Seneca's theory of the prince continued to captivate the early modern imagination in western Europe. A few years after the Institutio of Erasmus, Guillaume Budé's De l'institution du prince drew heavily on a Senecan ideology of clemency to reinforce a bracing defence of monarchical absolutism. In that treatise, the Persian king Artaxerxes is held to have been so full of ‘great clemency, infinite goodness, and wonderful humaneness’ that, although he ‘wanted to preserve the authority of the legal system’ and had ‘no wish to revoke the ordinances of the kings who had preceded him’, he ‘also wanted to exercise the virtue of clemency’ in ‘order to temper the ordinance's rigour and harshness with equity and gentle royal humaneness’. Julius Caesar was similarly ‘so clement and humane’ that after the suicide of Cato (‘so envious of my clemency and kindness’, says Caesar, reproachfully), the dictator chose to spare the diehard republican's son because he was ‘more mindful of his own moral standards than of his anger or of the enormous power that he had acquired’. Caesar ‘thereby displayed the unsurpassed, praiseworthy force of his humaneness, which stemmed from his great magnanimity’. In the 1530s, the Senecan argument about the mercy of the mighty received further attention among French humanists at the hands of the young lawyer Jean Calvin, whose first complete published work was a commentary on De clementia.