Basil's rise shows how gifts a friend never has to earn eventually stop registering as gifts at all, while a deliberately kept enemy stays honest out of necessity.
Michael III was two years old when his father, Emperor Theophilos, died and left him the Byzantine Empire. Two years old. He couldn't hold a sword, couldn't read a treaty, couldn't tell you which of the men bowing to him wanted him alive and which wanted him dead. So his uncles ran things in his place, and the sharpest of them, by a distance, was a man named Bardas. Ambitious. Intelligent. Exactly the kind of man who could have taken the throne for himself the day Theophilos died, and didn't. He waited. He served the boy instead.
When Michael came of age he needed an advisor, and the obvious choice was Bardas — the man had already earned it. But years before, as a boy wandering the royal stables, a wild horse had turned on Michael, and a stable hand named Basil had thrown himself at it and pulled him clear. Michael liked his nerve. He made him head of the stables on the spot, and from there, the gifts never really stopped. Money. Land. Titles. That's what you do when you love someone and you've never once had to earn anything yourself. You give.
Basil didn't know the first thing about politics, so Michael had him tutored at the finest schools in the empire, and within a few years he came out the other side a sharp, polished courtier. After that Michael leaned on him for everything. Not like an employee — like a brother. More than once he overruled Bardas, a man with real judgment, because Basil said otherwise. And there was one thing about Basil that never changed no matter how much came his way: money never satisfied him. Michael doubled his salary. Then tripled it. It was never enough, and it was never going to be, because what Basil wanted was never the money.
By the time Bardas had risen to head of the imperial army, Basil had already decided he was a problem standing between him and everything else. So he went to work on Michael quietly, telling him again and again that his own uncle was plotting against him, that Bardas wanted the throne and meant to take it by killing him for it. He got Michael to believe it completely. And when the moment came, Basil didn't send someone to do it for him. He walked into a crowd and killed Bardas with his own hands.
Then he asked for the army, and Michael gave it to him — of course he did, this was the man who had just saved him from a traitor. Now Basil had money, soldiers, and a loyalty running to him instead of to the emperor. A few years on, the empire fell into hard times, and Michael asked for the money Basil had borrowed from the treasury back. Basil said no. He didn't argue it or explain himself, he just smiled — the kind of smile you give someone you've quietly stopped respecting — and walked off. That smile was the moment Michael understood exactly what he'd built with his own hands. By then there was nothing left to do about it. Soon after, drunk, he was surrounded by Basil's men. The next morning his head was on a spear, and the man holding it had once pulled him out of the dirt as a boy and called himself a friend.
Michael's mistake wasn't trusting a bad man. Basil wasn't rotten from day one. His mistake was never once making Basil feel the weight of what he'd been handed. Every gift landed on Basil like something he already deserved, not something he owed gratitude for — so he never felt any. That's what friendship does to a ledger. It makes you stop counting, and it makes the other person stop noticing there was ever anything to count.
This is the second law of power, and Robert Greene states it without softening it: never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies. The mechanism isn't cruelty. It's envy. Give a friend enough envy and he will betray you without even experiencing it as betrayal — he'll feel entitled. An enemy you bring in deliberately, for the work, doesn't get that comfort. He has something to prove. He knows you handed him nothing, so he has to earn it in front of you, every single day, and that keeps him honest in a way love never will.
If you want the other half of this law — not the warning but the method — go to China, a few centuries later. After the Han dynasty collapsed, the throne became the most dangerous seat in the empire. Whoever sat on it got conspired against and murdered by his own generals, who then turned on each other until one of them wore the crown long enough to be murdered in turn. It happened so many times it stopped being a scandal and started being a pattern. In 959, a general named Zhao Kuangyin took the throne as Emperor Taizu of Song, and he understood, probably better than anyone who'd sat there before him, exactly how the pattern ended.
So he threw a banquet. Invited every powerful general in his army, poured the wine himself, and once everyone had drunk enough to be honest, sent the guards out of the room. The generals assumed that meant it was time to die. Instead Taizu told them plainly that he didn't suspect a man among them — but did any of them actually want his crown badly enough to take it? Drunk and cornered, they all swore loyalty. Taizu wasn't finished. He offered them a trade: give up your military rank, and I will give you whatever you want instead. Wealth. Status. Land. Comfort for the rest of their lives. By morning every general in the room had resigned his command, and Taizu kept his word and gave them everything they'd asked for. He didn't need to kill a single one of them. He turned wolves into dogs with one evening and a cellar of wine.
Later, when a defeated southern king named Liu surrendered to him, Taizu invited him to the palace and handed him a cup of wine. Poisoning a cup of wine was the standard way to end a surrendered king's life in that era, and Liu knew it. He begged for his life and refused to drink. Taizu laughed, took the cup out of Liu's hand, and drank it himself. From that day Liu became one of his most loyal men. And when his ministers uncovered a genuine plot against him by a smaller ruler, a man named Jiang Shu, Taizu didn't have him arrested. He received him with full honours, and sent him off with a sealed envelope to open on the road — containing the very documents proving his own conspiracy. Jiang Shu understood, reading them, that Taizu had known everything and chosen to forgive him anyway. He spent the rest of his life as one of the emperor's most loyal men too.
There's a Chinese proverb for this: your friends are the jaws of a wild animal, and if you're not careful, they will eat you. Taizu used one hand to pay off men who might have turned on him, and the other hand to turn actual enemies into his closest allies. That's not sentiment. That's management. And it's a large part of why the dynasty he founded ruled China for roughly three hundred years.
Here's where it stops being a story about emperors. You've done a version of this already, probably without noticing. You've got a role to fill — a project lead, a partner, someone to run point on something that matters — and you hand it to the friend, because it feels safer, because you already trust them, because interviewing a stranger feels cold and handing it to your friend feels loyal. What it actually is, most of the time, is conflict avoidance wearing the costume of loyalty. You didn't pick the best person for the job. You picked the person you didn't want to have an awkward conversation with.
And then the work underperforms, and you can't say anything, because saying something isn't a performance conversation anymore — it's a fight with someone you have dinner with. You lower the bar instead. The rest of the team notices you lowered it, and notices who it was lowered for, and some quiet portion of their respect for you leaves the room and doesn't come back. Meanwhile the one person who actually had to prove himself to you, who never got the benefit of the doubt, is doing better work and getting less credit for it, because you're not grading him on output. You're grading your friend on affection and calling it a performance review.
Here's the part the story doesn't want to say out loud, so I will. This law works. It also costs you something real, and you should know the price before you pay it. A life run on this principle is a life where loyalty is never assumed, only proven, which means you are always, in some low hum under everything, watching. You stop being able to fully relax around the people closest to you, because some part of you is still grading them. That's not a small cost. That's the cost of being effective. Taizu kept his throne for three hundred years. Nobody tells you whether he slept well.
The honest answer is that friends still matter, more than this law wants to admit on its own. You just need to know which ones are real. The friend who agrees with everything you say, who never once tells you you're wrong, who smiles at every decision you make — that isn't a friend, that's an audience. A real friend tells you where you're making the mistake before it costs you anything. Voltaire put it better than most people manage: God save me from my friends, I'll take care of my enemies myself. The people closest to you know exactly where you're soft. If you never find out which of them would actually use that against you, you won't find out until the knife's already in.
Watch the people you love the most, not because they're secretly evil, but because love is exactly what makes you stop counting. And somebody chewed up by the jaws of a wild animal never saw it as a jaw. He saw it as a hand, right up until it closed.
This law comes from Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power.