"But the tyrant may not escape his condition; no, he cannot even so much as pray except it be for something else. Anyone who has suffered the loss of a friend by death believes in his heart that time will eventually heal his grief; but tyrants, on the contrary, find their troubles growing worse and worse; since it is not easy for a tyrant to reach old age, and a tyrant's old age is grievous, unlike that of the horse in the proverb. For his victims as well as those who despise him have multiplied, and he, owing to his own infirmities, cannot defend himself.
"Now all calamities are naturally more alarming in anticipation than they are grievous in experience, as is true of hunger, exile, imprisonment, or loss of civil rights; but if the fear of death were removed, then no further distress remains. For death in itself is so far from troubling those who have experienced it, that they have no further grief at all.
"Fear of it, however, is so intense that many have anticipated the event. People on a storm-tossed ship have not waited for it to go down but have taken their own lives first; others have done the same when surrounded by the enemy, although they well knew that nothing worse than death awaited them.
"This is the evil plight that despots are ever in, both by day and by night. For condemned criminals a stated day is set on which they must die, but tyrants are uncertain whether death will come soon or the hour has already struck. No moment, not even the most fleeting, is free from this dread, but whether eating or sacrificing to the gods the tyrant must live in this fear.
"And if ever it occurs to such a ruler to seek diversion, even in the enjoyments of love, no matter how intense the passion, his mind dwells on death, imagining that perhaps he will be slain by the very object of his love, and with this fear he must quaff his wine and with it must lay himself down to sleep. And so, in my opinion, the tyrant is happy only at the moment when he is struck down, since it is then that he is freed from his greatest evil.
"But the most absurd thing of all is this: Other men realize that their condition is hopeless and so do not suffer long when death is possible for them; but tyrants, though suffering from the greatest evils, imagine that they are surrounded by the greatest blessings, presumably because they are deceived by the opinions of others who have not had experience of ruling. God has inflicted tyrants with this ignorance that they may hold out under their punishment.
"Again, to the prosperous life seems more worth living and death correspondingly more bitter, while those in adversity seem to find life harder to endure and to welcome death more gladly. But for tyrants both are harder than for others, since in life they have far less happiness than those who eagerly long to die, and yet they fear death as if they were getting the greatest enjoyment out of life.
"And if things pleasurable naturally afford greater delight when they are rare, but become repulsive to those who have the continuous enjoyment of them, and if evils that never cease are naturally harder to bear; then we may almost say that both these—the pleasurable and the painful—are always with the tyrant in such a way that he rarely finds relief from pain and is never conscious of pleasure.
"Besides, he continually dreads the power of the rich and the craving of the poor for riches. Again, despots are the only persons who receive no thanks for the favors they bestow; since people never think they get enough, while those who fail to get what they want hate them above all others.
"The most disliked man, too, is he who has acquired great wealth unjustly; hence no man is more disliked than a tyrant. And furthermore, he is obliged to show favors to those about him, otherwise he will perish most speedily. But it is not easy to give to many repeatedly without taking from others.
"Accordingly, the men whom he despoils are his enemies, while his beneficiaries eye him with suspicion and seek to be rid of him as soon as possible. What is far removed from him he fears because of its remoteness; what is near, because it is close to him; from those at a distance he looks for war, from those near at hand, treachery.
"Peace he considers undesirable because it leaves men idle, and war, because he is obliged to disturb his subjects by raising money and compelling them to take the field as well. So when there is a war, tyrants want peace; and when peace has been made, they at once scheme for war. When the people have all the comforts of life, they fear their insolence; when hard times come, they fear their wrath. They feel that it is safe neither to leave the country nor to stay the home, neither to appear in public nor to live in seclusion, nay, not even to set foot where they may do so in safety, and that plotting and treachery menace them on every side.
"Every one of them calls to mind the deaths of tyrants and all the conspiracies that have ever been formed against them; he imagines that they are all coming his way, and is terror-stricken as if he were doomed to all those deaths; and he is always wanting to look on every side and to turn around, as though he might be struck from any quarter; but this is the very thing he may not do from shame and fear at once.
"For the more apparent the tyrant's fear, the more do men conspire against him through scorn of his cowardice. He lives, therefore, like one shut up in a narrow cell with swords hanging over his head and others, just touching the skin, fixed all about him. So closely indeed about the tyrant's soul as well as his body are the swords set that Tantalus in Hades has a far easier time of it, Tantalus, who is said
to dread the rock that sways above his head.
"Tantalus at least has no further dread of death, while the tyrant suffers in life that fate which men ascribe to Tantalus in the other world.
"Now for those who have made themselves tyrants of but a single city or a small country, it is not impossible to flee from their realm and live in seclusion elsewhere—yet no one has any fondness for a tyrant, but only hatred and suspicion, and everyone is ready to surrender him to his victims—those, however, who rule over many cities and peoples and over a boundless territory, as the Persian king does, cannot escape, even though they come to comprehend their evil plight and some god remove their ignorance from them. It seems, then, that the tyrant's life would never be safe, not even if he were to become bronze or iron, but that even then he would be destroyed by being broken to pieces or melted down.
"If you talk with him boldly, he is angered and fears your frankness; if you converse with him meekly and deferentially, he suspects your meekness. He feels that he is being insulted by those who treat him as an equal and deceived by those who are more obsequious. Censure, too, stings him far more than it does others because he, a sovereign, is spoken ill of; nor is he pleased with praise either, for he does not think that the speaker is sincere in his praise. Then, of the fairest and most useful of all treasures he has the greatest lack; for friendship and good-will he can expect from no one; nay, keepers of savage lions will love these brutes sooner than they who court and approach tyrants will love them.
"I, however," says Diogenes, "go by night whithersoever I will and travel by day unattended, and I am not afraid to go even through an army if need be, without the herald's staff, yea, and amid brigands; for I have no enemy, public or private, to block my way.
"If all the gold, all the silver, and all the copper should give out, that would not injure me in the least. And if an earthquake lays all the houses low as happened once in Sparta, and all the sheep are killed so that not a single man has wherewithal to clothe himself, and want overwhelms not only Attica but Boeotia as well and the Peloponnesus and Thessaly, as it is said to have done aforetime, I shall fare none the worse nor be the more destitute.
"For how much more naked shall I be than I am now, how much more homeless? I shall find all the food I need in apples, millet, barley, vetches, the cheapest of lentils, acorns roasted in the ashes, and cornel-berries, on which Homer says Circe feasted Odysseus' comrades and on which even the largest animals can subsist."
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