Brenda Deen Schildgen

Dante's Utopian Political Vision, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation of Pagans

^^ "'[•••] velut in ultimum finem, omnia nostra opera ordinantur, quia est pax

universalis [...]."

{Monarchia I. lv.5)'

"Ethics," writes Giorgio Agamben, "begins only when the good is revealed to

consist in nothing other than a grasping of evil [...] truth is revealed only by

giving a place to non-truth — that is, as a taking-place of the false, as an exposure of its own innermost impropriety" (Coming Community IV). The premise that truth cannot be understood except by showing the false drives both

the ethical and poetic rhythms in the Commedia. Starting with the false, the

poem consistently exposes its contrasting truth. However, because of the apparently moral standing of the virtuous pagans, one of the more perplexing

and elusive aspects of this dichotomy between false and true is the ethical

conundrum Dante poses about the judgment that condemns the pagans to Limbo.

This essay argues that Dante's Utopian politics based on Orosius's

historiographical legacy is precisely what directs him to exile his Latin poets — Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan — to Limbo. Their appearance in the poem in contrast to those pagans Dante selects for salvation suggests that Dante believed

his ancient poets lacked the vision to see the Empire as the instrument of

providential history.

In Inferno 4, Dante the author exalts himself ("m'essalto" 120)^ in the

company of the ancient poets, even while he seems to be arguing that despite

their literary gifts, the poets deserved Limbo, the "verde smalto" (118). Dante

returns to the issue of the virtuous excluded from salvation throughout the poem,

but Paradiso 19 and 20 particularly address the problem. Indeed, scholars have

argued that Par. 19: 70-78, where Dante raises the issue of the salvation of non-

Christians, perhaps suggests Dante's doubts about the condemnation of the

virtuous pagans in Limbo (Padoan 120-22; Foster; Sanguineti 235-54; Casella,

"Figurazione"). Of course, Dante does select certain figures ft^om the ancient

' "[...] all our human actions are directed as to their Una! end. That means is universal

peace."

^ Throughout this essay. I refer to the Giorgio Petrocchi critical edition of The Divine

Comedy used by Singleton.

Annali d 'Italianistica 1 9 (200 1

)

52 Brenda Deen Schildgen

world as redeemed pagans — Statius, {Purg. 21 and 22), Cato (Purg. 1), Trajan (Par. 20; 44), and Ripheus (Par. 20: 68). Therefore, his decision to exile the

ancient poets emphasizes that Dante chooses to distinguish pagans he deemed worthy of salvation from those he assigned to Limbo. Also, the tantalizing void

created by the absence of Livy and "M buono Augusto" {/nf. 1: 71), and Virgil's

strong presence in Inferno and Purgatorio (along with the great poets of his

century, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan) emphasizes Dante's distinction between his

condemned Latin poets and other pagans he chose to save. The ethics of salvation is thus revealed by one "non-truth" giving way to an absolute truth, but the latter cannot be seen without also understanding and knowing the other, as

Agamben argues.

Taking into consideration Dante's commitment to the Roman imperial model of government, the cultural legacy of Virgil, and the status of the salvation

of pagans as an intellectual and theological issue from the twelfth century

onwards, this essay examines the ethical criteria Dante adopts for the salvation

of pagans.

Salvation of Pagans

The salvation of pagans is not nearly the unorthodox position that many believe it to be (Caperan; Sullivan). There were strong arguments from the twelfth

century on reaching back to Pauline and Augustinian statements that moral Jews

and pagans who had lived before the coming of Christ had equal access to salvation. For if all mankind had the same roots and the same creator God, they

all had to have access to the same possibility of salvation. This is the argument

that Augustine made on several occasions: "All together we are members of

Christ and are his body; and not just we who are in this place only, but throughout the world; and not at this time only, but — what shall I say — from Abel the just man until the end of time, as long as man begets and is begotten,

whoever among the just made his passage through this life, whether now, that is,

not in this place, but in the present life, or in generations to come, all the just are

this one body of Christ, and individually his members" (Serm. 341:9.11 Col.

1499-1500). Note here Augustine's emphasis on the Roman virtue of "justice,"

which makes mankind members of the body of Christ. Similarly in De Vera Religione^ he wrote that in his time Christianity was the one true religion

(XXV.46) but in the Retractationes^ pointing out that Christianity did not exist in

antiquity, he contended that Christ's salvation had to be open to all mankind

from the beginning of time because God's purpose in creating the universe was

the salvation of humanity (I.xiii.3). Here there is no stipulation about baptism or

"knowing" Christ intellectually.

The rediscovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century likewise gave rise to

persuasive arguments, particularly presented by Peter Abelard, among others,

that the Greeks — Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates — as well as the great Latin writers must have access to heaven under the same rules as the Hebrew

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 53

patriarchs {Introd. ad Theol. PL 178. I. 25. Col. 1034 C-D; Theol. Christ II. Col. 1 179C and Expositio ad. Rom.'" I Col. 802 D). But even more important, as argued by Hugh of St. Victor (De Sacram. 11. pt. Vl.vii), Albert the Great (Commentarii in tertium libri sententiarum, dist. XXV, B, art. II, Ad. 6), Thomas Aquinas {Summa Theologica. Secunda Secundae, Quest. 1; art. VII), and Bonaventure (!n tertium librum sententiarum. d. 25, a. 1, q.2, ad. 6), for

those who had not received the sacrament of baptism, a conversion of heart might be sufficient, for the providence of God was deemed most merciful (Caperan 170-200). Thus there was widespread belief in the possibility of

salvation, particularly for those who had lived before Christ, or for those who had never encountered Christianity but were nonetheless just. Furthermore and

more importantly in a sense, from the twelfth century on, the salvation of pagans

was a topic open to theological discussion without any absolute convictions

regulating the conclusions except that those people who were eligible for salvation had to be virtuous.

Dante's Political Ideas

"Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem" ('The space of Rome's city is the

same as the world" Fasti 2.684). Ovid's proclamation equates the orbis terrarum

with the Roman Empire and with the city of Rome as its center. This legacy of the ancient Roman imperial hegemony shaped Dante's geo-political imagination because for him, the peace of the political world was coterminous with the space

of the Roman Empire (Mazzotta 1-13). The birth of Christ during the reign of Augustus Caesar, first Roman Emperor, was, as for Orosius and in contrast to Augustine (Fortin vii-xxvi), too fortuitous for Dante to dismiss as mere

coincidence. Dante, in fourteenth-century Italy plagued by civil strife, whether

inter-city or intra-city, looked back to an unproblematic peace he imaginatively

created out of the memories of the ancient Roman Empire, the model for the time

of peace he desired for the present. Dante's desire is a desperate attempt to

restore Rome as the world's center and to reinstate Roman civic virtue (Hollander and Rossi 74). In his own time, their value had been shattered by

Italy's inter-city squabbling, the relocation of the Pope to Avignon, and the

rejection of Henry VII, whom, in his Letters V, VI, and VII, Dante had

welcomed to Italy to be crowned emperor-elect (1310-1312).

Dante's views on the Roman Empire are, of course, well known to scholars

of his work.-^ Memory of the Roman imperium as a structure of civic power

formed Dante's desire for a restored Roman Empire. In this political vision, the

^ For works on Dante's idea of Rome, his politics, and ihe roles of pope and emperor, see

Nardi. "11 concetto" 2 1 5-75 and 'intorno" 1 5 1 -3 1 3; Silverstein 1 87-2 1 8; d'Entreves 311-

50; Barbi 49-68; Kantorowicz; Davis. Dante and the Idea ofRome and "Dante's Vision"

23-41; De Angelis; Limentani 113-37; Mazzoni, "Teoresi" 9-111; Mazzotta 66-106;

DuBois 28-51. 52-70; Ferrante 3-131; Schnapp 14-35; Sistrunk; Armour; Scott 29-59.

54 Brenda Deen Schildgen

virtues with which he characterized the Romans, justice in particular, would rule,

and the Church would lose all temporal power. But in the Monarchia, the

Commedia, Convivio, and the political letters, there is no imperial infrastructure,

no concrete political program; only Utopian political visions based on nostalgia

and desire. Davis sums up Dante's theory of history and politics: "It rests on

memory and desire, memory of an alleged golden age under Augustus, a universal peace that Dante believed existed only once in human history, and

desire for a savior, evidently a new Augustus, who would restore this unique and vanished order to the modern world" ("Dante and the Empire" 73).

To eliminate wars and their cause, as Dante proposed in the Convivio, it is

necessary that "tutta la Terra, e quanto all'umana generazione a possedere e

dato, esser Monarcia, cioe uno solo Principato e uno Principe avere, il quale,

tutto possedendo e piu desiderare non possendo, li re tenga contenti nelli termini

delli regni, sicche pace intra loro sia, nella quale si posino le cittadi, e in questa

posa le vicinanze s'amino, in questo amore le case prendano ogni loro bisogno,

il quale preso, Tuomo viva felicemente; ch'e quello per che Tuomo e nato" (4. 4.

4). Dante's political vision incorporates the whole earth under a single rule and a

single ruler! This grand poetic project, like his later prophetic utterances in the

Paradiso, expresses his Utopian desire for peace in the world. As Justinian says

in Paradiso 6, "Poi, presso al tempo che tutto 'I ciel vole / redur lo mondo a suo

modo sereno, / Cesare per voler di Roma il tolle" (55-57). Dante probably developed his political ideas under the influence of Remigio

dei Girolami who was a lettore at the studium at the Dominican Santa Maria

Novella in Florence (Davis, "The Florentine Studio"' 347-61). Remigio, a

Florentine born in 1247, was a disciple of Thomas Aquinas in Paris in 1269, and

died in 1319 in Florence. He gave courses at the studium that lay people could

attend, and among his many sermons are De bono pads, De iustitia, and De

peccato usurae, all of which are themes in Dante's poetry. Remigio, in contrast

to Dante, however, developed a philosophy of community closer to Thomistic,

Augustinian, and Aristotelian social-political thought, which emphasized the idea

of social collectivism and civitas, both of which would affect a general political

theory (Davis "Remigio de' Girolami"; De Matteis; Capitani, "II De Peccato

Usure'';). Two other sources of inspiration for Dante's political ideas, particularly in terms of church-state relationships, are John of Salisbury and

Bernard of Clairvaux. John's Policraticus discussed at length the respective

roles of king and emperor (Pezard 163-91); likewise, Bernard's De

Consideratione addressed the limits of papal power in the secular domain

(Botterill 13). Unlike Remigio's more practical, although visionary politics,

Dante's empire, emperor, and pope as conceived in the Monorchia are Utopian

ideals (Capitani, "Spigolatura" 81), for he has constructed the myth of the pax

romano as a radical critique of his own age of political turmoil and fratricidal

conflict. The Monorchia is clearly in dialogue with the documents issued by the

offices of the Emperor, the Pope, the King of France and the King of Naples, but

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 55

Dante's politics nonetheless remain a project of his desires and do not conclude

in a specific political action (Limentani 133; Davis, "Dante and the Empire").

Whether the poet's idea of the empire was in support of Henry V!l or

another emperor, hope fuelled his commitment to the possibility of a world

unified by justice and liberty. This was the point made by Giovanni Gentile in a

lecture titled "La profezia di Dante," delivered Feb. 17, 1918 {Studi di Dante

69). As a literary undertaking, Dante's political Utopia was a mimesis of the

Roman Empire as ruled ideally by Justinian {Par. 6), according to Law, not the

military-political project of Constantine or the political-monarchical aspirations

of the French kings who had initiated the crusades (Schildgen, "Dante and the

Crusades"). Dante was the first to advocate the idea of a "universal temporal

community," which would demand the "collaboration of a completely unified

human race" (Gilson 165-66).

Although Convivio (4. 5) and Monarchia (I. 16) recall the historical time of

peace when Augustus Caesar reigned, by providence contemporaneously with

the birth of Christ, to prove why Rome should be the center of his Utopian plans,

Dante also turned to the legendary story of Aeneas and the Virgilian text. He

features Aeneas's miscegenated family history and Rome's hybrid culture to

support his argument for Rome as the heir to universal government. In other

words, Rome's and the Romans' intrinsic superiority, in addition to being

divinely supported {Convivio 4. 4), he argued, was earned by virtue and by

hereditary right {Monarchia 2-3) (Silverstein). Rome was uniquely situated to

take on leadership of the world because its exemplary "nobility" was its "hybrid"

inheritance. Dante argued that through Aeneas Rome combined all three

continents (Asia, Europe, and Africa), thus moving the center of the world, in

Dante's view, to Italy through hereditary rights and miscegenation. Dante

rereads history through poeta noster, Virgil, and he adopts the Roman poets'

imperium as his literary project, even though some of these poets were clearly

less optimistic about these universal ideals than Dante. Thus Dante adopts the

idea of the Roman Empire of his Roman forbears, but his attitude towards it

differs. While the Roman poets proclaim it, they simultaneously veil their

proclamations with unresolved tensions about its goals and achievements,

whereas Dante uses it as his symbolic geo-political Utopia that he wishes his own

world to imitate.

The Legacy of Virgil

Critics generally agree that the Roman poets share a common pessimism about

human behavior, particularly in the political sphere, which called into question

the goals of the Empire."* This pessimism in his poetic forebears may indeed lie

'^ Those who have taken up these tensions in the Roman poets include Leach 191;

Johnson, Darkness \'isible, whose thesis is the visible darkness in Virgil's poem; Conte

56 Brenda Deen Schildgen

behind Dante's confinement of "le gente di molto valore" {Inf. 4, 44) to Limbo.

Virgil himself tells Dante that he and the others are there for no other fault ("non

per altro rio" Inf. 4, 40) than that they did not adore God properly. Now they live in desire without hope, a fitting contrapasso for those who lived without hope

but with desire in life:

E s' e' furon dinanzi al crislianesmo

non adorar debitamente a Dio;

e di questi cotai son io medesmo.

Per tai difetti. non per altro rio,

semo perduti, e sol di tanto otTesi

che sanza spemc vivemo in disio.

{Inferno 4, 37-42)

Because Christian political optimism and hope in Orosian historiography was

linked to the Roman imperiunu this living without hope distances the Roman

poets from Dante's idea of a redeemed history. It is true that the added pathos of

Dante's parting from his maestro in Purgatorio 27 provides a substantial

aesthetic reason for assigning Virgil to Limbo. But the tragic, or hopeless, and

ultimately Stoic view of history that Virgil reveals in his poem might also help

explain why Dante's Virgil ends up in Limbo along with all the other Roman

poets who concomitantly shared Virgil's misgivings about the Empire.

Dante deviates from medieval writers who allegorized Virgil and made him

a hidden Christian. This reading habit was based on Eclogue 4, which seemed to

prophesy the coming of the savior and also on allegorical readings of the .Aeneid

that heralded a triumphant Christian Rome.'' Hollander and others are correct in

141-84; Segal; Galinsky 210-61; DuBois 28-51; Armstrong 93-116; Quint 21-96; and

.lohnson. Momentary Monsters. ^ The range of readings of Virgil in the long millennium called the Middle Ages is

expansive. Besides the interpretation that he was a prophet of Christianity, those readings

also include allegorizations of the Aeneid, as for example, by Fulgentius, the fourth

century Macrobius. followed later by the twelfth century Bernardus Silvestris. both of

whom advance neo-platonic readings. Servius's fourth-century commentary adopted a

more literal approach, whereas the twelfth-century .lohn of Salisbury's discussion of the

.Aeneid in Policralici I and II, as Augustine's earlier use and reference to Virgil, reveal an

intense appreciation of his poetry, which could prove philosophically useful. One might

also include here Dante's Monorchia, which, while interpreting Virgil's poem, makes it a

political allegory for the founding of Rome as part of God's providential plan. For a

recent and thorough summary work on these readings, see Courcelle and Pierre and

Jeanne Courcelle. For readings of Virgil in the Middle Ages, see Comparer's still

outstanding survey; for Servius's commentary, see Thomas; de Lubac 233-62. Hollander

surveys the late classical and later traditions for reading Virgil, which included

literal/historical, allegorical, and moral (Donatus. Servius. Macrobius. Fulgentius.

Prudentius. Augustine, .lerome, Isidore of Seville, and Bernardus Silvestris) in .lacoff and

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 57

arguing that Dante's Virgil is "first and foremost the Virgil of the Aeneid ?ind not

the Virgil of the commentators" {Allegory 96). Particularly in the Commedia where he quotes the Aeneid frequently, the acuity of Dante's reading habits

makes it very evident that he has moved beyond the commentaries circulating in his times. His reading is not the literal Virgil of Servius, nor the allegorical

reading of Fulgentius, nor the neo-platonist allegory of Bernardus Silvestris,

although hints of all of these can be seen in the Commedia.^ Dante's reading of

Virgil shares with Saint Augustine's a great appreciation for the lyric power of

Virgil's poetry (Hagendahl):

"Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte

che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?"

"Tu se' lo mio maestro e '1 mio autore.

tu se' solo colui da cu' io lolsi

lo bello stilo che m'ha fatto onore"

(Inf. 1.79-80. 85-87)

Dante has in common with Augustine also a similar habit of reading the Aeneid as history. In the Monarchia, Dante freely uses Virgil's story of Aeneas's

conquest of Latium to establish the superior nobility of the Roman people and their right to rule the world. In the Commedia, he continues his imperial polemic,

but he sets the story of the founding of Rome against the poet who sang its glories. Having Virgil label his own poem a "tragedy" ("I'alta mia tragedia" Inf. 20, 1 13), Dante presents his ancient friend as blind to the providential history of

Rome. Virgil is "de li altri poeti onore e lume" (Inf. 1, 82); he is Dante's guide

through "la citta dolente"; he is "il lume" (Purg. 22, 68) to whom Statius could say, "Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano" (Purg. 22, 73). However, he is confined

to a permanent "esilio," rhymed with "Virgilio" {Par. 26, 116, 118), to where, as

Adam says, Dante's lady moved him ("mosse tua donna" Par. 26, 1 18), perhaps an ironic use of the word, since Virgil can never move (Barolini, Dante's Poets

253; Allan: Barolini, "Q.").

Schnapp 96-103. Of Dante's reading he writes, "the major impulse behind Dante's sense

of Virgil springs from his reading Virgil as Virgil "read' himself; treating the literal sense

as the record of actual events" (103). See also Mazzoni, "Saggio" 29-206; Hollander.

"Dante's Misreadings" 79-93; 265-270; Padoan; lannucci 69-128; DuBois 28-51;

Barolini, The Vndivine Comedy 76-80; see also Hollander, "II Virgilio dantesco." For the

role of tensions between Augustine's critique of Virgil's poem and Dante's undermining

of Virgil, see Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert 147-91; Paratore; Pasquazi 45-69;

Hollander. "The Tragedy" 131-218.

^ Hollander, Allegory 92-103; see also Ronconi, who concludes that "Dante sa che

scrittori cristiani. da Lattanzio a Prudenzio a Abelardo, intesero I'ecloga come profetica;

ma il pari di S. Girolamo non crede a un Virgilio "cristiano senza cristo'" (570).

58 Brenda Deen Schildgen

Dante's Redeemed Pagans The criterion for the salvation of the pagans in Dante's poem provides an important clue to his own theology of salvation for the ancient world. In Paradiso 19 and 20, Dante takes up his own concern about whether there is salvation outside of Christianity (Jacomuzzi). Canto 20, with the appearance of

Ripheus, a pre-Christian pagan character (68) from Virgil's Aeneid {U. 339, 394,

and 426-27), and Trajan, a post-Christian pagan (44-45), introduces a question

about salvation outside of Christian time (Foster; Russo; Schildgen, "Dante and

the Indus"). Likewise, the appearance of Cato, a pagan suicide and supporter of

the Roman Republic in Purgatorio 1 and 2, unsettles any convictions that the poem conforms to a narrow version of Christianity. The presence of these figures on the way to salvation, or already saved souls, disrupts the claims to an

exclusively Judeo-Christian heaven. When we consider both whom among the pagans Dante chose to save and whom he praised while leaving in silence their places in the afterlife, we can see an interesting pattern. In fact, Caperan suggests

that Dante is more restrictive on the salvation of pagans than the theology of his

own time gave him license to be (206-12). Therefore, we have to look for some special reasons for his choices. In Paradiso 20, Dante hints at what

characteristics single out the saved pagans. Speaking of Trajan, Dante has the

Eagle say,

"Che Tuna de lo 'nferno, u' non si ricdc

gia mai a buon voler. torno a I'ossa;

e cio di viva spene fu mercede:

di viva spene, che mise la possa

nc' prieghi fatti a Dio per suscitarla.

si che potesse sua voglia esser mossa."

(Par. 20. 106-111)

The other, Ripheus, "tutto suo amor la giu pose a drittura" (20, 121). Thus,

the first, Dante doubly emphasizes, possessed living hope, whereas the second,

also given over to righteousness, possessed hope and love. What made these

figures unique was their openness and commitment to hope and to love. His

emphasis on love and hope (rather than the Roman cardinal virtues alone) points

to the criteria Dante has elected to decide which pagans to save and which to

leave in Limbo; their selection reflects this dispensation.

Dante sends Statius, who stands in poetic opposition to Virgil, who is not

saved, to heaven. Like Ripheus, Cato, and Trajan, Statius was deeply committed

to the good of the state, and, with Domitian's patronage, he was a strong

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 59

supporter of the Empire.^ While claiming that Virgil's poetry made him both a poet and a Christian, Statius nonetheless is very different from Virgil. But

although his poetry, like Virgil's, condemns Greek violence and treachery, in focusing on Greek failures Statius's poetry lacks Virgil's pessimistic concern

with the generalized human incapacity to control impulses, an emotional handicap that Virgil places at the heart of history's blindness in the Aeneid.

Virgil's position follows from the Stoic legacy that informs the poetry of all his

Roman poetic companions in Limbo. Although Stoicism in particular experienced a rebirth in the Renaissance,

and Seneca's importance in the later period is well established (Pena; Daraki;

Colish; Verbeke 1-19), it has not been generally recognized how widespread both Stoic and Epicurean ideas were in the Middle Ages. Cicero and Seneca

were the two most important sources of Stoic ideas throughout the Middle Ages,

but Ovid, Lucan, Horace, and Virgil all show interest in one or the other

philosophy. Virgil's hint about the transmigration of souls in Book VI of the

Aeneid (724-51) links him with Platonism and Stoic ethics, and his sense of

ineluctable and destructive forces, whether of human passions or of divine

origin, likewise links him with Stoicism. In the tradition of the Stoic critique of

Roman and Macedonian imperial aggrandizement, Lucan's Book 10 of the Pharsalia reflects this Stoic conviction. The Pythagorean discourse of Book 15

in the Metamorphoses exposes Epicureanism as Ovid contrasts Pythagorean

philosophy's Stoic ethic to Epicurean pleasure (15, 59-478). Padoan had argued

that Dante used Fulgentius to develop an allegorical reading of Statius's

Thebaid, whereby Theseus as hero became a figure for Christ. More convincing

is Barolini's argument that Statius identifies himself with providential history

because he says, echoing Virgil's "buon Augusto" {Inf. 1, 71), that he was born

under '"1 buon Tito" {Purg. 21, 82; on this issue see: Barolini, Dante's Poets

263; Di Scipio 85-86). Dante identifies Titus as one of the critical emperors in

Justinian's providential history of Rome (Par. 6, 92). Thus one dimension of Dante's decision to save Statius is not merely his support of the Empire, but

recognition that he represents an optimistic view of history, which saw the

founding of Rome and the pacification of the Mediterranean basin by Romans as

central moments in salvation history.

Ripheus — "Cadit et Ripheus, iustissimus unus / qui fuit in Teucris et servantissimus aequi" ("Ripheus, too, falls, foremost in justice among the

' This fact was known in the Middle Ages because all medieval Statius manuscripts

identified him with the reign of Domitian. For discussions of Statius and his Christianity,

see Brugnoli. "Stazio in Dante" who argued that Statius's Christianity was an invention

of Dante's. But in a more recent article he argues that, though he believes that Dante had

special reasons for making Statius Christian, it was not his invention ("Lo Stazio"). See

also Barolini, Dante's Poets 256-69; Heilbron; Padoan argues that for Dante, Statius's

hero Theseus was a type of Christ figure (134-36).

60 Brenda Deen Schildgen

Trojans, and most zealous for the right" Aeneid II, 426-27) — is among the just rulers in Paradiso (20, 68). As a Trojan noted, according to Virgil, for justice,

Ripheus belongs to a select group of moral pre-Christian pagans whose people

would participate in the providential founding of Rome. On the other hand, Dante recalls the emperor Trajan (b. 53, d. 117; reigned 98-1 17) who lived after Christ's birth as the emperor "il cui valore / mosse Gregorio e la sua gran

vittoria" ("whose worth moved Gregory to his great victory" Purg. 10, 74-75).

Trajan's story was actually a celebrated exemplum of the possibility of the

salvation of pagans in the period, because believing that Trajan could be saved,

even after death, left open the possibility that any model pagan could also be

saved (Caperan 167-68). A medieval tradition recorded in Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum Historiale (XI. 46; XXIII. 22) and told in the Vita S. Gregorii Magni

of Paulus Diaconus, held that Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), seeing the

famous story of a widow's appeal on Trajan's column, was so "moved" that he

prayed that Trajan be released from hell (Vickers). John of Salisbury's

Policraticus refers to Trajan as "Gloriam tamen militarem moderatione

superavit, Romae et per provincias omnibus se aequalem exhibens" ("By

moderation he has risen above military glory both at Rome and throughout the provinces, showing himself fair to all" Policraticus I.V.8). Thomas Aquinas

praises him in the same way {Summa III, suppl.71.5). Tradition held that Trajan

had responded with generosity and a sense of justice to the woman whose son

had been killed. Dante writes, "Or ti conforta; ch'ei convene / ch'i' solva il mio

dovere anzi ch'i' mova:/ giustizia vuole e pieta mi ritene" {Purg. 10, 91-93).

Dante's version of Trajan suggests the influence of John of Salisbury's

Policraticus where he receives an encomium for his ideal leadership which

concludes, "Felicior Augusto, melior sis Traiano" ("Happier than Augustus,

better than Trajan")^ Dante characterizes Trajan with essential Roman virtues,

"giustizia" and "pieta," both celebrated in Virgil's Aeneid as ideals, but

° "Gloriam tamen militarem moderatione superavii. Romae tamen et per provincias

omnibus se aequalem exhibens. amicos salutandi causa frequentans vel egrolantes vel

testis diebus. cum eisdem indiscreta vicissim habens convivia. vehiculis eorum et

vestibus indifferenter utens, publice et privatim dilans omnes, immunitates civitatibus

largiens, relaxans tributa provinciis. nulli gravis, cams omnibus, adeo et usque ad nosram

etatem in senatu non aliter principibus acclametur: Felicior Augusto, melior sis Traiano!"

"Quare Traianus videatur omnibus praeferendus" (By moderation he has risen above

military glory, both in Rome and throughout the provinces showing himself the equal of

all. For the sake of greeting friends he spent time with the sick, and on festive days he,

more than once, gave them all a place at the dinner table. Me would ride in their carts and

dress like them. Publicly and privately he would enrich all. bestowing exemptions on

citizens, reducing taxes in the provinces. He was heavy-handed with none, dear to all. So

that even in our day in the Senate, leaders are acclaimed in no other way than. "You are

happier than Augustus, better than Trajan'" Policraticus I. 315).

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 61

transformed and translated into Dante's own ideological idiom.^ Like Ripheus,

Trajan finds himself among the just rulers in Dante's heaven {Par. 20, 44-45).

But there is another feature to Trajan that cannot be casually overlooked.

Not only was the story of Trajan's generosity to the widow widespread, but so

too was the conviction that his sins had been remitted as a consequence. Thus

Thomas Aquinas wrote "quod Traianus precibus beati Gregorii ad vitam fuerit

revocatus et ita gratiam consecutus sit, per quam remissionem peccatorum habuit

et per consequens immunitatem a poena" ("that by the prayers of blessed

Gregory Trajan would be called back to life and thus attain the grace through

which he had the forgiveness of sin and consequently freedom from punishment"

Siimma III, supp. 71,5). Repeating John of Salisbury's "Felicior Augusto, melior

sis Traiano" (Comentum III 285), Benvenuto da Imola's gloss points to the

virtues "umilta" and "giustizia" in Trajan: "certe maxima humiliatio fuit quod

altissimus princeps ita inclinaret imperatoriam maiestatem ad audiendam

mulierculam plorantem, sub superbis signis, in campo martio superbo, inter

equites superbos" ("certainly greater was that humiliation whereby the highest

emperor so bent down his imperial majesty to hear the simple woman begging

beneath the exalted emblems, in the exalted martian field, among his exalted

knights" Comentum III 288-89).

Even though Dante clearly associated Trajan with this story of the widow,

which he uses as a circumlocution for talking about him without naming him,

"colui che piu al becco mi s'accosta,/ la vedovella consolo del figlio" {Par. 20,

44-45), Trajan was equally famous for restoring the Empire from decadence, a

history celebrated on Trajan's Column in Rome and recorded in Orosius and

repeated by John of Salisbury in Polleraticus. The column had survived,

tradition held, because Gregory had seen the story of the widow carved into it,

which led to his concern for Trajan. Orosius writes that Trajan was selected

when Nerva recognized that the state was decadent and almost in ruins, "qua

quondam legerat Nerva Hispanum virum Traianum, per quem respublica

reparata est [...]" ("with which Nerva had chosen the Spaniard Trajan, through

whom the state was restored" VI 1.34, 2). Thus Trajan is a figure who represents

the idea of rulership based on worthiness, rather than on inheritance, a position

Dante also had argued in Convivio, for which he gives the example of Hugh

Capet, "figliuol d'un beccaio di Parigi" {Purg. 20, 52), and which Cacciaguida

also supports in Par. 16. Furthermore, Orosius emphasizes Trajan's role in

pacifying the Roman territories, for under Trajan the Empire reached its largest

expansion, including not just the Mediterranean basin but Gaul, Britannia,

Germania, the Euphrates and Tigris river basins, Seleucia, and Babylonia.

Orosius conferred divine intervention on Trajan's reign because Nerva's

^ See Garrison for a history and analysis of the use ofpietas and iustitia from the ancient

Romans to Dryden; Ball; Silverstein for the importance of pietas in the De Monorchia

(192-94); Hollander and Rossi also discuss Roman republican virtues (69-75).

62 Brenda Deen Schildgen

selection of Trajan as his adoptive son and heir was "per quern revera adfiictae

reipublicae divina provisione consuluit" ("through whom by divine foresight the good of the state so severely wounded was restored" VII, 1 1,1). Thus Trajan's

story combines four central issues for Dante: divine and providential interest in

history which led to the pacification and expansion of the Empire; rule based on

worth rather than blood; and commitment to the people of the Empire exercised

with the Roman civic virtues of humility and justice. Dante has no precedent for placing Cato (95-46 BC), a supporter of the

Roman Republic, in Purgatory. Silverstein drew attention to how Dante deviated from standard views on Cato in the Middle Ages. He wrote, "Dante's estimation

of the suicide of Utica thus appears in opposition to that of his Christian sources,

preferring the eulogies of Cicero, Seneca, and the other ancient authorities to the

dispraise and silence of Augustine and Tolomeo and untouched by the cool

reserve of John of Salisbury" (208; Hollander and Rossi 63-64). But Cato, the

lawgiver, like Ripheus and Trajan, is famous for his commitment to liberty, a

Roman virtue central to Dante's Utopian political vision.'^ In the Monorchia, Dante singles out those

qui pro salute publica devotas animas posuerunt, ut Liviiis, non quantum est dignum, sed

quantum potest, glorificando renarrat; accedit et illud inenarrabile sacrifitium severissimi

libertatis tutoris Marci Catonis. Quorum alter! pro salute patrie mortis tenebras non

horruerunt; alter, ut mundo libertatis amores accenderet. quanti libertas esset oslcndit.

dum e vita liber decedere maluit quam sine libertate manere in ilia. {Monarchia 2.5: 15)

(who laid down their lives dedicated to the salvation of the community, as Livy relates to

their glory, not in terms worthy of them but as best he can: and that sacrifice [words

cannot express it] of the most stern guardian of liberty, Marcus Cato. The former for the

deliverance of their fatherland did not recoil from the shadows of death; the latter, in

order to set the world afire with love and freedom, showed the value of freedom when he

preferred to die a free man rather than remain alive without freedom.)

Thomas Aquinas {Summa 5, II, II, q.64; II, 11, q. 125 a. 2; III, q. 47, a. 6) and

Augustine {Cite de Dieu, I, XVII-XXIII, XXVII) both recalled Cato as a figure

who exemplified the value of liberty, and John of Salisbury in the Policraticus

remarked that he was a venerable image of virtue (I, 197). As the first figure

Dante sees on entering Purgatory, he represents the absolute justice of God, for

Whom distinctions between suicide and self-sacrifice, political liberty and

'^ Mazzotta remains by far the best discussion of Cato in the Comedy (14-65), A brief

list of critical studies of Cato in the Comedy includes Pasquazi (All'eterno 175-94). who

gives an overview of the critical discussion concluding that Cato represents "il valore

della liberta" (179). Sanguineti argues that Cato represents a fusion of the Christian idea

of the freedom of the will and an ideal free political regime (125-47). See also Pezard,

"Le Chant" 1 75-90; Renucci 296-3 1 1 ; Auerbach 1 1 -76; Kaske 1-18.

Dante 's Political Values, the Roman Empire, and the Salvation ofPagans 63

absolute liberty are more subtle than the human intellect can easily comprehend.

Thus, Dante presents Cato's suicide as a heroic act, because it was not out of

selfishness but out of selfless love of liberty for his country. Cato does not

appear at the beginning of Purgatorio as a type of the future-saved pagans, as

Auerbach argued in "Figura" (11-76). In contrast to Brutus and Cassius, who

chose civil war when faced with what they perceived as tyranny and suicide

when their efforts failed, Cato chose suicide rather than the betrayal of liberty.

As Dante put it, quoting Cicero: "[...] and he had always persisted in any resolve

or plan he had undertaken, it was fitting that he should die rather than set eyes on

the face of the tyrant" ("[...] semperque in proposito susceptoque consilio

permansisset, moriendum ei potius quam tyrampni vultus aspiciendus fuit"

Monorchia, 2.5: 17).

Such a sacrifice — "illud inenarrabile sacrifitium severissimi libertatis tutoris Marci Catonis" {Mon. 2:5:15) — makes Cato the typological opposite to Brutus and Cassius, the betrayers of liberty and the creators of universal schism,

whom Dante has just seen in the mouths of Satan {Inf. 34). In an act of transcendent hope, "To set the world afire with love of freedom" {Mon. 2.5: 15),

Cato had chosen death at his own hands. As the guardian of the gates of

Purgatory and as lawgiver, Cato exemplifies hope spurred by Roman civic

virtue, the foundation of a new world based on law and liberty, limits and

freedom, although they are interdependent and ruled by the human will. In the

Pharsalia, Lucan presents Cato as willing to sacrifice his own life if his death

could save his people from civil war (2:312). Dante's act of saving Cato shows

Roman history can be made consistent with providential history (Mazzotta 21,

59), for like Dante's Trajan and Ripheus, Cato too believed injustice and liberty,

virtues central to romanitas. Thus, rather than ultimately undermining Empire,

Cato's suicide is providential because Roman political ideals and the good of the

state inspired it.

In saving some pagans, Dante chooses those figures that supported the

values that he has assigned to Rome as Republic and as Empire. He connects the

ideal goals and achievements of the Empire with its model citizens: Ripheus, as

an exemplary just Trojan, a type of the future Roman; Cato, as one who

condemns the curse of civil war and symbolizes the Roman civic virtue of

"liberty"; Statius, supporter of the Empire; and Trajan, exemplary restorer of the

Empire's boundaries and model of justice and piety. Although not a strong

argument, because it argues from silence, one cannot help wondering, given

Dante's apparent criteria for selecting pagans for salvation, whether indeed he

did leave open a space for Augustus Caesar and for Livy, "che non erra" {/nf 28,

12). Both, after all, practiced Roman civic virtue and supported the stability of

the imperium, which brought an end to civil war and ushered in an age of peace.

In contrast, Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Seneca, Cicero, and Horace shared the same

profound doubts about the providentiality of the Empire, for as Virgil says of

himself and his co-residents in Limbo, "non adorar debitamente a Dio: / e di

64 Brenda Deen Schildgen

questi cotai son io medesmo" {Inf. 4, 38-39). In their case, baptism or being born

before Christ {Inf. 4, 35-37) may not indeed be their central deficiency. Rather, not only in the present do "sanza speme vivemo in disio" {Inf. 4, 42), but indeed,

this pessimism characterized how they had actually lived. Dante is seized by sadness when he hears of Virgil's and the other ancient luminaries' mutual fate,

for their suspension — "pero che gente di molto valore / conobbi che 'n quel limbo eran sospesi" {Inf. 4, 44-45) — is, according to Dante's view, like the hopelessness of their vision of human history.

Dante took the Roman Empire as represented by the Roman poets and transformed it into his political ideal, but in his attempt to see divine providence

as history's director, he condemned his poets' pessimism and replaced it with his

own visionary geo-political theory. He confined his great lights, of whom he made himself a joyful associate, to Limbo because of their blindness, but

specifically he singled out other Romans for salvation whom he made co- partners in his own vision. Dante's Utopian political vision put faith in a history

guided by divine providence, whereas in reading his great literary forebears, he

recognized that they did not share this hope.

Returning to the ethical theme undertaken in this discussion, it is in Dante's

contrast between saved pagans and those he assigns to Limbo that he clarifies the

criteria for his poetic choices. As Agamben, rephrasing Aquinas wrote, "the

inhabitants of Limbo do not receive an afflictive punishment, like that of hell,

but only a punishment of privation that consists in the perpetual lack of vision of

God" (11). The ethical principle operating here is that salvation is both the

experience of and the reward for those whose just actions are inspired by hope.

University ofCalifornia, Davis

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Sin City: Augustine and Machiavelli’s Reordering of Rome

John M. Warner University of California-Davis John T. Scott University of California-Davis

We examine Machiavelli’s critical appropriation of Augustine’s analysis of Rome’s decline and fall in order to understand his own interpretation of Rome and the lessons it offers for a successful republic. If Machiavelli’s departure from Augustine is obvious, as seen for example in his exculpation of Romulus for the fratricide Augustine condemns, equally illuminating is what Machiavelli borrows from him. For Augustine, Romulus’ fratricide discloses the limits of pagan virtue and politics and reveals that the civic republican view of an early virtuous republic is nostalgic if not impossible. Machiavelli agrees with Augustine about the character of Rome, yet embraces the ambitious and acquisitive politics Augustine rebuffs. Machiavelli not only excuses Romulus’ fratricide in ‘‘ordering’’ Rome, but makes it the archetypal act that must be repeated through ‘‘reordering’’ to sustain the state against the perennial problem of corruption. We thereby address two of the primary issues in Machiavelli scholarship—the character of his republicanism and the nature and extent of his innovation with regard to his ancient sources—and suggest that the ‘‘civic republican’’ or ‘‘neo-Roman’’ interpretation of Machiavelli is incorrect in its conclusions concerning his republicanism as well as his relationship to his ancient sources.

T he success and then ultimate decline and fall of Rome have attracted attention from at least the Renaissance to the present day. Recent

domestic and international politics have reanimated interest in the republic turned empire. Are We Rome? is the title of a recent work that begins by noting that Americans have looked to Rome since the beginnings of the nation, when Publius, Brutus, and other ancient shades were conjured in the battle over the character of the regime (Murphy 2008; see also Chua 2007; Ferguson 2004). In examining the relationship be- tween republic and empire today and two millennia ago, scholars have often recurred to the Renaissance, when philosophers, poets, and politicians thought of imitating the art and politics of a past appreciated anew. ‘‘Machiavelli, looking back at the conception of the ancients and anticipating that of the moderns, is really the one who offers the most adequate illus- tration of the paradox of empire,’’ argue Hardt and Negri (2001, 372). Machiavelli’s own critical appro- priation of ancient Rome serves as a touchstone for

both recovering the past and applying its lessons to whatever present in which we may find ourselves.

Machiavelli himself begins his Discourses on Livy by complaining about an obstacle to a correct com- prehension of Rome and of ancient history more generally. He laments that whereas his contemporaries honor antiquity by imitating its arts, they admire rather than imitate the political deeds of the ancients. This lamentable situation, Machiavelli explains, arises from ‘‘not having a true knowledge of histories, through not getting from reading them that sense nor tasting that flavor that they have in themselves.’’ His contemporaries have learned to behold the deeds described and the possibilities envisaged in the ancient histories as fantastic, unearthly, and even inhuman; they appear so remote from Renaissance Florence that it is ‘‘as if heaven [il cielo], sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity’’ (DL I.Preface.2).1 The question thus arises: if the readers of Machiavelli’s day mis- understand Roman history and the ancient histories

The Journal of Politics, Vol. 73, No. 3, July 2011, Pp. 857–871 doi:10.1017/S002238161100051X

� Southern Political Science Association, 2011 ISSN 0022-3816

1All citations to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy are to Machiavelli (1996) and will be by book, chapter, and paragraph. References to the Italian are to Machiavelli (1976). References to Augustine’s City of God are to Augustine (1950) and will be by book and chapter. References to the Latin are to Augustine (1877). We follow the divisions by book and chapter in the Latin version.

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more generally, and thereby did not consider imi- tating the ancients, who or what is responsible for this misunderstanding?

Standing between his contemporaries and ancient Rome is a figure who passionately believed that ‘‘heaven’’ had indeed varied from what it was in antiquity: Augustine. Augustine’s City of God was the most influential interpretation of Rome available to the Middle Ages, and his scathing critique of Roman virtue remained influential in the Renaissance era. As Davis explains of Augustine and Orosius, the Bishop of Hippo’s fellow apologist for Christianity upon the fall of Rome: ‘‘Both Augustine and Orosius presented a rather unsympathetic picture of Roman republican heroes, while furnishing the medieval world with most of its information about them.... The influence of Orosius and St. Augustine tended to inhibit medieval sympathy for the Roman Republic’’ (1974, 32; see Pocock 2003, chap. 5). Augustine continued to exert considerable intellectual influence in Renaissance Florence (see Fitzgerald 2003; Gill 2005). This influ- ence is witnessed by Machiavelli’s predecessor in the Florentine chancery and the central figure in Baron’s (1955) influential work on ‘‘civic humanism,’’ Coluc- cio Salutati, whose initial enthusiasm for republican Rome was reversed under Augustine’s influence (see Skinner 1978, 72 ff.). If Machiavelli is to persuade his readers that imitation of ancient politics—that is, the creative imitation made possible through the proper interpretation of ancient sources—is possible and desirable, he must overcome the understanding of Rome decisively shaped by Augustine.

Although Machiavelli never directly mentions Augustine in his works, it is clear that his narrative about the importance of libido dominandi in ancient Rome exists within a conceptual world erected in large part by Augustine. Indeed, scholars who seem unable to agree on anything else appear quite unanimous in believing that Augustine served as an important intellectual signpost for Machiavelli. Some see Augustine as an influence for Machiavelli’s con- ception of politics in a fallen world (Colish 1999; Deane 1963, 56, 117–18; De Grazia 1989; Prezzolini 1954), while others claim that he helped create the intellectual framework concerning time and fortune within which Machiavelli is working and against which he is struggling (Pocock 1975). Still others view Augustine as an adversary to whom Machiavelli is responding in his revival of pagan politics (Fontana 1999, esp. 655–58; Hulliung 1983), his defense of tumult and imperialism against Rome’s detractors (Sasso 1986, 490–99), and his treatment of Christian- ity itself (Parel 1992, esp. 154; Sullivan 1996a, esp. 37,

52–53). Finally, despite the absence of clear direct evidence for Machiavelli’s familiarity with Augustine, a number of scholars seem to agree with Sasso’s judg- ment that the learned Florentine ‘‘certainly knew’’ the City of God (1986, 157–58; see also 490–99). In this light, numerous editors of the Discourses cite Augustine as a probable source for various passages, most notably the exculpation of Romulus’ fratricide against the ‘‘many’’ who judge it to be a ‘‘bad example’’ (DL I.9.1).2 In sum, even if Machiavelli’s reinterpre- tation of Roman history cannot be definitely said to be specifically intended to reverse or undermine Augustine’s account, the great bishop can be said to be responsible for constructing much of the theoret- ical framework in which Machiavelli is operating and against which he is struggling.

We examine Machiavelli’s analysis of Rome in the Discourses in light of Augustine’s treatment of Rome in the City of God in order to address two of the primary issues in scholarship on Machiavelli: the character of his republicanism and, related, the nature and extent of his innovation with regard to his ancient sources. If Machiavelli’s departure from Augustine’s condemnation of pagan politics is per- haps obvious, as seen for example in his exculpation of Romulus for the fratricide Augustine condemns, equally illuminating is what Machiavelli borrows from Augustine. Machiavelli and Augustine both trace Rome’s particular ‘‘virtue’’ to its founding by Romulus, and they both view Romulus’ fratricide as paradigmatic of the Roman regime as a whole. For Augustine, Romulus’ act is paradigmatic of the sinful character of the acquisitiveness and prideful virtue that gives the lie to the nostalgia voiced by Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and others for the ‘‘true way’’—in Sallust’s phrase—of a virtuous early Rome. Romulus’ fratricide discloses the limits of pagan virtue and politics for Augustine. For Machiavelli no less than for Augustine, the ‘‘true way’’ of a polity that seeks peace within and without is not possible given the nature of human things. Yet Machiavelli embraces what Augustine rebuffs. The Florentine secretary counsels adopting the inevitable—and profitable— course of internal discord and external expansion whereas the Bishop of Hippo laments the modes and orders of the city of man. While joining Augustine in rejecting the nostalgic view of old Rome, Machiavelli not only excuses Romulus’ fratricide in ‘‘ordering’’

2 See, e.g., the editions by Inglese (Machiavelli 1984), Mansfield

and Tarcov (Machiavelli 1996), Vivanti (Machiavelli 1997), and Atkinson and Sices (2002).

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Rome, but makes it the archetypal act that must be repeated through ‘‘reordering’’ to sustain the republic.

Our reading of Machiavelli in light of Augustine makes a unique contribution to the central debate among scholars over the character of Machiavelli’s republicanism and extent of his innovation with regard to his ancient sources by revealing Machia- velli’s critical view of the classical ‘‘civic republican’’ tradition that many interpreters have held him to be following. Most prominently, Skinner (1990, 2002, esp. 171), building on his earlier (1977) examination of Machiavelli in terms of a Quattrocento civic repub- lican thought, sees the Florentine as a ‘‘neo-Roman’’ thinker who was decisively influenced by Sallust and Cicero (see also Fontana 2003; Viroli 1998). We agree that Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ is Machiavelli’s target, but our reading Machiavelli in light of Augustine reveals that he rejects this ‘‘true way.’’ This finding confirms other criticisms of the civic republican interpretation of Machiavelli (e.g., Connell 2000; McCormick 2003; Rahe 2004, 2008; see also Sullivan 1996b), but we approach the question by analyzing Machiavelli’s critical appropriation of his ancient sources. Finally, while we come to similar conclusions regarding Machiavelli’s embrace of the tumultuous, acquisitive, and expansionist Rome as Strauss (1958) and others (e.g., Hulliung 1983; Lefort 1972; Mansfield 1979, 1996; Sullivan 1996a), we do so not by placing him in the high philosophic tradition of Plato and others, but rather by situating him in the largely historical discourse in which he—at least initially—situates himself (cf. Strauss 1958 to Lefort 1972, 259–305). We read the Discourses in light of Augustine’s inter- pretation of Rome, which is itself in part a response to the same historians read by Machiavelli.

Finally, a quick word about our enabling assump- tions will clarify what we are—and are not—arguing. First, we have already noted that the evidence con- cerning Machiavelli’s familiarity with Augustine is circumstantial (if strong), and while we will provide further evidence that makes the case even stronger, we need not and do not assume any direct influence. Second, although we examine Machiavelli’s thought in light of the conceptual world decisively shaped by Augustine, we focus on the concrete question of Machiavelli’s interpretation of Rome, namely on how his solution to the problem of corruption through ‘‘ordering’’ and ‘‘reordering’’ critically appropriates elements of Augustine’s treatment of Roman politics. Our analysis does, of course, bear on broader ques- tions concerning Machiavelli and Augustine’s respec- tive visions of politics, and we will briefly address them in the conclusion.

The Sins of the Fathers: Augustine on Pagan Rome

Augustine wrote the City of God against the Pagans in order to answer the charge that Christianity had led to the fall of Rome, but in taking up this task he offers a broad and influential examination of the character of the Roman polity from the perspective of Christianity. Augustine’s ultimate assessment of Rome, pagan politics in general, and the civitas terrena—politics itself—is the central question in scholarship on his thought. Scholars locate them- selves on a continuum that stretches all the way from the extreme view that Augustine rejects Rome, pagan politics, and politics itself as essentially and irredeem- ably corrupt through a series of more intermediary interpretations to the opposite extreme of the view that Augustine sees Rome at its best as exhibiting virtuous, if ultimately tragic examples of pagan politics and envisions an essential role for the moral states- manship of the Christian politician in the earthly city (e.g., Cornish 2010; Deane 1963; Markus 1970; Von Heyking 2001, esp. 157–71; Wolin 1960, chap. 4).

Despite such varying and inconsistent interpre- tations of Augustine’s qualified admiration (or lack thereof) for certain examples of pagan virtue and his hopes (or lack thereof) for earthly politics, these scholars agree that Augustine offers a searching criticism of the Roman polity. Since we are interested here less in current interpretations of Augustine’s political thought than his reception among Machia- velli and his contemporaries, we again note Davis’ (1974, 32) characterization of that influence as presenting an unsympathetic picture of the Roman republic and thereby inhibiting sympathy for Rome. With this in mind, we emphasize two aspects of Augustine’s political theory on which there is broad agreement in preparation for our examination of Machiavelli’s critical appropriation of Augustine. First, scholars agree that Augustine condemns the ambition and acquisitiveness that generally (if per- haps not universally) characterized Rome from its founding in Romulus’ fratricide and that Augustine treats Romulus as a paradigmatic case of such ambition. As we shall see, Machiavelli agrees with Augustine on Romulus as an exemplar but embraces what the bishop rejects. Second, and related, scholars broadly agree that Augustine rejects the romanticized view of early Rome advanced by Sallust and others and instead argues that the ‘‘true way’’ of civic republican- ism regretted by Sallust at best only fleetingly charac- terized Rome. In other words, even if Augustine

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accepts Cicero’s definition of a ‘‘republic’’ and admires Sallust’s vision of the ‘‘true way’’ of a virtuous republic, Augustine does not believe that Rome ever lived up to such ideals. As we shall see, Machiavelli accepts Augustine’s characterization of Roman politics while rejecting the civil republican ideal admired by Cicero, Sallust, and perhaps Augustine as well.

Founding Sin City: Romulus’ Fratricide and the

Character of Rome

In order to make his case about the true character of Rome, Augustine confronts the most formidable of the theorists and historians of the Roman republic. Augustine first engages Cicero, accepting Tully’s definition of a republic but then using it to deny that Rome was ever (or rarely) truly such a republic. Augustine quotes an important passage from Cicero’s De Republica—one of the most substantial extant fragments from the work available to Machiavelli and his contemporaries (see Sasso 1986, 151, for Machia- velli’s debt to Augustine on this point). In this passage, Cicero has Scipio define a ‘‘republic’’ after first rejecting the position that a republic must sometimes necessarily be governed with injustice, a position familiar to readers of Machiavelli, in favor of the argument ‘‘that it cannot be governed without the most absolute justice.’’ According to Scipio, a republic (rei publica) is ‘‘the weal of the people’’ (rem populi) (CG II.21 quoting Cicero De Republica I.25). In the context of Cicero’s work this definition is doubly nostalgic, for it constitutes not only a lament by Scipio over the loss of virtue that had already begun after the destruction of Carthage, the dramatic setting of the dialogue, but also an indictment of the final collapse of the republic at the time Cicero is writing.

Augustine accepts Cicero’s definition of a repub- lic and agrees with Cicero and Sallust that the republic ‘‘had altogether ceased to exist’’ by their time after having steadily declined since the conclu- sion of the Punic Wars. But the bishop goes much further. He bluntly declares: ‘‘Rome never was a republic, because true justice had never a place in it’’ (CG II.21). As he famously asks with reference to Rome’s growing empire: ‘‘Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?’’ (IV.4). Nonetheless, Augustine does grant there was once ‘‘a republic of a certain kind’’ in ancient Rome (II.21), and he grants that the early republic was better governed (V.19). When he returns to the subject in Book XIX as promised, then, Augustine relaxes the Ciceronian standard: ‘‘But if we discard this defini-

tion of a people, and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love’’ (XIX.23–24; see Wolin 1960, 126–27). Pagan Rome fails to meet even this compromised standard of a ‘‘people’’: though the ancient Romans doubtlessly performed awesome acts of virtue, their motive was not love of God or even love of country, but love of ‘‘glory.’’ The object of their ‘‘love’’ was so flawed as to prevent the most virtuous incarnation of Rome from meeting even the relaxed standard of justice.

More significantly, for Augustine this libido dominandi characterized Rome and animated the city since its archetypal founding by Romulus. Indeed Romulus’ crime is paradigmatic of Rome, and perhaps of pagan politics as a whole and earthly politics in its entirety. If Romulus was guilty, then the whole of Rome shares culpability: ‘‘the whole city is chargeable with [the crime], because it did not see to its punish- ment, and thus committed, not fratricide, but parricide, which is worse’’ (CG III.6). Rome bears something like the mark of Cain for Romulus’ fratricide. The founding fratricide of Rome becomes emblematic of Augustine’s general distinction between the city of man and the city of God. ‘‘Thus the founder of the earthly city was a fratricide,’’ and Augustine writes of Cain: ‘‘Overcome with envy, he slew his own brother, a citizen of the eternal city, and a sojourner on earth. So that we cannot be surprised that this first specimen, or, as the Greeks say, archetype of crime, should, long afterwards, find a corresponding crime at the foundation of that city which was destined to reign over so many nations, and be the head of this earthly city of which we speak’’ (XV.5). Motivated by envy and by ‘‘the glory of ruling,’’ Romulus’ fratricide thus imitates the archetype of Cain and Abel:

And thus there is no difference between the founda- tion of this city and of the earthly city, unless it be that Romulus and Remus were both citizens of the earthly city. Both desired to have the glory of founding the Roman republic, but both could not have as much glory as if one only [unus esset] had claimed it . . . . In order, therefore, that the whole glory might be enjoyed by one [Ut ergo totam dominationem haberet unus], his consort was re- moved; and by this crime the empire was made larger indeed, but inferior, while otherwise it would have been less, but better. (XV.5)

Driven by the love of dominion and glory, Romulus had to be alone. Machiavelli too will focus in his analysis of Romulus’ actions on the need to be ‘‘one alone’’ in ordering.

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For Augustine, then, Romulus’ fratricide reveals the prevailing character of Rome from its very begin- nings. While he gives a number of other historical examples to counter the view of a virtuous early Roman republic, the case of Junius Brutus is partic- ularly important to Augustine for assessing Rome, as it will be for Machiavelli as well. The Bishop of Hippo discusses two of Brutus’ actions in overthrowing the kings and establishing the republic: his role in the execution of his own sons for their part in a conspiracy to bring back the Tarquins and his role in the expulsion of his fellow liberator and consul, L. Tarquinius Collatinus. Augustine’s attitude toward the execution of the sons of Brutus is conflicted because of his uncertainty about the ‘‘ends’’ Brutus had in mind. The ambiguity is captured in the lines from Virgil quoted by Augustine: ‘‘His country’s love shall all o’erbear/And unextinguished thirst of praise’’ (CG III.16, quoting Aeneid VI.822–23).3 Insofar as Brutus’ act was moti- vated by love of country and freedom, Augustine considers it tragic: a noble if regrettable action required by the city of man. However, insofar as Brutus acted for praise and glory, Augustine condemns him. The glory-seeking Brutus is revealed for Augustine in the expulsion of his fellow consul, which he condemns unreservedly. ‘‘Is this, then, the glory of Brutus—this injustice, alike detestable and profitless to the republic. Was it to this that he was driven by ‘his country’s love, and unextinguished thirst of praise’? . . . How unjustly Brutus acted, in depriving of honor and country his colleague in that new office . . . . Such were the ills, such the disasters, which fell out when the government was ‘ordered with justice and moderation’’’ (III.16, quoting Sallust Catilinae Coniuratio 9). Note that Augustine emphasizes that Brutus’ action stripped his colleague of ‘‘honor,’’ thereby suggesting that Brutus, like Romulus, wanted to be ‘‘alone’’ in the glory of reordering Rome. Augustine’s mockery of Sallust’s depiction of the early Roman republic here brings us to Augustine’s view of the impossibility of Sallust’s ‘‘true way.’’

Sallust Days: Augustine and the ‘‘True Way’’

In order to link Rome’s corruption to its expansion, Augustine engages throughout his treatment of

Rome’s history with Sallust, accepting much of Sallust’s praise of a virtuous republic of civic-minded citizens but denying that Rome rarely or ever met such a standard, even in the early republic about which Sallust rhapsodizes. Augustine draws upon Sallust’s Catilinae Coniuratio, in which the Roman historian recounts the conspiracy of Cataline on the cusp of the fall of the republic as a culminating example of the deterioration of Roman virtue. In order to make his larger point, Sallust begins his work with an account of the early Roman republic, which he suggests was characterized by justice and virtue, and its deterioration after the Punic wars when it no longer faced the external threat of Carthage. In this context, Sallust laments that Rome’s citizens were no longer animated by an ambition allied to virtue and pursued by the ‘‘true path’’ (vera via) but were instead motivated by an ambition allied to avarice and pursued by the false ways of ‘‘craft and decep- tion’’ (Sallust Catilinae Coniurato 11). Sallust’s anal- ysis of the virtuous republicanism of Rome and its decay after the defeat of Carthage is similar to Cicero’s, and the two writers were Augustine’s chief sources for the understanding of lost Roman virtue.4

Augustine first raises Sallust in Book II of the City of God to provide evidence for his conclusion that Rome never met Cicero’s definition of a republic. He mocks Sallust’s praise of a supposed virtuous age before the Punic Wars of ‘‘natural equity and virtue’’ by raising the examples of the rape of the Sabine women, Junius Brutus’ inequitable treatment of his colleague Collatinus, and the Romans’ ingratitude toward Camillus, the savior of their city (CG II.17– 18). The only exception Augustine allows to the nostalgic view of a virtuous Rome is the reign of Numa, who introduced religious orders into Rome and led the city during its longest period of peace (III.9). Augustine avers that ‘‘a long continuance of peace’’ should have been Rome’s ‘‘perpetual policy’’ and argues that it erred in attempting to extend herself beyond due proportion: ‘‘Why must a king- dom be distracted in order to be great? In this little world of man’s body, it is it not better to have a moderate stature, and health with it, than to attain the huge dimensions of a giant by unnatural tor- ments, and when you attain it to find not rest’’ (III.10). For Augustine, the closing of the gates of the temple of Janus under Numa was a fleeting interlude for a city impelled by the same ambition to rule as

3Plutarch, another probable source for Machiavelli’s discussion of Junius Brutus, is extraordinarily ambivalent about Brutus’ action: ‘‘An action truly open alike to the highest commendation and the strongest sanction; for either the greatness of his virtue raised him above the impressions of sorrow, or the extravagance of his misery took away all sense of it; but neither seemed common, or the result of humanity, but either divine or brutish’’ (‘‘Life of Poplicola,’’ 1864, 208).

4 Livy could be added, but Augustine does not refer to him in the

City of God (although see IV.26 for a possible allusion). See Livy Ad Urbe condita, Preface, for his lamentation on Rome’s decline.

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characterized Romulus. Machiavelli, we shall see, will reject this policy as impracticable and parasitic on the ambitious acquisitiveness exemplified by Romulus.

Augustine’s own chronicle of Rome’s early his- tory shows that the city was consumed internally and externally by ambition. ‘‘This vice of restless ambition was the sole motive to that social and parricidal war’’ between Rome and Alba, for example: ‘‘a vice which Sallust brands in passing’’ in his ‘‘brief but hearty commendation of those primitive times in which life was spent without covetousness.’’ Sallust’s exception is nonetheless Augustine’s rule. ‘‘This lust of sover- eignty [libido dominandi] disturbs and consumes the human race with frightful ills. By this lust Rome was overcome when she triumphed over Alba, and prais- ing her own crime, called it glory’’ (CG III.14). The love of dominion and glory characterizes Rome from the outset and is the cause of Rome’s expansion and civil wars (IV.3). ‘‘That eagerness for praise and desire of glory, then, was that which accomplished those many wonderful things, laudable, doubtless, and glorious according to human judgment’’ (V.12). Sallust is guilty of such faulty judgment. In the conclusion of his account of Roman history, Augus- tine creatively engages Sallust over the question of what the ‘‘true way’’ is for human virtue and politics, a debate in which Machiavelli will engage in the same terms in his Discourses. At City of God V.12, he quotes Sallust at length:

‘‘But at first it was ambition rather than avarice that stirred the minds of men, which vice, however, is nearer to virtue. For glory, honor, and power are desired alike by the good man and by the ignoble; but the former,’’ he says, ‘‘strives onward to them by the true way [vera via], whilst the other, knowing nothing of the good arts, seeks them by fraud and deceit.’’ (V.12; quoting Sallust, Catilinae Coniuratio 11)

In a decidedly un-Machiavellian moment, Augustine interprets ‘‘good arts’’ to be ‘‘the use of virtuous means rather than deceitful intrigue to arrive at honor, glory, and power.’’ The ‘‘true way,’’ in short, is the way of ‘‘virtue’’ (V.12). Yet the Roman pursuit of virtue is limited by the horizon of human judg- ment. ‘‘That glory, honor, and power, therefore which they desired for themselves, and to which the good sought to attain by good arts, should not be sought after by virtue, but virtue by them. For there is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of men’’ (V.12). As close as Sallust’s exemplar of pagan virtue in the work, the glory-seeking of Cato, may be to true virtue, he is still short of it. ‘‘Wherefore even the praises of Cato are only applicable to a few; for

only a few were possessed of that virtue which leads men to pursue after glory, honor, and power by the true way—that is, by virtue itself’’ (V.12). The Roman pursuit of public greatness at the expense of private gain, as praiseworthy as it may be, then, is a form of self-restraint improperly motivated by a base love of praise (V.12–13). In the course of time, Rome deviated from even Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ with increas- ing frequency. Augustine’s condemnation of the vi- cious pursuit of glory and dominion anticipates Machiavelli: ‘‘Therefore he who desires glory presses on to obtain it either by the true way, or certainly by deceit and artifice, wishing to appear good when he is not’’ (V.19).

Augustine’s engagement with Sallust is complex. On the one hand, he betrays a degree of admiration for the pagan civic virtue Sallust calls by the name of the ‘‘true way,’’ but he rejects Sallust’s embellished portrait of a better age and denies that Rome ever followed even this diminished understanding of virtue except perhaps in the rarest of cases. On the other hand, Augustine demotes Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ to its pagan stature in the light of the truth of revelation, which reveals the ‘‘true way’’ (Augustine, Confessions VII.18; cf. John 14:6: ‘‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’’ [RSV]; 2 Peter 2:2: ‘‘the way of truth’’). ‘‘But the fact is,’’ Augustine writes in discussing Cicero’s con- ception of a republic, ‘‘true justice has no existence save in the republic whose founder is Christ’’ (CG II.21). Machiavelli, in turn, will join Augustine in rejecting Sallust’s interpretation of Rome as having once followed the ‘‘true way,’’ but will reject both Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ of civic republicanism and Augus- tine’s higher path of ‘‘truth and the true way.’’ He celebrates Rome as unreservedly as Sallust while seeing it as clearly as Augustine.

Machiavelli’s New Way: The Reordering of Rome

At the very beginning of the Discourses, Machiavelli announces that he has decided ‘‘to take a path [via] as yet untrodden by anyone.’’ Yet this new ‘‘way’’ somewhat paradoxically involves a novel interpreta- tion of Roman history, a critical appropriation of ancient politics. We suggest that Machiavelli’s ‘‘reordering’’ of Rome reflects important elements of Augustine’s pessimistic account of Roman history even as it reverses Augustine’s ultimate judgment about the sinful nature of ancient politics. Indeed though Machiavelli cannot endorse the great bishop’s

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impassioned homiletics against the civitas terrena, he nonetheless joins Augustine in concluding that the ‘‘true way’’ of civic republicanism espoused by Sallust, Cicero, and others is naive if not altogether impossible.

Other scholars have recently drawn attention to the importance of Sallust, Cicero, and others for understanding the character of Machiavelli’s repub- licanism. Most prominently, Skinner (2002, esp. chaps. 5–7) sees Machiavelli as a ‘‘neo-Roman’’ thinker decisively influenced by Sallust and Cicero and best understood in this ‘‘civic republican’’ tradition. We agree that Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ is Machiavelli’s target, but differ from them in assessing Machiavelli’s aim. We begin, then, by establishing Machiavelli’s rejection of the ‘‘true way’’ as impos- sible, and interpret his championing of the tumul- tuous, acquisitive, and expansionist state represented by Rome as a radical rejection of the very under- standing of politics that Skinner and the Cambridge school are eager to attribute to him. Releasing the libido dominandi that Augustine condemns, however, leads to a problem of ‘‘corruption’’ in the people. Skinner (2002) and others (e.g., Viroli 1998) thus correctly note Machiavelli’s overriding concern with ‘‘corruption,’’ but once again misidentify Machiavelli’s remedy. We therefore turn to Machiavelli’s solution in ‘‘ordering’’ and ‘‘reordering’’ the state. This ordering or founding is exemplified for Machiavelli, as it was for Augustine, by Romulus. Yet Machiavelli exculpates Romulus where Augustine condemns him, not by arguing that Romulus is to be excused because of the public-spiritedness of his actions but by suggesting how Romulus’ ambition redounded to the good of the state. Ordering must be repeated through periodic reordering for the maintenance of the state, and we therefore turn to Machiavelli’s discussion of Junius Brutus’ reordering of Rome.

The Impossibility of the ‘‘True Way’’

Like both the Roman civic republicans and Augus- tine, Machiavelli is concerned with the problem of political corruption, but rather than promoting a virtuous, pacific, and nonexpansionist state, he em- braces an acquisitive state that channels the libido dominandi Augustine condemned. Before providing his own solution to persistent problem of corruption, Machiavelli has to show the unworkability of the alternative. Though Machiavelli anticipates a number of his major concerns in the first five chapters of the Discourses—the problem of corruption, the juxtapo- sition of the model of Rome as he understands it

against the model of the ‘‘true way’’ of a civic repub- lic, and the solution of ordering and reordering— his critique of the Augustinian understanding of political stability becomes explicit at Discourses.I.6. There, Machiavelli recalls Augustine (CG XV.5) by observing that the founder of a state must decide whether ‘‘he wished it to expand like Rome’’ or whether it should ‘‘remain within narrow limits’’ like Sparta or Venice. Of course, Augustine’s stated preference is for the nonexpansionist path not taken by Rome: recalling Sallust’s ‘‘true way,’’ Machiavelli terms the model exemplified by Sparta as ‘‘the true political way of life [il vero vivere politico] and the true quiet of a city’’ (I.6.4). Like Augustine, however, Machiavelli holds such a way to be impossible: ‘‘Without doubt I believe that if the thing could be held balanced in this mode, it would be the true political way of life and the true quiet of the city. But since all things of men are in motion and cannot stay steady, they must either rise or fall’’ (I.6.4; emphasis supplied). The reason Machiavelli provides for this impossibility is the ‘‘corruption’’ he has already identified as a persistent problem. Machiavelli ex- plains that both external necessities and domestic considerations require an expansionist state: ‘‘if heaven were so kind that it did not have to make war, from that would arise the idleness to make it either effeminate or divided; these two things to- gether, or each by itself, would be the cause of its ruin.’’ The state must be designed so that ‘‘if indeed necessity brings it to expand, it can conserve what it has seized.’’ The ‘‘middle way’’ of an externally pacific and internally balanced state is impossible for both external and internal considerations. Thus Machiavelli believes it ‘‘necessary to follow the Ro- man order and not that of other republics’’ (I.6.4), and rejects the ‘‘true way’’ of a civic republic both as a historical reality and as an authoritative normative principle (see also Connell 2001).

Exculpating Sin City: Romulus’ Exemplary Founding

If Machiavelli’s departure from Augustine and others who condemn Romulus for his fratricide is obvious, if important, for grasping his innovations on the tradition, then what is perhaps more revelatory for understanding his reinterpretation of Rome is how Romulus’ ambition provide the clue to Rome’s success. Romulus’ actions as Machiavelli interprets them indicate the central importance of ordering and reordering for maintaining the state, an importance unappreciated by the Roman historians themselves or

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by Augustine, or by Machiavelli’s civic republican predecessors who wrote under the dual influence of the Classical and Christian interpretation of the ancient republic. Ordering and reordering is neces- sary because the ‘‘matter’’ of the state, its members, must continually be given ‘‘form’’ in order to resist corruption (see Prince VI [1998, 23]). Because of the nature of the material and the need for repeated reorderings, Machiavelli rejects Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ not only as historically inaccurate but also as a theoretical impossibility. He therefore joins Augus- tine in dismissing the nostalgic view of Rome while embracing the ambitious and violent means that repelled Augustine.

Machiavelli’s defense of Romulus constitutes an obvious and self-conscious rejection of the received opinion, and Augustine is among the most influential advocates of the conventional view. Indeed Machia- velli’s discussion of Romulus is intimately related to Augustine’s account and implicitly critical of it. Machiavelli’s rehabilitation of Romulus occurs in Discourses I.9: ‘‘That It Is Necessary To Be Alone If One Wishes To Found A Republic Anew Or Reform It Outside Its Ancient Orders.’’ His title proclaims a general rule, and we should note that Machiavelli’s emphasis is already upon the Augustinian theme of Romulus’s ambition to be ‘‘alone.’’ After apologizing for keeping his reader so long in suspense by not having made any mention ‘‘of the orderers of that republic’’ (but cf. I.1.1 beg.), Machiavelli turns to Romulus. ‘‘I say that many would perhaps judge it a bad example that a founder of a civil way of life, as was Romulus, should have first killed his brother, then consented to the death of Titus Tatius the Sabine, chosen by him as a partner in the kingdom’’ (I.9.1).

There are a number of plausible candidates among classical authors for the ‘‘many’’ whose view Machia- velli opposes. Cicero criticizes Romulus for sacrificing the honestum for the utile in killing his brother (De Officiis III.41), Livy refers to Romulus’ act as the result of jealousy and ambition (Ad Urbe condita I.6), and Plutarch condemns the fratricide as a rash act borne of anger (Lives, ‘‘Comparison of Romulus with Theseus,’’ 1864, 47). Given that Machiavelli’s own discussion of the question of whether dishonest means can be used for useful ends appears to respond to Cicero, scholars frequently adduce Cicero as Machiavelli’s main target here. These scholars typically argue that Machiavelli departs from Cicero and the tradition following him all the way through the Quattrocento civic humanists solely—if dramatically—in his justification of the use of unjust means for a good end, all the while insisting

that Machiavelli continues to subscribe to the tradi- tional classical and civic republican end of a free way of life (Skinner 2002, 151, 155, 170; Viroli 1998, 96; see also Coby 1999, 41–45).

However, Machiavelli’s phrasing in his discussion of Romulus suggests less those who specifically condemn Romulus’ fratricide than those who see Romulus’s act as exemplary: as ‘‘a bad example’’ for ‘‘a founder of a civil way of life.’’ Among the critics of Romulus’ actions, only Augustine takes Romulus’ fratricide as a critical example of the character of the Rome. Machiavelli explains that Romulus’ actions might be considered a ‘‘bad example’’ because they will serve as an authoritative example for those who will act in their turn ‘‘through ambition and the desire to command’’ (I.9.1). Ambition and especially the desire to command, libido dominandi, are pre- cisely the characteristics Augustine sees in Rome and exemplified by Romulus. Augustine, then, appears to be first among those Machiavelli has in mind in justifying Romulus’ act and, related, in ascertaining the true character of Rome.

The exculpation of Romulus against the received opinion pertains to the way in which vicious means can be somehow justified by the end. Yet, closer scrutiny reveals ambiguity about the ‘‘end’’ that Romulus had in mind—or that Machiavelli has in mind. Machiavelli admits that the received opinion condemning Romulus ‘‘would be true if one did not consider what end [fine] had induced him to commit such a homicide’’ (I.9.1). Machiavelli’s explanation of the ‘‘end’’ that induced Romulus to commit fratricide takes the form of the sudden promulgation of a general rule: ‘‘This should be taken as a general rule: that it never or rarely happens that any republic or kingdom is ordered well from the beginning or reformed altogether anew outside its old orders unless it is ordered by one individual. Indeed it is necessary that one alone [uno solo] give the mode and that any such ordering depend on his mind’’ (I.9.2). At first blush, and given the title to the chapter, then, the need to be ‘‘one alone’’ in ordering or reordering seems to be the ‘‘end’’ that excuses Romulus.

These first appearances will ultimately turn out to be accurate, but Machiavelli himself first wants to give the appearance that he excuses Romulus for having acting for other and nobler ends. He explains:

So a prudent orderer of a republic, who has the intent [questo animo] to wish to help not himself but the common good, not for his own succession but for the common fatherland should contrive to have authority alone; nor will a wise understanding ever reprove anyone for an extraordinary action that he

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uses to order a kingdom or constitute a republic. It is very suitable that where the deed accuses him, the effect [effeto] excuses him; and when it is good, as was that of Romulus, it will always be excused. (I.9.2; trans. altered)

The end (or, rather, the ‘‘effect’’), it seems, justifies the means. But what is the ‘‘end’’ here? As noted above, Machiavelli’s civic republican interpreters suggest that the ‘‘end’’ that would justify Romulus’ actions is the ‘‘common good’’ understood as a free way of life. Machiavelli certainly gives this impres- sion, but closer scrutiny reveals serious difficulties with this interpretation. Readers of this chapter should recall that Machiavelli has earlier stated that Romulus’ ‘‘end’’ (fine) was in fact to found not a republic but a kingdom and, further and more problematically, that Romulus acted ‘‘for his own succession’’ and not ‘‘for the common fatherland’’ (I.2.7). Moreover, in this earlier discussion of Romulus’ ‘‘end,’’ Machiavelli argues only that the laws Romulus and the other kings made conformed to ‘‘a free way of life’’ (I.2.7). In other words, these laws happened to conform to such a way of life, whatever their intention. Machiavelli also emphasizes that these laws required reordering by those who expelled the kings. Thus it does not appear that Romulus’ ‘‘end’’ was the common good. Returning to I.9, Machiavelli argues that proof that Romulus acted for ‘‘the common good and not for his own ambition’’ was the institution of the Senate (I.9.2). However, even a cursory examination of Machiavelli’s own sources reveals that Romulus ordered the Senate for his own purposes and not for the common good (see Livy Ab Urbe condita I.8, 15–16). This point was made by Machiavelli’s friend Guicciardini in his commentary on the Discourses (in Atkinson and Sices 2002, 400). In sum, Machiavelli’s own discussion of Romulus’ ‘‘end’’ undermines the impression that it was acting for the ‘‘common good’’ that justifies his criminal means.

Romulus in Machiavelli’s accounting appears, in fact, to have acted in order to ‘‘be alone,’’ which was the first impression he gave. Machiavelli thereby accepts Augustine’s characterization of Romulus’ ambitious desire to be ‘‘one only’’ (unus esset) in his authority. Machiavelli even underscores Romulus’ desire to ‘‘be alone’’ when he again departs from his sources when he adds to the charge of fratricide by alleging that Romulus ‘‘consented’’ to the death of his colleague, Titus Tatius, and giving that offense con- siderably more emphasis than his sources (see Livy, Ad Urbe condita I.14; see Mansfield 1979, 63). Romulus therefore removed not just his brother,

but every rival. Neither Romulus’ ‘‘intent’’ nor the ‘‘end’’ he had in mind matter for Machiavelli if the ‘‘effect’’ was good. The ‘‘intent’’ need not be the same thing as the ‘‘end’’ or ‘‘effect’’ of an action, and the ‘‘effect’’ of Romulus’ actions was good despite his ‘‘intent’’ (see Fontana 1999, 649; Lefort 1972, 488–91, 610–11).

Machiavelli is interested less in understanding Romulus’ motives than he is in the exemplary status of the need to ‘‘be alone’’ in ordering or reordering a state, as the title of the chapter indicates. Machiavelli is unclear in this context on why a prudent orderer or reorderer must be ‘‘one alone,’’ except to say that the ordering must depend upon his ‘‘mind’’ (animo) alone (I.9.2). Or, alternatively, that the ordering requires having a single ‘‘authority’’ that directs the ordering, as in the case of Moses, Lycurgus, and Solon (I.9.3). An obvious answer about at least the motivation or ‘‘end’’ of the orderer himself, however, is provided once again by Augustine: glory. In his discussion of Romulus’ fratricide, Augustine empha- sizes that he wanted to be ‘‘alone’’ so that he did not have to share the glory. Machiavelli, too, points to glory as the reward for Romulus: ‘‘And truly, if a prince seeks the glory of the world, he ought to desire to possess a corrupt city . . . to reorder it as did Romulus. And truly the heavens cannot give to men a greater opportunity for glory, nor can men desire any greater’’ (I.10.6). Romulus’ ambition to rule and his desire for glory—glory such as founding a state that bore his name for centuries—is a necessary spur to such ordering and reordering. Machiavelli and Au- gustine thus essentially agree on Romulus’ motives, but Machiavelli praises what Augustine condemns. As for the interpreter who might ‘‘excuse’’ the deed because of its ‘‘effect,’’ the necessity of ordering itself, and the need to be ‘‘alone’’ in doing so, is what excuses the actions of Romulus. ‘‘What is excused is not merely the means of homicide but also the end (in the sense of aim) of seeking sole authority’’ (Mansfield 1979, 65). Machiavelli thus agrees with Augustine’s account of Romulus’ desire to be ‘‘alone,’’ but sees in this solitary orderer an example that provides the key to Rome’s success.

Romulus represents for Machiavelli the impor- tance of ordering—and reordering—for Rome’s suc- cess. Romulus is Machiavelli’s exemplar in the Discourses of an orderer, but the title of the chapter in which he justifies Romulus’ actions suggests the close relationship between ordering and reordering: ‘‘That It Is Necessary To Be Alone If One Wishes To Found A Republic Anew Or Reform It Outside Its Ancient Orders’’ (I.9). In this chapter Romulus

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appears to be the exemplar of an ‘‘orderer’’ of a republic (although Machiavelli adds ‘‘kingdom’’ at I.9.2) and the Spartan Cleomenes appears to be the exemplar of a reformer of ancient orders. Machiavelli nonetheless introduces Cleomenes as an example of ‘‘those who desire to be orderers of good laws’’ (I.9.4; emphasis supplied), and we learn in the next chapter that Romulus ‘‘reordered’’ Rome (I.10.6; emphasis supplied; see also I.18.5). Ordering and reordering are thus not distinguishable. As Pocock explains in analyzing the parallel discussion of Romulus and other new princes in chapter 6 of The Prince: ‘‘What Machiavelli is saying here, I think, is that the pure case of the prophet or legislator, who finds the people inert matter and molds them into form in a way that owes nothing to fortuna, never exists in reality . . . . There is always an antecedent structure of habit and memory . . . ’’ (1972, 171–72; see also Pocock 1975, 175). Pocock’s explanation of the ordering as reor- dering in moments of founding by new princes is useful even if he does not fully appreciate Machia- velli’s insistence upon continual reordering as the secret of Rome’s success and, thus, Machiavelli’s break with the civic republican tradition in which Pocock locates him.

Romulus Redux: Brutus and the Reordering of Rome

Although Machiavelli hints at the essential role that reordering in his understanding of Rome’s success from the outset of the Discourses, reordering becomes his explicit theme at the outset of Book III: ‘‘If One Wishes a Sect or a Republic to Live Long, It is Necessary to Draw It Back Often toward Its Begin- ning’’ (III.1.Title). While he cites a number of examples of such reordering in Roman history, his main example soon becomes Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the Tarquins and established the re- public. Machiavelli’s discussion of Brutus is part of a general reflection on the necessity of reordering for states. Reordering is by the tendency for people to become ‘‘corrupt,’’ no longer observing the law or religion. He explains that the lives of ‘‘mixed bodies’’ such as a state or a sect can be prolonged if they are led ‘‘toward their beginnings’’ (III.1.1). By these ‘‘beginnings,’’ Machiavelli means especially the fear that leads men to obey the laws of an orderer in the first place, contrary to their lawless inclinations. Drawing the state ‘‘back toward its beginnings’’ requires ‘‘putting that terror and that fear in men’’ experienced in its ordering (III.1.3). Such punish- ments are Machiavelli’s own ‘‘true way’’ (see III.28.1).

Brutus is his main example of a reordering done through ‘‘intrinsic prudence,’’ which he explains can be effected through institutions (‘‘orders’’) and actors (‘‘men’’). The ‘‘orders’’ of Rome such as the tribunes, the censors, and the attendant laws need to be ‘‘brought to life’’ by virtuous men. This inspiriting process arises best through punishments or execu- tions that revive men’s ‘‘memory and fear’’ of ‘‘their beginnings.’’ The execution of the sons of Brutus is the most notable example of this in Roman history, and he therefore concludes III.1 by turning to ‘‘Brutus, father of Roman liberty’’ (III.1.6).

Machiavelli’s discussion of Brutus contains a number of parallels to his discussion of Romulus, including the use of murderous means and ambiguity about the end. Machiavelli’s Brutus is at once more public spirited and more ambitious than the Livian original. In Discourses III.2, Machiavelli takes Brutus as his example of the general adage announced in the title: ‘‘That It Is a Very Wise Thing to Simulate Craziness at the Right Time.’’ Whereas Livy attributes Brutus’ feigned stupidity to his desire to live securely and maintain his patrimony against the kings (see Ad Urbe condita I.56), Machiavelli explicitly departs from his source by assigning his motive ‘‘to be less observed and to have more occasion for crushing the kings and freeing his own fatherland whenever opportunity would be given him’’ (DL III.2.1; see Mansfield 1979, 305–306). The rape of Lucretia, then, was precisely the ‘‘opportunity’’ Brutus awaited. Her rape and suicide prove to be less a rallying cry for outraged virtue than a convenient pretext for Brutus and the Senate to reassert themselves against the ‘‘extraordinary and hateful’’ Tarquin, whose son had committed the rape. As Pitkin (1987, 247–48) notes, Machiavelli nearly fails to mentions to Lucretia at all, especially in contrast to Livy, who dwells on her rape and suicide, as does Augustine.5 Machiavelli instead states that Tarquin was ‘‘expelled not because his son had raped Lucretia, but because he had broken the laws of the kingdom and governed it tyrannically, as he had taken away all authority from the Senate and adapted it for himself.’’ As Machiavelli explains, ‘‘if the accident of Lucretia had not come, as soon as another had arisen it would have brought the same effect.’’ The ‘‘accident’’ of Lucretia’s rape gave Brutus the opportunity to reorder Rome.

The two actions Brutus took to secure the new republic that drew Augustine’s attention were his

5 Augustine offers a lengthy discussion of Lucretia (CG I.19–28)

that treats her suicide as archetypal of Roman virtue, namely concluding that her action was ultimately driven by pride.

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roles in the expulsion of his colleague, Collatinus, and the execution of his sons. Recall that Augustine was ambivalent about Brutus’ killing of his sons, a tragic deed required by the city of man, but unreserved in his criticism of Brutus’ treatment of Collitinus, which he interpreted as an ambitious deed motivated by the desire to be ‘‘alone’’ in the glory of reordering Rome. Machiavelli pairs Brutus with his colleague Collati- nus, the husband of Lurcretia, in his account of the ‘‘accident’’ that allowed him to execute his plan to reorder Rome (III.5.1), but then Collatinus drops out of his discussion of Brutus. However, Collatinus stars in Machiavelli’s earlier account in I.28 of Rome’s comparative lack of ‘‘ingratitude’’ toward its citizens. He states that Collatinus ‘‘went into exile for no cause other than that he bore the name of the Tarquins, even though he had been found to have freed Rome’’ (I.28.1). The absence of mention of Junius Brutus here only serves to remind the reader of his role in expelling his colleague. In Livy’s account, Brutus, having garnered great glory through the expulsion of the Tarquins and wielding the kingly power as consul and (alone) attended by the symbol of royal power, the fasces (see DL I.25), calls an assembly where he confronts a dumbfounded Collatinus with the de- mand that he leave Rome because of his name (see Livy, Ad Urbe condita II.1–2). Machiavelli’s charac- terization of the expulsion of Collatinus merely for bearing the name of Tarquin suggests that he agrees with Augustine in his characterization of Brutus’ motives—namely to be alone in the glory of reorder- ing Rome—though he silently approves the means which Augustine condemns.

Just as he makes Romulus the exemplar of a general adage that one must be ‘‘alone’’ in ordering and reordering a state, so too Machiavelli turns Brutus’ action into a chilling ‘‘catch phrase’’ (Coby 1999, 52): ‘‘That it is Necessary to Kill the Sons of Brutus If One Wishes to Maintain a Newly Acquired Freedom’’ (III.3). After remarking on the ‘‘example rare in all memories of things’’ of Brutus condemning his sons and witnessing their execution, Machiavelli transforms this extraordinary act into an exemplary one. ‘‘This will always be known by those who read of ancient things: that after a change of state, either from republic to tyranny or from tyranny to republic, a memorable execution against the enemies of present conditions is necessary’’ (III.3.1). Contrary to Pocock (1975, 204–205), who acknowledges Ma- chiavelli’s argument for reordering yet suggests that ‘‘we must refrain from entering the time process as far as it is possible to do so,’’ Machiavelli approves of regular reordering and almost relishes their necessary

bloodiness. Having generalized the extraordinary, therefore Machiavelli transforms it into a maxim: ‘‘Whoever takes up a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and whoever makes a free state and does not kill the sons of Brutus, maintains himself for little time’’ (III.3.1). ‘‘Brutus’’ and the ‘‘sons of Brutus’’ become actors in Machiavelli’s morality play, with ‘‘Kill the Sons of Brutus!’’ the rallying cry.

In this context, Machiavelli refers his reader back to Discourses I.16, the topic of which is the difficulty of a people in maintaining its freedom if it is used to living under a prince and ‘‘by Some Accident It Becomes Free’’ (I.16 title). Rome after the expulsion of the Tarquins is Machiavelli’s example here, and his remedy for the inconveniences of such a situation is the first case of his rallying cry: ‘‘If one wishes to remedy these inconveniences and the disorders writ- ten above might bring with them, there is no remedy more powerful, nor more valid, more secure, and more necessary, than to kill the sons of Brutus’’ (I.16.4). Brutus himself warrants no mention here, for his actions in reordering are exemplary: capable of being generalized into a maxim. This earlier recom- mendation to ‘‘kill the sons of Brutus’’ is the turning point in Machiavelli’s analysis in the beginning of the Discourses of the problem of the ‘‘corruption’’ of the people and how to solve it. Reordering—or bringing the state back to its ‘‘beginnings’’—is Machiavelli’s solution.

Machiavelli’s earlier discussion in Discourses I.16 of ‘‘killing the sons of Brutus’’ as a solution to the problem of corruption is part of a series of chapters (I.16–20) on the question of corruption in which his departure from the ‘‘true way’’ of classic civic repub- licans as well as from Augustine becomes manifest and in which the extent of his reinterpretation of Rome can be glimpsed. This series of chapters follows another series devoted to the question of Roman religion (I.11– 15) in which Machiavelli stresses the political uses of religion. Machiavelli begins this discussion of religion by praising Numa over Romulus: ‘‘Although Rome had Romulus as its first orderer,’’ he begins I.11, ‘‘none- theless, since the heavens judged that the orders of Romulus would not suffice for such an empire,’’ they inspired the choice of Numa as his successor, and Numa, finding ‘‘a very ferocious people,’’ wanted to reduce the people to civil obedience ‘‘with the arts of peace’’ and therefore ‘‘turned to religion’’ (I.11.1). Here it is useful to recall that Augustine, in his discussion of early Rome, reserved his praise solely for the religiosity and ‘‘arts of peace’’ of Numa, which he averred should have been Rome’s permanent policy. Machiavelli, though he joins Augustine in preferring

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Numa to Romulus, does so for very un-Augustinian reasons: religion, he explains, was deemed necessary by ‘‘the heavens’’ in order to acquire ‘‘an empire.’’ In stark contrast to Augustine, Machiavelli’s emphasis is on the uses of religion for an ambitious and acquisitive state, which is precisely his theme in the ensuing chapters on religion. When employed as an ‘‘art of peace’’ rather than of war, religion is a source of corruption.

Machiavelli therefore revises his initial assess- ment of Numa and Romulus in the following series of chapters on corruption that begins with his counsel to ‘‘kill the sons of Brutus.’’ This revision comes at I.19, appropriately titled, ‘‘After an Excellent Prince a Weak Prince Can Maintain Himself, but after a Weak One no Kingdom can be Maintained by Another Weak One.’’ Here, Numa is said to have ‘‘not so much virtue’’ as Romulus, and Numa’s ‘‘arts of peace’’ are revealed to be parasitic on the ‘‘belli- cose’’ virtue of his predecessor. Had Rome followed Numa’s pacifistic policies, she would have become ‘‘effeminate and the prey of its neighbors’’ (I.19.4). Such ‘‘corruption’’ was precisely the reason Machia- velli rejected as impossible the ‘‘true political way of life and the true quiet of the city.’’

Truth and the True Way

Machiavelli’s treatment of the use and abuse of reli- gion in relation to the ‘‘ordering’’ of Rome lead us to a perhaps unavoidable issue facing any interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought in relation to Augustine, a subject we can only broach here: Machiavelli’s view of Christianity. The vast literature on this highly controversial subject can be broadly (if somewhat crudely) characterized in the following way: one group of scholars argues that Machiavelli is sincere in his claims to be a Christian or at least sees his thought as being in the broad orbit of Augustine’s conception of politics in a fallen world, while another group con- tends that Machiavelli is highly critical of Christianity, especially for its political effects. Although there remain large disagreements within and across these groups—including as to whether, even granted his criticisms of Christianity, Machiavelli believes that some versions or ‘‘interpretations’’ of Christianity can be salutary for political life (see esp. DL III.1.4)— space constraints leave us unable to wade into these debates here. Thus we restrict ourselves to a brief examination of the most obvious passage from the Discourses where Christianity is at issue, and therefore where Machiavelli may have Augustine in mind, namely his discussion of the ‘‘truth and the true

way’’ of ‘‘our religion’’ as opposed to the pagan religions of ancient peoples.

We have already noted how Machiavelli opens the Discourses by complaining that his contempora- ries admire but do not think of imitating the political deeds of the ancients in part because of ‘‘the weakness into which the present religion has led the world’’ prevents a useful engagement with the ancient histories (DL I.Preface.2). The Roman achievement somehow looks smaller once viewed through a Christian—and especially an Augustinian—lens. Machiavelli returns to this subject later at Discourses II.2, where he details the Romans’ obstinate defense of their freedom against others. Once again he turns to religion as a central explanation for the difference between ancients and moderns:

Thinking then whence it can arise that in those ancient times peoples were more lovers of freedom than in these, I believe it arises from the same cause that makes men less strong now, which I believe is the difference between our education and the an- cient, founded on the difference between our religion and the ancient. For our religion, having shown the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less the honor of the world, whereas the Gentiles, esteeming it very much and have placed the highest good in it, were more ferocious in their actions. (II.2.2)

Machiavelli echoes his initial remark in the Discourses about the ‘‘the weakness into which the present religion has led the world,’’ and he does so using language about ‘‘truth and the true way’’ that evokes both Augustine and the ‘‘true way’’ of civic repub- licanism he rejected as impossible earlier in the work. The two ‘‘true ways’’ are connected for Machiavelli, for they both lead to ‘‘idleness’’—an ‘‘ambitious idleness’’ in the case of Christianity (see Sullivan 1996a, chap. 2; Rahe 2008, chap. 2)—that produces weakness and finally corruption. If, then, Machiavelli joins Augustine in viewing Sallust’s ‘‘true way’’ as impossible, he just as adamantly rejects Augustine’s interpretation of ‘‘the truth and the true way’’ of Christianity. We thereby arrive at a familiar (if still controversial) conclusion, but we do so by way of a path as yet untrodden by anyone, namely by showing how Machiavelli puts elements of Augustine’s inter- pretation of Roman history in the service of a decidedly un-Augustinian political vision.

Conclusion

We have examined Machiavelli’s reordering of Rome in light of Augustine’s City of God in order to

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understand the character of his republicanism and the extent of his innovation with regard to his sources. We have shown not only how Machiavelli follows Augustine in regarding the ‘‘true way’’ of Sallust as a bit romantic if not impossible, but also how Machiavelli embraces the ambitious and acquis- itive portrait of Rome that Augustine criticized. More particularly, we have examined Machiavelli’s critical engagement with Augustine regarding the reasons for Rome’s success and failure and argued that Machia- velli sees in the paradigmatic actions of Romulus and Brutus in ordering and reordering Rome—actions Augustine condemned—the secret to Rome’s success, an insight unappreciated by the Roman political theorists and historians, Augustine, or Machiavelli’s civic republican contemporaries.

Given Machiavelli’s reputation as a ‘‘realist’’ who criticizes those who, like Augustine, have imagined ‘‘republics and principalities’’ that ‘‘have never been seen or known to exist in truth’’ (chap. 15 [1998, 61]; emphasis supplied), it is fair to wonder about the practicality of Machiavelli’s own solution to the problem of political corruption. Is it reasonable to think that prudent (re)orderers will emerge every generation? On this score we note that, despite his intriguing remark that successive reordering might make a perpetual republic possible at least in principle (DL III.22.3; see III.1.3, but compare III.17), Machia- velli generally agrees with Augustine in thinking that there is no permanent practical solution to the problem posed by political corruption. However in seeking to identify the conditions under which states can run ‘‘the whole course that is ordered for them by heaven’’ (III.1.1), Machiavelli does not necessarily make un- reasonable assumptions about the capacities of found- ers and refounders. Indeed, our analysis shows that Machiavelli’s exemplary state was ordered and reor- dered not by omniscient and foresighted lawgivers, but rather by ambitious power seekers with somewhat narrow personal aims. The emergence of Republican Rome was a happy accident, an unanticipated effect of individual ambition. The fact that both Romulus and Brutus failed to fully envisage the significance of their acts suggests not only that Machiavelli’s political theory does not require perfectly foresighted politi- cians, but also that the emergence of a successful state owes much to fortune as well as to virtue.

If Machiavelli’s willingness to follow Augustine in acknowledging the myopic selfishness and deceitful- ness of Roman heroes shows he is no utopian, then his effort to reconceptualize their selfishness in ways that expand our sense of political possibility shows he is not exactly a pessimist either. Indeed, Machiavelli

engages with Augustine and others neither to simply decry nor to simply celebrate the Roman achieve- ment, but rather to reveal a new and as yet untried set of political possibilities, possibilities to be enacted by those who—like the virtuous addressees of the Discourses—only need states in order to be princes. Of course, the new theoretical space that Machiavelli opens has its limits, and the great Florentine is, we have suggested, too circumspect about the possibil- ities that he himself celebrates to think them unpro- blematic. Indeed Machiavelli follows Augustine in emphasizing the dangers of the ambitious, acquis- itive, and sinful practices that characterize the earthly city, and in acknowledging the fact that certain kinds of limits necessarily attend the political life.

Yet we think it is ultimately a mistake to characterize Machiavelli’s vision of politics as a secularized version of Augustine’s understanding of the limited horizons of the earthly city. Rather, Machiavelli creatively engages with the framework of thought stamped strongly by Augustine in order to articulate a new vision of politics (see Fontana 1999, 658). Augustine’s ultimate judgment concerning the city of man was informed by a view of history in which the rise and fall of Rome was significant because it prepared the world for the ascendance of Christianity. In opposition to Augustine’s linear conception of history, Machiavelli articulates a cycli- cal theory of history very early in the Discourses, thereby signaling his effort to invert Augustine’s narrative of prefiguration and, in so doing, to reinterpret the significance both of Rome’s fall and of Christianity’s rise. The sense of hope or qualified optimism that Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of Rome is meant to encourage thus leads us away from the Augustinian understanding of history and morality and toward a renewed willingness to court the dangerous possibilities that Augustine rejected. We conclude, then, by suggesting that Augustine and Machiavelli agree in thinking that certain kinds of limits necessarily attend political life without agreeing on what or where those limits are. If prudence consists in knowing how to choose the better of two imperfect options, then it also dictates that we opt for the earthly city—and all its difficulties—over the city of God.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank William Connell, Rosario Dawson, Paul Rahe, and Vickie Sullivan for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Machiavelli's Dante & the Sources of Machiavellianism Author(s): Larry I. Peterman Source: Polity, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 247-272 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3234782 Accessed: 15-05-2017 18:17 UTC

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Machiavelli's Dante & the Sources of Machiavellianism

Larry I. Peterman University of California-Davis

Machiavelli is generally seen as the first "truly modern" political thinker. This article asks how and why he was different and explores Machiavelli's use and occasional abuse of Dante in search of an answer. The author notes that Dante speaks to many of the same thinkers and much of the same experience as Machiavelli, yet his thought does not move in the same direction. A comparison of the two Florentines, he argues, yields insights into how and why Machiavelli remade political philosophy as he did.

Larry I. Peterman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California-Davis. He has published a number of essays dealing with the political thought of Dante and Machiavelli in journals ranging from the American Political Science Review to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History.

There is widespread agreement that Machiavelli is the first truly modern political thinker, but much less agreement about what constitutes his novelty or about what leads him to abandon prior ways of political thinking.' Despite various attempts to trace his intellectual paternity, we remain uncertain about how his arguments relate to those of his prede- cessors. It follows that we are also uncertain about why he refuses to be bound by the political inheritance left him by classical and medieval thinkers and, ultimately, about his political intention.2

1. For Machiavelli's modernity, see, e.g., Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 199; Isiah Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Studies on Machiavelli, ed. Myron Gilmore (Florence: Sansoni, 1972); Anthony Parel, "Machiavelli's Method and His Interpreters," in The Political Calculus, ed. Panel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958).

2. See, e.g., J. H. Whitfield, "Savonarola and the Purpose of The Prince, " The Modern Language Review, LXIV (1949); Donald Weinstein, "Machiavelli and

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248 Machiavelli's Dante

With this in mind, we shall explore both general and specific points of contact between Machiavelli and Dante, who is at least arguably among the many former writers and thinkers from whom Machiavelli explicitly departs in such places as the Prince and the Discourses. We know that Machiavelli admired and studied Dante closely. Yet we also know that he found Dante's thought deficient in ways that touch upon politics, e.g., Dante's failure to recognize that "a man is under no greater obligation than to his country." Thus, Machiavelli's reminiscences about and references to Dante, despite their relative infrequency, are an entrance to

his larger rejection of prior political thought.3 By the same token, they provide access to the foundations of Machiavellianism and, thereby, to the foundations of modern thought.

Savonarola," in Studies on Machiavelli; Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," The Journal of Modern History, XI (1939); Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli's 'Prince' and Its Forerunners (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968). Machiavelli's puzzling relationship to his predecessors is nicely expressed by Leo Strauss. In one place Strauss says that "antitheological passion induced" Machiavelli to produce a new kind of political philosophy. In another place he indicates that a new sense of scientific in- ventiveness is the basis for Machiavelli's criticism of earlier ways of political thought. Thus, we are led to ask whether it was something present in Machiavelli's age or lacking in prior ages, or both, that moved him politically to emulate Columbus. Cf. History of Political Philosophy, 2nd Ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 269; Thoughts, p. 299.

3. Unless otherwise noted, Machiavelli references, in square brackets, will be to the sec- ond edition of the two volume Opere edited by Francesco Flora and Carlo Cordie (Milan: Mondadori, 1968). For Machiavelli's references and allusions to Dante, see, e.g., Prince XV [1.48], hereafter PR.; Discourses I.lviii, II.i, II.xvii [1.217, 231, 274], hereafter DISC; Dialogue on Language, ed. Bartolo Sozzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 770b-771a; History of Florence II.xviii [11.81]; "Letter to Vettori," in Allan Gilbert, The Chief Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 11.927-31; Golden Ass, in Gilbert, Works, 11.753; Francesco Ercole, "Dante e Machiavelli," Quaderni Di Politica, 2 (1922), 44; Larry Peterman, "Dante and the Setting for Machiavellianism," American Political Science Review, 76 (1982); Peterman, "Machiavelli versus Dante: Language and Politics in the Dialogue on Language,." Interpretation, 10 (1982), 201-21. Cf. DISC. I.xix, xiv [1.147, 192]; Dialogue 772b43-49; Florence VI.xxix [11.314]. The Life of Castruccio Castracani [1.669-73] provides another sort of evidence of Machiavelli's respect for Dante. It con- cludes with a series of "wonderful" sayings for which Castruccio was supposedly re- nowned, most of which arise in Diogenes Laertius. In three cases Castrucci repeats something he hears from others. Only once, in his thirty-third saying, does he repeat advice which he explicitly requested of another. This advice stems from the Inferno. Thus Dante is the only source of information whom Castruccio, Machiavelli's hero, actively pursues. See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 223-5.

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Larry I. Peterman 249

I.

A good place to begin assessing the relationship between Dante and Machiavelli is with their positions on a question that dominated Euro- pean political thought for the better part of a millenium, the status of the Roman Empire, and especially its relation to the well-being of Christian- ity. At the outset, the two agree on the events that bound the history of the Empire, its origins under Augustus and the final serious attempts to revive it during the thirteenth century Franciscan-Dominican religious revitalization.4 They disagree, however, about the character of these events. For Dante, the Empire and Christianity waxed and waned together, thereby demonstrating that the political and religious orders could be attuned and providing a model for future attempts to fashion political-religious harmony. For Machiavelli, on the other hand, the Em- pire and Christianity seem always to have been at odds, with the result that he rejects Dante's proposals for balancing or accommodating politics and religion.

In Dante's version of imperial history, Augustus's "perfect monarchy" is a secular-indeed, the secular-expression of Scripture's "fullness of time." Its claim to such eminence is supported by, among other things, Christ's choice to be born during Augustus's reign, a fact which many medieval thinkers found impressive. For Dante, it follows, Augustan Rome represents the mutual high points of the Empire and of Christianity, the moment when there was perfect peace throughout the world and when the "Son of God [became] mortal for the salvation of men," i.e., the moment when the highest promises of politics and pro- vidence came together.' By the same token, Augustan Rome testifies to the interrelated well-being, at least potentially, of Christianity and the political world. This is part of a greater Dantean argument, shown most clearly in the discussion of the integrated heavenly spheres in the Banquet and in the Divine Comedy, for the correspondence of temporal and ex- tratemporal affairs and, by extension, for the harmony of the secular and the spiritual, or the political and the religious. Indeed, Dante's political and religious goods are sufficiently intertwined to permit him both to employ imperial imagery to describe the heavenly end-to be

4. Cf. Monarchy, ed. Pier Ricci (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), I.xvi. 1-3, hereafter MON.; Paradise XI-XII, references to the Divine Comedy will be to the John Sinclair text and translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); Art of War II [1.508]; DISC. III.i [1.330]. PR. XV; DISC. I.xliii [1.48, 216].

5. Cf. MON. I.xvi.1-3, II.x.4-9. On the importance to medieval writers of Christ's Roman citizenship, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 156.

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250 Machiavelli's Dante

"forever citizens of that Rome of which Christ is Roman"-and to

employ parallel Scriptural imagery to indicate the character of the original empire. As Christ's birth into the register of Augustan Rome demonstrated the perfection of the best regime "in those matters which are subject to time," so too his citizenship in heavenly Rome testifies to its final perfection.6

Such a correspondence also prevails in Dante's description of condi- tions at the time of the Franciscan-Dominican revival. The portion of the Divine Comedy devoted to the saints only indirectly deals with politics, but the Banquet identifies Frederick II, under whom their orders originated and initially flourished, as "the last emperor of the Romans." As the birth of Jesus occurs under and validates the reign of the first of the emperors, so too the penultimate Christian revival occurs under and validates the reign of the last of the historical emperors.7 Conversely, in the wake of Frederick and as the influence of St. Francis and St. Dominic

wanes, the health of both the political and religious worlds deteriorates. Dante likens contemporary Italian politics to life in a brothel and is similarly outspoken on the state of Christianity under the corrupt and in- effectual direction of the Church and Popes of his lifetime. However, he holds out hope for his fellows. The deterioration of politics and the spiritual order may be reversed by a new world monarchy, which repre- sents a secularized version of the respublica Christiana of the Church. Here, a new Emperor-the Divine Comedy's veltro or DX V-together with a Supreme Pontiff will lead men to temporal happiness and eternal life.8 Political and spiritual revitalization are, in short, to occur together. The political and religious orders will be rejoined and the conditions that existed at the time of Augustan Rome will be recreated, or even improved upon.

With this, Dante's arguments come full circle. The final empire rees- tablishes the integration of political and religious well-being that had in- itially been manifested in Augustus's Rome. This harmony between politics and religion has an added feature which must also be noted. It represents an accommodation between the forces of reason and of revel- ation. Philosophy, of which politics is an extension, and theology, of which religion is an extension, will henceforth be able to coexist comfort- ably. In the Monarchy, Dante says the Emperor will use philosophical

6. PURG. XXXII.102. See, also, Kantorowicz, Two Bodies, p. 466; Charles Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

7. Cf. PARA. XI, XII; Convivio, ed. G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli (Florence: Le Mon- nier, 1964), IV.iii.6, hereafter CONV.

8. PURG. VI.76-79; INF. 1.101, PURG. XXXIII.43, MON. III.xv.7-15.

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Larry I. Peterman 251

teaching and the exercise of moral and intellectual virtues to lead us to that happiness typified by the "earthly paradise," while the Supreme Pontiff will use spiritual teaching and the exercise of theological virtues to lead us to that happiness typified by the "heavenly paradise." Dante's surface teaching, then, is that the promises of the two ends of our lives will no longer suffer from the tension between the spheres of reason and revelation, or of speculation and practice, which informed so much of classical and medieval political thought.9

Machiavelli's version of imperial history differs significantly from Dante's. For one thing, Machiavelli disapproves of Augustus. The Art of War, for example, says that he bore primary responsibility for disarming the Roman people and, thereby, for leading them into corruption. Thus, Augustus bears responsibility for the eventual collapse of the Empire. Where Dante's Augustus marks the high point of the historical Empire, Machiavelli's Augustus represents both its beginning and the beginning of its end. Augustus is certainly not on Machiavelli's list of great founders. Indeed, he is not mentioned in the Prince, which is curious given his stature as the first Emperor and his importance for earlier writers.10 Machiavelli's low assessment of Augustus, however, does not seem due wholly to his disapproval of something greater than himself. If we couple the argument-with which Machiavelli would have been familiar by way of Dante if no one else-that Augustus was notable for being the ruler under whom Christ chose to be born, with Machiavelli's appraisal of Augustus, we are left with the impression that Christianity comes to life and grows at the same moment that Roman politics begins to deteriorate. Christianity's birth, for which it is hard to blame Augustus, coincides with the beginnings of Imperial political failure.

A similar pattern emerges in Machiavelli's account of the period dur- ing which the later Empire foundered. Although Machiavelli shares Dante's view of the importance of the thirteenth century Franciscan- Dominican revival, he teaches that this second founding of Christianity is concurrent with the failure of Frederick II, and not, as for Dante, with Frederick's success. The revival, Machiavelli says, maintained and main- tains the Christian religion at the same time that Frederick spawns the

9. Cf. MON. I.ii.4-7, III.xv.7-15. See Karl Vossler, Medieval Culture, trans. William Lawton (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1929), I1.180; Pocock, Moment, p. 5; Etienne Gilson, Dante and Philosophy, trans. David Moore (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 199-201; Kantorowicz, Two Bodies, pp. 461ff.

10. I [1.459]. See Strauss, Thoughts, p. 177. Augustus's absence from the list of Roman emperors in PR. XIX calls to mind Christ's absence from the discussion of founders and unarmed prophets in VI.

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252 Machiavelli's Dante

Guelf-Ghibelline factionalism that leads eventually to "the ruin of all Italy." As the birth of Christianity coincides with the beginning of Roman political failure, so too the later Christian revival coincides with the beginning of modern Italy's political failure. This case clarifies the nature of the conflict between Christianity and the Empire. In effect, Christianity attracts men's loyalties, thus weakening the existing political order, but Christian leaders are either too weak or disinclined to fashion a new political order of their own. We are told that St. Francis and St. Dominic strengthened the church and religion by providing a shield for depraved clerical authorities and by teaching men to be obedient to such authorities. Thus their revival strengthened the hand of Frederick's papal

opponents--mainly Innocent III and Innocent IV-who, Machiavelli says, combined love of religion with personal ambition in a way that con- tinually "provoked new dissensions in Italy." This process, whereby the Pontiffs are strong enough to obstruct the unification of Italy by others but do not unify it themselves, continues into Machiavelli's own day. Leo X is most powerful at the same time that Italy is weak and disunited almost beyond repair. Machiavelli's version of the ends of imperial history, then, points to an inverse relationship between political and Christian well-being. Where the Christian religion is strong, he seems to suggest, the political order tends to be weak."

This is not to say that Machiavelli opposes religious and political vital- ity in all cases or contexts. Pre-Christian Rome was characterized by religious and political strength and, according to the exhortatio in the Prince, the Medici might bring about a similar situation in Italy.'2 These points aside, however, it remains that Machiavelli, in contrast to Dante, indicates an historical opposition between the health of Christianity and the strength or virtue of the political. He also questions other facets of Dantean thought. To the degree that Dante's history reflects an order or cosmos in which temporal matters respond to the heavens and politics coexists with divine and speculative affairs, Machiavelli's reversal of Dante's history makes questionable both Dante's unity of heavens and earth and his proposals for harmonizing politics, philosophy, and theology. Indeed, the opposition between religion and politics in Machia- velli's account is associated with a similar opposition between the con- cerns of heaven, philosophy and theology, and the concerns of earth, political science. In that famous passage of the Prince where Machiavelli departs from what "many have written" concerning the methods of

11. Cf. DISC. III.i; Florence I.xxi, xxiii; PR. XI [I.330, II.36-8, 1.38]. 12. The Medici are to succeed, in part, by becoming principe of the church. PR. XXVI

[I.82].

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princes, it is clear that Dante must be counted among the "many." The complaint that such writers are "imagining republics and principates that have never been seen or known to be in truth" is also a criticism of any politics that looks beyond the temporal world for its origins and stan- dards. Any regime, like Dante's, that answers to philosophical and theological ends represents an obstacle to Machiavellian politics. This, I think, begins to suggest the dimensions of Machiavelli's undoing of Dante. In the broadest terms, the Dantean harmony between the earth and the heavens is dissolved, and one cannot look for any guide to action beyond what one can immediately feel." By extension, the accommoda- tions between politics, philosophy, and theology characteristic of Dan- tean thought become empty.

We can now attempt to situate the more immediate divisions between Dante and Machiavelli. First, Dante's assertions that the heavens are in- terdependent and that the secular and divine are unified lead him to ac- cept the permanent temporal influence of providence and fortune. That is, his teaching about the interlocking and unified order of permanent and impermanent things means that providence and fortune, which are active forces in the impermanent world, are parts of a greater unity which no amount of human ingenuity can undo. Thus, his apparent op- timism about balancing all aspects of our lives and, by extension, achiev- ing all that we might desire is tempered by his recognition that pro- vidence and fortune may interfere with our achieving such a balance.14' Things beyond our control sometimes deny us temporal satisfactions and also those goals that, according to the argument for congruence between this world and the next, ought to be as assured as our heavenly satisfac- tions and goals. Where, for example, we might expect temporal happi- ness to be the reward for our acting in accord with the moral and intellec- tual virtues, just as the bliss of the next world is the reward for our acting in accord with the theological virtues, we discover that sometimes the world disappoints us. Virtue often goes unrewarded and, more disturb- ing, vice sometimes is rewarded. In the Banquet, Dante argues that our urge to perfection will be temporally realized in a universal order where we will achieve "that [happiness] for the sake of which we are born." At the same time, he reminds us that there is a want of equity in practical af- fairs, where the "basest churl" may fortuitously come upon wealth

13. PR. XV, XVIII [1.48-49, 57], XXVI, DISC. I.xi. 14. For Dante's purported optimism, see, e.g., Bruno Nardi, Dante e la Cultura

Medievale (Bari: Laterza, 1942), pp. 263-77; Francesco Ercole, II Pensiero Politico Di Dante (Milan: Alpes, 1928), pp. 83, 226; Aldo Vallone, Dante (Milan: Vallardi, 1971), p. 15.

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254 Machiavelli's Dante

denied to better men. Dante himself therefore provides a counterpoint to the proposition that men can achieve the same degree of certainty in practical matters as in intellectual and spiritual matters."I

It is impossible to do justice to Dante's entire argument here. It will, however, be worthwhile to touch upon its outlines inasmuch as they pro- vide a sense of what changes when Machiavelli urges men not to be vic- timized by fortune. The Divine Comedy is our best resource in this respect. In Purgatory, Dante finds himself in the "place set apart for human nature as its nest," i.e., a poetic representation of the Garden of Eden or the Monarchy's earthly paradise. Here he comes upon a mysterious lady, who is generally regarded as a symbol of "the active life in its perfection." She tells Dante about the divine source of the things of this world and about how from diverse virtues there follow diverse

growths, a process which, if understood, would remove men's marvel when "some plant takes root without visible seed." According to the lady, natural things may be traced to divine origins and in the perfect natural order there is no interruption between generation and completion or fulfillment. To this she adds "a corollary as a grace." It was perhaps this, she says, of which the old poets dreamed when they sang on Par- nassus of the "age of gold and its happy state." Thus she joins ancient and Christian ideas of natural perfection, a condition in which the natural order of generation is unobstructed and there is "lasting spring."'' In the Garden of Eden, as in her version of the stories of the poets, the unexpected is banished.

The possibility of such perfection, however, is called into question a few cantos later in Paradise when Dante encounters Charles Martel, the youthful former King of Hungary and heir to the Kingdom of Naples whose life was cut short by the plague in defiance of his contemporaries' belief that he would become a great political leader. In contrast to the mysterious lady's practical perfection, Charles represents failed political expectations and the possibility of the emergence of evil where good is anticipated. As he says to Dante, had the world not "held me but a short time below," much evil "would not have been." As a symbol of the tem- poral failure of just deserts, Charles invites a question that had been left open by the discussion in the Garden of Eden. How is it, Dante asks him with an allusion to the mysterious lady's invisible but perfect seed, "that from sweet seed can come bitter fruit?" The picture of natural perfection offered earlier is marred by Dante's knowledge that natural generation

15. See CONV. I.i.1-2, III.vii.2ff., IV.xi.6-12. xxii.10ff; Larry Peterman, "Dante and Happiness," Medievalia et Humanistica, 10 (1981). Cf. Metaphysics 980a25.

16. PURG. XXVIII. 103ff. (and Sinclair's gloss). Cf. Genesis 11.8-9, PURG. XXI.40ff.

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Larry I. Peterman 255

can be obstructed, i.e., that what nature seems to intend does not always come to pass despite the sense that it would be "impossible that nature fail in what is needful." Charles's explanation of this troublesome fact parallels the speech of the mysterious lady in that it consists of a state- ment and a corollary-the only other use of that term in the Divine Com- edy. "Generated nature," he says, "would always take a like course with its generators if divine providence did not overrule." His "corollary" is that "always, if nature meets with fortune unsuited to it, like any kind of seed out of its own region, it goes badly." To this he adds an example, which is simultaneously a gibe at his brothers Louis and Robert, who were unsuited for their temporal roles, and a reminder that religion and politics are alike subject to fortune. The world below, he says, demonstrates that its "track is off the road" when it "wrest(s) to religion one born to gird on the sword, and make(s) a king of one that is fit for sermons." As the proper balance of the world monarchy would ulti- mately rest on a satisfactory division of labor between an Emperor and a Supreme Pontiff, so the practical world suffered when Louis the priest and Robert the king confused their natural roles, i.e., when fortune in- tercepted nature's course. In sum, Charles offers a counterbalance to the perfection and certainty of the earthly paradise. In the world which he has lost and Dante will soon reenter, providence may stand between natural potential and its realization, and fortune can pervert what nature intends."I

That Charles is unclear about where providence ends and fortune begins is not critical for our immediate purpose. More important is that they share in being unforeseeable and unpredictable from our perspec- tive. To borrow from St. Augustine, fortuitous things no less than provi- dential things "are hidden in the will either of the true God or one of His spirits." Insofar as we cannot know where or when they will strike, we cannot achieve absolute assurance in temporal matters and our world falls short of the earthly paradise. The best we can do, apparently, is try to diminish the effect of the unexpected, which is a far cry from controll- ing or vanquishing it. This means, in turn, that the real world, as Dante has it, is bifurcated by the sense of assurance associated with the mysterious lady and the poets of whom she speaks, and by the doubts generated by Charles Martel and exemplified by his and his brothers' ex- periences. In the Monarchy, Dante may begin his discussion of Rome's providential right to rule with a sense of confidence born in his trust of divine authority and reason-of revelation and philosophy-but he

17. PARA. VIII.91ff. The second corollary adds a "cloak" to the first's "grace."

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256 Machiavelli's Dante

almost immediately tempers this by recalling that Aristotle's Ethics teaches us not to expect the same kind of certainty in all subject matters. This may be said to be Dante's version of the political paradox of medieval Christian-Aristotelianism. The unrelenting Christian search for certitude, which culminates in the ideas of an Augustan "fullness of time," of a philosophically defended universal community of human be- ings, and of an earthly paradise, must be weighed against the limits of certitude "in the matters which are subject to time."'' As a result, Dante's subjects must balance the assurances that ultimately guide them against the fact of practical uncertainty. They live in a condition of cer- titude they identify with religion and philosophy, a certitude foreign to classical thought, yet their politics retains the nervous quality characteristic of classical doctrines.

From Machiavelli's perspective, this situation could hardly have been appealing. For one thing, the interstices between the certain rewards of theology and philosophy and the uncertainties of politics left consider- able room for maneuver for the theologians whose influence he found pernicious. What can be said with more confidence, however, is that Machiavelli's departure from Dante on the integration of the temporal and eternal now begins to pay dividends. By divorcing the two worlds, the one we can "feel" or "see and know" from the one we cannot, he provides a means of escape from all that is not within the bounds of what we can sensibly grasp, including providence and fortune. We are less sub- ject to what is beyond us and thus a way is opened for a new confidence that we can control our fates. It is telling that when in the Prince Machia- velli constrains fortune, he does so in the name of free will." We shall return to this below. For the moment, it is enough to say that Machiavelli reverses Dante in two ways. Not only does he divorce politics from the eternal or imagined, he suggests that the security that had hitherto been available with regard to the extratemporal sphere is to become at least partially available here.

Here again, Machiavelli's teaching on Rome and Christianity is ger- mane. Discourses III.i, which describes the impact of St. Francis and St. Dominic, draws our attention to the political equivalent of their success, the rebirth of Roman vitality and virtue subsequent to Rome's conquest by the Gauls. A few chapters earlier Machiavelli attributes this rebirth to the power of the heavens or of fortune. Initially he treats the terms

18. City of God V.9; MON. I.xvi.8, ii.3, 8; II.i.7-8, ii.7-8. Cf. II.iv.1, v.24, x.4-5, III.vi.7.

19. PR. XVIII, XXV [I1.57, 78-9].

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Larry I. Peterman 257

synonomously but in the end he emphasizes the workings of fortune. He does not characterize the accomplishments of St. Francis and St. Dominic in the same way. Their exemplary lives were sufficient, it seems, to move men irrespective of the workings of chance. The power of religion is manifested outside the sphere of fortune, whereas political ex- cellence or virtue is, if not an expression of fortune, at least coeval with

the beneficence of fortune. In this way, by indicating that one sphere may ignore fortune while the other must build upon it, Machiavelli rein- forces the opposition between Christianity and the political world. By the same token, he offers the opportunity to set fortune aside, at least an ap- preciable part of our lives, an opportunity that had been foreclosed to Dante's world by the interlocking nature of its heavens. Where Dante will not partition temporal matters so as to secure an arena against for-

tune's mischievous potential--recall that Robert the king and Louis the priest were both subject to fortune- Machiavelli can say that fortune rules only half our actions.20

It is a mark of Machiavelli's boldness that one of his examples of someone surmounting fortune is supplied by the religion whose political impact he usually wants to constrain. Bolder yet, he seems to suggest that such religious success may even become a basis for political success. As we learn in the Prince, the ecclesiastical principality, which crushed Venice and before which the King of France trembles, is maintained, like Christianity was maintained earlier by St. Francis and St. Dominic, without regard for chance.21 The principality is sustained by what Machi- avelli calls "superior causes" and is not subject to the same uncertainties as purely secular regimes. With this step, the certitude of religion becomes an avenue to political certitude. Somehow, successful Machia- vellian politics will follow the model of Christianity, whose assurances are such that the religious are freed from fortune's grasp. One of the paradoxes of Machiavelli's teaching is that the certitude identified with the religion whose political influence it decries supplies the basis for a new kind of temporal, and thereby political, certainty. In the Machia- vellian scheme of things, Christianity simultaneously opposes political well-being and provides a clue as to what is required for modern political success, i.e., to attain in politics the kind of certainty that, for Dante,

20. Cf. MON. II.ii.7, Nich. Ethics 1094b24. DISC. III.i, II.xxix [1.327-31, 314-16]. In the last case, fortuna in the title becomes i cieli and fortuna in the body. See Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 282-5, 300. Machiavelli's most famous statement on fortune occurs in PR. XXV. Cf. DISC. 11.29 [1.316], PARA. XXV.67-9.

21. PR. XI [1.36]. Cf. I [1.5].

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258 Machiavelli's Dante

had been attainable only at the levels of speculation and revelation. Machiavelli reinforces this idea in various ways. For example, Discourses I.xi, which will be treated at greater length below, parallels the Prince's statement on ecclesiastical principalities in that it relates how Numa's in- troduction of religion to Rome led to "good orders" and thereby to "good fortune" and "happy successes." The religion associated with the political strength of pre-imperial Rome and the religion associated with the weakness of post-republican Rome, then, have in common an ability to withstand changes (varia) in fortune.22 For Machiavelli, of course, pagan religion and Christianity are very different. Still, the similar political impacts of Numa's religion and that of the ecclesiastical princi- pality's leads one to wonder about the process whereby something funda- mental to religion becomes fundamental to politics. What we encounter here amounts to more than the instrumental perspective upon religion with which Machiavelli is frequently identified. It is the sense that a quality associated with religion, and most emphatically with Christian- ity, may lead to the freeing of politics from the kind of political uncer- tainty accepted by thinkers like Dante. Thus, where Dante leads us to wonder about the interplay of religious certainty and political uncer- tainty, Machiavelli leads us to consider how religious certainty is trans- formed into political certainty. By the same token, he leads us to wonder about the process whereby Dante's teachings are dislodged and replaced. Here, the Discourses' references to Dante become helpful.

II.

There are two explicit and several tacit references to Dante in the Discourses. Moreover, one may speculate that the whole of Book II ought to be considered in a Dantean context. Although Dante is not men- tioned in its body, its subject matter-Rome's external affairs-and its division into thirty-three chapters both recall Dante. Machiavelli employs the latter device, for instance, to call attention to Dante in the Life of Castruccio Castracani. The question of Machiavelli's devices and numerological tricks aside, however, Book II seems to be an open response to Dante's teaching on the providential basis and mission of Rome. Its theme, as announced in the proem, is how the Romans augmented their empire, and it begins by rebutting the opinion of "many" that the Romans acquired the empire more through the favor of fortune than by virtue. In evidence of the popular opinion, Machiavelli offers the comment of Plutarch, that "most grave writer," that the

22. [I.125-6], PR. XXV [1.79]. Cf. PR. XI.

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Larry I. Peterman 259

Romans erected "more temples to Fortune than to any other god." His own position is the opposite of this. Book II tells how Rome's military virtue led to her acquisitions and how her good "modes and orders" maintained them.2

With this, Discourses II, in a way that echoes the Prince XV, places Dante among the "many" whose opinions are to be corrected. Dante's argument that Rome's extension and political success were providential was keyed to his open, even notorious, opposition in the Monarchy, the only Dantean text mentioned in the Discourses, to the idea that the Em- pire rested upon might. Indeed, the parallels between the opening sec- tions of Discourses II and Monarchy II, also the second of three books, reinforce the suspicion that Discourses II is intended as a response to Dante and that, on this issue at least, Dante represents a modern equivalent to Plutarch. In any event, Discourses II replicates the begin- ning of Monarchy II but reverses its point. Where Dante objects to the prominent, but "superficial," opinion that the empire rested "simply upon armed force" rather than providence, Machiavelli objects to the widely held opinion that Rome owed its Empire to fortune rather than military prowess.24

That Machiavelli's "many" attribute to fortune what Dante attributes to providence obscures but does not fundamentally lessen the opposition between the Discourses and the Monarchy. For Machiavelli, as his restatement of Plutarch implies, providence and fortune are indis- tinguishable insofar as their opposition to armed might is concerned. Thus, as previously noted, he treats the two synonomously in recounting how Rome was revitalized after its defeat by the Gauls. For Dante, as Charles Martel demonstrates and as we have also noted previously, the situation is not much different.25 As evidence of the legitimacy of trial by combat, for example, he refers us to Ennius's restatement of a speech by Pyrrhus wherein the gods, and in particular Hera, are considered the final arbiters of disputes settled by the fortunes of war. Dante's gloss on the passage is instructive: "by Hera (Pyrrhus) meant fortune, the cause which we more correctly call divine providence."26 In identifying pagan fortune with Christian providence, Dante may be said to anticipate

23. [1.230-1]. See above, n. 3. 24. MON. II.i.2.

25. II.xxix [I.314, 315]. For medieval recognition of the difficulty of distinguishing the providential from the fortuitous, see, e.g., Maimonides, "Letter on Astrology," trans. Ralph Lerner, in Medieval Political Philosophy, ed. Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. 234-5.

26. CONV. IV.v.1l, PARA. VIII.139, MON. I.ix.8-9.

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260 Machiavelli's Dante

Machiavelli, but Machiavelli reverses him by denying that armed force is subordinate to either and thereby frees arms from the constraints Dante imposes upon them. Dante, who sought to correct an opinion that was previously dominant-he admits to having once held it himself-is, in turn, corrected by Machiavelli's reaffirmation of the original position. In this sense, Discourses II's new direction amounts to a revival of an argu- ment that Dante, and the "many" with whom he is associated, had at- tempted to discredit.27

This line of argument is extended in the central chapter of Book II. As the first chapter refuted a common opinion about the old world, this chapter refutes a "universal opinion" about the modern world. Here, in II.xvii, the "many" are said to hold that artillery has drastically changed human affairs. Had artillery existed during Roman times, their argument goes, the Romans could not have conquered so easily as they did nor been so bold militarily, for artillery has decreased the "employment or display" of virtue and makes it impossible any longer to imitate the an- cient orders. Were the prevailing view on artillery to stand, Machiavelli concludes, war would soon be reduced to the issue of artillery. This posi- tion is unacceptable to Machiavelli. Although he does not take issue with the idea that artillery is a great innovation, he rejects the argument that it has so changed the world that men cannot return to the virtuous old ways.28 Now, it is arguable that artillery stands for more than a technological development in the Discourses.29 But even if this is so, the initial bearing of Machiavelli's argument is that men ought not to be overly impressed by the impact of new things, a mistake of which Dante, in particular, could be accused. Dante, for example, openly associates Florentine moral and political deterioration with the influence of new ways and new peoples and is pessimistic about the likelihood of reform- ing his contemporaries. Despite his proposal of a new temporal order, he does not think it likely that the men of his day can regain the virtues of earlier ages. Machiavelli was well aware of this. Indeed, in the Dialogue on Language, he severely criticizes Dante for his harsh and despairing judgment on his fellows.

Together, therefore, the beginning and middle chapters of Discourses II amount to a response to Dante's evaluation of the ancient world and his criticism of the modern world. While it is debatable whether

Machiavelli expressly had Dante in mind when he composed this book,

27. MON. II.i.2. Cf. CONV. IV.v.1, 6. 28. DISC. II.xvii [I.274-80]. 29. See, e.g., Mansfield, New Modes, p. 238.

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Larry I. Peterman 261

Dante certainly fits the unflattering description in its proem of the men who always, but not always reasonably, praise ancient times and accuse present times. More to the point, according to Discourses II, Machiavelli has to replace, in the teaching associated with Dante, both that part per- taining to virtue in the ancient world and that part pertaining to corrup- tion in the modern world. Machiavelli faces a sizable challenge. Having argued that the old world was subject to the same forces as the new and that the new could replicate the qualities of the old, he needs to show, in the face of the opposition of Dante and others, how ancient ways could be restored for modern men."3

III.

Some of the particulars of Machiavelli's attempt, as against Dante's, to combine elements of the ancient and modern world are evident in the two

chapters of the Discourses which explicitly refer to Dante. The first of these is Discourses I.xi., entitled "Of the Religion of the Romans." It begins by linking Roman strength to religious vigor; "never for so many centuries was there such fear of God as in that republic." It concludes with an account of how modern men, irrespective of their degree of civility, might be persuaded to follow "a new order or opinion" that would provide the kind of political security generated by Roman religious fear. In other words, it moves from an account of the religious sources of ancient political well-being to an account of what can be ac- complished in the way of replicating such well-being in the modern world, despite the apparent incommensurability of ancient and modern religion. That Roman strength could be reestablished in some form seems to be a given. As Machiavelli puts it at the end of the chapter, "let no one despair, then, of being able to effect that which has been effected by others; for, as we have said in our preface, men are born and live and die in an order which remains ever the same."

The chapter provides several illuminating examples of what is required if modern men are to effect events successfully according to the ancient pattern. Machiavelli's first example is the salutary political impact of Roman religion supplied by Numa, who reduced a ferocious people to civil obedience by way of religion. His final example is supplied by

30. INF. XVI.73, PURG. XVI.122, PARA. XVI.96ff., XVI.40ff, DIAL. 772b45-773a9. This is not to say that Dante was unqualifiedly opposed to the new. Adduc- ing support from Scripture, for example, the Monarchy (I.i.3-4) will demonstrate "truths no-one else has considered" and present an idea of world monarchy foreign to classical thought.

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262 Machiavelli's Dante

Savonarola, who persuaded Florentines that he spoke with God and thus induced them to have faith or trust in him. This, for Machiavelli, testifies to the possibility that modern men could be persuaded to adopt new and better ways. Taking the first and last examples, then, the fear that underlay ancient religion-Machiavelli says Roman citizens were more afraid of breaking their oaths than of breaking the law-is balanced by the trust engendered by the most famous cleric of Machiavelli's day. In these respects, the argument moves from identifying ancient religion with political strength to identifying modern religion with political potential. Modern men, it would appear, can achieve the political security of an- cient men insofar as the persuasiveness identified with Savonarola can replace the sense of dread identified with the Numa. How this replace- ment, or transformation, is to be managed is not expressly indicated. However, Machiavelli offers a hint by way of Dante. The transition from the qualities that underlay Roman strength to those that underlie modern potential is denoted by what Machiavelli calls a "prudent" saying of Dante. Whereas in Book II Machiavelli may silently indicate Dante's identification with the ideas that must be discarded to make the world

over, in I.xi he expressly employs Dante to show what is required to make the world over.

The context here is an argument that princes alone cannot fill the void created by the disappearance of ancient religion because princely rule lacks continuity. Fear of a prince, as Machiavelli puts it, may replace fear of God, the source of Roman strength, as a guarantor of the well- being of a kingdom but it is untrustworthy because princes are short lived and their virtue is not apt to outlast them. In support, Machiavelli refers to Purgatory 7, with two emendations. He ascribes to Dante what Sordello says about the failed nobles in the Valley of Princes and iden- tifies virtue with what Sordello calls probity."

Rarely does human probity descend through the branches, and this he wills who gives it, that it may be sought from him.

With this, Machiavelli introduces a familiar element in his teaching. In effect, he uses Dante to support his attack on aristocratic or lineal claims to political prominence. According to Dante's Sordello, lineal claims are deficient in a modern context because virtue is a divine gift rather than a

31. PURG. VII.122-4. Machiavelli also changes risurge in the original to discende. The change would seem to point to a changed perception on the status of founders. Cf. DISC. I.xix.

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Larry I. Peterman 263

matter of inheritance. This effectively removes one of the principal political alternatives to the arts of persuasion, the subject Machiavelli takes up immediately thereafter. Those who accept the traditional argu- ment that position is a matter of descent need not concern themselves about convincing others to accept or trust them.32 From Machiavelli's purported Dantean perspective, the same set of beliefs on which Savonarola builds forecloses political claims arising in blood ties and inheritance.

In part, then, Machiavelli would reconfigure the modern world by removing the power of the gentiluomini, i.e., the class that represents traditional lineal claims. This also means that he answers Dante's

criticism of the modern world by turning Dante upon himself. What the Divine Comedy says is a sign of political weakness-Sordello's descrip- tion of modern princes is sorrowful-now becomes a source of strength. This kind of turnabout is characteristic of the Discourses. Discourses

I.xxxiii, for example, is a companion piece to I.xi insofar as gentiluomini are concerned. The chapter highlights the political dangers inherent in youth of "noble birth and outstanding virtue," thereby using Aristotle's definition of gentlemen to render objectionable the group on which Aristotle rested hopes for a practically good political order. Machiavelli, in other words, adopts Aristotle's view that "gentlehood," as Dante calls it, is a matter of breeding and character but reverses Aristotle by making

gentlemen obstacles, rather than sources, of political well-being.3 Again, Discourses I.xi is at the center of a series of chapters at whose peripheries Rome is praised because it disregarded blood claims to posi- tion and in which the need for rule other than by lineage is reasserted. In the latter case, Machiavelli embroiders the point made in Discourses I.xi. Unless a man lives a very long time or one virtuous man succeeds another, unlikely by inheritance according to Sordello, states will relapse to a condition of corruption and lose their freedom. Here, too, Machia- velli compares Rome favorably to Sparta-Aristotle's example of a good regime-and Venice because Rome placed responsibility for liberty in the plebs whereas Sparta and Venice placed it in the nobili. This had, among other things, the advantage of making Rome a better setting for political expansion than Sparta or Venice, since the nobility, according to Machiavelli, favor political stability and tranquility above other political

32. See, e.g., DISC I.lv, I.lx, III.xvi, heading and body [1.212-3, 224, 380]; Strauss, Thoughts, p. 217.

33. [I.168]; CONV. IV.iii.6; MON. II.iii.3. See Peterman, "Dante and the Setting," 637-8; Peterman, "Dante and Happiness," 83-4.

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264 Machiavelli's Dante

ends. Secure and confident in their own positions and with regard to foreigners, they do not experience the anxiety that causes regimes led by nongentlemen to strike out in new directions and grow.3" Gentlemen are not merely impervious to the persuasive arts, their political self- assurance makes them defenders of the status quo and obstacles to new ways. In these senses, Machiavelli's attack upon them bears out and develops the alternatives set out in Discourses I.xi. Either something resembling the nervousness and fear, grounded in religion, of Rome must be reintroduced in the world or the tools of Savonarola must be

perfected politically, which in turn means that the confidence heretofore located in an upper class will be relocated in those who can build politically upon Savonarola's model. In either case, or in any combina- tion of the two, the political influence of gentiluomini must be removed. "

In using Dante as he does in Discourses I.xi, Machiavelli obscures the Aristotelian element in Dante's teaching. To be sure, Dante recognizes that blood descent is an unsatisfactory source of privilege in a Christian setting. For example, he clearly identifies the antagonism between belief that all men are descended from a single man and belief that lineage distinguishes men from one another in any essential sense. However, the Christian half of his teaching, expressed in part by Sordello, is mitigated by such things as Hugh Capet's dynastic concern later in the Purgatory. Again, the Banquet's critique of Aristotelian gentilezza, attributed to Frederick II, is balanced by its agreement with Aristotle that fathers pass on their natures to their sons and that agents and patients, which include fathers and sons, are somehow inseparable. The Banquet may also follow Scripture in denigrating inherited wealth but it still ascribes im- portance to the conditions of one's birth and to the impact of breeding insofar as realizing virtue is concerned. Men who must work for their sustenance rather than being born to it, Dante says, will not have the leisure and freedom to develop the habits of virtue.36 Such things are in-

34. I.v, xvii [I1.105-7, 142]. Machiavelli recognizes the inherent strength of hereditary princes. His comments on Marcus Aurelius in PR. XIX [1.61], for example, balance his comments on wholly new princes in PR. VI. Cf. DISC. I.vi [I.108-10] and statements on "hereditary" regimes in PR. I and II.

35. DISC. I.vi [I.111], I.lx [1.224]. 36. CONV. IV.xv.1-3, IV.iii.6, II.viii.6, and Busnelli's gloss, III.x.2. Cf. IV.xi.9-10,

PURG. VII; CONV. IV.xx.7; IV.xxix.8ff. Machiavelli indicates his appreciation of Dante's argument that there is a tension between religion and the idea of lineal descent in the chapters which bound DISC. II, where he approves the Roman policy of making the consulate "the reward of virtue, not blood," (1.224), and lauds the revitalization of Roman religion [1.124, 231-4].

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Larry I. Peterman 265

dicative of the delicate course Dante steers between classical doctrines on

the sower of natural generation and descent and Christian belief in a God who, to recall the opening of the Monarchy, "gives to all liberally and upbraids none." By attributing Sordello's position to Dante, therefore, Machiavelli, at the least, obfuscates the Dantean accommodation be- tween Christian and classical positions.37

This means that Machiavelli emphasizes the religious end of Dante's teaching. His use of Dante points to a world largely moved by religious values. The chapter's ending statement on Savonarolan persuasion rein- forces this point by underscoring an older argument, wherein, as demonstration is the hallmark of philosophy, persuasion is the hallmark of religion. That is, insofar as he associates religion with persuasion, Machiavelli echoes the position of some of his precursors, including, I think, Dante."3 However, whereas those precursors balanced the argu- ment for religious power with an argument for the power of philosophy, Machiavelli does not mention the power of philosophy. Instead, he argues for a modern persuasiveness, and thereby a modern religion, which is doubly powerful in that it operates in the void left by the failure of ancient religion and the absence of philosophy. In short, Machiavelli gives us a world that seems dominated by Christianity and subject to the tools Christianity employs.

Despite the fact that Machiavelli recognizes that Christianity is somehow at odds with the fear-induced valor of the ancient world, this does not mean that he abandons the idea that there is political utility in fear.39 All his readers will recognize that. Moreover, he raises the ques- tion of how one is to combine the fear typical of the ancient world with the persuasive power inherent in the modern Christian context. But before we turn to this question, we must ask a prior one. Why does

37. I.i.6 (my emphasis). In identifying probity with virtue in general, Machiavelli at- tenuates Dante's teaching on virtue. For Dante probity is a particular virtue characteristic of young manhood and the martial life (CONV. IV.xxvi, xxvii.1). See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 227, 234, 244-5.

38. See, e.g., Alfarabi: "In everything of which philosophy gives an account based on intellectual perception or conception, religion gives an account based on imagination. In everything demonstrated by philosophy, religion employs persuasion" ("Attainment of Happiness," trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Medieval Political Philosophy, p. 77). For Dante's version of these ideas, see CONV. III.xv.2.

39. On the difference between pagan and Christian valor, see, e.g., Ernst Kantorowicz, "Gods in Uniform," in Kantorowicz, Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin, 1965), pp. 8-11. From Machiavelli's perspective, Christianity dissipates the fear out of which ancient valor was produced. In the Art of War II [1.508], he speaks of how the Chris- tian religion lessens fear and, thereby, diminishes martial valor.

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266 Machiavelli's Dante

Machiavelli expect that religious persuasion can or will become political persuasion?

Here again, Machiavelli's use of Dante is suggestive. If, in Discourses I.xi, Dante introduces us to the potential inherent in modern persuasion, in Discourses I.liii-the only other explicit reference to Dante in the Discourses-he introduces the "consideration of what it is easy and of what it is hard to persuade a people." In this respect, Discourses I.liii may be said to indicate how the argument of I.xi becomes operational. Where the earlier chapter, for example, reveals the audience for persua- sion-the rude and the uomini civili, the later chapter reveals the most ef- fective means of persuasion."' Basically, Machiavelli teaches that it is easy to persuade the people or multitude to adopt seemingly sure and bold courses, however foolish, and hard to persuade them to adopt seem- ingly hopeless and cowardly courses, however wise. His examples con- trast the lack of persuasive success of those who advocated wise policies with the persuasive success of those who advocated ruinous policies. The examples suggest rules for those who want to be persuasive, e.g., people are apt to respond positively to one they think of as their own. But it is by way of Dante that we learn what ultimately is behind persuasion, and what makes it a potentially powerful political tool.

In Discourses I.liii, Machiavelli cites Dante to support the argument that when the people lack a leader in whom they have faith, they will often seek their own ruin, and that when they have no faith in anyone at all, they will of necessity come to ruin. "Of this proposition," Machiavelli claims, "Dante says in . . . On Monarchy that the people often cries 'long live its death and death to its life.' " This quotation is for the most part faithful to the original, although it appears in the Ban- quet rather than the Monarchy. Machiavelli's use of the passage, however, is at odds with the way Dante intends it. For Machiavelli, the people's cry demonstrates what happens when popular faith fails. For Dante, on the other hand, it illustrates the perils that follow from the blindness "to the light of discernment" characteristic of the le populari persone. It does not represent a failure of confidence so much as a failure of reason. Such failure is attributable particularly to the fact that most people have no opportunity, or are unable, to develop the habit of discernment associated with virtuous behavior. For Dante, men at large

40. I.liii complements I.xi in a number of other ways as well. For example, as a reference to Dante marks I.xi's transition from concern for the permanence of princes to concern about persuasion in principalities or republics, so a reference to Dante marks I.liii's transi- tion from concern for the fragility of popular government to concern for persuasion among republican peoples.

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Larry I. Peterman 267

are incapable of independently pursuing virtuous and responsible ends. Employing an old metaphor, he describes their sheeplike behavior as they follow one another to their deaths if but one chooses that course. Dante's people are not ruined because they lack purpose, confidence, or faith but because they tend, in their ignorance, to trust the unworthy. Thus, in the midst of his discussion, Dante borrows from Boethius to make the point that popular glory is vain since it rests upon the opinions of the undiscerning and vulgar.41

It follows that by using Dante to make the point that the people need to have faith in their rulers, the argument in Discourses I.liii replaces Dante's concern for the menace associated with popular lack of discern- ment with concern for the menace associated with popular lack of trust or faith. It also alters Dante's teaching in other ways. Dante's argument for leaders of judgment and justice, like David and Solomon, is now sub- ordinated to an argument which emphasizes the need for popular political faith and for persuasive leaders, a point that Machiavelli rein- forces in the next chapter. This is not to say that Dante fails to recognize the importance of persuasion, nor that Machiavelli disdains the qualities represented by a David or a Solomon.42 Machiavelli simply misuses Dante insofar as Dante becomes part of an argument which appears to place the need for a ruler's persuasiveness on par with his need for virtue and judgment. In place of Dante's argument for political, if not spiritual, rulers on the Aristotelian model, we now have an argument for rulers who can instill confidence or faith on the Savonarolan model. In-

deed, the argument of Discourses I.liii may be said to diminish Aristotle more directly. The Aristotle who takes exception to those who identify ruling ability with rhetoric becomes less imposing as Machiavelli increases the emphasis on ruling persuasiveness and its complement, propaganda.43

Discourses I.liii, then, furthers the argument initiated in I.xi. Whereas in the earlier chapter Dante marks the shift from the Roman to the Chris- tian religion, in the later he points to the political effects of that shift. The same quality which made Savonarola successful in spiritual mat- ters-the ability to inspirefede-is now demonstrated to be most needful in political leaders. Not only has Christian trust replaced ancient fear, Christianity's requirements are now coextensive with politics. Its values are now the values of both the political and spiritual worlds.44 The faith

41. CONV. I.xi.5-10.

42. MON. I.xv.9, III.xv.9-12. 43. Strauss, Thoughts, 173, 297-8. Propaganda is here used in the sense that the Church

employs in its Societies for the Propagation of the Faith. 44. [I.206].

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268 Machiavelli's Dante

and confidence in the life to come, and the hope, which are the spiritual characteristics of Christian men are qualities that the new Machiavellian leader must inspire in his followers. The successful Machiavellian politi- cian must emulate and improve upon Savonarola, who, to borrow from the Prince, found it easy to persuade his followers but difficult to hold them in that persuasion.45 By way of Machiavelli's Dante we become aware of one of the remarkable paradoxes of Machiavellian thought. The teachings of Machiavelli, Christianity's adversary, are apparently more a function of the strength and appeal of Christianity than those of Christianity's apparent advocates, including Dante. We recall that Dante, trying to accommodate Christianity with Aristotelianism, pro- posed a world order that was in some measure politically independent of religion. A comparison of Machiavelli's Dante with Dante himself, then, leads us to say that Machiavelli departs from Dante because, unlike Dante, he does not resist Christianity's penetration of the political world.

IV.

We can now reformulate the question posed earlier. Given their ap- parently contradictory characters, how does Machiavelli expect to ac- commodate the fear and insecurity characteristic of the Roman world with the faith and certainty needed for modern persuasion? Indeed, the arguments on persuasion in Discourses I.xi and I.liii, with their emphasis on using and instilling fede, appear antithetical to the arguments in Discourses II.i and II.xvii for reinstituting fear-induced military valor. Machiavelli seems to offer us competing stimuli, trust and fearfulness, as the necessary propelling forces for his new politics. The Prince's use of Savonarola to emphasize the importance of holding men to their persua- sion is, for example, immediately followed by the teaching that suc- cessful rulers must be ready to apply force when persuasion fails. Machiavelli employs Dante to remove one of the barriers to ancient fear, the gentiluomini, and to bring out the need for political faith. But in so doing he raises the question, What common political ground is possible for fear and faith?"4

45. PR. VI [19-20]. 46. Dante points to the problematic aspects of Machiavelli's position. As he presents the

case, Christianity provides a kind of "certainty" that arises in the promise of "future glory" and is foreign to ancient thought (see, Peterman, "Dante and the Setting," 632-3). The demand for such certainty extends into temporal matters according to the view that the ways of this world parallel the ways of the heavens. Thus, the tranquility of the next world becomes a model for temporal peace (MON. I.xvi.2, GAL. IV.4). Machiavelli may be said to build upon this position but, to rephrase the point in the text, how can he do so in a world which demands the revival of fear?

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Larry I. Peterman 269

At this point, we may return to the argument on artillery in Discourses II,xvii. As already noted, Machiavelli holds that "universal opinion" overestimates artillery's impact insofar as it believes this new device has destroyed the possibility of old-style valor. Roman armies, Machiavelli says, would have held their own even in the face of this prototypical modern weapon. And, in keeping with the lesson in Book I that there is a sameness in human affairs, Machiavelli would extend this into the present. Properly motivated modern soldiers can withstand artillery without compromising its powerful potential. The contemporary prob- lem is seeing to it that men are not overwhelmed by the violence of modern "instruments of fire." Properly trained and led, they can learn to compensate for their quite understandable fear of artillery. We learn in Discourses II.xvii that offensive-minded armies commanded by those who know how to employ artillery without placing undue faith in it, manned by infantry undeterred by its terrors, and staffed by officers un- dismayed at being within its reach anywhere on the field, can emulate the virtues of old. Common agreement about artillery's impact and common sensitivity to its fearsomeness do not foreclose military behavior con- sistent with that of the virtuous Roman legions. Indeed, artillery's fearsomeness provides an impetus to the reemergence of old-style valor by reintroducing the fear, or a variant of the fear, that animated the legions. At all ranks, artillery increases fear by making the possibility of death more immediate, although it does not threaten armies in the aggre- gate much more than did ancient weapons.47 Artillery's usefulness, in this sense, extends beyond the field. It serves to recreate the fear lost when Christianity, according to Machiavelli's account, set aside uncon- ditional warfare and the equation of defeat with death or slavery. Ar- tillery thereby serves as an antidote to the Christian way of living, which is characterized by dangers that men fear only a little. Consciousness of the terrors of artillery creates an opportunity for reestablishing military virtue on a basis that approximates that of ancient virtue.48

What artillery represents in the Machiavellian scheme of things may also be indicated by the relationship of Discourses II.xvii to I.xi and the final chapter of the Discourses, III.xlix. The artillery chapter stands mid-

47. The violenza delle artiglierie is described at the conclusion of II.xvi [1.273]. Artillery is called instrumenti de'fuochi at the beginning of II.xvii. The other comments in the text are from the body of II.xvii [I.274-80].

48. See above, n. 39. Artillery also erodes the influence of the gentiluomini who repre- sent an obstacle to Machiavelli's new ways and orders. By lessening the effectiveness of fixed fortifications and of defensive warfare, it weakens their defensively oriented regimes. Cf. DISC. II.xviii.

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270 Machiavelli's Dante

way between these other chapters, the sixty-sixth of the 132 chapters which they span. Numerology and its dangers aside, the interesting feature of this set of chapters is that it places Machiavelli's statement on artillery between statements on the interrelationships, religious and political, of confidence and fear. We have already discussed Discourses I.xi and its transition from Roman religion based on fear to Christian religion based on faith and trust. In Discourses III.xlix, on the other hand, Machiavelli outlines the new provisions required to maintain freedom in a modern republic. Here he calls for "wise physicians" to treat "accidents" and recalls the terrifying and terrible acts by which Rome kept its citizens, and particularly its soldiers, in line. Machiavelli's statement on artillery is situated between statements which acknowledge the force of Roman religious fear and of Christian faith and demonstrate the need for a modern political equivalent of medical science and for the prudent use of terror. Religious fear and faith on the one side are balanced, if you will, by confidence-inducing science and fear-inducing statecraft. Conversely, ancient fear and modern faith are balanced on the one side and science and terror on the other. This allows us to speculate as to whether Machiavellian artillery might represent a modern conjunc- tion of fear and trust since it, like medicine, is the product of confidence- inspiring science and, like Rome's "terrible executions," is a source of continuous fear. Certainly, Discourses II.xvii, at the heart of the Discourses's Dantean book, suggests a response to the question posed earlier. Human inventiveness, or science, here borne out in artillery, is at least a provisional source of the combination of fear and confidence needed to power the modern regime.49

This brings us to a final comparison of Dante and Machiavelli and, perhaps, an illustration of the ultimate division between them. Like Machiavelli, Dante views men in this world as permanently subject to fear and suggests that artistry or science may help bring such fear within acceptable bounds. Indeed, in making the latter point, he employs the same metaphors that Machiavelli will make famous. If Machiavelli tells us that virtue identified with prudence or knowledge may operate as a levee to control the potential torrent of malevolent fortune and that such virtue allows men to emulate the fox and avoid snares, the Divine Com- edy relates how fear impels the Flemings to build dikes and how guile relieves the fox's fear of traps. However, we have already seen that Dante does not go so far as Machiavelli to subdue the uncertain and fear-

49. [I1.442-5]. That science can simultaneously induce fear and confidence will be an idea familiar to anyone familiar with contemporary controversies regarding physics and genetics.

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Larry I. Peterman 271

ful. Beyond the things mentioned above, for example, he cautions us that the vengeance of God must always be feared irrespective of our belief that we need only fear what can do us ill. Even for Christians, it would seem, there is no escape from some degree of temporal uncertainty and fear. Despite their urge toward certainty, confusion being the worst punishment they can wish on their enemies, Christians live with an anxi-

ety that neither faith nor artistry can wholly dissipate.50 Dante's self-description in the Divine Comedy is, perhaps, as good a

testimony to this condition as one can find in his works. He is torn be- tween fear that his art cannot do justice to what he sees about him and fear that he would be untrue to his art if he fails to try to do it justice. Again, he is anxious because his fellows will resent what he has to say of them, but is afraid to remain silent lest future men think him a "timid

friend to truth." Here, his reflection on his own condition represents his accommodation between philosophy and practical matters and eternal and temporal matters. He echoes Aristotle in calling attention to his need to balance responsibility to the truth with responsibility to his fellows. On the other hand, his commitment to a beneficial art "that is to God, as it were, as a Grandchild" and the fear which that art creates in him cor-

respond to his portrayal of a God that is alternately a source of hope and fear, of certainty and anxiety." Dante's treatment of the interrelated matters of hope, anxiety, certainty, and fear is, then, part of his confron- tation with the great problem of the Christian-Aristotelian, to provide room for movement between the compulsions of reason and of revela- tion. In Machiavelli's hands, by contrast, the drive for assurance repre- sented by the attempt to control fortune and the revival of fear that ac- companies technological advances are overtly stripped of their intellec- tual and theological extensions. They become instruments whereby the masterful prince, combining the strengths of Numa and Savonarola, will recreate ancient politics in modern circumstances. Machiavellian artillery manifests the possibility of taking political advantage of the characteris- tics of ancient fear and modern faith without the encumbrances of an-

50. CONV. III.xi.9, 15; xii.8, IV.xxx.3; MON. II.v.24, III.vi.7; INF. II.88-9, XIV.17. Cf. INF. XXXI.95, PURG. XIII. 122. Cf. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Medieval Political Philosophy, p. 223.

51. INF. XI.97-108, XXXII.6ff., PARA. XVII.106-20, PURG. XVI.112. Cf. DISC. III.xxi and xxii, where Hannibal's ferocity and use of fear are favorably compared to the methods of Scipio, and the methods of Manlius Torquatus are favorably compared to those of Valerius. Dante also recognizes the political need for fear. At the center of the Comedy (PURG. XVI.112), he has Marco Lombard explain that when the sword, the empire, is joined to the crook, the church, both go badly because "the one does not fear the other."

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272 Machiavelli's Dante

cient political philosophy or modern theology. Machiavelli's antagonism to theology and his respect for inventiveness-the first pits him against the church, the second against ancient political philosophers-eventuates in a teaching where science replaces the tenuous combination of theology and philosophy one encounters in Dante.

A final note on all this is provided by Machiavelli himself. In Discourses II.xxiii, he quotes Livy in his argument that Rome was suc- cessful because it avoided middle courses in dealing with subject peoples. The quotation stems from Camillus's speech to the Senate concerning treatment of the conquered Latins. In both Machiavelli and Livy, Camillus urges haste while the minds of the Latins were stunned. However, Machiavelli excises a sentence from the original. He does not repeat Camillus's statement that the Senate must also move quickly because it was keeping so many peoples in suspense, torn between hope and fear. It is a measure of Machiavelli's bold new political science that the alternation between fear and hope that Camillus sought to alleviate becomes a source of rather than an obstacle to political health.52 For Dante, this alternation and its accompanying discomfort is mitigated by the possibility of salvation or speculation. For Machiavelli, there seems to be no such escape, unless, looking well forward, it lies in an act of will.

52. [1.296-7]; LIVY VIII.13 ("whatever you decide to do, you must make haste; you are keeping so many peoples in suspense, between hope and fear," in Livy: Rome and Italy, trans. Betty Radice [New York: Penguin, 1982]). On Machiavellian hope and fear, see Strauss's comments on how Machiavelli "explicitly urges all readers to hope, i.e., to aban- don themselves to the passion opposite to fear," while constructing a society wherein men "can be made good and kept good only by such compulsion causing fear as originates in other men" (Thoughts, pp. 215, 249; 232-3).

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1

PS 361 – Classical Political Thought

Dr. Philipp Kneis

M I C R O - L E C T U R E 7 :

P O L I T I C A L R U L E & U T O P I A I N T H E E A R L Y M I D D L E A G E S

The Middle Ages are a very dynamic period, and a time of great inventions and political

experimentation. In Italy, the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Florence are rising forces. Dante

Alighieri is writing in Italian, not Latin, thus propagating and defining the vernacular language. This

in itself is a stark departure from the belief in the cosmopolitan Roman ecumene. Speaking a so-called

“lay” or people’s language other than Latin officially empowers local peoples and their ways of

expressing themselves. With the addition of the invention of printing with movable letters by

Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, local languages are becoming important, probably for the first time in

history their speakers are being given a chance to represent their thoughts, and feelings, in a more

authoritative voice towards the speakers of an elite language. While Gutenberg’s first complete print

is his bible, the presses are soon used to also print lay translations of the Bible, which will soon be

used to fuel the Reformation. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, this is for the follow-up class on

Modern Political Thought.

Back in the Renaissance, the other Florentine writer we will be discussing is Niccolò Machiavelli,

whose Il Principe was modeled on Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. He is famous for his

political realism and presumed cynicism. Finally, we will end on a utopian note, and include an

English perspective investigating strange new worlds, and even stranger politics and social mores.

The very term “utopia” is coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in a political document meant to

criticize British political rule via a satirical text that describes a fictitious island, a non-place, and its

socio-political system that could be seen as good, although the satire paints a more complex picture.

In Greek, “topos” means “place”, “ou” means “not” and “eu” means good – the latter were both

pronounced as “u” at the time. Thus a “utopia” is a place that is both unreal and, possibly, good. To

clarify matters, a frightening vision of other places as not good is usually referred to as “dystopia”,

“dys-” meaning bad, thus a bad place. Given the complexities of most utopian societies, it could be

debated whether even a utopia has both positive and negative sides; and in reality, most of utopian

fictions and theories do indeed underline that.

Utopian fictions are foundational to any thinking about society and politics, and many great political

thinkers have pondered on the politics of the ideal state, and have theorized it, beginning probably

with Plato’s Atlantis story, and its highlighting of the alleged moral purity of the land-based Ancient

Athens vis-à-vis the perceived decadence of the cosmopolitan sea empire of Atlantis.

The utopian desire can be found in imagining how a city or state is supposed to be like, how a country

imagines itself, or imagines other countries to be — in order to find a place of understanding oneself

in relation to that dream.

2

Almost always, utopian tales hold a political dimension. They also usually have to be removed from

reality through time or space. Be it imaginary islands, exotic countries, alien planets or galaxies, a

jump to the past or the future, or sometimes simply dreams: such devices help to allegorize a story

about contemporary society. These are merely metaphors about the relative here and now.

Allegorization herein may hold two functions: to remove a story from the local and specific to the

universal and general level, or to simply protect its author from ridicule and persecution.

Writing about Atlantis and Ancient Athens, Plato actually wrote about Persia and Athens in his own

time. In using metaphor instead of direct political commentary, his story gained relevance for future

generations and has inspired all kinds of searches for the island of Atlantis itself. — Writing about

Utopia, Thomas More actually wrote about sixteenth century England.

Any utopian non-place could be expected to be an utterly fantastic world, populated with ideas and

beings beyond all that was known or imagined before. New vistas of understanding and feeling could

be uncovered; new dimensions, new worlds could look like nothing in our contemporary and very

local surroundings. One could say that in theory, this is true.

Sir and later Saint Thomas More writes his Utopia at a time (1516) when a new continent has been

revealed in 1492. This is the same year the Reconquista of Spain, the regaining of the peninsula from

the Moors, had been completed. Both processes fueled new political imaginations. Only a year later,

in 1517, Martin Luther published his “95 Theses” in his call for religious reform. More was executed

in 1535 because he did not want to sanction Henry VIII’s claim to be the new head of the Church, after

failing to secure a divorce from the Pope. The conflict between the Pope and worldly authorities like

the King of England, together with calls for a reform of the church, inaugurate the end of the Middle

Ages, and the breakup of the Roman (Catholic) world. This third death, like the previous two

(Socrates and Caesar) yet again stands for a complex moment of change at the confluence of religion

and politics.

3

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XVI, 2014, 2, pp. 506-515

506

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two

Educational Projects Compared

Giovanni Giorgini Università di Bologna

Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Cicero’s writings or his historical significance

as an example in politics and in rhetoric for Italian Humanist and Renaissance culture.

Machiavelli, well-educated in the classics, drew from Cicero the inspiration for embarking on a

project of education of a new ruling class: Machiavelli’s “principe nuovo” is new when compared

to his contemporary counterparts, imbued with Christian and Humanist notions of virtue;

however, the “principe nuovo” has an old soul, since the new notion of prudence elaborated by

Machiavelli has its roots in classical images of ethical and political virtue, in Plato, Aristotle and

Cicero. Machiavelli, just like Cicero, felt that what he had not been able to do in deeds with his

political action at the service of the Florentine republic, he could do through his writings:

putting his knowledge of men and politics, his expertise gained through practical experience and

constant reading of ancient authors at the service of his fellow-countrymen and of his patria.

The novelty of Machiavelli’s teaching consists in advocating a new kind of prudence, which

consists in the capacity to do evil in view of a good and elevated purpose: to save, preserve and

aggrandize the State.

KEYWORDS

Cicero, Machiavelli, Renaissance

1. Prologue

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Cicero’s writings or his

historical significance as an example in politics and in rhetoric for Italian

Humanist and Renaissance culture. Cicero’s influence was both direct (through

his works) and indirect (through authors who had read him and appropriated his

ideas and style); it exerted itself both theoretically (his philosophical and political

ideas) and stylistically. Quentin Skinner remarked that in Humanism and

Renaissance Cicero was the best known and most widely quoted author of classical

antiquity; Marcia Colish recalled that more than 600 hundred manuscripts of the

De officiis survive to testify the importance of this text.1 A well-read person such

as Niccolò Machiavelli could not avoid being exposed to the ideas and writings of

1 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, vol. 2, p. 2;

M.L. Colish, “Cicero’s De officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince”, Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978)

pp. 81-93.

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two Educational Projects Compared

507

Cicero which, as I shall try to show, had a profound impact on him and were

instrumental in enabling him to elaborate some of his most original views. More

specifically, Machiavelli drew from Cicero, a man who lived in troubled times in a

troubled republic similar to his own, the inspiration for embarking on a project of

education of a new ruling class: Machiavelli’s “principe nuovo” is new when

compared to his contemporary counterparts, imbued with Christian and

Humanist notions of virtue; however, the “principe nuovo” has an old soul, since

the new notion of prudence elaborated by Machiavelli has its roots in classical

images of ethical and political virtue, in Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. Machiavelli,

just like Cicero, felt that what he had not been able to do in deeds with his

political action at the service of the Florentine republic, he could do through his

writings: putting his knowledge of men and politics, his expertise gained through

practical experience and constant reading of ancient authors at the service of his

fellow-countrymen and of his patria. Amidst the civil wars which ravaged the

Roman republic and which would soon put an end to it, Cicero wrote his last

political works both as a testimony to something that was about to disappear and

as a legacy for future generations of politicians: both authors were looking at the

future because they could not detect any political personality who could work for

the common good in their present factional circumstances; both were thinking of

prospective young readers endowed with a sense of patriotism who could be

educated in order to rise up to the supreme task ahead.

2. Machiavelli’s education in the classics

Carlo Dionisotti’s opinion about Machiavelli’s classical education is well known

and I fully subscribe to it:

Machiavelli, among his other qualities, happened to be a well educated man

in letters, endowed with a refined ear and an expert hand at the art of

writing.2

Machiavelli received a traditional education in the classics for a man of his time

and status: as a boy he learnt Latin, which he used interchangeably with the

Italian vernacular as an adult, even in his private letters to his friends as well as in

his official missives.3 We know the names of some of his early teachers and from

2 C. Dionisotti, Machiavellerie, Torino, Einaudi, 1980, p. 113: “Machiavelli, fra le altre sue doti,

anche ebbe quella di essere uomo letterariamente bene educato, che aveva orecchio fino e mano

addestrata all’arte dello scrivere”. 3 For Machiavelli’s education see R. Black, Machiavelli, Oxford, Routledge, 2013. Black

maintains that Machiavelli had a good Humanist education and compares his Latin writings to

those of some contemporaries, like his friend Biagio Bonaccorsi, in order to maintain that

GIOVANNI GIORGINI

508

his father’s diary we learn which books were in his house and which other were

borrowed or somehow circulated in the house and we can infer some of his possible

readings.4 We also know that after his forced retirement from active politics,

caused by the return of the Medici family to Florence in 1512, Machiavelli

attended the literary meetings held in the Orti Oricellari, the gardens of Bernardo

Rucellai’s house, which hosted the Florentine Platonic Academy after its move

from the Medici’s villa of Careggi. This participation testifies, in case that his

literary output was not evidence enough, that Machiavelli was genuinely

interested in literary, philosophical and political questions which he liked to

debate with his literary friends. We can therefore surmise that sometimes he did

not have a first hand knowledge of certain texts, which he knew through these

conversations.

This image of a man of letters in constant conversation with ancient authors

is confirmed by what Machiavelli himself tells us about his free time. We know,

for instance, that in the years of forced political inactivity he found consolation in

reading Latin poets such as Ovid and Tibullus, as is testified by his famous letter

to Francesco Vettori dated December 10, 1513: “

I have a book with me, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of these minor poets,

such as Tibullus, Ovid and the like: I read of their amorous passions and their

loves, I remember mine, I take a lot of pleasure in this thought.5

This impression is confirmed by the way Machiavelli writes, which is

strongly influenced by the example and the style of Greek and Latin authors.6 To

Machiavelli was not at all inferior to well-educated men of his time. For a similar opinion see U.

Dotti, Machiavelli rivoluzionario, Rome, Carocci, 2003. On Machiavelli and his use of the classics

see also E. Benner, Machiavelli’s Ethics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009. 4 B. Machiavelli, Libro di ricordi, edited by C. Olschki, Florence, Le Monnier, 1954. On this book

see the interesting work by C. Atkinson, Debts, Dowries, Donkeys: The Diary of Niccolò

Machiavelli’s Father, Messer Bernardo, in Quattrocento Florence, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,

2002. 5 Letter of Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, December 10th, 1513: “Ho un libro sotto, o Dante

o Petrarca, o un di questi poeti minori, come Tibullo, Ovidio et simili: leggo quelle loro amorose

passioni et quelli loro amori, ricordomi de’ mia, godomi un pezzo in questo pensiero”. This letter

may have been inspired by Petrarch, Metrica I 6 to Iacopo Colonna: see S. Larosa,

“Autobiografia e tradizione letteraria nella ‘giornata’ di Niccolò Machiavelli”, Interpres 22

(2003) pp. 223-75. 6 This is a well-known fact, which has been systematically studied, with astonishing erudition,

by L.A. Burd (ed), Il Principe by Niccolò Machiavelli, Oxford, Clarendon, 1891 (with an

excellent introduction by Lord Acton); see also L.J. Walker (ed), The Discourses of Niccolò

Machiavelli, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950. C. Triantafillis, Nicolò Machiavelli e gli

scrittori greci, Venezia, Tipografia del Giornale “Il Tempo”, 1875 is still an interesting reading

for his extremist thesis: Triantafillis was persuaded that Machiavelli knew ancient Greek and

therefore read Greek authors in the original and imitated them.

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two Educational Projects Compared

509

take only one instance: the famous dedicatory letter of the Prince is full of

classical suggestions and borrowings. Its opening is taken after Isocrates’ oration

To Nicocles 1-2. Machiavelli’s statement there that he did not make use of “other

allurements or extrinsic adornments” (“qualunque altro lenocinio o ornamento

estrinseco”) is again a reprise of Isocrates, this time Philip 27-28; his choice not to

use “bombastic or magnificent words” (“parole ampullose o magnifiche”) refers to

Horace, Ars Poetica 97, where it is said that the ampullae are bombastic

expressions; while “varietà della materia e gravità del subietto” refers to the

Rhetorica ad Herennium and to Cicero’s De Oratore, where varietas and gravitas are

described as the two qualities which should always be present in a public

discourse; the humble style which follows from these prescriptions is the style

suited to teaching according to Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, XII, 10, 59).7 We

may provisionally conclude that Machiavelli was a genuine literary person, who

borrowed from the classics a style and certain expressions for rhetorical reasons, in

order to make his prose more elegant and suited to his audience.

More substantially and to the point, Machiavelli was in constant dialogue

with classical authors, from whom he drew inspiration and against whom he

elaborated some of his most famous ideas. There is thus a twofold influence of

classical authors on Machiavelli, one positive and one negative. This influence is,

however, remarkably strong and I think we should take Machiavelli seriously

when he states that the ancients were superior in most departments to the

moderns and when he consequently advocates a return to ancient modes and

ways, in politics, religion, morality and military art: his ‘revolution’ is in fact a

return to the ancient.

3. Machiavelli and Cicero

Such twofold influence can be distinctly detected in Machiavelli’s relation to such

a fundamental author for the Humanist culture as Cicero.8 Machiavelli

appropriated certain insights of Cicero while he openly rejected other ideas of his,

which he found mistaken; he debated subjects that had been examined and given

a classic solution by Cicero (such as whether it is better to be loved or feared; or

the pros and cons of liberality in politics). The relation between the two thinkers is

strong and polemical –and therefore worth exploring. Since both authors were also

first rank politicians in their respective countries, we may start from their opinion

on the importance of political education. As Ezio Raimondi observed, Humanist 7 See B. Richardson, The Prince and Its Early Italian Readers in M. Coyle (ed), Niccolò

Machiavelli’s The Prince. New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester-New York, Manchester

University Press, 1995, pp. 18-39. 8 Colish too maintains that Cicero exerted a positive as well as a negative influence on

Machiavelli: p. 82.

GIOVANNI GIORGINI

510

culture followed Cicero in making the orator a paradigmatic hero: Cicero, for his

part, had found in the eloquentia which follows from ratio the defining feature of

our shared humanity.9 For Cicero the orator, the statesman, is the epitome of a

capacity which is unique of human beings, that of creating laws and operating for

the common good through eloquence;10 the statesman is both a man of letters and

of action, a vir bonus dicendi peritus (where the accent is not only on the bonus as it

was the case for Cato);11 the flourishing of eloquentia brings human beings out of

their initial bestial condition where violence stands in place of eloquence and the

strongest rules.12 The condottiere Francesco Colonna in the Art of War is exactly

some such complex character, a general who is also a man of letters and an orator,

capable to quote Frontinus, Plutarch and Xenophon, dexterous on the battlefield

as well as eloquent in spurring the soldiers to fight.

The great Victorian editor of the Prince Lawrence A. Burd had already

drawn the readers’ attention to the dependence of certain ideas of Machiavelli

from topics examined by Cicero in his works. For instance, Machiavelli’s

treatment “on liberality and thriftiness” in Prince 16 is strongly influenced by

Cicero’s considerations “de beneficentia ac liberalitate” in the De officiis. This

work was particularly congenial to Machiavelli and “operates like a shadow text

for parts of Il Principe”:13 it contained a lengthy praise of political life, together

with famous arguments in support of a possible reconciliation or rather

harmonization and identification of utile (the individual interest) and honestum

(the common good). The possible reconciliation of honestas and utilitas, the

honourable and the expedient, was not a novel idea for Cicero, who had already

argued for it in his De inventione (written about 86 BCE) and in the De oratore (55

BCE). In the De officiis (44 BCE) Cicero went on to state that there is one simple

“rule” (regula) for all cases in this matter, namely “that which seems expedient

must not be morally wrong (turpe); or, if it is morally wrong, it must not seem

expedient”.14 In the De officiis Cicero also maintained that liberality, when

supported with one’s personal wealth, destroys its own source, causes

impoverishment and forces to rob other people, thereby becoming a source of

hatred instead of love for a politician; these considerations are obviously very

9 E. Raimondi, Politica e commedia: Il centauro disarmato, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1998, p. 148, who

refers to the studies of Hannah N. Gray. 10 See for instance De officiis I, 13 where Cicero says that only human beings possess the veri

inquisitio atque investigatio, which arouses the desire to be governed only by just people who

care about the common good. 11 See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria XII, 1. See also the observations by W.L. Grant, “Cicero on

the Moral Character of the Orator”, The Classical Journal 38 (1943) pp. 472-478. 12 See Cicero, De inventione I, 2 and, in general, the De legibus and the De officiis. 13 J.A. Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli, Martlesham, D.S. Brewer, 2002, p. 76. 14 Cicero, De officiis III, 81. On this see the interesting G. Remer, “Rhetoric as a Balancing of

Ends: Cicero and Machiavelli”, Philosophy and Rhetoric 42 (2009) pp. 1-28.

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two Educational Projects Compared

511

similar to those put forth by Machiavelli on this subject.15 It is at this level,

however, that the two authors part way, for Cicero goes on to link true liberality

with moral duty (officium) and right (iustum); whereas Machiavelli is notoriously

uninterested in the moral consequences for the individual and looks at the

practical and political result of liberality: he therefore suggests to the prince, if he

is “prudent”, not to care about being considered thrifty, “non si curare del nome

del misero”.

On the other hand, it is against Cicero’s teaching that Machiavelli’s famous

admonishment concerning the duty to keep one’s word is directed. In examining

this topic in a passage in the De officiis, Cicero maintained that it was imperative

to stand by what one had sworn even in war; he condemned at the same time

those who commit injustice through fraud (fraus) and violence (vis), which he

personified with the fox and the lion, respectively, which he judged “utrumque

hominum alienissimum”.16 In the final lines of Book I, then, Cicero concluded his

account by vehemently stating that the political community (communitas) should

not have priority over everything, including temperance and moderation: for

there are certain actions which are so deplorable or so evil that the wise man

(sapiens) would never commit them, not even to save his country. For Cicero the

question can in practice be set aside because he cannot conceive of situations in

which the country may ask the wise man to do such actions.17 It seems evident

that the part of chapter 18 devoted to the “dua generazioni di combattere” of the

Prince aims at refuting Cicero’s doctrine, which would have come to mind to all

contemporary readers. This is even more evident because the beginning of the

chapter, the topic examined and structure of the argument clearly refer to Cicero’s

treatment of loyalty and the prohibition of fraud, which should not be used even

in war. Machiavelli, on the contrary, after stating that there are “two ways of

fighting”, one through laws the other through force, one typical of men the other

of beasts, goes on to say that the constraints of politics force the prince “to know

how to use the beast”. The clear tribute to Cicero, although it is devised to refute

his argument and actually to overturn it, serves the purpose to confer a dramatic

tone to the subject at hand: Machiavelli seems to be saying that when the

statesman is faced with the possibility of the destruction of the State, he is

entitled to use all sort of means to avoid this end; contra Cicero, namely against

the authority of tradition. It may be interesting to note that Cicero, in his turn,

was accused to have used glib, if not illegal means to have Catilina and his cronies

declared enemies of the Roman republic. Machiavelli would have commented that

15 See Cicero, De officiis I, 42-44 and II, 52-58. 16 Cicero, De officiis I, 41. 17 Cicero, De officiis I, 159.

GIOVANNI GIORGINI

512

“the country is well defended in whatever way it is defended, either with

ignominy or with glory”.18

Similarly, the question of what makes the statesman more influent and

capable “ad opes tuendas ac tenendas”, whether love or fear, is thoroughly

examined first by Cicero. Quoting his beloved Ennius, Cicero had stated that there

is nothing more suited to preserve one’s power and the State than the love of one’s

fellow-countrymen; while there is nothing more alien than fear, because fear

generates hatred and thus the desire to see the hated statesman dead. Cicero went

on to produce the case of Caesar (without mentioning his name) in order to show

that the people’s hatred brings about death, even in the case of a most powerful

person: “multorum autem odiis nullas opes posse obsistere, si antea fuit ignotum,

nuper est cognitum”.19 In chapter 17 of the Prince Machiavelli examines this

subject but deems very important to make a significant correction: he separates

fear from hate and famously maintains that what is important is “not to be hated

by the people (lo universale)”; this will remain one of his deepest convictions as it

is repeated in many places and in many works. On the other hand, Machiavelli is

persuaded that fear constitutes a stronger bond than love, in consideration of

men’s notorious unreliability and selfishness; most times –he considers in a sad

vein in Discourses III, 21- people follow and obey those who make themselves

feared more than those who make themselves loved. Being loved, feared or hated

depends on the qualities of the statesman and here the visions of the two thinkers

diverge completely. For Cicero is adamant in maintaining that pretence and

appearance are not conducive to real glory because they are soon discovered;

whereas Machiavelli overturns completely Cicero’s argument and utters one of his

most famous statements: since human beings judge by the appearances and

“everyone sees what you look like but few touch what you are” what matters is to

appear virtuous; indeed, he adds with unabashed consistency, if one actually

possesses certain virtues cannot refrain from exercising them; in politics, however,

it is better to “seem to possess them” so that one can exercise them or not

according to the necessity of the circumstances.20 It is important to notice that

Machiavelli is not replacing Cicero’s virtues with a “technique” –as most

commentators still argue- here;21 rather, he is replacing Cicero’s virtues with a

18 Machiavelli, Discourses III, 41. 19 Cicero, De officiis II, 23. 20 Cicero, De officiis II, 43; cfr. Machiavelli, Prince 17. 21 See J.J. Barlow, “The Fox and the Lion: Machiavelli replies to Cicero”, History of Political

Thought 20 (1999) pp. 627-645: “Cicero is thinking of virtues, Machiavelli of techniques” (p.

634); Barlow finds Cicero to be altogether incoherent and this fact explains such contrasting

interpretations of his text (p. 644). D.J. Kapust, “Acting the Princely Style: Ethos and Pathos

in Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and Machiavelli’s The Prince”, Political Studies 58 (2010) pp. 590-

608; Kapust maintains that Machiavelli overturns completely Cicero’s vision and that even if

the prince possesses a virtue, this is certainly not the moral virtue and decency of Cicero.

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two Educational Projects Compared

513

different virtue, a new kind of prudence which consists in the capacity to do evil in

view of a good and elevated purpose, nay the most important purpose: to save,

preserve and aggrandize the State. This new virtue is the result of a process of

political education which starts with the identification of the final goal of political

activity, its summum bonum –the preservation of the State; which is different

from the preservation of the ruler’s own power, although the two ends may

sometimes coincide. Having a grim view of human nature, Machiavelli believes

that without the authority of the State and the law and order it guarantees, no

good life, no virtuous or ethical life of any kind, indeed no life at all is possible.

This virtue enables the (new) statesman to remain ‘good’ even when he commits

evil deeds; namely, it enables him to identify correctly those dramatic

circumstances in which there are no honourable or straight means to preserve the

State and therefore it is necessary to use unjust, illegal and immoral means. Isaiah

Berlin identified very well this point in Machiavelli, whom, in his opinion,

uncovered an insoluble dilemma: he realized that not all ultimate values are

necessarily compatible with one another and therefore recognized that ends

equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other.22 Machiavelli

therefore warns his prospective new statesman that by entering politics he may

wind up damning his soul. This is because the virtues and ends of Christian

morality are different from those requested by responsible politics, a realm in

which there is an element of necessity which Machiavelli brings to the fore and

emphasizes repeatedly: the new prince, in order to preserve the State, is often

forced “to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion”.

He must therefore be able to “enter evil, if necessitated”.23 Evil remains evil in

Machiavelli’s vision and human beings face thus a tragic choice: if they want to

follow the injunctions of Christian religion, they should refrain from entering

politics; if they do enter this realm, they must be aware that it might be required

from them to act in a way incompatible with the salvation of their soul.

Machiavelli unveiled how politics is the realm of tragic existential choices.24

The contrast between the two thinkers on this subject is exemplified by

their different judgment on Romulus and the killing of his brother Remus. For

Cicero, when Romulus “decided that it was more expedient for him to reign alone

than to share the throne with another, he slew his brother”: blinded by a false

appearance of utility, he showed no piety or humanity and committed a terrible

Kapust concludes, echoing Cicero’s definition of the orator, that Machiavelli’s prince “is

certainly not a good man, skilled in speaking” (p. 606). 22 I. Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli” in Against the Current, Oxford, Clarendon, 1979,

pp. 45-79. 23 Machiavelli, Prince 18. 24 See G. Giorgini, “Machiavelli e il problema delle «mani sporche». Considerazioni sul male in

politica”, Biblioteca della Libertà 49 (2014) pp. 19-35.

GIOVANNI GIORGINI

514

crime.25 Machiavelli, on the contrary, while still considering Romulus’ action a

crime, excuses it on the ground that it was committed to create a new political

arrangement, a republic and a vivere civile, and therefore for the well-being of the

country and the common good: “it follows therefore that, while the deed accuses

him, the effect excuses him” –he concludes.26

Another Ciceronean influence can be detected in Machiavelli’s idea that the

princes are responsible for the behaviour of their subjects and, more generally,

that their example has a very significant impact on the citizens. In the De legibus

III, 32 Cicero had stated that:

Hence vicious princes are the more pernicious in their effects on a republic, in

that they not only themselves introduce vices, but impregnate the citizens

with them: so that they are nuisance not merely because they themselves are

corrupt, but because they corrupt others and by example do more harm than

they do by sinning.

Machiavelli, besides continuously encouraging the prince to give “great examples”

to his citizens,27 comments that in the States where there are robberies the blame

falls on the princes and their “wickedness” (tristitia), not on the natura trista of the

peoples.28 Conversely, Machiavelli argues that the example of a “good man” can

bring a republic to its original good condition and can therefore preserve it. This is

because institutions need to be ‘vivified’ by the virtue and work of a good man;

other good men will follow his example. Indeed, if a republic was so lucky to have

someone who from time to time renovated the laws with his example, it would not

only escape the inevitable ruin, it would last forever (la sarebbe perpetua).29

4. Cicero and Machiavelli: Two conflicting educational projects

We may conclude that notwithstanding their different takes on important

subjects, Cicero and Machiavelli had two important features in common. Both

lived in very troubled times for their countries, characterized by prolonged civil

wars and neglect for the common good by all parties involved. In this grim

situation both believed that the only way out consisted in educating a new

generation of statesmen who had their priorities straight and who therefore cared

for the common good, the respublica, above all other things. They were both

achingly aware of the desperate situation their countries were living in and they 25 Cicero, De officiis III, 41. 26 Machiavelli, Discourses I, 9. 27 See Machiavelli, Prince 21. 28 Machiavelli, Discourses III, 29. 29 Machiavelli, Discourses III, 1 and III, 22.

Cicero and Machiavelli: Two Visions of Statesmanship and Two Educational Projects Compared

515

both had an acute sense of personal failure for not having been able to be more

effective in their political action. Indeed, by looking at Cicero’s inability to save

the Roman republic from the ambitions of such politicians as Caesar, Pompey,

Antony and Octavian Machiavelli was prompted to elaborate his own ideas about

how a “well-ordered republic” should deal with extremely ambitious personalities:

it should welcome citizens who gain their reputation “publicly”, who are honoured

for their services and good counsels to the republic; it should forbid all attempts to

gain reputation “privately”, namely through marriages, lending money and doing

other things which create partisans.30

As a result, Cicero and Machiavelli both fell back on the project of creating

a new kind of statesman through their writings; indeed, writing replaced political

action, as they both candidly declare.31 Being both practical men, their eyes were

certainly on the current situation but their mind was looking at the future, at

those future politicians who could be created, moulded through education.32

Replying to Atticus in his dialogue De legibus, Cicero states very clearly that his

discourse on laws and education is not conceived for the present men or the

current senate but rather addresses future statesmen (de futuris: III, 29). As for

Machiavelli, he states many times in the works he wrote post res perditas that his

intention was to instil virtue in the young people who read his writings:

For it is the office of a good man to teach others that good which because of

the malignity of the times and of fortune, he has not been able to accomplish,

so that, many being capable, some of those more loved by Heaven can

accomplish it.33

“Many being capable”: Machiavelli’s project was to educate in the art of State

many young readers and turn them into the statesmen of the future. Interestingly

enough, in order to do so he deemed it necessary to teach the prospective

politicians the virtue of the ancients so that they could avoid the vices of the

moderns.

30 Machiavelli, Discourses III, 28. Interesting considerations on this subject in A.S. Duff,

“Republicanism and the Problem of Ambition: The Critique of Cicero in Machiavelli’s

Discourses”, The Journal of Politics 73 (2011) pp. 980-992. 31 In De officiis III, 3 Cicero says that he learnt from educated men that “among evils one ought

not only to choose the least, but also to extract even from these any element of good that they

may contain”. This notion is very similar to Machiavelli’s advice to pick the less bad course as

good in Prince 21. 32 See the very interesting observations on the use of rhetoric in this context by V. Kahn,

Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton, Princeton, Princeton

University Press, 1994. 33 Machiavelli, Discourses II, Preface.

Title:

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Record: 1

Seeds of the secular state: Dante's political Philosophy as seen in

the De Monarchia.

Davis, Derek

Journal of Church & State. Spring91, Vol. 33 Issue 2, p327. 20p.

Literary Criticism

DE Monarchia (Book)

DANTE Alighieri, 1265-1321

POLITICAL science -- Early works to 1800

CRITICISM

Examines the background, content, and implications of Dante

Alighieri's `De Monarchia' as a classical treatise on political theory.

Evaluation of Dante's political philosophy; Historical context in which

the treatise was written; Dante's life in Florence, Italy during the

Renaissance; Church and state tension; Content description of the

`De Monarchia.'

8003

0021-969X

9605010101

Religion and Philosophy Collection

SEEDS OF TE SECULAR STATE: DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AS SEEN IN

THE DE MONARCHIA

Dante Alighieri is among those rare poets who have profoundly stirred the imaginations of people

everywhere since he penned works like The Divine Comedy and Vita Nuova seven centuries ago. Few

people today, however, know Dante as a political philosopher whose seminal thinking in many ways set the

course for the development of Western political theory. This essay examines the background, content, and

implications of Dante's classical treatise on political theory, De Monarchia, a work that today must be

recognized for its significant contributions to the birth and growth of the secular state as a viable model of

political order.

De Monarchia was written at a transitional time in history--the shift from the Middle Ages to the

Renaissance. In fact, historians have frequently debated the question of whether Dante (1265-1321)

belongs to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.[1]

This question becomes especially pronounced in the evaluation of Dante's political philosophy. In De

Monarchia, he wrote as one still committed to the centuries-old Gelasian theory of the cooperation of the

two sovereign spheres, spiritual and temporal, yet he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming

for the state its true independence. Dante, therefore, may rightly be called a medieval man foreshadowing

the Renaissance, a true watershed between two eras. While the formulation of the new ideology advancing

the secular state as the primary political unit was reserved for,the Renaissance, developed most notably by

Dante's fellow Florentine in the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli, it was Dante, in his De Monarchia,

who began to close the door on the medieval view of a unitary commonwealth under the dual authority of

the pope and the emperor.

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The De Monarchia, examined in the context of the papal imperial struggles of Dante's day, shows Dante's

goal to be a statecraft that would provide for world peace. His solution, a world monarchy under a world

emperor, would minimize the principal impediment to peace--papal intervention in political maters--but

Dante's own commitment to a Christian commonwealth prohibited him, in the end, from denying to the

church an ultimate supremacy. Nevertheless, the De Monarchia contains groundbreaking thought on the

theory of the secular state, such that Dante may rightly be called a significant figure in the development of

Western political theory. Before addressing the De Monarchia, however, it is necessary to examine the

historical context in which it was written, as it was Dante's own particular experiences in Italian politics that

motivated him to write De Monarchia.

DANTE'S LIFE IN FLORENCE

It was at Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance,[2] that Dante Alighieri was born in May of 1265. The city

was then under its first republican constitution and was sharply divided between the partisans of the pope,

the Guelfs, and the partisans of the emperor, the Ghibellines. The Guelfs gained control of Florence in

1266, an event which greatly pleased Dante's family who, though of noble ancestry, were neither wealthy

nor particularly prominent. Guelf control marked the beginning of a thirty-year period of relative peace and

prosperity in Florence, sometimes elusive conditions in the great city already known for its artistic and

intellectual life.[3] During this time, Dante received his education, owing much to the influence of Brunetto

Latini, a scholar and philosopher who figured largely in the councils of the Florentine commune. Dante

married in 1295 and the following year became actively involved in the political life of a prospering

Florence.[4]

But success, it seems, made the proud Florentines more quarrelsome than ever. As Dante wrote years

later, "The new people and the sudden gains have generated pride and excess."[5] Struggles for power

became commonplace among Florentine Guelfs, and the two factions that developed, the Blacks led by the

Donati family and the Whites led by the Cerchi, eventually fought a ruthless civil war in 1300. Dante's part in

these troubles cannot be traced with any certainty, but it is known that he held a number of communal

offices after 1295 and that he was elected as one of six priors to the city's governing body, the Signoria, in

1300.[6]

The Florentine political events of 1300 proved to be fateful for Dante. The Signoria, with Dante as one of its

priors, sought to lessen factionalism among the Blacks and Whites by banishing several of the leading

members of each faction. Despite the opposition of Dante and the White leaders to papal interference in

Florentine affairs, Pope Boniface VIII invited Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip of France, to enter

Florence in 1301 to settle the differences between the two rival factions. Seeking to enhance his own

control over Florence, Boniface unwittingly assisted the Blacks to seize power, and more than six hundred

Whites were condemned to exile.[7] In 1302, Dante, with a number of other Whites, was charged with

corruption in office. Refusing to pay a fine of five hundred florins on moral principles, he was permanently

exiled and was to be burned alive if he should ever come within the jurisdiction of the republic.[8] Dante

never returned to Florence.

Dante's political philosophy was related both to his exile as well as to the endless dissensions between the

papal and imperial parties before and during his lifetime. For a period of roughly one hundred fifty years

prior to Dante's exile from Florence, the Italian city-states had been the focus of imperial territorial designs.

In these advances, the ally of the Italian cities was usually the papacy.[9] On imperial advances against

such cities as Allesandria (1167), Barbarossa (1174), Genoa and Venice (l238), Verona, Padua, and Ferrara

(1240s), Padua (1256), Adda (1259), Benevento (1266), and Tagliacozzo (1267), papal forces intervened

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and sought to impede, usually successfully, the imperial armies.[10]

The alliances with the popes had their cost, however, as the Italian cities soon discovered. The popes

increasingly aspired to rule the Italian city-states themselves, and especially the Regnum Italicum.[11]

Resistance to these advances frequently led to the excommunication of kings and rulers of the Italian cities.

Eventually, by the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the papacy controlled politically much of Italy, save

Tuscany and other areas of central Italy. Yet the popes sought to expand their influence there as well. It was

the interference of Boniface VIII in 1301 in Florence that, when protested by the city's Signoria, resulted in

the excommunication of the entire Signoria of "Whites," including Dante, who, as already mentioned, also

was exiled. The popes managed during the same period to win control of the Romagna (east-central Italy),

traditionally the major pro-imperial stronghold. As Quentin Skinner has observed, "The outcome was that by

the end of the thirteenth century, the Papacy had succeeded in winning direct temporal control over a large

area of central Italy, as well as a considerable measure of influence over most of the major cities of the

Regnum Italicum."[12] In all of this, Dante observed again and again the elusive nature of civil peace and

was already becoming increasingly resentful of what he considered to be an excessive role of the church in

political affairs.

THE CHURCH-STATE TENSION OF DANTE'S DAY

The aggressive papal tendencies just described were matched by the formation of an ideology to legitimate

the papal claims to temporal rule.[13] The primary feature of medieval political thought, as it grew to

maturity in the eleventh century under the direction of Pope Gregory VII (1075-1084), was the conception of

a single universal society, unified under the divine will, expounded in the last resort by a single authority.

The Roman Catholic Church, endeavoring to enthrone itself over all the peoples of the world, made the

determined attempt to unify all life, in all its reaches--political, religious, social, economic, intellectual--under

the control of the divinely appointed head, the pope. Thus there arose the doctrine of hierarchy in which

God's heavenly authority was passed to an ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth. In this worldview the

legitimacy of a civil ruler depended not on consent from below, but on a position in a hierarchy ordained

from above.[14]

Along with this idea of a universal, all-embracing hierarchy, its severance between two orders of life, the

spiritual and the temporal, was generally accepted by theorists in the Middle Ages as the eternal counsel of

God. Pope Gelasius I (492-496), who drew heavily on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, had already laid the

foundation for this perspective by postulating that the temporal and spiritual powers, each divinely ordained

and sovereign in its own sphere, were to cooperate in the realization of the "City of God" on earth.[15] In the

words of Gelasius: "There are two things, most august emperor, by which the world is chiefly ruled: the

sacred power of the priesthood and the royal power. Of these, the priests carry the greater weight, because

they will have to render account in the divine judgment for the kings of men."[16]

The conflict inherent in this dualism and the requisite unity became the starting point for speculative

discourse between church and state. Most theorists of the Middle Ages would not accept the dualism as

final; reconciliation for the sake of divine unity was always believed to be attainable. The conflict arising out

of this tension between the temporal and the spiritual was continuous through the Middle Ages, and the

discourse frequently pitted the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities in a struggle for the free exercise of

their divinely perceived functions.[17] In the event of an irreconcilable clash of interests, however, the pope

usually would have the final word; such an arrangement was best calculated to achieve, in theory, what

most rulers and subjects wanted most--order and unity in society.[18]

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Beginning in the ninth century under the Frankish King Charlemagne, a long and disastrous struggle

developed between the kings and emperors on the one hand and the pontiffs on the other over the issue of

ultimate supremacy. Until the middle of the eleventh century, the temporal rulers were the dominant

members of the imperial-papal partnership that sought as its end a Christian society. During this period, due

largely to the logistical problems attendant in administering a geographically large empire, the papacy

generally was powerless to enforce its claimed authority over emperors and feudal lords.[19]

The papacy, however, through spiritual renewal and renewed boldness in challenging the temporal authority

of the emperors, subsequently achieved new heights of power, especially under the pontificates of Gregory

VII and Innocent III (1198-1216). Brilliant, shrewd, and well-versed in ecclesiastical tradition, Innocent

claimed for the papacy "the plenitude, so in the extent of his power, [he] is pre-eminent over all, since he is

the vicar of Him whose is the earth and the fullness thereof, the whole world and all that dwelleth

therein."[20] Boniface VIII affirmed Innocent's triumphant proclamation, especially in his famed Bull of 1302,

Unam Sanctum, which asserted that in a Christian society "there are two swords, the spiritual and the

temporal one . . . it is necessary that one should be below the other and thus that the temporal should be

subordinate to the spiritual power."[21]

Confronted with these all-embracing claims which the popes backed up with considerable military might, the

Italian cities sought to retaliate. But what was needed was a political ideology to legitimate their attack on

the powers and immunities being claimed by the church. Florence, the self-appointed guardian of "Tuscan

liberties,"[22] would produce in the person of Dante (albeit while in exile) the most formidable attack on the

church's claims to temporal power by arguing for an imperial counterbalancing of the pope.

PREPARATION FOR THE DE MONARCHIA

The election in November 1308 of Count Henry IV of Luxembourg as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

and the events in the years immediately following motivated Dante to pen the De Monarchia. Upon his

election, Henry VII promptly allied himself with Pope Clement V, declared his subordination to the spiritual

authority, and vowed a crusade to restore peace to Italy. Under the Hapsburgs, Rudolph and Albert, Italy

increasingly had become divided and unstable politically. With aspirations of uniting his kingdom's subjects

everywhere, Henry turned his attention toward Italy. In 1310 he entered Italy at Turin with five thousand

troops; finally an emperor was coming into Italy, one who was prepared to cooperate with the pope.[23]

An exultant Dante saw the event as the advent of a golden age, as God's hand working in human history to

bring about world peace. In a letter written to Italy's kings, dukes, marquises, and civil leaders, Dante

proclaimed that a divine moment had arrived: "[God] has raised up another Moses, who will catch away his

people from the oppressions of the Egyptians and lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey."[24] For

Dante, Henry was the "bridegroom Caesar," and Italy, which heretofore had been pitied, would soon be the

envy of the world.[25] Moreover, Dante was ecstatic in likening the emperor to the Savior: "Behold the Lamb

of God, behold him who hath taken away the sins of the world."[26] Dante's fervent use of religious

language was not intended to ascribe deity to the emperor; it was designed merely to underline a point that

he would later make in the De Monarchia, namely, that the independent authority of the emperor derives not

from the pope, or from God through the pope, but from God himself.

Making peace in Italy, however, required more than the divine authority ascribed to the emperor by Dante.

Moreover, the announced alliance between Henry and Clement seemed of little importance to the Italian

people. Guelfs in the various cities, drawing on traditional Guelf stances, were frequently hostile to the

emperor. Yet Ghibelline uproars became a common experience in the northern cities when, for example, the

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emperor, in the effort to appease Guelf factions, would authorize the return of Guelf exiles. The Ghibelline

contingents in various cities generally gave the emperor warm receptions, but welcoming celebrations were

sometimes disrupted by Guelfs, thus destroying the political equilibrium so delicately and precariously

maintained already.[27]

In a separate letter to Henry, Dante urged the emperor to continue through Italy, even to Florence, the pin

holding together the entire Guelf League. Then, in a letter addressed to the Florentines, Dante bemoaned

the turbid consequences of the absence of the emperor in his own region: "When the throne of Augustus is

vacant, the whole world loses its way."[28] Henry had requested of Florence that it desist from its advance

against neighboring Arezzo. In his letter to Henry, Dante was enraged by Florence's denial of Henry's

request. The Florentine mayor, Betto Brunelleschi, asserting his proud city's ancient rights, declared,

without reservation, that Florence never had lowered its horns for any lord. With such an attitude, it was not

surprising that in early 1311, Florence began making military preparations and fortifying its walls to defend

itself against the emperor.[29]

All of this seemed mad to Dante, who in his scathing letter to the Florentines, addressed them as "the arrant

scoundrels within the city."[30] In his letter, Dante claimed that Florence was making a show of its defense

of liberty, yet was acting in violation of the will of God, of nature, and of all mankind.[31] The military

preparations paid off, however, as the Florentines were later able to rebuff what they considered to be an

imperial siege of their city.[32]

In the spring of 1312, Henry left friendly Pisa and marched on Rome. What he met there instead of the

friendly welcome promised by Clement was an armed camp, with Robert of Sicily (still smarting from his

failure to be chosen emperor instead of Henry) blocking his way. Almost literally Henry's men had to fight

their way to the basilica of St. John Lateran, where, instead of at St. Peter's, as Clement had promised,

Henry VII was crowned emperor. Henry's rapidly deteriorating relationship with Clement suffered further

damage when Clement demanded that Henry refrain from attacking Naples and that he make a truce with

Robert of Sicily. This turnabout was unexpected by Henry, but he responded with his own defense of his

independence from papal authority. Henry dispatched encyclicals declaring that his government of the

empire was a direct gift from God, and that the pope ruled in spiritual matters only.

In his encyclicals, Henry likened earthly government to the celestial hierarchy and declared that all men and

kingdoms ought to be subject to the emperor. Henry further refused the pope's request to take an oath not

to invade Robert's kingdom in Sicily. The pope responded to all of this by commanding Henry to leave

Rome and to never return to church lands.[33] It was into this melee of renewed antagonisms between

church and state that Dante stepped in with his De Monarchia.[34]

THE DE MONARCHIA

De Monarchia was written to defend the proposition that the emperor had the right to absolute power over

the world's people and governments in temporal affairs, a right ordained by God and subject to no limitation

by the pope. Though it was written in a moment of political crisis, Dante's purpose apparently was to write a

philosophical treatise that would transcend his own day, since he made no direct references to

contemporary people or events.

The treatise is divided into three books with chapter divisions. In all three books, Dante marshaled his

arguments from Holy Writ, as well as from the writers of antiquity, and in particular, Aristotle, Cicero, Livy,

and Virgil. In Book I, Dante sought to prove his basic assumption that a universal empire is indispensable to

the well-being of mankind. The proper goal of the peoples of the earth, individually or collectively

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considered, Dante maintained, drawing from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, is the realization of their

intellectual potentialities. Yet civil strife impedes mankind from the realization of this goal. Seeking to find

the root of the fundamental evil of civil strife, Dante discovered it in the sin of cupidity to which all of God's

creatures are prone. Cupidity can be removed from any person only when he or she already possesses

everything, and only a universal monarch, possessing all, could qualify. Dante wrote:

But when there is nothing to be desired there can be no cupidity, because the passions cannot remain when

their objects have been eliminated. But the Monarch has nothing to desire, since the ocean alone is the limit

of his jurisdiction--unlike other princes. . . whose jurisdictions are limited by one another's frontiers. It follows

that of all mortals the Monarch can be the purest incarnation of justice.[35]

Dante diplomatically avoided the direct accusation of cupidity in the papacy, although it does appear

resoundingly in The Divine Comedy, where he accused the papacy, whose "avarice afflicts the world,"[36] of

taking from Constantine that which was not its own, as well as of joining the "sword. . . to the crook,"[37]

that is, invading the civil sphere at every turn.

World peace and, conversely, the avoidance of civil strife, Dante argued, can be maintained only through a

world empire. The form of such a universal empire is monarchy--the rule of a single prince who alone can

achieve unity of mankind. Dante elevated the argument for universal monarchy above the level of civil

necessity to that of cosmic and divine perfection. God is the first cause of all creation and singly rules all.

Moreover, humanity comes nearest to achieving its goal when it most resembles God: "Therefore, when

mankind is subject to one Prince it is most like God and this implies conformity to the divine intention, which

is the condition of perfection."[38]

In arguing for a universal monarch, Dante acknowledged the existence of lower forms of body politic. As

John Morrall has insightfully noted, Dante believed with the other Aristotelians of his time in the city as the

ideal unit in which to live and find felicity; however, as Morrall observed, Dante also believed the existence

of wars between cities demanded the creation of a yet higher political authority that would govern the world

peacefully.[39]

In Book II, Dante sought to prove that the Roman Empire was the only true empire that ever existed. This

was no mere Italian prejudice surfacing; for Dante, "the Roman people was ordained to rule."[40] It mattered

not that at the time, through a transitory delegation of powers, the German princes were the electors of the

emperor. The empire, by a historic and natural right, was Roman, and the emperor therefore a Roman

prince, just as the supreme pontiff was a Roman bishop.[41] Rome, and no other, was to hold the seat of

Caesar and the chair of Peter.

Dante's argument for the primacy of the Roman Empire was historical as well as theological. Historically, he

argued at length that the Roman conquest of the world happened lawfully. The Roman people were a most

noble people,[42] a theme borrowed from Virgil. Dante further asserted that whoever wills the good of the

community thereby wills the advancement of what is good. By bringing many peoples under their rule, the

Romans acted for the benefit of the community of mankind because common rule might result in world

peace.[43] Moreover, "that holy, pious, and glorious people" repressed their greed in order to bring peace to

the world community.[44] He agreed with Aristotle's argument in his Politics that some peoples are born to

rule, while others are born to be ruled, and moreover, he asserted that history bears witness to the reality

that nature ordained the Romans to rule.[45]

Theologically, Dante argued that God is always acting providentially in history and, therefore, God ordained

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the Romans to rule.[46] In an interesting and novel line of reasoning, Dante addressed the relationship

between the Roman Empire and the coming of Christ, arguing that Christ's choosing to be born under the

authority of Rome proved the legitimacy of the empire. Thus the chronological sequence of Christ's birth

and the ascendancy of the Roman Empire was no coincidence; it was the stamp of God's approval upon the

legitimacy of the Empire.[47]

Having proven in Book I that a world emperor is essential to peace among men and in Book II that the

worldwide Roman Empire is the jurisdiction of the emperor, Dante proceeded to the most polemical, if not

the most crucial, part of his treatise. In Book III, Dante framed a most important question: "Whether the

authority of the Roman Monarch . . . is immediately dependent on God, or whether his authority comes

indirectly from some other, a vicar or minister of God (I [Dante] am referring to the successor of Peter) who

is entrusted with the keys of the kingdom of heaven."[48] Dante's familiarity with Scripture was his main

weapon in Book III. As a source of authority, Scripture was to be primary, not the traditions of the church as

the decretalists maintained. In chapters 3 to 10 he sought to refute specific papal arguments that included

allegorical interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. He also considered extensively a major text

which the proponents of papal superiority relied upon, Matthew 16:19, where Christ leaves the keys of the

kingdom to Peter, concluding that the kingdom refers only to heaven and that, therefore, Peter's office has

jurisdiction over only spiritual matters (i.e., showing the way of salvation), not temporal matters.

In the final chapters of Book III, Dante turned to the positive arguments for imperial independence. In

Chapter 12, he argued that since the empire existed before the papacy, it is not possible that its

prerogatives are derived from the papacy. In Chapter 13, he argued that natural law as well cannot support

papal claims of supremacy because the church is not a creation of nature, as is the temporal order, but is

rather a supernatural creation with limited purposes.

The weightiest chapter in Book III is the last, where Dante contended that the authority of the empire

derived from God, not the papacy. The argument is relatively straightforward: man has two natures, one

physical and the other spiritual, which have profound political consequences. He declared:

Unerring Providence has therefore set man to attain two goals: the first is happiness in this life, which

consists in the exercise of his own powers and is typified by the earthly paradise; the second is the

happiness of eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of the divine countenance (which man cannot

attain to of his own power but only by the aid of divine illumination) and is typified by the heavenly paradise.

This explains why two guides have been appointed for man to lead him to his twofold goal: there is the

Supreme Pontiff who is to lead mankind to eternal life in accordance with revelation; and there is the

emperor who, in accordance with philosophical teaching, is to lead mankind to temporal happiness.[49]

Was Dante committing himself to two completely independent planes of existence? His statements seem to

postulate two separate goals (earthly and heavenly) attained by two separate means (philosophy and

revelation). Yet herein lies the distinctiveness of Dante's political thought. In order for mankind to achieve

happiness in this earthly life, which requires peace among all peoples, the political ruler must not, as a ruler,

be subordinated to the pope. Previous scholastic philosophy had regarded man's heavenly goal of salvation

as the all-sufficing end to which the secondary goal of earthly happiness might be a useful aid. As one

scholar has noted, "Dante seems to have been the first thinker to elevate the earthly destiny of Man, in

particular his political and philosophical development, into an end in itself."[50]

Dante's effort was to forge a carefully balanced dualism in which church and state were independent of

each other. But could he sustain this separation right through the end of the De Monarchia? In a word, no.

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In the end, Dante was overtaken by his Christian commitment to the Catholic Church, the medieval

admission that conflict between the realms of church and state are inevitable, and the belief that in the

event of a clash of competing interests, the emperor must bow before the pontiff. Dante concluded: "Caesar,

therefore, is obliged to observe that reverence towards Peter which a first-born son owes to his father; so

that when he is enlightened by the light of paternal grace, he may the more powerfully enlighten the world,

at the head of which he has been placed by the One who alone is ruler of all things spiritual and

temporal."[51] Dante's determined effort to create an absolute division between the spiritual and temporal

spheres gave way, in the end, to the Gelasian view-- papal supremacy. In the words of Marjorie Reeves,

Dante "at the last opens a door through which the ecclesiastics could once more invade the political

territory."[52]

One might logically ask at this point how Dante's view of imperial independence was any different from that

of the line of imperial rulers, from Charlemagne to Henry VII, who sought for the emperors a right of

temporal rule free from papal interference. The answer is complex, but Dante's view must be seen as

adding something fresh to the medieval debate about how the spiritual and temporal spheres were to

cooperate in ruling a Christian commonwealth.

Medieval theory generally held that ecclesiastical and civil governments were two activities of a single

whole.[53] The goal was a Christian society ruled by a partnership; if the partnership crumbled, it was

believed, all of society would crumble with it.[54] Each generation faced the same disagreements over the

allocation of responsibility between the popes and the emperors; the divisions generally were attempted

along the lines of sacred and secular, spiritual and temporal, earthly and heavenly, and the like. The greater

debate, however, focused on the issue of supremacy in the partnership. Because society was to be a

Christian one, the overlap in spiritual and temporal duties of the partners was seen as natural; the claim to

supremacy was merely the consequent attempt to stabilize society by giving to either pope or emperor the

final say when the lines of division of responsibility were blurred or when clearly competing interests

surfaced. Some emperors, like Charlemagne and Otto I (936973), saw themselves as the coordinating and

sovereign head of society, whose jurisdiction extended to spiritual as well as temporal interests. Others, like

Frederick II (1215-1250), grudgingly gave in to papal supremacy but asserted the imperial jurisdiction over

temporal concerns.[55] Henry VII, according to William Bowsky at least, seems to have fallen in the latter

category, asserting principally his God-given right to rule in temporal matters free from papal

interference.[56]

For Dante, though, supremacy was not the ultimate issue. He, like Henry VII, held to the ideal of the papal-

imperial partnership but argued for the imperial authority in temporal matters in a unique way. He focused

on a divinely created dual nature in mankind--one nature seeking a temporal enjoyment in this life and the

other nature seeking a spiritual enjoyment to be cultivated now but ultimately enjoyed in the afterlife.

Temporal enjoyment was the God-granted jurisdiction of the emperor; spiritual enjoyment was the

God-granted jurisdiction of the pope. He was willing to grant to the pope an ultimate supremacy, but only as

a formality. For Dante, supremacy did not need to be an issue if the independent authority of the emperor

was recognized.

Dante's real contribution, then, as seen in the De Monarchia, lay in his unique theoretical justification for the

emperor's authority--the isolation of mankind's temporal from his spiritual makeup--which gave to the state,

exercising its rightful authority over mankind's temporal makeup, an independent and elevated position.

REFLECTIONS ON DANTE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

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A number of additional observations' can be made regarding the impact and implications of Dante's political

thought. To begin with, one might reflect upon the accuracy of a statement offered by the British historian

and statesman, Lord Bryce (1838-1922), who called De Monarchia an epitaph rather than a prophecy.[57]

To be sure, Dante's call in the early fourteenth century for a world empire ruled by a world emperor has not

yet been heeded In fact, some critics have termed Dante's vision of a universal monarchy an idle and

idealistic dream.[58] Actually, however, Dante's proclamation was only the bold revival of a great ideal that

had guided Western rulers for many centuries--in the empire of Constantine, of Charlemagne, and of the

German emperors. Echoes of the same utopian dream of a oneworld government remain alive today. These

echoes represent only the dream of a strong central controlling power that can keep human greed in check

and provide a lasting peace. Dante merely was able to express the dream with more passion and more

eloquence than any who preceded him. Perhaps the De Monarchia, in its identification with an idealistic

passion for a world government that might usher in world peace, a passion that persists to this day, as well

as in its identification with the more secular thought that would help produce the nation-state of the future,

was much more prophetic than Lord Bryce could envision.

Another observation concerning Dante's political thought arises from the suggestion made earlier in this

essay that Dante, while belonging to the Middle Ages, also was a forerunner of the Renaissance. This

should here be affirmed. Humanism, which became a dominant intellectual force during the movement now

known as the Renaissance, emphasized the fundamental belief in the dignity and value of man.[59]

Humanism was neither religious nor antireligious at its core, as Paul Kristeller, among others, has rightly

argued,[60] but as an intellectual movement, it certainly brought to bear a competition between religious and

nonreligious concerns.[61] In Dante's isolation of the temporal dimension from the spiritual dimension in

human beings, asserted for the purpose of demonstrating that the emperor held absolute power over the

peoples of the world in temporal affairs as a right ordained by God and subject to no limitation by the pope,

one can easily see the essentially nonreligious concerns of mankind (political affairs) competing with the

essentially religious concerns (submission to the pope) in the mind of Dante. This reveals in Dante a

dawning humanism[62] seeking to break with the medieval religious orientation of political life. E. H.

Kantorowicz has argued that Dante indeed made a clean break:

Dante's metaphysical surgery exceeded that of others who before him had separated the empire from the

embrace of the Church . . . by appropriating, as it were, the intellect for the state and leaving the care of the

soul to the Church. Dante did not turn humanitas against Christianitas, but thoroughly separated the one

from the other; he took the "human" out of the Christian compound and isolated it as a value in its own

right.[63]

While Kantorowicz's perception of the degree of Dante's separation of the religious element from the

political domain might be overextended, if only slightly, Dante's bifurcation of the temporal and the spiritual

in the political domain at the least foreshadowed later developments in political theory. As Felix Gilbert has

shown, the Renaissance humanists adopted historical example as the basis for political theory, a marked

shift from the abstract theoretical (and vitally religious) foundations used by the medievalists.[64] Moreover,

as the political thinking of the humanists progressed after Dante's day, the religious orientation of political

life began to wane and almost disappeared altogether.[65] But Dante, possessing features of medieval

thought and fore shadowing, if not introducing, the new humanist thought, might appropriately be called in

terms of his political theory a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This thesis, moreover,

is supported by Christopher Dawson who discovered in Dante a synthesis between the tendencies of

medieval thought and certain newly emerging patterns of Western culture. Dawson wrote: "While on the one

hand it [this synthesis] looks back to the medieval idea of a universal society and to the tradition of

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Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, it looks forward to the Renaissanee, to the national

monarchy and to the new humanist culture."[66]

Finally, although Dante's political hopes were fixed on the universal empire of the past and not the national

monarchy of the future, his De Monarchia, in its foretelling of the break with the unitary conception of society

that had for so long dominated European political theory, paved the way for the development of secular

political theory Despite the seriousness of Dante's proposal for rescuing society from the domination of the

pope, Skinner is probably correct in asserting that Dante's proposal was less than satisfactory for certain

republics, like those in Lombardy and Tuscany, which were forever jealous of their liberties. Skinner has

suggested that while Dante's proposal would have allowed those republics to deny the right of the pope to

interfere in their affairs, it did so at the expense of branding them once again as vassals of the Holy Roman

Empire. In Skinner's own words, "What they needed most of all was a form of political argument capable of

vindicating their liberty against the church without involving them in ceding it to anyone else."[67]

Other Italian thinkers were to resolve this problem. The first to press his claims for the new autonomy of the

state was Marsilius (1275-1342) of Padua who argued in Defensor Pacis that each city republic is an

independent kingdom and not a vassal of any empire or superior civil structure. This framework, when

joined with the conception (already seen in Dante's De Monarchia) that the church has no temporal

jurisdiction, was quite satisfactory as the needed intellectual basis for separation by the republics from the

papacy.[68] But while it was intellectually possible for the republics to entertain thoughts of freedom from

papal domination and control of their affairs, it was practically impossible, in an age thoroughly dominated

by the principle of church-state partnership, for the republics to accord Marsilius's revolutionary treatise the

high praise it would receive in subsequent times--outside of the Italian republics.[69]

Two centuries later, Machiavelli (1469-1527) would reject the entire medieval theory of a universal society

and devote his keen intellect to the task of formulating the policy of the new secular national state. For

Machievelli, the state was a distinctly human institution with no formal ties to religion.[70]

Religion, however, was not easily extracted from the Italian political tradition or from the makeup of the

European national monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The complete divorce of church

and state was, therefore, to be first attempted only in a virgin nation on foreign soil; it was in the eighteenth

century that the separationist principles found in the political theories of Marsilius and Machiavelli were to

find their fullest expression in the United States Constitution.[71] While it would be going too far to give

credit to Dante for formulating lasting principles which later would provide the framework for the secular

state, it should not be an overstatement to say that both Marsilius and Machisvelli, as original thinkers who

broke new ground by calling for a secular state, were indebted to the Florentine political poet, Dante

Alighieri, for laying much of the essential foundation upon which they would build.

[1.] For example, William R. Estep, Renaissance and Reformation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986),

22, has raised the question, calling Dante medieval in his philosophical and theological presuppositions, but

Renaissance in his literary style. Edward Huline, The-Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution and the

Catholic Reformation (New York: Century Books, 1915), 91, assigns Dante to the Renaissance. George

Sellery, The Renaissance: Its Nature and Origins (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,

1962), 36, feels that Dante represents the last and the best of the Middle Ages. Finally, Luigi Sturzo, Church

and State (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 127, assigns him to two "epochs"-the

Middle Ages and Humanism. The author is aware of Marvin Becker's suggestion that the depiction of Dante

as occupying a middleground between past and future political thought has become a worn-out scholarly

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cliche. See Marvin B. Becker, "Dante and His Literary Contemporaries as Political Men," Speculum

41(1966), 665. But however frequent its use, it remains a valid depiction as indicated by the number of good

authors who have made its application, only a few of which have been noted here. Yet if this author

correctly reads Becker, he is not denying the accuracy of the depiction, only the fact that it does not tell the

whole story. Dante, argues Becker, had political sentiments which were concretely an expression of his own

time so that his position contained "more than the fruits of the past and the embryo of the future." The

present essay would affirm Becker in some of its particulars, but has as its theme a broader perspective

than Becker's, namely, the political views of Dante, especially as they refute to church and state, as seen in

the context of the historical development of Western political thought, and from such a perspective, Dante

indeed must be seen as an important link between two eras.

[2.] Estep, Renaissance and Reformation, 22.

[3.] Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence From the Founding of the City Through the Renaissance (New

York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 133-78; Francis Fergusson, Dante (New York: The MacMillan Company,

1966), 4-7. For a very brief but succinct description of the origin and nature of the Guelf and Ghibelline

parties, see p. 6 of Fergusson's work.

[4.] Dante, vol. 21 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), v.

[5.] Quoted in Fergusson, Dante, 26, from The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XVI, 73.

[6.] Ibid., 26-29. The struggle between "Blacks" and "Whites" was not, of course ethnically oriented. Rather,

the struggle centered on the degree of authority the pope should have in Florentine politics: the Blacks

advocated greater papal authority, the Whites lesser.

[7.] A good account of this episode is given by a nineteenth-century historian, R. W. Church, Dante and

Other Essays (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1888), 42-47.

[8.] Ibid.

[9.] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1978), 1:12.

[10.] Ibid., 12-14.

[11.] The term Regnum Italicum refers to that part of Northern Italy which corresponds to the Lombard

kingdom of the Dark Ages, which Otto I reincorporated into the German Empire in 962. See Skinner, The

Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:4, n.1.

[12.] Ibid., 1:14.

[13.] Ibid.

[14.] Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1982), 42; F. J. C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval

Thinkers (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 15; Christopher Dawson, "Church and State in the Middle

Ages," in Medieval Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1959), 70-71.

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[15.] James E. Wood, Jr., E. Bruce Thompson, and Robert T. Miller, Church and State in Scripture, History,

and Constitutional Law (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1958), 61.

[16.] Ibid. The emperor being addressed by Gelasius was Anastasius, who ruled from 491 to 518.

[17.] Raymond C. Gettell, History of Political Thought (New York: The Century Co., 1924), 13.

[18.] Wood, Church and State in Scripture, History, and Constittutional Law, 62.

[19.] Ibid., 62-63.

[20.] Quoted in ibid., 64.

[21.] Quoted in Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:15. 22.

[22.] Ibid., 16.

[23.] William M. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of Empire and City-State, 1310-1313 (Westport,

Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 54-60; Ricardo J. Quinones, Dante Alighieri (Boston: Twayne Publishers,

1979), 89.

[24.] Letter V (of the usual numbering of thirteen political letters ascribed to Dante); reprinted in Dante:

Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. with an Introduction by Donald Nicholl (London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 1954), 97. Dante's political letters are classics of political polemic and should be read by

students of Dante's political thought. They supplement, but in no way contradict, the De Monarchia.

[25.] Ibid., 99.

[26.] Ibid., (Letter VII), 110.

[27.] Bowsky, Henry Vll in Italy, 54-158; Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 89-91.

28. Letter VI as reprinted in Nicholl, Dante: Monarchy and the Three Political Letters, 103 (see note 24).

29. Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 9091.

30. Letter VI as reprinted in Nicholl, Dante: Monarchy and the Three Political Letters, 103.

31. Ibid., 104.

32. Quinones, Dante Alighieri, 91.

[33.] Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy, 159-70; ibid., 91-92.

[34.] The date of authorship of the De Monarchia is a thorny problem. It was written, according to some who

have studied the subject, as early as 1309. However the most trustworthy critics give it a date of 1312 or

1313, during or shortly after Henry VII's expedition through Italy. A good discussion of the dating of the De

Monarchia is found in Cesare Foligno, "Notes on the Date of the Composition of the De Monarchia," in

Dante. Essays in Commemoration 1321-1921, ea., Antonio Cippico, Harold E. Good, Edmund C. Gardner,

W. P. Ker, and Walter Seton (London: University of London Press, 1921),141-56.

[35.] De Monarchia, Book I, 11. All references from the De Monarchia are taken from Donald Nicholl's

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translation (see note 24).

[36.] Inferno, Canto XIX, Line 104, taken from The Divine Comedy, trans. H. R. Huse (New York: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, 1968).

[37.] Purgatory, Canto XVI, Lines 109-10.

[38.] De Monarchia, Book 1, 8.

[39.] John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 97.

[40.] De Monarchia, Book II, 6.

[41.] John A. Abbo; Political Thought: Men and Ideas (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1960),130.

[42.] De Monarchia, Book II, 3.

[43.] Ibid., Book II, 5.

[44.] Ibid.

[45.] Ibid. Book II, 6.

[46.] Ibid. Book II, 3.

[47.] Ibid., Book II, 2. One author has discovered a parallel line of reasoning in Dante's Convivio: even

before the birth of Christ, the Roman citizens were infused with divine love rather than human love, which is

why Luke can say in his Gospel that the world was at peace at the time of Christ's birth. See Michael

Richter, "Dante the Philosopher-Historian in the Monarchia," in Dante Soundings, ed. David Nolan (Dublin:

Irish Academic Press, 1981), 170.

[48.] De Monarchia Book III, 1.

[49.] Ibid., Book III 16.

[50.] Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, 101.

[51.] De Monarchia, Book III, 16.

[52.] Marjorie Reeves, "Marsiglio of Padua and Dante Alighieri," in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed.

Beryl Smalley (New York: Basil Blackwell and Mott, Ltd., 1965), 92.

[53.] Wood, Church and State in Scripture, History, and Constitutional Law, 65.

[54.] Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1475, 4th ed. (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 476.

[55.] Generally, see E.H. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 11941260 (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co.,

1957), 90-95

[56.] Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy, 187-88.

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[57.] Heranshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers. 135.

[58.] Abbo, Political Thought: Men and Ideas, 134.

[59.] Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York:

Harper and Row Publishers, 1961), 22, 125.

[60.] Ibid., 74.

[61.] Ibid., 70-91.

[62.] Kristeller has opined that humanism arose in medieval Italy about the end of the thirteenth century.

Ibid., 116.

[63.] E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 465.

[64.] Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," in Niccolo

Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1977),156.

[65.] Ibid.

[66.] Dawson, "Church and State in the Middle Ages," 85.

[67.] Skinner, The Foundations of Modem Political Thought, 1:18.

[68.] Ibid., 18-21. The extent of Marsilius's reliance upon the De Monarchia cannot be determined with any

certainty. Although Marsilius rnakes no direct references to the De Monarchia in his treatise, at least one

translator of Defensor Pacis has found a number of parallel features in the two works, so that it is not at all

unreasortable to suppose that Marsilius was quite familiar with the De Monarchia. Marsilius of Padua, The

Defender of Peace, trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 42, n. 24; 82, n. 3. 83,

n. 6; 99, n. 2; 278, n. 14. For an analysis of Defensor Pacis, see Charles Wellborn, "Marsilius of Padua: A

Modern Look," Journal of Church and State 4 (November 1962): 191-204.

[69.] H. Hearder and D. P. Waley, eds., A Short History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1963), 49-120.

[70.] Getell, History of Political Thought, 145.

[71.] In his classic treatise on the development of religious freedom in America, Sanford H. Cobb asserted

that "this revolutionary principle, declarative of the complete separation of Church and State, so startlingly in

contrast with the principles which had dominated in the past--ths pure Religiow Liberty--may be confidently

reckoned as of distinctly American origin .... Here, among all the benefits to mankind to which this soil has

given rise, this pure religious liberty may be justly rated as the great gift of America to civilization and the

world ...." Sanford H. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America: A History (New York: MacMillan Co.,

1902), 2.

One additional clarifying point might be made here. It is suggested here only that the framers of the United

States Constitution formally endorsed the notion of a secular state, free from any formal ties to religion, a

notion clearly advocated by both Marsilius and Machiavelli, and not that the United States adopted broader

Machiavellian principles in the sense that Leo Strauss has described Machiavellianism, as "government of

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the sword" which leads to tyranny. Indeed, the United States should be regarded as having been founded

on principles of moral theory, universal peace, freedom and justice, as Strauss argues. Leo Strauss,

"Machiavelli the Immoralist," in Machiavelli, The Prince, 183-84.

~~~~~~~~

By DEREK DAVIS

DEREK DAVIS (B.A., M.A., J.D., Baylor University) is associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of

Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is author of Original Intent: Chief Justice Rehnquist and the

Course of American Church-State Relations and co-editor of The Role of Religion in the Making of Public

Policy (forthcoming). Special interests include religious liberty, intellectual history, and taxation of exempt

organizations.

Copyright of Journal of Church & State is the property of Oxford University Press / UK and its content may

not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express

written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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427IMAGINED REPUBLICS: MACHIAVELLI, UTOPIA, AND UTOPIAThe Journal of Value Inquiry 34: 427–437, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Imagined Republics: Machiavelli, Utopia, and Utopia

MICHAEL JACKSON Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

1. Introduction

Most readers know of More’s life and canonization. Most people see Utopia through a soft focus of idealism, all the fuzzier for those who know it only by name and reputation. Machiavelli earned his reputation as the preacher of evil by 1559 when his work was proscribed on the Catholic Church’s Index. By 1595 readers understood the word “Machiavelli” as a synonym for evil in English, as well as French, Italian, and German.1 In 1995, Machiavelli for Beginners portrays the Florentine with the horns of a devil and there is nothing to alter that stereotype in the mere two thousand words spread over all its pages.2 In less than five-hundred years The Prince traveled from blasphemy to cliché. One man is a saint and the other a devil.

Their lives overlapped, with Machiavelli slightly senior to More. Each reacted to the civic humanist tradition of Rome particularly Cicero De Officiis.3

Each contributed to the renewal of that tradition. Each was a theorist and also a politician, defined as someone who holds public office. Each paid a price for political life. Each is best known for a single work, though both wrote much else. Each has a personal reputation beyond his book. The similarities extend to the books. Both The Prince and Utopia are slim volumes of little more than one hundred pages. Each is self-conscious about advice to princes, a well- established genre in their day. These similarities make their differences all the more noteworthy.

Twice Machiavelli criticized normative theory like that of utopia. In The Prince, Machiavelli anticipated More’s Utopia when he wrote: “Many have imagined up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does lives is so wide that man who neglects what is done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction.”4 Several conclusions follow from this. First, Machiavelli knew of utopian political theory or, as he puts it, “imagined republics.”5 Second, he respected the utopian effort to say “how one should live,” but argued it is removed from “how one does live.”6 Third, preoccupation

428 MICHAEL JACKSON

with how we should live leads to self-destruction. Note that he does not disparage normative thinking of how we should live. Like Saint Paul he is aware of that gulf. Nor does he imply that the gulf between how we should live and how we do live is fixed.

Machiavelli offered a further critique of utopia in a letter when he says: “I believe that the true way of understanding the road to Paradise is to know that of hell in order to avoid the former.”7 Again he does not disparage utopian thinking, but instead makes a personal commitment to find “the road to Paradise” by carefully avoiding, through understanding, the road to Hell. He does not say that avoiding the road to Hell is Paradise. The metaphor is a journey along a road. Taken together these passages warrant the label of realist for Machiavelli, at least since 1605 when utopian writer and politician Francis Bacon thanked Machiavelli with these words: “We are beholden to Machiavelli and others who wrote of what men do and not what they ought to do.”8

Though Machiavelli had no knowledge of Thomas More or Utopia, he knew of what he called imagined republics. The tradition of letters to Christian prince that The Prince parodies was full of fanciful recommendations.9 Machiavelli was not the first political philosopher to put realism in writing, but he was remarkably unapologetic about it. While More may not have known a book like The Prince, the text of Utopia makes clear that he knew of advisors to princes who encouraged the practices Machiavelli reviews. The conclusion from their similarities is that Machiavelli and More were, albeit unconsciously, in a common discourse.

Utopia has much in common with The Prince, making all the more odd More’s white reputation and Machiavelli’s black one. Specifically, both Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas More understand politics to have a logic of its own that takes it beyond conventional morality. As well, Machiavelli offers a critique of utopian thinkers who assume the best of everyone morally and practically. Yet it is also clear that Machiavelli had his own impossible, utopian dreams, namely a free and united Italy, which would emerge only hundreds of years later. Machiavelli’s attitude to utopia is complex.

2. Machiavelli, The Prince, and a Prince

The Prince circulated in manuscript within the year of its completion, thereafter, Machiavelli did not revise the text; it was published after his death in 1532. Utopia went through four editions. More made changes. The Prince was written in the vulgar Italian, while Utopia was in elite Latin. Machiavelli wrote in exile outside Florence. He had served as chancellor to the republican government of Florence for a number of years. His service included foreign missions, which made him sensitive to Italy’s low standing among the major powers of the day. After power politics restored the de Medici family to rule

429IMAGINED REPUBLICS: MACHIAVELLI, UTOPIA, AND UTOPIA

in Florence Machiavelli was deposed, exiled, and later tortured. Not all servants of the republic met this fate. Some who worked along side Machiavelli were retained and others but dismissed. At the same time, some were killed. Only speculation can answer why Machiavelli suffered as he did.10

Machiavelli affixed to The Prince a dedication to the new Medici prince of Florence.11 We might conclude that he wrote The Prince to win the favor of Prince Medici. While Machiavelli invited that conclusion when he confided in his letters that this was his intent, the truth is more singular. He made little effort in the remaining twelve years of his life to submit the book to Prince Medici. Moreover, at the same time he wrote the larger and more detailed book The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius’s History of Rome. The Discourses shows Machiavelli’s roots in the civic humanist tradition of republican government. He broke off writing The Discourses, according to his correspondence, to write The Prince.12 Circumstantial evidence alone braids together The Prince and The Discourses as vine to fence.

Since Jean Jacques Rousseau, at least, theorists have seen the republican stripes on Machiavelli’s shoulders and struggled to reconcile The Prince with that insignia.13 Rousseau’s simple insight was that Machiavelli taught that we are free politically to make our own fate.14 Others offer more complicated interpretations to integrate republicanism with The Prince.15 As compelling as the interpretations are, they turn on contextual evidence and neglect the subtly of the text of The Prince. There is contextual and textual evidence that Machiavelli works on several levels. How else could The Prince survive between the hammer and anvil of the cliché-smiths?

Two other works are pertinent. While a library catalogue lists many works by Machiavelli, he only published one in his lifetime, The Art of War. In addition, Machiavelli wrote plays, including comedies performed for the entertainment of his circle in exile, chief among them is The Mandrake. It, too, casts light on the meaning of his political theory.

The unity of The Prince and The Discourses deepens with an obvious parallel. Both books start with a letter of dedication. In addition to the dedication to Prince Medici that of The Prince also says that this book contains all Machiavelli knows of politics. Likewise The Discourses starts with a dedicatory epistle, one to two leaders of the Republican forces. In this letter he also says that the following, large book contains all that the author knows.16 The Discourses appeared posthumously in 1531. That the books were written at the same time over two years and start with this same avowal gives pause. Is one declaration true and the other not? Does one book contain Machiavelli’s true teaching and the other not? In fact both dec- larations are true in that the two books together contain the complete statement of his political theory as is confirmed by reference with The Art of War and The Mandrake.

430 MICHAEL JACKSON

3. More, Utopia, and Utopia

Three aspects of Thomas More and his Utopia are important. His advising a prince, the political arrangements of Utopia, and More’s relationship to Utopia. In Book One of Utopia, when Utopia has been but mentioned, Peter Gilles, Thomas More, and Raphael Hythlodaeus discuss advice to princes.17 Giles, who knows Hythlodaeus better, says he should serve a king with his knowledge and experience. He argues that Raphael could improve the lives of his fellows. Raphael declines because he has no interest in wealth or power. His denial induces More to second Gilles, urging Raphael to apply his talents and energies to public affairs even if at the cost of some personal inconvenience.

Raphael again refuses for three reasons. One of them is modesty. He does not think he is as highly qualified as they think. He also thinks that most kings are only interested in war to expand their realms, not in the science of improving them. As well, he maintains that advocating change is impossible. A policy seen in practice elsewhere, Raphael says, would be rejected in the name of tradition. That would include even a policy seen in the mind’s eye. In this short passage Raphael doubts that political theory can influence political practice.18 Moreover, it is explicit that the advisor would suggest change.

On the one hand, many political scientists conclude that constitutions must grow in an environment and cannot be transplanted from elsewhere or the mind’s eye. Efforts after World War I to transplant limited government to the Weimar Republic and Eastern Europe, and efforts after World War II to transplant democracy to Japan show how fraught with difficulty the process is. On the other hand, much of the present global embrace of small government by selling public assets is the result of the ideas of political theory.19 The result remains to be seen. In sum, theory does inform practice, though sometimes it does not always work.

There are also the political arrangements of Utopia described in Book II.20

Following the customary division into foreign and domestic policy, the chief feature of Utopia is uniformity. There are fifty-four identical towns and the people are homogeneous. Each person works in the fields for two-year turns. The residences are shared, not private. There is no private property. Nor is there ornamentation. Clothes last a lifetime. Most children follow the employment of their parents. Idleness is forbidden. In each town a few of the brightest are educated, about five hundred from twenty-four thousand. Only officials and intellectuals get special medical treatment. Supper is accompanied by music. The only other entertainments admitted are improving lectures. Travel needs a special permit. Euthanasia occurs. Overall, there is a high level of mutual surveillance to make each person conform. Breaking the adultery or travel laws leads to enslavement. These arrangements are enforced by an elaborate hierarchy of offices: Styward, one for every thirty households, Bencheater, one for every ten Stywards, and Mayor, elected for life by the

431IMAGINED REPUBLICS: MACHIAVELLI, UTOPIA, AND UTOPIA

Stywards from four popular nominees. There is much detail about who speaks with whom about what. These are the details unknown to those who recognize Utopia only by name. If they were known, its reputation might darken. There is more to Utopia in Utopia than these features, but concentrating on them assists the comparison of both the reputations and the theories of Machiavelli and More.

In foreign policy, Utopians pass from the dreary to the distasteful. Utopia takes the land it wants. Should the owners resist, the Utopians declare war. As blunt as it seems, the passage is nonetheless ambiguous. Within it More starts by expelling the natives and later implies that the land is not being used. Perhaps the natives differ from the legal owners, as they often did in the minds of Europeans.21 With the passage, More defends the seizure by limiting it to land not in use, though the natives might disagree. Terra nullius is a disputed doctrine today, but not then. Neither the natives nor the legal owners are respected by the Utopians.

Slaves are butchers, kitchen hands, and hunters, jobs beneath the dignity of Utopians. They are prisoners of war, “slaves by birth,” or foreign slaves.22

Among them are Utopian convicts. The Utopians also traffic in slaves by buying condemned criminals from other countries to serve them. The life of the slave in Utopia is so good that foreigners come to Utopia and volunteer for slavery. Does More, like Robert Nozick accept this surrender of autonomy as just?23 Machiavelli was never naïve enough to think that slavery was a good life, or that anyone was a slave by birth.

In war, the Utopians rely on secret agents, assassination of opposing leaders, bribery, treason, and mercenaries. Utopians never fight on their own soil. It is better to devastate someone else’s land than our own. That is a prescription many political leaders follow, as when Winston Churchill tried to fight the Germans in Norway and France as buffers to England. At the outset of the discussion of foreign policy, More justifies these Utopian practices on the grounds that this is the way so-called Christian princes conduct themselves. Utopians meet like with like. “Diplomacy is downright dishonest.”24 He goes on to say

If the very same people who pride themselves on suggesting such tricks to their rulers found the same sort of things going on in connection with a private contract, they’d be the first to denounce it . . . as criminal.25

Here Thomas More and Niccolo Machiavelli take common ground. That diplomacy has its own rules well apart from those of private life is

the central truth of Machiavelli’s political theory. For More it is suitable only to those who have not seen the light of Utopia: “that’s how kings behave out there” beyond Utopia.26 It is clear from The Prince that the foundation and security of a political community rests on savage and violent acts. The full

432 MICHAEL JACKSON

story of the founding of Utopia itself might bear witness to this. Even in The Prince, Machiavelli recognizes that such acts are beyond the pale of morality. At the same time, in The Discourses, Machiavelli emphasizes the importance of morality in private life once the polity is secure. Politics in some few circumstances of foundation and security is amoral so that citizens may be moral. More makes the disclaimer at the end of Raphael’s exposition that “I cannot agree with everything that he said, for all his undoubted learning and experience.”27 At the least, we must not identify More with every word of Raphael’s. That may also remind us to extend the same courtesy to Machiavelli by not attributing to him every theme explored in The Prince.28

4. Diplomacy and Politics

Thomas More and Niccolo Machiavelli agree that diplomacy has a logic of its own beyond conventional morality. What More means by “diplomacy” is what Machiavelli means by “politics.” It is the foundation and security of a political community in a chaotic and violent world. We might say that Machiavelli offers a close study of More’s view of diplomacy.

Where that first reference to “imagined republics” occurs in The Prince Machiavelli says that “a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.”29 In the passage, Machiavelli refers to “a man” but the context is of a man who is a prince, since the chapter concerns “how a prince should govern.”30 Machiavelli does not say that all people are vicious. He says that a prince acts among “so many who are not virtuous” inside the fatal circle of life.31 Even this overstates his argument. Machiavelli need only argue that a prince moves in circles where some people may be vicious, and where the virtue of others is unsure. To survive in the world of diplomacy a prince must “learn how not to be virtuous.”32 The prince must learn how not to be moral. It does not come naturally or easily to a prince, or to anyone else. It must be learned.

In discussing the need for a prince to avoid incurring the hatred of his subjects, Machiavelli says that because of the fickleness of the many, a prince can be hated for doing good as readily as for doing evil. Experienced politicians nod sadly at the truth of this observation. In such a world “a prince is . . . often forced not to be good.”33 Not only is the evil associated with Machiavelli’s name unnatural, and so has to be learned, once learned a prince may still be reluctant to use it unless forced by circumstance.

Somewhat earlier in The Prince, Machiavelli presents Agathocles of Syracuse, a contemporary of Hannibal, as an example of a decisive ruler who employed violence to shed enemies. As a man of action, Agathocles is praised at length, and then Machiavelli adds: “Yet it cannot be called prowess to kill fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be treacherous, pitiless, irreligious.”34 Why

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not? “These ways can win a prince power but not glory.”35 He goes on to condemn Agathocles for his “brutal cruelty, inhumanity, his countless crimes, which altogether forbid his being honoured among eminent men.”36 His criticism of Agathocles shows the complexity of his judgement. Agathocles illustrates the courage and ruthlessness that Machiavelli commends, but he also exceeded the necessity that marks the moral upper limit of the logic of diplomacy. Not everything is permitted by raison d’état. What is permitted is what is necessary and in proportion.

Machiavelli distils his teaching when he says that violence may be used well where it is used once and for all.37 This is the economy of violence.38

Use it to end, not to widen or to open, new conflicts. Machiavelli advocates violence only to prevent and deter more violence in the interest of political security. Thomas More never comes to terms with violence, only assuming, for example, that individuals defeated by the Utopians will accept the result. They are more likely to nurture hatred, if necessary in amber, for generations to take revenge. The news from the Balkans, the Middle East, or Northern Ireland puts paid to that assumption. Machiavelli may claim to be wiser and more realistic.

5. Machiavelli’s Political Theory

Reading The Prince and The Discourses together, the whole of Machiavelli’s political theory appears. A prince founds and secures a polis. To do so requires rising above conventional morality. Once founded, citizens in a well-ordered polity will depose a prince and install a republican government of equals. As the supreme political actor engaged in the supreme political act of creating a stable regime, a prince may exceed actions approved by the conventional morality of private contracts. To create order out of disorder a prince may have to kill, lie, and steal. A prince is a means to an end. A prince is unlikely to welcome such a transitory role, and likely to resist deposition, if foreseen. It is best then to omit it from the book directed to a prince. If The Prince is a book about deception, it also deceives its readers, particularly a prince.

The Prince has deceived many readers over the ages. Coming to it with prejudices derived from Machiavelli’s reputation, they note only the crudest of his arguments. They read the book quickly and superficially, much as a prince might, a man of action with no time for academic split hairs. Machiavelli’s argument is heavily qualified. He holds that it would be better if a sensible person took on the task of princely foundation. This is the reason for Machiavelli’s discussion of learning how not to be good, and being forced to use violence. But it is unlikely that such a person will be equal to the immorality needed. A prince is more likely to be Caligula than Cincinnatus. In the architectonic labor of creating a political order a prince mixes with many

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other ambitious individuals. Everyone will not be virtuous, or vicious. Because of the difficulty of knowing who is virtuous and who is vicious, Machiavelli tells a prince to act as if most people are vicious. This is but prudence, and the reason he speaks of “the many who are not virtuous.”39 Machiavelli is not utopian in the sense of assuming the best of everyone.

Both More and Machiavelli discuss mercenaries. More recommends their use. Utopia only fights abroad and no Utopian fights abroad. Mercenaries do all Utopian fighting. Mercenaries were common in the Sixteenth Century. They were the professional soldiers of the day in the absence of a profession of arms.40 In contrast, Machiavelli says mercenaries “are useless and dangerous”41

He also offers a political critique of mercenaries in his book The Art of War.42

The city-states of Italy used mercenaries and included Englishmen in their ranks, and Machiavelli was not alone in thinking that they formed a cartel. Profit and glory animate mercenaries, things they can only enjoy if they survive. These incentives reduce their ardor. They accepted public contracts to defend or attack. They made a great show with of noise, color, smoke, and dust while agreeing among themselves who was to win on the day and how to share the money. Mercenaries could not to be trusted. They would not die in battle for the patrimony. As Thomas More says, ever-higher bidders bought off the mercenaries.43 But they were not willing to die even for the highest bidder from Utopia.

There are two defects with mercenaries. One is that they are untrustworthy. Machiavelli and More both recognize this but react to it in different ways. According to Machiavelli, mercenaries undermine the civic virtue of a republic. Even if they were as useful as More assumes, Machiavelli wants a citizen army to cement the bond of citizens to the city and to each other. Machiavelli longs for heroic citizens on a Roman ideal who would give their lives for their patrimony against the barbarians from the next hilltop. Here Machiavelli shows a romantic streak, but his thesis is that a healthy civic culture is one in which citizens accept the obligation to defend. The Art of War is a detailed program about raising, training, motivating, and deploying a citizen army cast against Greek and Roman examples. Pericles’s Funeral Oration invokes the meaning Machiavelli had in mind: the noble death in battle, the raised monuments, the dignified survivors, and the memorial.44 The Romanticism recurs in the last chapter of The Prince, when he calls for Italian unity to drive out the various invaders and occupier, invoking the image of Italia.45 An image of this Italia personified adorned the walls of his office. That call was answered only three hundred years later. In the common use of the word, Machiavelli was utopian in his hopes for Italian unification.

The final piece in the puzzle of Machiavelli’s political theory is the vantage point afforded by his comic play The Mandrake.46 A wily schemer arranges a marriage that secures a fortune to the good of the city. If the schemer is Machiavelli and the city is Florence, then the prince is duped. The only two

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characters in the play who understand the civic importance of the union are the schemer and the woman who accepts the subterfuge for her own purposes. His own libido and vanity blind the princely figure. The schemer sees the interest of the whole, while the lady sees her place in that context. The wealthy husband is stupid enough to participate in his own downfall.

The Mandrake shows Machiavelli’s recognition that the good of the whole is possible. It has to be created, not assumed. To create it takes deceit and bribes. Such immoralities are justified as means to a good end, as long as they are in portion to the end. Each person has a place in the whole, but most people will have to be led into it by guile and deception. Some people may be led into it by education. Machiavelli’s concentration on the foundation and perpetuation of a polity distinguishes him from many utopian theorists, like Thomas More, who assume but do not analyze foundational matters. Machiavelli realizes that one function of a theory is to guide action. He does so in The Prince in a way that reflects the message of deceit, unifying signs and significance. Machiavelli is often accused of fathering modernism in politics.47 It also seems that he is of our own times in presenting his message of deceit in a deceit.

6. Conclusion

Machiavelli and More have much in common, as can be seen in their lives and their major works. Most importantly, they share an understanding that diplomacy exceeds normal morality. Machiavelli offers an unflinching study of that excess, while More makes light of it.

While Machiavelli would dismiss Raphael Hythlodaeus’s advice about imagined republics, Thomas More acknowledges the importance of Machiavelli’s advice in his observations on diplomacy. Machiavelli and More agree that the immorality of diplomacy is justified if it creates a peaceful political order. Studies of Thomas More’s remind us of his irony, wit, and love of rhetorical devices.48 These features make it all the more difficult to read his intentions into Utopia. It has been suggested that like the Hans Holbein portrait of Thomas More en famille, it is an elaborate code.49 Close attention to Machiavelli’s words reveals a measured analysis of a prince who creates the fence that defines a polity. The Discourses supplies the vine of republican government that grows over the fence, replacing it.50

Notes

1. See Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, The Portable Machiavelli (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979), p. 69.

2. Patrick Curry and Oscar Zarate, Machiavelli for Beginners (Cambridge, England: Icon, 1995).

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3. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume I, The Renaissance (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 255ff.

4. Machiavelli, The Prince (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961), p. 91. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Bondanella and Musa, op cit., p. 74. 8. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London: Oxford University Press, 1951),

xxi. 9. 9. Skinner, op cit., p. 117ff.

10. See Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolo Machiavelli (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) and also see Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (London: Harvester, 1989).

11. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 29. 12. Bondanella and Musa, op cit., p. 69. The Prince itself contains an allusion to The

Discourses on its opening page, p. 33. 13. See Jack Hexter, “The Loom on Language and the Fabric of Imperatives: The Case of Il

Principe and Utopia,” American Historical Review 69 (1964), p. 949. 14. Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger Masters (New York: St Martin

Press, 1978), book III, chapter VI. 15. Garrett Mattingly, “Machiavelli’s Prince,” American Scholar 27 (1958), p. 483; Sheldon

Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), p. 231; and Mary Dietz, “Trapping the Prince,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986), pp. 780.

16. Machiavelli, The Discourses (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970), p. 93. 17. More, Utopia (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965), pp. 41–42. 18. Ibid., p. 42. 19. See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between

Government and Marketplace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). 20. More, op cit., pp. 70ff. 21. Ibid., p. 80. 22. Ibid., p. 101. 23. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic, 1974), pp. 290–292. 24. More, op cit., p. 108. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 132. 28. See Hexter, op cit., p. 949. 29. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 91. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 108. 34. Ibid., p. 62. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 66. 38. See Wolin, op cit., p. 220. 39. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 91. 40. See Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy

(London: Bodley Head, 1974), p. 10. 41. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 77. 42. Machiavelli, The Art of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). 43. More, op cit., p. 85.

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44. See Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967), pp. 116–123.

45. Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 133–138. 46. See Mark Hulliung, “Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” Review of Politics 40 (1978), pp.

43–57 and Timothy Lukes, “Play therapy in Political Theory: Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” Teaching Political Science 9 (1981), pp. 35–38.

47. See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958).

48. See Damian Grace, “Utopia: A dialectical Interpretation,” Moreana 26 (1989), pp. 274– 302.

49. See Geraldine Norman, “How Hans Holbein hid a royal secret,” Times (18 June 1983). 50. I am grateful to Damian Grace for advice and encouragement, and to the editor of The

Journal of Value Inquiry for many improvements to the study.

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