Seeking Real Truths: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli

Seeking Real Truths

Seeking Real Truths Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli

Edited by

Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

Cover illustration: by Rafael Francisco Salas. Photography by Diane Mockridge. Salas and Mockridge are professors at Ripon College. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all right holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978 90 04 15877 1 Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Mario and Riccardo And all who have come before

CONTENTS

Editors’ Preface ........................................................................... Acknowledgements ..................................................................... Contributors ................................................................................ Editors’ Introduction The Enduring Power of Niccolò Machiavelli: An Overview of his Life and Times ................................................................. Patricia Vilches

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GOVERNMENT An Introduction to The Prince Edited and translated by Gerald Seaman .................................. Marie Gaille-Nikodimov

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Machiavelli’s Burden: The Prince as Literary Text ...................... Charles D. Tarlton

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The Discourses on Livy: Preserving a Free Way of Life ................ Julia Conaway Bondanella

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Machiavelli: Rhetoric and Prudence .......................................... Eugene Garver

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SOCIETY Machiavelli and Women ............................................................. Jo Ann Cavallo

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Masculinity and Machiavelli ...................................................... Gerry Milligan

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Machiavelli on Stage: Mandragola and Clizia .............................. Salvatore Di Maria

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Debauchery, Mayhem, and Sex in Machiavelli’s Mandragola .................................................................................... Salvino Bizzarro

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The Mask in the Mirror: Nicomaco as an Imprudent Ruler-Prince in the Clizia ........................................................... Patricia Vilches

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To Hell with Men and Meaning! Vesting Authority in Belfagor ......................................................................................... Sante Matteo

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RECEPTION Historical Reception of Machiavelli .......................................... Mary Walsh

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Machiavelli the Revolutionary: A Modern Reinterpretation .... Susan A. Ashley

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Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: Idealized Machiavellian Prince .......... Joseph Khoury

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Shakespeare and Machiavelli: The Prince and the History Plays ............................................................................................ John Roe

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Machiavelli, Thucydides, and the Anglo-American Tradition ..................................................................................... William E. Klein

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Machiavelli in the Modern World ............................................. RoseAnna Mueller

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Index ...........................................................................................

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EDITORS’ PREFACE

The sixteen chapters of this volume present a perspective on Machiavelli that is intended to be benecial simultaneously to an audience of generalists seeking background and reference material and to specialists who are interested in examining and/or discovering critical thinking on Machiavelli from a variety of disciplinary angles and points of view. Our goal, as editors, has been to be broad, not narrow, in our presentation because the work of Machiavelli demands such an approach. Indeed, no single discipline in the academy can claim Machiavelli exclusively: political science and government, history, literature, language, theatre, philosophy—Machiavelli is, for each of these elds, an important and inuential thinker, and the reader will nd all of them represented in this collection. In addition to disciplinary breadth, we have also sought to widen the scholarly lens on Machiavelli to include the work of scholars from countries beyond the United States and Italy, such as France, England, Canada, and Australia. Contributors to our volume are connected to leading research universities and institutions, such as Columbia, Indiana, the University at Albany, New York University, Miami University of Ohio, and the University of Tennessee in the United States; the Centre National de Recherche Scientique (CNRS) in France, the University of York, England, the University of Canberra, Australia, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada; and American colleges and liberal arts colleges such as St. John’s (Minnesota), Colorado College, Columbia College (Chicago), the College of Staten Island, CUNY, Lawrence University, and Ripon College. The diversity of the various institutions represented here is an indication of the great wealth of intellectual resources that can be marshaled in support of creative inquiry and high-quality scholarship. We are indeed fortunate to have so many dedicated and insightful colleagues. After an Introduction that provides an overview of Machiavelli’s life and times, this volume is divided into three sections: Government, Society, and Reception. No single section is exhaustive in its coverage, and the volume intentionally does not construe itself as an encyclopedia or compendium of scholarship on every aspect of Machiavelli’s career. Some readers may be disappointed to nd that the section on Government

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does not include chapters that are explicitly dedicated to The Art of War or to Machiavelli’s letters. Neither of these important works is ignored, of course. But, our choice to focus on The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, we believe, is a defensible one. These are, in fact, the key Machiavellian treatises on government, and the tensions and connections between the two coalesce into an indisputable crux for understanding the purpose and inuence of our author. The entries by Marie GailleNikodimov, Charles Tarlton, Julia Bondanella, and Eugene Garver in this section provide a rich perspective on this stage of Machiavelli’s writing and career. A mix of overview and incisive analysis, these chapters carefully respect our overall goal of speaking both to the student and to the specialist. The section on Society can be thought of in two pieces, one focused on gender, the other on theatre. The initial two entries, by Jo Ann Cavallo and Gerry Milligan, provide a broad and deep analysis of gender in Machiavelli. Revealing and understanding the role and place of masculinity and women in Machiavelli’s writings is crucial to our ability to contextualize and make sense of Machiavelli’s thought and discourse both in his times and in ours. The subsequent entries, by Salvatore Di Maria, Salvino Bizzarro, Patricia Vilches, and Sante Matteo, analyze Machiavelli’s creative work for the stage: the Mandragola, Clizia, and Belfagor. The curious reader might ask why we have chosen to group these particular chapters under the heading Society. Generally speaking, we have done so because each scholar looks at the theatre as a form that stages a Machiavellian reection on the attitudes, behaviors, and mores that prevailed among his contemporaries. That Machiavelli’s preferred theatrical mode was comedy should not go unnoticed. And it may suggest that, to establish a sufcient amount of critical distance between the author and his piercing observations on Florentine life, Machiavelli felt it necessary to make recourse to ction—however thin the actual veil on reality—and to levity—however serious the subject and however biting the critique. The chapters in the nal section of this volume are grouped under the heading of Reception and offer perspectives on the inuence, the uses and ( perhaps) the abuses of Machiavelli that reach beyond his native Italy and extend into the Anglo-American world. In some ways, this section is by necessity the most open-ended of the volume and provides a set of boundaries for fertile elds of future work. Seeing, in the entries by Joseph Khoury and John Roe, the impact of Machiavelli in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare provocatively suggests a direc-

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tion for further inquiry on the place of Machiavelli in other literatures, cultures, and times. Susan Ashley’s piece on Machiavelli and Gramsci shows that Machiavelli is truly something more than a political abstraction in the modern world. Mary Walsh, William Klein, and RoseAnna Mueller offer wide-ranging overviews of the inuence of Machiavelli on history and government, his place in contemporary texts and discourse, and his connections to political traditions in England and the United States. Whether student or scholar, the reader will nd something in this section that speaks forcefully to the enduring presence of Machiavelli and his thought in the construction and elaboration of political, historical, and social thinking in our contemporary life. Machiavelli famously wrote that, with his offer of The Prince to Lorenzo, his highness should “consider it and read it with attention.” It is in a similar spirit that we offer this not-so-little “libello” on Machiavelli in the hope that it too may offer some small benet to individuals as they pursue their studies and their lives and as they invariably confront Fortuna e Virtù. Heeding Machiavelli’s advice, we have attempted to follow the lion and the fox, with strong and intelligent arguments, and thus to overcome the wolves and avoid the traps. As you judge the measure of our success, please take this book “con quello animo che [noi] lo mand[iamo].” Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman Appleton, Wisconsin, U.S.A. December 2006

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In preparing this volume, we have received support—professional, material, emotional, and otherwise—from many people and places. Our gratitude is great and wide-ranging, greater than any few small words on a page can encompass. That said, we would like to thank explicitly our family and friends and our colleagues, especially those whose essays follow in this book, for their patience and understanding, and for their kind attention to the sorts of deadlines and constraints that can make publishing a collection with multiple authors, shall we say, complicated. Our editors at Brill have been extraordinarily gracious in helping us to manage such a circumstance and in guiding this book to its nal form. This form is also largely due to the tireless effort of Joanne Johnson, whose assistance with proof-reading and formatting the nal manuscript was invaluable and indispensable. We are grateful to Italica and its editor, Andrea Ciccarelli, for permission to reprint Sante Matteo’s “To Hell with Men and Meaning! Vesting Authority in Machiavelli’s Belfagor.” Likewise, we are grateful to Marie Gaille-Nikodimov and the Librairie Générale Française for permission to translate and adapt her French Introduction to The Prince. Finally, we would like to thank Lawrence University and Ripon College for providing us with grant support and intellectual sustenance. It is our hope that this book reects the immeasurably positive qualities that permeate the scholarly atmosphere and environment of these two ne American liberal arts colleges.

CONTRIBUTORS

Susan A. Ashley is Professor of History and Dean of the College/Dean of the Faculty at Colorado College. She published Making Liberalism Work: The Italian Experience, 1860–1914 in 2003 (Greenwood Press) and is currently completing a study of French and Italian visions of marginality in late nineteenth and early twentieth century France and Italy. Other publications include an examination of the serial murderer, Joseph Vacher. (Vincent, K. Steven and Alison Klairmont-Lingo, eds. The Human Tradition in Modern France, “Vacher the Ripper of the Southwest,” 83–98, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000.) Salvatore Bizzarro is Professor of Romance Languages at the Colorado College, having also served as Director of the Italian in Italy Program from 1990 to the present, and having participated twice in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Program in Florence, Italy, devoted mostly to Renaissance Art and Literature. He has written an important volume on the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Pablo Neruda/All poets the Poet, published by Scarecrow Press in 1979; has contributed as author and Associate Editor to an equally important publication on Latin America, Latin America During Nixon’s Second Term, published by the American College in Paris (1976); and his third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Chile (rst published by Scarecrow Press in 1972; with a second edition in 1986 and the third in 2005) is a truly major reference work, with excellent-cross references that balance entries on history, geography, politics, economics, literature, art, and biography, giving us a view of ancient and modern Chile. He has contributed several sections to Encyclopedias and numerous articles for scholarly journals. Julia Conaway Bondanella is Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University. She is the author of Petrarch’s Visions and Their Renaissance Analogues and co-editor of the Cassell Dictionary of Italian Literature. She is translator and co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Rousseau’s Political Writings. For Oxford University Press, she has translated, edited, annotated, and introduced Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Famous Artists, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life with Peter Bondanella. For Barnes and Noble’s Classics Series, she has co-edited, annotated, and introduced the Longfellow translation

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of Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso. She is author of a variety of articles on Medieval and Renaissance topics. She has served as Executive Secretary of the American Association for Italian Studies; President of the National Collegiate Honors Council; Assistant Chairman for Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and, for over two decades, as Associate Dean of Indiana University’s Hutton Honors College. Jo Ann Cavallo is Associate Professor of Italian at Columbia University. She is the author of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire (Associated University Presses, 1993), The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (University of Toronto Press, 2004), and co-editor of Fortune and Romance: Boiardo in America (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). She has also published articles on early Christian and gnostic literature (the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Truth), on Italian authors from the medieval to the modern period (Dante, Petrarch, Boiardo, Ariosto, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Tasso, Giordano Bruno, and Elsa Morante), and on folk traditions that dramatize epic narratives (Sicilian puppet theater and the epic Maggio of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines). Salvatore Di Maria received his early education in the Italian public schools, the BA in French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the PhD in Italian from the University of Wisconsin in 1978, and has been teaching at the University of Tennessee since 1985. In 1984, he co-authored with Robert Rodini, a book on Ariosto (Univ. of Missouri Press), and has since written articles on various authors, ranging from Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Bandello, Cecchi, and many others. Recently, he published The Italian Tragedy (Bucknell, 2002) and is presently working on the originality of imitation in the Renaissance Theater. Marie Gaille-Nikodimov is a researcher for the National Center for Scientic Research (CNRS) and works in the Research Center on Meaning, Ethics and Society (CERSES, Paris, France). She has translated Il Principe in French (Le Prince, Le Livre de Poche, 2000), published a study on the theory of civil conict in Machiavelli’s work (Conit civil et liberté. La pensée machiavélienne entre histoire et medicine, Champion, 2004), and edited with Th. Ménissier Lectures de Machiavel (Ellipses, 2005).

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Eugene Garver is Regents Professor of Philosophy at Saint John’s University. He is author of Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), and, more recently, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Joseph Khoury is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at St. Francis Xavier University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His main interests are Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Political Philosophy, Literary Theory, Theories of Inuence, and Comparative Literature. Joseph is now preparing a critical edition of Barnabe Riche’s romance, The Adventures of Brusanius, Prince of Hungaria, a source text for Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Joseph’s most recent article outlines William Thomas’s plagiarism of Machiavelli (in Carmine Di Biase, ed., Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). William E. Klein teaches the history of political discourse in New York University’s General Studies Program and in the Honors Program. He writes on a range of topics, from Renaissance political thought to constitutional history to modern crime. Sante Matteo, Professor of Italian and Coordinator of Italian Studies at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, was born in Italy, in Petrella Tifernina (CB), graduated with a BA in French from Kenyon College, and received a PhD in Italian from the Johns Hopkins University. His publications include books on Foscolo and Manzoni and articles spanning all periods of Italian literature and culture, including cinema. In 1998 he convened an international symposium on Africa and Italy that spawned two edited collections of essays: one published in Italy in Italian, Africa Italia: Due continenti si avvicinano (Fara, 1999), and a larger volume in English, ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures (Forum italicum, 2001). More recently, in the summer of 2006, one of his research interests, Marco Polo’s legacy in Italian culture, took him on a two-month trek along the Silk Road through Central Asia, from China to Turkey.

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Gerry Milligan is Assistant Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, where he teaches courses on women writers and Renaissance Italian literature. He has written several articles on masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, and his current research focuses on gender and warfare. RoseAnna Mueller received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York Graduate School. She teaches Italian and humanities at Columbia College Chicago. She has taught Machiavelli in “Crisis and Creativity: the Italian Renaissance” at the Santa Reparata School of International Art in Florence. She is a contributor to Voices in Italian Americana, Italica, and the Renaissance Quarterly. John Roe is Reader in English & Related Literature at the University of York, UK. He is the 2006–07 Visiting Gillespie Professor of English at The College of Wooster, Ohio. He has recently published an updated edition of Shakespeare: The Poems for Cambridge University Press (2006), and he is the author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002). Gerald Seaman is Professor of Romance and Classical Languages and VP/Dean of Faculty at Ripon College. He received his MA and PhD from Stanford University and his BA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Mr. Seaman has studied in France at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the Institut d’Études Politiques (Aix-en-Provence) and has published and presented widely on medieval and early modern French and Italian literature. Charles D. Tarlton is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science, The University at Albany, Albany, New York. He has, over the years, written about Locke, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. He is currently researching the connection between politics and autobiography in Rousseau. He lives with his wife, Ann, in Normandy. Patricia Vilches received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. Her concentration was Italian Renaissance treatises and Spanish Golden Age prose. She has published and presented at conferences on the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, and her research now concentrates on Machiavelli and the New World. She is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Italian at Lawrence University.

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Mary Walsh is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Politics at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the convenor of the Bachelor of Philosophy Honours Program and teaches Politics and Democracy, Introduction to Government, and Identity Politics. She has previously taught at the University of Queensland, Grifth University, and the Queensland University of Technology. Dr. Walsh has published several journal articles and book chapters in the areas of political theory, democratic theory, feminist theory, and Australian politics. Current publications appear in Contemporary Political Theory and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. Dr. Walsh is currently completing work on Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir and is the author of the forthcoming book Introducing Political Theory.

THE ENDURING POWER OF NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI: AN OVERVIEW OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES Patricia Vilches

I. Machiavelli’s Redemption Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his political masterpieces within closed chambers and while in exile. He made a commitment to examine “the material things that are available to the human senses.”1 He determined not to follow the rationalizations of classical Western philosophers who afrmed that truth derived from “reason and/or revelation.”2 Machiavelli, then, refused to live in a Neoplatonic cave because he desired to gure the concrete truth of the matter; after him, the papal and secular courts had to digest and reckon with his separation of the exemplary from the necessary. As Sebastian de Grazia states so brilliantly, Machiavelli uncovered new territories; he was an explorer of the human psyche and followed “a path not yet tread by anyone, seeking new ordering principles, ‘to nd new modes and orders.’ ”3 Today, his thoughts live out in the public sphere and clearly illuminate social and political conduct in the Western World. Machiavelli’s ideas about human interactions are ever present in our society.4 Political struggles that take place either in the international community or in the domestic realm unambiguously demonstrate the cunning acts of the generality of men in which only “a few will judge with their hands.”5 Individuals, then, enact, on a macro and micro social stage, Machiavelli’s observations about human nature. Hence, his ideas have immediacy and appear contemporaneous.

1 Robert A. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed: Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory (Bethelem: Lehigh University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 43. 2 Ibid. 3 Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21. 4 See, for instance, Anthony Jay, Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life (New York: Holts, Rinehart, & Winston, 1968, 1967). 5 De Grazia points to the fact that Machiavelli refers to men’s bad ways in general and not in particular. The critic observes: “The context of the passage about ‘ungrateful, shifty’ men makes a distinction in time of circumstance,” 105–106.

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The reections we nd in Machiavelli are those of a humanist steeped in classical Western tradition. His work teaches us that our free will allows us to control at least half of our human affairs; the other half belongs to Lady Fortuna.6 If we follow his advice, we must “remain exible and intellectually alert to rapid political and social change.”7 We must act like the fox and the lion; with the cunning of the fox and the strength of the lion, we must seek to beat adversity. We must use virtù (strength, prowess, etc.), a concept deeply rooted in classical tradition, to be prepared to react accordingly when Lady Fortuna is ready to strike. We must not be afraid, for she favors vigor in an individual; we must act physically young at heart; we should never let our guard down, for the world is in continuous strife and, to win over fate, one has to be ready to act. Machiavelli has been called a philosopher, the founder of political science in the Western world, a republican, reactionary, proto-Marxist, devil worshipper, etc., to name just a few of the different ways in which individuals have reacted to or (mis)interpreted him. For Maurizio Viroli, however, Machiavelli was not a political scientist but a rescuer of the Romans’ civil wisdom, a magnicent rhetorician who could ascertain “political reality by uncovering meanings that were not immediately visible but which could be identied.”8 His texts, then, must be uncovered by the very few individuals who can see through what really transpires in the course of human behavior and events. In order to accomplish that task, humans must use shrewd tactics and, in following the path of the great, be innovators.9 In the Anglo-Saxon world, there is a tendency to differentiate and nd the “real” Machiavelli in The Discourses, which antecedes “modern Western democracies.”10 One thing is for certain: his writings have affected political, philosophical, and literary ideas positively or negatively. No

6 See Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Skinner states that “Machiavelli’s most graphic image for this sense of man as the master of his fate is again classical in inspiration. He stresses that “Fortune is a woman” and is in consequence readily allured by many qualities. So he sees a genuine possibility of making oneself the ally of Fortune, of learning to act in harmony with her powers, neutralizing her varying nature and thus remaining successful in all one’s affairs,” 28. 7 Peter Bondanella and Julia Conaway Bondanella. Introduction and translation. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xv. 8 Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2. 9 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), 73. 10 Francesco Bausi, Machiavelli (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2005), 15.

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one who has read his texts has remained unmoved. As expected, those of us contributing to a companion to Machiavelli studies are profoundly and positively moved by Machiavelli’s original and visionary thoughts on human relationships. How did he conceive his political ideas? He did so by long study of ancient Rome’s political leaders’ actions and through his own experience as a secretary for the Second Chancery in the Florentine republic. Machiavelli’s ideas cannot be easily catalogued or quickly dened. Harvey C. Manseld and Nathan Tarcov state, “[ he] did not write in such a mode as to prevent dispute about what he said.”11 For instance, Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his most well-known text in which he instructs heads of state on how to keep absolute power in newly acquired territories, and he composed The Discourses on Livy, a text that adheres to republicanism and to the right of the people to be free from political tyranny. Both texts were published after his death in 1532 and 1531 respectively. How could one person engage in such diverse political thinking? What should we make of the fact that The Prince and The Discourses were written within a short interval of each other? How do we reconcile such opposing views on statecraft? Some scholars contend that the segretario interrupted The Prince to initiate The Discourses, adding the last chapter of The Prince at a later date. According to John Najemy, we can only presume to identify the precise occasione that was at hand when the secretario wrote the “Exhortation to Seize Italy and Free Her from the Barbarians.”12 Furthermore, Manseld and Tarcov contend that the contrast in the two political treatises is not that deep because underneath it all, The Prince is partly republican, and The Discourses are partly princely and tyrannical.13 From a rhetorical viewpoint, because Machiavelli sought a “partisan truth,” he permitted himself to write “The Prince to give advice to a prince on how to secure his state, and The Discourses on Livy to instruct his compatriots on how to order and govern a free republic.”14 At the core, then, is Machiavelli’s originality

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Harvey C. Manseld and Nathan Tarcov, Niccolò Machiavelli Discourses on Livy (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), xvii. All quotations from the Discourses are from this text. 12 Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 179. 13 Ibid., xxii. Manseld and Tarcov argue that The Prince does not only address heads of state, “it does not endorse principalities or tyrannies over republics in the way that The Discourses recommends republics over principalities or tyrannies,” xxii. 14 Viroli, Machiavelli, 3. Viroli is adamant to set the record straight about Machiavelli’s

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in excising moral ethics and religious favor from discussions of political and social action. In their place, the secretary deals almost exclusively with the concrete. Maurizio Viroli states that Machiavelli detractors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called him “the corrupter of the true (Aristotelian) ideas of politics.”15 What Machiavelli had to offer was not pretty. For this reason, perhaps, he might have expected a negative reaction to his advice to rulers because it was in some ways unsavory. As an outcast, the former segretario did not have much to lose and so endeavored to impart truth and wisdom about the need for concealment in a topsyturvy world. In this respect, Robert A. Kocis afrms, “the concrete world is always a bit ‘messier’ than the world of ideas.”16 Through his experience and vast reading of classical history, the segretario analyzed with gusto the messy ways of human interactions in which individuals take responsibility and act with autonomy.17 Machiavelli himself tells us with pride that he is not interested in following the trendy and erudite ways of his time. On the contrary, he tells his readers in chapter 15 of The Prince that his approach to his text does not follow traditional guidelines; hence, he adds, “I fear that, when I too write about it, I shall be thought conceited, since in discussing this material I depart very far from the methods of the others.”18 What matters for him are ideas that will trigger action and, thus, declares that “I have decided that I must concern myself with the truth of the matter as facts show it rather than with any fanciful notion” (15, 57). With this statement, he brushes aside traditionally fawning manifestoes and replaces them with practical and useful political advice for rulers. In this sense, he is a revolutionary of the mind. It should not surprise us, then, that in his political texts, the segretario advises rulers to dissociate themselves from ethical and religious comportment for reasons of state. Gone are the Neo-Platonic ideals of a Speculum of princes, since

being a consummate rhetorician who could use ornate words to persuade. Hence, he states, we should not be puzzled that the segretario wrote for two different audiences. “The great puzzle that has tormented so many interpreters is, in fact, no puzzle at all, if we read [The Prince and The Discourses] for what they are—namely, two exemplary texts of political rhetoric,” 3. 15 From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 127. 16 Kocis, 44. 17 Ibid., 45. 18 All quotations from The Prince are from The Chief Works and Others. Ed. and trans. Allan Gilbert. Fourth Ed., 3 vols. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), 57.

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one must confront the verità effettuale or, as Gilbert translates it, “the truth of the matter” of the political arena. In fact, Machiavelli praises contemporary rulers who, in the name of ethics and religion, have conquered new territories precisely by eschewing moral and religious conduct. Among them, Ferdinand of Aragon stands out, “[who] never preaches anything except peace and truth, and to both of them he is utterly opposed. Either one, if he had practiced it, would many times have taken from him either his reputation or his power” (18, 67). The uniqueness of Machiavelli is that he devises his political ideas by rationalizing concealment within displays of exemplary behavior by rulers. Using this device, he creates the modern prince.

II. Machiavelli’s Time and Place Machiavelli’s life spanned strenuous political times for the Italian states. When he was born, on May 3, 1469, Italy could only look with longing on its glorious past. Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli descended from a family of noble background that held political clout in Florence. His father Bernardo, however, had chosen to pursue the study of the classics and had neglected to become more active in politics.19 Machiavelli’s mother was Bartolommea di Stefano Nelli. Though noble, Machiavelli’s family was by no means wealthy; hence, “his prospects were modest at best”20 Being an avid humanist himself, Bernardo, notwithstanding his lack of material means, moved in the right circles of Florence and instilled in young Niccolò a love for the classics. Bernardo gave his son the tools to become, among other professions, a political philosopher and a playwright.21

19 De Grazia reports in detail the familial background of Machiavelli: “Niccolò’s paternal grandfather, Niccolò di Buoninsegna, died a bachelor. On his deathbed he legitimated a natural child, Bernardo, as his son and charged a brother with raising him. This Bernardo, our Niccolò’s father, administered the modest family estate (not always managing to stay in the black) and was evidently a man for good conversation,” 5. 20 The Portable Machiavelli. Ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 2005, 1979), 9. Bondanella and Musa declare: “But if Bernardo’s means were insufcient to guarantee his son instant access to economic and political power, his great interest in books, particularly the Latin classics, was perhaps a more valuable legacy. We know that he possessed a copy of Flavio Biondo’s Decades, that he borrowed a copy of Justin’s history, and that he obtained a prized copy of Livy’s history of republican Rome in return for laboriously compiling for the printer an index of Livy’s place-names,” 9. 21 Skinner, in analyzing Bernardo Machiavelli’s diary, states that “in spite of the

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The year 1494 is of particular interest to Machiavelli biographers. J. R. Hale afrms: “The period from the invasion of Italy in 1494 by Charles VIII of France, when Machiavelli was twenty-four, to the savage sack of Rome by the troops of Charles V in 1527, the year of Machiavelli’s death, wrenched the course of the peninsula’s history so sharply from its track that contemporaries looked at their own world with the same amazed interest that an astronomer might show were the moon suddenly to reveal its back.”22 In truth, the Italian Early Modern period bestowed upon Western thought humanistic jewels in science, arts, and letters which inuenced the rest of Europe and eventually the New World. The politically divided Italian nation-states, on the other hand, were at the same time subdued by the politically powerful nations of France and Spain. Machiavelli, as a studious reader of the past, was a true patriot who reected on and wrote about Rome’s political success and saw it again in the contemporary examples of France and Spain. He adamantly sought both a united Italy and a united militia that would be able to repel and subdue foreign invasion. For Machiavelli, political liberty can be obtained through astute negotiations that will have a favorable outcome for a nation state. His ideas clearly demonstrate the contradictory philosophies of the Italian Renaissance, a time of acute critical thought during which moral values were modied in order to reconcile a growing sense of individual liberty with religious restrictions. Religious treatises were still in demand, but intellectuals were more interested in rediscovering and understanding the individual of antiquity and of the natural world that surrounds us.23 In this connection, Jacob Burckhardt depicts Italy as an ebullient place above morality and religion, with a considerably hedonistic thirst

large expense involved—which he anxiously itemized—he was careful to provide his son with an excellent grounding in the studia humanitatis. We rst hear of Machiavelli’s education immediately after his seventh birthday when his father records that ‘my little son Niccolò has started to go to Master Matteo’ for the rst stage of his formal schooling, the study of Latin. By the time Machiavelli was twelve he had graduated to the second stage, and had passed into the care of a famous school-master, Paolo da Ronciglione, who taught several of the most illustrious humanists of Machiavelli’s generation,” 5. 22 J. R. Hale, Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy (New York: MacMillan Company, 1960), 1. 23 See Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance. Trans. David Moore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), esp. chapter 4, “The Concept of the Renaissance.”

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for knowledge.24 On the other hand, Hans Baron asserts that cultural ourishing comes accompanied by servitude to foreign tyrants.25 Just like Machiavelli’s supposedly opposing political ideas in The Prince and The Discourses, contradictory perceptions of Renaissance Italy are tightly intertwined. This fact helps us to understand better that Machiavelli, whose name has been associated with Old Nick, was at the same time considered a staunch patriot, a moralist, and a conservative. Machiavelli initiated his political career in the wake of the failed government of Frate Girolamo Savonarola, who ruled Florence with an iron hand from 1494–1498.26 The Dominican friar’s successful tenure reected a perceived moral decay and a desire for social change in the republic.27 In truth, Savonarola embraced the beliefs of future European religious Reformers and opposed the materialistic turn taken by the ofcial church. His desire was to make the church return to an idealized time in which there was a direct communion with Christ, without the need for human intervention. In Florence, he presided over the infamous Bonre of the Vanities, burning any item deemed prone to incite moral laxities: women’s mirrors, silk dresses, erotic poetry ( judged so by Savonarola), etc. The Dominican friar’s ruthless purity and unabashed

24 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1935), 426–443. 25 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 26 Viroli, in chapter 2 of From Politics to Reasons of State, discusses Savonarola’s Tratatto del reggimento di Firenze, “a work designed to set the guidelines for the new republican constitution . . .” In his treatise, “Savonarola gives the traditional concept of a political regime, a decided republican thrust, stressing at the same time that only a true ‘civil government’ may succeed to prevent the rise of tyranny and protect the most precious good of liberty,” 122. 27 Burckhardt dedicates an entire section of his book to “Morality and Religion.” Under the heading “Morality and Immorality,” the critic afrms: “At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilization of the Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting serious thinkers who saw a connection between this ruin and the prevalent immorality. It was not one of those methodical moralists who in every age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the time, but it was Machiavelli, who, in one of his best-considered works, said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.’ Another man would perhaps have said, ‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and ofcers wicked men.’ Machiavelli adds, ‘because the church and her representatives set us the worst example,’ ” 262.

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commitment to his religious agenda nally turned on him. Both the papacy and the Florentines saw him as a liability. Machiavelli was a witness of Savonarola’s horrible death and tells us in The Prince that the religious leader failed politically because he was “unarmed; hence he was destroyed amid his institutions when they were still new” (6, 27). Savonarola’s execution facilitated Machiavelli’s entrance into the realm of politics in the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic. He was twenty-nine. He exemplied, then, the ideal ruler because he had the virtù or the chops to perform at a high level as second chancellor of the republic, and he also had the Fortuna of being his father’s son. Clearly, Machiavelli became a favorite to win the political post, not because of inuential and powerful familial ties but because his father had imbued him with a strong humanistic background. Machiavelli had read the classics and was immersed in Roman tradition, especially in Ciceronian rhetoric. He displayed mastery in Latin and had been taught moral philosophy. Thus, we can say that, since his family did not hold the social clout of other more prominent Florentine families, Niccolò rose in Florentine politics on the strength of his intellect and his background as a scholar, not by connection or nepotism. He was the right man for the job. The Italian nation states were at that time so vulnerable that Machiavelli’s diplomatic career abruptly ended with the collapse of the Soderini government and the return of the Medici in 1512. For fourteen years, however, the segretario had pursued a very successful career and acquired a wealth of knowledge that would benet him greatly when it came time to reect on political leadership. He proclaims, in his texts, that most of the decay in Italy was caused by the excessive power of the church over the Italian territories, and that the more Christian a nation appeared the less religious it acted. Powerful nations adhered to the church’s tenets in name only. The Roman court, he declares in The Discourses, had kept the Italian territory divided, and “because of the wicked examples of that court, this province has lost all devotion and all religion” (I.12, 38). By keeping the territories divided, there was no desire to ght for one’s land, and there was no sense of “political virtue” in Italians.28 Foreign invasions were frequent, and Italians had to depend on mercenary armies who did not engage in heroism because they were not ghting for their own nation or patria. Having a militia, then,

28

Chabod, 62.

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became a major preoccupation for Machiavelli, who fought for the development of one in Florence and had to contend with the wrath of opposing factions when Florence’s sovereignty was at stake. He makes the case adamantly in The Prince: “The mercenary and the auxiliary are useless and dangerous; if a prince continues to base his government on mercenary armies he will never be either stable or safe; they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal; valiant among friends, among enemies cowardly; they have no fear to God, no loyalty to men” (12, 47). Machiavelli was pessimistic about human nature. He tells us, in The Prince, that a ruler cannot “keep [ ] his promises and live [ ] with sincerity” if he wants to keep his realm (18, 64). A prudent prince must conceal and pretend to keep promises: because men “are bad and do not keep their promises to you, you likewise do not have to keep yours to them” (18, 65). In fact, Machiavelli’s pessimism about human nature makes the harsh reality of his times more acute to the eye of the reader. He speaks of a general illness that existed in his time and presents a recurrent metaphor of a medico searching for a cure for such an illness. In order to nd the right medico, “Italy needed to be brought to her present condition, to be more slave than the Hebrews, more servant than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians, without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, devastated, subject to every sort of ruination” (26, 93). Machiavelli’s most admired leaders are the ones who, like Cesare Borgia, did not disclose their intentions and favored necessary duplicity to accomplish their political strategies. In his career as a diplomat, Machiavelli came into contact with the newly installed duke of Romagna when Borgia demanded to be formally aligned with Florence, and Machiavelli was chosen by the chancery for the delicate ambassadorship. Quentin Skinner maintains that this was Machiavelli’s perfect job because he could be “a rst-hand observer and assessor of contemporary statecraft.”29 In his Legations, as Skinner argues, Machiavelli composed well-developed reections on his mediations with Borgia that were later translated into The Prince. In the Legations, the segretario remarked how the son of Rodrigo Borgia, who became Alexander VI, relied too heavily on Lady Fortuna.30 Borgia’s luck had run out. He had contracted

29 30

Skinner, 9. Ibid., 10.

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his father’s malaria or—as it was rumored at the time—was poisoned along with the pope and was facing his own death. For the segretario, as he reported to the Ten of War, Borgia erred after his father’s death in giving his support for the papacy to cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, a bitter enemy of Alexander VI who was forced into exile when Rodrigo Borgia became pope. Once elected to the papacy, della Rovere took the name Julius II, and “Machiavelli watched [ Julius II and Borgia] these two masters of duplicity beginning to circle around one another . . . [demonstrating] that his initial doubts about the duke’s abilities had been thoroughly justied.”31 Shortly, the effects of the election of Julius II took a toll on Borgia, and the Duke Valentino’s interactions in Rome with Machiavelli were not the energetic and positive ones of the past. The segretario quickly realized that the pope was not going to make Borgia Gonfalonier of the Church. The duke was being beaten by Julius II at his own game of not keeping his promises; “he began to feel the ground give way beneath his feet; he was astonished and did not know what to do.”32 The election of Julius II did not augur well for the Florentine republic. After nine years of a tug-of-war between Soderini, France, and Rome, the pope forced Soderini out and helped reinstate the Medici, signaling the end of Machiavelli’s political career. When campaigning, Cardinal della Rovere made promises that he clearly did not keep. The pope has a prominent prole in both The Prince and The Discourses. In The Prince, Machiavelli blamed Borgia for the pope’s election because Julius II, he argued, would turn on Borgia “through fear or hate” (7, 34). Because of his ambassadorial position, Machiavelli saw rsthand how the prelate conducted his business. When discussing “being altogether wicked or altogether good” in The Discourses, the segretario pondered Julius II’s bravura, throwing himself—“by that fury with which he governed all things”—into the enemy hands of the powerful Giovampagolo Baglioni, the tyrant of Perugia. Machiavelli was disappointed by the fact that

31

Ibid., 11. Roberto Ridol, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 71. Through letters to the Ten of War, Machiavelli gives a detailed account of the doomed Duca Valentino: “Of his hero’s nal steps to ruin, Machiavelli ironically remarks: ‘We see that this Pope is beginning to pay his debts honourably; he wipes them out with the cotton-wool from the inkstand. Nevertheless his hands are blessed by all.’ And two days later, speaking again of Borgia’s fortunes: ‘One can see that his sins have brought him little by little to penance.’ Finally he wrote: ‘And so, inch by inch, the Duke slips into the tomb.’ Amen,” 72–73. 32

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Giovampagolo, “who did not mind being incestuous and a public parricide, did not know how—or, to say better, did not dare, when he had just the opportunity for it—to engage in an enterprise in which everybody would have admired his spirit and that would have left an eternal memory of himself as being the rst who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be esteemed whoever lives and reigns as they do; and he would have done a thing whose greatness would have surpassed all infamy, every danger, that could have proceeded from it” (I.27, 63). Machiavelli was closely associated with the government of gonfalonier Soderini, a man who wanted to appear to history as a ruler who did not prot from his political position. The segretario had started his career with the aid of Soderini; likewise, his years as a man of politics ended because of Soderini. After the disaster of Prato, the gonfalonier could not negotiate any terms with his enemies and had to abandon Florence, after securing safe-conduct to Siena. What would be the fate of his segretario? Reacting to a campaign to smear Soderini’s reputation, Machiavelli wrote with passion Ai Palleschi, and, as a result, was abruptly removed from ofce on November 7, 1512. The Ai Palleschi became his last ofcial writing. He was asked to pay a ne and was forbidden to enter the Palazzo, “to which he had to return to account for a great amount of money that he had managed for the battalions of the Ordinanza (translation mine).”33 Furthermore, by the beginning of 1513, his enemies sought retaliation for Machiavelli’s frank ways and prominent participation in the past republic. He was, thus, unjustiably accused of conspiring against the Medici and had to endure torture and exile. This dramatic chapter in Machiavelli’s life was recorded by Francesco Vettori in his Sommario della Istoria d’Italia: Agostino Capponi and Pietropaulo Boscoli conspired to kill Giuliano de’ Medici. And they were discovered because they drew up a list in which they wrote the names of those they believed, after the assassination, would be shown to be on their side . . . And they were so careless that they dropped the list, and it was found and taken to the Cardinal [Giovanni de’ Medici]; and, recognizing names of suspected men, he ordered that not only Pietropaulo and Agostino should be imprisoned, but all the others who were on the list (translation mine).34

33

Ugo Dotti, Machiavelli rivoluzionario: Vita e opera (Roma: Carocci Editori, 2003),

228. 34

Ibid., 237.

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Machiavelli’s name appeared seventh on the list of the conspirators. His arrest was imminent, but he was not found at his home, and a proclamation was issued against him. Anybody who had knowledge of his whereabouts had a duty to denounce him. Machiavelli did not hold out for too long; he reported shortly afterwards because he understood that his work in the Second Republic and his later harsh admonitions and defense of Soderini’s deposed republic in the Ai Palleschi made him a persona non grata.35 “Diplomacy’s loss was posterity’s gain” asserts Joseph V. Femia.36 With the demeanor of a spurned lover, Machiavelli, after being pardoned and freed from incarceration, became obsessed with getting back into the political arena when the Medici celebrated their rst pope, Leo X. At this point, Femia observes, “the ad hoc observations of the political participant gave way to a more general theoretical examination of the underlying realities of political action.”37 He no longer had to contend with the realities of a political career which brought him into contact with famous condottieri. That realization did not come easy for Machiavelli, though. After being freed through Vettori’s diplomatic intervention, he urgently attempted to procure himself a position in Leo X’s court. Vettori either could not or did not want to help the former segretario who, in turn, resigned himself to leave Florence to retreat to his family farm in Sant’Andrea in Percussina. Once there, he lived a double life: during the day he went about his business as a normal contadino, and in the evening he vicariously joined the company of illustrious men of the past who instructed him about how governments are led, how they succeed, and how they fail.38

35

Ibid., 238. Machiavelli Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 5. 37 Ibid. 38 Viroli, in Machiavelli, expresses frustration at other critics’ interpretation of the intellectual relationship that Machiavelli established with the ancients: “. . . he repeated over and over again in all his words that the political wisdom of the ancients was far superior to the political ideas of the moderns, and that he wrote all his political works to persuade princes and leaders of republics to imitate the former and avoid the latter. ‘While bowing ironically to the authority of the ancients,’ Harvey C. Manseld has written, ‘Machiavelli in fact uses ancient examples to reproach ancient teaching. He returns to the ancients in order to improve on them.’ This view entirely misrepresents the nature of Machiavelli’s intellectual relationship with the ancients. He treats the ancients not as authorities to be used against other authorities, but as intellectual authorities with whom he shares the commitment and the passion for political wisdom,” 3–4. 36

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III. Machiavelli as a Man of Letters Machiavelli was fascinated by history’s protagonists, winners and losers, and strove to make his readings both didactic and pleasurable in the classical tradition.39 For him, the element of the anecdote was an essential aspect of giving advice to a prospective ruler. For this reason, through him we learn about the intimate circumstances that make or destroy a condottiere. These could be especially dramatic, as Cesare Borgia’s case shows. Machiavelli’s exempla, Peter Bondanella afrms, are directly related to practical political activity that he analyzed from a theoretical framework shaped by his own experience and ideas; “they are rarely presented as historical personications of simple vice or virtue.”40 Life is much more complex, and people’s attitudes can have multiple shades. The segretario seems to remind us of this every time that we approach his texts. In his writings on government, Machiavelli showed a notable independence of mind, and he stood by his ideas even when, as Carlo Dionisotti asserts, he was forced to stoop to the newly installed Medici regime, “begging fruitlessly for Medici preferment.”41 Beyond The Prince and The Discourses, Machiavelli’s unique perspective and attitude are also evidenced in his creative works. Literature in Florence, at the time, mimicked political events in the republic and had come into crisis, according to Dionisotti, with Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in 1494.42 Florence became literarily dependent on other Italian states. Venice and Rome inuenced the way in which literati developed their repertoire and brought into light “the crisis in Florentine literature.” By a sudden stroke, Lady Fortuna made Machiavelli both spectator and participant in this crisis. Dionisotti reects: “. . . born as he was for comedy, he probably enjoyed the spectacle of the writers and philosophers who, having made merry with the Medici, now hastened to beat their breasts with Savonarola, and then were left high and dry, without a clue as to

39

Peter Bondanella, Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 23. Bondanella emphasizes that for Machiavelli, history “is essentially an educational tool that is also a pleasurable, literary genre with its own proper style and principles of organization. Indeed it is the pleasing form of presentation that alone guarantees the impact of the moral lesson,” 24. 40 Ibid., 25. 41 “Machiavelli, Man of Letters.” Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 20. 42 Ibid., 30.

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what to do next.”43 The segretario’s literary formation emulated, then, the development of his political theories which were also an intricate part of all his ction. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Machiavelli not only concentrated on Roman Fine Arts, he also strove to depict a politically glorious Rome and developed his style away from the trend of Petrarchan love poetry, which had a decisively un-Florentine fashion.44 Times of political uncertainty beget politically engaged literati. Unlike Petrarch, who found himself in a rather privileged position and did not see t for a poet to be involved in politics,45 Machiavelli had an afnity with the strong political engagement of poetic predecessors like Dante, who in his Divine Comedy so brilliantly depicted his political enemies in the various circles of Hell. In fact, through his correspondence and in self-mockery, the segretario emulated Dante and placed himself in the roster of well-known poets by sneering at Ludovico Ariosto for not giving him credit as a poet in his Orlando Furioso: Lately I have been reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; the entire poem is really ne and many passages are marvelous. If he is there with you, give him my regards and tell him that my only complaint is that in his mention of so many poets he has left me out like some prick and that he has done to me in his Orlando what I shall not do to him in my Ass.46

With a sardonic comment, Machiavelli made fun of himself as a poet and had the inventiveness to refer to Ariosto in asinine terms, while at the same time promoting his writing of Dell’Asino d’oro, based on Apuleius’s text, 43

Ibid. Ibid., 35. Dionisotti declares: “Machiavelli entered once and for all a path diverging from that of Petrarchan love poetry, which represented the mainstream of the new Italian literature in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. Critics will reply that his path was naturally and necessarily a different one, that we could never imagine Machiavelli in the garb of a writer like Benivieni or Cei. I do not intend to answer this obvious objection fostered as it is by an awareness of exactly who the ‘one and only’ Machiavelli is. I maintain, instead, that a different method of investigation is more useful: one that considers the various possibilities that Machiavelli was offered but refused. Such a comparative method will help us to account for the unpredictable gestures, the startling inventiveness, the sudden lights, of the one and only Machiavelli.” 45 See John M. Najemy, “Machiavelli and Geta: Men of Letters,” Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993). Najemy brings about the political engagement of among others, Brunetto Latini and later Leonardo Bruni, intellectuals who stressed the involvement of men of letters in “the civic arena,” 54. 46 This extract is from Letter 254. “Niccolò Machiavelli to Ludovico Alamanni.” Florence, 17 December 1517. Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. Trans. and ed. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press 1996), 318. 44

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which he left incomplete. Such a stark assertion bespeaks the author’s readiness to engage in intense literary and political thought. Notwithstanding his perception of himself as a middle-rung poet, Machiavelli phrased his complaint from the dramatic point of view of one who desired membership as a literati while at the same time understanding that Ariosto’s roster of poets was not so illustrious. In his remarks regarding Ariosto, thus, we nd the sardonic and smiling author of La Mandragola, considered one of the best comedies of the Renaissance. Machiavelli included the ckle aspect of Lady Fortuna in all his works of ction. By giving humanity half responsibility for one’s actions, he presented a sense of secular dualism in individuals’ reaction to events.47 From this perspective, if we determine to make good use of what we can control, our turf, we can win even if we have pledged our soul to the devil, a humanistic devil, that is. As it is, in Belfagor, Machiavelli reverses the Christian hell and makes the city of Florence the true hell from which the fallen angel must escape. Belfagor, because of fate, is chosen to carry on with the task of reporting about the misbehavior of women on earth but cannot do his devilish duties because of an insupportable wife. Later on, he is beaten by the astute Giammateo and decides to return to Pluto rather than putting up with his former wife’s nagging or with humanity’s ways in general. With Belfagor, Machiavelli sent us the message that we should concentrate on what we have at hand rather than hope to receive help from divine intervention. If we can control half of what comes to us, we can even beat the devil. Hence, we should not be such fools as to waste our chances. After his illustrious fourteen-year service as a Florentine man of affairs, Machiavelli could never get off the wrong side of Lady Fortuna. Dismissed from his position in the Second Chancery, he was humiliated by his peers and tortured for false accusations of conspiracy. Later on, through his famous Prince, he procured some sustenance for himself and his family through a commission from the Medici to write the Florentine Histories. How could a well-known republican write a history of his beloved city in which he had to glorify despots? He followed his dicta of balancing the delicate path between intention and action: [. . .] Here in the country I have been applying myself, and continue to do so, to writing the history, and I would pay ten soldi—but no more—to have you by my side so that I might show you where I am, because, since

47

Kocis, 47.

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patricia vilches I am about to come to certain details, I would need to learn from you whether or not I am being too offensive in my exaggerating or understating of the facts. Nevertheless, I shall continue to seek advice from myself, and I shall try to do my best to arrange it so that—still telling the truth—no one will have anything to complain about.48

As with his political treatises, Machiavelli sought to ponder and intertwine historic connections between Florence and ancient Rome. In his dedication to Clement VII, he was extremely careful in his wording and succeeded at both concealing while revealing criticism of the Medici’s historic legacy in Florence. In spite of treading in dangerous territory, he strove to write with a sense of civic duty and equity, transmitting in more adaptable fashion, the thoughts displayed in The Prince and The Discourses.49 The assumption to the Papacy in 1527 of Giuliano de’ Medici as Clement VII made the Medici tenure vulnerable in Florence. Giuliano was a strong ruler, but, in order to advance his career in Rome, he left the governing of the city to inept condottieri who were quickly deposed by the Medici’s increasing enemies. This signaled the beginning of the Third Republic in Florence. As for Machiavelli, who must have rejoiced that his beloved city was again a republic, the political development had a negative impact. Eager to get into the politics of the new republic, the segretario, tragically, was mistrusted and, once again, associated with a deposed regime. Clement VII had his own political calamity to contend with. He was not able to procure the backing of France, thus

48 Letter 285. Atkinson and Sice declare that there is no absolute evidence that Machiavelli’s assertion refers directly to the Florentine Histories. “Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini,” Machiavelli and His Friends, 351. Michael White presents Machiavelli’s contemporary history as he was communicating to his friend Francesco Guicciardini: “In the world beyond his country retreat the politicians, kings and pontiffs were engaged in their usual games and shaping the events that would ll the pages of future histories. The balance of power in Europe, always a delicate thing, had been destabilized in recent years by two deaths. In 1516 Ferdinand II (also known as Ferdinand the Catholic) who had been King of Aragon, Castile, Sicily and León (as well as ruler of Naples since 1504), had died. The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian had followed him to the grave in 1519. That year the nineteen-year-old grandson of Ferdinand and Maximilian and son of the late Philip I and Joanna of Castile became Holy Roman Emperor, as Charles V, having already been crowned King Charles I of Spain three years earlier. This union of two of the major power blocs of Europe posed an intolerable threat to France, and from 1521 it sparked a series of wars that were to drag on for a generation. Italy was inexorably drawn into these wars because of a succession of incompetent popes, beginning with Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), who tried to play the two ends off against the middle,” 236–237. 49 Salvatore Benso, Machiavelli italiano (Palermo & Roma: F. Cuini Editori, 1943), 187.

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alienating Spain. The infamous Sack of Rome ordered by Charles V to destroy the alliance between France and the papacy took place in May of that same year. Machiavelli, nally being witness to a maimed papal court, died in June of 1527.

Bibliography Atkinson, James B., and David Sices., trans. and ed. Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Bausi, Francesco. Machiavelli. Roma: Salerno, 2005. Benso, Salvatore. Machiavelli italiano. Palermo & Roma: F. Cuini Editori, 1943. Bondanella, Peter. Machiavelli and the Art of Renaissance History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. ——, and Julia Bondanella. Discourses on Livy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ——, and Mark Musa. The Portable Machiavelli. London: Penguin, 2005, 1979. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1935. Chabod, Federico. Machiavelli and the Renaissance. Trans. David Moore. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. de Grazia, Sebastian. Machiavelli in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Dionisotti, Carlo. “Machiavelli, Man of Letters.” Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Dotti, Ugo. Machiavelli rivoluzionario: Vita e opera. Roma: Carocci Editori, 2003. Femia, Joseph V. Machiavelli Revisited. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. Gilbert, Allan., ed. and trans. The Chief Works and Others. Fourth Edition. 3 vols. Durham: Duke University Press, 1965. Hale, J. R. Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy. New York: MacMillan Company, 1960. Kocis, Robert A. Machiavelli Redeemed: Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory. Bethelem: Lehigh University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Manseld, Harvey C., and Nathan Tarcov. Niccolò Machiavelli Discourses on Livy. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Najemy, John M. Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. ——. “Machiavelli and Geta: Men of Letters.” Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Ridol, Roberto. The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Trans. Cecil Grayson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli. Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought Series. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ——. From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. White, Michael. Machiavelli: A Man Misunderstood. London: Abacus, 2004, 2005.

GOVERNMENT

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCE EDITED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY GERALD SEAMAN1 Marie Gaille-Nikodimov

The Prince is one of history’s most frequently read, translated, and commented upon texts. Clairvoyant and awless for some, diabolical and courtesan for others, this work has caused a commotion throughout the centuries. Some readers have even become disciples of The Prince, believing that it contains proven recipes that can be applied successfully to politics, to the military, to love, and to market economics. Given this attention, it is worth noting that the original autograph text of The Prince is not extant, and that the dedicatory copy which came to Lorenzo de’ Medici (the young), and which was conserved in the Medici library until the beginning of the seventeenth century, has also been lost. Thus, although there have been many editions of The Prince, there is no automatically denitive version of the text. A letter from Machiavelli to his friend Francesco Vettori informs us of the circumstances surrounding the composition of The Prince. Removed from the Florentine Chancery on February 12, 1513; suspected of having fomented with Agostino Capponi and Pierpaolo Boscoli a plot against Cardinal Guiliano de’ Medici; tortured and condemned to life in prison; Machiavelli was nally released and conned to reside on his small estate in San Casciano. From there, on December 10, 1513, he wrote the famous Letter 224 describing his daily and evening activities. After stopping about his property, reading a poem next to a stream, talking and playing cards or other games with neighbors, he would return home and go into his room. He describes the scene as follows: On the threshold, I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and

1 This chapter is adapted from an Introduction to The Prince published in Paris by Librairie Générale Française in 2000. It appears here by permission.

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marie gaille-nikodimov for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terried by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have proted from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the denition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost.2

Relying on this letter, we cannot establish with certainty, however, that the text which we read today occupied Machiavelli’s attention only between the summer of 1513 and the 10th of December of that same year. Interpreters have proposed a variety of hypotheses for the time of composition and revision which could extend to May 1514 or even as far as 1518. Moreover, fate has left us a split textual tradition, one based on manuscripts and the other based on editions. The text was published for the rst time in 1532, ve years after Machiavelli’s death, rst in Rome (the Blado editions) and then in Florence (the Bernardo di Giunta editions). The manuscript tradition, which includes copies from years prior to 1532, is nonetheless essential to the establishment of a critical text, since the edited copies are characterized by substantial corrections and textual revisions that are written in Machiavelli’s own hand. Finally, the title itself can be open to interpretation. In the December 10, 1513, letter, Machiavelli refers to his work as De principatibus; that same title is used in a letter from Niccolò Guiccardini to his father that dates from July 29, 1517. In The Discourses on Livy, however, Machiavelli, in his own hand, refers to the work as De principe, which is also the title used in the post-1532 editions of the text. A look at the manuscript tradition does not help settle matters. The differing titles of Machiavelli’s work, then, oscillate between a focus on the prince and a focus on the principality, from instruction manual in government to a work about politics. G. Inglese chose to retain the De Principatibus title for his 1994 critical edition and used Il Principe for the paperback edition in 1995. If we decide to follow the oldest editorial tradition and favor the title 2 English translation from Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. Trans. and ed. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 264.

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The Prince, it is because we are convinced that the work itself contains an irrefutable argument for doing so. Machiavelli clearly places greatest emphasis on the dialogue between himself, in a counselor’s role, and the character of the prince whom he addresses intimately on page after page of the text. From this perspective, it seems possible to sacrice the titular reference to the principality, even as we acknowledge the important place of that topic within the body of the work itself. With The Prince, Machiavelli offers us an intense reading experience, for his text has rhythm, style, and allure. We cannot deny that the literary quality of the work has played a role in its historical success. But this success is due as much to the questions and considerations that the text raises and provokes. His writing is driven by an acknowledgement of the historical instability of Florentine institutions and of the weakness of Italian city-states as they confronted powerful foreign invasions. It is lled with the urgency of war and the need to reform the city-states. In this context, Machiavelli assumes the posture of an historian during a time of crisis, as H. Arendt denes it: when present events have rendered past wisdom null and void and made following common sense irrelevant, it becomes necessary to rediscover the political sense of judgment.3 The task becomes to propose a new category and framework of analysis that will allow us to understand these events and to determine the ends and means of the actions we take. This task is exceptionally difcult to accomplish for “discerning what is new and different from what we are already accustomed to requires a particular quality of judgment.”4 Still, it is precisely with respect to this particular quality of judgment that Machiavelli’s desired role as counselor is dened and grounded. The prince, no matter how clairvoyant, cannot spare himself the cost of the effort that is necessary to understand and to determine the course of his own actions. Being thus engaged, he knows he cannot go it alone. He simply does not have that luxury, and so he is obliged to lend his ear to others. The deafness of the kings who are denounced by Raphael, the voyager in Thomas More’s Utopia, cannot be tolerated. For Machiavelli, the prince must listen to the advice of the person who is removed from action and has no stake in the decision, a person who has the time 3 Hannah Arendt, Juger: Sur la philosophie politique de Kant. Trans. M. Revault d’Allones (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 4 This citation of Arendt can be found in R. Benier, “H. Arendt et la faculté de juger.” Juger: Sur la philosophie politique de Kant, 157–158. Translated from the French.

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for observation and discernment. Inversely, it should be said that, in Machiavelli’s eyes, the value of his counsel is due to his practical knowledge of the art of the state and, generally speaking, to the experience he acquired during his years of service to the Florentine Chancery. In the December 10, 1513, letter to Francesco Vettori, Machiavelli in effect said of his little work that: Were it to be read, it would be evident that during the fteen years I have been studying the art of the state I have neither slept nor fooled around, and anybody ought to be happy to utilize someone who has had so much experience at the expense of others.5

This experience with current events, which is made complete through an in-depth knowledge of the ancients, is a condition for providing counsel: the good counselor is the man who is able to mix practical experience with a disengagement from action. If we refer to A. Kojève’s thinking about the relationship between the philosopher and the tyrant, we can easily understand how this hybrid status of the counselor disturbs the person who chooses the contemplative life and might, on the other hand, motivate the person who wishes to participate in the life of the city. Distinguishing two conceptions of the truth, this latter person in effect underlines their implications for the way in which one leads one’s life. If one’s being is essentially immutable, then it is present to humans as an eternal and absolute truth that is discovered either through religious revelation or through one’s intellectual effort.6 If one considers the contrary position, however, that being is revealed essentially through its historical unfolding, one should, in the world of politics, avoid solitude and, like Socrates, mingle with citizens and even participate in the administration of a city’s affairs. If Machiavelli were asked to take a side in this debate, there is no doubt that he would place himself on the side of those who choose to be engaged in thinking and in acting and thus refuse the choice of retreating into a world of pure reection. An active period of experience precedes and accompanies the leisure time that is necessary for writing.

5

English translation from Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence,

265. 6 Alexander Kojève, “Tyrannie et sagesse.” Leo Strauss, De la tyrannie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 169.

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Of course, Machiavelli is not out to discover the truth about being but rather is attempting to determine the conditions of action for a prince. This occurs by virtue of a discourse on the nature of things as they are, as chapter 15, with its focus on verità effettuale, makes clear. How does Machiavelli set all this up? In the text, there are a number of motifs that highlight his method. First of all, he seeks to provide counsel to the prince and is not a prisoner of his own point of view. In order to best serve the prince’s desire to acquire and to maintain power at the head of the city or province, he shows his aptitude for envisioning and describing the points of view of others. The prince cannot achieve his objective unless he is able to understand his opponents and is able to win their favor or, at least, convince them not to do him harm. Thus we can see that Machiavelli, as early as the Dedication, employs an artistic metaphor to compare his work to that of a painter: one must know the best places for observing and becoming acquainted with the nature of princes and the nature of people. Echoing fteenth-century work on perspective, we might say that Machiavelli asks the same question as Pascal: “I must do as painters do—distance myself from my subject, but not too far. How far is far enough? Guess.”7 With this question of placement of perspective, Machiavelli does not believe that there are, however, an innite number of possible points of view: there are those of the enemy, those of allies, those of the powerful, and those of the people. It is not possible to encompass all points of view in a single perspective. Rather, one must become capable of shifting from one to the next: “The work exists to help facilitate the passage from one place and one universe of words to another place and another universe of words.”8 Machiavelli does not however seek to determine the conditions for action in general. Rather, he immerses the prince in numerous analyses of individual cases by means of examples. Recourse to examples was widely used in the texts of renaissance humanists, but with Machiavelli it attained a completely original status. As a rst innovation, one discovers that Machiavelli does not use examples as a means to illustrate or introduce an argument. Rather, it is by the exposition of a given example that Machiavelli himself argues, judges, measures, weighs the pros and cons, contradicts, interrogates, and elaborates.

7 8

Blaise Pascal, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), No. 558. Gérald Sfez, Machiavel, Le Prince sans qualities (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998).

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As a second innovation: the history that these examples are supposed to take into account is told in a way that advances the goals of Machiavelli’s arguments. Evidence for this can be found in his use of Herodian’s Roman History in chapter 19. Machiavelli notably softens the matter that he takes from this source. He does not take up the opposition between the emperors who had been weakened by the Orient and those who were barbaric and tyrannical but rather focuses on the problem that they all had to face: the essential role of soldiers to their power and the necessity of winning them over to their side. In order to support the idea that a prince must above all concern himself with not being hated by the people, Machiavelli disdains Herodian’s chronological ordering of the emperors so that he may evaluate the causes of their success or failure. He nds inspiration in his source and then adapts it, by omission and exaggeration, to his own argument. Thus he resumes his discussion of the causes of hatred toward Pertinax, adds to it a reason for contempt—old age—and sets aside Pertinax’s speeches to the Senate, which might have been useful to an analysis of his generosity. Throughout The Prince, one nds this kind of refashioning of textual or factual sources: historical material is segmented, even touched up; read or lived, history comes to resemble a palimpsest that the political thinker constantly reworks and in whatever way he nds suitable. Taking this kind of liberty in his writing is characteristic of Machiavelli’s œuvre. It is present in The Discourses on Livy, as A. Matucci has shown in his analysis of the two terms that Machiavelli uses to describe his work: discourse and “narration.”9 The former, according to usage that was current during the rst half of the sixteenth century, refers to an act of wit or reasoning and, since it applies to a text and not to an event, is opposed to gloss (chiosa) and commentary (comento). The Discourses, according to Matucci, mix together two words that had heretofore been distinct in Florentine historiography: the narration of history and reection on history. In the same way, the term “narration” that is used in the Dedication to The Discourses refers to a style that is equally distant from political treatises as it is from the practice of history: that is the entry to “oratio” according to the meaning Cicero gave to that term in his De oratore, that is the entry into argumentation. This liberty appears also in the fact that a single event or person is evoked by Machiavelli

9 Andrea Matucci, Machiavelli nella storiograa orentina: Per la storia di une genere letterario (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1991).

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in diverse manners according to the course of his argument. It is not clear, from that, that one can pertinently criticize Machiavelli based on criteria such as the precise use of facts and the scientic use of source material, for he uses examples in a free manner. In this sense, the use of examples supports his mode of argumentation in two ways: rst, it gives him a setting for it; second, it is malleable, changing according to the author’s object. Thus, in chapters 3 and 24, Phillip of Macedonia appears. In the rst chapter, he is the embodiment of failure in the face of the Romans, never having been able to secure their friendship without being abased himself. In the second, he is praised by Machiavelli for having discovered, despite the small size of his territory, how to put up a lasting front against the Romans, and, as such a leader, he is shown as an example for the princes of Italy who have themselves been defeated by foreign armies. Third and nal innovation: far from systematically shedding light on the kinds of actions that should be imitated, Machiavelli often exposes failures and mistakes. In this case, such instances constitute counterexamples for the rules, customs, and counsel whose pertinence or universal efcacy Machiavelli wishes to challenge. Thus it is in contrast to the proverb: “Chi fonda in sul populo, fonda in sul fango” (Founding a state on the people is like founding it on mud) that Machiavelli cites the examples of the Gracchi in Rome and Giorgio Scali in Florence in chapter 9. Some examples, of course, show a clear path of action: the prince to whom Machiavelli addresses himself has predecessors, “very excellent men,” in whom he can and should nd inspiration. But, should it be a matter of simply reproducing their actions? One might draw that conclusion from a reading of Francesco Guicciardini, Machiavelli’s friend and interlocutor on affairs of state. He accuses Machiavelli of lacking discernment—discrezione—of being inattentive to the differences and peculiar qualities of different eras, all of which makes imitation impossible and invalidates the idea that lessons can be taken from history.10 Machiavelli’s argument is in reality more complicated than that, and it is difcult to clarify fully because his work accords no place to a theory of history that would take this form of desirable imitation into account. It would be wrong to create opposing identities between the

10 Francesco Guicciardini, Selected Writings. Ed. Cecil Grayson, trans. Margaret Grayson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

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ancient world and the modern world. Rather, Machiavelli’s text is lled with examples of events that attest to an encounter—a riscontro—between these two periods, to their resemblances and to their similarities. One can suppose, without forcing the text, that such similarities are connected to the permanence of human passions and to the presence in all political entities of the same kinds of political desires and humors that were identied in chapter 9—that one detects, in afrming this kind of permanence, an anthropological train of thought or a necessary hypothesis for whomsoever wishes to dedicate his thought to the conditions for conquest or for maintaining the power of the state. In these examples, this permanence of human passion and humors should not invite confusion with particular cases of ideal-types who should dene a prince’s mode of action. Rather, it allows the historian, following his own judgment, to move freely between time periods and, from this, to be able to develop analogies which can be used as a guide to action, identifying good and bad choices rather than determining what to do. Thus, Machiavelli is able to underline in chapter 3 the contrast between the Roman’s decisions, which led to their successes in their colonies, and the poor choices of the kings of France after they invaded Italian territory. The two series of examples that describe these good and bad choices are inscribed in a comparison that is made possible by the identication of a common goal—the conquest of a new country—and by similar conditions—the desires and passions of men, subjects or allies, and the reasons for their allegiance to a new prince. Thus we can speak of a creative form of imitation as opposed to one that simply reproduces a previous act. As paradoxical as this may seem, it does allow us to grasp how, in Machiavelli’s eyes, a prince, by his “virtù,” may enroll himself in the glorious list of “very excellent” men and, at the same time, be considered innovative. He is inspired by the excellent actions of those who have served as his examples, but he has invented his own course of action, in a context that is his own and which may be unique and hitherto unknown. From this perspective, the comparison taken up in chapter 6 between the imitator and the archer who aims higher than his target is important. Through this image, Machiavelli stresses two causes for the impossibility of reproducing past acts: one cannot borrow the same path that one seeks to imitate, and one can never equal it. In these causes, the distance from imitated to imitator is clearly indicated, and the way to innovation is opened. The set of examples and counter-examples that are at the disposal of the prince through his reading are similar, one could say, to the guide

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that is given to the voyager, which he can consult to evaluate a present situation in which he is required to act: the writer Machiavelli took care, as he says on many occasions, to reduce—ridurre, ridurre a memoria—to a small number the images and sentences that the prince would need to remember. By means of this reduction, Machiavelli is aiming for the most effective form of counsel: a few striking persons or events will better serve the prince than would lengthy volumes or a chronological narrative, even if it is abundant and detailed with his own personal experiences. The end of Savonarola, therefore, reminds everyone that arms are indispensable to whomsoever wishes to command a city. Evoking Soderini allows Machiavelli to incite the prince to deance and to the use of evil when necessary. Looked at only from the point of view of ancient prudence, the work of transmission, adaptation, selection, and evaluation that Machiavelli made to effect this reduction was enormous. L. Arthur Burd’s 1891 edition of The Prince shows great evidence of this. Through his work of reduction, Machiavelli shows his prince the route that his intellect must follow and does not divulge any kind of recipe for action. It is up to the prince, after having read, discussed, thought about, and made inquiries of himself, to establish analogies that will illuminate a possible course of action in a given context. Indeed, we have already noted that the prince, being engaged in action, does not have the free time necessary to dedicate to reection. This is true, with respect to his counselor, but Machiavelli takes advantage of the leisure time that is used for hunting and recommends that they use this time to think about the art of war. Chapter 14, in this sense, constitutes a tableau of what the prince should do when he is traveling about the countryside with others: like Philopoemen, prince of the Achaians, while observing the landscape he should conceive of the different possible offensive and defensive actions that he might take and discuss them with his companions. Knowledge of the landscape, and these kinds of discussions, Machiavelli emphasizes, will be useful to the prince who will later be able to rely on this knowledge when he is engaged in a real battle. The approach that Machiavelli applies and recommends takes its pertinence from the idea that The Prince expresses rules of action that are of general value. Indeed, Machiavelli himself uses the term “rule” or even “sentence.” Nonetheless, an examination of their occurrence reveals that rules, conceived as we have seen from particular cases, are relativized. After establishing them, Machiavelli outlines a possible situation where the rules might not hold or suggests that they would

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only hold under certain conditions. In this connection, we may, after having underlined the necessity for the prince to use his intellect to imagine the possible situations and the action appropriate to each one, skip from this point in the text all the way to chapter 23. This chapter contributes to the denition of Machiavelli’s avowed prince: this prince is a prudent man, and this prudence is in fact the quality that allows the prince to apply the rules with discernment, to modulate them according to the situation, even to create new ones, by comparison or analogical transfer to the present context or the lived situation. Like the physician to whom he is often considered similar, the prince must formulate a diagnosis and determine the remedy to use in each case in a particular manner. If The Prince is not focused on prescribing general rules for action, what kind of counsel does it advocate? Machiavelli, it seems, wishes to inculcate in the prince the kinds of concerns that should draw his attention and preoccupy him. The prince himself should not be dependent on forces that could cause him harm. On the contrary, he should establish his own forces and only rely on them. The gure of Cesare Borgia, in chapter 7, exemplies this independence with respect to harmful forces. Starting from a position of dependence on the arms of others, he progressively removes himself from this dependence by reducing the forces to nothing or by cultivating alliances which prevent them from harming him and which also attach him to the people who have been conquered. Even if they do not exclude other elements, the kinds of forces that are given priority in The Prince are those that will best ensure military power. This has many implications: mercenary forces are rejected because they work for personal gain and not for a common cause of patriotism that inspires courage in the hearts of soldiers. When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, this criticism of mercenaries could be understood on two levels: Florence, like other Italian cities, had been attacked by foreign invaders, and its military weakness did not allow it to resist. In addition, the use of mercenary soldiers in defense of Italian cities had become commonplace. Machiavelli was not only opposed to the use of mercenaries, he was also opposed to military alliances that could require sharing victory with others who might later wish to conquer themselves. His critique, which The Discourses elaborate using the motif of “money is not the nerve of war,” and the counsel that the prince should establish an army of his own—a militia made up of members of the city itself—are articulated early on in Machiavelli’s writings. Before him, Bruni had developed this thought, after him

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Gianotti would do the same, but the vigor and clarity of Machiavelli’s defense of the necessity of having an army of one’s own made him the most convincing spokesperson for this argument. The originality of Machiavelli’s critique can be found in the concentration of criticisms that tie the project for an army of one’s own together with an analysis of the way in which the prince must join himself to the powerful and to the people. The distinction between internal and external policies is, in this context, meaningless. A prince who is hated by his subjects is made weak militarily: his subjects would be favorable to conquest by another prince or another republic, and these latter would seek only to nourish the hate that the subjects felt for their current prince. At the very least, subjects in this state would hesitate to defend their prince at all. This consideration is valid with respect to the people, for, because they are large in number, they make up the greater part of one’s army. Thus, in his examination of the emergence of civil principality (chapter 9)—which occurs when a person from the city becomes prince by virtue of the support of the powerful and of the people—Machiavelli emphasizes the necessity of attracting the favor of the people and of maintaining this favor if it is indeed the people who brought the prince to power. But the prince cannot neglect to pay attention to the powerful, though for different reasons: for them, it is not their number that matters, but the fact that they are far-sighted and that they are more clever than the people. The nature of the relationships that the prince can have with the powerful and with the people must be dened in a deeper way than this reection on the necessity of an army of one’s own permits. In every city, as Machiavelli says in chapter 9, there are two kinds of desire: for the powerful, they wish to command, to dominate, to oppress. For the people, they wish not to be commanded, dominated, or oppressed. Indeed, they wish to have a share of power. These desires vary with the history of the city. One could thus envision two opposite poles: one a city where the members are accustomed to liberty and where the people desire liberty and a share of deliberating and decision-making power. The history of the ancient roman republic and modern Florence illustrates this kind of city. The other kind of city, however, would be one that has always been administered by a monarch where the desire for liberty does not exist and where the people wish not to be oppressed but do not pretend to wish for a share in power, though their own desire to oppress the powerful is extremely great. Between these two poles, one can imagine any number of other possible congurations.

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It is essential that we note that Machiavelli, when describing the relationships between the powerful and the people in terms of dominating or not being dominated, used the word humor—“umore”—along with the terms desire and appetite. This directs our attention immediately to the kind of Hippocratic medical terminology that was in vogue at the time and that was current in the discourse of the city. A comparison between the way in which Machiavelli used this term and the ways of Savonarola and F. Guicciardini shows how unique Machiavelli’s usage was. His was much more systematic than his contemporaries, and the term “humor” occupies a central place in Machiavelli’s thought on the fate of the city and the action of the prince. It does not appear in his political writings from the time of the Chancery but is, on the other hand, present in The Prince, The Discourses, and The History of Florence. If these desires refer to categories of citizens—the powerful and the people in this case—they are not necessarily synonyms or equivalents. These categories are evoked when Machiavelli addresses the question of the division of responsibilities in the city, whereas desires or humors appear in his analyses of change or reform of institutions or regimes. Feeding off one another, without xed limits, these humors, as they collide, are the source of an innite historical dynamic. The usage of humor as a medical term makes it all the more apparent to the reader that the city is, for Machiavelli, the place where things are mixed together and for which one must nd a correct balance. In the same way that humors combine and are balanced in the body to effect health or illness, the desires of the powerful and of the people combine in a relationship that is more or less benecial to the fate of the city. From bloody division to pacic coexistence an entire range of relationships and combinations of the desire of the powerful and the desire of the people is conceivable. When a prince, by heredity or by conquest, commands a city, he nds himself confronted by the question of the balance of humors either because, from a military perspective, he requires the favor of the people or because he wishes to avoid civil conict or a plot against his life. Yet, the prince can exercise some inuence over these humors. It is a vain hope to wish to reconcile the powerful and the people. Their respective desires, which are by denition antagonistic, make such an ambition absurd. On the other hand, he could favor a balance that neither puts the city nor his hold on power in danger. Obviously, to the extent that these desires remain piqued, the action of the prince toward them must be permanent. He cannot pretend to discover a kind of rule that

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would resolve the question once and for all and make a certain balance permanent. An additional difculty can be found in the fact that each context requires a different and unique method and response. Between recourse to arms, exile, assassination, and the creation of a law that would allow the powerful and the people to satiate—“sfogare”—their appetites or the creation of an institution that would regulate specic conicts between the powerful and the people—like the French parliament (chapter 19), the prince must know how to choose the means that are most appropriate to his situation and to the history of the city. The skill required for this permanent action is extreme for the prince must be able to make the powerful feel that they retain a kind of power that is commensurate with their pretensions and with the conception they have made for themselves and their rank. He must all the while act in such a way that the people do not feel oppressed by the powerful. It seems like squaring a circle. But it would be wrong to suggest that Machiavelli does not believe that a balance of the humors is possible, at least during a certain extent of time. As an example, he refers to the French kingdom in chapter 19 which follows immediately the statement on what balance should be put in place—do not make the powerful desperate lest they plot against the prince; and, satisfy the people in their desire not to be oppressed. Without this, they will not defend the prince when he is attacked by the powerful or by outside enemies. When one examines the effects that this regulation of humors has on a prince’s reputation, one nds Machiavelli describing it in terms of passions. This brings us back to the essentially affective dimension of his analysis in that these passions appear to account for the fragility or the surety of a prince’s power. Machiavelli does not embrace the idea of a transcendent foundation. He also renounces the idea of a prince whose power rests on the fact that he acts in a way that promotes the good of the people—to pursue the common good and not antagonize the powerful and all the while satisfy the people—these are two very different kinds of things. Friendship, love, hate, admiration, esteem, spite, fear—these are the words that Machiavelli uses in chapters 15–21, which are devoted to a prince’s reputation and to a critique of fortresses, to measure a prince’s power beyond the material resources that he has at his disposal. The new prince and the hereditary prince are equals in this regard. Certainly chapter 2 seems to suggest that the task of the hereditary prince is more simple, but chapter 24 contradicts that assertion. First, great deeds give the new prince a great reputation; and he can take on the appearance of a long-time former prince. But later,

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sloth and short-sightedness can cause a prince to lose his possessions, which is seen in the defeat of the Italian princes. In opposition to the hatred of the people and the powerful, the prince must seek their favor. This is what Machiavelli recommends in the most general terms. But, a more specic analysis of the relationship of the prince to the people and the powerful is necessary because a prince can actually cause himself harm if he is excessively generous or merciful in his search for favor. In times of adversity, fear is stronger than love. For this reason, the prince should cultivate a sense of fear among his subjects, but he must do so in a way that does not transform fear into hate. Chapter 17 concludes with a denition of the combination of passions that is most likely to promote the maintenance of a prince’s power: fear without hate. As much as it provides a way to organize an army and to create bonds with the people and the powerful, The Prince also rejects resignation, fatalism, and inaction, and promotes engagement and action. This occurs in two ways. In the rst, Machiavelli denounces the effects of resignation and inaction. Maintaining an analytic tone that is nonetheless already passionate, the secretary, in chapter 24, initiates a call to liberate Italy from the barbarians and provides a one-word diagnosis of the cause for Italy’s military defeats: indolence. In another way, Machiavelli argues strongly against the omnipotence of fortune. In chapter 25, he suggests that the course of events is determined by an almost equal division of human action and fortune. It makes sense to act, and especially so since Machiavelli’s views on action are not inscribed within a frame that is governed by Providence. Chapter 11 discusses ecclesiastic principalities. Machiavelli declares that they are self-perpetuating, no matter the manner in which they are governed and no matter the mores of the prince. This surprising state of affairs, Machiavelli believes, stems from the fact that they are established and maintained by God. Conceived of in this way, as founded on a transcendent divine power, ecclesiastic principalities are of no interest to Machiavelli. He refuses to speak of them, and there is irony in Machiavelli’s perspective. He touches on the emergence of the church as a temporal power and then proceeds to talk about Alexander VI and Julius. Machiavelli situates his analyses in a temporal plane and speaks in terms of force and confrontation when he describes the conditions for the prince’s action. Alexander VI and Julius created a powerful church by the power of the sword, through ruse, and through temporary alliances. Their success was not due to a transcendent power. It can be no different for the prince, for whom this work is explicitly destined.

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The temporal dimension in Machiavelli is not dened exclusively in terms of its opposition to a providential dimension. It is also set in opposition to the kind of astrological thinking that was so common at the time. Although there are more astrological elements to be found in his thinking in The Discourses than in The Prince, it is nonetheless worthwhile to dedicate some attention to this issue because it will help us to understand how Machiavelli expresses the conditions for the prince’s action and, more generally, for anyone’s action. It is possible that Machiavelli had astrological beliefs, as some passages in his Discourses on Livy show. Still, we should distinguish between determinism, which Machiavelli did not favor, and another kind of belief that recognizes the inuence of the stars on the sub-lunar world without making them out to be a source or cause of events. Natural astrology sees in the movement of the stars a general cause for, but not a specic relationship to, terrestrial events. In the Proemio of The Discourses I, Machiavelli recalls this inuence as something that conditions but does not determine human action; and chapter I, 56 simply states the factual existence of celestial signs that can presage terrestrial events and which are beyond human ability to interpret. Action in the temporal dimension, therefore, is never vain, even if it is not always effective. There are good and bad choices; and there are weak and lazy acts or, by contrast, energetic and valiant ones. Machiavelli’s invitation to action opens up a realm of possibilities that is nonetheless lled with limitations. Action can never be considered outside of a context. The prince cannot act solely according to his own wishes but must determine how to act within a specied context. Beyond the particularities of each context, the prince must never think in terms of peace but must always think in terms of war. As M. Senellart has said so well: “Machiavelli does not refuse peace; but he does denounce a love of peace that would lead to repose and to a failure to remember war.”11 If a prince thinks in terms of peace, he will not be able to work with his subjects in a way that will assure that he can count on them in times of war. Thus, a prince would be mistaken to think that, in times of peace, he need no longer be concerned with inciting hatred in his subjects. If he were to despoil them, tax them heavily, or take their women, he would be betrayed at

11 Michel Senellart, Machiavélisme et raison d’État (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).

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the rst possible occasion. Last-minute attempts at benevolence would not compensate for how the prince treated his subjects in a time when he did not need them. Machiavelli believes that a prince must use his character to his advantage when facing difcult circumstances. This is illustrated in chapter 19, when he speaks of Marcus and Pertinax and how they, along with Alexander, shared the traits of modesty, love of justice, benevolence, and humanity. Marcus’s life and fate were happy because he was admired for his many virtues and because he inherited his empire and thus was not beholden to the people or to the army. Pertinax, by contrast, met a bad end because he was made emperor against the will of the soldiers who were accustomed to a licentious lifestyle and because he was disrespected due to his age. Using this comparison, Machiavelli shows that one condition for a prince’s success is his ability to act in a way that is appropriately adapted to the context. Although he believes that adaptation is possible, Machiavelli recognizes that some princes were born in times that made their own particular success impossible. Along with a rejection of resignation and this recognition of limits, Machiavelli also believed that the prince must be sensitive to the variations in the nature of the times and must be capable of being a good forecaster, like a doctor whose diagnosis prevents illness even before signs of it appear. The Prince is lled with reminders of the possibility of being overthrown, either by an enemy attack or by unhappy subjects. The opposition between times of peace and times of adversity is at the center of this discourse. The prince must not only be prepared for adversity to come—as the construction of dikes to protect against oods demonstrates in chapter 25—he must also adjust his action to conform to the nature of the times. This requires more than just never thinking about peace. It also requires that the prince act badly when it is necessary. To know when and how to do so is, in Machiavelli’s eyes, one of the most difcult aspects of the prince’s job. And yet, as the example of Agathocles of Sicily shows, it cannot be avoided. By being cruel at the beginning of his reign, Agathocles was able, without any civic controversy, to remain king of Syracuse and never had to commit any further acts of inhumanity (chapter 8).12

12 Gérald Sfez, Machiavel, la politique du moindre mal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).

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To engage and disengage from bad acts, to temporize or to react immediately, but also to use law or force as a weapon, and, nally, since force is an animal attribute, to use physical strength like a lion or to use cunning like a fox (chapter 18): with these alternatives, Machiavelli depicts the prince like Dante’s artist, with a trembling hand, oscillating irretrievably between humanity and inhumanity, benevolence and cruelty, and paints the portrait of a scandalous gure if one were to think in terms of political morality.13 As he does this, he also captures the relationship of the prince to fortune, hesitating between its personication—either a being or a wheel—and a negative concept—fortune being that which arises when a man does not avail himself of his own strength but resigns himself to fate and devolves into inaction. Fortune demands that the prince face up to things; it is also, at the same time, the thing that the prince must confront. Machiavelli does not only draw the prince’s attention to the temporal dimension, he also asks him to think of the affairs of his state, from conquest to maintenance, in terms of appearances. Commentators on The Prince have rightly emphasized that, from chapters 15–21, the text encourages the prince to cultivate a certain image of himself, in spite of his character. But he also asks the prince to try to go beyond appearances. For some readers, The Prince teaches a prince rst and foremost how to deceive people by providing them with an image that will impress them, seduce them, and build attachments from which the prince can draw his own personal advantages. But, in chapter 17, Machiavelli also offers this astonishing portrait of men in general: Because we can say this about men in general: They are ungrateful, changeable, simulators and dissimulators, runaways in danger, eager for gain; while you do well by them they are all yours; they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, their children, as was said above, when need is far off; but when it comes near you, they turn about.14

In the midst of men, the prince is therefore in danger—and he must remind himself constantly of this fact—and the threat cannot be removed unless the prince knows how to pierce the façade of appearances that men place before him. Machiavelli uses three metaphors, all 13 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, Canto XIII. Ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 14 Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Trans. Allan Gilbert. Vol. One (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 62.

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based on the senses, to describe the quality that is required for a prince to succeed in this enterprise. In one, he distinguishes between two ways of seeing—one which focuses on appearances, and another that sees beyond them and captures things better, as the powerful do or as does a good doctor. In another, he speaks of being able to detect the odor of poison in something sweet smelling. Finally, he focuses on the difference between seeing and touching, stating that those who know how to use their sense of touch can penetrate beyond appearances. If the prince is in danger, his subjects are deceived by him when, in the same way, he projects a veil of appearance. This is necessary for the prince to conquer and to maintain power. He could do neither if the people did not form an attachment to him. But, this attachment is built on the manifestation of certain qualities to which men are sensitive and which create the prince’s reputation. The effectiveness of this image is guaranteed by the fact that very few men know how to “touch”: they are simulators and dissimulators, but there are very few of them who can actually penetrate beyond appearances. Since a prince cannot possess every quality that is necessary for conquest and maintenance of power, he must cultivate for himself an image that will make it appear that he does indeed possess these qualities. Machiavelli, in this way, is asking the prince to think about his actions in terms of the kind of qualities they will demonstrate, without considering what they might hide. A prince’s actions therefore are inscribed in a realm of appearances wherein the prince must tend to the image that will give rise to his reputation. Determining what reputation is appropriate to conquest and to the maintenance of power is one of the aspects of The Prince that most clearly reveals its polemical character. In chapter 15, Machiavelli quickly divests himself of the opposition between good and bad qualities, as it has been understood in Ciceronian, Christian, or Humanist terms, in order to treat qualities exclusively from the point of view of their contribution to a prince’s ability for conquest and rule. As he does this, he introduces duration as an essential consideration. Thus, it is sometimes better to cultivate a bad reputation for parsimony, when it is the better way to maintain power, than a reputation for liberality— continuous and indiscriminate spending reduces resources and forces excessive taxation on subjects in times of war if the coffers go bare. On the other hand, parsimony allows the wealth of the principality to grow and helps the prince to avoid engendering hatred in his subjects

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by overly burdensome taxes. Inversely, one should not accept every possible kind of bad reputation. To be considered a prince of little religion is harmful (chapter 18), for example. Between a good reputation and a bad reputation, the prince must know how to choose prudently and variously according to circumstances. Finally, the prince must know that a reputation that is favorable to conquest and to rule is not exclusively the product of duration. It relies on great deeds and timely examples. These latter allow a prince to maintain his status, to inspire admiration and, in doing so (as Machiavelli suggests in chapter 24) to transcend the effects of the former establishment within a state. Through valiant acts, a prince attains a reputation for strength, courage, and power which mirrors the effects of the former establishment on his subjects. To focus the prince on the temporal dimension, to ask him to count only on his own strength and the strength of his state, to show him the truth of things behind their appearances while teaching him not to have faith in appearances: for what purpose has Machiavelli taken the trouble to compose these reections, which are the product of both his experiences and his study? In his eyes, beyond his desire to re-establish himself in government, writing this work was made necessary by the state of Italy. Its need for a prince is pointed out unambiguously in the nal chapter. Specically, Italy needs a prince who will know how to heal its wounds and how to build a state on a solid foundation. In other words, Italy needs a prince who is both a physician and an architect. If we spend too much time focusing on the kind of prince that is not endorsed by Machiavelli—the virtuous prince (in the moral sense of the term), God’s agent on earth, etc.—we could lose sight of the positive attributes of the Machiavellian prince. Most notably, the quality of “virtù” is attached to this prince, and Machiavelli deploys a dense array of other metaphors and comparisons that link the prince to the physician who prevents illness or cures it, to architects, and to builders. The founder of a state—whether he creates it or takes control over it at a moment when it is in ruins—is the object par excellence of Machiavellian praise. Such praise is particularly explicit in the 1520 text A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence, written after the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici: “I believe the greatest honor possible for men to have is that willingly given them by their native cities; I believe the greatest good to be done and the most pleasing to God is that which one does to one’s native city. Besides this, no man is so much exalted by any act of his as are those men who have with laws and with institutions

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remodeled republics and kingdoms.”15 Without pretending that this text is an a posteriori clarication of Machiavelli’s intentions in The Prince, we can nonetheless point out that, in chapter 26, he uses these sentiments to name such a reformer. This perspective allows us to respond to two questions of interpretation. First, what is the relationship of The Prince to The Discourses? We should reafrm that Machiavelli does not have a split personality, à la Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. His writings on principalities and The Discourses are addressing a similar question: the future of the city of Florence and the means to enact civil and military reforms in a context that has been more and more disturbed by foreign invasions, civil dissent, and the corruption of citizens. A quick look at chapter I, 18 of The Discourses may be of help in this connection. In this chapter, Machiavelli undertakes what one might call an experiment in political thinking. Here, he inquires about how a city can restore its freedom or establish it depending on its level of corruption. In a situation of extreme corruption, even a republican city will need to await the arrival of an energetic individual who is capable of violence. Becoming prince, this person could restore order to the city and clean up the sources of corruption. From this chapter, one could venture the hypothesis that Machiavelli splits off the question of how rule of the city is maintained. Machiavelli is republican so long as it is possible to safeguard a free form of government. But once the course of events makes that impossible, he focuses rst and foremost on safeguarding the city itself. In the rst case, the two meanings of “libertá”—independence with respect to a source of authority and power from outside the city, and republican form of government—are united. In the second, they are separated. One must save what can be saved; if the government can’t be saved, at least the independence of the city must be. With The Prince, we nd ourselves in the second scenario. There is no time to regret the loss of the republic and no reason to expect that a prince who has just saved the city will simply slip back into the background. In this situation, there is less concern for corruption and dissent among citizens and much more for the threat of invasion and defeat. Nonetheless, Italy’s unfortunate circumstance, which does in fact result from corruption and disunion, requires the same sort of intervention by a single man, the prince. Machiavelli believes that one man alone, who is energetic,

15

Ibid., 113–114.

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courageous, violent, far-sighted, and prudent, is better suited to succeeding in founding or re-founding a city than are many men together, as he makes clear in The Discourses.16 In this way, far from being in opposition, The Prince and The Discourses together complete a reection on the conditions and modalities for reforming cities and their forms of government. From this, we can see clearly Machiavelli’s desire to construct The Prince as a piece of persuasive rhetoric. Whether we can see the basis for the text’s composition in Cicero’s De inventione, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the works of Quintillien, as Mr. Viroli does, is an open question.17 We can certainly recognize some gures of roman style—such as the exordium in the Dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and the exhortatio in the nal chapter—but we do not see in the succession of chapters a traditional rhetorical structure. As we look for a structure to the work, we discover that the process that was announced at the beginning is not followed past chapter 11, after which the text is composed of sections which are relatively independent from each other. Links are made between them by recalling subject matter that was treated earlier or by repeating subject matter and treating it from a different perspective or point of view. It appears most evident that Machiavelli’s desire to persuade can be found more in the character of the text than in its structure. The Prince is, as Leo Strauss has said, “a combat text.”18 Of course, Machiavelli the writer does not nd himself in the same position as the captain orator described by Fabrizio Colonna in book IV of the Art of War: he is not addressing a crowd of soldiers to persuade them to go into battle or to incite their courage. But, he is not far from that position. His task also is to persuade a prince to go to war and to inspire in him the will to ght. Chapter 26 is explicitly addressed to leaders and not to Italy. Leaders are the ones who are failing to heed the call; courage is not what is failing Italy. That the call to liberate Italy is made in a specic chapter should not lead us to separate off the militant tone of Machiavelli’s analysis of the conditions for action. On the contrary, Machiavelli’s appeal depends on this kind of analysis. From this point of view, it is remarkable that his analysis has a polemical character. If 16

Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Chapter 3, “The Power of Words.” Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 18 Leo Strauss, Pensées sur Machiavel (Paris: Payot, 1982). 17

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his inquiry takes a twist or turn after an objection or a question, this is because Machiavelli shares with historians, chroniclers, retired political actors, rich merchants who worry about the future of their city, even with religious agents such as Savonarola, the same preoccupation: how to understand the events that have occurred in Italy since 1494; how to reveal the cause of the various defeats; and how to show the way out of civil and military crisis. He does not share with them, however, agreement on the means for coming to grips with these things or for creating a project of reform or re-founding.

Bibliography Atkinson, James B., and David Sices, ed. and trans. Machiavelli and his Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Paradiso. Ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Arendt, Hannah. Juger: Sur la philosophie politique de Kant. Trans. M. Revault d’Allones. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Benier, R. “H. Arendt et la faculté de juger.” Juger: Sur la philosophie politique de Kant. Trans. M. Revault d’Allones. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Guicciardini, Francesco. Selected Writings. Ed. Cecil Grayson, trans. Margaret Grayson. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Kojève, Alexander. “Tyrannie et sagesse.” Leo Strauss, De la tyrannie. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Trans. Allan Gilbert. Vol. One. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965. Matucci, Andrea. Machiavelli nella storiograa orentina: Per la storia di une genere letterario. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1991. Pascal, Blaise. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Senellart, Michel. Machiavélisme et raison d’État. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. Sfez, Gérald. Machiavel, la politique du moindre mal. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. ——. Machiavel, Le Prince sans qualities. Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998. Strauss, Leo. Pensées sur Machiavel. Paris: Payot, 1982. Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

MACHIAVELLI’S BURDEN: THE PRINCE AS LITERARY TEXT Charles D. Tarlton

Hence, if you look for a man’s burden, you will nd the principle that reveals the structure of his unburdening. . . . Kenneth Burke1 I did it my own self to gratify. John Bunyon2

Some time after The Prince had been composed and had circulated in manuscript among Machiavelli’s friends, he wrote the proem or dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici. With the text before him, Machiavelli tried to capture for Lorenzo (and whoever else might read it) the sense and purpose of what he had written, intimating just what was most important about the little gift he was sending. When we examine this belated introduction carefully, three major and tightly interrelated moments are most conspicuous: 1) the problematic relation between political ability (knowledge and experience) and success, 2) the awkwardness, irony, and unfairness of social and political rank, and 3) fortuna’s decisive, unpredictable, and deliberate interference in human affairs. In the months of 1513, post res perditas, when he was writing The Prince, guilt and dejection over his sudden calamity lay heavily on his mind. He had fallen, in a shockingly short time, from the heights of success (as represented by the remarks of a friend, in 1509, who had praised him excessively for his militia’s brilliant showing at Pisa and compared him to Quintus Fabius Maximus),3 to become the broken and humiliated outcast who could write, in a letter in 1513, that “it is a miracle

1 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 92. 2 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Vol. XV, Part 1, The Author’s Apology for his Book. The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001), www.bartleby.com/15/1/ [14 February 2006]. 3 James B. Atkinson and David Sices, trans. and ed., Machiavelli and His Friends, Their Personal Correspondence (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), hereinafter, Correspondence, Letter 167.

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that I am alive, because my post was taken from me and I was about to lose my life . . . I have had to endure all sorts of other evils, both prison and other kinds.”4 In such situations, human beings need to understand what has happened to them, to give it a name, and, nearly as often, nd some means for distancing themselves from its full implications or so softening those implications that they can salvage the condence to go on. Some might sacrice themselves in suicidal attempts at revenge, or try to quiet the murmuring that dogs them by acts of mad daring. Machiavelli, however, for all his familiarity with the world of violent men, was himself much gentler—a poet, a dramatist, a writer. The world of imagination promised the best way for him to seek deliverance from his agony. How better to achieve that than by writing a pithy, eccentric, and highly personal treatise on politics, at the center of which he could situate an imaginary and upstart political innovator who thrusts himself destructively into the middle of Italian politics? Such a vehicle could serve, moreover, as a setting in which he might dream a highly symbolic drama in which the ironies that plagued his days could be re-staged, assaulted, and overcome. Poetry might let him invent just the cast of surrogates (men and actions) in terms of which he might relive and improve his political life.5 The Prince is an episodic text, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress with this difference—the characters who rise up and drift away in The Prince can be viewed as recurrences of a single persona; let us call him Il principe. He is a fantasy political actor who, transmuting from chapter to chapter, adopts various roles and performs, as it were, in the shifting scenes at the center of each chapter. On the surface, Machiavelli uses the names of actual historical princes in crucial places, but he has also brought in the abstract idea of a prince—some prince, any 4

Correspondence, Letter 214. There is a large and growing literature that looks at Machiavelli’s The Prince from the point of view of literature rather than political science proper. Those writings that I have found most useful include in this connection are: Thomas M. Greene, “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Prince,” Yale French Studies 67 (1984), 57–71; Michael McCanles, The Discourse of “Il Principe,” (Malibu: Udena, 1983); Eugene Garver, “Machiavelli’s The Prince: A Neglected Rhetorical Classic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 (1980), 99–120; Martin Coyle, ed., Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince:” New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), especially John Parkin, “Dialogue in The Prince”; John M. Najemy, “Language and The Prince”; Andrew Mousley, “The Prince and Textual Politics”; and all of the essays in Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn, eds., Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). 5

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prince, or all princes—to every chapter of The Prince. They appear as the subjects of narrative fragments of varying length, the stories of Il principe’s actions which are surrounded, in turn, by maxims, rules, and sweeping theoretical statements. Everything takes on the look of a story, fable, or parable, and tucked in amidst the more obvious stories, we nd prose passages that fasten the larger and more obviously narrative parts together. Not exactly story or exposition, these passages seem to fuse theory and story in a single form; the actors, scenes, and actions have been abstracted or typied. Consider, for example: Men who become rulers by prowess similar to theirs acquire their principalities with difculty but hold them with ease. The difculties they encounter in acquiring their principalities arise partly because of the new institutions and laws they are forced to introduce in founding the state and making themselves secure (20–21).

There is plenty of drama here, albeit slowed down and smoothed over. There may be no names or specic places, no dates or times, but there is story. We can nd, of course, different possible degrees of specicity in any narrative form. The expression “we ght,” tells a story in germ. “We will have to ght,” says a little more. “We, my citizens and I, will have to ght the enemy relentlessly, in the name of God,” carries us a lot farther along. Nevertheless, action (and, by implication), actors, setting, purpose, and outcome are present in all three. The same is true for virtually all of The Prince as a text; the fragments we encounter are pieces of the symbolic action of The Prince, which, in turn, we might then re-entitle, “The picaresque adventures of Il principe,” a swashbuckler who (oddly) very seldom wins, sometimes fails utterly, but mostly achieves only a sort of begrudging-near success. Despite that, Il principe, leaping from scene to scene, is always struggling to nd his way through the labyrinth of historical examples, precepts, rules, maxims, and theories that dene his labors. Machiavelli rst introduces this princely apparition in chapter 2, hesitating even to name the menace that rose up to threaten hereditary princes, and for which no amount of protection was sufcient. He here identies Il principe, indirectly, only as “an extraordinary and inordinate force” (8). As the ‘new prince,’ Il principe appears in a succession of dramatic political situations (conquering a neighboring kingdom, liberating an enslaved people, ousting an established prince and clinging to his place, rushing about to create his military foundations “on

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the run,” murdering or persuading his way into power, and the like) and, in acting out the underlying motif in each, he carries on, in Machiavelli’s name, as it were, the latter’s effort to come to terms with the apprehensions underpinning his own tragic fate. In the unfolding of The Prince, we can follow Machiavelli’s symbolic encounters with such key and troubling personal questions as: how anyone with such superb political perception could nevertheless fail at a crucial juncture; how, despite that inherent superiority, he had always been required to bow and scrape; and how fortuna had vindictively burst upon the scene to turn all his accomplishments to dust. 1. His prowess was such, even when he was an ordinary citizen, that his biographer wrote: “that he required nothing to be a prince but a princedom” (22). Machiavelli deeply felt, at least half of the time, that knowledge and experience ought to lead to success. His own knowledge had failed him (and Florence), and it was just those ideas in which he had put the most faith, especially the idea of the militia, the citizen army, that had let him down most ruinously. Right across the text of The Prince, in story after story, these problems are performed and the performances minutely examined to nd alternative and exonerating explanations. Machiavelli was engrossed here in the explanation of loss (we might even think of success, in The Prince, as but the avoidance of loss). Nothing, Machiavelli wrote, was so “dear to me or that I value as much as my understanding of the deeds of great men, won by me from long acquaintance with contemporary affairs and a continuous study of the ancient world” (3). The knowledge and experience that he was offering Lorenzo was so powerful, Machiavelli implies, that he could nonchalantly promise that “if he carefully observes the rules I have given above, a new prince will appear to have been long established and will quickly become more safe and secure in his government than if he had been ruling his state for a long time” (77). Knowledge of the right action to take was the guarantee of success, and the proof of that lay in the successes of the great leaders of the past, particularly the Romans; one need only study “the actions of eminent men to see how they conducted themselves during war and to discover the reasons for their victories or their defeats, so that he can avoid the latter and imitate the former” (49). Success, on at least one level of the text of The Prince, results from political actions or policy being in accord with the times. The knowl-

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edge best suited to the achieving of success, then, was knowing what action would be most suitable to the achieving of one’s goals in some particular situation. History provided examples of success and failure, models of completed actions in which the goals, the settings, the actions themselves, and their outcomes are concluded. It is clear in these examples whether the historical actor had done the right thing or not, simply because he was successful or not. In the present, you need only model your actions on those of successful past actors, who had pursued goals like yours, in circumstances like yours. “So a prudent man must always follow in the footsteps of great men,” Machiavelli wrote, “and imitate those who have been outstanding” (19). A closer reading of these and other passages, however, reveals a twist that calls such a straightforward summing into question. The emulative method, Machiavelli hints here and there, is not really so undemanding. In fact, men do naturally imitate those who have been victorious, although it is most often done, he also said, despite the fact that most men could not really reach as high or as far as those truly great. This was all right, because even when “his own prowess fails to compare with theirs, at least it has an air (odore) of greatness about it” (19). One feels something in common with the great men of the past, he seems to have said, as if comforting someone, even if that resemblance is an illusion. Had we been there to hear him say that, how could we have doubted for a second that he was talking about his own experience? His was a knowledge gained painfully, he had told us, and, in large part, “from a long acquaintance with contemporary affairs and a continuous study of the ancient world” (3). He was, perhaps, like one of those “eminent men” of the past, who, in his pursuit of historical successes to copy, studied “history so that he [could] do what eminent men have done before him: taken as their model some historical gure who has been praised and honoured; and always kept his deeds and actions before them” (49). Machiavelli doubtless had let himself fantasize in this way about the parallels between his own knowledge and ability and those of the greatest princes, both historical and contemporary. However, he had also come to realize that the distance between himself and, say, Caesar or Severus or Hiero, was too great to surmount by merely feeling the resemblance or snifng the odore. In any event, it is clear that from the outset he would both present this historical-imitative method as his own (made available, of course, in the predigested form that Machiavelli

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had “very diligently analyzed and pondered . . . and summarized” in his “little book” (3)) and, at the same time, hedge his bets, acknowledging that the difculty any prince “encounters in maintaining his rule is more or less serious insofar as he is more or less able” (19). In any case, the troublesome question here remains how someone who so well “knew” the mysteries of the political process (as Machiavelli claims he did) could have failed so abjectly. He remains undecided between the view that knowledge and experience are the means to success, on the one hand, and the realization, on the other, that such a connection may only be illusory, the result merely of overestimating one’s own capacities. As a result, the text strains in the effort to salvage his own ability, and to show that, if he did fail, it was not for lack of knowing what to do. Machiavelli beseeched Lorenzo to “realize the extent to which, undeservedly, I have to endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune” (3). Undeservedly, because all he had ever done, he had done for his country and to the best of his considerable ability. Il principe, having known the security of the publicly beloved hereditary princedom, whose power and security demanded only that he be “reasonably assiduous” and “not neglect the institutions founded by one’s ancestors,” is suddenly catapulted into the role of the “new prince,” where “difculties do arise” (7–8). Machiavelli focused the bulk of his attention on two new princes who failed—Louis XII, the king of France, and Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. The few successful new princes who do appear—Ferdinand of Aragon, Agathocles the Syracusan, Pope Julius II, and the Roman emperor Severus—become mere caricatures, their successes attributed mainly to a kind of cunning or instinctive and violent capacity to act without caution. Louis XII and Cesare Borgia, however, stood in important, if different, relations to the rules of politics. The actions of the former illuminated those rules in the breach; the latter was an original, whose actions were so dazzling they actually brought new rules into existence. Nevertheless, they both failed. We meet Louis XII in Chapter 3, in the midst of his ill-fated foray into Lombardy and the Duchy of Milan. Louis rolled into Italy with his army, conquered Milan, helped Cesare Borgia’s campaign in the Romagna, subjugated the Kingdom of Naples with the help of Ferdinand of Aragon, was opposed by Pope Julius II and the Holy League, and was eventually driven from Italy. Already a powerful king, but eager to restore an old claim and capture a foothold in northern Italy, Louis is used by Machiavelli to demonstrate the fate of the ‘insufcient prince.’

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The Prince has cast Louis’s story in a logic of contrariety, in which his actions come into view entirely in the form of mistaken strategies, rules manifested in the negative. Louis had, therefore, made these ve mistakes: he had destroyed the weaker powers; increased the power of someone already powerful in Italy; brought into that country a very powerful foreigner; stayed away from Italy himself; failed to establish settlements there. Even these mistakes, if he had lived, need not have been fatal if there had not been a sixth: his dispossessing the Venetians of their state (14).

Louis’s faltering is related with an obvious moral. The story is prefaced by commemoration of the successes of the Romans in similar kinds of invasions, from which successes Machiavelli abstracts a structure of political rules, which, inside out, Louis’s actions systematically violate. Masquerading as Louis, Il principe acts out his tragic through-line, hunting down the connection between ability and political success. Machiavelli’s message is clear. The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes (14).

We readily understand Machiavelli’s indignation here; in the rst place, Louis’s inexcusable failure had ultimately (if unwittingly) set in motion the series of events that led directly to Machiavelli’s own catastrophe. The French failure to impede the objectives of Ferdinand and Julius II deposited the Spanish army (and the Medici) on Florence’s doorstep. Nevertheless, Louis’s desire to acquire more was certainly understandable, and Machiavelli insists, “I do not mean to condemn the course of action taken by the king” (13). At rst, Louis only did what circumstances forced him to do. However, blame attaches to failure, in this connection, when the ambition is not rooted in a realistic expectation. France, under Louis, blindly undertook more than she had the resources to accomplish. In the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court of appeal, one judges by the result. So let a prince set about the task of conquering, and maintaining his state; his methods will always be judged honorable and will be universally praised (58).

At the same time, Machiavelli cannot let go of the obviously (and personally) expedient view that even where failure and loss are involved,

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something might yet be salvaged if it can be shown that the actor had the requisite knowledge and experience. Even though Louis had made mistake after mistake (ve, to begin with), Machiavelli remarked that he could have rescued himself, if he just had not made the sixth mistake (which was to “help another become powerful”).6 Louis, who already had the princedom, was, perhaps, no real prince because he squandered his magnicent advantages of wealth, power, armies, and friends, whereas Machiavelli, like Hiero, had all along had the requisite ability but languished only for the lack of stuff. As if to leave no doubt about the closeness of this episode to Machiavelli’s own heart, he intrudes himself, in the persona of the author, into the text at the end of the chapter. Repeating the central lesson: King Louis, therefore, lost Lombardy because he observed none of the rules observed by others who have seized countries and determined to hold on to them. There is nothing fantastic about this, it is very commonplace and reasonable. I had a word on this subject with Rouen, at Nantes, when Valentino (as Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander, was popularly called) was occupying the Romagna (15).

The Italians knew nothing of War, the Archbishop of Rouen had said to Machiavelli, to which he had replied, as he tells us, that the French knew nothing of statecraft. They knew nothing of what Machiavelli knew so well; and, so, they lost. Cesare Borgia, on the other hand, was Machiavelli’s choice as the most imitable of princes, who nevertheless also failed. If Machiavelli traced Louis’s failure to his doing the opposite of what ought to be done, he could not do the same to Cesare Borgia. Though Borgia was, perhaps, an even more complete failure than Louis, Machiavelli insisted that he “was right in putting him forward as an example for all those who have acquired power through good fortune and the arms of others” (27). Borgia’s story is the most fully realized narrative in The Prince, and the lessons Machiavelli drew from it reveal how important that story was to his purposes in the book. The arc of Cesare’s brief political career (“having summed up all that the duke did” (27)) mirrors Machiavelli’s own concerns in The Prince, and the summary of the lessons to be learned from Borgia reads like a synopsis of the book. 6 This idea of a continuously deferrable outcome was a crucial one for Machiavelli. Its importance in the overall structure of The Prince is developed in Charles D. Tarlton, “Machiavelli’s The Prince as Memoir,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 46, 1 (Spring, 2004), 1–19.

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So a new prince cannot nd more recent examples than those set by the duke, if he thinks it is necessary to secure himself against his enemies, win friends, conquer either by force or by stratagem, make himself both loved and feared by his subjects, followed and respected by his soldiers, if he determines to destroy those who can and will injure him, to reform ancient institutions, be severe yet loved, magnanimous and generous, and if he decides to destroy disloyal troops and create a new standing army, maintaining such relations with kings and princes that they have either to help him graciously or go carefully in doing him harm (28).

The abridgment of Borgia’s deeds epitomizes the whole of The Prince; the lessons reach back to the earliest chapters and stretch forward to the conclusions. If we would know the underlying romance of Il principe, we must see him here in Cesare Borgia’s sad shoes. Moreover, remaining alert for signs of Machiavelli’s own symbolic investment in all that happens, we can notice how very evocatively he links his own misfortunes with Borgia’s by employing parallel verbal structures to name their common fates; thus, his own grief he attributed to “una grande e continua malignità di fortuna (great and continuous misfortune), while Borgia, he said, suffered from una estraordinaria et extreme malignità di fortuna (extraordinary and extreme misfortune).”7 Because Borgia was one who made “the journey” [to political power] “as if [he] had wings,” his problems only began the moment he alighted. Being dependent on his father and the king of France for his position, he stood little chance of lasting success unless, as the current textual embodiment of Il principe, he proved to be one of those princes of “such prowess that overnight they can learn how to preserve what fortune has suddenly tossed in to their laps, and unless they can then lay foundations such as other princes would have already been building on” (22–23). For the greater part of Borgia’s short career, this proved to be quite easy; where Louis’s failure had been traceable to his ignorance of what the Romans and others before him had known so well (thus, conrming ironically Machiavelli’s linking of ability with success), Borgia’s impressive early successes are said to grow out of his instinctive grasp of what was, in virtually any circumstances, the right and necessary thing to do. Machiavelli’s Borgia neither drew on the past nor imitated anyone; he was, as it were, an originator of strategies, maneuvers that might later become maxims to guide others.

7

Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe e Discorsi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1960), 14, 35.

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Borgia was the only political actor in The Prince whose political acumen is portrayed as being on a par with the Romans. Both just somehow seemed to know what to do, and both eventually failed for the same reason. The Romans, who always “saw when troubles were coming” (12), failed, in the end, to read the consequences of hiring Goth mercenaries, and it “was the start of the downfall of the Roman empire” (47). Borgia, similarly, “had laid excellent foundations for his future power,” but (and, here, as was the case discussing Louis, Machiavelli again intrudes his own persona into the text, talking with Borgia himself ) he failed to anticipate a sudden damaging turn of events. If when Alexander died, he had been well himself, everything would have been easy for him. And he himself said to me, the day Julius II was elected, that he had thought of everything that could happen when his father died, and found a remedy for everything except that he never thought that when he did so he himself would also be at the point of death. (27)

For Machiavelli the key to the story of Il principe as Borgia, however, resides in its essential ambiguity. Borgia was both the unsuspecting victim of fortuna and someone who made a mistake that “was the cause of his ultimate ruin” (28). Machiavelli’s text remains indeterminate (I almost said ‘irresolute’) in this connection, I suspect, because he remains equally uncertain regarding his own blamelessness for his own fate. Fortuna, however compelling as an explanation, was also too convenient, too apologetic. Either both of them, he and Borgia, so skilled and knowing and so closely coupled in the text of The Prince, were responsible for what happened to them, or they were not. Fortuna, in Chapter 6 of the text, was as yet insufciently developed to bridge between the poles of this duality, and was too entirely restricted to the question of one’s opportunity; we have to wait for the penultimate chapter to encounter fortuna as caprice and vindictiveness. For the moment, we can speculate, however, that Machiavelli, having looked in the mirror and seen the reected resemblance to Cesare, had already begun to conclude that “fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves” (79). No more than a fty-fty chance, regardless how well one has prepared one’s forces, are not good odds. The predicament of Il principe, as represented in the carefully wrought stories of Louis and Borgia, designates the cathartic and strategic sleight of hand by which Machiavelli tried to rise above his own sense of self-reproach. If lack of understanding could fell so powerful a king as

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Louis, and if someone as clever and resourceful as Borgia, through no fault of his own, could nevertheless come to a bad end, then Machiavelli, lacking adequate resources and armed only with his clear grasp of politics might be pardoned for not saving himself. 2. In this case, he may well be given good advice, but he would not last long because the man who governs him would soon deprive him of his state (76–77). Either you are already a prince, or you are on the way to becoming one (52). Hierarchy, as Kenneth Burke reminded us, is always awkward and embarrassing. Discourse across the gulfs that dene rank is generally difcult and poignant; the very principle that elevates one over another carries in it, by implication, the suggestion and the possibility of their reversal. In his address to Lorenzo, Machiavelli was so humble, excusing in advance any inadvertent presumptuousness that might have found its way into his writing. He admitted to being a man of “low and humble status,” living in “low-lying regions,” whereas Lorenzo, he acknowledged, was a prince, living on a “lofty peak.” Between these expressions of hair-tugging deference, Machiavelli insinuates a subversive metaphor based on the tactics of map makers, who, when they “are sketching the landscape put themselves down in the plain to study the mountains and the highlands, and to study the low-lying land they put themselves high on the mountains.” Not wanting his point to be missed, he quickly explains that “to comprehend fully the nature of the people, one must be a prince, and to comprehend fully the nature of princes, one must be an ordinary citizen” (4). Each rank, the high and the low, requires the perspective of the other to recognize itself; that is an intense symbiosis. Proceeding into the text of The Prince proper, it is hard not to cast a glance back; there was something sarcastic in that display of subservience, just subtle enough not to be missed. From chapter 3 through chapter 8, Il principe stood alone; “one must urgently arrange matters so that when they [the populace] no longer believe they can be made to believe by force” (21). The distance, difference, and friction between ruler and people in those early chapters were vast and decisive. Machiavelli’s dramatizations of Il principe were quite cold-blooded and stark. The people were constrained in the narrowest roles: they invited the conqueror in, but were inevitably disappointed in the result; they clung to their old rulers and were therefore slaughtered;

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or they attacked and overthrew pusillanimous new princes and fell in line with wise, resolute, and resourceful ones. In every case, however, the characters played by Il principe stood diametrically opposed to the people; the rhetorical structure of hierarchy was centered on command and obedience. None of the stories point in a single direction. Over against the cold mechanistic clanking of Il principe’s arrival on the scene, there is a constant, softer, but no less steady drumbeat of egalitarian sentiment. We already know that the (all but mystical) source of political wisdom was always the Romans (of the Republic, that is); their collective and independent organization assured them wise leaders and noble policies. The idea of republics, as a general rule, constituted a kind of poison pill to Il principe: “Whoever becomes the master of a city accustomed to freedom, and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed himself ” (18). They remain a constant threat despite Il principe’s best efforts because “the memory of their ancient liberty does not and cannot let them rest” (19). Machiavelli’s predilection for republics is never completely absent from The Prince. Chapter 8 had narrated the crimes of two murderous princes (the one, Agathocles, successful, the other, Oliverotto da Fermo, not) and extolled the merit of expeditious cruelty, but the adventures of Il principe resume in earnest in Chapter 9, which tells the story of the principatu civili (the constitutional or civil prince, with its echoes of community), relating how an ordinary private citizen rises to the rank of prince on a wave of popular or aristocratic emotion. In the course of this prince’s circuitous ways to power, Machiavelli explores the multifarious forms of social and political rank. Machiavelli had suffered routinely from the hostility of those above him in both political authority and social status; “I was born in poverty,” he wrote to Francesco Vettori shortly after being released from jail, “and at an early age learned how to scrimp rather than to thrive.”8 Therefore, it is with some interest that we watch him deconstruct the sociological structure of domination. All states were, at the core, divided between the people and the nobles, the former and largest group wanting only not to be oppressed, and the latter seeking only to oppress. Machiavelli’s bias here is quite clear. These divisions within all cities can lead to any of three outcomes—a principality (when either the nobles or the people, out of fear of the

8

Correspondence, Letter 206.

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other side, elevate one of their own and support his bid for power), a republic (when the conict is channeled into and through public institutions and laws), and anarchy (when the conict simply rages on). Machiavelli collapses the two logical princely possibilities into one; the man who becomes a prince through the encouragement of the nobles will eventually have to turn on them (because the nobles are always themselves ambitious and, therefore, dangerous) and seek the support of the people. “Moreover,” he adds, “a prince can never make himself safe against a hostile people: there are too many of them” (33). The mix is uid and risky, up and down, forever alternating. The people, fearful and disorganized, are looking only for safety; the nobles, some pusillanimous and able to be manipulated, the others ambitious and shifty, seek power and the opportunity to lord it over the populace. Il principe has to weave his way through an intricate web of competing and mutually suspicious forces. In the end, however, the greatest stability is gained by siding with the people against the nobles. Machiavelli dismisses those who decry the political imsiness of the people’s loyalty (“Let no one contradict this opinion of mine with that trite proverb, that he who builds on the people builds on mud”) (34), and takes the people’s side against the nobles. Crucially, however, the victory of the people that this chapter envisions requires a miraculous transformation of Il principe from an opportunistic political adventurer into an archetypal hero-prince. But if it is a prince who builds his power on the people, one who can command and is a man of courage, who does not despair in adversity, who does not fail to take precautions, and who wins general allegiance by his personal qualities and the institutions he establishes, he will never be let down by the people; and he will be found to have established his power securely (35).

Rank is often the goal and consequence of ambition (when it is not inherited, of course), so Machiavelli appends a little coda to his story of the popularly chosen prince. Commonly, even in the case of the paragon he has just described, Il principe is not content with a power that, like the one praised above, might have a reciprocal quality about it. Craving more than mere respect, security, and harmony, some potential princes will inevitably attempt to seize absolute power, to raise themselves above even the people’s scrutiny. They enter a morass, however, through which Machiavelli, apparently, cannot imagine a successful passage. A maelstrom of reaction, resistance, betrayal, danger, and confusion is all that awaits such immoderation.

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The petty motives that underpin the behavior of the upper classes and prevent the ordering of a prosperous and optimistic society (something, he will insist later on, that ought to be the goal of any proper prince) are banished by Il principe in the guise of this civil prince. Real politics carries us over and beyond small-minded purposes, Machiavelli seems to be saying, and it allows the man of virtue and skill to rise up and overturn the prevailing hierarchies. It is not difcult to see the implications for Lorenzo (and any others who might have lorded it over Machiavelli). No one, he warns, is ever permanently ensconced in their pinnacles. The Prince abruptly changes subject in Chapter 15; Machiavelli turns away from the overt violence of conquests and toward the sublimated violence of artice. Il principe moves about, trying on various masks, donning disguises, and practicing strange voices. He is a prince performing before an audience of the people because princes, we are told, “are more exposed to view . . . and are judged for various qualities which earn them either praise or condemnation” (50). Of these many vices and virtues, there are some that “everyone will agree that it would be most laudable if a prince” (50 –51) possessed them; there are others that an astute prince can never more than pretend to have. He must know the difference between ‘moral actions’ that will cost him his position, and those which, to the delight of the moralizing crowd, he can indulge to the limit. As an actor, Il principe must resist dragging his off-stage personality on to the boards; in fact, as Machiavelli insists, he probably ought not to have an off-stage personality at all, but “he should have a exible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate” (57). Il principe’s goal now is to capture the good will of the people, an objective beyond the reach of the crude tactics of war and conquest (the tools of the “lion”). He requires the wiles of the “fox” to keep himself always before the eyes of public, yet always out of sight. “Men in general judge by their eyes,” Machiavelli wrote, “rather than by their hands; because, everyone is in a position to watch, few are in a position to come in close touch with you. . . . The common people are always impressed by appearances and results. In this context, there are only common people, and there is no leeway for the few when the many are rmly sustained” (58). The hierarchal pillar at the center of politics can be seen to lean a little, showing signs of instability. The prince comes down closer to the people, closer to resembling the people, to reect back to the people the expectations they themselves have about government. There can be no success if one is hated or contemned by the populace. The stage direc-

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tions for the part of Il principe increasingly require him to engineer the good will of the people; otherwise, “he must go in fear of everything and everyone” (61). “But, wait,” Il principe might say, “that’s all an illusion; behind the scene of those tricks, the prince is free to do what he wants.” One wonders, though, what could that be, that “what he wants,” if it were something that would not otherwise work on stage? Everything comes under the proscenium arch of public approval. Il principe, whose earliest roles had each required only the skills and determination of the innovator whose mind was set on conquering and maintaining a state, has by now become merely an instrument of that state, his every action now dedicated to holding its fragile constitution together. He has learned this ironic and valuable lesson in respect of hierarchy and rank: in symbiosis, there is little difference between tenant and host. It is the basis for social hope. 3. Their own indolence was to blame, because, having never imagined when times were quiet that they could change (and this is a common failing of mankind, never to anticipate a storm when the sea is calm), when adversity came their rst thoughts were of ight and not resistance (78). Il principe has arrived at a decisive moment. Behind him, amidst the now wavering certainties of the promised political mechanics, the predators are snifng and howling for his blood. Machiavelli’s general laws and maxims have come gradually to seem less and less certain; we repeatedly meet such caveats as, “it is impossible to give a nal verdict on any of these policies,” (67) and “here generalization is impossible” (69). Situations are no longer so easily categorized; as the saying goes, the devil is suddenly in the details. In front of Il principe, the quicksand of fortuna is waiting to suck him down. “I say that we see that some princes ourish one day and come to grief the next,” Machiavelli cautions, “without appearing to have changed in character or any other way” (80). What has brought this misfortune down upon our hero? The simple answer is that with all this emphasis on the past, we have been neglecting the future! “Time sweeps everything along,” Machiavelli had warned early on, foreshadowing (we now see) what was about to unfold, “and can bring good as well as evil, evil as well as good” (12). While the earliest escapades of Louis XII, Borgia, Agathocles, and the rest had gestured toward an undoubted connection between action and circumstances, the emphasis had always been on choosing the right action for whatever circumstances one happened to nd oneself.

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Political knowledge amounted to a kind of strategic calculus, in which knowledgeable actors plotted the vectors of cause and effect from situation to situation, comparing vital similarities and dissimilarities, for good measure, watching themselves in the historical mirror. Earlier, noting how Louis XII did none of the things that successful conquerors had done, and pressed to explain just how he knew what those rules were, Machiavelli had credited the Romans for having originated the model strategies and principles. Il principe now steps forward to ask: “How could they have always known what to do?” The answer is, weirdly, they could tell fortunes. In these instances, the Romans did what all wise rulers must: cope not only with present troubles but also with ones likely to arise in future, and assiduously forestall them. When trouble is sensed well in advance it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable (12).

Machiavelli, it seems, had all along been warning Il principe about the uncertainties of politics, even while uttering assurances that he knew its ins and outs. Maybe the “Romans saw when troubles were coming and always took counter-measures,” but these were more or less fantasy Romans, and Il principe and everyone else who has studied politics with any seriousness knows that nothing can safely be predicted, that no tactics are guaranteed, and that no victory is ever permanent. Still, if Machiavelli would insist that “political disorders can be quickly healed, if they are seen well in advance,” he still has to hedge his bets, and add that “only a prudent ruler has such foresight” (12). We have to wait until chapter 21, however, to nd out what Machiavelli means by prudence. Then no government should ever imagine that it can always adopt a safe course; rather, it should regard all possible courses of action as risky. This is the way things are: whenever one tries to escape one danger one runs into another. Prudence [ here it is] consists in being able to assess the nature of a particular threat and in accepting the lesser evil (73, emphasis added).

I wonder (and Il principe certainly wonders) whether we would have read very far beyond the opening passages of this book if Machiavelli had told us to begin with how little he really knew. When we eventually get to a fuller explication of fortuna in Chapter 25, the spotlight will be on Pope Julius II. The soldier pope’s success and his good fortuna were, of course, the other side of the coin from Machiavelli’s fall from grace, just as they had also canceled out Cesare Borgia’s good

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luck streak. Such observations are crucial to our understanding of The Prince as a symbolic action in which Machiavelli sought to name, encompass, and transcend the calamity in his life. In the rst place, I would argue that he had set out to excuse his own failure as something utterly beyond his control. Fortuna had worked its malice on Machiavelli just as it had victimized Cesare Borgia (and all those unnamed other princes who had counted wholly on fortuna). In this view, fortuna was whimsical, a capricious goddess raising men up, as Machiavelli had put it in his “Tercets on Fortune,” only to crash them down the harder. Fortuna exists literarily to exonerate us from all responsibility. In the Proem, Machiavelli had employed another, second strategy with respect to fortuna. Within the short compass of that brief introduction, we nd, linked together in an embarrassing pairing (virtually suggesting courtship), on the one hand, the cluster of Machiavelli (knowledge of politics, bad fortuna, low status (luoghi basso), the people) and, on the other hand, the cluster of Lorenzo (needing political knowledge, good fortuna, high status (sua altezza), prince). By the end of the book, as we shall see in the afterword, he had collapsed the differences between the two clusters, allowing the gure, Machiavelli, to go forward optimistically, in tandem with Lorenzo, in the now composite and heroic Il principe, metamorphosed into the savior of Italy. Before getting to that, however, the penultimate story in our adventures of Il principe nds our political adventurer weaving his way through fortuna’s obstacle course of shifting ratios among personal dispositions, circumstances, courses of action, and endings. “I say that we see some princes ourish one day and come to grief the next,” Machiavelli said, “without appearing to have changed in character or any other way” (80). In the midst of shifting circumstances, anyone whose actions remain always the same must eventually fail. By the same token (one would have supposed), anyone whose actions were simply wild, formless, and unpredictable would also run into trouble, eventually. Consider the options available to princes in their mad scramble to conquer and hold on to states. “One man proceeds with circumspection, another impetuously; one uses violence, another stratagem; one man goes about things patiently, another does the opposite; and yet everyone, for all this diversity of method, can reach his objective” (80). There are all kinds of princes who have succeeded, yet no one can say which of them followed the wisest course of action. But, wait, there’s more. “It can also be observed,” he goes on, “that with two circumspect men, one will achieve his end, the other not; and likewise two men succeed

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equally well with different methods, one of them being circumspect and the other impetuous” (80). We can see why there is so much confusion and inertia among the princes; they are irresolute and passive, perhaps, just because they cannot gure out what to do. Ah, but there is an answer. “This results,” Machiavelli assures us, “from nothing else except the extent to which their methods are or are not suited to the nature of the times” (80). Is this (by now, certainly) merely tautological conclusion really meant to reassure Il principe? I do not think so; but it is, I believe, meant to stretch out the question of what to do beyond the simple considerations of immediate success or failure. One can be doing the right thing for a long time, succeeding all over the place, and then, suddenly, and without anyone seeing it come, the very next action (say, trusting our beloved militia to hold out against an angry, hungry, and vengeful Spanish army, or believing that a lifetime of public service in which one always sought only the public good would by itself keep us beyond suspicion) we fall ignominiously on our faces. “This also explains why prosperity is ephemeral,” Machiavelli announced, pregnant with implication, “because if a man behaves with patience and circumspection and the time and circumstances are such that this method is called for, he will prosper; but if time and circumstances change he will be ruined because he does not change his policy” (80). Was it a failure of judgment or of nerve? Who could not see that there had to be a connection between our actions and our setting? We must all have something like a natural instinct to create just such balances. Failure here must reect a kind of aw, a weakness of character or intellect. Machiavelli’s next move, however, is to expand the area of the unexceptionable to accommodate just such failure. “Nor do we nd any man shrewd enough to know how to adapt his policy in this way” (80). No one knows how to do it; no one could have known how to do it; how could I have known how to do it; why would you blame me? Il principe strikes a deant pose. It is all perfectly reasonable, is it not?, simply a matter of no one being able to act in contradiction to his or her basic disposition, on the one hand, or, on the other, “having always prospered by proceeding one way, he cannot persuade himself to change” (80). Not even Cesare Borgia could surmount this natural law: He was a man of great courage and high intentions, and he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did; his plans were frustrated only because Alexander’s life was cut short and because of his own sickness (27).

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Moreover, even Julius II, who “was impetuous in everything . . . and found the time and circumstances so favourable to his way of proceeding that he always met with success . . . would have come to grief . . . if there had come a time when it was necessary for him to act with circumspection” (81). All of his deeds were of the same disconcerting nature, and all of them succeeded. We know, though, that he would have eventually failed (he did not, however, fail in time for it to do Machiavelli any good) because “he would never have acted other than in character” (81).9 Il principe remembers something that Machiavelli had said much earlier, namely, that the prince “should have a exible disposition” (57); he must be able to lie, kill, betray, torment, pretend, deceive, and hoard whenever his political position requires him to do so. However, this exibility seems mainly tactically moral; it is a matter of adopting whatever disguises will elicit the desired response from the populace who are always watching and commenting. It is a different thing entirely when Il principe is facing waves of previously unknown enemies coming up and into view over the horizon to attack him. Here exibility has to operate deeply within the truth of the prince’s psychology; he would have to be able to make himself over for real. What is lacking in all this talk of fortuna, therefore, is any explicit recommendation for how to act. We have heard before that Il principe “must read history, studying the actions of eminent men to see how they conducted themselves” (49), that when the ruler’s family “has been wiped out there is no one left to fear” (16–17), and that “there is no doubt that a prince’s greatness depends on his triumphing over difculties and opposition” (69). What is Machiavelli’s nal word about how to face fortuna? Just this: I conclude, therefore, that as fortune is changeable whereas men are obstinate in their ways, men prosper so long as fortune and policy are in accord, and when there is a clash they fail. I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her (81).

Audacity replaces ability against fortuna in the prescription now being written for Il principe. Machiavelli now only needed to show how he meant to use all this; turning away from the past, Il principe suddenly launches into a fantastic future.

9 Again, the idea of deferred success and failure. Time eventually brings everything.

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4. “As for the rest of the Italians uniting, you make me laugh; rst, there will never be any union in Italy that will do any good; even if all the leaders were united, that would be inadequate because the armies here are not worth a red cent.” 10 In Chapter 6, “Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others like them,” were introduced as examples of leaders so able that they do not seem to have had from fortune anything other than opportunity. Fortune, as it were, provided the matter, but they gave it its form; without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished, and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain (20).

By the time we have come to the end of The Prince, the “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians,” however, these images have undergone some big changes. First of all, Italy has been added to the list (linking Lorenzo with those other legendary heroes), but, more importantly, the relation between hero and people (country, situation, “opportunity,” fortuna) has been transformed. We now learn that the Israelites needed rst to have been enslaved to bring forth a Moses, the Persians had to be oppressed for there to be a Cyrus, the Athenians were scattered only in order to produce a Theseus, and Italy “had to be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more widely scattered than the Athenians; leaderless, lawless, crushed, despoiled, torn, overrun; she had to have endured every kind of desolation . . . in order, therefore that Italy, after so long a time, may behold its saviour. . . .” (82, 84). Being down in the depths of ruin and despair has become, for all these peoples, merely (as it always has been, in redemption talk) the precondition for deliverance; the oppressed shall triumph by virtue of having been oppressed. Nevertheless, the people require their rescuing prince; their able, wise, and fortunate leader. The old leaders have been too weak; they have all succumbed to their own indolence and stupidity. Never thinking about the future, neglecting their armies, and failing in every category of good political leadership, they complain that their peoples have abandoned them. “[ T ]hose who are capable are not obeyed,” Machiavelli observes, “Everyone imagines he is competent, and hitherto no one has had the competence to dominate the others by his prowess and good fortune” (83). The times are, indeed, ripe for Il principe, who now combines good fortune with

10

Correspondence, Letter 219.

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true ability; he transforms into Lorenzo. Only the Medici possess the good fortuna and the ability it will take to “lead Italy to her salvation” (82). All that is missing is the knowledge of what to do. “The task will not be very hard,” Machiavelli soothes, unashamedly naming himself repeatedly, “if you will call to mind the actions and lives of the men I have mentioned. . . . There is great justice in our cause . . . provided only your House will emulate the methods of those I have singled out for admiration” (82–83). Machiavelli, himself stepping now into the shoes of Il principe, has literarily hitched his wagon to the Medici star. The distance that, in the Proem, had stretched between his luoghi bassi and Lorenzo’s altezza has been bridged, verbally, at least. Before anyone can notice, he points the discussion away from images of God and redemption and onto armies. Italy’s grave situation was due to the weakness of Italian arms and armies “because the old military systems were bad and there has been no one who knew how to establish a new one” (83). A crusade had to be conducted right here, and who else to supply the knowledge and experience of creating armies better than Machiavelli himself ? Had he not once known and reveled in the glory of military success in the victory at Pisa? “If I did not think it would make you too proud,” Agostino Vespucci had written to him, in 1509, when Machiavelli’s victorious militia (whose success in defeating the Pisans everyone granted was due mainly to Machiavelli)11 was the talk of the town, “I should dare say that you with your battalions accomplished so much good work, in such a way that, not by delaying but by speeding up, you restored the affairs of Florence.”12 “And nothing brings a man greater honour,” Machiavelli himself had pronounced, “than the new laws and new institutions he establishes. When these are soundly based and bear the mark of greatness, they make him revered and admired” (83). We seem on the brink of a momentous declaration. Think of all the promises he has been making about how a courageous Il principe—who exercises prudence, who aims slightly higher than the target, who sees into the future, who keeps his own counsel, who can feign both attitude and action when necessary, and who knows how to use the knife of cruelty with compassion—will “reach the eminence that fortune and

11 Roberto Ridol, The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 107–108. 12 Correspondence, Letter 167.

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your other qualities promise you” (4). We suppose that he must now be going to reveal the huge and complex project he has proposed for them, outlining the intricate plans and arrangements to be begun, but, instead, he reaches deeply into his old bag of chestnuts for this: Therefore if your illustrious House wants to emulate those eminent men who saved their countries, before all else it is essential for it, as the right basis for every campaign, to raise a citizen army; for there can be no more loyal, more true, or better troops (24).

It sounds suspiciously as if he were looking for a second chance. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what, in his own words, had actually gone wrong. Less than a year earlier, Machiavelli had written: In the meantime, it came about that the Spanish army had appeared before Prato [garrisoned by Machiavelli’s own militia] and attacked it vigorously. Since they were unable to take it by storm, His Excellency began negotiating an agreement with the Florentine ambassador. . . . When the ambassadors arrived with this proposal [a payment from Florence to the King of Spain and his agreement not to force the Medici upon Florence] reported on the weakened condition of the Spaniards, and asserted that they might die of hunger and that Prato was going to hold out, the gonfalonier and the scores of people with whom he was consulting were inspired with such great condence that despite the advice from the wise for peace on that basis, the gonfalonier kept on postponing matters, until two days later news of Prato’s capture arrived and of how the Spaniards, having broken through some of the walls, began to force the defenders back and to terrify them. So that, after slight resistance, they all ed and the Spaniards took possession of the city, put it to sack, and massacred the city population in a pitiable spectacle of calamity.13

The Florentine Republic capitulated, then, and the Medici were restored to power. The people surrendered their liberty, Machiavelli concluded, because “everyone started to fear a sack because of the cowardice our soldiers displayed at Prato.”14 Those were his soldiers, the same ‘citizen army’ he was now ogging to Lorenzo. The two major schemes in the “exhortation,” the unication of Italy and the necessity of a citizen army seem, when judged in the harsh light of day, hopelessly improbable and unworkable. Nevertheless, here they are in the text, enthusiastically offered to Lorenzo as the chariots they might both ride into a triumphant future. Perhaps Machiavelli trusted

13 14

Correspondence, Letter 203. Correspondence, Letter 203.

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that Medici inuence would, of itself, be able to make his dreams come true ( just as Hobbes would later dream of a sovereign who would transform his ‘speculations’ into ‘the utility of practice’). Nevertheless, he had to have been in a trauma-induced poetic paroxysm to concoct the fantasy that he might link up with Lorenzo and his “illustrious House, which, with its fortune and prowess [ fortuna e virtù], favoured by God and the Church, of which it is now the head, can lead Italy to her salvation” (82). This cannot be stated too bluntly: there was nothing reasonable in this appeal. As far as we know, the Medici never read or remarked on The Prince, nor, in these early years, were even the most pitiable of Machiavelli’s appeals given serious consideration. As his biographer wrote, the Medici “could not forgive the man who had done and written so much against them, the ‘puppet’ of Soderini, nor forget the coldness he had shown to them—as indeed he was obliged to do—as exiles in the courts of Rome and France.”15 What if we treat not only the ideas of a unied Italy, an invincible citizen army, and a Machiavelli restored to political importance, but all the rest of The Prince as false and illusory? The narratives of Louis XII and Cesare Borgia, Agathocles and Oliverotto, the story of the (already abstract and ctionalized) constitutional princes, the deprecation of mercenaries and the lauding of militias, the comedy of tricksters and gullible publics, the dogghts among the Roman emperors, the dubious advisers and the even cunninger ones, the reasons why Italian leaders always gave way to the French, the Spanish, the Swiss, and the Pope—none of these can any longer be considered even remotely historical. They instead arise from the needs of Machiavelli’s discourse; they bear the weight of the text’s emotional and symbolic purposes. Thus, none of those narratives is based on historical sources (no public records, no well-known chronicles, no rst-hand testimony, no memoirs carefully set out). They also largely contradict Machiavelli’s own observations is his diplomatic dispatches. So, what is their origin? I would argue that they simply grow logically and imaginatively out of the effort to create Il principe in his many juicy parts. He was the surrogate that Machiavelli intended would bear away his own burdens of failure, fall, and misfortune.

15

Ridol, 131.

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Think back over the crucial narratives in The Prince and the liberties taken in them. Machiavelli drastically condensed Louis XII’s fteen-year adventure in Italy into ve or six terse pivotal actions. He transformed Cesare Borgia’s complex and erratic endgame (from which, according to Machiavelli’s own dispatches from Rome in 1503, Borgia might have extricated himself at any moment by conceding to the Pope’s territorial demands in the Romagna)16 into a simple, infallible, and dreamed up axiom. More marginally, he contracted the enormous political and military signicance of Ferdinand of Aragon in Italy into a couple of passing comments in chapters focused on other things. Realizing, then, that there is something terribly unrealistic about all of it, when we come to the end, to this “exhortation,” the move into pure fantasy does not seem so radical. The generalities and self-delusions of the “exhortation” merely conrm the judgment that what we have here is decidedly not history or political science, but literary imagination. As ctions, the depicted and theorized actions of Il principe are not determined by the recognized shape and emphases of any known historical discourse (although, of course, they gesture in that direction, picking up, as Machiavelli himself might say, the odore of history). They are available, in effect, to be shaped by the needs of the work’s underlying symbolic action; they stand for the crucial incidents dening Machiavelli’s burden in 1513 (and immediately thereafter) and his effort to create a surrogate realm of political action where his ideas (well-enough known and scattered across his correspondence and poetic works), his dreams, and his deeds might lead to an ending far different than the one Time’s verdict had pronounced.

Bibliography Ascoli, Albert Russell, and Victoria Kahn, eds. Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Atkinson, James B., and David Sices, trans. and ed. Machiavelli and His Friends, Their Personal Correspondence. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Berridge, G. R., ed. Machiavelli’s Legations. Allandale Online Publishing: Leicester, 2001 [reprinted from Christian A. Detmold trans., The Historical and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (1882)].

16

See Machiavelli’s dispatches from 23 November to 12 December 1503 in G. R. Berridge ed., Machiavelli’s Legations (Allandale Online Publishing: Leicester, 2001) [reprinted from Christian A. Detmold trans., The Historical and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (1882)], 242–262.

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Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Vol. XV, Part 1, The Author’s Apology for his Book. The Harvard Classics. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/15/1/ [14 February 2006]. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1941. Coyle, Martin., ed. Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince:” New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Garver, Eugene. “Machiavelli’s The Prince: A Neglected Rhetorical Classic.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 13 (1980): 99–120. Greene, Thomas M. “The End of Discourse in Machiavelli’s Prince.” Yale French Studies 67 (1984): 57–71. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Il principe e Discorsi. Giovanni Procacci and Sergio Bertelli, eds. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1960. McCanles, Michael. The Discourse of “Il Principe.” Malibu: Undena, 1983. Mousley, Andrew. “The Prince and Textual Politics.” Martin Coyle, ed. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Najemy, John M. “Language and The Prince.” Martin Coyle, ed. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Parkin, John. “Dialogue in The Prince.” Martin Coyle, ed. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester (UK) and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Ridol, Roberto. The Life of Niccolò Machiavelli. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963. Tarlton, Charles D. “Machiavelli’s The Prince as Memoir.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 46, 1 (Spring, 2004): 1–19.

THE DISCOURSES ON LIVY: PRESERVING A FREE WAY OF LIFE Julia Conaway Bondanella

In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli embarks on a quest to discover both the necessary attributes of a vivere libero—a free way of life—and its effects on those who live it, revealing himself to be an experienced and enthusiastic public servant, a student of history, and a passionate proponent of free republics rather than a forerunner of the modern political scientist.1 Comparing himself to early explorers like Columbus, he embarks on an investigation of the best model of republican government.2 Although his contemporaries preferred the Venetian model, and at the time he wrote, most Italian city republics were becoming principalities, he persists in going down a path he describes as “still untrodden” (Preface to Autograph Manuscript).3 Undoubtedly he shares in the judgment of his classical models from Aristotle to Cicero, that political action is among the most glorious human activities (I. 10, 47–50)4 and that the goal of a republic is to achieve civic greatness, but he qualies this verdict with the direct claim that “governments by peoples are better than governments by princes” (I. 58, 144). In The Discourses on Livy, the primary model for a great republic is Rome, and the chief characteristics

1

Ernst Cassirer and others have depicted Machiavelli as a scientist who analyzes the forms of political life. Maurizio Viroli’s careful and convincing analysis of his rhetoric supports the view of Machiavelli as a student of the classics and passionate advocate of republican liberty rather than a “scientist.” See Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73–113, or, more recently, Viroli’s introduction to Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), vi–xxxix. All citations from this work come from this edition. 2 I prefer to translate modi e ordini nuovi as new methods and institutions. For a different view, see Harvey Manseld, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). 3 Discourses on Livy, trans. and ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15. All future citations from this work come from this translation and will be listed in the text by book and chapter, as well as by the relevant page number of this edition. 4 In his Florentine Histories (I. Proem), Machiavelli says that “politics have greatness in them.” See the edition edited and translated by Laura F. Baneld and Harvey C. Manseld, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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of the vivere libero reect Roman practice: they include political liberty, devotion to the common good, equality under just laws, mixed, elective government, the active participation of the people, expansionism, open opportunities to compete for civic honors, and the avoidance of excessive self-interest, ambition, envy, tyranny, corruption, and harm. Maintaining a free way of life requires tolerating internal political conict and using new standards for judging political actions, but most of all it requires the right institutions (ordini ) and methods (modi ) as well as citizens with exceptional talents (virtù). Political action in a free republic clearly confers special worth on human life. In Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, only a free, republican government by the people can achieve greatness and glory. Because Athens and Venice had free beginnings and lived under their own laws, they were able “to reach the level of greatness they presently enjoy” (I. 1, 19–20). Machiavelli claims that founders of both republics and kingdoms rank second only to the founders of religion in earning glory and praise, but he warns that tyranny is an ever-present danger because human beings, including the powerful, are all too readily seduced by false goods—especially those that appeal to their own self-interest.5 He warns, reecting an essentially pessimistic Augustinian view of human nature best outlined in The Prince, that human beings, no matter how talented, are all too quickly distracted from the common good, because they are also fundamentally weak, changeable, and selsh. Only in a republic with the right institutions and values can this somewhat deplorable human readiness to indulge private appetites and interests be contained and turned toward the common good and the establishment of a free way of life. For Machiavelli, the only republic with the right institutions, values, and valor was the Roman Republic, another city with free beginnings. The necessities “imposed upon the city by Romulus, Numa, and the others” combined with “the fertility of the site, the convenience of the sea, the frequent victories, and the great size of its empire were unable to corrupt it for centuries, and these laws kept it full of as much exceptional ability [virtù] as ever adorned any other city or republic” (I. 1, 22).6

5 “Among all men who are praised, the most highly praised are those who have been leaders and founders of religions. Close afterwards come those who have founded either republics or kingdoms” (I. 10, 47). 6 Quentin Skinner discusses the theme of “grandezza” or greatness in “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the pre-humanist origins of republican ideas,” in Machiavelli and Republican-

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Livy and the Italian Republican Tradition Livy’s history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (From the Foundation of the City) and the myth of Republican Rome, occupy a key place in Italian Renaissance culture from the time of the earliest humanist, Petrarch.7 Livy’s history helped to dene a major political idiom, a language of both images and ideas embraced by Renaissance artists and thinkers, including Machiavelli, for its concrete relevance to the practical world of Italian politics.8 Machiavelli believed that classical historians, especially the ancient Romans, had laid down a number of fundamental rules for understanding human behavior, especially in the sphere of political action, in their major historical works. He adapts what he nds in Livy, partly through the juxtaposition of classical examples with those from his own times, to expound his own political and social theories.9 As Viroli demonstrates, Machiavelli abides by the conventions of classical rhetoric, especially the conviction that history is a valuable source of information and example for political oratory, the chief goal of which is to persuade.10 In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli exploits history to enliven his discourse and to convince his audience that a free and

ism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 125–28 and 137–38, as well as in his Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7 Petrarch once asked: “what else, then, is all history, if not the praise of Rome?” in a Latin work Apologia contra cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias. Cited by Theodor E. Mommsen in “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene F. Rice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 122. For a detailed account of the myth of Rome in philosophy, art, literature, and music from Petrarch to the present, see Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 8 Livy’s monumental history of republican Rome was written during the period that witnessed the transformation of its republic into an empire. It focuses upon the achievements of the Roman Republic. 9 The use of classical and modern examples is a rhetorical strategy in all of Machiavelli’s works; it seems to have been an automatic reex in his thinking and in his work as a diplomat. See the “Introduction” to Discourses on Livy, viii–ix. 10 Viroli, Machiavelli, esp. 73–113. Viroli not only surpasses earlier analyses of Machiavelli’s style in the level of detail but also offers new insights into his political thought, especially his patriotism. He convincingly demonstrates that Machiavelli follows the rules of classical rhetoric, particularly Quintillian, Cicero, and the anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium [ To Gaius Herennius: On the Theory of Public Speaking]. Viroli argues that in the composition of his political and historical works, Machiavelli’s objective is to persuade his readers that he is an expert who can provide guidance in matters of state.

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independent republic on the Roman model should be the goal of political activity.11 For Machiavelli, the question of how to create, secure, and maintain a republican government that would ensure a free way of life was both a practical question, since he was employed by the Florentine government,12 as well as intensely personal, since he had been falsely accused of conspiring against the Medici after their return to power in 1513, when he was sentenced to exile on his farm in San Casciano.13 He witnessed the slow death of his beloved Florentine republic, which he recounts in his Florentine Histories. Oddly enough, after the return of the Medici, republican political theory thrived in Florentine intellectual circles, particularly in meetings at the Orti Oricellari.14 Machiavelli

11 See such passages as I. 58, 144 and I. 59, 46. Machiavelli clearly believes that a great republic promotes goodness and virtù. 12 For a discussion of Machiavelli’s work in the Florentine chancery, see Fredi Chiappelli, “Machiavelli as Secretary,” Italian Quarterly 13 (1970), 27–44; Robert Black, “Machiavelli, servant of the Florentine republic,” 71–100 and John M. Najemy, “The controversy surrounding Machiavelli’s service to the republic,” 101–118 in Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism; and Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 155–80. 13 Machiavelli addresses these vexing issues in The Discourses on Livy, which can be and, perhaps, should be seen in the context of the political writing in his history of Florence and his handbook on the new principality. Interestingly, The Prince only appeared in print in 1532, a year after the posthumous publication of The Discourses on Livy. The readers of the time, apparently consumed by their religious and nationalistic passions that led them to condemn the author of The Prince and his book, disregarded his truly original treatment of republican politics in The Discourses on Livy. In an age of reformation and authoritarianism, The Discourses on Livy would be relegated to the background, since it ies in the face of the trends of the times by discussing politics in a secular fashion, by praising class conict as benecial to good government, and by dening the republic as the only form of the state that guarantees the good life. Early commentary on Machiavelli’s works may be traced in Sidney Anglo’s Machiavelli—The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The replacement of Livy as a historical model by Tacitus in an authoritarian era is discussed by Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) and Bondanella, The Eternal City, 47–114. 14 These gardens were then located in the outskirts of Florence, a location that today is near the main city train station. Cosimo Rucellai, an aristocratic opponent of the restored Medici regime and one of the men to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Discourses on Livy, owned them. Machiavelli apparently discussed the drafts of The Discourses on Livy there. For the classic study of how these gardens contributed to the growth of Florentine political theory, see Felix Gilbert, “Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari: a Study on the Origin of Modern Political Thought,” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), 136–56, rpt. in Gilbert’s History: Choice and Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 215–246. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (I: 152–54), also discusses this topic.

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beneted from his participation in this group and from his friendship with Francesco Guicciardini, a more skeptical republican thinker.15 His theory of republican government reects not only his experiences as a public ofcial and diplomat in the service of the Florentine republic, but also his deep and durable knowledge of the works of classical as well as Italian pre-humanist and humanist political theorists.16 Like them, he promotes the ideal of civic greatness founded in political liberty and supported by good institutions and customs, including a mixed constitution, elective government that is inclusive rather than exclusive, equality under just laws, opportunities open to all, and an absence of excessive wealth that corrupts. Although Venice served as the inspiration for political thinkers from at least the end of the fourteenth century,17 Machiavelli’s preference is for the Roman model of republicanism because it had far greater success in providing enduring freedom to its citizens. In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli’s practical purpose is to show through an analysis of the Roman model how to create and to sustain a vivere libero—a free way of life—despite a world full of forces and contingencies beyond human control. Machiavelli focuses upon how to create citizens who care more for their country than themselves through his analysis and interpretation of the institutions, customs,

15 For the relationship between Machiavelli and Guicciardini, see Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Rudolf von Albertini, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Peter Bondanella, Francesco Guicciardini (Boston: Twayne, 1976); Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); and especially Guicciardini’s own comments on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy in The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s “Discourses” & Guicciardini’s “Considerations”, trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). 16 In “Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Bock, Skinner, and Viroli, 121–141, Quentin Skinner traces some of the central concepts in The Discourses on Livy to pre-humanist thinkers, noting that Machiavelli mounts a defense of traditional republican ideals in a traditional way, including the ideas that a city must be free to attain greatness and that a city can only be free if it has a republican constitution. In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (I: 139–89), Skinner focuses upon the ideas of the early humanists and the civic humanists who carried forward the traditional political ideology and inuenced Machiavelli’s political thought and language. 17 See Felix Gilbert, “The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought,” History, 179–214, which discusses Pier Paolo Vergerio’s De republica veneta fragmenta (Fragment on the Venetian Republic) and the political “myth” of Venice during the Italian Renaissance. Vergerio draws his conclusion from Plato’s assertion in the Laws that the mixed constitution is the most durable form of government.

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and the virtù of the Roman Republic seen through the eyes of Livy. Machiavelli’s original insights into the role of religion in politics, the superiority of Rome over Venice, and the benets of social conict among different social classes enrich the republican debate. At the center of his concept of republicanism lies his prescription for well-designed institutions and just laws applied equally to all citizens, including all public ofcials. For Machiavelli, equality under the law is the essence of a free way of life, and liberty means that a state and its citizens are not dependent on others.

The Machiavellian Cosmos Although some critics have suggested that Machiavelli’s political philosophy lacks a spiritual dimension,18 he sees human political activities taking place in an arena that is home to a variety of cosmic and earthly forces, including God, or the “heavens,” as well as Fortune and cycles of time or history. In The Discourses on Livy, these constants of the Machiavellian cosmos remain more or less beyond human control, offering both opportunities and opposition to human effort. Machiavelli never systematically charts out their roles, but he constantly refers to them as he investigates the challenges of creating a republic worthy of sacrice and patriotic passion.19 The function of God or the divine remains one of inspiring great tasks of political innovation or of absolving men who display exceptional talent for using unconventional methods in moments of political necessity.20 Divine authority may benet the state by prompting men, 18

Federico Chabod, Scritti su Machiavelli (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 80. For a lucid discussion of Machiavelli’s worldview, see Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); or a shorter discussion in Viroli, Machiavelli, 17–24. On Machiavelli’s atheism or pagan outlook, see Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in his Against the Current (New York: Viking Press, 1980); and Freidrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New York: Praeger, 1957). On Machiavelli’s attitude toward God and religion, see Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Even before De Grazia, Luigi Russo’s Machiavelli, 3rd edition (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 222–24, characterizes Machiavelli’s religiosity as fundamentally Christian. Most modern scholars, including all of Machiavelli’s recent biographers, consider Machiavelli anticlerical but not an atheist in spite of his bad reputation over the years. 20 See The Prince, chap. 26. In chap. 8, God appears as a friend of founders who excuses new princes who use cruelties well or when they actually contribute to the 19

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in their fear of punishment, to keep oaths and to serve their country (I. 11–13, 50–58). This God differs from the traditional Christian God, who advises men to be humble and to submit to suffering, by supporting those who show exceptional abilities in the political arena and in the pursuit of worldly honor (I. 11, 50–52). In addition to God, the heavens are “lled with intelligences, who by means of natural abilities foresee future events and, having compassion for men, warn them with . . . signs so that they can prepare their defenses” (I. 56, 139). Even when the heavens send natural disasters that result in death and destruction, they may actually contribute to human welfare, like a purgation that restores a body to health (II. 5, 168–69). Machiavelli refers to the success of the Gauls’ attack on Rome as a combination of heavenly design and human error, a military disaster that paradoxically restored Roman society to its ancient values (II. 29, 234–35). Fortune may be the most prominent force in Machiavelli’s cosmos.21 In The Prince, control within the arena of human action seems roughly divided between Fortune and human virtù, with a slight advantage to Fortune.22 Nonetheless, Machiavelli’s Fortune is not blind.23 Fortune often selects men of virtù, Machiavelli says in The Discourses on Livy, because they are capable of recognizing opportunities she offers to accomplish great deeds (II. 29, 235). When Fortune wants to cause disasters, however, she may choose incompetent men to bring them about, but she may do so in order to drive a city, a group, or an individual toward even greater achievements. Machiavelli cautions, however, that “men may side with fortune, but not oppose her; they can weave her warp

common good (pp. 33–4), and in The Discourses on Livy (I. 9, 46–47), Machiavelli discusses the case of Romulus as a leader who must be “excused” even for fratricide because it ultimately contributed to the establishment of a republic. Still, he emphasizes that God may not play a role in the establishment of political institutions (I. 11, 51), in his discussion of a specically civic role for religion. As Viroli notes in Machiavelli (pp. 21–24), the idea of God as a friend of republican founders and patriots has a source in Macrobius’s “Dream of Scipio” and also appears in the works of Petrarch and Matteo Palmieri. 21 In Fortune Is a River: Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Magnicent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 10, Roger D. Masters equates fortune and human history in Machiavelli’s writing. I am not convinced that this equation is entirely correct, since Machiavelli tends to look at fortune as a force at work in the world along with God and the heavens. In Parel’s view (The Machiavellian Cosmos, pp. 63–67), Fortune is the mistress of chance and accident and, according to Viroli (Machiavelli, p. 20), she is quite arbitrary. 22 Machiavelli, The Prince, XXV, 84. 23 Viroli, Machiavelli, 20.

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but they cannot tear it apart” (II. 29, 236). Although he admits that Fortune can be hostile to virtù (II. 16, 193), he declares that men must always take advantage of the opportunities afforded them; they “must never give up, for without knowing her goals as she moves along paths both crossed and unknown, men always have to hope” (II. 29, 236).24 Machiavelli acknowledges the control of Fortune and the heavens over human events, but he argues that virtù and prudence rather than Fortune favored the Roman people in acquiring their empire (II. 1, 152–55). Hence, he concludes that republics of his own day will succeed only when strong reformers learn from the study of antiquity how to regulate Fortune (II. 30, 239). Historical forces play a powerful role in the sphere of human activity. In both prefaces to his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli complains that although modern men honor antiquity by imitating its art or utilizing its medicine or laws, no princes, republics, military leaders, or citizens follow ancient practice, and he argues that in failing to understand the true meaning of the ancient histories, men enjoy the incidents they recount without thinking of imitating them because they believe that imitation is impossible.25 He counters with a different understanding of the nature of history, which he views as essentially cyclical rather than progressive. If history repeatedly presents similar opportunities for human action, it is possible to learn how to take advantage of them by studying history. Machiavelli states that not only the sky, sun, and the elements, but also mankind have not “changed in their motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity” (“Preface to Autograph Manuscript,” p. 15 and “Preface to 1531 Roman Edition,” p. 18). He concludes that imitation of the ancients in politics is clearly possible because “all the things of this world in every era have their counterparts in ancient times” (III. 43, 351). Histories from both ancient and modern times show this constant recycling of opportunities and skillful actions from which the modern reader can learn. Hence, to remedy this misunderstanding of history and the failures of modern republics, Machiavelli proposes to offer his own analysis and interpretation of Livy’s history of the Roman Republic to give modern peoples the practical knowledge to recover their right to self rule and to a free way of life: 24 See also II. 30, 239, where Machiavelli conrms his view that Fortune shows her power all the more strongly when men are weak. 25 “Preface to Autograph Manuscript” (p. 15) and “Preface to 1531 Roman Edition” (p. 17).

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Anyone who studies current and ancient affairs will easily recognize that the same desires and humours exist and have always existed in all cities and among all peoples. Thus, it is an easy matter for anyone who examines past events carefully to foresee future events in every republic and to apply the remedies that the ancients employed, or if old remedies cannot be found, to think of new ones based upon the similarity of circumstances (I. 39, 105).

Along with the external or cosmic agents that affect life in the human sphere, Machiavelli explores the internal human motivations that condition political and social life in all places and among all peoples (I. 39, 105). No less challenging to the establishment of a free republic in which men are devoted to the common good is human nature with its passions. He warns that “nature has created men in such a way that they can desire everything but are unable to obtain everything, so that their desire is always greater than their power of acquisition, and discontent with what they possess and lack of satisfaction are the result” (I. 37, 99).26 The Discourses on Livy offers an analysis of human nature consistent with that in his other works,27 because republics, too, must nd ways of discouraging and limiting human wickedness. The scourge of good republics is ambition (I. 37, 101–02);28 envy, greed, and ambition are among the most destructive forces in society. Machiavelli’s analysis of the efforts of the nobility to limit the power of the plebeians after the expulsion of the Tarquins make him conclude that “men never do good except out of necessity, but where choices are abundant and unlimited freedom is the norm, everything immediately becomes confused and disorderly” (I. 3, 28). While conceding that human beings easily “become bored with the good and grieve for the bad” (III. 21, 307),

26 In I. 53. 130–31, Machiavelli notes how difcult it is for human beings to pierce the appearances to distinguish the good from the bad. Also see “Preface to Book II” (p. 151) where Machiavelli reiterates his judgment of human appetites. 27 The Prince, for example, contains many passages referring to human vices. Great leaders and good citizens face a dual challenge: they must combat their own passions as well as those of other human beings. Human wickedness encompasses a full range of vices; human beings are, he warns the new prince, “ungrateful, ckle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, and greedy for gain. While you work for their benet they are completely yours, offering you their blood, their property, their lives and their sons, as I said above, when the need to do so is far away. But when it draws nearer to you, they turn away” (XVII, p. 58). 28 Machiavelli focuses upon ambition and love of property as a key element in human nature because he believes it ultimately ruined not only the Roman Republic but his own Florentine Republic as well, since Cosimo de’ Medici and the Medici family in general were more interested in their own welfare than in the common good.

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he characterizes them as unwilling to change and incapable of perceiving the truth about the evil intentions of others (I. 18, 70). Men, he says, “live as much by appearances as by realities . . .” (I. 25, 79). Interestingly, he applies his statements about human nature in The Prince to mass psychology and to the behavior of an uncontrolled multitude, while claiming that a people in a well-organized republic will become good and capable of freedom because their good laws and wise leaders have improved on human nature (I. 58). In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli displays greater optimism in arguing that republics by virtue of their institutions and laws may shape human character to emphasize the good rather than the evil; he regards human beings as educable and capable of engaging in great enterprises, like that of establishing a vivere libero.

The Rule of Law The rst book of The Discourses on Livy focuses upon basic institutions— government, laws, and religion—that create the conditions for this free way of life. Reecting the idea that good institutions create and sustain liberty, a key term in The Discourses on Livy is ordini, which refers to institutions and laws, or other features of a society that dene its way of life. Laws dene the fabric of civic life; they are the “nerve and life of a free government” (I. 33, 92), and the Roman people, “regulated by laws,” were “stable, prudent, and grateful” (I. 58, 142). Machiavelli envisions the political and civil life of a carefully planned republic as being grounded in a combination of good customs and good laws, which are meaningless unless obeyed. He observes that “just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained, so laws require good customs in order to be observed” (I. 18, 68). He basically argues that since “men never do good except out of necessity,” laws must dene certain limits for human behavior preventing men from damaging their fellow-citizens and the common welfare: the laws must “make them good” (I. 3, 28). In an uncorrupt republic, laws counter the worst tendencies in human nature: “it is necessary for anyone who organizes a republic and establishes laws in it to take for granted that all men are evil and that they will always act according to the wickedness of their nature . . .” (I. 3, 28). In his analysis of how power corrupted the decemvirs and their leader Appius Claudius, Machiavelli notes how easily ambition destroyed

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Quintus Fabius’s good habits, arguing that lawgivers who study this example will be “more quick to restrain human appetites and to deprive people of all hope of being able to do evil with impunity” (I. 42, 113). Laws must be instituted to protect against tyranny, but they must also dene conduct that promotes the greatest good—“the common good.”29 Good laws, in The Discourses on Livy, teach men how to be good citizens, making them capable of living a free way of life. Machiavelli explains the greatness of individual Roman citizens by the power of Roman customs and laws: “Nor can one in any way reasonably call a republic disorganized where so many examples of exceptional ability occur, for good examples arise from good training, good training from good laws, and good laws from those disturbances [ between the plebeians and the nobles]” (I. 4, 30). Furthermore, he argues that the laws of a great republic must contain provisions and remedies for all eventualities so that the government can respond to them legally (I. 34, 95). The rule of law in a well-organized republic requires all members of the society to obey the laws; it also requires that laws be enforced impartially. Otherwise, the state is no more than a tyranny, like the Roman Empire under the evil emperors (I. 10, 48).30 Laws must, above all, protect liberty and provide a means of release for “the variability of those humours that agitate the republic” (I. 7, 38). In Rome, the guardianship of liberty was placed in the hands of the people, because through their tribunes and their participation in public affairs, they could counterbalance the power of the nobles. Their authority was enhanced by a law providing the power to accuse publicly any “citizens before the people or some magistrate or council when they commit any kind of offence against free government” (I. 7, 38). Such public indictments also restrained citizens from making attempts on the government. In the case of Coriolanus, this law provided a legal way for the multitude to express their anger towards him (I. 7, 38–39). Summoned by the tribunes, he could argue his case rather than being murdered by a mob. In discussing the judgment against the decimvir Appius Claudius, Machiavelli notes that it would have been inappropriate to deny him

29 When Machiavelli speaks of founders and reformers, he emphasizes that the best, such as Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, and others, were “able to create laws for the common good” (I. 9, 46). As Viroli notes in Machiavelli, pp. 116 ff., the notion of rule by law goes back to Cicero and the Italian tradition. 30 In this chapter, Machiavelli categorizes the good emperors as those “who lived under the laws.”

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the right of appeal, violating established law: “I do not believe there is any worse example in a republic than to make a law and then not to observe it, and even more so when it is not observed by the person who made it” (I. 45, 116). Violations of the law are never acceptable. Although an individual citizen may have done good deeds, he must unquestionably be punished for evil acts because “no well-organized republic ever cancels the demerits of its citizens with their merits” (I. 24, 78). In giving his unconventional morality a new foundation, Machiavelli insists upon respect for the law. He argues that since ambition can turn bad, threatening law and liberty, the law must be applied without regard for the prominence of an individual or for a momentary political advantage, citing the trials and judgments against notable citizens, such as the sentences imposed on the sons of Brutus, Horatius, Manlius Capitolinus, and the Decemvirs, or charges such as those lodged against the Scipios. Horatius saved Rome by overcoming the Curiatii, but when he murdered his sister, he was put on trial for his life “despite the fact that his merits were so great and new” (I. 24, 78). Although Manlius Capitolinus had heroically saved Rome from the Gauls, his end was decidedly inglorious. Executed for sedition, Manlius “was thrown headlong without any respect whatsoever for his merits from the very Capitol he had earlier saved with such great honour” (I. 24, 79). Machiavelli envisions an uncorrupted republic in which all are treated equally under the law, and “the fear of punishment makes men better and less ambitious” (I. 29, 85–86). Recognizing that when law enforcement became lax Roman citizens became corrupt, Machiavelli views Brutus’s severity in killing his own sons as necessary to preserve liberty in Rome, and he warns that “anyone who creates a free government and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will not sustain himself for long” (III. 3, 252). The point is that punishments, too, must be imposed fairly without regard to wealth, rank, or fame. Obedience to the law and equality under the law are the vital foundation of Machiavelli’s republicanism.

Class Conict and Liberty Machiavelli’s view of lawmaking must be understood within the context of his original insights into the nature and results of turbulence in Roman political life. His striking interpretation of Livy’s history based upon his original theory that class conict gave rise to liberty in repub-

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lican Rome is at odds with a tradition of classical and Italian political thinking; it troubled his fellow republican theorists, who preferred a republic with peaceful internal politcs, and it was rejected by his friend Guicciardini.31 Machiavelli observes “that those who condemn the disturbances between the nobles and the plebeians condemn those very things that were the primary cause of Roman liberty and that they give more consideration to the noises and cries arising from such disturbances than to the good effects they produced . . .” (I. 4, 29). He argues that the tension and conict between the two principal classes in Roman society produced “laws and institutions for the benet of civic liberty,” which in some way responded sufciently to the interests of both the nobility and the people that they prevented real violence. Emphasizing the positive outcomes of the conicts, he adds that they “rarely led to exile and even more rarely to bloodshed” (I. 4, 30). For Machiavelli, who had written about the armed violence that frequently disturbed his native Florence, the conict in Rome seemed salutary in comparison.32 Machiavelli steadfastly maintains that the plebeians’ protests guaranteed liberty in Rome, and he asserts that protests expressing the will of free peoples normally expand liberty because their origin lies with a group who cannot usurp power and who fear oppression. He declares that the common people most effectively check the ambitions of the powerful, drawing upon the example of Marcus Menenius and Marcus Fulvius, appointed respectively dictator and master of the horse, in order to investigate certain conspiracies or attempts to subvert free elections (I. 5, 32–33). The historical evidence shows, therefore, that an individual chosen from the common people is most capable of making disinterested inquiries. Although they may nd themselves deceived, they also have the capacity of judgment to take to heart the words of a good man and turn away from evil (I. 53–53; I. 58, 140). In Machiavelli’s republic, the power of speech and the right of free speech plays an invaluable role in public, political debate.

31 See Guicciardini’s comments on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy in The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s “Discourses” & Guicciardini’s “Considerations”, 380–438. Guicciardini viewed Rome’s disorderly social conicts in a negative fashion and thought Rome was saved not by its strong republican institutions but, rather, by good luck and military skill. 32 See his Florentine Histories (I. 1), ed. and trans. Laura F. Baneld and Harvey C. Manseld, Jr.

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Machiavelli concludes that discord between the plebeians and the senate created “a perfect republic” (I. 2, 27), by which he means a free republic. He generalizes beyond the Roman example to claim that since these two classes are typical of any society, their conicts alone will be the source of all laws that favor liberty: “in every republic there are two different tendencies, that of the people and that of the upper class, and . . . all of the laws which are passed in favour of liberty are from the rift between the two” (I. 4, 29). Cities that use their people in signicant enterprises, like the Roman Republic, must ensure that they can express their ambitions, since the “desires of free peoples are rarely harmful to liberty” (I. 4, 30). Although Rome achieved stability through institutions and laws, these institutions and laws paradoxically originated in social conict.

A Mixed Government Machiavelli never wavers in advocating a government with the participation of a large number of citizens (what his contemporaries dened as a governo largo) because he believes that such a state will benet from having many individuals who can exercise their diverse talents (virtù) in the service of their country. He asserts that “although one man alone is capable of instituting or reforming a government,” it will endure only “when it remains a matter of concern to many and when it is the task of many to maintain it” (I. 9, 45). One obvious shortcoming of a principality is that “the talent of a single man . . . disappears when he dies and will only rarely be found in his successor” (I. 11, 52), but a well-organized republic will necessarily have a succession of able leaders (I. 20, 73). He considers the Roman republic far preferable to those of Sparta and Venice because the government involved the Roman people, the plebeians, in addition to an aristocratic elite. In Machiavelli’s view, the best form of government is elective. Only a republican government with a fully representative structure can ensure a free way of life. Hence, he seeks a constitutional framework that creates a durable, stable, and free republic. Given his view of the world as a place of unavoidable change, Machiavelli accepts Polybius’s reasoning that all types of government go through an inevitable cycle of growth and decline. Of the six kinds of government, the three good forms—principality, aristocracy, and democracy—predictably devolve into three bad forms: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy. In addition to the

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fact that everything in the sublunary world has a natural tendency to decay, the good forms of government become corrupt because human beings generally fail to subordinate their own interests to the common good (I. 2, 24–25). Following tradition, Machiavelli offers practical and even hopeful advice on how best to combat corruption and change. Drawing on the ideas of Polybius and Italian political theorists, who had advocated a mixed constitution,33 he envisions a mixed type of government in which the different social groups represented produce a government with checks and balances; he even envisions such checks and balances among magistracies in a city (I. 50, 125). He cites the example of prudent founders like Lycurgus in Sparta who developed a form of government that combined the three good forms, an arrangement in which each one “keeps watch over the other” (I. 2, 24). Although Machiavelli recognizes that the mixed constitution in Venice had ensured the city’s liberty for centuries, he deviates from his contemporaries’ preference for the Venetian model because it gives far too much power to the aristocrats. Arguing that only the plebeians can serve as the guardians of liberty because they “have less of an appetite to usurp it” than the nobles, he advocates the Roman model even if it embodied the kind of social conict other republican thinkers abhorred and which they found absent in the Venetian model (I. 4, 29–30). In the case of Rome, the government became “mixed” only through an evolutionary process made possible by normally sound institutions. Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, created a system of sharing power with the senate and well-organized laws that reected his own exceptional ability (virtù); prevented the Romans from becoming corrupt; and allowed for change.34 In Rome the agent of change was the conict between the plebeians and the senate. After consuls replaced the kings, the conict continued to produce notable benets, including the ofce of the tribunes, representing the plebeians. The addition of the tribunes to the ofces of the consuls and the senate, which represented the kingly and aristocratic authority, resulted in a mixed government.

33 Some humanists were inspired more by the example of Venice than of Rome, but Machiavelli found the number of citizens participating in that government too small and the system too inexible to defend itself in moments of change. 34 Machiavelli constantly analyzes the ways in which corruption leads to the destruction of republics, thereby offering advice on how to avoid it. See, for example, his claims (I. 16) that a corrupt people cannot enjoy its liberty.

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The tribunes, Machiavelli tells us, “were established with such power and prestige that they could always thereafter act as intermediaries between the plebeians and the senate and could curb the insolence of the nobles” (I. 3, 29). Machiavelli praises the Romans who, having recognized that republics need institutions to deal with emergencies, created the dictatorship, which functioned well as long as the Roman people were incorrupt. He calls the dictatorial authority the “source of the greatness of such an empire” (I. 34, 95) because it gave the Roman government great exibility in the way it addressed pressing needs. Since the mixed authority in the state prevented one group from suppressing another, it established greater stability, security, and liberty for all citizens: “it created a perfect republic” (I. 2, 7). A reminder in book three advises that the “downfall of cities . . . arises from their failure to modify the intitutions of their republics over time” (III. 9, 282). Ultimately, in Machiavelli’s opinion, Rome became great because it could and did adapt, even though he recognizes the errors it made, such as the agrarian laws (I. 37) or establishing the decemvirs with the absolute power that corrupts.

Religion as an Integral Tool of Governing In his exploration of institutions that protect the free republic from corruption and conspiracy, Machiavelli introduces religion as a tool of the art of the state, both in creating its institutions and in reforming them. Pocock states that “Machiavelli was not free from the need to visualize the republic, or any other body politic, as originating in the realm of the sacred.”35 If Machiavelli connects his republic with the divine, it is, in part, because he recognizes the value of religion in creating beliefs and values that benet a republic. Of course, he also believes political action is, in itself, a glorious enterprise with something of the divine in it. Although Romulus did not have recourse to religion in establishing the state, Numa “pretended” to have a relationship with a nymph from whom he received counsel in order to introduce certain new institutions (I. 11, 51). Machiavelli argues that a successful republic upholds and respects its religious practices precisely because they have a crucial impact on the quality and durability of civil and political life.

35 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 190–94.

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Machiavelli takes an unorthodox view—for his times—of the function of religion in the state. When the goal of political action is to create good citizens through restraining their passions and educating them in republican values, religion becomes a reliable collaborator in the civic project. To protect the republic from tyranny and corruption, whether or not its leaders believe in God, the state must sustain and defend its religious practices and endorse religious worship; it must keep religious traditions and practices free of corruption and safeguard the people’s respect for them to remain “good and united” (I. 12, 53–54). Of course, Machiavelli would not have discerned any particular conict between religion and politics because Florentine republicans were typically Christian, and the civic humanists before him clearly championed the active life in the world, especially participation in public affairs without rejecting Christianity.36 Yet, like Dante and Boccaccio before him, Machiavelli takes a dim view of ecclesiastical behavior, which he believes has affected people’s devotion, even if his anticlericalism often expresses itself in a humorous fashion.37 He claims that there is “no greater indication of the ruin of a state than to see a disregard for its divine worship” (I. 12, 53).38 When Machiavelli argues that ancient peoples loved liberty more than modern societies, the key lies in profound differences in education and religion. Christianity falls under attack for subverting the values necessary to establishing a well-organized republic. Although Christianity “has shown us truth and the true path, it also makes us place a lower value on worldly honour, whereas the pagans, who greatly valued honour and considered it the highest good, were more ferocious in their actions” (II. 2, 158–59). In glorifying “humble and contemplative men rather than active ones,” Christianity has promulgated suffering, meekness, self-effacement, and a contempt for worldly honor and achievement, and

36 An early humanist like Petrarch felt the conict between the retired life and a life seeking worldly honor and fame, a struggle that colors not only his love poetry but his Latin writings, especially his Secretum, On the Solitary Life, On Religious Leisure, and many of his letters, including the famous “Ascent of Mount Ventoux.” By Machiavelli’s time, the issue of devoting oneself to worldly affairs was much less vexing. 37 Machiavelli’s anticlericalism resembles that of Boccaccio in The Decameron. For example, the character of Brother Timoteo in Machiavelli’s classic comedy, The Mandrake Root, presents the classic topos in medieval and Renaissance literature of the unworthy but cunning priest. 38 See De Grazia’s discussion of Machiavelli’s religion in Machiavelli in Hell (pp. 100–01, 120–21): he argues that Machiavelli compresses the duality of church and state. Yet, he does so in a way that makes religion a vital component of political action and a free way of life.

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this cultivation of weakness has led to corruption and tyranny rather than to freedom and the common good (II. 2, 159). Accusing cowardly men of having misinterpreted and falsied Christianity “according to an ideal of freedom from earthly toil and not according to one of exceptional ability,” Machiavelli counters that the Christian religion actually permits citizens “to exalt and defend [their] native land” (II. 2, 159).39 Machiavelli makes religion a vital component of political action and a free way of life: To be fully virtuous, strong and good, a state needs religion because “where there is religion, arms can easily be introduced” (I. 12, 51). Religion empowers military organizations: it produces good institutions, including good armies (I. 12, 52). Religion offers an effective means of “controlling the armies, in giving courage to the plebeians, in keeping men good, and in shaming the wicked” (I. 11, 51). When education and loyalty fail to give soldiers the courage to withstand the enemy and to defend their homeland, religion becomes crucial. Fear of God can instill the necessary strength of will. Machiavelli offers the example of the great general Scipio’s behavior after Hannibal had defeated the Romans at Cannae. When a group of citizens were about to abandon their city, Scipio went to nd them “and, with his bare sword in his hand, he forced them to swear not to abandon their native land” (I. 11, 51). Their fears of divine punishment made them remain faithful to their oath because they were as yet uncorrupted (I. 13, 57–8). Machiavelli concludes that soldiers’ condence can be greatly enhanced “through religion when it is properly used” (I. 15, 61). Religion becomes important as one of the remedies for the political corruption he sees in Italy and elsewhere, which he constantly contrasts to the civil and political life in the German free cities.40 Although he concedes that Romulus did not need the authority of religion, he still ranks Numa above his predecessor, describing his introduction of religion as a crucial tool in building a society: “he turned to religion as something absolutely necessary for maintaining a civilized society” (I. 11, 50). Machiavelli never makes a negative judgment concerning Numa’s pretense about having a divine contact or the truth of Romans’ belief, 39 In Machiavelli (pp. 156–74, esp. 166), Viroli’s illuminating discussion of Machiavelli’s patriotism demonstrates that Machiavelli’s argument about Christianity and worldly glory originates in a long tradition of Florentine Christian patriotism. 40 Viroli, Machiavelli (pp. 131–43), analyzes how Machiavelli’s theory of the free republic can be studied from the angle of political corruption. He notes that Machiavelli regularly contrasts a civil and free way of living with tyranny. See for example, I. 17; I. 55; and III. 8.

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especially in oracles, miracles, and auguries because, in his view, religion and its rituals played a crucial role in the development of Roman institutions and in Roman excellence (virtù) through the education of the Roman people, who “feared breaking an oath more than breaking the laws, like people who respected the power of God more than that of men . . .” (I. 11, 51).41 By creating an energizing religion, Numa adds another dimension to the founding of Rome: “the arts of peace.” Machiavelli, who never banishes God from his cosmos, makes religion a pillar of the state because it can teach the right values, while ensuring obedience to laws, customs, and traditions. Pagan religion, he observes, taught that the supreme good was “in greatness of mind, strength of body, and in all the other things apt to make men the strongest” (II. 2, 159). Underlying his argument that religion is essential in the state is Machiavelli’s assumption that men are educable. When Camillus’s soldiers become terried upon their rst sight of the size of the Etruscan army, he tells them to act in accordance with their “training and habit” (III. 31, 330). It was enough to remind them of their education and their customs to embolden them in front of their enemy.

Military Institutions: Expansionism and Freedom Besides a mixed constitution, a good legal system and salutary religious practices to support the growth of civic virtues and to shield the republic from corruption, Machiavelli advocates military discipline and power as another safeguard for a vivere libero. Like earlier theorists of free communal governments, Machiavelli conceives of armies as a legitimate and necessary means of defending liberty and of achieving civic greatness. For him, power is a path to glory and renown (II. 4, 167). Machiavelli’s commitment to strong armies and good military discipline has little to do with modern notions of imperialism or colonialism. He associates the greatness of a republic with its territorial expansion, but it is more a matter of survival and the preservation of civic values within a competitive external environment. He envisions expansion not only in terms of conquest and predation but also in terms of increasing the number of citizens, creating benecial alliances, and preserving

41

See also I. 12 and I. 14.

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freedom (II. 4). For a republic in which the populace is free to participate in public debate or to protest social policies, expansion in size and power provides a release for social tension. It is in the context of Roman military exploits that Machiavelli reiterates his strong commitment to a citizen army. He had, after all, argued for a citizen militia in Florence because of his experience with incompetent mercenary troops in the 1505 siege of Pisa. Even though the Florentine troops failed in their mission, Machiavelli never gave up his faith in the citizen armies he promotes in The Prince and The Art of War as well as in The Discourses on Livy with compelling examples of Roman glory. He asserts that free soldiers are more courageous (I. 43, 114) and claims that only the Roman armies were full of both order and fury (III. 36, 340). Although he disagrees with other humanists that the Roman military ensured the success of the Republic, he clearly believed that the Roman legions played an important part in building a free way of life in the Roman Republic. In the beginning, Roman armies were composed of citizen soldiers who practiced other professions. Machiavelli’s own experience as Secretary of the Ten of Liberty and Peace in the Florentine republic, a panel that dealt with foreign affairs and war, proved to him that foreign affairs and “arms” or military operations play as signicant a role in the life of states as domestic affairs. In The Prince, Machiavelli states that good armies, along with good laws, give strong foundations to all types of states, adding that “good laws cannot exist where there are no good armies, and where good armies exist there must be good laws” (XII. 42–43). This principle remains constant in his Discourses on Livy, where the military joins the legal system and religious practices to teach the citizens the kind of virtuous discipline required to live a free way of life. By training citizens as soldiers, a city educates them to love their native land, provides for self-defense, and ensures the possibility of expansion. Machiavelli devotes most of Book II to Roman expansionism, analyzing military strategies and methods of conduct, and rejecting the claim made by critics from Plutarch to Guicciardini that Roman expansionism succeeded primarily because of Fortune’s favor.42 Machiavelli emphasizes that it was the exceptional abilities or virtù of their armies along with their prudence in the conduct of wars that brought them fortune and military success. Above all, he sees the issue in terms of

42

Plutarch makes this argument in his Moralia.

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his notion that the people must be the guardians of liberty. Criticizing cities that avoid increasing the number of their inhabitants, Machiavelli contrasts the successes of Rome with the failures of Venice, Athens, and Sparta in the dangerous enterprise of expansion.43 In Venice the commoners or plebeians played no role in the defense of the city, so that the Venetian republic had to depend on mercenary troops: this fundamental constitutional choice led to Venice’s decline as a political force on the mainland. Machiavelli’s negative view of mercenaries, set out in The Prince and The Art of War, reappears in The Discourses on Livy.44 In Rome, citizens from all walks of life became soldiers; great leaders like Cincinnatus might be poor farmers, but Rome recognized their talents and utilized them (II. 25, 316–17). Only an army composed of citizen soldiers can contribute during both times of peace and war: Soldiers are also citizens, who, in times of peace, can contribute to the common good in other ways. Machiavelli prefers a republic like Rome with a growing population, even though it might be less well organized than Sparta or Athens and less peaceful than Venice because “without this abundance of men it will never succeed in becoming a great city” (II. 3, 161–63). Machiavelli views free republics with larger populations and larger armies as having an advantage within a competitive environment, but he never advocates an uncontrolled type of expansionism or empire building. For Machiavelli, conquest must have a goal other than simply increasing a state’s power; it is a means of achieving the territorial greatness that will allow it to defend itself without being dependent on the troops of others. The proper way to pursue security is through alliances and leagues; by protecting and treating subject cities with dignity; and by resorting to military force only after other prudent strategies have failed. In The Discourses on Livy, he examines the three methods of expansion used by republics. Utilized by the ancient Etruscans, the rst involves forming “a confederation of many republics in which none surpassed the others in either authority or rank; and as they acquired territory, they made the other cities their confederates, just as the Swiss have done in our own times, and as in the ancient times the Achaeans and the Aetolians did in Greece” (II. 4, 163). Characteristic of the Romans, the

43 In I. 5 and II. 3, Machiavelli analyzes the consequences when republics fail to expand. 44 See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 197–201.

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second and preferred method involves making alliances, while retaining leadership in a “position of command” (II. 4, 164). In describing the third method, that of creating subjects rather than allies, as did the Spartans and the Athenians, Machiavelli asserts that it “is entirely useless,” because it destroyed the republics that acquired the territories they could not hold. Rome, on the contrary, creating allies, “rose to the heights of power. And since it was the only city to live in this manner, it was also the only one to become so powerful. . . . This mode of conduct, as has been said, has been employed only by the Romans; nor can a republic wishing to expand its territory employ any other method, because experience has shown us none other more certain or more true” (II. 4, 164–65). In the way Machiavelli discusses it, the Roman method of expansion cannot be described as predatory but perhaps as exemplifying the critical quality of prudence exercised by their armies. Although the Romans sometimes used harsh methods, even when cities surrendered as subjects, the Romans “allowed the cities they did not destroy to live under their own laws” and “left no sign of Roman power,” obliging them to observe specic conditions (II. 21, 211). Although Machiavelli praises the Florentines’ benevolent policy toward Pistoia, which made that city voluntarily and willingly accept Florentine rule, he strongly criticizes their aggressive policies towards Pisa, Siena, and Lucca, because treating these cities like enemies made them resist. His conclusion is that republics should attempt to form leagues or to offer protection. He adds: “I do not, for this reason, think that one should not employ arms and force, but they must be reserved for the last resort, when and where other methods are not sufcient” (II. 21, 212–13).45 This condition of endless changes in an uncertain world tests a static republic, such as Venice, which helps to explain Machiavelli’s insistent preference for an expansionist republic that can respond to endless cycles of internal and external challenges (I. 6, 37). In the second and third books of The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli explores the role and impact of the Roman military on the freedom and welfare of the Roman Republic as well as a range of issues pertaining to the conduct of a republic in foreign and military affairs. Besides exploring the advantages of expansionism, he assesses Roman military

45 Machiavelli makes similar arguments in the Florentine Histories (II. 38) with respect to Florence’s dealings with Arezzo (positive) and Volterra (negative).

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conduct and military strategies or methods in a way reminiscent of The Prince. In his preface to Book II, he concedes that men do not know the complete truth about antiquity, but he never waivers in his belief that the Roman model can and should be imitated. Machiavelli sets forth advice on a variety of issues, highlighting the innovative strategies utilized by the Romans in waging and winning wars (II. 6; II. 9)— ghting only one critical war at a time (II. 1); conducting short massive campaigns; taking only part of their conquered enemies’ lands for colonies and the public treasury (II. 6); knowing when and whom to attack (II. 9; III. 10–11); depending on good soldiers rather than money (II. 10); avoiding alliances with weak princes (II. 12); being decisive in dealing with enemies (II. 15); organizing with care all military operations; imposing strong discipline (II. 16, 19; III. 36); using well-trained citizen soldiers; utilizing infantry in good formations rather than artillery and avoiding fortresses (II. 16–18, 20, 24); eschewing damaging foreign customs (II. 19); knowing how to treat conquered cities (II. 21; III. 20); cultivating good judgment and prudent behavior in warfare (II. 25–27); obeying the law of nations (II. 28); using effective means of taking towns (II. 32); appointing knowledgeable and capable commanders who can instill condence and trust in troops and take them safely into battle (II. 33, 38; III. 14, 18, 37, 39); and granting army commanders discretionary powers (III. 15, 39). In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli revisits the methods of political and military conduct he treats in chapters XV–XIX of The Prince, where he subverts the traditional Ciceronian precept that to achieve glory and to preserve a state, a leader must be virtuous. In a republic, however, such unconventional methods are largely conned to the conduct of warfare, with the possible exceptions of the moment of the founding and instances of internal conspiracies (III. 6). In The Discourses on Livy, the distinction between good and evil remains problematic: “in human actions . . . one nds, among other difculties, that in the desire to bring something to a perfect conclusion, there is always some evil very near this good, which arises so easily along with it that it seems impossible to avoid the one while wanting the other” (III. 37, 342). Machiavelli makes clear that “where the ultimate decision concerning the safety of one’s country is to be taken, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful, should be permitted; on the contrary . . . one should follow in its entirety the policy that saves its life and preserves its liberty” (III. 41, 350). The problem is that people, who do not know how to be “honourably bad or perfectly good,” cannot

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carry out an evil deed that “contains in itself some grandeur or some generosity” (I. 27, 82). Hence, Machiavelli excuses Romulus for the murder of his brother because founding a free city constitutes a praiseworthy standard for glorious achievement.46 Referring to Xenophon’s Life of Cyrus, Machiavelli observes that for great leaders like Cyrus, deception was a weapon even more potent than force (II. 13). He asserts that republics must do no less in the conduct of foreign affairs, noting, for example, how Rome used deceit to entrap her allies. Deceit is a crucial weapon, one of “the methods necessary to achieve greatness,” until the republic becomes so powerful that “force alone proves sufcient” (II. 13, 186). Force and fraud were important elements in the arsenal of Roman military commanders. In Book III, Machiavelli reafrms deceit as a vital method of military conduct that should not, however, result in breaking “your word and your agreements.” Deceit should not be employed in every action, but “in waging a war it is, nevertheless, a laudable and glorious thing, and the man who employs deceit to overcome the enemy is to be praised, just like the man who overcomes him by force” (III. 40, 48). Addressing the question of promises made by consuls under duress, he indicates that a republic is not obligated to keep such agreements (III. 42, 350). Machiavelli also warns that is it crucial for commanders and leaders to know whether to use cruelty or mercy to control a crowd or an army and to avoid making oneself hated. He concludes, much as he does in The Prince, that depending on the circumstances, two different modes of conduct can achieve the same results, offering again such examples as Hannibal and Scipio as well as Manlius Torquatus, Valerius Corvinus, and in particular Camillus, whose excessive severity and lack of generosity led the people to drive him from the city despite his many praiseworthy qualities (III. 20, 305).47

The Role of Virtù in a Free Society Throughout The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli gives voice to his concerns about the dangers of corruption, both moral, in the Machiavellian sense, and institutional. He declares that “every day in a great city . . . accidents necessarily arise that require a physician” (I. 49, 358). The cosmic,

46 47

See the discussion of the founding of Rome in I. 9. These examples are discussed in III. 19–23.

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institutional, and new moral orders are, it seems, inextricably intertwined.48 Corruption is inherent in the nature of created things in a world dominated by mutability and Fortune who cannot be opposed (II. 29, 236). Besides the inherent passions and wickedness of human nature, self-deception leads “almost all men” to turn to tyranny; the prime examples of such self-delusion are Catiline and Caesar, the latter of whom Machiavelli describes as especially “detestable” (I. 10, 47–48). This drive to dominate in individual citizens can only lead to tyranny and inequality, which makes it impossible to construct a free way of life.49 Hence, in Book III, Machiavelli takes up the question of reform and renewal, analyzing in detail the role of virtù in a free republic, and elaborating on exactly what individual citizens can do for their country. Moreover, Machiavelli transcends the faith he expresses throughout The Prince in the innovative powers of exceptional individuals who combat Fortune and dominate their environment, expanding this trust both to individuals committed to the common good of a republic and to the virtù of institutions and groups (III. 31, 329–30). Advising that “the actions of individual men made Rome great” (III. 1, 250), he also cautions that it is critical to judge people by their demonstrated ability (virtù) or actual deeds (I. 18, 69; III. 34). In establishing a free republic with an empire, Rome had to learn how to organize and to train the large citizen body required for expansion and domination (I. 5, 32). Besides allowing them to participate in public affairs as citizens, which led to sometimes tumultuous conict, Rome also had to educate and to arm her citizens in order to utilize the full variety of their abilities (virtù). In this way, Rome achieved a greatness so far surpassing that of any other state, that Machiavelli prefers it to all others despite his recognition that even the superior Roman model cannot hold off corruption and change forever.50 Given his analysis of Rome’s eventual corruption and the demise of the republic, it is not surprising that the longest chapter in The Discourses on Livy deals with his advice for understanding and preventing or suppressing conspiracies (III. 6).

48 See Pocock’s discussion of corruption in The Machiavellian Moment, 202–11; see also Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I: 163–68, 178–79; as well as Viroli, Machiavelli, 131–43. 49 See his remarks on inequality as the cause of corruption in I. 17, 67. 50 In The Machiavellian Moment, p. 199, Pocock explains that a failure to expand exposes a state to Fortune without the means to withstand her blows. In other words, failing to expand exposes a state to greater dangers than expansion uncovers.

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In his study of Livy’s history, Machiavelli goes beyond his negative assessment of human nature, a staple in his advice to a prince or a republic, and claries his assumption that people are educable through good laws and institutions. Machiavelli stresses that only in a free republic with institutions and laws devoted to the common good will citizens of virtù continually arise who can learn to defend, support, and renew public devotion to a free way of life. He makes the bold claim that the world has as much virtù in the present as it possessed in the past, suggesting that not only new founders but entire “provinces” or states could benet from his advice. A central concept in The Prince, where the term describes politically, if not morally, constructive actions, virtù now becomes a vital element in the founding and preservation of a free republic. In The Discourses on Livy, references to virtù arise as frequently as those to ordini (institutions). Not only a quality of a republic’s citizens, leaders, and public ofcials, virtù becomes an attribute of its armies and the body politic itself and is indispensable for enduring freedom. A republic is only as virtuous as its citizens, both individually and collectively, and their virtù must always express itself in defending the common good and their freedom. In Book I, we learn that virtù plays a role of unique importance in the founding of a state; the exceptional talents of the founder must be embedded in the institutions he creates if they are to last. Later in the work, Machiavelli declares that virtù plays a reforming role in the renewal of “mixed bodies, such as republics and religions,” which, like all worldly things, are subject to continual change (III. 1, 246). Thus, recognizing the difculty of nding an individual with all the requisite talents for founding a good republic, Machiavelli presents his reader with no less than two founders—Romulus and Numa—who seem to correspond to the combination of armed and unarmed prophets mentioned in chapter VI of The Prince. Although Machiavelli’s vision of the state is remarkably secular, he never entirely excludes divine agencies. Machiavelli notes that since “the heavens [my italics] judged Romulus’s institutions would not sufce for so great an empire, they inspired the Roman senate to elect Numa Pompilius as his successor, so that the matters left undone by Romulus were organized by Numa” (I. 11, 50). Numa, who was the founder of Roman religious practices, may rank above Romulus in the praiseworthiness of his actions (I. 10, 47). Machiavelli claims that in legal, governmental, and military institutions “we recognize the ability of the builder and the fortune of what he has built: this is more or less remarkable according to whether he who has been its founder is more or less able” (I. 1, 20). Since Machiavelli presents the Roman

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Republic as having achieved the highest level of grandezza, the talents of its founders must have been exceptional in nature. Virtù plays a signicant role in staving off the deterioration inherent in the created world, the world of human enterprise. The quality of a republic’s institutions, as well as the diverse talents of individual citizens, plays a role not only in maintaining the core values of republics and religions but in their continual renewal. Machiavelli speaks of reform as an ongoing process of bringing “such bodies back to their beginnings . . . either by some extrinsic accident or by some intrinsic prudence” (III. 1, 246–47). Machiavelli illustrates the former, an external event, with the attack of the Gauls on Rome, which provoked benecial religious and legal reform. Intrinsic accidents may involve either some good law, such as those creating the censors and the dictatorial authority, or the virtù of a particular individual. Even laws “must be given life by the exceptional ability of a single citizen, who courageously strives to enforce them against the power of all those who fail to observe them” (III. 1, 248). He cites the examples of men such as the rst Brutus, who executed his own sons for plotting against the republic, or Manlius Torquatus, who executed a son for failing to obey orders (III. 1, 248). The return to beginnings may be achieved through “the simple talents of a single man, without depending upon a law which drives you on to its execution” (III. 1, 248). He cites the good examples of Horatius Cocles, Muscius Scaevola, Fabricius, the two Decii, and Regulus Atilius, whose “uncommon and worthy examples created in Rome almost the same effect that was created by laws and institutions” (III. 1, 249). In the case of religious renewal, he cites the modern examples of Saints Francis and Dominic, whose “new institutions were powerful enough to prevent the dishonesty of the priests and leaders of this religion from ruining it . . .” (III. 1, 249). Hence, the republic depends on severe, uncompromising public ofcials and citizens, who, untouched by private interests, ambition, or envy are rigorous in upholding and applying the laws that guarantee freedom and in taking prudent actions to benet the common good. Book III focuses upon how acts of moral and physical courage sustain freedom and ward off corruption within a republic. Corruption is always just around the corner, however, and in the title of the last chapter, Machiavelli reafrms the idea that preserving freedom requires on a daily basis “new measures” and “good qualities” (III. 49, 358). Although wicked citizens exist, they “cannot do evil in a republic that is not corrupted” (III. 8, 278). Machiavelli examines virtù from a variety of perspectives, noting that exemplary actions need to occur approximately

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every decade to ward off corruption (III. 1, 249–50). In the critical early days of the Roman Republic, Junius Brutus’s pretense of madness, an act of deception, gave him the ability to seize the opportunity to overthrow the kings and liberate his native land; he displayed his severity, greatness of spirit, and devotion to liberty by executing his own sons for their sedition (III. 2–3). Machiavelli also recognizes that good institutions and good citizens can combat the treachery of a powerful and popular hero such as Manlius Capitolinus, who saved Rome, only later to attack its institutions and laws in his envy over rewards granted to others. His example shows “how great strength of mind and body and how many good works done for the benet of one’s own city can be later canceled out by an evil passion to rule” (III. 8, 278). In this case, the integrity of the city’s institutions, its way of life, and its basic material—that is, its people—prevented any citizen from defending him and resulted in a judgment against Manlius and his execution. Machiavelli comments that “the love of their native city was stronger than anything else in all of the people” (III. 8, 278).51 For Machiavelli, the longevity, adaptability, and good fortune of republics depend upon the “diversity of the citizens who inhabit it” (I. 9, 282). Nowhere is this more obvious than in the armies of free states. For a state determined to build an empire, like Rome, the number of skilled soldiers and talented commanders is critical. Machiavelli concedes that the virtù of the troops is as crucial to battles as that of their leaders, and he realizes that outstanding good troops can create good commanders. Still, he emphasizes the need for prudent, capable commanders who know how to train their troops and make their men trust them, so that an army can condently go into battle despite odd occurrences, strange noises, and erce enemies (III. 9, 12–14). Machiavelli warns that to avoid having men of exceptional abilities turn against the state, republics must nd ways to give them some recognition even in times of peace, especially through maintaining armies and planning for war (III. 16). Besides his concern about envy on the part of powerful men, Machiavelli observes that envy and ingratitude sometimes prevents egalitarian

51 Machiavelli’s characterization of Cosimo de’ Medici in his Florentine Histories (VII. 6) describes this individual as someone who loved himself more than his country. No comment from Machiavelli could be more negative. It should also be remembered that in one of Machiavelli’s most famous private letters, Machiavelli declares just the opposite—that he loves his native city more than his soul.

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republics from recognizing worthy men. To ensure that citizens without virtù cannot be corrupted by wealth, “the most useful thing instituted in a free society is a way to keep the citizens poor” (I. 25, 316). Machiavelli regularly attributes the success of the Roman Republic to the custom that “poverty did not close the path to any rank or honour whatsoever, and that exceptional ability [virtù] was sought after wherever it made its home. The fact that rank and ability were inseparable from wealth made wealth less desirable” (I. 25, 316–17). As the preeminent model of republican virtù, to whom George Washington has regularly been compared, Machiavelli cites Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who had a “small farm, which he worked with his own hands” (I. 25, 317).52 When the senate’s emissaries arrived from Rome to advise him of his election as dictator, they found Cincinnatus ploughing his elds. After organizing an army and saving the republic from danger, Cincinnatus not only denied the army he rescued of the spoils of battle, but he removed the defeated consul Minucius from ofce. He then returned to his farm. In another example of the severe, disciplined, patriotic, hardworking, frugal Roman, Marcus Regulus demonstrated that winning honour in war was enough for good citizens by leaving all the prots from his victory to the public. Both men are models of good Roman citizens, who returned to being “frugal, humble guardians of their own small pieces of land, obedient to the magistrates, and respectful to their superiors . . .” (III. 25, 318). A wise republic takes advantage of the talents of its citizens without regard for their economic or social standing. Although individual citizens play a powerful role in upholding a free way of life, a republic requires something more than the excellence of individuals if it is to ward off corruption and tyranny—the virtù of its entire citizen body.53 If they are to be the guardians of liberty, the people must show restraint in their actions and recognize whom to respect (I. 53–54). Their goodness expresses itself chiey in the fulllment of their duties as citizens, one of which may be in serving in the military and another in obeying the law. Machiavelli’s examples of the plebeians’ respect for the law distinguish his conception of a virtuous citizen body. When Camillus made a vow to give a tenth of the spoils taken

52 Washington as a modern Cincinnatus is discussed by Gary Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1984); and in Bondanella, The Eternal City, 136–47. 53 Viroli, Machiavelli, pp. 138, 148–74, argues convincingly that this type of virtù is best dened as love of country.

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from Veii as a gift to Apollo, the senate reversed the decision. The willingness of the plebeians to comply with the senate’s edict as well as the senate’s faith that the plebeians would return a tenth of their spoils to the public treasury demonstrates, in Machiavelli’s view, “how much goodness and religion were in that people and how much good was to be expected from it” (I. 55, 134). He cites the free city republics of Germany, where citizens pay their taxes by placing the amount they owe into a strongbox after taking an oath to pay the proper sum without anyone counting it. He notes that these cities “ourish in liberty” because their citizens, who are both good and religious, maintain equality among themselves and uphold the law “in such a fashion that no one outside or within these republics dares to occupy them” (I. 55, 135). Machiavelli even speculates that the absence of nobles in the republics of Florence, Siena, and Lucca have established “such a state of equality that a prudent man with a knowledge of ancient civilizations could easily introduce a free form of government there” (I. 55, 136–37). In The Discourses on Livy, virtù generally refers to politically constructive, if not traditionally moral, action that contributes to the common good and ensures a free way of life. In this context, Machiavelli regularly associates virtù with the quality of prudence, which can be an attribute of individuals or well-organized peoples (I. 58, 142; III. 34, 334). Machiavelli appears to understand prudence in the manner of Cicero and Aquinas, where it becomes the ability to reason in the right way about things to be done and refers to understanding the past and present as well as anticipating the future.54 In particular, prudence in The Discourses on Livy denes the ability to nd an intelligent way to dominate Fortune and to succeed in preserving a free way of life. Not surprisingly, the issue of prudence arises in Book II, where Machiavelli states that “three things are required in war: many soldiers and good ones, prudent leaders, and good fortune” (II. 10, 180). He clearly pairs the two qualities in attributing Ottaviano Fregoso’s capture of Genoa to “his own exceptional ability [virtù] and prudence” (II. 24, 223). Prudence is important in selecting allies (II. 11) and in selecting good military strategies, especially moderation in speech and knowing when to make peace (II. 11, 24, 26–27, 33). In Book III, Machiavelli refers to the “prudence of a tribune” that enabled the Roman army to escape when they were trapped by the Veientes (III. 12, 291). He calls

54

See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 24–28 for a discussion of Machiavelli’s ideal of prudence but not specically in the context of The Discourses on Livy.

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Camillus “the most prudent of all Roman commanders” because he avoided more bloodshed in taking the city of Veii by making it known that no one would be punished who was unarmed (III. 12, 291). The task of sustaining freedom in a republic requires constant vigilance to cure social ills, and in Machiavelli’s view, those measures must be sufciently severe in order to ensure the citizen-soldiers’ obedience, like the Roman practice of decimating the armies (III. 49, 358–59). Unless devised by a prudent man, such measures will result in the downfall of the city (III. 49, 359). Machiavelli illustrates this point with the example of Quinctius Fabius Maximus, who conceived of a plan to control citizenship through the assignments to tribes, so that the new people in Rome, who did not share in traditional Roman republican values, could not corrupt the whole city (III. 9, 359). Hence, Machiavelli identies virtù both as a quality of individuals and as an attribute of institutions and entire societies. As in The Prince, virtù regularly confronts Fortune, and Machiavelli rejects the view of Plutarch and Livy that Roman military success was largely a matter of good luck. The greatness of a republic is measured in terms of its virtù—the virtù of its individual citizens, its armies, and its people as a whole, but it is an ongoing struggle to preserve and renew a free way of life because of the constant accidents that arise to challenge even the greatest cities like Rome.

Conclusion In The Discourses on Livy, the importance of founding a free, independent republic is so crucial that its actions and the actions of its citizens must often be judged according to standards that stand apart from those of conventional morality. Although many of Machiavelli’s insights into the nature of political behavior tend to be remarkably consistent throughout his writings, it is clear that The Discourses on Livy offers new insights into the character of life in a free republic.55 The essentials of Machiavelli’s cosmos remain constant: virtù confronts Fortune, the heavens, God, and human nature and takes advantage of the fact that when

55 Geerken and others write about the “fundamental unity” between The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, but they fail to elaborate on their profound differences. See John H. Geerken, “Machiavelli Studies since 1969,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976), 351–68.

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Fortune “wants to accomplish great deeds, she selects a man with such spirit and such exceptional ability that he recognizes those occasions that she offers him” (II. 29, 235). Still, virtù can be lodged in institutions and military organizations, and a free republic must take advantage of the opportunities offered by Fortune or use force to gain the advantage against a malevolent Fortune. In The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli draws on historical examples, which are typical of his method of political and social analysis, to document virtù in men and in institutions. The goal of political action in Discourses on Livy is to secure and maintain a free way of life. In each of its three books, Machiavelli focuses upon how best to establish and maintain a free way of life: in the rst book through an analysis of institutions and laws and the relationship between social classes; in the second through an analysis of a policy of expansionism and of military organization and methods; and in the third, through an analysis of the exceptional talents and patriotism of individuals. Machiavelli’s focus is not simply on political liberty but on liberty in the broadest sense—it is on a vivere libero, a free way of life. The very word has such resonance, he tells us, that upon hearing the word proclaimed, the troops of Syracuse turned away from taking revenge against the killer of their tyrant, Hieronymus, the grandson of Hiero of Syracuse, to “considering how a free way of life might be organized in that city” (II. 2, 157–8). In his examination of how to achieve political liberty, he notes that its benets extend beyond the political sphere. He notes that “all countries and provinces living in liberty have gained enormous advantages from it” (II. 3, 160). Benets extend to the economic and social spheres. Family life is enhanced because men know that through their own efforts they can nd a wife and support a family. A father knows that his children will be born free with opportunities to succeed in the world. A free society promotes the kind of competition that has public and private benets. Machiavelli notes: “Wealth will be seen to increase more rapidly, both that which derives from agriculture and that from crafts and trade, because each man more willingly increases those things and seeks to acquire those goods that he believes, once acquired, he can enjoy” (II. 3, 160). Finally, only a free society allows citizens to enjoy their possessions without fear for their safety (I. 16, 63). Machiavelli rereads Livy in a way that illuminates his own political ideals, which, as J. G. A. Pocock has ably documented, helped to inspire the Atlantic republican tradition of England and America.56

56

See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, esp. 183–218 and 506–52.

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Bibliography Anglo, Sidney. Machiavelli—The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Atkinson, James B., and David Sices, trans. The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s “Discourses” & Guicciardini’s “Considerations.” DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Berlin, Isaiah. “The Originality of Machiavelli.” Against the Current. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Biow, Douglas. Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Black, Robert. “Machiavelli, Servant of the Florentine Republic.” Machiavelli and Republicanism. Ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bondanella, Peter. The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. ——. Francesco Guicciardini. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Chabod, Federico. Scritti su Machiavelli. Turin: Einaudi, 1964. Chiappelli, Fredi. “Machiavelli as Secretary.” Italian Quarterly 13 (1970): 27–44. de Grazia, Sebastian. Machiavelli in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Geerken, John H. “Machiavelli Studies since 1969.” The Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 351–68. Gilbert, Felix. “Bernardo Rucellai and the Orti Oricellari: A Study on the Origin of Modern Political Thought.” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 136–56. ——. History: Choice and Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. ——. Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. ——. “The Venetian Constitution in Florentine Political Thought.” History, 179–214. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Trans. and ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ——. Florentine Histories. Trans. and ed. Laura F. Baneld and Harvey C. Manseld, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. ——. The Prince. Trans. Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Manseld, Harvey. Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979. Masters, Roger D. Fortune Is a River: Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Magnicent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Meinecke, Freidrich. Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and Its Place in Modern History. Trans. Douglas Scott. New York: Praeger, 1957. Mommsen, Theodor E. “Petrarch’s Conception of the Dark Ages.” Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Ed. Eugene F. Rice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. Najemy, John M. “The Controversy Surrounding Machiavelli’s Service to the Republic.” Machiavelli and Republicanism. Ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Parel, Anthony J. The Machiavellian Cosmos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Phillips, Mark. Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Russo, Luigi. Machiavelli. Third edition. Bari: Laterza, 1949. Schellhase, Kenneth C. Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

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——. Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ——. “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas.” Machiavelli and Republicanism. Ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Viroli, Maurizio. Introduction to Machiavelli. The Prince. Trans. Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——. Machiavelli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. von Albertini, Rudolf. Firenze dalla repubblica al principato. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Wills, Gary. Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment. New York: Doubleday, 1984.

MACHIAVELLI: RHETORIC AND PRUDENCE Eugene Garver

I I remember a Second City routine from many years ago in which Severn Darden frames the issue of free will and necessity as, “What would have happened if Oedipus had read the book before setting out on his journey?” The entire re-enactment of Oedipus, and especially the punch line, are relevant here, but I’m not going to give them away. Instead I want to ask a similar question about Machiavelli. What happens if the prince’s subjects or republican citizens read The Prince and the Discourses? If Machiavelli offers esoteric knowledge to a limited audience of leaders, then he will empower them to deceive and manipulate ignorant, unsuspecting subjects. On the other hand, if Machiavellian leaders can be more successful once their subjects are sophisticated enough for complicity with their leaders, then the relation between ruler and ruled will be quite different. I want to argue that leaders become more powerful as their subjects become Machiavellian readers, as Machiavelli lets princely subjects overhear his advice to the prince. The new prince has to look like a prince, be perceived as acting like a king and not like a thug. Machiavelli tells the prince—and the republican audience of The Discourses on Livy for that matter—that they are entering a new world in which trust no longer automatically binds rulers and subjects. Maybe the hereditary monarch can depend on unreective trust and the bonds of affection that bind prince and people, but neither the usurping prince nor the republican leader can. It is frightening to leave the world of trust because if people can’t be trusted, then they might do anything, and if the people don’t trust the leader, they won’t obey and follow him. Stability is gone. Reliability disappears. Machiavelli’s innovation, which justly leads to him being called realistic and even scientic, is to substitute prediction for trust. Foresight and detachment become central aspects of prudence. If people act predictably—and The Prince and The Discourses on Livy show how people are and can be made to be predictable—then one

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can safely abandon the world of trust. In fact, the prince will do better by insuring that people are predictable than by trying to get the people to trust him. If you bring good results, the people will forget the past, whose traditions and legitimacy can only work against the new prince. The things written above, carried out prudently, make a new prince seem an old one, and make him quickly safer and rmer in his position than if he were in it by right of descent. Because the actions of a new prince are more closely watched than those of a hereditary prince; and when these reveal strength and wisdom, they lay hold on men and bind them to him more rmly than does ancient blood.1

Because “men love of their own free will, but are inspired with fear by the will of the prince, a wise prince should always rely upon himself, and not upon the will of others.” It is better to be feared than loved. This strategy has heavy consequences though. Making oneself secure by giving the people present benets, substituting prediction for trust, transforms stability into a policy of constant acquisition. It will always be open to the people to ask, “what have you done for me lately?” The new prince succeeds by getting the people to look to present and future benets rather than past triumphs. But when they do, the people will have expectations too heavy for the prince to meet. Prediction is much more expensive than trust. It would be better, even if not safer, to get the people to trust the leader. Psychologically, it is plausible that we trust those who trust us. Like friendship, trust is normally reciprocal. The prince cannot afford to trust the people, and the people know it. Yet the prince needs the people to trust him. The new prince has no choice but to live in a world of prediction rather than trust. When Machiavelli asks whether it is better to be feared or loved, he presents a false choice: anyone in a position to ask such a question is already committed to relying on fear, relying on actions that make his subjects predictable by being dependent on him. Love as a tactic is love transformed. Machiavelli advertises this as the real world, as opposed to the ideals of philosophers and priests.2 The

1 The Prince, chapter 24, in Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), vol. 1, p. 88. 2 “Only those who hold the view that friendship is neither better nor worse than money, but is simply not compatible to money or other commodities are capable of having friends. Similarly only those who would not even consider exchanges of money for friendship are capable of having friends.” Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 352.

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prince treats the people as predictable. The prince gets people to treat him as predictable. Both these are aspects of the preference for fear over love. The rhetorical issue is whether the prince will do better if the people too give up trust for prediction. If so, teaching the people to read Machiavellian texts and Machiavellian deeds will increase the prince’s power. Consider, for example, Discourses on Livy I.9: Nor will a wise mind ever reproach anyone for some extraordinary action performed in order to found a kingdom or institute a republic. It is, indeed, tting that while the action accuses him, the result excuses him; and when the result is good, as it was with Romulus, it will always excuse him.3

The leader is always subject to judgment when he acts in an extraordinary way. If the end justies the means, this is because the means need justifying. The people can self-consciously and knowingly act on the principle that while the action accuses, the result excuses, seeing the act as wrong, and excused by effective results. Machiavellian leaders need subjects who are as bilingual as they are, uent both in the language of morality and the language of utility and “effective truth” (la verità effetuale). Many people nd it hard to think both languages. Instead, for them, the result colors the action: it wasn’t so bad anyway; it couldn’t have been; just look at the result. “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even as a duty.”4 The hold of traditional morality is strong, even when we don’t act on it and don’t hold others to its standards. Such realistic subjects will still be manipulated and deceived. It’s just that they will cooperate in their deceptions.

3 I use the translation in Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Manseld and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 4 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Putnam, 1952), 121. See DL I.18.51: “Because the ordering of a city for a political way of life presupposes a good man, and becoming prince of a republic by violence presupposes a bad man, one will nd that it very rarely happens that someone good wishes to become prince by bad ways, even though his end be good, and that someone wicked, having become prince, wishes to work well, and that it will ever occur to his mind to use well the authority that he has acquired badly.”

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Here are three quick examples from chapters 17 and 18 of The Prince that show the complications to my question of whether the leader should invite his subjects to read Machiavelli. In chapter 17, the prince must not mind a reputation for cruelty or parsimony. These are appearances which match his reality without danger. The Machiavellian audience will be realistic enough to realize that cruelty and parsimony can be well-used. Machiavellian readers will make the prince more powerful. In contrast, the prince needs a reputation for courage, and this means appearing to take risks in good causes. Instead of not minding a bad reputation, which will be excused, he needs a good reputation. Machiavellian readers will not be satised with a false appearance; they want the real thing. Chapter 18’s question of whether it is better to be feared or loved demands a different kind of consideration. While he asks which is better, he answers that it is much safer (molto più sicuro) to be feared. Even if the prince should choose to be frightful because it is safer, he certainly cannot appear to be motivated by considerations of safety. In this case the prince must hide the reality from his subjects, and so must be a dissembler. A sophisticated audience would undermine the prince’s performance. Along the same lines, the prince cannot always keep his word. The people should realize—and the allegory of the lion and the fox helps to teach the people—that no prince can always be faithful. And yet in each particular case “it is necessary that the prince should know how to color this nature well, and how to be a great hypocrite and dissembler. For men are so simple, and yield so much to immediate necessity, that the deceiver will never lack dupes.”5 The prince needs his subjects to be sophisticated enough to know that when he breaks his word, he is not being dishonest but prudent ( prudente). But they cannot be so sophisticated that they see through each particular betrayal. The prince’s subjects reverse the dictum in the Discourses that “although men are apt to deceive themselves in general matters, yet they rarely do so in particulars” (I.47). The prince’s subjects have to be taken in, and then defend the prince for taking them in.

5 See too DL I.25, 60: “The generality of men feed on what appears as much as on what is; indeed, many times they are moved more by things that appear than by things that are.”

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A nal example from chapter 18: “It may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful and ckle, dissemblers, avoiders of danger, and greedy of gain.” Two questions: if the prince’s subjects know that they are ungrateful, etc., will they be more compliant? If the prince’s subjects know that he regards them as ungrateful, etc., will they be more obedient? Altogether, the details of Machiavelli’s performance raise the question of whether one can be a Machiavellian subject with one’s eyes open, and whether the Machiavellian leader should prefer such subjects. Prediction has its appeals. It is forward-looking and realistic. Unlike trust, prediction can be a subject for science, letting us transform prudence into political science. But there are drawbacks too. A world in which only the result counts seems a lot riskier than one in which I can still be the prince even when I fail in a particular case, as he says is true for the hereditary ruler. Can I survive for very long if the loyalty of the people does not extend beyond each day’s success? He says in the Discourses on Livy (III.1) that “those are the best-constituted bodies, and have the longest existence, which possess the intrinsic means of frequently renewing themselves,” but it looks like the prince must renew himself daily, bringing new benets to the people. Traditional rulers rely on trust. The Machiavellian prince relies on prediction instead. At the beginning of The Prince, the position of the usurper looks quite unfavorable against the position of the hereditary ruler, who only has to avoid mistakes to stay in power.6 By chapter 24, The Prince has trained its readers to recognize that the new ruler is actually a ruler, not just a thug with power. And similarly in chapter 19, the prince who follows his advice “has reputation enough. And against one who has reputation, conspiracy is difcult; attack on him is difcult, if only he is thought to be of great merit and revered by his people.”7

6 Chapter 2. “It is enough merely that the prince does not transcend the order of things established by his predecessors, and then to accommodate himself to events as they occur. So that if such a prince has but ordinary sagacity, he will always maintain himself in his state, unless some extraordinary and superior force should deprive him of it. And even in such a case he will recover it, whenever the occupant meets with any reverses.” 7 Gilbert, p. 68. As Hobbes puts it in Behemoth, “The power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people. . . . If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them to obey the laws? An army, you will say? But what shall force the army?” English Works VI, 184, 237.

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I want to look at these issues in more depth by an apparently remote analogy. Plato’s Phaedrus begins with a pair of speeches, one written by Lysias and read aloud to Socrates by Phaedrus, and one improvised by Socrates in response. Both of them aim at seducing an attractive young boy by arguing paradoxically—and scandalously in precisely the way The Prince is scandalous—that he is better off giving his sexual favors to a clear-headed, realistic, and predictable non-lover than to a lover. Like Machiavelli telling the prince that it is better to be feared than loved, Lysias and Socrates tell the boy that he is better off submitting to a non-lover than a lover, similarly preferring prediction to trust. Lysias argues in the most businesslike way, appealing to the interests of the boy, arguing that those interests are best served by the attentions of a dispassionate and calculating non-lover. Phaedrus nds it delightfully clever (227c). Instead of nding it a pleasantly scandalous novelty, Socrates nds shameful the substitution of the language of interest for the language of eros. Still, he aims to beat Lysias at his own game by presenting his own argument on behalf of the non-lover. Both Lysias and Socrates argue that the boy should discount any lover’s feelings of affection in favor of the calculations of a non-lover. The non-lover then will not have to seduce a boy by pretending to be a lover but by making the boy into a non-erotic calculating person like himself. Only the non-lover can argue honestly and openly. The language of prediction is the only non-deceptive practical tongue. Erotic rhetoric is inherently deceptive, albeit often self-deceptive Lysias argues, since the smitten lover promises eternal delity but tires of the boy as soon as he starts to lose his youthful beauty. Lysias is not the rst non-lover to try to seduce an attractive boy. The desire for sex has always disguised itself as a desire for love. Lysias is the rst non-lover to avow it and invite the boy to be similarly calculating. The originality in the rhetorical performance of The Prince is not the content of what Machiavelli says—everyone already knows that success and traditional virtue are often at odds—but the fact of saying it.8

8 See too my “Saying What Goes Without Saying: Bacon’s Essays on Speech, Intelligence and Morality.” Fred Antczak, ed., Essays in Honor of Wayne Booth (Ohio State University Press, 1994).

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The theme of Lysias’s speech is set at the beginning: “Lovers repent of the kindnesses which they have shown when their passion ceases, but to the non-lovers who are free and not under any compulsion, no time of repentance ever comes; for they confer their benets according to the measure of their ability, in the way which is most conducive to their own interest” (231a). According to Lysias, most older men aren’t truly lovers; they just want sex from these attractive young boys. But they have to pretend to be lovers to insinuate themselves into the company of the beloved. Similarly, Machiavelli’s prince pretends to live by the rules of traditional morality but really gures out how to buy the people off and keep them happy and quiescent. He appears always to keep his word by distracting attention from the times when he doesn’t. This is the non-lover posing as a lover, the crafty politician pretending to be a moral leader. The new prince does not need Machiavelli to tell him that he must act that way. Necessity has always taught usurpers how to behave. But his subjects need to know what he’s doing and why. This is Lysias’s message. The boy should recognize the non-lover for what he is and give in to him anyway. The Lysian differs from most old men, and the Machiavellian is different from most usurpers only in admitting the fact. “Yes, I know I promised, but we all know that promises are valid only as long as keeping them is useful, so you shouldn’t blame me for going back on my word now. You and I know that I have to appear trustworthy—it would be dishonorable to appear otherwise—but we also know that that is mere appearance that should take in only a child.” Lysias addresses the boy as a non-lover and converts the boy into an economic maximizer just like him. The prince must not only learn how not to be good but must teach the same to his subjects, so that they will readily excuse his crimes. Far from being a deceiver, the Lysian and the Machiavellian seduce the people into joining with him in his realistic amoral world.

IV The echoes of the Phaedrus should be strong as we return to Machiavelli. Machiavelli teaches the prince to speak the language of interest to his subjects and to turn against the language of morality. The new prince cannot speak the language of tradition, as his subjects can, since that would work against him. Seen from within that world, he is a criminal, a usurper. He has to persuade his subjects that the language of interest

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is a legitimate political language. Using that language without making the subjects receptive might move them by interest, but it won’t be as effective as teaching them that they should be moved by interest. Machiavellian realism is not an ideology but a rhetorical strategy. It is the non-lover showing that he is treating the boy like a grown-up. There is complicity in rhetorical realism, with the speaker getting the audience to align with him as the sophisticated against the innocents, who believe the rhetoric of priests and moralists and benightedly ignore the gap between what they say and the way the world is. The realist prince aligns himself with the audience in order to dominate them. The non-lover conquers the object of love by proposing a contract by which he is allowed to dominate. Machiavelli’s prince knows that people are not to be trusted. Why should the people trust someone who does not trust them? This question is precisely analogous to the question the young boy in the Phaedrus faces: why should I yield sexually to a non-lover? What the boy chooses to give to the non-lover is not love but sex. Similarly, the new prince does not demand trust but a new form of loyalty based on benets received and benets promised. Lysias tells the boy he addresses to live in the realistic world of calculation and exchange of benets, free from the illusions of love. Socrates, trying to outdo Lysias in persuading a hypothetical boy of the superiority of the non-lover, is really a lover in disguise. He tries to achieve an erotic, non-utilitarian, end by using the language of calculation and benets. Socrates, not Lysias, is the truly deceptive one. Like Socrates, Machiavelli is also a deceiver but not in the way usually thought. He only pretends to live by interest and calculation alone. If he wants to become secure, he needs more. The paradox of the lover disguised as a non-lover is the paradox of the stable usurper. We think that the language of morality is a cover for the language of interest, and we who live in a democratic age are especially adept at such debunking. But Socrates and Machiavelli show that it’s really the other way around, and their rhetorical appeals are much more threatening. We are used to non-lovers pretending to be lovers to get sex from attractive young boys. Lysias abandons the pretence and admits he is a non-lover in search of a good time. Socrates, though, invents a new pretence, that of a lover who pretends to be a non-lover, hard-heartedly promising advantage to obtain love. Similarly, the new usurper stops pretending to be a traditional ruler, and like Lysias, admits that he lives in a world governed by power alone. Like Socrates, the Machiavellian takes the dance a step further. He pretends

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to speak nothing but the language of power and regard the language of trust, loyalty, and morality as a sham, but in fact he exploits the language of utility and advantage in order to gain trust. Like Socrates, Machiavelli recognizes that the prince cannot, with Lysias, simply abandon the language of morality and a vision of how things should be. He cannot purge himself, not only because he has to know how to use the language of morality to convince people who actually believe in it, but because morality is an accurate description, not of how things are, but of how they ought to be. It cannot be called virtue to kill one’s fellow-citizens, to betray one’s friends, and to be without delity, without mercy, without religion; such proceedings enable one to gain sovereignty, but not fame. If we consider Agathocles’ ability in entering into and getting out of dangers, and his greatness of mind in enduring and overcoming adversities, we cannot see why he must be judged inferior to any of the most excellent generals. Nevertheless, his outrageous cruelty and inhumanity together with his countless wicked acts do not permit him to be honored among the noblest men. We cannot, then, attribute to fortune or to virtue what he accomplished without the one or the other.9

When Machiavelli says, in chapter 15 of The Prince, that “the manner in which men live is so different from the way in which they ought to live, that he who leaves the common course for that which he ought to follow will nd that it leads him to ruin rather than to safety,” he means that things really ought to be the way everyone does in fact think they ought to be. When he says at DL I.9 that the act accuses, while the result excuses, he does not think that those accusations will ever disappear, as we all become enlightened realists and eschew morality. A world of nothing but utility and interest would not contain such an accusation, but that world is unimaginable. This is not the rhetoric of the ignorant persuading the ignorant, but of a sophisticated bilingual leader persuading a sophisticated bilingual people. Machiavelli shows that leaders face a pair of predicaments. They have to abandon trust for prediction, and then somehow use predictability to build trust. They must be honest in one regard, abandoning the pretence of morality, in order to be dishonest in another, using interest as a cover for more stable forms of obedience between ruler and ruled. They must create forms of deception in which the audience,

9

The Prince, chapter 8, Gilbert, p. 36.

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subjects or citizens, cooperate in their own deception. One hint of how to do this comes from looking at the third character in the Phaedrus, Phaedrus himself. Phaedrus delights in the cleverness of Lysias’s paradoxical appeal by the non-lover. He enjoys it so much that he doesn’t notice—or excuses—the not only businesslike but pedestrian shallowness of the speech. Phaedrus’s pleasure in Lysias’s speech is the pleasure of being scandalized, of hearing what shouldn’t be said in decent company. The Phaedrus then offers a clue for how to create this new form of trust. Phaedrus isn’t seduced by Lysias’s speech into becoming his lover. He is charmed by it and becomes his acolyte and follower.

V The language of classical rhetoric helps us interpret this shift, this new form of deception and of truth, and transfer it to the case of Machiavelli. Lysias’s and Socrates’ speeches are epideictic rhetoric masquerading as and imitating deliberative rhetoric. In order to praise the non-lover, they pretend to speak as a non-lover seducing his boy. The Machiavellian prince is not a non-lover, like Lysias, or even a lover disguising himself as a non-lover, like Socrates, but a rhetorician using the stance of the non-lover to shock and charm his audience into trusting someone who only promises, and sometimes delivers, benets, not love. The Machiavellian prince appears to engage in deliberative rhetoric, persuading subjects that he possesses practical wisdom, and that, therefore, they will gain by accepting his policies. But he really practices epideictic rhetoric, demonstrating his character and convincing them to obey. If the prince can buy loyalty only because of the benets he provides, he cannot last. He puts on a show of deliberating, of pursuing acquisitive policies that will let him win against competitors. His demonstration aims not at winning but at getting the people on his side, in victory and in defeat. The prince might learn to imitate Moses, but it is more important that he convince the audience that he is acting like Moses, and, therefore, should be honored and obeyed like Moses. Septimius Severus’s courage not only brought victory but left the people “stupeed and astounded by it, whilst it made the army respectful and satised” (c. 19). Machiavellian prudence is the epideictic imitation of deliberation. Marx remarks in the 18th Brumaire that men traded real gold for fake

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porridge. If the Machiavellian leader can get his subjects to do the same, he will succeed. He teaches his subjects to be an appreciative audience. The subjects as spectators live through imagination and so become distracted from the effects of the ruler’s actions on their own lives. They can admire and sympathize with the ruler instead of demanding actual gold. I want to use this new formulation of Machiavellian prudence, the epideictic imitation of deliberation, to look again at Machiavelli’s posing of the issue of whether it is better to be feared than loved. As I remarked earlier, even to be in a position to pose that question, one has in a sense already answered it, since when love is one option among others, it is no longer love in the traditional sense. When the language of morality is one language alongside the language of interest, morality becomes one consideration among others instead of having the categorical and absolute power one associates with morality. Machiavelli resolves the issue, we saw, by saying that it is safer to be feared than loved. He reduces “better” to “safer,” much as Lysias translates the boy’s choice of lovers into whether it is safer to be seduced by a nonlover rather than a lover. The arts of the lion and the fox in chapter 18 can produce fear. The subject can submit to fear consciously and voluntarily. I can know that you are doing something to frighten me and still be frightened. But if I know that you are doing something to make me love you, that is a reason not to love you. Socrates might take this as a reason to think that love is more than human—since it exceeds human arts—but Machiavelli sees love as outside the prince’s control and therefore unsafe. Similarly, participants in deliberative and judicial rhetoric can be naïve audiences. They don’t have to know that they are the audience of a rhetorical performance in order to respond to it. Not so for epideictic audience. The ruler who relies on fear alone doesn’t need complicity in his subjects, but the ruler who shows his subjects that he is choosing between fear and love needs this cooperation. It may be safer to be feared than loved, but fear is more expensive than love. The deposed hereditary prince, after all, will recover his state “whenever the occupant meets with any reverses” (c. 2). Therefore the utilitarian calculus of the non-lover will not do for either the prince or his subjects. The prince has to take risks. Modern game theory has shown how someone can gain by convincing others that he will act irrationally, sacricing material interests in the name of fairness or

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some other value. Acting irrationally is irrational, but making others believe that you will do so presents a certain character to the world. The prince teaches his subjects to forego material gain in the name of higher values, such as patriotism, by himself foregoing such gains in the name of glory.10 Machiavelli’s prince must be seen as great. Actually being great helps but is neither necessary nor sufcient. Cesare Borgia is so admirable that we can judge that his failure was not his fault. Epideictic success gives him the power to survive bad fortune. The successful prince must imitate great men not only to practice the same arts but to be seen as following in their footsteps. Consider, for example, the exemplary punishments the prince should practice, such as chopping Remiro d’Orco’s body in two pieces. Cesare “wanted to make it clear that, if there had been any cruelty,” he was not responsible for it, and that his hard-hearted minister should be blamed. If the prince is a deceiver, the people will believe that he was not responsible for the cruelties because he executed Remiro. But Machiavelli need not think the people are that easily fooled. Instead, one could read the story as saying that because “the ferocious sight made the people of the Romagna simultaneously happy and dumbfounded” (soddisfatte e sbigottite), they were willing to believe that he wasn’t responsible for the cruelties. They enjoyed his performance so much that they were wiling to believe him. As in a successful advertising campaign, the subjects voluntarily give assent in exchange for the pleasure the prince gives. Similarly, Ferdinand of Aragon was “always plotting and carrying out great enterprises, which have always kept his subjects bewildered and astonished, waiting to see what their outcome would be” (c. 21). Better to have them waiting to see the outcome than only to be interested in the outcome itself. If the purpose of the prince’s rhetoric is not to deceive or intimidate the people but to get them on his side, then he can have the comforts of trust and avoid the heavy cost of being merely predictable. If the people are loyal and supportive only when the prince benets them, no prince

10 “Willingness to sacrice turns out to be in people’s strategic advantage . . . if one condition is met: it is anticipated.” Cass R. Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, “Inequality and Indignation.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 339. DL I.11.35: “A prudent individual knows many goods that do not have in themselves evident reasons with which one can persuade others.”

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will succeed for long.11 The successful prince must promise more than he can deliver and not lose loyalty of the people as a consequence. The prudent leader as epideictic as well as deliberative orator solves the problem. Phaedrus is the ideal Machiavellian subject. He delights in Lysias’s performance as a realist. In the same way, the Machiavellian subject gives the prince credit for charmingly and cunningly imitating not the lover but the non-lover, the hard-headed realist singled-mindedly concerned with success. This is still hard work, not the easy life of the hereditary monarch who inherits credit and stability. The prince must keep all attention constantly on him. But that is still easier than having to succeed all the time. The prince can now be the most successful seducer of all. He can get people to trust him without reciprocating. To secure a beloved without being a lover is like getting others to trust you without trusting them. This is exactly the paradox of the prince. Machiavelli teaches him not to trust anyone else, to put his faith only in resources he can himself control. On the other hand, he has to be a gure the people will trust. Normally, trust is reciprocal. I trust you because I know that you trust me. I love you because you love me. If I am supposed to trust you while knowing that you don’t trust me, you had better deliver the goods. Satisfying my interests would be the only reason I would rely on someone without feeling that I was trusted in return. “There is nothing that consumes itself so quickly as liberality.” Always satisfying people’s interests is similarly self-consuming. The complicity between prince and subject, the subjects delighting in the prince’s realistic performance, creates a new form of trust. Epideictic rhetoric places more demands on its audience than other genres. Deliberative and judicial or forensic rhetoric do not need friendship and trust between speaker and audience. The good judge in forensic situations can be “objective,” judging guilt or innocence fairly precisely because he himself has no stake in the outcome. The deliberative judge can do well by considering his own interests, and so puts no faith in the speaker beyond believing what he says. But the epideictic audience must have a form of rhetorical friendship and trust towards the speaker. Affection need not be present, or comes about only as a consequence of other emotions such as admiration, but it still is trust, albeit in a new form.

11

“Suffering in common unies more than joy does.” Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”

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Therefore I do not think Machiavelli offers esoteric knowledge to the prince. The prince will be more successful the better his audience knows how to read his appearances, and The Prince and the Discourses on Livy teach subjects how to read. They learn how not to be good by forgiving and following princes who are not good. In Socrates’ telling of the allegory of the cave, some people are forced to leave the world of illusion and behold true realities. In Machiavelli’s reading, there is no escape from the world of illusion to a better place. We cannot give up the language of morality and think simply in terms of interest and advantage like Lysias’s non-lover. However, while no one leaves the cave, Machiavelli teaches everyone to recognize that they are living in a cave, that the language of morality, which they nd indispensable, is fraught with tempting and comforting illusions. Thus, in chapter 15, Machiavelli rst contrasts between reality and the world of the imagination, between the real truth (la verità effettuale) and speculation. But this is immediately transformed into the contrast between “the manner in which men live” and “the way in which they ought to live.” We can discard speculation and imaginary republics, but we cannot discard the way we ought to live. This is an ideal, not in the sense that it is unreal, although it is that, but in the sense that we should aim at it. Just because something is ideal does not mean that it is unreal. It only means that it cannot be an object of deliberation and choice. The language of praise and the language of utility are not interchangeable.12 Machiavelli thus argues against the dictum in the Rhetoric that arguments in deliberative rhetoric can be transformed into those of epideictic rhetoric by a change of phrase (I.9.1367b37–1368a10). This divergence from Aristotle crucially differentiates ancient pagan morality with its relation between rhetoric and prudence, and modern neo-pagan morality with a different relation between rhetoric and prudence. It differentiates Machiavelli from Ciceronian humanism and its Renaissance successors, who are truly monolingual, since delibera12 Edward Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988), 13–14. “The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways, for the make-believe world may often mold the real one. In order to be viable, in order to serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may be, a ction must bear some resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the willing suspension of disbelief collapses. And conversely it may collapse if facts stray too far from the ction.”

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tive and epideictic rhetoric speak the same language, which includes both the useful and the honorable, utile and honestum.13 The optimism of humanism comes from thinking that utility and honor are aligned, and, therefore, rhetoric and prudence similarly aligned. The language of praise, although Machiavelli debunks it, is not pure rationalization. It tells us what we want and what we cannot have. What we want and cannot have is just as real as what necessity makes us do. By mocking the impotence of traditional and Christian morality and seeing the power of Moses and Alexander VI to lie in arms, not words, he both excludes traditional values from la verità effetuale and shows that these values are necessarily part of the world. We must live in both the world of morality and the world of necessity, and they are not compatible. We have to be as bilingual as Phaedrus, complicit with Lysias and being seduced by him into a world of rhetorical pleasures as well as deliberative utility. Traditional or Christian morality becomes a different kind of truth when it no longer has a monopoly on truth. In Machiavelli’s hands, they are no longer illusions but resources, strategies with practical value. If we all must be bilingual and recognize that there is no automatic translation between the language of utility and that of morality, then differences between reality and appearance become inevitable and not simply deceptive: the prince when compelled by circumstances to act in a certain way must make it appear that he is so acting by choice. “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority” (DL I.1). These reminders of Plato’s meditations on rhetoric uncover a new dimension of Machiavellian prudence. Machiavellian prudence consists in rhetorical arts of appearance, arts of speaking, as the prince persuades his subjects, and arts of reading, as the prince judges appearances to make decisions. Prudence consists in the prince creating the proper ratio between deliberative and epideictic rhetoric, that is, between himself as a performer and as a practical agent who brings about useful results. Prudence consists in the proper ratio between the honorable and the useful. With no concrete results at all, the prince’s exhibitions become

13 “Because the reordering of a city for a political way of life presupposes a good man, and becoming prince of a republic by violence presupposes a bad one, one will nd that it very rarely happens that someone good wishes to become prince by bad ways, even though his end be good, and that someone wicked, having become prince, wishes to work well, and that it will ever occur to him to use well the authority that he has acquired badly.”

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hollow bravado. With an excessive concentration on results, the prince relies on prediction, not trust, and we saw that that was a self-defeating strategy. Both deliberative and epideictic abilities are abilities to overcome fortune and extend the rule of virtù. But they battle against fortuna in different ways. The deliberative aspect of prudence gives the prince the foresight to construct dams before the river overows its banks. That aspect of prudence lets the prince plan ahead for oods and droughts by adapting quickly to circumstances. Epideictic prudence overcomes fortuna through a show of force, acting with the bravado to which fortune responds like a lady. The new form of prudence involves wisely choosing the proper ratio of deliberative to epideictic rhetoric. The prince’s trustworthiness is like a bank’s credit rating. A bank has credit when some of its deposits are held as cash. It makes no sense to ask which deposits are invested and which are held. Money is fungible, and the bank has credit when the proper fraction of deposits is held. Similarly, the prince has credit when he makes good on some of his promises. You’ve got to be good at least some of the time. Otherwise, you will look like Agathocles. There is no rule specifying the proper fraction, but it makes no sense to say which of his promises he has made good on and which he has had to abandon. Different subjects might answer that question differently, but all must think that he is credible. When they do not, then there is a run on the bank. The prince’s credit can quickly evaporate. Hatred and contempt can encourage people to call in their assets. The new prince is neither usurper nor hereditary ruler, although in different ways he imitates both. He imitates the hereditary ruler when he acts piously and pretends to possess the traditional virtues. Less obviously he imitates the usurper by pretending to aim at success alone, while in reality he is aiming at acquiring a reputation for doing great and glorious things. The reputation cannot be hollow, but how fully deserved it is depends on the skill of the prince. In the end, then, the Machiavellian prince does not become a traditional ruler; the Phaedrus’s non-lover does not become a lover. The Machiavellian leader will have “his power better entrenched than it would be if had long held ofce. For the actions of a new ruler are much more closely scrutinized than those of a hereditary ruler; and new rulers, when they are seen to be virtuose, attract much more support and make men more indebted to them than do hereditary rulers” (c. 24). I suggest that the crucial word in that crucial passage is “seen”: If princes

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are seen to be virtuose, the Machiavellian prince must not only be virtuose, he must learn the Machiavellian arts of being seen to be virtuosi. What, then, of my original question: what happens to the Machiavellian ruler when his subjects read the book? More precisely, what happens to the Machiavellian ruler when he teaches his subjects to read his own actions as Machiavellian? Such subjects will be neither harder nor easier to deceive, since the willingness of men to be fooled comes from constants of human nature that self-awareness cannot touch. But connoisseurs of Machiavellian virtuosity will be more willing to forgive, more willing to extend credit to the prince, and so a knowing public contributes to the stability of princely rule.

Bibliography Garver, Eugene. “Saying What Goes Without Saying: Bacon’s Essays on Speech, Intelligence and Morality.” Ed. Fred Antczak. Essays in Honor of Wayne Booth. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. Gilbert, Allan. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. Ed. Sir William Molesworth. London: J. Bohn, 1843. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Manseld and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Morgan, Edward. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988. Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” Tamilnation.org. http://tamilnation.org/self determination/nation/renan.htm (accessed November 12, 2006). Sunstein, Cass R., and Edna Ullmann-Margalit. “Inequality and Indignation.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001): 337–62. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. New York: Putnam, 1952.

SOCIETY

MACHIAVELLI AND WOMEN Jo Ann Cavallo

“. . . a lover of all women” Francesco Guicciardini of Niccolò Machiavelli (1525)

With so much else to draw our attention when reading Machiavelli’s opus, not much space was devoted to his views on women until relatively recently. The rst sustained consideration of the issue, Hanna Pitkin’s Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (1984), presented a mostly negative judgment, attributing Machiavelli’s supposed misogyny to a fear of women.1 In the wake of Pitkin’s groundbreaking monograph, subsequent studies have paid greater attention to gender-related issues, giving rise to a spectrum of positions.2 Maria J. Falco’s recent Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli (2004) sets out to offer a range of essays representing “every major strand of feminist thought on la questione di Machiavelli.”3 While most contributors to the volume continue to highlight Machiavelli’s anti-feminist attitudes, a signicant minority credits him with a positive characterization of women in specic works, especially his comedies. In her essay “Rethinking Machiavelli: Feminism and Citizenship,” Jane Jaquette writes: “it is time to recover Machiavelli as an interlocutor rather than a foil for feminist theory” (338). It is perhaps not surprising that the recent focus on Machiavelli and women has engendered a diversity of views considering that discussion of the topic which has fascinated his readers for centuries, viz., his political views, has itself hardly led to a consensus. In both cases, 1 Pitkin speaks of Machiavelli’s “misogynistic fear of women and his projection of that fear upon Fortuna,” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 14. 2 Most critics, however, have been reluctant to credit Machiavelli for positive portrayals of women. Wayne Rebhorn, for example, writes: “A few positive images of women can be found in Machiavelli’s works, but upon close inspection, even these admirable women turn out to pose a threat to men,” Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Condence Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 172. 3 Feminist Interpretations of Machiavelli (University Park, PA; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 2. Falco’s introduction provides a concise history of genderrelated studies of Machiavelli (see especially 12–21). Machiavelli’s recent biographers (De Grazia, Viroli, White) also devote attention to Machiavelli’s views on women.

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some of the divergence in interpretation can be attributed to ambiguity or inconsistency in the author himself. On the issue of women, there is plenty in Machiavelli’s writing to support the view of him as a misogynist. At the same time, however, the negative attitude toward women that can be found in some of his writings was commonplace and reects a society in which women were thought of and legally treated as secondary citizens if not outright property, lacking access to the same education or rights as men.4 In the following pages, then, I leave aside what Machiavelli says about women in general in order to focus on the individual females that populate his writing: real-life love interests in his personal letters, political gures in his non-ctional writings, imaginary characters in his ction, and personications across various genres. While women within Machiavelli’s opus are my primary focus, I occasionally take a comparative look at the wider literary context. What I believe emerges is not only a positive characterization of Machiavelli’s various women, but essential similarities among them that offer a model for human action—whether male or female. In the humanist tradition, literary and historical characters are understood to represent models of behavior to imitate or avoid. Machiavelli does not depart from the practice of presenting role models; rather, he challenges the validity of traditional norms found in manuals for rulers. In reformulating the denition of liberality and stinginess in princes, for example, he decries the kind of municence which nancially burdens many subjects in order to favor a privileged few (The Prince, chap. 16).5 On the issue of gender, I would argue that Machiavelli likewise redenes virtue based on real-life experience rather than on handbooks prescribing female behavior. The “ideal” traditionally imposed on women consisted in the specically “feminine” virtues of chastity, silence, and obedience to male authority. Although Machiavelli does not directly outline a new set of virtues for women the way that he does for rulers in The Prince, in my view he consistently depicts female gures—both real and imaginary—in ways that counter misogynist stereotypes and chauvinistic ideals.6 4 Much has been written in recent decades about the question of women’s status during the Renaissance. See, most recently, Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005). 5 References to The Prince are from volume 1 of Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958). 6 I agree with Arlene Saxonhouse that Machiavelli “revolutionalized political thought by calling into question the traditional virtues, and the virtues and vices of women

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In treating together historical and ctional female gures, I follow Machiavelli’s own lead, since his letters indicate repeatedly that he saw life and literature as a continuum. In a letter describing how he passes his time in exile, Machiavelli refers not only to evenings spent communing with statesmen of antiquity, but mornings in the company of love poets: “I have a book under my arm: Dante, Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, or some such. I read about their amorous passions and their loves, remember my own, and these reections make me happy for a while” (December 10, 1513; Letter 224).7 By linking his own amorous passions to those described in poetry, Machiavelli treats the latter as manifestations of a reality on a par with his personal experience. Moreover, Machiavelli groups together ancient Roman “pagan” poets who celebrated requited sexual love and medieval Christian poets whose love stories recount a trajectory of unconsummated desire. Thus, by stating that the loves recounted by these four poets remind him of his own, Machiavelli is bringing his fellow Florentines into the orbit of profane love expressed by the ancient Romans and at the same time validating passionate love as worthy of being experienced and recorded by great poets in both antiquity and his own time.

Personal Letters Although Machiavelli does not name anyone in particular in the abovecited letter, he openly refers to actual women in his correspondence with friends. His extramarital affairs are not exceptional in themselves given that, as Pitkin notes, marriage was generally arranged by the families and considered incompatible with romantic love,8 and thus marital delity was not expected of husbands.9 What is of interest in needed to be as thoroughly transformed as those of the men,” Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli (New York: Praeger, 1985), 154. However, whereas Saxonhouse writes that Machiavelli “makes the differences between what had been opposites so ambiguous that we can no longer tell good from bad or women from men” (151), I would argue that the transformation is not due to ambiguity, but to a new formulation of virtue along non-gendered lines. 7 All references to Machiavelli’s correspondence are from Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, trans. and ed. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). 8 Fortune is a Woman, 209–10. 9 Ibid., 212.

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this context are Machiavelli’s views on women and gender expressed through references to real-life lovers. The most important of these are La Riccia, a Florentine courtesan mentioned in letters between 1510 and 1520, La Tafani, who appears in letters of 1514 and 1515, and the actress Barbera Raffacani Salutati, whom he meets in 1524 and to whom he remains attached until his death in 1527. Nothing more is known about Machiavelli’s ten-year relationship with La Riccia than what is stated in his correspondence, where she emerges as an autonomous woman not afraid to speak her mind. He remarks in a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori that when in Florence he visits her so often that she calls him a “house pest” (February 4, 1514; Letter 229). He then goes on to note how she chided him for his presumed wisdom while pretending to talk to a maid: “Wise men, oh these wise men, I don’t know what they have upstairs; it seems to me they turn everything topsy-turvy.” Yet Machiavelli’s portrait of La Riccia goes beyond that of a self-assured woman prone to witty remarks. Even after initiating a relationship with La Tafani, he continues to share his trials and tribulations with La Riccia. Vettori recalls that Machiavelli had described her faithfulness and compassion ( January 16, 1515; Letter 246). In this context ‘faithfulness’ does not refer to sexual exclusivity (La Riccia had other lovers as well), but rather to her steadfastness in sticking by Machiavelli throughout his political ordeals when many of his male companions had deserted him. This is the faithfulness that characterizes true friendship according to Machiavelli’s contemporary Lodovico Ariosto, as expressed in his epic published the following year: “A man riding high on Fortune’s wheel cannot tell who really loves him, for his true and his spurious friends stand side by side and show him equal devotion. But should he fall upon hard times, his crowd of atterers will slip away. Only the friend who loves from his heart will stand by his lord and love him when he is dead” (Orlando Furioso 19.1). Machiavelli was not quite dead, but he had indubitably fallen upon hard times, crushed under the weight of exile following false accusations of conspiracy against the Medici. In another letter to Vettori, Machiavelli describes the consolation he derived from telling his troubles to La Riccia and a mutual friend who are referred to as his “sole havens and refuges for my skiff bereft of rudder and sail because of the unending tempest” ( January 31, 1515; Letter 247). Through Machiavelli’s expressions of appreciation for La Riccia’s friendship and constancy, she emerges as a loyal, intelligent, and compassionate individual.

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While in exile in the countryside outside Florence, Machiavelli met La Tafani, a woman about whom little is known. In a letter to Vettori, Machiavelli describes his new beloved as “a creature so gracious, so rened, so noble—both in nature and in circumstance—that never could either my praise or my love for her be as much as she deserves” (August 3, 1514; Letter 238). He goes on to describe his enamorment in a scene that imagines the workings of Cupid and Venus: “I ought to tell you [. . .] how this love began, how Love ensnared me with his nets, where he spread them, and what they were like; [. . .] these were nets of gold woven by Venus, so soft and gentle that even though an insensitive heart could have severed them, nevertheless I declined to do so.” Not only does Machiavelli refrain from referring to his relationship with La Tafani as a conquest, but he depicts himself as under her power: “Everything seems easy to me: I adapt to her every whim, even to those that seem different from and contrary to what my own ought to be.” His state of enamorment, however, is not seen as a mere pastime, but as a vital consolation that gives him a reprieve from suffering inicted in the public sphere and releases his mind from thinking about political matters: And even though I may now seem to have entered into great travail, I nevertheless feel so great a sweetness in it, both because of the delight that rare and gentle countenance brings me and because I have laid aside all memory of my sorrows, that not for anything in the world would I desire freedom—even if I could have it. I have renounced, then, thoughts about matters great and grave. No longer do I delight in reading about the deeds of the ancients or in discussing those of the moderns: everything has been transformed into tender thoughts, for which I thank Venus and all of Cyprus.10

While earlier in his letter Machiavelli privileged the role played by the God of Love in his enamorment, in this expression of gratitude he singles out Venus and her mythical birthplace. He then goes on to contrast his blissful state under the aegis of the female goddess with the pain caused by male-dominated power politics: “I have discovered nothing but harm in these other [political] matters, but in matters of love there are always good things and pleasures.”

10 See also his January 31, 1515, letter in which he expresses his personal experience of passionate love through language and images drawn from classical mythology and medieval love poetry: the “youthful archer” shot an arrow “with such great force [. . .] that I feel its painful wound still; thus I confess and recognize his power (letter 247).

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We know somewhat more about Barbera Rafcani Salutati, the actress whom Machiavelli met in 1524. Although he is not her only lover, nor is she his, he is often seen in public with her and his letters suggest a serious relationship that lasts until his death. Francesco Guicciardini, in a letter criticizing Machiavelli’s behavior, expresses his sense of a superiority of cultured men over actresses and courtesans that he nds completely lacking in his friend: “[you] have gotten into such bad habits that their corrupt manners seem good to you and worthy of such as us” (August 7, 1525; Letter 294). Machiavell’s letters would indicate that he did not in fact place himself above his female companions in either goodness or worthiness. Machiavelli wrote both Clizia and La Mandragola for Barbera Salutati. In a letter to Guicciardini, he notes that she offered to sing the intermezzi for the latter play (October 16–20, 1525; Letter 299). Machiavelli subsequently commends Barbera to Guicciardini when she is in Rome, adding: “she gives me far more concern than does the emperor” (March 15, 1526; Letter 305). Even as the war with Charles V looms, he is nevertheless still able to focus on his private relationship with Barbera in his correspondence (August 5, 1526; Letter 315). The other important female presence in Machiavelli’s life is of course his wife Marietta Corsini, whom he married in 1501. Although the marriage was arranged by his family and not a love match, references in his personal correspondence to friends and relatives attest to their reciprocal affection and concern. Marietta’s only extant letter, written two years after their marriage, is playful, caring, and practical: You make fun of me, but you are not right to, for I would be ourishing more if you were here. You know very well how happy I am when you are not down there [i.e., Rome]; and all the more so now that I have been told that there is so much disease down there, just think how glad I must be, for I nd no rest either day or night. That is the happiness I get from the baby. So I pray you to send me letters a little more often than you do [. . .]. Do not be surprised if I have not written you, because I have not been able to, since I had a fever up to now; I am not angry. For now the baby is well, he looks like you [. . .]. Since he looks like you, he seems beautiful to me. [. . .] Remember to come back home. [. . .] I am sending you a doublet and two shirts and two kerchiefs and a towel, which I am sewing for you (November 24, 1503; Letter 83).

A letter to Machiavelli from his son Guido twenty-four years later reveals a continued bond of affection between husband and wife: “We learn from your letter to Madonna Marietta that you have bought

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such a beautiful chain for Baccina [. . .]. We are not worrying about the lansquenets anymore because you have promised us to try and be with us if anything should happen. And so Madonna Marietta is no longer worried. [. . . .] Madonna Marietta gives you her regards and sends you two shirts, two towels, two caps, three pairs of hose, and four handkerchiefs. She prays you to come back soon” (April 17, 1527; Letter 332). Although Machiavelli did not express the same romantic sentiments toward his wife as toward the women discussed above—at least not in his extant letters to his friends—Marietta nevertheless emerges as a sustained presence with a distinct personality. The actual women in Machiavelli’s life, as presented in his letters to friends, are portrayed positively as capable and strong-minded individuals. Machiavelli depicts himself not as a conqueror of his female companions, but as a willing subject under the power of love. Moreover, his relationship with them includes friendship and cultural collaborations. In the public war of life, these women are his allies, a private source of joy and consolation in the face of repeated disappointments and injustices suffered at the hands of his fellow men.

Political History It is not surprising that women are scarce in Machiavelli’s historical writings since female rulers were the rare exception in both the histories that served as his models and in his own experience. On the few occasions in which women do appear in this context, he treats them with respect and admiration for the princely qualities they display. With reference to his treatment of Dido, Caterina Sforza, Queen Rosamunda, and Joanna I of Naples, Sebastian De Grazia writes that Machiavelli “recognizes without prejudice the merit in women as rulers, never imputing sexual differences in political capacity” (134). Of these, the gure that most captured Machiavelli’s attention is Caterina Sforza, who in 1488 successfully defended Forlì against conspirators who had just murdered her husband and who were holding her children hostage. She entered the town’s citadel ostensibly in order to negotiate a surrender, but once inside she refused to yield, asserting either that she had the means to bear more children or that she was already pregnant, depending upon the source recording the event. In Discourses 3.6, Machiavelli imagines Sforza accompanying her claim of procreative potential with a highly provocative gesture: “And

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to show that she did not care about her children, she uncovered to them her genital members, saying she still had means for producing more children” (1:444).11 The way we interpret Machiavelli’s striking anecdote has some bearing on how we see his relation to women. The most useful and thorough discussion of the matter is Julia Hairston’s essay “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza.”12 By placing Machiavelli’s rendition of the Lady of Forlì in the context of various contemporary accounts of the event, she is able to show how Machiavelli reworked the material that was available to him. However, whereas Hairston goes on to conclude that Machiavelli diminished Sforza’s historical persona, faulting his depiction of her as a ruler, a mother, and a woman, I would like to offer a more positive reading of Machiavelli’s representation of her on all three scores. Regarding Sforza’s political skills, Hairston takes Machiavelli to task for not choosing the more reliable version of the story in which she claims to be pregnant, since this ploy also most clearly demonstrates her political astuteness: “Machiavelli takes a perspicacious political move on Sforza’s part and turns it into an empty, histrionic gesture—one that intrinsically does not function politically.”13 In my view, however, there is more to Machiavelli’s account than its theatricality. While it is true, as Hairston states, that only Caterina’s bluff of pregnancy could claim a legitimate heir to the city’s deceased ruler, Machiavelli’s choice to project Caterina’s child-bearing capabilities into the indenite future gives her instead an aura of invincibility by suggesting an unlimited ability to engender offspring. While the conspirators’ threat of death to her children is specic to the moment, her asserted power to repeatedly generate new life makes her seem virtually indestructible. Nor does this version depict Caterina as less politically astute, since in fact her ploy is shown to have had the desired effect. Machiavelli’s early readers would have known, moreover, that she not only thwarted the coup and went on to govern Imola and Forlì for several years, but also that after having been subsequently forced to yield her territory to Cesare Borgia, she moved to Florence and married Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, bearing a son who would become the famous condottiero Giovanni

11 References to the Discourses are from volume 1 of Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958). 12 Julia L. Hairston, “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 687–712. 13 Ibid., 709.

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delle Bande Nere. Rather than making a false claim of pregnancy, Machiavelli’s Caterina almost prophesies the future fruit of her womb, a military captain famed in turn for his courage and cunning. According to Hairston, Machiavelli’s version of the event includes a “brazen, even malicious description” (691) of Sforza as an uncaring mother: “Sforza’s behavior is represented as highly atypical both for a mother because of its lack of maternal sentiment and for a woman because of its audacity and immodesty” (708). Yet Machiavelli never states that Sforza does not really care about her children; rather, her gesture is intended to convince the conspirators that she does not. The point for Machiavelli is thus not her degree of maternal sentiment, but her ability to persuade her enemies of the validity of her words in order to save her state. In Machiavelli’s depiction of the scene, moreover, Caterina astutely plays with the nature of the proof: she lays bare what is discernible underneath her skirt as evidence of what is indiscernible within her heart. By substituting her visible body for her invisible emotion, she leads the conspirators to accept a false sign as concrete evidence of an otherwise improbable claim of maternal indifference. In order to prove to the conspirators that she is an unnatural (i.e., uncaring) mother, she demonstrates that she is an unconventional (i.e., immodest) woman. It is precisely the shock value of the gesture in the latter sphere that supports the efcacy of her claim in the former. On the issue of gender, I would also venture a more positive assessment than the following one offered by Hairston: “Yet at the same time Machiavelli re-genders Caterina Sforza as masculine, he also surreptitiously ‘disarms’ her, paradoxically using the female body and maternity as his weapons. Sforza’s anasyrmos serves as a reminder to his readers and to himself that she is, after all, ‘just’ a woman even though she behaves like a man” (708). First of all, the cunning and courage that Caterina employs to save her state are not necessarily gender-specic to males in Machiavelli’s estimation. In The Prince, he uses Virgil’s Dido as an example of a ruler who understands that drastic measures are called for to protect a newborn state from peril (1:62). Moreover, it seems to me that rather than disarming Caterina, Machiavelli empowers her by depicting a woman who in a critical moment of great vulnerability is capable of combining the fox’s cunning (maneuvering to get into the citadel) and the lion’s courage (confronting the conspirators) to regain the state. Consistent with his attitude toward women in his personal correspondence, Machiavelli’s version of this event shows his appreciation of

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Caterina’s iconoclastic behavior and disregard of conventional mores. Indeed, Machiavelli’s admiring narrative of Caterina’s gesture is brought into greater relief if compared to an episode of the Orlando Furioso in which women’s garments are forcibly removed from the waist down in adherence to a cruel law (Orlando Furioso 37). The female warriors Bradamante and Marsa encounter a group of ladies thus exposed who, overcome by shame, sit passively on the ground attempting to conceal their private parts. In Machiavelli, on the contrary, Sforza does not consider her body a locus of vulnerability, but one of pride and power. By exposing her genitalia—the opposite of what the demure female should do—and by demonstrating to her enemies a lack of concern for her children—the opposite of what the typical mother should do—Caterina saves both her family and her state. She thus turns the power of women to produce children (the female’s biological and private role) into a tool to save her city (traditionally the male’s public role). In knowing how to exploit her gender-specic capabilities, Caterina is shown to have a presence of mind and quickness of wit that is exceptional in either gender and worthy of a ruler.

Fiction De Grazia nds a sympathetic portrayal of women in Machiavelli’s poetry and comedies: “In his verses and plays, mean or stupid or unsympathetic women rarely appear, and never as the heroine” (138). Yet he immediately goes on to say that “the heroine is so good she hardly has more than three lines to utter.” This qualier, which places the attribute of goodness within the framework of conventional behavior, hardly does justice to the range of Machiavelli’s ctional women. In my view, Machiavelli does not ascribe to conventional mores in his ction any more than he does in his personal letters or historical works. This section examines the female characters who emerge from the pages of the satirical allegory The Golden Ass, the novella Belfagor, the comedies La Mandragola and Clizia, as well as some lesser-known works of prose and poetry.14

14 References to the ctional works in this section are from volume 2 of Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others.

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The Golden Ass is set on an island in which the enchantress Circe presides over the men she has transformed into animals. The work, like Apuleius’s eponymous narrative, is related as an autobiography. In an opening scene reminiscent of Inferno 1, a “terror-stricken” Niccolò is rescued not by an elderly gentleman the likes of Virgil but rather by “a woman of the utmost beauty, but breezy and brash [. . .] with locks blonde and disheveled” (2:754). The damsel, a servant of Circe, gures as a guide who will lead him from a frightening dark woods to the safety of her chamber. The reader may interpret the details of this transitional scene as replete with either philosophical or sexual allusions, since in the ensuing narrative Machiavelli will presume a perfect harmony between the two spheres.15 The damsel leads him to “a huge edice of wondrous height” which they reach only after passing “through the water of [a] ditch by fording” (2:756). After crossing the moat, his “beautiful, tall and kindly” lady takes him by the hand “with utmost grace,” leads him into a chamber “where with her own hands she kindled a great re,” and then proceeds to dry him. Machiavelli, recognizing her as a savior gure, tells her: “I had come to the end of my life, in a dark, cloudy and sunless place, when I was overtaken by the night. You led me with you, to save me” (2:757). Machiavelli’s new guide recalls not only Dante’s Virgil but also Boethius’s Lady Philosophy (Consolation of Philosophy), instructing and advising him in strategies for facing the injustices that fortune has sent (and will continue to send) his way. Acknowledging that “never has anyone borne more ingratitude or greater toil,” she urges him to accept his situation with stoic fortitude (2:757). Unlike her lofty literary predecessors, however, the damsel also takes on the role of lover. After brieng Machiavelli in metaphysics and moral philosophy, she moves on to more pleasurable matters and invites him to join her under the covers. And just as in his personal letter discussed above where Machiavelli includes Petrarch and Dante in his list of passionate lovers, here he appropriates features of their poetry expressing unrequited and spiritual love respectively to recount a scene that is instead both fully requited and explicitly sexual. Whereas Petrarch, in his love for the unreachable

15 Michael Harvey notes, for example, that the term virtù occurs eleven times in the poem “in a bundle of erotic, political, and moral senses.” “Lost in the Wilderness: Love and Longing in L’Asino,” The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, ed. Vickie B. Sullivan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 121.

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Laura, had opened a sonnet blessing “the day and the month and the year and the season and the time and the hour and the instant and the beautiful countryside and the place where I was struck by the two lovely eyes that have bound me” (#61), Machiavelli puts the matter more succinctly, exclaiming to the naked woman beside him: “Blessed be your beauties! [Blessed] the hour when I set foot in the forest, and [if ever] things I have done or written touched your heart” (2:761). Although it is not clear what deeds or writings could have touched the heart of Machiavelli’s new beloved, the phrase suggests a continued link to Petrarch’s sonnet which concludes by blessing his “many words” and “all the pages” devoted to his lady. In his ensuing love scene, Machiavelli playfully incorporates language that suggests the Sweet New Style of Dante’s Vita Nuova. However, whereas in Dante’s case “sweetness to the heart” is based on sight, in Machiavelli’s description it is derived from the sense of touch: “And when I touched her body, a sweetness came to my heart so pleasing that I do not believe I shall ever taste greater” (2:761). Machiavelli continues to appropriate the terminology of the love lyric as he describes his sexual climax: “enfolded in those angelic beauties that made me forgetful of human things, I felt at my heart so many joys with such sweetness that I swooned in tasting the utmost of all sweets, all prostrate on her sweet bosom” (2:761). In addition to taking on the multiple roles of guide, mentor, and lover, Machiavelli’s “lady” also acts as a friend. He describes their conversation the following day after she has returned from her shepherding duties: “she and I talked together of many things, as one friend speaks with another” (2:764). Machiavelli’s depiction of women in the duel role of lover and friend was discussed above in the context of his personal letters describing the consolation he derived from his relationship with La Riccia and La Tafani. Yet Niccolò’s ctional lover-friend is not just any woman, but a handmaiden of the enchantress Circe. In line with a long tradition of allegorical narrative and commentary, writers of the period would typically portray Circe and her cohorts as temptations luring the hero away from his public duty.16 The Circe-like Alcina, for

16 For representations of Circe from classical to Renaissance literature, see Judith Yarnall, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). For the episode of the hero drawn away from public duty by a seductive enchantress in the Italian Renaissance epic, see Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

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example, seduces rst Astolfo in the Orlando Innamorato (2.13.54–66) and then Ruggiero in the Orlando Furioso (7.9–31). The heroes nally escape and go on to fulll their political destinies only thanks to external support from higher forces. Machiavelli, far from warning against the private pursuit of pleasure as a distraction from a higher public calling, celebrates the bond between Niccolò (the author himself ) and Circe’s maiden as a remedy against the suffering caused by the evils and injustices of the political sphere. As if to show that the lovely damsel does not lead him to a state of oblivion, Niccolò uses the time that he spends alone to reect on the problems of mankind. The greatest threat to the wellbeing of the world is not the passionate love which leads the hero to neglect his civic duty, as in the romance epic, but the unbridled appetite for power that causes rulers to destroy their state: “That which more than anything else throws kingdoms down from the highest hills is this: that the powerful with their power are never sated.”17 Further, in the course of the narrative even Circe herself loses her traditional negative connotations as dangerous enchantress. Initially she is presented as a fearsome gure who deprives men of their humanity by transforming them into various animals that correspond to their character. Subsequently, we learn that Machiavelli’s foretold transformation into an ass will actually help him gain insight and acquire the necessary wisdom to face future hardships. Finally, near the end of the unnished poem, a pig fashioned after Plutarch’s Gryllus disdains the prospect of reacquiring his humanity, arguing that other animals are superior to the human species. Circe’s infamous transformation of men into animals thereby comes to be viewed—against tradition—as a protective, benevolent measure that grants privileged individuals a higher form of existence. Machiavelli’s comedy La Mandragola, according to its prologue, is about how an enamored young man (Callimaco) tricked a prudent young woman (Lucrezia). The extramarital encounter resulting from this trick is so much to Lucrezia’s liking that she dictates the conditions for its continual reenactment. The play has given rise to conicting interpretations, depending in part on whether the conclusion is seen

17 That is not to say that this theme is missing from the epic, but that it is not developed in the hero-seductress episode. On the insatiability of rulers, Boiardo writes: “And as it happens to great lords/Who only want what they can’t have,/The greater obstacles there are/To reaching what they would obtain/The more they jeopardize their realms,/And what they want, they cannot gain” (Orlando Innamorato 1.1.5).

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as bemoaning Lucrezia’s loss of chastity or as celebrating her plan for future happiness. In the rst case, critics have generally used traditional morality in order to question Lucrezia’s character in comparison with the Roman Lucretia. Yet Machiavelli himself outs conventional mores in the play’s prologue, in which he expresses his wish that the audience may share Lucrezia’s good fortune: “I hope you’ll be tricked as she was” (2:777). From the outset Lucrezia is established as a model individual for her many positive qualities. She is not only credited with controlling her husband—Callimaco says that Nicia “lets her rule him completely” (2:780)—but she is recognized as capable of governing a state—the condence-man Ligurio believes that Lucrezia is “t to rule a kingdom” (2:783). By the play’s conclusion, Lucrezia emerges as a wise ruler who will determine the course of events in the future. Callimaco quotes her plan of action: I take you then for lord, master, guide; you are my father, you are my defender; I want you as my chief good; and what my husband has asked for one night, I intend him to have always. You’ll make yourself his best friend; you’ll go to the church this morning, and from there you’ll come to have dinner with us; after that your comings and stayings’ll be as you like, and we can be together at any time without suspicion. (2:819)

Although the opening of her speech appears to give Callimaco authority over her, she is actually the one who has taken charge of the situation, rst by appointing Callimaco to various roles and then by instructing him on what actions to take to ensure their continued bliss. Her increased assertiveness is noticed by her husband as well, who complains that “she acts like a ghting cock” and admits to her that “this morning it’s exactly as though you were born a second time” (2:819). Lucrezia’s gurative rebirth reinforces the opposition vis-à-vis her Roman namesake, who committed suicide after having been coerced into an extramarital sexual encounter. Yet perhaps Tarquinius’s virtuous wife was not the only Lucrezia that Machiavelli had in mind. Noting that Lucrezia was also the actual name of La Riccia, De Grazia suggests that Machiavelli’s lover provides “one more possible source for the choice [of names] by an association of opposites” (140). Whether or not Machiavelli’s personal life played a part in the naming of his heroine, the connection between the ctional and the real-life Lucrezia need not be viewed as an opposition: indeed, there is no essential incompatibility between the character that emerges at the end of the play and

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the woman that emerges from the pages of Machiavelli’s letters. The conclusion of the play thus also disparages society’s double-standard by which it was acceptable for men but not for women to take a lover. In addition to arguing in favor of the natural rights of women, the play also draws attention to the question of their legal rights. Through the speech of Lucrezia’s mother, Sostrata, Machiavelli criticizes laws that treated women as property rather than as citizens: “Don’t you see that a woman who doesn’t have any children doesn’t have any home? When her husband dies, she is left wretched, deserted by everybody?” (2:802). Although the play’s conclusion does not lead to a change in the law offering greater protection to widows, it does vouchsafe Lucrezia’s future security by promising her in time both children and a more desirable husband. At the conclusion of the play, Callimaco informs Ligurio of the promise he made to Lucrezia “that when God removed [Nicia], I’d take her as my wife” (2.818).18 Machiavelli’s comedy Clizia, based on the Casina by Plautus, features an astute wife who manages to save her family from disgrace by shaming her husband out of a misplaced passion for their adopted daughter. Although this resolution differs from that of La Mandragola, both comedies conclude with a state in which a very capable woman has set new rules for her personal satisfaction and for the benet of all those involved. Like Lucrezia, Sofronia also proves to be superior in judgment to those around her and exhibits qualities that make her a most efcient and prudent prince. After she has brought events to a successful conclusion, even ghting against Fortune at one point, her husband Nicomaco cedes to her all authority over himself, their son Cleander, and the girl Clizia (2:861). Sofronia conrms that his declaration applies to the future as well as the present: “He’s given me a blank check, and in the future wants me to run everything according to my own notions,” and she shows that she fully intends to exercise her authority starting with the future of Clizia: “She’ll come back, or she’ll not come back, just as I decide” (2:862). Catherine H. Zuckert writes that Machiavelli portrays Sofronia not only as the “rightful ruler

18

For a more extended positive reading of Lucrezia’s story, see in particular Joseph A. Barber, “The Irony of Lucrezia: Machiavelli’s Donna di virtù,” Studies in Philology (1985 Fall) 82 (4): 450–459, and Maristella de Panizza Lorch, “Women in the Context of Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, ed. Ada Testaferri (Ottawa: Dovehouse; 1989), 253–271.

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of the household,” but as the “embodiment of virtù,” concluding that “there is no essential difference between the sexes with regard to their potential for achieving human excellence.”19 Given that Clizia, rst performed in January 1525, depicts an older married man infatuated with a beautiful young woman, it has often been pointed out that Nicomaco’s amorous folly parallels Machiavelli’s own enamorment of the much younger Barbera Salutati. I would argue, however, that Machiavelli did not intend that his play closely mirror his personal situation. Whereas Nicomaco is suddenly transformed from a faithful and civic-minded husband to a doting idiot, Machiavelli had fallen in love with a number of women during the course of his marriage to Marietta. Nicomaco, moreover, is shamed by his wife into coming to his senses before he ruins his reputation, whereas the incorrigible Machiavelli outs social convention by appearing frequently with Barbera in public even when this draws censure from his brother-in-law (March 1, 1525; Letter 286). Clizia is a secluded virgin who is not even seen on stage; Barbera Salutati, on the other hand, had concurrent lovers in addition to Machiavelli and acted on stage by profession. Finally, Sofronia successfully orchestrates a plan to bring Nicomaco under her governance; by contrast, Marietta’s repeated pleas to her husband to return home soon never seem to have any effect on his actual whereabouts. Machiavelli gives us a different view of the wife gure in the novella Belfagor: The Devil Who Married. After countless men have arrived in Hell lamenting that “they were brought to such great misfortune by nothing else than by getting married” (2:869), Pluto sends the devil Belfagor to earth to investigate this claim. Following various vicissitudes, Belfagor returns to Pluto’s realm giving conrmation “about the ills that a wife can bring into a house” (2:877). Moreover, it is precisely the (false) news of his wife’s approach that frightens Belfagor into leaving the earthly realm and eeing to the underworld: “He preferred to return to Hell to give an accounting for his deeds rather than again with such great annoyance, anxiety and danger to put his neck under the marriage yoke” (2:877). Although one would expect a generalized criticism of the female sex in an anti-uxorial tale, Machiavelli focuses less on gender than on

19 Zuckert, “Fortune is a Woman—But So Is Prudence: Machiavelli’s Clizia,” Feminist Interpretations of Machiavelli (University Park, PA; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 199.

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class distinctions. Under the name of Roderigo of Castile, Belfagor demonstrates his wealth and largesse as soon as he arrives in Florence, and as a result “many noble citizens who had plenty of daughters and little money made proposals to him” (2:871). Roderigo chooses the daughter of a nobleman who was “of a very important family and greatly respected in Florence” and at the same time “very poor” (2:871). If Belfagor’s rst mistake was to attempt to buy love from a member of the impoverished nobility, his second mistake was to think that his acquiescence to his wife’s demands could achieve peace in the household. On the contrary: [Onesta’s pride] became loftier as soon as she realized her husband’s love for her, and since she felt she could in every way lord it over him, she gave him orders without any mercy or consideration and did not hesitate, when he denied her anything, to sting him with rude and offensive words. (2:872).

The situation goes beyond a critique of social class since Machiavelli depicts her as a tyrant within her own household: “even those devils [Belfagor] had brought with him to act as servants chose to go back to Hell and live in the re rather than stay in the world under her rule” (2:872). Onesta thus also serves as an example of the kind of ruler decried in The Golden Ass, whose unlimited power and insatiable desires lead to the ruin of the social order. Atypical of works in the anti-uxorial tradition, Machiavelli does not extend his negative depiction to all women. In Onesta’s own family, her mother is absent from the narrative, while her greedy father dominates and her brothers are good for nothing but wasting Roderigo’s money. Further, Roderigo’s aversion to his wife does not prevent him from later entering the bodies of innocent women as a devil who must then be exorcised. In fact, he is so much at home in the body of the daughter of King Louis VII of France that he plans to reside there indenitely rather than returning to Hell. He only nally leaves the girl alone when the peasant Gianmatteo tricks him into thinking that his wife is nearby. Even in this conclusion, Machiavelli seems less interested in reinforcing gender stereotypes than in overturning assumptions about social class. It is not a coincidence that it is a peasant rather than a member of the upper classes who has the intelligence to outwit Belfagor. Yet Gianmatteo is not only smarter than the devil, he is also the only character in the novella who exercises true moral virtue. While members

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of the nobility shamelessly attempt to exploit Roderigo in order to increase their wealth, the peasant is simply interested in regaining a peaceful existence on his farm. Machiavelli wrote other brief works of prose and poetry that may give further indication of his views on women. An autograph manuscript entitled “Articles for a Pleasure Company” offers a set of tongue-incheek rules for establishing a company whose goal is to imagine—and then to do—things that give delight to men and women. Veering away from either a male-dominated hierarchy or a “women on top” reversal, Machiavelli species that men and women will alternately rule the group. His rules are clearly meant to be in jest, yet what is striking is how consistently he assumes that women are equal partners with men. Even Castiglione’s early sixteenth-century manual for court behavior, The Book of the Courtier, which portrays an ideal gathering of educated men and women at the Court of Urbino presided over by a female, nevertheless relegates women to the role of silent witnesses while the male courtiers debate models of male and female behavior. Machiavelli not only grants men and women equal rights and capabilities, but also assumes they share the same sexual desires. He proclaims, for example, that “each man and each woman shall sleep the one without his wife and the other without her husband, at least fteen days every month, under the penalty that husband and wife shall sleep together two months without intermission” (2:867). Wives may also remove their husbands from the premises by giving them purgatives if they do not perform their marital duty. Machiavelli treats conventional social mores as a hypocritical restriction that not only leads to unhappiness on earth, but that also causes damnation in the afterlife. In the anti-Dantesque carnival song “By Lovers and Ladies Without Hope,” both unrequited lovers and their unresponsive ladies nd themselves “in the deep center of Hell” (2:879). The ladies confess that they had equally loved the men, but had refrained from showing their true feelings out of a concern for their reputation: “However great has been your love, just as great ours too has been, but not having displayed it as you have, for the sake of our honor it has remained unspoken” (2:879). Machiavelli’s “ladies without hope” thus are guilty not of cruelty, but of capitulation to conventional mores at the expense of their sentiments.20 The lovers nd them

20

Boccaccio’s memorable tale of Nastagio degli Onesti (Decameron 5.8) and Ariosto’s

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blameworthy nonetheless, and their afrmation of the need to seize the moment echoes a sentiment expressed elsewhere in Machiavelli’s opus with regard to Fortune: “he who does not act when he has time, then repents and prays in vain” (2:879). The poem concludes with a warning delivered from the enlightened ladies to female readers: “Therefore, ladies, when you have bound some lover to your love, in order not to be wanderers like us, avoid all bashfulness; do not send them to the cursed kingdom, because one who brings damnation on another is to like pain condemned by Heaven” (2:879). Even when Machiavelli does adopt a tale of female cruelty, its meaning is circumscribed by its function as a negative exemplum within a more positive model of male-female relations. The narrative poem “Serenade,” written possibly between 1514 and 1515 (2:1016), begins with the poet’s exhortation to his lady to return his love. The rst strategy that he uses to persuade her is his warning of the wrath of Venus and Amor toward those who do not yield to them: It does not avail to be of great and lofty ability, it does not avail to have power, to have valor, if one does not yield to the noble kingdom of Venus the fair and of her son Amor. Of them alone the ire is to be feared, and the anger and implacable rage, because one is a woman, the other young and agile, and they have taken from many their individual being (2:1016).21

Machiavelli goes on to explain to the unnamed addressee of the poem that the ensuing tale is meant to be read as “an example, in order that you may learn to ee the cruel net wherein Anaxarete was taken.” As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Anaxarete’s cruelty toward her suitor and eventual punishment is used as an exemplum by the suitor Vertumnus in wooing his beloved Pomona. After hearing the story of Anaxarete’s sorry end, Pomona is persuaded to not make the same mistake and to return Vertumnus’s love. In this way, Anaxarete’s negative example produces a positive effect rst of all within the narrative itself. With the hope that the lesson will not be lost on the poem’s addressee, Machiavelli concludes by reminding her which is the behavior to follow

tale of Lydia (Orlando Furioso 34.44–67) also represent infernal punishment for an unresponsive woman. In both these cases, however, the woman is condemned to suffer for cruelty and ingratitude toward her suitor. 21 While Machiavelli singles out Amor for his age and Venus for her gender, he treats them as equally powerful, giving a sense of love as a force that can be conceived of interchangeably as masculine or feminine.

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and which to avoid: “imitate Pomona’s example and not Anaxarete’s cruelty” (2:1020). The ctional female characters that Machiavelli offers as positive models take on various roles and demonstrate a range of capabilities. Circe’s damsel offers philosophical guidance, passion, and friendship; Lucrezia capitalizes on fortuitous circumstances for the benet of all involved; Sofronia manipulates events in order to achieve her goal. Machiavelli assumes that women are as ready to fulll their emotional and sexual desires as are men, and he refuses to pay lip service to the double-standard promulgated in his day under the cover of genderspecic rules for behavior. Those women depicted more negatively in his ctional works are either products of a spoiled social class (Onesta), slaves to conventional mores (the ladies without hope), or unnaturally heartless (Anaxarete). As a rule, just as Machiavelli assumes the equal rights of women and men in the ctional spaces he envisions, he endows his female characters with an equal capacity for rational thought, human emotion and desire, and resolute action.

Personication The concept most frequently personied as a woman by Machiavelli is that of fortune. He clearly did not invent the connection: for centuries writers in Latin and the Romance languages had exploited the feminine noun to elaborate the characteristics of Fortuna.22 In his “Tercets On Fortune,” Machiavelli draws heavily on this tradition, imagining “Occasione” as a supreme ruler who sits on a high throne in a palace. Although her power is superhuman, Machiavelli allows for the possibility that she can be defeated by those who face her with sufcient valor: “Her natural power for all men is too strong and her reign is always violent if prowess still greater than hers does not vanquish her” (2:745). He recognizes, however, that in the end Fortune’s negative force is overwhelming and inevitable: “you cannot therefore trust yourself to her nor hope to escape her hard bite, her hard blows, violent and cruel.” Machiavelli expresses a similar ambivalence between hoping that Fortune will favor the intrepid and acknowledging that she will eventually

22 See Howard Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (1927; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1974).

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crush her victims when he cites Alexander of Macedonia and Julius Caesar as the two most famous men to challenge Fortuna. He initially uses them as examples that prove “how much he pleases Fortune and how acceptable he is who pushes her, who shoves her, who jostles her” (2:748–9). Machiavelli does not conclude his example with their victories, however, but rather with their nal defeat: “Yet nevertheless the coveted harbor one of the two failed to reach, and the other, covered with wounds, in his enemy’s shadow was slain” (2:749). Machiavelli’s tercets thus depict Fortune as a force one must confront aggressively in order to have any momentary hope of success, and yet which is ultimately indomitable. Machiavelli describes Fortune’s realm as a site from which there may be no escape: “Over a palace open on every side she reigns, and she deprives no one of entering, but the getting out is not sure” (2:746). Among her servants is Penitence, who is also depicted as Fortune’s companion in the poem “On Occasion.”23 Penitence as punishment for having failed to seize an opportunity was part of the iconography traditi