The Fate of Traitors
It is not easy then to define to whom one may properly
The true traitor is the man who acts with personal objects or from party spirit. |
apply this name. The nearest approach to truth
would be to assign it to those who in times of
public danger, either for the sake of personal
security or advantage, or to retaliate upon political opponents, put their cities into the hands
of the enemy: or indeed to those who, by admitting a foreign
garrison, and employing external assistance to carry out private
aims and views, bring their country under the direction of a
superior power.
All such men as these one might include in
the category of traitors with perfect reasonableness. Such men,
indeed, gain neither profit nor honour, but the reverse, as
every one acknowledges.
And this brings me
back to my original observation, that it is difficult
to understand with what object, and supported
by what reasoning, men rush upon such a disastrous position.
For no one ever yet betrayed his city or camp or fort without
being detected; but even if a man here and there managed
to conceal it at the moment of his crime, yet all have been
detected in the course of time. Nor when known has any
such ever had a happy life; but, as a rule, they meet with the
punishment they deserve from the very persons in whose
favour they act.
For, indeed, though generals and princes
constantly employ traitors for their own purposes; yet when
they have got all they can out of them, they
treat them thenceforth as traitors, as Demosthenes says; very naturally considering that
those, who have put their country and original friends into the
hands of their enemies, are never likely to be really loyal or
to keep faith with themselves. Nay, even though they escape
violence at the hands of these, yet they do not easily avoid
the vengeance of those whom they betrayed. Or if, finally,
they manage to evade the designs of both the one and the
other, yet all over the world fame dogs their footsteps with
vengeance to their lives' end, suggesting to their imaginations
night and day numberless terrors, false and true; helping and
hounding on all who design any evil against them; and, finally,
refusing to allow them even in sleep to forget their crimes, but
forcing them to dream of every kind of plot and disaster,
because they are aware of the universal loathing and hatred
which attend them. Yet, though all this is true, nobody who
wanted one was ever at a loss for a traitor, except in the rarest
cases. From which one might say with some plausibility that
man, reputed the most cunning of animals, gives considerable
grounds for being regarded as the stupidest. For the other
animals, which obey their bodily appetites alone, can be
deceived by these alone; while man, though he has reason
to guide him, is led into error by the failure of that reason no
less than by his physical appetites. . . .