Whether it be expedient for a city to have few or many citizens
The ancient founders of cities, considering that laws and civil discipline could not be easily conserved and kept where a mighty multitude of people swarmed (for multitudes do breed and bring confusion) they limited the number of citizens beyond which they supposed the form and order of government they sought to hold within their cities could not else be maintained. Such were Lycurgus, Solon and Aristotle. But the Romans, supposing power (without which a city cannot be long maintained) consisteth for the most part in the multitude of people, endeavoured all the ways and means they might to make their country great and to replenish the same with store of people, as we have before and more at full declared in our books Della Ragion di Stato.
If the world would be governed by reason, and all men would content themselves with that which justly doth belong unto them, haply the judgment of the ancient law-makers were worthy to be embraced. But experience shows, through the corruption of human nature, that force prevails above reason, and arms above laws, and teacheth us besides the opinion of the Romans must be preferred before the Grecians; inasmuch as we see the Athenians and the Lacedemonians (not to speak of other commonweals of the Grecians) came to present ruin upon a very small discomfiture and loss of a thousand and seven hundred citizens or little more where, on the other side, the Romans triumphed in the end though many times they lost an infinite number of their people in their attempts and enterprises. For it is clear more Romans perished in the wars they had against Pyrrhus, the Carthaginians, Numantians, Viriathus, Sertorius and others, than fell without comparison of all their enemies. And yet for all that they rested always conquerors by means of their unexhausted multitude, with the which, supplying their loss from time to time, they overcame their enemies as much, though they were strong and fierce, as with their fortitude and strength. In these former books I have sufficiently declared the ways and means whereby a city may increase to that magnificency and greatness that is to be desired, so that I have no further to speak thereunto, but only to propound one thing more that I have thought upon, not for the necessity so much of the matter as that because I think it will be an ornament unto the work, and give a very good light unto it.
And therefore let us now consider.
