Free The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Page B

does he have to beg help to achieve his goals, or can he impose them? If he’s begging help, he’s bound to fail and will get nowhere. But if he’s got his own resources and can impose his plans, then it’s unlikely he’ll be running serious risks. This is why the visionary who has armed force on his side has always won through, while unarmed even your visionary is always a loser. Because on top of everything else, we must remember that the general public’s mood will swing. It’s easy to convince people of something, but hard to keep them convinced. So when they stop believing in you, you must be in a position to force them to believe.
    Moses, Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus couldn’t have got people to respect their new laws for long if they hadn’t possessed armed force. We saw what happened in our own times to Girolamo Savonarola: he was overthrown along with all his reforms when people stopped believing in him. He had no way of keeping the initial believers on board or forcing the sceptical to see the light. But any new ruler bringing in changes will have to deal with huge obstacles and dangers, mostly in the early stages, and must overcome them with his own abilities. Once he’s done that and eliminated those who resented his achievements, so that people start to respect and admire him, then he can enjoy his power in safety and will live honoured and fulfilled.
    I’ve mentioned four exceptional leaders but now I want to bring in a lesser man, Hiero of Syracuse, who nevertheless had some of the same qualities as the others and will serve as an example of a whole category. Originally an ordinary citizen, Hiero became King of Syracuse. Once again the only luck he had lay in the initial situation: under threat from Carthage, the Syracusans elected him as their military commander and he was so successful they then made him king. In fact, even as a private citizen he was so capable that one writer said of him: ‘He had all it takes to be a king except a kingdom.’ Hiero disbanded the existing army and mustered a new one. He broke off old alliances and made new ones; that way, with his own soldiers and his own allies to support him, he had laid the foundation for building whatever he wanted. So it cost him considerable effort to establish his power, but very little to hold on to it.

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    States won by lucky circumstance and someone else’s armed forces
    A private citizen who becomes a ruler out of sheer good luck needn’t make much effort to take his state but will have to sweat if he is to hold on to it. He has no trouble climbing on to his pedestal, since he is lifted there; but as soon as he is up on top, there will be any number of problems. I’m talking about situations where someone buys a territory with money, or is simply granted it as a favour. This was the case with quite a few rulers of cities in Ionia and the Hellespont: Darius gave them their thrones so that they would govern with his security and prestige in mind. Another example is those emperors who started out as private citizens and rose to power by bribing the army.
    These men rely entirely on the support and continuing success of the people who gave them their power, which is to say on two extremely unreliable and unstable quantities. They don’t know how to hang on to power and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to. They don’t know how because, unless they are remarkably gifted and competent, we can hardly suppose that their lives as private citizens have equipped them for command. They won’t be able to in any event because they don’t possess an army that can be relied on to stay friendly and loyal. Like anything that appears suddenly and grows fast, regimes that come out of nothing inevitably have shallow roots and will tend to crash in the first storm. Unless of course the man who is suddenly made a ruler turns out to be so talented that he immediately sets to work to