Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises (Penguin Classics) (6 page)

[1] ‘As a matter of fact, though,’ Simonides replied, ‘I for one wouldn’t count these points of yours as particularly important. I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly seen plenty of well-respected men voluntarily deny themselves food, drink and savouries,
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and even [2] abstain from sex. No, the difference between you tyrants and ordinary citizens is that you can make mighty plans and rapidly put them into effect, you have a vast amount of luxuries, you own horses of outstanding quality, arms and armour of unrivalled magnificence, wonderful jewellery for your womenfolk and the most magnificent residences on the accoutrements of which no expense has been spared. In terms of their quantity and their technical accomplishments there are no better slaves than yours, and there is no one in a better position than you to harm your enemies and reward your friends.’
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[3] ‘I don’t find it at all surprising,’ Hiero replied, ‘that the mass of mankind are taken in by tyranny, since the rabble tend to assess [4] happiness and unhappiness by external appearances. Tyranny flaunts
in public its speciously valuable possessions, but there’s another, darker side to it, which is kept hidden away in the minds of tyrants – in the place where human happiness and misery are stored. Anyway, as I [5] say, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the masses should have failed to notice this, but that even people like yourself– people with a reputation for judging most things in the clearer light of intelligence rather than by external appearances – this does strike me as astonishing.

‘Speaking from personal experience, Simonides, I can tell you that [6] no one is a more complete stranger to life’s greatest blessings than a tyrant, and that no one has a greater share of life’s worst troubles either. To take the first example that comes to mind, peace is held to [7] be of immense benefit for mankind. It may be so, but tyrants have hardly a moment of peace in their lives. War is considered a disaster, but no one sees more of it than a tyrant. The point is that, unless their [8] state is actually at war, ordinary citizens can go anywhere they want without fear of being killed by anyone; wherever tyrants go, however, they always treat it as enemy territory. At any rate, they think they have no choice but to spend their lives in armour and to take an armed escort with them at all times.
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‘Secondly, even if ordinary citizens do go out on a campaign into [9] enemy territory, they consider themselves safe once they return home; but back home is where a tyrant knows there is the highest concentration of his enemies. Thirdly, if the city is attacked by a superior [10] invading force, the weaker side thinks it dangerous to be outside the city walls, but once behind the fortifications, they all regard their situation as one of safety. A tyrant, however, is not out of danger even when he enters his residence; in fact, he thinks he has to protect himself there more than anywhere else.
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Fourthly, a truce or a permanent peace [11] puts an end to war for ordinary citizens, but there’s no peace between a tyrant and his subjects, and he cannot ever confidently rely on truces.

‘So there are hostilities between states, and hostilities between [12] tyrants and their oppressed subjects. All the hardships that are involved in wars between states are also suffered in the other kind of war by tyrants, in the sense that tyrants as well as the ordinary citizens of states [13] have to bear arms, tread warily and face danger, and also because both groups are liable to suffer from any adverse consequences of defeat.
[14] So far, then, both kinds of war are equal. However, the pleasures the citizens of a state
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gain in wars between states are not available to [15] tyrants; this is where the similarity stops. For, as you know, when states win a battle, the pleasure the citizens get from forcing the enemy into retreat, from pursuing fugitives and killing their foes, beggars description. It’s impossible to capture in words how they glory in their achievement, how they bask in the brilliance of their fame, how they are cheered by the thought that they have enhanced the power [16] of their community. Every one of them claims that he was privy to the plan and killed more people than anyone else; in fact, it’s hard to find a space free of lies and exaggeration; all you find is people claiming to have killed more of the enemy than actually fell in the battle! This just goes to show what a fine thing they regard outright victory to [17] be. As for a tyrant, however, when he suspects some people of plotting against him, and then finds out that his suspicions are true and puts the conspirators to death, he is well aware that he is not enhancing the power of the community and that in future he will have fewer subjects to rule over; so far from finding it possible to be happy about what he is doing and to pride himself on it, he plays it down as much as he can and defends the justice of what he has done even while he is in the middle of doing it. This just goes to show how disgusted [18] even he feels about his actions. Even the death of people he feared doesn’t boost his morale at all; in fact, he takes even more precautions than he did before. So this is the kind of war a tyrant spends his life fighting, as I have explained.’
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[1]‘Next, consider how tyrants are placed with regard to friendship and affection. Let’s start by trying to see how important a part they play [2] in helping a person to live well. I mean, people who like someone enjoy his company, gladly do him favours, miss him when he isn’t there, are delighted when he returns, share his pleasure at his successes [3] and support him through any setbacks.
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States too are well aware of the importance of the part friendship plays in helping people to live
well and pleasantly. At any rate, it is not uncommon for the legal code of states to allow people to kill adulterers, and only adulterers, with impunity, and the thinking behind this law is obviously that adultery impairs the affection a wife feels for her husband. After all, [4] if sex takes place without the woman’s consent, this does not make the slightest difference to the regard her husband feels for her, as long as the affection she feels for him clearly remains inviolate.
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My own [5] assessment of the importance of friendship and affection to the good life leads me to believe that when a person is liked he really doesn’t have to seek for good things: they just come his way of their own accord, from both gods and men.

‘That is how important a possession friendship is – but friendship [6] is something else which a tyrant above all is denied. If you doubt the truth of what I’m saying, Simonides, why don’t you look at it this way? The strongest bonds of affection, as you know, are held to be [7] those felt by parents for their children, by children for their parents, by brothers for their brothers, by wives for their husbands and by comrades for their comrades. A little reflection will show you that [8] this is far more true for ordinary citizens than for tyrants. Tyrants have often killed their own children or been killed themselves by their children; when brothers have been involved in tyranny together, it is not uncommon for them to have become one another’s assassins; plenty of tyrants have even been killed by their own wives – yes, and also by comrades who were apparently their closest friends. In short, [9] when the people who might naturally feel the most affection for them – or who at least might have been particularly impelled by convention to do so – hate them so much, how are we to suppose that anyone else feels affection for them?’

‘What about trust? Surely the less a person knows of trust, the more [1] he is deprived of something of value. I mean, without trust what delight could we find in others’ company? Without trust, what joy would there be in the relationship between man and wife? Without
[2] trust, what pleasure would there be in owning a slave? Yet here again, in the matter of trusting people, a tyrant is worse off than anyone else. He lives in constant mistrust even of what he eats and drinks; before consecrating any food and drink to the gods he tells a servant to taste them, because he can’t be sure that they won’t have been poisoned.

[3] ‘One of the most important things in the lives of ordinary citizens is the country they live in. The citizens of a country serve for free as one another’s bodyguards against slaves and criminals, to make sure [4] that none of their fellow citizens meets a violent death.
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They take this job of protecting one another so seriously that it is not uncommon for them to have a law that even the associates of a murderer are polluted.
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And the upshot is that a country enables each of its citizens [5] to live in security. A tyrant’s life, however, is the opposite of everyone else’s in this respect too. So far from being punished, the murderer of a tyrant is greatly honoured by his fellow citizens; instead of being banned from the shrines, as the killers of ordinary citizens are, states erect statues of tyrannicides in their sanctuaries.
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[6] ‘You might imagine that a tyrant’s extra possessions afford him extra pleasure as well, but that would be wrong too, Simonides. Consider the analogy of a professional athlete, who doesn’t get any pleasure from beating amateurs, but hates losing to his rivals.
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The same goes for a tyrant: there’s no pleasure for him in having conspicuously more than ordinary citizens, but it hurts him to have less than other tyrants, whom he regards as his competitors in wealth.

[7] ‘Nor is it the case that a tyrant’s wishes are more quickly realized than those of ordinary citizens. An ordinary citizen might want a house or a farm or a house-slave, but a tyrant wants whole cities, vast tracts of land, safe harbours and impregnable strongholds, which are far harder and riskier to come by than the things an ordinary citizen aims for.

[8] ‘In actual fact, though, it is as common to find an impoverished tyrant as it is rare to meet poverty among ordinary citizens. The criterion of wealth and poverty is not quantity but a person’s perceived needs,
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which is why “plenty” means “more than enough” and “little” [9] means “less than enough”. A tyrant is less capable of meeting his essential expenses with all his vast wealth than an ordinary citizen is
with his money, because an ordinary citizen can cut down what he spends on his daily needs in any way he chooses, whereas this is out of the question for a tyrant. After all, the most expensive and essential item for a tyrant is protecting his life, and cutting down what he spends on this would seem to be lethal.

‘Then again, why should we pity people as poor when they can [10] honestly come by everything they need? Wouldn’t it be fairer to count people wretched and poor when they are so badly off that they have no choice but to find criminal and degrading means of staying alive? Well, no one turns to crime more than a tyrant: he frequently [11] steals from temples
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as well as from people, because he is in constant need of money to cover his necessary expenditure. You see, he has two options: either maintain an army all the time, as if there were a war on, or be killed.’

‘Here’s another hardship a tyrant experiences, Simonides. He is just [1] as capable as any citizen of recognizing bravery, cleverness and moral rectitude in people, but instead of admiring such qualities, he is afraid of them. He worries about brave people using their courage in the service of freedom, about clever people intriguing against him and about morally good people being chosen by the general populace as their champions. So his fear makes him do away with such people, [2] but then whom is he left with? Only people who are without morality, lack self-discipline and are servile. He puts his trust in immoral people because they share his fear about the state some day winning its freedom and getting them in its power, in weak-willed people because of their laissez-faire attitude towards whatever is going on, and in servile people because they don’t even value freedom. So to my mind this is another hardship, to have to be intimately involved with people other than those one thinks good.

‘Moreover, although even a tyrant is bound to be patriotic (because [3] he relies on the state for his life and happiness), nevertheless his situation as tyrant forces him to have a deleterious effect on the state.
The point is that he doesn’t like to develop combativeness and military skills in the citizens of his state; it gives him greater pleasure to make his foreign militia a more formidable fighting force than his fellow [4] countrymen and to use them as his personal guards. Also, even in years of plenty, when the state is overflowing with good things, a tyrant does not share in the celebrations, because he thinks he will find his subjects more submissive the needier they are.’

[1] ‘Simonides,’ Hiero went on, ‘I would also like to tell you about all the pleasures
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enjoyed as an ordinary citizen, but which I am aware [2] of lacking now that I have become a tyrant. I used to enjoy the company of friends and acquaintances of my own age, as they enjoyed mine too; I used to spend time with myself when I wanted a bit of peace and quiet; I used to while away the hours at symposia, often until I forgot all the hardships of human life, often until my mind was fully taken up with the singing and dancing and fun, and often until [3] sleep was all I and my companions wanted.
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But now I have no one to enjoy my company because my comrades are slaves instead of friends, and there’s no pleasure in my association with them because I can see in them no flicker of warmth towards me. I am as wary of drunkenness and sleep as I would be of a trap.
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[4] ‘To be frightened of a crowd and also of solitude, to be frightened of being unguarded and also of your very guards, to be reluctant to have unarmed people around you and yet to find the sight of armed [5] men alarming – isn’t this a horrible situation? And then to trust strangers rather than your fellow citizens and non-Greeks rather than Greeks, to want to turn free men into slaves and yet to be forced to make slaves free
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– doesn’t all this strike you as evidence of a mind [6] cowed by fears?
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And
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fear, you know, not only is painful in itself, by its mere presence in the mind, but also haunts all our pleasures and spoils them.

[7] ‘If you have experience of warfare, Simonides, as I do, and were ever stationed with enemy lines close at hand confronting you, call
to mind how you approached your food at the time and what the quality of your sleep was. Tyrants are prey to all the fears that troubled [8] you then, and to more terrifying ones as well, since the enemies they seem to see are all around them, not just in front of them.’

‘I absolutely agree with some of what you’re saying,’ Simonides [9] replied. ‘War
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a frightening thing. All the same, Hiero, we reduce the fears that trouble our meals and sleep on campaign by stationing guards out in front of our position.’

‘Of course you do, Simonides,’ Hiero said. ‘And these guards in [10] their turn are watched over by the laws of the state, which guarantee that they fear to neglect their duty as well as taking on your fears. But tyrants hire guards for pay, as if they were labourers at harvest-time.
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Now, the most important requirement for guards, I imagine, is trust- [11] worthiness, but it’s far easier to find scores of labourers for agricultural or any other kind of work than it is to find a single trustworthy guard, especially when money is what induces them to become guards in the first place and they can earn far more in a few moments by killing the tyrant than they would receive from him in pay for a lengthy stint of protecting him.

‘You said you envied our ability to help our friends immensely and [12] do the utmost harm to our enemies, but again you’re wrong. I mean, [13] could you really tell yourself that you’re helping friends when you know perfectly well that the more people receive from you the more quickly they want to get out of your sight? For a tyrant’s gifts are never regarded as a person’s property until he is beyond his reach. Or [14] again, how does your claim that a tyrant can do particular harm to his enemies fare in the light of the fact that he knows perfectly well that every single one of his subjects is his enemy and that he can’t have them all put to death or thrown into prison – whom would he rule if he did that? – but has to protect them and be involved with them, even while knowing their hatred for him?

‘Another point, Simonides. I can assure you that when a tyrant is [15] afraid of any of his subjects, it is hard for him to see them alive, but also hard for him to kill them. As an analogy, imagine someone with a good horse who is nevertheless worried that it might fatally let him down: the horse’s good points make it hard for him to kill it, yet it
[16] is also hard for him to keep it alive and make use of it, when he is worried that in a dangerous situation it might prove fatal for him. The same goes, in fact, for any possession that is irritating but useful: it is as much of a nuisance to have it as it is to do without it.’