Injuries are either to a man’s life, to his property, or to his honour.  As regards the first, they who threaten injuries to life incur more danger than they who actually inflict them; or rather, while great danger is incurred in threatening, none at all is incurred from inflicting such injuries.  For the dead are past thinking of revenge; and those who survive, for the most part leave such thoughts to the dead.  But he whose life is threatened, finding himself forced by necessity either to do or suffer, becomes a man most dangerous to the prince, as shall be fully explained hereafter.

After menaces to life, injuries to property and honour stir men more than any others, and of these a Prince has most to beware.  For he can never strip a man so bare of his possessions as not to leave him some weapon wherewith to redress his wrongs, nor ever so far dishonour him as to quell the stubborn spirit which prompts revenge.  Of all dishonours those done to the women of a household are the worst; after which come such personal indignities as nerved the arm of Pausanias against Philip of Macedon, and of many another against other princes; and, in our own days, it was no other reason that moved Giulio Belanti to conspire against Pandolfo, lord of Siena, than that Pandolfo, who had given him his daughter to wife, afterwards took her from him, as presently shall be told.  Chief among the causes which led the Pazzi to conspire against the Medici, was the law passed by the latter depriving them of the inheritance of Giovanni Bonromei.

Another most powerful motive to conspire against a prince is the desire men feel to free their country from a usurper.  This it was which impelled Brutus and Cassius to conspire against Caesar, and countless others against such tyrants as Phalaris, Dionysius, and the like.  Against this humour no tyrant can guard, except by laying down his tyranny; which as none will do, few escape an unhappy end.  Whence the verses of Juvenal:—­

 “Few tyrants die a peaceful death, and few
 The kings who visit Proserpine’s dread lord,
 Unscathed by wounds and blood."[2]

Great, as I have said already, are the dangers which men run in conspiring; for at all times they are in peril, whether in contriving, in executing, or after execution.  And since in conspiracies either many are engaged, or one only (for although it cannot properly be said of one man that he conspires, there may exist in him the fixed resolve to put the prince to death), it is only the solitary plotter who escapes the first of these three stages of danger.  For he runs no risk before executing his design, since as he imparts it to none, there is none to bring it to the ear of the prince.  A deliberate resolve like this may be conceived by a person in any rank of life, high or low, base or noble, and whether or no he be the familiar of his prince.  For every one must, at some time or other, have leave to speak to the prince, and whoever has this leave has opportunity