On the Magistrates and Republic of Venice

be held by hatred. Therefore, there will be no need to fear that any sedition or grudge might be contracted among citizens, which is the greatest and most dangerous ruin of republics. Conversely, in the judgments of men, unless someone is punished by the authority of the laws, grave discords and enmities often arise. For it is almost impossible for us not to be ill-disposed toward the one who has brought us harm; hence, I know not whether a greater gift has been granted to the human race by nature, the parent of all, than this invention of laws, which was even rightfully consecrated by the ancients to the immortal gods. Indeed, what may seem more wonderful, Aristotle, the leader of philosophers by common consent, in that book which he wrote On the World to Alexander, King of the Macedonians, finds nothing to which he might liken the supreme God, except the ancient law in a rightly instituted city: so that the opinion of so great a philosopher is, in effect, that what the ancient law is in civil society, God is in this universe of things. And in the books in which he treats of the republic, he says that law is the mind