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Dialogues and On ClemencyOn Clemency, Book Two
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On Clemency, Book Two

1 What more than anything else drove me to write on clemency, Nero Caesar, was a single remark of yours, which I remember hearing, not without admiration, when it was spoken, and then repeating to others: a generous remark, the remark of a great mind and of great mildness, which was not studied nor meant for other ears, but burst out suddenly and brought into the open the quarrel between your goodness and your fortune. Your prefect Burrus,1 an excellent man, born to serve you as emperor, was about to execute two bandits, and he kept pressing you to write down whom you wished to be punished and on what grounds; this had often been put off, and he was insisting that it be done at last. When he, reluctant, brought out the paper and was handing it to you, reluctant too, you cried out: “I wish I did not know how to write!” O remark worthy to be heard by all the nations that live within the Roman empire, and by those that lie beside it in doubtful freedom, and by those that rise against it with their strength or their spirit! O remark that ought to be sent out to an assembly of all mortals, a remark in whose words emperors and kings should take their oath! O remark worthy of a human race innocent as a whole, a remark for whose sake that ancient age ought to be restored! Now, surely, it would be fitting for all to agree on what is fair and good; for greed for what belongs to others, the source of every evil of the mind, to be driven out; for piety and integrity to rise again, together with good faith and modesty; and for the vices, having abused their long reign, to give way at last to an age fortunate and pure.

2 That this will come to pass in great measure, Caesar, I am glad to hope and to trust. That gentleness of your mind will be handed on and will spread little by little through the whole body of the empire, and everything will be shaped in your likeness. Good health flows from the head: it is from there that all the parts are lively and erect, or droop in languor, according as their mind is alive or withers. There will be citizens, there will be allies worthy of this goodness, and right morals will return to the whole world; everywhere your hands will be spared their work. Allow me to linger here a while longer, not to please your ears (for that is not my way; I would rather give offense with the truth than give pleasure by flattery). What, then, is my reason? Besides wishing you to be as familiar as possible with your own good deeds and words, so that what is now nature and impulse may become judgment, I reflect that many great but detestable sayings have entered human life and are passed about on everyone’s lips, like that one, “Let them hate, so long as they fear,”2 which a Greek line resembles, in which a man bids the earth be mingled with fire once he is dead,3 and others of this stamp. And somehow talents working on monstrous and hateful material have found a happier expression for violent and excited feelings; I have never yet heard a spirited saying come from a good and gentle man. What, then, is the upshot? That you must sometimes write, though rarely, unwillingly, and with great hesitation, the thing that made you hate the knowledge of letters, but write it as you do now: with great hesitation, after many postponements.

3 And so that the fair-sounding name of clemency may not at some point deceive us and lead us off into its opposite, let us see what clemency is, what it is like, and what limits it has.

Clemency is self-control of the mind when it has the power to take vengeance, or the mildness of a superior toward an inferior in fixing punishments. It is safer to put forward several definitions, so that a single one may not fail to take in the whole matter and, so to speak, lose its case on the wording; so it can also be called an inclination of the mind toward mildness in exacting punishment. The following definition will meet with objections, though it comes very close to the truth, if we say that clemency is a moderation that remits something from a deserved and due punishment: the protest will be that no virtue does less than is due to anyone. Yet everyone understands that clemency is this: the quality that turns aside short of what could deservedly be imposed.

4 The unskilled think that its opposite is severity; but no virtue is opposed to a virtue. What, then, is set against clemency? Cruelty, which is nothing else than harshness of mind in exacting punishments. “But some people do not exact punishments and yet are cruel, like those who kill strangers and passersby, not for gain but for the sake of killing, and, not content with killing, torture them, like the notorious Busiris and Procrustes,4 and pirates who flog their captives and put them on the fire alive.” This is cruelty, certainly; but since it neither pursues vengeance (for it has not been wronged) nor is angry at any offense (for no crime has gone before), it falls outside our definition; for the definition covered lack of self-control of the mind in exacting punishments. We can say that this is not cruelty but fierceness, to which savagery is a pleasure; we can call it madness, for there are various kinds of madness, and none more unmistakable than the kind that goes as far as the slaughter and mangling of men. Those, then, I shall call cruel who have a reason for punishing but no measure, as in the case of Phalaris,5 who, they say, raged not indeed against innocent men, but beyond all human and reasonable measure. We can escape quibbling by defining cruelty in this way: an inclination of the mind toward harsher measures. Clemency drives this far off and bids it keep its distance; with severity clemency is in harmony.

It is to the point to ask here what pity (misericordia) is; for many praise it as a virtue and call the man who feels pity a good man. But it too is a vice of the mind. Both of these lie close to severity and to clemency, and we must avoid both; for under the appearance of severity we fall into cruelty, under the appearance of clemency into pity. In the second the danger is lighter, but the error is equal for all who depart from the truth.

5 So, just as religion honors the gods and superstition wrongs them, all good men will show clemency and gentleness but will avoid pity; for it is the vice of a small mind that gives way at the impression of others’ ills. That is why it is most familiar to the worst sort of people: it is old women and silly girls who are moved by the tears of the guiltiest, and who, if they could, would break open the prison. Pity looks not at the cause but at the fortune; clemency takes the side of reason.

I know that the Stoic school has a bad name among the unskilled as too hard, and the least likely to give good counsel to emperors and kings; it is held against the school that it denies that the wise man feels pity, denies that he pardons. These claims, stated by themselves, are hateful; for they seem to leave no hope to human errors, and to bring every offense to punishment. If that is so, what kind of knowledge is this, which bids us unlearn humanity and closes the surest harbor against fortune, the help we give one another? But no school is kinder or milder, none more loving of men or more attentive to the common good; its very purpose is to be of use and of help, and to look out not only for itself but for all together and for each one. Pity is a sickness of the mind brought on by the impression of others’ miseries, or a sorrow caught from the ills of others when it believes that they befall people who do not deserve them. But sickness does not befall the wise man; his intellect is serene, and nothing can happen that would cloud it over. And nothing so befits a man as a great mind; but a mind cannot be great and sorrowful at once. Grief bruises the intellect, casts it down, shrinks it. This will not happen to the wise man even in his own calamities: he will beat back all the wrath of fortune and break it before it reaches him; he will always keep the same countenance, calm and unshaken, which he could not do if he let sorrow in.

6 Add that the wise man both foresees and has a plan ready at hand; but nothing clear and pure ever comes from what is muddy. Sorrow is unfit for discerning things, for devising what is useful, avoiding what is dangerous, weighing what is fair; therefore the wise man does not feel pity, because pity cannot occur without misery of mind. Everything else that I would wish those who feel pity to do, he will do gladly and with a lofty mind. He will come to the aid of others’ tears, but will not join in them; he will give his hand to the shipwrecked, hospitality to the exile, a coin to the needy, not the insulting coin that most of those who wish to be thought full of pity fling at those they help, disdaining them and afraid of their touch, but he will give as one human being to another, out of what is common to all. He will give a son back to his mother’s tears, order chains to be loosed, release a man from the gladiators’ school, and bury even the corpse of a criminal; but he will do these things with a calm intellect and an unchanged face. So the wise man will not feel pity, but he will help, he will be of use, born as he is for the common aid and the public good, of which he will give a share to each. He will extend his goodness in due proportion even to the unfortunate who deserve censure and need correction; but to the afflicted and to those in trouble through bad luck he will come to the rescue far more gladly. Whenever he can, he will step in between Fortune and her victims; for where will he better use his wealth or his strength than in setting up again what chance has knocked down? He will not drop his eyes or lose heart at the sight of someone’s withered leg, or ragged leanness, or old age leaning on a staff; but he will help all who are worthy and, in the manner of the gods, look graciously on the unfortunate.

Pity is next door to misery (miseria); for it has something of misery in it and draws something from it. You may be sure that eyes are weak if they fill with tears themselves at the sight of another’s inflamed eyes, just as surely, by Hercules, as it is a disease, not merriment, always to laugh when others laugh and to open one’s own mouth wide whenever anyone yawns. Pity is a vice of minds too much afraid of misery; to demand it of the wise man is very nearly to demand that he wail and groan at strangers’ funerals.

7 “But why will he not pardon?” Come, let us now settle this too, what pardon is, and we shall know that the wise man ought not to grant it. Pardon is the remission of a deserved punishment. Why the wise man ought not to grant it is explained at greater length by those who have made this their subject; I, to speak briefly, as though pleading another’s case, say this: a man is pardoned who ought to have been punished; but the wise man does nothing that he ought not to do and leaves out nothing that he ought to do; therefore he does not remit a punishment that he ought to exact. But what you wish to obtain from pardon he will grant you by a more honorable way. For the wise man will spare, will look out for the man, will correct him; he will do the same as if he pardoned, and yet he will not pardon, since the man who pardons admits that he has left undone something that ought to have been done. One man he will merely admonish with words and not punish at all, looking to his age, which can still be reformed; another, who is plainly laboring under the odium of his crime, he will order to go unharmed, because he was deceived, because he slipped through wine; enemies he will let go safe, sometimes even with praise, if they were called to war for honorable reasons, for good faith, for a treaty, for freedom. All these are the works not of pardon but of clemency. Clemency has free discretion. It judges not by the letter of a legal formula but by what is fair and good; it may acquit, and it may set the damages at whatever figure it wishes. It does none of these things as though it were doing less than is just, but as though what it has decided were the most just. To pardon, on the other hand, is not to punish a man whom you judge deserving of punishment; pardon is the remission of a punishment that is due. The first thing clemency achieves is this: it declares that those it lets go ought to have suffered nothing else. It is fuller than pardon, and more honorable. The dispute, in my opinion, is over the word; about the thing we agree. The wise man will remit much; he will save many whose character is unsound but curable. He will imitate good farmers, who tend not only straight and tall trees: to those too that some cause has bent crooked they fasten props to straighten them; some they trim around so that the branches may not weigh down their height; some that are weak through a fault of the ground they nourish; for some that suffer under another’s shade they open up the sky. He will see which character is to be treated by which method, and how crooked things may be bent straight. ⟨…⟩6

Notes

  1. 1. Sextus Afranius Burrus, praetorian prefect from AD 51 to 62 and, with Seneca, Nero’s chief adviser.

  2. 2. A line from the Atreus of the tragic poet Accius.

  3. 3. A line from an unknown Greek tragedy, much quoted in antiquity: “When I am dead, let earth be mingled with fire.”

  4. 4. Busiris, a mythical king of Egypt who sacrificed strangers; Procrustes, a robber of Attica who made his victims fit his bed by stretching them or cutting them down.

  5. 5. Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas in Sicily in the sixth century BC, said to have roasted men alive in a bronze bull.

  6. 6. The rest is lost.