Lehal Library

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