On Kingship

Contents

Reading pages: 3–33 · 34–65 · 66–77

1. 3Synesius opens by asking whether only a speaker from a great city with showy rhetoric may be heard at court.
2. 4Philosophy comes to court with weighty and free speech, not the flattering rhetoric of the great cities.
3. 5Flattery is like poison in honey; true speech, like medicine, hurts in order to save.
4. 6Synesius presents himself as Cyrene's envoy, bringing a gold crown for the emperor's head and philosophy for his soul.
5. 7Cyrene is a ruin needing imperial help, but truth gives a speech its nobility; reforming the emperor reforms the whole empire.
6. 8The emperor should blush at the faults the speech will name, since shame leads to repentance, while obstinacy deserves punishment.
7. 9Others praise the emperor's wealth and armies; Synesius counts these a matter of good fortune, not of praise.
8. 10Good fortune is external and unstable and needs great effort to keep; tragedy is made from the falls of the powerful.
9. 11Theodosius won the throne by virtue; Arcadius inherited it and must now earn it by virtue.
10. 12Theodosius defeated two usurpers and died undefeated; his heir must guard the kingdom by toil, virtue and God's help.
11. 13Numbers of subjects no more make a king than a flock makes a shepherd rather than a butcher.
12. 14The true king toils for his subjects like a shepherd; the tyrant fattens himself on them like a butcher.
13. 15Youth can go either way; philosophy must keep the young emperor from sliding from kingship into tyranny, its nearest vice.
14. 16Law rules the king, the king's whim rules the tyrant; happiness belongs to the ruler whose power follows prudence.
15. 17Strength and wisdom must go together, as the Egyptians show in their double Hermes and their Sphinx.
16. 18Prudence, eldest of the virtues, brings the others with it; without it, power only gives vice an outlet.
17. 19Wealth and power are instruments, good or bad by their user; the earthly king is God's friend if he imitates divine providence.
18. 20No name reaches God's essence; ‘king’ names him from his subjects, and the other name a king must share with God is ‘good’.
19. 21All agree in calling God good, but even this name describes him only as the cause of good things, as the sacred prayers praise his care rather than his power.
20. 22The king should imitate God by pouring out good on his subjects; Synesius will sculpt the ideal king in words, with piety as the base.
21. 23The king must first rule himself, for the soul is a many-headed beast of conflicting powers.
22. 24Mind must reign over the passions in the king's soul; such a man's calm and goodness benefit whole nations.
23. 25The divided soul never agrees with itself; the first kingly task is to rule oneself.
24. 26After ruling himself, the king turns to his friends, who are the most kingly possession and whose good fortune shows his goodness.
25. 27A king needs friends to see and hear for him, but must guard against flattery disguised as friendship.
26. 28The king should share the soldiers' drills himself, so that calling them fellow soldiers is true.
27. 29A king seen at work among his soldiers earns their love, the strongest wall of a kingdom.
28. 30Soldiers, like dogs, love those they know; a king who knows his officers by name strengthens the army.
29. 31As Homer's god roused the Greeks with his sceptre, a king calling men by name rouses them to fight.
30. 32Homer's Agamemnon names and praises each man; a king who does so will find his soldiers ready to shed their blood.
31. 33A king must know his soldiers as a craftsman knows his tools; Synesius turns now to a pointed criticism.
32. 34Court ceremonial has shut emperors away from the world, leaving them to bodily pleasures and the life of a jellyfish.
33. 35Shut in the palace, the emperor keeps company with jesters and fools instead of wise men and soldiers.
34. 36Every great empire was built by rulers who lived and toiled like their soldiers.
35. 37Empires fall by abandoning the ways that built them; Rome's rulers have exchanged the old ways for purple, gold and jewels.
36. 38Jewelled robes make the emperors peacocks, so loaded with gold that they bear it like fetters.
37. 39The emperors, walking on gold dust and hiding in their chambers like lizards, fare worse than the open-living generals of old.
38. 40Rome's old generals carried war across the Euphrates and the Danube; now the barbarians cross into the empire and demand payment for peace.
39. 41Setting extravagance beside the simplicity of old, Synesius prepares to show the true beauty of kingship by an example.
40. 42Synesius tells of an emperor who, on campaign against Persia, stopped to dine on the Armenian heights when Persian envoys arrived.
41. 43The envoys found the emperor, without any guard of honour, lying on the grass in a plain tunic eating stale pea soup.
42. 44The bald emperor bluntly threatened the Persian king and dismissed the envoys, and the Persians were terrified.
43. 45Earlier emperors went in person as spies and gave up power freely; the Romans long avoided the title ‘king’, and emperors still avoid it in their letters.
44. 46Roman emperors call themselves autokratores, a republican title, out of a wise wariness of the name of king, which tyranny has discredited.
45. 47Like God, who governs silently, the true king shuns theatrical display; only tyrants hide behind spectacle.
46. 48Agesilaus, lame and living in public, humbled the Persian king; only the frugal Epaminondas could defeat him.
47. 49Epaminondas kept his plain habits at banquets and cared for the blade, not the ornament, of his sword.
48. 50Extravagance must be banished; the emperor must restore the old kingly simplicity, for the empire stands on a razor's edge.
49. 51Returning to the portrait of the king, Synesius recalls that the emperor must live among his soldiers to win their goodwill.
50. 52The soldiers must be the empire's own citizens; arming foreigners is like setting wolves among the sheepdogs.
51. 53Armed foreigners in the empire are like Tantalus's stone hanging by a thread; they must be expelled like a foreign body.
52. 54Romans themselves, from farmers to philosophers to idle theatre-goers, should be enlisted instead of the Scythians.
53. 55If the army is foreign while the citizens are unarmed, the soldiers will become masters; Rome must fight its own wars and exclude barbarians from office.
54. 56Gothic chieftains in sheepskins sit in the senate beside the consul, while every Roman household has Scythian slaves.
55. 57The same blond barbarians who are Rome's slaves in private are its rulers in public, as once the gladiators Crixus and Spartacus rose against Rome.
56. 58Spartacus's motley slaves nearly destroyed Rome; far more dangerous are whole armies kin to Rome's slaves, led by their own generals.
57. 59The Gothic soldiers and their slaves are a fortress within the empire; the army must be purged of them like darnel from wheat.
58. 60The Romans rule the world; the Scythians are a slave race, always driven from their land by one people after another.
59. 61The Goths came to Rome as suppliants, rebelled, were defeated by Theodosius, and were then pardoned and settled as allies on Roman land.
60. 62The pardoned Goths despise Rome, and their example draws other barbarians; Rome must recover its glory and drive them out.
61. 63If the emperor turns his anger on the Goths, they will either farm as subjects or flee back across the Danube.
62. 64A king strong in war secures peace, which is war's goal; he should visit the civilian population and govern distant parts through embassies.
63. 65Through embassies the king relieves distress throughout the empire; he must be accessible and gentle, and his soldiers must spare the civilians.
64. 66Soldiers who plunder those they protect are like dogs that ravage the flock; a good king needs no heavy taxes.
65. 67A good king avoids extravagance and needless wars, and taxes gently; love of money is shameful in anyone and worst in a king.
66. 68Lovers of money invert the order of soul, body and possessions; the king should banish greed and set up contests in virtue.
67. 69A virtuous, pious emperor who prays publicly to the common King of all brings back the golden age and becomes a lover of mankind.
68. 70The statue is completed: the king, like the sun, gives good things tirelessly and forms his ministers in the same likeness.
69. 71Rule over a vast empire must be delegated to governors and judges, since no one man can know every place and case.
70. 72As God governs through nature, the king should govern through a few just officials, chosen for merit rather than wealth.
71. 73A rich man who buys his office will sell justice, embracing the gold to which he owes his rank.
72. 74The emperor should seek out virtuous poor men for office; this will win him lasting fame and change public esteem.
73. 75By honouring poverty and virtue the king can change his subjects' values; Synesius now prays for his own beloved, philosophy.
74. 76Synesius prays that the emperor love philosophy, not for her sake, since she dwells with God, but for the sake of human affairs.
75. 77Synesius closes: if the emperor joins philosophy to kingship, the statue drawn in words will come alive, and Cyrene's requests will be heard.