Lehal Library

against two kinds of danger: one internal, coming from his own people; the other external, coming from foreign powers. To defend yourself against foreign powers you need a good army and good allies. And if you have a good army you’ll always have good allies, and when you’re secure against foreign powers you’ll always be secure internally too, assum- ing there wasn’t already a conspiracy under way. Then even when a foreign power does move against you, if you’ve lived and organized yourself as I’ve suggested, you only have to keep your nerve and you’ll survive any and every attack, like the Spartan ruler Nabis in the example I gave earlier. To get back to the internal situation: when there is no threat from outside, a ruler must take care that his subjects don’t start conspiring against him. He can guard against this by making sure he isn’t hated or despised and that people are happy with him, all of which is very important, as I’ve explained at length. In fact, one of the most powerful prevent- ive measures against conspiracies is simply not being hated by a majority of the people. People planning a conspiracy must believe that killing the ruler will be popular; when they realize that, on the contrary, it would be unpopular they lose heart, because conspiracies are always beset with endless difficulties. Experience shows that for every successful con- spiracy there are any number of failures. A conspirator can’t act alone and can look for accomplices only among people he believes are unhappy with the situation. But as soon as he reveals his intentions to someone else he’s giving that person the chance to improve his position, since obviously there are all kinds of advantages to be had from betraying a conspiracy. When you reckon that the benefits of betrayal are assured, while joining a conspiracy is a risky and extremely dangerous business, the man will have to be a rare friend indeed, or a very bitter enemy of the government, if he’s going to keep faith. To summarize: on the conspirator’s side all you have is