e most equal commonwealth. Her body consists of one
order, and her Senate is like a rolling stone, as was said, which never
did, nor, while it continues upon that rotation, never shall gather the
moss of a divided or ambitious interest, much less such a one as that
which grasped the people of Rome in the talons of their own eagles. And
if Machiavel, averse from doing this commonwealth right, had considered
her orders, as his reader shall easily perceive he never did, he must
have been so far from attributing the prudence of them to chance, that
he would have touched up his admirable work to that perfection which,
as to the civil part, has no pattern in the universal world but this of
Venice.

"Rome, secure by her potent and victorious arms from all external causes
of commotion, was either beholden for her peace at home to her enemies
abroad, or could never rest her head. My lords, you that are parents
of a commonwealth, and so freer agents than such as are merely natural,
have a care. For, as no man shall show me a commonwealth born straight
that ever became crooked, so no man shall show me a commonwealth born
crooked that ever became straight. Rome was crooked in her birth, or
rather prodigious. Her twins, the patrician and plebeian orders, came,
as was shown by the foregoing story, into the world, one body but two
heads, or rather two bellies; for, notwithstanding the fable out of
AEsop, whereby Menenius Agrippa, the orator that was sent from the
Senate to the people at Mount Aventin, showed the fathers to be the
belly, and the people to be the arms and the legs (which except that,
how slothful soever it might seem, they were nourished, not these only,
but the whole body must languish and be dissolved), it is plain that the
fathers were a distinct belly, such a one as took the meat indeed out of
the people's mouths, but abhorring the agrarian, returned it not in
the due and necessary nutrition of a commonwealth. Nevertheless, as the
people that live about the cataracts of Nilus are said not to hear the
noise, so neither the Roman writers, nor Machiavel the most conversant
with them, seem among so many of the tribunitian storms to hear their
natural voice; for though they could not miss of it so far as to
attribute them to the strife of the people for participation in
magistracy, or, in which Machiavel more particularly joins, to that
about the agrarian, this was to take the business short, and the remedy
for the disea