Egyptian Oedipus, Volume 1

...all admire; everyone—the highest, the middle, and the lowest—beholds with wonder your love toward the State original: Remp., an abbreviation for Republicam, referring here to the Holy Roman Empire.; they look up uniquely to your devotion to religion and your pursuit of peace and harmony. They observe your other truly heroic virtues not merely through obvious signs; rather, everyone—whether sacred or secular, enemy or friend—feels and speaks of your illustrious deeds, your noble counsels, and your words uttered as if from an oracle. Perhaps a distant posterity will perceive the internal and mystical meanings of these words much more fully and with even greater veneration.

Others have not lacked strength, fortitude, or power; yet they lacked the intellectual ornaments of knowledge. But in YOU, who have embraced all things, there is a wonderful integrity of character, a rare and unusual fortitude, and a mind that remains unshaken, equal, and always the same amidst both prosperity and adversity. There is Justice original: Iustitia in your judicial inquiries, constancy in times of doubt, prudence in your counsels, and an incredible clemency—the likes of which no one has ever seen, read about, or heard of in any Prince original: Principe, used here as a general title for a sovereign ruler..

In the perilous state of these times, there has been no lack of provocations for YOUR severity, nor seeds of civil unrest, nor the festering wounds of embittered minds encountered everywhere. But YOU, guided by the rule original: amussi, literally a mason's level or rule, implying exactness or a standard. of justice—that is, by the provident moderation original: moderatione of YOUR great mind—have healed what was wounded rather than cutting it away. By choosing to overlook certain things and not inquiring too anxiously into every matter, you preferred to seem to have found good men rather than to have forced them to be so. You reject that foul maxim of Tyrants original: Tyrannorum.: "let them hate, as long as..." This is the beginning of the famous Roman tragic fragment Oderint dum metuant ("Let them hate, so long as they fear"), a sentiment Kircher contrasts with the Emperor's clemency.