest as below you. Had you set even one man’s third consulship in the same year as your own, it would be held a proof of a mighty spirit. For as it belongs to good fortune to be able to do as much as you wish, so it belongs to greatness to wish as much as you are able. Praiseworthy, indeed, is he too who earned a third consulship; but more, the man under whom he earned it: great and to be remembered is the man who received so great a reward, but greater the man who gave it to the receiver. What of this — that you adorned two men alike with a third consulship, by the sanctity of being your colleague? — so that it can be doubtful to no one that this was your chief reason for extending your own consulship: that it might embrace the consulships of two men, and that you should give yourself as colleague to more than one. Each had lately held a second consulship given by your father — that is, how much less than if given by you? Before the eyes of each there still hovered the fasces lately laid down; in the ears of each there still lodged that solemn, forewarning shout of the lictors; when again the curule chair, again the purple: as once, when the enemy was near at hand and the commonwealth was brought to the utmost peril and called for a man tried in office, it was not consulships that were restored to the same men, but the same men that were restored to consulships. So great is your power of doing good, that your indulgence rivals necessities. But now they had taken off the bordered togas — let them put them on again; but now they had bidden the lictors depart — let them call them back; but now their congratulating friends had withdrawn — let them return. Is this the genius of a man? the power of a man? to renew joys, to make gladness whole again, to give no rest to congratulations, and to allow no other intervals for repeated consulships than the time it takes to end them? May you do these things always, and may neither your spirit nor your fortune ever grow weary in this work. May you give third consulships to as many as possible; and when you have given third consulships to very many, may there yet always remain more to whom you should give them.

Of all benefits bestowed on the deserving, the joy overflows not more to the men themselves than to those like them; but above all, from the consulship of these men so great a gladness reached not some part of the senate but the whole senate, that all seemed both to have given and to have received the same honor. For these are the very men whom the senate, when it set the best men in charge of reducing public expenditures, chose — and chose first. This, then, this is what worked them deep into Caesar’s heart. Or have we too seldom learned by experience that this is the condition of things — that the senate’s favor either helps or harms a man with the prince? Was not, a little while ago, nothing more deadly than that thought of the prince: "This man the senate approves; this man is dear to the senate"? He hated those whom we loved — and we too those whom he loved. Now there is a contest between prince and senate in the affection for each worthiest man. We point them out to one another, we trust one another, and — what is the greatest sign of mutual love — we love the same men. Therefore, Conscript Fathers, show your favor openly, love steadfastly. No longer must love be hidden lest it harm, nor hatred suppressed lest it help. Caesar approves and disapproves the same things as the senate. He takes you, present and even absent, into his counsel. He made consuls a third time the men whom you had chosen — and made them in the order in which they had been chosen by you. A great honor to you in any case: whether he loves most the very men he knows to be dearest to you, or whether he prefers no one to them, though he may love someone more. Rewards have been set before the elders, examples before the young: let them approach, let them throng at last the safe and open houses; whoever looks up to men approved by the senate, he most of all earns the prince’s favor. For he thinks that whatever is added to each man is added to himself, and he places no glory in being greater than all, unless those than whom he is greater are themselves the greatest. Persist, Caesar, in that plan of yours, and believe us to be such as each man’s reputation says. To this give your ears, to this your eyes; do not look back at secret judgments, and at whisperings that lie in wait for none more than for those who listen to them. Better to trust all than individuals: for individuals can deceive and be deceived; no one has deceived all, and all have deceived no one.

I return now to your consulship — though there are certain things which pertain to the consulship indeed, yet come before it. First of all, that you were present at your own elections — a candidate not for the consulship only, but for immortality, and glory, and for an example that good princes would follow and bad ones marvel at. The Roman people saw you in that ancient seat of their power; you endured that long formula of the elections, and a delay no longer to be mocked at; and you were made consul just as one of us whom you make consuls. How few of the preceding princes showed that honor either to the consulship or to the people? Did not others, languid with sleep and overflowing with yesterday’s dinner, wait for the announcements of their own elections? Others, indeed, wakeful and sleepless, but within their own bedchambers, were plotting exile and slaughter against the very consuls by whom they were being proclaimed consuls. O ambition, crooked and ignorant of true majesty — to covet an honor you would disdain, to disdain one you have coveted, and, while you look out on the Campus and the elections from gardens close by, to be as far from them as if you were sundered by the Danube and the Rhine! Would you turn away from your own honor the hoped-for votes, and, content to have ordered yourself proclaimed consul, not keep up even the pretense of a free state? Would you stay away from the elections, hidden and concealed, as though there the consulship were not being given you, but your power taken away? This was the persuasion of those most arrogant masters: that they seemed to themselves to cease to be princes if they did anything as senators. Yet most were kept away not so much by pride as by a kind of fear. Were they, conscious of their debaucheries and incestuous nights, to dare to pollute the auspices and defile the consecrated Campus with an impious footstep? They had not so despised gods and men as to be able to bear and endure, in that most spacious seat, the eyes of gods and men turned upon them. You, on the contrary, were counseled by your own moderation and holiness to present yourself both to the reverence of the gods and to the judgments of men.

Others earned the consulship before they received it; you earned it even while receiving it. The solemnities of the elections were finished — if you were thinking of a prince — and already the whole crowd had begun to stir, when you, to the wonder of all, approach the consul’s chair: you offer yourself to be sworn into words unknown to princes, except when they were forcing others to swear them. Do you see how necessary it was not to refuse the consulship? We should not have thought you would do this, had you refused it. I am amazed, Conscript Fathers, and do not yet sufficiently trust either my eyes or my ears, and ask myself again and again whether I heard it, whether I saw it. The emperor, then, and Caesar, and Augustus, the Pontifex Maximus, stood before the lap of a consul? and the consul sat, with the prince standing before him? and sat untroubled, undismayed, and as though it were the custom for this to be done? Nay, sitting, he dictated the oath to the one standing, and the other swore, uttered, and spoke out plainly the words by which he devoted his own head, his own house, to the anger of the gods, should he knowingly prove false. Vast is your glory, Caesar, and equal, whether princes do this hereafter or do not. Is any proclamation worthy enough — that, a third-time consul, you did the same as a first-time one? as a prince, the same as a private man? as an emperor, the same as under an emperor? I do not know now, I do not know, which is the more beautiful: that you swore with no one dictating, or this, that you swore with another dictating.

On the rostra too, with like scruple, you subjected yourself to the laws — laws, Caesar, which no one wrote for a prince. But you wish nothing more to be permitted to you than to us; and so it comes that we wish more for you. Which I now hear for the first time, now learn for the first time: that a prince is not above the laws, but the laws above the prince; that the same is not permitted to Caesar as consul as to the rest. He swears to the law, with the gods attending — for to whom should they attend more than to Caesar? He swears, with those looking on who must swear the same: not unaware, moreover, that the oath he has sworn must be kept more scrupulously by no one than by him whom it most concerns that there be no perjury. And so, on the point of leaving the consulship, you swore that you had done nothing against the laws. This was great when you promised it; greater, after you had performed it. And to come forward so often onto the rostra, to tread that place which the arrogance of princes left unclimbed, here to take up, here to lay down magistracies — how worthy of you, and how unlike the custom of those who, by an edict, threw off a consulship held a very few days, nay, not held at all! This before the assembly, this before the rostra, this on oath: so that the end should agree with the beginning, and that they should be understood to have been consuls themselves by this alone — that others had not been.

I have not leapt over our prince’s consulship, Conscript Fathers; rather I have gathered into one place whatever was to be said about the oath. For we ought not, as in a barren and meager subject, to draw out and scatter the same kind of praise and handle it again and again. The first day of your consulship had dawned, on which you, entering the senate-house, exhorted us — now one by one, now all together — to take up liberty again, to take on the cares of what was now a shared rule, to watch over the public interests and to rise to them. All before you said these same things, yet no one before you was believed. Before our eyes were the shipwrecks of many, whom, carried out by a treacherous calm, a sudden squall had struck down. For what sea is so faithless as the blandishments of those princes, whose fickleness and treachery were so great that it was easier to have them angry than well-disposed? But you, untroubled and eager, we follow where you call. You bid us be free; we shall be. You bid us bring out into the open what we think; we shall bring it forth. For it was not by any cowardice or inborn sluggishness that we held back until now: terror, and fear, and that wretched prudence bred of perils warned us to turn our eyes, ears, and minds away from the commonwealth — and there was, in fact, no commonwealth at all. But now, relying and leaning on your right hand and your promises, we unbar mouths fenced in by long servitude, and loose the tongue bridled by so many evils. For you wish us to be such as you bid, and that there be nothing painted in your exhortations, nothing sly — nothing, in short, that means to deceive one who believes it, not without peril to the deceiver. For no prince was ever deceived but he who first deceived.

For my part I seem to have discerned this feeling of the public father both from his speech and from the very delivery of it. For what weight in the sentiments! what unaffected truth in the words! what earnestness in the voice! what affirmation in the face! how great a sincerity in the eyes, the bearing, the gesture — in the whole body! He will, then, always hold to what he has urged, and will know that, as often as we make trial of the liberty he gave, we are obeying him. Nor is it to be feared that he will think us incautious if we steadily use the loyalty of the times — we whom he remembers to have lived otherwise under a bad prince. To pronounce vows both for the eternity of the empire and for the safety of the citizens? Nay, we used to do it for the safety of the princes, and on their account for the eternity of the empire. These vows for our empire — it is worth noting in what words they were undertaken: "If you shall have ruled the commonwealth well and for the good of all." Vows worthy to be always undertaken and always discharged. The commonwealth dealt with the gods, on your own motion, Caesar, that they should keep you safe and unharmed if you had kept the rest so; but if otherwise, that they too should turn their eyes from the keeping of your life, and abandon you to vows not undertaken openly. Others used to wish, and to make, themselves survivors of the commonwealth; to you your own safety is hateful, if it be not joined with the safety of the commonwealth. You suffer nothing to be wished for you, unless it profit those who wish it; and every year you send the gods into counsel about you, and require that they change their judgment if you cease to be such as you were when chosen. But it is with a mighty good conscience, Caesar, that you bargain with the gods to preserve you if you deserve it, since you know that whether you deserve it none knows better than the gods. Does he not seem to you, Conscript Fathers, to turn these things over with himself day and night? I, for my part, against myself — if the good of all so required — have even armed the prefect’s hand; yet I do not even pray away the anger or the neglect of the gods: nay, I beg and beseech that the commonwealth may never undertake vows for me unwillingly; or, if it has undertaken them unwillingly, that it may not owe them.

You reap, then, Caesar, the most glorious fruit of your safety from the agreement of the gods. For since you make the condition that the gods preserve you only if you have ruled the commonwealth well and for the good of all, you are certain that you are governing the commonwealth well, since they preserve you. And so the day passes for you untroubled and glad, which used to hold other princes in care and fear, when, anxious and astonished, and too little trusting in our patience, they awaited from this side and that the messengers of the public servitude. And if perchance rivers, snows, or winds had delayed any of them, they at once believed it to be that which they deserved; and there was no distinction in their terror, because, since under a bad prince whoever is more worthy is feared as a successor, and since there is no one who is not more worthy, all are feared. Your security no delay of messengers, no tardiness of letters puts off. You know that everywhere men swear loyalty to you, since you yourself have sworn to all. There is no one who does not do this for himself. We love you indeed, as much as you deserve; yet we do this not out of love for you, but for ourselves: and may the day never dawn on which it is not our own interest, but mere loyalty, that pronounces vows for you, Caesar. Shameful is the safekeeping of a prince that can be charged to one’s account. One would like to complain that no princes pry into our secrets but those we hate. For if good princes had the same care as bad ones had, what admiration of you, what joy and exultation, you would catch everywhere! what conversations of all men with their wives and children, what conversations even with their household altars and hearths! You would know that those tenderest ears are spared. And besides, though hatred and love are opposites, they have this very much alike — that we love good princes the more unrestrainedly where we more freely hate bad ones.

Yet you took a proof both of our feeling and of our judgment — as great as you, being present, could take — on that day when you so provided for the anxiety and the modesty of the candidates that no one’s joy should be marred by another’s sorrow. Some withdrew with gladness, others with hope: many had to be congratulated, no one had to be consoled. Nor for that did you the less earnestly exhort our young men to go round the senate, to make their suit to the senate, and so to hope for honors from the prince, if they had sought them from the senate. At which point, if any needed an example, you added that they should imitate you. A hard example, Caesar, and one that no candidate could imitate any more than a prince could. For who, even for a single day, has been a more reverent candidate of the senate than you — both in your whole life, and at that very time when you judge of candidates? Or did anything but reverence for the senate obtain from you that you should offer to young men of a most illustrious family the honor owed to their lineage — but before it was owed? At last, then, nobility is not darkened, but made illustrious, by the prince; at last those grandsons of mighty men, those descendants of liberty, Caesar neither terrifies nor fears: nay, with hastened honors he enlarges and exalts them, and restores them to their ancestors. If anywhere there is anything of ancient stock, anything of surviving renown, this he embraces and cherishes and brings forth for the use of the commonwealth. There are great names, drawn from the darkness of oblivion into the honor of men and the honor of fame by the indulgence of Caesar — whose part it is both to preserve the noble and to make them.

One of the candidates had governed a province as quaestor, and there had set the revenues of a most flourishing community on a sound footing by an excellent regulation. This you thought worth alleging to the senate. For why, under you as prince — you who surpassed the splendor of your line by your virtue — should the condition of those who deserved to have noble descendants be worse than that of those who had noble ancestors? O worthy man, to report such things always of our magistrates, and to make men good not by the punishments of the bad, but by the rewards of the good! The young men were fired, and raised their spirits to rival what they saw praised; and there was no one whom this thought did not enter, since he knew that whatever was well done by anyone in the provinces — all of it you know. It is profitable, Caesar, and salutary for the governors of provinces to have this confidence: that there is ready for their integrity, for their industry, the greatest reward — the prince’s judgment, the prince’s vote. Until now, however, even the most sincere and upright characters, though it did not warp them, were yet blunted by a wretched but true reflection. For you see: "If I do anything well, Caesar will not know it; or if he knows it, he will not bear witness to it." And so that same neglect, or spite, of the princes — since it promised impunity to ill deeds and no reward to right ones — did not hold the former back from crime, yet held the latter back from praiseworthy action. But now, if anyone governs a province well, to him is offered a dignity won by his virtue. For the field of honor and glory lies open to all: from it let each seek what he desires, and, having gained it, owe it to himself. To the provinces too, for the future, you have remitted both the fear of wrongs and the necessity of accusing. For if those whom they have thanked have done them good, they will be forced to complain of no one. And besides, it is clear that nothing profits a candidate more toward the honors that follow than those already discharged. Best is a magistracy sought by a magistracy, an honor by an honor. I would have the man who has governed a province allege not only the notes of friends, nor petitions wheedled out by a city cabal, but the decrees of colonies, the decrees of communities. Well are cities, peoples, and nations inserted among the votes of consular men. The most effective kind of canvassing for a candidate is to give thanks.

And then with what assent of the senate, with what joy was it received, when you met the candidates with a kiss, as you named each one — coming down, indeed, to the level ground, and as though one of those offering congratulations! Shall I admire you the more, or condemn those who brought it about that this should seem a great thing? — those who, as if fixed to their curule chairs, used to put out only a hand, and that hesitantly and sluggishly, like men charging it to one’s account. And so an unwonted sight met our eyes: a prince and a candidate standing together; we beheld the giver of the honor equal to those receiving it. How this act of yours was celebrated by the whole senate with a true acclamation: "So much the greater, so much the more august!" For he to whom nothing remains for increasing his eminence can grow in one way only: if he lowers himself, secure in his own greatness. For from no danger is the fortune of princes farther removed than from humility. To me, indeed, not so much your humanity as your concentration upon it seemed admirable. For while you lent your eyes, your voice, your hand to the proceeding, you fulfilled every measure of courtesy, as though you had entrusted those same offices to another. And besides, when the candidates’ supporters received their names with the honor they are wont to, you too were among those receiving them, and from the prince’s mouth that senatorial assent was heard; and what we rejoiced to bear in witness before the prince on behalf of the deserving was borne in witness by the prince. You acted, then, when you said "the best men": and not only were their lives approved by you, but the senate’s judgment was approved, and it rejoiced that it was honored no less than those you praised.

For in that you prayed that that very ordering of the elections might turn out well and happily "for us, for the commonwealth, for you" — is it not such that we ought to reverse this order of vows, and at last to beseech the gods that all you do and all you shall do may turn out prosperously "for you, for the commonwealth, for us"? or, if the wish should be briefer, "for you alone" — in whom are both the commonwealth and ourselves? There was a time — and far too long it lasted — when some things were adverse, others prosperous, to the prince and to us; now things glad and things sad are alike shared by you with us, and we can no more be happy without you than you without us. Would you, if you could, have added at the end of your vows: "that the gods grant your prayers only if you have persevered in deserving our judgment"? So far is nothing dearer to you than the love of your citizens, that you wish to be loved first by us, then by the gods — and so by them, if you are loved by us. And indeed the ends of former princes taught that not even by the gods are any loved but those whom men love. It was hard to match these prayers of yours with praises; yet we matched them. What ardor of love, what goads, what torches set those acclamations beneath us! They were the voices not of our wit, Caesar, but of your virtue and your merits — voices that no flattery ever devised, that no man’s terror ever wrung out. Whom did we ever fear so as to feign these things? whom did we ever love so as to confess them? You know the constraint of servitude: when did you ever hear anything like this, and when did you ever say it? Fear, indeed, devises much, but things that show themselves sought out by the unwilling; the genius of anxiety is one thing, of security another; the invention of the sorrowful is one, of the joyful another; neither can pretense bring forth. The wretched have their own words, the happy their own; and even if the very same words be spoken by both, they are spoken differently.

You yourself are witness of the gladness that was on every mouth. No one’s cloak, no one’s bearing stayed as he had borne it in a moment before. Hence the roofs rang back with the voices, and nothing was shut close enough for such shouts. Who then did not leap up from his place? who felt that he had leaped? Many things we did of our own accord, more by a kind of impulse and command. For in joy too there is a compelling force. Did your modesty, at least, set any limit to it? For the more it was checked by you, the more we blazed up — not from defiance, Caesar; but as it is in your power whether we rejoice, so how much is not even in our own. You yourself confirmed the sincerity of our acclamations by the truth of your tears. We saw your eyes grow moist, your face cast down with joy, and as much blood in your face as there was modesty in your heart. And by this we were the more fired to pray that you might never have any other cause for tears, and that you might never have to wipe your brow. Let us ask this very temple, these seats, as though they would answer, whether they ever saw a prince’s tears: but the senate they have often seen weeping. You have laid a burden on future princes — but on our descendants too. For these will demand of their princes that they deserve to hear the same; and those will be indignant that they do not hear it.

I can say nothing more fitting than what was said by the whole senate: "O happy you!" And when we said it, we marveled not at your wealth, but at your spirit. For the only true happiness is to be seen worthy of happiness. But while many things were said that day wisely and weightily, this above all: "Trust us, trust yourself." This we said with great confidence in ourselves, but with greater in you. For one man may perhaps deceive another, but no one will deceive himself. Let him only look into his life, and ask himself what he deserves. Accordingly, that which took credit from our voices before bad princes lent them credit before the best one. For however much we did the things that lovers do, those princes still believed themselves — that they were not loved. Besides this we prayed: "So may the gods love you, as you love us." Who would say this of himself, or to a prince who loved only moderately? For ourselves, indeed, this was the sum of our vows: "So may the gods love us, as you do." Is it not true, what we cried out amid these things: "O happy us!"? For what is happier than we, for whom it is no longer to be wished that the prince should love us, but that the gods should — as the prince does? A state given to its religions, and ever piously earning the gods’ indulgence, thinks that nothing can be added to its happiness, save that the gods should imitate Caesar.

But why do I chase and gather up details? As though I could either embrace in a speech, or keep up with in memory, the things which you, Conscript Fathers — that no oblivion might intercept them — decreed should be both entered in the public records and engraved in bronze. Before, only the speeches of princes used to be entrusted to eternity by that kind of monument; our acclamations, indeed, were shut within the walls of the senate-house. For they were such as neither the senate nor the princes could glory in. But that these should go out to the people, and be handed down to posterity, was both for the public benefit and for the public dignity: first, that the whole world might be brought in as witness and sharer of our devotion; next, that it might be plain that we dare to judge of good and bad princes, and not only after they are gone; lastly, that it might be known by proof that we were grateful before too, but wretched — we who were not before permitted to prove that we were grateful. But with what striving, with what effort, with what shouts was it demanded that you should not suppress our feelings, nor your own merits, and, in short, that you should provide for the future by the example! Let princes too learn to tell true acclamations from false, and count it among your gifts that they can no longer be deceived. They need not have the road to good fame built for them, but only not abandon it; flattery need not be driven off, but only not brought back. It is settled both what they should do, and what they ought to hear if they do it. What now shall I pray for the senate, beyond what I have prayed with the whole senate, except that the joy you then showed in your eyes may cling to your heart? May you love that day, and yet surpass it; may you earn new things, and hear new things — for the same words cannot be said unless for the same deeds.

And then how old-fashioned, how consular it was, that the senate sat a full three days after your example, while meanwhile you did nothing but act the consul! Each man asked what he pleased; to dissent, to cross to the other side, and to put his own judgment at the commonwealth’s disposal, was safe: we were all consulted, and even counted; and the opinion that prevailed was not the first, but the better. But who before dared to speak, who to open his mouth, except those wretched men who were asked first? The rest, indeed, fixed and thunderstruck, endured that mute, sedentary necessity of assent — with what grief of mind, with what shuddering of the whole body! One man, and one alone, proposed what all would follow, and all disapprove — first of all the very man who had proposed it. So true is it that nothing displeases all more than the things done as though they pleased all. Perhaps the emperor composed himself, in the senate, to a show of reverence for it; but once gone out, he at once withdrew into the prince, and was wont to drive off, neglect, and despise all the consular duties. But this man is consul just as though he were consul only: he thought nothing beneath himself except what was beneath a consul. And first, he came forth from his house in such a way that no apparatus of princely arrogance, no tumult of outrunners, held him up. There was one delay at the threshold: to consult the birds and to revere the warnings of the divine powers. No one was driven out of the way, no one thrust aside; so great was the calm of the attendants, so great the restraint of the fasces, that often a crowd of strangers forced both the consul and the prince to halt. His own retinue, indeed, was so modest, so restrained, that some ancient and great consul under a good prince seemed to be passing by. His way was more often to the forum, yet frequently also to the Campus.

For he attended the consular elections himself, taking as much pleasure from their announcement as before from their designation. The candidates stood before the prince’s curule chair, as he himself had stood before the consul’s, and were sworn into the words into which a little before the prince himself had sworn — he who thinks there is so much in an oath that he exacts it from others too. The rest of the day was given to the tribunal. And there, what scruple of fairness! what reverence for the laws! Someone would approach him as prince: he would answer that he was a consul. By him the right of no magistrate, the authority of none, was diminished; rather it was increased, since he referred most matters to the praetors, and that with calling them his colleagues — not because it was popular and pleasing to his hearers, but because so he felt. He placed so much dignity in the office itself that he reckoned it no more to be called a colleague by a prince than to be a praetor. Besides, he was so assiduous at the tribunal that he seemed to be refreshed and restored by toil. Which of us takes the same care, the same sweat? who so devotes himself to, or suffices for, the honors he has sought? And indeed it is fair that he should excel the other consuls as much, the very man who makes consuls: for it would seem unworthy even of Fortune, if he who could give honors could not hold them. Let him who is about to make consuls teach them, and let him persuade those about to receive the highest honor that he knows what it is he is about to give: so it comes that they too know what they have received.

Wherefore the more justly did the senate both ask and command that you take up a fourth consulship. That this is a word of command, not of flattery, believe by your own compliance: for in no other matter ought either the senate more to exact it from you, or you to render it to the senate. For as with other men, so with princes — even those who seem gods to themselves — all their span is short and fragile. And so it befits every best man to strive and labor that he may benefit the commonwealth even after himself — by monuments of moderation and justice, namely, very many of which a consul can establish. This, surely, is your aim: to recall and lead back liberty. What honor, then, ought you to love more, what name to assume more often, than that which recovered liberty first devised? It is no less the mark of a citizen to be both prince and consul alike than to be only a consul. Take account, too, of the modesty of your colleagues — your colleagues, I say: for so you yourself speak, and so you would have us speak. The memory of their own third consulship will be burdensome to their modesty, until they see you a consul. For what is enough for a prince cannot but be too much for private men. Grant, Caesar, the prayers of those who wish it; and those vows which you are wont to support before the gods, and of which you yourself are master, make them attain their end.

Perhaps a third consulship is enough for you; but for us it is so much the less enough. It has schooled and led us to long to have you consul again and again. We should press this more slackly, if we did not yet know what kind of consul you would be. It was more tolerable that the trial of you, than the use of you, be denied us. Shall it be granted us to see that consul again? Will he hear, will he return, the same words as lately? and will he afford as much joy as he himself receives? Will he preside over the public gladness, its author and cause? and will he try, as he is wont, to restrain our feelings, and fail? Will there be a happy and splendid contest between the senate’s devotion and the prince’s modesty, whether it be conquered or conquer? For my part I foresee some unknown gladness, and one greater than the last. For who is of so feeble a wit as not to hope for a consul so much the better, the more often he has been one? Another, if he had not given himself straightway to idleness and pleasure, would yet have refreshed his labors with leisure and rest; this man, freed from consular cares, took up again the cares of a prince — so careful of the balance that neither as prince did he seek the consul’s duty, nor as consul the prince’s. We see how he meets the needs of the provinces, the prayers even of single communities. No difficulty in hearing, no delay in answering: they approach at once, they are dismissed at once; and at last a crowd of embassies, shut out, no longer besieges the prince’s doors.

What more? In all his judicial hearings, how mild his severity, how undissolved his clemency! You do not sit to enrich the fiscus, nor is there any other reward of your verdict for you than to have judged well. The litigants stand before you, anxious not about their own fortunes, but about your esteem of them; and they fear not so much what you may think of their case as what you may think of their character. O what truly belongs to a prince, and to a consul too: to reconcile rival communities, and to check swelling peoples by reason no less than by command; to intervene against the injustices of magistrates, and to make undone whatever ought not to have been done; and at last, after the manner of the swiftest star, to visit all things, to hear all things, and, called upon from wherever, at once, like a divine power, to be present and to stand by! Such, I would believe, are the things which the very father of the world governs by his nod, if ever he has cast his eyes down upon the earth and deigned to count the fates of mortals among his divine works — free and released from which part of his cares, he now gives his time to heaven alone, since he gave us you to perform his office toward the whole race of men in his stead. For you do perform it, and you suffice for him who entrusted it, since every day is laid up for you with the greatest benefit to us, with praise to you.

But if at any time you have come even with the flood of business, you reckon a change of toil to be as good as rest. For what relaxation have you, save to range the glades, to start the beasts from their lairs, to surmount the vast ridges of the mountains, and to set foot on the bristling crags, helped by no man’s hand, no man’s track; and, amid all this, with reverent mind to approach the sacred groves and to come face to face with the divine powers? Once this was the training of youth, this its pleasure; in these arts the leaders-to-be were steeped: to contend with the swift beasts in speed, with the bold in strength, with the cunning in craft; and it was held no mean glory of peace that the inroad of wild beasts was driven from the fields, and the labor of the countrymen freed from a kind of siege. Those princes too laid claim to that glory who could not perform it — and laid claim to it by collecting, with feigned skill, beasts tamed and broken by their cages, and then loosed for their own mockery. For this man the sweat of seeking and of taking is equal, and the highest and likewise most welcome labor is to find. And indeed, if ever it has pleased him to carry that same bodily strength out upon the seas, he does not follow the floating sails with his eyes or his hands, but now sits at the helm, now vies with the strongest of his companions to break the waves, to tame the resisting winds, and with the oars to cross the straits that stand in his way.

How unlike that other, who could not bear the leisure of the Alban lake nor the torpor and silence of Baiae, nor even endure the beat and crash of the oars without shuddering at each stroke with a shameful dread! And so, far from every sound, himself unshaken and unmoving, he was towed along in a boat fastened and bound, no otherwise than some scapegoat. A foul sight, when the emperor of the Roman People followed another’s course and another’s steersman, as though in a captured ship. Nor were even the rivers and streams free of that ugliness. The Danube and the Rhine rejoiced to bear so much of our shame, with no less disgrace to the empire that the Roman eagles, the Roman standards, the Roman bank itself looked on at it, than that the enemy did — the enemy, whose custom it is to range those same rivers (now stiff with frost, or overflowing the plains, now flowing and bearing them along) in boats, and to cross them by swimming. Nor indeed would I greatly praise, in itself, hardness of body and of muscle; but if a spirit stronger than these rules the whole body — a spirit that the indulgence of fortune does not soften, that a prince’s abundance does not warp toward sloth and luxury — then, whether he exercise himself on the mountains or the sea, I shall marvel both at a body glad in its work and at limbs growing by their labors. For I see that, from of old, the husbands of goddesses and the children of gods grew famous no more by the dignity of their marriages than by these arts. At the same time I reflect that, since these are this man’s play and diversion, how great those serious and earnest pleasures must be, from which he withdraws into such leisure. For there are pleasures by which one best judges each man’s gravity, holiness, and temperance. For who is so dissolute that no show of severity lurks in his occupations? It is by our leisure that we are betrayed. Did not most princes spend this same time on dice, debaucheries, and luxury, when they filled the relaxations of their serious cares with a rivalry in vices?

Great fortune has this first property, that it suffers nothing to be covered, nothing to be hidden; and of princes it lays open not only the house but the very bedchambers and inmost retreats, and sets out and unfolds all their secrets to be known by rumor. But for you, Caesar, nothing could be more conducive to glory than to be inspected to the depths. Splendid, indeed, are the things you bring out into public; but no less are those you keep within your threshold. It is magnificent that you restrain and recall yourself from all contagion of vices, but more magnificent that you do so for your own household. For by how much it is harder to vouch for others than for oneself, by so much the more praiseworthy is it that, being yourself the best, you have made all around you like yourself. To many illustrious men a wife taken too rashly, or kept too patiently, was a disgrace: and so a domestic infamy undid men famous abroad; and what kept them from being held the greatest of citizens was this, that they were lesser as husbands. To you your wife turns to honor and glory. For what is more chaste than she? what more old-fashioned? If a wife were to be chosen for the Pontifex Maximus, would he not choose either her, or one like her — and where is there one like her? How she claims for herself nothing of your fortune but joy! how steadfastly she reveres not your power, but you yourself! You are to each other the same as you were: you approve each other equally; and good fortune has added nothing to you, except that you have begun to know how well each of you bears good fortune. She — how modest in dress! how sparing in retinue! how citizen-like in her going! This is the husband’s work, who so steeped, so trained her: for the wife the glory of compliance is enough. When she sees that no terror, no ostentation attends you, would she not also walk in silence, and imitate, so far as her sex allows, her husband going on foot? This would have become her, even if you did otherwise. But under this modesty of her husband, how much modesty does the wife owe to the husband — the woman to herself!

And your sister — how she remembers that she is a sister! how in her your candor, your truthfulness, your openness are recognized! so that, if anyone should compare her with your wife, he would be forced to doubt which is more effective for living rightly: to be well trained, or to be happily born. Nothing is so prone to feuds as rivalry, especially among women; and it is born most of all from close connection, is fed by equality, flares into envy, whose end is hatred. Which makes it the more admirable that, between two women in one house, and of equal fortune, there is no strife, no contention. They look up to each other, they yield to each other; and since each loves you most lavishly, they think it makes no difference to them which of them you love more. Both have the same purpose, the same course of life, and nothing by which you might perceive that they are two. For they strive to imitate you, to follow you. Therefore each has the same character, because each has yours: hence their moderation, hence too their perpetual security. For they will never be in danger of being private women, since they have not ceased to be. The senate had offered them the title of Augustae, which they vied with each other in declining, as long as you refused the title of Father of the Fatherland — either because they judged there was more in this, to be called your wife and your sister, than to be called Augustae. But whatever reason persuaded them to such modesty, they are the more worthy to be, and to be held, august in our hearts, because they are not so called. For what is more praiseworthy in women than that they should place true honor not in the splendor of titles, but in the judgments of men, and make themselves equal to great names even while they decline them?

By now even in the hearts of private men that ancient good of mortals, friendship, had withered away, into whose place had moved sycophancy, flattery, and — worse than hatred — the pretense of love. For in the house of the princes only the name of friendship remained, empty, of course, and mocked. For what friendship could there be among men of whom some seemed to themselves masters, others slaves? You have led back this banished and wandering thing: you have friends, because you yourself are a friend. For love is not commanded of subjects, as other things are; nor is there any feeling so upright and free and impatient of domination, none that more demands return in kind. A prince can perhaps be hated by some unjustly, can be so even though he does not himself hate; but he cannot be loved unless he himself loves. You love, then, since you are loved; and in that which is on both sides most honorable lies all your glory — you who, made superior, come down to all the offices of intimacy, and from emperor lower yourself into a friend; nay, then most of all an emperor, when you play the friend in place of the emperor. For since the fortune of princes has need of very many friendships, the chief work of a prince is to win friends. May this way of life please you always, and may you hold most steadfastly to this, among your other virtues; and may you never be persuaded that anything is beneath a prince but to hate. It is the most pleasant thing in human affairs to be loved, but no less to love; of which you enjoy both in such a way that, though you yourself love most ardently, you are yet loved still more ardently: first, because it is easier to love one than many; next, because you have so great a power of binding your friends to you that no one could fail to love you the more, unless he were ungrateful.

It is worth recounting what torment you laid upon yourself, that you might deny nothing to a friend. You let go a most excellent man, most dear to you, unwillingly and in sorrow, and as though you could not keep him. How much you loved him you learned by the want of him, torn apart and separated, while you yield and are overcome. And so — a thing unheard of in the telling — when prince and prince’s friend willed opposite things, that was done rather which the friend willed. O thing to be committed to memory and to letters! to choose a praetorian prefect not from those who push themselves forward, but from those who draw back; and to give that same man back to the leisure he stubbornly loves; and, while you yourself are racked with the cares of empire, to grudge no one the glory of repose. We understand, Caesar, how much we owe you for that laborious and toilsome post, since leisure is both sought from you and given by you, as though it were the best of things. What confusion of yours I hear there was, when you escorted him as he departed! For you escorted him, and did not restrain yourself from bringing an embrace and a kiss to him as he went out upon the shore. Caesar stood on that watchtower of friendship, and prayed to the seas, and for a swift return — if only the man himself had wished it — and could not forbear to follow him, as he drew away, again and again with vows and with tears. For of your generosity I say nothing. For by what gifts can this care of a prince be equaled, this forbearance, by which you brought it about that he seemed to himself too resolute, and almost hard? Nor do I doubt that he debated with himself whether to turn the helm back; and he would have done it, but that it is almost happier and more pleasant than the very companionship of a prince — to long for a prince who longs for you. And he, indeed, as he enjoyed the greatest profit of the office he took up, so enjoys a greater glory in the office laid down; while you, by that graciousness, have brought it about that you may not seem to keep anyone against his will.

This was the act of a citizen, and most befitting a public father: to compel nothing, and always to remember that no power so great can be given to anyone that liberty is not more welcome than power. You are worthy, Caesar, to entrust offices to those who wish to lay them down; to grant exemption to those who ask it — unwillingly indeed, yet to grant it; to think yourself not abandoned by friends who beg for rest; ever to find both men to recall from leisure and men to give back to it. You too, whom our father deigns to look upon familiarly, foster the judgment he holds of you: this is your task. For a prince, when he has proved in one man that he knows how to love, is free of blame if he loves others less. Who, indeed, would love him only moderately, when he does not give the laws of loving, but receives them? This man prefers to be loved present, that one absent: let each be loved as he prefers; let no one come into weariness by his presence, no one into oblivion by his absence. Each holds the place he once earned; and it is easier for an absent man’s face to slip from the prince’s eyes than for affection to slip from his heart.

Most princes, though they were masters of the citizens, were slaves of their freedmen: by their counsels, by their nod they were ruled; through them they heard, through them they spoke; through them — nay, from them — were sought even praetorships, and priesthoods, and consulships. You show your freedmen the highest honor indeed, but as freedmen; and you believe it amply enough for them if they be reckoned honest and frugal. For you know that great freedmen are the chief sign of a prince who is not great. And first, you keep no one in service but one chosen by yourself, or by your father, or by some best of princes; and then you daily so shape these very men that they measure themselves not by your fortune, but by their own — and they are the more worthy that every honor be paid them by us, because it is not necessary. Was it for just causes that the Senate and Roman People added to you the surname "Best"? Ready, indeed, it was, and lying to hand, yet new. You may know that no one before deserved it — a thing that would not have had to be devised, if anyone had deserved it. Or was it better to call you "Fortunate"? — a name given not to character, but to fortune; better, "the Great"? — in which there is more envy than beauty. The best of princes adopted you into his own name, the senate into the name of "Best." This is as much your own as your father’s; and he who calls you "Trajan" marks you out no more definitely and distinctly than he who calls you "Best": as once the Pisones were pointed out by their frugality, the Laelii by their wisdom, the Metelli by their devotion — all which are contained together in that one name. Nor can he seem best who is not more excellent than all the best, each in his own praise. Rightly, then, was this added to you after the other titles, as the greater. For it is less to be Emperor and Caesar and Augustus than to be better than all the Emperors and Caesars and Augusti. And therefore that father of men and gods is worshipped first by the name of "Best," then of "Greatest." Whence your praise is the more illustrious, since it is agreed that you are no less best than greatest. You have attained a name that cannot pass to another but so as to appear, in a good prince, borrowed, in a bad one, false; which, though all hereafter assume it, will yet always be recognized as yours. For as by the name "Augustus" we are reminded of him to whom it was first dedicated, so this title "Best" will never recur to the memory of men without you; and as often as our descendants are forced to call anyone "Best," so often will they remember who deserved to be so called.

With what joy do you now delight, deified Nerva, when you see that he is, and is called, "Best" whom you chose as the best! how glad for you, that, compared with your son, you are surpassed! For by nothing else is the greatness of your spirit more approved than that, being yourself the best, you did not fear to choose a better. But you too, father Trajan — for you also, if not the stars, yet hold the seat nearest the stars — what pleasure you receive, when you behold that tribune of yours, that soldier of yours, so great an emperor, so great a prince! and most amicably you contend with him who adopted him: whether it was the finer thing to have begotten such a man, or to have chosen him! All honor to you both for your mighty service to the commonwealth, on which you bestowed so great a good! Though to one of you your son’s virtue gave the triumphal honors, to the other heaven: yet your praise is no less that you earned these things through a son than if you had earned them yourselves.

I know, Conscript Fathers, that all citizens, but consuls above all, ought to be so disposed as to think themselves bound more publicly than privately. For as it is more right and more beautiful to hate bad princes for the wrongs done to all than for one’s own, so good princes are more splendidly loved for the things they grant to the human race than for those they grant to individuals. Yet since it has become the custom that consuls, when the public thanksgiving has been delivered, should declare in their own name too how much they owe the prince, allow me to discharge this office no more for myself than for my colleague, Cornutus Tertullus, a most distinguished man. For why should I not give thanks for him too, for whom I owe no less? — especially since the most indulgent emperor, in our concord, has bestowed on both of us things which, had he conferred them on only one, would yet have bound us both equally. Both of us that plunderer and butcher of every best man had scorched, by the slaughters of our friends, and by the thunderbolt hurled at the man next to us. For we gloried in the same friends, we mourned the same when lost; and as now hope and joy, so then grief and fear were common to us. The deified Nerva had paid this honor to our perils — that he wished to advance us, though it might seem less because we were good — because this too would be a sign of the age’s change: that those should flourish whose chief prayer had before been to slip from the prince’s memory.

We had not yet completed two years in a most laborious and great office, when you, best of princes, bravest of emperors, offered us the consulship, so that to the highest honor the glory of swiftness might be added. So great is the difference between you and those princes who sought to commend their own favors by difficulty, and thought honors more welcome to those who received them if first despair, and weariness, and a delay like a refusal had turned them into a kind of stigma and shame. Modesty forbids us to recount with what testimony you adorned each of us — that, for our love of the right, our love of the commonwealth, you made us equal to those consuls of old. Whether deservedly or not, we dare decide neither way: because it is not right to detract from your affirmation, and it is burdensome to confess that the things you said of us — and so magnificent — are true. Yet you are worthy to make those men consuls of whom you can proclaim such things. Grant us pardon, that among these benefits of yours the most welcome to us is that you wished us to be colleagues again. So our mutual affection, so the harmonious course of our lives, so one and the same plan of purpose demanded — whose force is such that the likeness of our characters lessens the glory of our concord, and it would be as much a wonder for one of us to differ from his colleague as from himself. It is no temporary or sudden thing, then, that each of us rejoices in his colleague’s consulship as though in his own a second time; except that those who are made consuls again are bound twice, indeed, but at different times: we receive two consulships at once, hold them at once, and each is consul in the other — but a second time, and together.

But how remarkable, that to us, prefects of the treasury, you gave a consulship before you gave a successor! Dignity was increased by dignity: the honor was not only continued but doubled, and it forestalled the end of the one office, as though it were too little merely to follow it. So great was your confidence in our integrity that you did not doubt you would act with your own carefulness unimpaired, if you did not suffer us, after that greatest office, to be private men. What of this — that you set our consulship in the same year as your own? And so no other page will receive us than the one that receives you as consul, and our names too will be added to the calendar at whose head you yourself are written. You deigned to preside at our elections, you to dictate to us that most sacred formula; by your judgment we were made consuls, by your voice proclaimed: so that you stood forth as the same — supporter of our honors in the senate-house, and proclaimer of them on the Campus. For that you assigned us that month above all which your birthday adorns — how beautiful for us! to whom it will fall to celebrate by edict, by spectacle, that day glad with a threefold joy: which took away the worst prince, gave the best, and begot one better than the best. Beneath your eyes a chariot more august than usual will receive us; we shall be borne along, eager, amid favorable omens and rival vows that will be heaped upon you in your presence, uncertain from which side the greater shout falls upon our ears.

But above all this seems worth proclaiming: that you suffer to be consuls those whom you have made consuls; since no danger, no fear from the prince weakens and breaks our consular spirits: nothing will have to be heard against our will, nothing decreed under compulsion. The honor keeps, and will keep, its own veneration, and we shall not lose our security through our authority. And if perchance anything be diminished from the consulship’s height, the fault will be ours, not the age’s. For, as far as the prince is concerned, it is permitted to play such consuls as there were before the principate. Can we return you any thanks equal to your benefits? except only this: that we always remember that we have been consuls, and your consuls; that we feel and propose what is worthy of men of consular rank; that we conduct ourselves in the commonwealth as believing there is a commonwealth. Let us not withdraw our counsel or our effort, nor think ourselves detached and as it were discharged from the consulship, but as it were bound and fettered by it; and let us hold the same station of labor and care as of reverence and dignity.

At the end of my speech I, a consul, on behalf of human affairs, pray to the gods who preside over and guard the empire, and you above all, Jupiter of the Capitol, that you favor your own benefits, and add perpetuity to gifts so great. You heard what we used to pray against a bad prince; now hear what we wish for one most unlike him. We do not distract you with vows. For we do not beg for peace, nor concord, nor security, nor wealth, nor honors: the one vow of all is simple, and embraces all those things — the safety of the prince. Nor indeed do we lay anything new upon you. For you took him into your protection even then, when you snatched him from the jaws of that most greedy robber. For not without your help, when all the highest things were being shaken, did he, who is loftier than all, stand unshaken. He was passed over by the worst prince, who could not be passed over by the best. You sent clear signs of your judgment, when, as he set out to the army, you yielded to him in your own name, in your own honor. You, speaking your mind through the emperor’s voice, chose him a son for that other, a father for us, a Pontifex Maximus for yourself. With the greater confidence, then, in those same vows which he himself bids be pronounced for him, I pray and beseech — if he rules the commonwealth well, if for the good of all — first, that you preserve him for our grandsons and great-grandsons; next, that one day you grant him a successor whom he has begotten, whom he has formed, and made like the adopted one; or, if this is denied by fate, that you be in his counsel as he chooses, and point out someone whom it would befit to be adopted on the Capitol.

How much I owe you, Conscript Fathers, is contained even in the public records. You bore witness for me — in my tribunate to my quietness, in my praetorship to my modesty; you all, in those duties too which, out of regard for our pursuits, you had laid upon me for the protection of the allies, bore the most venerable witness to my steadfastness. You lately approved the designation of my consulship with these acclamations, so that I understand I must strive again and again to embrace this agreement of yours, and to hold it, and daily to increase it. For I remember that it is judged most truly, whether a man has deserved an honor or not, when he has obtained it. Only favor this purpose of mine, and believe: that if, carried forward in a certain course by that most treacherous prince, before he avowed his hatred of good men, I halted once he had avowed it; that, when I saw what shortcuts to honors lay open, I preferred the longer road; that in bad times I am counted among the sorrowful and the fearful, in good among the untroubled and the glad; that, in short, I love the best prince as much as I was hated by the worst — I shall always so serve your reverence as to think myself not a consul, and soon a consular, but a candidate for the consulship.