Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince

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ROMAN MONARCHY AND THE RENAISSANCE PRINCE

Beginning with a sustained analysis of Seneca’s theory of monarchy in the treatise De clementia, Peter Stacey traces the formative impact of ancient Roman political philosophy upon medieval and Renaissance thinking about princely government on the Italian peninsula from the time of Frederick II to the early-modern period. Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince offers a systematic reconstruction of the pre-humanist and humanist history of the genre of political reflection known as the mirror-for-princes tradition – a tradition which, as Stacey shows, is indebted to Seneca’s speculum above all other classical accounts of the virtuous prince – and culminates with a comprehensive and controversial reading of the greatest work of Renaissance monarchical political theory, Machiavelli’s The Prince. Peter Stacey brings to light a story which has been lost from view in recent accounts of the Renaissance debt to classical antiquity, providing a radically revisionist account of the history of the Renaissance prince. is College Lecturer and Osborn Fellow in Medieval History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

PETER STACEY

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

79

Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

ROMAN MONARCHY AND THE RENAISSANCE PRINCE PETER STACEY Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521869898 © Peter Stacey 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction PART I

1

THE ROMAN PRINCEPS

21

1 The Roman theory of monarchy PART II

23

THE ROMAN THEORY AND THE FORMATION

OF THE RENAISSANCE PRINCEPS

73

2 The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps

75

PART III

THE HUMANIST PRINCEPS IN THE TRECENTO

117

3 Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae

119

4 Princely humanism in the Italian civitas

145

PART IV

THE HUMANIST PRINCEPS FROM THE

QUATTROCENTO TO THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

171

5 Princeps, rex, imperator

173

PART V

205

6

THE MACHIAVELLIAN ATTACK

The strategy

207

7 The battle

260

Conclusion

312

Bibliography Index

317 332 vii

Acknowledgements

A number of institutions have lent crucial support to this book. I need to thank in particular the Director and staff of the British School at Rome; the Director and Fellows of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London; and above all the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who have sustained this project with immense generosity from its inception as a doctoral dissertation to its completion after four invaluable years as a Research Fellow. I next have to thank Cambridge University Press, and in particular Richard Fisher, whose superb advice, support and enthusiasm have been extremely important to me. I must thank Chris Jackson, too, for his fine editorial work on the text. And I should also like to thank the anonymous readers who provided the Press with extraordinarily helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier draft. I am very grateful to various friends for their warm hospitality in Rome and in Lecce during the writing of this book: Henriette Sacchetti, Patrick Coppola, Luigi del Prete, Luisa Montecchi, The´re`se Boespflug, Gianfranco and Maria Lucia Rima, Pierfrancesco and Alessandra Chirizzi, Nando and Hilda Coppola and family. I must mention Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Alison Brown: their comments on my work and ideas and their support at various stages have been indispensable. Paul Botley, John Chalcraft, Christopher Kelly, Martin Ruehl, Angus Gowland and Geoff Baldwin have been the very greatest of friends, tirelessly reading and discussing my work, sharing with me their scholarship and insights with unflagging generosity and correcting me with considerable patience. It remains a great privilege as well as a great pleasure to be around them. In addition, I am profoundly grateful to Rich Sever, Ingrid Schro¨der, Adam Gold, Anne Amos, Shelagh Stacey, and, above all, to Silvia Rima, for their care for me and this book over recent years. The debt to my former research supervisor, David Abulafia, runs very deep indeed. He introduced me as an undergraduate at Caius to the viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Renaissance, and taught me to be, among other things, endlessly wary of all forms of provincialism when writing its history. He has been a model supervisor, fostering my commitment to the history of the Mezzogiorno in particular with boundless energy and placing at my disposal his immense learning and wisdom at every stage of my career. I cannot thank him enough for his help and friendship over the years, but I hope at least to continue to pay testimony to its formative effect in books to come. I am indebted most of all to Quentin Skinner. The scholarly and intellectual debts are evident on virtually every page of the book, but here I need to record that his utterly unswerving support and unfailing generosity at every stage of its writing have been just as essential to its completion. He has also taught me what it means to be encouraging, and that singular lesson – more than everything else that I have learnt from him over the years – has meant the most to me.

Introduction

The protagonist of this book is a Roman political theory which helped to define the intellectual and ideological contours of the European earlymodern state by performing an important historical and conceptual role in the formation of the Renaissance prince. This role has gradually become obscured over recent centuries, and the main purpose of the following chapters is to try to illuminate it. My explanation of the theory’s contribution to the history of the sovereign state consists in two basic parts. The first is in terms of its conceptual character: it is a theory about the sovereign princeps, and an argument which is explicitly concerned to delineate a series of relations between the princeps and the status of various entities. So, for example, the prince is said to have the ‘state’ of those persons whom he governs in his hand; he is described as a tutor of ‘the public state’; and his principatus is supposed to reflect the ‘state of the world’. These claims are connected to a distinctive way of thinking about persons which considers their status from the point of view of the universal law of reason, rather than from a purely local legal perspective. The theory holds that persons should be governed according to the same rationality which governs the cosmos. One consequence of this approach was that it introduced to Roman political discourse a novel way of looking at the question of what a free or unfree person was. These manoeuvres and their revolutionary character are at the heart of my investigation of the theory and its classical setting in the first part of the book. The second part of the explanation of how this conceptual apparatus came to structure the early-modern state is the history of its use as a powerful ideological tool to a succession of Renaissance monarchical regimes across the Italian peninsula between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Accounting for the centrality of the Roman theory of the princeps to the development of Renaissance monarchical thinking is, on the one hand, a matter of seeing how some fundamental characteristics of the theory itself made it valuable to those political agents wishing to 1

2

Introduction

identify themselves as princes. But it is also necessary to describe its historical role in some detail in order to observe the specificity of its deployment in a set of determinate and different contexts from the Duecento onwards. Its doctrines are picked up in piecemeal fashion, adapted and occasionally transformed according to local ideological needs across a series of social, political and military conflicts and legitimation crises; and it is through its initial involvement in these polemical contexts that discursive regularities are stabilised and coherent ideologies developed at a local level. The structure of my argument is designed to negotiate a path through these considerations. The classical section in which I examine the construction and content of the Roman theory is followed by five Renaissance chapters which trace out the story of how, why and to what effect, subsequent to its recovery by the medieval West, its language came to inform the articulation of the person of the Renaissance princeps in all three types of secular monarchical settings – imperial, royal and signorial – which characterised the political geography of the Italian peninsula between the Duecento and the High Renaissance. Ancient Rome might seem the obvious place to start any genealogy of the princeps, that most Roman of persons, but my insistence on returning to the Roman theory of monarchy – to point out its existence, to say who wrote it and when, what it says and why – is related to two specific concerns. The first of these is to try to reverse some of the effects of its gradual, and perhaps even systematic, occlusion from the historiography of the Renaissance’s ideological and intellectual debt to classical antiquity. The history of that occlusion is another story. But one explanation for why the theory remains obscured may be that we have become accustomed to thinking about the various languages which the Renaissance recovered from Roman antiquity in terms which have the effect of eclipsing a defining political and ideological event in the history of ancient Roman political life and literature. There is a massive caesura running down the centre of that history caused by the Roman revolution and the establishment of the Roman Principate under Augustus. The figure of the princeps is a product of that revolution. But the Roman revolution rather disappears – and with it the theory of the princeps – in the analytical categories currently deployed to talk about the body of concepts which were drawn from Roman literature into the various social, political, moral, literary, rhetorical, pedagogical and philosophical languages of the Renaissance, particularly those articulated in a humanist idiom. By excavating the classical theory of monarchy, I aim to prise open the general categories of ‘Roman historians’, ‘Roman rhetorical models’, ‘Roman moralists’, ‘Roman moral

Introduction

3

philosophy’, ‘the Roman authors’, ‘the Roman tradition’ and ‘Romanism’ which are now in use within Renaissance historiography.1 These descriptions have proved extremely important in emphasising the Romanitas of the Renaissance. But they are also deceptively flat and can hide as much as they reveal when they are used to imply an homogeneity or stability of political, moral and rhetorical outlook where none exists either in Roman or in Renaissance discourse. My specific aim in searching to break into this compound terminology is to recuperate some precise instances of the reordering which occurs at a conceptual level in the legal, political, visual and ethical apparatus elaborated after the Roman revolution. This process produces some of the monarchical and monological elements of Roman political theory which make a distinctive contribution to the historical formation of a post-classical European subjectivity and to the construction of a sovereign order within early-modern states. The Roman theory of monarchy is an extended act of conceptual redefinition which has an almost embarrassingly imperial provenance. Its vision of a peaceful and happy principate extending across the entire world under the government of the virtuous princeps – humane, self-reflecting and thoroughly conscientious – reveals so frank a commitment to a global hegemony founded upon sovereign reason that it seems scarcely straightfaced. Its description of the res publica appears not to be very republican. And its idea of liberty – that a free person is one who lives according to universal reason and the law of nature – enables the Roman prince to assume a strikingly absolutist position at the head of the body politic, to rebut the accusation that the Roman Principate was a form of domination, and to suggest that, under his loving care, the body politic had been actually liberated rather than enslaved at the point of the sword by Caesarian conquest. Its latinity is not to everyone’s taste, and, perhaps most awkwardly of all, its author is not Cicero. Yet none of these characteristics prevented this Roman argument about the princeps from becoming profoundly implicated in the constitution of monarchical political government on the Italian peninsula from the Duecento onwards. By the early sixteenth century, it had become so fundamental to the language which articulated the persona of the Renaissance prince that it attracted the unwavering hostility of Machiavelli in Il Principe. Surveying a peninsula which had seen the steady rise to power of monarchical regimes over the course of more than two and a half centuries, Machiavelli’s argument 1

For examples of this terminology, see Skinner 1981: 25, 30, 34, 35 (reiterated in Skinner 2000: 28–9, 32, 34); Tuck 1993: 6, 9, 10, 12, 14; Viroli 1992: 14.

4

Introduction

comprises a meticulously constructed attack upon a vision of the persona of the princeps and his principatus which had come to captivate the Renaissance imagination. The concluding chapters of the book describe this assault on the Roman argument about the prince. Machiavelli’s text furnishes the other principal reason I begin my argument with a reconsideration of the classical case for the prince. My aim is to bring more sharply into focus the shattering effect of Machiavelli’s attack upon the tradition of political reflection which has in recent decades become very closely identified with a humanist literature about the prince usually designated as the speculum principis, or ‘mirror-for-princes’ genre. I reiterate the conventional wisdom that there is the closest possible relation between Machiavelli’s text and the ideology of the princely mirror, a context first suggested in the pioneering work of Felix Gilbert and in the scholarship of Allan Gilbert, but subsequently elaborated, modified and refined with unrivalled precision, and to immensely powerful effect, by Quentin Skinner in his classic interpretation of Il Principe.2 This context is now well-observed within Machiavellian scholarship, but it is Skinner’s work which has most fully demonstrated how and why Machiavelli’s text is ‘a contribution to the genre of advice-books for princes which at the same time revolutionised the genre itself’. I also sustain a view of Machiavelli’s argument which endorses Skinner’s recent description of the great moralist as ‘essentially the exponent of a neo-classical form of humanist political thought’.3 And my interpretation is, in some ways, an extended corroboration of Skinner’s insistence that the ‘most original and creative aspects’ of ‘Machiavelli’s political vision are best understood as a series of polemical – sometimes even satirical – reactions against the humanist assumptions he inherited and basically continued to endorse’.4 However, whereas both Felix Gilbert and Skinner began a systematic reconstruction of the ideology around a series of princely mirrors produced in the second half of the fifteenth century, this account begins to trace out the monarchical language of the genre in the second half of the first century. It commences with a detailed study of De clementia, the political treatise of the Stoic philosopher Seneca which lays out a vision of the Roman princeps and his principatus and which declares in its opening sentence that its argument is designed to perform the role of a mirror. The Senecan text is the earliest surviving example of a Latin speculum principis, and the only surviving example of a 2

3

Gilbert 1977a: 91–114; Gilbert 1938; Skinner 1978, I: 116–38; Skinner 1981: 21–47; Skinner 1981: 423–34; Skinner 2000: 23–53; Skinner 2002, II: 134–47. Skinner 2000: Preface. 4 Skinner 2000: Preface.

Introduction

5

systematic attempt to theorise the Roman monarchy. The theory is articulated in the demonstrative mode, that most princely of rhetorical genres; it is envisaged as an image of a person; and, as its central conceit reveals, its fortunes were tied to a view of the world in which both a text and a person could be said and be seen to reflect things as they really were. The central chapters of this book indicate how those fortunes were gradually but firmly secured across nearly three centuries of Renaissance political experience. In so doing, they provide an explanation as to why the Senecan argument of De clementia should have become the object of Machiavelli’s theoretical concerns in Il Principe. In laying out this more extensive thesis, I hold fast to some of the unassailable elements of the Skinnerian interpretation of Il Principe and its ideological context, while at the same time introducing two main modifications to it. The first consists in underlining that this humanist ideological tradition is considerably longer in the making than is currently envisaged. Skinner himself has recently provided a more detailed view of the development of the mirror-for-princes literature during the Trecento, but commentators on Renaissance political thought tend to follow the earlier view proposed by Gilbert and sustained by Skinner in Foundations that ‘the heyday’ of humanist princely writing is largely a development of the second half of the Quattrocento, a phenomenon then contrasted with an earlier ‘civic’ phase of humanist political thought.5 By contrast, I analyse its formation within a much more extensively structured political context which stretches well back into the Duecento in order to embrace the reign of Frederick II in the Kingdom of Sicily and the crisis of government within the northern Italian communes which precipitates the rise to power of the signori. I do so in order to indicate a very long ‘pre-humanist’ history of the princely ideology of the mirror prior to its emergence in Petrarchan humanist discourse in the 1340s. But the fundamental change which I introduce to the Skinnerian perspective on Machiavelli’s text concerns the theoretical structure of the humanist ideology of the princeps and its classical provenance. My basic point is that we may have been tracking the wrong Roman theory in our study of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and its ideological context. I argue that we need to turn away from Cicero’s De officiis and concentrate on Seneca’s De clementia and its formative place in Renaissance political thought in order to see more closely what Machiavelli’s text is doing. The importance of 5

For the Trecento material, see Skinner 1988: 414–16; Skinner 2002, II: 120–6. For emphasis on the later Quattrocento, see Gilbert 1977a: 93–109; Skinner 1978, I: 115–17; Skinner 1988: 423–5; Skinner 2002, II: 134–5. For similar views, see Rubinstein 1991: 30–5; Viroli 1998: 52.

6

Introduction

Seneca to Machiavelli in Il Principe has certainly been suggested before. In the late 1960s, an insightful article by Neal Wood explored what he saw as the ‘parallels in their thought’.6 And in Philosophy and Government in the early 1990s, Richard Tuck observed that Il Principe was ‘largely an indirect criticism of Seneca rather than Cicero’, recalling that ‘Cicero, after all, had not provided a defence of princely government comparable to Seneca’s De clementia’.7 This assertion was, I think, fundamentally correct, although it made it harder to make sense of Tuck’s elaboration of a great distinction between an ‘old’ humanism which was said, somewhat contradictorily, to have been ‘dominated by the ideas and the style of Cicero’, and a ‘new’ early-modern humanism.8 It also incidentally raised the question of the degree of intimacy with which Machiavelli engages with the Senecan theory, and it is perhaps worth confronting this issue immediately. Are there grounds for thinking that all or any part of Machiavelli’s text is explicitly and self-consciously engaged in reversing the contentions of Seneca himself in De clementia? Or is Il Principe better understood as an ‘indirect’ intervention, an attack upon a series of prevalent ideological conventions which may well have the effect of overturning crucial doctrines of Seneca’s political theory – assuming for the moment that the Senecan argument had indeed come to inform Renaissance princely discourse significantly by Machiavelli’s day – but which nevertheless stops short of an engagement with the classical text itself? I veer strongly towards the former view at certain points of my analysis of the Machiavellian text for reasons which I hope to make clearer. But I cannot see any reason for supposing that such an interpretation necessarily rules out the latter view either. A strategy in which one alternates between occasionally criticising contemporary beliefs on their own terms and occasionally dragging them back to some earlier and more theoretical point of their formulation is not so arcane. On the contrary, in view of Machiavelli’s famous claim in the preface that his volume is the fruit of ‘una lunga esperienzia delle cose moderne et una continua lezione delle antique’, it makes considerable sense to think that his text is concerned with both ancient and modern wisdom about princely government.9 After all, Machiavelli straightforwardly names and cites ancient authorities on occasion in his text.10 The thought that he might be shown to be engaging with a particular set of classical political opinions which has not yet been clearly identified does not seem to be a particularly controversial one. And somewhere in between the two 6 10

7 8 9 Wood 1968: 11. Tuck 1993: 20. Tuck 1993: 5. Machiavelli 1960: 13. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61 (Tacitus); Ch.XVIII: 69 (Virgil).

Introduction

7

poles of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ criticism, we might also need to consider the existence of a series of literary tactics regularly used by humanists to imitate, to ironise or to mimic their classical sources without citing them explicitly. What may look like rather oblique or veiled allusion in the work of Renaissance humanist writers on princely government is often the studiously cultivated effect of Renaissance rhetorical art. Some careful decoding is sometimes necessary in order to avoid deploying the categories of direct and indirect criticism too bluntly. However, the person who has most carefully and consistently drawn attention to the irrefutable place of De clementia in the ideology which Machiavelli is subverting is, in fact, Skinner himself.11 Since each of my points of departure from his interpretation of Il Principe represent to a considerable degree the development of ideas indicated in various parts of his scholarship on the Machiavellian text and its Renaissance background, I want to delineate them with some care at the outset. Skinner’s work on Renaissance thought in general has effected a dramatic transformation in our understanding of how and why Roman classical concepts and arguments structured humanist political discourse. The extent of his contribution is particularly discernible in the obligation not only to recognise, in the light of his work on Machiavelli in particular, the pervasive Roman character of the classical republicanism expressed in the Discorsi but also to acknowledge that virtually all of the categories which Il Principe deploys are similarly Roman. Machiavelli is engaged in controverting a profoundly Roman story about how the prince should behave. The fact that he does so in no less profoundly Roman rhetorical mode, as a number of scholars have been illustrating for some time – Kahn, Cox, Viroli and Ho¨rnquist most recently – only serves to underline the point further.12 Even Althusser – not, perhaps, the closest reader of the text, but a no less creative interpreter of Machiavelli’s thesis for all that – could see that the work had practically nothing to do with Aristotle.13 In sum, 11

12

13

See especially Skinner 1981: 29 (for Seneca and fortuna); 36 (for Senecan magnanimitas and liberalitas in De clementia and De beneficiis); 45–6 (for crudelitas in De clementia and in Il Principe); Machiavelli 1988: xvii, xxi (for the same conceptual connection); xxii (for notions of affability and accessibility in De clementia with which Machiavelli disagrees). Kahn 1994; Cox 1997; Viroli 1998: 73–113; Ho¨rnquist 2004: 4–37. For a bibliography on Machiavelli’s rhetoric, see Cox 1997: 1110, n.3. Althusser 1999: 36. For Althusser’s reliance on the French Barincou edition of the text, see note at ix. For a restatement of the fact that neither the basic Aristotelian category of ‘politics’ nor any of its cognate forms is used by Machiavelli in his text, see Viroli 1992: 129, esp. n. 8; for Machiavelli’s Aristotelian concerns in Il Principe, see Pocock 1975: 156–82; Mansfield 1996; Ho¨rnquist 2004: 211–27.

8

Introduction

Machiavelli’s argument is about the government of persons and states, its precepts are self-consciously articulated according to the principles of Roman classical rhetoric, and the central concepts which structure Machiavelli’s theory – principe and principato, imperio and stato, virtu` and ragione, fortuna, necessita` and occasione, liberta` and servitu`, onore and gloria, fama and reputazione – are translations of a terminology which had been almost entirely imported into Renaissance thinking about the figure of the prince from Roman literature. Furthermore, Skinner’s analysis of Machiavelli’s ‘humanist allegiances’ and ‘the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the whole tradition of humanist political thought’ has taken us to the core of the Machiavellian revolution by indicating with unparalleled perspicacity a crucial conceptual rupture which occurs at the heart of Il Principe.14 As Skinner explains, the central theoretical contention over which Machiavelli parts company with his humanist predecessors and their classical authorities is the fundamental belief that the rational course of action in every conceivable situation will never involve a properly discerning moral agent in a conflict between considerations of what is right and honourable on the one hand, and calculations of what is beneficial on the other.15 Machiavelli’s selfproclaimed departure ‘very greatly’ from the line of thinking ‘of the others’ is thus said to consist in his identification of just such a clash between what is deemed, in the Latin terminology in which this ethical doctrine was discussed by classical and humanist authors, to be dignum or honestum – that is, honourable – and thus in accordance with what is virtuous, and what is, in fact, utile in view of the primary princely task of mantenere lo stato which Machiavelli posits.16 The point at which these profound insights into the Machiavellian revolution begin to lose some of their clarity occurs when the event is located within an ideological field constituted by a speculum principis literature which is simultaneously held to be primarily structured by the contentions of Cicero’s De officiis. According to Skinner, Machiavelli is engaged in subverting ‘above all Cicero’s general treatise on moral duties, De officiis’, and this view is now widely shared.17 In Foundations, the conceptual core of the writings of the ‘mirror-for-princes theorists’ of the 14 16

17

Skinner 2000: 39, 44. 15 Skinner 2000: 41–3. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘partendomi, massime nel disputare questa materia, dalli ordini delli altri’. For this argument (which runs throughout his writings on the text), see Skinner’s introduction to Machiavelli 1988: xv. For the consensus, see Colish 1978; Viroli 1992: 131; Viroli 1998: 52–4; Jackson Barlow 1999.

Introduction

9

later fifteenth century was said to be derived from an earlier, somewhat collapsed Ciceronian civic tradition.18 In a more recent exploration of Trecento material on the prince, Skinner has described the argument of Petrarch in his famous letter to Francesco da Carrara in the 1370s in terms of the ‘overwhelming extent of his debt to Cicero, especially the doctrines of the De officiis’.19 The same is said to hold for his ‘humanist successors’.20 Viroli has similarly asserted that ‘Petrarch’s main source is Cicero’ in the letter.21 Both princely and civic humanist ideologies thus come to be primarily informed by Cicero and the precepts of Cicero’s De officiis. We need to clarify the relation between De officiis and the mirror-forprinces genre which is currently believed to be indebted to it. This belief is generating a series of claims peculiar to the pervasive logic of a Ciceronian Renaissance. It is striking, for instance, to find it said that in Il Principe Machiavelli is attacking ‘the conventional Ciceronian precept that to attain glory and preserve his state the prince must be virtuous’.22 Cicero himself, of course, laid down no such precept, and De officiis is quite transparently not a mirror for a prince. It is the most violently anti-Caesarian and profoundly anti-monarchical tract to come down to us from Roman antiquity, which is one reason it became a key text to the republican tradition, as Skinner points out.23 It does not give us the concept of a virtuous princeps, and it does not extend any image of either principe or principato to which Machiavelli can be said to be referring when he famously declares his departure from ‘le cose circa uno principe immaginate’ or when he disagrees with a consensus of opinion in which, as he even more scathingly puts it, ‘molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principati che non si sono mai visti ne´ conosciuti essere in vero’.24 On the contrary, De officiis gives us a republican ideology which makes it virtually impossible to describe monarchy as anything other than tyranny. Of course, none of these characteristics militate against the text being put to a wholly different use in a transformed, monarchical setting. This is, in fact, exactly what happened. But a very great deal needs to happen to Cicero’s account of virtue in the Roman republic in order to make it plausibly yield the idea of a bonus princeps. In short, the princeps needs to become the best, rather than the worst possible thing that can occur to a res publica. This process of ideological recharacterisation is not, however, the surreptitious achievement of Renaissance humanists who turn the text to their own 18 20 23

Skinner 1978, I: 117–19; Skinner 2002, II: 135. 19 Skinner 1988: 415; Skinner 2002, II: 124–5. Skinner 1988: 416. 21 Viroli 1992: 72. 22 Viroli 1998: 52. Skinner 2002, II: 27. 24 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65.

10

Introduction

advantage and silently step over its anti-monarchism. It occurs in the first century as a consequence of the Roman revolution. A great deal of the crucial redescription of the central concepts of Roman republican discourse is undertaken within De clementia. In performing this task, Seneca is a philosophical participant in a wider process long observed in the formation of Roman imperial ideology: the construction of the person of the princeps upon the identity of the civis, and the creative reorganisation of some central republican concepts in order to represent a degree of continuity across a revolutionary act of military conquest, after which, as Paul Veyne points out most recently in his brilliant study of Seneca, ‘everything changed’.25 The series of reconfigurations performed in the Senecan text came to constitute the theoretical groundwork of the Renaissance ideology of the princeps to a remarkable extent. Take the topic debated in De officiis about whether it is better to be loved or feared when acting in government. Seneca is easily the most rigorous of all Roman writers on monarchical government, pagan and Christian, to tackle Cicero’s allegation that Caesar had become so feared and hated by his attempts to enslave the Roman citizens and make himself their princeps that it had ensured his overthrow. Seneca reprises the topic and reorganises it entirely. Part of his explanation as to why a virtuous prince is not a contradiction in terms involves Seneca in a redefinition of tyranny. That redefinition produces a stark contrast between the love that exists between the perfectly rational, merciful prince and those whom he rules, and the fear and hate that his reverse image correspondingly incurs as a result of his inhumane cruelty. The antithesis between tyrannical bestiality and princely manliness which so crisply defines the persona of the Renaissance prince and which Machiavelli’s theory confounds is not Ciceronian – Cicero had nothing to say at all about princely virtus in De officiis. However, as humanists from Petrarch to Erasmus very clearly saw, the antithesis was absolutely pivotal to the Senecan construction of the Roman monarch in De clementia, where the figure of the monstrously cruel tyrant is depicted at great length. There were undoubtedly considerable political, polemical, moral and rhetorical benefits to be gained from occasionally adducing Cicero’s words to acclaim a loveable prince and to support his vision of libertas, iustitia and the res publica – a vision so markedly different from that of Cicero himself. But the ability to draft in Cicero to the prince’s cause was the product of 25

Veyne 2003: 152. For the construction of the emperor’s person as a republican citizen, see especially Wallace-Hadrill 1981; Wallace-Hadrill 1982.

Introduction

11

centuries of ideological accretion. In the case of the ideological construction of the loveable princeps in humanist princely writing, Seneca’s political theory could hardly be said to be the only source of support for the idea within Roman imperial literature. Yet it was nevertheless crucial to that construction, perhaps because it was the most concerted philosophical attempt to explain why the virtuous prince is so loved. The fact that the explanation was couched in terms of the prince’s merciful and humane behaviour towards his subjects helped to make the Senecan text a favourite place to go for arguments in support of enlightened monarchy – arguments which attracted the deepest hostility of Machiavelli. That the topic of love and fear was one which both Cicero and Seneca had analysed in different ways rather than the peculiar property of the Ciceronian argument is a discursive fact about the classical texts which is very apparent to writers on government in the Duecento. Humanists from Petrarch onwards proved equally as adept in recurring both to the monarchical and the republican theories in order to amplify their discussions of the matter. This characteristic of the history of the debate about love and fear in Renaissance political writing is not very apparent in the existing historiography. But it is arguably crucial to understanding why Machiavelli’s own contribution to the debate occurs in a chapter which is headed by the title De crudelitate et pietate; et an sit melius amari quam timeri, vel e contra, and which opens with him declaring that ‘every prince should want to be thought merciful, not cruel; nevertheless one should take care not to be merciful in an inappropriate way’.26 Skinner is punctilious in reminding readers that Machiavelli’s treatment of crudelitas is here engaging with ‘the classic analysis of this evil, Seneca’s De clementia’; and he goes even further in describing Machiavelli’s attack as one launched against ‘the accepted image of the true prince, one mainly derived from Seneca’s famous account’.27 But the same consideration should also extend to Machiavelli’s discussion of ‘whether it is better to be loved than feared’, a debate which the title of the chapter itself links to the quality of crudelitas, but which is said to see Machiavelli ‘directly alluding to De officiis II, 7, 23–4’.28 Yet it is Seneca who tells the Renaissance at length about cruelty and mercy, and love and fear, in his definition of the virtuous prince. The 26

27 28

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68 (Machiavelli 1988: 58): ‘dico che ciascuno principe debbe desiderare di esser tenuto pietoso e non crudele: non di manco debbe avvertire di non usare male questa pieta`.’ Except where stated otherwise, I either cite Price and Skinner’s translation or use it as the basis of my own. Machiavelli 1988: xvii. Machiavelli 1988: xvii (discussing Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 69–71, esp. his declaration at 69: ‘Nasce da questo una disputa: s’elli e` meglio essere amato che temuto, o e converso’).

12

Introduction

Senecan prince ‘is loved, defended and courted by the entire civitas’.29 His security is assured by the fact that his mercy wins him ‘one impregnable bulwark – the love of the citizens’.30 A cruel tyrant, on the other hand, is ‘hated because he is feared, and being hated makes him want to be feared’.31 Machiavelli disagrees: ‘a prince must nevertheless make himself feared in such a way, that, even if he does not become loved, he does not become hated’ since ‘it is perfectly possible to be feared without incurring hatred’.32 Machiavelli may well be alluding to Cicero in this chapter. In fact, it seems highly likely: as he points out, the topic is the subject of a dispute, and that dispute had conventionally drawn in evidence from both classical writers. But Machiavelli is nevertheless intervening in a specifically Senecan construction of the debate, and not merely because he is writing – like Seneca – about the connections between cruelty, love and fear in a theory of the virtuous prince. The shocking impact of his chapter consists in its blurring a distinction which only emerges in the Senecan division between humane prince and bestial tyrant. The Ciceronian theory made no distinction for the Renaissance to develop and for Machiavelli to subvert: in De officiis, the very idea of a princeps is held to be an appallingly tyrannical prospect. Armed with a knowledge of the Roman theory of the prince and its Renaissance history, a similar degree of specificity about the object of Machiavelli’s attacks can be identified throughout his text. The explanation for this focus may be almost deceptively simple. In putting forward his own controversial case, Machiavelli is, I maintain, undermining a classical argument which had come to inform humanist thinking in the ideology of the mirror to a striking degree because it was an argument specifically about the princeps and princely government. Machiavelli is not indiscriminately wielding a Roman political, moral, philosophical and social vocabulary in the direction of monarchy; he is moving it about within a determinate conceptual field particularly indebted to one classical composition for the way in which its terms had come to be related. Identifying this degree of structure to the apparatus under reconceptualisation does not 29

30

31

32

Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396: ‘a tota civitate amatur, defenditur, colitur’. I normally cite Cooper and Procope´’s translation of De clementia (Seneca 1995), but here the translation is mine. Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’ Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 392–4 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Nam cum invisus sit, quia timetur, timeri vult, quia invisus est.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70 (Machiavelli 1988: 59): ‘Debbe non di manco el principe farsi temere in modo, che, se non acquista lo amore, che fugga l’odio; perche´ puo` molto bene stare insieme esser temuto e non odiato.’ But note how the causal connection between fear and hate in the Senecan theory continues the theme of the words of Ennius cited by Cicero in De officiis, II.7.23.

Introduction

13

mean overlooking the presence of other elements of classical writing introduced by Machiavelli into Il Principe. Nor is it to overlook the famously creative use to which Machiavelli puts Cicero’s De officiis in the one place where its presence is spectacularly evident: the passage of Chapter XVIII in which Machiavelli reworks the imagery of fox and lion, retrieved directly from the Ciceronian text, in order to illustrate his point about the need for the prince to cultivate bestial qualities.33 Machiavelli’s recourse to De officiis in this chapter illustrates his systematic use of material drawn from a considerable number of Roman texts in a highly complex rhetorical discourse which weaves together examples, voices and images from a considerable range of classical auctores. But there is nevertheless a degree of specificity in Machiavelli’s system of reference which occasions his descent into the Ciceronian imagery at this point in his argument as he works his way through a series of allusions.34 The reason Machiavelli should turn to the textbook of classical republicanism in this passage in order to envision a princely person equipped with precisely the qualities which Cicero condemns in the De officiis is linked to the reason he should turn, in the very same paragraph, to recommend that his prince become a ‘gran simulatore e dissimulatore’.35 For Machiavelli is here similarly advocating to his prince the imitation of another profoundly Roman republican beˆte noire: the person of Catiline. Although there is a distinctive body of rhetorical theory underpinning Machiavelli’s conception of the arts of simulation and dissimulation, his choice of words is almost certainly pointed in this passage. For Machiavelli’s humanist readers would have been all too aware that the man who had plotted to overthrow the Roman res publica and install himself as monarch had been memorably introduced by Sallust in his Bellum Catilinae as a simulator ac dissimulator.36 At this particular juncture of his argument, Machiavelli is reanimating spectres from Roman republican discourse in order to flesh out his vision of the prince, and the explanation for why words and images from Ciceronian and Sallustian passages come into the picture in this particular chapter requires further comment. Perhaps the greatest advantage in seeing how and why Machiavelli is intent upon ravaging the perspective of the Senecan mirror is that it helps to illumine arguably the most obscure and vexing part of the Machiavellian 33

34 36

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72. For a recent assessment of this heavily annotated passage, see Jackson Barlow 1999. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72. 35 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 73. Sallust 1921, 5.4: 8: ‘animus audax subdolus varius, cuius rei lubet simulator ac dissimulator’.

14

Introduction

revolution: the place of the relation between the princeps and fortuna. Machiavelli’s concern to set his audience straight on the proper way to view the effects of fortuna in the world is inextricably connected with his assault on the conventional form of the belief that ‘it is always rational to be moral’, as Skinner puts it.37 It is certainly true that an attempt to dispel the notion that ‘a thing may be morally right without being expedient, and expedient without being morally right’ lies ‘at the heart of Cicero’s Moral Obligation’, as Skinner further indicates.38 But the idea that what is dignum is always what is utile can hardly be said to be the exclusive property of that Ciceronian theory. On the contrary, it is fundamental to Stoic ethics, as Cicero himself explains in De officiis and as Renaissance humanists well knew.39 It is certainly right to say that ‘Cicero takes for granted the Stoic doctrine of the identity of the honourable and the beneficial’ in De officiis; but it nevertheless causes problems for the Roman statesman, who discusses it so laboriously in part because he struggles throughout his theory to keep the equation together.40 Cicero, after all, is not a Stoic and he never makes the Roman res publica coterminous with the Stoic cosmic civitas within which Stoic ethics were conceptualised. But the equation certainly provides the basis of the much more orthodox Stoic reasoning in Seneca’s mirror. And that reasoning is effortlessly sustained in De clementia partly because of Seneca’s view of fortuna. Cicero obviously had nothing to say about the relationship between the prince and fortuna. Seneca, on the other hand, discusses the terms of that relationship throughout his argument. Setting those terms is a crucial part of his theory. For the Stoic moral formula about the useful and the honourable which comes under such duress in the Machiavellian text demands that you take a very specific stance on the idea of contingency in the world in order to sustain the principle coherently. It demands that you deny that there is, in fact, anything contingent at all about the world. Seneca’s exhaustive attempts in his political and moral philosophy to convert his Roman audience to a Stoic, providential point of view about the character of fortuna helped turn him into the principal Roman philosopher of a phenomenon whose existence he wanted to argue was more apparent than real. Seneca wrote copiously about Fortuna’s weaponry, her kingdom, her cruelty and her enslaving designs upon man while at the same time remaining entirely committed to a belief in a divine and providential universe. When the classical mirror is picked up by the medieval West, so is its depiction of the relationship between 37 40

Skinner 2000: 41. 38 Skinner 2000: 41. 39 Cicero 1913, III.2.7–4.20: 276–86. See Griffin’s comments in Cicero 1991: xxii, xxxv–xxxvi.

Introduction

15

fortuna and the princeps. And when Senecan moral philosophy travels from medieval monasteries to Petrarchan humanist circles, so a thoroughly Senecan depiction of the war between the man of virtue and Fortuna, the tyrannical dominatrix, comes to inform the Renaissance imagination. So if it is true that the belief that ‘expediency can never conflict with moral rectitude’ is ‘adopted in its entirety by the writers of advice-books for Renaissance princes’, it would therefore follow that these writers must have adopted the type of providentialist perspective on Fortuna which Seneca and the Stoics advocated – a perspective which was, besides, assimilable to a Christian moral position.41 Unless one turns Machiavelli into a providentialist, which is even more absurd than turning him into an Aristotelian, it seems unlikely, then, that he is ‘a typical representative of humanist attitudes’ in ‘his handling of this crucial theme’ of Fortuna in the penultimate chapter of Il Principe.42 On the contrary, it seems highly likely that when Machiavelli parts company with these writers over the basic structure of their ethical thinking, he must also be departing from their commitment to a specific view of Fortuna, rather than endorsing or developing an already existing conception of its place in the virtuous government of persons and states.43 Machiavelli’s idea of Fortuna is better understood as a crucial part of the subversive apparatus used to effect a conceptual revolution, rather than the extension of an established Renaissance view of the world which had helped to bring forth ‘a new attitude to freedom’ among the humanists of fifteenth-century Italy.44 This is not to deny that Renaissance humanists had indeed revivified a classical conception of man’s relation to Fortuna and explored a new-found sense of liberty as a consequence.45 On the contrary, it is an important aspect of my argument about the development of the Senecan ideology to agree that this is precisely what happened. It is Machiavelli who is in violent disagreement with this description of things. He sees that this attitude towards Fortuna has helped to bring about quite the reverse of liberty and it is the central aim of his text to put the matter straight. The fact that he does so by reworking both the language and the imagery of the Senecan argument of De clementia in his famous chapter on Fortuna may yet prove to be another astonishing display of Machiavelli’s masterful economy of violence. Seneca as a providentialist obsessed with Fortuna? Machiavelli is merciless in his punishment of this irony. 41 43 45

Skinner 2000: 41. 42 Skinner 2000: 32. For discussion of this point, see Newell 1987. For this argument, see Skinner 2000: 28–35.

44

Skinner 2000: 31.

16

Introduction

There are some obvious dangers of over-interpretation which accompany my focus in this book on the historical life of a specific set of ideas: of forcing a reading of Machiavelli’s text too exclusively in the light of the Senecan theory; or of stretching an understanding of the Florentine’s language to a point where his text would seem to be playing in a rather recondite manner with one particular classical argument above all others. In response first of all to the second type of objection – that I am turning Machiavelli into a literary e´rudit of a rather obsessional nature – I am certainly insistent that Machiavelli is a quite brilliant orator. But I also see him as one engaged in a heated battle, a campaign waged just beneath the apparent calm of his cool definitions and measured typologies. This interpretation of Il Principe would shade into the merely suggestive if it remained at the level of the purely literary; but my reading of the text comes after a sustained analysis of the Senecan content of princely humanism from the time of Petrarch onwards. I consider the various historical and ideological reasons, in conjunction with an examination of the language of Il Principe, for which it might have made sense for Machiavelli to have discerned and attacked a distinctively Senecan body of doctrine about princely rule. Whether this approach makes my analysis ultimately convincing is another matter. But by making evident in the central chapters the existence of ample humanist precedents for engaging with the Senecan text, I nevertheless hope to bring some historical depth to my arguments. As for the first type of objection, it should already be clear that I am quite categorically not claiming that Il Principe is all about Seneca. I am, however, claiming that an attack on a neo-Senecan ideology constitutes a significant part of Machiavelli’s undertaking; and it is that part of the story which I concentrate upon telling in this book. While Renaissance princely ideology in its humanist mode is manifestly made up of a considerable number of diverse classical voices and theoretical strands, there is a relatively stable conceptual framework which runs through its history and which derives from the Roman speculum principis, even though it comes to acquire significantly new meanings in a post-classical, Christian environment. That framework determines the princely persona in a distinctively Senecan manner. But it also helps to characterise the political body over which the prince rules as a free republic. While these two aspects of the theory are inextricably interrelated, recognising the ideological utility of the second of them to the politics of the prince in the Renaissance may do the most to shake us out of a calm complacency with regard to Machiavelli’s theoretical undertaking in Il Principe.

Introduction

17

One virtually structural characteristic of the fetish of the Florentine Renaissance which Skinner’s work has done a great deal to demystify but which the more heavily invested spheres of Anglophone scholarship has nevertheless continued to reproduce has been a reluctance to let the object of its affections too near the rival definition of libertas and the res publica which had come to inform humanist thinking in monarchical quarters since the inception of a Petrarchan discourse on the princeps in the 1340s. I have therefore tried to outline the account of the res publica and the idea of libertas under a princeps which humanists outside Florence were interested in elaborating in the Trecento, and to indicate how both concepts have classical credentials which cannot be verified against a Ciceronian Renaissance. The aim here is to contribute material to the reconstruction of the ideological and polemical context in which the Florentines advanced their own neo-classical and markedly Ciceronian argument in the early Quattrocento. The steady, and perhaps systematic, removal of the work of Bruni and the civic humanists from a framework in which their concerns can be seen as the product of an engagement with an opposing humanist point of view, an ideological response to a set of well-defined arguments pivoted upon a rival vision of Roman greatness, has enabled their documents to be construed as the outcome of a relentlessly provincialised Florentine perspective, almost wholly fixated upon its own affairs, and incapable of finding, looking at, thinking about, and responding creatively and polemically to a different interpretation of Rome’s past emanating from a source beyond it. Part of reversing this tendency involves observing the longevity of the conceptual apparatus with which the prince was armed in 1402 and the depth of the problem which republican thinkers from Bruni to Machiavelli faced. Indeed, what is most striking about the Milanese princely ideology by the time that Giangaleazzo Visconti reaches the environs of Florence in 1402 is not so much that it has to hand a notion of libertas and the res publica which humanist monarchical discourse has been articulating for over fifty years, but that it is the heir of a specifically Viscontean ideology which has been propagating a version of both of these concepts for over one hundred and twenty years. The Visconti virtually found their regime on the claim to be saving the res publica and its libertas. And they have an impeccably classical argument with which to sustain their case. Since my overriding concern has been to bring both the theory and its Renaissance history into view, I have tried as far as possible to resist burdening or colonising its past with more recent conceptual concerns. The aim is to leave the way clear for an historical enquiry into how some of the theoretical elements of the mirror may have helped to structure the

18

Introduction

development of early-modern political experience at a practical and conceptual level in such a way that they have contributed to the definition of those later preoccupations. I hope that the notes which accompany my reading of the Senecan text indicate some of the extent to which my attempts to come to grips with Seneca’s philosophy have been immensely helped by the brilliant renaissance of Anglophone scholarship on ancient Stoicism. Experts in this particular field may find that I have moved rather too quickly over the complexities which surround the place of Senecan thought within the history of Stoicism as a whole. These lacunae are regrettable, and where possible I have attempted in my notes to point the reader to more extended discussions. But I have decided to avoid – for the moment at least – becoming too preoccupied by such theoretical problems in favour of a brisker narrative in view of the overall aim of the book. I have also learnt a great deal from the French ‘revival of Seneca’ which began in the early 1980s in a literature produced by a publishing circle around Michel Foucault.46 It is occasionally difficult to avoid describing the political argument of De clementia in a terminology redolent of Foucault’s concerns about the self, but this may be because those concerns were sometimes stated in almost hauntingly Senecan terms (Foucault’s immersion in Senecan philosophy is well known: he thought Seneca’s Epistulae morales, for example, superb).47 I have certainly drawn some attention to the development of one particular technology of the self (to cite the jargon) in the theory: the classical practice of conscience and its acquisition of a juridical character at the earliest pre-Christian stages of its involvement in western European monarchical power. Generally, though, I have made a concerted effort to try to let the prince speak for himself. Bringing back this ghost from ancient Rome seems important for one other pressing reason. His is the voice of sovereign reason itself, and to suggest that it has been drowned out in the historical reconstruction of Renaissance political discourse through mere inadvertence is implausible. A certain partiality in the reconstitution of Renaissance intellectual and ideological preoccupations has had the almost exquisite effect of depriving the prince of one of the key arguments which he wielded for his assumption of power, making it much easier for successive generations of modern scholars to tyrannise him. It is unnecessary to recall the seemingly endless 46

47

Foucault 1988; Foucault 2000: 93–106, 207–22; 223–51. For Foucault and Senecan philosophy, see Davidson 1994 (repr. in Gutting 1994: 115–40); Veyne 1993: 1–2; Veyne 2003: ix–x; Hadot 1989: 176–7; Hadot 1992. For Foucault’s opinion of the Epistulae morales, see Veyne 1993: 1.

Introduction

19

references to Renaissance tyranny that have come to entitle books and articles as well as to inform analyses of Renaissance political thought in the last fifty years since Hans Baron’s decision to characterise not merely the Visconti ruler of Milan in 1402 but also an entire age as one of tyranny.48 Baron was hardly the first to think in such terms. Burckhardt famously used the language of tyranny to describe the signori; but then Burckhardt also began his account of the Renaissance with their story because he perceived, with almost Nietzschean lucidity, something of the violent and bloody origins of the rationality of the state in their activities.49 This unsettling insight was buried by Baron’s thesis of civic humanism, which was wedded to the Florentine claim that the Milanese prince was a tyrant (which he was, of course, from a Ciceronian perspective) and to a quaint attempt to medievalise Caesarism. But a propensity to lapse into a language of tyranny or – even more inappropriately – despotism when confronted with the prince in humanist discourse is not restricted to those bound to the culture of the Florentine Renaissance.50 Such statements are produced according to the logic of a Ciceronian Renaissance. For the theory of monarchy which is central to the Renaissance prince is pivoted on the contention that it is virtue and virtue alone which makes a prince a prince. Renaissance humanists are quite insistent that the claim to princely status is a moral claim. They allege that a prince is so called by reason of his virtue and by virtue of his reason. This point of view cannot be articulated out of a Ciceronian Renaissance. It belongs to a way of thinking about the government of the republic which only emerges after the Caesarian conquest. It may, of course, be desirable at some level to tyrannise the monarchical rationality that brings us the princeps. It may also be a little predictable: the state, after all, has a well-known tendency to cover its tracks. But to silence the prince, deprive him of his weapons, and occlude his vision of the res publica and libertas arguably points the way to his triumph. Bringing him back into view may help to loosen his grip upon the writing of a Renaissance which is making him disappear to magnificently monarchical effect. 48 49

50

Baron 1955. For the very latest discussions of Baron’s thesis, see the essays in Hankins 2000. For Burckhardt and Nietzsche, see in particular Rehm 1928; von Martin 1947; Heller 1971; Montinari 1981. I need to thank Martin Ruehl for invaluable guidance on this subject. For an important statement of the need to ‘banish the term despot from the vocabulary of late medieval Italian politics’, see Kohl 1998: xviii.

PART I

The Roman Princeps

CHAPTER

1

The Roman theory of monarchy

One hundred years and a revolution separate Cicero’s De officiis from Seneca’s De clementia. That both texts share a political, moral and rhetorical language to some extent indicates a degree of conceptual continuity in Roman political discourse across the Caesarian divide which is illustrative of a relatively unexceptional fact about the history of ideologies: every political experience, however novel, is rendered intelligible to some degree by the use of pre-existing vocabularies. Both texts articulate political theories in distinctively Roman rhetorical mode; both are primarily concerned with laying down moral precepts as the key to successful political conduct; and neither is particularly exercised by questions of constitutional definition or reform (Seneca in particular is explicitly dismissive of the importance of this line of enquiry). Furthermore, both authors identify the cultivation and practice of virtus as crucial to the welfare of the Roman res publica; both give accounts of the Roman body politic which delineate the relations between this quality and the concepts of gloria, honor and fama in their prescriptions of its proper exercise; and both are preoccupied with the extent and the effect of the domination represented by the person of Caesar on the politics of their day. But the political distance which has been travelled between the two texts is most obviously revealed in the diametrically opposed positions towards the figure of Caesar and the idea of monarchy which each of them take up. THE CICERONIAN CRITIQUE OF MONARCHY

The concept of a virtuous prince is rendered virtually a contradiction in terms by Cicero’s theory of political virtue in De officiis, which associated the institution of monarchy with that of slavery to enduring effect.1 This 1

For monarchy as slavery in neo-Roman republicanism from Machiavelli onwards, see Skinner 1998: 36–57; Skinner 2002, II: 286–307. For anti-monarchism more generally in early-modern European republicanism, see the articles in Gelderen and Skinner 2002, I: 1–81.

23

24

The Roman Princeps

outcome is very much the point of his text, given the historical circumstances in which it was written. Cicero’s ‘conservative moral response to the revolution through which he was living’ was a moral response to the perceived threat of monarchy.2 An integral part of Cicero’s account of republican virtue in De officiis is the unrelentingly scathing denunciation of the military dictatorship of Julius Caesar as the epitome of the moral and political corruption facing the Roman res publica, accompanied by an impassioned defence of his assassination two years earlier in 44 as tyrannicide. The killing of Caesar had been ‘the fairest of all splendid deeds’ which had gloriously spared the free people of Rome from monarchical servitude.3 The dictator had been ‘a man who longed to be king of the Roman people and master of every nation’.4 His will to be dominus was irrational, unjust and utterly dishonourable: ‘if anyone says that such a greed is honourable, he is out of his mind: for he is approving the death of laws and liberty; and counting their oppression – a foul and hateful thing – as something glorious’.5 Caesar had been ‘a king who oppressed the Roman people themselves with the Roman people’s army, and forced a city that was not just free, but even the ruler of the nations, to be his slave . . . what stains of guilt, what wounds do you think he had in his heart?’6 He had been nothing other than a ‘tyrant, whom the city endured under force of arms’.7 The vivid image of a vicious and oppressive tyrant, driven by inordinate desire to enslave the free people of Rome, is further fleshed out by Cicero when he says of Caesar that a particular verse of Euripides was ‘always on his lips . . . ‘‘If justice must be violated for the sake of ruling, then it must be violated: you may indulge your piety elsewhere.’’’8 Resorting to the most pejorative political vocabulary available within Roman republican ideology, Cicero thus polemicises relentlessly around 2 3

4

5

6

7

8

Atkins 2000: 513. Cicero 1913, III.4.19: 286 (Cicero 1991: 107): ‘ex omnibus praeclaris factis illud pulcherrimum’. I cite Griffin and Atkin’s translation of De officiis throughout. Cicero 1913, III.21.83: 356 (Cicero 1991: 131): ‘qui rex populi Romani dominusque omnium gentium esse concupiverit idque perfecerit’. Cicero 1913, III.21.83: 356 (Cicero 1991: 131): ‘Hanc cupiditatem si honestam quis esse dicit, amens est; probat enim legum et libertatis interitum earumque oppressionem taetram et detestabilem gloriosum putat.’ Cicero 1913, III.21.84–5: 358 (Cicero 1991: 132): ‘quanto pluris ei regi putas, qui exercitu populi Romani populum ipsum Romanum oppressisset civitatemque non modo liberam, sed etiam gentibus imperantem servire sibi coegisset . . . quas conscientiae labes in animo censes habuisse, quae vulnera?’ Cicero 1913, II.7.23: 190 (Cicero 1991: 71): ‘huius tyranni solum, quem armis oppressa pertulit civitas . . .’ Cicero 1913, III.21.82: 354–6 (my translation): ‘in ore semper Graecos versus de Phoenissis habebat . . . ‘‘Nam si violandum est ius, regnandi gratia/Violandum est; aliis rebus pietatem colas.’’’

The Roman theory of monarchy

25

the idea that Caesar was driven by cupiditas regnandi, a desire to be rex, and so to reinstate the system of monarchy whose last representative had been characterised as Superbus and whose memory had been wiped out in the interests of the Roman people.9 But this polemical onslaught, in which Cicero makes rex and princeps and tyrannus and dominus interchangeable terms for an enslaving monarchical figure motivated by the vices of superbia and cupiditas, is grounded in a series of theoretical moves. Cicero’s text articulates a political and social code of conduct designed to prevent precisely this type of domination recurring within the Roman res publica and to ensure its continued existence in a condition of liberty. When Cicero compares the situation in which the res publica had recently found itself under the rule of Caesar to the condition of an enslaved person, he is referring to the condition defined by Roman law as one in which a person is subject to the ius, or jurisdiction, of another person, and therefore in their power.10 As the rubric De statu hominis states at the start of Justinian’s Digest, free and unfree persons are differentiated by the fact that the latter are subject to the law and power of someone else.11 According to this view, the free people of Rome had lost their ability or power to live under their own jurisdiction during Caesar’s period of domination and had suffered an illegitimate form of subjection to the will of one of its citizens. This critique is firmly linked to his earlier argument in Book I, where Cicero introduces the view that monarchy is an offence to justice, the virtue which does most of the work in Cicero’s theory. Justice is the quality which he upholds as ‘the most illustrious of the virtues, on account of which men are called good’, and as ‘the mistress and queen of virtues’.12 It is responsible for sustaining ‘the reasoning by which the fellowship of men with one another, and the communal life, are held together’.13 But no sooner has Cicero concluded his treatment of justice and the related topic of iniuria than we are presented with a condemnation of monarchy. He states that ‘men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of 9 10

11

12

13

See Cicero 1913, III.10.40: 308. See Digest 1985, vol. I, I.5.3–4: 15; vol. I, I.6.1–3: 17–18. For a discussion of the relevant rubrics, see Skinner 1998: 38–41. Digest 1985, vol. I, I.5.4: 15: ‘Servitus est . . . qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subicitur’; I.6.1: 17: ‘alieno iuri subiectae sunt . . . in aliena potestate sunt’. Cicero 1913, I.7.20: 20 (Cicero 1991: 9): ‘iustitia, in qua virtutis est splendor maximus, ex qua viri boni nominantur’; III.6.28: 294 (Cicero 1991: 110): ‘iustitia; haec enim una virtus omnium est domina et regina virtutum’. Cicero 1913, I.7.20: 20 (Cicero 1991: 9): ‘ea ratio, qua societas hominum inter ipsos et vitae quasi communitas continetur’.

26

The Roman Princeps

command or honour or glory’, which leads him to cite and endorse fully the maxim of Ennius that ‘to kingship belongs neither sacred fellowship nor faith’.14 He explains that since monarchy is one of those types of situation in which ‘a plurality of people is unable to excel’, it will therefore generate ‘such contention that it is extremely difficult to maintain a sacred fellowship’.15 Unsurprisingly, he adduces as an instance of the degeneration of the ‘sacred fellowship’ the ‘temerity of Caesar, who overturned all the laws of gods and men for the sake of that which he had imagined for himself in his mistaken fancy: pre-eminence [principatus]’.16 The Caesarian will to the principatus is the outcome of a personality and an imagination disordered by desire. Cicero’s theory holds that the claim to pre-eminent virtue upon which monarchy is based is held to be not only deeply contentious but also destructive of the societas which it is the purpose of political rationality to sustain. Three explanations are evident in Cicero’s text as to why any argument that moral pre-eminence justifies monarchy will evoke ‘such contention’. The first is the empirical observation that, even if it were once the case, there are no exceptionally virtuous men around today: as Cicero says, ‘we do not live with men who are perfect and clearly wise’ but only among citizens of ordinary moral character capable of moral improvement.17 The second is an historical point. Rome’s laws have sufficiently inculcated its citizens with the requisite notion of justice and equality to render it implausible that any one individual could carry the day in arguing that they have a better claim to be able to implement justice for all. But the third and most searching reason which Cicero gives is that it is arguably a mistake to think that it could ever be a part of sapientia, and therefore the attribute of a truly wise man, even to articulate such a view, let alone for the res publica to act upon it by instituting a monarchy. To do so is to dissociate being wise from being just: yet, as Cicero wants to define it, being wise should be above all a matter of cultivating the reasoning which is designed 14

15

16

17

Cicero 1913, I.8.26: 26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Maxime autem adducuntur plerique, ut eos iustitiae capiat oblivio, cum in imperiorum, honorum, gloriae cupiditatem inciderunt. Quod enim est apud Ennium: Nulla sancta societas/Nec fides regni est.’ Cicero 1913, I.8.26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Nam quicquid eius modi est, in quo non possint plures excellere, in eo fit plerumque tanta contentio, ut difficillimum sit servare ‘‘sanctam societatem’’.’ Cicero 1913, I.8.26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Declaravit id modo temeritas C. Caesaris, qui omnia iura divina et humana pervertit propter eum, quem sibi ipse opinionis errore finxerat, principatum.’ Cicero 1913, I.15.46: 48–50 (Cicero 1991: 20): ‘Quoniam autem vivitur non cum perfectis hominibus planeque sapientibus, sed cum iis, in quibus praeclare agitur si sunt simulacra virtutis, etiam hoc intellegendum puto, neminem omnino esse neglegendum, in quo aliqua significatio virtutis appareat, colendum autem esse ita quemque maxime, ut quisque maxime virtutibus his lenioribus erit ornatus, modestia, temperantia, hac ipsa, de qua multa iam dicta sunt, iustitia.’

The Roman theory of monarchy

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to preserve the fellowship and society of the republic, and under Cicero’s description, this reasoning cannot incorporate the type of argument necessary to advocate the subordination of citizens to the direction and ius of a man of pre-eminent virtue. For Cicero’s theory, as Atkins points out, ‘wisdom was not wisdom without justice’, an argument which Cicero himself upholds with reference to Plato.18 Having socialised the virtue of sapientia, Cicero is unwilling to regard the grounds for arguing for such subordination as anything other than contentious, for they will always have to be found in a type of knowledge which threatens to supplant, rather than sustain, social and political life. These types of argument are profoundly dissociative in their implications. They operate with a notion of a superior rationality to which they make an appeal and which Cicero, as an academic sceptic, is reluctant to recognise; and they are traced firmly in his text to those men who are regularly held to be magnanimous and wise. Cicero’s need to clarify the value of these qualities in the republic is pronounced because, as he indicates himself, the recent threat of monarchy posed by Caesar had been remarkably ‘troubling . . . in that the desire for honour, command, power and glory usually exist in men of the greatest spirit and most brilliant intellectual talent’.19 As problematic for Cicero as it had been for Aristotle, magnanimity is held to be a deeply ambivalent quality in a citizen in De officiis. The problem is expressed succinctly in Book I: It is a hateful fact that loftiness and greatness of spirit all too easily give birth to wilfulness and an excessive desire for pre-eminence [cupiditas principatus] . . . the more outstanding an individual is in greatness of spirit, the more he desires complete pre-eminence [princeps], or rather to be the sole ruler. But when you desire to surpass all others, it is difficult to respect the fairness that is a special mark of justice. Consequently, such men allow themselves to be defeated neither by argument nor by any public or legal obligation. Only too often do they emerge in public life as bribers and agitators, seeking to acquire as much wealth as possible, preferring violent pre-eminence to equality through justice.20

18 19

20

Atkins 2000: 513; Cicero 1913, I.19.63: 64. Cicero 1913, I.8.26: 26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Est autem in hoc genere molestum, quod in maximis animis splendidissimisque ingeniis plerumque exsistunt honoris, imperii, potentiae, gloriae cupiditates.’ Cicero 1913, I.19.64: 66 (Cicero 1991: 26): ‘Sed illud odiosum est, quod in hac elatione et magnitudine animi facillime pertinacia et nimia cupiditas principatus innascitur . . . ut quisque animi magnitudine maxime excellet, ita maxime vult princeps omnium vel potius solus esse. Difficile autem est, cum praestare omnibus concupieris, servare aequitatem, quae est iustitiae maxime propria. Ex quo fit, ut neque disceptione vinci se nec ullo publico ac legitimo iure patiantur, exsistuntque in re publica plerumque largitores et factiosi, ut opes quam maximas consequantur et sint vi potius superiores quam iustitia pares.’

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The Roman Princeps

Wanting and achieving pre-eminence – establishing oneself as princeps – is yet again held to be the result of unreason and injustice – a violence to ius. Cicero is adamant in warning us that ‘the loftier a man’s spirit, the more easily he is driven by desire for glory to injustice. This is slippery ground indeed . . .’21 The man of magnanimity wants to be recognised for his greatness in a way which threatens justice, whereas Cicero wants to maintain that ‘a true and wise greatness of spirit judges that deeds and not glory are the basis of the honourableness that nature most seeks. It prefers not to seem princeps but to be so.’22 What lurks behind this apparent concession is the possibility of a true vir sapiens whose wisdom and virtue really do single him out as princeps. Cicero duly gives room to some arguments which later become central to Seneca’s monarchical theory: the man of magnanimity despises externals, seeks nothing other than ‘what is honourable and seemly’, and is convinced that ‘he ought not to be subject to any man or any passion or any accident of fortune’.23 He gives us a glimpse of a concept of liberty which also comes to the fore in Seneca.24 But he clearly perceives a sovereign tenor in these doctrines, repeating his warning that ‘the desire for glory . . . destroys the liberty for which men of great spirit ought to be in competition’.25 If the spectre of Caesar haunts Cicero’s critique of magnanimity, the difficulties which magnanimitas and sapientia present are the consequence of more than recent history. In availing himself of some of the key concepts of Stoic ethics in order to elaborate a political morality suitable for a specific, historically defined political community composed of agents described as men of ordinary moral capacity, Cicero repeatedly encounters a conflict which attends upon his dislocation of Stoic ethical teaching from its metaphysical framework, and, in particular, from the type of community in which it had been envisaged and made to work by a succession of Stoic philosophers after Zeno: the cosmic city of gods and men. As Schofield’s classic work has shown, Cicero was well aware of this doctrine, 21

22

23

24

25

Cicero 1913, I.19.65: 66 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘Facillime autem ad res iniustas impellitur, ut quisque altissimo animo est, gloriae cupiditate; qui locus est sane lubricus’. Cicero 1913, I.19.65: 66 (Cicero 1991: 26–7): ‘Vera et sapiens animi magnitudo honestum illud, quod maxime natura sequitur, in factis positum, non in gloria iudicat principemque se esse mavult quam videri.’ Cicero 1913, I.20.66: 68 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘cum persuasum est nihil hominem, nisi quod honestum decorumque sit, aut admirari aut optare aut expetere oportere nullique neque homini neque perturbationi animi nec fortunae succumbere’. Cicero 1913, I.20.67: 68 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘solum id, quod honestum sit, bonum iudices et ab omni animi perturbatione liber sis’. Cicero 1913, I.20.68: 70 (Cicero 1991: 28): ‘Cavenda etiam est gloriae cupiditas, ut supra dixi, pro qua magnanimis viris omnis debet esse contentio.’

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for he records a description of it in his account of Stoic theology in De natura deorum: In the first place the universe was created for the sake of gods and men, and the things it contains were provided and contrived for the enjoyment of men. For the universe is, as it were, the common home of gods and men, or a city that belongs to both. For they alone live according to justice and law by the use of reason.26

Schofield has explained how the doctrine forms part of Stoic teaching on divine providence. The Stoics held that the universe was organised and animated purposefully and benevolently by an immanent force which they identified with logos or ratio. In their writings, this concept was associated with, and personified variously as, ‘nature’, ‘providence’, ‘fate’, ‘fortune’, ‘god’, ‘the gods’ and ‘Zeus’. Reason directs the universe and the rational beings for which it was created, and both gods and men are able to participate in this divine scheme of things and live in harmony with it because of their rational faculty. This shared capacity to reason is understood to provide men and gods with the basis of a community since it supplies them with a notion of justice and law. The law by which both men and gods should abide is the law of nature, which is equated with reason. And as Cicero himself pointed out in a wholly Stoic passage in De legibus, ‘those who have law in common have justice in common. But those who have these things in common must be held to belong to the same civitas.’27 So there exists a universal civitas whose members consist in those who are sufficiently rational – who share, that is, in recta ratio, or ‘right reason’ – to adhere to its law, and thereby to a notion of justice; but the cosmic city is not a political entity with written, positive laws, and its members are bound by an authority which is not located in any terrestrial institution, but in reason itself: the source of law is internalised, ‘making it something like the voice of conscience’.28 The state of perfected rationality which the Stoics identify with virtue – and therefore wisdom – is thus attained by living in accordance with the dictates of nature or natural law. In so acting according to right reason, we participate within a cosmic community. Given this 26

27

28

Cicero 1933, II.62.154: 272: ‘Principio ipse mundus deorum hominumque causa factus est, quaeque in eo sunt ea parata ad fructum hominum et inventa sunt. Est enim mundus quasi communis deorum atque hominum domus, aut urbs utrorumque; soli enim ratione utentes iure ac lege vivunt.’ For a full analysis of the doctrine, see Schofield 1999 (65 for translation cited here). For a more recent recension of Schofield’s interpretation of Stoic ethics, see Schofield 2003. Cicero 1928, I.7.23: 322: ‘inter quos porro est communio legis, inter eos communio iuris est; quibus autem haec sunt inter eos communia, et civitatis eiusdem habendi sunt’. For the translation and discussion, see Schofield 1999: 68, esp. n. 12. Schofield 1999: 69.

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The Roman Princeps

providential character of the universe, Stoic ethics held that nothing beneficial could possibly be gained from acting contrary to reason, and that developing the capacity to live one’s life according to reason – acquiring and maintaining virtue, in other words – was the fundamental aim of life, the sole good to be pursued by man. Cicero needed to shape Stoic ethics to the context of an historically bounded political community which was not co-extensive with the cosmic civitas. Given that Cicero’s citizen was not coterminous with the Stoic vir sapiens, his obligations to his local political community occasioned conduct which conflicted with the dictates of Stoic natural law – and therefore with his obligations as a member of the cosmic community – in crucial areas: the institution of private property contravened natural law, as Cicero himself indicates in his defence of the system, while the assassination of Caesar could only be justified in terms of the interests of the Roman Republic.29 In an extended tussle to uphold the Stoic rule that what is dignum is always what is utile, Cicero’s theory moves uneasily between redefining the honourable in terms of the rationality necessary to the republic’s flourishing, and conceding exceptions to the Stoic understanding of the rule when it is applied in the face of clashes between what is dignum in the Stoic moral universe with what is utile to the Roman res publica. The negotiation is made all the more delicate by the fact that Cicero cuts loose his community from a providential cosmology: in keeping fortuna divorced from natura, Cicero brings contingency into play in a res publica already contending moral and political claims on the grounds of probable justification through argument and debate within deliberative assemblies.30 THE SENECAN THEORY OF THE PRINCE

De clementia provides an account of the necessity of the profoundly altered political state of affairs engendered by the institution of a princeps at the head of the Roman res publica. In order to legitimate precisely what Cicero’s theory had sought to avert – the subjection of the Roman populus to the ius of a princeps – the fundamental theoretical movement pervading his text is Seneca’s consistent application of the monological concept of Stoic ratio to his material. His first move is to extend the Roman res publica across the entire globe. In describing the emperor as a universal monarch 29

30

For the discussion of private property, see Cicero 1913, I.7.21: 22. For Caesar’s assassination as an act benefiting the Roman people, see Cicero 1913, III.4.19: 286. For the conflict between natura and fortuna, see Cicero 1913, I.33.120: 122.

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from the very outset, ruling over ‘all mortals’, ‘with power of life and death over nations’, entrusted with the duty of accounting, ‘should the gods demand it’, for ‘the whole human race’, Seneca makes the political society over which the princeps is entitled to rule worldwide in extent.31 By setting up his theory in this way, Seneca appears to start mapping out the Roman civitas as the Stoic cosmic city. In his ethics, Seneca refers to the doctrine of the cosmic city, but there he talks of the existence of two republics: Let us embrace with our minds two res publicae: one great and truly common – in which gods and men are contained, in which we look not to this or that corner, but measure the bounds of our civitas with the sun; the other to which the particular circumstances of birth have assigned us . . .32

In De clementia, Seneca makes Stoic ratio the governing principle of his political community, which thereby comes to share the same rationality, law and justice as the cosmic city. The two res publicae begin to be identified at a theoretical level. Although it is by no means a smooth or stable alignment, the manoeuvre enables Seneca to ground the Roman imperial ideology of virtus upon a strictly Stoic notion of reason. He can then immediately inscribe a principle of universal law and justice upon the person of the prince in order to justify the emperor’s lack of any formal obligation in terms of the human, positive law or agency or constitutional requirement at a local level. The virtue of Seneca’s princeps explains and legitimates his absolutism: by definition, the prince is bound only to a higher, universal moral law. Seneca proceeds to claim that, in the absence of any constitutional or legal restraints, virtue and virtue alone is the criterion for legitimate rule. Everything comes down to the virtuous character of the ruler, argues Seneca, asserting quite explicitly that ‘no one could conceive of anything more becoming to a ruler than mercy, whatever the manner of his accession to power and whatever its legal basis’.33 He spells out the lesson: ‘what distinguishes a tyrant from a king are his actions, not the name’.34 And having made constitutional 31

32

33

34

Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–5: 356–8 (Seneca 1995: 128–9): ‘ex omnibus mortalibus . . . vitae necisque gentibus arbiter . . . qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat in mea manu positum est . . . dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum’. Seneca 1932b, 4.1: 186–8: ‘Duas res publicas animo complectamur, alteram magnam et vere publicam, qua dii atque homines continentur, in qua non ad hunc angulum respicimus aut ad illum, sed terminos civitatis nostrae cum sole metimur; alteram, cui nos adscripsit condicio nascendi.’ The translation is from Schofield 1999: 93. For ‘the greater city’, see also De ira, II.31.7. Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Excogitare nemo quicquam poterit, quod magis decorum regenti sit quam clementia, quocumque modo is et quocumque iure praepositus ceteris erit.’ Seneca 1928a, I.12.1: 392 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘Tyrannus autem a rege factis distat, non nomine.’

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The Roman Princeps

definitions and nomenclature unimportant, he then makes a further move which secures the utility of his theory to royal regimes for centuries to come: he reintroduces the hated word rex to Roman political discourse and makes it an equivalent term throughout his text for princeps and imperator. He never addresses Nero directly as rex, but he uses the word and its cognates repeatedly, interchangeably and with an affected indifference to the novelty of his usage, referring casually at one point in the text to ‘princes and kings and whatever other title there may be for guardians of public order’.35 This consistent equivalence has two related effects. One is that, in aligning the language of the rex to that of the princeps, Seneca’s text neutralises the negative evaluation traditionally associated with the word rex in particular and with the vocabulary of kingship in general. The other consequence is that it enables Seneca to establish a conduit for Greek kingship theory into Roman imperial ideology and thereby to introduce topics found in earlier Stoic and Hellenistic treatises on autocratic kingship, most notably in the two treatises of Isocrates, Nicocles and Ad Nicoclem, and in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, where the theme of the virtuous monarch had been extensively discussed.36 The result of these innovations is a frequently observed one: the first book of De clementia has the generic character of a book on kingship. In deriving the political authority of the Roman monarch from his moral capacity, Seneca has to explain why one person above all other rational agents should be responsible for the direction of the res publica. If the true civitas is the cosmic civitas in which all men are capable of participating as rational beings, the structure of Seneca’s political society suggests that only one person is fully qualified for membership; the admission of the others seems to have been temporarily deferred. Seneca needs to justify the principle of subordination now operative within the Roman monarchy. There are occasions in the theory where Seneca draws analogies between the prince’s rule of the res publica and the gods’ rule of the universe in such a way as to suggest a less than conventionally Stoic basis for his theory – as if the earthly civitas were not actually confluent with the cosmic civitas, but rather its analogue.37 Despite such variations, 35

36

37

Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘principes regesque et quocumque alio nomine sunt tutores status publici’. For the royal aspect of the princely ideology and for the loci drawn from Isocrates, Xenophon and others, see Griffin 1976: 129–71, esp. 144–5. The theory may exhibit a less than canonical reading of the doctrine at I.7.1–2, for instance (Seneca 1928a: 374). For a discussion of the use of both Stoic and Platonic elements in monarchical theory in the later Empire, see Schofield 1999: 84–92; for Middle Stoicism’s re-engagement with Platonism

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deviations and apparent unorthodoxies, Seneca must nevertheless straightforwardly see to it that the bond of obligation between prince and those whom he rules cannot be overridden or ‘trumped’ in any way by the terms of an individual’s membership of the more extensively structured moral community which his own Stoic philosophy predicated. Seneca’s solution is to equate the princeps with the heroic figure of the Stoic vir sapiens, whose state of perfected rationality, and therefore of perfect virtus, made him such a pivotal figure of moral reflection and emulation in Stoic and Senecan ethics. And since the prince is identifiable as just such a wise man, he will understand that he is ‘born to assist the community and promote the common good’.38 He will therefore always ensure that the bonum commune and never a partisan interest is upheld by his government. This point helps to validate Seneca’s description of the monarchy as a res publica, now extensively restructured along universal lines. It also follows that if the prince is just such an exceptionally and perfectly rational person, his ius or lex is morally compelling in absolute terms. In the incomplete second book of the treatise, Seneca moves seamlessly from praising the emperor to discoursing on the vir sapiens. He contends that the identity of the prince as a true vir sapiens is discernible in his demonstration of divine clementia above all of the other virtues. Clementia is conceptualised as a supra-legal quality, operating over and above existing local law. It is thus the quintessential virtue of absolutism, and its exercise is held to be in conformity with universal ius. The effect of this conceptual structure is that, in demonstrating his clementia, the emperor can be regarded not only as the embodiment of sapientia, but also as the epitome of iustitia. The seeming contradiction is that it is in the operation of his power beyond and above human law – in acts of clemency in the face of injustices caused by human moral infirmity – that Seneca’s princeps shows himself to be most in conformity with ius and lex, understood in Stoic terms as synonyms of divine ratio. One can now see the sense of Seneca’s opening claim that the prince has guaranteed not only ‘security deep and abundant’ for the Roman populus but also ‘law raised above all violations of law’.39 For as Seneca later says, the truly merciful prince is a supremely

38

39

from the mid-second century BC onwards, see Sedley 2003: 20–4; for Platonism and Seneca’s ideas about the divine, see Donini 1979; but for an explanation of why such dualism is not evidence of ‘Platonising intrusions’ on Stoic cosmology, see Algra 2003: 167–8. Seneca 1928a, II.6.3: 440–2 (Seneca 1995: 163): ‘in commune auxilium natus ac bonum publicum, ex quo dabit cuique partem’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta, affluens . . . ius supra omnem iniuriam positum’.

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rational person who knows how to judge in accordance with cosmic principles of law and justice: ‘clemency exercises free judgement: it judges not by legal formula but by what is equitable and good’.40 To be a virtuous prince is to be a person who is capable of possessing and exercising this type of liberum arbitrium. It is to be a properly free person. Somewhat paradoxically, Seneca’s theory then binds the prince to this divine law by formulating a severe ethical regime for him. He is subjected – indeed enslaved, as one passage puts it – to the rule of universal ratio, the lex naturae.41 While the legalistic character of Seneca’s political theory helps him to legitimate the conquest and subjection involved in the Roman revolution, one needs to resist mentally converting its moral terminology into a purely legal idiom. If the idea of the cosmic city ‘mediates the transition from republicanism to natural law theory’, then De clementia occupies a midpoint in that transition, sharing a little in the ‘Janus-facing’ character which Schofield identifies in earlier Stoicism.42 Many of the Stoic elements identifiable in Seneca’s political and moral thought were later incorporated into the Roman legal codes; but the effectiveness of Seneca’s theory is that it utilises the Stoic idea of a moral law at the same time as it appropriates established concepts of Roman moral and political discourse and familiar rhetorical strategies. Seneca is a sophisticated magister of the ars rhetorica. He writes in his capacity as an informal political advisor to the Roman emperor, Nero Caesar, to whom the text is addressed. De clementia was composed between December 55 and December 56, shortly after the young prince’s accession to the imperial throne in 54.43 But Seneca is also Nero’s former praeceptor in the traditional aristocratic syllabus of the studia liberalia, and his text is an argument constructed according to recognisable rhetorical rules articulated and embodied in the theory and practice of Roman classical oratory.44 In De clementia, as elsewhere, Seneca is concerned to convey Stoic doctrine, often criticised for its dryness, in a conventionally Roman rhetorical mode of discourse. His exposition of moral precepts proceeds in particular by means of exemplification, thus

40

41

42 44

Seneca 1928a, II.7.3: 444 (my translation): ‘Clementia liberum arbitrium habet; non sub formula, sed ex aequo et bono iudicat.’ Explicit reference to the lex naturae is at Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408, but the idea is expressed throughout the text’s arguments in various legal metaphors. The role of conscience is discussed below. Schofield 1999: 102–3. 43 Seneca 1995: 119. For Seneca’s involvement in Nero’s education as his praeceptor, see Griffin 1976: 63–6; for the Senecan syllabus, see Giancotti 1953; for Nero’s education in general, see Parker 1946: 44–8.

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accommodating itself to a method of argument preferred by Roman political society.45 Seneca similarly draws upon a familiar moral vocabulary. The virtue of clemency is one for which Cicero had fulsomely praised Julius Caesar in the Pro Marcello and Pro Ligario, where the basic structure of the concept which Seneca elaborates and refines – extra-judicial and anchored to a Stoic psychology – had already been sketched.46 Clementia, closely accompanied by magnanimitas, heads the distinctive typology of virtues at the core of the theory. Seneca specifies these two qualities more than any other as the mark of a true prince. The rest of the typology is constituted by a range of repeatedly named virtues over and above the sapientia and iustitia necessarily in possession of a prince modelled on the Stoic vir sapiens. Several of them are equally well established within Roman political vocabulary, but they come to play a far more important role in the circumstances of absolute power which Seneca is theorising. In particular, Seneca insists that his prince be mitis, and he reiterates forcefully the need to cultivate in particular the virtues of moderatio, temperantia, mansuetudo, lenitas, humanitas and patientia.47 Mildness, moderation, temperance, gentleness, calmness, humaneness, patience: these states of mind provide the psychological conditions necessary for the successful performance of acts of clemency and magnanimity in particular, but they are crucial in a more extensive way for their mitigating effect on the mind of a prince upon whose agency the res publica is now entirely dependent for its well-being. Perturbations of the psyche caused by emotional states of mind such as anger were identified in Stoic and Senecan ethics as manifestations of an irrational person and as eliminible only through the combination of moral education and habitual practice. But the unhelpful consequences of those perturbations are amplified to the point of mortal danger in circumstances where the vir sapiens heads the body politic.48 Anger is the mark of a demented, insane agent; and the res publica risks losing its mind if its ruler loses his temper. But the moral typology is also part of a more controversial argument which runs throughout the text. Its elements

45 46 47

48

For this point, see Sedley 2001: 151. See especially the passages at Cicero, Pro Marcello, 8–9; 17–20; 31; Pro Ligario, 6–8; 10; 13–16. The loci for Seneca’s endorsement and exemplification of these virtues in De clementia and for his condemnation of the corresponding vices are: for mitis, I.7.2; I.11.1; I.13.4; I.22.3; I.25.1; for moderatio, I.2.2; I.11.1; I.18.1; I.19.4; I.21.4; II.3.2; for temperantia, I.7.4; I.11.2; I.12.4; I.14.2; I.20.2; II.3.1; II.4.2; for mansuetudo, I.7.3; I.8.6; I.11.1; I.16.1; II.2.1; II.5.1; for lenitas, II.1.1; II.2.3; II.3.1; II.5.3; for humanitas, I.2.2; I.3.2; for patientia, I.14.1; I.22.3. For discussions of ira in Roman intellectual history, see Harris 2001.

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are used to construct a regime of self-mastery for the Senecan prince which is said to guarantee not only his own but also the Roman people’s freedom. Veyne’s observation that ‘everything changed after the Roman conquest, once liberty . . . was forced to bow before Caesarism’ extends to the content of Seneca’s theory, where the very concept of libertas undergoes a dramatic transformation as he sets out to justify the conquest of the Roman people by making its new master a fully self-mastering Stoic homo liber.49 Yet before any of these conceptual manoeuvres can be undertaken, Seneca faces the task of coming to terms with the rhetorical genre within which he is required to operate in order to proffer his theory at all. If in practice Cicero had proved extremely adept at the laudatio – Pro Marcello is an outstanding example of the most unrepublican of virtues, that of clemency, lauded in the most unrepublican of rhetorical modes – the genre had been repeatedly disparaged in his rhetorical writings as puerile, ostentatious, pompous, sophistical, Greek, effeminate and alien to the political practices of the Republic, entirely unsuited to the manly battles of Roman public life.50 To consider it appropriate that speeches in regular political life should be devoted to the sustained praise of the virtues of one living member of the political community was a categorically unrepublican rhetorical perspective, implying an inordinate degree of importance attached to one individual’s contribution to government. Under the Principate, the effective subordination of senatorial debate to the imperial will and the displacement of the deliberative by the demonstrative genre as the increasingly dominant mode of political address within public life presented a problem for Seneca. The articulation of a theoretical vision of monarchy before the Roman emperor involved a delicate negotiation of power which can be seen to have necessitated the entire structure of his text. Seneca faced the dilemma of possibly risking his life if his audience detected a discrepancy between the normative strictures of his account of monarchy and the present political circumstances under which it was elaborated. There could, in short, be no gap between theory and practice. Nero had to be held to be the type of monarch which Seneca was talking about.

49

50

Veyne 2003: 152 (and 17 for Stoic self-mastery and its involvement in Roman imperial ideology via Senecan theory). See in particular Cicero, De oratore, II.341; Orator, 11.37 and 13.42.

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MIRRORS, VISION AND THE FIGURE OF IMPERSONATION

Seneca’s elegant and daring solution to this problem is to split Nero into two persons: I have undertaken to write on the subject of clemency, Nero Caesar, in order to act, in a certain way, in place of a mirror, and hold forth you to yourself as you are on the point of attaining the very greatest pleasure of all.51

By the conclusion of his opening sentence, Seneca’s text has generated two Neros with his promise to hold forth – ‘te tibi ostenderem’ – but his syntax makes quite clear that it is only one of these, the te and not the tibi, which is ‘on the point of attaining the greatest pleasure of all’. It is Seneca’s use of the word speculum in this sentence that has famously marked out his De clementia as the earliest surviving example of a ‘mirror-for-princes’ text. Seneca’s general attitude towards the use of mirrors in contemporary ethical, social and sexual practices is actually deeply negative, which is why he is keen to appropriate their function – that of ‘holding forth’ images – and to perform it in their place.52 The type of image which his text produces, and the type of seeing required for its inspection, is, in Seneca’s opinion, of a different and superior order to that which is involved in the use of physical mirrors. The philosopher’s text promises to offer a true reflection. Seneca sets up a strong contrast from the very start between two ways of looking at the world: through reasoned discourse, he wants to substitute rational reflection, and indeed self-reflection, for a view of the world and the self which is uninformed by ratio. For Seneca, as the most recent translators of De clementia point out, clemency is ‘a mental condition’.53 There are rational principles which need to be grasped about the quality and importance of mercy – what it is, why and when you should use it, and so on. They cannot be apprehended merely by empirical observation; and being merciful is never a matter of calculating outcomes. Time and again, Seneca warns against the dangers of relying simply upon the corporeal eye as a guide to the appropriateness of merciful action. To do so 51

52

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.1: 356 (translation mine): ‘Scribere de clementia, Nero Caesar, institui, ut quodam modo speculi vice fungerer et te tibi ostenderem perventurum ad voluptatem maximam omnium.’ For their lack of effectiveness in ethical practices, see Seneca 1928b, II.36.1–3: 248; for their distorting effects, see his comments in Natural Questions in Seneca 1971, I.5.13–14: 54; and for the mirror’s ‘perverse’ uses – ‘there is no vice for which it has not become indispensable’ – see Seneca 1971, I.16.1–17.10: 82–94 (citing translation at 95). Seneca 1995: 124–5. In addition to Procope´ and Cooper’s remarks, note also Veyne’s indication of the crux of the matter: ‘In sum, what was essentially at stake in politics was the mental attitude of the master. Seneca was announcing that a new era had arrived’ (Veyne 2003: 17).

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is to run the risk of confusing mercy with pity, or misericordia, which Seneca regards as entirely irrational. Defining misericordia as ‘the vice of a pusillanimous mind that succumbs to the sight of others’ ills’, and therefore something which ‘good men will avoid’, Seneca derides the tendency to be moved to act on such a basis as characteristic of ‘old women’ who are so ‘moved’ by the tears of the very worst criminals that they would release them from prison if they could.54 To be moved to action by such an unthinking and emotional way of looking at the world is a failure of reason which Seneca repeatedly connects with weak-sightedness. ‘Pity is a sickness of the mind caused by the sight of other people’s miseries’; and ‘pity looks at Fortuna, not the causes; whereas mercy joins in with reason’.55 For Seneca, nothing happens without a reason, and we should not be blinded by Fortuna, whose effect on the world is only apparently contingent and irrational. To react in an emotional way to adversity, to become sorrowful, to be plagued by tristitia at such sights is not conducive ‘to discerning things, to thinking about what can usefully be done, to avoiding danger, to reckoning about justice’.56 Clear-sightedness, by contrast, is the property of someone whose visual perception is sufficiently anchored in a rational comprehension of the world. By extension, since ‘mercy joins in with reason’, to be merciful is to be similarly clear-sighted: one sees the reasons how, why and when it makes sense to act mercifully. The purpose of De clementia is to give those reasons. At the same time, in line with established rhetorical theory, Seneca realises that the best way of convincing Nero of his case is to enlist a series of rhetorical figures and tropes and assemble an ‘expression in words of a given situation in such a way that it seems to be a matter of seeing rather than of hearing’ the facts of the case, thus converting his audience into a spectator.57 If the allusion to the speculum allows Seneca to begin a long metaphor in which visual perception is characterised as an attribute of the 54

55

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Seneca 1928a, II.5.1: 438 (Seneca 1995: 161): ‘clementiam mansuetudinemque omnes boni viri praestabunt, misericordiam autem vitabunt; est enim vitium pusilli animi ad speciem alienorum malorum succidentis. Itaque pessimo cuique familiarissima est; anus et mulierculae sunt, quae lacrimis nocentissimorum moventur, quae, si liceret, carcerem effringeret.’ Seneca 1928a, II.5.4: 438 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘misericordia est aegritudo animi ob alienarum miseriarum speciem’; Seneca 1928a, II.5.1: 438 (Seneca 1995: 161): ‘misericordia non causam, sed fortunam spectat; clementia rationi accedit’. Seneca 1928a, II.6.1: 440 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘tristitia inhabilis est ad dispiciendas res, utilia excogitanda, periculosa vitanda, aequa aestimanda’. For further discussion of the vice of tristitia, see below. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.40, vol. IV: 56 (citing translation at 57): ‘quaedam forma rerum ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri’. For an analysis of this manoeuvre as a process of conversion – an analysis to which this reading of Seneca is indebted – see Skinner 1996: 182–8.

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mind, the metaphorical use of the verb ostendere simultaneously begins a figure of thought that dominates the structure of the preface. According to Quintilian, writing a generation later, ‘holding forth’ was an extremely important aspect of rhetorical practice which the successful orator needed to understand and master.58 He asserts that ‘it is a great virtue to express our subject clearly and in such a way that it seems to be actually seen’; and he adds that ‘a speech does not adequately fulfill its purpose or attain the total domination it should have if it goes no further than the ears, and the judge feels that he is merely being told the story of the matters he has to decide, without their being brought out and held forth to his mind’s eye’.59 Elsewhere he claims that the ability ‘not so much to narrate as to hold forth’ is one which succeeds in affecting the minds of the audience as if they were actually present at the occurrence under description.60 Quintilian’s interpretation of the role and importance of holding forth has been summarised succinctly by Quentin Skinner: ‘He argues that it may be possible to employ figurative language with so much vividness and immediacy that our audience comes to ‘‘see’’ what we are trying to describe, and is thereby roused to accept and endorse our vision of events.’61 In Quintilian’s view, the orator needs to develop his capacity to fantasise, to visualise in his mind images of things that are not present. Having produced a vivid picture in his mind of what he wants to convey, the accomplished orator will set about describing this image in a powerful way in order to move his audience. Seneca develops one particular figure in order to express his fantasy. The te which he proceeds to hold forth to Nero is an imagined Nero who appears in the prologue to make a long, eloquent speech. This image is produced by a figure of thought known in rhetorical theory as ‘fictiones personarum’, or the ‘figuring of persons’: the figure of impersonation.62 So when Seneca tells Nero that he intends to ‘hold forth you to yourself . . . (‘‘te tibi ostenderem’’)’, he is being prepared to see the image of himself 58 59

60

61

For ‘holding forth’, see Skinner 1996: 185–6. Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.62, vol. III: 374–6 (375–7, modified): ‘Magna virtus est res de quibus loquimur clare atque, ut cerni videantur, enuntiare. Non enim satis efficit neque, ut debet, plene dominatur oratio, si usque ad aures valet atque ea sibi iudex, de quibus cognoscit, narrari credit, non exprimi et oculis mentis ostendi.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.2.32, vol. III: 60 (my translation): ‘quae non tam dicere videtur quam ostendere’. For antecedents in the Roman tradition, see Cicero, De inventione, I.54.104, and Ad Herennium, IV.34.45. Of the Roman theorists, it is Quintilian who, in providing a coherent theory of an established practice, systematically uses the verb ostendere to describe this aspect of rhetorical performance. Skinner 1996: 183. 62 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.29, vol. IV: 50 : ‘fictiones personarum’.

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which Seneca is about to produce through an act of impersonation. An image of Nero does indeed ‘appear’ , addressing his audience with a speech that dominates Seneca’s prologue. Seneca goes on to say: For even though the true fruit of virtuous deeds is simply to have performed them and there is no more fitting reward for the virtues apart from the virtues themselves, it is nevertheless enjoyable to inspect and to go through the good state of one’s conscience, and then to cast one’s eyes on the huge multitude here – quarrelsome, factious, uncontrolled, as likely to run riot for its own as for another’s downfall, if it breaks the yoke now on it – and say to oneself: ‘Have I, of all mortals, found favour and been chosen to act on earth in place of the gods? I am the judge with power of life and death over nations, and the lot and state of everyone has been placed in my hands. All dispensations of fortune to mortals are made through pronouncements on my lips. My verdict is what gives people and cities cause to rejoice. No region anywhere flourishes but by my will and favour. These swords in their countless thousands, sheathed through the peace that I bring, will be drawn at my nod. The extermination or banishment of nations, the granting or loss of their liberty, the enslavement of kings, or their coronation, the destruction or rise of cities – all this comes under my jurisdiction. Such is the extent of my power. Yet I have not been driven to unjust punishment by anger or youthful impulse, nor by the rashness and obstinacy of men, which wrenches the patience, from even the calmest breasts, nor even by the glory, fearsome but common among those of high command, of parading one’s power through terror. My sword has been sheathed, indeed hung away altogether. I have spared to the utmost even the meanest blood. There is no one, whatever else he may lack, who has not the name of man to commend him to my favour. My sternness I conceal, my mercy I hold at the ready. I watch over myself as though the laws, which I have summoned from decay and darkness into the light, will call me to account. I have been touched by the first flush of one person’s youthfulness, by another’s extreme old age. I have granted pardon to one man because of his high position, to another because of his low estate. Whenever I could find no other ground for pity, I have shown mercy to myself. This very day, should the gods demand it, I can render account for the whole human race.’63

63

Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–4: 356–8 (Seneca 1995: 128–9, modified): ‘Quamvis enim recte factorum verus fructus sit fecisse nec ullum virtutum pretium dignum illis extra ipsas sit, iuvat inspicere et circumire bonam conscientiam, tum immittere oculos in hanc immensam multitudinem discordem, seditiosam, impotentem, in perniciem alienam suamque pariter exsultaturam, si hoc iugum fregerit, et ita loqui secum: ‘‘Egone ex omnibus mortalibus placui electusque sum, qui in terris deorum vice fungerer? Ego vitae necisque gentibus arbiter; qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est; quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit, meo ore pronuntiat; ex nostro responso laetitiae causas populi urbesque concipiunt; nulla pars usquam nisi volente propitioque me floret; haec tot milia gladiorum, quae pax mea comprimit, ad nutum meum stringentur; quas nationes funditus excidi, quas transportari, quibus libertatem dari, quibus eripi, quos reges mancipia fieri quorumque capiti regium circumdari decus oporteat, quae ruant urbes, quae oriantur, mea iuris

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As a clarification of the character and types of political power at the emperor’s disposal, this speech is astonishingly direct. The prince is held to act ‘in place of’ the gods as their vicegerent. He is also understood to be acting on their behalf, as a trustee of divine concerns, obliged to keep and render an account of his administration of the world.64 As imperator, the princeps retains supreme command of the armed forces. Full jurisdictional power, both executive and legislative, resides in him alone. His lips and his mouth articulate the law governing the body politic. His position in relation to human, or ‘positive’, law is absolute: as Griffin, Cooper and Procope´ all indicate, the significance of the phrase ‘I watch over myself as though the laws . . . will call me to account’ lies in Seneca’s use of ‘as though’, which effectively transfers the custodial function of external laws governing the exercise of political power to the person of the prince himself.65 Of course, the prince may choose to bind himself to the laws, and he may be well advised to do so, but formally speaking, he is entirely unobliged. Watching over himself, the prince is self-reflexive and introspective: the image is figured talking to himself and looking inward.66 The prince renders ratio to himself and to the gods alone. Conscience becomes a crucial attribute of the princeps whom Seneca holds forth. It is striking that the impersonated speech of the prince which provides us with the part of the theory delineating the prince’s relationship to the laws is imagined as a dramatic soliloquy delivered by a conscientious prince reflecting upon his self: conscientiousness is a condition of absolutism. The burden which Seneca makes the prince carry for his clementia – the virtue of conquest exercised towards defeated enemies over whom the victor wields the power of life and death with the force of the sword – is packed into a compelling ethical regime of self-conquest, self-surveillance and self-examination. Freed from human law, the person of the prince finds himself confronting another type of tribunal altogether.

64 65 66

dictio est. In hac tanta facultate rerum non ira me ad iniqua supplicia compulit, non iuvenilis impetus, non temeritas hominum et contumacia, quae saepe tranquillissimis quoque pectoribus patientiam extorsit, non ipsa ostentandae per terrores potentiae dira, sed frequens magnis imperiis gloria. Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est, summa parsimonia etiam vilissimi sanguinis; nemo non, cui alia desunt, hominis nomine apud me gratiosus est. Severitatem abditam, at clementiam in procinctu habeo; sic me custodio, tamquam legibus, quas ex situ ac tenebris in lucem evocavi, rationem redditurus sim. Alterius aetate prima motus sum, alterius ultima; alium dignitati donavi, alium humilitati; quotiens nullam inveneram misericordiae causam, mihi peperci. Hodie dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’’’ For a discussion of Nero’s vicegerency, see Fears 1975: 486–96. Griffin 2000: 536–7. For Procope´ and Cooper’s comments, see Seneca 1995: 124. ‘loqui secum’ and ‘inspicere’. See n. 63 above.

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The Roman Princeps THE PRACTICE AND PLEASURES OF CONSCIENCE

By figuring the prince in the process of examining his conscience, Seneca is advocating to the emperor the need to place himself regularly before the iudex of ratio, the judge of reason, whose seat of judgement is in the mind.67 In the case of both of the interior monologues which Seneca provides as examples of this practice – the first in De ira, where he is advocating a regime of daily self-examination, and the second in the prologue to De clementia, where he envisages an interior monologue performed by the person of Nero – the appeals to the internal judge of reason are described as acts of enumerating or returning ‘ratio’, and these accounts are framed entirely in rhetorical speech.68 In describing conscience as a matter of ‘daily pleading my case at my own court’, Seneca inextricably links the idea of rendering ratio with oratorical performance in this interior courtroom.69 The practice of conscience is also said to have pleasant effects upon the mind. In De ira, Seneca had extolled its psychological benefits, talking of the ‘calm, deep and unimpeded’ sleep which followed a session of self-interrogation at the end of each day.70 In the Epistulae morales, Seneca also stresses the advantages of a good conscience.71 In De clementia, Seneca’s assertion that his graphic illustration of the conscientious emperor will involve Nero in maxima voluptas merits some attention: here, after all, is an avowed Stoic with a reputation for austerity seeming to embrace Epicurus, commencing his discourse on virtue by ostensibly holding out the prospect of great pleasure and therefore, at least from an orthodox Stoic point of view, of great vice. Seneca himself points out in one of his letters to Lucilius that ‘we Stoics believe that voluptas is a vice. It assuredly is; but we are accustomed to use the word when we wish to indicate a happy state of mind.’72 Conversationally, 67

68

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71 72

For conscientious self-reflection envisaged as advocacy in a court-room, see the extended description of self-interrogation in Seneca 1928b, III.36.1–38.2: 338–44. For the idea of bringing our emotional states ‘before the judge’ of our conscience, see Seneca 1928b, III.36.2: 40. Seneca 1928b, III.36.1: 338: ‘Omnes sensus perducendi sunt ad firmitatem; natura patientes sunt, si animus illos desit corrumpere, qui cotidie ad rationem reddendam vocandus est’; Seneca 1928a, I.1.4: 358: ‘Hodie dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’ Seneca 1928b, III.36.3: 340 (Seneca 1995: 110): ‘Utor hac potestate et cotidie apud me causam dico.’ For the ‘court of reason’ in Seneca’s thought, see Veyne 2003: 54–5. Seneca 1928b, III.36.2: 340: ‘Qualis ille somnus post recognitionem sui sequitur, quam tranquillus, quam altus ac liber, cum aut laudatus est animus aut admonitus et speculator sui censorque secretus cognouit de moribus suis.’ See Seneca 1917–25, 43.4–5, vol. I: 286. Seneca 1917–25, 59.1, vol. I: 408–10: ‘Vitium esse voluptatem credimus. Sit sane; ponere tamen illam solemus ad demonstrandam animi hilarem adfectionem.’

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Seneca explains, we often use this notion of pleasure to refer to a state of mind which we should more properly describe in terms of gaudium, or joy. Ordinary discourse conflates these two descriptions, but strictly speaking, we should distinguish between them: ‘voluptas is a thing of ill repute, and gaudium only comes to the wise’.73 For joy is elatio animi, elation of a mind ‘which trusts in the goods and truths which are its own’, whereas voluptas pins pleasure to external affairs, which may well change, so that the events which produce pleasurable feelings in us one minute bring us tristitia, or sadness, the next.74 Seneca says that this cannot be the right way to think about joy which ‘never ceases and never changes into its opposite’.75 Through the prologue of De clementia, the notion of voluptas is surreptitiously transformed from the moment of its initial and quite shocking appearance into a synonym of gaudium, as the fleeting pleasures of the material mirror are exchanged for rational feelings of joy for the prince as a result of beholding, in an act of conscience, an image of unchanging, constant reason held forth by the words of the text to the eyes of his mind.76 As the prince enjoys seeing his own image, so the Roman citizens are delighted to behold the image of mercy in their prince: ‘there is no-one so satisfied at his own guiltlessness’, says Seneca, ‘as not to rejoice that mercy should stand before his eyes, ready for human error’.77 Crucially, the speech simultaneously functions as a summary of Seneca’s entire argument. The impersonation of Nero embodies and exemplifies all the precepts which Seneca will go on to discuss in his theory. Nero already is as he should be, which is why Seneca can say in the prologue to Book I that ‘no one seeks an example for you to imitate – apart from yourself ’.78 Seneca’s stated aim in addressing Nero thus is that he is ‘as familiar as possible with your good deeds and words so that what is now a matter of natural impulse in you may become a matter of settled judgement’.79 73

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76

77

78

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Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410: ‘voluptatem . . . rem infamem esse et gaudium nisi sapienti non contingere’. Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410: ‘Est enim animi elatio suis bonis verisque fidentis. Vulgo tamen sic loquimur magnum gaudium nos ex illius consulatu aut nuptiis aut ex partu uxoris percepisse, quae adeo non sunt gaudia, ut saepe initia futurae tristitiae sint.’ Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410 (411): ‘Gaudio autem iunctum est non desinere nec in contrarium verti.’ ‘From a present good, the sage will not take pleasure but a pure joy – that of having done his duty. He knows no other good than the satisfaction of his conscience’ (Veyne 2003: 51). Seneca 1928a, I.1.9: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘nec est quisquam cui tam valde innocentia sua placeat ut non stare in conspectu clementiam paratam humanis erroribus gaudeat’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129): ‘nemo iam divum Augustum nec Ti. Caesaris prima tempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra te quaerit’. Seneca 1928a, II.2.2: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘quod bene factis dictisque tuis quam familiarissimum esse te cupio, ut, quod nunc natura et impetus est, fiat iudicium’.

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The task is not to make Nero’s present words and deeds different but to ensure that they continue in the same vein. The opening of Book II parallels that of Book I, beginning with Seneca again holding forth the prince’s vox, reporting a dictum designed to illustrate Nero’s benevolence.80 As Tacitus was to note with devastating acuity, Seneca puts words into Nero’s mouth.81 The prince’s speech is a continuous feature of Seneca’s description of good political rule. The impersonated discourse of Nero is, among other things, a bravura display of eloquence. Seneca makes no attempt to theorise princely eloquence – to argue, for example, that the emperor’s rhetorical ability no less than his virtue should excel that of his subjects. But eloquence was still a crucial index of political intelligence among the Roman aristocracy. Seneca makes the point about the importance of the prince’s dicta no less than his facta quite clearly: ‘what you say and do is seized on by rumour, and that is why none should care more about their reputation than those whose reputation, whatever their desserts may be, is going to be great’.82 The act of impersonation allows Seneca to recapture some of the ground on which his praise is to work throughout the rest of the text. If he needs to assert that Nero already is as Nero should be, Seneca ensures that the identity of Nero is not left for Nero to establish. Nero is initially shown what he is through an impersonation, and is then praised for being identical to the person that is held out to him; but the praise is valid only if Nero recognises himself to be the person which Seneca shows him to be. And on a theoretical level, supreme command – the absolute judicial, legislative and military power which Seneca attributes to the person of Nero on the basis of his virtus and ratio – is only legitimately Nero’s if he successfully identifies himself with the person of Nero which Seneca figures in his speech. The overall effect of this rhetorical strategy is to make each occasion on which Seneca turns from the material of his speech to praise the emperor for embodying the principles he is explicating extraordinarily stressful for Nero if he cannot in fact live up to such standards. Perhaps sensing something cruel going on in the mirror, Nero – in another brief moment of impersonation – cries out as he struggles to incorporate the identity which Seneca has fashioned for him: ‘But this is slavery, not 80 81

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Seneca 1928a, II.1.1–3: 430–2. See his deeply sarcastic critique of the Senecan ideology and of Nero’s eloquence in Tacitus, Annalium libri, XIII.1–5. Seneca 1928a, I.8.1: 378 (Seneca 1995: 136–7): ‘vestra facta dictaque rumor excipit, et ideo nullis magis curandum est, qualem famam habeant, quam qui, qualemcumque meruerint, magnam habituri sunt’.

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imperium!’83 Seneca’s reply is stern: ‘What? Are you not aware that this supreme command means noble slavery for you . . . You cannot escape your fortuna. It besieges you; wherever you descend, it follows you with its mass of trappings. The slavery of being supremely great lies in the impossibility of ever becoming anything less.’84 To be a prince is to be in a state of servitude, to be subject to the rule of universal reason. Seneca piles on the pressure. The prince is the subject of the intense scrutiny of his subjects, who cannot take their eyes off him: ‘you have no more chance than the sun of not being seen. A flood of light meets you face to face, and the eyes of all are turned towards it.’85 And his subjects demand of him impeccable taste: But the burden which you have taken upon yourself is huge. No one now speaks of our deified Augustus or the early years of Tiberius Caesar; no one seeks an example for you to imitate – apart from yourself. Your reign is being judged by the taste (gustus) which we have had of it. This would be hard were that goodness of yours put on for the moment. No one can wear a mask (persona) for long; fictions (ficta) soon fall back into their own true nature.86

Nero cannot act a part. He must be constantly virtuous. He must, in short, embody the moral person whom Seneca’s text holds him to be. Seneca’s famous warning to Nero that ‘no one can wear a persona for long’ is a statement not only of high drama but of the deepest possible irony, for a persona is precisely what Seneca appears to have pressed upon Nero through the fiction of impersonation. PERSONS, STATES, LIBERTY AND SLAVERY

Before examining the qualities of the persona of the prince in more detail, it is worth recalling what exactly he is supposed to govern. An outline of the 83 84

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Seneca 1928a, I.8.1: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘‘‘Ista,’’ inquis, ‘‘servitus est, non imperium.’’’ Seneca 1928a, I.8.1–3: 376–8 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘Quid? Tu non experiris istud nobilem esse tibi servitutem . . . Aberrare a fortuna tua non potes; obsidet te et, quocumque descendis, magno apparatu sequitur. Est haec summae magnitudinis servitus non posse fieri minorem.’ I have followed Wilamowitz’s reading of the text at I.8.1 as indicated by Cooper and Procope´ (Seneca 1995: 136, n.21) rather than the Loeb edition, which reads at I.8.1: ‘Quid? Tu non experiris istud nobis esse, tibi servitutem?’ (Seneca 1928a: 376). Seneca 1928a, I.8.4: 378 (Seneca 1995: 137): ‘tibi non magis quam soli latere contingit. Multa circa te lux est, omnium in istam conversi oculi sunt.’ Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129–30): ‘Sed ingens tibi onus imposuisti; nemo iam divum Augustum nec Ti. Caesaris prima tempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra te quaerit; principatus tuus ad gustum exigitur. Difficile hoc fuisset, si non naturalis tibi ista bonitas esset, sed ad tempus sumpta. Nemo enim potest personam diu ferre, ficta cito in naturam suam recidunt; quibus veritas subest quaeque, ut ita dicam, ex solido enascuntur, tempore ipso in maius meliusque procedunt.’

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answer is already visible. He governs his self by ensuring the rule of ratio over his own person. And he rules a res publica which theoretically incorporates each and every person in the world. Establishing the rule of reason over the prince’s own person and over the res publica are identified by Seneca as similar tasks. The extensive reconfiguration of the metaphor of the body politic which occurs throughout Seneca’s text consists in the repeated representation of the res publica as one person. Seneca informs his prince that ‘you are the mind of your res publica, and it is your body’.87 The welfare of the body is guaranteed by its princely head: ‘the gentleness of your mind will be transmitted to others; little by little, it will be diffused over the whole body of the empire. All will be formed in your likeness. Health springs from the head.’88 But Seneca further develops this idea of the body politic in order to redefine the libertas of the Republic in Stoic terms. It is Seneca’s claim in De clementia that the installation of a virtuous prince at its head has cured the ills which had long afflicted the Roman body politic and, in so doing, has restored it to a state of freedom which it had formerly lost.89 This claim clearly requires some redefinitions. In the Roman legal theory of persons, the fundamental distinction which was used to divide human beings into free persons or slaves was that the former category consisted of those not subject to the ius and potestas of another human being. Yet Seneca is describing and indeed praising a state of affairs in which he is very precisely claiming that the entire world and each and every mortal within it is now subjected to the ius and potestas of the princeps. He would therefore seem to be endorsing the establishment of the Principate as an event which, from a conventional point of view, causes wholesale enslavement. Seneca appears to allude to this perspective himself right at the outset, referring to the ‘yoke’ now placed on the ‘seditious, factious, impotent multitude’ which lies far beneath the prince’s merciful gaze and which is said to require such a restraint because it is ‘as likely to run riot for its own as for another’s downfall’.90 But Seneca then announces that under their prince the ‘happiest form of res publica’ has become evident to the Roman people, with ‘supreme libertas in want of nothing 87 88

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Seneca 1928a, I.5.1: 370 (my translation): ‘tu animus rei publicae tuae es, illa corpus tuum’. Seneca 1928a, II.2.1: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘Tradetur ista animi tui mansuetudo diffundeturque paulatim per omne imperii corpus, et cuncta in similitudinem tuam formabuntur. A capite bona valetudo’. For the general question of principatus et libertas, see Wirszubski 1960: 124–71. For De clementia as the ‘final collapse’ of the republican concept of libertas, see the illuminating discussion at Wiszubski 1960: 150–3. Seneca 1928a, I.1.1: 356 (Seneca 1995: 128): ‘multitudinem discordem, seditiosam, impotentem, in perniciem alienam suamque pariter exsultaturam, si hoc iugum fregerit . . .’

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save the licence to ruin itself ’.91 In short, Seneca wants to continue to talk about the libertas of the res publica, but he has to find a way of talking about a body that is free even when it is simultaneously constrained by the ius of another person. The language of the yoke is an important indication of a theoretical position which is being taken up in the earliest stages of Seneca’s argument. What Seneca is conveying is the idea that the factionalism of the late Republic which had manifested itself in protracted civil discord was the outcome of a lack of virtus in the body politic.92 Thus far, his diagnosis is a highly conventional one, shared by almost every commentator on the civil war. But Seneca is insinuating a specific point about the necessity of the Principate which gradually emerges in the course of his text. The basic shape of his argument starts from an assumption that, prior to the acquisition of a princely head, a situation had arisen in which the extent of the vitiation of the Roman populus – its descent into deeply divisive and irrational behaviour in the madness of civil war – had caused it to lose its coherence as a body which knows how to think and live properly. It had become merely a multitude. It had lost its virtus, its ratio, to such a degree that it appears to have become nothing better than an irrational animal requiring forceful restraint. The Roman populus had therefore ceased to function as a person in possession of its freedom. Moral corruption had rendered it entirely incapable of rational behaviour, and it had been reduced to a state of irrationality, or – as Seneca puts it throughout his writings – slavery. In speaking of the establishment of princely government, the story which Seneca wishes to tell, in other words, is of a passage from slavery to freedom for the body politic, rather than the reverse. But in insinuating this movement, Seneca is playing upon a well-known distinction within the Roman law of persons by offering a conception of freedom and slavery which is not pivoted upon Roman law at all. His theory of moral personality involves him in a radical redefinition of the conventional legal terminology about the free and unfree status of a person. For he construes the idea of liberty around the Stoic idea of ius, operative within a cosmic civitas, rather than around the specific and local Roman ius civile which governs the members of a territorially delimited civitas. Seneca, as we shall see, is quite capable of explicitly denouncing an attitude of mind which implied an unduly strong ideological attachment to the type of equality 91

92

Seneca 1928, 1.1.8: 360–2 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publicae, cui ad summam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia.’ For Seneca on the Roman civil wars, see Canfora 2000.

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promised by the Roman ius civile to its citizens in the face of the manifest chaos of civil war. By preferring the Stoic conception of ius and a rather grander conception of the res publica, Seneca can hold fast to the conventional notion that the libertas of the civitas is upheld because everybody lives according to the same law and rationality. But he can also imply that the condition in which the populus found itself prior to the Principate was one in which it had utterly lost the ability to live according to ius as it should properly be understood. According to this reasoning, then, the descent into irrationality effectively obliterated the Republic’s status as a free person. And since the Republic cannot be said in any meaningful way to have been in a condition of freedom, it cannot be said to have forfeited its liberty with the establishment of the Principate. On the contrary, Seneca can now say that it is the imposition of the prince upon a hopelessly irrational and self-destructive multitude of persons that restores its freedom after a period of slavery. For the Stoics, to be free is to live according to reason and thus to be free from the slavery of the irrational affects.93 To be free refers to a psychological disposition which is required to live one’s life successfully.94 This disposition consists in the full awareness of the objective fact that events in the world are providentially determined. Notwithstanding the ancient criticisms levelled against Stoicism for its strict determinism, the Stoics possessed a conception of freedom which could be coherently sustained within its metaphysical system, and it is one which Seneca, like Epictetus later, is especially given to expounding.95 Given the strong character of the Stoic theory of causation, freedom in Stoic ethics amounts to the rational acceptance of, and harmonious alignment with, the cosmic force of ratio. It is not merely futile but actually enslaving to struggle against necessity. Such necessity does not deprive agents entirely of their freedom to make choices about their actions. The principle of logos or ratio which governs the world is located within man as well as without. Stoic pantheism holds that each human being is part of the divine scheme in a very material sense. The Stoics identify the godlike element which inheres within the body as the distinctively human rational faculty. Man’s reason represents only a tiny part of the divine, and so his powers with respect to the whole of the determining process of the universe are weak – so much so that ‘following’ 93

94 95

For a particularly clear statement of freedom and slavery in these terms, see Seneca 1917–25, 80, vol. II: 212–18. For a clear statement of this point, see Long 1996: 175. For a lucid exposition of this conception of freedom as a ‘positive’ one, see Long 1996. See also Frede 2003 and the definitive study in Bobzien 1998.

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rather than ‘initiating’ events is stressed as its proper function.96 But this does not mean that we are entirely deprived of our autonomy. An insight into the sort of reconciliation effected within Stoic metaphysics between freedom and determinism is afforded by a passage of Chrysippus preserved by Aulus Gellius: The various categories of things in the world and the beginnings of causes are set in motion by the order, law and the necessity of fate. But the prompting of our decisions and thoughts, and our actions, are controlled by each man’s particular will and disposition.97

There is therefore some space within the scheme of things for individuals to make a meaningful choice about what action they should take. We can choose not to follow the dictates of Nature, and thus throw ourselves out of kilter with the smoothly flowing operation of the world, although this is bound to leave us unhappy at the very least.98 Thanks to Nature, we possess the natural inclination as rational beings to comprehend and to assent to the operation of providential reason, and our freedom, properly understood, consists in our so doing.99 But this natural capacity must be nurtured by a careful process of character formation through the right type of education and environment. The Stoic theory of moral agency was highly sensitive to the view, common both to Plato and to Aristotle, that character determines action, and to the even sharper observation that the process of character formation was itself determined by circumstances of environment. For the Stoics, acting out of character was simply inconceivable. A sufficiently rational agent who follows right reason unerringly wills the right moral path for himself as a consequence of his correct perception of the way of the world. And, furthermore, since one could be said not to have full, or even very much, control over the process of character formation in one’s earliest years, the extent of an agent’s freedom in making a decision about any specific form of activity in the immediate present becomes further diminished in the Stoic account. The extent of the responsibility which an agent bears for ending up in a state of unhappiness, moral corruption or slavery is unclear. But plainly, Stoic ethics did not exculpate an agent who arrives in such a state as the powerless victim of an 96 97

98 99

Long 1996: 179. Aulus Gellius 1961–3, VII.2.11–12, vol. II: 98 (citing translation in Long 1996: 186–7): ‘sic ordo et ratio et necessitas fati genera ipsa et principia causarum movet, impetus vero consiliorum mentiumque nostrarum actionesque ipsas voluntas cuiusque propria et animorum ingenia moderantur’. For the parallels between Stoic determinism and the Marxist theory of history, see Veyne 2003: 45. For an exposition of the Stoic concept of oikeio¯sis, see Pembroke 1996. For a recent discussion of the idea of nature in Seneca’s philosophy, see Fedeli 2000.

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inevitable destiny. Admittedly, once we are in a such a state of slavery, misled by affects into making false judgements about what constitutes our own good, we may effectively have lost what power we once had to determine differently for ourselves, to recharacterise ourselves upon our own initiative. But it remains eminently possible for a bad man to become good through moral education, and the whole of Seneca’s work is, in one sense, a testimony to the Stoic belief in philosophy as a practical guide to moral improvement which can be effected through the restructuring of the practices of one’s life. To be free, then, is not a matter of living according to a contingent set of human laws to which we give our assent as manifestations of our choices, but a question of living according to the much more compelling law of nature to which we will, if sufficiently rational, voluntarily assent in order to experience ourselves as free.100 Our slavery, on the other hand, will be the product of a less than rational disposition towards the events which occur to us in our lives: we will find our minds dominated by a series of emotions hostile to our free mental state, and we will become captive to those feelings which it should be the aim of every good and wise agent to expunge vigorously from their life. This Stoic account of freedom informs Seneca’s claim in the De clementia that, under the government of the prince, the Roman body politic is a free person. Seneca is thereby able to mount a defence of the Principate as an historical necessity which brought about the restoration of the liberty lost amid the corruption of the late Republic. His strongest statement on the decline of the Republic and the necessity of the Principate was to come later, in De beneficiis, where Brutus’ assassination of Julius Caesar is criticised for being ‘badly wrong . . . his action was not true to Stoic teaching’.101 Seneca gives three possible ways of explaining Brutus’ error: ‘either he feared the very word ‘‘king’’, although the optimal state of the civitas is under a just king’; ‘or he expected civic freedom to survive when the advantages of autocracy were so great’; ‘or else he thought that the civitas could be recalled to its former constitution when its ancient ways had been abandoned – that an equality of civic rights and a due supremacy of law could be maintained’.102 But in De clementia, we find a similar reference to 100 101

102

The argument is summarised succinctly in Long 1996: 194. Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228): ‘in hac re videtur vehementer errasse nec ex institutione Stoica se egisse’. Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228–9, modified): ‘Qui aut regis nomen extimuit, cum optimus civitatis status sub rege iusto sit, aut ibi speravit libertatem futuram, ubi tam magnum praemium erat et imperandi et serviendi, aut existimavit civitatem in priorem formam posse revocari amissis pristinis moribus futuramque ibi aequalitatem civilis iuris et staturas suo loco leges.’

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the moral corruption characteristic of the later Republic and to the remedial effects of monarchy. The body politic can now look to Nero for a cure: ‘the happiest form of commonwealth meets their eyes, with supreme liberty in want of nothing save the licence to ruin itself’.103 Previously wracked by internal dissension, the res publica is now to be constrained to be free by the head that rules the body in accordance with universal ratio. For ‘the body is entirely at the service of the mind’; and if what dominates the soul is irrational, the body is harmed: ‘if its avarice masters us, we scan the sea for material gain. Its lust for glory has long since led us to thrust our right hand into the flame.’104 Under the prince, the ‘vast multitude of men surrounds one man as though he were its mind, ruled by his spirit, guided by his reason; it would crush and shatter itself by its own strength, without the support of his discernment’.105 Here, once again, the Roman people is described as a ‘multitude’ which is only constituted as a coherent body when headed by the prince. Adducing Virgil to support his thesis that ‘the commonwealth needs a head’ and that the prince is ‘the bond which holds the commonwealth together’, Seneca cites the famous passage from the Georgics in which the monarch of the bees is compared to an earthly ruler, to the effect that ‘while he survives, in concord and content/The commons live, by no divisions rent/But the great monarch’s death dissolves the government’.106 And, turning to another figure, Seneca reminds us of the inseparableness of princely head and political body when he says that: ‘Long ago, in fact, Caesar so assumed the mantle of the Republic that neither could be separated without the ruin of the other. He needs the strength, and it needs a head.’107 How exactly the head and the body had come to be conjoined is not made very clear. An allusion to the bloody seas of Actium is the closest we get to an explanation of the historical process.108

103

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107

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publica, cui ad summam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia’. Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 336 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘Quemadmodum totum corpus animo deservit . . . sive avarus dominus est, mare lucri causa scrutamur, sive ambitiosus, iam dudum dextram flammis obiecimus.’ Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 366–8 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘Haec immensa multitudo unius animae circumdata illius spiritu regitur, illius ratione flectitur pressura se ac fractura viribus suis, nisi consilio sustineretur.’ Seneca 1928a, I.4.1–2: 368 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘Ille est enim vinculum, per quod res publica cohaeret, illespiritus vitalis . . . Rege incolumi mens omnibus una; amisso rupere fidem.’ The citation is from Virgil, Georgics, IV. 212–13. Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (my translation): ‘Olim enim ita se induit rei publicae Caesar, ut seduci alterum non posset sine utriusque pernicie; nam et illi viribus opus est et huic capite.’ See Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 390.

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Having merged the populus with the princeps into one body in order to explain the structure of the res publica in such a way as to escape the picture of a dominant person ruling separate persons in a relation of unfree subjection, Seneca can then talk about the status of the new political corpus. He talks of ‘princes and kings and whatever other name there may be for guardians of the public state’, suggesting that monarchs need to learn how to guide, govern and keep safe their community in the same way that reason governs the world.109 Seneca’s ‘guardians of the public state’ must have the requisite virtus in order to ensure that the lives which they govern are ruled in accordance with ratio. This will ensure that the ‘public state’ reflects the ‘state’ of the world. Seneca tells us that the ‘state of the world’ is never more ‘pleasing to the eye and lovelier’ than when it is serene and calm, governed by the gods who are benign and rational; and that a ‘calm well-ordered empire’ guided by the hand of a prince ought to reflect this state of affairs.110 And in De beneficiis, Seneca contends that the Stoic view which Brutus should have adopted towards the rise of Caesar was that the ‘optimal state of the civitas’ is ensured by the rule of a just king.111 The logic of Seneca’s argument about persons, states and reasons is fully apparent in this declaration: the civitas is in the best possible ‘state’ at precisely the moment in which, according to the conventional definition of free and unfree persons, it enters into a state of servitude under the rule of a king. There is nevertheless something awkward about the way in which persons are understood in the Senecan story to separate out from the totality of the body politic. Seneca says in the prologue that the status of every mortal is said to be in the hands of the prince. Notwithstanding their apparent disappearance into one political body, Seneca does assign a status to each person whom the prince rules. In theory, since everyone forms part of one body politic ruled by reason, everyone – prince and populus alike – is free. It would therefore appear coherent to posit the free status of each individual. But this would suggest a degree of individual autonomy within the body which is never envisaged within the theory. As the sustained 109

110

111

Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (my translation): ‘Ideo principes regesque et quocumque alio nomine sunt tutores status publici.’ Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositum miti animo exercere imperium et cogitare, uter mundi status gratior oculis pulchriorque sit, sereno et puro die, an cum fragoribus crebris omnia quatiuntur et ignes hinc atque illinc micant! Atqui non alia facies est quieti moratique imperii quam sereni caeli et nitentis.’ Behind the ‘mundi status’ there may lie the Stoic understanding of the cosmos as a rational animal. For Stoic corporealism and vitalism, see White 2003 (esp. 129). Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92: ‘cum optimus civitatis status sub rege iusto sit’.

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description of a mutual and radical dependency between the body politic and the princely head suggests, there is just one person in a state of Stoic freedom at the centre of the Senecan argument of De clementia. This person can be identified as the person of the res publica, the public person, the person of the civitas, and to this extent the Senecan argument succeeds in upholding the claim that the res publica now enjoys summa libertas. That Seneca’s political theory is elaborated upon the idea of one person moving through the Stoic universe is perhaps to be expected. As a Stoic philosopher, Seneca is simply not interested in carving out a theoretical space for the normative description of a person other than one modelled – to a greater or lesser extent – on the Stoic vir sapiens. The cure for everything is for everyone to become a Stoic. Seneca offers no advice about the mechanics of government, about the practicalities of administration; nor does he prescribe for the subject constitutionally deprived of participation in government a subordinate, or different, role. The populus is simply said to imitate the prince by following his example. One can discern here the makings of a fairly intractable problem. If all the members of the populus followed the prince’s example fully, one would expect them eventually to achieve such a degree of rationality that there would be no need for government at all: everyone would become autonomous, self-regulating individuals within the cosmic civitas. But the terms of the theory, as well as the political, social and institutional apparatus which it helps to consolidate, militate against this development: those whom the prince rules are children to a father, bodies without a head. For as long as they remain envisaged as such, they are dependent upon the rationality of another in order to ensure their liberty. It is as if their admission as fully participating adult members of the universal civitas is endlessly deferred. THE QUALITY OF MERCY

Of all the virtues with which the prince must be equipped, it is his ability to be merciful which Seneca regards as essential. Seneca begins his analysis of the quality by pointing out that ‘of all the virtues, in truth, none befits a human being more, since none is more humane’.112 Stoics like Seneca think that ‘man should be seen as a social animal born for the common good’, and merciful behaviour helps establish conditions of ‘peace’ and ‘leisure’ 112

Seneca 1928a, I.3.2: 364 (Seneca 1995: 131): ‘Nullam ex omnibus virtutibus homini magis convenire, cum sit nulla humanior.’

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and ‘quiet’ either conducive or equivalent to that end.113 For we are prone to error, and it must make sense for the smooth functioning of society that we sometimes adopt an attitude of leniency in circumstances in which we are wronged or injured or harmed, even when we might be entitled to pursue the injury. Seneca views moral delinquency as a fact about human society: ‘we have all done wrong, some seriously, some more trivially, some on purpose, some perhaps under impulse or led astray . . . Nor have we merely transgressed – to the ends of our lives we will continue to transgress.’114 But it is notable that Seneca chooses this type of scenario in De clementia in order to epitomise what it is to be a human: if error is human, mercy is humane. For every act of mercy in which a protagonist rises to behaviour which shows them acting at the peak of their human capacities, there is a party on the receiving end of such excellent behaviour which is acknowledged to have behaved less admirably. Mercy can only be exhibited towards an inferior, whether that inferiority is designated by some institutional mark of lesser social or political or legal status, or whether it is simply manifested in a momentary moral error.115 This characteristic of mercy becomes evident in Book II, where Seneca formulates five definitions: ‘self-control (temperantia) of the mind when it has the power to take vengeance’; ‘leniency on the part of a superior towards an inferior’; ‘a tendency of the mind to leniency in exacting a punishment’; ‘moderation that remits something of a deserved and due punishment’; and ‘something which stops short of what could deservedly be imposed’.116 Mercy causes you to stop short of bringing fully to bear all the physical or legal power which you have at your disposal over another person; and its preferred sphere of operation is the judicial. Where human justice might demand ius for iniuria, mercy remits punishment even when it is merited. Seneca is insistent on this aspect of his definition. When he comes to discussing its opposite, cruelty, he 113

114

115

116

Seneca 1928a, I.3.2: 364 (Seneca 1995: 131–2): ‘necesse est non solum inter nos, qui hominem sociale animal communi bono genitum videri volumus, sed etiam inter illos, qui hominem voluptati donant, quorum omnia dicta factaque ad utilitates suas spectant; nam si quietam petit et otium, hanc virtutem naturae suae nanctus est, quae pacem amat et manus retinet’. Seneca 1928a, I.6.3: 374 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘Peccavimus omnes, alii gravia, alii leviora, alii ex destinato, alii forte impulsi aut aliena nequitia ablati . . . nec deliquimus tantum, sed usque ad extremum aevi delinquemus.’ I occasionally use ‘clemency’ as a synonym of ‘mercy’ primarily for reasons of stylistic variation. But I also intend to hint at the juridical resonance of the former when it is used in more modern contexts (i.e. when the modern state acts as arbiter of the lives and deaths of its subjects in cases of pleas for clemency). Seneca 1928a, II.3.1–2: 434 (Seneca 1995: 160): ‘(clementia est) temperantia animi in potestate ulciscendi’; ‘lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis poenis’; ‘inclinatio animi ad lenitatem in poena exigenda’; ‘moderationem aliquid ex merita ac debita poena remittentem’; ‘quae se flectit citra id, quod merito constitui posset’.

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says it is ‘nothing other than grimness of mind in exacting punishment’ and ‘lack of self-control by the mind in exacting punishment’ exercised by those ‘who have reason to punish but no moderation in doing so’.117 Given the godlike power of life and death which the prince wields over man, Seneca can say that ‘mercy becomes no one more than a king or a prince’ and that ‘it most becomes emperors, finding when among them more to save and greater scope for revealing itself ’.118 For ‘true mercy . . . means supreme power exercised with the truest self-control (temperantia), an embracing love for the human race as though for oneself’.119 Furthermore, Seneca stresses that a policy of clemency must characterise a reign from its very inception. ‘True mercy means spotlessness, it means never having shed a citizen’s blood,’ Seneca asserts.120 The merciful prince is innocent. Seneca duly criticises Augustus for having learnt this lesson rather late in his political life. The young Augustus ‘was hot-headed, he burned with anger’; in his old age, ‘he may have shown moderation and mercy. Of course he did – after staining the sea at Actium with Roman blood.’121 Nero, by contrast, is praised for having given Rome ‘a civitas unstained by blood’.122 To exercise mercy requires a psyche which has vigorously expunged the irrational and perturbing affects of anger, greed, sadness and pity. We are reminded that ‘savage, inexorable anger is not becoming to a king’.123 It is all the more commendable ‘that one whose anger has nothing to resist it, whose severest sentence commands the assent of the very people who perish by it . . . that this very man should take hold of himself, putting his power to better, more peaceful use’.124 In so acting, the prince adopts ‘as his own the attitude of the gods’, since ‘to save life is 117

118

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121

122 123 124

Seneca 1928a, II.4.1–3: 436 (Seneca 1995: 160–1): ‘Crudelitas, quae nihil aliud est quam atrocitas animi in exigendis poenis’; ‘in poenis exigendis intemperantiam animi’; ‘Illos ergo crudeles vocabo, qui puniendi causam habent, modum non habent.’ Seneca 1928a, I.3.3: 364 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘Nullum tamen clementia ex omnibus magis quam regem aut principem decet’; Seneca 1928a, I.5.2: 370 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘clementia omnibus quidem hominibus secundum naturam, maxime tamen decora imperatoribus, quanto plus habet apud illos, quod servet, quantoque in maiore materia apparet’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.2: 390 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘haec est, Caesar, clementia vera . . . in maxima potestate verissima animi temperantia et humani generis comprendens ut sui amor’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.2: 390 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘haec est, Caesar, clementia vera, quam tu praestas, quae non saevitiae paenitentia coepit, nullam habere maculam, numquam civilem sanguinem fudisse’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.1–2: 390–2 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘in adulescentia caluit, arsit ira . . . fuerit moderatus et clemens, nempe post mare Actiacum Romano cruore infectum’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.3: 390 (Seneca 1995, 143): ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.6: 372 (Seneca 1995: 134–5): ‘Non decet regem saeva nec inexorabilis ira.’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.4: 370–2 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Quid enim est memorabilius quam eum, cuius irae nihil obstat, cuius graviori sententiae ipsi, qui pereunt, assentiuntur . . . ipsum sibi manum inicere et potestate sua in melius placidiusque uti.’

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the prerogative of high good fortune, never more admirable than when it attains the same power as the gods’.125 Ratio – and the synonyms which Seneca associates with it – is benevolent and merciful.126 It follows that for a human to act – and to have the power to act – in a likewise manner is the supreme mark of virtue. ‘The gods’, Seneca reminds Nero, are ‘neither implacable nor unreasonable, are not given to pursuing the crimes of potentates immediately with their thunderbolts’; and so ‘how much more reasonable’, he concludes, ‘is it for a man set in authority over men to exercise his command in a gentle spirit’.127 The prince should thus be mild-mannered. For this behaviour of the gods is exemplary, ‘a model for the prince: he should wish to be to the citizens as he would wish the gods to be to him’.128 With reason holding sway over mankind under the direction of the prince, ‘the whole world will see the return of right morals’, the return of ‘piety and integrity’, and ‘good faith and modesty’ which will bring about ‘a pure and happy age’.129 The duties of the prince are also described as those of good parents, ‘whose habit it is to reproach their children sometimes gently, sometimes with threats . . . no one in his right mind, surely, would disinherit a son for a first offence . . . no one comes to the point of inflicting punishment until he has run out of remedies. That is how a parent, and also a prince, ought to act.’130 Seneca further explains that ‘we have given the ‘‘Father of the Fatherland’’ that name to remind him that he has been granted the power of a father, the most moderate of powers, in caring for children and subordinating his interests to theirs’.131 125

126

127

128

129

130

131

Seneca 1928a, I.5.7: 372 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘Servare proprium est excellentis fortunae, quae numquam magis suspici debet, quam cum illi contigit idem posse quod dis . . . Deorum itaque sibi animum adserens princeps.’ ‘To say of God that he is ‘‘good, provident and benevolent’’ is as true and basic in Stoic thought as the statement that he is all-pervading pneuma’ (Long 1996: 176). For more recent discussion, see Algra 2003. Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘Quod si di placabiles et aequi delicta potentium non statim fulminibus persequuntur, quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositum miti animo exercere imperium.’ Seneca 1928a, I.7.1: 374 (Seneca 1995: 135–6): ‘deorum feci mentionem, optime hoc exemplum principi constituam, ad quod formetur, ut se talem esse civibus, quales sibi deos velit’. Seneca 1928a, II.2.1: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘in totum orbem recti mores revertentur’; Seneca 1928a, II.1.4: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘pietatem integritatemque cum fide ac modestia resurgere et vitia diuturno abusa regno dare tandem felici ac puro saeculo locum’. Seneca 1928a, I.14.1–2: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Quod ergo officium eius est? Quod bonorum parentium, qui obiurgare liberos non numquam blande, non numquam minaciter solent, aliquando admonere etiam verberibus. Numquid aliquis sanus filium a prima offensa exheredat? . . . Nemo ad supplicia exigenda pervenit, nisi qui remedia consumpsit. Hoc, quod parenti, etiam principi faciendum est.’ Seneca 1928a, I.14.2: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Patrem quidem Patriae appellavimus, ut sciret datam sibi potestatem patriam, quae est temperantissima liberis consulens suaque post illos reponens.’

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The closest possible relation between the paternal and the princely roles is further alleged by Seneca as he introduces an anecdote about Augustus with the claim that the ‘good prince’ is ‘a model with which to compare the good father’.132 THE PRINCELY MEDIC

Seneca repeatedly compares the beneficial effects of the prince’s government upon the body politic with the successful practice of medicine by a doctor. The medical metaphor had certainly been present in Cicero’s theory of the res publica in De officiis.133 But the theme is very considerably amplified within the Senecan text, where it is introduced as early as the second chapter of the first book, inextricably tied to the idea of princely clemency. Here we are told that ‘just as medicine is of use to the sick but is also prized by the healthy, so mercy, while invoked by those who deserve punishment, is also revered by the guiltless’.134 The idea that clemency is a gentle cure and a remedy for the disease of injustice is exemplified by Augustus’ behaviour towards the treacherous Cinna. Unsure as to how he should respond to the criminal’s act, the emperor is counselled by his wife Livia to change his ineffectual policy of ‘severity’ in favour of one of ‘mercy’. In so entirely altering the nature of the treatment he chooses to mete out to rebels, Livia says that he would only be opting to ‘do as doctors do’ when they find that ‘the usual remedies do no good’.135 Augustus may have begun a policy of clemency too late in his political life, but the story neatly illustrates the attitude which the good prince must adopt: ‘inclined to the milder course, even when it may be of use to punish, he reveals his reluctance to apply harsh remedies’.136 The idea that the prince must avoid aspera remedia is reiterated in Book I, Chapter 17, where we find the most extravagant extension of the medical analogy. Seneca contrasts the savagery and cruelty of the tyrannical habit of terrifyingly and persistently raging 132

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Seneca 1928a, I.15.3: 400 (Seneca 1995: 147): ‘Hoc ipso exemplo dabo, quem compares bono patri, bonum principem.’ See Cicero 1913, I.24.83: 82. Seneca 1928a, I.2.1: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘Sed primum omnium, sicut medicinae apud aegros usus, etiam apud sanos honor est, ita clementiam, quamvis poena digni invocent, etiam innocentes colunt.’ Seneca 1928a, I.9.6: 382–4 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘Fac, quod medici solent, qui, ubi usitata remedia non procedunt, temptant contraria. Severitate nihil adhuc profecisti; Salvidienum Lepidus secutus est, Lepidum Murena, Murenam Caepio, Caepionem Egnatius, ut alios taceam, quos tantum ausos pudet. Nunc tempta, quomodo tibi cedat clementia.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘inclinatus ad mitiora, etiam si ex usu est animadvertere, ostendens quam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat’.

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against malefactors with the proper princely custom of making everything in the kingdom milder through the exercise of clemency towards wrongdoers. Seneca compares iniuria with diseases which require mollis medicina and mollis curatio – ‘gentle medicine’ and ‘gentle treatment’, rather than irrationally harsh outbursts: We cure diseases – we do not lose our temper with them. Yet here, too, we have a disease, of the mind. It requires gentle medicine and a doctor with no hostility of his own towards the patient. To despair of making a cure is the mark of a bad doctor. Likewise, in cases where the mind is affected, the right course for the one entrusted with everyone’s health is not to abandon hope too quickly and pronounce the symptoms fatal. It is, rather, to wrestle with the failings and stand up to them, to make some ashamed of their illness while deceiving others with gentle treatment. The cure will be swifter and better if the remedies are disguised. The aim of the prince should not just be to restore health, but to avoid an embarrassing scar.137

Divine, fatherly, instructive and now curative, Seneca’s prince may hold the ‘state’ of each and every person in his hands, but he is altogether a kinder and more benevolent person than a dominus, or slave-master. LOVE, FEAR AND TYRANNY

In view of the dependency between the prince and those under his cure and care, the people’s love of their ruler is a perfectly rational attitude. Seneca insists that the prince need carry no weapons himself because his virtus keeps him safe from harm by guaranteeing him the undying love of the ruled. Seneca draws an example from nature, recalling that within the monarchy of the bees, ‘their king himself has no sting. Not wishing him to be savage or to exact a costly revenge, Nature took away his weapon and left his anger unarmed. A mighty example for great kings!’138 The merciful prince’s ‘vigilant care for the safety of each and every one’ of his subjects will mean that they ‘protect his person’, encircling him as if round ‘a bright and kindly star’, ready for the ‘sacrifice of themselves and their own, whenever the safety of their commander requires it’; and their love for 137

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Seneca 1928a, I.17.1–2: 406 (Seneca 1995: 149): ‘Morbis medemur nec irascimur; atqui et hic morbus est animi; mollem medicinam desiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro. Mali medici est desperare, ne curet: idem in iis, quorum animus adfectus est, facere debebit is, cui tradita salus omnium est, non cito spem proicere nec mortifera signa pronuntiare; luctetur cum vitiis, resistat, aliis morbum suum exprobret, quosdam molli curatione decipiat citius meliusque sanaturus remediis fallentibus; agat princeps curam non tantum salutis, sed etiam honestae cicatricis.’ Seneca 1928a, I.19.3: 410 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘rex ipse sine aculeo est; noluit illum natura nec saevum esse nec ultionem magno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit’.

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him will impel his subjects to ‘fly towards him, racing each other, in total readiness to throw themselves onto the blades of those who lie in wait for him, to cast their own bodies to the ground if human slaughter is needed to provide the foundation of his road to safety’.139 In short, his clemency means that ‘he is loved, defended and courted by the entire civitas’.140 Consequently, there is ‘no need for him to raise aloft high fortresses or to fortify hills steep to climb’.141 His ‘mercy will assure the king’s safety even in the open’ for he has ‘one impregnable bulwark – the love of the citizens’.142 This love means that ‘such a prince, protected by his own good deeds, has no need of guards. He wears his armour purely for decoration.’143 Seneca’s theory of virtuous monarchy is correspondingly accompanied by an entirely moral conception of tyranny, rather than by any constitutional or legal definition of bad rule.144 Seneca says that ‘it is mercy which causes there to be a great distinction between king and tyrant’.145 As he asks rhetorically, ‘what difference is there between a tyrant and a king – after all, they both enjoy the same degree of licence and apparently the same fortuna – other than that tyrants act savagely for pleasure, while kings do so only with good cause and out of necessity?’146 Seneca then explains that kings, like tyrants, certainly use their power to kill, but they do so on occasions when ‘public utility’ counsels it, whereas ‘a tyrant’s savagery 139

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Seneca 1928a, I.3.3–4: 366 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘cuius curam excubare pro salute singulorum atque universorum cottidie experientur . . . tamquam ad clarum ac beneficum sidus certatim advolant. Obicere se pro illo mucronibus insidiantium paratissimi et substernere corpora sua, si per stragem illi humanam iter ad salutem struendum sit, somnum eius nocturnis excubiis muniunt, latera obiecti circumfusique defendunt, incurrentibus periculis se opponunt. Non est hic sine ratione populis urbibusque consensus sic protegendi amandique reges et se suaque iactandi, quocumque desideravit imperantis salus’. Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (my translation): ‘a tota civitate amatur, defenditur, colitur’. Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘Non opus est instruere in altum editas arces nec in adscensum arduos colles emunire nec latera montium abscidere’. Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.5: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nihil praesidiis eget, arma ornamenti causa habet.’ Illuminating comments on Seneca’s idea of tyranny and its place in De clementia are in Schiesaro 2000 (esp. 139–41). Seneca 1928a, I.12.3: 392 (Seneca 1995: 144, modified): ‘clementia efficit, ut magnum inter regem tyrannumque discrimen sit’. Cooper and Procope´ (Seneca 1995: 144, n.53) comment on this theory of tyranny that ‘only where, as with the Roman emperor, the laws offer his subjects no guarantee of their rights and their wishes are of no decisive importance, does a moral quality such as clemency on the part of the monarch become the decisive criterion’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (my translation): ‘Quid interest inter tyrannum ac regem (species enim ipsa fortunae ac licentia par est), nisi quod tyranni in voluptatem saeviunt, reges non nisi ex causa ac necessitate?’

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comes from the heart’.147 Just as mercy and the love which it inspires mark out good government, so the surest sign of tyranny is fear and hatred caused by a cruel ruler. Cruelty can never form a stable basis for lasting rule. Extended passages of De clementia are given over to painting an image of the tyrant as ‘fierce and bloodthirsty’: savage, inhumane and, above all, bestial in character.148 The madness of cruel rule is ‘to kill, to rage, to delight in the noise of chains and to cut off the heads of citizens, to pour out a mass of blood wherever you go, to terrify people and send them running by your very appearance. Would life be any different if lions and bears ruled the kingdom, if serpents and the most noxious kind of animal were given power over us?’149 The tyrant’s rule is characterised by the absence of fides in his political and social relations. He cannot ‘hold the good will and the loyalty of his ministers’.150 His cruelty leaves him ‘with no trust in the loyalty of friends or the piety of his children’ and ‘a conscience full of crimes and torment’.151 He is ‘hated because he is feared, and being hated makes him want to be feared’.152 The favoured dictum of the tyrant which is cited by Seneca on two occasions in De clementia and once in De ira is ‘that execrable verse . . . ‘‘Let them hate, provided that they fear’’’.153 Tyrants have a distinctive rhetoric: their lack of ratio is manifested in their oratio. And fear induces people ‘to try anything’, as Seneca puts it, to overthrow the vicious tyrant.154 In developing this distinction between good and bad rule, Seneca is able to revisit the topic which Cicero had discussed in De officiis – whether it is better for a person in government to be loved rather than feared – and to reconfigure it in order to endorse Cicero’s conclusion but entirely alter the effect. Cicero exemplified his feared tyrant by referring to Caesar’s 147

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Seneca 1928a, I.12.1: 390–2 (my translation): ‘‘‘Quid ergo? Non reges quoque occidere solent?’’ Sed quotiens id fieri publica utilitas persuadet; tyrannis saevitia cordi est.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘acerbum et sanguinarium’. For the important concept of immanitas in De clementia, see Seneca 1928a, I.26.4: 426 and II.2.3: 434. Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426 (Seneca 1995: 156–7, modified): ‘occidere, saevire, delectari sono catenarum et civium capita decidere, quocumque ventum est, multum sanguinis fundere, aspectu suo terrere ac fugare? Quae alia vita esset, si leones ursique regnarent, si serpentibus in nos ac noxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144–5): ‘non potest habere quisquam bonae ac fidae voluntatis ministros’. Seneca 1928a, I.13.3: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘non amicorum fidei credens, non pietati liberorum . . . et conscientiam suam plenam sceleribus ac tormentis adaperuit’. Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 392–4 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Nam cum invisus sit, quia timetur, timeri vult, quia invisus est.’ Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘illo exsecrabilis versu . . . ‘‘Oderint, dum metuant’’’. The verse from Euripides is cited again at II.2.2 (Seneca 1928a: 432). Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘omnia experiri suadet’.

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assassination: ‘it is not only the death of that tyrant, whom the city endured under force of arms . . . that declares the power of men’s hatred to destroy. Many tyrants have met a similar end’ – this is because, as he put it famously, ‘fear is a poor guardian over any length of time’.155 Caesar was hated and feared because he attempted to overthrow the constitution and institute monarchy – or tyranny, as Cicero sees it. But Seneca makes the vice of cruelty – an infringement of universal law and the antithesis of clemency – rather than the violation of any human law the defining characteristic of tyranny. He can then hold up his Caesar as a princeps who is loved and indicate instead, and pointedly, the republican general Sulla as an outstanding example of the tyrant, framing his claim in the form of a rhetorical question: ‘why should Sulla not be called a tyrant? His killing only came to an end when he ran out of enemies . . . what tyrant ever drank so greedily of human blood as he did?’156 THE HONOURABLE AND THE USEFUL

Since Seneca’s political theory is articulated within a firmly Stoic metaphysics, the question of a conflict between calculations of what is dignum and what is utile never arises. To act virtuously is simply to act in accordance with beneficent, providential reason. It would be senseless to suggest that government according to such a moral imperative could be anything other than beneficial for members of the universal civitas. But notwithstanding the orthodox Stoic contention that virtue should be pursued for its own sake, Seneca nevertheless has to point out the social and political benefits of such a strategy in order to be fully persuasive.157 This poses a dilemma. The whole thrust of Stoic and Senecan ethics is to stress the need for unerring constancy in one’s moral activity regardless of the immediate social and political consequences of following a difficult moral path.158 In the case of two of the great Stoic exemplars of the vir sapiens, Socrates and Cato, Seneca’s own writings highlight how their noble conduct was greeted with less than just recognition among their 155

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Cicero 1913, II.7.23: 190 (Cicero 1991: 71): ‘Nec vero huius tyranni solum, quem armis oppressa pertulit civitas . . . declarat, quantum odium hominum valeat ad pestem, sed reliquorum similes exitus tyrannorum . . . malus enim est custos diuturnitatis metus.’ Seneca 1928a, I.12.1–2: 392 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘et L. Sullam tyrannum appellari quid prohibet, cui occidendi finem fecit inopia hostium . . . quis tamen umquam tyrannus tam avide humanum sanguinem bibit quam ille’. Cooper and Procope´ highlight this reliance on ‘traditional ways of recommending a course of action – Seneca is arguing per honestum et utile’ (Seneca 1995: 122). This is the central theme of De constantia, but it is emphasised throughout Seneca’s ethical works.

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contemporaries.159 Social and political rewards may not be immediately forthcoming for the Stoic man of virtue because of the insufficient rationality of the other agents among whom he lives. In his writings, Seneca simultaneously counsels that ‘virtue has never failed to reward a man both during his lifetime and after his death, provided he follows her faithfully’, and, as Cicero had similarly indicated in the Disputationes Tusculanae, that ‘glory is the shadow of virtue; it will attend virtue even against her will’.160 But he acknowledges the hostility with which exemplary moral behaviour is sometimes met: in the case of Cato, ridicule and rejection initially greeted his displays of virtue.161 People are often blinded by invidia – envy.162 But you must neither deviate from the straight and arduous path in order to accommodate your actions to their warped perceptions, Seneca warns, nor think that you can put on a show of virtue, for ‘pretence accomplishes nothing’.163 The problem is one of moral economy: if man has the capacity for moral perfection, it is nevertheless empirically the case that very few wise men have ever lived. The aim of Senecan ethics is to make us into good archers. Seneca adopts the favoured metaphor of the Stoics to insist that ‘the archer ought not to hit the mark only sometimes; he ought to miss it only sometimes. That which takes effect by chance is not an art. Now wisdom is an art; it should have a definite aim, choosing only those who will make progress.’164 But in De clementia, Seneca tends towards the rather bleaker assessment of the moral achievements of the human race in order to justify the establishment of the Principate. Most of us are bad at the art of good living: we are neither magni viri nor great archers, and we fall far short of the target if we take aim at all. In fact, we may err repeatedly to the point of civil war. The dilemma for Seneca’s theory is its need to work with two apparently contrasting views of the rationality of the social agents among whom it is to 159 160

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Seneca 1917–25, 79.14, vol. II: 208: ‘Vix recepit Socraten fama. Quamdiu Catonem civitas ignoravit!’ Seneca 1917–25, 79.18, vol. II: 210 (211, modified): ‘Nulli non virtus et vivo et mortuo rettulit gratiam, si modo illam bona secutus est fide’; Seneca 1917–25, 79.13, vol. II: 206 (207–9): ‘Gloria umbra virtutis est; etiam invitam comitabitur.’ Compare the last with Cicero, Tusc., I.45.109: ‘gloria . . . virtutem tamquam umbra sequitur’. For the ridiculing of Cato in De constantia, see Seneca 1928c, 2.1–3: 50–2; 14.3–4: 90. For the blinding effect of invidia upon the capacity to recognise and reward virtue, see Seneca 1917–25, 79.13, vol. II: 208; for the silencing effect of livor, or spite, upon the same capacity, see Seneca 1917–25, 79.17, vol. II: 210. Seneca 1917–25, 79.18, vol. II: 210 : ‘Nihil simulatio proficit.’ Seneca 1917–25, 29.3, vol. I: 204 (205): ‘Saggitarius non aliquando ferire debet, sed aliquando deerrare. Non est ars, quae ad effectum casu venit. Sapientia ars est; certum petat, eligat profecturos, ab is, quos desperavit, recedat, non tamen cito relinquat et in ipsa desperatione extrema remedia tempte.’ For Cicero’s construal of the analogy in his discussion of Stoicism, see Cicero, De finibus, III.22.

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be put into practice. On the one hand, the theory has to present a picture of corruption and disorder in order to explain the necessity of the imposition of a monarchical head. On the other hand, it tries to assure the prince that his virtuous policies will not be pursued in an inhospitable social setting but will, on the contrary, meet with loving approval. Mercy not only brings safety and security, but also fame, honour and glory. Virtuous words and deeds will not only ensure glory and honour, but also fama. And given his fixed fortuna, the prince cannot escape fama or infamia. ‘Cruel masters have the whole city pointing at them with hatred and loathing. So, too with kings. The wrongs which they do have a wider scope. The infamy and odium is passed on over the centuries.’165 Seneca reminds Nero that the best way of ensuring his reputation is simply to be virtuous: ‘what you say and do is seized on by rumour, and that is why none should care more about their reputation than those whose reputation, whatever their desserts may be, is going to be great’.166 But in order for glory, honour and fame to be held out as the rewards of virtue, Seneca’s theory has to presuppose that the prince’s subjects are sufficiently rational to recognise virtuous deeds – that they have indeed been formed in his image, following his example of perfect rationality. It is as if his subjects suddenly catch up with the rationality of the prince. If they were not rational enough to practise selfgovernment, they are now nevertheless rational enough to realise this fact about themselves and therefore love, honour and glorify the head that rules the body politic and guarantees their freedom. HAPPINESS AND SADNESS

Everyone becomes riveted to the same rationality in the theory. Seneca’s subjects, as well as the prince himself, are held to see things clearly. Their clarity is implicit in Seneca’s contention throughout De clementia that the members of the res publica are happy. Seneca introduces the concept of felicitas in the proem as he is depicting the ‘fairest form of res publica’ now placed before the eyes of all those ruled by Nero. Under Nero’s government, he tells the prince, ‘all your citizens are now compelled to acknowledge that they are happy and that nothing henceforth can be added to their 165

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Seneca 1928a, I.18.3: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Quemadmodum domini crudeles tota civitate commonstrantur invisique et detestabiles sunt, ita regum et iniuria latius patet et infamia atque odium saeculis traditur.’ Seneca 1928a, I.8.1: 378 (Seneca 1995: 136–7): ‘vestra facta dictaque rumor excipit, et ideo nullis magis curandum est, qualem famam habeant, quam qui, qualemcumque meruerint, magnam habituri sunt’.

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blessings, provided that they last’.167 What has brought about this happiness is none other than Nero’s mercy: ‘whatever house it enters, mercy will make it happy and calm’.168 Seneca explains that ‘happiness that deserves the name lies in giving salvation to many, recalling them to life from the throes of death and earning by mercy the civic crown’.169 The merciful prince, then, is a happy prince: inclined to the milder course, even when it may be of use to punish, he reveals his reluctance to apply harsh remedies. Free in mind from all trace of enmity or wildness, he exercises his power in an indulgent and beneficial manner, eager only to win the approval of the citizens for his commands, abundantly happy in his own eyes if he can share his good fortune with the public. Affable in conversation, accessible and easily approached, amiable in expression (which is what wins over most people) . . . he is loved by the whole civitas, protected and courted.170

This happy state of affairs is contrasted with the tyrant’s lack of felicitas: ‘what could be unhappier’, Seneca asks of the tyrant who presses on with his cruelty to such an extent that there is no turning back, ‘than to be, as he now is, obliged to be bad?’171 Seneca explicates the idea of felicitas at work in De clementia more comprehensively in De beata vita. There he informs us that ‘true happiness is founded upon virtue’.172 Felicitas comes from aligning oneself with reason and so obtaining true liberty. It is a delusion to think that felicitas can ever be fortuitous.173 To ascribe happiness to a state of mind dependent 167

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.7: 360 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘omnibus tamen nunc civibus tuis et haec confessio exprimitur esse felices et illa nihil iam his accedere bonis posse, nisi ut perpetua sint’. Seneca 1928a, I.5.4: 370 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Clementia, in quamcumque domum pervenerit, eam felicem tranquillamque praestabit.’ Seneca 1928a, I.26.5: 428 (Seneca 1995: 157): ‘Felicitas illa multis salutem dare et ad vitam ab ipsa morte revocare et mereri clementia civicam.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘inclinatus ad mitiora, etiam si ex usu est animadvertere, ostendens quam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat, in cuius animo nihil hostile, nihil efferum est, qui potentiam suam placide ac salutariter exercet approbare imperia sua civibus cupiens, felix abunde sibi visus, si fortunam suam publicarit, sermone adfabilis, aditu accessuque facilis, vultu, qui maxime populos demeretur, amabilis . . . a tota civitate, amatur, defenditur, colitur’. Seneca 1928a, I.13.2: 396 (my translation): ‘Quid autem eo infelicius, cui iam esse malo necesse est?’ Seneca 1932a, 16.1: 140: ‘Ergo in uirtute posita est uera felicitas.’ Seneca 1932a, 16.1–3: 140–2: ‘Quid haec tibi uirtus suadebit? ne quid aut bonum aut malum existimes quod nec uirtute nec malitia continget; deinde ut sis inmobilis et contra malum <et> ex bono, ut qua fas est deum effingas. Quid tibi pro hac expeditione promittit? ingentia et aequa diuinis: nihil cogeris, nullo indigebis, liber eris, tutus indemnis; nihil frustra temptabis, nihil prohibeberis; omnia tibi ex sententia cedent, nihil aduersum accidet, nihil contra opinionem ac uoluntatem. ‘‘Quid ergo? uirtus ad beate uiuendum sufficit?’’ Perfecta illa et diuina quidni sufficiat, immo superfluat? Quid enim deesse potest extra desiderium omnium posito? Quid extrinsecus opus est ei qui omnia sua in se collegit? Sed ei qui ad uirtutem tendit, etiam si multum processit, opus est aliqua fortunae indulgentia adhuc inter humana luctanti, dum nodum illum exsoluit et omne

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to any extent upon the possession of external goods is to render it too fleeting and insecure a state for Seneca: externals may come and go according to circumstances beyond our control. Seneca’s concept of felicitas is an objective notion of human flourishing, and refers to a constant psychological state connected with seeing things clearly, rationally, constantly. Tristitia is condemned repeatedly in De clementia as a mental defect which affects one’s ability to see clearly. Seneca first associates tristitia with being pitiful: to commiserate is ‘a sickness of the mind caused by an impression of miseries affecting other people; or a sadness induced by bad things which seem to happen to others for no good reason’.174 He adds that ‘sadness is ill adapted for seeing how things are, for thinking out what might be useful, for avoiding what might be dangerous and working out what would be fair’.175 To be sad is to lapse into false belief and to be misled by wrong impressions about the world. A wise man always sees a good reason for what happens. His mind is serene, happy, and his vision clear: ‘He will always have the same, calm, unshaken expression, which he could not do if he were open to sadness . . . The wise man sees ahead and has his course of action ready.’176 THE PRINCE AND FORTUNA

‘The fortuna of the prince is too grand for him to need consolation’: from the prologue to the last surviving chapter of De clementia, Seneca returns over and over again to the idea of fortuna and its relation to the rule of the prince.177 Given Seneca’s stress on the providential rationality which governs the world, the civitas and its members, the centrality of fortuna to his thought requires some explication. Seneca uses the word consistently throughout his writing in two very distinctive ways. On the one hand, he equates fortuna with providential ratio. This usage is explained most clearly in De providentia, where Seneca goes to some length to uphold the orthodox Stoic doctrine that ‘the world is governed by Providence’ – and

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uinculum mortale. Quid ergo interest? quod arte alligati sunt alii, adstricti [alii], districti quoque: hic qui ad superiora progressus est et se altius extulit laxam catenam trahit, nondum liber, iam tamen pro libero.’ Seneca 1928a, II.5.4: 438–40 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘Misericordia est aegritudo animi ob alienarum miseriarum speciem aut tristitia ex alienis malis contracta quae accidere immerentibus credit.’ Seneca 1928a, II.6.1: 440 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘Tristitia inhabilis est ad dispiciendas res, utilia excogitanda, periculosa vitanda, aequa aestimanda.’ Seneca 1928a, II.5.5–6.1: 440 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘eandem semper faciem servabit, placidam, inconcussam, quod facere non posset, si tristitia reciperet. Adice, quod sapiens et providet et in expedito consilium habet.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416 (my translation): ‘Principis maior est fortuna, quam ut solacio egeat.’

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that nothing, therefore, occurs in life sine ratio, without a reason – in the face of the common objection that, as he puts it, ‘many bad things happen to good people’.178 Seneca’s argument is simply that contingency in human affairs is apparent rather than real.179 He rehearses this fundamental perspective in De beneficiis, saying that ‘you can call on Nature, Fate or Fortune’ variously to talk about divine reason because ‘all are names of one and the same god variously exercising his power’.180 Fortune is there characterised as divine, rational and male. This meaning of fortuna is intended repeatedly throughout De clementia. In the prologue, Nero tells us that ‘all dispensations of fortuna to mortals are made through pronouncements on my lips’.181 As vicegerent of the gods, the prince determines the fortuna of every human being.182 This function exactly parallels the relationship between Nero and the gods: Nero’s fortuna is affixed, alloted, divinely determined, destined. This is why Seneca reminds him that ‘you cannot escape your fortuna: it besieges you’.183 Elsewhere, Seneca repeats that ‘a great fortuna is a great servitude’.184 The fixity of fortuna is the fixity of providential ratio. And the prince’s great fortuna puts him in such a conspicuous position from the point of view of the public that he cannot seek solace in retribution for any injuries which may be done to him. Seneca warns Nero that his power is too ‘manifest’ for the prince to seek ‘a reputation for power’ through inflicting harm.185 His high fortuna demands constant clemency from him. Yet although there is nothing fortuitous about Seneca’s moral universe, he nevertheless uses the idea of fortuna to express adversity and bad luck as well. He regularly talks about both bona fortuna and mala fortuna. In so doing, he adopts the Roman notion of fortuna as a blind, irrational force in order to describe, in conversational style, an ordinary aspect of moral life. 178

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Seneca 1928d, I.1: 2: ‘Quaesisti a me, Lucili, quid ista, si providentia mundus regeretur, multa bonis viris mala acciderent.’ Seneca 1928d, 1.3: 4: ‘Ne illa quidem quae videntur confusa et incerta . . . sine ratione, quamvis subita sint, accidunt.’ Seneca 1935, IV.8.3: 220 (Seneca 1995: 279–80): ‘Sic nunc naturam voca, fatum, fortunam; omnia eiusdem dei nomina sunt varie utentis sua potestate.’ Seneca 1928a, I.1.2: 356 (Seneca 1995: 128): ‘quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit, meo ore pronuntiat’. The same idea is expressed in Seneca, De brevitate vitae, 4.4 (Seneca 1932c: 296–8). Seneca 1928a, I.8.2: 378 (Seneca 1995: 137): ‘Aberrare a fortuna tua non potes; obsidet te.’ Seneca returns to the theme of the inescapability of the prince’s high fortune – and how it deprives him of otium – in De brevitate vitae, 4.1–4 (Seneca 1928c: 296–8). See De consolatione ad Polybium, 6.5 (Seneca 1932d: 372): ‘Magna servitus est magna fortuna; non licet tibi quicquam arbitrio tuo facere.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416: ‘Principis maior est fortuna . . . manifestiorque vis, quam ut alieno malo opinionem sibi virium quaerat.’

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Seneca agrees that there is no question that life is full of difficulties, and we are all faced with sudden and apparently inexplicable reversals of good and bad luck. But, in truth, such apparent adversities and injustices have a rational cause and a rational explanation. A wise man sees that such setbacks or sudden advantages are not, in fact, implacably opposed to the exercise of reason and virtue, but should be viewed as providentially furnished opportunities for demonstrations of virtue. The relationship between God, or ratio, and man is an exacting one: in De providentia, God is said to be like a ‘magnificent parent, and no mild task-master of the virtues’.186 Moral progress must be strenuous because virtus needs to be tested in order to ‘flourish’. It ‘shrivels without an adversary’.187 The consequence of the demands made upon good men is that they ‘labour and sweat, ascend through toil’ to the heights of moral virtue.188 Seneca’s moral is that you must rise to the challenge. Like a Roman father who seeks to discipline his children, God ‘does not indulge the good man in delights, but tests him, hardens him, prepares him for his service’.189 In other words, you can be allotted adversity for your own good. The aim is not to concede ground to what seems like bad luck by wilting or reacting in an unduly emotional way, but rather to rise above it, secure in the knowledge that the most rational response is to stay one’s course, and to view it as a useful and characterbuilding experience. Throughout his writing, Seneca furnishes extremely ornate depictions of such experiences as belligerent engagements in which the wise man proves himself to be invictus, morally invincible. In the same way that he turns to various personifications of ratio to describe its rule over the world, Seneca consistently uses Fortuna to depict and personify an irrational and hostile agent that appears to challenge our ability to think and see clearly. The wise man understands that ‘death, imprisonment, burning, and all the other missiles of Fortuna . . . are not evils, but only seem to be’.190 Fortuna can 186

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Seneca 1928d, 1.5: 6: ‘parens ille magnificus, uirtutum non lenis exactor, sicut seueri patres, durius educat’. Seneca 1928d, 2.4: 8: ‘Marcet sine adversario virtus.’ Seneca 1928d, 1.6: 6: ‘Itaque cum videris bonos viros acceptosque diis laborare, sudare, per arduum escendere, malos autem lascivire et voluptatibus fluere.’ Seneca 1928d, 1.5–6: 6: ‘Immo etiam necessitudo et similitudo, quoniam quidem bonus tempore tantum a deo differt, discipulus eius aemulatorque et vera progenies, quam parens ille magnificus, virtutum non lenis exactor, sicut severi patres, durius educat . . . Bonum virum in deliciis non habet, experitur, indurat, sibi illum parat.’ Seneca 1917–25, 85.26, vol. II: 300 (301): ‘‘‘Quid ergo? . . . mortem, vincula, ignes, alia tela fortunae non timebat?’’ Non. Scit enim illa non esse mala, sed videri.’

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seem to be ‘waging war’ on you, but you must not be overcome and enslaved by this apparent enemy of virtue.191 The wise man is ‘unerring in judgement, unshaken, unafraid, a man who may be moved but never perturbed by the use of force – a man whom Fortune, when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound. For Fortune’s missiles rebound from such a man.’192 We need Fortuna’s hostility in order to put us to the test and ensure that we have a chance to win glory: A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an inferior, and knows that to win without danger is to win without glory. The same is true of Fortuna. She seeks out the bravest men to match with her; some she passes by in disdain. Those that are most stubborn and unbending she assails, men against whom she may exert all her strength. Mucius she tries by fire, Fabricius by poverty, Rutilius by exile, Regulus by torture, Socrates by poison, Cato by death. It is only evil Fortuna that discovers a great exemplar.193

When reason meets resistance in the world, its opponent is characterised as female. Kept as a personification of adversity within Seneca’s imaginative depiction of the virtuous man’s encounter with such resistance, Fortuna puts a succession of Roman heroes’ virtus – that quality of manliness – to the test, forcing them to contest their constancy, their steadfastness on the path of reason, in the face of her savage onslaughts. Fortuna thus comes to embody the irrational elements which Senecan political thought tyrannises. She is said to preside over slaves in the cruellest of kingdoms. Fortuna possesses a regnum which the wise man should despise.194 She rules over it with a perverse ius. Her jurisdiction is that of a dominus over a servus.195 She is ‘like a mistress that is changeable and passionate and neglectful of her slaves’, and ‘she will be capricious in both 191

192

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Seneca 1917–25, 51.8, vol. I: 340: ‘Fortuna mecum bellum gerit.’ Seneca immediately proceeds to discuss this war of conquest in terms of freedom and slavery. Seneca 1917–25, 45.9, vol. I: 296 (297, modified): ‘certus iudicii, inconcussus, intrepidus, quem aliqua vis movet, nulla perturbat, quem fortuna, cum quod habuit telum nocentissimum vi maxima intorsit, pungit, non vulnerat, et hoc raro. Nam cetera eius tela, quibus genus humanum debellatur, grandinis more dissultant, quae incussa tectis sine ullo habitatoris incommodo crepitat ac solvitur.’ Seneca 1928d, 3.4: 16 (citing translation on 17): ‘Ignominiam iudicat gladiator cum inferiore componi et scit eum sine gloria uinci qui sine periculo uincitur. Idem facit fortuna: fortissimos sibi pares quaerit, quosdam fastidio transit. Contumacissimum quemque et rectissimum adgreditur, aduersus quem uim suam intendat: ignem experitur in Mucio, paupertatem in Fabricio, exilium in Rutilio, tormenta in Regulo, uenenum in Socrate, mortem in Catone. Magnum exemplum nisi mala fortuna non inuenit.’ For Fortune’s regnum, see, for example, De brevitate vitae, 10.4 (Seneca 1932c: 316); De vita beata, 25.5 (Seneca 1932a: 168). For the extent of her jurisdiction, see Seneca 1932c: 316; Seneca 1917–25, vol. I: 248.

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her rewards and her punishments’.196 But a wise man ‘always possesses an undiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master and towering above all others. For what can possibly be above him who is above Fortuna?’197 It is only ‘when one strays away from Nature’ that ‘one is compelled to crave, and fear, and be a slave to the things of chance. We may return to the true path; we may be restored to our proper state; let us therefore be so, in order that we may be able to endure pain, in whatever form it attacks our bodies and say to Fortuna: ‘‘You have to deal with a Man; seek someone whom you can conquer!’’’198 For Seneca, the capacity to withstand these assaults is virtus. And he constantly compares the cultivation of virtus with the idea of building an inner fortification against outer attack. In De clementia, virtue earns the prince the love of his citizens, which then acts as ‘an unassailable fortress’ for him. His Epistulae urge: gird yourself about with philosophy, an impregnable wall. Though it be assaulted by many engines, Fortune can find no passage into it. The soul stands on unassailable ground, if it has abandoned external things, it is independent in its own fortress, and every weapon that is hurled falls short of the mark. Fortune has not the long reach with which we credit her; she can seize none except him that clings to her. Let us then recoil from her as far as we are able. This will be possible for us only through knowledge of self and of Nature.199

Seneca associates this ability to fend off the slings and arrows of Fortuna not with physical fortitude, but with an inner, mental strength, and with the virtue of magnanimity above all others. In De constantia he made magnanimity the crowning virtue of the vir sapiens.200 And in De ira, Seneca clearly laid out the psychological basis of magnanimous activity:

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Seneca 1932e, 10.6: 32 (citing translation on 33): ‘Ut varia et libidinosa mancipiorumque suorum neglegens domina et poenis et muneribus errabit.’ Seneca 1932c, 5.3: 300 (301): ‘numquam sapiens in tam humilem nomen procedet, numquam semiliber erit, integrae semper libertatis et solidae, solutus et sui iuris et altior ceteris. Quid enim supra eum potest esse, qui supra fortunam est?’ Seneca 1917–25, 98.14, vol. III: 126 (127): ‘Quidquid fieri potuit potest, nos modo purgemus animum sequamurque naturam, a qua aberranti cupiendum timendumque est et fortuitis serviendum. Licet reverti in viam, licet in integrum restitui: restituamur, ut possimus dolores quocumque modo corpus invaserint perferre et fortunae dicere ‘‘cum viro tibi negotium est: quaere quem vincas’’.’ Seneca 1917–25, 82.5, vol. II: 242 (243): ‘Philosophia circumdanda est, inexpugnabilis murus, quem fortuna multis machinis lacessitum non transit. In insuperabili loco stat animus, qui externa deseruit, et arce se sua vindicat; infra illum omne telum cadit. Neminem occupat nisi haerentem sibi. Itaque quantum possumus, ab illa resiliamus; quod sola praestabit sui naturaeque cognitio.’ Seneca 1928c, 11.1: 80: ‘Praeterea cum magnam partem contumeliarum superbi insolentesque faciant et male felicitatem ferentes, habet quo istum affectum inflatum respuat, pulcherrimum virtutem omnium, magnanimitatem.’

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Beyond any doubt, one raises oneself from the common lot to a higher level by looking down upon those who provoke. The mark of true greatness is not to feel the blow, to be like the mighty beast looking round slowly at the baying of hounds, like the huge rock as the waves dash in vain against it. Not to be angry is to be unshaken by wrong done to one; to succumb to anger is to become agitated. But he whom I have raised above all annoyance has embraced the supreme good and can reply not to man alone but to Fortune herself: ‘Do all that you will, you are too insignificant to cloud my serenity. Reason forbids it, and I have entrusted my life to reason’s governance.’201

This analysis is imported into the political theory of De clementia. Seneca declares that ‘the characteristic of a great mind is to be peaceful and calm, looking down from above at injuries or affronts’ and that ‘it is for women to rave in anger, for wild beasts . . . to bite and worry the fallen’.202 Here Seneca characterises magnanimity as well as clemency – with which it becomes intimately associated – as the defining quality of the princeps. Seneca asserts that ‘magnanimity befits any mortal, even the poorest’, asking whether there can be serious doubt that there is ‘anything greater or braver than to beat back the force of ill fortuna?’203 But, as with clemency, Seneca believes that magnanimity ‘has freer scope in good fortuna, and is shown to better effect up on the magistrate’s bench than down on the floor’, adding that ‘a great mind is an adornment to great fortuna, but it must rise to it and stand above it, or else bring down fortuna, too, to the ground’.204 The magnanimous prince looks down on apparent misfortune and iniuria with equanimity, using ‘in a noble spirit the great gift which the gods have given him – his power to grant life and take it away’.205 Seneca

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Seneca 1928b, III.25.3–4: 318 (Seneca 1995: 102): ‘Illud non veniet in dubium, quin se exemerit turbae et altius steterit quisque despexit lacessentis. Proprium est magnitudinis verae non sentire percussum. Sic immanis fera ad latratum canum lenta respexit, sic irritus ingenti scopulo fluctus adsultat. Qui non irascitur, inconcussus iniuria perstitit, qui irascitur, motus est. At ille quem modo altiorem omni incommodo posui, tenet amplexu quodam summum bonum, nec homini tantum sed ipsi fortunae respondet: ‘‘Omnia licet facias, minor es quam ut serenitatem meam obducas. Vetat hoc ratio, cui uitam regendam dedi.’’’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.5: 372 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘magni autem animi proprium est placidum esse tranquillumque et iniurias atque offensiones superne despicere. Muliebre est furere in ira, ferarum vero nec generosarum quidem praemordere et urguere proiectos.’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.3: 370 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Decet magnanimitas quemlibet mortalem, etiam illum, infra quem nihil est; quid enim maius aut fortius quam malam fortunam retundere?’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.3–5: 370–2 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Haec tamen magnanimitas in bona fortuna laxiorem locum habet meliusque in tribunali quam in plano conspicitur . . . Magnam fortunam magnus animus decet, qui, nisi se ad illam extulit et altior stetit, illam quoque infra ad terram deducit.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘Uti itaque animose debet tanto munere deorum dandi auferendique vitam potens.’

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depicts the magnanimous and merciful prince as gloriously unperturbed by the petty injustices perpetrated against his person by ordinary mortals: I would not apply the word ‘merciful’ to one who is easy about suffering inflicted on another, but to one with goads of his own to drive him on but who still does not leap into action, who understands that the mark of a great mind is to endure wrongs done to him even where his power is supreme, and that nothing is more glorious than a wronged prince unrequited.206

Seneca gives us a double answer in De clementia as to how the prince attains the lofty heights of power: he reaches the high ground in politics because of his great good fortune and because of his virtue. From Seneca’s point of view, these are not rival explanations of the prince’s rise to his ‘pinnacle’ or summit, but rather dual aspects of one and the same providential scheme.207 Properly understood, Fortuna is merely a synonym for divine ratio, in accordance with which the prince unerringly acts because of his virtus. The prince has been allotted his great fortuna by the gods on account of his virtus. Nothing is owed to chance. Necessitas has forced him, like the gods, to occupy his summit. There the prince will lead the most public and visible of lives, possibly confronting the greatest of difficulties: tests, burdens, insults. In a fully rational frame of mind, the prince will assent to this fortuna and secure his freedom. A mala fortuna assails a prince who is at the same time held to owe his lofty position to bona fortuna: it is a contradiction in terms which Seneca preserves in order to dramatise the countless battles which need to be waged in order to acquire and practise virtue. The perpetuation of the distinctively Roman personification of an irrational force at work in the world in the form of a female goddess certainly seems to be the perpetuation of something like an objectification mistake. But Fortuna was a familiar part of the conceptual equipment of Roman political, moral and philosophical enquiry. Notwithstanding his own adherence to a monotheistic and providentialist philosophy, Seneca is reluctant to jettison this way of talking. He wants to discuss the challenges facing his audience, presenting Stoic philosophy in a comprehensible way which will allow him to show how their interpretation of such forces at work in the world is irrational, one which is based upon false appearances. In order to do so, he 206

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Seneca 1928a, I.20.3: 414 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘clementem vocabo non in alieno dolore facilem, sed eum, qui, cum suis stimulis exagitetur, non prosilit, qui intellegit magni animi esse iniurias in summa potentia pati nec quicquam esse gloriosius principe impune laeso’. Seneca 1928a, I.8.3: 378: ‘Est haec summae magnitudinis servitus non posse fieri minorem; sed cum dis tibi communis ipsa necessitas est. Nam illos quoque caelum adligatos tenet, nec magis illis descendere datum est quam tibi tutum: fastigio tuo adfixus es.’

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preserves the objectification, even if it is an irrational view, in order to redescribe the proper relation one should take up to the world – how one should see things. A further part of the explanation as to why Seneca gives Fortuna this dual character may be related to his view that, except in the rarest case of a Stoic sage, no one’s vision of the providential scheme can be entirely perfect. There are conflicts and diseases and events in Nature’s scheme which cause mishaps to individuals’ lives, and it is extremely hard for us to see the bigger picture. This is the challenge which we face as agents, according to the Stoics: to battle with an inveterate propensity to attribute to such events a bad nature when their bad nature is really only a result of our failure to conquer those feelings which interfere with our reception of the correct state of affairs in the world. The battle with Fortuna in the world is an externalised projection of the interior struggle for self-conquest. The struggle for the victory of reason within the self is not envisaged by Seneca as a battle between reason and some irrational part of the soul, and his view does not belong to the psychomachic tradition – though it is easily assimilable to it. The Stoic conception of the psyche as the hegemonikon eliminates the notion of a conflict between warring parts of a bipartite or tripartite soul. Rather, the conflict is a war over conflicting views: one rational and right, the other irrational and wrong, one virtuous and happy and the other vice-ridden and sad. The virtuous prince, however, exhibits a perfected rationality and consequently maintains his self and every other person in peace, freedom, security and serenity. In this way, the status of the civitas under the rule of the princeps resembles the peaceful and tranquil status of the world as it is ruled by ratio. But every person depends upon the prince’s ability to master his self, to maintain this perspective and to rule accordingly. He must not fall under the sway of an irrational mistress.

PART II

The Roman Theory and the Formation of the Renaissance Princeps

CHAPTER

2

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps

THE ROMAN THEORY AND THE REX IN THE REGNUM SICILIAE

The ‘great blaze of Seneca’s popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ in western Europe acquired a remarkable intensity in the protracted ideological confrontation between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II over the latter’s government of the Kingdom of Sicily in the first half of the Duecento.1 In 1231, some three years after the Regnum had been transformed into a battlefield by a papal army launched against the Sicilian monarch, one of the earliest instances of recourse to Senecan political theory stands out amid the series of military and juridical conflicts which helped define the development of the various monarchical centres of power on the Italian peninsula during the thirteenth century.2 As Kantorowicz and Marongiu` noted, the prologue of the massive body of royal legislation, promulgated by Frederick in the aftermath of the invasion and entitled the Liber Augustalis, cites the preamble of De clementia, placing the words of the Senecan princeps in the mouth of Frederick, ‘ever Caesar Augustus of the Romans, Felicitous Victor and Conqueror of Italy, Sicily, Jerusalem, Arles’.3 Part of the Senecan theory thus became inscribed upon

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Reynolds 1983: 359. For events leading up to the legislation, see especially Abulafia 1992: 164–205; Kantorowicz 1931: 170–8, 197–211; van Cleve 1972: 158–233. For the text of Liber Augustalis, I cite the most recent edition of the legislation, an anastatic reprint of the Cervonius text of 1773 containing the glossa ordinaria of Marino da Caramanico and the apparatus of Andrea da Isernia: Constitutionum Regni Siciliarum libri III 1999, 2 vols., (henceforth CRSL 1999), vol. I: 1–432, citing rubric of law before page reference. An anastatic reprint of the Carcani edition is in Constitutiones Regni Siciliae 1992 (henceforth CRS 1992), where a bibliography and discussion of the printed editions of the legislation from the editio princeps of 1475 to 1992 is given in Andrea Romano’s introduction: ix–xxxix. For a history of the text, see Capasso 1871; CRS 1992: ix–xxxix; and CRSL 1999, vol. I: xiii–xliii. For an English translation, see Liber Augustalis 1971, whose version I have regularly consulted as a basis for my own. For the Liber’s citation of the Senecan theory of monarchy, see Kantorowicz 1957: 116, esp. n. 85. For further discussion of this Senecan passage, see the articles in Marongiu` 1972, Ch.X: 42; Ch.XI: 315; Ch.XIII: 297–301.

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the constitutional document which provided the fundamental framework of public law within the Kingdom of Sicily from 1231 down to the Napoleonic era: And so, by this compelling necessity of things, and no less by the inspiration of Divine Providence, princes of peoples were created so that through their agency unbridled wickedness might be restrained, so that these arbiters of life and death for mankind might establish – as if executors, so to speak, of Divine Providence – the fortune, lot and state of every person, and so that from their hands, they might be able to render account perfectly of the stewardship committed to them. By the king of kings and prince of princes, these things above all others are sought: that they do not allow the sacrosanct Church, the mother of the Christian religion, to be stained by the hidden treacheries of those who disparage the faith; that they defend her with the power of the earthly sword from the incursions of the enemies of the public; and that they conserve to the best of their ability both peace and justice – like two sisters embracing one another – for a pacified people.4

While some of its elements already had an identifiable history in Sicilian royal ideology, this passage forms the core of the first coherent political theory to be articulated in written form by a government since the kingdom’s inception.5 Certain aspects of the theory are amplified in the following three books of legislation, but its basic structure is presented in the proem. The description of the prince as the arbiter of life and death who wields executive power over the ‘fortune, lot and state’ of those whom he rules is taken from De clementia. The passage also resonates with the language of the Senecan prologue in its formulation of the prince as a trustee required to render ratio to God for persons placed in his hands.6 As Marino da Caramanico, the earliest thirteenth-century

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CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘Sicque ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nec minus divine provisionis instinctu principes gentium sunt creati per quos posset licentia scelerum coerceri; qui vite necisque arbitri gentibus qualem quisque fortunam, sortem, statumque haberet, velut executores quodammodo divine Providentie stabilirent, de quorum manibus ut villicationis sibi commisse perfecte reddere valeant rationem. A Rege Regum e Principe Principum ista potissime requiruntur; ut Sacrosanctam Ecclesiam, Christiane Religionis Matrem, detractorum fidei maculari clandestinis perfidiis non permittant, et ut ipsam ab hostium publicorum incursibus, gladii materialis potentia tueantur, utque pacem populis eisdemque pacificatis iustitiam, que velut due sorores se ad invicem amplexantur, pro posse conservent.’ For explication of the ideology informing Norman royal art and architecture, see Borsook 1990 (a useful bibliography is at 87–101); Tronzo 1997. Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–5: 356–8: ‘ex omnibus mortalibus . . . vitae necisque gentibus arbiter . . . qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat in mea manu positum est . . . dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum’.

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commentator on the Constitutions, points out when glossing the words ‘statumque haberet’: These are the words of Seneca in the first book of De clementia to Nero, where he says: ‘Have I, of all mortals, found favour and been chosen to act on earth in place of the gods? I am the arbiter of life and death over peoples, and the lot and state of everyone has been placed in my hands. All dispensations of fortune to mortals are made through pronouncements on my lips.’7

Recognising that the Senecan words of Frederick’s proem express concepts which are attached to a theory, Marino substantiates his gloss by copying down an extended section of the Roman theory in order to clarify their use within the lawcodes. His commentary fleshes out the Senecan arbiter of the proem: his readers can see that the manual metaphor of the Senecan passage has been carried into the Frederician theory, and that the lips of the prince exercise immense power in determining the ‘the lot and state’ of everyone placed in his hands. A vast amount has been written about the purported Frederician contribution to the ideological and institutional development of the state since the case – firmly based upon an interpretation of the Emperor’s legislative programme for the Kingdom – was first put by Burckhardt and subsequently elaborated by Kantorowicz.8 Yet there has been no discussion of the place, role or meaning of the actual word status within the political theory contained in the Liber, nor of its classical provenance. It is an ahistorical absurdity to suggest that Frederick contributed anything at all towards the expression or the practical or institutional embodiment of an idea that did not yet exist in the form in which he is often alleged to have held it. But with some attentiveness to the historicity of the concept, one can nevertheless observe that the architects of Frederick’s programme at Melfi were evidently responsible for articulating some notion of ‘status’ and its relation to the person of the princeps which they derived from Seneca’s De clementia. As a consequence, a significant part of the Roman theory of the prince was etched onto the constitutional apparatus of royal 7

8

CRSL 1999, vol. I: 4, n.(h): ‘Statumque haberet. Ista verba sunt Senece, primo de clementia, ad Neronem ubi dicit: Ego ne ex omnibus mortalibus placui, electusque sum, quod in terris Deorum vice fungerer? Ego vitae necisque arbiter gentibus: qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in manu mea positum est: quod cuique mortalium fortuna datum velit, meo ore pronunciat.’ Da Caramanico’s gloss on the Senecan citation is mentioned in Kantorowicz 1957: 116, n.85. For the date of the gloss (1278–85), see Vallone 1985: 177–82. Da Caramanico’s proem is discussed below. Burckhardt 1990: 19–22; Kantorowicz 1931: 228–98; Kantorowicz 1957: 97–107. For a guide to the immense literature on Frederick II and ‘the state’, see CRSL 1999, vol. I: xv (Introduzione), n.5.

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government in Frederick’s Liber, where it was inspected, interpreted and reiterated over the course of centuries by generation after generation of civilian lawyers and publicists concerned to account for the origin and extent of royal power in the Kingdom subsequent to his reign. Three outstanding features of the intellectual and ideological contours which defined the position of his Sicilian regime in 1231 help explain Frederick’s alignment with the Senecan princeps in the Liber. The first of these is identifiable in the immediate context of the legislation. There was a pressing need for a clarification of royal authority which could accompany its rigorous reimposition in the Regnum Siciliae after the military, political and social conflicts of the late 1220s.9 Those conflicts had massively disrupted the consolidation of royal power in the Kingdom undertaken in the first part of the decade.10 They had been caused by Frederick’s excommunication, the concomitant release of his subjects from their oaths of allegiance to him, and the papal invasion of his territories in the south of the peninsula. The Liber Augustalis pointedly refers its public to this polemical background: the Regnum had been ‘very frequently assailed up to now . . . by the incursions of disturbances now past’;11 and the legislation aimed to rectify the effects of interference within the kingdom caused by ‘the wickedness of the invaders of our kingdom . . . not long ago in different provinces’.12 These problems were inextricably linked to a second aspect of the ideological context which helped determine the recourse to Senecan theory. Frederick’s regime confronted, in acutely aggravated form, a conflict over definitions which recurred from the inception of the Kingdom to its incorporation within the Spanish Empire. For as long as the Roman papacy contended its claim to ultimate possession and temporal jurisdiction over the Kingdom, the development of the Sicilian monarchical ideology would be inflected by its need to counter, refute, incorporate, accommodate or merely pass over in silence – according to its various political exigencies at any given moment – those papal claims and the theoretical basis on which they were constructed. The ideological terrain within which the Frederician account of his monarchical person had to be 9 10 11

12

CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxi; Abulafia 1992: 202. Kantorowicz 1931: 121–35; van Cleve 1972: 139–57; Abulafia 1992: 139–48. CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 6: ‘Cum igitur Regnum Siciliae nostrae Maiestatis hereditas pretiosa plerumque propter imbecillitatem aetatis nostrae, plerumque etiam propter absentiam nostram praeteritarum perturbationum incursibus exstiterit hactenus lacessitum’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.74, 134: ‘[praescripsimus, quot, et quales Baiuli, iudices, atque notarii per urbes singulas, iustitiam ministrarent, videlicet, ut his,] quos dudum invasorum Regni nostri per diversas provincias creavit iniquitas’.

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situated was marked out by a rival allocation of his position as rex. That allocation was effected within the papal interpretation by a series of concepts which circumscribed his royal person and which obliged him to accept two connected points of view: that the Sicilian Regnum consisted in lands which belonged to a principatus of which the pope, and not Frederick, was princeps; and that, as rex of that Regnum, Frederick enjoyed a subordinate role within the economy of secular power which, when overstepped, entailed upon the Holy Roman Emperor (as it had upon every other Sicilian king from Roger II onwards) the disciplinary measures of excommunication and invasion exercised by the pope, not in his capacity as a feudal dominus of some local territories, but as his princeps. The primary grounds upon which the papacy defended its use of these powers in the Kingdom – the doctrine of the papal vicariate and the Donation of Constantine – similarly constituted the fundamental basis of its claims to ultimate secular authority over Frederick in every other territory which he ruled as Holy Roman Emperor.13 Even while the papacy insisted upon the separateness of the Regnum from the Empire, its claims to princely rule both within and without the Kingdom were raised upon common ideological strata. This fact has made the historiography of Frederick’s controversy with the papacy often bewilderingly complicated, and an attempt at some crispness here is not intended to eclipse the considerable conceptual complexities surrounding the constitutional position of the Regnum. On the contrary, the turn to Senecan political theory at Melfi neatly elided many of those complexities by positing a monarchical persona whose powers as rex within the Regnum were entirely undifferentiated from the powers of a princeps within a principatus. The vocabulary of the rex was a crucial aspect of the utility of the classical theory of the prince to a monarch promulgating legislation explicitly intended for application solely within a regnum. Frederick subsequently made no attempt to assimilate the political, administrative, judicial and bureaucratic operations of the Kingdom to an imperial superstructure. But De clementia provided Frederick with a language with which to describe his position within the Regnum in a manner which entirely blurred the distinction between rex and princeps. They were descriptions of one and the same person in theory as well as in practice at Melfi. 13

For an historical account of the theory of the vicariate, see Ullmann 1955: 2–8. For its development by popes and decretalists from the later twelfth century to Innocent III, and its role in justifying the excommunication and final deposition of Frederick, see Watt 1991: 377–8, 381–6; Pennington 1991: 427; Robinson 1991: 260; Abulafia 1992: 166–70, 355–406. A profound consideration is in Wilks 1963: 275, 331–407.

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The language of rex and regnum within the classical theory was crucial. But it was also incidental upon an even more potent series of interrelated claims about the persona of the Senecan prince which Frederick’s Liber reformulated. In asserting the pope’s jurisdictional supremacy over the secular princeps, papal monarchical ideology had been historically obliged to articulate its position by using elements of Roman constitutional, moral and legal thought which had begun to emerge at an early stage of the Roman Principate in the Senecan document, and which had subsequently become more widely diffused within Roman imperial ideology. The result was a papal version of universal monarchy whose theoretical structure, in certain key areas, so closely resembled that of its imperial antagonist that it could be penetrated and refuted by reasserting apposite elements of the Roman theory of the princeps. This manoeuvre is observable in the Frederician theory, which uses a Senecan ideology to counter the effect of the papal vicariate – the doctrine to which the ideological justification for Frederick’s recent excommunication and the invasion of his kingdom was ultimately traceable. By elaborating the princeps in Senecan terms at Melfi, the Frederician theory effected a profound act of dislocation. The Senecan prince came attached to an account of the origins of monarchical power which could be rearticulated in order to obviate papal mediation of secular authority. The fundamental theoretical basis upon which the papacy claimed its plenitudo potestatis – the vicariate – was neatly sidestepped. The classical theory indicated a monarchical person whose rule was held to be personally, directly and providentially instituted in place of the gods on earth. The Senecan statement of the concept of the vicegerency in the proem of De clementia – ‘in terris deorum vice fungerer?’ – indicated the prince’s function with a vocabulary which had become conventional in Roman law and in papal ideology.14 Furthermore, that vicegerent role was described within the Senecan theory through a metaphor of legal accountancy: the principate was a form of trust requiring the rendering of ratio, or account, to the executor of that trust for what had been placed in the monarch’s hands.15 Both the manual metaphor and the notion of accounting for a trust are reformulated within the Frederician proem. Frederick took the 14 15

Seneca 1928a, I.1.2: 356. Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–4: 356–8: ‘ ‘‘Egone ex omnibus mortalibus placui electusque sum, qui in terris deorum vice fungerer? Ego vitae necisque gentibus arbiter; qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est . . . sic me custodio, tamquam legibus, quas ex situ ac tenebris in lucem evocavi, rationem redditurus sim . . . Hodie dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’’ ’

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place on earth of the person of God, ruling over the lives and deaths, the ‘state’, ‘fortune’ and ‘lot’ of those persons whom the legislation designates repeatedly as subjects. And it is no coincidence that the theory then immediately describes God as ‘the King of Kings and Prince of Princes’. The divine person whose place the monarch takes on earth is imposed with the interchangeably royal and princely characteristics which the person of the monarch on earth aims to deploy. The Senecan monarch was a person possessed of royal virtues in a royal setting as much as a princely person of distinctively princely qualities within a principality. The lack of distinction between the categories in the theory accorded with the very particular circumstances of Frederick’s rule over the Regnum: the claim is that Frederick acts as a vicegerent as both rex of the Kingdom and princeps of the Holy Roman Empire. The claim to divine and unmediated authorisation for the exercise of royal power which had been depicted in the Rogerian mosaics at Palermo was now grounded in an apparatus imported from the Roman theory of the prince. From its opening declaration to its valedictory close, the Liber Augustalis passes over in resoundingly polemical silence the role of the papacy in the constitution of princely government. A third part of the explanation for the Frederician use of the Roman theory of the prince involves considering how the terminology of the Senecan argument resonated among Christian readers. De clementia and De beneficiis were the first Senecan texts to come back into circulation in western Europe, emerging in Northern Italy around 800.16 Their subsequent dissemination throughout western Europe owes much of its impetus to the renaissance of classical studies in the twelfth century, which produced a massive proliferation of manuscripts containing partial or complete versions of these two treatises.17 Together with Letters 1–88 of the Epistulae morales, they were easily the most popular of Seneca’s authentic works during the twelfth-century renaissance, although the text of the letters (which initially circulated in two manuscript traditions) does not appear to have penetrated south of the Alps until the thirteenth century.18 An absolutely central role in the medieval transmission of the Senecan canon was played by the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino in the Kingdom.19 The earliest extant manuscript of most of Seneca’s other moral 16

17 19

Reynolds 1983: 359. Outstanding recent scholarship on the textual tradition of De clementia (and De beneficiis) is in Mazzoli 1978 and Mazzoli 1982. Latest additions to the history of the text are Busonero 2000 and Malaspina 2000 (with useful bibliography at 372–5). Malaspina 2000: 359. 18 Reynolds 1965: 97, 112; Malaspina 2000: 359. Reynolds 1965: 86–7; Reynolds 1983: 359.

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works, including De providentia, De constantia sapientis, De beata vita, De otio, De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae and the three books of De ira, is the product of a copyist at the monastery, and his eleventh-century text – the so-called codex Ambrosianus – was pored over by at least three scholars during the following century.20 The Kingdom thus enjoyed access to these ethical treatises at an early stage in their dissemination. Indeed, the fortuna of the Senecan corpus is intimately connected to the history of the Kingdom: it was a Neapolitan press which first brought De clementia to its Renaissance public in printed form, producing in 1475 the editio princeps of all the moral works commonly attributed to Seneca.21 But the reasons for the sustained and yet immensely varied relation between monarchical power and Senecan political theory through the centuries can only be fully grasped by thinking about the Christian fortuna of the persona at the heart of De clementia. The principal causes of the immense popularity of Seneca’s moral works from the twelfth century onwards are well documented in the historiography of Senecanism.22 Senecan moral philosophy exercised a peculiarly strong authority because it was perceived to approximate to Christianity. The various loci within the writings of the Church Fathers which were assembled in order to endorse the sense of conceptual proximity between Senecan and Christian ethics are fully charted.23 Seneca’s Christian credentials were strengthened immeasurably from the late eleventh century onwards by the increasing circulation of a pseudo-Senecan correspondence with St Paul. These letters generated the legend of the philosopher’s friendship with the apostle and helped to sustain the later, related belief that Seneca had been a Christian.24 The passage of Christian writing which was most frequently cited to authorise these opinions was found in St Jerome’s De viris illustribus, in which the theologian describes Seneca 20

21

22

23

24

The other texts comprising the ‘Dialogi’ are: Consolatio ad Marciam, Consolatio ad Polybium, Consolatio ad Helviam. Prior to the work of the fourteenth-century Neapolitan jurist Pietro Monteforte on the ms. (for which, see Billanovich 1996a), the codex Ambrosianus had had at least three twelfth-century correctors, who had at least one other copy of the Dialogues at the monastery. For this ms. and for the centrality of Montecassino to the transmission of Seneca’s treatises, see the bibliography at Reynolds 1983: 366. For the 1475 Neapolitan edition and other early printed editions of the moral works of Seneca, see Niutta 1999. Essential parts of the history are in Momigliano 1955; Reynolds 1965, esp. 112–24; Martellotti 1972; Meerseman 1973; Panizza 1977; dell’Orto 1999; Niutta 1999. Momigliano 1955: 13–15; Reynolds 1965: 83–4; Meerseman 1973, esp. 43, 49; Panizza 1977: 305, 324–34. See Jackson Barlow’s critical edition of the letters and discussion of their fortuna in Epistolae Senecae 1938. For discussion of their impact, see Momigliano 1955; Reynolds 1965: 81–9; Panizza 1977, esp. 305–8, 313–36.

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as ‘a man who led a life of the greatest continence and whom I would not place within the catalogus sanctorum were I not prompted to do so by those letters of Paul to Seneca, and of Seneca to Paul, which are read by a great many people’.25 Although the inclusion of Seneca within the catalogus sanctorum may have meant only adding him to a list of writers on Christian topics, the phrase was interpreted with increasing gusto as evidence of his saintliness.26 During the twelfth century, the passage served as a preface in manuscripts containing the genuine Senecan letters and the spurious Pauline correspondence, and was thenceforth faithfully cited in Senecan biography from the early Trecento, thereby assisting greatly in the construction of Seneca as an auctor of essentially Christian persuasion.27 The familiar aspects of the explanation for why Senecan ethics appeared attractive to Christian readers can also be quickly summarised.28 Seneca was a philosopher of a providential universe in whose work Nature, Reason, Fate, Necessity and Fortune were all treated as descriptions of a cosmic power which was regularly personified as a deity. That personification, furthermore, took a singular form with enough frequency to permit the belief that Seneca’s Stoicism was monotheistic, even if he often talked about ‘the gods’ rather than ‘god’. The Senecan attributes of the divine persona were similarly promising for a Christian looking for points of identification with the Senecan moral world. They indicated a beneficent, loving father figure, occasionally a hard task-master in allocating the fortunes of man, but only out of a caring concern to test moral strength. But two further aspects of Senecan thought arguably helped to make his moral writings even more psychologically compelling within a post-Augustinian Christian universe.29 The first of these was that Seneca situated his moral agent in both an earthly and a cosmic civitas. Since for Seneca ‘the true city is the cosmic city’, ethical progress consisted in the emulation of the vir sapiens whose perfected rationality made him an equal of the gods and rendered him free from the slavery of material attachments and from all forms of irrational response to the contingencies of his 25

26 27 28

29

Jerome 1845: 629 (Ch.12): ‘Lucius Annaeus Seneca Cordubensis, Sotionis Stoici discipulus . . . continentissimae vitae fuit, quem non ponerem in catalogo sanctorum nisi me illae epistolae provocarent, quae leguntur a plurimis, Pauli ad Senecam, et Senecae ad Paulum.’ Reynolds 1965: 84, n.5. Reynolds 1965: 113; Panizza 1977: 306–7, 316–26; Albanese 2004. Reynolds 1965: 113–14; Meersemann 1973, esp. 43–9; Panizza 1977: 305 (where she notes that Seneca was a source of instruction on the cultivation of conscience). For Augustine and Seneca, see Gallicet 2000; for early medieval Christian Stoicism in general, see Colish 1985.

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mundane life.30 This image of the vir sapiens, coupled with Seneca’s advocacy of an austere ethical regime in the pursuit of virtue as the only good, was lauded by Christian apologists as a form of contemptus mundi. Seneca’s writings were hugely popular in the monasteries of the Cistercians, the Benedictines and the Augustinians; he was depicted as an ascetic and a monastic person; and he became the author of an antimaterialist text named De paupertate, a compilation of extracts from letters 1–88 of the Epistulae morales which came into circulation in the twelfth century.31 But a second reason Seneca became a gripping moral companion for the Christian was that the philosopher often made man’s attempt to live the beata vita in this split site of moral activity look very hard indeed because of his human tendency to error. Barring Hercules, Socrates and Scipio, we all err, Seneca had frankly admitted in De clementia.32 On the one hand, the right thing to do was always to follow the divine and universal law of the cosmic civitas, discernible because of man’s participation in divine rationality. On the other hand, doing the right thing frequently appeared to be extremely difficult for an ordinary mortal. Seneca wrote about this dilemma in a language which vividly represented both the divine and the errant human perspectives. Seneca’s Christian readers acquired a taste for his ethics in an imaginative and conceptual world increasingly dominated by a monarchical persona described not only as both a rex and a princeps but also, in the Latin of the Vulgate and of the theologians, as the possessor of a series of virtues which coincided with the qualities of the Senecan prince. In those Christian texts, the virtues of mansuetudo, magnanimitas and clementia are repeatedly used to describe a perfectly benevolent, merciful and gentle person, who is also held to be mitis, or mild.33 Within both the Stoic account of monarchy and the Christian story, the consequence of a providentially ordained interception in the hopelessly erratic affairs of man was to render human beings simultaneously free from the dramatic consequences of their own irrationality and absolutely dependent upon a divine paternal figure, a princeps mundi who acts as the final arbiter of life 30 31

32 33

Schofield 1999: 93. For Seneca’s authority as a maximus morum philosophus among the monks, see Reynolds 1965: 104–7; Meerseman 1973, esp. 45–6. For the contents and influence of De paupertate, see Reynolds 1965: 113; Meerseman 1973: 117–28. For depictions of Seneca in ascetic and monastic pose, see dell’Orto 1999: 29–37. For the history of the figure of Seneca in art, see now Zanker 2000. Seneca 1928a, I.6.3: 374: ‘Peccavimus omnes.’ For magnanimitas within the Christian tradition, see Gauthier 1951. I give specific examples of the occurrence of the other virtues in the Bible and Christian theology below.

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and death within the setting of a universal civitas. In the Senecan theory, the Roman populace had lost its capacity to act rationally, and therefore its libertas, only reacquiring its freedom through a relation of dependency upon the princeps. But within the Christian story, the brief appearance on earth of a perfect princely person had helped establish the belief that his kingdom was extramundane. The possibility of the human embodiment of such a godlike person recedes from view as the chain which links gods and men within the cosmic civitas – universal ratio – becomes ruptured in Christian theology. Civil war is replaced by the Fall. The rupture produced a crucial re-adjustment in the moral evaluation of misericordia, pity, as a monarchical attribute. What had been condemned by Seneca as the vice of the weak-minded and sentimental became posited as the virtue par excellence of a divine monarch moved to pity by the wretched plight of errant mankind. If for Seneca error was a human fact, humanitas was nevertheless an ideal attached to the concept of a person capable of progressing to the heights of virtue. Such a hope had disappeared entirely within the Augustinian account of what it meant to be human. A final point needs to be made about the citation of De clementia in the Liber. Frederick identifies with the person of the Senecan princeps at a very precise moment: he is about to enunciate a massive body of legislation which minutely observes and limits the movements and activities of his subjects. There is a close connection between the ideology of accountability and the characteristic – most recently highlighted by Romano – of scrupulous accountancy which pervades the rationality of the Frederician legislation.34 The identification beween the Neapolitan monarch and the Senecan arbiter who declares – as Marino observes – that upon his lips rest ‘all dispensations of fortune’ to mortals extends throughout the legislation. Its depth emerges in the development of the relation of the divine person of the monarch to the divine person whose place he purported to take on earth. Here one obvious theoretical difficulty presented itself. Frederick’s ability to provide iura for his kingdom as a vicegerent of God needed to be situated within a broader Christian metaphysics in order to explain how the secular legislator came to possess the ability to interpret authoritatively the dictates of divine providence and thus perform the role of an arbiter of ius without the transforming sacramental structure of hierocratic theory. 34

For how things become ‘minuziosamente disciplinate’ and ‘minuziosamente regolamentate’ (xxv) as an effect of the laws, see Romano’s comments in CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxiv–xxvi. See also Burckhardt 1990: 20–1; Kantorowicz 1931: 271–92; Liber Augustalis 1971: xxx–xxxv; Abulafia 1992: 214–25.

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Confronting the problem of vitiation which appeared to bind the secular ruler to priestly mediation, the proem narrates the creation of the universe by ‘Divine Providence’.35 God creates man in ‘his own image and likeness’.36 The Fall is the result of Adam and Eve’s ‘transgression’ of the law under which they had been placed by God, and their punishment is the loss of their immortality.37 At this juncture, God causes the world to be populated by their offspring, and he puts it under their direction. The reason for this divine action is held to be ‘in order that divine clemency might not so totally and suddenly despoil what he had formed earlier with such disastrous result, and so that the destruction of other creatures might not result from the destruction of man’s form insofar as they might then lack a purpose and their value might not serve the needs of another creature’.38 Insofar as dominion springs from the ‘blemish of transgression’ and society is subsequently characterised by ‘hatred’, holding ‘as property what was common by natural law’,39 man is held to move from a virtuous and naturally sociable state to one of ‘disputes’.40 It is because of this development that ‘princes of nations were created . . . through whom license of crimes might be corrected’.41 Political society is thus the result of the ‘compelling necessity of things’. So far, so orthodox; but at the same time, political society is held to be brought about ‘not less by the inspiration of Divine Providence’.42 The description departs from convention in its depiction of the providential plan not as a result of God’s misericordia for man after a transgression which leaves him hopelessly vitiated, but as the outcome of divine clementia which leaves his reason intact. God’s response to man’s breach of law in Paradise is represented as a classic act 35

36

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38

39

40

41

42

CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 1: ‘Post mundi machinam providentia divina formatam, et primordialem materiam, naturae melioris conditionis officio.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 2: ‘hominem dignissimam creaturam ad imaginem propriam, effigiemque formatam’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 2–3: ‘ipsosque (verumtamen sub quadam lege praecepti) constituit, quam quia servare tenaciter contempserunt, transgressionis eosdem poena damnatos, ab ea, quam ipsis ante contulerat, immortalitate proscripsit’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 3–4: ‘Ne tamen in totum quod ante formaverat, tam ruinose, tam subito divina clementia deformaret; et ne hominis forma destructa sequeretur per consequens destructio ceterorum (dum carerent subiecto proposito) et ipsorum commoditas ullius usibus non serviret: ex amborum semine terram mortalibus foecundavit, ipsamque subiecit eisdem.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘qui paterni discriminis non ignari, sed in ipsos a patribus transgressionis vitio propagato inter se odia invicem conceperunt: rerumque dominia iure naturali communia distinxerunt’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘homo, quem Deus rectum et simplicem procreavit, immiscere se quaestionibus non ambegit’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘Sicque ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nec minus divinae provisionis instinctu, principes gentium sunt creati, per quos posset licentia scelerum coerceri.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4.

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of princely clemency which aims less at the total destruction of his subjects’ distinctive capacity as humans to reason and more at its rectification. Providence, reason and necessity thus become more closely aligned; and while the negotiation of the issue of vitiation is certainly awkward, political society can be subsequently held to be the product of natural reason as well as the result of a divinely providential scheme necessitated by human error. The concepts of natural law and natural reason recur throughout the legislation. In Book 1, the law on tithes runs that ‘insofar as the bountiful right hand of the Saviour has placed us in charge of the temporal affairs of princes of other lands, we are more strictly obliged by the inspiration of natural law to remedies’.43 The same book states elsewhere that ‘natural reason does not find abhorrent’ a stipulation which is held to be a part of the ius gentium, or law of nations.44 But the most striking use of the concept of reason in order to explain the natural and secular origins of government emerges in the legislation’s handling of the lex regia. This Roman law is discussed in Chapter 31 of Book I, which states that ‘it was not without great forethought and well-considered planning that the Quirites conferred the ius et imperium for establishing law on the Roman princeps by the lex regia’.45 The reason for the conferral of imperium by the Roman people is said to be so that ‘justice might originate in one and the same person who was responsible for their defence, the ruler of the people, to whom the height of Caesarian fortuna has been granted’.46 Legal right is thereby ceded to Caesar’s de facto position of power, attained through his providentially allotted fortuna. The populus are thus held to be able to reason sufficiently – with foresight – in order to act in accordance with the providential force which brings Caesar to power. Through the lex regia, they rationally align their will with Providence, thereby giving their formal consent both to the necessity and to the rationality of the establishment of the Principate. Their act ‘can be proven to have been provided not only usefully but from necessity’.47 In assimilating the lex regia in this way, the theory posits a rational subject and a principle of consent which arms it 43

44 45

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47

CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.7: 19: ‘Quanto ceteris terrae Principibus munifica dextera Salvatoris in temporalibus nos praefecit, tanto saltem iuris naturalis instinctu ad antidota strictius obligamur.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.16: 35: ‘Iuris gentium induxit auctoritas et naturalis haec ratio non abhorret.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.31: 81: ‘Non sine grandi consilio, et deliberatione perpensa condendae legis ius, et Imperium in Romanum Principem, lege Regia transtulere Quirites’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.31: 81: ‘. . . ut ab eodem, qui commisso sibi Caesareae fortunae fastigio, pro potentiam populis imperabat, prodiret origo iustitiae, a quo eiusdem defensio procedebat’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.31: 81: ‘Ideoque convinci potest non tam utiliter, quam necessario fuisse provisum, ut in eiusdem persona concurrentibus his duobus, iuris origine scilicet, et tutela, ut a iustitia vigor, et a vigore iustitia non abesset.’

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with further means of arguing for the confluence of providence, reason and necessity in the origins of absolutist government without jeopardising its concomitant claim about divine authorisation. As Kantorowicz showed, Frederick’s sustained self-representation as an absolute monarch embodying iustitia was facilitated by the civilians’ rediscovery of a ‘non-ecclesiastical Stoicism’.48 It was characterised by a tendency to deify Ratio as the personification of God and as a ‘manifestation of Nature equal to God’, and to exalt the ‘absolute power of legal Reason’.49 But it is worth noting that Frederick’s assertion that ‘although our imperial majesty is free from all laws, it is nevertheless not altogether exalted above the judgement of Reason, herself the Mother of all Law’50 is a version, albeit differently gendered, of the Senecan idea that the princely arbiter and promulgator of laws is self-legislating, placing his person before the iudex of ratio. That relation pervades Frederick’s legislative activity. But what makes the Liber radically aligned to a Senecan way of thinking is its emphasis on the clemency of the ruling person. In describing the divine direction of man’s affairs, the defining attribute of the persona of God is held to be his clementia. When taking the place of the person of God on earth, Frederick accordingly exercises the same defining virtue. Free from the body of laws which he inherits but bound to the terms of divine ratio which guides his juridical activity, Frederick repeatedly claims that his legislation is the product of his divinely merciful person. He ‘cleaves to the footprints of imperial clemency’ when pronouncing on the redemption of captives.51 In making judicial appointments we are told that ‘when his imperial clemency turns the eyes of his foresight to the paths of justice and extols the height of his government, arming the imperious majesty with the fortification of laws, he relieves both the oppressions and the burdens of his subjects, who – after God – draw breath only by the leniency of the magnificent prince’.52 But Frederick also regularly exercises three other qualities denoted by Seneca as essential parts of being merciful: he is mitis, mansuetus, lenis. In amending or abolishing existing laws, Frederick mitigates. The relatives of exiles are ‘saved by the leniency of 48 50

51 52

Kantorowicz 1957: 107. 49 Kantorowicz 1957: 107. Historia Diplomatica Friderici II, vol. 5: 162: ‘quamquam soluta imperialis a quibuscumque legibus sit maiestas, sic tamen in totum non est exempta iudicio rationis que iuris est mater’. See comments at Kantorowicz 1957: 105–6 (his translation cited here). CRSL 1999, vol. I, II.4: 202: ‘Clementiae imperialis vestigiis inhaerentes.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.74: 133–4: ‘Cum circa iustitiae tramites imperialis clementia oculos suae provisionis advertit, et sui regiminis extollit fastigium, armando legum munimine imperatoriam maiestatem, et subiectorum gravamina, et oppressiones relevat, qui sola post Deum magnificentiae Principis lenitate respirant.’

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our piety’.53 His modification of ‘the harshness of the old laws’ is sanctioned by his royal person who wishes to ‘soften’ them by ‘an interpretation’ emanating from ‘our imperial gentleness’.54 The virtue of mansuetudo is elsewhere held to ‘mitigate a hard and harsh penalty’ affixed by preexisting laws but reckoned by Frederick to be disproportionate to the particular offence.55 The idea of ‘status’ which is incorporated into the legislation from the Senecan argument is thus attached to a distinctive ideology of persons and their proper government pivoted on a Stoic conception of ratio. As the arbiter of the life, death, state, fortune and general lot of the subject, the princeps is endowed with a distinctively Senecan set of virtues which ensure that his legislation proceeds in alignment with divine, providential and natural reason. A neo-Stoic personality is thereby uneasily superimposed upon prince and subject, obliging both to a regime of reason but leaving them in a moral universe still characterised by Christian vitiation. THE NEAPOLITAN JURISTS AND THE CLASSICAL THEORY

The ideological ramifications of the Liber’s assimilation of the Sicilian monarch to the person of the princeps exalted by Seneca’s theory were profound, complex and immediately problematic. The Liber Augustalis had announced itself to the world with a title so uncompromisingly Roman and imperial that it was soon effaced after the installation of the ostensibly pro-papal Angevins, and the legal codes were subsequently called the Constitutions. Yet every monarch who presided over and enforced them as law within the Regnum simultaneously perpetuated a claim about his person and its relation both to God and his subjects in terminology derived from the Senecan speculum. The pivotal place of the legislation in the government of the Kingdom assured this definition of the monarch extensive publicity, affixing and advancing the fortunes of the Senecan theory within the political life of the Regnum. Marino’s commentary quickly acquired an authoritative status as the glossa ordinaria of the legislation and became part of the conventional apparatus which accompanied the text of the Sicilian laws both in manuscript and in print through to the editions 53 54

55

CRSL 1999, vol. I, II.8: 210: ‘pietatis nostrae lenitatis servatis’. CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.12: 28: ‘Asperitatem veterum legum . . . interpretatione imperialis mansuetudinis lenientes praesenti legi . . . sancimus.’ CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.48: 104: ‘Duram et diram poenam . . . minime congruentem . . . imperiali mansuetudine mitigantes, decernimus.’

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of the late eighteenth century.56 Virtually every student of the legislation would have therefore been reminded both of the description of the monarch which their author, Piero della Vigna, had used in the preface and of its Senecan provenance, which Marino had carefully glossed.57 THE APPLICATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL THEORY

As the royal ideology developed over the next hundred years across the reigns of the first four Angevin monarchs, the text of De clementia was systematically studied and its precepts assiduously adduced by a distinguished civilian tradition deeply implicated in sustaining the monarch’s claims to wield the powers of the princeps. Marino was employed in the Magna Curia.58 He was followed by a succession of jurists – Andrea da Isernia, Bartolomeo da Capua and Luca da Penna – who committed themselves to defining the character and extent of royal power in the Regnum. Like Marino, both Bartolomeo and Andrea were responsible for providing a full gloss on the Frederician Constitutions. Bartolomeo was a professor of civil law at the Neapolitan studium whose commentary on the Constitutions became known as the glossa aurea.59 He also held the post of protonotary from 1290, and of royal logothete in 1296, thereby becoming the highest-ranking official in Angevin government until his death in 1328.60 Andrea da Isernia was variously a judge, a treasury official and finally vice-protonotary within the royal bureaucracy.61 Another distinguished graduate of the Neapolitan studium, Luca da Penna, acted as judge, royal counsellor and as protonotary in the second half of the Trecento.62 He wrote numerous glosses on various Sicilian laws promulgated during his lifetime, and regularly referred to the laws of Frederick II throughout his work.63 These three jurists cited De clementia ‘over and over again’ in their writings.64 Kantorowicz helped to show how and why Senecan theory 56

57

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For the centrality of Marino’s glossa ordinaria to the apparatus of the text, see Romano’s comments at CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxxii–xxxiv. For his biography and a classic account of his work, see Calasso 1957. For Piero della Vigna, Frederick’s logothete, principal jurist and compositor of the constitutions, see de Blasiis 1861; Kantorowicz 1931: 298–307; Abulafia 1992: 203–4, 265–6. Vallone 1985: 179–80. For Bartolomeo, see Boyer 1995; Kelly 2003: 32–4, 182–3, 251–4, 312–14. Boyer 1995: 193; Kelly 2003: 34. For Andrea da Isernia, see especially Calasso 1961; Vallone 1985: 184–90; Kelly 2003: 67, 107, 109. For Luca da Penna, see Ullmann 1969. 63 Ullmann 1969: 7–8. Kantorowicz 1957: 116, n.85.

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subsequently dominated civilian discussions of the prince. Pointing out that in their political theory ‘their philosopher was not Aristotle, but Seneca and his ideal of the ‘‘Sage’’’, he produced example after example of the uses not only of Seneca’s De clementia in their work, but also of De beneficiis, De ira and the Epistulae morales.65 A crucial part of the explanation for this relationship was supplied by the civilians themselves. ‘Seneca’, said Andrea da Isernia, ‘was the finest jurist, as is patently clear to anyone who reads him.’66 The classical optimus iurista supplied the lawyers with a concept of a princely person and a body of theory so firmly centred upon the Stoic idea of ratio as a form of ius and lex that his texts proved an embarrassment of riches. His political theory was seamlessly transferred into the juridical field, providing a powerful and fertile means of reinforcing on occasion a markedly absolutist definition of royal power. De clementia was minutely studied, its precepts repeatedly adduced. So, for example, Andrea declared that ‘the Princeps is the Pater patriae, says Seneca in the first book of De clementia. Therefore he is father of those in the patria, that is, his subjects’; he then immediately proceeds to develop the idea by citing Book II of De ira.67 Another striking way in which the Neapolitan jurists resorted to Seneca’s theory was their frequent citation of the Senecan description of the prince as caput and animus of the corpus of the res publica in order to elaborate the metaphor of the body politic.68 A further idea upheld by reference to the text was observed by Ullmann in the later work of Luca, who sustained the Stoic thesis of the natural sociability of man by lifting Seneca’s formulation of the doctrine – ‘hominem sociale animal communi bono’ – from De clementia.69 This aspect of Stoic social doctrine was integral to a political conception of the civitas which was uncompromisingly secular, monarchical and absolutist, articulated in a language derived from Roman juridical and political theory. For both Luca and Seneca, the only way to ensure good government and the common good within the civitas was to install a princeps as its head. As Luca puts it, ‘there is nothing more

65 66

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Kantorowicz 1957: 473, n.56, and index s.v. ‘Seneca’. Isernia 1571, fol. 305v (cited from Kantorowicz 1957: 473, n.56): ‘Seneca fuit iurista optimus, ut patet illis qui legerunt eum’. Isernia 1571, fol. 232 (cited from Kantorowicz 1957: 305, n.75): ‘Princeps est pater patriae, dicit Seneca primo de clementia. Ergo illorum, qui sunt in patria, idest subditorum. Sicut arguit ipse [Seneca] secundo de ira: ‘‘nefas est nocere patriae, ergo civi quoque’’.’ The passage from De ira is at II.31.7. See Kantorowicz 1957: 215, 440, n.405, for the repeated use by both Andrea da Isernia and Luca da Penna of De clementia, I.5.1: ‘tu animus rei publicae tuae es, illa corpus tuum’. See Ullmann 1969: 166, n.2. The relevant passage is De clementia I.3.2.

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necessary to civitates than principates: without them it is impossible for a civitas to exist’.70 Applying these Senecan doctrines to the person of the rex as much as to the person of the princeps depended upon assimilating their identity. How was that identification effected after the departure of Frederick II? The first way was to operate within the terms of the Senecan theory itself, using its argument about moral personality: rex, princeps and imperator were interchangeable descriptions of a monarchical person embodying reason and demonstrating the requisite virtues. But this argument could take firm hold only after the acquisition of the idea of a plurality of princely persons operative within political life – after, that is, it became conceivable to think of extending the prerogatives of the princeps to rulers other than the Holy Roman Emperor. A crucial step in precisely this direction had already been taken among the Neapolitans by Marino in his theory of the liber rex, laid out between 1278 and 1285.71 The conflation of rex and princeps within the Frederician prologue presented Marino with the constitutional task of separating out the Sicilian kingdom from the Holy Empire, while simultaneously attempting to preserve the identity of the rex as a princeps and the idea of the regnum as a form of principatus. For pressing political and ideological reasons, his theory moved as far away from the language of the classical theory as possible – inextricably bound as it was to the figure of the Roman imperial prince – and located an alternative set of resources with which to legitimate the princely powers of the rex. In detaching the Kingdom from the Empire, Marino detached the historical identity of the rex from that of the Roman princeps, and established a genealogy of his person outside a Roman imperial framework. But he arrived (albeit more famously) at precisely the same point of equivalence between regal and princely authority which the use of the classical theory had helped effect in Frederick’s Liber. In the course of Marino’s discussion of which of the powers traditionally accorded to the Roman princeps by Roman law belonged by right to the Sicilian king, he asserts both that ‘the king of Sicily is a prince in his kingdom’ and that ‘the king of Sicily, as we have shown above, has no superior’.72 Far from being an attack on the moral identity of the persona of the Roman theory, 70

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Penna 1597, XII, 59, 8, no. 3 (cited from Ullmann 1969: 169): ‘Nihil est tam necessarium civitatibus quam principatibus, sine quibus impossibile est esse civitas.’ Caramanico 1957. For Calasso’s thesis, see Pennington 1993: 31, 34–7; for further insights into Marino’s theory, see Canning 1991: 464–6. Caramanico 1957: 200: ‘Sed inde movemur, quia cum, sicut dictum est, rex Sicilie sit princeps in regno’; 201: ‘rex Sicilie, ut supra probavimus, superiorem non habet’.

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Marino’s argument merely indicated that the Roman emperors had never historically incorporated such a virtuous persona. Furthermore, Marino firmly anchored within the royal ideology a terminology drawn from Roman legal texts which served to engender a monarchy along strongly Stoic lines. The conceptual space within which a Senecan argument for the prince could be continued to be advanced by civilians consequently received further definition. Mapping out the monarch’s persona according to a typology of distinctively Senecan princely virtues reinforced the royal claim to princely power. Bartolomeo da Capua embraced the new Aristotelianism in his discussions of royal virtue while continuing to draw upon the older Senecan princely tradition.73 In 1324, he took as the text of his public sermon ‘Ecce rex tuus, veniet tibi mansuetus’, from Matthew 21:5.74 While De clementia had affixed the virtue of mansuetudo as a prerequisite of the bonus rex on no less than six occasions, the virtue had subsequently played an important part in both the Vulgate and in the Christian ideology of kingship to which it helped give rise. Bartolomeo begins by referring to a variety of biblical passages, citing Paul to Timothy 2:24, to the effect that ‘the servant of the Lord should not be disputatious, but be gentle to all’, before turning to Psalms 36:11 to remind his royal audience that the mansueti shall inherit the earth.75 Turning to his classical authorities, he recalls that ‘gentleness is the moderator of angers, as is written in Book IV of the Ethics’.76 He then cites one of Seneca’s definitions of clemency verbatim: ‘Clemency is a leniency on the part of a superior towards an inferior in imposing punishments, as Seneca says in Book II De clementia.’77 He rounds off his excursus with the biblical personification of the requisite royal virtues and their role in assuring good rule, asserting that ‘Pity and Truth guard the king, and his throne is strengthened through Clemency’.78 Bartolomeo’s discussion certainly reflects Thomas Aquinas’ analysis in the Summa, where the enquiry into ira, crudelitas, mansuetudo and clementia is closely informed by Senecan moral philosophy, and 73 74

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For the penetration of scholastic philosophy into the royal court, see Kelly 2003: 30–1; 34–41; 182–3. Boyer 1995: 197 (242–8 for edition of the text of the sermon). For Bartolomeo’s lay sermons as a consistent feature of royal publicity and ceremonial under Robert, see Kelly 2003: 33–4. Boyer 1995: 245: ‘Servum Domini non oportet litigare, sed mansuetum esse ad omnes . . . Mansueti autem hereditabunt terram.’ Boyer 1995: 246: ‘Quod mansuetudo est moderativa irarum, sicut scribitur IIII Etthicorum.’ Boyer 1995: 246: ‘clementia est lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis penis, ut Seneca dicit in II De clementia ad verbum’. The citation is from De clementia, II.3.1. Boyer 1995: 246: ‘Misericordia et veritas custodiunt regem et roboratur clementia tronus eius’ (citing Proverbs 20:28).

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particularly by the doctrines of De clementia, which Thomas cites repeatedly.79 But his emphasis on the importance of royal lenitas and mansuetudo is also informed by his knowledge of the Senecan theory and the dangers of anger in the absolute monarch.80 These concerns about royal anger had surfaced in an earlier sermon which Bartolomeo had preached on the text of ‘Render unto Caesar’ from Romans 13:7.81 He first states that it is ‘not for nothing that the king carries the sword, as the Apostle says’.82 He then explains St Paul’s text by saying that ‘a king should be feared’ because he is ‘the arbiter of life and death, and in his anger he has the power to kill, as Seneca says in the beginning of De clementia to Nero’, but also because conscience dictates that he should ‘obey God, since all power is from the lord God’.83 Bartolomeo thus recurs to the Senecan definition of the princeps inscribed on the lawcodes which he had glossed, and applies it to his rex, gliding between rex and princeps in effortless accordance with the Senecan argument. Bartolomeo knew from the Constitutions that the ‘fortune and state’ of every subject was in the hands of the prince. If the sword were to be wielded in a fit of anger, Bartolomeo saw potentially lethal repercussions for the members of the body politic. The Senecan argument clearly helped to legitimate royal absolutism. Within the civilian tradition, analysing the character of princely absolutism typically took the form of confronting and attempting to reconcile two rubrics from Justinian’s lawbooks. The first of these was Princeps legibus solutus at Digest 1.3.31, the touchstone of all juridical declarations of princely absolutism. This was then juxtaposed with Digna vox at Codex 1.14.4, which declared that ‘it is a statement worthy of the majesty of the ruler for the prince to profess himself bound by the laws, to such an extent does our authority depend upon the authority of the law’.84 From the earliest civilian glosses on the codes, the response to these apparently conflicting directions of thought, as Pennington observes, had been to 79

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Boyer 1995: 245, n.12; Aquinas 1964–, vol. 44, 2a2ae.q.157: 34–49. The quaestio persistently declares its debt to De clementia. Aquinas 1964–, vol. 44, 2a2ae. q.157–9: 34–81. The text of the sermon is given in Boyer 1998: 153–7. Boyer 1998: 153: ‘non sine causa gladium portat, ut dicit Apostolus in eodem capitolo’. Boyer 1998: 154–5: ‘et debetur hic timor regibus: non solum propter iram, set propter conscientiam . . . quasi dicat non est timendus rex solum propter potestatem coactivam quam habet, quia est arbiter vite necisque et in ira sua potest occidere, ut Seneca dicit in primo De clementia ad Neronem, set propter conscientiam, ut Deo obediatur, quoniam omnis potestas a domino Deo est’. Codex (1877) 1.14.4: 68: ‘Digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principem profiteri: adeo de auctoritate iuris nostra pendet auctoritas. Et re vera maius imperio est submittere legibus principatum.’

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emphasise the ‘psychological state of an emperor who binds himself to the law’.85 And, as Tierney says of Accursius’ gloss, ‘the emperor was ‘‘loosed from the laws’’ only in the sense that there existed no legal machinery for bringing him to justice if he broke them . . . Fidelity to the law which was required of all men, had to be maintained in the case of the Prince alone through internal rather than external discipline.’86 In the writings of the Neapolitan jurists, just such a form of internal discipline – of subjection to ius and iustitia – begins to be predicated of their monarch by increasing recourse to the philosophy of the Roman Stoic who had legitimated princely absolutism in his political theory by positing a self-legislating, self-surveying, self-reflecting prince. In the hands of one trained lawyer in particular, the discourse of the Senecan mirror was to be elaborately placed before the Neapolitan monarch. But before turning to Petrarch, one needs first to look north of the Regnum, where Senecan theory was acquiring a similar prominence within a literature concerned with the government of the civitas. THE ROMAN THEORY AND THE RISE OF THE SIGNORI

For the start of the story of the most audacious appropriation of the Roman theory of the prince, one needs to turn to the crisis of communal government and the series of military takeovers which brought the signori to preside over numerous northern Italian city-states during the second half of the Duecento and the early Trecento. At the peak of their commercial expansion, at the height of their economic productivity, at the ‘climax of democratic . . . revolution’, there was, as Philip Jones has observed in his magisterial study of the Italian city-states – with perhaps a touch of irony – ‘a paradox, a seeming contradiction at the very heart of Italian affairs’, as so many communal governments were collapsed and subjected to the rule of signori.87 Under these signori, ‘a wholly new feudality arose alongside or in place of the old lines of clan and ruler. With the shift from commune to court and dynasty, the despots . . . began to transform their power base . . . and to assume the superior position or posture of impartial rulers personifying unity, order, and peace.’88 From the heart of a civic and mercantile society, there emerges what Jones has labelled a ‘counter-ideology’ and he acknowledged – somewhat grimly – its distinctly Roman imperial 85 87 88

Pennington 1993: 81. 86 Tierney 1963: 390, 392. Jones 1997: 519. For recent discussion of the signorial takeovers, see Dean 1999: 458–78. Jones 1997: 640.

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character.89 As he puts it, there were now ‘two regimes and two ideologies’ in the city-states.90 Between approximately 1240 and 1400, the task of restructuring the identity of the civitas at a political and juridical level from self-governing commune to monarchical principality was invaluably assisted by a theory which had already been implicated in a similarly revolutionary manoeuvre and whose contentions were now set to work in order to provide some of the essential elements of the counter-ideology.91 A basic shift can be discerned: the signorial monarchies turn to the wealth of Roman texts which had helped furnish the republican regimes with the central elements of an account of their selfgoverning political arrangements, and begin to reiterate the other side of the Roman story – the story of the res publica saved from the discordant effects of civil conflict by a princeps installed as the head of the body politic. SENECAN ETHICS, THE SOVEREIGN PERSON AND DE CLEMENTIA IN THE DUECENTO

The impact of Senecan philosophy upon the formation of Renaissance thought in its earliest history has long been noted.92 But the presence of a specifically Senecan strand of ethics in the so-called ‘pre-humanist’ literature of the city-states during the thirteenth century has been recently described by Quentin Skinner.93 Skinner showed how a series of Duecento texts on government proffered a vision of government within the civitas which manifested an overwhelming intellectual and ideological debt to the moral philosophy of ancient Rome.94 In particular, it displayed a strong reliance upon a set of well-defined Roman classical authorities: Sallust, Seneca and above all Cicero.95 Notwithstanding the increasing circulation of the first translations of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics in the 1250s and 1260s, this secular literature remained committed to the articulation of moral and political precepts and aims of basically Roman provenance.96 Skinner then contrasted the primary importance attributed to the virtue of justice by some of these writers with another distinctive moral typology, ‘a rival way of thinking about the virtues’, which ‘arose out of Senecan 89 90 91 92 93 94

Jones 1997: 644 (and for the Roman imperial character of the emerging principatus, see 522, 621). Jones 1997: 645. For the transition, Ercole 1928 is still fundamental. For a recent reiteration, see Kristeller 1991: 273, 279. See the recent redaction of Skinner’s seminal article on Lorenzetti in Skinner 2002, II: 39–92. Skinner 2002, II: 42, 92. 95 Skinner 2002, II: 56; 41–2. 96 Skinner 2002, II: 42.

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roots’.97 Both the Epistulae morales and De clementia helped to authorise an emphasis on magnanimity, a virtue which, as Skinner rightly stresses, ‘occupies an absolutely central place’ in the Senecan alternative to the Ciceronian typology.98 The third text which helped sustain the pre-eminence attached to the virtue – the Formula vitae honestae – was not actually Senecan, although it was generally believed to have been authentic during the Duecento and for centuries after. The Formula was the work of the Spanish abbot and bishop Martin of Braga, and was written between 570 and 579.99 Martin had used Seneca’s De ira as the basis of his own text of the same name some time after 572.100 The Formula is possibly based in part upon a lost work of Seneca, perhaps even a De officiis; it is certainly informed by Senecan moral philosophy.101 It had also been originally addressed to a monarch, King Miro, whom the author hails at the opening of his dedication of the tract as ‘clementissime rex’, but from the twelfth century, the Formula circulated without this royal preface.102 It became commonly known as De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus, although a mutilated form of it was combined with a long collection of sententiae excerpted from the Epistulae morales to produce a discrete work which circulated under the title of De copia verborum.103 The Formula helped to swell the number and content of pseudo-Senecan texts and florilegia in circulation by the Duecento, adding to a list which included such titles as De paupertate, De remediis fortuitorum, De moribus and Proverbia Senecae – all ‘Senecan’ works whose popularity ensured that many of them would be printed in the early 1470s under Seneca’s name, well before the Renaissance presses had produced editions of any of his authentic works.104 But it also reinforced one characteristic of genuinely Senecan philosophy while both exaggerating and revising it from a Christian perspective, making magnanimitas one of the four moral attributes essential for a vir who aims to be ‘honestus ac bene moratus’ and ‘perfectus’.105 97 99

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98 Skinner 2002, II: 63–4. Skinner 2002, II: 65. For the text, see Braga 1950: 236–50. For the author, see vii; for his Senecanism and the Formula, see the discussion at 5, 7, 53, 204–35. For the importance of the Formula to these writers, see Skinner 2002, II: 43, 51. Braga 1950: 53; see also Meerseman 1973: 43–4. 101 Braga 1950: 206. Braga 1950: 208–9; Meerseman 1973: 44. Braga 1950: 7, 208–9. For the text, composition and history of De copia verborum, see Meerseman 1973: 92–114. Meerseman 1973; Niutta 1999. For Pseudo-Seneca in the volgare, see Bertolini 2004. Braga 1950: 237. Martin thus substitutes fortitudo, one of the four cardinal virtues, with magnanimitas, effectively equating the two qualities.

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After equating magnanimity with fortitude, the Formula claims that its possession makes a person ‘free, fearless, lively’.106 Cicero had hinted at the idea of the magnanimus vir as a person who is above all liber in the Stoic sense of the word; but Senecan ethics had elevated the connection to one of singular importance. In the Formula, it is further underlined. The magnanimous man is held to be ‘without trepidation’, facing ‘the end of this life’ with equanimity rather than with fear and trembling.107 The Formula then opens up the rich seam of precepts on magnanimity in both De ira and De clementia in order to extract the wisdom that the magnanimous man can never be affected by insults: ‘About your enemy you will say ‘‘He has not harmed me, but he has been minded to cause harm’’ .’108 As one might expect of a neo-Senecan theorist of anger, this formulation is principally indebted to a series of connections made in De ira. But it is developed in conjunction with an argument which rearticulates the reasoning laid out in Chapters 21 to 23 of Book I of De clementia about the inappropriateness of acts of retribution by a prince looking to avenge himself against his enemy. The Formula suggests to its royal audience that in treating any such enemy, ‘when you see that he is in your power, you will reckon it vengeance enough to have had the power to avenge yourself: know that to forgive is a great and honourable form of vengeance’.109 This argument about power is a paraphrase of Seneca’s claim that when the prince ‘looks down upon’ his enemy, now subjected to his potestas and ius, and therefore at the mercy of the monarch, ‘his vengeance is already complete’.110 But the claim has undergone a crucial alteration as it is restated in the Formula: the idea of holding back from retaliating for injury is rendered by the verb ignoscere. Yet ‘to forgive’ or ‘to pardon’, Seneca insists in De clementia, is a morally culpable activity, which always implicates the forgiver in not pursuing redress against someone for a series of bad reasons. The infiltration of the notion of forgiveness into the ‘Senecan’ Formula via the use of ignoscere may be partly explained by Seneca’s own 106

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Braga 1950: 241: ‘Magnanimitas vero, quae et fortitudo dicitur, si insit animo tuo, cum magna fiducia vives liber, intrepidus, alacer.’ Braga 1950: 241: ‘Magnum humani animi bonum est non tremere, sed constare sibi et finem huius vitae intrepidus exspectare.’ Braga 1950: 241: ‘Si magnanimus fueris, numquam iudicabis tibi contumeliam fieri. De inimico dices: ‘‘Non nocuit mihi sed animum nocendi habuit’’.’ The Senecan argument about iniuria contumelia, magnanimitas and the vir sapiens at De ira, 3.5.7–8 has been seminal here. Braga 1950: 241: ‘cum illum in potestate tua videris, vindictam putabis vindicare potuisse: scito enim honestum et magnum vindictae esse genus ignoscere’. Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416: ‘Hoc dico, cum ab inferioribus petitus violatusque est; nam si, quos pares aliquando habuit, infra se videt, satis vindicatus est.’

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confusing use of the word to indicate leniency in certain moments of Book I, before he settles down to clarify his terminology in Book II.111 But it is also a reminder that Martin of Braga’s text is dedicated to a Christian king and belongs to broadly the same moral universe which had helped determine the recharacterisation of the Senecan vice of misericordia as a virtue. By the time of the thirteenth century, Seneca’s Christian identity was already well developed, and one of the texts now in circulation under his name made him a firm advocate of a type of activity which he had actually censured. The other important way in which the Formula constituted a modification to the body of Senecan thought available to writers from the Duecento onwards was that it helped to turn Seneca into a theorist of prudentia. This characteristic is as necessary to the type of person whom Martin wishes to train as the other two qualities which he names – continentia and iustitia – and is treated first of all, at considerable length. The Formula’s analysis of prudence is actually heavily derived from Cicero’s De officiis, but in relocating the concept to a Christian and royal context, Martin of Braga can be seen to be broadly participating in the recharacterisation of so many of Cicero’s ideas which had typified Seneca’s own work. Prudence is drawn into a depiction of a virtuous monarch in a strongly Stoic providential universe. The truly prudent man ‘can never be wrong’, it is alleged, and he therefore never finds himself saying ‘I did not think this would happen’.112 In particular, the Formula sets up a strong antithesis between the prudent ability to discern the ‘nature’ and the ‘truth’ of the things as they really are from the vice of succumbing to false belief.113 The injunction to the man who wishes to be perfectly prudent is to ensure that his ‘opinions are judgements’.114 He should aim to provide ‘stable and certain thinking whenever he makes deliberations, or enquiries, or engages in contemplation’.115 This degree of fixity in making judgements is to be attained by avoiding certain situations which imperil his ability to make calculations about how to ‘live correctly according to reason’.116 111 112

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Griffin 1976: 156. Braga 1950: 239: ‘Si prudens esse cupis, in futura prospectum intende et quae possunt contingere, animo tuo cuncta propone. Nihil tibi subitum sit sed totum ante prospicies. Nam qui prudens est non dicit: ‘‘Non putavi hoc fieri,’’ quia non dubitat, sed exspectat, nec suspicatur sed cavet . . . Prudens fallere non vult, falli non potest.’ Braga 1950: 238: ‘per rationem recte vives, si omnia prius aestimes et perpenses et dignitatem rebus non ex opinione multorum sed ex earum natura constituas. Nam scire debes quia sunt quae non videantur bona esse et sunt, et sunt quae videantur et non sunt.’ Braga 1950: 239: ‘Opiniones tuae iudicia sint.’ Braga 1950: 239: ‘Sed cogitatio tua stabilis et certa sive deliberet sive quaeret sive contempletur non recedat a vero.’ Braga 1950: 238: ‘tunc per rationem recte vives’.

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The degree to which these alterations and additions to the conceptual content of the corpus of ethical and political texts attributed to Seneca registered upon Duecento literature to produce a specific version of Senecan philosophy – more compatible with Christianity and with an emphasis on prudentia – can be seen in the work of the Albertano of Brescia.117 Albertano was a causidicus and judge whose public career was interrupted upon his capture and imprisonment in Cremona by Frederick II’s forces in 1238. But he subsequently resumed an active role in communal life as a lawyer in Brescia.118 By the time of his death in the 1250s, Albertano had produced a body of literature which has generated the claim that he was responsible for the ‘transformation of the Senecan tradition’ of the twelfth century.119 According to this interpretation, Albertano drew upon his intimate knowledge of a surprisingly large range of the available Senecan texts in order to formulate a secular and distinctively Senecan ethic, posited on the idea of a correct rule – or ‘form of life’, as Albertano put it. He was thus responsible for transposing to a lay sphere a reading of Senecan philosophy in terms of self-formation, reformation and transformation which had long found favour in monastic circles.120 Even before the date of his first text, written while in prison and entitled the Liber de amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vita, Albertano had been ‘un lettore paziente e attento’ of the entire collection of Seneca’s Epistulae morales.121 Unsurprisingly, the letters are among the most frequently cited of all the Senecan texts throughout Albertano’s work; but even in the Liber de amore, he roams widely across other Senecan and pseudo-Senecan treatises and compilations, quoting frequently from De clementia, De beneficiis and De ira, as well as from De moribus and the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus, which, like most Renaissance readers up to the time of Erasmus, he attributes to Seneca.122 Albertano is remarkably 117

118 119

120 122

For Albertano of Brescia, see Powell 1992; Navone 1994; Spinelli 1996; Nuccio 1997. A crucial article on the context and content of his Senecan studies is Villa 1969; see also Witt 2000: 58–9. Powell 1992: 1–4. See the chapter entitled ‘Forma Vitae: The transformation of the Senecan tradition’ in Powell 1992: 37–55. Powell 1992: 37–55. 121 Villa 1969: 24–7. For the text of Liber de amore, I cite the unpublished but online edition of Sharon Hiltz at: http:// freespace.virgin.net/angus.graham/Albertano.htm (henceforth Brescia 1980). I have consulted her valuable footnotes for information on the use of the Senecan texts. For the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus, their attribution to Seneca and their dispersal through the Senecan apocrypha and proverbia, see Meerseman 1973: 51–8.

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partial to ‘the Formula of Seneca’, relying on it no less than twenty-one times to support his arguments in the Liber de amore, drawing upon its analysis of prudentia on thirteen separate occasions and upon its treatment of magnanimity twice. The point at which key elements of the political theory of De clementia and the moral theory of the Formula converge within Albertano’s work is when he focuses his attention upon a social phenomenon which preoccupied many politically articulate members of the city-states: the pursuit of vindicta, or vendetta.123 Alarm over the manifestations of discordia in the civitas and concomitant attempts to enforce a reliance upon public mechanisms for legal redress helped to bring the practice of seeking personal vengeance for injuries under close inspection. In Book 3, Chapter 15, of the Liber de amore, Albertano begins his discussion ‘On pursuing, omitting or tempering vengeance, and on the duties of the judge or whosoever with respect to the matter’ by reminding his reader that: ‘Vengeance pertains to God alone, or to the judge who has jurisdiction.’124 Albertano turns to Seneca’s Epistulae morales in order to assert that the application of ratio is essential for any judge, recalling the ‘wise’ precept that ‘‘‘if you want to conquer the whole world, subject yourself to reason’’’.125 Then a series of counsels rearticulate the Senecan case for clemency in conjunction with the ‘Senecan’ advice to pardon from the Formula.126 An agglomeration of ‘Senecan’ sententiae follows: Albertano exhorts his reader to ‘conquer yourself when you conquer others. For as the same Seneca says, ‘‘He who conquers himself enjoys a double conquest when victorious’’.’127 Finally, the theory of De clementia is cited in order to reinforce the message.128 Further illustration of his attitude towards vindicta is found in Albertano’s last work, the Liber consolationis et consilii of 1246, which provides an analysis of violence, vendetta and justice in the commune in the form of a dramatic dialogue between ‘a rich and powerful man’, 123 124

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For the Brescian context, see Powell 1992: 16–36. Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15 (where the chapter heading reads ‘De vindicta facienda vel obmittenda vel temperanda, et de officio iudicis vel cuiuslibet circa vindictam’): ‘Vindicta enim ad solum Deum pertinet, vel ad iudicem habentem iurisdictionem.’ Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Iudicando enim in eo iuditio septem principaliter sunt necessaria videlicet: scientia, jurisdictio, ratiocinatio, deliberatio, iustitia, timor Domini, et necessitas’; ‘Unde quidam sapiens dixit, ‘‘Si vis vincere totum mundum, subice te rationi’’ ’ (citing Epistulae morales, 37.4). Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Ut Seneca De Formula Honeste Vite dixit, ‘‘Melius est ignoscere, quam post victorie penitere’’’ (citing Braga 1950: 241). Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Et vincas te ipsum in victoria. Nam ut idem ait Seneca, ‘‘Bis vincit qui se in victoria vincit’’’ (citing Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, 77). Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Unde Seneca De Clementia Imperatoris dixit . . .’ (citing, in abbreviated form, De clementia, I.3.3; and, in corrupt form, De clementia, 1.19.3).

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Melibeus, and his aptly named wife, Prudentia. The husband is intent upon exacting revenge for an attack on his wife and daughter, while Prudentia provides him with both the consolation and the counsel to which the title refers.129 The work opens with Prudentia seeking to placate her distraught husband, a task which involves her, on seven separate occasions in the second chapter alone, reciting verbatim a range of Senecan advice from the Epistulae morales on the wise man’s proper attitude to lacrimae and tristitia.130 But Melibeus is not consoled. Scorning his wife’s advice to pursue justice through the public courts, Melibeus declares that: ‘I want to tempt my fortune and to cleave to fortune, pursuing vengeance myself, because fortune has favoured me up to now and will assist me in my vengeance, should God grant it.’131 Prudence gives him ‘many reasons’ for not doing any such thing, addressing him with a series of pseudo-Senecan sententiae and with what ‘Seneca said in his Letters’.132 He is warned, in the words of Letter 82, that to cleave to Fortuna is a disastrous policy, for ‘she seizes the person who cleaves to her’.133 Seneca’s advice to Lucilius in this letter is never to cling to Fortuna in spite of her apparent assaults and changeable charms, but to stick to virtue and to surround one’s self with the ‘impregnable wall of philosophy’.134 Prudence knows her Seneca: ‘So do not cleave to her, nor confide in her in any way: she is neither stable nor lasting.’135 On the contrary, she reminds her husband: ‘Be wise and conquer fortune through virtue, for Seneca says in his Letters, ‘‘the wise man conquers fortune through virtue’’.’136 Nor should Melibeus imagine that Fortuna could, in fact, help him, as Prudence then explains, bringing out the meaning of fortune 129 130 131

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Brescia 1873, Ch.1: 2: ‘vir potens et dives’. For the dialogue and its context, see Powell 1992: 74–89. See the notes accompanying Brescia 1873: 3–6. Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘fortunam volo temptare atque, vindictam per me faciendo, fortunae adhaerere; quia fortuna usque nunc me fovit et, dante Domino, ad vindictam me adjuvabit’. Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘Prudentia respondit: Meo consilio fortunam non temptabis nec, vindictam per te faciendo, illi adhaerebis; et hoc dico multis rationibus. Prima ratione, quia ‘‘male geritur, quidquid fortunae geritur fide’’, ut Seneca in Epistolis dixit’ (citing Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, 320). Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘Quinta ratione, quia fortuna non adjuvat, sed ‘‘occupat adhaerentem sibi’’ ’ (citing Epistulae morales, 82.4). Seneca 1917–25, 82.5, vol. II: 242: ‘Philosophia circumdanda est, inexpugnabilis murus, quem fortuna multis machinis lacessitum non transit. In insuperabili loco stat animus, qui externa deseruit, et arce se sua vindicat; infra illum omne telum cadit.’ Fortuna, Seneca reminds us here, does not have sufficiently ‘long hands’ to reach us. Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘Non igitur fortunae inhaeres, nec aliquo modo in illa confidas; non enim stabilis est vel perpetua.’ Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 90: ‘Esto itaque sapiens, et vince fortunam virtute; ait enim Seneca in Epistolis: ‘‘Sapiens vincit fortunam virtute’’’ (citing Epistulae morales, 71.30).

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in Senecan philosophy from the lengthy treatment of the subject in Letter 98 in order to assure him that ‘it is an error for people to say that fortune brings us both good and bad’.137 This line of thought is compounded by a reminder of Boethius’ point that ‘there is no such thing as Fortuna, except in popular opinion’, and by a reiteration of the correct belief that ‘the Lord is fortune’: it is God who can give and take away all things.138 Having been persuaded of the potentially calamitous social consequences of his desire for vengeance, Melibeus is gradually prevailed upon to accept that reconciliation and concord are the way forward: he should, in good Christian fashion, make the first step towards peace, and he should, in good Senecan fashion, remember that ‘we must forget injuries’.139 For the sake of peace, he is urged to the same act of Senecan self-conquest which Albertano had described in his earlier work, and by reference to the same sententia of Publilius Syrus.140 The culminating chapter is entitled ‘On mercy and piety and pity’.141 The parting counsels of Prudence are ‘to follow the sense of Seneca’, and she repeats the Senecan injunctions which Albertano had prescribed in his Liber de amore: to powerful forgiveness in accordance with the Formula; to the emulation of the king bee who lacks an angry sting; and to the imitation of the merciful king of the De clementia.142 Prudence wins the day; and Melibeus duly shows the requisite mercy and pity and piety towards his malefactors, after they have prostrated themselves at his feet, begged his forgiveness and declared

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Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 90: ‘Nec credas, fortunam te posse iuvare; nam, ut idem ait, ‘‘errant qui dicunt, fortunam nobis tribuere aliquid boni vel mali’’’ (citing Epistulae morales, 98.2). Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 90–1: ‘Et hoc intelligas de illa, quam homines simplices fortunam appellant; ait enim Boetius in libro secundo De Consolatione: Nihil enim est fortuna, nisi secundum opinionem vulgi . . . Si autem crederes, Dominum esse fortunam, recte putares, illum mala posse auferre et bona cuncta tribuere valere.’ Brescia 1873, Ch.48: 107: ‘Inquiras ergo pacem, et injuriae obliviscaris; ait enim Seneca in Epistolis: ‘‘Injuriae oblivisci debemus, beneficii vero meminisse’’ ’ (substituting beneficia for officia in the precept in Epistulae morales, 81.7). Brescia 1873, Ch.50: 122–3: ‘In hoc itaque negotio te taliter regas, ut in hac victoria per eos tibi concessa te vincas; et sic bis vincere poteris. Ait enim Seneca: ‘‘Bis vincit qui se in victoria vincit’’ ’ (citing Publilius Syrus, Sententia, 64). Brescia 1873, Ch.51: 123, where the title reads: ‘De Clementia et Pietate et Misericordia’. Brescia 1873, Ch.51: 123–4: ‘dico tibi, quia pietas et clementia non solum parvos vel mediocres ornant et sublimant, sed etiam magnos reges et principes decorant . . . Et Seneca, De clementia Imperatoris, dixit: ‘‘Nullum clementia magis decet quam regem’’; et iterum: ‘‘Iracundissimae et parvi corporis sunt apes, rex tamen earum sine aculeo est’’ . . . Quare consulo tibi, ut sensum Senecae sequaris, qui dixit: ‘‘Si forte inimicum tuum in potestate tua videris, vindictam putabis vindicare potuisse. Scito enim honestum et magnum vindictae genus, ignoscere’’’ (citing De clementia, I.3.3; I.19.2; Braga 1950: 241).

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themselves the unworthy ‘subjects’ of the person whom they call ‘your lordship’.143 SENECAN POLITICAL THEORY AND THE FORMATION O F T H E P O D E S T A`

A fuller rendition of the Senecan theory of monarchy was worked into an account of the duties and function of the civic podesta` or rector supplied by Giovanni da Viterbo in his Liber de regimine civitatum.144 Giovanni begins to justify a preference for Senecan moral theory in his section ‘On the definition of law and justice’, where he promises to be brief because these two concepts are amply defined under the same heading in the Digest and the Institutes.145 But he adds: ‘however, as regards justice, I am going to add a different approach, following Seneca’.146 This commitment helps explain why, when defining the qualities of the person of the rector, Giovanni is led to reiterate Senecan precepts throughout his book, and why, on several notable occasions, he transcribes very extensive passages of Senecan moral and political philosophy in his argument. When, for example, the author argues on the need to avoid anger, he repeatedly turns both to De clementia and De ira for guidance.147 All three books of De ira are scoured for relevant advice for a ruler in whom, for Giovanni as for Seneca, ratio must rule supreme: Reason gives time to either side, and then demands a further adjournment to give itself room to tease out the truth: anger is in a hurry. Reason wishes to pass a fair judgement: anger wishes the judgement which it has already passed to seem fair.148

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Brescia 1873, Ch.51: 125: ‘praedicti adversarii . . . flexisque genibus suis fusisque lacrimis ad pedes dicti domini ac dominae Prudentiae prostrati dixerunt: ‘‘Ecce venimus huc parati in omnibus et per omnia vestris obedire praeceptis. Verumtamen, licet indigni, vestram dominationem, quatenus, erga nos non exercentes vindictam, sed potius placabilitatem, clementiam et pietatem, nobis subditis vestris donare dignenimi indulgentiam.’’’ Viterbo 1901: 215–80. For discussions of Giovanni’s work, see Viroli 1992: 22–5; Skinner 2002, II: 19–26, 45–7, 50–1, 66. Viterbo 1901, Ch.10: 220 (‘De diffinitione iuris et iustitiae’): ‘Iuris vero et iustitiae non est necesse apponi, quoniam satis plene in Digestis et Institutionibus de iustitia e iure, de hiis est diffinitum licet de iustitia diverso modo secundum Senecam sim in hoc opusculo adnexurus’ (referring to the titles ‘De iustitia et iure’ at Digest I. 1 and Institutes I. 1). Viterbo 1901, Ch.10: 220: ‘licet de iustitia diverso modo secundum Senecam sim in hoc opusculo adnexurus’. Viterbo 1901, Ch.62: 238–9. Viterbo 1901, Ch.62: 239: ‘Ratio utrique parti tempus dat, deinde advocatione et sibi petit, ut excutiende veritatis spatium habeat: ira festinat. Ratio id iudicare vult quod equum est: ira id equum videri sibi vult quod iudicavit.’

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Giovanni also transcribes the ‘Senecan’ Formula, entirely copying out its treatment of the four virtues over the course of ten chapters, before closing with a ‘Senecan’ proverb on self-conquest: ‘You want to obtain honour? I will give you a great command: command yourself.’149 Two chapters in particular are devoted to transcribing the authentic Senecan princely theory. The first comes in the course of a discussion of the debate over whether a ruler should be loved rather than feared.150 Giovanni is fully aware that this is a topic to which both Cicero and Seneca had contributed; and he duly goes on to support the contention that it is better to be loved by first citing the relevant parts of De officiis and then turning to extract line after line of Senecan wisdom from De clementia. So he reports that ‘mercy is not the name I would give to exhausted cruelty’, and then repeats the idea of mercy as the great ‘ornament’ of the prince: ‘mercy enhances not only a ruler’s honour but his safety. The ornamentum of emperors, it is at the same time its surest light.’151 Giovanni comes to the seminal passage on the difference between a prince and a tyrant: ‘what difference is there between a king and a tyrant? – after all, their show of fortune and their licence is the same. It is simply that tyrants act savagely . . . kings do so only for a reason and out of necessity.’152 We are reminded of the Senecan definition of monarchy – that ‘it is mercy which causes there to be a great distinction between king and tyrant’, and that while both have armed guards at their disposal, ‘the one has them as a bulwark for peace, the other in order to repress great hatred with great fear’.153 Giovanni lays out the Senecan logic that a merciful ruler is ‘loved by the whole civitas, protected and courted’ and that ‘such a prince, protected by his own good deeds, has no need of guards. He wears his armour purely

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See Viterbo 1901: 252–5, where the text of the Formula closes on 255 with the dictum: ‘Vis honorem habere? Dabo tibi magnum imperium: impera tibi.’ See Viterbo 1901: Ch.124: 262. Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘Ego non voco clementiam lassam crudelitatem; clementia non tantum honestiores sed tuitiores prestat, ornamentum-(que) enim imperatorum est et certissima lux’ (citing De clementia, 1.11.2; and a version of 1.11.4, where the text reads: ‘Clementia ergo non tantum honestiores sed tutiores praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus’). The corruption of salus into lux in Giovanni’s text is notable; it is also comprehensible in view of a theory which insists on the enlightening effects of the clement prince. Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘Quid enim interest inter tirannum et regem? Species ipsa fortune ac licentia par est, nisi quod tiranni, in voluptatem seviunt, reges non nisi ex causa ac necessitate’ (citing De clementia, 1.11.4). Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘Clementia efficit, ut magnum inter regem et tirannum discrimen sit, uterque licet non minus armis valletur; sed alter arma habet, quibus in munimentum pacis utatur, alter ut magno timore magna odia compescat’ (citing De clementia, 1.12.3).

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for ornament.’154 And he refers us to the argument of Book 1, Chapter 14, in which Seneca had argued that being merciful is ‘how a parent, and also a prince should act. If we call him ‘‘Father of the Fatherland’’, it is not empty flattery that has led us to do so.’155 Giovanni finds further material for his own argument in Seneca’s justification of the title of Pater patriae for his prince: ‘we have called him ‘‘Father of the Fatherland’’ to remind him that he has been granted paternal power’ – for Seneca, the most moderate of powers.156 He continues to course through various parts of the Roman theory, underlining how a king ‘has one unassailable fortress: the love of his citizens’.157 Giovanni’s appropriation of the Senecan case for thinking about defence and security in terms of the prince’s virtuously ornamented person – the argument that the prince is armed by his virtue alone and that he consequently has no need of weapons – is linked to the other notable place in which his own advice consists in simply copying out whole passages of De clementia. In Chapter 136, Giovanni considers what a podesta` should do in the event of military activity.158 His concern for the welfare of the person of the podesta` leads him to the Senecan description of the relation of princely head to the body of the res publica, recalling that the monarch’s person ‘is the bond which holds the res publica together’; that ‘he is the breath of life’; and that those whom he rules ‘would be nothing but a burden, a prey, were that mind of the empire to be withdrawn’.159 De clementia’s definition of magnanimity as the preeminent virtue for those who sit in judgement is then recalled; but Giovanni also sets out in virtually unabridged form the Senecan analogy of the king bee, unarmed by nature, in order to claim that ‘it is not fitting that the podesta` of the civitas and the army should fight’ and to

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Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘a tota civitate amatur et colitur ac defenditur . . . hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nil presidiis eget, arma ornamenti causa habet’ (citing Seneca, De clementia, 1.13.4). Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Hoc quod parenti, et principi est faciendum, quem appellavimus patrem patriae non adulatione vana adducti’ (citing De clementia, 1.14.2). Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Patrem quidem patriae appellavimus, ut sciret sibi datam potestatem patriam’ (citing De clementia, 1.14.2). Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Salvum regem clementia in aperto prestabit; unum est inexpugnabile munimentum’ (citing De clementia, 1.19.6). See Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 273–4 (entitled ‘Quid faciendum sit potestati tempore extrahendi exercitum’). Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 274: ‘ipse est vinculum, per quod res publica civitatis coheret, ipse spiritus vitalis, [per] quem [haec] tot milia trahunt, nichil ipsa per se futura nisi honus et preda, si mens illa imperii subtrahatur’ (citing De clementia, I.4.1).

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adjoin this pacific sentiment to the idea that the ruler is a shepherd of his flock.160 Perhaps the most creative reprisal of the doctrines of De clementia is to be found in the third book of Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou tre´sor, where they are subjected to a strikingly satirical treatment. Latini shows little hostility to Senecan ethics per se – he repeatedly draws on a considerable number of Senecan texts in order to expand his teaching on the virtues and vices from Chapter 50 onwards in Book 2.161 But when he turns to discuss the qualities necessary for a podesta` in Book 3, his tone changes. The first point to note is that his attack occurs in a chapter entitled ‘The discord between those who want to be feared and those who want to be loved’, in which Latini picks out the words both of Cicero in De officiis and of Seneca in De clementia.162 But Latini prises the two authorities apart, creating a strong distinction between the handling of the topic in their respective theories. He does this by giving a travesty of Seneca’s argument at the start of his chapter: Among governors of cities there is often this difference, that some prefer to be feared rather than loved, and others prefer to be loved rather than feared. Those who prefer to be feared rather than loved wish to have the reputation of being harsh, and because they wish to have the reputation of being harsh, and because they wish to seem harsh and cruel, they impose harsh punishments and bitter torments, and through this they believe that they will be feared more and that the city will be more peaceful. They prove this through the sayings of Seneca, who says that infrequent punishment corrupts a city, and that an abundance of sinners brings about sinful habits, and that a person loses the desire for malice when he is harshly tormented, and that a lenient prince reinforces vice, and the mildness of the lord removes the shame of the evildoer, and the punishment which is established by the lord is more to be feared than the one established by a friend, and the more the punishments are public, the more they serve as examples . . . Against this, others say that it is better to be loved than feared, because love cannot exist without fear, but fear can easily exist without love. Cicero says that in the world there is no surer thing than to be loved, and no more terrible one than to be feared, for each one hates the one he fears . . . Long fear is a poor guardian; cruelty

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Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 274: ‘Item et alia ratione pugnare non decet civitatis et exercitum potestatem, quoniam percusso rectore possent oves dispergi’. It follows the exemplum of the bees from Seneca, De clementia, I, 19, 2–6, beginning ‘Natura enim comenta . . .’ (see Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 274). See Latini 1948: 224–314. For Pseudo-Seneca in Latini, see Bertolini 2004: 357–8. Latini 1948, III.96: 414–16, where the chapter heading at 414 reads: ‘De la discorde ki est entre ciaus ki voelent estre cremus et ame´’. For a discussion of this chapter (though not of its Senecan content), see Skinner 1978, I: 47–8; for Latini’s contribution to Renaissance classical republicanism, see especially Skinner 2002, II: 10–38; 39–92; for a consideration of Latini’s debt to Aristotle as well as to Cicero, see Viroli 1992: 26–30.

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is the enemy of nature . . . all punishment must be imposed without wrong, not by the lord, but for the common good.163

Put thus, the whole sense of the Senecan advice of De clementia is entirely reversed, making it discontinuous with the Ciceronian argument which the monarchical theory had sought to appropriate and reapply within a civitas now led by a princeps. What Latini appears to be attacking, by way of parody, is not exactly the theory (although it is arguable that his hostility does extend to the theory itself), but an ideology in which the Senecan theory of monarchy is becoming implicated as a justification for the behaviour of persons who are ‘harsh and cruel’ and who come to preside in a partial manner over the judicial system of the civitas in a way which Latini contrasts with ‘le bien dou commun’. Latini develops his satire of the Senecan ideology with considerable dexterity. He is translating Seneca’s rhetorical question in De clementia when he asks, ‘what difference is there between a king and a tyrant? They are similar in good fortune and in power, but the tyrant performs works of cruelty gladly, a king only by necessity. The one is loved, the other is feared’; and he is similarly following the Roman theory’s prescriptions when laying it down that the tyrant is ‘considered to be a bad father who always strikes and hits his child harshly’, thus revealing himself to be the opposite of the kindly paternal figure whom Seneca had described as the model for the good prince.164 But by accurately recalling these distinctions between Senecan prince and bestial tyrant, Latini is helping to confound the contemporary version of the Senecan argument, for he has begun his analysis by reporting how the 163

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Latini 1948, III.96: 414–15 (citing translation in Latini 1993: 373): ‘entre les governeours des viles siut avoir une tele difference, que li un aiment miex estre cremus ke ame´s, et li autre desirent plus a estre ame´s ke cremus. Et cil ki ayment mieus a estre cremus que ame´s desirent a avoir renomee de grant fierte´; et, por c¸ou k’il welent sambler fiers et crueus, metent tres fieres paines et aspres tormens, et de ce quident que l’en les redoute plus et que la vile en soit mieus apaisie. Et ce pruevent il par les dis Seneque, ki dist k’escharsete´ de poine corront les cite´s, et ke l’abondance des pecheours amainent les usages de pecchier, et ke cil pert le hardement de sa malice ki est fierement tormente´s, et que li prince soufrant conferme les visces, et la douc¸our dou signor oste la vergoigne dou maufetour, et plus est redoutee la paine ki est establie de par son signor ke de par son ami, et de tant comme li torment sont plus apert proufitent il plus par example . . . Contre ce dist li autres ke mieus vaut a estre ame´s que cremus, por c¸ou c’amours ne puet estre sans cremour, mais cremours si puet bien estre sans amour: Tuilles dit que au monde n’a plus seure chose a deffendre ses choses ke d’iestre ame´s, ne nule plus espoentable ke d’iestre cremus; car chascuns het celui k’il crient . . . Longue paour est male garde, cruaute´ est enemie de nature. Il covient que chacuns crieme celui ou ciaus de que il wet estre cremus, et force ki est par paour n’aura ja longue duree, et toute paine doit estre mise sans tort, non mie par le signor, mais por le bien dou commun.’ Latini 1948, III.96: 415 (Latini 1993: 374): ‘Quele difference a il entre roi et tirant? Il sont pareil de fortune et de pooir, mais li tirans fet oevres de crualte´ par son gre´, ce ne fet pas li rois sans necessite´: li uns est ame´s et li autres est cremus. Et cil est tenus a mauvais peres ki tozjors bat et fiert son enfant asprement.’

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words of Seneca have become a counsel to the prince to instil fear through severe punishment and so to behave – as Latini intimates – tyrannically. Latini then gives the following summary of what he calls ‘ceste querele’ about the governor, and loving and fearing: By these words, you can clearly understand this debate, for clemency which is opposed to cruelty is a restraint to the heart over the punishment it can establish. Cicero says that the most beautiful thing in a lordship is clemency and pity. To this is added justice, without which the city cannot be governed. Seneca says: when I am occupied with watching over the city, I find so many vices among so many people that to cure the evils of each person it is necessary that some be healed by anger and others by exile and by pilgrimages, and others by sorrow, and others by poverty and others by the sword.165

Latini’s recollection of the Senecan point of view refers the reader to the theory of punishment which Seneca had prescribed for the wise magistrate in De ira and which Latini is here partially translating.166 In the Senecan text, the rational vir sapiens in government is indeed commended for using, in medicinal fashion, the penalties which Latini cites; but only in cases of incurable recidivism where Seneca sees it as hopeless to seek to expunge inveterate vice. It is certainly possible that Latini is seeking to clarify a properly Senecan perspective and so reveal its distortion by contemporaries; but the manner in which the moralist’s advice is excerpted and juxtaposed within Latini’s argument seems to damn the classical arguments by association with their more recent restatement. Rather than wielding his medicinal powers in order to eliminate divisions, and resorting to harsh remedies only when reason prescribes them as necessary, the Senecan arbiter of Latini’s text appears to resort all too quickly to practices which embody the great vices of anger and cruelty, and which result in suffering and exile. Cicero, meanwhile, emerges as the purveyor of the preferable arguments about clemency and pity, a move which involves Latini in a redistribution of emphasis, to say the least. Latini’s attack on these Senecan arguments and their proponents among contemporary governors of cities points to an ideological conflict accompanying the political turbulence within the northern communes, several of 165

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Latini 1948, III.96: 415 (Latini 1993: 374, modified): ‘Par ceste parole puet on bien entendre ceste querele; car clemence ki est contre cruaute´ est uns atempremens de corage sor la paine ki li puet establir. Tuilles dist que la plus bele chose ki est en signorie si est clemence et pitie´s, s’ele est jointe avec droit, sans coi la cite´ ne puet pas estre governee. Seneques dist, quand je suis a curer la cite´, je i truis tant de visces entre tant de gens, ke pour garir les maus de chascun il couvient que li uns soit sane´s par ire et li autres par essil et par pelerinage, et li autres par dolour et li autres par poverte´ et li autres par fier.’ See De ira, I.16.4.

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which were already beginning to be subjected to the rule of permanent signori by the time of Li livres dou tre´sor. Latini was an articulate defender of the liberties of the communes, and his polemic may have been directed squarely at a way of thinking which was threatening to bring about their destruction with the assistance of a theory which Latini knew well. He may also perhaps be obliquely passing comment on the recent politics of another object of his considerable sarcasm in Li livres dou tre´sor: Frederick II.167 Pages of Book I are given over to a condemnation of the politics of Frederick and of his erstwhile successors over the previous three decades.168 The extent to which these later Hohenstaufen interventions in the northern city-states were accompanied by the same type of Senecan claims which had been used to underpin Frederick II’s princely authority remains to be seen.169 But Latini’s attack on the Senecan ideology may be aimed at making evident a monarchical threat to the self-governing commune which had far from passed, and which was now beginning to assert itself aggressively within the civitas itself. THE SIGNORIAL IDEOLOGY

In order to furnish a full explanation of how these arguments of the Roman theory of monarchy come to inform the ideology of the signori, it is worth recapitulating some of its characteristics. De clementia described the institution of a prince at the head of a formerly self-governing res publica as a just, rational, necessary and providentially determined act. It explained how the princeps had solved the problems faced by a civitas caught in endemic civil conflict. It depicted a person whose claim to wield the powers of the prince derived from his demonstrable possession of certain distinctive qualities which promised to ensure the civitas peace, tranquillity, security and happiness after the divisions of the past. It argued that the prince was legitimate whatever the manner of his accession and whatever his legal status. And it underlined the need for a rational head for a body which had become liable to the irrational and destructive effects of avaritia and the causa lucri. The terms of this analysis were eminently adaptable to an explanation of monarchy as the necessary consequence of a mercantile society too dominated by libidinous affects to conduct its own government. And since it promised the benefit of securing libertas for the res 167 169

See Latini 1948, I.95: 75. 168 See Latini 1948, I.95–8: 75–81. For the particular importance of clemency and magnanimity in the representation of the Hohenstaufen by Nicolai de Jamsilla, see Tateo 1990: 33.

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publica, the Roman theory of the prince offered the signori a way of vaunting themselves as protectors rather than as destroyers of cherished political values. Indeed, the signorial ideology begins very quickly to advance claims not only about its unique ability to guarantee true pax and tranquillitas for the civitas under the rule of a princely head, but also about its success in guaranteeing true libertas for the res publica. The emerging signorial regimes insist that ‘liberty was now union under a ruler; tyranny disunion under a commune’, as Jones observes. They had a thoroughly respectable classical argument with which to sustain their point of view – an argument whose doctrines had already been widely reiterated in a literature ostensibly aimed at the moral formation of both citizen and political governor.170 Finally, the Senecan theory of monarchy offered a moral definition of the prince which enabled them to rebut the damaging accusation that they were tyranni. By identifying themselves with the characteristics of the person described in De clementia – the magnanimous and clement prince, the divinely rational and supremely just vir sapiens, the loving and benevolent Pater patriae – they aligned themselves with a way of thinking which held that virtue alone defined a princely person. If the signori had been content merely to vindicate a claim to be vicarious representatives of either the pope or the emperor, they would have been obliged to display the suitable moral characteristics of the person in whose ‘place’ such a claim positioned them in their rule over the civitas. And that monarchical personality was well defined within both papal and imperial ideology by a moral and constitutional language which posited a merciful and mild prince acting as a divine trustee. But the structure of the new monarchies was not merely a local, internalised form of an established, external order of political obligation. On the contrary, it is important not to overlook the revolutionary aspect of signorial ideology, which increasingly discarded the notion that the new monarchs were simply wielding, in a vicarious capacity on behalf of either the pope or the emperor, the powers usually reserved to the princeps, and alleged instead the much more radical idea that they were exercising these powers on account of their own demonstrable possession of the requisite princely virtue. Signorial domination of civic political life entailed the recharacterisation of the existing administrative, bureaucratic and political structures in order to make them responsive to the directive will of the person at the head of government. The new regimes accordingly presided over alterations to the 170

Jones 1997: 644.

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constitutional definitions of political arrangements within various citystates. The general council of the city of Mantua decreed in 1299, in favour of its Bonacolsi signore, that ‘we order and decree that the distinguished Lord Guido should and ought to be captain general of the city of Mantua . . . and should rule and govern the city and district and commune with his undiluted, pure and free will, as shall best and most usefully seem agreeable to him, with council or without council, and he shall have undiluted and pure power and jurisdiction, decision, lordship, and free determination over the commune . . . and men of the city and district’.171 Similarly, in Verona, the della Scala received a mandate for Alberto in 1277 which entrusted him with ‘full, general and liberal authority and power of ruling and governing over all in all things’.172 The document conferring signoria on Obizzo d’Este in Ferrara in 1264 was especially punctilious.173 In 1267, one hostile contemporary chronicler described the transfer of power to Obizzo II in Ferrara as conferring ‘the fullest dominion’ on a boy of seventeen in such a way ‘that he may do everything, just or unjust, by the power of his will. The new ruler’, he laments, ‘has more power than God eternal, who is not able to do unjust things.’174 These instances of constitutional redefinition required some juridical clarification if the signori were to validate their de facto exercise of imperium within the civitas against the charge that they had been involved in nothing other than the usurpation of imperial sovereignty within the terrae imperii.175 That such theoretical challenges were both met and resolved within the post-glossatorial tradition of jurists in the Trecento is well established.176 But to remain fixated upon the juridical basis of the new monarchies is to remain enthralled to a way of thinking about legitimacy which threatens to overlook the essential point which the literature acclaiming the new monarchs was insistently making. The new ideology, like its imperial ancestor, was pivoted on the possession of virtus alone. Certain key virtues become noticeable in the praise awarded to the new rulers. Azzo VIII d’Este was hailed as ‘a liberal man innocent of tyranny’; while Obizzo d’Este was described by one chronicler as ‘a most worthy and magnanimous lord’, who was loved by all of his people.177 In Milan, the founder of the Visconti dynasty, Ottone Visconti, was memorialised on his tombstone as the ‘intrepid shepherd’ of the Milanese and as an almost 171 172

173 175

Cited from Larner 1980: 143. Jones 1997: 622, where he cites from the text of the grant the phrase ‘plenam, generalem et liberam auctoritatem et potestatem in omnibus et per omnia regendi, gubernandi’. For the text, see Larner 1980: 169. 174 Cited from Larner 1980: 138. Canning 1987: 119. 176 See Canning 1987: 221–7. 177 Jones 1997: 632.

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Herculean type of ruler undaunted by the hardest of trials.178 This invincible quality in the face of difficulty was matched with a propensity to forgiveness: he was ‘a bestower of pardon’, a ‘pious prince’, the ‘father of his country’, ‘a repository of wisdom’ and a ‘beloved leader’ through whose rule the ‘highest splendour of the virtues’ had illuminated Milan and ‘quiet’ had been established.179 The tombstone was part of a concerted effort undertaken by Matteo Visconti in the early Trecento to celebrate the Visconti Pater patriae, a project which included the commission of a fresco cycle in the hall of the Rocca of Anjera illustrating the Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani, an epic poem written by the Dominican intimate of the Visconti, Stefanardo da Vimercate.180 It depicts the triumph in 1277 of Ottone Visconti over rival forces in his fight to install himself as the city’s archbishop, and the narrative scheme has been described by Evelyn Welch: ‘the surviving paintings tell primarily of the archbishop’s clemency and magnanimity. He is shown forgiving his enemies, instructing his soldiers to spare the city and entering Milan as an episcopal leader.’181 This programmatic elaboration of the image of Visconti developed an ideological trajectory which is already evident in the account of the establishment of Visconti rule provided by Stefanardo da Vimercate in his Liber.182 The genre of the Liber is telling. A Latin epic fittingly composed in ‘heroic’ hexameters, as the poet explains at the outset, it is indebted to Virgil, Lucan and Statius.183 The use of Roman imperial epic to tell the story of the foundation of a new principate is observable in the De Scaligerorum origine, another contribution to the genre which was written by the Paduan humanist and notary Ferreto de’ Ferreti shortly after Cangrande della Scala had become signore in his city in 1328.184 The

178

179 182

183

184

Forcella 1889–93, I: 4, where the text is recorded as: ‘INCLYTUS ILLE PATER PATRIAE LUX GL’A PATRUM. FULGOR IUSTICIE. FIDEI BASIS. ARCHA SOPHYE. LARGITOR VENIE. PORTUS PIETATIS EGENIS. INTREPIDUS PASTOR. QUEM MOLLES NULLA LABOR. ARDUA DEVICIT. POPULA LATURA QUIETEM. ILLE PIUS PRINCEPS. PRESUL AMABIL IN QUEM. ALTUS VIRTUTUM. SPLENDOR VENERAT OMNIS. QUO MEDIOLANUM RADIABAS LAMPADE TANTA. TOTAQUE FULGEBAT’. See Welch 1995: 15. See note above. 180 Welch 1995: 15. 181 Welch 1995: 12. Vimercate 1910–12. For the fullest treatment of his life and works, see Cremaschi 1950; recent discussion is in Witt 2000: 69–71, 75–8. Vimercate 1910–12: 7: ‘Heroycis cedant elegi . . .’ Calligaris’ footnotes pick out the allusions and debts to the Roman epic writers throughout the poem. Ferreto de’ Ferreti 1908–20, III: 3–100. For recent comments, see Witt 2000: 163–5; 168–9. For Skinner’s (long-standing) observation of the epic as part of a new monarchical story accompanying the signori, see Skinner 2002, II: 120.

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fact that the della Scala were now the masters of Verona, Vicenza and Padua – the three northern Italian centres in which it is conventional to look for the beginnings of pre-Petrarchan humanism – is embellished a little by Ferreto. Having begun with the intention of singing the praises of the ‘magnanimous Cangrande’, he closes his poem with a celebration of the fact that ‘the whole earth’ has now been ‘subjected’ to various members of the family, ‘new princes’ of a world which obeys and indeed ‘rejoices in being in their power and possession’.185 In Milan, the daunting task which is said to have faced Ottone Visconti in the epic of da Vimercate is no less powerfully accomplished. A much-celebrated and fecund felix urbs, the home of heroes and once the closest observer of the law, Milan is now a place of ‘civil strife’, which is ‘savaged’ by a ‘voracious envy’.186 Its inhabitants pursue their ‘private’ affairs while the ‘neglected res publica perishes’; laws are disregarded as criminal acts; murder and theft hold sway.187 The author describes this disruption as the domination of iusticium infelix, a dreadful cessation in the public administration of justice through the law-courts.188 The vices of ambitio and avaritia ‘shake the foundations’ of the res publica, and an ‘atrocious and unrestrained anger’ have taken the

185

Ferreto de’ Ferreti 1908–20, III: 3: ‘Nunc michi, dum primos in carmine molior ausus Magnanimum refer, alma, Canem . . .’ (for Virgil’s similarly early introduction of ‘magnanimus Aeneas’, see Aeneid, I.260); 100: ‘Omnis enim tellus patruo subiecta sibique Paret, et ipsorum gaudet ditione potiri; Equalique fide se supposuere novellis Principibus . . .’

186

Vimercate 1910–12: 8: ‘Erroribus pollet, populi fecunda potentis, Urbs nota et felix, longoque celebris ab evo, Imperii condam sedes ac emula iuris’; 9–10: ‘sed ea civilia iurgia; sevit Nuper livor edax . . .’

187

Vimercate 1910–12: 10: ‘tractant privata coloni, Et neglecta perit res publica: iura tribuni Esse putant facinus . . . . . . cedes viget atque rapina.’

188

Vimercate 1910–12: 10: ‘Iusticium infelix urbis dominatur in aula.’

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place of moderation.189 It is a situation in which ‘will reigns lawlessly’, ‘reason surrenders’ and ‘madness is princeps’.190 There is thus a monarchical principle at work at the start of the poet’s vision. And what slowly comes into view as the epic progresses is Visconti as a person who embodies law, reason and justice and who comes as a ‘magnanimous father’ to cure the disordered civitas of its madness and its sadness, staunching the blood and tears, bringing back not only joy but also liberty to a res publica so that it can resume its proper business under his direction.191 In installing himself at the head of government, Visconti rids the city of the princeps of unreason by embodying its opposite. Thus da Vimercate can happily end his story of a long-oppressed city, hailing how it has been ‘restored by the divine vigour of virtue and healed by the strong medicaments of its father’.192 His concluding message about the changing fortunes of the city underlines the theme running through the entire poem. In view of the turns of Fortune’s wheel, the most important thing in the world is the one thing that never changes: ‘virtue alone endures, glittering brighter than pure gold’.193 189

Vimercate 1910–12: 10–11: ‘Diripit ambitio immeritos temeraria fasces. Gurges avaritie nullo saciabilis haustu Fundamenta quatit . . .’

190

Vimercate 1910–12: 10–11: ‘exlex regnatque voluntas. Soccombit ratio . . . . . . suus est dementia princeps.’

191

192

For the wounds, see Vimercate 1910–12: 16–17; for the resumption of the res publica and its regained gaudium and libertas, see 92. Vimercate 1910–12: 92–3: ‘Sic Urbs, prolixi langoris pressa dolore, Crimine purgato, dive relevata vigore Virtutis, fortique sui medicamine Patris, Tendit ad antique cursum sanata tenoris.’

193

Vimercate 1910–12: 93: ‘Quam dubio, fortuna, gradu mortalia ludis! Heu quam precipites humana rotatur in orbes Conditio! Nunc summa petit, nunc mergitur imis. Vana quidem pereunt, transitque volatilis etas, Rebus et innitens robur ruit omne caducis. Sola manet virtus, puro rutilantior auro.’

PART III

The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

CHAPTER

3

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae

The effect of Petrarch upon the group of lawyers, government officials, teachers and writers in and around Naples which emerged in the 1340s to constitute the first recognisably humanist community in the history of the Kingdom has been captured in a metaphor of conquest by Giuseppe Billanovich.1 There is little room to doubt the galvanising character of Petrarch’s engagement in the intellectual milieu of Angevin Naples. His two visits to the capital in 1341 and 1343, his relationship with King Robert and his correspondence over two decades with various members of the loose coalition of scholars and readers with whom he sustained friendships helped to secure the commitment of certain personnel associated with royal government to the studia humanitatis.2 The Petrarchan allegiances of the first generation of Neapolitan humanists clearly show their conversion to a ‘nuovo stile di cultura’.3 Much of the extant Neapolitan correspondence is located within Petrarch’s Epistolae Familiares, collected and edited into a definitive redaction by Petrarch himself in 1366.4 The Neapolitan letters include Petrarch’s writings on monarchy. They mark the inception of the long history of European royal humanism. But some of the groundwork for a ready reception of his account of the virtuous prince and the status of those whom he ruled had already been prepared. PETRARCH AND SENECA

Petrarch’s Senecanism needs little introduction. The formative effect of Senecan moral theory upon his writing is summarised in Ugo Dotti’s 1

2 3

Billanovich 1996a: 459: ‘Il Petrarca convert´ı gli intellettuali con una conquista cos´ı rapida e cos´ı brillante . . .’ For Trecento Neapolitan humanism, see Altamura 1952. For the Neapolitan humanists in government and their relations with Petrarch, see Faraglia 1889; Wilkins 1955a; Walter 1964; Campana 1964; Billanovich 1996a. See also the survey of personnel and historiography in Kelly 2003: 41–9, 62–3. Wilkins 1955a: 213–21; Wilkins 1955b; Billanovich 1996a; Kelly 2003: 45–7. Billanovich 1996a: 459. 4 Mann 1984: 24.

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observation that ‘si potrebbe tranquillamente affermare che Seneca rappresenta per il Petrarca l’auctor maximus, il filosofo per eccellenza, certo il sostegno di tutta la sua dottrina morale’.5 Petrarch’s use of the Epistulae morales in his writing shows him to be ‘a careful and sensitive reader of Seneca’ and during the early 1350s, as he worked on the edition of his own Epistolae, Nicholas Mann explains how ‘Petrarch came to favour a twentybook model based on Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius’ before finally opting for twenty-four.6 Even a cursory glance at his text reveals the extent to which the Senecan epistles constituted a voice and a substantial source of wisdom for Petrarch. Consoling, advising, instructing and exhorting his readers with repeated injunctions to withstand the blows of fortune by cleaving to virtue and by overcoming libidinous attachments to worldly goods, Petrarch’s persona in his correspondence and in his consolatio literature is deeply impressed with the teachings of the Stoic. Berthold Ullman highlighted that Petrarch’s list of ‘specially prized books’ itemised in particular detail the manuscripts of Seneca and Cicero, and that pride of place within Petrarch’s ordering of the Senecan corpus was given to the Epistulae morales.7 The correspondence was thus ranked even higher than De clementia – listed second by Petrarch – which led Ullman to conclude that the Epistulae morales ‘play the most important part in Petrarch’s philosophical development’.8 The extent of Petrarch’s debt to Senecan literary and rhetorical theory, meanwhile, has been recently demonstrated by Ann Moss.9 These allegiances find ample expression in the correspondence which Petrarch penned to Tommaso da Messina, a Sicilian civilian whom he had known in Bologna.10 It is to Tommaso that Petrarch addresses his well-known discourse on rhetorical invention in which he urges that one should follow Seneca’s ‘loftiest advice about invention . . . to imitate the bees’, who ‘produce wax and honey from the flowers they leave behind’.11 Petrarch 5

For Dotti’s comments, see his introduction to Petrarca 1978: 11. Mann 1984: 24. 7 Ullman 1955: 118, 124. For Petrarch’s classical authorities, see Nolhac 1907 and Billanovich 1947. For a useful guide to the possession of mss. containing De clementia (together with De beneficiis) by major Italian humanist figures from Petrarch onwards, see Appendix I of Mazzoli 1982: 211–13. 8 9 Ullman 1955: 124. Moss 1996: 51–3. 10 The Latin text of Rerum familiarum libri is cited from Petrarca 1933–42. An English translation (which I use as the basis for my own) is in Petrarca 1975–85. For the three letters to Tommaso discussed here, see Petrarca 1933–42, I: 14–21, 39–48. For Tommaso da Messina, see Bernardo’s comments in Petrarca 1975–85, I: 15, n.1. 11 Petrarca 1933–42, vol. I: 39 (Fam. I.8): ‘denique, in omnem eventum, illum habeas velim consilii huius auctorem [sc. Senecam]. Cuius summa est: apes in inventionibus imitandas, que flores, non quales acceperint, referunt, sed ceras ac mella mirifica quadam permixtione conficiunt.’ Seneca’s discussion is at Epistulae morales, 84, 3–4. 6

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affirms that we need to ‘produce in our own words thoughts borrowed from others’, to ‘write neither in the style of one or another writer, but in a style uniquely ours, although gathered from a variety of sources’.12 Seneca’s teaching on imitation and invention in Letter 84 of Epistulae morales – on how to read writers and come away with ‘the choicest flowers’ – was later developed by the greatest exponent of Senecan moral philosophy of the early Renaissance, Gasparino Barzizza.13 Seneca’s authority as a moral and political praeceptor was accompanied by close attention to his rhetorical teaching well into the High Renaissance, where Erasmus ‘brackets Seneca and Jerome together, as the two great masters of eloquence – pagan and Christian’.14 SENECAN POLITICAL THEORY AND THE VIRTUES OF THE REX

In Petrarch’s letters on princely rule, the doctrines of Seneca’s De clementia are reiterated in a rhetorical style characterised by a subtle form of imitatio. Petrarch’s correspondence with Tommaso da Messina was either composed or at least amended in the 1350s as Petrarch was compiling his edition of Epistolae Familiares, then backdated by the humanist. Its position at the head of the collection is a means of introducing the reader to a body of moral and rhetorical doctrines which Petrarch follows in the subsequent letters.15 In Petrarch’s letter to Dionigi da San Sepolcro, an Augustinian whom he had first met in Avignon, the imitative mode is used to rehearse the precepts of Seneca himself.16 During Petrarch’s first visit to Naples in 1341, the poet had famously submitted himself to the ‘high and profound judgement’ of the Angevin monarch Robert, who had examined and approved his worthiness to be crowned Poet Laureate in Rome.17 The poet’s reception in the city had been prepared in advance by Dionigi, who had been installed as professor of theology at the University of Naples in 1338–9, and who appears to have become a close confidant of Robert.18 Petrarch’s letter congratulates Dionigi for his admission to an intimate 12

13 15

16 18

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 40: ‘elegantioris esse solertie, ut, apium imitatores, nostris verbis quamvis aliorum hominum sententias proferamus. Rursus nec huius stilum aut illius, sed unum nostrum conflatum ex pluribus habeamus.’ Pigman 1982; Moss 1996: 52–3. 14 Jardine 1994: 30. Wilkins 1955c: 166; for the editorial work, see Billanovich 1947: 3–55; for Petrarch’s strategic ordering of the letters and the topic of imitatio, see Mann 1984: 25. See Fam. IV.2 (Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161–7). 17 Petrarca 1955: 313. Billanovich 1996a: 459; Kelly 2003: 39–40, 51, 60, 65.

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position of familiaritas with Europe’s most outstanding monarch.19 Before arriving at his discussion of the king, Petrarch charts the moral progress which Dionigi had made from the cradle to the royal court according to a distinctly Senecan topography. He starts by ridiculing Dionigi’s mother, whose vain and irrational hopes for her son merely pertained to the ‘one law that applies for all feeble little women: they wish for absurd trifles, they dread the ridiculous’.20 Dionigi’s mother had been culpable of desiring for her child ‘a lengthy life, protected against innumerable dangers and calamities; riches – that extraordinary snare of human minds and fatal burden of liberty; and beauty of the human body, so often a cause of deformity of soul’.21 Dionigi’s father is mocked more gently. Petrarch accepts the possibility that ‘his hopes were more elevated’, perhaps wishing for his son ‘what the great satirist says: ‘‘the fame and eloquence of a Demosthenes or a Cicero’’’.22 But Petrarch points out that ‘the death of both’ of these classical orators ‘bears testimony’ to the manner in which desire for worldly fame propels us towards a perilous existence in public life.23 This is clearly not a rejection of the duties of public life per se, nor a rejection of the value of fama. It is a warning to be wary of the motivation for engagement within public life. Petrarch is looking for a degree of clear-sightedness about moral endeavour which vain hopes jeopardise. For Petrarch, fama is guaranteed by never deviating from true virtus. Moral excellence, he concedes, may not encounter anything but hostility from members of one’s particular, mundane civitas. But he insists that such local opinion is not the measure of true fama. In his correspondence with Tommaso, he had asked in rhetorical fashion: ‘How many rivals did Augustine, Jerome or Gregory have until such time as their respected virtue and their divine and astonishing abundance of writings overcame envy? Hardly any one of these enjoyed any public fame until the day of his

19

20 21

22

23

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘nichil eque adiuvat ac nobilium ingeniorum familiaritas et clarorum virorum conversatio’. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘muliercularum omnium una lex est: inepta cupiunt, ridenda formidant’. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘Optavit aliquando tibi genetrix longitudinem dierum, innumerabilibus periculis et calamitatibus obiectam; aliquando divitias, humanarum mentium non mediocrem laqueum ac funestam sarcinam libertatis; aliquando formam corporis, deformitatis anime plerunque materiam.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘De patre libet altiora credere; optaverit ergo filio quod ait Satyricus, Eloquium et famam Demosthenis aut Ciceronis’ (citing Juvenal, Satires, X, 114). Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘que quanti sepe periculi plena sint, utriusque exitus est testis’.

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death.’24 The Petrarchan injunction is always ‘to cultivate virtue while you are alive and you will find fame after your death’.25 Virgil ‘had disdained in a manly fashion the words of his detractors’, relying instead upon ‘the faith and judgement that Augustus had for his talent’.26 Petrarch’s own fama, so roundly honoured in this world by Dionigi’s royal master, was valid because it was the verdict of the new Augustus. When Petrarch demands to know ‘where will you find an Augustus as a judge, who we know protected the talents of his day most strenuously and in every possible way . . . where do we look for a judge like Augustus?’, he answers himself: ‘Italy does have one, indeed the entire world has only one, Robert, the king of Sicily.’27 The great fortuna of Naples, beloved city of Virgil, had been restored by Robert: ‘O Fortunate Naples, you have been allotted the incomparable happiness of having the only ornament of our age.’28 Naples is felix, for under ‘the foremost judge of talent and learning’, it has become the ‘most venerable home of letters’.29 Under Robert’s rule, its sors and fortuna are declared to be ‘happy’. In Petrarch’s disparagement of worldly fame in favour of an immortal reputation guaranteed by the recognition of a few virtuous men – true arbiters undeflected by the ebb and flow of vulgar evaluation – his argument is that those who think otherwise about fama become hostages to fortuna. He draws out a contrast between two types of fama – one as true and as lasting as the constant judge who pronounces it, the other as fleeting and as false as the common crowd which misapplies the term – by resorting to the antinomy of fortuna and virtus which was central to Senecan moral theory. In so doing, he gives his views in a language which shows Seneca to be not only the principal classical authority informing his precepts, but the source of many of his metaphors too: Let Fortuna dispose of the destiny of your talent and of your name as it does with all other things. Did you think that her power extended only over the wealthy? 24

25 26

27

28

29

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 17 (Fam I.2): ‘Quantos olim emulos Augustinus noster, quantos Ieronimus, quantos habuit Gregorius, donec spectata virtus et literarum divina et admirabilis ubertas invidiam vicere! Vix horum quisquam integrum fame preconium, nisi ab ipso die mortis, accepit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 21: ‘virtutem cole dum vivis, famam invenies in sepulcro’. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘Quid Virgilio maius habuit lingua latina . . . ipse autem et ingenii fiducia et iudice fretus Augusto, alto animo invidorum verba despexit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘ubi Augustum iudicem invenies, quem enixe admodum atque omnibus modis ingeniis sui temporis favisse compertum est? . . . ubi enim, ut dixi, Augustum iudicem queremus? Unum habet Italia, imo vero terrarum orbis; unum habet, Robertum siculum regem.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘Fortunata Neapolis, que unicum seculi nostri decus incomparabili felicitate sortita es; fortunata, inquam’. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘Neapolis, literarum domus augustissima’; I: 16: ‘ubi ingeniorum ac studiorum equissimus extimator habitat!’

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She is the mistress of all human affairs except virtue, and often she even attacks virtue but never does she succeed in overcoming it. Fame, than which there is nothing less stable, she easily overthrows and causes to revolve with shifting favours, transferring it from those who are worthy to those who are not. For this reason nothing is more inconstant and unjust than the judgement of the people on whom fame rests. That such judgement is constantly shaky is not surprising, since it is supported on such weak foundations. Thus, Fortuna reigns only over the living; death frees man from her command. As a consequence, such nonsense ceases and, whether Fortuna likes it or not, fame follows virtue like a shadow follows a solid body.30

The injunction to Senecan constancy underpins Petrarch’s description of Dionigi’s liberating journey from the slavery of vain desires for his welfare towards the good which Petrarch, Robert and God were holding out for him. Petrarch reminds him that while ‘the good that I wish for you as much as for me is the blessed life which many long for but few attain’, it involves a perilous voyage towards a better, saner place.31 The ‘way is a health-giving one which is both difficult and narrow, with alluring detours lying all around’.32 The analogy which Petrarch then applies to the task of ethical formation is the Stoic one which Seneca had used in his letters: As in archery, so in every single sort of human activity, to miss the mark and go astray is extremely easy. To hit the target, this is the end of the artist; and this is why it is more difficult, because there is only one way to it, but countless ways to error. Indeed, what I call the ‘blessed life’ (although it may have seemed otherwise to extremely learned and clever men) human labor might hope for and even merit in some way, yet in this prison house of a body it cannot embrace and hold on to it.33

30

31

32

33

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 19–20: ‘Patere, ut ceterarum rerum, sic ingenii tui sortem nominisque fortunam. Putabas eam in solis divitiis ius habere? Humanarum rerum omnium, excepta virtute, domina est; illam quoque sepe oppugnare, sed numquam expugnare, permittitur. Famam certe, qua nichil est levius, facile rotat ac ventosis suffragiis circumvolit, a dignis eam transferens ad indignos. Nichil quidem mobilius, nichil iniquius vulgari iudicio, super quo fama fundata est. Itaque mirum non est, si assidue quatitur que tam tremulis innititur fundamentis. Hec sane nonnisi in vivos regnum habet; mors hominem eximit ab imperio fortune; cessant exinde ludibria hec, et – velit illa vel nolit – virtutum fama, ceu solidum corpus umbra consequitur.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161 (Fam. IV.2): ‘Illud bonum tibi cupio quod michi, beatam vitam, ad quam multi suspirant, pauci perveniunt.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161–2: ‘Est enim salebrosum iter atque angustum et difficile, et amena ac prona circum devia.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘est autem, ut in sagittando, sic in alia qualibet operatione mortalium, aberrare perfacile. Signum attingere, is demum artificii finis est; idcirco difficilior, quia ad illum una tantummodo, ad errorem innumerabiles sunt vie. Hanc sane quam dico beatam vitam, quanquam ingeniosissimis atque doctissimis viris forte aliter visum sit, in hoc corporis ergastulo mereri quidem utcunque potest labor humanus et sperare, amplecti autem ac tenere non potest.’

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The unerring path of Stoic toil and sweat promises to bring the beata vita within human reach, but our imprisoning natures then appear to frustrate our actually securing it. Yet Petrarch faces down the presumptious futility which such heroic moral strivings seem to represent from a strictly Augustinian perspective by beginning to assimilate the notion of the beata vita to the concept of felicitas. He continues: However, this mortal life has in the meantime something very similar in common with that of eternity: although it can never be blessed – for the blessed is too much for anyone to have the strength to approach – yet it may look down on human miseries far beneath it and, even while situated well below it, still gleam in the light of supernal felicity. Riches, certainly, do not provide this, nor the approbation of the insane multitude, nor power, nor pleasure, but the companionship of the virtues and tranquillity of mind . . .34

If one then asks where on earth such supernal felicity can be best glimpsed, it becomes clear that it is the place to which Dionigi is journeying: the presence of the royal person in Naples, that shining ‘ornament’ under whose rule the kingdom now enjoyed ‘incomparable happiness’. For Robert has understood the great Senecan lesson that virtue and virtue alone must be the constant companion of the true monarch; his exemplary qualities mean that Naples flourishes in true felicity; and it is into an unparalleled celebration of Senecan monarchical rule that Petrarch now leads us, a fitting conclusion to his account of Dionigi’s journey to the heights of moral virtue: Who in Italy – indeed, who in the whole of Europe – is more distinguished than Robert? For in him, I am often accustomed to reflect, what is so admirable is not so much his diadem as his morals, not so much his kingdom as his mind. For, I should say, he is truly a king who not only rules and restrains his subjects but also his own self, who exercises imperium over his passions – those rebels of the mind who would oppress him if he gave way. But just as there is certainly no victory more distinguished than the conquest of oneself, so there is no kingdom ruled with higher authority than the rule over oneself.35

34

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Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘Habet tamen interdum illi eterne quiddam hec mortalis vita simillimum, ut etsi beata nondum sit – id enim beatum est duntaxat cui nichil valet accedere – iam tamen humanas miserias longe infra se videat et in imo stans adhuc superne felicitatis luce resplendeat. Hoc sane non divitiae prestant, non insanientis vulgi plausus, non potentia, non voluptas, sed virtutum comitatus atque animi tranquillitas’. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘‘‘Quis in Italia, imo vero quis in Europa clarior Roberto?’’ in quo sepe cogitans soleo non tam dyadema quam mores, neque tam regnum quam animum admirari. Illum ego vere regem dixerim, qui non subditos modo, sed se ipsum regit ac frenat; qui exercet in passiones suas imperium, que sunt animo rebelles, illum, si cesserit, oppressure. Ut nulla est quidem clarior victoria quam se ipsum vincere, sic nullum regnum altius quam se ipsum regere.’

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Robert’s moral invincibility and his heroic self-rule mark him out as the self-conquering vir sapiens of Senecan moral philosophy who had been repeatedly lauded in the literature of the Duecento. Unconquered by passion, a model of self-mastery, he is invictus, a quality as rare as the vir sapiens himself. Ulysses, Hercules and Cato had all been regarded by Seneca as outstanding examples of Stoic wise men who had truly walked ‘the virile path’ and ‘the hard and rugged road’ to the ‘lofty summit’ which rises ‘high above all fortune’.36 They had reached that place because they were men of great constancy, ‘unconquered by struggles, and were despisers of pleasures, and victors over every fear’.37 But King Robert is clearly identified as the protagonist of the Roman theory of the prince. Petrarch advances the basic premise of the theory in his acclamation of Robert’s mores and in his dismissal of the importance of the external marks of monarchy. The virtuous state of the monarchical mind, free from the disturbances of the affects, becomes the only ground for considering whether the exercise of imperium over the kingdom is legitimate. If the royal psyche, in its post-Augustinian state, is incapable of expunging entirely the affects, it has clearly engaged in an internal war of subjection from which it emerges victorious, invincible and thereby fully entitled to wield imperium externally over persons as subjects. In Petrarch’s hands, the Senecan goal of self-formation and self-government is pictured in terms of two persons in a war of conquest, one rational and the other a passionate rebel subject. Notwithstanding their enthusiasm for Stoic conceptions of virtus and ratio, few humanists shared the same degree of optimism about the possibilities for a unified hegemon which classical Stoicism had nurtured, and their arguments tended to impose a Stoic moral schema upon a partitioned psyche in which there was an ineradicable deposit of badness as a result of the Fall. Consequently, the Senecan idea of self-mastery was transplanted to a Christianised psychomachic tradition. Petrarch proceeds to expand the fundamental Senecan point that virtue is the only basis of monarchical rule: It is therefore an astonishing, albeit public, form of madness to call someone a king who is neither a king, nor free nor often even a man. It is a great thing to be a king, it is a fact of no consequence at all to be merely called one. Kings are rarer than is commonly supposed by people; it is not, in fact, a common title at all. Sceptres 36

37

Seneca 1928c, I.1–2: 48: ‘virilem ingressi viam . . . in illum editum verticem . . . supra fortunam. ‘‘At ardua per quae vocamur et confragosa sunt.’’’ Seneca 1928c, II.1: 50: ‘Catonem autem certius exemplar sapientis viri nobis deos immortalis dedisse quam Ulixen et Herculen prioribus saeculis. Hos enim Stoici nostri sapientes pronuntiaverunt, invictos laboribus et contemptores voluptatis et victores omnium terrorum.’

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would use up fewer jewels and less ivory if only kings carried them. True kings carry inside themselves that which makes them venerable: they remain kings even when retinues have been laid aside and insignia thrown away; the cultivation of what is on the surface makes the rest of them horrible.38

Titulature, regalia, constitutional definitions: all are dismissed as irrelevant in Petrarch’s embrace of the doctrine that the possession of virtus is the sole criterion for distinguishing a true from a false monarch. But Petrarch also connects true virtus with true libertas, upholding the Stoic reasoning which had underpinned the whole of De clementia’s defence of the Principate. To be a true monarch is to be a true vir. And to be a vir is to embrace the quality of virtus in such a way that it ensures that you are free from the enslaving effects of the passions and all forms of desiring attachment to external worldly goods. For Petrarch, Robert’s ability to free himself from the affects and rule the regnum according to virtue seems hardly compromised at all by original sin. Petrarch makes clear that the king needs precisely those virtues which Seneca had laid down as the essential prerequisite for good rule: How will a man over whom ambition reigns be a royal ruler to me? How will he be invincible, if adversity lays him low? And how will he be serene, if grief clouds over him? How can he be magnanimous, if fear of even the slightest thing frightens him out of his mind? And – let us pass over in silence the shining names of all the virtues – who will be able to say to me that he is free when he is weighed down by the manifold yoke of the various desires?39

Invincible, free and now magnanimous, the monarch accumulates a succession of Senecan princely qualities which secure his release from the iugum of desire. In so doing, he successfully banishes from his mind the vice of ambitio. A dominus ambitiosus, Seneca had warned, would lead the body politic to destruction as surely as a master in the grip of avaritia.40 But the extent of Petrarch’s immersion in Senecan philosophy becomes even more apparent in his juxtaposition of magnanimitas with the 38

39

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Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘Mira ergo, licet publica, dementia regem eum dicere, qui nec rex nec liber et sepe ne homo quidem sit. Magnum est regem esse, perexiguum regem dici; rariores sunt reges quam vulgus existimat; non est titulus iste vulgaris. Minus gemmarum atque eboris sceptra consumerent, si soli reges illa portarent. Veri reges intra se gerunt quod eos venerabiles facit: semotis licet satellitibus et abiectis insignibus reges sunt; ceteros cultus exterior facit horribiles.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘Quomodo ille michi rex erit, in quem regnat ambitio? quomodo invictus quem sternit adversitas? quomodus serenus quem meror obnubilat? quomodo magnanimus quem minimarum etiam rerum pavor exanimat? et ut fulgida virtutum nomina taceamus, quis michi liberum dicet eum qui cupidinum variarum iugo premitur multiplici?’ Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 366: ‘cum ille imperavit, sive avarus dominus est, mare lucri causa scrutamur, sive ambitiosus, iam dudum dextram flammis obiecimus aut voluntarii terram subsiluimus’.

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quality of serenitas and in his description of the clouding effects of vice. De clementia had taken up the definition of magnanimity which Seneca had earlier given in De ira: The mark of true greatness is not to feel the blow . . . not to be angry is to be unshaken by wrong done to one; to succumb to anger is to become agitated. But he whom I have raised above all annoyance has embraced the supreme good and can reply not to man alone but to Fortune herself: ‘Do all that you will, you are too insignificant to cloud my serenity. Reason forbids it, and I have entrusted my life to reason’s governance.’41

In running magnanimity so closely together with serenitas, Petrarch was on firmly Senecan terrain: by helping to ensure the serenity of the man of preeminent virtue, magnanimity guaranteed cloudless skies over the civitas of the truly virtuous. Petrarch uses a distinctive metereological imagery in his depiction of the vices which cause the mind to lose its serenity and grow cloudy. He is carefully reworking a passage from Book II, Chapter 5, of De clementia. Seneca had repeatedly contrasted the happy state of the body politic under virtuous princely direction with the baleful state of affairs produced by a person under the distorting influence of unhealthy affects, like tristitia or misericordia, but he had also contrasted a sick with a serene mind: Commiseration is ‘sickness of the mind caused by the sight of other people’s miseries, or a sadness contracted from other people’s troubles which happen to others without, so it thinks, their deserving them’. But no sickness befalls the wise man. His mind is serene and nothing can occur to cloud it over. Again, nothing more befits a man than a great mind. But a mind cannot both be great and also grieving, since grief blunts the wits, debases and shrivels them. And this is something that will not happen to a wise man even in his own misfortunes.42

Translating obducare by resorting to the metaphorical idea of a mind becoming enveloped in cloud is fully authorised by Seneca’s repeated use of the verb to develop the metereological analogy.43 Furthermore, in 41

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Seneca 1928b, III.25.3–4: 318 (Seneca 1995: 102): ‘Proprium est magnitudinis verae non sentire percussum . . . Qui non irascitur, inconcussus iniuria perstitit, qui irascitur, motus est. At ille quem modo altiorem omni incommodo posui tenet amplexu quodam summum bonum, nec homini tantum sed ipsi fortunae respondet: ‘‘omnia licet facias, minor es quam ut serenitatem meam obducas. Vetat hoc ratio, cui uitam regendam dedi.’’’ Seneca 1928b, II.5.4–5: 438–40 (Seneca 1995: 162, modified): ‘Misericordia est aegritudo animi ob alienarum miseriarum speciem aut tristitia ex alienis malis contracta, quae accidere immerentibus credit; aegritudo autem in sapientem virum non cadit; serena eius mens est, nec quicquam incidere potest, quod illam obducat. Nihilque aeque hominem quam magnus animus decet; non potest autem magnus esse idem ac maestus. Maeror contundit mentes, abicit, contrahit; hoc sapienti ne in suis quidem accidet calamitatibus.’ See also Seneca 1928b, III.25.4: 318.

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De clementia, the virtuous prince governs those whose ‘state’ was placed ‘in my hand’ according to the same divine rationality which governed ‘the state of the world’; and Seneca had gone on to say that the state of the world under the rule of reason is never more ‘pleasing to the eye and lovelier’ than on a ‘day serene and bright’.44 Seneca had drawn out the analogies between this serene ‘state of the world’, the state of the prince and the state of those whom he rules by saying that ‘the look of a calm and well-ordered empire is like that of the sky serene and shining’.45 This state of affairs was then contrasted with a ‘reign that is cruel’, and ‘troubled and overcast’.46 Petrarch thus follows Seneca in contrasting vicious weather conditions with serenitas. In tracking down the clouding effects of vice, he enters into the distinctive metaphorical language of De clementia. Even the vice which Petrarch names as the cause of the cloudiness – meror – is specified by Seneca in his description of the gloomy threats to princely magnanimity and serenity.47 These clouds reappear in a later Petrarchan document. He instructs his friend Giovanni Barrili, a soldier and magistrate from Capua, ‘to subject your mind to reason – or to put it another way – to subject you to yourself ’.48 The rational persona’s task of self-subjection is thus announced as the key to moral progress. Amplifying his theme, Petrarch first turns to Cicero’s account of Platonic ethics in the Tusculan Disputations, in order to assert that Plato ‘imitated nature itself’ in proposing a tripartite structure to the soul.49 But if Petrarch briefly recurs to the Greek through Roman sources to secure his authority, the subsequent development of the importance of ratio draws on a much more familiar, and recognisably Stoic, vocabulary: any attempt at describing anger here would be superfluous, since its sad results are known even to the common man and fill entire volumes by philosophers, especially Plutarch and Seneca. I think you should be briefly reminded of what every learned person knows: where passions dwell, so too do hideous clouds

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.2: 356: ‘qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est’; Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376: ‘quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositum miti animo exercere imperium et cogitare, uter mundi status gratior oculis pulchriorque sit, sereno et puro die’. Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376: ‘Atqui non alia facies est quieti moratique imperii quam sereni caeli et nitentis.’ Seneca 1928a, I.7.3: 376: ‘Crudele regnum turbidum tenebrisque obscurum est.’ Seneca 1928a, II.5.5: 440: ‘Maeror contundit mentes, abicit, contrahit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 38 (Fam. XII.14): ‘peto autem, vir insignis, ut animum rationi sive, ut aliter idem dicam, te tibi subicias’. For Barrili, see Ch.4, n.1. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 39: ‘Plato naturam ipsam studio imitatus tripartitam anime sedem comperit.’ The allusion is to Cicero, Tusc. I.10.20.

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and horrendous shadows of the soul – the eclipse of reason, I should properly say. And what I think applies to all of these passions applies very closely indeed, I think, to anger. For there is nothing else which so disturbs peace and serenity, nothing which gives clearer testimony of a troubled man: a pallid face, confused speech, shaking limbs, an overcast aspect, eyebrows raised, eyes burning, rapid breath. When anger inhabits the mind, these symptoms drag it to the light of day, like Cacus brought forth from hiding, and render it visible to onlookers.50

The figures used to paint this picture of the physiognomy of rage are drawn primarily from De ira, the Senecan text to which Petrarch is obviously referring Barrili.51 Now Petrarch links the clouds to the two great Senecan vices of ira and tristitia. He recalls the states of mind which are within the reach of the man who cultivates reason: By contrast, when the mind is subjected to the rule of reason and is free from the passions, therein resides unshakeable tranquillity, pleasant serenity, human happiness. It follows, therefore, that if we want to be happy (that happiness which pertains to mortal life, that is, although of course we aspire to another type) it must be the loftiest participant of the divine mind, so that – as is said about the highest peak of Olympus – no such cloud of the passions can reach it.52

An Olympian feat of self-subjection is thus required to attain felicitas and libertas. Petrarch holds Robert to have performed just such a feat. Robert’s selfconquering capacity is further manifest in two other qualities. He is ‘truly renowned, truly a king; while he exercises an imperious command over himself, he is marked out by examples of unrivalled patience and moderation’.53 Once again, the Senecan typology of monarchical virtues is 50

51 52

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Petrarca 1933–42, III: 39: ‘et supervacuum fuerit iram tibi velle describere, cuius tristes exitus vulgo etiam notos quidam philosophorum integris voluminibus sunt amplexi, precipue Plutarchus et Seneca. Illud tibi brevissime quod nemo doctus ignorat, inculcandum reor: ubi passiones habitant, nubilum esse teterrimum et horrendas anime tenebras, ac rationis, ut proprie dixerim, eclipsim; quod cum de omnibus tum de ira convenientissime dici arbitror. Nichil est enim quod eque tranquillitatem serenitatemque perturbet, nichil ubi tam clara testimonia lese mentis appareant, pallor vultus, confusa vox, membrorum tremor, obducta frons, elatum supercilium, ardentis oculi, celer anhelitas: hec sunt que iram in animis habitantem, velut eductum latebris Cacum, in lucem trahunt ac spectantibus visibilem representant.’ See especially De ira, II.35.3–6. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 39: ‘Contra ubi mens rationis imperio subiecta et passionibus libera est, illic immota tranquillitas, illic ioconda serenitas, illic demum humana felicitas est. Oportet igitur, si felices esse volumus, ea felicitate quam recipit vita mortalis, etsi per hanc ad aliam aspiramus, oportet, inquam, illam etheree mentis altissimam esse particulam, ut quod de supremo dicitur Olimpi iugo, nulla eam passionum nubes possit attingere.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163 (Fam. IV.2): ‘Robertus vere inclitus et vere rex est; qui quam sit imperiosus in se ipsum exempla inaudite patientie et moderationis indicant.’

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expanded. Seneca had stressed the importance of princely moderatio in no less than six separate places; as for patientia, the claim that the ‘prince will establish good morals in the civitas and cleanse it of its vices by patience’ had underlined that the virtue was fundamental to the health of the monarchy.54 But Petrarch’s moral arguments reach their Senecan climax in the development of his assertion that virtue can have nothing to do with ‘cultivation of what is on the surface’.55 Virtus must be integral to the nature of the prince. Seneca had expressed this commitment in his famous warning to the prince that ‘no one can wear a persona for long’, since ‘fictions soon fall back into their true nature’.56 Petrarch turns away from the explicitly dramatic metaphor of Seneca to reformulate the doctrine: With what effrontery do we call someone a man whom we know to retain nothing that truly belongs to man except the bare outline, deformed by the morals of beasts and terrible in the ferocity which he shares with savage animals?57

Petrarch’s argument is that it is a hollow ‘frons’ to apply the term virtus to a mere effigy, devoid of true moral quality on the inside. It is virtus which makes a man; and it is a quality located internally, and not manifested on the exterior form of the body. Moral descriptions must pick out true men and true monarchs by remaining focused upon their internal qualities. The risk of doing otherwise is to provide evaluations which are superficial and empty of moral worth, thus revealing our own moral character. Petrarch draws an extreme contrast between inside and outside, perhaps a ramification of an Augustinian anti-materialism, but perhaps, too, a rhetorical strategy to fix the eyes of the reader to the point which he is emphatically making about monarchy – that it has nothing to do with externals and everything to do with the secure possession of virtus inside the person of the prince. Having virtually completed his discussion of royal virtue in this subtly imitative way, Petrarch then abruptly names the classical authority sustaining his beliefs about monarchy:

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Seneca 1928a, I.22.3: 418 (Seneca 1995: 154): ‘Constituit bonos mores civitati princeps et vitia eluit, si patiens eorum est.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘ceteros cultus exterior facit horribiles’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘Nemo enim potest personam diu ferre, ficta cito in naturam suam recidunt; quibus veritas subest quaeque, ut ita dicam, ex solido enascuntur, tempore ipso in maius meliusque procedunt.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘Qua fronte hominem dicimus, quem scimus ex homine nichil preter nudam effigiem retinere, beluarum moribus deformem et sevorem animantium feritate terribilem?’

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In a certain tragedy of his, your Seneca summarised superbly what a king ought or ought not to do in these verses: ‘Wealth does not make a king, Nor purple vestments Nor a royal aspect Nor royal quarters of gold. A king is a man who lays aside fear And the evils of a dire heart.’ And then a little later: ‘A good mind possesses the kingdom There is no need for horses Nor arms . . . A king is he who fears nothing.’ These are the words of Seneca. And it is to this king that you have proceeded upon being summoned – a suitable ending, given our point of departure.58

The story of Robert as a Senecan monarch is explicitly underlined, and yet brought to a close with a rather wieldy excerpt of Senecan tragedy. True, the ideology of kingship in the passage which Petrarch cites is entirely of a piece with the theory of princely virtus in De clementia which he has been articulating up to this point. But it is striking that he should decide to refer his reader to the Thyestes, rather than to the far more famous document on royal power.59 Petrarch had gone to some lengths to represent the doctrines

58

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘Seneca tuus in quadam tragedia quid regem faciat et quid non faciat, egregie recollegit his versibus: Regem non faciunt opes, Non vestis tyrie color, Non frontis nota regie, Non auro nitide trabes; Rex est qui posuit metus Et diri mala pectoris. Nec longe post: Mens regnum bona possidet Nil ullis opus est equis Ni armis . . . Rex est qui metuit nichil. Hec ille. Ad hunc itaque regem, ut principio conveniat finis, vocatus ivisti.’ The verses are at Seneca, Thyestes, 344–9, 380–8.

59

Senecan tragedy had been revived in early Trecento Padua, and of all the Paduan humanists praised by Petrarch, it was a major exponent of that intellectual current, Lovato Lovati, whom he lauded most. For a recent discussion, see Villa 2000. For Petrarch’s praise of the Paduans, see the comments of Billanovich 1996b: 124. For Boccaccio in Naples, see Torraca 1914. For Boccaccio, Naples and the ‘tragic’ Seneca, see Billanovich 1996a, esp. 486–9, for the copious citations of Senecan tragedy in the Genealogia; Martellotti 1972: 152–60. See also Mayer 1994.

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of De clementia in his own words; why now the explicit reference to his classical authority, and to a different text? The answer may be because he came to hold the outstandingly unconventional – though entirely correct – belief that Seneca the tragedian was one and the same person as Seneca the moral philosopher.60 Petrarch’s suspicions about the traditional distinction between Seneca the moralist and the author of the tragedies only emerged in public form in 1365, when it immediately generated a humanist dispute.61 The controversy was pursued through the correspondence of the Neapolitan humanists, particularly by Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte, another Neapolitan jurist committed to the study of Seneca.62 Petrarch’s belief became public after years of reading the Senecan corpus and well after the date of the letter to Dionigi.63 Given the juxtaposition of his rhetorical rearticulation of Senecan precepts on royal rule with the passage on kingship from the Thyestes, the belief may have been implicit in the argument that he was making about ‘your Seneca’ to Dionigi. Perhaps Petrarch was even confronting his readers with the evidence for his belief about Seneca’s identity. Alternatively, Petrarch’s editorial work on the collection in the 1350s and 1360s might have involved him in inserting the passage and framing the implicit claim retrospectively; in which case, Dionigi, who died in 1342, would not have seen it. Regardless of this possible explanation, Petrarch’s letter pointed to ways of using material from an extended Senecan corpus with which to embellish the monarchical story of De clementia. Using the tragedies as well as the other moral treatises to develop the depth and copiousness of the Senecan monarchical language was not a practice which necessarily demanded agreement with Petrarch’s argument about the identity of their author. SENECAN TYRANNY

When Robert dies in 1343, Petrarch is inconsolable, lamenting the unstable fortunes of the city in a language which draws as deeply as ever upon the Roman theory of monarchy. Deprived of Robert’s virtuous presence, Naples is plunged into darkness as Petrarch relentlessly reverses his depiction of a happy, free and enlightened monarchy in the hands of Robert by turning to the utterly contrasting language of bestiality, of cruelty and of monstrosity which Seneca had used in De clementia to characterise tyrannical rule. In the last two chapters of Book I, he had bequeathed a highly 60 61 62

63

Martellotti 1972; Billanovich 1996a. Billanovich 1996a: 471. The letter is Fam. XXIV.5. Billanovich 1996a. For Pietro’s ownership and scholarly correction of the famous Montecassino codex Ambrosianus, see Reynolds 1983: 366. For some indications of the chronology of these thoughts, see Martellotti 1972: 150–5.

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wrought picture of the tyrant whose ‘bestial madness’ and ‘ferocity’ makes him nothing better than ‘an animal of the forest . . . its jaws yawning wide’.64 The tyrant’s inhumane ‘savagery’ is a disease of the mind, his ‘cruelty’ a pleasure. Whereas such vice in private individuals had far less potential to cause widespread damage, the same type of mental affliction in the case of princes, Seneca had warned, had extraordinary consequences for the health of the body politic. Seneca had expressed the contrast in the impact caused by the ‘private’ madness of cruelty and the public devastation caused by princely bestiality through an imagery which fared well after the Fall: ‘tiny snakes go unnoticed. There is no public hunt for them. But when a serpent has exceeded the normal size and grown into a monster, poisoning the wells with its spittle, scorching whatever it breathes on . . .’, it requires ‘the engines of war’ to stop it.65 Princely vice was a monster on the rampage, a disease which spread through the city.66 But it was pictured as a ‘vast blaze’, a raging blast of angry heat which causes edifices to collapse in a massive public conflagration.67 Leave it to run riot, warns Seneca, and its moral character begins to inform the tyrant’s ‘closest friends’ and the ‘entertainments’, ‘parties’ and ‘public shows’ within the civitas.68 Would life be any different, he exclaims, ‘if lions and bears had the kingdom, if serpents and the most noxious kind of animal were given power over us?’69 Petrarch draws upon the full repertoire of Senecan imagery in order to convey the terrible, tyrannical state of affairs which now pertained in the Neapolitan kingdom. He mentions his concerns to Barbato da Sulmona, but they were laid out in much greater detail to Cardinal Giovanni 64

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67

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Seneca 1928a, I.25.2: 422–4 (Seneca 1995: 155): ‘saevitia . . . animi morbus ad insaniem pervenit ultimam, cum crudelitas versa est in voluptatem et iam occidere hominem iuvat’. Seneca 1928a, I.25.3–4: 424 (Seneca 1995: 156): ‘Matura talem virum a tergo sequitur aversio, odia, venena, gladii; tam multis periculis petitur, quam multorum ipse periculum est, privatisque non numquam consiliis, alias vero consternatione publica circumvenitur. Levis enim et privata pernicies non totas urbes movet; quod late furere coepit et omnes appetit, undique configitur. Serpentes parvulae fallunt nec publice conquiruntur; ubi aliqua solitam mensuram transit et in monstrum excrevit, ubi fontes sputu inficit et, si adflavit, deurit obteritque, quacumque incessit, ballistis petitur.’ Seneca 1928a, I.25.5: 424 (Seneca 1995: 156): ‘at ubi crebris mortibus pestilentiam esse apparuit, conclamatio civitatis ac fuga est’. Seneca 1928a, I.25.5: 424 (Seneca 1995: 156): ‘Sub uno aliquo tecto flamma apparuit: familia vicinique aquam ingerunt; ac incendium vastum et multas iam domos depastum parte urbis obruitur’; I.26.5: 428 (Seneca 1995: 157): ‘multos quidem occidere et indiscretos incendii ac ruinae potentia est’. Seneca 1928a, I.26.2: 426 (Seneca 1995, 156): ‘puta esse tutam crudelitatem, quale eius regnum est? . . . non convivia securi ineunt . . . non spectacula, ex quibus materia criminis ac periculi quaeritur. Apparentur licet magna impensa et regiis opibus et artificum exquisitis nominibus, quem tam ludi in carcere iuvent?’ Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426 (Seneca 1995: 156–7): ‘Quae alia vita esset, si leones ursique regnarent, si serpentibus in nos ac noxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’

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Colonna in a letter about his second visit to Naples in late 1343. The new royal council, Petrarch reported, was ‘a monster’ and a ‘plague’.70 The poet is moved to pity by the sight of ‘my noble Parthenope’, so reduced and remade in the image of her new advisors.71 In the place of Robert had arisen an ‘horrendous triped of a beast’, a monster that had nothing in common with its illustrious predecessor, but shamefully bore the ‘sacred name of Robert’.72 All the vices of the royal replacement are pictured by Petrarch on the body, a hollow effigy of royal authority which has nothing of the man inside.73 The monster ‘has invaded the throne’, and Petrarch announces he ‘will from now on think it far from incredible that a serpent can arise from the bones of a buried man, given that this stupid viper has sprung up from the royal tomb’.74 In Petrarch’s distress – angry, inconsolable, pitiful – he blames Fortuna for this turn of events, bitterly exclaiming that ‘this is the fidelity of Fortuna: she turns and overturns alike human affairs . . . it was not enough for her to have stolen the sun from the world, nor to have cast dark shadows over it; no, she snatched away our unparalleled king and replaced him with another – not just one inferior in virtue, but this atrocious, rough animal’.75 The new order is cruel and bestial, but it is also faithless and female. The dominatrix brings to power a beast which is immitis. It embodies, that is, the opposite of the princely quality of mildness. A demented Petrarch rails against God: ‘is this how you look upon us, Rector of the Stars, is this the ideal successor to such a king?’76 Petrarch then recalls a ‘Sicilian hall’ of infamy to remind us that this kind of tyranny has horribly distinguished precedents – Agathocles, Phalaris, the Dionysii.77 Yet the present 70

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Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7 (Fam. V.3): ‘Neapolim veni, reginas adii et reginarum consilio interfui. Proh pudor, quale monstrum! Auferat ab italico celo Deus genus hoc pestis.’ For Petrarch, Giovanni Colonna and this visit, see Wilkins 1955b: 5–6. For the letter to Sulmona, see Fam. V.1 in Petrarca 1933–42, II: 3: ‘video, regnumque sine rege. Nam quid ego eum qui ab alio regitur, regem dicam, multorum avaritie – mestus addam – multorumque sevitie expositum.’ For the divisions within the regency council, see Le´onard 1954: 343–4. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7: ‘compatior tibi, mea nobilis Parthenope; vere tu harum quelibet facta es; nulla pietas, nulla veritas, nulla fides’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7: ‘Ac ne sacrum nomen ignores, Robertus dicitur. In illius Roberti serenissimi nuper regis locum, quod unum decus etatis nostre fuerat, eternum dedecus Robertus iste surrexit.’ See Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7 for the graphic depiction. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7–8: ‘Iam minus incredibile putabo e sepulti hominis medulla nasci posse serpentem, quoniam a sepulcro regio regis hec surdo prosiluit . . . solium tuum invasit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘Sed hec fortune fides est: res humanas vertit pariter et evertit. Non fuit satis mundo solem abstulisse, nisi atras insuper tenebras attulisset, et erepto regi unico non unus alter, quamlibet virtutibus inferior, succederet, sed hec atrox et immitis belua.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘Siccine nos aspicis, astrorum rector? Hic tanto regi successor ydoneus?’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘Hic, post Dyonisios Agathoclemque et Phalaridem – cunctis obscenior et, clam licet, immanior – fato debitus restabat aule sicule.’

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incarnation ‘is more obscene, more inhumane’ than all of them.78 Petrarch turns to Macrobius for words: the noxious tyrant who has taken Robert’s place is an ‘inclementissimus incubator’, a most unmerciful oppressor.79 The established order of the universe is so shattered in Petrarch’s disturbed vision that it is making him feel sick with anger, and he needs to calm himself: ‘In truth, while I am trying to relieve my indignant stomach, I fear I may stir up the bile in you, too.’80 Searching for language to describe the gravity of the situation was futile. It only succeeded in imperilling Petrarch’s ‘tranquillity of mind’.81 He concludes: ‘it is advisable to bring my words to an end’.82 Still, Petrarch returned to the subject again, in another letter to Colonna, now recounting a Naples that looked even more Neronic than Augustan.83 The monstrousness of the situation has grown to utterly Senecan proportions. First he tells of his lack of success to date in discharging the task which had been assigned to him by the Cardinal and which consisted in Petrarch presenting an appeal for the release of three brothers in prison in Naples.84 He had already grimly warned Colonna that, under the prevailing political circumstances, ‘if they expect the clemency of the Council, it is finished: they will waste away in the squalor of the prison’.85 Now he sees serpentine venom in the cruel tyranny which was engulfing the kingdom, referring to the ‘corrosively poisonous snake’ which had wound itself around the minds of the judges upon whom he had sought to impress the plea of clemency.86 When the council adjourns, everyone hurries home because of the ‘untreatable sickness of this city’.87 Naples has ‘a dark, obscene and inveterate malady’.88 The streets are not safe at night because armed noble youths roam them. There is no ‘paternal discipline’, 78 79

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Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘ut Macrobii verbo utar, ‘‘inclementissimus incubator’’’. The Macrobius citation is from Commentariorum in Somnium Scipionis, I.10.16. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 9: ‘Verum ego, dum verborum spumis indignantem stomacum relevare studeo, vereor ne tibi quoque bilem moverim.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 9: ‘quod nec Cicero ipse possit nec Demosthenes, et, si forte successerit, auctori suo tantum damnosum sit ingenium, quo scribenti potius animi tranquillitas quam scelerum impunitas sontibus auferatur?’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 9: ‘Itaque finem verbis imponere consilium est.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20–1 (Fam. V.6). For the context of the letter, see Wilkins 1955b: 11. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 10 (Fam. V.3): ‘si enim consilii clementiam expectant, actum est: squalore carceris consumentur’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘nisi constrictos pietate animos seps ille tabificus resolvisset . . . lethale malum sit’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘immedicabilis egritudo huius urbis’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘unum hoc obscurum habet et obscenum et inveteratum malum’.

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no ‘authority of judges’, no ‘royal majesty’ to ‘restrain their licence’.89 Yet Petrarch thinks the nocturnal perils hardly surprising in view of what happens in broad daylight.90 For the city has become enthralled to infamous gladiatorial games, ‘kings and people alike spectators’ to the ‘barbaric ferocity’ of ‘human blood flowing as if it were the blood of cattle’.91 A bestialised people engage in an orgy of self-slaughter amidst the ‘applause of the insane’.92 And the place of this perverse and infamous spectacle? It is called ‘the Furnace’, and it is described as a ‘sooty workshop of inhumane savagery’ which ‘blackens the bloody blacksmiths at the anvil of death’.93 Petrarch’s picture of a sickness snaking its way through minds and streets culminates in the description of a site of burning intensity, a great conflagration of entire persons – the minds and bodies of the civitas – consumed with the vices of cruelty and avarice. This is no place for the studia humanitatis. The city which Virgil called the ‘sweetest of all’ has become ‘the stuff of tragedy’, and Petrarch leaves his reader with a poignant line from the great Augustan epic in order to make abundantly clear the vicious effect of Senecan tyranny upon the once happy state of Parthenope: ‘alas, flee these cruel lands, flee the mean shore’.94 THE EDUCATION OF THE PRINCE

Petrarch never returned to the city, but his hopes for a restoration of its fortunes were revived by the change in political direction which it experienced in the early 1350s.95 After Louis the Great of Hungary invaded the Kingdom in 1347, Robert’s heiress Giovanna married Louis of Taranto, 89

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Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘nocturnum iter . . . anceps ac periculis plenum est, obsidentibus vias nobilibus adolescentulis armatis, quorum licentiam nulla umquam vel patrum disciplina vel magistratuum auctoritas vel regum maiestas atque imperium frenare quivit’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘Quid autem miri est, siquid per umbram noctis nullo teste petulantius audeant, cum luce media.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘inspectantibus regibus ac populo, infamis ille gladiatorius ludus in urbe itala celebretur, plusquam barbarica feritate? Ubi more pecudum sanguis humanus funditur.’ Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘et sepe, plaudentibus insanorum’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20–1: ‘ductus sum, ad locum urbi contiguum, quem Carbonariam vocant non indigno vocabulo, ubi scilicet ad mortis incudem cruentos fabros denigrat inhumane fuliginosa sevetie officina’. Petrarca 1933–42, II: 21: ‘nam et tragicum opus est et multa super his inter obstinatos cives verba iam perdidi. Minime vero mirabere amicos tuos, tanto avaritie premio proposito, in ea urbe vinctos esse, in qua hominem innoxium occidere ludus est; quam licet unam ex omnibus Virgilius dulcem vocet, non inique tamen, ut nunc est, Bistonia notasset infamia: ‘‘Heu fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum.’’’ For the citation, see Virgil, Aeneid, III.44. For a summary of the political context, see Abulafia 1997: 162–6. For Petrarch’s relations with the Neapolitan court in the early 1350s, see Wilkins 1955d: 58–62.

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thereby securing the Crown a source of military power, and the Hungarian challenge was gradually repelled.96 Louis was crowned king in May 1352.97 The new Angevin government appointed his mentor, the Florentine businessman Nicola Acciaiuoli, as Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom. Petrarch took it upon himself to outline to the new power behind the throne his duties as a royal guardian.98 The result was an institutio regia, an early contribution to a humanist genre which was to reach its most sophisticated form in the work of Erasmus.99 It was ‘immediately famous’, its fortuna ‘immense’: it was annotated and circulated with a commentary by Barbato, the Neapolitan humanist and dedicated cultivator of Petrarchan teaching.100 It was, predictably, a programme of instruction designed to instil the central precepts of the Senecan royal ideology which had informed Petrarch’s Neapolitan writing. For an outstanding model of virtue to imitate, and for the young king to ‘have before his eyes’, Petrarch says he need look no further than the ‘ideal example’ of ‘his illustrious and divine uncle Robert’.101 For Robert was ‘wise, he was magnanimous, he was mild, he was the king of kings’.102 In short, Robert was the embodiment of all the Senecan precepts of De clementia. So let the young king gaze on that divine image, Petrarch states, ‘let him form himself according to the rule of that man, let him contemplate himself in that flawless mirror’.103 The Petrarchan Institutio conveys its messages by means of an imagery as strikingly Senecan as ever. We are reminded that the king enjoys the title of ‘his Serenity’ for as long as ‘no cloud of grief, no icy fear, no mist of earthly desires, no haughty air of exuberant cheeriness’ descend upon him, for his mind must be ‘next to God and higher than human passions’.104 He must never forget that ‘anger in a prince is the basest’ of vices, and in putting it thus, Petrarch reminds us that the rex whom he is addressing is indistinguishable from a princeps: the Senecan argument about the 96 98 99 100 101

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97 Abulafia 1997: 164. Abulafia 1997: 164. Wilkins 1955d: 61; Abulafia 1997: 165. The text is Fam. XII.2 (Petrarca 1933–42, III: 5–17). Wilkins 1955a: 251; Billanovich 1996a: 460–1 (for the ‘fortuna enorme’ of the Institutio). Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘habet ante oculus rex tuus . . . recens ac domesticum virtutum omnium, exemplar ydoneum: illustrem ac divinum eius patruum Robertum’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘ille sapiens, ille magnanimus, ille mitis, ille rex regum erat’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘Illum intueatur; ad illius regulam se conformet; in illo se nitidissimo speculo contempletur.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘Ad hec non temere neque fortuito serenissimi titulum sibi impositum arbitretur, sed ut in animum eius, Deo proximum et humanis passionibus altiorem, nulla meroris nebula, nullus flatus letitie gestientis, nulla pavoris glacies, nullus libidinum terrenarum fumus possit ascendere.’

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inconsequentiality of titles and names holds strong in this ideology of virtus.105 The connection between princely anger and cruelty is continued in the progression of Petrarch’s discourse: ‘even to use the word cruelty is a wickedness’, he asserts.106 And Petrarch follows almost to the letter Seneca’s reasoning about cruelty in a monarch, recalling that ‘it is all the more fatal in a man who has to hand so many instruments to cause harm’.107 Furthermore, the Senecan theory is applied within an entity variously described as a kingdom, a principate and a republic. Petrarch tells Acciaiuoli that his task is to train the prince in cura to ensure the health ‘both of the rex and of the respublica’.108 Petrarch underlines three superlative qualities that must be ‘held forth’ and ‘affixed to the mind’ of the monarch.109 Two of these occupied a pivotal place in the Senecan theory. Petrarch affirms the indispensible quality of magnanimitas, which he defines, in straightforwardly Senecan terms, as ‘the peculiar virtue of kings, without which they are neither worthy of the kingdom nor of the royal name’.110 Therein lies the massive utility of the Senecan ideology to persons claiming to be princes: if they show they have magnanimitas in particular, they may argue that the nomen of rex, or princeps, or imperator is truly applicable to them. The second essential virtue is said to be humanitas. Again, Petrarch rehearses the Senecan case, saying that ‘this is not merely a virtue of man but his very nature, and if it is lacking, it is more monstrous than corrupt; a king ought to have it all the more, in as much as he who holds first place among men must duly excel them’.111 But both magnanimitas and humanitas come after the virtue which makes the prince ‘extremely similar to God’: misericordia.112 Petrarch immediately rebukes ‘those philosophers who condemned pity’ for ‘having erred deeply’, and it seems clear that he means Seneca.113 Sharing in divine pity for man is firmly stamped with the mark of princely virtue. While this alteration to the Senecan typology was necessitated by the Augustinianism that surfaces within Petrarchan humanism, 105

Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘Iram in principe turpissimam non ignoret.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘crudelitatem vero nominari etiam nefas esse’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘eo funestiorem quo nocendi plura suppeditant instrumenta’. 108 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 17: ‘hunc optimis et regis et reipublicae curis exerce’. 109 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Ostende illi’; 14: ‘affigatque animo regem’. 110 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘magnanimitatem peculiarem regibus esse virtutem, sine qua nec regno nec regio nomine digni sunt’. 111 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘humanitatem si assit, non virtutem esse hominibus sed naturam, si desit, monstrum potius esse quam vitium; eo magis regi debitam quo magis regi debitam quo magis reliquos homines debet excellere is qui primum in hominibus locum tenet’. 112 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘affigatque animo regem misericordia simillimum Deo fieri’. 113 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘penitus errasse philosophos qui misericordiam damnaverunt’. 106 107

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it hardly involved a diminution of the importance of clementia, which Petrarch continues to praise for its mitigating effects.114 As other Senecan doctrines become more prominent, the humanist ideology begins to participate in some of De clementia’s most characteristic formulations. Most notably, Petrarch forcefully expresses the importance of bearing in mind the Senecan doctrine of kingship as an onerous and highly conspicuous form of servitude. He begins by reminding Acciaiuoli that he has been instrumental in leading the king to the ‘highest pinnacle of the human state’.115 Acciaiuoli must accordingly show the young monarch the steps by which he has arrived at this elevated ‘state’, this ‘peak of fortune’.116 These steps are described as ‘arts’, and the art of the ascent must consist in the cultivation of virtue, for the king must show that he merits his lofty position ‘no less on account of his virtue than on account of his blood’.117 This duty is all the more imperative because ‘a principate does not make a man but exposes him’ and in his exposed state, all the honorific attributes which accrue to the prince as a monarch do not ‘change his mind and his morals’ but rather ‘put them on display’.118 The consequences are obvious: ‘the higher he is, the more clearly he is seen and the less possible it is for him to hide what he has done’, and ‘the more power he has, the less licence he enjoys’.119 Petrarch then develops the idea that the lofty ‘state’ of the prince is an exposed, difficult place to occupy by stressing the importance of impressing upon the king that ‘he is weighed down by a burdensome honour and an honourable burden’.120 This is because ‘while before he may have been unimpeded and free, he who becomes king thenceforth undertakes an honourable but laborious and solicitous servitude, so that under this servitude, there may be public liberty’.121 He immediately continues the Senecan moral, saying that ‘he must henceforth live an exemplary life, for it is by the example of kings that kingdoms are formed, and an explanation for whatever error might be committed by the common 114 115 116 117

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See Petrarca 1933–42, III: 13. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘regem . . . in summum status humani fastigium perduxisti’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Ostende illi quibus gradibus in hunc fortune vertice sit evectus.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘quibus gradibus . . . quibus artibus consistendum sit, neque tam deinceps enitendum ut ascendat altius quam ut ascensu se se approbet non indignum et hereditarium sceptrum non magis sanguini debitum quam virtuti’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Non facit virum sed detegit principatus, et honores non mutant mores atque animum sed ostendunt.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 9: ‘Cogitet quo altior est eo se clarius videri eoque minus occultari posse que gesserit, et quo potentie plus est eo minus esse licentie.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘Denique honeroso honore et honorato se pressum honere fateatur.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘eumque qui rex fiat, etsi ante fuerit expeditus ac liber, ex illo tamen honestam suscipere sed laboriosam ac solicitam servitutem et sub qua publica sit libertas’.

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crowd is usually demanded from the hands of those who preside over them’.122 Petrarch’s description of the passage to the ‘highest pinnacle of the human state’ thus depicts the movement of a person whose feet are free to a position in which they are encumbered. The lofty ‘state’ is a form of servitude in which one appears to relinquish a footloose condition and become restricted by the burden which one is carrying. A prince is no longer in a position of ‘expediency’. On the contrary, his obligations heavily impede him. Yet in terms of the favoured Senecan metaphor for moral progress which runs through Petrarch’s arguments, the virtuous prince always walks the hardest path to the highest human state, arriving at a place of libertas and felicitas which is then said to be guaranteed for the whole monarchical body. This moral person, then, becomes free at precisely the moment that his feet appear to end up losing their freedom to the lowest state of all, the state of servitude. The prince is both in servitude and in liberty. He is subject to a higher sovereign who moves his body, and at the same time in total control of his free persona by means of his cultivation of reason. These contradictions may have been resolvable through a materialist Stoic metaphysics. The prince of perfect virtue had no dominus other than reason itself. But ratio did have a determining effect upon the movement of bodies, and Seneca had regularly personified this motivating force. When Petrarch develops the Senecan doctrine of kingship as noble servitude, his prince becomes articulated in similar fashion. It is Petrarch’s argument that ‘true’ liberty is freedom from the effects of the passions by cultivating reason. But it is also his argument that while a Senecan prince like Robert may arrive at the heights of divine virtue, he is nevertheless subject to the domination of a higher sovereign person, whom he describes as ‘the lord of virtue and the king of glory’.123 From the time of Petrarch onwards, humanist princely discourse cultivated both princely freedom and princely servitude. But the tension between liberty and servitude which the Roman theory of monarchy helped to transmit to the humanist ideology was accompanied by another, related dichotomy running through the Senecan text which similarly begins to characterise princely discourse. This second dichotomy prevails in the treatment of the character of Fortuna. Petrarch’s letter to Acciaiuoli develops Fortuna according to a dual 122

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Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘vivendumque sibi deinceps exemplariter: exemplo enim regum regna componi et requiri solere de manibus presidentium quicquid vulgus erraverit’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Illi qui est dominus virtutum et rex glorie.’

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perspective. He begins with a series of references to conquest: ‘over the course of time, faith defeats perfidy, bountifulness avarice, humility pride’.124 He then links these conquests to the military triumphs which Acciaiuoli has helped the Angevins to secure over the Hungarians. ‘Immortal is the war between envy and glory, between evil and virtue, and thanks to Him who is the lord of virtue and king of glory, under whose leadership the worst side in this present struggle has been conquered, the best side triumphs – so contrary to what we often see.’125 God as dux and dominus has led the virtuous Angevin to victory over the depraved foreign invader. In this providential light, the king’s fortuna becomes equated with fate. Petrarch now instructs Acciaiuoli to ensure that his king now learns how to walk to the point at which he has already arrived: You have a king . . . whom you have led through many dangers, under fate’s compulsion, to the highest pinnacle of the human state. Show him by what steps he has been carried to this pinnacle of fortune, in what arts it is held to consist, and that thenceforth, rather than struggling to ascend higher, he must prove that he is worthy of his ascent . . .126

The prince has played a somewhat passive role in the dangerous physical journey to the lofty pinnacle of fortune. Compelled by fate and assisted by Acciaiuoli, he is carried there in the first instance. Petrarch identifies the agency of fate with God, the dominus of virtue under whose leadership the ‘best side’ had prospered. So it would follow that the dominus has compelled the prince’s bodily movement, through bloodlines and battlefields, to the highest and most fortunate state. God, fate and fortune are all in alignment from this perspective. The prince now has to take steps to make himself into the image of the person who is held to be his master and the arbiter of his fate and fortune, so making good the claim that his rule enjoys the blessings of divine providence. But Petrarch warns the royal official that, in fact, ‘nothing has been achieved’ when one surveys the moral battle that lies ahead.127 For ‘now is 124

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Petrarca 1933–42, III:5: ‘Iantandem, vir clarissime, perfidiam fides avaritiam largitias superbiam vicit humilitas.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Immortale bellum est inter invidiam et gloriam, inter nequitiam et virtutem, gratias Illi qui est dominus virtutum et rex glorie, quod eo duce in presenti certamine victa parte deterrima, cuius sepe contrarium videmus, optima pars triumphat.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Habes regem . . . cum quo terra marique iactatus es, quem per multa precipitia cogente fato in summum status humani fastigium perduxisti. Ostende illi quibus gradibus in hunc fortune verticem sit evectus, quibus artibus consistendum sit, neque tam deinceps enitendum ut ascendat altius quam ut ascensu se se approbet non indignum.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘nichil est actum’.

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in fact the time for you to summon up all your strength of mind, to arm yourself for vast undertakings . . . if you have any of the moral qualities of a Caesar’.128 He asserts that ‘we saw you fight back so magnificently against adverse Fortuna; now we see you as the conqueror, but lo and behold, even when conquered, she often returns with a milder face on . . . you conquered her as an adversary, she returns to battle as an ally’.129 Petrarch insists that ‘the weapons have changed, but not the enemy’; and accordingly, Acciaiuoli needs ‘a new type of armour’ to fight ‘in the open’ the opponent whom he had defeated at close quarters.130 History shows how ‘peace time has often been more dangerous than war’.131 The mind is constantly under siege, constantly fighting.132 The virtuous man needs an adversary, or else he grows languid in his leisure, dissipated rather than indomitable, seduced by his inactivity.133 Petrarch says that ‘the end of labour and life is one and the same for you and for every distinguished man right up to the last breath, against enemies either visible or invisible’.134 He urges immediate action, for ‘at no other time was there such a need for you to raise yourself up with such force, and for your mind to overcome itself’.135 Acciaiuoli has arrived at the greatest challenge of all, ‘in which the whole world may learn what sort and how much of a man you are when confronted with each of the two kinds of Fortuna’.136 This exhortation to engage in warfare with all the mental powers at one’s disposal is conceptually related to the lengthier treatment of the two types of fortuna in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortune, also written during 128

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Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Nunc siquidem tempus est ut omnes animi tui vires colligas atque ingentibus negotiis accingaris . . . siquid Cesarei moris habes.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘Vidimus te adverse fortune magnificentissime reluctantem; iam cernimus te victorem; sed en totiens victa revertitur aspectu mitior et aurate cassidis, ut ita dixerim, fulgore suavior. Vicisti adversam; prospera redit in prelium.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘mutata sunt arma, non hostis, et tibi quoque novo armorum genere est opus . . . In arcto quidem egregie rem gessesti; qualem te in aperto exhibeas expectamus.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘sepe pax periculosior bello fuit’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘nulla homini pertinacior lis quam cum animo moribusque suis; nusquam minus indutiarum; intra murum pugna est’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘Quorundum virtus otio latuit; quorundam vero prorsus emarcuit, locum submoti hostis occupante luxuria . . . Romanos bello indomitos et omnium gentium victores pax tranquilla perdomuit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘si me audire volueris, scies unum esse laboris et vite finem tibique et omnibus claris viris usque ad extremum spiritum vel cum visibili vel cum invisibili hoste luctandum fore’. Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Nullo unquam tempore tam magno conamine consurgendum tibi tamque supra se ipsum attollendus animus fuit.’ Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Ad summa certamina ventum est ut universus orbis intelligat in utraque fortuna qualis quantusque vir fueris.’

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the 1350s,137 in which the role of Ratio in overcoming Fortuna is dramatically personified in the 253 dialogues.138 But Fortune’s duality is as pervasive in humanist princely ideology as it had been in the Senecan theory. From Petrarch onwards, the Senecan injunction to conquer or simply magnanimously rise above Fortuna in an attitude of lofty disdain towards her enslaving power becomes the princely way of ensuring libertas. While the wise monarch owes nothing to the inconstant caprices of the dominatrix because of his virtue, he yet owes everything to his great fortune affixing him to his pinnacle, as if there were one fortuna dominating the physical body, and quite another which he dominates by the force of his moral personality. In arriving at the highest ‘human state’, the monarch escapes a form of slavery threatened by Fortuna for liberty under the dominus of divine reason, only to be told that this is a form of noble servitude. He is instructed that he must constantly labour under a heavy weight, that his movement is now impeded, and that everyone is looking at him. The felix princeps of royal humanist discourse found himself – mid-Trecento – affixed to a profoundly Senecan state. 137

138

Mann 1984: 76 (and for the providential Stoic determinism – and the Senecanism – of De remediis utriusque fortune, see 78–9). Mann 1984: 76.

CHAPTER

4

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas

In view of the conceptual character of the Senecan ideology which Petrarch had developed in his writings about the Neapolitan rex, it is unsurprising that he resorted to the same language when describing and prescribing the principles of good monarchical government to the signori. The Petrarchan development of the Senecan argument was clear: if a ruler possessed the requisite virtues, thereby ensuring that reason reigned supreme over his own person and over the political body which he ruled, then he could be duly named as princeps, or rex, or imperator irrespective of any external apparatus which might be adduced to support such a claim. In fact, Petrarch had openly denigrated the reliance on dynastic entitlement and the physical symbolism of monarchical power in his discussions of the identity of the true prince. This line of argument was of immense utility to signorial regimes looking to consolidate their princely claims. Through Petrarch’s association with the signori, a political language already indebted to the texts of Roman imperial ideology in general and to the contentions of De clementia in particular developed a fully humanist character. Before settling in Milan in 1353 for eight years, Petrarch had corresponded with its ruler, Luchino Visconti, and with Visconti’s podesta` in Parma, Paganino da Milano.1 Writing to Paganino during the 1340s, Petrarch declared that he was well aware of the argument that the Roman Empire had increased in size far more before the establishment of the Principate, but that it was nevertheless the opinion of many great men that ‘the happiest state of the res publica is under a single, just prince’.2 This was certainly the vision of the Roman felix res publica which Seneca had held out in De clementia, where he had declared that, thanks to the rule 1 2

For Petrarch’s Milanese period, see Wilkins 1958. Petrarca 1933–42, I: 116–17 (Fam. III.7): ‘Quamvis non sim nescius quanto plus sub multorum quam sub unius imperio romana res creverit, multis tamen et magnis viris visum scio felicissimum reipublice statum esse sub uno eodemque iusto principe.’

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of the virtuous prince, ‘ius has now been raised above all iniuria’, and that ‘the happiest form of res publica’ was said to greet the eyes of the public.3 And he had reiterated the point in De beneficiis, reminding his reader that ‘the optimal state of the civitas is under a just king’.4 Petrarch’s words do not merely paraphrase these claims: they form part of an argument which restates Seneca’s justification for monarchy. Seneca had argued that it had been mistaken to wish to restore the res publica to its former shape, in view of the moral degeneration which had led to civil war, and in view of the manifest benefits to be had from autocracy under such conditions.5 In similar vein, Petrarch explains to Paganino that in view of ‘the present state of our affairs, amid such an implacable discord of minds, there is absolutely no doubt remaining for us that monarchy is the best way of restoring and repairing Italy’s strength, which the madness of civil wars has long dissipated’.6 Petrarch ‘has come to realise this, and to acknowledge that a royal hand is needed for our diseases’; and he has no doubt that Paganino believes that he prefers ‘no king more than this king of ours, under whose power we live so agreeably and tranquilly’.7 Petrarch’s ‘king’ is Luchino Visconti. For ‘if it is justice alone which distinguishes a tyrant from a king, then our king is a true king’.8 This is a version of the Senecan argument which substitutes the virtue of iustitia for the virtue of clementia in determining the moral difference between rex and tyrannus. It is, moreover, a version which is fully consonant with the argument of De clementia, where the merciful prince was very clearly held to be the embodiment of iustitia, of ius raised above all iniuria. And Petrarch’s claims about the best state of the res publica recall these Senecan statements even more strongly at the point where he insists that ‘our king is a true king, however much those who are the truest tyrants of all – men who want to call themselves fathers of their countries – call him a tyrant’.9 Visconti’s critics are the true tyrants,

3

4 5 6

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta, adfluens, ius supra omnem iniuriam positum; obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publica’. Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228–9): ‘cum optimus civitatis status sub rege iusto sit’. See Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228–9). Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘Certe ut nostrarum rerum presens status est, in hac animorum tam implacata discordia, nulla prorsus apud nos dubitatio relinquitur, monarchiam esse optimam relegendis reparandisque viribus italis, quas longus bellorum civilium sparsit furor.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘Hec ut ego novi, fateorque regiam manum nostris morbis necessariam, sic te illud credere non dubito nullum me regem malle quam hunc nostrum, cuius sub ditione vivimus adeo suaviter ac tranquille.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘Et profecto si regem a tyranno sola iustitia discernit, iste rex verus est.’ Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘iste rex verus est, quamlibet tyrannum vocent verissimi omnium tyranni, qui se patres patrie dici volunt’.

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outdoing ‘Phalaris . . . Agathocles . . . Dionysius . . . Gaius . . . Nero . . . Heliogabalus’ in their shamelessness and bestial ferocity.10 The refutation of the accusation of tyranny levelled against Visconti makes clear that the title of true prince brings with it the identity of Pater patriae. Petrarch’s mock incredulity is reserved for an act of inappropriate nomination, for the appropriation of a title that truly belongs to the iustus rex of the classical theory, and, by implication, to the iustus rex of Milan. But the most systematic exposition of the Petrarchan argument about monarchical virtue in a signorial context dates to the 1370s, some two decades after the humanist had decided to take his work, his ideas, his library and his skills as a government official to Milan. Petrarch’s letter of 1373 to Francesco da Carrara, the ruler of Padua, expends considerable energy in its proem preparing the ground for a long disquisition on monarchical virtue.11 It explains why Petrarch needs to write on princely government to a person who already embodies the qualities he is about to extol. Petrarch knows that no one is beyond criticism, although Francesco is virtually faultless. He goes on to say that a person can be called ‘perfect and excellent’ when they are only very minimally ‘liable’.12 The word which Petrarch uses here is obnoxius, the term used in classical writing to describe a slavish condition of indebtedness or addiction when a person is dependent upon, at the mercy of or in the power of someone else.13 Petrarch thus connects the ‘perfect and excellent’ person whom he associates with Francesco to someone who is free. He next exhorts his correspondent to ‘give thanks to God’ for ‘having made you as you are’.14 Francesco’s virtuous character is by no means explicable solely in terms of divine beneficence. Petrarch is quick to attribute it to the formative education which the monarch had enjoyed as a youth, when ‘you were able to learn both by instruction and by example’ a series of magnificent and noble lessons ‘under your glorious and magnanimous father’.15 Francesco’s youth 10

11

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13 14 15

Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘verissimi omnium tyranni . . . cum quibus nullus Phalaris, nullus Agathocles, nullus Dyonisius, nullus denique Gaius aut Nero omniumque fedissimus Eliogabalus possit de impudicitia et feritate contendere’. I cite the Latin text of the letter from the collection Rerum senilium libri (XIV.1) provided in Petrarca 1978: 760–836. A translation (which I have consulted as a basis for my own) is in Petrarca 1992, II: 521–52. Petrarca 1978: 764: ‘Est, fateor, conditio ista mortalium, ut nullus omnino sit irreprehensibilis. Ille perfectus atque optimus dici potest, qui parvis ac paucis obnoxius est.’ Skinner 1998: 42–4. Petrarca 1978: 764: ‘Age ergo gratias deo, qui te talem fecit.’ Petrarca 1978: 764–6: ‘omnibus nota est, ut sub ipsum scilicet adolescentie tue florem glorioso et magnanimo patre spoliatus, sub quo preclara omnia atque magnifica discere et doctrina poteras et exemplo’.

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had proved no obstacle to his successful rule of the res publica upon the death of his father. On the contrary, Petrarch salutes the fact that ‘you have ruled with such maturity, with all the judgement of an older person’.16 Francesco has thus demonstrated that, like Seneca’s prince, even at the start of his reign he has not been moved by ‘juvenile impulse’ in his government but by ‘senile consilium’ – the counsel of maturer years.17 Francesco has grown up quickly. Indeed he has subsequently shown himself to be ‘an example to rulers of other cities’.18 Petrarch has even heard that ‘neighbouring peoples long to be subject to you’ and that ‘they envy your subjects’.19 Francesco’s qualifications as a free man are then further developed. His rule is said to be beneficial because he is morally invincible, ‘addicted neither to presumptious insolence nor to idle pleasure’.20 The martial metaphor used to express the idea of unfreedom here is that of ‘surrender’ to an enemy. But Petrarch explains that Francesco avoids this condition of being defeated by such hostile vices because he exhibits an ‘extremely vigilant’ form of engagement in the business of governing.21 The result is that he is acknowledged to be ‘tranquil, but not inactive’ and ‘gloriosus’, or illustrious, but not arrogant: Francesco’s ‘modesty rivals his magnanimity’.22 He shows ‘unbelievable humaneness’ even to ‘the most humble’ of his people.23 Under his command, the civitas has acquired extensive defences along its borders, an unprecedented benefit for the res publica.24 Remarkably, ‘no tumults’ or ‘disturbances’ broke out upon his succession. And from the start of the reign, Petrarch claims, ‘no innocent blood has been shed’, thus moving Francesco even closer to the fulfilment of the ideal of beginning one’s rule in innocence. The result of all this conduct is that ‘the citizens under your leadership are free and safe’ and that ‘you have kept the fatherland flourishing in serene tranquillity and constant peace’ for 16

17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ad regimen omnium conscendisti, commissamque tibi rem publicam, immaturos superante annos industria, tanta maturitate tamque senili consilio rexisti’. For the elimination of ‘juvenile impulse’ in the Senecan prince, see De clementia, I.1.3. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘te . . . exemplar aliarum urbium rectoribus exhiberes’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ita ut sepe ego finitimos populos tibi subesse votis optantes audierim et tibi subditis invidentes’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut tu interim, nec tumide insolentie nec inerti deditus voluptati’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘in hoc unum vigilantissimo studio incubueris’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut te omnes agnoscerent sine desidia tranquillum, sine superbia gloriosum, utque in te modestia cum magnanimitate contenderet’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘cum te pene ex equo etiam minimis adeundum incredibili humanitate prestares’. Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘quod numquam aut populum, dum civitas communi consilio regebatur, aut cuiquam tuorum, dum tam diu frena rei publice tenuerunt, in animum venit, solus tu patriis in finibus oportunis locis arces multas ac validas erexisti’.

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years.25 And Petrarch can safely hail Francesco as gloriosus without jeopardising his claim about modestia because he reiterates the line of thought that ‘true virtue does not reject deserved glory, and is accustomed to follow it – even against its wishes – as a shadow follows the body’.26 Petrarch has already confronted his audience with a picture of a gloriously virtuous person who rules both subditi and the res publica in the civitas of Padua: a man who is neither obnoxius nor deditus but liber; a ruler of incredible humanitas, magnanimitas and modestia; almost preternaturally mature, endlessly vigilant, always industrious, and pre-eminently capable of securing libertas, pax and tranquillitas for his people. This approach not merely entails a markedly Senecan description of the ruler, it replicates the structure of De clementia. From the outset, we are presented with a picture of the persona whom Petrarch is about to construct as the princely ideal in his letter. Its recipient is reassuringly identified from the outset with that person. Petrarch announces to the Paduan monarch that his intention is: to show what the ruler of a country should be, so that, by looking at this as though looking at yourself in the mirror, whenever you see yourself as the sort of person whom I am describing – as you will very often – you may experience joy and may become even more devoted and obedient in days to come to the dispenser of all virtues and goods, and so rise up with a huge effort through all the difficult barriers to that level where you cannot rise any higher. If you should ever feel that you are lacking anything, rub your face, so to speak, wipe clean your brow . . . see to it that you become more handsome, or at any rate at least more brilliant, than yourself.27

Petrarch’s exploration of the Senecan imagery of the mirror is combined with a political and moral message no less indebted to the classical speculum. The principal task which Francesco must undertake is to ensure that he always reflects the picture of the divinely virtuous prince which Petrarch is about to extend to him. Since the monarch’s natural goodness and his education have already ensured his correct formation, his glancing back at 25

26

27

Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut et cives te duce liberi fuerint ac securi . . . totque iam per annos florentem patriam serena tranquillitate et constanti pace tenueris’. Petrarca 1978: 762–4: ‘etsi vera virtus dignam gloriam non recuset, eamque vel invitam ut corpus umbra sequi soleat’. Petrarca 1978: 770: ‘et qualis esse debeat patrie rector, expediam, ut hoc velut in speculo tete intuens, ubi te talem videris, qualem dico, quod persepe facies, gaudeas, et virtutum bonorumque omnium largitori devotior fias atque in dies obsequentior, et ingenti nisu per difficultatum obices assurgas usque ad illum gradum, quo ire altius iam non possis; si quando autem deesse tibi aliquid senseris, faciem ipse tuam, ut si dicam, perfrices et manu operum fame frontem tergas teque ipso formosior vel certe nitidior fieri cures’.

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Petrarch’s speculum is merely a corroborative exercise. And as for Seneca, so for Petrarch, this task of moral self-examination promises the additional benefit of gaudium. Introducing his precepts on the qualities of the ruler in this manner obliges Petrarch to confront another problem encountered in the Senecan speculum and in imperial rhetoric more generally: how to deflect the accusation of adulatio which invariably attended upon panegyric. When Seneca had declared that the aim of his speculum was to make the prince ‘as familiar as possible with’ his own ‘good words and deeds so that what is now a matter of natural impulse may become a matter of settled judgement’, he had been quick to disavow that his work was merely an attempt ‘to charm’ the ears of his audience, reminding his monarch: ‘I would rather offend you with the truth than please you with flattery.’28 And so we find Petrarch following suit as he establishes his moral credentials as a purveyor of true representations in his practice of the ‘custom of praising princes’.29 Petrarch assures his correspondent that he will eschew such blandishments and ‘comply with the truth rather than with the favour of the person praised’.30 Declaring that adulation is offensive, he describes his commitment to truth-telling in terms of the Stoic language of constancy.31 For a writer committed to the rationality of the Senecan speculum, the task of grounding one’s praise and blame in the truth is a question of establishing one’s self as a point of fixity, an unwavering reflector of the way things really are insofar as one’s words, like one’s deeds, can be seen to be in alignment with the external world. The virtue of constancy becomes a key tool in the establishment of a rhetorical ethos. For Petrarch, the vice of flattery is exacerbated by the vice of ‘inconstancy’, which he finds ‘highly offensive’ and which he attributes not to those who ‘praise unworthy men’ but to those who ‘later go on – with amazing flightiness of mind – to attack those whom they have earlier praised’.32 Petrarch says that ‘there is nothing baser, or less honorable’ than this type of behaviour, which he regards as a

28

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31 32

Seneca 1928a, II.2.2: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘Diutius me morari hic patere, non ut blandum auribus tuis (nec enim hic mihi mos est; maluerim veris offendere quam placere adulando); quid ergo est? Praeter id, quod bene factis dictisque tuis quam familiarissimum esse te cupio, ut, quod nunc natura et impetus est, fiat iudicium.’ Petrarca 1978: 760: ‘Nam et hic quoque mos est principes laudare . . .’ Petrarca 1978: 760: ‘. . . quod et ipse nonnunquam feci, non tam laudati gratie quam veritati obsequens’. Petrarca 1978: 760–2: ‘Qua in re hinc laudantis adulatio, hinc vel maxime inconstantia me offendit.’ Petrarca 1978: 760–2: ‘Qua in re hinc laudantis adulatio, hinc vel maxime inconstantia me offendit. Sunt enim et qui indignos laudent et qui laudatos mira mox animi levitate vituperent.’

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mental sickness and which, he proclaims, could never lead him to ‘censure what I had earlier praised’.33 For Petrarch the greatest culprit of such despicable inconstancy is Cicero, who changed his mind about Caesar. So Petrarch declares that ‘in this respect, I rate Cicero the worst’ and ‘in this one matter I almost hate him’ – judgements which apparently pain the humanist, given his huge admiration and affection for the statesman, but which he is forced to make because ‘the truth is greater and more precious’.34 Petrarch views the contradictory evaluations of Caesar in the Ciceronian corpus as a sign of intolerable moral instability: if you ‘read his orations addressed either to Caesar or to the Senate in his presence’, you find that ‘the praises of Caesar are so great that they seem undeserved by any mortal’, but if you ‘go on’ to De officiis and the Philippics, ‘you will find hatred’ and ‘invective’ in equal measure.35 Petrarch finds these variant opinions ‘all the more dishonourable’ in the case of writings like De officiis, because Cicero poured out ‘all the vituperation on him when he was dead’, having lavished Caesar with praise while he was alive.36 Fortunately, Petrarch points out, Caesar ‘has his destiny to comfort him’, that is, Augustus, an adoptive son, successor and ‘companion greater than anyone else’.37 After these carefully crafted opening comments, Francesco is instructed by the speculum to ensure that he is cherished by those whom he rules, governing them not as if he were their dominus, but ‘as a father of the fatherland’.38 Petrarch knows from Seneca’s mirror not only that ‘Augustus was called father of the fatherland’ but that ‘Nero was called father of the fatherland’ too; and that while the former had shown himself to be a true father, the latter had proved to be greatest enemy of both pietas and the

33

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37

38

Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘quo nichil inhonestius, nichil est turpius’; ‘Id michi nequaquam eventurum reor ut morbo animi laudata vituperem.’ Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘In quo quidem maxime Ciceronem noto usque adeo ut quem inter omnes scriptores gentium miror ac diligo, in hoc uno pene oderim . . . Invitus de delicto michi viro maxime hec loquor, sed dilectior et maior est veritas.’ Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘Lege ipsius orationes quas vel ad ipsum Cesarem vel eo presente ad senatum habuit: tante ibi cesaree laudes sunt, ut nec mortali debite nec a mortali profecte ingenio videantur. Sed progredere, lege libros Officiorum orationesque Philippicas: invenies nec affectibus odia nec laudibus inferiora convitia.’ Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘utque sit indignior hec tanta varietas, viventi laus et defuncto vituperatio omnis attribuitur’. Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘Habet tamen, sortem suam quo soletur, Cesar unum ex omnibus magnum comitem nepotem filiumque suum adoptivum Cesarum Augustum.’ Petrarca 1978: 776: ‘Ex quo utique magnum tibi et honestum gaudium nasci debet, qui te tuis ita carum sentias, quasi non civium dominus sed patrie pater sis.’

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patria.39 He also picks up the Senecan corporal imagery, urging that ‘you must love your citizens as though they were limbs of your body, or parts of your soul: for the republic is one body and you are its head’.40 And he follows Seneca’s identification of the res publica as an entity which is like the person of the princeps. For when he says that the monarch must not only love those whom he rules like sons, like relatives, like parts of his body, he goes even further in stressing that he must love them ‘as much as you love yourself ’.41 When Petrarch enumerates the duties of the ruler he outlines the dimensions of the Renaissance prince’s commitment to public works in distinctly Herculean terms, encouraging Francesco ‘to undertake with special care the project of draining the marshes’ around the city.42 This will secure the ‘serenity’ and ‘salubriousness’ of the atmosphere.43 The monarch’s care for the body politic must extend to the quality of the air which his subjects breathe. In the development of Petrarchan discourse on monarchy, Olympian acts of self-overcoming begin to be regularly combined with displays of heroic, almost super-human ability to eliminate the bad elements of the natural order surrounding the monarchy and the civitas. Both types of conquest are linked by Petrarch to magnanimity. When he urges these acts upon Francesco, he apostrophises him as vir magnanimus.44 Petrarch stresses the superlative connotations of Senecan magnanimitas once again, pointing out that ‘it is usually magnanimity rather than humility which is praised in a prince’.45 However, he wants to clarify that to be magnanimous is also to be self-abasing. He shows how modesty is an essential part of the effortless superiority associated with magnanimity by reminding Francesco of Augustus – ‘the best and greatest of princes’ – who never insisted on divine honours and who even sought to evade the title of ‘dominus’ at all costs.46 In like fashion, Petrarch knows 39

40

41

42

43

44 45 46

Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘Pater patrie dictus est Augustus Cesar, pater patrie dictus est Nero. Ille verus pater, iste vero hostis et patrie et pietatis.’ Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘Amandi tibi sunt igitur cives tui ut filii, imo, ut sic dixerim, tanquam corporis tui membra sive anime tue partes: unum enim corpus est res publica cuius tu caput es.’ Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘universamque rem publicam non quantum filium modo vel parentes, sed quantum temet ipsum amare debes’. Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘Unum subinde nunc aliud ex his oritur, ut, viis publicis intra et circa urbem reformatis, paludum in circuitu siccandarum proxime.’ For the full discussion of beneficence, see 784–94. Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘studium sollicita pietate suscipias . . . Tibi tam pio in opere Deus aderit . . . quo et presentibus terre uber et locorum forma et celi serenitas salubritasque proveniat.’ Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘Aggredere tandem, vir magnanime.’ Petrarca 1978: 818: ‘Scio quidem non humilitatem in principe, sed magnanimitatem solere laudari.’ Petrarca 1978: 820: ‘Cesar Augustus, principum maximus atque optimus, non modo divinos honores non optavit seque adorari noluit, sed ne dominum quidem dici voluit.’

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that Francesco merely ‘bears patiently’ rather than revels in the ‘title of dominus’; he knows that Francesco is prone to confessing that he would foreswear all the responsibility which he presently carries were he not so fearful that someone else might ‘invade the republic’ and that it would consequently become ‘oppressed by an even heavier yoke’; and he knows, furthermore, that Francesco ‘would much rather be free than a lord’, so that he could enjoy ‘an unimpeded and tranquil youth’, a footloose time without ‘so many cares’ for the republic.47 Having qualified Francesco as a free man, Petrarch faithfully brings his reader back to the doctrine of princely rule as a form of servitude. Petrarch roams widely in his search for material with which to embellish his case. Many of the points made in the Roman theory of the prince which he reiterates are illustrated by dicta and facta drawn from a set of Roman imperial texts which this Petrarchan document in particular helps to make canonical within the ideology: the Lives of Suetonius, the panegyrics of Claudian, and, most frequently of all, the imperial biographies of the Historia Augusta. When he turns his attention to discussing the question of the prince’s accountability, he upholds his view that the ‘republic’ has been ‘committed’ to ‘the care’ of the monarch as its administrator, and not as its dominus, or owner.48 When he says that the monarch ‘should do everything as someone who will be giving an account of everything’, he adds that ‘at any rate, he has an account to give to God, if not to men’.49 In setting out this precept, he can find a dictum of Hadrian in the Historia Augusta to add some colour; he can go to Suetonius for the claim that ‘Augustus rendered a set of accounts of his rule to the Senate’; and he can point to De officiis to support the idea that the capacity to be able to ‘render an account’ for one’s behaviour, even when not formally obliged to do so, is practically the definition of moral duty.50 But the specific point which Petrarch wants to draw out is a Senecan one, applicable within a type of res publica which is recognisably absolutist: ‘what does it matter’, he says, ‘that 47

48

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50

Petrarca 1978: 822: ‘Audivi amplius quam semel dum tu diceres et iureiurando interposito affirmares non te dominio delectari paratumque illud sponte dimittere, ni timeres ne rem publicam alter invaderet et graviore illa iugo forsitan premeretur et tu esse quod nolles sub domino cogereris: alioquin multo malle te liberum quam dominum, cum et abunde de proprio dives sis, et potens sine tot curis expeditam et tranquillam agere iuventam . . .’ Petrarca 1978: 794: ‘ei cui reipublice cura commissa est summo opere providendum . . . Nichil igitur effundat, nil omnino faciat, nisi quod ad decus aut commodum pertineat civitatis, cui presidet; aut regni sic ad summam agat omnia ut administrator non ut dominus.’ Petrarca 1978: 794: ‘Ita, inquam, agat omnia, ut rationem de omnibus redditurus, utique enim rationem reddere habet, etsi non hominibus, at Deo.’ See Petrarca 1978: 794–6.

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someone is not to be held accountable to another person? For the soul is beholden to itself and its conscience, which, when unassuaged, makes life sad and anxious.’51 The monarch gives an account of his rule to his self and to his god alone. Petrarch can barely summon up sufficient emphasis to insist that Francesco must rule alone and advance no one in his government so much that ‘someone other than you is master’.52 Such a situation, Petrarch warns, would excite the greatest contempt among those whom he ruled. Burckhardt’s view that ‘the purely modern fiction of the omnipotence of the state’ was ‘worked out in detail’ in this Petrarchan document may be worth re-examining.53 A formerly undisclosed theme now becomes discernible in his opening chapter, where his assessment of this Petrarchan letter follows closely on from an analysis of Frederick II’s Constitutions of Melfi. In both cases, Burckhardt was tracking, albeit inadvertently, the presence of the self-reflecting Senecan princely person in a political literature deeply informed by the ideology of the mirror. Correspondingly, the extent of Petrarch’s debt to Cicero which more recent historiography has purported to find requires some redefinition. The idea that the text is somehow indebted to the Somnium Scipionis merely snatches at the presence of one vox among many in Petrarch’s rhetorical discourse.54 But Skinner’s point about the importance of De officiis requires attention.55 Petrarch’s whole argument runs counter to the anti-monarchism and antiCaesarism of the Ciceronian text which he criticises so heavily at the start of his speech. The place where Petrarch’s Ciceronianism is thought to be most evident is in his discussion of justice, where it is announced that ‘the function of justice is to give each his due, to harm no one without due cause, and even in circumstances where good cause has been established, to incline towards pity, imitating the behaviour of the celestial judge and eternal king’.56 The first two parts of the definition are certainly central to Cicero’s conception of justice, but they are also basic elements of Roman law. They are coupled to the last part – about 51

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Petrarca 1978: 796: ‘Quid autem refert alteri non teneri, cum sibi ipsi sueque conscientie animus teneatur, cui nisi satisfaciet, tristis et anxia vita sit?’ Petrarca 1978: 810: ‘Hac parte unum hoc monere satis atque hortari vix sufficio, ne quem talium sic commisse tibi patrie preficias, ut alius dominus sit quam tu.’ Burckhardt 1990: 23. For this claim, see Viroli 1992: 72. Skinner 1988: 415; Skinner 2002, II: 124–5. Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘Illud iustitie de qua loquor, munus eximium lateque latissimum, ius suum quique tribuere, nulli sine ingenti causa nocere, et, causa quamvis affuerit, ad misericordiam inclinare, imitantem celestis iudicis eternique regis morem.’

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the need to imitate the divine and royal morality of pity – because Petrarch wants his monarchical ruler to know that ‘pity and justice are inseparably conjoined’.57 He then recurs to St Ambrose’s writing on the Emperor Theodosius in order to extract the Christian wisdom that ‘pity is justice, and justice pity’.58 What Petrarch is counselling here is that Francesco should follow the example of the Christian king of kings, so that he ‘does not deny forgiveness’ to people who lapse ‘into error’ when it is safe to do so without running the risk of setting a dangerous precedent.59 The monarch needs to balance these acts of forgiveness against the need not to lapse himself into ‘too much pity’ or ‘too much leniency’ in the exercise of justice, since these excesses can be tantamount to ‘great cruelty’.60 These comments do echo Ciceronian strictures about the need to balance clementia against severitas, but those strictures had been reiterated by Seneca in a monarchical context; and here they appear to be part of an attempt to transpose Seneca’s teaching about the proper exercise of the royal, princely and imperial virtue of clementia onto the Christian quality of misericordia. When the humanist turns to discuss how the monarchical ruler should make himself ‘loveable’, he begins by saying that ‘the stability of the principate’ depends upon not wanting to be feared by everyone.61 He then immediately proceeds to associate the cultivation of fear in particular with the great vice of crudelitas, citing as an example the barbaric attitude of the Emperor Maximinus which is reported in the Historia Augusta.62 Petrarch goes to the Saturnalia of Macrobius to retrieve the saying: ‘He who is feared by many must fear many.’63 But he asks his audience to ‘listen to Cicero, or rather the truth speaking through Cicero’s mouth’ when he cites from De officiis the opinion that ‘nothing is more more conducive to securing power and retaining it than to be loved, nothing more alien than 57

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Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘Quamvis ergo misericordia et iustitia prima fronte contrarie videantur, recto iudicio inseparabiliter sunt coniuncte.’ Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘imo quidem ‘‘liquet iustitiam esse misericordiam et misericordiam esse iustitiam’’, quod preclare in libro De obitu Theodosii imperatoris sacer ait Ambrosius’. The reference is to Ambrose, De obitu Theodosius, 26. Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘ut levitate lapsis atque errore, si sine exempli periculo fieri potest, misericordia non negetur’. Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘Alioquin fieri potest ut nimia misericordia et indiscreta lenitas sit magna crudelitas.’ Petrarca 1978: 772: ‘Sit ergo hic rector in primis amabilis nec bonis formidabilis . . . nichil est enim stultius, nichil a principatus stabilitate remotius quam velle ab omnibus formidari.’ Petrarca 1978: 772, citing Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Maximini, VIII.8. Petrarca 1978: 772: ‘‘‘Necesse esset multos timeat quem multi timent’’’, citing Macrobius, Saturnalia, II.7.4.

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to be feared’ and that ‘fear is a bad guardian of longevity’.64 Petrarch then points out that Cicero’s understanding of the importance of love is derived from Ennius, whose warning that ‘whomsoever they fear they hate’ is cited in De officiis.65 Continuing to weave a complicated path through numerous places in Roman literature in which the question has been posed, Petrarch then focuses upon the grim dictum: ‘Let them hate, provided that they fear’ – which had been picked out twice by Seneca in De clementia and once in De ira as the favoured verse of the tyrant, and which Suetonius had attributed to Caligula in his biography.66 At this point, Petrarch launches into a defence of Caesar as someone who ‘did everything to be loved rather than feared’ through a notable degree of ‘gentleness and clemency’ and ‘munificence and liberality’ in his actions.67 Yet to adopt this view is to reverse the entire thrust of Cicero’s argument in De officiis, where the assassination of the tyrant Caesar is used to exemplify how fear can never help a person to retain authority for long. Petrarch is exploiting Ciceronian doctrine in order to make a case for clement Caesarism, exactly as Seneca had done in De clementia. In Petrarch’s text, the irony is more apparent in view of his opening comments about Cicero’s inconstant varietas. Petrarch clearly identified in Pro Ligario and Pro Marcello the line of thought about clemency and conquest which the Senecan theory had gone on to develop. For when the humanist states that ‘to spare someone is a noble kind of revenge, and to forget is extremely noble’, he adds that ‘Cicero himself writes’ that Caesar ‘used to forget nothing except past injuries’.68 HUMANIST PRINCELY DISCOURSE IN THE LATER TRECENTO

Between the 1360s and the end of the century, the writings of the generation of humanists after Petrarch continued to elaborate this Senecan princely ideology, using the language in both a distinctively ‘rexist’, or royal, mode and in signorial contexts to entitle rulers in Naples, Padua, 64

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Petrarca 1978: 772: ‘audiendus Cicero, imo quidem Ciceronis ore loquens veritas audienda esset. ‘‘Omnium’’, inquit, ‘‘rerum nec aptius est quicquam ad opes tuendas ac tenendas quam diligi, nec alienius quam timeri’’, nec multo post: ‘‘Malus enim’’ inquit, ‘‘custos diuturnitatis metus contraque benivolentia fidelis vel ad perpetuitatem’’’, citing Cicero, De officiis, II.7.23. Petrarca 1978: 774, citing Cicero’s use of Ennius at De officiis, II.7.23. Petrarca 1978: 774, citing the dictum found at De clementia, I.12.4; II.2.2; De ira, I.20.4; Suetonius, Caligula, 30, 1. Petrarca 1978: 774: ‘omnia fecit quibus esset amabilis potius quam timendus, quadam hinc mansuetudine atque clementia, hinc munificentia et liberalitate mirabili’. Petrarca 1978: 774: ‘ad veniam vero tam facilis fuerit, ut de eo Cicero idem scribat quod nichil soleret nisi iniurias oblivisci. Nobile quidem vindicte genus est parcere, nobilissimum oblivisci’, recalling Cicero, Pro Ligario, 12.34.

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Ferrara and Milan as princes. The effect of deploying this language of the princeps to talk about the monarchical rule of both regnum and civitas was the reinforcement of both of these entities as forms of principatus. At the same time, the language continued to provide a description of a res publica ruled by a princeps, and a political body ruled by a virtuous head who guaranteed its unity, its peace and its liberty. The ideology acquires a greater degree of ornateness and copiousness in part as the result of increasing rhetorical sophistication, in part as the consequence of an expanding and increasingly varied set of Roman texts which were drawn upon in order to embellish the precepts of princely government laid out by humanist educators, politicians and moralists. The person of the monarch also acquires the degree of interiority which the Senecan princely theory had envisaged for him; and it develops a more composite Senecan character, to some degree because humanists continued to transpose Senecan ethics onto a Senecan monarchical ideology in order to write about the prince. Like Petrarch, humanists such as Coluccio Salutati, who was a notary, and Pier Paolo Vergerio, who was a trained canonist, had a considerable knowledge of Roman law. Their articulation of the prince brings out some of the legalistic characteristics of the Stoic political theory which had pervaded Roman legal thought, especially the idea that ratio is a form of lex and the associated notion that, as the embodiment of ratio, the prince is the embodiment of iustitia. SALUTATI

The Petrarchan character of Salutati’s humanism requires no recapitulation, but the profoundly Senecan provenance of his Stoicism – an intellectual debt which the humanist lawyer and chancellor of the Florentine Republic shared with Petrarch – needs some further definition. Ullman and Witt have marked out the evidence clearly.69 Of all the classical schools of philosophy, the Stoics are known to have ‘had the greatest influence on Salutati through most of his life’.70 Salutati’s thought was ‘specifically Stoic’ in that the humanist was pre-eminently concerned with the figure of Fortuna, depicting her assaults upon the man of virtue in his work as ‘envious, cruel, treacherous, and deceptive’, and describing her person as 69

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Ullman 1963; Witt 1983. For the Petrarchan allegiances of the Florentine humanist group towards which Salutati gravitated, see Witt 1983: 57–62; for Salutati’s personal relationship with Petrarch, see Witt 1983: 85, 183; for Salutati’s lengthy efforts to secure copies of Petrarch’s work and of the contents of his library, see Witt 1983: 184–9; for Salutati’s stoicism, see Witt 1983: 62–77. Witt 1983: 64.

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‘raging, now enticing’, prevailing upon him persistently in ‘endeavours to destroy his control over the emotions’.71 There were few Stoics who saw Fortuna in this way – in fact there were few Stoics who saw Fortuna at all – other than Seneca. Similarly, while Salutati saw Fortuna in these terms, he was also able to write an account of a providential universe in De fato et fortuna in 1396, in which – as Witt forcefully reminds us – his ‘view of fortuna was that he became accustomed to conceiving it as an equivalent to God’s Providence’.72 The declared argument of the text was that the order of the universe ‘proceeds by fixed and immutable reason’ emanating from the person of God.73 Salutati similarly affixed fate and necessity to the axis of ratio, defining the former as ‘necessity flowing from God’s Providence directing and governing all things which exist and are produced in the universe’.74 This vision of things created for Salutati the problem of finding a place in his theory for a meaningful account of human freedom, and he resorted to an Augustinian theology in order to salvage a version of free will.75 Even here, Witt observes, ‘so eager is Salutati to stress the predominant role played by God in the human act, that it is difficult to see what is left for the free will’.76 In De fato et fortuna, Salutati announces the principal source of his understanding of Stoicism by declaring that ‘our Seneca’ is ‘without doubt the princeps of all the Stoics who wrote in Latin’.77 Three years later, in De nobilitate legum et medicine, he states that Seneca was an ‘incomparable preceptor of morals’, one of the many glowing epithets which he applied to the philosopher throughout his writings.78 Salutati was an assiduous Senecan scholar. Of the four major manuscripts containing opera of ‘Seneca moralis’ which are known to have belonged to him, two of them are heavily annotated in his own hand.79 Both of these contained De clementia; they also included De beneficiis, De ira and the Epistulae morales. There was another text of De clementia in a third manuscript, together with further versions of De ira and excerpts from De beneficiis, as 71 74

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Witt 1983: 63. 72 Witt 1983: 323–4. 73 Witt 1983: 319. Salutati 1985: 23: ‘ut fatum sit necessitas a Dei providentia fluens cuncta dirigens et gubernans, que sub celo sunt et efficiuntur’. The testimony of Seneca is adduced to support this definition in his next chapter (24–5). Witt 1983: 329–30. 76 Witt 1983: 323. Salutati 1985: 46: ‘Seneca quidam noster, stoicorum qui latinis scripserunt litteris sine dubio princeps’ (repeating his assertion at 24 that Seneca is truly the ‘latinorum stoicorum princeps’). Salutati 1947: 294: ‘incomparabilis morum preceptor Seneca’; for the other descriptions, see Ullman 1963: 251. The manuscripts are described in Ullman’s inventory of Salutati’s library. See items 18, 46, 53 and 56 in Ullman 1963: 150, 166, 169, 171. Note also the discussion of these mss. in Mazzoli 1982: 211–12.

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well as a complete copy of De beata vita. Salutati also possessed a copy of the Pauline correspondence: his belief in the friendship between St Paul and Seneca is well testified.80 Senecan excerpts and spuria, meanwhile, are scattered through numerous manuscripts. As for Seneca’s other works, one of the oldest manuscripts in Salutati’s library contained the complete Tragedies which had been copied by Salutati himself at some point after the 1350s, along with Mussato’s Ecerinis. It has extensive marginalia and interlinear variants.81 Salutati’s engagement with Seneca Tragicus emerged most conspicuously in his De laboribus Herculis, in which he was deeply concerned with Seneca’s depiction of the Stoic hero in the Hercules furens and Hercules Oeteus.82 Salutati maintained the traditional distinction between their author and the philosopher, but his admiration for the tragedies remained high: he cited them ‘several hundred times throughout his work’.83 Salutati’s almost inordinate esteem for Senecan moral philosophy, on the other hand, was based to a considerable degree upon his extraordinarily attentive reading of the Epistulae morales, which led to his involvement in the intense humanist critical discussions surrounding the text and meaning of a passage of Seneca’s first letter to Lucilius.84 In De fato et fortuna, Salutati explains why Seneca constituted such an important moral guide. Rather than placing a limit upon man’s capacity to ascend to the highest grounds of moral attainment – a limitation which he sees as inherent in assuming an Aristotelian ethical stance based on the doctrine of the mean (‘peripatetic mediocrity’) – Seneca’s ‘divine letters’ urge us to the ‘sublimity of a superheroic state’, and they aspire ‘to the height of Christian perfection’.85 Salutati understood Seneca’s moral teaching to be extraordinarily close to Christian truth: to follow in the footsteps of the vir sapiens of Seneca was to walk an essentially Christian path in imitation of Christ. Salutati is known to have tempered his Stoicism during the course of his intellectual development, acknowledging that while the rigidity of its doctrines approximated very nearly to Christian teaching, its exhortations to moral perfection delineated such a steep incline to the 80 82 83 84 85

Witt 1983: 214. 81 Witt 1983: 55. For Salutati and Senecan tragedy, see Witt 1983: 212–19; Ullman 1963: 23–4. Ullman 1963: 250. For Salutati’s intervention in the dispute, see Witt 1983: 234. Salutati 1985: 46–7: ‘Seneca quidam noster, stoicorum qui latinis scripserunt litteris sine dubio princeps et virtutum diligentissimus elimator, quique non eas illa peripathetica mediocritate que virtutibus ex humane participationis possibilitate modum ponit, sed ad superheroici status sublimitatem extollit divinis illis Epistolis, quibus doctrina mirabili <est> et que multotiens ad altitudinem christiane perfectionis ascendat.’

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‘superheroic state’ that arguably only Jesus Christ had possessed this degree of virtue.86 Salutati’s answer was to begin to advocate Aristotelian ethics as a more serviceable guide for ordinary mortals, even if he continued to espouse Stoicism and the Senecan letters as the finest philosophical treatment of the nature of true virtue. But Salutati’s writings about princely virtue show no sign of binding the monarch to a mediocre state. One text was addressed to the Angevin monarch of the Regnum, Charles of Durazzo. A cousin of Giovanna I, Charles had successfully pursued his claim to the throne of the Regnum with the support of the Roman pope Urban VI, who had excommunicated and formally deposed Giovanna in 1379 for her support of the French antipope Clement VII.87 Conquering southern Italy with an army composed largely of Hungarian mercenaries, Charles was crowned king of Sicily in Rome in June 1381. At some point in mid-September 1381, news reached Florence of his military victory over Otto of Brunswick, the German husband of Queen Giovanna I.88 The deposed queen had been arrested, imprisoned and, by the summer of the following year, smothered; but not before Salutati had set about composing an extended panegyric of the new king in which he urged the full set of Senecan virtues of moderation, magnanimity and self-restraint. Salutati spent considerable time working on the oration, although in the event it was neither finished nor delivered to the king.89 A version of it appears to have been copied in a manuscript of one Dominus Honofrius, whom Witt identifies as one of the two Florentine ambassadors to the Neapolitan court of Charles in 1384.90 Witt’s inference is that Salutati’s text was ‘probably copied in the chancery for the ambassador and was designed as a basis for his speeches to the king’.91 Salutati’s opening words hail the conqueror as ‘gloriossime rex, dux inclite, princeps victoriose’.92 The new rex is next acclaimed as the ‘most gentle of princes’: both the interchangeability of rex with princeps and the immediate attribution of the virtue of mansuetudo to the military conqueror open the way to the steady application of the language of Senecan monarchy throughout the oration.93 Charles is held up as a brilliant

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Excellent clarification of these points is in Witt 1983: 359–60. Abulafia 1997: 166–71. 88 Witt 1983: 209. For the text of the letter, see Salutati 1891–1911, II: 11–46. For an analysis of the circumstances surrounding its composition and transmission, see Witt 1983: 209–11. Witt 1983: 210, n.3. 91 Witt 1983: 210, n.3. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 11. 93 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 12.

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monarch, whose virtues help him ‘to glisten with a wonderful light of splendour above the regal peak’.94 This sublime position moves Salutati to admire the ‘astonishing felicity’ which stems from ‘your fortuna’, although he quietly announces that, having arrived at ‘the peak of your highness’ by means of ‘the happiest of courses’, the king should be aware of ‘how much moderation’ needs to be cultivated in view of the immense power which his new rule brings him.95 Charles is next praised for his ‘humaneness’, a quality which Salutati observes on display in the king’s willingness to have shown himself ‘to be always agreeable and easy to inferiors’.96 When he comes to give advice to Charles, Salutati begins by drawing out an analogy which was fast becoming a convention of humanist princely discourse: So you are king: before taking command over others, start commanding yourself. Rule over yourself; in your keenness to rule subjects, do not abandon the governing principle over yourself. For one man is a very great kingdom. Let reason command you, hold the sceptre over you. Let it regulate your will, curb your first motions, restrain your anger, extinguish your desire, blunt your longings. And, when you sense that you are this person, then command others.97

The royal rule of reason is to be established within the sovereign kingdom of the person of the king. Subjecting himself to reason within, the king emerges – as Petrarch had similarly contended – fully entitled to princely rule over subjects in his exterior kingdom. Only when he has demonstrated his superior virtue in this manner may the monarch authoritatively wield power over his kingdom: Let it be more disgraceful for you to be surpassed in virtue by your subjects than by the arms of others. It is both base and ridiculous for a morally inferior man to preside over his betters: you should excel your subjects not only in rank but in virtue. You should endeavour not only to be a king, but also to be judged worthy

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Salutati 1891–1911, II: 12: ‘licet tuis virtutibus, quibus supra regale fastigium mira splendoris luce refulges’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 13: ‘tue fortune mirabili felicitate permotum’; 13: ‘in tanto successuum tuorum felicissimo cursu et in tanti potentatus regimine quanta sit moderatio culmini tue celsitudinis adhibenda’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 14: ‘spem etiam dedit humanitas tua, qui te minoribus semper placidum et facilem prebuisti’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 32: ‘Rex igitur es: incipe prius tibi quam aliis imperare; rege te ipsum, noli regendorum subditorum studio tuimet derelinquere moderamen. Unus homo maximum regnum est; imperet et sceptrum teneat in te ratio; regulet voluntatem, contineat primos motus, comprimat iram, extinguat libidinem, obtundat cupiditates et, cum te talem senseris, tunc aliis imperato.’

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of your regal peak. For it is a feeble kingdom indeed which is thought to have been conferred upon an unworthy candidate.98

Salutati then reveals how deeply indebted he is to the Roman theory of monarchy: For a true king is a man whom reason places in authority, not a person produced by birth, or marked out by sheer power, or made by election. Yet the person who is pre-eminent in reason is one whom virtue so brings to perfection over all the others that, by comparison with him, they always appear to be lacking something.99

Salutati thus makes virtue a state of perfected rationality, combines it with a definition of monarchy in which virtue – and therefore reason – is the only criterion of the true prince, and immediately follows up this formulation by reverting to the same Senecan contention which sustained the Petrarchan discourse on monarchy: ‘there is no difference between a tyrant and a king, except that the latter is good, the former bad.’100 He further reiterates this definition in words closer to the Petrarchan rehearsal of the Senecan eschewal of the trappings of monarchy, saying that: ‘virtue alone – and not title, nor anointing, nor crown, nor consecration – produces the royal name’.101 In urging the monarch to subject his person to the government of reason, Salutati develops two key aspects of the Roman theory of the prince. The first is the view of monarchy as an onerous form of servitude: I want you first of all to reflect on the fact that you are a king, which is in fact a name that derives from ruling, and not from reigning, and signifies a sense of burden no less than of splendour. To rule is certainly a thing of great dignity; but it also involves labour, and if you abandon the latter, you will relinquish the former. The name of a king is not one used lightly: ruling over others is not an easy responsibility. So it was not without good reason that Tiberius, who went on to corrupt the laudable principle he enunciated through the cruelty and extravagance of his rule, is said to have groaned in response to those friends of his who urged him to take up his dominion without delay: ‘you have no idea how much of a 98

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Salutati 1891–1911, II: 32: ‘Sit tibi fedius tuorum superari virtutibus, quam aliorum armis. Turpe quidem est atque ridiculum minus bonum melioribus presidere: non tantum dignitate tuis, sed virtutibus antecellas. Conare quod non solum rex sis, sed dignus regali culmine iudiceris. Infirmum quidem regnum est, quod delatum creditur ad indignum.’ Salutati 1891–1911, II: 32–3: ‘Ille verus rex est, quem preficit ratio, non quem nativitas exhibet, potentia imprimit vel electio facit. Ratione autem preest quem ita super alios perfecit virtus, quod in eius comparationem aliquid non videatur aliis non deesse.’ Salutati 1891–1911, II: 33: ‘nichil inter tyrannum et regem interest, nisi quia hic bonus, ille malus est’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 33: ‘sola virtus, non titulus, non unctio, non diadema, non consecratio regium nomen gignit’.

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monster imperium is!’, before he finally, as if under coercion and all the while deeply lamenting the wretched and burdensome servitude to which he was to be yoked, took up the government of affairs.102

Salutati achieves a degree of variation in representing the Senecan doctrine, exemplifying his point by citing Suetonius, while at the same time amplifying the notion of servitude with a description of yokes, burdens and coercion. Nero protests; Tiberius groans. But this servitude brings out the heroic character of the prince. Salutati’s comparison of Charles of Durazzo’s triumph with that of the founder of the Angevin dynasty in the Kingdom, Charles of Anjou, leads him to apostrophise the imago of the latter, hailing his conquest over the Ghibelline Manfred in Herculean terms: ‘you acquired for your successors such a great kingdom with your sweat and your labours’.103 A little later, as the figure of apostrophe is continued and varied, Salutati points out to the ‘magnanimous prince’ that he has a ‘distinguished heir to his labours’.104 When he turns to address the present king, however, he is somewhat reticent about applying this heroic language. Hailing the new monarch as ‘the most glorious of princes’, Salutati reminds him abruptly that ‘it should be quite sufficient’ for him ‘to glory in the fact that God, the creator of all things, filled that magnanimous breast of yours with strength for this deed’.105 In Salutati’s vision of the conquest, there is a person moving the monarch: He directed you with his own hand . . . he raised you to the lofty peak of such a great kingdom . . . He himself, omnipotent God, moves the entire foundations of the earth, he himself anointed you, he himself led you into the kingdom by his own hand, and he himself has been your constant ally, so that you never became the prey of your enemies, he inclined the mind of the leaders of the kingdom and the people themselves to favour you, he opened the gates of the city of Naples to

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Salutati 1891–1911, II: 31–2: ‘volo quod primo cogites te regem esse, quod quidem nomen, a regendo veniens, non a regnando, non minus oneris significat quam splendoris. Regere quidem dignitatis est, est etiam et laboris, ut si hunc deseras, illam perdas. Non est ociosum nomen regis, non est facile munus aliis imperare, ut non immerito Tiberius, qui laudabile principium sui imperii crudelitate luxuriaque corrupit, persuadentibus amicis quod inire non cunctaretur dominium, tradatur increpans respondisse: nescitis quanta bellua sit imperium; et tandem, quasi coactus, conquerens miseram et onerosam sibi iniungi servitutem, rerum moderamina suscepisse.’ The citation is from Suetonius, Tiberius, 24. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 21: ‘patiare, fortissime principum, qui tuis posteris tantum regnum tuo sudore tuisque laboribus paravisti’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 23: ‘Nec pudeat, magnanime princeps . . . te talem et tam claram habuisse tuorum laborum heredem.’ Salutati 1891–1911, II: 25: ‘Ingens igitur et magnifica, ut ad te revertar, gloriosissime princeps, ingens, inquam, est ista victoria . . . satis tibi gloriari licet, quod opificii rerum omnium faber Deus tibi tam magnanimi pectoris robur infudit.’

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you, he rendered its populace friendly to you . . . he himself delivered the enemy with its army into your hands without any sweat or blood being shed.106

The providential metaphysics of De fato et fortuna is fully operative in this scenario. The physical involvement of the king in his military conquest is rendered practically nugatory. He is not the great author of his own victory: he neither walks to the royal heights with his own legs, nor takes the kingdom with his own hands. At the moment of military conquest, he is constituted as the passive object of a movement exercised upon his person by a divine power. God’s hand is eminently detectable in the king’s fortuna, carrying him through ‘the happiest of courses’ to the ‘astonishing felicity’ at ‘the peak of your highness’.107 As far as his conquest is concerned, the legitimate extent of the prince’s claim to glory seems to be his ability to boast that his magnanimity is a gift from God. The heroic labour has been almost entirely divine, and the prince has not had to shed a drop of sweat. Where, then, does Salutati identify a more promising arena for Herculean labour, for Stoic sweat and toil? In the moral conquests which the prince must make, in making reason rule his mind, in assuming the burden of royal servitude, in wrestling with the ‘monster’ of imperium and with the ‘race of vipers’ in the anti-pope’s camp, and, above all, in extirpating invidia from his government.108 Invidia comes to life in Salutati’s text: it is the ‘plague of courtiers’ and a ‘lethal beast’, which works ‘like a deathly venom’ upon the minds of men.109 The great ‘labour’ or ‘task’ performed by ‘blessed kings and happy princes’ lies in their recognition of Invidia’s weapons, in seeing through her ‘fictions’, and in slaying the vices that creep into the mind and cause infection in the body politic.110 The other means by which Salutati seeks to submit his monarch to the dictates of ratio is by advocating to him, through the figure of impersonation, the practice of conscientious self-examination:

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Salutati 1891–1911, II: 25: ‘sua manu direxit . . . ad tanti regni celsitudinem sublimavit. Ipse, ipse quidem omnipotens Deus movit omnia fundamenta terre; ipse te regem unxit; ipse te in regnum sua manu perduxit; ipse te, ne hostium tuorum predam fieres, continue sociavit; ipse procerum regni mentem in tuum favorem et ipsos populos inclinavit . . . ipse tibi Neapolitane civitatis portas aperuit; ipse tibi populum illum reddidit obsequentem . . . ipse hostem cum exercitu suo sine sudore et sanguine in manibus tuis dedit.’ See notes 105 and 106 above. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 27: ‘genus illud viperarum’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 35: ‘quasi venenum pestiferum mentes inficiens . . . nulla curialium pestis maior . . . pestis mortifera’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 35 (addressing Invidia): ‘societatem mortalium occulta infectione corrumpis . . . o beatos reges, o felices principes, qui tua figmenta cognoscunt, qui sciunt a tuis sagittis innocuos conservare’.

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Lodge in yourself a most diligent account (ratio) of all your thoughts and deeds: do not cast behind your shoulder any error for which you may have been responsible: instead, place yourself before yourself; say to yourself and to your conscience: these are the good things I have neglected, these the wrongs I have done, in this I have offended the spirit of the divine majesty . . .111

Elsewhere Salutati brings out the legalistic aspects of this practice of selfreflection, describing how conscience is an infallible eye-witness of all our deeds and alleging that we cannot possibly evade its accusatory and judgemental gaze into the innermost recesses of our soul.112 Conscience offers a structure of permanent surveillance within which to locate a prince whose activities are legally uncircumscribable. SALUTATI, VERGERIO AND THE SIGNORE AS PRINCEPS

Salutati’s correspondence with signori also follows the logic of the Senecan argument that virtue is the only criterion of monarchical rule. Writing to the ‘illustrious and distinguished prince’ Alberto d’Este in order to urge him to exercise clemency towards a member of government personnel involved in a popular rebellion in Ferrara, he strategically begins his plea by acclaiming the princely humanitas of the house of Este before going on to describe Alberto himself as ‘most humane of princes’.113 But humanist princely discourse was taken up with perhaps the greatest energy within the signorial contexts of Milan and Padua, where Petrarch had already led the way in praising the Carrara and the Visconti. One notable proponent of Senecan philosophy was Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna, a civil servant at the court of the Carrara whose writings illustrate his profound immersion in Seneca’s ethics and in the political theory of De clementia.114 An even more distinguished proponent in Padua was Pier Paolo Vergerio, who 111

112

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Salutati 1891–1911, II: 27: ‘pone tecum omnium cogitationum tuarum atque factorum diligentissimam rationem; noli, si quid per te erratum est, post terga proicere. Pone te ante te; dic tibi et conscientie tue: hec bona neglexi, hec mala feci, in hoc divine maiestatis numen offendi.’ Salutati, 1947: 334–6: ‘Nos ipsi possumus nobis tam esse Cato quam Lelius. Conscientiam enim nostram effugere non valemus. Infallibilis testis est, non possumus illam decipere. Non possumus ipsam, sicut illos coram quibus peccaverimus, evitare. Alii de nobis loquuntur ad alios. Illa nobiscum de nobis loquitur. Illa nos accusat, nos convincit, nos iudicat.’ For the letter to Marchese Alberto d’Este, see Salutati 1891–1911, II: 176–80. It opens: ‘Illustris et inclite princeps, singularissime domine mi. Non dedignetur illa clarissima domus Estensis humanitas in tuis progenitoribus semper emicuit’; and continues (178): ‘tu, princeps humanissime, hunc virum honestissimum . . . non dignaberis in tuam gratiam et statum pristinum revocare?’ See Ravenna 1980; Ravenna 1989. For biography, bibliography and discussions of his work and its context, see Sabbadini 1924; Kohl 1975; Kohl’s comments in Ravenna 1980: 13–46; Kohl 1983; Witt 1996; Witt 2000: 339–43. For Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna and Vergerio, see McManamon 1996: 10, 37–9. For the Paduan political context in these years, see Kohl 1998.

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came to regard Conversini as a mentor but whose formation as a Petrarchan humanist had been partly assured through his association with Salutati during his youth.115 According to McManamon, Vergerio, as a student and professor at Bologna, was ‘galvanised by the idealism that Cicero and Seneca had embodied’.116 Like Petrarch and Salutati, Vergerio was committed to an austere form of Stoicism. McManamon points to his attempts ‘to conceive of his poverty as the nurturing companion of a true sage’, an attitude ‘in keeping with Stoic ideals’ and related to his admiration for the ascetic aspects of the experience of St Jerome.117 Vergerio is similarly said to have ‘gravitated towards the Stoic doctrine of impassivity, inspired by his reading of the Roman philosopher, Seneca’, although he may not yet have been in possession of the two manuscripts of Seneca’s writings which he is known to have acquired and glossed.118 Indeed, in ‘repeatedly emphasising his recourse to authors such as Seneca’, Vergerio was ‘engaged in a therapeutic quest to convince himself and others of his happiness’, although, like Salutati, the humanist’s commitment to the rigours of Stoic and Senecan ethics relaxed as he matured.119 Vergerio’s writings on monarchy are fully informed by the Roman theory of the prince. His oratory at the court of Francesco Novello da Carrara depicted a Padua restored to freedom after a period of Visconti domination by a virtuous act of liberation that had ushered in peace.120 The plea which he lodged with Francesco Novello in the early 1390s to show clemency to Bartolomeo Cermisone after his defection to the Visconti was a classic appeal to the prince to exercise the great Roman imperial virtue which was reckoned to have ‘reconciled Roman society after the traumatic experience of civil war’.121 Opening with the salutation ‘mildest of princes’, Vergerio takes Francesco to be ‘merciful and gentle’ both by nature and by reason of his moral formation.122 Nothing, he alleges, offers a more memorable demonstration of the benevolence of princes than Francesco’s recent display of ‘a superabundance of clemency’ in the wake of civil war; 115

116 117 118

119 122

For Vergerio’s Petrarchism, see McManamon 1996: 51–70. For Vergerio and Salutati, see Robey 1973; McManamon 1996: 14–16, 36. For Vergerio’s contribution and its context, see Robey 1980 and Robey 1983. McManamon 1996: 18, 22. McManamon 1996: 20. For Vergerio’s lifelong admiration of Jerome, see McManamon 1999. McManamon 1996: 20. For the mss. of Seneca, see McManamon 1999: 260–1. For the autograph glosses of his Senecan writings, see McManamon 1996: 158. McManamon 1996: 21. 120 McManamon 1996: 39–49. 121 See McManamon 1996: 47. Vergerio 1934: 431–2: ‘Multa michi verba facienda essent pro impetranda venia, mitissime princeps, nisi te et natura et moribus, ut ex preclaris facinoribus tuis compertum habeo, clementem mansuetumque cognoscerem.’

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no misdeed, it seems, is so ‘atrocious or savage that you could not overcome it with your gentleness’ – so much so that Vergerio is led to refer to Francesco’s ‘innate clemency’.123 Vergerio was aware that this ideology yielded a specific version of the concept of liberty, as the surviving fragment of his theoretical work De monarchia shows.124 Here Vergerio states that monarchy – or ‘the principatus of one man’ – is preferable to the rule of the many, and is modelled on the divine rule of God, the summus imperator who governs everything by his judgement alone as the supreme arbiter.125 The closest thing to God’s heavenly regime is ‘a good princeps and a well-ordered civitas’.126 The distinction between princeps and rex then disappears, and the conflation of categories of rex, princeps and imperator within this way of thinking about the prince emerges once again as Vergerio continues: ‘if, therefore, a king is good, if he is just, if he is clement, and if the more power he has over the laws, the more he submits himself to them, there is certain peace, there is true liberty.’127 The perfectly virtuous, self-subjecting figure of the just and clement king promises vera libertas. The question of how to produce a virtuous monarch capable of bringing peace and liberty to the civitas is partly addressed in Vergerio’s immensely influential treatise De ingenuis moribus, where an education in the liberal arts or the ‘liberal disciplines’ is held to be essential to the political health of a monarchy.128 These studies, Vergerio explains, are so called because ‘they are worthy of a free man’.129 They are the means by which ‘virtue and wisdom are either practised or sought’.130 As such, they should be the concern of everyone. But he stresses that a liberal education is especially

123

124 125

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128 129 130

Vergerio 1934: 433: ‘sed nulla utique maiora, nulla magis memoranda se offerunt quam que tu ex abundantissima clementia perfecisti . . . nullumque unquam tam atrox tamque truculentum nefas contra te conceptum est quod mansuetudine tua non vinceres . . . quapropter innatam tibi clementiam, que etiam ad perfidos et parricidas attigit, redde viro forti et fideli insontique proli eius’. The extant text is at Vergerio 1934: 447–50. See the discussion in Robey 1973. Vergerio 1934: 447: ‘Illud michi ante omnia certum videtur, monarchiam, id est unius principatum, multitudinis imperio prestare, et ad similitudinem huius machine mundane, que tam firma pace, tam certis legibus iuncta constat, mortales homines regi, atque ad regulam illius summi imperatoris, qui cuncta solus arbitrio suo moderatur, vitam nostram conferri.’ Vergerio 1934: 447: ‘Quid enim esse potest similius Deo et illi perpetuo celorum consensui quam princeps bonus et bene composita civitas?’ Vergerio 1934: 447: ‘Si sit itaque rex bonus, si iustus, si clemens, et, quo plus legibus potest, eo magis legibus subsit, ibi certa pax, ibi vera libertas est.’ Vergerio 2002: 4. Vergerio 2002: 28: ‘Liberalia igitur studia vocamus, quae sunt homine libero digna.’ Vergerio 2002: 28: ‘ea sunt quibus virtus ac sapientia aut exercetur aut quaeritur’.

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crucial to those ‘of lofty rank’.131 Paraphrasing De clementia, he explains that these men are particularly obliged to ensure they have been educated properly, for they ‘cannot do or say anything in secret’.132 Rather, they have to show themselves to be worthy of the ‘fortune and rank’ they possess.133 He later adds that in ‘princes and great men’ moral probity ‘is considered remarkable and renowned’ either ‘because it is rare amidst good fortune, and therefore most greatly admired, or because it gleams more brightly from fortune’s splendor’.134 To be a ruler is to be highly conspicuous: ‘evil deeds cannot remain hidden, even secret ones’.135 Fortunately for Padua, Ubertino da Carrara – to whom Vergerio addresses his text – has been born in ‘an ancient and royal city’ which ‘flourishes in the study of all the liberal arts’.136 He is the son of ‘a prince under whose leadership the happy state of the city . . . increases daily’.137 He is also committed to the type of syllabus that Vergerio is about to outline. This is why Vergerio is able to exclaim: ‘what else can I advise you to do, other than what you always do? What person can I recommend to you as a model of virtue other than yourself?’138 Vergerio’s treatise, he assures Ubertino, is not designed ‘to advise you, but to advise others of this age through you’.139 Vergerio goes on to discuss in detail the pedagogical utility of persons as mirrors: living images of virtues whom the young can usefully reflect upon and aim to imitate.140 But he very explicitly connects the study of the liberal arts with the condition of being free. When discussing the syllabus, he declares that ‘to the truly noble mind, and to those who are obliged to involve themselves in public affairs and human communities, knowledge of history and moral

131

Vergerio 2002: 4: ‘praecipue tamen qui excelsiore loco sunt’. Vergerio 2002: 4: ‘quorumque nihil neque dictum neque factum latere potest, decens est ita principalibus artibus instructos esse’, rehearsing – as Kallendorf indicates in his notes to the text – the points at Seneca, De clementia, I.8.1. 133 Vergerio 2002: 4: ‘Ut et fortuna et gradu dignitatis quam obtinent digni habeantur.’ 134 Vergerio 2002: 40: ‘in principibus vero et magnis viris probitas, sive quod rara sit in multa fortuna ac propterea magis admirationi habetur, sive quod ex fortuna splendore magis illustretur, ea, vel si modica est, praeclara atque insignis habetur’. 135 Vergerio 2002: 40: ‘malefacta autem nec latere quamvis secreta possunt, nec cognita diu tacere’. 136 Vergerio 2002: 4: ‘in hac vetustissima regia urbe quae et cunctarum bonarum artium studiis floret’. 137 Vergerio 2002: 6: ‘ex principum genere atque ipso patre principe natus, sub cuius ductu et felix urbis status et familiae vestrae clarissimum nomen excrescit in dies’. 138 Vergerio 2002: 6 (citing translation (modified) from Vergerio 2002): ‘Quid enim aliud possum monere te ut facias quam quod semper facis? Aut quem tibi alium ad exemplar virtutis commendare quam te ipsum?’ 139 Vergerio 2002: 6–8: ‘Tuo igitur nomine breve hoc opus suscepi et de liberalibus adulescentiae studiis ac moribus, id est, in quibus rebus exerceri ingenuos adulescentes quidve cavere conveniat, adortus sum ad te scribere, non quidem quo ipse te, sed ut per te ceteros id aetatis commoneam.’ 140 See Vergerio 2002: 12–14. 132

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philosophy are the more suitable subjects’.141 For ‘the rest of the arts are called ‘‘liberal’’ because they befit free men, but philosophy is liberal because its study makes men free.’142 Here Vergerio is rehearsing Seneca’s words.143 Certainly, eloquence is a crucial part of the curriculum, and history is vital in supplying us with examples, but moral philosophy gives us the necessary precepts to make us virtuous, wise and free. Vergerio’s commitment to libertas has been observed by McManamon, who points out how ‘Vergerio tended to emphasise the moral dimension of the free person’ and ‘reflected upon his own interior freedom and what inhibited that freedom. When human beings succumbed to physical urges, they sacrificed that freedom. To fill one’s stomach or acquire riches or satisfy one’s lust all comprised enslavement . . .’144 The outlines of a distinctive picture of how a Renaissance humanist education could be said to produce free men within free republics thus begin to emerge. Republics could be held to enjoy true liberty insofar as the prince who ruled them was such a free person. The prince is free because he is wise, living in accordance with reason, carefully nurtured by the studia liberalia which ensure his correct moral formation as a free person: free from the effects of libido, irrational affects and mala Fortuna. As the head of the res publica, the free prince governs the body politic virtuously, thus guaranteeing its happy, peaceful and free state. He thereby constitutes an example for those whom he rules – a mirror of virtue. But it is not just that a humanist pedagogical ideology played out to monarchical effect when institutionalised within the political structures of a princely regime. The pedagogical writing itself was inflected by the monarchical ideology which helped to legitimate and reproduce the political structures in which it was composed. Vergerio could see that there was another story to be told about liberty and freedom within the republic, and it was one which he placed in the mouth of Cicero in his celebrated defence of the Roman statesman against the criticisms of Petrarch. According to this Ciceronian perspective, ‘in a free city, the very name of cruelty is hated’, but equally, ‘so is that of clemency invidious; nor are we easily accustomed to call a man clement, 141

142

143

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Vergerio 2002: 49: ‘Nam liberalibus quidem ingeniis et his qui in publicis rebus et hominum communitate versari debent, convenientiora sunt historiae notitia et moralis philosophiae studium.’ Vergerio 2002: 49: ‘Ceterae quidem enim artium ‘‘liberales’’ dicuntur quia liberos homines deceant; philosophia vero idcirco est liberalis quod eius studium liberos homines efficit.’ Seneca 1917–25, 88.2, vol. II: 348: ‘Quare liberalia studia dicta sint, vides; quia homine libero digna sunt. Ceterum unum studium vere liberale est, quod liberum facit.’ McManamon 1996: 91.

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unless he can also be cruel with impunity’.145 The fact that Caesarian clemency was construed within the Ciceronian republican tradition as tyrannical absolutism was exactly the problem which Seneca had tried to see off in De clementia. The marshalling of Ciceronian arguments against monarchy was to reach its climax in the Florentine conflict with the Milanese at the turn of the century; but the contrast between liberty and monarchy can be found in Salutati’s writings as early as 1377.146 In 1392, Salutati indicated to Pasquino de’ Capelli in Milan that his study of Cicero and the Roman civil wars was helping to clarify his thoughts on the means by which Rome was reduced ‘from popular liberty to monarchical servitude’.147 Salutati was also able to draw upon De officiis to claim that Caesar was the ‘parricide of the fatherland’; and a Ciceronian thesis correspondingly underpinned his assertion in 1394 that Caesar and Augustus marked the ‘beginning of perpetual servitude’ for the Roman populus.148 145

146

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Vergerio 1934: 441: ‘ut in libera civitate nomen ipsum crudelitatis odiosum est, ita et clementie invidiosum, nec facile solemus quemquam clemente dicere, nisi qui et crudelis impune esse possit’. For the defence of Cicero and for Vergerio’s civic humanist credentials, see Robey 1973: 6–14; McManamon 1996: 52–60. See the citation in Witt 1969: 452: ‘Sublata autem sub cesaribus libertate . . .’ As Witt points out (452) of this missive, ‘when Salutati speaks of liberty in these passages, he surely means republican liberty as opposed to a government of a lord no matter how beneficent his role’. Salutati 1891–1911, II: 389: ‘vidi tuo munere bellorum civilium fundamenta et quid caput illud orbis terrarum de libertate populica in monarchie detruderit servitutem’. Indicated in Robey 1973: 23. For Caesar as a parricide, see Salutati’s comments to Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna in Salutati 1891–1911, II: 409: ‘et cum iure patricida patrie vocaretur’. For the reference to the ‘servitude of monarchy’, see Salutati’s letter to Pasquino cited in the note above, and also Witt 1969: 464–5; for the ‘perpetual servitude of princes’, see the text of an unpublished missive at Witt 1969: 466, n.115: ‘Quid enim fuerunt cesaris vel octavii dominatus nisi principium perpetue servitutis’ (also cited in Robey 1973: 23).

PART IV

The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento to the High Renaissance

CHAPTER

5

Princeps, rex, imperator

The Senecan ideology was hardly the only means by which the Renaissance monarch articulated his claims to embody the person and authority of the princeps. In addition to an array of legal arguments, an impressive mobilisation of ideological resources drawn from a considerable range of Roman imperial texts and monuments can be observed in the formation of the princely person and in the description of his principatus. And during the Quattrocento, elements of Platonic political theory were also steadily introduced into humanist discourse on the prince, grafted onto a pre-existing tradition of considerable longevity.1 But there was a limit to the extent to which Platonic ideals could transform either the content or the character of a mode of political reflection within a culture so fervently committed to the articulation of its thinking in Roman rhetorical style, and so indebted already for a great deal of its basic conceptual structure to a markedly Roman literature on the ideals of monarchical rule. From Petrarch to Erasmus, humanist mirrors generally spend little time introducing the prince to Plato’s theory of forms.2 Notwithstanding the multiplicity of classical texts and genres upon which humanists drew in princely discourse, one can discern a coherent and fairly continuous conceptual basis underpinning their account of the virtuous prince. That structure is traceable to a remarkable extent to the one classical speculum with which almost every writer on monarchy was highly familiar: De clementia. Indeed, from the turn of the Quattrocento through to the High Renaissance, the centrality of the classical theory of the prince to monarchical ideology on the Italian peninsula was secured by a complex series of causes which can be very basically abbreviated. 1 2

Hankins 1990; Vegetti and Pissavino 2005. But for an important exception, see the discussion of Francesco Patrizi’s Platonism in De regno in Viroli 1992: 114–21 (n.b.: at 96, Viroli also notes the ‘decided sympathy for Seneca’ expressed in the Trattato politico-morale of the Florentine moralist Giovanni Cavalcanti during the 1440s).

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Humanist princely discourse in both its royal and signorial mode had already acquired a fundamental set of conventions from the Senecan speculum which held in place the person purported by the theory through myriad modifications during the Quattrocento. But if continuity was guaranteed in part by the establishment of regularities at a discursive level, and in part by the increasingly sophisticated exploration of Senecan philosophy, it was also assured by the ongoing political utility of the ideology to which it had given rise. The theory constituted a vital ideological resource across the period because it furnished a language with which to explain and legitimate military conquest and the establishment and consolidation of princely rule as right, rational and enlightened. This chapter is designed to illustrate some of the diversity, utility and complexity of the theory’s relation to the princely ideology by examining that relation in a signorial, royal and imperial setting. THE SENECAN PRINCEPS IN VISCONTEAN MILAN

One of the many insights into the history of Renaissance Senecanism which Letizia Panizza provided in her seminal article on Gasparino Barzizza, the leading exponent of Senecan moral philosophy during the early Quattrocento, was her observation about the eclipsing effect of Enlightenment silences in the historiography of her subject.3 In his ‘determination to present Barzizza as the fitting successor to Petrarch, another Cicero who brought the revival of eloquence to its peak’, the eighteenthcentury editor of Barzizza’s letters had heralded the humanist’s achievements primarily in terms of his work, from 1421 onwards, on the newly discovered orations of Cicero, while omitting to mention at all Barzizza’s work on Seneca’s letters in the form of commentaries for which he became famous in his day.4 Pronouncing it ‘astonishing’ that within this historiography such achievements ‘slip into the background’ and ‘disappear altogether’, Panizza recovered an episode in the development of Senecan studies by laying out a systematic account of the context, chronology and content of Barzizza’s exposition of Seneca’s moral philosophy.5 As a consequence, a distinctive intellectual trajectory became evident within the movement of humanist thought from the early Trecento to the early Quattrocento, which made Barzizza’s regard for Seneca’s Epistulae morales 3

4

Panizza 1977. Also fundamental to the revival of interest in Gasparino Barzizza: Mazzuconi 1977; Mercer 1979; Pigman 1981; Pigman 1982; Panizza 1983; Rosa 1997; Rosa 1999. Panizza 1977: 301, commenting on Furietti’s preface in Barzizza 1723a. 5 Panizza 1977: 301.

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as ‘the product of the greatest moral philosopher in antiquity’ appear far from idiosyncratic.6 Barzizza was a graduate of the University of Pavia, an important centre of Milanese humanism under the Visconti. He may have been the ‘Gasparinus’ who worked as a notary at the Visconti curia during the years 1384–92. It is also possible that he obtained a position at court during the years 1400 to 1403.7 At any rate, he became a teacher at Pavia from 1403, and his contact with humanists in the Visconti court almost certainly helped to define his work. In 1407, Barzizza took up residence in Padua as a university lecturer in rhetoric and moral philosophy, later returning to Pavia upon his appointment to the chair of rhetoric in 1421 and remaining there until his death.8 During his early years in Padua, he produced his commentaries on the Senecan correspondence while lecturing on the texts.9 He conscientiously reworked his notes for a course of public lectures on the Epistulae morales in 1411, but his commentaries also circulated informally among friends and admirers.10 His commitment to Senecan philosophy was defined by a range of conventional humanist beliefs and scholarly activities. His engagement in the dispute over the text and meaning of Letter 1 of the Epistulae morales links Barzizza to an established humanist debate.11 His interest in Seneca’s tragedies could be traced back through Salutati, Boccaccio and Petrarch to Albertino Mussato in early Trecento Padua, as could his work on Seneca’s biography.12 The vitae of Seneca written by Barzizza and by the Chancellor of Padua, Sicco Polenton, drew particularly upon Boccaccio in order to embroider the claim that Seneca had been, as Mussato had put it, a ‘philosopher of Christian dogma and a tacit supporter of Christians’.13 Polenton’s Seneca embodies his own ideal of the vir sapiens refracted through a Christian perspective: ascetic, poor, chaste, vegetarian.14 Barzizza went further: Seneca 6

7 9

10 12 13

14

Mercer 1979: 43. For Barzizza’s possession of five manuscripts containing the works of ‘Seneca’, including the Epistulae morales, the spurious correspondence, the moral works, the tragedies and the declamations of Seneca the Elder, see Mercer 1979: 113–14. For Barzizza’s Senecanism as the continuation of twelfth-century trends, see Panizza 1977: 304. For earlier scholarly commentaries on the Senecan and pseudo-Senecan correspondence, see Panizza 1977: 307–8; Marcucci 1999. 8 Martellotti 1965: 35; Mercer 1979: 25. Panizza 1977: 298–9; Mercer 1979: 29. For the composition, revisions and redactions of Barzizza’s commentaries between 1408 and 1413, see Panizza 1977: 299, 308–13; Mercer 1979: 38–9, 80; Albanese 1999: 15–24. Panizza 1977: 299–301; Mercer 1979: 43 (106–17 for Barzizza’s school). 11 Panizza 1983. For Barzizza’s glosses on Seneca’s tragedies, see Mercer 1979: 78. Panizza 1977: 307, n.39 (citing Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS L 53 sup, fol. 1r): ‘Philosophus christiani dogmatis et christianorum fautor tacitus.’ For Barzizza’s biography of Seneca, see Panizza 1977: 304–32. Panizza 1977: 325.

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was a friend of St Paul who had actually embraced Christianity at his death in a secret form of baptism, securing his salvation after a life of dissembled faith which made him comparable to Nicodemus.15 Barzizza’s successor in the chair of rhetoric at Pavia, Lorenzo Valla, was to reject as spurious the Pauline correspondence, thus beginning the process of chipping away at Seneca’s increasingly complicated Christian credentials. But Valla’s doubts remained characteristically exceptional at least until the time of Erasmus.16 The more conventional view was reasserted by Valla’s successor in the chair, Antonio Beccadelli, better known as Panormita.17 Panormita was Visconti’s court poet and a teacher of rhetoric at Pavia from 1429 to 1434. He was probably a former student of Barzizza; his opinion of the man was at any rate extremely high.18 Panormita also subscribed to a Christian Seneca, asking rhetorically, in a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, ‘who doubts that Annaeus Seneca knew Christ and was a friend of the apostle Paul and has a place in the catalogue of the saints?’19 Barzizza held that the most important part of philosophy ‘impels men to live the good and blessed life with a certain type of reasoning’.20 While admitting their importance, Barzizza alleged that the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions were too bound to a contemplative form of philosophy.21 He criticised Aristotelianism for being especially liable to stiflingly abstract enquiries. Barzizza singled out Seneca as an unparalleled source of ethical wisdom – ‘easily the princeps of all the Greeks and Latins’ – because his rhetorical writings effectively engendered changes in moral behaviour.22 The humanist had ‘no hesitation in placing this man before Plato and Aristotle’ because ‘the latter are praised for their disputations, the former for his advice and his activities. Whereas they taught men how to understand and to talk, he placed every fruitful outcome of philosophy in 15 17

18

19

20

21 22

Panizza 1977: 319–25. 16 Panizza 1977: 336; Jardine 1994: 31–2. For Panormita, see especially Resta 1954; Resta 1965; Resta’s comments in Beccadelli 1968: 5–58; Resta 1990; Ryder 1976a; Bentley 1987: 84–100, 135–7, 147–61, 160–8. Resta 1965: 400; Mercer 1979: 133, 136. For Gasparino as ‘a sort of Delphic oracle’ for Panormita, see Sabbadini and Catalano-Tirrito 1910: 119–20. Beccadelli 1553, IV: 81: ‘Quis ambigit Anneum Senecam Christum novisse et Apostoli Pauli amicum fuisse, et in catalogo sanctorum positum?’ Barzizza 1977c: 350: ‘Quanquam multa sint in philosophia vel ad institutionem vitae vel ad naturae leges a sapientissimis hominibus praeclare scripta . . . tamen non egregriae dixerim ullam eius partem nostro studio aut nostra admiratione dignam quam illam quae homines ad bene beateque vivendum cum ratione quadam impellat.’ Barzizza 1977c: 351–2. Barzizza 1977b: 349: ‘Non ergo immerito creditus est ab omnibus viris illustribus qui post ipsum venerunt in virtute et moribus regnasse, et omnium sive Grecorum sive Latinorum facile principem fuisse in hac ipsa philosophia arbitror magis faciendo quam dicendo quantum prodesset hominibus philosophia ostendit.’

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action.’23 Seneca was a Latin Socrates; his rhetorical writings were essential to ‘the welfare of the soul’, providing the basis of a ‘vivere oneste’ in a body of moral doctrine which demonstrated an exemplary concern to link philosophy to practice.24 For these reasons, Barzizza asserted, Seneca ‘is quite rightly called the greatest teacher of life by everyone in our time’.25 Barzizza engaged in one regular practice of self-formation in which he repeatedly enrolled the Senecan texts: he developed the habit of copying philosophical mottos onto his manuscripts. So, for example, the dictum ‘vincit malos pertinax bonitas’ from Seneca’s De beneficiis is inscribed on the fogli di guardia of six of his codices, thus constituting a stimulating injunction to constancy.26 But Barzizza regarded the Epistulae morales as the finest source of instruction on how to achieve the ‘perfect state of life and that felicity which the Stoics attributed to virtue alone’.27 Barzizza’s commitment to Senecan ethics pervades his political writings. The Visconti in Milan and the Carrara in Padua had been characterised for decades by a Petrarchan ideology of virtue indebted to the Roman theory of monarchy. From approximately 1412 to 1435 both Gasparino and his son, Guiniforte, produced orations addressed to Filippo Maria Visconti which were deeply Senecan in their depiction of monarchy.28 In 1412, Filippo Maria Visconti had embarked upon a sustained project of reconstituting the Milanese domains which had become severely dissipated during the previous decade.29 His first success was in regaining control of Milan itself in June 1412, and one Barzizza speech, probably written later that year, begins with a celebration of the virtuous achievements and the felicitas of his ‘most illustrious duke and outstanding 23

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Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Nos vero . . . habemus Scenecam quem ego minime Socrate inferiorem neque vita neque morte iudico. Platoni vero et Aristoteli non dubitabo hunc hominem anteferre. Illorum enim disputationes, huius vero consilia et facta laudantur. Cum enim illi intelligere et loqui docuissent, iste omnium philosophiae fructum in actionem constituit.’ Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Ego vero de hoc homine ita iudico ut ei difficile sit honeste vivere qui huius adhortationes ac praecepta non legerit . . . Quotiens autem paulo attentius me Senece dedissem, mirum erat quantum vel bene vivendi ad spem mihi accederet, vel ad animi salutem.’ Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Non itaque immerito dictus est optimus magister vitae ab omnibus nostrae aetatis hominibus.’ Rosa 1997: 15. For the motto, see Seneca, De beneficiis, VII.31.1. Barzizza 1977a: 342: ‘causa finalis huius libri est perfectus vitae status et ea felicitas quam Stoici posuerunt in sola virtute’. The orations are in Barzizza 1723a and Barzizza 1723b (discussed in Mercer 1979: 98–105). For Visconti as ‘our most humane prince’, ‘the best of princes’, ‘the most wise prince’ and ‘our divine prince’, see Beccadelli 1553, I: 1b–7a; III: 48a. For mss. containing De clementia in the Pavian library under the Visconti and Sforza, see Mazzoli 1982: 212. For the humanist milieu under the Visconti, see Garin 1955; Rabil Jr 1991. For the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, see Cognasso 1966: 345–57. Cognasso 1966: 357–424.

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prince’.30 Filippo Maria had lost ‘nearly the whole’ of his ‘principate’; and the ruler’s enemies ‘had attempted to shake to the foundations, to topple and to lash’ his ‘state’.31 But in recovering Milan, Filippo Maria had restored hope both to the principality and to the whole of Italy.32 His great sapientia is held to consist in the extraordinary virtus which had been evident ‘even in the cradle’.33 For ‘there has been no one in our age who in adulthood has borne the injuries of Fortuna more wisely’ than Filippo Maria, who has ‘not only endured them but also overcome them since childhood’.34 This wisdom and virtue is also held to have made him a master in the ‘science of ruling a principatus’, equipping him with ‘gravity in deliberation, swiftness in execution, justice in government and clemency in pardoning easily’.35 The result is that ‘anyone who approaches you thinks that they are looking upon no mere mortal man but upon someone seemingly sent to us from heaven itself’.36 The heaven-sent Filippo Maria ‘is raising up the foundations of the royal majesty which the magnanimous prince your father had laid down’, a feat which the ruler was accomplishing ‘with great virtue’.37 The power of the Senecan monarchical ideology for the Milanese was this ability to articulate the Visconti signore as a ‘magnanimous prince’ enjoying a ‘royal majesty’ in his ‘principate’. It elevated the ruler to such a height that it put the ‘ducal name’ which his father and predecessor Giangaleazzo Visconti had been granted by the emperor into the shade.38 Barzizza acknowledges that the title had brought lustre to

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33 34

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Cognasso 1966: 393–4. For the oration, see Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Quantum tuae felicitati gratuler, illustrissime Dux, ac Princeps clarissime, etsi non dubitem, satis animo tuo persuasum esse; tamen res visa est, et aetate mea, et studiis maxima digna, ea ad te scribere, quae vel ad fidem meam, vel ad perpetuam gloriam tuam pertineant.’ For its date, see note at Cognasso 1966: 37. Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Cum enim morte Serenissime Ducis patris tui omnia fere cum eo sepulta videremus, neque iam ullum speraremus exitum tot nostris calamitatibus posse inveniri . . . Non enim propositi mei est commemorare, a quibus hominibus gravissimas iniurias perpessus fueris, aut quibus auctoribus de toto tuo Principatu, ac fratis iam pene actum esset . . . qui omni scelere, ac impietate universum statum tuum labefactare, ac funditus evertere, et lacerare conati sunt.’ Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Tantam enim spem, Dux optime, non solum his, qui tibi serviunt, sed pene toti Italiae hoc tempore attulisti.’ Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘in cunabulis tuis’. Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Nemo nostris annis fuit, qui in aetate perfecta sapientius injurias fortunae tulerit, quam tu ab ipsa usque pueritia non solum pertulisti, sed etiam fortiter vicisti.’ Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Nunc vero, quae in te Principatus gerendi scientia est, quanta in deliberando gravitas, in conficiendo celeritas, in gubernando iustitia, quae denique in facile ignoscendo clementia?’ Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Certe quisquis ad te accedit, non iam se mortalem hominem intueri, sed quasi ex ipso Coelo ad nos missum putat.’ Barzizza 1723a:38: ‘Quare nemo dubitaverit, te ad hoc natum esse, ut fundamenta Regiae Majestatis, quae pater tuus Princeps magnanimus iecerat, tu ipse magna virtute modo excites.’ Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Ducale nomen’.

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Visconti rule, but he points out to Filippo Maria that it was ‘inconceivable, after having raised yourself up from so many dangers and labours, you should be content with that dignity which the most famous Duke himself first brought to your house’.39 The ideology which Barzizza’s text extends had long offered a far more potent language with which to assert the princely character of signorial rule. Capable of conquering Fortuna, Filippo Maria is then assured by Barzizza that ‘fortune rules the greatest of your affairs by divine counsel and through the great power of the stars, and you will ascend higher than many men – especially your own – expect’.40 If ‘it is the virtue of princes not merely to attain the glory of his ancestors but to outstrip it’, Filippo Maria’s precocious attainment of the princely heights has nevertheless been achieved divinitus – by means of divine providence.41 Barzizza then digs deeper into the Senecan text. Having already reached ‘such great happiness’, the ‘most clement Duke’, he says, need only self-reflect.42 Barzizza ‘can find no one among the ancients whom you should rather follow than you yourself ’.43 The Visconti prince is his own best example. Barzizza thus counsels him to ‘learn from yourself’ before acting.44 Above all, Filippo Maria is urged to look after himself for the same reasons that Seneca had given: ‘your health is our health, certainly, and if you look after yourself, you attend to the common dignity and welfare of your people and the goods of everyone’.45 This care would bring Filippo Maria the advantage which Seneca had pointed out and which Barzizza reiterates: ‘there will be many people who, if need be, would willingly and readily place their physical strength and their bodies in every kind of danger on your behalf ’.46 39

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Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Non enim credibile est, te ex tot periculis, ac laboribus emersisse, ut ea dignitate contentus sis, quam Dux ille clarissimus primus in domum tuam attulit.’ Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Mihi crede, magna vi astrorum, et divino consilio fortuna tuas res maximas reget; et altius ascendes, quam multi homines, sed maxime tui, expectant.’ Barzizza 1723a: 38–9: ‘et est Principum virtus non tantum gloriam maiorum sequi, sed etiam anteire . . . Et quoniam, quae vix aliis Principibus in senectute contigerunt, tu divinitus anticipasti.’ Barzizza 1723a: 38–9: ‘Merito ergo huic tuae tantae felicitati maxime gratulor, Dux clementissime, et te plurimum adhortor, ut sicut facis omnia saepe tecum mediteris, quae te summum Principem efficiant.’ Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘non invenio, quem antiquorum potius sequaris, quam te ipsum’. Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘Tu a te ipso disces, quid agendum sit.’ Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘Cum enim tua salus nostra sit, certe, si te ipsum conservaveris, communi eorum, qui tui sunt, ac bonorum omnium saluti, dignitatique consules.’ Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘Et quo diligentior sis in tua salute custodienda, omne studium, omnem curam, ac diligentiam adhibebis, cum omnia suspecta sint: hoc omnes volunt, qui te modo circumstant, ac diligunt. Nec dubito multos esse, qui, si opus erit, ipsa latera sua, ac corpora omnibus periculis libenter, et impigre pro te opponent.’

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Barzizza’s son, Guiniforte, similarly expounded Senecan doctrine to Filippo Maria nineteen years later, extolling clementia as ‘that greatest of all the virtues which are called royal’, and announcing that he is compelled to think of Filippo Maria’s clemency as if it were ‘a limb of his soul, a part of his essence’, so deeply did it inform his person.47 This was a truly heroic accomplishment, since, as Barzizza underlines, ‘there is nothing more difficult for a man than self-conquest’.48 Guiniforte proceeds to exemplify the precepts of the theory by reference to Visconti’s government. He highlights Filippo Maria’s merciful treatment of even the ‘most terrible enemies’ who had dedicated themselves to ‘subverting your state’ but who had been conquered in war and now reduced utterly ‘into your power’.49 His self-restraint in sparing the lives of opponents and those of their families was remarkable, restoring them to their possessions and their libertas.50 In so doing he had shown his ‘placable nature’ and his ‘leniency’ – a conquest of victory itself, which is ‘by nature insolent and proud’.51 Barzizza barely rephrases the idea of the prince as arbiter, reminding Visconti that ‘the power of life and death over us has been placed in your hand by God Almighty’, congratulating him for never misusing his liberrimum arbitrium out of anger.52 Guiniforte then points to the ‘force and splendour of clemency which extends far and wide’.53 But clemency is also fertile, bearing great fruit for the prince.54 The imagery of De clementia is well exploited.55 Turning to 47

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Barzizza 1723b: 10: ‘Nunc vero, ut ad summam illam omnium virtutum, quae Regiae nuncupantur, accedam, clementiam scilicet; adeo te cunctis admirabilem in ea praebuisti, ut iam non amplius veluti habitus quidam accedat animo, sed quasi membrum animae, et essentiae tuae pars merito iudicari possit.’ The date of the text is given at 15. For Guiniforte, see the bibliography in Albanese 1999: 47, n.53. Barzizza 1723b: 10: ‘Quod si, et argumento, et exemplo tenemus, nihil homini difficilius esse, quam seipsum vincere.’ Barzizza 1723b: 10–11: ‘Saepe enim, cum atrocissimos hostes in tui potestatem eventus belli redegisset, et quidem eos, qui susceptorum ex domo tua beneficiorum, non tam, immemores, quam ingrati suam omnem operam in tuo Statu subvertendo quandoque adhibuissent.’ Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘illos a tua pietate non solum vita, libertate, conjugibus, liberis, potentia, dignitate, fortunis denique omnibus, verum etiam splendissimis tuis muneribus donatos patriae suae restituisti’. Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘Quo uno facto ipsam quoque victoriam natura insolentem, ac superbam placabilitate vicisse, et lenitudine tua domuisse videris.’ Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘Iracundiam autem consilii, et modestiae inimicam ita comprimis: ut, cum a summo Deo vitae, ac necis nostrae potestas in manu tua posita sit, numquam tamen liberrimo hoc tuo arbitrio ad supplicia contumacibus infligenda, ira commotus abutaris.’ Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘longe enim, ac late clementiae vis, ac splendor patet’. Barzizza 1723b: 12: ‘Audeo, Princeps humanissime, affirmare uberrimum te ex hac ipsa clementia, quam ita studiose in omni sui parte excoluisti, fructum reportasse.’ For virtus as a fruit, see De clementia, I.1.1. For the idea that the wise prince is a farmer cultivating trees, see De clementia, II.7.4. For the clement head presiding over abundance, see De clementia I.19.8. For the healthy body politic as thriving vegetation which never wilts while its head is fit, see De clementia II.2.1.

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another metaphor favoured in the theory, Barzizza reminds Filippo Maria that clemency is florid and his a ‘most flourishing kingdom’.56 Finally, the humanist hails him as a ‘Pater piissime’, describing his Milanese subjects as ‘imitators of your paternal virtue’.57 One topic from De clementia proved to be outstandingly useful to Renaissance princely regimes seeking to assert their rulers’ claims to preeminence. Seneca had provided clear guidance on how the prince should treat monarchs whom he had conquered. The Roman prince’s claim to be the sole princeps mundi could be amply validated, according to Seneca, by his clement behaviour towards captured rulers. Clemency meant not having either a superior or an equal. For one can easily ‘take the life of even a superior; one cannot grant it to anyone except an inferior’.58 And ‘no one has ever saved anyone without being superior to the person saved’.59 Military conquest might put a prince physically in possession of another monarch, but such potestas did not in itself indicate any form of meaningful superiority on the terms of the Senecan theory. Superiority comes to the ruler from using ‘in a noble spirit the great gift which the gods have given him’.60 The loftiest demonstration of such magnanimity involves sparing ‘those whom he knows to have been on the same royal pinnacle as he’, since the mere fact of having gained control over them suffices as punishment for former monarchs.61 Seneca had summarised the dilemma of the fallen monarch memorably: ‘to owe one’s life is to have lost it’.62 In this position of indebtedness, a captured monarch survives ‘to the glory of his saviour’, and he should be kept alive rather than ‘snatched from sight’: the debtor ‘offers a lasting spectacle of the other’s excellence’.63 Indeed, ‘if his 56

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Barzizza 1723b: 14: ‘in tuo florentissimo Regno’. For things flourishing under the clement prince of the theory, see De clementia, I.1.2 (‘nulla pars usquam nisi volente propitioque me floret’); I.10.1 (‘quidquid floris erat in civitate, clementiae suae debebat’); I.19.18 (‘Quis ab hoc non, si possit, fortunam quoque avertere velit, sub quo iustitia, pax, pudicitia, securitas, dignitas florent, sub quo opulenta civitas copia bonorum omnium abundat?’). Barzizza 1723b: 13–14: ‘In te, Princeps potentissime, omnia et vitae nostrae ornamenta, et salutis adminicula posita sunt: tu nos paternae virtutis imitatores succurrendo . . . tu, Pater piissime.’ Seneca 1928a, I.5.6: 372 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘vita enim etiam superiori eripitur, numquam nisi inferiori datur’. Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘servavit quidem nemo nisi maior eo, quem servabat’. Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘Uti itaque animose debet tanto munere deorum dandi auferendique vitam potens.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘In iis praesertim, quos scit aliquando sibi par fastigium obtinuisse, hoc arbitrium adeptus ultionem implevit perfecitque, quantum verae poenae satis erat.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘perdidit enim vitam, qui debet’. Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘quisquis ex alto ad inimici pedes abiectus alienam de capite regnoque sententiam exspectavit, in servatoris sui gloriam vivit plusque eius nomini confert incolumis, quam si ex oculis ablatus esset. Adsiduum enim spectaculum alienae virtutis est; in triumpho cito transisset.’

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kingdom can safely be left in his charge’, it is wise to restore the ruler to the heights ‘from which he fell’, since a monarch left in situ through an act of clemency will redound to the triumphant prince’s credit.64 Acting thus means ‘to triumph over one’s own victory’, ensuring that ‘the praise will be hugely increased’.65 A chance for the Milanese regime to deploy this distinctive set of claims was presented by the political events of 1435, when King Alfonso of Aragon was captured by a Genoese fleet near the island of Ponza during the long war of conquest waged in pursuit of his claim to the Neapolitan throne.66 The Genoese delivered their captive to their overlord, Filippo Maria Visconti, who became Alfonso’s jailer. This encounter famously transformed the political complexion of Quattrocento Italy. Alfonso was unexpectedly set free by Filippo Maria, who immediately became his most powerful – and at that stage his only – political ally. The Milanese did not overlook the opportunity to exploit the ideological advantages of Visconti’s actions. In the Duomo of Milan on the festival of Corpus Christi in 1446, Francesco Filelfo, one of Barzizza’s former pupils, produced a panegyric of the Milanese prince’s virtues which culminated in a description of Alfonso’s imprisonment.67 Alfonso is at the mercy of Filippo Maria, transformed ‘from a king into merely a private individual, from a master into a captive, from a free man into a slave’.68 All his territories are effectively ‘in the power and control of Filippo Maria alone’.69 But Visconti liberates Alfonso, and Filelfo can exclaim, ‘the admirable magnanimity of our prince! The kindness of this the most munificent man of all time!’70 To the Visconti prince, ‘nothing was more abhorrent than cruelty, nothing more ingrained in him than clemency, nothing more habitual than humaneness and beneficence’.71

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Seneca 1928a, I.21.3: 416–18 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘Si vero regnum quoque suum tuto relinqui apud eum potuit reponique eo, unde deciderat, ingenti incremento surgit laus eius, qui contentus fuit ex rege victo nihil praeter gloriam sumere. Hoc est etiam ex victoria sua triumphare testarique nihil se, quod dignum esset victore, apud victos invenisse.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.3: 416–18 (Seneca 1995: 153). For the battle and its consequences, see Cognasso 1966: 439–49; Ryder 1990: 200–9. For the text, see Filelfo 1898. For Filelfo and Barzizza, see Mercer 1979: 136. For Filelfo and Milan, see Robin 1991. For Filelfo in general, see especially Avesani 1986. Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘privatum e rege, e domino captivum, e libero servum’. Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘in unius Philippi Mariae Angli potestatem ac ditionem’. Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘O mirabilem principis nostri magnitudinem animi! O in omne saeculorum omnium munificentissimi viri benignitatem!’ Filelfo 1898: 21: ‘Primum omnium ostendit Philippus nihil a suis moribus abhorrere magis crudelitate, nihil esse clementia sibi antiquius, nihil humanitate et beneficentia usitatius.’

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From Aragonese Naples, the view of the king’s capture was somewhat different, but no less artfully brought into focus by the same concepts of the Roman theory of monarchy. Looking back at the events some twenty years later, Panormita, now in Aragonese employment, made his king’s capture the setting for a mighty display of magnanimity in the face of injury and adversity. Alfonso simply rises above his misfortune: They say that when they led him to Filippo, the captured king so invariably retained the authority and majesty of a free man that he appeared to his victors not as someone vanquished, but rather as a vanquisher. For he gave instructions daily to the sailors who brought him . . . and they carried them out with reverence and compliance. Moreover, it is not for nothing that some said that whatever fortune befell him, Alfonso seemed and was deservedly thought a king.72

Both prisoner and captor are thus able to demonstrate their princely character on the terms of the Senecan theory. Within both accounts, the fact of Alfonso’s physical captivity is immaterial. Visconti’s superiority is established over the king when he magnanimously sets him free, not when he captures him in war; while in the Alfonsine account, the king is said to have never really lost his libertas in the first place. Alfonso can be held to be a vir liber notwithstanding his chains. He constantly maintains his liberty in the face of ill-fortune. Prison becomes an ideal setting for a princely display of virtue, a place where monarchical qualities can really shine through. THE SENECAN PRINCEPS IN ARAGONESE NAPLES

Having captured Naples in 1442, Alfonso – known as ‘the Magnanimous’ – returned in the following year to the capital of his new kingdom. After nearly two decades of conflict, he had succeeded in bringing both island and mainland under Aragonese government, reconstituting the Kingdom of Sicily according to its former dimensions. Alfonso ‘celebrated his triumph in the style of the Roman Caesars’ in what was, by all accounts, a carefully choreographed entry into the capital.73 En route, Alfonso’s retinue passed through the city’s Florentine community. A dramatic interlude ensued, as the inhabitants led out a procession of the cardinal 72

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Beccadelli 1589, III.38: 80–1: ‘Captum vero regem, dum ad Philippum perducerent adeo liberi auctoritatem maiestatemque perpetuo servasse aiunt, ut interdum victoribus ipsis, non victus, sed victor potius appareret. Nautis enim, qui eum conducerent, ac navis praefecto, quae ipse cuperet, quotidie mandasse, mandata illos obsequenter et reverenter executos esse. Propterea haud quidem temere dixisse nonnullos, in omni fortuna Alphonsum et videri et existimari merito regem.’ Ryder 1990: 248.

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and theological virtues, each personification bearing identifying symbols in its hands.74 The figure of a Roman Caesar followed them in an ornate carriage, a globe of the world at his feet. According to one tradition, he hailed Alfonso as ‘Eccelso re o Cesare novello’ in a clunking pun, urging the king to cultivate justice and to spurn Fortuna, and beseeching almighty God to keep the king in prosperity and ‘Florence in liberty’.75 In the elegant account of Alfonso’s triumphus later provided by Panormita, Caesar warned Alfonso about the deceptions of domina Fortuna at the head of the procession, seen stroking her golden hair: ‘on no account should you trust in her: she is unstable and fickle. And behold the changeable world. Everything is uncertain except virtue.’76 As the retinue progressed, an altogether more princely set of moral qualities – Magnanimity, Constancy, Liberality and Clemency – were mobilised by the Catalan contingent, and each apostrophised the king from its float.77 The most extravagant claim was reserved for the figure of Clementia, who virtually steps out of the Senecan speculum and goes to greet her own image in the person of the Aragonese king: Then Clemency, her face more exhilarated than all the others, gazed at her reflection in the king as if in a mirror. ‘O King, these other sisters of mine render you outstanding among mortals, certainly’ she said. ‘But I make you the equal not of men but of the gods. For it is I who have showed you how to conquer yourself, how to spare the defeated, and how the defeated are to be reconciled to you.’78

The Senecan virtue announces the two dominant themes of the Alfonsine ideology: divine clemency and princely self-conquest.79 A letter of 1443 from Panormita to Alfonso exemplifies the political language that was to inform the humanist narrative of Alfonso’s victory: 74 75

Ryder 1990: 250. Croce 1889: 563: ‘Eccelso Re, o Cesare novello . . . Alfonso Re di pace Iddio te esalti e dia prosperitate, Salvando al mio Firenze libertate.’

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Beccadelli 1589: 108–9: ‘Sequebatur hos rerum domina fortuna super tabulato pictis tapetibus instrato . . . ‘‘Sed fortunae quae tibi paulo ante crinem aureum porrigere videbatur, nequaquam confidas, fluxa et instabilis est. Ecce et mundus volubilis, et praeter virtutem omnia incerta.’’’ Panormita’s account of the procession of virtues is found at Beccadelli 1589: 108–10. Beccadelli 1589: 110: ‘Clementia deinde vultum praeter caeteras exhilarata velut in rege quasi in speculo se ipsa intueretur. Reliquae, inquit, o rex hae sorores inter mortales te sane prestantissimum reddunt. Ego vero te non hominibus sed diis immortalibus facio aequalem. Ille quidem vincere ego te victis parcere eosdem tibi conciliari monstravi.’ Important interpretations of the political character and function of Neapolitan humanism under the Alfonsine regime are: Gothein 1915; Altamura 1941; Resta’s preface in Beccadelli 1968: 5–58; Tateo 1971; Santoro 1974; Bentley 1987; Santoro 1990; Ferrau` 2001.

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Everyone deservedly rejoices because you are victorious, but I rejoice both because you are victorious and because you practise clemency and moderation in victory. Your virtus has rightly obtained victory for you, but this much you have in common with many others. For there have always been, and there are today, those who have conquered, triumphed, ruled: they are innumerable and include among them those who are unjust and wholly unworthy; but those who have vanquished and have also spared the vanquished, never acting intemperately, avariciously, cruelly – there are extremely few examples of such men either in our own time or throughout the whole of history . . . Your Cato used to say that the worst ruler was one who did not know how to rule over himself, and consequently, as I recall, that it seemed absurd that a man who could not conquer himself should be the conqueror of many others. That great Macedonian is praised for being undefeated in feats of arms, but he is censured because he was vanquished by his own anger. Hannibal’s cruelty robbed him of much of his glory. For my part, I would rather that victory wins praise for you, than Fortune wins victory for you: for whatever happens in war redounds to Fortune’s praise, but if in conquering you conduct yourself with benevolence, pity, chastity, mildness, and firmness, you will defraud Fortune of her praise . . . you will serve for the whole of posterity as an example of clemency and humaneness.80

The extent to which Panormita here deploys the language of Cicero’s panegyric of Julius Caesar in Pro Marcello to hail the clemency of his own prince shows how Renaissance princely ideology recognised the theoretical relation between Cicero’s treatment of clemency in his Caesarian speeches and the Senecan development of the theme.81 But there was a polemical edge to this recruitment of Cicero to the Aragonese cause. The Alfonsine ideology took up and reinvigorated the Trecento Petrarchan arguments about the Neapolitan rex, forwarding them from the humanist heart of royal government. Alfonso emerges fully equipped with the requisite Senecan princely virtues long held to ensure the proper government of a body politic plagued by division. Yet the Alfonsine version 80

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Beccadelli 1746: 313–14: ‘Quod vincis, merito omnes gaudent; ego vero, et quod vincis gaudeo, et quod victoria clementer, et moderate uteris, recte quidem virtus tibi victoriam peperit: verum hoc ipsum commune cum multis: nam et qui fuerunt, et qui sunt, vicerunt, triumphaverunt, imperarunt: hique innumerabiles, et interdum etiam iniusti, ac penitus indigni, qui vero, et vicerint, et victis pepercerint, nihil intemperanter, nihil avare, nihil crudeliter agentes, hi nostro, atque omni tempore perpauci, sed et dissimiles habiti sunt, et habebuntur. Cato tuus aiebat pessimum imperatorem esse, qui sibi ipsi imperare nescire, ideo, ut arbitror, quoniam absurdum videretur eum plures vincere, qui se unum ipse non vinceret. Macedo ille magnus armis invictus laudatur, ira victus vituperatur. Annibalis gloriae multum crudelitas detrahit. Equidem malo tibi victoria laudem inveniat, quam fortuna victoriam, quicquid in bello accidit, fortunae laus est: verum si vincendo, benigne, misericorditer, caste, mansuete, constanter te gesseris, fortunam sua laude fraudabis . . . erisque posteris omnibus clementiae, et humanitatis exemplum.’ See especially Cicero, Pro Marcello, 4–13.

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was much more than a restatement of Petrarchan royal humanism. In the first place, the language had passed through an important stage of development in the Milanese nexus. The production of the Alfonsine ideology was enriched by a flow of ideas, materials, manuscripts and personnel from Lombardy. The earliest humanists to be recruited to the Aragonese cause had passed formative years in Viscontean Milan. The first to arrive at Alfonso’s side in 1432 was Guiniforte Barzizza.82 In a letter to the king in June 1440, Guiniforte informs Alfonso that he is finally in a position to send a copy of his father’s commentaries on the letters of Seneca which the king has ‘so greatly demanded’.83 Guiniforte was shortly followed to Naples by Valla and Panormita.84 The definition of the king’s image was further determined by a set of political and ideological considerations which the language of Alfonso’s critics illuminates. If the Crown’s military domination was largely achieved by 1443, opposition to Aragonese rule materialised in sporadic moments of rebellion and fully re-emerged upon the death of Alfonso in 1458 in the form of seven years of civil war, which recurred again during the 1480s, under his successor Ferrante.85 One of the ideological causes of these baronial wars – a little hard to locate in modern accounts – was royal absolutism. Alfonso’s rule was regularly designated as solutus a legibus and the category of potestas absoluta was invoked time and again in the chancery registers of his reign.86 To construe Alfonso’s politics of clemency as conciliatory is to remain locked into the ideological construction of that politics. Sporadic rebellion and then civil war indicate a rather different perception of what was occurring. In 1446, Borso d’Este warned Alfonso that in his kingdom ‘he is not loved at all; on the contrary, he is hated instead’, mainly because his patronage of ‘Catalans’ had alienated segments of the nobility who felt their ancient rights had been infringed.87

82 83

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Ryder 1976b: 221; Albanese 1999: 47. For the text of the letter, see Albanese 1999: 49–50. Barzizza’s letters to Alfonso reveal Alfonso’s insistence on obtaining Seneca’s works (Albanese 1999: 46–8). For Alfonso’s possession of a copy of Barzizza’s commentary on Seneca’s letters (Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, lat. 8555), see Albanese 1999: 14, 25–37. For the history of the transfer to Naples of the mss. belonging to his father, Gasparino, see Rosa 1997. For Panormita’s move, see Ryder 1976a: 124–5; for Valla’s, Bentley 1987: 108–10. For Centelles’ rebellion in Calabria in 1444, see Pontieri 1962; Ryder 1976b: 288, 321, 323; Ryder 1990: 247–8. For civil war under Ferrante, see Bentley 1987: 24–33; Abulafia 1997: 223–9. For the economic conflicts between the Crown and its subjects, see del Treppo 1987. Ryder 1976b: 31–2. For analysis of the judicial material relating to the administration of justice under Alfonso, see also Ryder 1976b: 136–68. Proposta 1879: 714: ‘non e amata per niente: anci, e plu tosto odiata’.

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This anti-Catalan sentiment formed part of a wider polemic against the Aragonese regime. The most stinging attack issued from Florence. Alfonso’s abortive Tuscan campaign in 1447–8, ostensibly in pursuit of a claim to the Milanese territories after Filippo Maria Visconti’s death, provoked a fierce response from the Republic.88 Florentine commercial interests in the Mediterranean had long conflicted with those of Aragon–Catalonia; after the conquest of the Regnum, their economic concerns were further threatened. When Alfonso laid siege to the Tuscan port of Piombino in June 1448, all the rhetorical reserves of classical republicanism were marshalled in order to denounce the military intervention. At the core of this invective was the identification of Alfonso as a beast, a plague, a marauding Hannibal. In the words of Cosimo de’ Medici, Alfonso was ‘la peste catalana’.89 Addressing the Sienese in 1448 as the representative of a Florentine embassy sent to drum up resistance to Alfonso’s encroachments in Tuscany, Giannozzo Manetti urged resistance to the ‘king who so ardently pants with desire to pervert all the liberties of Italian peoples and take control of them’.90 If Piombino fell, Alfonso would be able to ‘torment and tear apart the whole of Italy more easily – and not just Tuscany’.91 The town of Bagno had managed to evade ‘the savage and inhuman hands of their Catalan and Spanish enemies’.92 But if no action were taken, Alfonso ‘would overthrow and ravage everything else that you Sienese have left with a steady campaign of plundering, devastation and wrecking’.93 Manetti’s assault reached its climax in his appropriation of 88

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For the circumstances surrounding the Milanese claim and the campaign of 1447–8, see Ryder 1990: 272–81. Pontieri 1975: 285; Ryder 1990: 278. Manetti 1968: 155: ‘Cum Florentini amici ac finitimi vestri, quorum legati et oratores sumus, prestantissimi huius incliti consistorii presides vosque alii clarissimi cives, Alfonsum celeberrimum Aragonum regem magnis et infestis exercitibus ex Tiburtinis regionibus, ubi anteacta hieme hibernaverat, in mediam pene Etruriam adventasse cognovissent, confestim ad celerem quandam virium suarum preparationem atque ad variam et copiosam peregrinorum militum conductionem se se ceteris posthabitis converterunt, ut commemorato regi singulas quasque Italorum populorum libertates pervertere et occupare cupienti atque anhelanti viriliter et animose (admodum ut cupiebant) repugnare ac resistere valerent.’ The similar ‘Oratio ad Venetos’, penned during the crisis, is in Manetti 1968: 165–75. These orations are discussed in Bentley 1987: 123–4, who describes Manetti’s otherwise close relations with the Alfonsine government at 122–7. For Manetti’s biography and political career, see Manetti 2003: vii–xix, and the bibliography at 319–22. Manetti 1968: 155: ‘ne Alfonsus opido capto oportunissima et accomodatissima futurorum tam maritimorum quam terrestrium bellorum sede potiretur, unde universam Italiam (nedum Etruriam solam) facilius postea diripere ac vexare posset’. Manetti 1968: 157–8: ‘Balnea namque – ut pauca e multis leviter attingamus – suapte natura libera et cunctis tendentibus pervia et expedita variis suorum militum direptionibus ita impedivit, ut egrotantes in egrotantibus suis persistere quam in sevas et inhumanas Catalanorum et Hispanorum hostium manus venire maluerint.’ Manetti 1968: 158: ‘reliqua omnia vestra partim direptionibus partim populationibus partim vastationibus perverterit ac vastaverit’.

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Cicero’s damning indictment of Caesar in order to condemn the Aragonese monarch: For so great and so violent is his ambition, so great and unbridled his desire to govern and dominate, and so great and so immense his lust and passion to rule and reign, that he lets it be known that he is allowed to do and say anything, no matter how base or wrong, in pursuit of the extension of his empire. Thus he does not think that for a king to lie and be deceitful for the sake of his throne is senseless and alien to the conduct of kings; he thinks it is actually royal and regal behaviour. Indeed he has frequently declared as much plainly and openly in his words and actions: he shows no fear in recalling and alleging that every human and divine law was overthrown daily by Gaius Caesar on behalf of the object of his desire – the principate. And he shows no shame in openly adducing and distorting another thing about the same Caesar – forgetting that it was said in quite another way by him – namely that Caesar was accustomed to render into Latin that execrable precept of a certain Greek poet in the following words: ‘If justice must be violated for sovereignty’s sake, it must be violated: you may indulge your scruples elsewhere.’ Alfonso does not hesitate to proffer this opinion of Caesar very frequently without any qualification and broadcast and interpret it in such a way that it gives licence to Christians (not to mention infidels) to violate any laws whatever for the sake of reigning supreme.94

There was nothing new about this use of De officiis as the source of the antiprincely arguments of Florentine republicanism, still glimmering in its foreign policy notwithstanding the increasingly obnoxious effects of the Medicean ascendancy at home. The thesis that monarchy was a form of slavery had resurfaced in the debate between Poggio Bracciolini and Guarino da Verona in the famous controversy over the relative merits of Scipio and Caesar.95 According to Poggio, the very name of Caesar was dishonourable, so closely was it associated with his crimes, so stained was 94

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Manetti 1968: 163–4: ‘tanta est enim et tam vehemens eius ambitio, tanto quoque et tam effrenata presidendi ac dominandi cupiditas, tanta denique et tam immensa regnandi et imperandi aviditas et ardor, ut omnia sibi quamvis turpia et nefaria pro amplificatione imperii dicere ac facere licere pre se ferat. Quocirca regem mentiri et fallere regnandi gratia non modo non absurdum et a regiis moribus alienum, sed et regium et regale esse putat; quod quidem verbis et operibus sepenumero ita plane et aperte declaravit, ut a C. Cesare propter eum quem sibi ipse in mente sua finxerat principatum omnia iura divina et humana perversa fuisse quotidie allegare et commemorare non extimescat; et illud alterum eiusdem Cesaris non oblitus, aliter tamen quam ab eo diceretur, in medium adducere ac depravare non erubescit: ille enim hanc execrandam cuiusdam Greci poete auctoritatem in Latinum sermonem talibus verbis convertere solebat: ‘‘Si violandum est ius, regni gratia violandum est. Aliis in rebus pietatem colas.’’ Alfonsus vero hanc Cesaris sententiam sine aliqua conditione plerumque proferre et promulgare et ita interpretari non dubitat, ut Christianis (nedum infidelibus hominibus) quecunque iura regnandi gratia violare liceat.’ This passage grafts together De officiis I.8.26 and De officiis III.21.82. For the documents in which the debate is principally conducted, see Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 357–90; Guarini 1915–19, II: 221–54. For the debate, see Oppel 1974.

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his reputation by the blood of civil war.96 His mores were characterised by rapacity, cupidity and ambition.97 Those who defended Caesar by appealing to his liberalitas were being disingenous: for how could it be called liberality to extort and seize property in order to redistribute it to one’s supporters? This was robbery, not liberality.98 And his apparent clemency was, in truth, a sham.99 Cicero’s praise of the clemency of Caesar in Pro Marcello was forced upon him by circumstances rather than by any commitment to veritas.100 There was nothing, Poggio concluded, ‘in the life of Caesar which could deservedly be regarded as praiseworthy, except for his military achievements’.101 He had murdered eloquence, undermined the foundations of the Republic and reduced the Roman people ‘to utterly wretched servitude’.102 The Neapolitan ideology was finely attuned to such attacking voices. The two humanist documents whose eloquence did most to secure Alfonso’s fama as an outstandingly virtuous princeps issued from the heart of the royal court after the Peace of Lodi in 1454. Both presented the Alfonsine conquest as the triumph of princely virtue; both involved the authorship of Panormita; and both depicted the Aragonese prince in strikingly complementary imagery. The first of these was Alfonso’s 96

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Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 364: ‘Caesaris nomen flagitia plurima dehonestant, rapinae, furta, intestinae dissensiones, civilis sanguis, libido immoderata dominandi, stupra, adulteria, studium lacerandae patriae, atque animus ad omne facinus promptus.’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Mores eius multifariae interpretantur. Quidam enim commendant, alii secus tradunt. Nam prona ad principatum natura vitam multis flagitiis inquinavit. Ambitio et damnandi [¼ dominandi?] cupido nil ex legibus, nil ex utilitate publica agere permisit. Facinorosos, audaces, raptores, egestate perditos, turpi iudicio damnatos in suam familiaritatem recipiens sublevabat, alebatque veluti suarum cupiditatum ministros. Libidine fuisse immoderata Suetonius tradit, stupra eius et adulteria referens permulta. Rapacem etiam constat fuisse et alienis appetentem . . .’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Liberalitatem quidam laudando efferunt. Sed quae est liberalitas, alteri per vim eripere, extorquere, furari ut aliis largiaris? Rapina haec, non liberalitas est appellanda.’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Nulla est clementia, non trucidare eos qui patriae libertatem tuentes, tyrannidem recusabant . . . quae laus est, non iugulasse cives, cum patriae sanguinem exorbuerit?’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Laudat noster Cicero Caesarem restituto Marco Marcello, multisque verbis commendat suam clementiam in civibus conservandis. Laudat item cum Q. Ligarium, regemque Deiotarum defendit, at vero eas laudes non protulit veritas, sed temporum necessitas extorsit.’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Nihil ergo reperiamus in Caesaris vita quod digne laudari mereatur, praeter res bello gestas.’ Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 363: ‘Caesar sua aetate florente republica nilque adversi formidante, largitionibus, ambitu, seditiosorum suffragio, factione Principum assecutus est Consulatum, in quo iecit fundamenta reipub. vertandae’; 365: ‘Scipio oblatam repulit Dictaturam, Caesar extorsit. Alter libertatem sui populi conservavit, alter redegit in miserrimam servitutem . . . Adde quod nomen Caesaris docti omnes viri execrari et odio habere deberent, non enim magis patriae quam latinae linguae et bonarum artium extitit parricida. Una enim cum libertate corruit latina eloquentia et studia literarum, quae in ipso flore prius fere quam inciperent extincta sunt.’

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triumphal arch, under construction from 1455, which formed the gateway to the royal residence in the Castel Nuovo.103 Here the narrative of the conquest is constructed from the ground upwards. The account of Alfonso’s victory is framed by scenes of Hercules’ labours which ascend from the lower arch up the fac¸ade, introducing the viewer to a depiction of the events of the triumphal procession of 1443 in an attic frieze.104 On the middle architrave, the inscription reads: ALFONSUS REGUM PRINCEPS HANC CONDIDIT ARCEM; below the frieze, the words of the arch proclaim: ALFONSUS REX HISPANUS SICULUS ITALICUS, and, underneath: PIUS CLEMENS INVICTUS.105 Some key terms of the royal ideology were thus set in stone.106 In 1455, Panormita published De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis, a literary depiction of Alfonso and a text whose rhetorical ingenuity guaranteed it such diffusion, admiration and translation that it has succeeded in defining the content of Alfonsine biography for centuries.107 Panormita’s outstanding student, Gianvito Resta, has argued that the text was the most celebrated and widely diffused ‘libello propagandistico’ of its era.108 Panormita’s collection of exempla virtutis opens with Alfonso’s counsellors advising him not to succumb to the entreaties of a desperate Queen Giovanna in the early 1420s to intervene in her disordered kingdom. The war would be hard, the woman was ‘of changing and inconstant mind’.109 The king, in his infinite wisdom, overrides them by reverting to an heroic example: ‘Hercules’, he recalls, ‘used to bring help to people in great difficulties even when not called upon. Are we really to hesitate to bring help to a queen, a female, in dire straits, pleading so earnestly for help? War is indeed a grave undertaking, I acknowledge, but it will be all the more noble for being so. Without toil and danger, no one has ever yet attained glory.’110 Four books later, the story of virtuous conquest is brought to a close with an equally triumphant demonstration of 103 104 105 106

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108 109 110

For recent scholarship on the arch, see Driscoll 1964; Hersey 1973; Pane 1975; Bologna 1994. For the Herculean imagery, see Hersey 1973:. 30, 37, 39, 40, 55, 94, n.26. Hersey 1973: 3. For Panormita’s authorship of at least some of the epigraphy, see Filangieri di Candida 1937: 267; Hersey 1973: 16. For the publication, see Beccadelli 1968: 35–6, n.1; Ryder 1976a: 134. For a catalogue of printed editions to the eighteenth century, see Beccadelli 1968: 35–6, n.1. For its continuing effect on the biography of Alfonso, see the use of the source in Ryder 1990: 306–57. Beccadelli 1968: 35. For manuscript copies, see de Marinis 1947–53, I: 26–7, n.21; II: 25–6. Beccadelli 1589, I.1: 21: ‘mulierem ingenio mobili et inconstanti’. Beccadelli 1589, I.1: 21: ‘Tum rex, accepimus, inquit, Herculem etiam non rogatum laborantibus subvenire consuesse. Nos reginae, nos foeminae, nos afflictae, nos demum tantopere roganti opem ferre dubitamus? Grave quippe bellum susceptum esse fateor, verum eo praeclarius futurum. Sine labore et periculo nemo adhuc gloriam consecutus est.’

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the king’s Stoic qualities. In the last exemplum of Book 4, royal constancy is reiterated through a familiar allegory. Here we learn of Alfonso’s target practice: Alfonso sometimes used to throw four arrows of a balista from forty paces, and then throwing them again he would slot them into the same holes, and then he would split these same fixed arrows one by one by striking them at the end.111

Alfonso unerringly hits the mark in a symbolic demonstration of his capacities as a vir sapiens. Both the arch and the handbook carve out an impeccably Spanish classical identity for their Senecan monarch. Such a manoeuvre had already been performed from the Trajanic era onwards in the texts and images produced under a succession of Spanish Roman emperors. The laus Hispaniae had become a convention of Roman imperial rhetoric.112 The retrieval of these elements from Roman imperial ideology is a characteristic of the Aragonese ideology. Alfonso becomes situated within a genealogy elaborated upon a basic scheme lifted from Claudian:113 Each of the provinces across the sea was accustomed to supply Rome and Italy with its own produce. Sicily, the most famous of its islands, supplied wheat and sugar; Sardinia leather and cheese; Corsica wine; Ibiza salt; and other provinces other goods. Only Spain used to give Rome and Italy emperors and kings. And what kind of emperors and kings? Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius, Arcadius, Honorius, Theodosius II. Finally Alfonso, the living image of all the virtues, who stands forth as equal to those mentioned above in every form of commendation . . .114

Spain is a fertile source of virtue, Alfonso the apotheosis of a grand classical tradition. The Trajanic connection proved most fruitful. Long lauded as a Christian emperor avant la lettre, Trajan’s humanist fortuna rose to new heights after the rediscovery of Pliny the Younger’s panegyric to the 111

112 113

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Beccadelli 1589, IV.46: 103: ‘Iaciebat interdum Alphonsus manu balistae sagittas quatuor, passibus quadraginta, refixas in suum quamque foramen iterum iaciens singillatim in postremam partem feriendo distinguebat.’ See, for instance, Pacatus 1994: 451–2; Claudian 1956, I: 243–5. For previous elaborations of the topic in panegyrics of Spanish monarchs, see Leonardo Bruni’s letter to King John of Castile, c.1435, in Soria 1956: 113–14 (for the context, see Luiso 1980: 126–7); Manetti 1611: 170–1; Manetti 2003: 168–9. The seminal passage is in Claudian 1956, I: 243–5. Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, IV: 92: ‘Consueverunt transmarinae provinciae sua quaeque Romae Italiaeque sufficere. Sicilia insularum celeberrima, frumentum, zaccarumque: Sardinia, coria ac caseum: vinum Corsica, Ebusus salem: atque aliae, alia. Sola Hispania Romae atque Italiae Imperatores ac reges dare solitus est. At quales imperatores aut quales reges? Traianum, Adrianum, Theodosium, Arcadium, Honorium, Theodosium alterum. Postremo Alphonsum virtutum omnium vivam imaginem, qui cum superioribus iis nullo laudationis genere inferior extet.’

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Spanish emperor by Giovanni Aurispa, who shared his find at the Council of Basle.115 It was instantly seized upon, its language worked into humanist rhetoric addressed to the Aragonese king.116 The Alfonsine arch included sculptural citations of Trajan’s triumphal arch at Benevento, the location of the king’s first parliament.117 Trajanic artefacts transmitted another important element to the Aragonese ideology: they repeatedly marked out Hercules as a divine moral archetype of princely rule who was intimately associated with Spain.118 Hercules Invictus was also Hercules Gaditanus, Hercules of Cadiz. Since the thirteenth century, the Hispanic character of Hercules had helped chroniclers elaborate a classical ethnology for the Spanish monarchy.119 Spanish humanism further developed these characteristics of the Stoic moral hero whom Seneca had so vigorously lauded.120 Hispania had nurtured eloquence as well: her sons included Quintilian, Martial and Lucan.121 Above all, Spain had produced the king’s favourite philosopher. In 1450, Manetti had dedicated his Vita Socratis et Senecae to Alfonso, furnished with a new preface: Most Serene and Glorious Prince: The illustrious life of the Spanish philosopher Seneca which I wrote in Latin some time ago I should have already sent to your majesty had I not thought its sending unworthy of your exceptional and outstanding pre-eminence.122

He goes on: But recently, as I understand from the letters of our excellent ambassador Franco, you have, to your credit, been turning your whole mind towards the finest studies 115

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For Aurispa’s discovery of the Panegyrici Latini and their immediate diffusion, see Suster 1888; Sabbadini 1995; Reeve 1996: 26. Biondo 1927: 150. Driscoll 1964: 87–96; Rotili 1972: 8–12. For the parliament of 1442 at Benevento, see Ryder 1990: 242, 248. Mattingly 1966–76, vol. III: lxvii–lxviii: ‘With A.D. 100 comes in a new type – Hercules with lionskin and club standing on a low base . . . Hercules, the great servant of the human race, the man who by his ‘‘virtus’’ wins immortality – an inevitable type then, of the Roman Emperor – was adopted as pattern by Trajan in a new and special way. The Hercules whom Rome knew best was the Hercules who came to Italy, driving the oxen of Geryon from the island by Gades – and it was therefore easy for Trajan, a native of South Spain, where Hercules Gaditanus enjoyed the highest honours, thus to link the Roman cult to that of his native land’. For the identification of Hercules with Trajan by Pliny in his Panegyric, see Pliny 1969, II, 14.5: 356. Tate 1954: 3, 18. 120 Seneca 1935, I.13. 2–3: 40–2 (Seneca 1995: 208–9). See, for instance, the comments in Valla 1984: 259: ‘Senecam, Lucanumque quos tu summo, ut debes, in honore habes, et conterraneus concivisque.’ Manetti 2003: 164–5: ‘Illustrem Senece Hispaniensis philosophi vitam, serenissime ac gloriosissime princeps, quondam a me latinis litteris perscriptam, maiestati tue iam pridem mississem, nisi transmissionem indignam tua eximia prestantique excellentia fore existimassem.’ For Manetti’s possession of two mss. containing De clementia, see Mazzoli 1982: 212.

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of moral philosophy. I have been informed in clear terms that it is for this reason that you have explicitly requested and required from him the aforementioned life of Seneca – who, if I may say it without offence, is agreed to be the prince of Latin philosophers.123

Royal requests to Guiniforte Barzizza for his father’s exegesis of the Epistulae morales are matched by repetitious references in Neapolitan texts to the king’s immersion in the Cordoban’s works.124 The most assiduous portrayal of Alfonso as a student of the Spanish philosopher is found in De dictis et factis. Alfonso discourses on the nature of the soul after a session of reading Seneca, ‘whom the king especially revered and learnt thoroughly’.125 Another such session of ‘reading the letters of Seneca’ is interrupted by Franco Sacchetti, who joins the debate as the king holds forth on the saying of the Stoic Hecaton (‘which is so praised by Seneca’) that ‘if you want to be loved, love’.126 Alfonso ‘loved and respected his Spanish contemporaries because they translated the letters of Seneca from Latin into their mother tongue, so that knowledge of that divine book should not escape the unlettered’.127 Above all, De dictis et factis rendered ‘la peste catalana’ as articulate in the classical idiom of his humanist officials as the ideology demanded. Alfonso emerges as a masterful orator, an inventor of winning arguments, armed with a prodigious memory, citing not merely Seneca but here Tibullus, there Virgil, a little later Augustine.128 In short, Alfonso has all the qualities necessary for ‘kings and princes managing the res publica at home and in war’.129 123

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Manetti 2003: 164: ‘Sed cum ex litteris Franci, prestantissimi oratoris nostri . . . te solum ad optima Philosophie Moralis studia animum convertisse nuper intellexerim; atque propterea predictam Senece vitam (quem Latinorum philosophorum principem, pace cunctorum dixerim, fuisse constat) ab eo ipso verbis tuis postulari et exigi plane aperteque cognoverim.’ The reference is to Franco Sacchetti, on a diplomatic mission to Naples in 1450. For the ‘culto di Seneca’ at Alfonso’s court, see Albanese 1999: 14, 44–6. Beccadelli 1589, I.31: 31: ‘Super lectionem Annaei Senecae, quem praecipue rex coluit, atque perdidicit, quaesitum est ab Alphonso Davalo purpuratorum humanissimo, Cur animus mortalium ita immensus atque insatiabilis foret?’ Beccadelli 1589, I.49: 37: ‘Legebamus fortassis Annaei Senecae epistolas, atque aderat Franciscus Sachetus Florentinorum legatus, vir eloquentissimus, ac Ludoicus Cardona celebratissimi nominis Theologus, multique praeterea docti et clari viri. Quaerebatur super praecepto Hecatonis, tantopere a Seneca laudato: SI VIS AMARI, AMA’ (citing Seneca, Epistulae morales, 9.6). Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, III: 68: ‘Hispanos conterraneos suos amasse et respexisse, quod epistolas Senecae ex latino in patrium sermonem verterunt, quo divini illius libri cognitio, etiam litterarum rudes non lateret.’ For Alonso de Cartegena’s hugely popular translation of the works of Seneca, see Lawrance 1986: 72. See, respectively, Beccadelli 1589, I.51: 39; II.41: 61–2; I.17: 27. Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, I: 20: ‘Reges vero ac terrarum principes, rempublicam domi militiaeque gerentes . . .’

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Alfonso is especially conversant with his Senecan obligations, using his knowledge of De clementia to refute his critics. In a passage marked clementer, Panormita states that: Cum argueretur aliquando rex quod mitis esset ac lenis nimis, ut qui nonnumquam etiam iis, qui vel graviter in ipsum deliquissent, ignosceret: se quidem paratum velle esse dicebat, Deo immortali, si ad calculum vocetur, oves quas in tutelam ab eo suscepisset, annumerare, et si illas repetat, restituere incolumnes omnes posse.130

But the royal words reformulate the language which Seneca places in Nero’s mouth in De clementia: ‘Hodie dis inmortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’ Potes hoc, Caesar, audacter praedicare omnia, quae in fidem tutelamque tuam venerunt, tuta haberi, nihil per te neque vi neque clam adimi rei publicae.131

The Senecan description of the princeps as merciful vicegerent has proved remarkably enduring since the Liber Augustalis. Now the impersonation is studied, the words uttered by a conscientious Spanish king, but the basic continuity is nevertheless striking. Alfonso also responded to criticism that he was ‘too lenient and mild’ by restating a Senecan argument with an ironic twist, suggesting that ‘they should wait for the time when bears and lions reigned’.132 Alfonso recalls that ‘clemency was truly the mark of man, ferocity that of beasts’.133 And he knows that virtue alone defines a princeps. He interrupts a ‘man praising [him] especially on account of his nobility: he was a king, the son of a king; the grandson of a king, the brother of a king’ in order to interject that ‘there was nothing in life that he valued less than what the man seemed to place such store by’.134 By contrast, Alfonso – now re-invented as a good Petrarchan humanist – ‘frequently used to speak of his desire that he should seem a king more because of his morals and his authority than because of the diadem or the purple’.135 Alfonso also knows

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Beccadelli 1589, II.47: 63. 131 Seneca 1928a, I.1.4: 358. Beccadelli 1589, II.49: 63: ‘Qui nimis lenem et mansuetum principem quereretur, expectandum iis esse dicebat, ut ursi ac leones, quandoque regnarent, hominis sane clementiam esse, beluarum feritatem.’ The passage from De clementia is Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426: ‘Quae alia vita esset, si leones ursique regnarent, si serpentibus in nos ac noxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’ Beccadelli 1589, II.49: 63: ‘hominis sane clementiam esse, beluarum feritatem’. Beccadelli 1589, II.29: 57: ‘Cum aliquis Alphonsum a nobilitate maxime laudaret, quod rex esset regis filius, regis nepos, regis frater. At istiusmodi rex hominem interpellans dixit, nihil esse quod in vita minoris ipse duceret, quam quod ille tanti facere videretur.’ Beccadelli 1589, I.24: 29: ‘Illudque saepenumero usurpare consuetum, cupere se moribus et autoritate potius regem videri, quam diademate aut purpura.’

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that his virtue furnishes him with an inexpugnabile munimentum – the love of his citizens:136 We sometimes saw Alfonso proceed alone, away from the pomp of his accompanying party. Because of this, some people criticised him and urged that he, too, should walk about in the manner of other princes, surrounded by a band of armed guards. But he was seen to shudder at this advice and to say that in fact he was not in the least alone when he went about, as they believed, but was accompanied by his innocence, and that, relying on the innocence of his citizens, there was nothing of which he should be terrified.137

And he is almost painfully aware of his own conspicuousness: The principate seemed to him an extremely difficult thing (or so he used to say emphatically) in that the life of princes sets an example to the populace, who are actually more inclined to vice than to virtue. Therefore, princes must abstain from sinning not only for their own sake, but also, and far more importantly, so that their vices are not imparted to their citizens. The populace is turned towards the conduct of princes, as towards the motion of the sun, and formed by it.138

The Senecan sun prince is inescapably bound to the gaze of his subjects. The invasive aspects of absolutism become manifest in Panormita’s text. Royal activity is brought into view with a moral vocabulary even more prolific than its Roman imperial ancestor. No fewer than forty-two different adverbs are used to describe the king’s virtuous activity in the rubric accompanying Panormita’s exempla. His sexual conduct, his eating and drinking habits, the expressivity of his face, and his way of dressing and walking all become objects of an evaluative vocabulary that maps out and measures his activities in terms of princely continence and abstinence. The prince is acutely conscious of the effects of alcohol. Alfonso regularly comments on the immoderate drinking of his subjects; he rarely imbibes wine and always in diluted form; he knows all about the alcoholism of 136

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But note that the metaphor had recurred exactly in Pliny’s Panegyricus (Pliny 1969, II, 49.3: 430): ‘Discimus experimento fidissimam esse custodiam principis innocentiam ipsius. Haec arx inaccessa, hoc inexpugnabile munimentum non egere’; cf. Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412: ‘Non opus est instruere in altum editas arces . . . salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’ Beccadelli 1589, II.43: 62: ‘Alphonsum nonnumquam solum absque comitantium pompa incedentem vidimus. Cum ob hoc a plerisque argueretur, suadereturque ut more aliorum principum, et ipse armatorum manu stipatus graderetur: Exhoruisse consilium visus est, atque dixisse, se quidem minime solum, ut isti crederent, sed innocentia civium fretus, quippiam extimescat.’ Beccadelli 1589, II.44: 62: ‘Perquam difficilem rem principatum sibi videri, vel eo maxime dicebat, quod principum vita popularibus exemplo cedat, illis quidem ad vitia quam ad virtutes proclivioribus. Quapropter principibus non modo sua causa a peccato abstinendum esse, sed multo etiam magis ne sua vitia infundantur in cives suos. Nam veluti ad solis motum, ita populares semper in principum mores verti atque formari.’

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Alexander the Great.139 The look of an insane drunk is flushed, like the raging complexion of a cruel tyrant. Alfonso pointedly refuses to rouge up for his victory procession into the capital.140 The Stoic princeps cannot be seen to triumph with a red face. THE SENECAN PRINCEPS IN HAPSBURG EUROPE

A year after publishing his first edition of the complete works of Seneca in 1515, Erasmus turned to address the future Hapsburg emperor Charles V in his Institutio Christiani Principis and laid out, almost one by one, the precepts of De clementia to the young prince who had appointed him as a member of his privy council earlier in 1516.141 Few knew the Senecan text better than Erasmus, who established a very strong claim to be regarded as the most outstanding of all of the philosopher’s editors with the publication of an extensively revised version of the Senecan opera omnia in 1529.142 Only Justus Lipsius was to rival Erasmus in the extent of his Senecan scholarship during the early-modern period.143 In Erasmus’ treatise, the Senecan ideology of the prince was applied to a monarchical figure who was soon be both rex and imperator within territories even more vast and disparate than those of Frederick II, and the highly extensible claims of that ideology were more than sufficiently geared to the task of developing the promise of a peaceful Spanish hegemony in Europe. Erasmus’ prince had become king of Aragon in 1516; he simultaneously assumed rule over Castile; and he was to be elected Holy Roman Emperor three years later.144 Humanist princely discourse had already produced a vision of Roman imperial rule well suited to the ideological requirements of an Hispanic ruler. Spanish involvement on the Italian peninsula was facilitated by a humanist princely ideology implicated for centuries in the constitution of princes and subjects from Messina to Milan; but when Charles V became ruler of the southern Kingdom, he 139 140

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142 144

See Beccadelli 1589, I.41: 35, II.7: 47, II.27: 56; I.41: 35. Beccadelli 1589, I.17: 27: ‘Parantem vero regem triumphalem currum inscendere, non defuerunt, qui admonerent, ut triumphantium more vultum minio illineret. Quibus respondisse fertur: minium Baccho soli convenire, qui non solum triumphi, sed vini etiam repertor extitisset.’ For the first edition of Seneca, see Trillitzsch 1965; Trillitzsch 1971, I: 221–50; Jardine 1994: 30–1. For Erasmus’s appointment, see Shoeck 1993: 165–7; and also Jardine’s comments in Erasmus 1997: xvi–xvii. The importance of De clementia to the political theory of Erasmus is largely unexplored in existing analyses of the Institutio; but note Jardine’s description (Erasmus 1997: 62, n.104) of Seneca and Plutarch as ‘lynch-pins of Erasmus’ political and moral theory’. For the second edition, see Jardine 1994: 30–3. 143 For Erasmus and Lipsius, see Papy 2002. Erasmus 1997: xvi.

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had ready to hand a conceptual and symbolic framework within which to articulate a distinctively Spanish version of regal, princely and imperial rule. The articulation of Senecan precepts to princely audiences had by now become a highly familiar and self-consciously imitative activity. So, for example, when Erasmus exclaims in his own Institutio that ‘I would not want you to think to yourself at this point: ‘‘but that is serving not ruling’’. . .’, he is engaged in a very conventional requirement of the genre – reminding the princeps of the Senecan doctrine of servitude – but he is also simultaneously drawing upon the deepest reserves of his eloquence in order to find a sufficiently arresting way of reiterating a thoroughly orthodox political belief.145 For the self-reflexive thought imaginatively imputed to Erasmus’ prince is the vox placed by Seneca into the mouth of the imagined person of Nero when confronted by his reflected image in the mirror. Erasmus impersonates his prince in imitation of the Senecan impersonation. And he produces a concatenation of conventional Senecan dicta in order to enjoin the prince to his servitude: ‘your life is open to view: you cannot hide’; ‘there is no denying that being a good prince is a burden’; ‘what God is in the universe, what the sun is to the world, and what the eye is in the body, that must the prince be in the res publica’.146 In keeping with the theory, the virtues of the king must be evident in his dicta, for ‘the nature of the prince is recognised more surely from what he says than from what he wears: anything caught from the prince’s lips is spread abroad’.147 The prince’s fama depends on his taking ‘the greatest care that what he says savours of integrity and gives evidence of thinking that is worthy of a good prince’.148 Erasmus thus assumes the role of ‘sanctissimus ille praeceptor Seneca’.149 Even for the most philologically inclined of sixteenth-century humanists, Seneca’s Christian authority remained intact. Further explanation can be given for why the Senecan lessons become so emphatic among the numerous and diverse classical voices in the Institutio. Erasmus’ pacificism had already been expressed in his distinctly Plinian 145

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Erasmus 1974, 1.82: 166 (Erasmus 1997: 41): ‘nolim te sic tecum cogitare: At istud servire est, non regnare’. Erasmus 1974, 1.38: 149 (Erasmus 1997: 21): ‘Tua in conspicuo uita est, latere non potes’; I.90: 170 (47): ‘Ut negari non potest, operosam esse rem, bonum agere Principem, ita multo est operosius, malum agere Principem’; I.90: 170 (48): ‘Quod Deus in uniuerso, quod sol in mundo, quod oculus in corpore, hoc oportet esse Principem in Republica.’ Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 186 (Erasmus 1997: 70): ‘Ex oratione certius quam ex amictu principis animus cognoscitur. Spargitur in vulgus quicquid ab ore principis fuerit exceptum.’ Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 186 (Erasmus 1997: 70): ‘Proinde summam oportet esse curam, ut ea quae loquitur virtutem sapiant et mentem bono principe dignam prae se ferant.’ Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 169.

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panegyric of Charles’ father, Philip of Austria.150 The escalation of military conflict in and around the Italian peninsula in the second decade of the sixteenth century threatened to engulf the major European powers in a scenario of almost continuous belligerence. The argument of the Institutio that ‘a good prince will never start a war at all unless, after everything has been tried, it cannot by any means be avoided’ extends into a profound scepticism about the very notion of a just war.151 Erasmus’ pacificism expresses itself in his insistence that the prince should be formed in a firmly Christian image, and in his denunciation of a humanist syllabus which veered towards the glorification of martial and pagan qualities. The production of such a Christian princely person significantly determines the extent and character of Erasmus’ reliance upon classical theory in general, which had to help authorise his basic perspective that ‘the model for government is to be taken from God himself, and from Christ who is both god and man’.152 This view was linked to the Institutio’s description of the vicarious position of the monarch on earth: he is ‘a prince, a Christian prince . . . the likeness of God and his vicar’.153 Christian princes, he also recalls a little later, ‘act in place of the Lord’.154 For nearly three hundred years, the Senecan theory of the prince had been supplying writers with the essential linguistic, conceptual and imaginative elements of just this type of vision of divine monarchical government. Many pre-Christian classical writers were adduced to support the idea of the divine government of the universe; but only Seneca had described the ‘function’ of the prince in terms of his position to act ‘in place’ of the divine; only Seneca provided a description of divine government in the hands of a person who was mitis, mansuetus and magnanimus; only Seneca had been sanctified. And finally, no other classical political philosophy was remotely as well equipped as De clementia to sustain Erasmus’ view that ‘mercy is the quality particularly praised’ in a prince because no other classical theory could equally sustain his commitment to constituting that monarchical perspective by means of all the available techniques of Roman 150 151

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For Erasmus and Pliny’s panegyric, see Rundle 1998. Erasmus 1974, 11.2: 213–14 (Erasmus 1997: 103): ‘Bonus princeps nunquam omnino bellum suscipiet, nisi cum tentatis omnibus nulla ratione vitari potuit.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.89: 169 (Erasmus 1997: 46): ‘Exemplum administrandi, potissimum ab ipso Deo petendum, et ab Homine Deoque Christo.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.41: 150 (Erasmus 1997: 22): ‘tu qui Christianus etiam es princeps, cum audis aut legis te dei simulacrum esse, te dei vicarium esse’. Erasmus 1974, 1.82: 165 (Erasmus 1997: 40): ‘Cum Christianorum unus sit Dominus, cur qui huius gerunt uices abs quovis malunt administrandi formam petere quam ab hoc, qui solus est totus imitandus?’

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rhetorical discourse.155 From Barzizza to Erasmus, Senecan political philosophy was held to be deeply engaging and profoundly geared towards practice because of its rhetorical character. The Senecan text vividly demonstrated how to make the prince’s lessons stick in his mind. The promises of the prologue to De clementia are carefully reframed in order to recreate the view from the monarchical heights. Erasmus imports the feature of impersonated, self-reflective discourse into the Institutio and into the mouth of the prince, whose eyes gaze down upon a familiar political landscape filled by an immense multitude: When you visit your cities, do not think to yourself like this: ‘I am the master of these; they are at my disposal; I can do what I like with them.’ But if you want to think about it as a good prince should, do so along these lines: ‘Everything here has been put in my trust, and I must therefore keep a good watch over it so that I may hand it back in better condition than I received it.’ When you survey the countless multitude of your subjects, beware of thinking: ‘These many servants I have.’ Think rather: ‘So many thousands of people depend on my watchfulness’ . . .156

These instances of impersonated speech depict conscientious activity. They help to constitute the self-reflecting interiority of the prince which the Senecan theory had predicated. When deciding whether to wage war or not, the ‘pious and clement’ prince sums up the case in an act of selfexamination, addressing a series of rhetorical questions to an interior arbiter for consideration: let him say to himself: ‘Shall I alone be the cause of so much woe? Shall so much human blood, so many widows . . . the total ruin of morality, law and religion: shall all this be laid at my door? Must I atone for all this before Christ?’157

As for Seneca, so for Erasmus, the cultivation of a conscience promises pleasant feelings in the form of voluptas:

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Erasmus 1974, 1.18: 142 (Erasmus 1997: 13): ‘peculiarem huius laudem esse clementiam’. Erasmus 1974, 1.79: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 38): ‘Cum vises urbes tuorum, nolito sic tecum cogitare: tantarum rerum dominus sum, haec omnia mei sunt arbitrii, in haec mihi licet quicquid libet. Si vero, quod bono principe dignum est cogitare voles, ad hunc cogitato modum: haec meae credita sunt fidei. Vigilandum igitur, quo meliora reddam quam acceperim. Cum innumeram tuorum multitudinem conspexeris, cave sic cogites: tam multos habeo servos, sed tot hominum milia de mea pendent sollicitudine.’ Erasmus 1974, 11.10: 216 (Erasmus 1997: 106): ‘Movebit et hoc principem pium et clementem, quod perspiciat ex tam immensis malis, quae bellum omne secum invehit, maximam partem eos redire, ad quos bellum nihil attinet quique his calamitatibus sunt indignissimi . . . tum ita secum cogitet: unus ego tot malorum autor fuero? Tantum humani sanguinis tot viduae tot luctu funestae domus tot orbi senes tot indigne egentes tanta morum legum ac pietatis pernicies mihi uni imputabitur? Haec mihi luenda Christo?’

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If you really are a prince, it will be surprising if you do not feel a great glow of satisfaction when you think to yourself: ‘I was wise to avoid that war, it was a good thing to stifle that uprising with the least possible bloodshed . . . this is indeed a pleasure worthy of the Christian prince.’158

From the beginning, the Institutio embodies the rhetorical idea which had been central to the function of the speculum since Seneca: Charles is taken already to be the bonus princeps which the Institutio aims to produce. Erasmus knows that ‘his highness had no need of any man’s advice, least of all mine’; but he nevertheless lays out the image of the optimus princeps ‘in your name’ so that, ‘through you’ and ‘from you’, other rulers ‘might take their example’.159 The circumstances which explain why the ‘principal hope of getting a good prince hangs on his correct education’ are carefully indicated: adducing Aristotle in support of his argument, Erasmus says, acidly, that such a dependency pertains in those barbaric political conditions in which a prince is not elected but hereditary.160 This situation renders the proper education of the prince an even more pressing public concern. Minutely poring over the contents of the princely syllabus went some way towards compensating for negligible constitutional power. No one would have been quite so riveted by the details of what the prince did in his nursery or with his spare time had he not also been the arbiter of their lives and deaths. The overall aim of the Institutio is to educate the head of the body politic properly. For ‘the prince’s imperium over the populus is the same as that of the mind over the body’.161 When Erasmus repeatedly refers to the status reipublicae, he is positing the status of a single person whose head and heart is that of the prince.162 Erasmus contends that the princely mens dominates the body because of its greater sapientia, and that a properly instructed mind will bring the body felicitas. The basic condition of such a 158

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Erasmus 1974, 1.90: 170 (Erasmus 1997: 47–8): ‘Cum apud te recoles: hoc bellum prudenter effugi, bene seditionem illam quam minimo sanguine compescui . . . si vere princeps es, mirum ni ingentem animo sentis voluptatem. Atque ea demum voluptas Christiano digna est principe.’ Erasmus 1974, Prologue: 134 (Erasmus 1997: 3): ‘Itaque cum non ignorem tuae celsitudini nihil opus esse cuiusquam monitis, nedum meis, tamen visum est optimi principis simulacrum in commune proponere, sed tuo sub nomine, ut qui magnis imperiis educantur, per te rationem accipiant administrandi, abs te exemplum.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.5: 136 (Erasmus 1997: 5): ‘Caeterum ubi nascitur princeps, non eligitur, quod et olim apud barbaras aliquot nationes fieri solitum testatur Aristoteles et nostris temporibus ubique fere receptum est: ibi praecipua boni Principis spes a recta pendet institutione.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39): ‘non aliud esse imperium principis in populum, quam quale est animi in corpus’. Note, for instance, Erasmus 1974, 1.72: 162 (Erasmus 1997: 36): ‘At quoties Reipublicae status in tyrannidem degenerauit, toties in exitium properasse compertum est’; 1.75: 162 (37): ‘Quod si secus fuerit, pessimus Reipublicae status sit oportet, ut qui pugnet cum eo qui est optimus.’

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successful reign is that ratio must rule the body.163 Making reason rule in the princely mind is a matter of eliminating the disease of affectus, for ‘if there is anything bad in the mind, it arises from the contagion of the body, which is enslaved to its affects’.164 Affects are thus held to be contagious diseases which enslave. They are tyrannical. In contrasting the prince with the tyrant, Erasmus declares the former praiseworthy if he is, variously, ‘a father, mild, placid, lenient, provident, equitable, humane, magnanimous, free, a spurner of money, not enslaved to his affects, in total command of himself, dominating his desires, someone who uses his reason’.165 A tyrant, by contrast, is ‘a slave of his desires, intemperate, immoderate, inconsiderate, inhumane . . . surrendered to his affects’.166 Erasmus is of the opinion that the ‘most pitiable and dishonorable form of slavery is to be a slave to vice and shameful desires. For what is more abject and disgraceful, I ask you, than for him who claims dominion over free men to be himself a slave to lust, anger, greed, ambition and all the rest of that band of unseemly masters?’167 Part of the moral regime of the Institutio involves making the prince a conscientious reader. When Erasmus names the classical authors to whom the prince should turn for moral and political guidance, the doctrines of De clementia which Erasmus is busily enunciating are given as one of the principal reasons for the pertinence of Senecan philosophy to the princeps. Having insisted first of all upon the primacy of Scripture, Erasmus then recommends that his prince read Plutarch, but ‘easily assigns the next place to Seneca’, whose ‘writings admirably excite and inspire the study of what is honourable, and carry the soul of the reader away from sordid cares to a sublime height, especially in their repeated denunciation of tyranny’.168 A prince schooled in the Erasmian doctrines of the Institutio would have little 163

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Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39): ‘Ut in homine quod praestantius est imperat, nimirum animus, rursum in animo quae pars est optima, ea praesidet, nempe ratio. Et quod dominatur in universo, id omnium est optimum nempe deus.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39, modified): ‘Si quid inest animo mali, id a corporis contagio proficiscitur, quod affectibus est obnoxium.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.70: 161 (Erasmus 1997: 35): ‘Pater, mitis, placidus, lenis, providus, aequus, humanus, magnanimus, liber, pecuniae contemptor, haud obnoxius affectibus, sibiipsi imperans, dominans voluptatibus, ratione utens.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.71: 162 (Erasmus 1997: 36): ‘voluptatum servus, intemperans, immoderatus, inconsyderatus, inhumanus . . . affectibus deditus’. Erasmus 1974, 1.52: 152 (Erasmus 1997: 24): ‘Quid, queso, turpius aut abiectius quam libidini iracundiae avariciae ambitioni aliisque id genus insolentissimis dominis servire eum, qui sibi vindicat imperium in homines liberos.’ Erasmus 1974, 2.15: 180 (Erasmus 1997: 62): ‘Plutarcho proximum locum facile tribuerim Senecae, qui scriptis suis mire exstimulat et inflammat ad honesti studium, lectoris animum a sordidus curibus in sublime subvehit peculiariter ubique dedocens tyrannidem.’

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difficulty recognising in the Senecan mirror the colourful imagery of tyranny which Erasmus deploys throughout the Institutio. In following his advice to study De clementia, the prince incorporates the key role which Erasmus ascribes to the person of the praeceptor. In view of the fact that ‘public felicity may hang upon the virtue of this one man’, it is the duty of the prince’s praeceptor to ‘thrust before his pupil’s eyes a terrible, loathsome beast’, a composition of ‘a dragon, wolf, lion, viper, bear and similar monsters’ with ‘a hunger that is never satisfied, fattened on human entrails and intoxicated with human blood, incapable of being removed without great destruction to the whole world’ in order to dissuade him from tyrannical vice.169 Yet the prince who reads De clementia will find practically the same picture of tyranny before his eyes. The text will do the work of the praeceptor in the prince’s solitary moments of self-formation. The Institutio systematically ransacks the Roman theory of monarchy for its descriptions of the ruler. The prince is the medicus reipublicae and the Pater patriae; but he is also described by Erasmus as the ‘the king bee’, and here, too, Erasmus openly refers his reader to the arguments of De clementia in order to explain why ‘the king alone has no sting’ and why Nature has deprived him of ‘a weapon, leaving his anger ineffective’.170 But when Erasmus cites the moral definition of monarchy from De clementia, saying ‘Seneca was certainly right to say ‘‘the difference between a tyrant and a king is in their actions and not their name’’’, he is not simply advancing a strategic argument.171 As far as he is concerned, the moral theory of monarchy is the only rational justification for monarchy at all. Erasmus puts the same argument in another way when he announces to his audience that ‘you will not be able to be a king unless reason is king over you’.172 169

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Erasmus 1974, 1.58: 154 (Erasmus 1997: 27): ‘A cuius unius virtute publica pendeat felicitas . . . subiiciat oculis immanem quandam ac tetram beluam e dracone lupo leone vipera urso similibusque conflatam portentis . . . ventre insatiabili, humanis saginatam visceribus, humano sanguine temulentam, quae pervigil omnium fortunis vitaeque immineat . . . quae nec ferri possit ob immanitatem nec tolli sine magna orbis ruina ob praesidiis et opibus armatam maliciam.’ Erasmus 1974, 7.5: 205 (Erasmus 1997: 92): ‘Princeps quid aliud est quam medicus reipublicae?’; 2.9: 178 (59): ‘Audit pater patriae; cogitet nullum unquam titulum principibus additum, quam patris patriae, qui magis propriae quadraret in bonum principem’; 1.62: 156–7 (29): ‘Apum regi amplissimum cubile est, sed id in medio, veluti tutissimo regi loco. Atque ipse quidem onere vacat, verum exactor est alienorum operum. Hoc amisso totum examen dilabitur. Praeterea insignis regi forma est dissimilisque caeteris distinguitur, quod cum apibus plurimum sit iracundiae, adeo ut aculeos in vulnere relinquant. Solus ipse rex aculeo caret. Noluit illum natura nec saevum esse nec ultionem magno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit. Exemplar hoc magnis regibus ingens est.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.54: 153 (Erasmus 1997: 25, modified): ‘Vere siquidem a Seneca dictum est tyrannum a rege distare factis, non nomine.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.95: 173 (Erasmus 1997: 52): ‘Regem agere non potes, nisi te ratio rexerit.’

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From Petrarch to Erasmus, virtue ‘nominates’ the monarch in an ideological tradition which culminates in as stridently Senecan a tone as it had begun. Erasmus asserts that ‘a Christian prince should be especially alert to what Seneca wrote’ about the fact that ‘among those who are called kings’ one can find examples who are so abominable that ‘they do not even deserve to be called tyrants’.173 Official appellations, birthrights, genealogies: the criteria are enumerated in order to be dismissed as of no consequence. The ideology which could raise a man from humble mercenary to princely status could equally level down a king with centuries of royal blood coursing through his veins to nothing better than a tyrant. But Erasmus restates the Petrarchan point amid a dense series of figures closely derived from De clementia: If all that makes a king is a chain, a sceptre, robes of royal purple and a train of attendants, what after all is to prevent the actors in a drama who come on the stage decked with all the pomp of state from being regarded as real kings? Do you want to know what distinguishes a real king from an actor? It is the spirit that is right for a prince: being like a father to the res publica.174

Both of Erasmus’ rhetorical questions imaginatively expand Seneca’s claim that ‘no one can wear a persona for long – fictions soon fall back into their true nature’. They develop the dramatic metaphor at work in the Senecan text in order to argue that a true king never acts a part, never dons a mask. This is what distinguishs a true rex or princeps or pater of the res publica from someone who merely acquires the trappings in order to impersonate the prince upon the stage. Erasmus warns his prince that his clemency must be real and not, like that of Julius Caesar, simulated.175 In fact, he is doggedly insistent that it is much easier to be a true prince than to be a dissimulating tyrant. Even though his treatise details the onerous duties which involve the prince in complete visibility, servitude, sleepless nights and sustained self-reflection; even though it specifies that the prince must 173

174

175

Erasmus 1974, 1.97: 174 (Erasmus 1997: 52–3, modified): ‘In primis cavendum Christiano principi, quod graviter a Seneca scriptum est, inter eos, qui reges appellantur, inveniri nonnullos, cum quibus si conferas Phalaridem Dionysium Polycratem, quorum et ipsa vocabula in omnium saeculorum abominationem abierunt, indigni sint, qui tyranni vocentur.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.27: 146 (Erasmus 1997: 17): ‘Si torques, si sceptrum, si purpura, si satellitium regem faciunt, quid tandem vetat pro regibus haberi tragoediarum histriones, qui iisdem ornati prodeunt in scenam? Vis scire, quid principem ab histrione secernit? Nempe animus principe dignus, hoc est in rempublicam paternus.’ Erasmus 1974, 2.18: 181 (Erasmus 1997: 63): ‘C. Caesaris industriam et animi sublimitatem, quam ille male praestitit ambitioni, tu bene impende patriae commodis. Clementiam, quam ille simulavit ad parandam fulciendamque tyrannidem, tu ex animo adhibe ad conciliandam civium tuorum in te charitatem.’

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always be a loveable king bee with no weapon, and a doctor and father to the entire res publica; even though it forcefully underlines Seneca’s account of the slavery of the prince by warning that ‘after you dedicate yourself to the res publica, you are no longer at liberty to live in your own way: you must sustain and cultivate the persona you have taken on’176 – even though it makes all this really quite punishing regime abundantly clear, Erasmus nevertheless maintains that while ‘being a good prince is a burden’, it is assuredly ‘much more of a burden to be a bad one’, since ‘following nature and reason is far less trouble than resorting to artifice and deceptions’.177 Nothing short of a chasm separates the moral world of Erasmus’ prince from that of Machiavelli’s ruler in Il Principe.178 176

177

178

Erasmus 1974, 1.89: 168 (Erasmus 1997: 44, modified): ‘Postea quam te semel reipublicae dedicasti, iam non est tibi liberum tuo more vivere; personam, quam suscepisti, sustineas ac tuearis oportet.’ Erasmus 1974, 1.90: 170 (Erasmus 1997: 47 – translation modified): ‘Ut negari non potest operosam esse rem bonum agere principem, ita multo est operosius malum agere principem. Longe minus habent negocii, quae naturam et honesti rationem sequuntur, quam quae fucis et arte constant.’ Although the Institutio was written three years after Il Principe, there is no evidence that Erasmus was acquainted with Machiavelli’s work (not published till 1532) when he composed his treatise. Notwithstanding its marginally later composition and its northern European origin, I follow Skinner (Skinner 1978: 443–5, where he points out the innovations of this northern tradition) in broadly regarding it as a typical, though sophisticated, contribution to the humanist literature on the prince which I have traced from Petrarch onwards. Jardine (Erasmus 1997: vi–vii) also opens her discussion of Erasmus’ work by placing the two treatises side by side. In making the Institutio part of the wider ideological context within which to locate Machiavelli’s work, I am thus to some extent following a well-defined approach.

PART V

The Machiavellian Attack

CHAPTER

6

The strategy

Since the Senecan princely ideology which I have been so far examining was by no means the only classical vocabulary available to Renaissance monarchical regimes wishing to couch their claims to political authority in a humanist idiom, I am not about to suggest that a deconstruction of the theory of De clementia is Machiavelli’s sole preoccupation in Il Principe. The Roman theory of monarchy has almost nothing to say, for example, about any of the basic ideas which Machiavelli is attacking in Chapter XVI in his comments on the evils of princely liberality. We might do better, as Skinner indicates, to turn instead to the seven books of Seneca’s De beneficiis for further illumination of conventional thinking on this subject, since the treatise had for centuries provided pre-humanist and humanist writers with an incomparably sustained philosophical treatment of the quality.1 Nor does De clementia really focus on the dilemma of flattery at court, the subject of Chapter XXIII of Il Principe, although even here, as Skinner also notes, Machiavelli is certainly involved in reversing at least one of the more usual pieces of advice proffered to princes on a Senecan basis.2 Although my concluding section will concentrate on the ways in which Machiavelli is engaged in controverting a specifically neoSenecan political and moral argument in his theory, its aim is not to minimise the importance of his engagement with a host of other Roman classical writers, from Sallust to Tacitus. Nevertheless, an attack on the image of the prince and his principate to which the Roman theory of monarchy had given rise certainly does lie at the heart of Machiavelli’s work. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of classical texts from which humanists excerpted, one can nevertheless recognise a coherent, distinctive and fairly continuous conceptual basis underpinning their account of the virtuous prince. That conceptual basis is traceable to a remarkable extent to the one classical speculum with which 1

Skinner 1981: 36.

2

Machiavelli 1960: xxii.

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almost every writer on monarchy had been highly familiar since at least the first half of the Duecento: Seneca’s De clementia. It has long been observed that Machiavelli’s text is both a continuation and a subversion of the humanist speculum principis genre. What I hope to have shown by now is the very considerable extent to which that genre was indebted, from the time of Petrarch onwards, to the earliest surviving Roman classical example of that genre – a debt, moreover, which can be partly explained by the equally considerable extent to which pre-humanist political discourse had drawn upon the same theory. While Machiavelli is immersed, like almost every other humanist writer of speculum principis treatises, in the work of numerous classical writers, he is quite manifestly concerned – again, like his humanist predecessors and contemporaries – about one classical argument in particular. Evidence of this characteristic concern begins to come into view as soon as one recalls some of the arguments found in existing scholarship on the place of Seneca’s theory of the prince in Machiavelli’s treatise. Skinner has already indicated that, in Chapter XVII, Machiavelli is controverting Seneca’s teaching in De clementia on the need for the truly virtuous prince to be always merciful and to be extremely reluctant to punish wrongdoing.3 As Skinner puts it, ‘faced with this orthodoxy, Machiavelli insists once more that it represents a complete misunderstanding of the virtue involved’.4 But the crucial part of Skinner’s insight – an insight which contends with the greatest accuracy, as we have now seen, that Machiavelli is indeed confronting a Senecan body of opinion at this point – arguably consists in his words ‘once more’. For Chapter XVII can hardly be said to be the earliest point at which Machiavelli concentrates upon overturning this orthodoxy on cruelty and clemency. Indeed, as we shall see, the acts of moral redescription which occur from Chapter XV onwards are the necessary theoretical consequences of Machiavelli’s analysis in the first half of his book of principalities and the means by which they are acquired. And that analysis is consistently shocking, in its inimitably nonchalant way, because of Machiavelli’s advocacy of policies quite clearly regarded traditionally as cruel, brutal and inhumane. As early as Chapter III, we encounter Machiavelli urging a prince intent upon successfully annexing a newly acquired principality to ‘wipe out the family of the ruler’ who had previously held sway over the 3 4

Skinner 1981:45–6. Skinner 1981: 46. For the idea that Machiavelli here ‘retorts’ to precepts in De clementia, see Skinner’s comments in Machiavelli 1988: xvii.

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state.5 But this advice contrasts in the strongest possible way with that of Seneca and his Renaissance enthusiasts, who had rigorously lauded the act of sparing conquered royalty on the grounds that it brought the conquering prince unparalleled glory.6 In the same chapter, we find Machiavelli discussing the viability of medicine forti, ‘strong medicine’; whereas Seneca had urged his prince to use mollis medicina – ‘gentle medicine’ – and to avoid ‘harsh remedies’.7 And elsewhere in Chapter III, Machiavelli advocates a policy of moving as quickly as possible to apply this strong medicine in the form of armed intervention and punishment; whereas Seneca had insisted that the prince should move as slowly as possible to unsheathe the sword, and to always regard such action as a last resort. A pattern of point and counter-point emerges even at this early stage of Il Principe, as Machiavelli begins to rework the conception of the princely medic which had been transmitted from De clementia to humanist princely ideology. One should bear in mind that Machiavelli himself regularly referred to his treatise as De principatibus, On Principalities, and that the book became known as Il Principe somewhat later. Machiavelli is at least as concerned to correct contemporary perceptions of the qualities of principalities and the modes in which they are acquired or come into existence as he is to correct contemporary perceptions of the qualities necessary for a prince to rule them successfully. His own description of its contents in his famous letter of December 1513 to Francesco Vettori represents this focus clearly, stating that he has ‘composed a little book On Principalities’ in which he hopes to ‘delve as deeply’ as he can in ‘thinking about this subject, disputing what a principality is, what species there are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost’.8 And if he is engaging in a dispute about what a principality is, the explanation why Machiavelli should be involved, in the course of this same dispute, in repeatedly attacking a specifically Senecan image of the prince and his principatus now needs to be expanded. The previous chapters have helped to constitute an historical part of the explanation by charting the popularity of that image during the 5

6 7

8

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18 (Machiavelli 1988: 8): ‘E chi le acquista, volendole tenere, debbe avere dua respetti: l’uno, che il sangue del loro principe antiquo si spenga . . .’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153). Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17 (Machiavelli 1988: 7); Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘quam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat’; I.17.1–2: 406 (149): ‘Morbis medemur nec irascimur; atqui et hic morbus est animi; mollem medicinam desiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro.’ Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 426: ‘composto uno opuscolo De principatibus; dove io mi profondo quanto io posso nelle cogitazioni di questo subietto, disputando che cosa e` principato, di quale spezie sono, come e’ si acquistono, come e’ si mantengono, perche´ e’ si perdono’.

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Renaissance. But a further reason is that the Senecan monarchical ideology masks very carefully those very elements which Machiavelli wants to expose and underline in his analysis of principalities: namely, the bloodshed, injury, domination and the degree of contingency involved in their creation and maintenance. Clementia, humanitas, innocentia: the string of qualities which define the Senecan image of the prince make the work of subjection and the maintenance of a relation of domination between ruler and ruled disappear in a form of bloodless conquest. Machiavelli is unwaveringly committed to reversing this effect by rendering visible once more the violence involved in establishing and perpetuating monarchical rule. Although the case advanced in Il Principe contains a continuous and savage assault on the person at the centre of the Roman theory of monarchy, the attack is nevertheless a deeply creative one. Machiavelli’s theory is often wrought from the wreckage of the very same classical argument which it relentlessly subverts. In Chapter III, Machiavelli may be in dispute with Seneca about the character of the medical treatment which a prince must dispense; but he does not for a moment doubt that the prince must act like a medic. The production of a rival vision of princely rule takes the form of a systematic plundering of conceptual and rhetorical resources from the enemy camp. Startling, shocking and winning, the Florentine’s treatise arrests and transports his audience’s view of things by steadily reworking familiar imagery. It redescribes and reconnects some of the primary relations at the heart of the humanist ideology of the prince while simultaneously transforming the entire basis upon which they had been elaborated. Even the weather changes, as Machiavelli ushers in a markedly less clement climate for his prince. And the figurative means which he uses to redesign or reconstruct the ideology are often drawn out from the same classical argument as its terminology – which is precisely why he uses them. Machiavelli deconstructs with devastating precision, appropriating and sharpening the tropes and figures of the Roman theory of monarchy into weapons which he then deploys against it. In short, he holds forth a new persona for the prince through a sustained campaign of reversals and inversions of the Senecan story. If ever a revolutionary could be said to have grasped the necessity of marching backward into battle, it is Machiavelli. A more bravura example of the conception and execution of a polemical strategy which assumes and turns to its own advantage the obligation to operate upon a given rhetorical terrain is hard to summon to mind. Machiavelli embraces that obligation with the greatest enthusiasm, making it pivotal to his account of persons, states and their rationality in

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Il Principe. His attack exploits a crucial fact about the way in which the prince had been articulated in De clementia in particular and perpetuated in the humanist ideology in general. That is to say, it forces both the theory and the mode of political reflection to which it had helped to give rise to confront the implications, and indeed the irony, of having articulated in Roman rhetorical mode an argument based upon a monological and univocal conception of ratio. It pounces, that is, upon something of the same conceptual paradox that Hobbes was later to confront: a theory of monarchical absolutism articulated according to the canons of classical rhetoric can never secure itself absolutely against rhetorical redescription for as long as it remains wedded to a type of discourse whose ratiocinative method ultimately instructs and indeed requires its users to become adept at arguing a case in utramque partem. For Hobbes, one possible way forward was to jettison his humanist inheritance in search of more secure ground upon which to construct the rationality of the state and to close off the possibility of its refutation.9 Machiavelli’s approach, by way of the most striking contrast, is to transform the terrain which he captures from his opponent by penetrating even more deeply into the resources of classical rhetoric, embracing the epistemological scepticism which its ratiocinative procedure always implied, if occasionally to the deep discomfort of a number of classical writers themselves. Those resources had multiplied during the Quattrocento. The humanist discoveries of 1416 and 1421 had brought back into circulation, in complete form, a handful of Roman texts of rhetorical theory which had immeasurably increased the complexity and sophistication of Renaissance rhetoric. Among them were complete versions of Cicero’s De oratore, Orator and Brutus.10 But almost from the moment of its recovery, one work in particular had become implicated in a series of attacks upon various intellectual and ideological orthodoxies in Renaissance Italy, and its unsettling, even disturbing, impact in different spheres generated controversies across the peninsula. Il Principe participates in the most spectacular way in this current of thought. Machiavelli’s prince is unimaginable without Quintilian.11 The closing section of this book is accordingly committed to outlining not one but two inextricably linked movements at work in Il Principe: an attack on a Senecan construction of the princely persona which is planned and executed by means 9

10

11

This development is apparent in The Elements of Law and De Cive, though the humanist Hobbes returns for Leviathan (for the reasons, see Skinner 1996: 426–37). For the impact of these texts upon contemporaries, see the comments of Biondo cited in Witt 2000: 341, n.7. For their recovery in 1421, see Reynolds 1983: 102. For the recovery of a complete Quintilian by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416, see Reynolds 1983: 333–4.

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of a series of conceptual resources drawn in particular from Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. QUINTILIANISM IN THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

Machiavelli’s Quintilianism has illustrious humanist precedents.12 The importance of Institutio oratoria to the philosophical and polemical work of Valla, for instance, has long been acknowledged.13 Although a full history of Quintilian in the Renaissance ‘waits to be written’, an important outline of the trajectory of Quattrocento Quintilianism and the controversies which it engendered among rhetorical theorists, philosophers and humanists throughout the peninsula from the time of Valla onwards has been provided by Monfasani, and by Grafton and Jardine.14 The reasons for the hostility towards this new Quintilianism are fascinating. Some opposition appears to have been provoked by the sheer grandeur of the aspirations which Quintilian lays out for the orator and which were developed by Valla and his followers. But one should also note the degree to which Quintilianic doctrine had penetrated the Florentine humanist milieu by Machiavelli’s day. It had been a Florentine, Poggio Bracciolini, who had famously retrieved the complete text of Institutio oratoria from St Gall earlier in the century; and it had been Poggio himself, particularly scandalised by Valla’s Comparatio, who had fired off ‘inflammatory’ polemics against the outspoken philologist by way of response.15 Valla, in turn, denied claiming that Quintilian was superior to Cicero, insisting that to be a Quintilianist meant committing oneself to the doctrines of a rhetorical authority whose supreme model was none other than Cicero himself.16 For Valla no less than for Quintilian, Cicero was ‘by far the greatest of Latin authors’, as he noted in the margins of his copy of Institutio oratoria.17 Valla, in other words, asserted ‘the interdependence of the oratorical works of Quintilian and Cicero’.18 And in Florence, this approach was unequivocally adopted by Angelo Poliziano, whose ‘unacknowledged master’ in matters of historical philology was Valla.19 Some

12

13

14 15 19

For a guide to the literature on Quintilian in the Renaissance, see Ward 1983: 158–9, n.83; Ward 1995; Monfasani 1992: 119–38. For Valla and Quintilian, see Grafton and Jardine 1986: 77–82; Martinelli 1986; Lorch 1991; Mack 1993; Camporeale 1995. Monfasani 1992: 119; Grafton and Jardine 1986: 66–82. Godman 1998: 39. 16 Godman 1998: 39. 17 Citing Godman 1998: 39. 18 Godman 1998: 39. Godman 1998: 39 (esp. n.52 for Poliziano’s regular use of Valla’s Elegantiae). For Poliziano’s scholarship as an important context within which to locate Machiavelli’s humanism, see Dionisotti 1980.

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three years after the humanist Matteo Collazio had attacked the Quintilianists in Venice, Poliziano opened his course on rhetoric in 1480 at the Studio fiorentino on a decidedly controversial note: he delivered an oration on Quintilian and Statius, devoting the greater part of his attention to the Roman rhetorical theorist in whose work he had been immersed for years.20 In a preface to Institutio oratoria (later printed in the Paris 1542 edition), Poliziano explained his position on Quintilian in terms which faithfully reflected the view of Valla: Indeed we do not, as it were, prefer Quintilian to Cicero, but we judge his Institutio oratoria to be fuller and more fecund than the rhetorical books of Cicero . . . we prefer to interpret Quintilian rather than Cicero, not indeed in order to detract from that sacrosanct glory of Cicero but that we might serve your interests as you hasten towards Cicero . . .21

As Godman summarises, Poliziano’s preference for Quintilian was not a matter of arguing for ‘canonical priority’ for him, but of arguing that his rhetorical theory was ‘simply fuller, richer, more complete and consistent than Cicero’s’.22 Notwithstanding a degree of resistance in some of the more conservative quarters of Renaissance intellectual life, the view that Quintilian was an incomparably more systematic and detailed analyst of the rhetorical art than any other Roman theorist was not a very hard proposition to sustain, given the monumental scale of Institutio oratoria when compared with the other extant classical treatises on rhetoric. That view was certainly shared well beyond Florence. In England, Thomas Elyot suggested that one could learn the entire rhetorical art simply by studying Quintilian.23 Indeed, Skinner has concluded, in his analysis of the pursuit of eloquence in the English Renaissance, that humanists generally cited Institutio oratoria with ‘even greater reverence’ than when referring to the works of Cicero.24 Juan Luis Vives, for example, ‘continually cites Quintilian as his own principal authority’.25 As for elsewhere in northern Europe, Quintilian’s latest editor, Donald Russell, has observed that ‘one only has to look through the various educational works’ of Erasmus to appreciate ‘how pervasive the Quintilianic ingredient is in all of them’.26 Poliziano’s interest in the work of both Quintilian and Valla during his time at the Studio ensured that Quintilianism gained a secure foothold in 20

21 24 26

For Collazio and the Venetian controversies over Quintilian, see Monfasani 1992: 128–34. For Poliziano’s inaugural lecture, see Godman 1998: 38–40; Grafton and Jardine 1986: 94–5. Cited from Ward 1983: 161. 22 Godman 1998: 43. 23 Skinner 1996: 34. Skinner 1996: 34. 25 Skinner 1996: 34. Quintilian 2001, vol. I: 23–4. Also underlined in Fumaroli 1980: 462.

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Florence in the decades prior to Machiavelli’s composition of Il Principe. It is certainly true that Marcello Virgilio Adriani, Poliziano’s successor in the chair of rhetoric after his death in 1494, was ambivalent about the direction of his predecessor’s work.27 After the expulsion of the Medici, Marcello Virgilio needed to distance himself from the legacy of Poliziano, who was closely identified with the old regime.28 Having been something of a Medicean prote´ge´ himself, Marcello Virgilio trimmed his sails, promising to usher in a new era at the university after sixty years during which, he alleged, the study of rhetoric had suffered as a result of the unfreedom of the city under the Medici.29 In so doing, he reasserted the connection between the flourishing of rhetoric and republican liberty which had been stressed by the earlier generations of civic humanists. But the disjunction between the interests of the two professors was by no means as sharp as Marcello Virgilio claimed. One of the many aspects of Quintilian’s work which Poliziano had especially cultivated was the elevated conception of the role which the Romans had assigned to the grammaticus in laying ‘the orator’s foundations’.30 Marcello Virgilio drew deeply upon this aspect of Poliziano’s work.31 And during his tenure, scholarship on Quintilian proceeded. His colleague at the university, Niccolo` Ange`li, produced a new edition of Institutio oratoria, which was published in October 1515.32 But as well as being a university professor of poetry and rhetoric, Marcello Virgilio was also First Chancellor of Florence from February 1498. That meant not only that he was at the very heart of the city, as Godman underlines, but that he was also Machiavelli’s immediate superior in the bureaucracy of the Republic for almost fifteen years, up to the time of Machiavelli’s dismissal as Second Chancellor after the return of the Medici in 1512.33 There can be little doubt that the daily contact between the two humanists over the years would have made Machiavelli wellattuned to the currents of thought which informed the work of the Chancellor in particular, and the wider rhetorical culture of Florence in the High Renaissance in general, thus ensuring the type of exposure to the ideas of Quintilian to which Il Principe amply testifies.

27 30

31 33

For Virgilio, see Godman 1998: 144–291. 28 Godman 1998: 147–8. 29 Godman 1998: 157. Godman 1998: 81; Quintilian 2001, I.4.5, vol.I: 104: ‘oratoris futuri fundamenta’ (the importance of what Quintilian terms grammatic¯e, a subject which is much more extensive than a more modern notion of grammar, is laid out in detail in I.4–9). See Godman 1998: 160–2. 32 Godman 1998: 211. Godman 1998: 149; and for the relationship between the two, see 145–50, 239–41, 255–6, 261, 272–3, 293–5.

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THE QUINTILIANISM OF IL PRINCIPE

To single out Machiavelli’s debts to Quintilian in Il Principe is emphatically not to argue for his exclusive reliance upon a single body of rhetorical thought. On the contrary, a common theme of Renaissance Quintilianists is their insistence on the need to harness Quintilian’s teaching to established doctrine, particularly that of Cicero. Various scholars have indeed detected traces of Ciceronian and pseudo-Ciceronian rhetorical theory at work in the text of Il Principe. Virginia Cox, for example, has laid out an intriguing case for why we should think that Il Principe is informed by the precepts of the treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium in particular.34 It seems likely that Machiavelli knew this work: Ad Herennium was the most basic textbook for beginners in rhetoric throughout the Renaissance, and a copy of it appears to have been available at least for some period of time at his family home.35 Echoes of it may well be present, as Cox suggests, in Chapters XV to XVIII. An alternative approach has been to explicate the rhetorical codes of Machiavelli’s text in terms of a number of texts believed to have been commonly used for the purposes of rhetorical instruction in Renaissance schools and universities. In order to illustrate Machiavelli’s ‘diligent application of the rules of deliberative rhetoric . . . from the very first page’, Maurizio Viroli gives an account of the construction of Machiavelli’s text by reference to various precepts drawn from the works of Cicero, Quintilian and the author of Ad Herennium.36 Again, this seems a fairly plausible interpretative strategy. But one nevertheless needs to heed the ‘important caution’ stressed by James Murphy, to the effect that ‘it is not yet possible to generalize about Renaissance rhetoric’.37 The availability of rhetorical texts varied, as did the syllabus from school to school and from teacher to teacher. In the absence of strong evidence, it is misleading to work with the assumption that a writer’s eloquence could have been learnt from any number of works of classical, medieval and Renaissance rhetoric all too often supposed to have been generally available and equally endorsed within any given rhetorical culture. While specific aspects of Machiavelli’s thinking can be related to elements of rhetorical learning which are exclusively Quintilianic, various other rhetorical strategies which Machiavelli employs in his treatise are harder to trace to any one particular text or school, and it may not be even desirable to try to do so. I draw attention to some of these approaches and often try to illuminate them by

34

Cox 1997.

35

See Machiavelli 1954: 123.

36

Viroli 1998: 77–97.

37

Murphy 1983: 32.

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way of reference to Institutio oratoria in particular, even on occasions where Quintilian’s teaching is merely representative of a wider consensus of opinion among, say, the Roman rhetoricians. This is not in order to suggest that Institutio oratoria is the only source of his thinking in Il Principe – it manifestly is not – but in order to remain on something approximating to firm historical ground, relating Machiavelli’s rhetorical approach to a body of thought which can be shown to have been at least a major source of some of his and his contemporaries’ thinking, rather than relating it to a group of texts whose presence and use is not yet so securely attested. In the case of Institutio oratoria, not only do we know that there was a very strong preference for Quintilian expressed within Florentine intellectual and political circles which accompanied ongoing scholarship on his writings from the time of Poliziano, there is also a great deal of incontrovertible textual evidence in Il Principe itself for the formative impact of Quintilianic doctrine on the construction of Machiavelli’s work. Once again, it is Skinner who has led the way in beginning to demonstrate the effect of Quintilianic rhetoric on Il Principe. Skinner’s sustained analysis of the classical and Renaissance history of the rhetorical figure of paradiastole, a technique of redescribing a given action or situation in such a way as to alter its moral character to the advantage of the orator, places the work of Quintilian very squarely at the centre of his narrative.38 Skinner first observes that ‘of all the ancient rhetoricians, it was undoubtedly Quintilian who gave the fullest and most authoritative survey of the figures and tropes of speech’ in Books VIII and IX of his Institutio, adding that upon Poggio’s recovery of the complete text, a much more refined explication of a wider and more exotic range of rhetorical schemata became available to students of rhetoric in the course of the Quattrocento.39 One such student was Antonio Mancinelli, whose Carmen de Figuris was first printed in 1493, and whose analysis of the figure of paradiastole is drawn entirely from Book IX of the Institutio.40 While the practice of rhetorical redescription was well known to a wide range of classical writers and was analysed by other rhetorical theorists such as the author of Ad Herennium, it is nevertheless Quintilian who gives ‘the fullest and most influential account of this technique’.41 Skinner duly proceeds to illustrate exactly what he means by ‘influential’ by showing how a considerable number of 38 39 41

For the various instalments of the account, see Skinner 2002, I: 175–87; II: 264–85; III: 87–141. Skinner 2002, III: 98. 40 Skinner 2002, III: 98–9. Skinner 2002, III: 92–3 (for discussion of the technique in Ad Herennium); II: 271 (for emphasis on Quintilian).

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Tudor rhetoricians take up specifically Quintilian’s analysis and his terminology.42 It is with the spread of explicitly Quintilianic allegiances that the technique became more common and began to excite considerable anxiety because of its capacity to destabilise conventional moral assumptions. Furthermore, Skinner has extended his reconstruction of the earlymodern history of rhetorical redescription to Machiavelli’s Il Principe, in which ‘paradiastole is assigned a crucial role’.43 Examining Machiavelli’s notorious use of the figure in Chapters XVI to XVIII, he notes how Chapter XVIII reveals the debt to Quintilian quite explicitly.44 For when Quintilian exemplifies the process ‘by which similar ideas are distinguished’, he says it is ‘when you call yourself wise instead of astute, brave instead of over-confident, careful instead of mean’.45 Quintilian’s example was noted by Mancinelli, who acknowledges that ‘according to the testimony of Quintilian in Book IX, it is an example of paradiastole when you call yourself wise rather than astute or courageous rather than overconfident’.46 That the quality of astutia might be manipulated in order to describe a virtue rather than a vice is a Quintilianic lesson not lost on Machiavelli, in whose text astuzia seems to be repeatedly recommended as the quality of a prudente signore and a principe savio.47 Yet Machiavelli’s Quintilianic allegiances are on display from the very first line of Il Principe. Before laying out an analysis of the exordium of Machiavelli’s work in order to highlight them, it may be helpful to see how this first section fits into the general structure of the text. To take seriously the proposition that Machiavelli’s treatise is constructed according to the canons of classical rhetoric requires us to accept that it is in all likelihood conceived according to a scheme consisting of at least five sections. The parts of the basic five-part scheme which underpins most classical rhetorical theory are: exordium (also called the prooemium), narratio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio (also called the conclusio).48 Quintilian stresses his 42 45

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Skinner 2002, II: 271–4. 43 Skinner 2002, III: 107. 44 Skinner 2002, III: 108–9. Quintilian 2001, IX.3.65, vol.IV: 138: ‘cui dant nomen paqadiarsokg´m, qua similia discernuntur: ‘‘cum te pro astuto sapientem appelles, pro confidente fortem, pro inliberali diligentem’’’. Skinner 2002, III: 99. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72: ‘Quanto sia laudabile in uno principe mantenere la fede e vivere con integrita` e non con astuzia, ciascuno lo intende: non di manco si vede, per esperienzia ne’ nostri tempi, quelli principi avere fatto gran cose che della fede hanno tenuto poco conto, e che hanno saputo con l’astuzia aggirare e cervelli delli uomini; et alla fine hanno superato quelli che si sono fondati in sulla lealta` . . . Non puo` per tanto uno signore prudente, ne´ debbe, osservare la fede, quando tale osservanzia li torni contro’; Ch.XX: 87: ‘molti iudicano che uno principe savio debbe, quando ne abbi la occasione, nutrirsi con astuzia qualche inimicizia, accio` che, oppresso quella, ne seguiti maggiore sua grandezza’. See the comments and references of Russell at Quintilian 2001, vol.II: 6.

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adherence to this fundamental five-part scheme.49 But Quintilian, like both Cicero and the author of the Ad Herennium before him, extends the structure. In De inventione, Cicero had laid down six parts for a speech, adding a separate section entitled partitio between the narratio and the confirmatio.50 The author of Ad Herennium had done likewise, calling the sixth part divisio, rather than partitio.51 Quintilian goes a step further: he both posits and analyses two further elements – the propositio and the partitio.52 Although there are good reasons for believing that Machiavelli is following one of the more extended versions, at least the five fundamental parts of Machiavelli’s work can be identified with reasonable ease and analysed in terms of their function.53 The first of those sections is Machiavelli’s dedicatory letter to the Medici prince, obviously identifiable as the exordium or prooemium of his oration. The primary function of the proem is generally agreed among the Roman rhetoricians: it is, says Cicero, to bring ‘the mind of the auditor into a proper condition to receive the rest of the speech’, which ‘will be accomplished if he becomes well-disposed, attentive and receptive’.54 Some of the self-consciously Quintilianic procedures which Machiavelli adopts here will require careful observation. Machiavelli’s prooemium is followed by the narratio in Chapter I of his text. All the Roman theorists similarly agree that the narratio comes immediately after the work of the introduction. It is where an orator ‘points out the facts on which the judge is to pronounce as soon as he has been prepared for it’ by means of the prooemium.55 The juxtaposition is explained by Quintilian: ‘the purpose of the prooemium is to make the judge better disposed, more receptive, and more attentive in taking in the facts’, but we can hardly proceed to produce proof of our 49

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For the five-part scheme, see Quintilian 2001, IV.1.1, vol.II: 180 (exordium); IV.2.1, vol.II: 218 (narratio); IV.3.1, vol.II: 284 (confirmatio); V.13.1, vol.II: 466 (refutatio, explicitly assigned to ‘the fourth place’ according to this five-part scheme); VI.1.1, vol.III: 16 (peroratio). For his reiteration of the fundamental five-part conception, see his comments at III.9.1–6, vol.II: 148–52; V. Proem, 5, vol.II: 324; VIII. Proem, 11, vol.III: 314. Cicero 1949, I.14.19: 40. Ad Herennium 1954, I.2.3: 8. Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292 (propositio); IV.5.1, vol.II: 298 (partitio). For the distinctiveness of the more refined seven-part scheme, see Skinner 1996: 47. For a description of Machiavelli’s text in terms of a six-part scheme composed of elements drawn from a variety of Roman rhetorical authorities, see Viroli 1988: 76–80. Cicero 1949, I.15.20: 40 (translation at 41): ‘Exordium est oratio animum auditoris idonee comparans ad reliquam dictionem; quod eveniet si eum benivolum, attentum, docilem confecerit.’ See Ad Herennium I.IV.6 for an almost identical definition. Quintilian 2001, IV.2.1, vol.II: 218: ‘Maxime naturale est . . . ut praeparato . . . iudice res de qua pronuntiaturus est indicetur: ea est narratio.’

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case, he points out, ‘unless the Cause is duly known’. So it is almost always essential that ‘the judge ought to be provided with knowledge of the facts at the outset’.56 A narrative, he explains, is an exposition of an action or an alleged action, or a ‘speech instructing the hearer on what is in dispute’.57 There is great art to its proper composition, because ‘narrative was not invented simply to acquaint the judge with the facts, but rather to ensure that he agrees with us’.58 When Machiavelli begins in Chapter II to substantiate the argument about principalities which he outlines in Chapter I, he emphasises that he has just finished setting out the basic elements of his case by means of a metaphor: he declares that his task henceforth will consist in his ‘weaving together the warps mentioned above’.59 Everything that it is fundamentally controversial about Machiavelli’s argument is stated in a calmly devastating manner in Chapter I. Machiavelli’s subversion of the conventions of the princely ideology does not begin in Chapter XV when he turns to consider the qualities of the prince. It begins at the beginning, when he presents a summary of his case. That summary is achieved in a series of statements exemplifying the three finest qualities which Cicero, the author of Ad Herennium and Quintilian all underline as necessary for a successful narratio: brevity, lucidity, credibility.60 Machiavelli’s brevity is self-evident.61 The lucid quality of his narratio resides in his use of ‘normal but expressive words’ and ‘a straightforward order’ so as to give a ‘distinct view of facts, persons, times, places and causes’ and to provide the audience ‘with a taste of everything that we shall be treating in the Proof: person, motive, place, time, means, occasion’.62 Its clarity is enhanced by the unobtrusive but 56

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Quintilian 2001, IV.2.24, vol.II: 230: ‘Nam cum prohoemium idcirco comparatum sit ut iudex ad rem accipiendam fiat conciliator docilior intentior, et probatio nisi causa prius cognita non possit adhiberi, protinus iudex notitia rerum instruendus videtur.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.2.31, vol.II: 234: ‘Narratio est rei factae aut ut factae utilis ad persuadendum expositio, vel . . . oratio docens auditorem quid in controversia sit.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.2.21, vol.II: 228: ‘Neque enim narratio in hoc reperta est, ut tantum cognoscat iudex, sed aliquanto magis ut consentiat.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘et andro` tessendo li orditi soprascritti’. Cicero 1949, I.20.28: 56: ‘Oportet igitur eam [sc. narrationem] tres habere res: ut breves, ut aperta, ut probabilis sit’; Ad Herennium 1954, I.9.14: 24: ‘Tres res convenit habere narrationem: ut brevis, ut dilucida, ut veri similis sit’; Quintilian 2001, IV.2.31, vol.II: 234: ‘Eam [sc. narrationem] plerique scriptores maximeque qui sunt ab Isocrate volunt esse lucidam brevem veri similem. Neque enim referet an pro lucida perspicuam, pro veri simili probabilem credibilemve dicamus.’ For Quintilian’s specifications about brevity in the narratio, see Quintilian 2001, IV.2.40–52, vol.II: 240–4. Quintilian 2001, IV.2.36, vol.II: 236–8: ‘Erit autem narratio aperta ac dilucida si fuerit primum exposita verbis propriis et significantibus . . . tum distincta rebus personis temporibus locis causis’;

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nevertheless highly effective tropes and figures.63 He makes quick and imaginative use of a simile – the trope of similitudo described by Quintilian as excellent for ‘shedding light on facts’ and often useful ‘to make an image of things’ – when he says that some new states are ‘like limbs attached to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them’.64 As for the credibility of Machiavelli’s argument, he nods towards his dependency upon exemplification when he says of states that ‘they are either wholly new, as Milan was to Francesco Sforza’.65 He thereby gestures at some of the more typical forms of proof to come.66 It is also important to note that the argument outlined in Machiavelli’s narratio consists in a highly controversial definition of the type of state which he calls a principality. Machiavelli insists that his argument takes the form of a dispute. No sooner has he laid down his basic line of thought about principatus in Chapter I than he announces, at the beginning of Chapter II, that ‘I will dispute how these principalities can be governed and maintained’.67 In Chapter XV, he restates the controversial nature of his argument, declaring that although ‘many have written’ on how a prince should govern, his treatise marks a departure ‘in disputing this subjectmatter’.68 And in his famous letter of December 1513 to Francesco Vettori, he says that he has ‘composed a little book On Principalities’ in which ‘I delve as deeply as I can in thinking about this subject, disputing what a principality is, what species there are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost’.69 Machiavelli begins to corroborate the facts of his case in Chapter II, at the point where he settles down to talk about the first type of principality which he has mentioned in his narratio. The point of the confirmatio is, as its name suggests, straightforwardly to prove one’s case. Cicero, for

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IV.2.56, vol.II: 246: ‘Omnia denique quae probatione tractaturi sumus, personam causam locum tempus instrumentum occasionem, narratione delibabimus.’ For the virtues of luciditas and propria verba, see his comments at VIII.2.22, vol.III: 338. For unobtrusive ornatus in the narratio, see Quintilian 2001, IV.2.116–18, vol.II: 276. For Quintilian’s theory of ornatus, see further discussion below. Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.72, vol.III: 380: ‘Praeclare vero ad inferendam rebus lucem repertae sunt similitudines: quarum aliae sunt quae probationis gratia inter argumenta ponuntur, aliae ad exprimendam rerum imaginem compositae’; Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘o sono come membri aggiunti allo stato ereditario del principe che li acquista’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘o sono nuovi tutti, come fu Milano a Francesco Sforza’. For further analysis of the narratio, see discussion in Chapter 7 here. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘disputero` come questi principati si possino governare e mantenere’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘molti di questo hanno scritto . . . partendomi, massime nel disputare questa materia, dalli ordini delli altri’. Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 426: ‘composto uno opuscolo De principatibus; dove io mi profondo quanto io posso nelle cogitazioni di questo subietto, disputando che cosa e` principato, di quale spezie sono, come e’ si acquistono, come e’ si mantengono, perche´ e’ si perdono’.

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instance, says that ‘by marshalling arguments’ in this third section of our speech, we ‘lend credit, authority to our case’.70 Machiavelli’s long confirmatio then runs until the point where he begins the fourth distinctive part of his work, the refutatio, in Chapter XXV. Quintilian understands that the process of refuting an opponent’s case is highly complex, but like other Roman authorities he treats confirmatio and refutatio as theoretically separable activities, since ‘proof is meant to establish something, and refutation to pull something down’.71 Refutation involves considerations of how and when to engage with the opposition, whether to isolate and attack individual points, or whether to attack them en masse, and so on.72 Patently false or unsustainable statements are easily controverted, but in Quintilian’s opinion, ‘it takes a real orator to make the opponent’s argument appear contradictory, irrelevant, unbelievable, superfluous or favourable to our side’.73 Chapter XXV sees Machiavelli explicitly engaging in a formal act of refutatio, as his opening sentence makes clear. He begins by announcing: ‘I am not unaware that many people have held and hold today the opinion that things in the world are governed by fortuna and by God in such a way that men have no power to correct them with their prudence, and that, on the contrary, they have no remedy at all; and for this reason they could judge that there is no point in sweating too much over things: better to leave oneself to be governed by fate.’74 Machiavelli’s way of restating the opposition’s case is savagely polemical. He has been ‘not unaware’ of the opinion to which he refers for the entire duration of his text. He has been mocking its very well-known ‘remedies’, for instance, since Chapter III.75 But in Chapter XXV, as he prepares to refute it for the final time, he twists the knife deep into its heart by means of an ironic act of ‘simulated 70

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Cicero 1949, I.24.34: 68 (translation at 69): ‘Confirmatio est per quam argumentando nostrae causae fidem et auctoritatem et firmamentum adiungit oratio.’ Quintilian 2001, III.9.5, vol.II: 150: ‘[Tamen nec iis adsentior qui detrahunt refutationem tamquam probationi subiectam, ut Aristoteles.] Haec enim est quae constituat, illa quae destruat.’ For refutatio as a distinctive section of a speech, see Quintilian 2001, V.13.1, vol.II: 466. Compare, for example, Cicero 1949, I.42.78: 122. Quintilian 2001, V.13.11–15, vol.II: 472–4. Quintilian 2001, V.13.17, vol.II: 476: ‘Sed tamen interim oratoris est efficere ut quid aut contrarium esse aut a causa diversum aut incredibile aut supervacuum aut nostrae potius causae videatur esse coniunctum.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98: ‘E non mi e` incognito come molti hanno avuto et hanno opinione che le cose del mondo sieno in modo governate dalla fortuna e da Dio, che li uomini con la prudenzia loro non possino correggerle, anzi non vi abbino remedio alcuno; e per questo, potrebbero iudicare che non fussi da insudare molto nelle cose, ma lasciarsi governare alla sorte.’ E.g. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17: ‘per non potere tu usare contro di loro medicine forti’. For the significance of this ‘strong medicine’, see my discussion in the following chapter.

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agreement’, as Quintilian calls it. This act of simulation is a figure of thought called concessio, ‘in which we seem to allow something damaging, just to show our confidence in the cause’.76 Machiavelli duly appears to concede ground to his opponents’ view of a providential universe: ‘When I think about this, at times I am in part inclined towards their opinion.’77 But Machiavelli’s inclinations, it quickly emerges, do not yield so passively to the sway of an argument about divinely determined things: ‘So that our free judgement is not entirely extinguished’, he goes on to say, drily, ‘I nonetheless judge that it may possibly be the truth that fortuna is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that even she leaves the government of half of them – or thereabouts – to us.’78 The defence of his position in terms of his desire not to imply the elimination of what Machiavelli calls libero arbitrio forms part of a stinging attack on the princely arbiter of the case which he is refuting. For the princely arbiter who determines the sors, fortuna and status of his subjects in accordance with the government of a providential universe was a judge whose exercise of clementia was said, in the Roman theory, to ensure him ‘liberum arbitrium’.79 Machiavelli is here engaged in refuting that argument on its own terms. He will continue to refute it for the rest of the chapter by appropriating not only Senecan language but also Senecan imagery. As Quintilian says, in responding to the question of ‘how figures ought to be countered’, ‘the right course on most occasions’ is that ‘they should always be exposed by the opponent, as hidden sores are opened’.80 Machiavelli’s most lethal attacks on the rationality of the Roman theory of monarchy are conducted in this manner. In Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli concludes his argument with a rousing peroration in which he exhorts his audience to liberate Italia. There is certainly a sense in which, as Viroli indicates, he has been in conclusive mode since Chapter XXIV, although one should recognise that, as his is a 76

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Quintilian 2001, IX.2.51, vol.IV: 62: ‘Non procul autem absunt ab hac simulatione res inter se similes . . . concessio, cum aliquid etiam inicum videmur causae fiducia pati’; for ‘simulated assent’ as a powerful tool in refutatio, see also the discussion at VI.3.72–3, vol.III: 100: ‘et simulata adsensione’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98–9: ‘A che pensando io qualche volta, mi sono in qualche parte inclinato nella opinione loro.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 99: ‘Non di manco, perche´ el nostro libero arbitrio non sia spento, iudico potere esser vero che la fortuna sia arbitra della meta` delle azione nostre, ma che etiam lei ne lasci governare l’altra meta`, o presso, a noi.’ Seneca 1928a, II.7.3: 444: ‘Clementia liberum arbitrium habet; non sub formula, sed ex aequo et bono iudicat.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.93, vol.IV: 88: ‘Quaesitum etiam est quo modo responderi contra figuras oporteret. Et quidam semper ex diverso aperiendas putaverunt, sicut latentia vitia rescinduntur. Idque sane frequentissime faciendum est.’

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complex causa, Machiavelli takes pains to recapitulate and conclude parts of his argument at various stages of its development.81 But, as Viroli also points out, the exhortatio bears all the formal marks of a final peroratio, and it is found, as one might expect, in the closing chapter.82 Quintilian insists on two distinctive aspects to an epilogue: the factual and the emotional.83 The first of these consists in the recapitulation of the facts of one’s case in order to refresh the judge’s memory as vividly and as briefly as possible.84 Quintilian says that ‘we must run quickly through all the ‘‘headings’’’ in order to avoid the criminal vice of boring our audience.85 Machiavelli proves himself to be as inventive in restating his own case as he had been in refuting that of his opponent. He rapidly summarises the points of Chapter VI: ‘as I said, it was necessary for the people of Israel to be enslaved in Egypt . . . for the Persians to be oppressed by the Medes . . . for the Athenians to be in disarray’.86 His peroration is all the more Quintilianic in that it is ‘enlivened by apt sententiae’ and ‘diversified by figures’. According to Quintilian, these rhetorical devices should be used when concluding because ‘nothing is more off-putting than the straightforward repetition of facts’.87 Machiavelli accordingly inserts a sententia from Livy and cites verses from Petrarch in order to embellish his reiterations.88 But he also 81

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Viroli 1998: 79. For Quintilian’s approval of recapitulation in complex causes, see Quintilian 2001, VI.1.8, vol.III: 20. For Machiavelli’s conclusiones in parts of his argument in chapters other than the last, see, for example, the instances in Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 77: ‘concludo, per tanto, che uno principe debbe tenere delle congiure poco conto’; 78: ‘di nuovo concludo che uno principe debbe stimare e’ grandi’; 83: ‘ma verro` alla conclusione di questo discorso’. Viroli 1998: 79–80. Quintilian 2001, VI.1.1, vol.III: 16: ‘Eius duplex ratio est, posita aut in rebus aut in adfectibus.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.1, vol.III: 16: ‘Rerum repetitio et congregratio, quae Graece dicitur a0 majeuakai! xri&, a quibusdam Latinorum enumeratio, et memoriam iudicis reficit et totam simul causam ponit ante oculos.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.2, vol.III: 18: ‘In hac quae repetemus quam brevissime dicenda sunt, et, quod Graeco verba patet, decurrendum per capita.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘E se, come io dissi, era necessario volendo vedere la virtu` di Moise`, che il populo d’Isdrael fussi stiavo in Egitto, et a conoscere la grandezza dello animo di Ciro, ch’e’ Persi fussino oppressati da Medi, e la eccellenzia di Teseo, che li Ateniesi fussino dispersi.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.2, vol.III: 18: ‘Quae autem enumeranda videntur, cum pondere aliquo dicenda sunt et aptis excitanda sententiis et figuris utique varianda: alioqui nihil est odiosius recta illa repetitione velut memoriae iudicum diffidentis.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘Qui e` iustizia grande: iustum enim est bellum quibus necessarium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est’ (citing Livy, 9.1); 105: ‘e sotto li sua auspizii si verifichi quel detto del Petrarca: Virtu´ contro a furore prendera` l’arme; e fia el combatter corto: che` l’antico valore nelli italici cor non e` ancor morto’ (citing Petrarch, Italia mia, verses 93–6).

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engages in some of the most highly figured passages of the text. Italia, Machiavelli tells us, is ‘piu` stiava che li Ebrei, piu` serva ch’e’ Persi, piu` dispersa che li Ateniensi, sanza capo, sanza ordine; battuta, spogliata, lacera, corsa’.89 In putting it thus, Machiavelli relates her plight by recurring repeatedly to a figure of speech which Quintilian classifies under the general heading of ‘addition’.90 This type of figure is evident, for instance, when ‘a series of clauses may either begin with the same word, with great effect and urgency’ or close with the same repetitive pattern.91 Machiavelli combines this figure with another, one which is at work when ‘words with the same meaning are also massed together’, and which Quintilian illustrates by reference to Cicero in the Catiline orations: ‘he went off, he departed, he broke out, he got away.’92 Machiavelli’s Italia is both stiava and serva, but there is very little – if anything – to distinguish her servile condition from that of a slave.93 When used properly, the effect of the figure, as Quintilian observes, is not so much superfluity of sense as an intense impact upon the affects of the audience.94 Machiavelli closes the sentence by threading an almost textbook instance of asyndeton (listed under the Latin name of dissolutio by Quintilian) through these other varieties of the figure of addition as they rise to a climax. The technique of omitting conjunctions is useful when we are ‘particularly insistent on something’ so that ‘our points are thus driven home one at a time and also, as it were, made more numerous’.95 Machiavelli’s concluding remarks about an Italia which is ‘beaten, stripped bare, lacerated, overrun’ derive considerable force from their figured character. But the most glaringly evident figure in the peroratio is personification. This figure brings Italia to life and equips Machiavelli with the means of launching highly charged appeals in an attempt to sway his audience’s opinion in the closing moments of the book, thereby enabling him to perform the second of the principal functions which Quintilian specifies as the purpose of an epilogue. Quintilian admits that using one’s rhetorical resources in order to manipulate affects in this concerted way poses ethical 89 90 91

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘piu´ stiava che li Ebrei, piu´ serva che’e’ Persi’. For the varieties of the figure of addition, see Quintilian 2001, IX.3.28–54, vol.IV: 114–30. Quintilian 2001, IX.3.30, vol.IV: 116: ‘Et ab isdem verbis plura acriter et instanter incipiunt . . . et in isdem desinunt.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.3.45–6, vol.IV: 126: ‘Congregantur quoque verba idem significantia . . . ‘‘abiit, excessit; erupit, evasit’’.’ See n.89 above. Quintilian 2001, IX.3.54, vol.IV: 130: ‘fons quidem unus, qui acriora facit et instantiora quae dicimus et vim quandam prae se ferentia velut saepius erumpentis adfectus’. Quintilian 2001, IX.3.50, vol.IV: 128: ‘figuram que quia coniunctionibus caret dissolutum vocatur: apta cum quid instantius dicimus: nam et singula inculcantur et quasi plura fiunt’. For the Greek nomination of this figure as asyndeton, see the comments at IX.3.50–1, vol.IV: 130.

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problems, but he suggests that ‘emotional appeals are necessary if truth, justice and the common good cannot be secured by other means’.96 A prosecutor should therefore seek to ‘stir up the judges’.97 He sometimes ‘excites tears of pity for the victim whose wrongs he seeks to avenge’.98 The peroration provides opportunities for arousing ‘envy, loathing and anger’, but the ‘chief way for the prosecution to arouse emotion is to make the charge seem as outrageous or even, if possible, as pitiable as possible’.99 In the case of an assault, for instance, Quintilian advises that outrage can be produced by dwelling on the qualities of the victim and on the ‘worthless and despicable character’ of their assailant.100 A prosecutor can elicit pity ‘by complaining of the misfortune of the victim whom he seeks to avenge’.101 Quintilian suggests that a really vivid imago of the future might be expressed – pointing to the potential dangers of leaving justice undone, for example.102 But most of all, a pitiful imago of the victim should be presented to the judge – effectively, but briefly, so as not to exhaust the patience or pity of the audience.103 One way of achieving this is to bring in appropriate evidence in order to make a massive visual impact: a bloody sword, unbandaged wounds, tortured bodies.104 The rhetorical equivalents of these methods revolve around the imaginative representation of the victim’s plight.105 Another way is through an act of impersonation, so that ‘the judge no longer thinks that he is listening to a lament for somebody else’s troubles, but that he is hearing the feelings and the voice of the afflicted, whose silent appearance alone moves him to tears’.106 Such 96

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Quintilian 2001, VI.1.7, vol.III: 20: ‘Necessarios tamen adfectus fatebuntur si aliter optineri vera et iusta et in commune profutura non possint.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.9, vol.III: 20: ‘huic [i.e. accusatori] concitare iudices . . . convenit’. Quintilian 2001, VI.1.9, vol.III: 20: ‘accusator habet interim lacrimas ex miseratione eius quem ulciscitur’. Quintilian 2001, VI.1.14–15, vol.III: 24: ‘Concitare quoque invidiam odium iram liberius in peroratione contingit . . . Summa tamen concitandi adfectus accusatori in hoc est, ut id quod obiecit aut quam atrocissimum aut etiam, si fieri potest, quam maxime miserabile esse videatur.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.16, vol.III: 24: ‘etiam si percussus sit [i.e. is quem accusator ulciscitur] a vili aliquo contemptoque’. Quintilian 2001, VI.1.18, vol.III: 26: ‘Utitur frequenter accusator et miseratione, cum aut eius casum quem ulciscitur aut liberorum ac parentium solitudinem conqueritur.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.19, vol.III: 26: ‘Etiam futuri temporis imagine iudices movet.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.28, vol.III: 33: ‘Nam cum etiam veros dolores mitiget tempus, citius evanescat necesse est illa quam dicendo effinximus imago.’ See Quintilian 2001, VI.1.30, vol.III: 32. See Quintilian 2001, VI.1.25–7, vol.III: 30. Quintilian 2001, VI.1.26, vol.III: 30: ‘His praecipue locis utiles sunt prosopopoeiae, id est fictae alienarum personarum orationes . . . cum ipsos loqui fingimus, ex personis quoque trahitur adfectus. Non enim iudex videtur aliena mala deflentis, sed sensum ac vocem auribus accipere miserorum, quorum etiam mutus aspectus lacrimas movet.’

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methods are likened by Quintilian to those of an actor, who speaks behind a persona, or mask.107 Italia begins to come alive in the opening sentence of Machiavelli’s peroratio when he tells us that he has been wondering ‘if at the moment in Italia the time was coming to honour a new prince, and if there was materia in it that might provide an occasion for someone prudent and virtuous to introduce forma which might bring honour to him and good to the men in general who live there’.108 This sentence is frequently taken to refer to the prince’s creative abilities – and it does – but it is Machiavelli, the princely preceptor, who presently ‘introduces’ forma in Italia. That is, he proceeds ‘to introduce’ or ‘to bring into’ Italia the forma of a persona. To create formae is to engage in the rhetorical figure of personification. As Quintilian explains, ‘we often fabricate formae’, pointing out how ‘Virgil invented Rumour, Prodicus Pleasure and Virtue, and Ennius Death and Life’.109 Machiavelli exchanges impersonation for personification in fulfilling the task of evoking pity in the audience, but the crucial effect – a vivid picture of a pitiable victim – is produced all the same. Italia has become fully animated by the next sentence – alive enough to have been enslaved and stripped bare. Machiavelli’s use of forma and materia does not necessarily point towards a reliance upon Aristotle; it may rather confirm his dependence upon Quintilian.110 As early as the second book of Institutio oratoria, Quintilian settles down to the closest explanation of what he consistently refers to as materia throughout his treatise. Here he reports the view that ‘the materia of rhetoric is ‘‘speech’’’, and quickly goes on to incorporate into his discussion the analogy of a sculptor working with materia on the grounds that a speech, like a statue, is a work of art.111 After some adjudication about various definitions, Quintilian concludes that ‘the materia of rhetoric is everything which is submitted to it’, and he goes on 107

Quintilian 2001, VI.1.26, vol.III: 30: ‘ut scaenicis actoribus eadem vox eademque pronuntiatio plus ad movendos adfectus sub persona valet’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 101–2: ‘Considerato, adunque, tutte le cose di sopra discorse, e pensando meco medesimo se in Italia al presente correvano tempi da onorare uno nuovo principe, e se ci era materia che dessi occasione a uno prudente e virtuoso, di introdurvi forma che facessi onore a lui e bene alla universita` delli uomini di quella.’ 109 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.36, vol.IV: 52: ‘Sed formas quoque fingimus saepe, ut Famam Vergilius, ut Voluptatem ac Virtutem, quem ad modum a Xenophonte traditur, Prodicus, ut Mortem ac Vitam, quas contendentes in satura tradit, Ennius. Est et incerta persona ficta oratio.’ 110 For the interpretation of these categories as essentially Aristotelian, see Pocock 1975: 164–82. 111 Quintilian 2001, II.21.1, vol.I: 406: ‘Materiam rhetorices quidam dixerunt esse orationem . . . Quae si ita accipitur ut sermo quacumque de re compositus dicatur oratio, non materia sed opus est, ut statuarii statua; nam est oratio efficitur arte sicut statua.’ 108

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to extend his treatment of the concept even further into the realm of aesthetics for the rest of the chapter.112 But his discussion of aesthetics has already included a debate over whether the making of a good orator resides more in the raw nature of the student than in the art with which he is moulded into shape: Quintilian has concluded that you need both nature and art to produce the perfect specimen. As he puts it, ‘nature is the materia of teaching; the one forms, the other is formed. Without materia, art can do nothing; materia has a value apart from art; the highest art is better than the best materia.’113 In Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli is pursuing a line of questioning which must confront any artist, whether sculptor, rhetorical praeceptor, or orator, or statesman: do I have at my disposal the necessary raw materia which I can shape, fashion, transform by means of my art? Machiavelli uses this aesthetic terminology because he insists that the government of the state is indeed an art – the art of the state.114 The prince must be an artist. But in Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli himself assumes this role. By means of his rhetorical art, he conjures out of his speech, or his materia, a forma: the persona of Italia. For Machiavelli, as we shall see, to bring forma to a state is to produce a person: founders of states ‘personify’ in a literal sense. As Machiavelli makes abundantly clear in his treatise, states are best thought of as persons. And to make a state – or to father a state, as we might say in line with Machiavelli’s thinking about the activity of the virtuous founder – is one of the most profoundly creative endeavours that anyone can undertake. But here Machiavelli performs the princely task of personification at a textual level, bringing the persona of Italia to life out of his verbal materia. Italia is then said to have suffered so much that she remains ‘almost lifeless’, waiting for ‘someone with the power to heal her wounds, and to put an end to the ravaging of Lombardy, to the extortions in the Kingdom and in Tuscany, and to cure the sores which have already been festering for so long’.115 The utterly wretched Italia practically parades her cuts and abrasions to the audience in order to expose the vile character of her

112 113

114 115

See Quintilian 2001, II.21.4–5, vol.I: 408. Quintilian 2001, II.19.3, vol.I: 400 (translation at 401): ‘Denique natura materia doctrinae est: haec fingit, illa fingitur. Nihil ars sine materia, materia etiam sine arte pretium est; ars summa materia optima melior.’ Importantly emphasised in Viroli 1998: 42–72. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘In modo che, rimasa sanza vita, espetta qual possa esser quello che sani le sue ferite, e ponga fine a’ sacchi di Lombardia, alle taglie del Reame e di Toscana, e la guarisca di quelle sue piaghe gia` per lungo tempo infistolite.’

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attacker: ‘Look how she prays to God that He send someone to redeem her of this cruelty and barbaric insolence.’116 Machiavelli produces this pathetic image in accordance with Quintilian’s strictures about the peroratio. In so doing, he simultaneously develops another characteristic of a successful conclusion. Quintilian states that ‘the most satisfactory thing is if you are in a position to derive an argument from your opponent’.117 It is certainly true that by this stage, the medical pretensions of the protagonist of the Roman theory of monarchy have been exposed and analysed, his salvific capacities questioned and his humanitas closely examined; but Machiavelli’s prince is still a medic – and to whom is Italia here appealing if not to a humane doctor who will heal her wounds and deliver her from cruel mistreatment? In addition to the five parts into which Machiavelli’s text has so far been divided, Quintilian adds the propositio and the partitio.118 Both of these are said to form part of the confirmatio, and Quintilian develops a distinctive role for each of them as means of ‘signposting or preparing the way for what is to come’ in the proof.119 The identity of propositio is somewhat blurred by Quintilian’s tendency to talk about things ‘proposed’ in the narratio, which he describes as ‘a sustained proposition of the proof ’.120 But he distinguishes it more clearly by explaining that it is ‘the initial stage of any confirmatio’.121 In straightforward cases, it may not be necessary. Its utility resides in more complex arguments.122 It usually comes after the narratio, in order to clarify what is primarily at stake.123 Occasionally inserting a short statement as soon as you have finished your narratio will lend the text the force of a propositio, as if to say ‘these are the matters on which you are to give judgement’.124 This can serve ‘as a reminder to the judge to give closer attention to the question’ now that ‘the narrative is over

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XXVI: 102: ‘Vedesi come la prega Dio che le mandi qualcuno che la redima da queste crudelta` e insolenzie barbare.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.1.4, vol.III: 18: ‘Illa vero iucundissima, si contingat aliquod ex adversario ducere argumentum.’ See Skinner 1996: 52–3. For their subordination to confirmatio, see Quintilian 2001, III.9.2, vol.II: 148–50. For their function as signposts, see Russell’s comments at vol.II: 174–5. Quintilian 2001, IV.2.79, vol.II: 258: ‘narratio est probationis continua propositio’. Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292: ‘Mihi autem propositio videtur omnis confirmationis initium.’ See Quintilian 2001, IV.4.2–4, vol.II: 292–4. Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292: ‘omnis confirmationis initium: quod non modo in ostendenda quaestione principali, sed nonnumquam etiam in singulis argumentis poni solet’. Quintilian 2001, IV.4.9, vol.II: 296: ‘Habet interim vim propositionis, etiamsi per se non est propositio, cum exposito rerum ordine subicimus: ‘‘de his cogniscitis’’.’

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and the proof is beginning’.125 Alternatively, a propositio may be located ‘in the individual arguments’,126 with the individual proofs following, in which case there is more than one proposition.127 As soon as Machiavelli finishes the narratio of Chapter I, he inserts a reminder to his reader that he is engaged in a specific type of reasoning in De principatibus which he explicitly contrasts with his work elsewhere. He prefaces his proof by announcing that he is going to be addressing himself ‘solely to the principality’.128 Strong grounds for thinking that Machiavelli has very deliberately paused to underline this point to his audience immediately after he has concluded his narratio – just where Quintilian envisages a principal propositio – will emerge in due course. But it is arguably Machiavelli’s use of the Quintilianic idea of partitio which lends his text some of its most distinctive stylistic characteristics. He constantly tells us in the body of the text where he is going with his argument. The intricacies of his path are demarcated in a language which resonates with the points about partition raised in the Institutio. To partition, Quintilian reports, is to provide an ‘orderly enumeration of our propositions’ in order to make ‘the cause clearer, and the judge more attentive and receptive’ so that he will always know ‘what we are presently speaking about and what we are going to speak about later on’.129 A well-partitioned speech is particularly ‘useful and agreeable’ if ‘we have to advance or refute a number of points’ rather than a single one, so that ‘the order in which we propose to speak of each matter is quite clear’.130 This task is considerably furthered ‘by setting limits to particular parts, just as the fatigue of a journey is a good deal relieved by reading the distance on the milestones’.131 It is ‘pleasant to

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Quintilian 2001, IV.4.9, vol.II: 296–8: ‘Ut sit haec commonitio iudicis, quo se ad quaestionem acrius intendat et velut quodam tactu excitatus finem esse narrationis et initium probationis intellegat, et nobis confirmationem ingredientibus ipse quoque quodam modo novum audiendi sumat exordium.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292: ‘sed nonnumquam etiam in singulis argumentis poni solet’. See Quintilian 2001, IV.4.6–7, vol.II: 296. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero` indrieto el ragionare delle republiche, perche´ altra volta ne ragionai a lungo. Volterommi solo al principato.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.5.1, vol.II: 298: ‘Partitio est nostrarum aut adversarii propositionum aut utrarumque ordine conlocata enumeratio. Hac quidam utendum semper putant, quod ea fiat causa lucidior et iudex intentior ac docilior si scierit et de quo dicimus et de quo dicturi postea sumus.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.5.8, vol.II: 302: ‘Itaque, si plura vel obicienda sunt vel diluenda, et utilis et iucunda partitio est, ut quo quaque de re dicturi simus ordine appareat.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.5.22, vol.II: 308: ‘sed partitio reficit quoque audientem certo singularum partium fine, non aliter quam facientibus iter multum detrahunt fatigationis notata inscriptis lapidibus spatia’.

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know how much of our work has been done’ and a relief for the audience to know ‘how much remains’.132 Machiavelli is almost unnervingly solicitous in the steps which he takes not to lose us in his proofs. As he sets off in Chapter II, he reminds us exactly what materia he is leaving behind and where he is going.133 His early chapters proceed to treat the various types of principalities and the means by which they are acquired in close accordance with the sequence laid out in the narratio. Even in Chapters VIII and IX, where Machiavelli draws attention to examples of acquisitions of principalities which do not fit nicely into the scheme of his narratio, he pairs them in order to partition them and then proceeds from one to the other: as he opens the second example in Chapter IX, he introduces it with the words, ‘But coming on to the other part . . .’.134 In Chapter XII, we have reached a certain stage in his argument: Machiavelli has now ‘discussed in particular’ a number of things about the qualities and conditions of principalities, and so ‘now there remains’ for him ‘to discuss in general terms the means that can be used in attacking and defending them’.135 Just as Quintilian envisages, Machiavelli uses partition not only to steer the audience over the course of his whole argument but also to give guidance within its more complex parts.136 In Chapter VII, the partition and enumeration of four modi, or courses of action, followed by Cesare Borgia are counted off.137 During his analysis of both occasions on which the king of France lost Milan in Chapter III, Machiavelli takes a characteristically Quintilianic rest, when he recalls that ‘the general reasons for the first loss have been discussed; it remains now to discuss the reasons for the second’.138

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Quintilian 2001, IV.5.23, vol.II: 308: ‘Nam et exhausti laboris nosse mensuram voluptati est, et hortatur ad reliqua fortius exequenda scire quantum supersit.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero` indrieto el ragionare delle republiche . . . Volterommi solo al principato.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘Ma perche´ di privato si diventa principe ancora in dua modi, il che non si puo` al tutto o alla fortuna o alla virtu´ attribuire, non mi pare da lasciarli indrieto . . .’; Ch.9: 45: ‘Ma, venendo all’altra parte . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 53: ‘Avendo discorso particularmente tutte le qualita` di quelli principati de’ quali nel principio proposi di ragionare, e considerato in qualche parte le cagioni del bene e male essere loro . . . mi resta ora a discorrere generalmente le offese e difese che in ciascuno de’ prenominati possono accadere.’ Quintilian 2001, III.9.3, vol.II: 150: ‘ideoque eam non orationis totius partem unam esse credendum est, sed quaestionum etiam singularum’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 38: ‘e penso` di farlo in quattro modi: prima . . . secondo . . . terzio . . . quarto . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘Le cagioni universali della prima si sono discorse: resta ora a dire quelle della seconda . . .’

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STATUS THEORY AND THE THEORY OF THE STATE

Mapping out these sections of Il Principe helps to indicate some of the terrain upon which Machiavelli repeatedly engages with the Senecan theory of the prince as his argument courses through its various points. It does so in accordance with a precise rhetorical methodology. Machiavelli produces his theory of the stato called a principato by running his key concept through a body of rhetorical instruction which is known as status theory.139 Machiavelli’s investigation is aligned to a ratiocinative system which is founded upon a strong belief in its own capacity to examine any subject by setting up its enquiry in terms of three basic questions. Quintilian states that ‘we must . . . accept the view of those whose authority Cicero follows, namely that there are three things which are subjects of enquiry in every dispute: Does it exist? What is it? What kind of thing is it?’140 In the end, Quintilian insists, every dispute is reducible to these three fundamental questions of conjecture, definition and quality. In any dispute, we shall first of all need to ask whether the thing in dispute exists or not. Once it is clear that it does exist, we may then need to say what the thing is. We may further develop our sense of its identity by saying what sort of thing it is. This approach is the basic core of Quintilianic status theory.141 When he asks, in exemplary fashion, ‘what is status, how it arises, how many of them there are and what they are’, he is putting the concept through his own theory in order to produce the answer that status is the type of ‘question’ which arises out of any matter in dispute or conflict.142 Quintilian concludes that there are thus ‘three rational states’ or ‘general states’ in rhetorical discourse – conjecture, definition and quality – and they correspond to the three questions of ‘Does it exist?’, ‘What is it?’ and ‘What kind of thing is it?’143 A case in which the form of a dispute is ‘You did it’, ‘No, I didn’t’ may turn upon a consideration of ‘whether I did it’.144 The question arising 139

140

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143 144

For Quintilian’s theory of status and for a bibliography on the subject, see Russell’s discussion at Quintilian 2001, vol.II: 3–4. Quintilian 2001, III.6.80, vol.II: 88: ‘Credendum est igitur iis quorum auctoritatem secutus est Cicero, tria esse quae in omni disputatione quaerantur: an sit, quid sit, quale sit.’ The full theory is laid out in Quintilian 2001, III.6, vol.II: 48–94; for the heart of the matter, see III.6.1–8, vol.II: 48–52. Quintilian 2001, III.6.1, vol.II: 48: ‘quid sit status et unde ducatur et quot et qui sint intuendum puto . . . quod nos statum, id quidam constitutionem vocant, alii quaestionem, alii quod ex quaestione appareat’. The rest of the chapter makes it clear that Quintilian sides with those who think of status as a type of question. See Quintilian 2001, III.6.56, vol.II: 76–8. My summary is a paraphrase of the points raised at Quintilian 2001, III.6.1–6 and III.6.66–78, vol.II: 48–50, 82–8.

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from this conflict is conjectural. If the dispute takes the form ‘That is what you did’, ‘I didn’t do that’, what is questionable is not whether something occurred, but what occurred: it is a matter of definition. A question of quality, however, emerges when a dispute turns upon the sort of thing under consideration. We may establish that someone was killed; but we may want to question more closely the killing in terms of its ‘qualities’ either in order to defend or deplore it, asking whether it was just, honourable, useful, committed in ignorance or insanity, and so on. Questions about ‘what should or should not be done, or should be sought or avoided’ are similarly questions of quality.145 Quintilian argues that ‘quantity . . . whether it is of measure or of number, usually if not always falls under quality’.146 So the whole gamut of questions about quantity, time, place, modality, instrumentality and cause which may be asked about some person or thing do not have a separate fundamental basis but are instead topics of argument applicable to the subject matter under investigation in order to clarify, as appropriate, one or more of these three types of question.147 Finally, disputes about the qualities of a person or action may lead to a change in the way we define them.148 Conversely, questions about definitions can easily become questions about qualities. As he points out, ‘the most powerful element in a definition’ is, in fact, qualitas.149 The best way of defining something is to enquire into its qualities: ‘Is love madness?’, asks Quintilian, by way of example.150 The centrality of the ‘qualis est’ question to the rhetorical art in his eyes means that ‘quality gives the most scope for the orator’s craft’.151 He explains that ‘to demonstrate the quality of things is work for pure eloquence; this is where it reigns, this is where it rules, this is where it wins the day all on its own’.152 In De principatibus, the most insistent type of consideration which Machiavelli takes to his materia is the interrogatory ‘qualis est’. The 145

146

147 148 149

150 151

152

Quintilian 2001, VII.4.2, vol.III: 236: ‘Eidem qualitati succedunt facienda ac non facienda, adpetenda vitanda.’ Quintilian 2001, VII.4.41, vol.III: 260: ‘Quantitas quoque, ut dixi, etiam si non semper, plerumque tamen eidem [sc qualitati] subiacet, seu modi est seu numeri.’ For the subsumption, see also his comments at VII.4.2 and VII.4.16, vol.III: 236, 244. See Quintilian 2001, III.6.24, vol.II: 60. Quintilian 2001, VII.3.2, vol.III: 216–18: ‘Interim a qualitate ad finitionem descenditur . . .’ Quintilian 2001, VII.3.28, vol.III: 232: ‘[id enim agimus, ut sit causae nostrae conveniens finitio]. Potentissima est autem in ea qualitas.’ Quintilian 2001, VII.3.28, vol.III: 232: ‘an amor insania’. Quintilian 2001, VII.4.23, vol.III: 248: ‘Et ideo qualitas maxime oratoris recipit operam, quia in utramque partem plurimum est ingenio loci, nec usquam tantum adfectus valent.’ Quintilian 2001, VII.4.24, vol.III: 248–50: ‘Quale quidque videatur, eloquentiae est opus: hic regnat, hic imperat, hic sola vincit.’

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frequent assumption that the treatise is primarily about the qualities of the prince overlooks the basic fact that this specific enquiry is opened up only in Chapter XV, when Machiavelli proceeds to list at length ‘some of these qualities’ by which men and princes are conventionally praised and blamed.153 Similarly, in Chapter XVI he opens by declaring: ‘To begin, then, with the first qualities mentioned above . . .’154 Chapter XVII also commences with Machiavelli turning to consider the ‘other previously mentioned qualities’ of cruelty and mercy.155 Issues of quality are announced again in the first sentence of Chapter XIX, in which Machiavelli promises that he ‘will discuss the qualities of certain emperors’, while the debate of Chapter XX is said to be about ‘whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or not’; it therefore turns on an issue of quality.156 Yet questions of quality dominate Machiavelli’s thinking from the beginning. The first sentence of Chapter XII summarises what he has been doing since Chapter II with its declaration of ‘having discussed in particular all the qualities of those principates about which I proposed to reason at the outset’.157 Even while Machiavelli conducts these discussions, he makes clear the status of his enquiry by saying that ‘in examining the qualities of these principalities, one should consider another thing: whether a prince has tanto stato’ – sufficient ‘state’, in the sense of ‘sufficient power and territory, to defend himself when this is necessary’.158 He thus narrows his general enquiry about the qualities of principalities into a single question of quantity in Chapter X. As for Quintilian, so for Machiavelli, considerations of quantity are subsumed under questions about quality. To attend to the structure of Machiavelli’s discourse in this way offers more than an insight into its rhetorical procedures. The move from a detailed consideration of the qualities of principalities to a detailed consideration of the qualities of the prince is the very crux of Machiavelli’s 153 154 155 156

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘alcune di queste qualita` che arrecano loro o biasimo o laude’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVI: 66: ‘Cominciandomi adunque alle prime soprascritte qualita` . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68: ‘Scendendo appresso alle altre preallegate qualita` . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 75: ‘Ma, perche´ circa le qualita` di che di sopra si fa menzione . . .’; Ch.XIX: 78: ‘discorrero` le qualita` di alcuni imperatori’; Ch.XX: 85, where the heading reads: ‘An arces et multa alia quae cotidie a principibus fiunt utilia an inutilia sint’ (translation from Machiavelli 1988: 72). Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XII: 53: ‘Avendo discorso particularmente tutte le qualita` di quelli principati de’ quali nel principio proposi di ragionare . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48 (Machiavelli 1988: 37–8): ‘Conviene avere, nello esaminare le qualita` di questi principati, un altra’considerazione: cioe`, se uno principe ha tanto stato che possa, bisognando, per se medesimo reggersi.’

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theory. In order to explain why this is so, one has to recall the case for the opposition. The core of Machiavelli’s theory is a systematic reworking of the interrelations of princeps, status, fortuna and virtus which had been established in the Senecan ideology. Machiavelli agrees that, as a result of the acquisition of his principatus, the prince holds the ‘state’ of his subjects ‘in his hand’; but his reconfiguration of the moral persona which the prince needs to cultivate in order to keep it in his hand – to perform, that is, the central task of mantenere lo stato – can only come after he has first shattered and then painstakingly reconstructed, from Chapter I onwards, a conventional description of what, precisely, the ‘state’ of a principality is and how the prince comes to lay his hand on it in the first place. Machiavelli sees that he cannot begin to address the question of what qualities a princeps must have without first questioning and countering the conventional understanding of the qualities of the principatus which he must govern and maintain. The organisation of Machiavelli’s materia in De principatibus is thus an inseparable part of his theory. The structure of his text constitutes a fullfrontal assault on the configuration of the head and body in the corporal metaphor of the Roman theory of monarchy. Machiavelli sees that the traditional interpretation of the virtues of the prince derives from a consideration of the relation of principatus to princeps. But that relation had been captured in the theory and subsequently rehearsed for centuries by means of a version of the metaphor of the body politic. At the centre of the Senecan explanation of the institution of Roman monarchy is the description of an act of fusion between head and body envisaged as the formation of a single body animated by a single persona. Machiavelli identifies the generation of this single body as a central point which he must refute. He therefore undoes the central theoretical manoeuvre upon which the entire ideology of the virtuous princeps has been raised and sustained by pulling apart and re-examining in minute detail what happens to bodies when they are subjected to princely conquest. Only through his unflinching redescription of how principatus are acquired and in what condition they are held can Machiavelli destroy the analogy and so begin to reconstruct the theory of moral personality which lies at the heart of the classical and humanist arguments about their proper maintenance. His detailed dissection of the type of activities in which princely virtu` must properly consist is theoretically pinned to his view of the stato upon which the prince must retain his hold. Machiavellian princely virtu` is as controversial, and only as controversial, as the Machiavellian definition of the ‘state’ of a principality.

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PROVING AND REFUTING

Every controversy requires proof. For Quintilian, refuting and proving are profoundly related as ratiocinative procedures.159 In the first place, ‘the methods are similar in either case’ since ‘the principle governing arguments in this part cannot be sought in any Places which are not used for the confirmation’.160 Here Quintilian is merely reiterating an argument which can be found in Cicero’s De inventione.161 Both refuting and proving involve identifying ‘topics, sententiae, words and figures’, seeing where the opposition has drawn its arguments and revisiting the same places, sometimes to pull out different conclusions, at other times to turn the evidence against the opposition, occasionally to show up internal inconsistencies in the rival argument.162 Furthermore, statements designed to strengthen or prove one’s own case often consist of an implicit act of refutation, an attack on a contrary definition. Quintilian insists that ‘we must both establish our own definition and destroy our opponent’s’.163 Proof will be most effective when it is self-consciously polemical. He envisages an almost ceaselessly combative approach: a winning orator will encroach upon his opponent’s material from proem to peroration. ‘Inartificial’ or ‘non-technical’ forms of proof are so called because they are per se ‘artless’; and they consist in things like previous legal ‘decisions, rumours, evidence from torture, documents, oaths and witnesses’.164 Machiavelli makes use of rumour in Chapter XVIII, declaring that ‘one present-day ruler, whom it is as well not to name, preaches nothing other than peace and trust, and yet he is extremely hostile to both’.165 But most of his case exhaustively exploits the complex of ‘artificial proofs’ which Quintilian envisages as the orator’s main tools in the creation of belief. They are made up of three types – signs, arguments and examples – of 159 160

161 162

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Quintilian 2001, V.13.56, vol.II: 496: ‘In his probandi refutandique ratio est.’ Quintilian 2001, V.13.1, vol.II: 466: ‘sed utriusque similis condicio est. Neque vero ex aliis locis ratio argumentorum in hac parte peti potest quam in confirmatione’. See Cicero 1949, I.42.78: 122. Quintilian 2001, V.13.1, vol.II: 466: ‘nec locorum aut sententiarum aut verborum et figurarum alia condicio est’. For the various methods of proving and disproving, see V.13.2–56, vol.II: 466–96. Quintilian 2001, VII.3.19, vol.III: 226: ‘In eo ‘‘quid sit’’ duplex opus est: nam et nostra confirmanda est et adversae partis destruenda finitio.’ Quintilian 2001, V.1.2, vol.II: 324: ‘id est, artificiales vocaverunt. Ex illo priore genere sunt praeiudicia, rumores, tormenta, tabulae, ius iurandum, testes, in quibus pars maxima contentionum forensium consistit. Sed ut ipsa per se carent arte . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 74: ‘Alcuno principe de’ presenti tempi, quale non e` bene nominare, non predica mai altro che pace e fede, e dell’una e dell’altra e` inimicissimo.’

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which by far the most important to Quintilian are arguments and examples.166 Quintilian’s discussion of arguments is largely a systematic analysis of the ‘common places’ where an orator may find his proofs.167 Here Quintilian makes two basic points. The first is that there is no question under investigation in rhetorical discourse which ‘is not based either on things or on persons’.168 Actions – things that happen – are classed within the category of things.169 The second is that there can be no ‘Topics of Arguments not based on the accidents of things or persons’.170 The orator needs to know where to go to fetch his arguments, and there is considerable overlap between the lists of rhetorical theorists when it comes to specifying the so-called ‘common places’. The ‘seats’ or places of argument are not only where arguments live: they are also where arguments are ‘born’.171 Not everything ‘is generated’ in one and the same terrain, but ‘if we know where everything is born, when we come to the place we shall easily see the argument in it’.172 If we are talking about a person, for instance, Quintilian suggests that we can talk about their genus, or birth; their nationality or their patria; their sex or age; their education or their physique; their good or bad fortuna and their differing conditions – are they rich or poor, famous or obscure, free or slaves, married or single?173 We can also refer to their cast of mind, their various moral qualities, their occupation, or their past actions and utterances.174 Even their name can be a source of an argument to be used for or against them.175 If we talk about things like actions, on the other hand, Quintilian suggests five principal questions: ‘why or where or when or how or by what means’ an action is 166

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Quintilian 2001, V.9.1, vol.II: 358: ‘Omnis igitur probatio artificialis constat aut signis aut argumentis aut exemplis.’ See Quintilian 2001, V.10.20–54, vol.II: 374–92. Quintilian 2001, V.8.4, vol.II: 356: ‘Nam neque ulla quaestio est quae non sit aut in re aut in persona.’ For this point, see Quintilian 2001, V.10.32, vol.II: 382. Quintilian 2001, V.8.4, vol.II: 356: ‘neque esse argumentorum loci possunt nisi in iis quae rebus aut personis accidunt’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.20–1, vol.II: 374–6: ‘Locos appello . . . sedes argumentorum, in quibus latent, ex quibus sunt petenda. Nam ut in terra non omni generantur omnia, nec avem aut feram reperias, ubi quaeque nasci aut morari soleat ignarus.’ Quintilian 2001, V.10.22, vol.II: 376: ‘At si scierimus ubi quodque nascatur, cum ad locum ventum erit facile quod in eo est pervidebimus.’ For the language of generation, see the previous note. Quintilian 2001, V.10.24–7, vol.II: 376–8: ‘genus . . . natio . . . patria . . . sexus . . . educatio et disciplina . . . habitus corporis . . . fortuna . . . in divite ac paupere . . . clarus an obscurus . . . liber an servus, maritus an caelebs’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.27–8, vol.II: 378: ‘animi natura . . . studia quoque . . . Spectantur ante acta dictaque.’ Quintilian 2001, V.10.30, vol.II: 380: ‘Ponunt in persona et nomen.’

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performed.176 These questions correspond to five categories which he lists as motive, place, time, mode and instrument.177 Quintilian occasionally expands these five considerations into six, adding the category of occasio, or opportunity. These categories, it must be stressed, are by no means specific to Quintilian’s series. Occasio, to single out only one example, is listed in similar discussions in Ad Herennium and De Inventione.178 The five considerations correspondingly entail five types of discussion: of motives, which invariably call into question the character and beliefs of the agent under consideration (and so shift the orator into the parallel series of loci about persons); of where any particular action takes place, since different places sometimes call for different actions; of the timing of an action, since there may be a time, as well as a place, for all kinds of actions not normally considered honourable or dishonourable; of the ‘mode’ or manner in which something is done; and, lastly, whether a person has the necessary ‘faculties’ or ‘instruments’, ‘resources’ or means to perform an action, since the question at stake is ‘per quae’, literally, ‘through which an action is completed’.179 Quintilian’s sixth category of occasio fits into this five-fold scheme under the category of time, where its cognate form casus is discussed at length. Here Quintilian admits that although he has included it under the heading of tempus, the idea of chance, or casus, ‘itself provides a place for arguments’: ‘it has’, he says, ‘a special character of its own’.180 Elsewhere, he explains that questions of occasio, or ‘opportunity for action’, have been understood as ways of talking about the very inception of an action, as if it provided the starting point or initial context in which an action is performed.181 The self-conscious generation of Machiavelli’s argument about actions by way of these places is partly advertised in the Latin capita of his chapters. In Chapter IV, he explains ‘why the kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebel against his successors after Alexander’s death’, while Chapter XXIV relays ‘why the rulers of Italy have lost their 176

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Quintilian 2001, V.10.32–3, vol.II: 382: ‘In omnibus porro quae fiunt quaeritur aut quare aut ubi aut quando aut quo modo aut per quae facta sunt.’ See the discussion of each topic at Quintilian 2001, V.10.33–52, vol.II: 382–90. Quintilian 2001, V.10.23, vol.II: 376: ‘cum sit, ut dixi, divisio ut omnia in haec duo partiamur, res atque personas, ut causa tempus locus occasio instrumentum modus et cetera rerum sint accidentia’. See also Cicero 1949, I.27.40: 78; Ad Herennium 1954, II.4.7: 68. I summarise the points raised at Quintilian 2001, V.10.33–52, vol.II: 382–90. Quintilian 2001, V.10.48, vol.II: 388: ‘Casus autem, qui et ipse praestat argumentis locum, sine dubio est ex insequentibus, sed quadam proprietate distinguitur.’ Quintilian 2001, III.6.27–28, vol.II: 62: ‘occasionem factorum, quod est apertius quam ut vel interpretandum vel exemplo sit demonstrandum; tamen a0 uoqla! & ’"´qcxm’. Russell (62) translates the Greek as ‘starting points of action’.

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states’.182 Chapter I supplies an answer to the question ‘quibus modis’ or ‘by what means’ principalities are acquired.183 Chapter V explores ‘in what way’ cities which used to be self-governing should be administered by the prince.184 The title of Chapter XVIII asks ‘in what way fides should be kept by princes’.185 Quomodo also appears in the heading of Chapters X and XXV.186 Analysing action in terms of instrumentality – the means ‘through which’ something is performed – is evident in Machiavelli’s discussion in Chapter VIII of cases where a principality is acquired ‘through’ neither fortune nor virtue: the chapter is headed ‘De his qui per scelera ad principatum pervenere’.187 In Chapter XI, Machiavelli explains how Pope Alexander VI acted ‘con lo instrumento del duca Valentino’.188 Machiavelli’s thoughts about the way in which considerations of place alter the scope and types of action are observable in Chapter III.189 His frequent use of the idea of occasio as a conceptual tool with which to analyse action further exemplifies his reliance upon a distinctive set of loci communes. Alexander VI is said to have acted ‘con la occasione della passata de’ Franzesi’.190 Chapter VI refers to Moses, Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus as exemplary rulers: Machiavelli says that ‘in examining their actions and their lives, one can see that they had nothing from fortuna other than the occasione’.191 This component of Machiavelli’s explanations about events and their occasional contingency helps him to introduce considerable subtlety into his account of how those who, ‘through their virtue and not through their fortuna, have become princes’.192 He goes on to explain that, ‘without that occasione’ from fortuna, their virtue would have been able to achieve nothing; but that ‘without that virtue, the occasione would have passed in vain’.193 Sometimes virtuous actions commence in sheer contingency.

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25 (Machiavelli 1988: 15): ‘Cur Darii regnum quod Alexander occupaverat a successoribus suis post Alexandri mortem non defecit’; Ch. XXIV: 97 (Machiavelli 1988: 83): ‘Cur Italiae principes regnum amiserunt.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Quot sint genera principatuum et quibus modis acquirantur.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 28: ‘Quomodo administrandae sunt civitates vel principatus, qui antequam occuparentur, suis legibus vivebant.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72: ‘Quomodo fides a principibus sit servanda.’ See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48; Ch.XXV: 98. 187 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 52 (referring to Cesare Borgia). See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 16–25. 190 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XI: 52. Machiavelli 1960, Ch. VI: 31: ‘Et esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino altro dalla fortuna che la occasione.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 30: ‘quelli che per propria virtu` e non per fortuna sono diventati principi’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31: ‘sanza quella occasione la virtu´ dello animo loro si sarebbe spenta, e senza quella virtu´, l’occasione sarebbe venuta invano’.

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Quintilian’s account of how to further an argument by means of definition is vital to Machiavelli’s work. Definition is ‘an accurate, lucid and brief expression of a fact’.194 It often comprises four elements: ‘Genus, Species, Difference, and Property’.195 Their utility varies according to the sort of questioning which an orator wants to pursue and the degree of specificity which he might want to introduce. In this respect, properties and differentiae are often vital to the success of a definition. As Quintilian puts it, ‘a definition is confirmed by Properties, destroyed by Differentiae’.196 A defining property of man, for instance, is speech: he alone has this property, so an object which speaks will necessarily be a man.197 But often properties are shared between several objects. Heat, for instance, is a property of a fire, but of many other things besides. Consequently, to assert the presence of heat in an object doesn’t help nail down its definition very helpfully as ‘a fire’.198 Being more specific requires differentiae. For ‘what is not a property will be a differentia’.199 Quintilian illustrates by an example. It is ‘said to be a differentia when the genus is divided into species and the species itself is then discerned’.200 So, in the case of defining ‘man’, ‘‘‘Animal’’ is the Genus, ‘‘mortal’’ the Species, ‘‘terrestrial’’ or ‘‘biped’’ the differentia’. Here the qualities of ‘terrestrial’ or ‘biped’ do not mark out properties of ‘man’ yet; but they do help to differentiate him from the species of mortals which are ‘marine’ or ‘quadruped’. ‘Man is rational’ gets you to the final species, according to Quintilian’s classification.201 Quintilian puts ‘horse’ through the same scheme: ‘the Genus is ‘‘animal’’, the Species ‘‘mortal’’, the Differentia ‘‘non rational’’ . . . the Property ‘‘neighing’’’.202 The differential helps rule out man, who shares with a horse the property of being mortal. These discussions lead Quintilian to Cicero’s conception of definition in his Topica, where definition was said to be always ‘a matter of Same and 194

Quintilian 2001, VII.3.2, vol.III: 218: ‘Finitio igitur est rei propositae propria et dilucida et breviter comprensa verbis enuntiatio.’ 195 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.3, vol.III: 218: ‘Constat maxime, sicut est dictum, genere specie differentibus propriis.’ See also V.10.55, vol.II: 392: ‘Finitioni subiecta maxime videntur genus species differens proprium.’ 196 Quintilian 2001, V.10.58, vol.II: 394 (translation at 395): ‘Propriis confirmatur finitio, differentibus solvitur.’ 197 The example is from Quintilian 2001, V.10.58, vol.II: 394. 198 Quintilian 2001, V.10.58, vol.II: 394. 199 Quintilian 2001, V.10.60, vol.II: 394: ‘Quod autem proprium non erit, differens erit.’ 200 Quintilian 2001, V.10.61, vol.II: 396: ‘Illud quoque differens vocant, cum genere in species diducto species ipsa discernitur.’ 201 For the example, see Quintilian 2001, V.10.62–3, vol.II: 396. 202 The example is in Quintilian 2001, VII.3.3, vol.III: 218.

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Other (for if you deny the applicability of a name, you always have to propose a better one)’.203 But Quintilian thinks it is more complicated than that. Sometimes, as an orator, you simply ask whether a word is the right one for the thing under description.204 That is, you just affirm or deny the applicability of the description, without proffering an alternative description. Sometimes, however, an orator does discuss whether one of two terms is applicable, often because it is highly useful to the cause to specify what else it might be.205 In a case about a killing, for instance, one might want to say that what is alleged to be a case of murder is in fact better described as an instance of manslaughter. A third and final approach might be if there is a dispute over things which appear to differ in species, and we ask whether both things can be called by the same name, or come under the same description, even though each is currently classed differently.206 The argument thus involves you in extending a definition to cover a thing under discussion by analysing it in relation to another thing which is uncontroversially described by the terminology you wish to appropriate.207 These last two approaches engage the orator who is giving a definition either in acts of distinction or in acts of extension. Quintilian goes on to name the process of distinction as paradiastole, which he classifies in line with convention as a figure but which he describes as ‘wholly a matter of definition, and so I doubt whether it is a Figure at all’.208 But paradiastole is just one of the argumentative techniques useful for defining things which Machiavelli acquires from the Roman theorist. Another extraordinarily prominent procedure in Machiavelli’s text is described by Quintilian as ‘division’. Again reiterating a Ciceronian doctrine, Quintilian repeats that ‘division is an aid to definition’.209 To divide material in an argument involves allocating it across differentia, and it 203

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Quintilian 2001, VII.3.8, vol.III: 220: ‘Quamquam autem dissentire vix audeo a Cicerone, qui multos secutus auctores dicit finitionem esse de eodem et de altero (semper enim neganti aliquod esse nomen dicendum quod sit potius)’ (referring to Cicero, Topica, 84). Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘Nam interim convenit unum quaerere an hoc sit.’ Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘Interim quaeritur hoc an hoc: furtum an sacrilegium (non quin sufficiat non esse sacrilegium, sed quia prosit dicere quid sit aliud).’ Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘Interim quaeritur in rebus species, an et hoc et hoc eodem modo sit appellandum, cum res utraque habet suum nomen . . . In omnibus autem huius generis litibus quaeritur an etiam hoc, quia nomen de quo ambigitur utique in alia re certum est.’ Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘In omnibus autem huius generis litibus quaeritur an etiam hoc, quia nomen de quo ambigitur utique in alia re certum est.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.3.65, vol.IV: 138: ‘Huic diversam volunt distinctionem, cui dant nomen paqadiarskg´m, qui similia discernuntur . . . Quod totum pendet ex finitione, ideoque an figura sit dubito.’ Quintilian 2001, V.10.63, vol.II: 396: ‘Divisione autem adiuvari finitionem docet.’

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sometimes involves dividing a genre into various forms or species.210 On other occasions, we use division in order to establish just one point in a proof: ‘To be a citizen, a man must either be born one, or be made one.’211 There are only two ways of being a citizen: so to prove a man is a citizen is to make one of those two criteria apply to him. You do not need both. You merely need to use the division to make your proof valid. A refutation of the same point, however, has to prove that the man is not a citizen because he was neither born one nor been made one: both sides of the division need eliminating in the refutation.212 Here, too, you need to bring out the division to make your refutation complete. But sometimes the scenario is not just about a basic division. It can get much more complex than one of two specified alternatives, and you need to eliminate all of them, or all but one of them, in order to leave only one remaining possibility that you wish to isolate and underline. Quintilian’s example is illuminating: ‘This slave whom you are claiming is either your homeborn slave, or was bought, or given to you, or left to you as a legacy, or captured from the enemy, or belongs to someone else.’213 If you eliminate all but the last possibility in this case, you successfully destroy the claim. Another way of using the procedure is to offer your opponent one of two propositions, the choice of either of which will damage their case.214 Or else you can put forward two contrary propositions, either of which will help you make your point.215 Division is highly effective under tight oratorical control, and Quintilian regards Cicero as a master of it.216 The most obvious place in Machiavelli’s text where almost all of these argumentative techniques associated with definition are put into practice is Chapter I. But they are also deployed to great effect in Chapters XII and XIII. Here, he is proving the point which he reiterates at the close of Chapter XIII, declaring: ‘I conclude, then, that without its own army, no principality is secure.’217 He opens his proof at the beginning of Chapter XII – which is partially entitled ‘how many genera of army there are’, with 210 211 212 213

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See Quintilian 2001, V.10.63, vol.II: 396. Quintilian 2001, V.10.65, vol.II: 398: ‘ut sit civis, aut natus sit oportet aut factus’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.65, vol.II: 398: ‘utrumque tollendum est: nec natus nec factus’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.67, vol.II: 398: ‘hic servus quem tibi vindicas aut verna tuus est aut emptus aut donatus aut testamento relictus aut ex hoste captus aut alienus’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.68, vol.II: 400: ‘vel cum duo ponentur inter se contraria, quorum tenuisse utrumlibet sufficiet’. Quintilian 2001, V.10.70, vol.II: 400: ‘Interim duo ita proponuntur ut utrumlibet electum idem efficiat.’ See the citations at Quintilian 2001, V.10.68–70, vol.II: 400. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61: ‘Concludo, adunque, che, sanza avere arme proprie, nessuno principato e` sicuro.’

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the claim that ‘the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, or auxiliaries, or a mixture of all three’.218 This elaborates his initial division in Chapter I of principalities acquired ‘con le armi d’altri o con le proprie’, which was more sparely based on the bipartite ‘Same and Other’ principle.219 Machiavelli still wants to argue that principalities should be maintained only with one’s own arms, but as he does so, he now divides the category of ‘others’, naming the alternatives. He then systematically eliminates them from consideration, leaving ‘one’s own arms’ as the only type worth considering. Machiavelli divides within the divisions. Mercenary generals are ‘either excellent men, or not’, he pronounces, and proceeds to show how the truth of either of these two propositions proves his point about their uselessness.220 If they are excellent, ‘you cannot trust them’ on account of their ambition; ‘if the general is not virtuous, he ruins you through his ordinariness’.221 Machiavelli’s rhetorical performance is commanding and its satirical touch so effective in part because he relishes these ways of dividing and conquering opposing arguments. Aside from these ‘arguments’, Machiavelli relies on two further types of artificial proof discussed by Quintilian. The most prominent is the example. Examples constitute proofs which ‘are adduced extrinsically’ by the orator, meaning that they are brought to bear on one’s argument from outside the materia of the case itself.222 Quintilian uses the Latin word exemplum to translate the Greek notion of paradeigma, which is employed ‘both generally of any matching of similar things, and especially with reference to things which rest on the authority of history’.223 An exemplum thus embodies the idea of similitude. But Quintilian also rates the authority of history highly, describing the historical example as ‘the mention of an event which either took place or is treated as having taken place, in order to make your point convincing’.224 In a speech, we should assess whether 218

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 53: ‘Quot sint genera militiae et de mercenariis militibus’; ‘l’arme con le quali uno principe defende el suo stato, o le sono proprie, o le sono mercenarie, o ausiliarie o miste.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 54: ‘E’ capitani mercennarii, o sono uomini eccellenti, o no; se sono, non te ne puoi fidare perche´ sempre aspireranno alla grandezza propria . . . ma se non e` virtuoso, ti rovina per lo ordinario.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XII: 54. Quintilian 2001, V.11.1, vol.II: 430: ‘Tertium genus, ex iis quae extrinsecus adducuntur in causam, Graeci vocant paqa! deicla . . .. ipsi appellemus exemplum.’ Quintilian 2001, V.11.1, vol.II: 430: ‘generaliter usi sunt in omni similium adpositione et specialiter in iis quae rerum gestarum auctoritate nituntur’. Quintilian 2001, V.11.6, vol.II: 432: ‘Potentissimum autem est inter ea quae sunt huius generis quod proprie vocamus exemplum, id est rei gestae aut ut gestae utilis ad persuadendum id quod intenderis commemoratio.’

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the example is wholly or partly similar to the point we want to prove, ‘so that we can take either all of its features into use or only the potentially useful ones’.225 Sometimes we want to exemplify a straightforward likeness; sometimes we use examples to bring out contrary points. Other means of working these historical proofs are moving ‘from greater to lesser’ or ‘from lesser to greater’ examples rather than between strictly parallel situations.226 Quintilian repeatedly uses Cicero to illustrate these methods. One could as easily turn to Machiavelli. No less varied is Machiavelli’s use of all the types of ‘authority’ which Quintilian catalogues as forms of ‘extrinsic’ proof ‘adduced to support a cause’.227 Among the dicta and sententiae of De principatibus which are attributable to ‘wise men’, Machiavelli approvingly refers in Chapter XIII to Tacitus, reporting that ‘wise men have always thought and held ‘‘quod nihil sit tam infirmum aut instabile quam fama potentiae non sua vi nixa’’’.228 Among those attributable to Quintilian’s category of ‘famous poets’, Machiavelli draws upon Virgil and Petrarch.229 Of sayings of ‘uncertain authorship’ which have become ‘vulgar’, Machiavelli mentions the ‘trite proverb’ that ‘he who builds upon the people, builds upon mud’.230 Among those attributable to ‘distinguished citizens’, Machiavelli’s reference in Chapter XII to the ‘sins’ of Italy is believed to be an appropriation of an opinion of Savonarola.231 Quintilian also sees how you can undermine your opponent’s authority by using him as an ‘authority’ for your own case: you can take ‘some remark or action of the judge or your opponent or your opponent’s advocate in order to strengthen your

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Quintilian 2001, V.11.6, vol.II: 432: ‘Intuendum igitur est totum simile sit an ex parte, ut aut omnia ex eo sumamus aut quae utilia erunt.’ For these variants, see Quintilian 2001, V.11.9–17, vol.II: 434–8. Quintilian 2001, V.11.36, vol.II: 450: ‘Adhibebitur extrinsecus in causam et auctoritas.’ For the auctoritas of wise dicta, see Quintilian 2001, V.11.36, vol.II: 450: ‘iudicia aut iudicationes vocant, non de quibus ex causa dicta sententia est, sed si quid ita visum gentibus, populis, sapientibus viris, claris civibus, inlustribus poetis referri potest’. For the opinions of Machiavelli’s ‘wise men’, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61 (Machiavelli 1988: 51): ‘E fu sempre opinione e sentenzia delli uomini savi ‘‘quod nihil sit tam infirmum aut instabile quam fama potentiae non sua vi nixa’’’ (citing Tacitus, Annals, XIII, 19). For Virgil, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 69; for Petrarch, Ch.XXVI: 105. For popular sayings, see Quintilian 2001, V.11.37, vol.II: 450: ‘Ne haec quidem vulgo dicta et recepta persuasione populari sine usu fuerint’; V.11.41, vol.II: 452: ‘Ea quoque quae vulgo recepta sunt hoc ipso, quod incertum auctorem habent, velut omnium fiunt . . .’ The point is exemplified at Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 47: ‘quello proverbio trito, che chi fonda in sul populo, fonda in sul fango’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 54: ‘e chi diceva come e’ n’erano cagione e’ peccati nostri, diceva el vero; ma non erano gia` quelli che credeva’. For the attribution to Savonarola, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XII: 54, n.5; Price and Skinner’s footnote (e) in Machiavelli 1988: 43.

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point’.232 Machiavelli’s comment about liberum arbitrium in his refutatio is merely one instance of his considerable expertise in this field. THE THEORY OF ORNATUS

But undoubtedly the most dramatic effect of Quintilianic doctrine upon the constitution of Machiavelli’s arguments is observable in his use of imagery. Books 8 and 9 of Institutio oratoria lay out Quintilian’s theory of ornatus. They provided the Renaissance with a systematic classification and analysis of the various tropes and figures of speech and of thought which primarily constitute the ornamenta of rhetorical discourse.233 As humanists like Machiavelli saw very clearly, these two books underline the utter indispensability of figurative language to the eloquent orator. Quintilian is adamant that you can have all the rhetorical training in the world and yet, if you do not know how to deliver your speech ornate, you have no hope of qualifying as truly eloquent. Quintilian shows how speech can be made illuminating and brilliant by the inventive use of single words.234 He also maintains that the apposite use of sententiae is crucial both to proof and to ornamentation.235 He calls sententiae the ‘highlights of an oration’ and the ‘eyes of eloquence’.236 But most of the theory consists in explaining how to create verbal ornatus through the use of a combination of words in tropes and figures. Although an essential function of ornamenting speech is making expressions of thoughts ‘shinier’, there is far more at stake than stylistic polish to ensuring that you are ornatus.237 For Quintilian explains that eloquence means ‘to bring out and communicate to an audience the thoughts you have formed in your mind’; and this involves finding ways to ‘express our subject clearly’ so that the audience ‘seems to actually see’ what is being said.238 And the best way of making an 232

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Quintilian 2001, V.11.43, vol.II: 454: ‘Nonnumquam contingit iudicis quoque aut adversarii aut eius qui ex diverso agit dictum aliquod aut factum adsumere qui ex diverso agit dictum aliquod aut factum adsumere ad eorum quae intendimus fidem.’ For a magisterial explication of the theory and its significance to Renaissance readers, see Skinner 1996: 181–98. See Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.15–40, vol.III: 346–62. See Quintilian 2001, VIII.5.1–35, vol. III: 406–24. Quintilian 2001, VIII.5.34, vol.III: 422–4: ‘Ego vero haec lumina orationis velut oculos quosdam esse eloquentiae credo.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.61, vol.III: 374: ‘Ornatum est quod perspicuo ac probabili plus est. Eius primi sunt gradi in eo quod velis concipiendo et exprimendo, tertius qui haec nitidiora faciat, quod proprie dixeris cultum.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem.15, vol.III: 316: ‘Eloqui enim est omnia quae mente conceperis promere atque ad audientis perferre’; VIII.3.62, vol.III: 374: ‘Magna virtus res de quibus loquimur clare atque ut cerni videantur enuntiare.’

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audience see your point of view is to use spectacular imagery. You have to ‘hold forth’ and impress images upon your audience with all the power of your imagination. This is the fundamental function of ornamenta. They enable the orator to engage in a form of vivid ‘representation.’239 If you are not equipped with this communicative capacity as an orator, Quintilian warns, the rest of his instruction ‘is useless, like a sword that is put up and will not come out of its scabbard’.240 To be ornatus means to be armed for battle. The orator must ‘commend himself’ by showing through ‘elegance and ornatus’ that he is ‘fighting with weapons which are not only effective but polished and gleaming’.241 The frequency and complexity of Machiavelli’s deployment of the tropes and figures at the outset make it evident that he is going into battle armed to the teeth. Machiavelli’s attack on the doctrines of the speculum principis is drawn up in terms closely derived from this Quintilianic theory of rhetorical representation inasmuch as it is explicitly directed at immagini.242 In Chapter XV, Machiavelli turns from principalities and arms to consider the qualities of the prince. He opens by declaring that ‘it now remains to see what sort of ways and means of government a prince must use with subjects and with friends’.243 Machiavelli is committed to making us ‘see’ those ways and means. Before he does so, he admits that many have written about this very issue. Yet ‘in disputing this subject’, he has found it necessary ‘to depart very greatly’ from the ‘ordini’ of the others.244 He goes on to describe his approach:

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Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.61–4, vol.III: 374–6: ‘qui plus est evidentia vel, ut alii dicunt, repraesentatio quam perspicuitas, et illud patet, hoc se quodam modo ostendit, inter ornamenta ponamus’. For the representation of the ‘tota rerum imago’ in pictorial terms, see VIII.3.63, vol.III: 376; for Cicero’s mastery in ‘conceiving images’, see VIII.3.64, vol.III: 376. Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem.15, vol.III: 316: ‘sine quo supervacua sunt priora et similia gladio condito atque intra vaginam suam haerenti’. Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.2, vol.III: 340: ‘Cultu vero atque ornatu se quoque commendat ipse qui dicit . . . nec fortibus modo sed etiam fulgentibus armis proeliatur.’ For the language of representation and images in the Quintilianic theory of ornatus, see Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.61–4, vol.III: 374–6: ‘quia plus est evidentia vel, ut alii dicunt, repraesentatio quam perspicuitas, et illud patet, hoc se quodam modo ostendit, inter ornamenta ponamus . . . Est igitur unum genus, quo tota rerum imago quodam modo verbis depingitur . . . Plurimum in hoc genere sicut ceteris eminet Cicero: an quisquam tam procul a concipiendis imaginibus rerum abest ut non, cum illa in Verrem legit: ‘‘stetit soleatus praetor populi Romani cum pallio purpureo tunicaque talari muliercula nixus in litore’’, non solum ipsos intueri videatur et locum et habitum, sed quaedam etiam ex iis quae dicta non sunt sibi ipse adstruat?’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 64: ‘Resta ora a vedere quali debbano essere e’ modi e governi di uno principe con sudditi o con li amici.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘partendomi, massime nel disputare questa materia, dalli ordini delli altri’.

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It has seemed to me more conveniente to concentrate on the actual truth of the matter rather than on its image. For many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known truly to exist.245

Machiavelli uses the past tense to describe where it has ‘seemed’ or ‘appeared’ necessary for him to go in his argument. For reasons which mainly derive from his concerns about correct partitioning, he is highly attentive to the tenses which he employs to say what he has done, what he is doing and what he is about to do. He has just spent fourteen chapters systematically examining various principalities and the way in which they are acquired. This is his departure from the conventional ordini. Machiavelli’s text is extraordinary because it does not start with the virtues of the prince. It starts with the entity which he calls the principality. And his account of it now necessitates a radically different image of the person of the prince and the means of princely government – of ‘what must be’, as he puts it, ‘the sorts of ways and means of government’ of a prince as a consequence of the first part of his argument.246 His argument is about cause and effect. His claim is that his prince is fit to govern what principalities are actually like, rather than some superimposed and false image of them. In abusing the opposition’s view as ‘imagined’ and contrasting it with the truth of things, Machiavelli is exploiting the sense of the fantastical in the process of imagining things. Yet he can hardly be said to have turned his back on the power of imagery in his own theory. There are few texts more memorable than Machiavelli’s precisely because it is immensely imaginative, spectacularly controversial. It lays down a rival account of the thing, or res, under forensic investigation in his text by re-representing it according to all the techniques of ornatus at his disposal. This practice crucially ensures the powerful visibility of his own case. In so doing, he is indebted to the account of the role of imagery in the production of belief and the representation of things in classical rhetorical procedure. THE VISIBILITY OF ORNAMENTS

The extent of Machiavelli’s Quintilianism is immediately evident. He starts to reveal his debts in a particularly studied way, commencing his 245

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘mi e` parso piu´ conveniente andare drieto alla verita` effetuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa. E molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principati che non si sono mai visti ne´ conosciuti essere in vero’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 64: ‘quali debbano essere e’ modi e governi di uno principe con sudditi o con li amici’.

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exordium with a sentence which carefully directs the eyes of his audience towards the concept of ornamenta: Those who desire to win favour with a prince usually approach him with things from among their possessions that are very dear to them, or with things that they see delight him; and so one sees very often that they are presented with horses, weapons, a cloth of gold, precious stones and similar ornaments worthy of their grand position.247

Having delineated the brilliant and belligerent characteristics of physical ornamenta, Machiavelli starts to ‘turn’ the vision of his audience by commencing an extensive metaphor – the ‘commonest and by far the most beautiful’ trope, according to Quintilian – in his second sentence:248 Wishing to offer myself to Your Magnificence with some proof of my servitude to you, I have not found among my belongings anything which I hold dearer or value more greatly than my knowledge of the actions of great men, learned through long experience of modern matters and a continual reading of ancient affairs: having examined and thought through these things at length and with great diligence, I have summarised them in a small volume which I now send to Your Magnificence.249

A mass of figures of addition and amplification bring this lengthy sentence to its climax. But at its heart lies the idea of mental furniture, the notion that knowledge can form part of one’s suppellettile. As Machiavelli’s trope makes clear, that knowledge is already proving to be as ornamented as the physical objects normally proffered to princes. The metaphor is part of an allegory about rhetorical invention. Machiavelli has ‘found’ among his suppellettile something which he offers as a ‘proof ’. He adds that the object of his invention is the valuable product of ‘continual reading’ and ‘great diligence’. In referring to what he has ‘found’ among his belongings, Machiavelli directs attention to the

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Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Sogliono el piu´ delle volte coloro che desiderano acquistare grazia appresso uno Principe, farseli incontro con quelle cose che infra le loro abbino piu´ care, o delle quali vegghino lui delettarsi; donde si vede molte volte essere loro presentati cavalli, arme, drappi d’oro, prete preziose, e simili ornamenti, degni della grandezza di quelli.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.4, vol.III: 426: ‘frequentissimus est tum longe pulcherrimus, tralatione dico, quae lesauoqa! Graece vocatur’. Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Desiderando io adunque offerirmi alla vostra Magnificenza con qualche testimone della servitu´ mia verso di quella, non ho trovato intra la mia suppellettile cosa, quale io abbia piu´ cara o tanto esistimi, quanto la cognizione delle azioni delle uomini grandi, imparata con una lunga esperienza delle cose moderne et una continua lezione delle antique: le quali avendo io con gran diligenzia lungamente escogitate et esaminate et ora in uno piccolo volume ridotte, mando alla Magnificenzia vostra.’

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invention of proofs. In underlining the extent of his reading, Machiavelli simultaneously indicates one of its effects. Reading is vital to the eloquent orator because it lends copiousness to style; it yields a ‘stock of ideas and a stock of words’. Think of the cultivation of copiousness, says Quintilian, as the accumulation of riches.250 The richness of Machiavelli’s style becomes immediately evident in his ‘belongings’. The word that Machiavelli chooses here – suppellettile – is a translation of the Latin substantive supellex, which means household furniture. Machiavelli exploits the fact that suppellettile is a compound derivation from super and lego. So when he says that the dearest thing among his suppellettile is a knowledge derived from ‘continual reading’, he is perhaps making a gently punning allusion, by way of ‘oratorical urbanity’, to the literal meaning of a word which had come to be used metaphorically.251 This is a very Quintilianic thing to do: ‘an opportune urbanity’ deployed during the orator’s attempts to insinuate himself into his audience’s goodwill can help refresh the judge, secure his attention and relieve tedium.252 But Machiavelli’s use of suppellettile goes deeper than a play on words. The word has two specific connotations. The first relates to a classical concern about the way in which supellex indicates moral character. One Roman moralist extremely concerned about what houses and their de´cor say about us is Seneca in his letters.253 But Machiavelli’s punning use of the word supellex is closer to another context. Among the classical rhetoricians, supellex belongs to a way of talking figuratively about well-furnished speech. The idea at work here is that one’s speech is a construction, and its de´cor is revealing of its architect and its inhabitant. For these theorists, the question is less a matter of austere de´cor and more one of acquiring appropriate furnishings. The distinction of being a well-furnished orator is acclaimed with especial vividness by Cicero in De oratore. A great speaker, alleges Cicero, should strive to enrich his work with so broad a knowledge of ethical and philosophical matters that it justifies the observation that one has ‘never

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Quintilian 2001, X.1.5, vol.IV: 254: ‘Num ergo dubium est quin ei velut opes sint quaedam parandae, quibus uti ubicumque desideratum erit possit? Eae constant copia rerum ac verborum.’ For copiousness and diligent reading, see the whole of X.1, vol.II: 252–322. Quintilian 2001, VI.3.14, vol.III: 68: ‘oratoria urbanitas rara’. Quintilian 2001, IV.1.49, vol.II: 208: ‘Et urbanitas oportuna reficit animos et undecumque petita iudicis voluptas levat taedium.’ See Seneca 1917–25, 5.6, vol.I: 22; Seneca 1917–25, 110.12, vol.III: 270. For recent studies of this aspect of Seneca’s philosophy, see Perez 2000; Henderson 2004.

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observed furniture so sumptuous in the outfit of an orator’.254 The same image is taken up by Quintilian at the beginning of Book 8 – the book which lays out his theory of ornatus – where he exploits the literal meaning of the word in order to stress how a properly educated orator will have ‘furnished himself with copious verbal resources by extensive and appropriate reading’.255 Machiavelli is very closely adhering to this precept, as he is more generally to the Quintilianic theory of ornatus. For when he says that the most precious item of his suppellettile has been ‘imparata’ by a ‘continua lezione’ of the ancients, his phrasing of this apparently modest boast is subtly imitative of Quintilian’s own words – ‘tum lectione multa et idonea copiosam sibi verborum supellectilem compararit’.256 Furthermore, as Godman suggests, those words of Quintilian had almost certainly acquired a currency in Florentine humanist circles thanks to Poliziano.257 Machiavelli’s furnishings as an orator are supplied from his immersion in this same literature. But his allusion is also a proof of the boast. In reformulating this precept, Machiavelli is inventively drawing upon a doctrine from Quintilian as testimony of his own diligence and enrichment as a student of classical antiquity. And he is also brilliantly ornamenting his speech. Machiavelli then starts to advance his moral credentials as a person equipped ‘to discuss the rules of government by princes’, notwithstanding the fact that he is ‘a man of low and infirm state’.258 His act of selfabasement is informed by a specifically Quintilianic precept about the creation of rhetorical ethos. Quintilian says that the benevolence of those who judge our arguments can be won in the proem by appealing either to personal qualities – those of the speaker, those of the judge, even those of our opponent – or to qualities of the subject-matter, or to both.259 His insistence that his students can exert a ‘decisive influence’ on the outcome of their cause if they are believed to be good people is hardly novel to 254

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Cicero 1942, I.161–5, vol I: 110–114: ‘et tamquam in aliquam locupletem ac refertam domum venerim, non explicata veste, neque proposito argento, neque tabulis et signis propalam collocatis, sed his omnibus multis magnificisque rebus constructis ac reconditis: sic modo in oratione Crassi divitias atque ornamenta eius ingenii per quaedam involucra atque integumenta perspexi . . . in oratoris vero instrumento tam lautam supellectilem numquam videram.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 28, vol.III: 320: ‘tum lectione multa et idonea copiosam sibi verborum supellectilem compararit’. Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 28, vol.III: 320. See Godman 1998: 41, n.66, for Poliziano’s use of supellectile in his inaugural lecture on Quintilian and Statius; for further comments on the connection, see Godman 1998: 277. Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Ne´ voglio sia reputata presunzione, se uno uomo di basso et infimo stato ardisce discorrere e regolare e’ governi de’ principi.’ See Quintilian 2001, IV.1.6–50, vol.II: 182–204.

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rhetorical theory.260 But Quintilian makes one peculiar point: orators can win themselves ‘tacit approval’ if they declare themselves ‘infirm, unprepared, no match for the talents of the opposing party’.261 And Quintilian regularly practises what he preaches. In his proem to the treatise, he duly announces his intention to describe the ideal orator’s persona ‘as well as my infirmitas will allow’.262 Why does it help to stress our infirmity as orators? Quintilian observes that people are generally favourable towards others experiencing difficulties.263 An orator who appears to be labouring under any such difficulty will thus be bound to excite some sympathy in his audience. But this approach, he adds, is particularly tactical when coming before a judge for the first time. If a judge does not feel intimidated about his own ability to deliver a just verdict by an advocate who immediately bristles with cleverness and confidence, he is likely to be better disposed to listen kindly and attentively to what is about to be said.264 Quintilian refers approvingly to ‘the ancient orators’ trick of concealing their eloquence’.265 The word that he uses to describe the art of concealing one’s own oratorical skill is simulatio. His general advice is that ‘artifices and stratagems . . . should be kept hidden’.266 He warns, however, that this is the sum of the secrecy that true eloquence can enjoy, since it will be invariably evident in our choice of words, in the profundity of the sententiae which we express, in the elegance of our figures.267 Quintilian’s basic but subtle point is that while true eloquence seems effortless only as a result of great artistry, it need never be ostentatious. And he is adamant that ‘nowhere else is it more necessary to be careful to avoid suspicion’ than in the prologue, which is ‘the one place in which careful preparation should least be on show, because the speaker’s art seems here to be wholly employed against the

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Quintilian 2001, IV.1.7, vol.II: 182: ‘plurimum tamen ad omnia momenti est in hoc positum, si vir bonus creditur’. For the establishing of ethos among a wider range of Roman theorists, see Skinner 1996: 127–31. Quintilian 2001, IV.1.8, vol.II: 182: ‘ita quaedam in his quoque commendatio tacita, si nos infirmos inparatos inpares agentium contra ingeniis dixerimus’. Quintilian 2001, 1.Proem.22, vol.I: 62: ‘quantum nostra valebit infirmitas dissereremus’. See Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184. Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184: ‘et iudex religiosus libentissime patronum audit quem iustitiae suae minime timet’. Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184: ‘Inde illa veterum circa occultandam eloquentiam simulatio.’ Quintilian 2001, XII.9.5, vol.V: 272: ‘Quare artes quidem et consilia lateant et quidquid si deprenditur perit.’ Quintilian 2001, XII.9.5, vol.V: 272: ‘Hactenus eloquentia secretum habet. Verborum quidem dilectus, gravitas sententiarum, figurarum elegantia aut non sunt aut apparent: sed vel propter hoc ipsum ostentanda non sunt, quod apparent.’

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judge’.268 Indeed, the very task of avoiding the impression that one is using one’s rhetorical art against the judge ‘is itself a mark of supreme art’, according to Quintilian.269 Machiavelli’s prologue self-consciously embodies this Quintilianic art. Consider his declaration to the Medici prince: I have not adorned (ornata) this work by filling it with rounded periods, with highsounding words or fine phrases, or with any other sort of allurement or external ornament (ornamenta) with which many writers customarily describe and adorn (ornare) their subject-matter, for my wish is that, if it is to be honoured at all, only the variety of the material and the gravity of the subject should make it acceptable (grata).270

At first glance, he appears to be eschewing ornamented language in order to let the materia of the case speak for itself, and so following a well-defined rhetorical path through the exordium by stressing the virtues of the case itself. But in performing this task, the orator does not abandon his eloquence; on the contrary, it requires the greatest dissimulating art. And Machiavelli, upon closer inspection, is engaged in the densest of Quintilianic strategies. When he switches between materia and subietto, he is imposing varietas upon his subject-matter: as Quintilian points out, the materia of rhetoric is the same thing as all those ‘matters which are subjected’ to it.271 Quintilian insists that you must use the gratia varietatis – the charm of variety – to relieve monotony.272 An oration without varietas is the ‘surest sign of a style which is without art’. It causes an unrelenting sense of tedium which is ‘most graceless’ in its artlessness.273 Then Machiavelli switches to repetition: he uses the verb ornare twice as well as its cognate ornamenta in the very sentence in which he seems to be eschewing the benefits which ornamenta bring. No orator worth his salt 268

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Quintilian 2001, IV.1.56, vol.II: 206–8: ‘Nec magis diligenter ne suspecti simus ulla parte vitandum est, propter quod minime ostentari debet in principiis cura, quia videtur ars omnis dicentis contra iudicem adhiberi.’ Quintilian 2001, IV.1.56, vol.II: 208: ‘Sed ipsum istud evitare summae artis.’ Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘La quale opera io non ho ornata ne´ ripiena di clausule ample, o di parole ampullose e magnifiche, o di qualunque altro lenocinio o ornamento estrinseco, con li quali molti sogliono le loro cose descrivere et ornare; perche´ io ho voluto, o che veruna cosa la onori, o che solamente la varieta` della materia e la gravita` del subietto la facci grata.’ Quintilian 2001, II.21.4–5, vol.I: 408: ‘Ego (neque id sine auctoribus) materiam esse rhetorices iudico omnes res quaecumque ei ad dicendum subiectae erunt . . . Et Cicero quodam loco materiam rhetorices vocat res quae subiectae sint ei, sed certas demum putat esse subiectas’ (citing Cicero, De inventione, 1.7). Quintilian 2001, IX.4.43, vol.IV: 184: ‘cum virtutes etiam ipsae taedium pariant nisi gratia varietatis’. Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.52, vol.III: 368: ‘Peior hac o! loei! deia; quae nulla varietatis gratia levat taedium atque est tota coloris unius.’

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indulges carelessly in such repetitious patterns. Knowing ‘how to fix some points in the mind by repetition’ is a basic lesson.274 Machiavelli is emphatically amplifying the theme of ornatus in his proclamation to be doing no such thing. He does so amid some glaring ornamenta. His prose is studded with flashy vocabulary. Take his claim that his own work is free of ‘qualunque altro lenocinio o ornamento estrinseco’. The category of extrinseco is profoundly Quintilianic. Having introduced it as a conceptual tool in Book 2, the Roman theorist uses the notion of things ‘extrinsic’ throughout the Institutio.275 Similarly, the idea that an orator might seek to seduce his audience by embellishing his discourse with meretricious lenocinia is peculiarly Quintilianic. In Book 4 of the Institutio, Quintilian says that the narratio should be adorned only with figures which enable the speaker to introduce a modicum of variety in a place where ‘other lenocinia are absent’.276 Elsewhere he derides the stylistic decadence of his contemporaries – ‘we who seek not ornamenta but lenocinia’ – which manifests itself in their reliance upon obscure, overblown figures.277 And in his concluding book he contends that ‘good men will never lack for honourable words’ because ‘even if their matter lacks lenocinia, its own nature will be ornament enough’.278 Quintilian contrasts the unconvincing and superficial benefits of resorting to lenocinia with the ‘proper’ ornamentation of a discourse in a manner appropriate to the nature of the case in hand. He imagines speech as a body which needs to be made beautiful. The whole body has to be properly tended: you have to bring out its natural qualities, rather than submerge them under an erratic and effeminate regime of depilation, nail-polishing and extravagant dressing.279 No sooner has Machiavelli made these rhetorical protestations than we find him gliding into a simile by way of another figure. He anticipates, in proleptic fashion, objections to his task in Il Principe by way of an erudite pun:

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Quintilian 2001, IX.2.4, vol.IV: 36: ‘Quae delectatio aut quod mediocriter saltem docti hominis indicium nisi alia repetitione, alia commoratione infigere, digredi a re et redire ad propositum suum scierit.’ For some examples of his repeated use of the category, see Quintilian 2001, II.16.13; III.6.7; III.8.11; IV.2.17; V.9.11; VIII.3.30; X.3.1; XII.9.5–6. Quintilian 2001, IV.2.118, vol.II: 276: ‘Caret enim ceteris lenociniis expositio et, nisi commendetur hac venustate, iaceat necesse est.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.Proem.26, vol.III: 320: ‘qui non ornamenta quaerimus sed lenocinia, quasi vero sit ulla verborum nisi rei cohaerentium virtus’. Quintilian 2001, XII.1.31, vol.V: 212: ‘quae etiam si lenociniis destituta sit, satis tamen natura sua ornatur’. For this image, see Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 18–22, vol.III: 316–18.

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I do not want it to be thought a presumption if a man of low and infirm state dares to discuss and lay down rules about the government of princes.280

Quintilian classifies the anticipation of ‘possible objections’ as a figure of thought which is ‘wonderfully powerful in a Cause’.281 But he also says that ‘while it is not rare in other parts of the speech’, this figure is ‘particularly appropriate in the prooemium’.282 Not only does Machiavelli follow these instructions; he slyly tells us that he is doing so. For the name which Quintilian gives to this figure of thought is praesumptio.283 So when Machiavelli says that he wishes for what he is doing not to be considered ‘presunzione’, he is naming what he is doing with the terminology of the rhetorical theorist whose precepts he is following. Of course he wants it to be thought a presumption: the anticipation of possible objections is what presumption is. Machiavelli carefully advertises his own figured speech as he conveys his low and infirm state. The inflection of his own rhetorical practice with the terminology of rhetorical theory is a continuous feature of Machiavelli’s exordium. He only barely stops short of naming the rhetorical device which he employs when forestalling his own ‘presumption’: just as those who draw maps place themselves low on the plain in order to consider the nature of the mountains and other high places, and place themselves high up on the mountains in order to understand the nature of the lowlands, so similarly in order to understand well the nature of the people, one needs to be prince, and in order to understand well the nature of princes, one needs to be one of the people.284

This graphic simile is deceptively simple. The trope of similitudo, Quintilian tells us, can be used in two particular ways: either as part of a proof in an argument, or in order to ‘make an image of things’.285 Similes ‘can provide ornament for a speech, and make it sublime, florid, pleasant, 280

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Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Ne´ voglio sia reputata presunzione se un uomo di basso ed infimo stato ardisce discorrere e regolare e’ governi de’ principi.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Mire vero in causis valet praesumptio, quae pqo´kglwi& dicitur, cum id quod obici potest occupamus.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Id neque in aliis partibus rarum est et praecipue prohoemio convenit.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Mire vero in causis valet praesumptio, quae pqo´kglwi& dicitur.’ Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘cos´ı come coloro che disegnono e’ paesi si pongano bassi nel piano a considerare la natura de’ monti e de’ luoghi alti, e per considerare quella de’ bassi si pongano alto sopra monti, similmente a conoscere bene la natura de’ populi bisogna esser principe, et a conoscere bene quella de’ principi bisogna esser populare’. Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.72, vol.III: 380: ‘ad exprimendam rerum imaginem’.

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admirable’.286 But they should be founded upon the great rhetorical virtue of ‘bringing the object before our eyes not only plainly but concisely and rapidly’.287 The basic rule which Quintilian lays down is that ‘what is selected to illustrate something else needs to be clearer than the thing it illustrates’.288 This is one reason he prefers his orator to strive to connect the simile ‘with the object of which it is an image, with a correspondence between the two halves of the comparison’, in order to produce an effect called ‘antapodosis’.289 Machiavelli’s simile accordingly lulls the audience into a sense of virtually exact correspondence by the repetition of words and syntax in each half of the comparison. It begins to look a little less than straightforward only when one sees that to follow the simile through with such exactitude leaves the audience orientated in a slightly unexpected way. For it would appear that the princely position is one of looking up to the heights to observe the nature of the people, while the act of looking down on the low land, correspondingly, is to assume the popular perspective on princes. Quite apart from broaching the thought that there are two very different points of view about princely government rather than a single, unilinear and ‘natural’ perspective shared by everyone within a single body politic, the effect of this simile is to leave the audience momentarily uncertain about Machiavelli’s own position. One might conclude that Machiavelli’s eschewal of ornamento extrinseco is simply Quintilianic dissimulation. But his disclaimers are configured in a peculiarly overt way. To stress one’s infirmitas and deny one’s praesumptio may pass for subtle attempts at concealing eloquence while silently declaring it. But to protest the absence of ‘extrinsic ornamentation’ at precisely the moment that one is heavily ornamenting an already densely figured proem with the very language of rhetorical theory about ornatus is to stretch things a little. Machiavelli turns his reader towards the formal qualities of his prose to the extent of actually naming its rhetorical elements. Why is he making his armoury so visible? Why does he break cover?

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Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.74, vol.III: 382: ‘Sed illud quoque de quo in argumentis diximus similitudinis genus ornat orationem, facitque sublimem floridam iucundam mirabilem.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.82, vol.III: 386: ‘Huic subiacet virtus non solum aperte ponendi rem ante oculos, sed circumcise atque velociter.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.73, vol.III: 380: ‘Quo in genere id est praecipue custodiendum, ne id quod similitudinis gratia adscivimus aut obscurum sit aut ignotum: debet enim quod inlustrandae alterius rei gratia adsumitur ipsum clarius eo quod inluminat.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.77–78, vol.III: 382: ‘Sed interim libera et separata est, interim, quod longe optimum est, cum re cuius est imago conectitur, conlatione invicem respondente, quod facit redditio contraria, quae antapodosis dicitur.’

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It may already be evident that by far the sharpest weapon which Machiavelli wields throughout his exordium is irony. Once again, his instructor in its proper use is Quintilian. Quintilian treats irony first of all as a ‘contrary’ trope which comes under the general heading of allegory.290 As a form of allegory, it consists in an act of inversion in which the sense of what we are saying is not merely different from, but virtually entirely contrary to, what we actually say.291 The trope of irony is disclosed when the means of delivery, the person of the speaker, or the subject matter ‘dissents’ from the words being used in such a way as to make clear that the ‘speech intends something totally different’.292 Irony has an illusory effect which Quintilian describes in terms of simulatio. So, for instance, he says that one can ‘blame with a pretence of praise’ and ‘praise with a pretence of blame’ through the use of irony.293 One feature of irony as a trope is that what is actually said may very well be literally true in another context.294 Yet Quintilian regards cases of saying ‘the opposite to what is intended’ as usually instances of deep sarcasm, and he links them to the mocking tropes of sarcasm, asteismos, antiphrasis, paraimia and mykterismos.295 These tropes similarly involve the speaker in contrariety and concealment in speech acts, although to varying degrees. Turning his attention to irony as a figure of thought, Quintilian indicates that although he prefers the Latinised form ironia, there are authoritative grounds for translating the Greek eironeia as dissimulatio.296 In De oratore, Cicero had described dissimulatio as ‘saying one thing and meaning another’ and as one of the most insinuating of the figures and tropes.297 The figure of irony is different from the trope primarily because it involves the orator in an extensive, complex and more submerged type of 290

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296 297

Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.54, vol.III: 456: ‘In eo vero genere quo contraria ostenduntur ironia est (inlusione vocant).’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.44, vol.III: 450: ‘Allegoria, quam inversionem interpretantur, aut aliud verbis, aliud sensu ostendit, aut etiam interim contrarium’; see also VIII.6.54, vol.III: 456 (text in previous note). For further discussion of Renaissance irony, see Knox 1989, ad indicem s.v. Quintilian. Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 456: ‘quae aut pronuntiatione intelligitur aut persona aut rei natura; nam si qua earum verbis dissentit, apparet diversam esse orationi voluntatem’. Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 455: ‘Et laudis autem simulatione detrahere et vituperationis laudare concessum est.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 456: ‘Quamquam in plurimis id tropis accidit, ut intersit de quo quidque dicatur, quia quod dicitur alibi verum est.’ Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.56, vol.III: 456: ‘Aliquando cum inrisu quodam contraria dicuntur iis quae intellegi volunt.’ For the mocking tropes, see 8.6.57–9, vol.III: 458. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.44, vol.IV: 58: ‘Ei0 qxmei! a inveni qui dissimulationem vocaret.’ Cicero 1942, III.203, vol.II: 162: ‘tum illa quae maxime quasi irrepit in homines mentes, alia dicentis ac significantis dissimulatio’.

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simulation.298 Sometimes it ‘can cover whole passages and sometimes the entire shape of a Cause’; sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, ‘a whole life may be held to illustrate Irony’.299 The figure is often produced by the sustained use of the trope, but of the other distinct types, the primary kind is called antiphrasis, an act of negation in which you deny what you are in fact clearly doing.300 But to ‘pretend to be giving orders or permissions’ is another form of irony, as is to ‘concede that our opponents have qualities which we do not want them to seem to have’.301 Quintilian repeatedly describes ironic acts in terms of fiction, simulation and dissimulation; but they are also ludicrous and powerful forms of ridicule. Even at its most severe, says Quintilian, irony should be considered as a type of joke.302 And ‘simulation and dissimulation are the greatest sources of laughter’.303 Quintilian attaches huge importance to the ability to harness humour to one’s cause, since ‘laughter possesses perhaps the most commanding and irresistible force of all’.304 Any orator seriously concerned with power has to reckon with it.305 Quintilian distinguishes irony from a range of related figures. The figure of emphasis is used ‘to drop a hint to show that what we want to be understood is not what we are saying’, helping to indicate ‘not necessarily the opposite’ of what we are saying, ‘as in irony’, but nevertheless something ‘hidden and left to the hearer to find’.306 Quintilian reports that this way of coding one’s oratory is commonly practised by his contemporaries, recounting how some people now identify the habit of using figures of 298 299

300

301

302

303

304

305

306

See Quintilian 2001, IX.2.45–6, vol.IV: 58–60. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.46, vol.IV: 60: ‘et tota interim causae conformatio, cum etiam vita universa ironiam habere videatur, qualis est visa Socratis’. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.46–47, vol.IV: 60: ‘sic hoc schema faciat tropos ille contextus. Quaedam vero genera huius figurae nullam cum tropis habent societatem, ut illa statim prima quae ducitur a negando, quam nonnulli amsi! Uqarim vocant.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.48, vol.IV: 62: ‘Ei0 qxmei! a est et cum similes imperantibus vel permittentibus sumus . . . et cum ea quae nolumus videri in adversariis esse concedimus eis.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.3.68, vol.III: 98: ‘Quid ironia? Nonne etiam quae severissime fit ioci paene genus est?’ Quintilian 2001, VI.3.85, vol.III: 106–8: ‘Plurimus autem circa simulationem et dissimulationem risus est, quae sunt vicina et prope eadem, sed simulatio est certam opinionem animi sui imitantis, dissimulatio aliena se parum intellegere fingentis.’ Quintilian 2001, VI.3.8, vol.III: 66: ‘habet vim nescio an imperiosissimam et cui repugnari minime potest’. For the power of laughter in the history of rhetorical theory, see Skinner 1996: 198–211; Skinner 2002, III: 142–76. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.64–5, vol.IV: 72: ‘Est emphasis etiam inter figuras . . . Iam enim ad id genus quod et frequentissimus est et expectari maxime credo veniendum est, in quo per quandam suspicionem quod non dicimus accipi, non utique contrarium . . . sed aliud latens et auditori quasi inveniendum.’

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thought in one’s oratory with these so-called ‘figured controversies’.307 He thus furnishes his reader with an insight into the discursive practices of the Roman Principate under Domitian.308 Heavily figured forms of oratory have three principal uses: they can be pleasurable and elegant ways of varying one’s speech; but they can also be used either ‘if it is unsafe to speak openly’ or else ‘if it is unseemly to do so’.309 Sometimes ‘powerful personages present an obstruction’ so that your case cannot openly ‘be maintained without blaming them’, so you need to speak figuratively.310 If you want to avoid being detected, your use of figures should not be ‘manifest’ but sparing and circumspect.311 Quintilian warns that ‘however good our figures, they must not be frequent. For they reveal themselves when they are used densely’.312 If one turns from these Quintilianic precepts to Machiavelli’s exordium, one can see how he is persistently engaged in the ironic dissimulation of his own eloquence. The man of low and infirm state is extremely well equipped. He stresses the unadorned nature of his prose by adorning it with words, tropes and figures according to a theory of ornatus. Machiavelli constantly negates what is occurring at a discursive level with a degree of antiphrastic contrariness which is textbook irony. And yet he ends his exordium as he begins it: on the subject of the visible. Like the person whom he is about to hold forth, Machiavelli knows how and when to modulate his dissimulations. The point of his proem is about seeing ornamentation, not about concealing it. Machiavelli makes visible his own figured speech. He arms the audience with the means of deciphering his disarming, dissembling strategies. He breaks all the rules of the unostentatiously eloquent Quintilianic orator. The movement between dissimulation and self-disclosure is visible in the concluding paragraph. It begins with a conventional example of one type of ironic statement. The man of ‘low and infirm state’ imperiously issues an order to his prince: 307 308 309

310

311

312

Quintilian 2001, IX.2.65, vol.IV: 72: ‘unde controversiae figuratae dicuntur’. For this theme, see especially Bartsch 1994: 93–7. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.66, vol.IV: 72–4: ‘Eius triplex usus est: unus si dicere palam parum tutum est, alter si non decet, tertius qui venustatis modo gratia adhibetur et ipsa novitate ac varietate magis quam si relatio sit recta delectat.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.68, vol.IV: 74: ‘cum personae potentes obstant sine quarum reprensione teneri causa non possit’. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.69, vol.IV: 74: ‘Ideoque hoc parcius et circumspectius faciendum est, quia nihil interest quo modo offendas, et aperta figura perdit hoc ipsum quod figura est . . . in primis ne sint manifestae.’ Quintilian 2001, IX.2.72, vol.IV: 76: ‘Sed ne si optimae quidem sint esse debent frequentes. Nam densitate ipsa figurae aperiuntur.’

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Accept this little gift, Your Magnificence, in the spirit in which I send it; if it is read and considered diligently, you will thereby understand my extreme desire that you reach that greatness which Fortuna and your other qualities promise. And if from the peak of your exalted highness Your Magnificence should some time glance down towards these low places, you will understand how indignantly I bear a great and continuously malign Fortuna.313

Here Machiavelli is only apparently rehearsing the convention of reassuring the prince that he already has the necessary virtues to ensure good princely rule. In fact, he says nothing about princely virtue. He sticks to ‘qualities’ and ‘fortuna’. The diligent reading which he makes the emphatic condition of the prince’s future understanding of Machiavelli’s ‘extreme desire’ will reveal to him that here, as elsewhere, Machiavelli is being deeply ironic. Complimenting a prince for his fortuna will turn out to be no compliment at all; making it coterminous with Machiavelli’s own appalling misfortune is perhaps an early sign of one of his deepest aspirations for his text. His apparent praise of the distinctively princely qualities of the person before him – in his declaration that sua umanita` will constrain him to accept Machiavelli’s gift – may be seen to be similarly implicated in the trope of irony.314 For Machiavelli thereby attributes to his prince a quality which, as he proceeds to show, fatally obliges him and often helps to ensure his destruction rather than his greatness. As Machiavelli closes, some of the familiar imagery of the speculum principis genre starts to shift. For the view of the fortunate prince who looks down ‘dalla apice della sua altezza’ upon an indignant Machiavelli is a perspective constructed out of eyes turned downwards to the low places: ‘volgera` gli occhi in questi luoghi bassi’. The descriptions of places through the use of spectacular imagery is much commended by Quintilian, who tells us that some use the word topographia to name the figurative device.315 But Machiavelli’s topography is a familiar one. Seneca’s prince is carried by his fortuna to the heights and, like the gods, ‘affixed’ to a ‘pinnacle’ from which he cannot ‘descend’.316 And Seneca’s own prologue, it may be 313

314 315

316

Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Pigli adunque vostra Magnificenzia questo piccolo dono con quello animo che io lo mando; il quale se da quella fia diligentemente considerato e letto, vi conoscera` drento uno estremo mio desiderio, che Lei pervenga a quella grandezza che la fortuna e le altre sua qualita` li promettano. E, se vostra Magnificenzia dallo apice della sua altezza qualche volta volgera` li occhi in questi luoghi bassi, conoscera` quanto io indegnamente sopporti una grande e continua malignita` di fortuna.’ Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘confido assai che per sua umanita` li debba essere accetta’. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.44, vol.IV: 58: ‘Locorum quoque dilucida et significans descriptio eidem virtuti adsignatur a quibus, alii sopocqaUi! am dicunt.’ Seneca 1928a, I.8.2: 378: ‘Aberrare a fortuna tua non potes . . . nec magis illis descendere datum est quam tibi tutum: fastigio tuo adfixus es.’

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recalled, was a view from those heights. In it, he had invited his prince to immittere oculos: to lower his eyes to the people below, whose status and fortuna had been deposited in his hand.317 Machiavelli is in very much the same place – in the prologue and below the prince – but he is in a distinctly un-Senecan frame of mind, or animo, as he puts it. For while Seneca admitted that, under princely rule, the populus was now restrained by a yoke, he also claimed that the popular view from below was of ‘the happiest form of respublica’ in which people are compelled to ‘confess’ that they are ‘happy’ because they see ‘supreme libertas in want of nothing save the licence to ruin itself’.318 Unlike writers from Seneca to Erasmus, Machiavelli feels under no such compulsion. This is because, unlike writers from Seneca to Erasmus, he sees no such thing from where he is situated, as he proceeds to tell us in Chapter I. 317

318

Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–2: 356: ‘immittere oculos in hanc immensam multitudinem . . . qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est; quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 360–2: ‘Multa illos cogunt ad hanc confessionem, qua nulla in homine tardior est: securitas alta, adfluens, ius supra omnem iniuriam positum; obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publicae, cui ad summam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia.’

CHAPTER

7

The battle

Machiavelli brings over one and a half millennia of monarchical encroachment upon republican territory to a categorical halt in the opening sentence of his first chapter: All the states, all the dominions that have held and hold command over men have been, and are, either republics or principalities.1

Machiavelli divides, and his division demolishes the cherished claim of the Roman theory of monarchy that the Roman res publica had been saved by the institution of a prince at its head. The single most potent ideological weapon which monarchies had wielded since the thirteenth century in advancing the argument for princely rule on the Italian peninsula is thereby snapped in two. As far as Machiavelli’s theory in De principatibus is concerned, whatever else a prince may rule, it is never said to be a republic and whatever else a prince may be, he is certainly not its mind. A pivotal part of the case which had been put forward for hundreds of years against neo-classical republicanism has been dismissed by means of a definition. Machiavelli has begun to generate a controversial typology of states which will usher in a new political grammar. The definition proceeds, but Machiavelli delays revealing the differentia which he has used to divide states which are called republics from those which he is naming as principalities. Instead he starts to subdivide the states called principalities. In so doing he begins to clarify the defining property of the principality: And principalities are either hereditary – where their master’s blood has been their prince for a long time – or they are new.2

1

2

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Tutti li stati, tutti e’ dominii che hanno avuto et hanno imperio sopra li uomini, sono stati e sono o republiche o principati.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘E’ principati sono o ereditarii, de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne sia suto lungo tempo principe, o e’ sono nuovi.’

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Machiavelli’s driving contempt for the hereditary principality will become fully apparent in Chapter II. Here his definition of it looks viciously disfigured by the barbarisms of pleonasm and prolixity. The jarring, repetitive ‘de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne sia suto lungo tempo principe’ amply exemplifies the misuse of the figure of addition which Quintilian highlights as one of the four most prominent types of solecism marring good language.3 But these linguistic vices actually help Machiavelli make his point about the property of a principality. Quintilianic definitions are about genus, species, difference and property. While the title of the chapter suggests an enquiry into how many genera of principalities there are, Machiavelli explains in his letter to Vettori that his work is rather an enquiry into the different species of state called a principality.4 He similarly enquires into the number of spezie of republics in the Discorsi.5 This variation may be significant; in the meantime, it is sufficient to note that Machiavelli is using a language of genus and species to define principalities and republics. According to him, there is something which distinguishes the two types of state other than just the name. Their names pick out different characteristics in an apposite way. For Machiavelli, the principal property of a principality is that it is, in fact, the property of someone else. The division which he makes within the category is based on a distinction between something which is ‘hereditary’ and something ‘new’; but this is to imply a very specific class of things. To describe things as hereditary as well as new – and therefore to ‘discern’ them in this way – is to indicate that they are possessions. The differential between the two kinds of principality would thus appear to be predicated on the fact of ownership; the question is whether they are a newly acquired possession or an hereditary one. Furthermore, the terminology which Machiavelli uses to describe the person who acquires the principality is already moving between signore and principe in an ostentatiously interchangeable way. It looks very much as if the principality is acquiring a prince who is its dominus, or its owner. 3

4

5

For the ‘vitium’ of pleonasm – of ‘burdening the style with unnecessary words’ – see Quintilian 2001, I.5.40, vol.I: 144; but especially the discussion in the heart of the theory of ornatus, where it is analysed next to prolixity – at VIII.3.53, vol.III: 370: ‘Vitanda etiam macrologia, id est longior quam oportet sermo, ut apud T. Livium: ‘‘legati non impetrata pace retro domum, unde venerant, abierant’’ . . . Est et pleonasmos vitium, cum supervacuis verbis ornatio oneratur: ‘‘ego oculis meis vidi (sat est enim vidi)’’.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15, where the title reads: ‘Quot sint genera principatuum . . .’; Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 426: ‘di quale spezie sono’. Machiavelli 1960, I.2: 129, where the chapter heading reads: ‘Di quante spezie sono le republiche . . .’ The same question is posed by Quintilian during his exemplifications of rhetorical definition at 2001, V.10.63, vol.II: 396: ‘quot sint species rerum publicarum’.

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In order to corroborate the proposition – as Machiavelli himself does – that a newly acquired state may be considered as much the possession of its prince as an hereditary one, one can turn to Chapter III, where he begins to talk about new principalities. Here Machiavelli discusses new states which are annexed to pre-existing ones and which he terms ‘mixed principalities’.6 New states which are acquired in the same ‘province’ and share the same language as an established state are ‘very easy to hold onto’, he points out, especially when they were formerly ruled by a prince: ‘to possess them securely, it is enough to have extinguished the line of the prince who used to dominate them’.7 If, on the other hand, the new state is acquired in a province that differs in language, customs and institutions, one solution is for ‘the person who acquires it to go and live there’, since ‘this would make that possession more secure, more durable’.8 Louis XII of France exemplifies how not to behave in such circumstances: although he ‘retained his possessions in Italy for longer’, he still lost them.9 As Machiavelli says very clearly indeed, a prince who possesses a principality ‘dominates’ it: he is its dominus, or owner, and the state is his possession. Contrastingly, he warns in Chapter V that in the case of republics, ‘in truth, there is no sure way of possessing them, other than by destroying them’. Republics cannot be possessed; whoever wants to dominate them as their prince must ‘undo them, or else expect to be undone by them’.10 The equivalence of principe with signore is evident throughout Machiavelli’s argument. His historical diversion into an explanation of ‘why the Kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebel against his successors after Alexander’s death’ is a highly strategic moment in the exposition of his case.11 It begins by announcing that Alexander the Great ‘became signore of Asia’.12 The verb that Machiavelli later uses to Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 16–17: ‘se non e` tutto nuovo, ma come membro, che si puo` chiamare tutto insieme quasi misto’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘o sono della medesima provincia e della medesima lingua, o non sono. Quando e’ sieno, e` facilita` grande a tenerli . . . et a possederli securamente basta avere spenta la linea del principe che li dominava.’ 8 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘Ma quando si acquista stati in una provincia disforme di lingua, di costumi e di ordini . . . uno de’ maggiori remedii e piu` vivi sarebbe che la persona di chi acquista vi andassi ad abitare. Questo farebbe piu` secura e piu` durabile quella possessione.’ 9 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 22: ‘e parlero` di Luigi . . . per aver tenuta piu` lunga possessione in Italia’. 10 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘Perche´, in verita`, non ci e` modo sicuro a possederle, altro che la ruina. E chi diviene patrone di una citta` consueta a vivere libera, e non la disfaccia, aspetti di essere disfatto da quella.’ 11 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25: ‘Cur Darii regnum quod Alexander occupaverat a successoribus suis post Alexandri mortem non defecit.’ 12 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25: ‘potrebbe alcuno maravigliarsi donde nacque che Alessandro Magno divento` signore della Asia in pochi anni’. 6

7

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describe the process of making oneself a signore, or master of a state, is ‘insignorire’. In Chapter VII, Alexander VI is said to have found it necessary ‘to create disorder among the states’ of the Colonna and Orsini ‘in order to be able to make himself master of a part of them’.13 And in Chapter XIX, the Roman emperor Severus confronts two major difficulties in his desire ‘to become master of the whole state’ of the Roman Empire.14 Machiavelli continues his definition: And new ones are either wholly new, as was Milan to Francesco Sforza, or they are like limbs adjoined to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as is the Kingdom of Naples to the King of Spain. And these dominions acquired in this way . . .15

First, Machiavelli has made a division within the category of principalities based on the differential ‘new’. He now divides the category of ‘new principalities’ itself. The distinction which he is drawing within this category is based on the idea of whole and parts. What makes a new principality wholly new or partly new is whether the person who acquires it by means other than inheritance already possesses other states or not. This method of separating out the wholly new from the partly new is extremely artful. Machiavelli’s decision to illustrate immediately both sorts of principality by reference to Milan and Naples is striking. One reason the Ambrosian Republic had lasted for three short years in Milan before Sforza’s rise to power was that Milan, like the Kingdom of Naples, was ostensibly one of the oldest monarchies on the peninsula, as Machiavelli well knew. Yet, according to his theory, both Milan and Naples are new principalities. The effect of exemplifying the category of ‘wholly new’ by reference to Sforza’s acquisition of Milan, and of contrasting its entirely new character with the partial newness of the Kingdom of Naples to the Spanish king, is to divert attention away, albeit temporarily, from the type of principality which is wholly new in a subtly different sense of the word – a newness which cannot be inferred from an argument about wholes and parts, since it cannot be properly described as partial. Machiavelli’s theory goes on to make quite clear that a principality can be wholly new in the sense that the person who acquires it also produces it, founds it, generates it.

13

14 15

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 35: ‘Era adunque necessario si turbassino quelli ordini, e disordinare li stati di coloro, per potersi insignorire securamente di parte di quelli.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 81: ‘A Severo dua difficulta`, volendosi insignorire di tutto lo stato.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘E’ nuovi, o sono nuovi tutti, come fu Milano a Francesco Sforza, o sono come membri aggiunti allo stato ereditario del principe che li acquista, come e` el regno di Napoli al re di Spagna. Sono, questi dominii cosi! acquistati . . .’

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In other words, it is wholly new in the sense of being newly born. Machiavelli’s discussion of ‘principati tutti nuovi, dove sia uno nuovo principe’ embraces this very specific sense in Chapter VI – a chapter in which neither Sforza nor the Spanish king is mentioned. Instead – and surely not without some relish in the contrariness which it brings to the structure of the chapter – Machiavelli illustrates this type of wholly new principality by referring solely to emphatically ancient examples. Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus are all held up as examples of new princes who have produced patria. They are founders of states who act like fathers, and the state which they generate cannot be snugly fitted into Machiavelli’s classificatory definition of principalities as it has been unfolded in Chapter I. They are examples of states whose relationship to their prince is not described in terms of possession and domination. Machiavelli uses some rhetorical artistry to leave the newly founded state submerged beneath the category of ‘wholly new states’ in his narratio. There is a very compelling theoretical reason for this arrangement which will become more evident. But there is also a highly polemical one. As Machiavelli starts to differentiate among the new principalities, he quietly makes a devastating distinction which helps to explain everything he has so far been saying: And these dominions acquired in this manner are either accustomed to living under a prince, or used to being free . . .16

Definitions are indeed destroyed by differentiae. Herein lies the difference between the state called a principality and a state called a republic which Machiavelli has employed in the first sentence of the book. One reason some people in Renaissance monarchies did not look longingly beyond their own borders to the free republic of the civic humanists is because they thought they were already living in one. Machiavelli is making it clear that this is categorically not the case. At a stroke, he guts the Roman theory of monarchy of the very essence of its moral argument about the rationality of the form of government which it envisages. The claim that true libertas is best sustained by monarchy had informed the Renaissance ideology of the prince and underpinned its polemical attacks on the disorderly vices of the republic since the thirteenth century. That claim now becomes a contradiction in terms. Machiavelli’s contrast leaves his reader in very little doubt indeed that to live under a prince is to be unfree, 16

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Sono, questi dominii cosi! acquistati, o consueti a vivere sotto uno principe, o usi ad essere liberi.’

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and that the dominion which is ruled by a prince is an unfree state. The entire thrust of the classical theory’s redescriptive manoeuvres is halted by an act of reappropriation of the republic’s most prized property. The transition from repubblica to principato does not ensure the preservation of libertas. It guarantees its elimination. The ingenuity in Machiavelli’s development of the definition now begins to emerge. States, he says, are either republics or principalities. The difference between them is that the former are free and the latter not free. But by the time we arrive at the differential, the property of the state called a principality – the property of being unfree – has already been described. Machiavelli has been subtly working the terms of the definition into his account from the very beginning. For he has already begun to make the term principe synonymous with signore, and has already implied that the principato is either an hereditary or a new possession. Yet to be in the possession of a signore, or dominus, is exactly what it means to be unfree, according to the concept of liberty which Machiavelli is using. It is also the main reason why the name of this state is not ‘res publica’. To live ‘under’ a prince is to live subject to his ius and potestas. As Machiavelli will remind us on no fewer than thirty-three occasions, those whom the prince rules are called sudditi – subjects. Subjects do not live in free states. They live in a dominion called a principality, and that principality lives ‘under’ a prince, subject to his dicio, or power. It is his dominion. Popes, emperors, dukes and kings: these titles become as conceptually inconsequential to Machiavelli’s theory as they had to Seneca’s. They are all examples of a prince who is the signore, or dominus, of his state. The same logic applies to the descriptions of the Roman Empire, the Milanese duchy, and the Regno of Naples and Sicily as principalities. These are all principalities because they are unfree states. As Machiavelli tells us in the Discorsi, ‘nothing that befell Milan or Naples . . . could ever bring them freedom, since their members were wholly corrupt. This is apparent after the death of Filippo Visconti, for, though it was proposed to introduce freedom in Milan, it could not be done, nor could any means of maintaining it be devised.’17 One can now begin to see the art of using the example of Sforza to illustrate the wholly new state in Chapter I. It cleverly obscures the one type of state whose status is not so clearly delineated: the newly founded state. Sforza, by 17

Machiavelli 1960, 1.17: 178: ‘Pertanto dico che nessuno accidente, benche´ grave e violento, potrebbe ridurre mai Milano o Napoli liberi, per essere quelle membra tutte corrotte. Il che si vide dopo la morte di Filippo Visconti, che´ volendosi ridurre Milano alla liberta`, non potette e non seppe mantenerla.’

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contrast, comes to rule over a state which had failed to become a republic after centuries of unfreedom. The following sentence says: ‘dominions acquired in this manner are either accustomed to living under a prince, or used to being free . . .’18 The new states of the narratio are not newly produced states. They had a past life: either they are accustomed to unfreedom – in which case, their unfreedom is merely continued under a new master – or they are used to freedom. Machiavelli is organising his definition with extraordinary care. The identity of the unfree state is fleshed out by means of the loci communes which Machiavelli uses to furnish his description. The first time he retrieves an argument about principalities – to distinguish between hereditary and new principalities – he comes back with a quality which he applies to discriminate the age of a thing as a possession. His second argument is about whole or parts, and Machiavelli proceeds to apply it within the category of new states by means of a similitudo. Similitudo is both an argument and an ornament: in saying that new states attached to old states are ‘like limbs’, Machiavelli suggests that he is talking about whole and partial bodies. But the differentia between republics and principalities – liberty – is derived from a place which can only generate an argument about persons. According to the Machiavellian definition, therefore, the principato would appear to be both a type of person – an unfree person – and a thing, a possession which is the property of someone else. There is a reason for this apparent contradiction in defining the identity of the state called a principality in terms both of persons and of things. An unfree person is also a thing in the possession of a master and is said, in Roman juridical terms, to be in a state of servitude. Justinian’s Digest makes it clear that the difference between free and unfree persons consists in the fact that ‘some persons are in their own power, some are subject to the law of another.’19 As the rubric De statu hominis states at the start of the Digest, the state of servitude is an institution by which ‘someone is subjected to the dominion of another’.20 Slaves are persons who are ‘in the power of their masters’.21 They are classifiable as items of property. They are things. Machiavelli’s definition of states separates the republic 18

19

20

21

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Sono, questi dominii cosi! acquistati, o consueti a vivere sotto uno principe, o usi ad essere liberi.’ Digest 1985, vol. 1, I.6.1: 17: ‘quaedam personae sui iuris sunt, quaedam alieno iuri subiectae sunt . . . in potestate sunt servi dominorum’. Digest 1985, vol. 1, I.5.4: 15: ‘Servitus est constitutio iuris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subicitur.’ See n.19 above.

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from the principality according to this understanding of what it means for a person to live in the dominion of another. That is to say, he displaces entirely the Stoic conception of liberty which had been imported into Roman political theory by Seneca in De clementia and which had come to inform the ideology of the princeps, reverting instead to a pristine Roman definition of what it means to be free and unfree.22 Another massive conceptual imposition is rolled back. Machiavelli makes clear that the principato is a dominion which is like a person in a state of servitude. At the theoretical heart of De principatibus is the idea of an unfree state, a state in the state of servitude. Its opening chapter defines the principality in these terms, and the following chapters proceed to corroborate this proposition. And this is precisely what Machiavelli says his work is about in the prologue, when he declares to his audience – in startlingly direct, if drivingly ironic, terms – that he is offering his small volume to his prince as ‘proof of my servitude’.23 There is, however, a crucial refinement to this schematic definition of free and unfree states which must be observed in Machiavelli’s theory in Il Principe.24 Here, as in the Discorsi, he needs to incorporate a particular type of trajectory of state development into his conceptual framework. He has to be able to explain how states initially formed and ruled by monarchs can become free states. The most obvious and most pertinent example of this phenomenon is the Roman state. As he notes in Chapter VI of Il Principe, Romulus was ‘king of Rome and founder of that patria’; and yet the state which he founded went on to be the most exemplary republic in history.25 The task of explaining how a state formed and ruled by one man as its king then develops into a republic creates a special problem for the use of the terminology of genus and species when defining the two states. It becomes impossible to make a strictly generic distinction between them. To talk of genus is to talk of births, and yet a state born to a princeps like Romulus may become a res publica. A free state, in other words, may have princely origins. Indeed, there are strong indications in the Discorsi that this is a highly preferable scenario for the formation of a republic.26 So a generic 22

23

24

25 26

Although the Digest was compiled considerably later than De clementia, it preserves an idea about freedom and servitude which dates to the time of the Roman Republic. Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Desiderando io adunque offerirmi alla vostra Magnificenzia con qualche testimone della servitu´ mia.’ Note, too, the refinement at I Discorsi I.2 (Machiavelli 1960: 133), as Machiavelli introduces the particular species of res publica, exemplified by Sparta, which has elective kings as a component of its mixed constitution. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31: ‘re di Roma e fondatore di quella patria’. See, for example, Machiavelli 1960, I.2: 129–30; 1.9: 153–5.

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distinction between states based on the quality of servitude and freedom is not valid in this case. The differentiation in state identity on this basis must begin at a specific level below the generic. But this fact is entirely coherent with another feature of Machiavelli’s endorsement of a Roman juridical understanding of free and unfree states: namely, that while slaves can be born in servitude, servitude is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. In Roman law, the state of slavery is an institution of the ius gentium. Machiavelli organises his definition by initially positing a clear distinction between republic and principality for crucial theoretical and rhetorical considerations. The impact of his definition is only strengthened when he reveals the basis of the distinction. But the distinction – as Machiavelli sees very clearly – is not an absolute one. He therefore uses considerable rhetorical and theoretical skill in order to retain the distinction without jeopardising the validity of his definitions. The language which he uses when he introduces the differential is carefully considered: states are ‘either accustomed to living under a prince or used to being free’. Servitude is not instantaneously generated at the birth of a state: it comes over time. Machiavelli is extraordinarily unwilling to think of the formation of a wholly new state by a person as anything other than the most profoundly creative of activities.27 Nor is his typology less than comprehensive. He finds a way of including the sort of state which Rome exemplifies both in the main body of his theory and in its outline: it comes under the description of wholly new principality, as Chapter VI makes clear. Machiavelli merely foxes the reader a little when he introduces the category, developing an argument about whole and partial newness with reference to Milan and Naples while omitting the notion of foundation from his descriptive language. Knowing how to marshall one’s case in the narratio in such a way that weaker or more concessive points do not mar one’s opening gambit is very much part of the orator’s training. For Machiavelli to introduce the idea of the generation of a new state in the midst of his definition would be to produce a genus rather late in the day, and so threaten the shape and procedure of his divisions and differentiations; while to reorganise the definition would ruin the polemical effect which he is clearly aiming for. One might pause to consider how Machiavelli attempts to resolve this issue of how a state which starts life under a prince then becomes a free res publica. The most important part of the pause, however, is to note that De principatibus is entirely silent on this matter. If one now turns to the 27

Second only to founding a new religion in terms of praiseworthiness (Machiavelli 1960, I.10: 156).

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beginning of the confirmatio in Chapter II, it looks likely that Machiavelli has found the rhetorical idea of a propositio highly useful in underlining his controversial distinction: I will leave behind reasoning about republics because I have reasoned about them at length elsewhere. I will address myself solely to the principality.28

Machiavelli insists that if you want to know about his thinking about republics – that is, about states which are used to being free – you have to go elsewhere. This claim is as ironic as ever, since he proceeds to refer repeatedly to the free state throughout the work, and to very great effect: his references cast a huge shadow across the unfreedom of the principality. This is not because Machiavelli does not see a way in which a prince’s actions as the founder of a state can be highly conducive to establishing a free way of life. His account of the development of free states in the Discorsi describes clearly how a prince can found a state as a primo progenitore; how a prince can guarantee it a birth free from ‘external servitude’; and how a prince can act like a Roman father towards his creation, giving birth to a ‘daughter’ and providing her with a good ‘education’, setting a good example and abiding by the same laws which he institutes for his offspring.29 There a prince is said to be able to give a ‘principio libero’ to a state and guide it towards a ‘vivere civile’, laying down its first ‘ordini’ in such a way as to conform it to a ‘vivere civile e libero’.30 But all of this theoretical material is conspicuously deferred from Il Principe, where Machiavelli’s thesis is not designed to explicate free states. It is almost exclusively about states which are, by his own definition, unfree. The state of the principality can be brought into greater focus by returning to see how the other elements laid out in Chapter I help Machiavelli to reconstitute the unfree person which De clementia had made disappear. Machiavelli’s dismissal of the idea that the prince rules a free state, together with his reprisal of a language of domination and 28

29

30

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero` indrieto el ragionare delle republiche, perche´ altra volta ne ragionai a lungo. Volterommi solo al principato.’ Machiavelli 1960, I.1: 128: ‘Chi esaminera`, adunque, la edificazione di Roma, se si prendera` Enea per suo primo progenitore, sara` di quelle cittadi edificate da’ forestieri; se Romolo di quelle edificate dagli uomini natii del luogo’; I.2: 129: ‘parlero` di quelle che hanno avuto il principio lontano da ogni servitu` esterna, ma si sono subito governate per loro arbitrio o come republiche o come principato’; I.11: 160: ‘il primo suo ordinatore Romolo, e che da quello abbi a riconoscere come figliuola il nascimento e la educazione sua’. Machiavelli 1960, I.1: 128: ‘Chi esaminera`, adunque, la edificazione di Roma . . . la vedra` avere principio libero, sanza dependere da alcuno’; I.9: 153: ‘uno fondatore d’un vivere civile, quale fu Romolo’; I.9: 153: ‘tutti gli ordini primi di quella citta` essere stati piu` conformi a uno vivere civile e libero’.

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servitude which the classical theory and the Renaissance ideology of the prince had sought so hard to evade, is intimately connected to his rejection of the notion that the prince and his principality are conjoined in one body. For the Senecan configuration had helped avert the allegation that the res publica had become enslaved, instead forming the basis of a vision of it as a free person ruling according to a universal rationality. The Roman theory had continued to talk about persons and states in terms of justice, liberty, the republic and the public good through a profound act of displacement, from the local to a cosmic level. But the rationalisation of the Roman revolution had also evacuated the universe of contingency. The great fortuna which carried the prince to the pinnacle of his power in the Senecan theory was nothing other than the force of providential ratio. The Roman monarchy had not arisen from libido dominandi, or cupiditas, or ambitio, or from any desiring impulse at all. On the contrary, it was held to originate in the same rational principle which governed nature, the world, the gods and the cosmos. The prince’s unerring and constant virtue demonstrated a ‘law raised above every injury’.31 With Actium now a faint memory, Seneca’s innocent monarch ruled peacefully over a ‘civitas unstained by blood’.32 Machiavelli undoes these conceptual manoeuvres in a very systematic way, separating out the res publica from the princeps, prising apart the totalised body of the Senecan account, and rendering visible all the desire, violence, bloodshed and injury involved in subjecting a person to a state of unfreedom which the Roman theory had sought to make invisible. But first he has to strip back the imposition of the Stoic providentialist scheme which had held the whole theory together and which had continued to prosper in a post-classical, Christian intellectual environment. He does this by driving his fist very hard and very precisely at the surface of the princely mirror, producing one long, shattering fracture which he reveals in the last sentence of his first chapter: And these dominions . . . either used to living under a prince, or used to being free . . . are acquired either with the arms of others or with one’s own, either through fortuna or through virtu`.33

This seemingly innocuous differentiation of fortuna from virtus has momentous consequences. All of the unities and fixities of the Roman theory 31 32 33

Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta . . . ius supra omnem iniuriam positum’. Seneca 1928a, I.11.3 (Seneca 1995:143): ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Sono, questi dominii . . . o consueti a vivere sotto uno principe, o usi a essere liberi; et acquistonsi, o con le arme d’altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtu´.’

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begin to dissolve under the force of this single blow to the picture of a providential universe in which the ethical absolutism of the humanist ideology had made sense. Machiavelli’s text is a relentless reversal of the Senecan view of the relation between the prince and Fortuna. It liberates the classical goddess from the petrifying effects of the Stoic mirror and its providential philosophy in which she had been reduced to little more than a metaphor for mental aberration. Machiavelli, in other words, makes her real rather than imaginary. Plenty of Renaissance humanists – like Seneca himself – had depicted Fortuna in the world; plenty had delineated her relation to the prince; and plenty had described the battle to overcome her. Yet Machiavelli is the first to constitute a vision of her out of these same materials according to a rationality which really reanimates her. His capacity to do so is indubitably connected to the fact that he is the earliest Renaissance thinker who also commits himself to despising Christian providentialism, to jettisoning its universalism and mocking its pieties, to reminding his audience that to have a signore is to be a slave, and to making it abundantly clear that if he wishes to maintain his state, the prince must follow a set of precepts which depart so dramatically from those of the figure whom Machiavelli sarcastically labels the ‘gran precettore’ that they secured their author a devilish notoriety for centuries.34 Machiavelli’s revivification of Fortuna constitutes a quite revolutionary point of view, and it helped to make his text uniquely objectionable. It also allows him to play havoc with the contention that it is virtue alone which defines or ‘nominates’ a prince. Machiavelli’s opening definitions imply that what gives the prince his name is his domination, as a signore, of an unfree state called a principato, and what gives the unfree state called a principality its name is that it belongs to a dominus, or signore, called a principe. That relation, he proceeds to underline, may have nothing at all to do with virtue. Some princes are given their state ‘either for money or by favour of the giver’; while some inherit them by sheer accident of birth.35 Principalities can be purveyed like slaves, in fact. But these explanations have a notably disorientating effect upon the Senecan ideology’s established topography. Suddenly it becomes possible to ‘ascend to the principality by some wicked and nefarious route’.36 And as early as Chapter II, we find him casually asserting that it is quite ‘reasonable’ that an hereditary 34 35

36

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31: ‘Moise`, che ebbe si! gran precettore . . .’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 33: ‘E questi tali sono, quando e` concesso ad alcuno uno stato o per danari o per grazia di chi lo concede.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘o per qualche via scellerata e nefaria si ascende al principato’.

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prince should ‘naturally’ become the object of his subjects’ affections so long as ‘extraordinary vices do not make him hated’.37 These caustic remarks mark the start of a satirical reworking of the standard depiction of the loving relations between prince and his populus. But they also scandalously contradict the logic of the Senecan ideology. Conventionally speaking, a prince with vices is not to be considered a prince at all, but a tyrant. Yet Machiavelli calmly refers to bad, vice-ridden princes and to principalities gained by wickedness. He does not mention tyrants or tyranny once in his text. Machiavelli’s redescription of the relation between Fortuna and the prince is inextricably related to his redescription of princely virtue. He sees that the task of acquiring, governing and maintaining a principatus demands a persona in possession of precisely the qualities excised from the prince by the theory of the speculum principis. First and foremost, it fatally disarms the prince. It converts his weapons into mere decorations and it arms him with nothing more than his virtue. It packs all the violence of conquest and military domination into an extended metaphor, an allegory. The sword of the Senecan prince ‘has been sheathed, indeed hung away altogether’;38 he keeps ‘his arms purely for ornamentation’;39 his ‘clemency’ brings him ‘not only honour but also safety’ and is said to be the ‘ornament of empires’.40 The prince is ‘protected by his own good deeds’, inspiring a love among his people which constitutes the prince’s one ‘unassailable fortress’.41 Consequently, ‘there is no need for him to raise aloft high citadels or to fortify hills steep to climb, nor to cut off the mountain-side and fence himself in with a multitude of walls and towers’ since ‘mercy will assure the king’s safety even in the open’.42 The Senecan prince is, above all, like that ‘mighty example for great kings’, the king bee: unlike the rest of the swarm, the monarch is ‘unarmed’, ‘without a sting’.43 ‘Nature took 37

38 39

40

41

42

43

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘se estraordinarii vizii non lo fanno odiare, e` ragionevole che naturalmente sia benevoluto da’ sua’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358 (Seneca 1995: 129): ‘Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.5:398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nihil praesidiis eget, arma ornamenti causa habet.’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (my translation): ‘Clementia ergo non tantum honestiores sed tutiores praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.5: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nihil praesidiis eget, arma ornamenti causa habet’; I.19.6: 412 (151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’ Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘Non opus est instruere in altum editas arces nec in adscensum arduos colles emunire nec latera montium abscidere’; I.19.6: 412 (151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit’. Seneca 1928a, I.19.3: 410 (Seneca 1995:150): ‘rex ipse sine aculeo est; noluit illum natura nec saevum esse nec ultionem magno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit. Exemplar hoc magnis regibus ingens.’

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away his weapon’, says Seneca approvingly, drawing out the moral: the virtuous prince – that great Pater patriae – should only use his ‘power in accordance with the law of nature’.44 If no Roman writer had been more preoccupied with the place of Fortuna in human affairs than Seneca, then no Renaissance writer is more convinced of the insanity of the view that the battle to overcome Fortuna can be won by merely mental exertion than Machiavelli. His theory violently turns back the tropes of the Senecan account. Machiavelli’s prince is not armed with his virtue. His virtue is to be armed. Machiavelli is adamant that you have no claim to be a virtuous prince at all if you are not armed. When he explains how new principalities are acquired by ‘one’s own arms and virtue’ in Chapter VI, he turns to the great and ancient innovatori in order to extol them as ‘grandissimi esempli’ of persons who have become princes ‘through their own virtue and not through fortuna’.45 These ancient examples illustrate the generation of a principality by a founding father whose ‘innovations’ are introduced into his patria by force of arms. Its generation may owe something to Fortuna, but the occasion which she provides is made pregnant with possibilities only because it is seized upon by an outstandingly virtuous man who is armed. This is why the conjunction is so fertile. If they ‘had been unarmed, their constitutions would not have been observed for very long’, Machiavelli points out.46 As he memorably puts it, ‘all armed prophets succeed whereas unarmed ones fail’.47 Since ‘being proficient in this art is what enables one to gain power’, it is not just the foundation of new principalities that requires arms.48 Acquiring pre-existing states through conquest also demands that the prince be a warrior. And even after establishing himself, ‘a wise prince . . . should never remain idle in peaceful times’ but should stay committed to the practice of arms so that ‘when fortuna changes, she finds him prepared to resist her’.49 The apparent 44

45

46

47

48 49

Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Eo scilicet formosius id esse magnificentiusque fatebimur, quo in maiore praestabitur potestate, quam non oportet noxiam esse, si ad naturae legem componitur.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 30: ‘io addurro` grandissimi esempli . . . per venire a quelli che per propria virtu` e non per fortuna sono diventati principi, dico che li piu´ eccellenti sono Moise`, Ciro, Romulo, Teseo, e simili’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 32: ‘non arebbono possuto fare osservare loro lungamente le loro constituzioni, se fussino stati disarmati’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 32: ‘Di qui nacque che tutt’i profeti armati vinsono, e li disarmati ruinorono.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e la cagione che te lo fa acquistare, e` lo essere professo di queste arte’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 64: ‘Questi simili modi debbe osservare uno principe savio, e mai ne’ tempi pacifici stare ozioso, ma con industria farne capitale, per potersene valere nelle avversita`, accio` che, quando si muta la fortuna, lo truovi parato a resisterle.’

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virtue of putting away one’s sword altogether is, for Machiavelli, moral blindness. The prince must apply himself above all else to military matters if he wishes to maintain his state: Machiavelli warns him that ‘the main reason that causes you to lose it is to neglect this art’.50 So ‘a prince should have no other objective nor other thought, nor take anything else as his art, except war, its organisation and its disciplines’.51 Machiavelli is hardly the first humanist to stress the importance of military training to the prince. One can turn back to Vergerio, for example, to find military exercises underlined as a significant part of the education of a young prince.52 But Machiavelli’s point is markedly different, and not just because he states it so emphatically. That emphasis is the consequence of his opposition to a specific rationality which had ostentatiously professed its pacifism and evacuated the violence of conquest after – and only after – a bloody and momentous act of subjection. It had disowned its own aggression. Machiavelli is constituting a radical counterpoint to that argument. His provocative insistence at this juncture is part of a battle with a type of rationality for governing persons and states which he despises as impotent, unmanly and catastrophically misguided. His redescription and remilitarisation of the rationality of governing states take the form of deconstructing specifically Senecan advice. Consider the development of his case in Chapter XIV, where he is laying out his position on the prince and the art of war: For being unarmed results, among other things, in your being despised. This is one of those infamies which the prince must always guard against, as will be explained later. For between someone armed and someone unarmed there is no proporzione.53

In this passage, Machiavelli is reverting to some rhetorical jargon. Proportio is the rhetorical term which Quintilian uses to convey the Greek term ‘analogy’.54 And analogy, or proportio, ‘refers any doubtful matter to something similar about which there is no question’.55 It is, in other 50 51

52 53

54

55

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘E la prima cagione che ti fa perdere quello, e` negligere questa arte.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘Debbe adunque uno principe non avere altro obietto ne´ altro pensiero, ne´ prendere cosa alcuna per sua arte, fuora della guerra et ordini e disciplina di essa.’ See, for example, Vergerio 2002: 67–83. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘Perche´, intra le altre cagioni che ti arreca di male lo essere disarmato, ti fa contennendo: la quale e` una di quelle infamie dalle quali el principe si debbe guardare, come di sotto si dira`. Perche´ da uno armato a uno disarmato non e` proporzione alcuna.’ Quintilian 2001, I.6.3–4, vol.I: 162: ‘Omnia tamen haec exigunt acre iudicium, analogia praecipue: quam proxime ex Graeco transferentes in Latinum proportionem vocaverunt.’ Quintilian 2001, I.6.3–4, vol.I: 162: ‘Eius haec vis est, ut id quod dubium est ad aliquid simile de quo non quaeritur referat, et incerta certis probet.’

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words, a type of argument based upon the idea of similitude. In Chapter XIV Machiavelli is exposing the weakness of the Senecan analogy between the unarmed prince and the king bee which had been cited approvingly since the Duecento in political literature on good rule. He continues: It is not rational that someone who is armed should willingly obey someone who is unarmed, and that an unarmed person is safe among armed servants. Since one will be contemptuous and the other suspicious, they cannot possibly work well together . . . a prince who does not understand military affairs cannot be esteemed by his soldiers, nor trust in them.56

This is a densely worked refutation of Seneca’s argument. The ‘trustworthy guards’ of Seneca’s ‘placid and calm king’ had been employed ‘for the common safety’ in De clementia; and Seneca’s ‘glorious soldier’ had understood his job to be a matter of ‘public security’.57 But they had all happily surrounded a prince whom they loved precisely because he was unarmed. Machiavelli is not merely retorting that to be unarmed amid one’s soldiery is the despicable antithesis of what it means to be virtuoso. He is also saying that it is not remotely ragionevole to expect to be obeyed, esteemed and assured of assistance in your goals if this is the case. The Senecan argument had sought corroboration in an analogy that rested on the Stoic view that the rationality of government must be similar to the ratio of nature. Machiavelli concentrates on rendering the analogy irrational. He shows that the argument for an unarmed prince which is underpinned by the analogy produces a disastrous lack of correspondence elsewhere. The dissimilitude which it engenders in the relation between prince and his servitori is shown to be totally counterproductive. For it brings about contempt, diffidence and insecurity instead of love, trust and safety. In systematically rendering literal the allegorical language of war which pervades the Senecan account of the virtus of the princeps and the vir sapiens, Machiavelli externalises a process which had been packed into a conscientious regime of self-surveillance, self-examination, self-conquest; 56

57

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e non e` ragionevole che chi e` armato obedisca volentieri a chi e` disarmato, e che il disarmato stia sicuro intra servitori armati. Perche´, sendo nell’uno sdegno e nell’altro sospetto, non e` possibile operino bene insieme. E pero` uno principe che della milizia non si intenda, oltre alle altre infelicita`, come e` detto, non puo` essere stimato da’ sua soldati ne´ fidarsi di loro.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Placido tranquilloque regi fida sunt auxilia sua, ut quibus ad communem salutem utatur, gloriosusque miles (publicae enim securitati se dare operam videt) omnem laborem libens patitur ut parentis custos.’

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everything, in short, that deprives the prince of impetus, that keeps him disastrously respectful and out of real warfare – all backward glances and timidita`, frightened of his own, powerful self.58 This elimination of affect robs the prince of the very aspects of a persona which serve him best. So Machiavelli turns the prince inside out: the self-subjection and selfovercoming of the mirror’s interior regime slide from view as the conquered subject comes back into focus. Freed from his introspection and informed by a Roman, pre-Christian, non-Stoic, anti-providential, fully rhetorical and explicitly belligerent rationality, the prince finally gets to look on a different person hidden from him for centuries. Machiavelli is effectively re-theorising the political outcome of the Roman revolution, giving it a different explanation. A key difference in that explanation is its alteration to a sense of motion at work in the Senecan ideology. The arbiter of life and death declares in De clementia that the status of those whom he rules ‘has been placed’ in his hand.59 Machiavelli’s redescription of the quality of princely virtus is a reaction against the passivity discernible in that act of deposition. He sees that for the principatus to have come into being at all, there must have been a huge exertion of power, of force, of violence, which he refuses to ascribe to a cause over and above human agency and which he wishes instead to embody within his theory. The fact of military conquest had been argued away in the Roman theory – and with it all the elements necessary to explain the impulses of a conquering body – by a theoretical manoeuvre which effectively traps the princeps in a position as passive as that of his subjects. That passivity is held in place by a deterministic moral theory which subjects him to the movement of a rationality frequently envisaged as a higher dominus. Machiavelli sweeps aside this metaphysics, barely pausing to dismiss the metaphors of divine trust and accountability which had become so prominent in explanations of conquest and princely government since Seneca. Machiavelli’s prince is no one’s lieutenant, no one’s trustee. Machiavelli frees him from all such obligations. The state is not placed in his hands by a providential deity, and Machiavelli never pores over the content of his prince’s conscience. His prince moves lightly, disburdened of centuries of depressing servitude. The excisions of De clementia start to rematerialise in the wake of the shattering impact of Chapter I. Chapter III is the first of many instances 58

59

For timidita`, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Chi fa altrimenti, o per timidita` o per mal consiglio, e` necessitato tenere el coltello’; for fear and the self, see Ch.XVII: 69: ‘ne´ si fare paura da se´ stesso’. Seneca 1928a, 1.1.2: 356: ‘qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est’.

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which reminds us of the ‘natural and ordinary necessity’ that ‘anyone who becomes a new ruler is always forced to injure his new subjects, both through his troops and through the infinite number of other injuries which are the consequence of the new acquisition’.60 As Machiavelli amplifies the injuries, he buries beneath the facts of military conquest the idea of a new law of reason ‘raised above every injury’, greeted by the sight of a happy, free and willing populus. With the recovery of injury comes the recovery of desire: the new lesson to learn is that ‘it is something really very natural and ordinary to desire to acquire’.61 And with the recovery of both comes bloodshed, as Machiavelli unleashes the first of a series of refutations of the injunction to be merciful, to spare captives, to preserve one’s monarchical innocence for the benefits of security. The blood begins to flow as Machiavelli sets about the Senecan precepts on how a prince should treat captured royalty. A captured monarch survives ‘to the glory of his saviour’ and should be kept alive in a position of indebtedness rather than ‘snatched from sight’, since the debtor ‘offers a lasting spectacle of the other’s excellence’.62 For ‘to owe one’s life is to have lost it’.63 No, says Machiavelli, you must ensure that the conquest of another monarch’s state includes ‘extinguishing the bloodline’ of the former prince.64 He uses a notorious construction here and elsewhere: he talks of the elimination of enemies in terms of spegnere. The idea is one of extinguishing, of snuffing out the light of life. But this reverses one of the most dominant metaphors at work in the Senecan theory in its portrayal of an enlightened and enlightening monarch. ‘A great light surrounds you’, proclaims Seneca of his monarch, who is said to ‘rise’ like the sun, and stand no more chance than the sun of ‘not being seen’.65 More specifically, his clementia – that lustrous ‘ornament of empire’ – will always keep a conquered monarch alive and in sight as testimony to his power.66 The wisdom of Machiavelli’s 60

61 62

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17: ‘un’altra necessita` naturale et ordinaria, quale fa che sempre bisogni offendere quelli di chi si diventa nuovo principe, e con gente d’arme, e con infinite altre iniurie che si tira dietro el nuovo acquisto’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 23: ‘E` cosa veramente molto naturale et ordinaria desiderare di acquistare.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘quisquis ex alto ad inimici pedes abiectus alienam de capite regnoque sententiam exspectavit, in servatoris sui gloriam vivit plusque eius nomini confert incolumis, quam si ex oculis ablatus esset. Adsiduum enim spectaculum alienae virtutis est; in triumpho cito transisset.’ Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘perdidit enim vitam, qui debet’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘E chi le acquista, volendole tenere, debbe avere dua respetti: l’uno, che il sangue del loro principe antiquo si spenga . . .’ Seneca 1928a, I.8.4: 378 (Seneca 1995: 137): ‘tibi non magis quam soli latere contingit. Multa circa te lux est, omnium in istam conversi oculi sunt.’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘Clementia ergo non tantum honestiores sed tutiores praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus.’

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prince consists in knowing how and when to have the opposite of such an illuminating effect. But his new monarch is also in the business of cancelling obligations rather than of contracting new debts. The danger of following the advice to turn a captured king into a debtor is that he may have some credit remaining among his former subjects. As Machiavelli explains in Chapter IV, developing further the idea of spegnere, if the ‘blood of the prince’ in a state which has the same structure as that of the Turkish Sultan is ‘spento, no one else remains to be feared, since the others do not have any credito with the people’.67 In modern Italian juridical parlance, one still talks of ‘extinguishing’ debts in the law of obligations, regularly using the verb estinguere to denote their cancellation.68 Machiavelli retains the vision which Seneca provides in De clementia of the prince’s treatment of the body politic as one of a doctor applying remedies. The reordering of the medical metaphor is underway early in Chapter III as Machiavelli begins to show the cause and effects of princely conquest. When he points out that in new principalities, ‘you cannot use strong medicine’ against those inhabitants who have helped you but who become quickly disillusioned with your inability to satisfy them, he is already thinking about the possible cures available to his principe savio in terms of medicine forti rather than the milder mollis medicina envisaged by the theorist of princely clemency.69 The ‘very good remedy’ of sending colonies to act ‘like shackles’ on the body of a conquered state in a different province looks much more like Machiavelli’s idea of strong medicine.70 The one remedy which he never prescribes is mercy, the great Senecan cure for sick and healthy alike. Machiavelli’s ‘wise princes’ practise preventive medicine: they act like the ancient Romans, prudently dealing ‘not only with existing troubles, but also with future ones’ since, in the early stages of an illness, cure is eminently possible, but when left to develop, the malady may well become incurable.71 67

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 27: ‘non si ha a dubitare d’altro che del sangue del principe; il quale spento, non resta alcuno di chi si abbia a temere, non avendo li altri credito con li populi’. For a typical example, see the discussion of l’estinzione dell’obbligazione in Talamanca 1990: 634–9. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17: ‘e per non potere tu usare contro di loro medicine forti, sendo loro obbligato . . .’ For the mollis medicina of the Senecan prince, see Seneca 1928a, I.17.1–2: 406 (Seneca 1995: 149): ‘Morbis medemur nec irascimur; atqui et hic morbus est animi; mollem medicinam desiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro.’ For the aversion to aspera remedia, see I.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘inclinatus ad mitiora, etiam si ex usu est animadvertere, ostendens quam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 19: ‘L’altro migliore remedio e` mandare colonie in uno o in dua luoghi, che sieno quasi compedi di quello stato.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Perche´ e Romani feciono in questi casi quello che tutti e principii savii debbono fare: li quali non solamente hanno ad avere riguardo alli scandoli presenti, ma a’ futuri, et a quelli con ogni industria obviare; perche´, prevedendosi discosto, facilmente vi si puo` remediare, ma, aspettando che ti si appressino, la medicina non e` a tempo, perche´ la malattia e` diventata incurabile.’

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This is the moral of the ‘physicians of the etico’, says Machiavelli, perhaps exploiting the thought that doctors who treat consumptives are more skilled in ethics than the kind of Stoic doctor who constantly counsels the use of ‘gentle medicine’ and who refuses to think of cruelty – or the ‘dire disease of the mind’ – as a potential cure.72 Machiavelli apparently likes this pun: in Chapter XIII, he refers again to his argument about ‘ethical fevers’ as he is condemning the lack of prudence of those whose projects proceed on the basis of a misconceived idea of what is good and overlook the ‘poison’ that lies concealed in their activities.73 What he finds most objectionable is the timing and pace of the Senecan princely doctor, who ‘reveals his reluctance to apply harsh remedies’ and who hesitates to use the knife out of his concern to leave only ‘an honourable scar’.74 For Machiavelli, to indulge in some early blood-letting might well be essential to the eventual health of the state. The fantasy which constrains the Senecan medic to move so gingerly – the belief that it is his own body over which he extends his medical treatment – is completely absent from Machiavelli’s vision of the prince’s state. Machiavelli pulls out the guts of the Roman theory of monarchy with almost surgical precision. Seneca’s prince never draws his sword once. He keeps it ‘hidden away’ and ‘sheathed’.75 Even though ‘no one ever had the sword entrusted to him at an earlier age’, he is able to boast that he has not been moved by any iuvenilis impetus – any youthful impulse – to use it cruelly, angrily, irrationally.76 His civitas is incruenta: unstained by blood.77 He knows that mercy cannot be ‘exhausted cruelty’, but that it must be a constant feature of his reign, since it ‘means never having shed a citizen’s blood’.78 And so Seneca congratulated his prince, pointing out 72

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Et interviene di questa come dicono e’ fisici dello etico, che nel principio del suo male, e` facile a curare e difficile a conoscere, ma, nel progresso del tempo, non l’avendo in principio conosciuta ne´ medicata, diventa facile a conoscere e difficile a curare.’ For cruelty as the dire disease, see Seneca 1928a, I.25.2: 424: ‘illi [sc.crudeli homini] dirus animi morbus ad insaniam pervenit ultimam, cum crudelitas versa est in voluptatem et iam occidere hominem iuvat’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61: ‘Ma la poca prudenzia delli uomini comincia una cosa, che, per sapere allora di buono, non si accorge del veleno che vi e` sotto: come io dissi di sopra delle febbre etiche.’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘quam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat’; I.17.2: 406 (149): ‘quosdam molli curatione decipiat citius meliusque sanaturus remediis fallentibus; agat princeps curam non tantum salutis, sed etiam honestae cicatricis’. Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358: ‘Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est.’ Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358: ‘non ira me ad iniqua supplicia compulit, non iuvenilis impetus . . .’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.3: 390: ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.2: 390 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘Ego vero clementiam non voco lassam crudelitatem . . . clementia vera, quam tu praestas . . . nullam habere maculam, numquam civilem sanguinem fudisse.’

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that ‘your principatus is being judged by the taste which we have had of it’.79 This unsimulated goodness had been contrasted with the bestial cruelty of the tyrant impulsively driven to ever more depraved activity, ‘to kill, to rage, to delight in the noise of chains, to cut off the heads of citizens, to pour out a mass of blood . . . to terrify people and send them running by your very appearance’.80 Seneca condemns this sad spectacle: ‘what could be unhappier than to be, as he now is, forced by necessity to be bad?’81 When Machiavelli comes to discussing the qualities of the prince in Chapter XV, he entirely reformulates this wisdom, claiming that ‘it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how to be ‘‘not good’’, and to use it and not use it according to necessity’.82 He will further go on to refute the Senecan point by claiming that happiness depends upon this very ability to vary one’s conduct. But these lessons are laid out after an attentive description of the circumstances in which new principalities are acquired and successfully maintained. And these, in turn, are decidedly bloody. In Chapter VIII, Machiavelli inquires as to how ‘Agathocles, and others like him, after committing countless acts of treacherousness and cruelty, could live securely’ when ‘many others have not been able to keep their hand on the state by acting cruelly even in peaceful times, let alone in times of war, which are uncertain’.83 Machiavelli explains by distinguishing between ‘cruel deeds committed well or badly’. ‘Good’ cruel deeds are those which are ‘committed all at once’ because they are ‘necessary for establishing oneself, and are not afterwards persisted in’, while bad ones are those ‘which are at first few in number, but increase with time rather than diminish’.84 Quite apart from the fact that this economy of violence throws the absolute morality of the Senecan theory into total disarray, it is 79 80

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Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129–30): ‘principatus tuus ad gustum exigitur’. Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426 (Seneca 1995: 156–7): ‘Quod istud . . . malum est occidere, saevire, delectari sono catenarum et civium capita decidere, quocumque ventum est, multum sanguinis fundere, aspectu suo terrere ac fugare?’ Seneca 1928a, I.13.2: 396: ‘Quid autem eo infelicius, cui iam esse malo necesse est?’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘Onde e` necessario a uno principe, volendosi mantenere, imparare a potere essere non buono, et usarlo e non usare secondo la necessita`.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Potrebbe alcuno dubitare donde nascessi che Agatocle et alcuno simile, dopo infiniti tradimenti e crudelta`, posse´ vivere lungamente sicuro nella sua patria e defendersi dalli inimici esterni, e da’ sua cittadini non li fu mai cospirato contro: con cio` sia che molti altri, mediante la crudelta` non abbino, etiam ne’ tempi pacifici, possuto mantenere lo stato, non che ne’ tempi dubbiosi di guerra.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Credo che questo avvenga dalle crudelta` male usate o bene usate. Bene usate si possono chiamare quelle (se del male e` licito dire bene) che si fanno ad uno tratto, per necessita` dello assicurarsi, e di poi non vi si insiste drento ma si convertiscono in piu` utilita` de’ sudditi che si puo`. Male usate sono quelle le quali, ancora che nel principio sieno poche, piu` tosto col tempo crescono che le si spenghino.’

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predicated upon the single fact that was made to disappear in the vision of a prince bringing a law raised ‘above all injury’. When Machiavelli reinstates the injuries of conquest, he unsheathes the hidden sword. The person who seizes a state and occupies it ‘must decide about all the injuries which it is necessary to commit, and do them all at once, so as not to have to repeatedly commit them every day’.85 This means that a prince’s subjects may well get a taste at the start of the prince’s reign of something very different from clemency. Machiavelli reconfigures the Senecan imagery: ‘injuries should be done altogether so that, being tasted less, they will cause less offence; and benefits should be given out very gradually, so that they are tasted better’.86 The irony of insisting upon just one taste is that, far from being able to keep his sword permanently sheathed, the prince ‘will always be forced to stand with sword in hand’.87 Cesare Borgia’s conduct in the Romagna exemplifies these lessons. The great duke ‘won over Romagna and her inhabitants’, and under him, they ‘began to taste prosperity’.88 But not before tasting great cruelty first. Personifying Romagna, Machiavelli states that Borgia ‘found her at the command of impotent signori who had been quicker to despoil their subjects than rule them correctly’.89 Without the guiding hand of a good artist like Borgia, Romagna had provided ‘material for disorder rather than order’, and had become ‘full of thefts, quarrels and outrages of every kind’.90 In order to pacify it, make it ‘obedient to the royal arm’ and establish good government over it, Borgia makes great use of Remirro de Orco, a ‘cruel man’ who succeeds in the task of pacification in no time at all but who incurs the hatred of its inhabitants.91 Wishing to distance himself personally from his minister’s brutality, Borgia enters into the theatre of cruelty, prudently seizing a suitable occasion to have Remirro ‘placed in the piazza at Cesena, cut in two’, along with ‘a wooden block and a bloody 85

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Onde e` da notare che, nel pigliare uno stato, debbe l’occupatore di esso discorrere tutte quelle offese che li e` necessario fare, e tutte farle a un tratto, per non le avere a rinnovare ogni d´ı.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Perche´ le iniurie si debbono fare tutte insieme, accio` che, assaporandosi meno, offendino meno: e’ benefizii si debbono fare a poco a poco, accio` che si assaporino meglio.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Chi fa altrimenti . . . e` sempre necessitato tenere el coltello in mano.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 36: ‘aversi acquistata amica la Romagna e guadagnatosi tutti quelli popoli, per avere cominciato a gustare el bene essere loro’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘trovandola suta comandata da signori impotenti, li quali piu` presto avevano spogliato e’ loro sudditi che corretti’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘e dato loro materia di disunione, non di unione, tanto che quella provincia era tutta piena di latrocinii, di brighe e di ogni altra ragione di insolenzia’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘iudico` fussi necessario, a volerla ridurre pacifica e obediente al braccio regio, darli buon governo. Pero` vi prepose messer Remirro de Orco, uomo crudele et espedito.’

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knife’.92 Machiavelli notes that ‘the ferocity of such a spectacle left that populace satisfied and dumbstruck’.93 Borgia has unsheathed the knife, bloodied it and made a terrifying public spectacle of the fact. He kills savagely; he leaves blood all over the public square; and the block of wood would suggest that he has had Remirro cut in two by an act of decapitation. The consolidation of his state has required Borgia to engage in the very activities described by Seneca as those of a ferocious tyrant. But Borgia knows that there is a time and a place for these activities. He knows how to start and stop. When Machiavelli returns to appraise his activities in Chapter XVII, he concedes that Borgia was ‘held to be cruel’; and yet he points out that his cruelty united and pacified Romagna.94 A new prince cannot possibly avoid the ‘nome di crudele’.95 Being so ‘nominated’ may not be fatal for the prince. On the contrary, a prince who follows this path on occasion ‘will really be acting more mercifully than those who, out of excessive piety, let disorders develop’, and so harm the entire community. So anxious were the Florentines to escape the ‘nome del crudele’ in their treatment of Pistoia that they let it be destroyed altogether.96 Machiavelli sees another way of holding – and of ‘holding forth’ – the person of Borgia, and of consequently renaming his vice as a virtue. In so doing, Machiavelli utterly confounds Seneca’s theory of tyranny. He can endorse the halfbeast Chiron as an exemplary precettore because his own precepts constitute a rationality which has eliminated entirely the dichotomy so prized by the classical praeceptor of princely humanitas. Machiavelli maintains that a prince who behaves cruelly, bestially and inhumanely may very well be behaving virtuously. There is nothing remotely ironic about these acts of transvaluation. They indicate a new moral calculus suitable for the task of mantenere lo stato which applies to republics as well as to principalities. The most maddening characteristic of the Senecan prince from a Machiavellian point of view is that he is entirely undone by a providential conception of time and, indeed, the times. He is unprepared to react suddenly to unforeseen changes in circumstances or in the weather, unable 92

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘E presa sopr’a questo occasione, lo fece mettere una mattina a Cesena, in dua pezzi in sulla piazza, con uno pezzo di legno e uno coltello sanguinoso a canto.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘La ferocita` del quale spettaculo fece quelli populi in uno tempo rimanere satisfatti e stupidi.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68: ‘Era tenuto Cesare Borgia crudele; non di manco quella sua crudelta` aveva racconcia la Romagna, unitola, ridottola in pace et in fede.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 69: ‘Et infra tutti e’ principi, al principe nuovo e` impossibile fuggire el nome di crudele.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68–9: ‘Il che se si considerra` bene, si vedra` quello essere stato molto piu´ pietoso che il populo fiorentino, il quale, per fuggire el nome del crudele, lascio` destruggere Pistoia.’

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to calibrate his behaviour according to variations in moment, place, person, situation. The Senecan wise man – whose example the figure of Cosimo de’ Medici had encouraged as the way to true happiness in Poggio’s dialogue De infelicitate principum of 1441 – is constitutionally incapable of grasping the Machiavellian concept of prudence.97 His moral regime rivets his persona to a leaden form of absolute constancy ultimately grounded in the benevolence of god, nature, time. Seneca had summed it up for his prince when he had depicted the ‘state’ of the world under the benevolence of divine rule: serene and bright, pleasant and lovely, sunny and cloudless. Machiavelli’s perspective in Il Principe is that this way of looking at the world is insane. What if the weather changes? What if your luck changes? Machiavelli has no patience with laments about the cruel inconstancies of the dominatrix Fortuna uttered at moments when the providential order suddenly becomes less than evident. To indulge in this behaviour is merely to swing violently from the mistaken belief in one’s total domination of the world to a position of abject submission. Fortuna may be powerful, but it is shameful – the very opposite of virtus – to allow oneself to be completely dominated by her. So he sharply points out: These princes of ours who had been settled for years in their principalities and then lost them should not blame fortuna but their own ignavia. For in quiet times they never thought that things could change (it is a common defect of men not to reckon on storms when the weather is fine). When adverse times came, they thought of fleeing and not of defending themselves.98

For Machiavelli, the Senecan view of Fortuna so widely endorsed is the height of imprudence, a psychological debility inextricably caught up in the doctrine of princely servitude. As Machiavelli points out, the error is one of counting so heavily upon a benign rationality that you effectively commit yourself to a slavish dependency upon an illusory master. And this attitude threatens to make you a dependant of others in a very literal sense: A man should never risk falling because he thinks it likely that he will be rescued. This may not happen, but even if it does it will not make you secure; such a defence is weak and cowardly and does not depend upon you. Only those

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For this point, see Viroli 1992: 109. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIV: 98: ‘Per tanto questi nostri principi, che erano stati molti anni nel principato loro, per averlo di poi perso non accusino la fortuna, ma la ignavia loro: perche´, non avendo mai ne’ tempi quieti pensato che possono mutarsi, (il che e` comune defetto delli uomini, non fare conto nella bonaccia della tempesta), quando poi vennono i tempi avversi, pensorono a fuggirsi e non a defendersi.’

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defences which depend upon you alone and on your virtue are good, certain, durable.99

The formulation of Machiavelli’s argument in the last sentence is pointed. In the midst of a polemic about changing times, weather conditions and fortunes, Machiavelli can once again refute the Stoic and Christian position on its own terms because he has totally redesigned the relationship between Fortuna and virtus in a non-providential world. The simple irony which he indicates is that the prince who cleaves to the conventional conception of virtue in order to free himself from Fortuna risks ending up her hostage. Machiavelli’s response to the reality of a cruel, capricious Fortuna is to reconstruct the princely persona. He begins to broach the key principle of his moral theory in Chapter II, when he casually notes that if an hereditary prince wishes to hold on to his state, he need only preserve the established order and ‘temporise in the event of anything untoward happening’.100 But the idea of temporeggiare strikes at the very basis of the Senecan persona of the prince.101 Seneca had posited the fundamental principle that ‘no one can wear a mask for long’ since ‘fictions soon fall back into their true nature’.102 The virtuous prince is praised because his ‘natural goodness’ is never just put on ad tempus, to suit the moment. But Machiavelli’s treatise welcomes drama: it produces an actor and an argument about the need to act. Above all, Machiavelli’s actor needs to be as good as his preceptor at considerations of quality. Specifically, he must be good at discerning ‘ogni qualita` di tempo’, as Machiavelli calls it in Chapter IX, or ‘le qualita` de’ tempi’ as he later rephrases it.103 He must be ‘disposed to change his mind completely as the winds of fortune and variations in circumstances dictate’.104 Machiavelli insists that to cultivate this persona is the only way to be happy and avoid unhappiness. Prudence is the key to this task. As he puts it in Chapter XXI, ‘prudence consists in knowing how to recognise the 99

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIV: 98: ‘perche´ non si vorrebbe mai cadere, per credere di trovare chi ti ricolga. Il che, o non avviene, o, s’elli avviene non e` con tua sicurta`, per essere quella difesa suta vile e non dependere da te. E quelle difese solamente sono buone, sono certe, sono durabili, che dependono da te proprio e dalla virtu´ tua.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘e di poi temporeggiare con li accidenti’. For the merits of temporising in the Discorsi, see Machiavelli 1960, 1.33: 206–9. Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129–30): ‘Difficile hoc fuisset, si non naturalis tibi ista bonitas esset, sed ad tempus sumpta. Nemo enim potest personam diu ferre, ficta cito in naturam suam recidunt; quibus veritas subest quaeque, ut ita dicam, ex solido enascuntur, tempore ipso in maius meliusque procedunt.’ See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 48; Ch.XXV: 99. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 73–4: ‘E pero` bisogna che elli abbi uno animo disposto a volgersi secondo ch’e venti della fortuna e le variazioni delle cose li comandano.’

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qualities of inconvenienti’.105 Discerning the sort of dangerous difficulties which surround you at any one time is a prerequisite for re-evaluating, where necessary, bad things as good, or, to cite Machiavelli, ‘knowing how to pick the least bad one as good’.106 In Chapter IX, Machiavelli ridicules the image advanced in De clementia of the ‘unanimity of peoples and cities in their protection and love of kings’ and of a populus who ‘fly towards’ their prince, eagerly ‘racing one another’ in their ‘total readiness to throw themselves onto the blades of those who lie in wait for him, to cast their own bodies to the ground . . . to provide the foundation of his road to safety’.107 Seneca had claimed that ‘for one man they lead ten legions into battle, rushing at the front line and bearing their breasts to the wounds’.108 Machiavelli sneers back that this may well hold good for peaceful times: ‘then everyone comes running, everyone promises, every person is willing to die for him, when death is far off ’.109 But this helpful disposition tends to vanish in more testing times when ‘few are to be found’ to help the state.110 Machiavelli’s subjects are no longer constrained to be happy, either. The virtuous prince who brings felicitas and libertas to his adoring public in the Roman theory of monarchy was said to have been ‘the vinculum which holds the res publica together’.111 In Chapter XVII, Machiavelli is perhaps mocking the sententious style as well as the Stoic doctrines of the Roman theory when he pithily declares that ‘love is sustained by a vinculum of obligation which, since men are bad, is broken on every occasion that suits them’.112 Fear, by way of equally pithy contrast, Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXI: 92: ‘la prudenzia consiste in sapere conoscere le qualita` delli inconvenienti’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXI: 92: ‘e pigliare el meno tristo per buono’. 107 Seneca 1928a, I.3.3–4: 366 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘cuius curam excubare pro salute singulorum atque universorum cottidie experientur . . . tamquam ad clarum ac beneficum sidus certatim advolant. Obicere se pro illo mucronibus insidiantium paratissimi et substernere corpora sua, si per stragem illi humanam iter ad salutem struendum sit, somnum eius nocturnis excubiis muniunt, latera obiecti circumfusique defendunt, incurrentibus periculis se opponunt. Non est hic sine ratione populis urbibusque consensus sic protegendi amandique reges et se suaque iactandi, quocumque desideravit imperantis salus.’ 108 Seneca 1928a, I.4.1: 368 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘Suam itaque incolumitatem amant, cum pro uno homine denas legiones in aciem deducunt, cum in primam frontem procurrunt et adversa volneribus pectora ferunt, ne imperatoris sui signa vertantur.’ 109 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 48: ‘Perche´ simile principe non puo` fondarsi sopra a quello che vede ne’ tempi quieti, quando e cittadini hanno bisogno dello stato; perche´ allora ognuno corre, ognuno promette, e ciascuno vuole morire per lui, quando la morte e` discosto.’ 110 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 48: ‘ma ne’ tempi avversi, quando lo stato ha bisogno de’ cittadini, allora se ne truova pochi’. 111 Seneca 1928a, I.4.1: 368: ‘Ille est enim vinculum, per quod res publica cohaeret.’ 112 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70: ‘perche´ l’amore e` tenuto da uno vinculo di obbligo, il quale, per essere li uomini tristi, da ogni occasione di propria utilita` e` rotto’. 105

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‘is preserved by a dread of punishment that never leaves you’.113 The Senecan themes which Machiavelli raises in this chapter have already been observed, but his attacks on the Roman theory have now acquired considerable depth. When he points out that ‘men are less hesitant about offending a prince who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared’, the rationality upon which the conventional discussion is raised has undergone a seismic shift: the assumption is now that men may be disposed to act offensively towards their prince regardless of how he behaves.114 The effect of the shift ramifies elsewhere. A theory which repeatedly enjoins its chief protagonist to avoid ‘being hated’ and to guard against ‘being despised’ may be said to be one well-acquainted with the ways of irony.115 Yet Machiavelli draws attention to the existence of hostility and conflicting rationalities in the principality not on the view that a theory should necessarily eliminate such differences, but as a response to a theory which promises to have done so. Look at the target of Machiavelli’s irony: Seneca had promised his unarmed prince an ‘unassailable fortress’ in the ‘love of his citizens’; but in Chapter XX, Machiavelli stays within the figurative language of Seneca just long enough to remind his prince that ‘the best fortress is not to be hated by the people’.116 Machiavelli may belong to a tradition of theorists of liberty for whom a major preoccupation is not so much that enslaved persons love their masters per se, but that they do so in the belief that they are free. Machiavelli’s sustained refutatio of the key doctrines of the Roman theory of monarchy culminates in Chapter XXV. Machiavelli commences by rehearsing the case for the opposition: I am not unaware that many people have held and hold today the opinion that things of the world are governed by fortuna and by God in such a way that men have no power to correct them with their prudence, and that, on the contrary, they have no remedy at all; and for this reason they could judge that there is no point in sweating much over things: better to leave oneself to be governed by fate.117

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70: ‘ma il timore e` tenuto da una paura di pena che non abbandona mai’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70: ‘E li uomini hanno meno respetto a offendere uno che si facci amare, che uno che si facci temere.’ For the densest concentration of these injunctions, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 75–84. Seneca 1928a, 1.19.6: 412: ‘Unum est inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium’; Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XX: 88: ‘Pero` la migliore fortezza che sia, e` non essere odiato dal populo.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98: ‘E non mi e` incognito come molti hanno avuto et hanno opinione che le cose del mondo sieno in modo governate dalla fortuna e da Dio, che li uomini con la prudenzia loro non possino correggerle, anzi non vi abbino remedio alcuno; e per questo, potrebbero iudicare che non fussi da insudare molto nelle cose, ma lasciarsi governare alla sorte.’

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This is a devastating way of restating the Senecan argument. In particular, Machiavelli draws attention to a central feature of the Stoic philosophy which underpins the theory – its determinism – and which has been criticised for millennia on grounds still known today as the ‘lazy argument’.118 One can see this characteristic of Stoicism at work in the turn which Marcello Virgilio’s philosophy took a year earlier, in November 1512, after the Medici’s return and Machiavelli’s dismissal. Drawing upon elements of Seneca’s De ira in the course of a professorial praelusio, the First Chancellor began to endorse the Stoic view that ‘everyone, from the slave to the king, should accept his fate and refrain from striving for higher things’.119 And, as Najemy has pointed out, Vettori rehearsed Seneca’s view on the deterministic nature of the universe in a letter to Machiavelli in November 1513, referring to Letter 107 of Seneca’s Epistulae morales in order to remind Machiavelli ‘Sed fatis trahimur’ – ‘but we are dragged along by the Fates’. Najemy is surely right to conclude that this piece of wisdom would have provoked rather than consoled his friend.120 In rehearsing this view, Machiavelli goes for the jugular. For his fundamental argument is that principalities are not republics, that they are not free states, and that they are acquired either by means of virtue or through fortune. That is the case laid out in Chapter I. It contests the theoretical basis of a dominant ideology which had persistently drawn upon the Senecan account in order to sustain the claim that installing a prince at the head of a republic was the best way of guaranteeing liberty. Underpinning this classical theory was a Stoic thesis about reason and freedom. Machiavelli now drags out the metaphysics which holds these claims in place in order to mock the theory’s conception of liberty. He proceeds by way of ironic concession, momentarily ‘inclined towards’ the opposition’s opinion before discarding it entirely with the declaration that ‘in order that our free judgement is not entirely extinguished, I nonetheless judge that it may possibly be the truth that fortuna is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that even she leaves the government of half of them – or thereabouts – to us’.121 Abiding by a theory predicated on the Senecan view of fortuna does not so much guarantee liberum arbitrium as extinguish it. So much for its divinely enlightening 118

119 121

For the ‘lazy argument’, or a0 qco`& ko´coˆ& (also called the ‘argument for inaction’ in Sandbach 1975: 104), see Long 1996: 173; Frede 2003: 201–5. Godman 1998: 198. 120 Najemy 1993: 220. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98–9: ‘A che pensando io qualche volta, mi sono in qualche parte inclinato nella opinione loro. Non di manco, perche´ el nostro libero arbitrio non sia spento, iudico potere esser vero che la fortuna sia arbitra della meta` delle azione nostre, ma che etiam lei ne lasci governare l’altra meta`, o presso, a noi.’

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quality. For Machiavelli, the act of conflating fortuna with an omnipotent divine figure produces a moral theory which negates the possibility of freedom. His argument smartly deprives the heroic moral struggles of the Stoic and Senecan vir sapiens of all their sense. In a world as overgoverned as his, what exactly is the point of all that uphill struggling, all that Herculean sweat? The claims of Senecan philosophy and his princely medic are made to look very hollow indeed: notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, they point towards an eclipse of liberty, the futility of moral labour and a lack of ‘any remedy’ at all for someone looking to put things right in the world. Machiavelli’s performance is now perhaps aspiring to live up to Quintilian’s judgement that ‘it takes a real orator to make the opponent’s argument appear contradictory, irrelevant, unbelievable, superfluous or favourable to our side’.122 He continues by showing that the real remedy consists in seeing things differently. Fortuna, he agrees, really is like nature: I compare her to one of those ruinous rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, destroy trees and buildings, move earth from one place and deposit it in another. Everyone flees before them, everyone gives way to their impetus, without being able to halt them in any way.123

But this picture of nature is drawn from a markedly different perspective than that of the Roman theory of monarchy. For a start, the imagery of fiumi rovinosi which ruinano illustrates nature’s highly destructive capacities as much as its benign effects in the world. To cultivate a rationality in the government of states which adheres to the lex naturae is thus to invite ruin as much as peace upon them when the weather changes. But it is crucial to note the element which now animates this violent picture of nature’s impetus: the Machiavellian addition of ira. The ruinous rivers ‘s’adirano’, Machiavelli says, they become enraged, angry. Natura thereby acquires a characteristic assiduously cut out of the Senecan picture of the prince’s world and his person. Seneca had transposed the vice of anger onto the tyrant in his monarchical theory and onto tyrannical Fortuna in his ethics in order to hold up both as personifications of the irrational and the unnatural. But even though he depicted her in detail, he insisted that it is as 122

123

Quintilian 2001, V.13.17, vol.II: 476: ‘Sed tamen interim oratoris est efficere ut quid aut contrarium esse aut a causa diversum aut incredibile aut supervacuum aut nostrae potius causae videatur esse coniunctum.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 99: ‘Et assomiglio quella a uno di questi fiumi rovinosi, che, quando s’adirano, allagano e’ piani, ruinano li arberi e li edifizii, lievono da questa parte terreno, pongono da quell’altra: ciascuno fugge loro dinanzi, ognuno cede allo impeto loro, sanza potervi in alcuna parte obstare.’

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irrational to think that Fortuna really exists as it is to get angry in a universe ruled by reason. ‘No one in his right mind is angry with nature’, Seneca had declared.124 In Machiavelli’s vision, Fortuna is sometimes good to us, sometimes bad. She is like nature, as Seneca said, but the basis of the similitude is that both are variable and liable to angry outbreaks. It is a nice touch that Machiavelli conveys this decidely un-Senecan idea of nature suddenly wracked by a great Senecan vice through imagery preferred by Seneca. In De clementia, he had repeatedly insisted on the elimination of anger from the prince’s person, but De ira – continually cited in the literature on good government from the Duecento onwards (and certainly well regarded in the humanist circles of Machiavelli’s Florence, as Marcello Virgilio’s use of it attests) – prescribed comprehensive cures for the burning impetus of anger which threatens to move a body to great harm.125 Seneca had likened the affect of anger to a fire and a fever, but he had also likened it to stormy weather.126 Part of the task of knowing how to excise or at least restrain its impetuous motion requires observing how fresh and strong an outburst we face as agents. Sometimes, says Seneca, it is best to cede some ground to it ‘until the first storm is over, in case it sweeps our remedies along with it’.127 On the other hand, if it is left to swell, a person can be swept away altogether, rendering futile ‘his effort to sink what cannot be drowned unless he himself drowns with it . . . as if caught in a storm, he does not go forward, he is carried along, enslaved by a raging malady’.128 So the best thing is ‘to intercept one’s affections as they first arise’, to anticipate a torrential downpour, because ‘storm and rain have signs that come before them’.129

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Seneca 1928b, II.10.6: 186 (Seneca 1995: 50): ‘nemo autem naturae sanus irascitur’. Seneca 1928b, III.1.1: 252: ‘nunc facere temptabimus, iram excidere animis aut certe refrenare et impetus eius inhibere. Id aliquando palam aperteque faciendum est, ubi minor vis mali patitur, aliquando ex occulto, ubi nimium ardet omnique inpedimento exasperatur et crescit.’ For Seneca’s use of the metaphor of a river in flood to describe affective disturbance, see the brilliant exposition in Veyne 2003: 56. Seneca 1928b, III.1.1: 252 (Seneca 1995: 76): ‘refert quantas uires quamque integras habeat, utrum reverberanda et agenda retro sit an cedere ei debeamus dum tempestas prima desaevit, ne remedia ipsa secum ferat’. Seneca 1928b, III.3.2–3: 258 (Seneca 1995: 79): ‘Necessarium est itaque foeditatem eius ac feritatem coarguere et ante oculis ponere quantum monstri sit homo in hominem furens quantoque impetu ruat non sine pernicie sua perniciosus et ea deprimens quae mergi nisi cum mergente non possunt. Quid ergo? sanum hunc aliquis vocat qui velut tempestate correptus non it sed agitur et furenti malo servit.’ Seneca 1928b, III.10.2: 278 (Seneca 1995: 87): ‘Facile est autem adfectus suos, cum primum oriuntur, deprehendere: morborum signa praecurrunt. Quemadmodum tempestatis ac pluviae ante ipsas notae veniunt, ita irae . . .’

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For Machiavelli, Senecan ethics eliminate the most essential elements of a human personality which might make it better prepared for sudden changes in the weather, misfortunes, reversals of luck: variazioni, in a word. A prerequisite of being able to resist the effects of these changes must be a capacity to see that nature does sometimes get angry, that our fortune does change, and that observing the unpredictability of the world is not a disordered vision but the precondition of felicitas. As Machiavelli rehearses his moral position, he entirely reverses the Stoic prescriptions of constancy as the basis of real happiness: One sees how a prince is happy today, ruined tomorrow, without his having changed his nature or any of his qualities. I believe that this occurs first of all for the reasons which have now been discussed at length, namely that a prince who relies on fortuna is ruined when she varies. Moreover, I believe that a happy person is one who alters their way of behaving in accordance with the quality of the times; correspondingly an unhappy person is one whose way of behaving is discordant with the times.130

Acting ad tempus is thus the key to happiness. Machiavelli points out that there are plenty of different and contrasting ways of acting, none of which is necessarily wrong or right and each of which may or may not result in the desired outcome. Their success or failure depends on whether they ‘conform’ to ‘the quality of the times’.131 The rigid prescription of specific behaviours is not the way to think about things. Machiavelli admits that one does not easily find ‘a man so prudent’ that he knows how ‘to accommodate himself’ with such a ready flexibility.132 Man is hampered either because ‘he finds it difficult to deviate from the path to which he is naturally inclined’ or because ‘he cannot be persuaded to depart from a tried and tested route’.133 But the insight nevertheless is that ‘if one changed one’s nature to suit the times and circumstances, one’s fortuna would not change’.134 One would always be successful in one’s projects. 130

131

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 99: ‘dico come si vede oggi questo principe felicitare e domani ruinare, sanza averli veduto mutare natura o qualita` alcuna: il che credo che nasca, prima, dalle cagioni che si sono lungamente per lo adrieto discorse, cioe` che quel principe che s’appoggia tutto in sulla fortuna, rovina, come quella varia. Credo, ancora, che sia felice quello che riscontra el modo del procedere suo con le qualita` de’ tempi; e similmente sia infelice quello che con il procedere suo si discordano e’ tempi.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘se non dalla qualita` de’ tempi che si conformano o no col procedere loro’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘Ne´ si truova uomo s´ı prudente, che si sappi accomodare a questo; s´ı perche´ non si puo` deviare da quello a che la natura l’inclina; s´ı etiam perche´, avendo sempre uno prosperato camminando per una via, non si puo` persuadere partirsi da quella . . . che´, se si mutassi di natura con li tempi e con le cose, non si muterebbe fortuna.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100. 134 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100.

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Having run the Stoic wisdom ragged, Machiavelli closes his assaults by contrasting two types of protagonist. One is respettivo. Machiavelli insists that a man who is ‘respectful’ has no idea how to act ‘when it is time for him to act forcefully’, and so he is ruined.135 The other is impetuoso. He is exemplified by Pope Julius II, who ‘always acted impetuously in his affairs, and found that times and circumstances so conform to this way of acting of his that he always came to a happy end’.136 Machiavelli carefully describes the motivation of Julius in his expedition against Bologna and in his behaviour towards the King of Spain and the Venetians. Julius, he says, ‘con la sua ferocia e impeto, si mosse personalmente a quella espedizione’: the pope ‘personally’ led the expedition with his ferociousness and his impetuosity.137 But the person of Julius is said to be ‘moved’ by his ferocity and impetus. Machiavelli goes on: ‘this movement brought the Spanish and the Venetians to a halt . . .’, helping Julius to impose upon his enemies in a typical example of how he always managed to secure ‘happy’ outcomes.138 And he repeats that Julius’ achievements were due to his ‘impetuous movement’.139 To be a happy and virtuous prince, you must be able to impose yourself impetuously upon the times and circumstances. Leaving the wreckage of the Roman theory of monarchy behind him, Machiavelli turns to sum up: ‘I conclude that since fortuna varies, and men are obstinately stuck in their ways, they are happy when concord prevails between them, and unhappy when there is discord.’140 When Fortuna recovers her freedom of movement, Stoic constancy becomes sheer obstinacy and a sure path to unhappiness sooner or later. All things considered, Machiavelli judges, ‘it is better to be impetuous than respectful, because fortuna is a woman’.141 So if you want to keep her submissive or ‘hold her down’ it is necessary to beat her, harm her, hurt her.142 Fortuna ‘lets her self be conquered more readily’ by men who treat her roughly than by ‘those who act coldly’. This is because ‘as a woman, she is a friend of young men, 135

136

137 138 139

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘pero` lo uomo respettivo, quando elli e` tempo di venire allo impeto, non lo sa fare; donde rovina’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘Papa Iulio II procede´ in ogni sua cosa impetuosamente; e trovo` tanto e tempi e le cose conforme a quello suo modo di procedere, che sempre sort´ı felice fine.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘La quale mossa fece stare sospesi e fermi Spagna e Viniziani.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101: ‘Condusse adunque Iulio con la sua mossa impetuosa quello che mai altro pontefice, con tutta la umana prudenza, arebbe condotto.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101: ‘Concludo, adunque, che, variando la fortuna, e stando li uomini ne’ loro modi ostinati, sono felici mentre concordano insieme, e, come discordano, infelici.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101: ‘Io iudico bene questo, che sia meglio essere impetuoso che respettivo; perche´ la fortuna e` donna et e` necessario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla et urtarla.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101.

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because they are less respectful, more ferocious and command her with greater boldness’.143 A more systematic inversion of the lessons of the Senecan mirror would be hard to imagine. After centuries of conscientious self-examination, of continually looking back at his actions and words, at his day, at his self, to see how near he is to becoming divinely rational and like God, the prince is suddenly confronted with the thought that such behaviour renders him impotent. Machiavelli’s claim is that the rationality of the fatherly Senecan prince makes him preternaturally senile. The innocent, humane image of virtue who has hung up his weapon altogether had indeed boasted in the mirror that ‘anger has not compelled me to unjust punishment, nor juvenile impetus, nor the temerity of men, nor defiance which often wrenches patience from even the calmest of breasts’.144 No anger, no youthful impetuosity, no temerity, no weapons: the only thing that moves the prince of the speculum is reason. That is what is said to make him a man. And that is what makes him different from Augustus, who ‘at the age of eighteen had already plunged his dagger into the bosom of friends, already plotted to assassinate the consul Mark Anthony, already been a partner in the prescriptions’.145 Augustus becomes a fitting example for Seneca ‘in his old age or just on the verge of it’, because ‘in his youth he was hot-tempered, he burned with anger, he did many things which he did not like to look back on’.146 Among those many things of his youth which Augustus was so unwilling to ‘look back on’ was the Roman revolution. Augustus established the Roman Principate on distinctly un-Senecan terms. He ‘may have shown moderation and mercy. Of course he did – after staining the sea at Actium with Roman blood.’147 Machiavelli gathers up the remains of the impetuous youth discarded by Seneca’s theory, and 143

144

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101: ‘E si vede che la si lascia piu` vincere da questi, che da quelli che freddamente procedano. E pero` sempre, come donna, e` amica de’ giovani, perche´ sono meno respettivi, piu` feroci e con piu` audacia la comandano.’ Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358 (Seneca 1995: 128–9): ‘In hac tanta facultate rerum non ira me ad iniqua supplicia compulit, non iuvenilis impetus, non temeritas hominum et contumacia, quae saepe tranquillissimis quoque pectoribus patientiam extorsit.’ Seneca 1928a, I.9.1: 380 (Seneca 1995: 138): ‘Divus Augustus fuit mitis princeps, si quis illum a principatu suo aestimare incipiat . . . Cum hoc aetatis esset, quod tu nunc es, duodevicensimum egressus annum, iam pugiones in sinum amicorum absconderat, iam insidiis M. Antonii consulis latus petierat, iam fuerat collega proscriptionis.’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 388 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘Haec Augustus senex aut iam in senectutem annis vergentibus; in adulescentia caluit, arsit ira, multa fecit, ad quae invitus oculos retorquebat.’ Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 388–90 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘Comparare nemo mansuetudini tuae audebit divum Augustum, etiam si in certamen iuvenilium annorum deduxerit senectutem plus quam maturam; fuerit moderatus et clemens, nempe post mare Actiacum Romano cruore infectum, nempe post fractas in Sicilia classes et suas et alienas, nempe post Perusinas aras et proscriptiones.’

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he re-embodies him with his eyes fixed firmly forward. Healing the Senecan excisions, Machiavelli restores to his prince not just his weapons but the impetus of bestial ferocity, fiery ardour and bare-faced temerity. Had not Seneca himself declared that the task of the magnanimous prince was to ‘beat back bad Fortuna’ and that a truly ‘great mind’ must ‘raise itself up above Fortuna, and stand above her’?148 Yet his theory had almost delighted in depriving the prince of the capacity for such a manly conquest. Machiavelli re-equips the prince with the means of properly taking on Fortuna. Young, armed and capable of great cruelty – and with some of the heat of Actium about him once more – Machiavelli’s prince becomes an agent with the power of bringing about a principato which, on the Florentine’s view, the Roman theory of monarchy had appeared to make a causal impossibility in its attempt to redescribe it as a historical necessity. FREE AND UNFREE STATES

Machiavelli brings out this young man from the depths of a construction which had posited, in the wake of the establishment of the Roman Principate, a post-revolutionary merger between prince and subject. His attack on that construction is immensely productive, dissolving the universal fixities of the Senecan theory and reversing its universalising motions. It also simultaneously constitutes a new rationality for the state, a new vision replete with a system of proofs and arguments retrieved from classical antiquity and now implemented with unparalleled rigour. But as it deconstructs and reconstructs the prince, it also brings back the unfree person whom the mirror had sought to eclipse at all costs, while giving the unfree subject an entirely new exemplum to contemplate. When Machiavelli reprises the theme of monarchy as a form of servitude, he restates it in a manner which distinguishes his approach from that of several generations of Florentine civic humanists from Salutati onwards who had stated the same belief throughout the Quattrocento. In Machiavelli’s day, a highly prominent proponent of the contrast between the liberty of the popular republic and the former servitude of the Florentine people under the Medici had been none other than Marcello Virgilio, who promptly ditched such allegiances upon the family’s return 148

Seneca 1928a, I.5.3: 370: ‘quid enim maius aut fortius quam malam fortunam retundere?’; I.5.5: 372: ‘Magnam fortunam magnus animus decet, qui, nisi se ad illam extulit et altior stetit, illam quoque infra ad terram deducit.’

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to power and thereby clung to his job in government.149 Machiavelli was not so lucky. By the time that he dedicates his treatise to the Medicean prince, he has lost his job, and has been both imprisoned and tortured by the new regime. Machiavelli’s personal history, he reminds his audience in the exordium, is one of disagi and periculi.150 Nevertheless, he appears to have relinquished neither the conventional republican belief about monarchy and servitude nor his desire to prove it. On the contrary, he announces energetically that he is full of ‘extreme desire’, conveying how indignantly he is putting up with his appalling misfortune, and presuming to explain how ‘un uomo di basso ed infimo stato ardisce discorrere e regolare e’ governi de’ principi’.151 In expressing his servitude, Machiavelli combines the cunning of the Plautine slave with the eloquence of the Quintilianic orator. But he is also at his most masterful in such moments. Machiavelli ardisce: he is proceeding in strict accordance with the advice which his precepts enshrine for his prince in his crucial engagement with Fortuna – not freddamente, but stimulated by a certain ardour. Torture can make people heated, and there is an intensity about Machiavelli’s words right from the start. Florentine humanists from Poggio to Marcello Virgilio were sensitive to the idea of rhetorical style as an index of liberty; and Machiavelli has perhaps already started to offer proof of his servitude by drawing attention to the heavily figured character of his speech. For, as Quintilian says, in the course of his discussion of the figured controversies of his own day under the Roman Principate, ‘what could be less figured than true liberty?’152 It is worth remembering, too, that although few Renaissance or modern commentators have doubted the significance of the events of 1512 for the way in which Florence was subsequently governed, there was no formal dissolution of the republic, no clear proclamation of a Medicean principality. On the contrary, as Jacopo Nardi was to observe in his history of the period of rule by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici somewhat later, there had never been a ‘greater appearance of civility and liberty, a greater dissimulation of princely authority’ than under their government.153 Like all Renaissance princes, the Medici did not come promising an end to the republic. But if they had wanted to continue to dissemble as simple citizens 149 150 151 152 153

Godman 1998: 175–6. Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘in tanti anni e con tanti mia disagi e periculi ho conosciuto’. Machiavelli 1960: 14. Quintilian 2001, IX.2.27, vol.IV: 48: ‘Quid enim minus figuratum quam vera libertas?’ Nardi 1858, II: 64: ‘ne` con maggiore apparenza di civilta` e di liberta`, ne` con maggiore dissimulazione di principato’.

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of the Republic, Machiavelli had other plans in mind for them. Already he had written to Vettori about these Medicean ‘masters’, and, for Machiavelli, to live under a signore or dominus was to be in that state of servitude to which he refers in his dedicatory letter.154 Indeed, that dedication so clearly associates the Medici with princely rule that it somewhat scotches any further dissimulation of their position. Machiavelli was under no illusions about the character of Medicean government. As Colish recalls, Machiavelli consistently associates the Medicean ascendancy of the Quattrocento with the Republic’s loss of liberty: he notes in the Discorsi how Piero Soderini, renowned for his love of liberty, refused to support Medici rule on the grounds that it would destroy liberty; and he states in the Istorie fiorentine that the Pazzi conspiracy had failed to free Florence from the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1478 because his regime had deafened her ears to the cry of freedom, and liberty was no longer known there.155 But if this point of view is presented with the greatest care and the greatest irony in the exordium, Machiavelli presses his central thesis throughout the rest of the treatise in far more explicit terms. One way in which he does so is by constantly reminding his reader of the first element of his opening definition. That is, he keeps repeating that a principality is not a republic. The elements of Chapter I unpicked an argument in which both the name of the republic and the notion of liberty had been stitched together for centuries. After underlining his distinction between principality and republic at the opening of Chapter II, Machiavelli proceeds to ensure, almost chapter by chapter, that the prince can never resort to such material again. He does so by exhaustively contrasting liberty and the free republic on the one hand, and the prince and his state on the other. In Chapter III, annexing new states is said to be easier in cases where they have been previously ‘dominated’ by a prince, harder when they are ‘used to a free way of life’.156 Machiavelli devotes the whole of Chapter V to underlining the almost insurmountable problems which he identifies in the task of trying to rule newly acquired states which ‘are accustomed to live according to their own laws and in liberty’.157 The prospects are grim 154

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Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 428: ‘questi signori Medici’. For Machiavelli’s fears in August 1513 about impending servitude – also expressed to Vettori – see Dotti 2003: 251. Colish 1993: 193. For the relevant passages, see Machiavelli 1960, I.52: 247; Machiavelli 1971, VIII.8: 822. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Quando e’ sieno, e` facilita` grande a tenerli, massime quando non sieno usi a vivere liberi; et a possederli securamente basta avere spenta la linea del principe che li dominava.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 28: ‘Quando quelli stati che s’acquistano, come e` detto, sono consueti a vivere con le loro legge e in liberta`, a volerli tenere, ci sono tre modi . . .’

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‘because in truth there is no secure way of possessing them’ other than by destroying them.158 Machiavelli is led to believe that ‘whoever becomes the master of a city accustomed to a free way of life and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it himself ’.159 He points out that to ‘destroy’ free cities frequently involves utterly ‘unmaking’ or ‘undoing’ them to the point of having, in fact, ‘to ruin them’ or ‘to extinguish them’ completely.160 This problem hardly arises in cities or provinces which ‘are used to living under a prince’ because ‘they are used to obeying’ and ‘they do not know how to live freely’. You merely have to get rid of the old patronus.161 Free states, however, can always rebel by appealing ‘to the name of liberty’ and ‘to their ancient institutions’ which ‘they never forget’.162 The Pisans may have endured their ‘servitude’ to the Florentines for a hundred years, but they nevertheless rebelled, Machiavelli reminds us.163 This is because ‘in republics there is greater life, greater hatred, more desire for revenge’, and notwithstanding attempts to subject them, free republics nurture something which Machiavelli’s text both embodies and verifies, over and over again, in the most productive manner possible: namely, ‘the memory of ancient liberty’.164 Machiavelli uses historical examples to press the contrast between republican liberty and monarchical servitude. Chapters VIII and IX are paired: in them, Machiavelli departs from the fundamental scheme of virtue and fortune established in Chapter I in order to explain the acquisition of principalities in slightly different terms. In Chapter VIII he cites two examples of princes who come to rule principalities by wicked, rather than virtuous, means. The first is Agathocles the Sicilian, who rises through the ranks to the position of praetor, but who thenceforth ‘resolved to become prince and to hold with violence and without any obligation to

158 159

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘Perche´, in verita`, non ci e` modo sicuro a possederle, altro che la ruina.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘chi diviene patrone di una citta` consueta a vivere libera, e non la disfaccia, aspetti di esser disfatto da quella’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘la piu` sicura via e` spegnerle o abitarvi’. For the notion of ‘undoing’, see previous note. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘quando le citta` o le provincie sono use a vivere sotto uno principe, e quel sangue sia spento, sendo da uno canto usi ad obedire, dall’altro non avendo el principe vecchio, farne uno infra loro non si accordano, vivere liberi non sanno; di modo che sono piu´ tardi a pigliare l’arme, e con piu` facilita` se li puo` uno principe guadagnare, et assicurarsi di loro’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘perche´ sempre ha per refugio, nella rebellione, el nome della liberta` e li ordini antichi sua; li quali ne´ per la lunghezza de’ tempi ne´ per benefizii mai si dimenticano’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘come fe’ Pisa dopo cento anni che ella era posta in servitu` da’ Fiorentini’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘Ma nelle repubbliche e` maggiore vita, maggiore odio, piu´ desiderio di vendetta; ne´ li lascia, ne´ puo` lasciare riposare la memoria della antiqua liberta`.’

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others for what had been formally conceded to him by agreement’.165 His means involved convoking ‘the people and the Senate of Syracuse as if to discuss matters concerning the republic’, and then proceeding ‘to massacre his fellow-citizens’, as Machiavelli underlines in his moral assessment of the case.166 The other example, Oliverotto of Fermo, similarly resorts to mass slaughter in a republic. Again, Oliverotto rises through the ranks, and again, he rejects the republican ethic, reckoning it a ‘cosa servile stare con gli altri’ – ‘a servile thing to be on the same footing as the others’.167 So he too uses false pretences with the leading citizens of Fermo before slaughtering them at a banquet. The difference between them is that while Agathocles behaves wickedly with the help of the outsider Hamilcar the Carthaginian, Oliverotto’s nefarious rise is achieved ‘with the help of some citizens of Fermo, to whom the servitude of their native city was preferable to its liberty’.168 Both Agathocles and Oliverotto ignore their obligations, engage in acts of gross dissimilation and indulge in merciless killing. As such, they are hardly distinguishable from that exemplar of princely virtue, Cesare Borgia. Yet in the case of Agathocles and Oliverotto, Machiavelli’s moral evaluation completely changes because of the setting in which their actions occur. It does so in a manner which is entirely coherent with the theory he is setting out. Machiavelli can hardly be said to have been less than frank about the fact that a different form of reasoning applies to states called republics. He begins his confirmatio in Chapter II by emphasising this very point. In analysing the moral character of deeds according to time, place, motive and so on, he makes a great deal depend on the rationality and beliefs of the particular state you happen to be talking about. One thing Machiavelli insists that you can never hope to do virtuously is to reduce a republic to a principality. The outstanding cases of immoral behaviour in Chapter VIII lead citizens of a republic from a state of liberty into a state of servitude. They are acts of enslavement perpetrated by citizens of free states. This type of activity – slaughtering citizens in order

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 41: ‘e avendo deliberato diventare principe e tenere con violenzia e sanza obligo d’altri quello che d’accordo li era suto concesso’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 41–2: ‘rauno` una mattina el populo et il senato di Siracusa, come se elli avessi avuto a deliberare cose pertinenti alla repubblica; et ad uno cenno ordinato, fece da’ sua soldati uccidere tutti li senatori e li piu` ricchi del popolo. Li quali morti, occupo` e tenne el principato di quella citta` sanza alcuna controversia civile . . . non si puo` ancora chiamare virtu´ ammazzare li sua cittadini.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 42. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 42: ‘con lo aiuto di alcuni cittadini di Fermo a’ quali era piu´ cara la servitu` che la liberta` della loro patria’.

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to turn a republic into a principality by the use of arms and dissimulation – cannot possibly be called virtuous, according to Machiavelli.169 With these examples of the vicious destruction of republics ringing in their ears, Machiavelli’s readers are then led into the other half of the paired chapters, Chapter IX, where Machiavelli explains how a prince comes to rule over a former republic by rather more passive means. When a private citizen does not use or misuse arms either of his own or of others in virtuous or vicious behaviour to become prince, but is instead placed in a position to dominate the rest by ‘the favour of his other citizens’, then ‘neither virtue alone nor simply good fortune is necessary’ but rather a hybrid version of the two which Machiavelli calls ‘a sort of fortunate astuteness’.170 For he is the beneficiary of almost ceaseless conflict between ‘two appetites’ or ‘humours’ in the body of a free city: ‘the desire of the popolo not to be at the command of the grandi, or oppressed by them, and the desire of the grandi to command and oppress the popolo’.171 There are three possible outcomes which Machiavelli identifies: ‘either a principality, or liberty, or anarchy’.172 The type of state which he calls a ‘civil principality’ occurs when either one of the two groups of citizens favours one of their own as a prince in order to avoid domination, only to secure a situation in which none of them lives in liberty any longer. It may be the case, then, that the name ‘civil principality’ is an example of Machiavelli’s use of irony, since the vita civile which it entails upon its citizens is one of servitude, and the very opposite of the civic humanist ideal so lauded by the Quattrocento Florentine humanists. The category of principato civile plays no part in Machiavelli’s republican theory in the Discorsi. It is not even mentioned. By way of a preface to Chapters VIII and IX of Il Principe, Machiavelli does say that one may well be able to ‘reason at greater length’, in the case of one of the two instances, ‘where republics are discussed’.173 So it is worth recalling that when he settles down to a full analysis of republics in the Discorsi, he identifies the attempt to resolve the tension between two 169 170

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 42: ‘non si puo` ancora chiamare virtu´ ammazzare li sua cittadini’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 45: ‘quando uno privato cittadino, non per scelleratezza o altra intollerabile violenzia, ma con il favore delli altri sua cittadini diventa principe della sua patria, il quale si puo` chiamare principato civile (ne´ a pervenirvi e` necessario o tutta virtu´ o tutta fortuna, ma piu´ presto una astuzia fortunata)’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 45: ‘in ogni citta` si truovano questi dua umori diversi; e nasce da questo, che il populo desidera non essere comandato ne´ oppresso da’ grandi, e li grandi desiderano comandare et opprimere el populo’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 45: ‘e da questi dua appetiti diversi nasce nelle citta` uno de’ tre effetti, o principato o liberta` o licenzia’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘ancora che dell’uno si possa piu´ diffusamente ragionare dove si trattassi delle repubbliche’.

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humours in the body politic as an utterly mistaken approach, observing that it is precisely the institutionalisation of this conflict which ensures the republic its liberty.174 One can now better observe the historical, ideological and conceptual reasons why Machiavelli should have insisted on this point in his analysis of free states. The attempt to resolve these differences had consistently played into the hands of a theoretical case for monarchy since the later thirteenth century. Machiavelli’s free state has to be a body big enough to incorporate difference. Seeking a cure for conflicting desires had tended to hand power to a princely medic. Since Machiavelli avoids monotony at all costs, he sometimes uses subtler ways to make his case. One is to resort to imagery. In Chapter III, for instance, he says that a prince who already has a state and who wants to annex a newly acquired one located in the same province should not have too many difficulties in ensuring that ‘in a very short space of time’ the new state ‘becomes one single body with his old state’.175 A little later, this figurative language reappears, this time as Machiavelli turns his attention to advising on the problems of retaining possession of a state in a different province. In such cases, the prince might like to think about establishing colonies in one or two places, he suggests, ‘like shackles, so to speak’.176 These compedes put chains upon the feet of the newly acquired body. But Machiavelli uses a diversionary egressio in Chapter IV to convey his point of view about the character of the unfree state in Chapter IV.177 The drivingly polemical point of this diversion lies in its explanation as to why Alexander’s successors encountered such little local resistance in maintaining Asia. His argument consists in illuminating the structure of the state. ‘All principalities known to history’, says Machiavelli, summoning up all of his rhetorical resources, ‘have been governed in one of two different ways.’178 They are ruled ‘either by means of a prince and all the other servi, who as ministers through his grace and concession help to govern the kingdom’.179 Or else, says Machiavelli, they are governed ‘by means of a prince and barons’.180 Barons participate in government by sheer fact of 174 175

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See Machiavelli 1960, 1.4: 136–8; Skinner 2002, II: 153–4. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘in brevissimo tempo diventa, con loro principato antiquo, tutto uno corpo’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 19: ‘che sieno quasi compedi di quello stato’. For egressio, see Quintilian 2001, III.9.4, vol.II: 150; IV.3.12–14, vol.II: 288–90. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘Respondo come e’ principati de’ quali si ha memoria, si truovano governati in dua modi diversi: o per uno principe, e tutti li altri servi, e’ quali come ministri per grazia e concessione sua, aiutono governare quello regno; o per uno principe e per baroni, li quali, non per grazia del signore, ma per antiquita` di sangue tengano quel grado. Questi tali baroni hanno stati e sudditi proprii, li quali ricognoscono per signori et hanno in loro naturale affezione.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26. 180 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26.

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their bloodline, rather than because they enjoy the grace and favour of the prince. Such barons ‘have states and subjects of their own, who hold them in their natural affection’.181 This type of situation means that a state in effect contains an ‘antiquated multitude of signori . . . recognised and loved by their own subjects’.182 By contrast, states which are governed ‘by means of one prince and servi’ (and Machiavelli insists upon reiterating this view of their servile character) are said to ‘hold their prince with greater authority because throughout the country there is no one who is recognised as a superior other than him’.183 Machiavelli exemplifies his point in a manner which further demonstrates his expertise at handling the concept of alterity. As a skilled orator, he is adept in the powerful manipulation of ‘same’ and ‘other’ because the specification of identity and difference is fundamental to rhetorical definition. In differentiating between the two modes of princely government, Machiavelli has given two alternatives. He now illustrates the difference. He solemnly announces that ‘the examples of these two differences of government are – in our times – the Turk and the King of France’.184 This is Machiavelli’s idea of a joke – broadly the same type of joke which is observable in his equally solemn declaration – in a chapter entitled ‘How hatred and contempt should be avoided’ – that the state of the Sultan of Egypt ‘is like the papal pontificate’.185 Machiavelli does not leave it to his readers to guess which of the two ways of governing a principality had been adopted by virtually every monarchical ruler on the Italian peninsula for centuries. Those readers may have been well aware that the nomination of ministers by kings and signori to their governing councils had been common practice since the Duecento. But the likeness is nevertheless driven home unsparingly, as Machiavelli assimilates the Turk to these monarchs: The whole of the Turkish monarchy is governed by a single signore; the others are his servi, and he divides his regno into sanjaks, and sends out various administrators whom he changes and alters as he pleases.186 181 182

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘d’una moltitudine antiquata di signori, in quello stato riconosciuti da’ loro sudditi et amati da quelli’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘Quelli stati che si governono per uno principe e per servi hanno el loro principe con piu´ autorita`; perche´ in tutta la sua provincia non e` alcuno che riconosca per superiore se non lui; e se obediscano alcuno altro, lo fanno come ministro et offiziale.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘Li esempli di queste dua diversita` di governi sono, ne’ nostri tempi, el Turco e il re di Francia.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 84: ‘questo stato del Soldano . . . e simile al pontificato cristiano’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘Tutta la monarchia del Turco e` governata da uno signore, li altri sono sua servi; e, distinguendo el suo regno in Sangiachi, vi manda diversi amministratori, e li muta e varia come pare a lui.’

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Machiavelli has almost entirely eliminated the discriminating rhetoric which had been consistently used by humanists, particularly since the fall of Constantinople and the rise of a humanist crusading literature, to demonise, bestialise and tyrannise the Turk, and to disparage his military achievements as acts of enslavement of Christian holy places.187 Instead, he describes the Turkish ruler in terms of a rather more familiar story of a signore who rules over a principato, now also called a regno, with the help of ministers and administrators appointed at his will. The Turk is by definition a prince. Machiavelli can now map out the similitude to devastating effect. Ministers in this type of principality – not the type that one finds in France with barons acting as signori, he explains, but the other type, which consists of one single signore in a regno ruling by his will, are ‘all enslaved and obliged’ to their prince, which makes it harder for a new prince to corrupt them.188 Lest there should be any doubt remaining about what servi are, Machiavelli removes it. Servi are stiavi: they are slaves in a state of servitude. The utility of Quintilianic procedure – of how to argue about ‘same’ and ‘other’ – emerges once again. While differentiae may destroy definitions, properties help to confirm them. The idea that the ministers of a signore, or prince, are effectively his servi is fully developed in Chapters XXII and XXIII as Machiavelli considers how a prince should select them. He enunciates an infallible rule: when you see that the minister is thinking more about himself than about you, and that in all his actions, he is looking after what is useful to him – this sort of person will never make a good minister, and you will never be able to trust him. For a man who has the state of someone in hand must never think about himself, but always about the prince, and must never concern himself with what does not belong to him.189

Price and Skinner point out that in this passage the state is ‘spoken of almost as a personal possession . . . ‘‘belonging’’ to a principe, and entrusted, so to speak, to the ministro, or put in his hands’.190 But this is very clearly 187

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For the humanist language of barbarism, slavery, inhumanity, cruelty and captivity to describe Turkish military success, see the texts in Hankins 1993, esp. at 122 (for the construction of the Turks as the immane genus), 134, and the material at 147–207. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 27: ‘Perche´ sendoli tutti stiavi et obbligati, si possono con piu´ difficulta` corrompere.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘Ma come uno principe possa conoscere el ministro, ci e` questo modo che non falla mai. Quando tu vedi el ministro pensare piu` a se´ che a te, e che in tutte le azioni vi ricerca dentro l’utile suo, questo tale cos´ı fatto mai fia buono ministro, mai te ne potrai fidare: perche´ quello che ha lo stato d’uno in mano, non debbe pensare mai a se´, ma sempre al principe, e non li ricordare mai cosa che non appartenga a lui.’ Machiavelli 1988: 80, n.[c].

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what is being said: the government of the principality must be conducted according to a rationality which will ensure that it remains in the prince’s hands irrespective of whether this is, in fact, utile to the subject. Machiavelli proceeds to explain how the prince can secure the participation of the ministro in this type of seemingly self-negating behaviour: ‘in order to keep him faithful, the prince must look after the minister by honouring him, making him rich, making him obliged to him, conferring honours and offices on him so that he sees that he cannot exist without the prince’.191 In this manner, Machiavelli sees that the minister’s desire for riches and offices will be sated, and his dependency upon the unfree status quo secured.192 Similarly satirical elements continue in the following chapter, where the task which faces the prince consists ‘in choosing within his state wise men’ as ministers.193 Here he encounters the problem that ‘courts are full of flatterers’.194 On the one hand, the only way to avoid being flattered is to insist upon being told the truth.195 But on the other, says Machiavelli, ‘when someone has the power to tell you the truth, you lose your reverence’.196 His solution is to insist that a minister’s ability to speak the truth should be strictly curtailed by the prince. Having given them ‘free judgement to tell him the truth’, the prince must then ensure that his ministers do so ‘only when he asks them, and not otherwise’.197 A ruler should certainly seek advice but ‘only when he wants it, not when others want to give it’.198 Their position is thus one of utter passivity. Moreover, if he suspects that someone is not being entirely candid for some reason, the prince should ‘get angry’.199 This is advice which counters centuries of Senecan warnings in political writing on monarchy about the dangers of princely ira. Further perturbing possibilities then emerge: of conflicting 191

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196 197

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘E dall’altro canto, el principe, per mantenerlo buono, debba pensare al ministro, onorandolo, facendolo ricco, obligandoselo, participandoli li onori e carichi; accio` che vegga che non puo` stare sanza lui.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘e che li assai onori non li faccino desiderare piu´ onori, le assai ricchezze non li faccino desiderare piu´ ricchezze, li assai carichi li faccino temere le mutazioni’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘eleggendo nel suo stato uomini savi’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘li adulatori, delli quali le corti sono piene’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘non ci e` altro modo a guardarsi dalle adulazioni, se non che li uomini intendino che non ti offendino a dirti el vero’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘ma, quando ciascuno puo` dirti el vero, ti manca la reverenzia’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘solo a quelli debbe dare libero arbitrio a parlarli la verita`, e di quelle cose sole che lui domanda, e non d’altro’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘Uno principe, per tanto, debbe consigliarsi sempre, ma quando lui vuole, e non quando vuole altri.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘anzi, intendendo che alcuno per alcuno respetto non gnene dica, turbarsene’.

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advice from courtiers; of disunity among his ministers; of the perils of an advisor who is cleverer than the prince and who might deprive him of his state; of a situation at the heart of government in which every advisor will always be considering ‘his own affairs’ unless corrupted into a form of servile loyalty.200 By identifying those tendencies and suggesting prudent remedies, Machiavelli corroborates his overall argument: the principality is not a republic, and it is not free. There is no trace of the bonum commune here. And the explanation lies in the fact that, as he points out in the Discorsi, ‘without any doubt, this bene comune is only observed in republics’.201 It is not only the prince’s ministers who are described in servile terms. A complementary development is Machiavelli’s description of the soldiers of the principality which the prince must arm as ‘armed servitori’.202 There is a coherence about these descriptions. Machiavelli’s unfree state is governed with the help of servi and servitori who are as unfree as the state in which they live. Machiavelli needs to explain how one person manages to maintain every other single person whom he rules in a state of unfreedom. It was easy for republican ideology to assert that the Roman Republic had been enslaved by Caesar, but Machiavelli sees that he needs to give an account of the complex means by which one person subjects a body of people to his will and power and maintains his hold over it. He identifies two necessities. The first is that the task straightforwardly requires a degree of strength – military and administrative – which outstrips the prince’s own bodily capacities. The second is that it requires the prince, by force if necessary but by persuasion if possible, to make the body of people over whom he rules acquire a set of beliefs which, if not exactly formulated according to his own perspective, at least ensure that his perspective is maintained. The prince must be concerned both with the strengths of the state as a body – its vires, as the title of Chapter X puts it – and with its beliefs, or opinioni.203 One of the most important aspects of Machiavelli’s account of the unfree state is that the person of the prince is not a part of it. States or 200

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘se gia` a sorte non si rimettessi in uno solo che al tutto lo governassi, che fussi uomo prudentissimo. In questo caso, potria bene essere, ma durerebbe poco, perche´ quello governatore in breve tempo li torrebbe lo stato; ma, consigliandosi con piu` d’uno, uno principe che non sia savio non ara` mai e’ consigli uniti, non sapra` per se´ stesso unirli: de’ consiglieri, ciascuno pensera` alla proprieta` sua; lui non li sapra` correggere, ne´ conoscere.’ Machiavelli 1960, II.2: 280: ‘E senza dubbio, questo bene comune non e` osservato se non nelle republiche.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e non e` ragionevole . . . il disarmato stia sicuro intra servitori armati’. For vires, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48, where the chapter heading reads: ‘Quomodo omnium principatuum vires perpendi debeant’. For the importance of considering and creating opinioni, see, for example, Ch.XIX: 75; Ch.XX: 87; Ch.XXIII: 96.

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dominions called principati are accustomed ‘to living under a prince’.204 They are said to be ‘unused to free living’ inasmuch as a prince who has ruled them can be said to have ‘dominated them’.205 As a body of persons living an unfree life, a principality can have compedes put on its feet; it can be adjoined to a pre-existing state in order to form ‘all one body’; its health can be treated by a prince who sometimes ‘intervenes in the affairs of a state’ like a doctor curing a body, tending it with remedies.206 The totalising fiction of one body has gone entirely. In Chapter IV, Machiavelli considers the conditions under which a ‘state might rebel’ upon the death of its prince; in Chapter V, he argues that when a prince establishes a state and entrusts its government to a few trustworthy friends in his absence, the state ‘knows that it cannot exist without his friendship and power’; in Chapter IX, Machiavelli thinks not only about those times when ‘citizens need the state’ but also about those adverse situations when ‘a state needs the citizens’.207 Though Hexter was right to draw attention to its marked passivity, the state which is called a principality is by no means inanimate.208 On the contrary, it is crucial for the prince who wishes to maintain it to recognise that his state does have a life of its own – thoughts, beliefs, customs, needs – which requires careful controlling and ordering precisely so that its activity does not ‘come to much’.209 Machiavelli’s principality is not directly analogous to an individual person. Machiavelli is generally quite wary about positing liberty or servitude as the properties of single persons. For him, free persons are those who live in free states; unfree persons in unfree states.210 Like the republic, the principality is a larger, mixed body. It is certainly true for Machiavelli that the state – like any body – must be considered to possess natural qualities. As he remarks in Chapter VII, ‘states which come about rapidly, like all other things in nature which are born and grow quickly, cannot sufficiently 204 205

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘consueti a vivere sotto uno principe’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘questi stati . . . massime quando non sieno usi a vivere liberi; e a possederli securamente basta avere spenta la linea del principe che li dominava’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 19: ‘L’altro migliore remedio e mandare colonie in uno o in duo luoghi che sieno quasi compedes di quello stato’; Ch.III: 18: ‘in brevissimo tempo diventa, con loro principato antiquo, tutto uno corpo’; Ch.III: 21: ‘E interviene di questa come dicono e fisici dello etico . . . Cos´ı interviene nelle cose di stato.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25: ‘donde pareva ragionevole che tutto quello stato si rebellassi’; Ch.V: 28: ‘Perche´, sendo quello stato creato da quello principe, sa che non puo` stare sanza l’amicizia e potenzia sua . . .’; Ch.IX: 48: ‘quando lo stato ha bisogno de’ cittadini’. Hexter 1973: 159. For the Renaissance history of the concept, see Skinner 1989; Skinner 2002, II: 368–413. For recent work, see Skinner and Stra˚th 2003. Hexter 1973: 159. For the republican body as ‘a free state’, see Skinner 1998: 24–77; for the idea in Machiavelli’s thought, see Skinner 2002, II: 160–85, 186–212.

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develop their roots, branches and trunks’ and will consequently ‘be destroyed by the first chill winds of adversity’.211 But this is precisely why the body needs to be tended with great art, and not just left to develop naturally. Nature can have terrible effects as well as good ones upon a body. Machiavelli insists on the art of the state. The fact that the art might be described in terms of architecture or tending plants does not so much contradict as complement the imagery of the state as a body. To talk of personal development in terms of character-building or cultivation is to use a conventional metaphorical language. The important thing about Machiavelli’s theory of the art of the state is that it must negotiate a path between nature and artifice. Machiavelli’s theory of the state comes to resemble Quintilian’s aesthetics: the art of governing the state involves working with the intrinsic materia of a natural body while bringing to it the transforming benefits of an extrinsic art.212 Machiavelli repeatedly refers to materia when discussing state formation. The virtuous founders of Chapter VI are said to receive from Fortuna the raw materia into which ‘to be able to introduce’ the forma of their state.213 But, as we have seen, in the Quintilianic rhetorical language with which Machiavelli is familiar, to introduce forma is to engage in personification. Princes who make states out of such materia personify: they seize upon an occasion provided by Fortuna to produce a person, and they need their weapons to do so. The state must then be made ornatus, like a text. Machiavelli insists that a new prince who wants glory will not only produce a new principality but will ‘adorn it and strengthen it’ with ‘good laws and good arms, good friends and good examples’.214 And if he wants to keep the state as his ‘possession’, says Machiavelli, a prince must ‘not fear to adorn’ it.215 Machiavelli’s prince acts like an orator inventing, disposing and embellishing materia. Indeed, his prince needs to be an orator. Machiavelli agrees with the Senecan view that a new prince is highly 211

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Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 34 (Machiavelli 1988: 23): ‘li stati che vengano subito, come tutte l’altre cose della natura che nascono e crescono presto, non possono avere le barbe e corrispondenzie loro; in modo, che ’l primo tempo avverso le spenge’. For Quintilian’s ‘Art, Artist, Work’ scheme, see Quintilian 2001, II.14, vol.I: 346–50 (and Russell’s introductory comments at 8); for the text as a body needing artful attention, see the seminal passage at VIII. Proem. 18–22, vol.III: 316–18. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31:‘Et esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino altro dalla fortuna che la occasione; la quale dette loro materia a potere introdurvi drento quella forma parse loro.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIV: 97: ‘E cos´ı ara` duplicata gloria, di avere dato principio a uno principato nuovo, e ornatolo e corroboratolo di buone legge di buone arme, di buoni amici e di buoni esempli.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXI: 93: ‘non tema di ornare le sua possessione per timore che le li sieno tolte’.

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conspicuous and that his fama can be won or lost through dicta as much as through facta. Machiavelli counsels him to take ‘great care that nothing comes out of his mouth which is not full’ of the requisite five qualities which he lists.216 The fact that there may be a disjunction between the prince’s attempts to represent his persona or anything else in the most virtuous light possible in order to maintain his state and his ‘real’ self or the actual facts of the matter is not considered by Machiavelli to constitute any type of moral dilemma per se. To object to such behaviour on these grounds alone would be entirely inconsistent with Machiavelli’s ethics. His states are predicated on persons with their affects intact, existing in a place where there can be no absolute certainty or final agreement about things. When Machiavelli uses the resources of classical rhetoric to constitute for his theory a rigorous ratiocinative basis, he is fully prepared to concede that, in the final analysis, one must use all the power at one’s disposal in order to defeat opposing arguments. The art of the state must comprise the classical art of oratory. And since the art of oratory is also conceived in terms of the art of war, it forms a wholly complementary aspect of the art of the state which Machiavelli defines as nothing other than the art of war. Machiavelli’s text is the embodiment of this principle. The question which one might now ask is which state his text is fighting for. There is good reason to think that Machiavelli’s descent to the battlefield to offer testimony of his servitude produces a considerable victory for the cause of the free state. This is not just because his theory separates free from unfree states, although as an extended act of definition, his text is a valuable republican acquisition. With consummate art, he has, after all, annihilated a rival conception of liberty, put an end to the prince’s claims to preside over a republic, and mocked the notion that the institution of a principato is the best way to ensure the common good. Yet Machiavelli’s greatest conquest is his seizure of the concept of the prince itself in the pursuit of the free state. For it is not the lack of trust, nor the use of arms, nor the occasions of cruelty, nor the turning of heads, nor the manipulation of fear, nor the practices of simulation or dissimulation which cast a shadow over the art of the state in Machiavelli’s treatise. All of these activities can and must be readily employed in the maintenance of a republic as much as a 216

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 74: ‘Debbe, adunque, avere uno principe gran cura che non li esca mai di bocca una cosa che non sia piena delle soprascritte cinque qualita`, e paia, a vederlo e udirlo, tutto pieta`, tutto fede, tutto integrita`, tutto religione. E non e` cosa piu` necessaria a parere di avere che questa ultima qualita`. E li uomini in universali iudicano piu` alli occhi che alle mani; perche´ tocca a vedere a ognuno, a sentire a pochi. Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu sei.’

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principality. Certainly, he codes his rhetoric to recall Catiline when referring to the prince’s need to be a simulator ac dissimulator; and he does so in a chapter whose title recalls the Ciceronian use of the maxim of Ennius that ‘to kingship belongs neither sacred fellowship nor faith’.217 But it is no prerogative of kings to break fides or resort to the arts of dissimulation. One only has to recall that it is Brutus, the father of Roman liberty himself, whom Machiavelli lauds in the Discorsi as the very greatest example of how to dissemble in the pursuit of the state.218 Nor is it the infliction of injury or the imposition of subjection and domination which unsettles his vision: the greatness of republics may well depend upon such abilities. Machiavelli’s rhetorical inflections are directed towards another point: namely, that in Il Principe the maintenance of the state is the maintenance of a state of unfreedom. There is no trace of liberty in any of Machiavelli’s principalities, and the single occasion on which Machiavelli predicates the condition of freedom of a principe in Il Principe is surely ironic. It occurs in Chapter XIX, as Machiavelli admires the constitution of France because it keeps the king – rather than the kingdom or its inhabitants – in ‘liberta` e sicurta`’.219 If one turns to the Discorsi, where France’s constitution is similarly held to be praiseworthy because it manages to give the people security and to oblige the king to some extent to honour its prescriptions, the irony is better illuminated. There, France’s constitution is regarded as exemplary because it provides a measure of security and contentment while heading off any ‘popular demand’ for the ‘restoration of freedom’: this demand, says Machiavelli simply, ‘the prince is unable to satisfy’.220 Machiavelli is actually remarkably consistent on this point. As early as 1510–11 in his Ritratto di cose di Francia, we find him providing an account of French political arrangements in which, as Elena Fasano Guarini has made abundantly clear, ‘liberta` and civilta` have no place’.221 217

218 219

220

221

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72: ‘Quomodo fides a principibus sit servanda’; Cicero 1913, I.8.26: 26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Maxime autem adducuntur plerique, ut eos iustitiae capiat oblivio, cum in imperiorum, honorum, gloriae cupiditatem inciderunt. Quod enim est apud Ennium: Nulla sancta societas/Nec fides regni est’; Sallust 1921, 5.4: 8: ‘animus audax subdolus varius, cuius rei lubet simulator ac dissimulator’. For the figure of Catiline as a precursor of Caesarian tyranny, see Machiavelli’s comments (and note the idea of unfreedom of speech under a prince) in Machiavelli 1960, I.10: 157; for Machiavelli’s comments on Sallust’s account of the conspiracy, see III.6: 409. Machiavelli 1960, III.2: 384–5. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 77: ‘Intra regni bene ordinati e governati a’ tempi nostri e` quello di Francia; et in esso si truovano infinite constituzione buone, donde depende la liberta` e sicurta` del re.’ Machiavelli 1960, I.16: 175–6: ‘Ma quanto all’altro popolare desiderio di riavere la sua liberta`, non potendo il principe sodisfargli . . . in esemplo ci e` il regno di Francia, il quale non vive sicuro per altro che per esserci quelli re obligati a infinite leggi, nelle quali si comprende la sicurta` di tutti i suoi popoli.’ Guarini 1990: 25.

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The art of the state consists not only in its creation but also in its maintenance by persons in government. In a republic, those persons are free citizens drawn from the larger citizen-body which constitutes the free state. In a principality, however, the prince needs to govern his state with the help of unfree subjects drawn from the unfree subject-body which is the unfree state. He needs, in the words of Machiavelli, servi and servitori. Machiavelli gestures – in only apparently parodic tone – towards the idea that the unfree state is an inverted version of a republic. In a republic, free citizens remain free through being able to participate in the government of the state, thereby ensuring that its administration does not fall under the domination of any one person or group of persons. In a principality, unfree subjects participate in the government of a state which is subject to the will of one person alone, and thereby help to ensure their own servitude. No feature of the art of the state necessary to offset the inevitable conflicts, tensions and differences within it produces free bodies. If founding a state is the height of princely creativity, then the rationality of its maintenance as a principality is almost invariably bound to the production of unfreedom. Machiavelli is only seemingly implicated in the cool inculcation of this sterile art. He is generally concerned to wage much more productive wars, which is why he does not shrink from taking up a position – with some heat about him – while simultaneously giving instructions upon the government of the principality. That position is delineated by his language: the prince does not rule a republic, his state is not a free state and its government is repeatedly – if obliquely – described in terms of its servility. However much moral redescription might successfully occur within a principality, and however coercive its mechanisms for the production of belief, Machiavelli has made it impossible for any such activity to be said to be undertaken in the name of the republic. The prince may be wise, prudent and armed. His subjects may enjoy some protection, the possibility of going about their business quietly, and the consolation that a good prince will not seize their property or, in the case of adult males, their wives.222 And as we have seen, the prince may even arm his servitori in order to help him maintain his possessione. Yet in so putting it, Machiavelli again confronts the reader with the thought that the end to which the art is being pursued is the continuation of a state which is not free.

222

See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 75. There is no reason to burden Machiavelli with the belief that these minimal restrictions amount to aspirations: whether the prince intervenes or not, his subjects are still unfree. See the points in Skinner 1996: 81–99.

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This thought may not be of great concern to people who want to be princes. And it may not impinge much upon those who are generally unconcerned about a free way of life. In fact, it may not even register at all. Machiavelli is aware that some people have been dominated for so long that they are neither capable of recognising their own slavery nor the extent of their own involvement in it. But Machiavelli’s text is not designed to convert the world. To engage in the type of rhetoric which Il Principe embodies is to commit oneself to structuring one’s argument in the light of the beliefs of a definite audience. There is no reason to suppose that Machiavelli had an exclusively Florentine readership in mind when he wrote. But, equally, there is no reason to think that a Florentine audience was anything other than important to him. And there is certainly no reason to accuse Machiavelli himself of being equivocal about the merits of liberty and servitude. To maintain that Machiavelli’s studied exclusion of the terminology of liberty, the republic and the common good from his description of the art of the state, and his inclusion of a language of servitude instead, is part of a dispassionate act of analysis is not merely to turn one’s back on his republican commitments and the language in which they and those of his associates were historically expressed.223 It is to ignore centuries of discourse about the benefits of princely rule to which Machiavelli’s treatise is highly attuned. But Machiavelli’s account of the virtuoso prince in De principatibus is not an example of irony extended to embrace an entire text. For Machiavelli knows the power of concession. It may indeed be time for a new prince. It cannot possibly be out of the question, and it might just be the answer to unfreedom. Machiavelli is hardly squeamish elsewhere about prescribing a period of princely domination – and therefore unfreedom – in the early years of a young state’s life. But Machiavelli – like a virtuous prince, in fact – is also a master of his materia. However one interprets his exhortation to liberty in Chapter XXVI, it indisputably points to disposizione grandissima (or ‘the marshalling of affairs in the best possible ordine’, as Quintilian defines it).224 For it countenances a new prince under the specific conditions of wretched slavery. Machiavelli’s concluding considerations of the appropriateness of the tempi and materia for a new prince produce a personification of Italia as a woman utterly reduced to, and in 223

224

For the view that Il Principe is ‘not a work of ideology’ and ‘cannot be identified as expressing the outlook of a group’ but ‘is rather an analytic study’, see Pocock 1975: 156. See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘Qui e` disposizione grandissima’; Quintilian 2001, III.3.8, vol.II: 26: ‘dispositio . . . rerum ordine quam optimo conlocatio’.

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desperate need of, liberation from external servitude. She would indeed seem to be promising materia for a productive monarch as good at introducing forma as Machiavelli and the ancient heroes of Chapter VI. But a person who is seriously interested in abiding by the description of illustrious and princely state formation in De principatibus needs to be sure that he is working to liberate this type of abject materia, and that he is not instead implicated in the altogether more wicked art of producing it. He needs, in short, to have been following Machiavelli’s argument about states from the beginning. For if Chapter XXVI really is the conclusion of his text, rather than a sudden aberration from an argument which has been conducted to that point in close conformity with the canons of classical rhetoric, then it is hard to see what sort of argument it could be concluding, if not one about liberty and servitude. Machiavelli has been talking all along about states of servitude. The fact that he now ends by broaching the thought that a prince may be required to liberate a person reduced to such a state is only apparently contradictory. It points to exactly the type of situation which Machiavelli has been working since Chapter I to isolate and distinguish: namely, the situation in which a prince founds a new state. In Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli recapitulates examples solely from Chapter VI. They remain for him outstanding illustrations of the powerfully creative and liberating force which he describes in greater detail in the Discorsi. These princes have not overthrown republics, thereby enslaving free persons; nor have they inherited principalities, thereby taking possession of unfree persons; nor have they acquired someone else’s principality – and therefore unfree persons – either by money or by conquest. These princes are rare and marvellous, Machiavelli reminds us in his conclusion.225 And although he has not pointed to any comparable example of their type in recent millennia – not even Cesare Borgia occupies the same theoretical space as they do – he now feels sure that the Medici prince may be able not merely to rival but even to surpass their achievements. Suddenly – almost miraculously – it becomes ‘not hard’ for the Medici to follow the greatest examples of Chapter VI, provided they ‘take up the ordini of those that I have proposed as a target to aim for’.226 Now Machiavelli feels obliged to point out that these ‘rare and marvellous’ men were ‘nonetheless men’.227 To the cause of the Medici, on the other hand, God is a greater 225 226

227

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘quelli uomini sieno rari e maravigliosi’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘ne´ puo` essere, dove e` grande disposizione, grande difficulta`, pur che quella pigli delli ordini di coloro che io ho proposti per mira’. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘non di manco furono uomini’.

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friend than to the princes of Chapter VI. Just look at the evidence: ‘a sea has opened, a cloud has shown you the way; water has flowed from the rock; manna has rained down here’.228 As Machiavelli says, ‘qui si veggano estraordinarii sanza esemplo condotti da Dio’.229 Having cultivated the rigours of a ratiocinative method sustained by systematic historical exemplification for the last twenty-five chapters, Machiavelli now carefully jettisons this rationality in order to embrace a biblical vision of the Medici as truly promising redeemers of a slave. The disjunction is glaring, to say the least. The chapter may yet prove to be the most mocking of all Machiavelli’s apparent attempts to praise Florence’s ruling family. The Catholic Church, for one, was neither amused nor convinced by Machiavelli’s sudden turn to God in his conclusion and placed his work on the index anyway. It is, in the end, Machiavelli’s liberating views which dominate the space of the exhortation. Even if the Medici prince was hardly up to the task (and the return of the family to power in Florence was hardly the triumph of an armed prince liberating his people from external domination, after all), Machiavelli, at least, knew what a virtuous monarch would do. In laying out this conception, he responded to his servitude in a masterful way, evading the paralysing effects of passivity by producing a vision of the prince which could be taken into government in order to make the state, notwithstanding its present owners, point forward, armed and aware of what it means to be free. 228

229

Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘Oltre a questo, qui si veggano estraordinarii sanza esemplo condotti da Dio: el mare s’e` aperto; una nube vi ha sco`rto el cammino; la pietra ha versato acqua; qui e` piovuto la manna; ogni cosa e` concorsa nella vostra grandezza.’ Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103.

Conclusion

Seneca’s theory of the prince continued to captivate the early modern imagination in western Europe. A few years after the Institutio of Erasmus, Guillaume Bude´’s De l’institution du prince drew heavily on a Senecan ideology of clemency to reinforce a bracing defence of monarchical absolutism. In that treatise, the Persian king Artaxerxes is held to have been so full of ‘great clemency, infinite goodness, and wonderful humaneness’ that, although he ‘wanted to preserve the authority of the legal system’ and had ‘no wish to revoke the ordinances of the kings who had preceded him’, he ‘also wanted to exercise the virtue of clemency’ in ‘order to temper the ordinance’s rigour and harshness with equity and gentle royal humaneness’.1 Julius Caesar was similarly ‘so clement and humane’ that after the suicide of Cato (‘so envious of my clemency and kindness’, says Caesar, reproachfully), the dictator chose to spare the diehard republican’s son because he was ‘more mindful of his own moral standards than of his anger or of the enormous power that he had acquired’.2 Caesar ‘thereby displayed the unsurpassed, praiseworthy force of his humaneness, which stemmed from his great magnanimity’.3 In the 1530s, the Senecan argument about the mercy of the mighty received further attention among French humanists at the hands of the young lawyer Jean Calvin, whose first complete published work was a commentary on De clementia.4 And in Spain, the speculum principis genre continued to draw on Seneca’s political 1

2

3

4

Bude´ 1966, Ch.27: 108–9 (translation – amending ‘humanity’ to ‘humaneness’ – in Bude´ 1997: 270): ‘fut plein de grande clemence, d’infinie bonte´, & merveilleuse humanite´ accompaigne´e d’aultres vertuz Royales . . . voulant garder l’authorite´ de iustice, & ne revocquer les ordonnances des Roys ses predecesseurs, desirant neantmoins user de sa vertu de clemence: Pour temperer la rigueur & acerbite´ de l’ordonnance, par equite´ & doulceur de l’humanite´ Royale . . .’ Bude´ 1966, Ch.33: 141–2 (Bude´ 1997: 271): ‘Il estoit si plein de clemence & d’humanite´ . . . Car tu as eu envie sur moy de ma clemence & benignite´ . . . memoratif de ses propres mœurs plus, que de son ire ou grande puissance qu’il avoit acquise.’ Bude´ 1966, Ch.33: 142 (Bude´ 1997: 271): ‘il monstra singuliere & recommendable vertu de son humanite´, procedant de grande magnanimite´ qui estoit en luy’. Calvin 1969. For Calvin’s ongoing use of Senecan ethics, see Battles 1965; Moreau 1994.

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theory: towards the end of the century, the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra refers repeatedly to De clementia throughout Book II of his Princeps christianus adversus Nicalaum Machiavellum, reiterating its contentions about the merits of clemency and the security that it brings, and referring to its warning about the dangers of assuming masks.5 Perhaps some sense of how well worn the process of plucking Senecan preceptive wisdom from De clementia had become by the close of the Cinquecento is detectable in the tone of Justus Lipsius as he recalled to a friend the visit of the Hapsburg archduke to the University of Louvain in 1599: I had to perform in the School of Theology . . . after an extemporaneous introduction I explained a short text from Seneca’s De clementia, beginning: ‘The prince’s greatness is firmly founded if all know that he is at once above them and on their side etc.’ I explained the text from Seneca, I say, and in it the task of princes, and finally I added a reflection on the happy result that would stem from this, that is that we Belgians would feel towards them the benevolence and the loyalty we had always felt for our rulers.6

Machiavelli’s Il Principe intervenes upon the historical rise to pre-eminence of this Senecan vision of monarchy. Machiavelli entirely transforms the ratiocinative basis of the Roman case for the princeps. He never gets trapped in an immanent critique. He generates a new way of thinking altogether. His dethronement of universal reason is a profound act of liberation. This is arguably what makes his text such a significant event, a new departure and a revolutionary episode in the history of the concept of the state. It skips free of the monological bind so magisterially that the reader occasionally glimpses a quite different order of experience from the one which characterises states addicted to universal reason. There is, for one thing, a markedly altered sense of tempo in the theory. For at least one reader in the mid-Cinquecento, Machiavelli’s variations were music to his ears. ‘Truly,’ said the Tudor gentleman William Thomas, ‘as the musician useth sometime a flat, and sometime a sharp note, sometime a short, and sometime a long, to make his song perfect; so, saith Macchiaveghi, ought man to frame his procedings unto his time.’7 It is true that, of all the different responses which have greeted Machiavelli’s work, my argument helps to explain and in part – but only in part – validate one particular way of thinking about Il Principe which has 5

6

7

See Ribadeneyra 1604, Book II, Chs.2, 18 and 19: 273–4, 380–6, 391. I must thank Geoff Baldwin for bringing this fact to my attention. Cited from Grafton 1991: 9 (who gives reference as Justus Lipsius, Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (Antwerp, 1637), vol. II: 454). Cited from Raab 1964: 43.

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persisted since his own century. This interpretation has generally insisted not merely on the satirical and ironic elements of the work, but also on the fact that it is profoundly concerned with liberty. The main proponents of the view that Machiavelli’s treatise was seeking to enlighten its public about freedom and domination are well known.8 An early spokesperson for the view emerged in Alberico Gentile, a professor of Roman law at Oxford, whose De legationibus libri tres of 1585 asserted that Machiavelli was the ‘supreme foe of tyranny’, that ‘it was not his purpose to instruct the tyrant, but by revealing his secret counsels to strip him bare and expose him’ and that ‘the purpose of this shrewdest of men was to instruct the nations under pretext of instructing the prince’.9 By that time, the belief that Il Principe was written by a man ‘who burned inwardly with hatred for the prince to whom he wrote, and hoped for nothing else from his book than that, by writing to a tyrant what would please a tyrant, he might bring about the tyrant’s speedy overthrow by his own act’ had already been in circulation for nearly fifty years, since Cardinal Pole’s Apologia ad Carolum Quintum (1539).10 In English republican quarters in the following century, the Florentine was acclaimed, not without some irony, as ‘the divine Machiavelli’ and the ‘prince of politicians’.11 J. Warr joined the ranks of readers who enlisted the treatise in the name of liberty after the execution of Charles I, announcing in a pamphlet entitled The Priviledges of the People that ‘Kings and Princes . . . walk in a distinct way of opposition to the Rights and Freedomes of the People; all of which you may see in Machiavils Prince’.12 Spinoza famously detected much the same story in Il Principe, suspecting that Machiavelli had wanted ‘to show how cautious a free multitude should be of entrusting its welfare absolutely to one man’.13 This reading endured well into the Enlightenment. Rousseau wrote in Du contrat social that ‘while appearing to instruct kings he has done much to educate the people. Machiavelli’s Prince is the book of Republicans’. In the 1782 edition, a note was inserted which stated that: Machiavelli was a decent man and a good citizen. But, being attached to the court of the Medicis, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his 8

9 10 11 12 13

See Gilbert 1977b: 166–8. For the reception of Machiavelli’s work in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see now Anglo 2005. Gentile 1924, II: 156 (cited from Kahn 1994: 285, n.64 – see also her discussion at 124–31). Donaldson 1988: 87–8. See, respectively, Harrington 1924: 135; Neville 1681: 21, 46, 124. Raab 1964: 124. Spinoza 1979, Ch.5.7: 291: ‘forsan voluit, quantum libera multitudo cavere debet, ne salutem suam uni absolute credat . . .’ For Machiavelli and Spinoza, see now Del Lucchese 2004.

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country’s oppression . . . the contradiction between the teaching of the Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and the History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or corrupt readers . . .14

Bayle’s Dictionnaire had endorsed this view of Machiavelli as a misunderstood republican.15 And Diderot accused Machiavelli’s critics of something much more serious than simply failing to find his text funny. The work had aimed to be instructive: ‘it is as if he said to his fellow citizens: read this work carefully. Should you ever accept a master, he will be such as I depict him for you.’ It was very much the fault of the reader, and not of Machiavelli, that they mistook ‘a satire for a eulogy’.16 Even within this community, the complexities of Machiavelli’s argument have tended to become ironed out. There is a carefully defined place within Machiavelli’s political thinking for the properly virtuous prince, as the Discorsi underline. What makes Il Principe so Machiavellian is that while simultaneously laying down a completely new set of moral principles for governing states – a task which is clearly crucial to Machiavelli’s political theory in all its forms – it also makes categorically clear the condition in which a state ruled by prince is maintained, and for whose good. Of course, free states are not for everyone: Machiavelli’s theory is supple enough to acknowledge the advantages of life in a well-ordered and unified state even if it is unfree. But it is nevertheless unfree for as long as it remains in princely hands, Machiavelli insists, and his quietly devastating explication of this point, so long alleged by civic humanists as the fundamental characteristic of monarchical life, may have made his text rather hotter to the touch than has been sufficiently acknowledged in recent times. By way of conclusion, it might be worth asking (again) whether, in their utter repudiation of a moral absolutism based upon a notion of universal reason and universal law, Machiavelli’s ethics make his closest modern ally in the war against unfreedom in its various forms as much Nietzsche as Marx. When the former suggests in his thesis on slave morality that we might at least consider the possibility that ‘this world has really never quite lost a certain odour of blood and torture (not even with old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty . . .)’, he may have been closer to a Machiavellian position than ever.17 But far from remaining so pleased with 14 15 16 17

Rousseau 1997, Book III, Ch.6: 95. Bayle 1702, article ‘Machiavelli’, note ‘o’ (citing Viroli 1998: 209, n.4). Diderot’s point is underlined by Gilbert 1977b: 168. Nietzsche 1994: 45.

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his ability to be ironic that he settled for playing the clever slave, Machiavelli was moved to point out to his fellow citizens the threat to liberty which princely domination posed. His response was sustained by a vision of the free state of unparalleled theoretical brilliance. That vision is predicated upon the existence of difference and contingency in the life of states, and it offered a clear alternative to the monarchical body at a particular historical juncture. But the practicability of the free state which Machiavelli advocated depended to some extent upon reversing a dominant ethic, and part of that work involved him in a heated campaign against the redescription of subjection and infinite injury in terms of liberty and happiness. There is perhaps something exemplary about this approach. Becoming unfree remained explicable to Machiavelli, who evidently appreciated that domination remains at its most annihilating when it lacks testimony, not when it receives it.

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Only works cited in the text are included below. The following abbreviation is used:

DBI – Dizionario biografico degli italiani (1960–), Rome. PRIMARY SOURCES

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Index

absolutism, see De clementia; prince Abulafia, David, 75n., 79n., 85n. accessibility, 7n., 64 Acciaiuoli, Nicola, 138, 140–3 Accursius, 95 Actium, battle of, 51, 55, 270 addition, 224, 261 Ad Herennium, 39n., 215, 216, 218, 219, 237 Adriani, Marcello Virgilio, 214, 289, 293, 294 affability, 7n., 64 Agathocles of Syracuse, 135, 147, 296–7 alcohol, 195–6 Alexander the Great, 185, 196, 237, 262, 299 Alexander VI, Pope, 238, 263 Alfonso of Aragon (the ‘Magnanimous’), King of Sicily and Naples, 182–3, 183–96 and alcohol, 195–6 and De clementia, 194–5 and De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis, 190–6 as orator, 193 and Seneca, 192–3 triumphal arch of, 189–90, 191 Althusser, Louis, 7 ambition, 114, 127, 189 Ambrose, St, 155 analogy (proportio), 274–5 Ange`li, Niccolo`, 214 anger, 35, 55, 93, 94, 109, 114, 129–30, 138, 139, 161, 180, 185, 225, 279, 288–9, 302 see also De ira Angevins in Kingdom of Sicily, 89 and Neapolitan civilians, 90 Aquinas, St Thomas, 93–4 archery as Stoic metaphor, 62, 124, 191 Aristotle, 7, 49, 91, 107, 159, 160, 176, 226 Ethics, 93, 96 Politics, 96 Asia, 262 asyndeton, 224

Atkins, E. M., 27 Augustine, St, 83, 122, 193 Augustus, 55, 57, 123, 151, 152, 153, 170, 292 Aulus Gellius, 49 Aurispa, Giovanni, 192 avarice, 110, 114, 137, 185 Barili, Giovanni, 129, 130 Baron, Hans, 18–19 Barzizza, Gasparino, 121, 174–9, 182, 199 and Epistulae morales, 174–5, 177, 192–3 on fortune, 178, 179 Barzizza, Guiniforte, 177, 180–1, 186, 193 Basle, Council of, 192 Bayle, Pierre, 315 beata vita, see blessed life Beccadelli, Antonio (Panormita), 176, 183, 184–5, 186 De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis, 190–6 and De clementia, 194–5 on fortune, 185 on self-conquest, 184–5 bees and imitation, 120 monarchy of, 51, 58 prince as king of, 58, 103, 106, 202, 204, 272–3, 275 Benevento, 192 bestiality, 10, 12, 60, 133, 134, 147, 194, 280, 282 bible, see Vulgate Billanovich, Giuseppe, 119, 132n. blessed life, 124–5 Bobzien, Suzanne, 48n. Boccaccio, 132n., 175 Boethius, 103 Bonacolsi, Guido, 112 Boorsook, Eve, 76n. Borgia, Cesare, 230, 238, 281–2, 310 Bracciolini, Poggio, 176, 188–9, 212, 294 De infelicitate principum, 283

332

Index Braga, Martin of, 97, 99 see also Formula vitae honestae Brescia, 100 Brescia, Albertano of, 100–4 see also Liber consolationis et consilii; Liber de amore Bruni, Leonardo, 17 Brutus, 50 Bude´, Guillaume, 312 Burckhardt, Jacob, 19, 77, 85n., 154 Caesar, Julius, 10, 24–6, 27, 28, 30, 35, 50, 51, 60, 61, 151, 156, 170, 185, 188–9, 203, 312 Caesar, monarchical figure of, 23, 143, 184 Calasso, Francesco, 92n. Caligula, Gaius, 147, 156 calmness (lenitas), 35 Calvin, Jean, 312 Capua, Bartolomeo da, 90, 93–4 Caramanico, Marino da, 76–7, 85, 89, 90 theory of liber rex, 92–3 Carmen de figuris, see Mancinelli Carrara, da, dynasty of, 165, 177 Francesco I, 9, 147–56 Francesco Novello, 166–7 Ubertino, 168 Catiline, 13, 307 see also Sallust Cato (the Younger), 61, 62, 126, 185 Charles III of Naples (Durazzo), 160–5 Charles V, Emperor, 196 see also Institutio Christiani Principis Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, 163 Chiron, 282 Cicero, 6, 10, 23–30, 96, 105, 107, 120, 122, 151, 169–70, 174, 185, 212, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 243 Brutus, 211 De finibus, 62n. De inventione, 39n., 218, 235, 237 De legibus, 29 De natura deorum, 29 De oratore, 36n., 211, 248–9, 255 Disputationes Tusculanae, 62, 129 Orator, 36n., 211 Philippicae, 151 Pro Ligario, 35, 156 Pro Marcello, 35, 36, 156, 185, 189 Topica, 239 see also De officiis Cinna, Gnaeus Cornelius, 57 civitas, cosmic, see Stoicism Claudian, 153, 191 clemency, see mercy

333

Clement VII, Pope, 160 Codex, 94 codex Ambrosianus, 82, 133n. Colish, Marcia, 295 Collazio, Matteo, 213 Colonna family, 263 Giovanni, 134, 136 common good, 91, 108, 225 Machiavelli on, 303 Seneca on, 33, 53, 91 commonplaces (loci communes), see proofs, rhetorical concessio, 222 conclusio, see peroratio confirmatio, 217, 218, 220–1, 235 conscience, 29, 40, 41, 42–3, 60, 94, 154, 164–5, 276 constancy, 61, 124, 126, 150, 184, 191, 290–1 Constitutions of Melfi (Liber Augustalis), 75–82, 85–90, 154, 194 continence, 83, 195 Cooper, John M., 41, 59n., 61n. Cox, Virginia, 7, 215 Cremona, 100 cruelty, 7n., 10, 11–12, 54–5, 60–1, 63, 64, 93, 107, 108, 109, 133, 134, 137, 139, 155, 169–70, 182, 185, 196, 228, 279–82 Cyrus the Great, 238, 264 Darius III, King of Persia, 237, 262 De beneficiis (Seneca), 7n., 91, 100, 158, 177, 207 necessity of Principate, 50 providential reason, 66 status, 50, 52 transmission of, 1, 81–2 De’ Capelli, Pasquino, 170 De clementia (Seneca), 4, 6, 7, 23, 30–72, 94, 97, 98 on absolutism, 31, 41 accessibility, 7n., 64 affability, 7n., 64 and Albertano of Brescia, 100, 101 and Alfonso of Aragon, 194–5 anger, 35, 55 Augustus, 55, 57 body politic, 46–8, 50–3, 91, 106, 152, 180 and Brunetto Latini, 107–9 Caesar, Julius, 50, 51 calmness, 35 captured royalty, 181–2 common good, 33, 91 conscience, 40, 41, 42–3, 60 constancy, 61 and Constitutions of Melfi, 75–82, 85–90, 154

334

Index

De clementia (Seneca) (cont.) cosmic civitas, 31, 32, 34, 61, 85 cruelty, 7n., 10, 11–12, 54–5, 60–1, 63, 64, 105, 108, 134, 279–80 eloquence, 44 faith, 60 fame, 63 first printed edition of, 82 fortune, 38, 56, 59, 65–72, 76, 270–1 gentleness, 35 and Giovanni da Viterbo, 104–7 glory, 63, 209 greed, 55 happiness, 63–5 ‘holding forth’, 37, 39–40, 41 honour, 63 humaneness, 35, 53–4, 85 impersonation, 39–40, 41, 43–5 inhumanity, 60, 134 innocence, 55 joy, 42–3 justice, 33–4, 35 legitimacy of prince, 31 leniency, 35, 54 liberty, 3, 36, 46–8, 85 love and fear of prince, 10–12, 58–61, 105–6, 107–9 and Machiavelli, 3–5, 6–7, 11, 15, 16, 207–12, 221–2, 234, 258–9, 267, 269–93 magnanimity, 35, 97, 106 mercy, 31, 33–4, 35, 37–8, 53–61, 63, 64, 66, 93, 105–6, 180, 181–2 mildness, 35, 56 mitigating effects of virtue, 35 moderation, 35, 54, 55, 130–1 natural law, 33–4 and Neapolitan civilians, 90–2, 93–5, 97 patience, 35, 130–1 and Petrarch, 120, 121–44, 145–56 pity, 37–8, 85 pleasure, 42–3 prince as arbiter of life and death, 40, 41, 76, 94, 276 prince as king, 32 prince as king bee, 58, 106, 272–3, 275 prince as medic, 57–8 prince as parent, 56, 106, 108 prince as Pater patriae, 56–7, 91, 106, 273 prince as slave, 44–5 prince as trustee, 31, 41, 80, 276 reason, 30, 31, 33–4, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 51, 56, 61, 71, 85 res publica, 46–8, 50–3, 63 rhetorical structure of, 36–45 Roman revolution, 10

sadness, 38, 43, 55, 63–5, 128 and Salutati, 158, 160–5 self-mastery, 35–6, 41 self-reflection, 37, 41, 42, 95 slavery, 44–5, 46–8 speculum principis, 4–5, 37, 38, 270–1 status, 1, 47, 52–3, 76 temperance, 35, 54 transmission of, 81–2 tyranny, 10–12, 31, 59–61, 64, 105, 108, 133–4, 279–80 and Vergerio, 166–9 vicegerency of prince, 39, 41, 80 vir sapiens, 33, 35–6, 53 wisdom, 35 De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis, see Beccadelli De fato et fortuna, see Salutati definition, rhetorical, 231–3, 235, 239–42 see also paradiastole De ingenuis moribus, see Vergerio De ira (Seneca), 91, 97, 98, 100, 104, 109, 128, 130, 158, 287, 289 on conscience, 42 magnanimity, 69–70 transmission of, 82 tyranny, 60, 156 della Scala, dynasty 114 Alberto, 112 Cangrande, 113 della Vigna, Piero, 90 De monarchia, see Vergerio Demosthenes, 122 De nobilitate legum et medicine, see Salutati De officiis (Cicero), 23–30, 151, 153, 154, 155–6, 188 anti-monarchism of, 9–10, 12, 23–8, 60–1, 170, 188 and Il Principe, 5, 6, 8–10, 13 on justice, 25–7 love and fear of governors, 10, 11, 12, 105, 107–9 and Stoic ethics, 14 tyranny, 12, 24–6, 60–1 wisdom, 26–7 De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus, see Formula vitae honestae De viris illustribus (St Jerome), 82–3 Diderot, Denis, 315 difference, 239–41 Digest, 25, 94, 104, 266 Digna vox, 94 Dionysius (tyrant of Sicily), 147 Discorsi (Machiavelli), 7, 295, 298, 310 on common good, 303 on France, 307 on stati, 261, 265, 267

Index disposition, 309 divisio, 218 Domitian, 257 Donation of Constantine, 79 Dotti, Ugo, 119 Ecerinis, see Mussato eloquence, 44, 121, 122, 192 see also rhetoric Elyot, Thomas, 213 Ennius, 12n., 26, 156 envy (invidia), 62, 122, 142, 164, 225 Epictetus, 48 Epicurus, 42 Epistulae morales, 18, 42, 81, 91, 97, 100, 101, 102, 158, 174–5, 177, 193 on fortune, 69, 102–3 transmission of, 81 Erasmus, Desiderius, 10, 100, 176, 196–204 and De clementia, 196 as editor of Seneca, 196 eloquence of, 197 pacifism of, 197–8 Panegyricus ad Philippum, 198 and Quintilian, 213 see also Institutio Christiani Principis Este, dynasty Alberto d’, 165 Azzo VIII d’, 112 Borso d’, 186 Obizzo d’, 112 ethos establishment of, 150 Euripides, 24 exemplification, 242–3 exordium (prooemium), 217, 218 faith, 60 fame, 23, 63, 122–4, 197 fantasia, see imagination fate, 29, 49, 66, 83, 142 see also providence; Stoicism Father of the Fatherland (Pater patriae), 56–7, 91, 106, 111, 113, 146, 147, 151–2, 273 Ferrante, King of Naples, 186 Ferrara, 112, 157, 165 Ferreti, Ferreto de’, 113–14 figures, rhetorical, 38, 210, 235 Quintilian on, 216, 223–8 see also addition, asyndeton, concessio, ‘holding forth’, impersonation, irony, ornatus, paradiastole, personification, praesumptio, topographia Filelfo, Francesco, 182

335

flattery (adulatio), 150–1, 207, 302 Florence, 17, 157, 187, 282 Studio, 213 Formula vitae honestae (Martin of Braga), 97–9, 101, 103, 105 fortitude, 97n., 98 fortune, 7n., 14–15, 28, 29, 30, 38, 56, 59, 65–72, 76, 81, 83, 87, 102–3, 120, 123–4, 126, 128, 135, 140, 141–4, 157–8, 161, 164, 168, 169, 178, 179, 183, 184, 185, 221–2, 234, 236, 238, 258, 270, 273, 283–4, 286–93, 305 see also De clementia; Il Principe; Seneca Foucault, Michel, 18 Frede, Dorothea, 48n. Frederick II, 5, 75–82, 85–9, 90, 92, 100, 110 freedom, see liberty Gentile, Alberico, 314 gentleness (mansuetudo), 35, 46, 84, 88–9, 93, 94, 160, 166 genus demonstrativum, 5, 36, 150–1 laus Hispaniae, 191 Gilbert, Allan, 4 Gilbert, Felix, 4, 5 Giovanna I of Naples, 137, 160 Giovanna II of Naples, 190 glory, 23, 27, 28, 62, 63, 141, 142, 148, 149, 163, 185, 190, 209 Godman, Peter, 213, 214, 249 Grafton, Anthony, 212 greed (cupiditas), 25, 27, 55, 189 Gregory, St, 122 Griffin, Miriam, 32n., 34n., 41 Hadrian, 153, 191 Hannibal, 185, 187 happiness (felicitas), 63–5, 123, 125, 130, 141, 144, 145–6, 161, 164, 166, 177, 179, 200, 202, 280, 284, 290–1 haughtiness (superbia), 25 Hecaton, 193 hegemonikon, see Stoicism Heliogabalus, 147 Hercules, 113, 126, 152, 163, 164, 190 and Spain, 191, 192 Hexter, J. H., 304 Historia Augusta, 153, 155 Hobbes, Thomas, 211 ‘holding forth’, 37, 38–40, 41, 139, 245 honour, 23, 27, 28, 63, 140 Ho¨rnquist, Mikael, 7 humaneness, 11, 35, 54, 85, 139, 148, 149, 161, 165, 182, 185, 201, 210, 228, 258, 312 humanism in Milan, 165, 175, 177, 186

336

Index

humanism (cont.) in Naples, 119, 138, 184–96 in Padua, 165, 177 royal, 119, 138, 144, 184–96 Il Principe (Machiavelli), 204 addition, 224 anger, 288–9, 302 astuteness, 217 asyndeton, 224 captured royalty, 208–9, 277–8 common good, 303 commonplaces, 237–8, 266 concessio, 222 confirmatio, 269, 297 cruelty, 208, 228, 280–2 and De clementia, 3–5, 6–7, 11–15, 16, 207–12, 221–2, 234, 258–9, 267, 269–93 definition, 231–3, 241–2, 260–8, 300–1 and De officiis, 5, 6, 8–10, 13 difference, 240–2, 260–8, 300–1 exemplification, 243–4 exordium (prooemium), 217, 218, 246–59, 295 figures and tropes in, 210, 220, 222, 223–8, 245–59 flattery, 207, 302 forma, 226–7, 305, 309–10 fortune, 13–15, 221–2, 234, 238, 258, 270–1, 273, 283–4, 286–93, 305 France, 307 happiness, 280, 284, 290–1 humaneness, 228, 259 ideological context, 5, 8–17, 207–8 inhumanity, 208, 282 irony, 255–7 lenocinio, 252 liberality, 207 liberty, 264–70 materia, 226–7, 305, 309–10 mercy, 208, 277–8, 280–2 narratio, 218–20, 266 occasione, 237, 238 ornatus, 245–59 paradiastole, 216, 240 personification, 224–6 praesumptio, 252–3 prince as arbiter, 222 prince as medic, 209, 210, 228, 278–9 propositio, 269 prudence, 221, 284–5, 286 refutatio, 286–93 and rhetoric, 7, 210–12, 215–59 rhetorical parts of, 218–30 Roman vocabulary, 7–8, 12

sententiae in, 223 simile, 253–4 slavery, 264–70 and speculum principis genre, 4–5, 204, 207–8, 258–9 stato/stati, definition and theory of, 227, 231, 234, 260–70, 271–2, 293–311, 315 and status theory, 230, 231–4 suppellettile, 247–9 ‘the Turk’, 300–1 varietas, 251 virtue, 270–2, 273, 283–4 imagination, 39 imitation, 120–1 impersonation, 39–40, 41, 43–5, 164, 197, 199, 203, 225 inhumanity, 10, 60, 134, 208, 282 innocence, 55, 148, 195, 210 Institutes, 104 Institutio Christiani Principis (Erasmus), 196–204 on affects, 201 body politic, 200–1 conscience, 199–200 and De clementia, 196–204 happiness, 200, 202 and Il Principe, 204 impersonation, 197, 199, 203 liberty, 201, 204 prince as father, 201 prince as king bee, 202 prince as medic, 202 prince as Pater patriae, 202 prince as slave 197, 204 princely vicegerent 198 slavery, 201 trusteeship of prince, 199 tyranny, 201, 202–3 institutio regia, 138 invention, 120–1 irony, 255–8 Isernia, Andrea da, 90, 91 Isocrates, 32 Jamsilla, Nicolai de, 110n. Jardine, Lisa, 196n., 204n., 212 Jerome, St, 82–3, 121, 122, 166 Jones, Philip, 95–6 joy (gaudium), 42–3, 115, 149, 150 Julius II, Pope, 291 justice, 25–7, 33–4, 35, 76, 87, 88, 95, 99, 104, 109, 111, 114, 115, 145, 146–7, 154–5, 157, 167, 178, 184, 188, 225, 270 Juvenal, 122n.

Index Kahn, Victoria, 7 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 75, 77, 85n., 88, 90–1 king in Hellenistic theory, 32 in humanist writing, see humanism as princeps, 32, 79, 81, 92–3, 138–9, 160, 167 see also prince Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 96 laudatio, see genus demonstrativum laus Hispaniae, see genus demonstrativum Latini, Brunetto, 107–10 see also Li Livres dou tre´sor law lex regia, 87–8 of nations (ius gentium), 87 of nature, 86, 87, 273 see also reason; Stoicism; virtue leniency (lenitas), 35, 54, 88–9, 94, 99, 107, 155, 180, 201 lenocinia, 252 lex regia, see law liberality, 7n., 184, 189, 207 liberal studies, 34, 167–9 Liber Augustalis, see Constitutions of Melfi Liber consolationis et consilii (Albertano of Brescia), 101–4 Liber de amore (Albertano of Brescia), 100, 101, 103 Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani (Stefanardo da Vimercate), 113–15 Liber de regimine civitatum (Giovanni da Viterbo), 104–7 liberty Erasmus on, 201, 204 Machiavelli on, 264–7 and magnanimity, 98 Petrarch on, 122, 127, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 149 in princely ideology, 17, 19, 110–11, 115, 127, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 149, 167, 168–70, 182–3, 204 and Principate, 46 Quintilian on, 294 Roman law definition of, 25, 46 Salutati on, 158 Seneca on, 3, 36, 46–8, 85, 98 in signorial ideology, 110–11, 115, 147, 148, 149, 167, 168–70, 182 Stoic concept of, 48–50, 98, 267 Vergerio on, 167, 168–70 Li Livres dou tre´sor (Brunetto Latini), 107–10 Lipsius, Justus, 196, 313

337

Livia, Empress, 57 Livy, 223 Long, A. A., 48n. Louis I of Hungary, 137 Louis XII of France, 262 Louis of Taranto, 137, 138 Lovati, Lovato, 132n. Lucan, 113, 192 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 3, 4, 11, 16, 17 Istorie Fiorentine, 295 see also Discorsi; Il Principe Macrobius, 136, 155 magnanimity, 7n., 27–8, 35, 69–71, 84, 97–8, 101, 106, 111, 112, 115, 127–8, 139, 148, 149, 152, 160, 163, 164, 178, 182, 184, 201, 312 Malaspina, Ermanno, 81n. Mancinelli, Antonio, 216, 217 Manetti, Giannozzo, 187–8 Vita Socratis et Senecae, 192–3 Mann, Nicholas, 120 Mantua, 112 Marongiu`, Antonio, 75 Martial, 192 Marx, Karl, 315 Mazzoli, Giancarlo, 81n. McManamon, John M., 166 medic, see prince Medici, Cosimo de’, 187, 283 Medici, family, 293, 310–11 government of, 294–5 Medici, Giulio de’, 294 medicine, mercy as, 57–8, 109 mercy (clementia), 10, 11–12, 31, 33–4, 35, 37–8, 53–61, 63, 64, 66, 84, 86, 88, 93, 98, 103, 109, 111, 136, 140, 146, 155, 166–7, 169–70, 178, 179, 180–1, 182, 184–5, 186, 189, 190, 194–5, 198, 199, 203, 208, 210, 272, 280–1, 312 see also De clementia Messina, Tommaso da, 120–1, 122–3 Milan, 114, 145, 147, 157, 165, 263–4, 265 see also Visconti Milano, Paganino da, 145–6 mildness (quality of mitis), 35, 56, 84, 88–9, 111, 135, 166, 201 mirrors persons as, 138, 168, 184 Seneca on, 37 texts as, 4–5, 37, 38, 149–50 moderation, 35, 54, 130–1, 160, 161, 185 modesty, 148, 149, 152

338

Index

monarchy Roman theory of, see De clementia as slavery, 23–8, 169–70, 188–9, 293–311 see also prince Monfasani, John, 212 Montecassino, 81, 82 Monteforte, Pietro da, 82n., 133 Moses, 238, 264 Moss, Ann, 120 Murphy, James, 215 Mussato, Albertino, 159, 175 Naples, city of, 156, 163 humanism in, 119, 138 and Petrarch, 119, 121, 123, 125, 133–9 triumphal arch of, 189–90, 191 University of, 121 Naples, Kingdom of, 182, 183, 263–4, 265 Nardi, Jacopo, 294 narratio, 217, 218–20 Nero, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44–5, 55, 56, 63, 66, 147, 151, 163 Nietszche, Friedrich, 19, 315 occasio, see Il Principe; Quintilian Oliverotto of Fermo, 297 Orco, Remirro de, 281, 282 ornamentation, see ornatus, theory of ornatus, theory of, 244–5 Orsini, family, 263 Otto of Brunswick, 160 Padua, 132n., 147, 156, 165, 166–7, 168, 175 see also Carrara Panizza, Letizia, 83n., 174 Panormita, see Beccadelli papacy and Kingdom of Sicily, 75, 78 monarchical theory of, 80 plenitudo potestas of, 80 as vicariate, 79, 80 paradiastole, 216, 217, 240 parent, see Father of the Fatherland; prince Parma, 145 partitio, 218, 229–30 Pater patriae, see Father of the Fatherland patience, 35, 130–1 Pavia, University of, 175, 176 Penna, Luca da, 90, 91 Pennington, Kenneth, 94 peroratio, 217, 222–8 personification, 67–8, 71, 83, 88, 224–6 Petrarch, 10, 16, 95, 156, 165, 174, 175, 208, 243 on anger, 129–30, 138, 139 Augustinianism of, 131, 139

and Caesar, 151, 156 and Cicero, 151, 154–6 on conscience, 154 correspondence with Tommaso da Messina, 120–1, 122–3 and De clementia, 121–44, 145–56 De remediis utriusque fortune, 143–4 Epistolae familiares, 119–44 and Epistulae morales, 119–21 on fame, 122–4 on fortune, 120, 123–4, 135, 140, 141–4 on happiness, 123, 125, 130, 141, 144, 145–6 Institutio regia (letter to Acciaiuoli), 138–44 on justice, 146–7, 154–5 letter to Dionigi da San Sepolcro, 121–33 letter to Francesco da Carrara, 147–56 letter to Paganino da Milano, 145–7 on liberty, 140, 141, 144, 147, 149 on love and fear, 155–6 and mirror imagery, 138, 149–50 and Naples, 119, 121, 123, 125, 133–9 on princely servitude, 140, 141, 144, 153 and Robert of Naples, 119, 123, 124, 125–6, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138 on self-conquest, 125–6, 129 on status, 142, 144, 145 on tyranny, 133–7, 146–7, 156 Phalaris, 135, 147 Piombino, 187 Pistoia, 282 pity (misericordia), 37–8, 55, 85, 86, 93, 99, 103, 109, 128, 139–40, 155, 185, 225 Plato, 27, 49, 129, 176 pleasure, 42–3 Pliny the Younger Panegyricus, 191 Plutarch, 129, 201 Pocock, J. G. A., 7n., 226n., 309n. podesta`, 110 Pole, Cardinal, 314 Polento, Sicco, 175 Poliziano, Angelo, 212–14, 216, 249 praesumptio, 252–3 prince as arbiter of life and death, 40, 41, 76, 84, 89, 94, 96, 180, 222 as king, 32, 79, 81, 92–3, 138–9, 160, 167 as king bee, 58, 103, 106, 202, 204, 272–3, 275 as legibus solutus, 41, 94–5, 153–4, 186 as medic, 57–8, 115, 139, 146, 202, 209, 210, 228, 278–9 as parent, 56, 106, 115, 181, 201 as Pater patriae, 56–7, 91, 106, 113, 146, 147, 151–2, 202, 273 as slave, 44–5, 140, 141, 144, 152, 162, 197

Index prince (cont.) as trustee, 31, 41, 80, 111, 153, 199 as vicegerent, 41, 80, 85, 198 Procope´, J. F., 41, 59n., 61n. prooemium, see exordium proofs, rhetorical, 235–44 commonplaces (loci communes, topics), 235, 236–8, 266 definition, 235, 239–41 examples, 220, 236, 242–4 inartificial, 235 proportio, see analogy propositio, 218 providence, 29, 49, 65, 76, 86, 87, 88, 142, 158, 164, 179, 201 see also fate, Stoicism prudence, 99, 101, 102–3, 221, 284–5, 286 Pseudo-Seneca De copia verborum, 97 De moribus, 97, 100 De paupertate, 84, 97 De remediis fortuitorum, 97 Proverbia Senecae, 97 Pseudo-correspondence with St Paul, 82–3, 159, 176 see also Formula vitae honestae Publilius Syrus, 100, 103 Quintilian, 192, 211–12 in High Renaissance, 212–14 Institutio oratoria: countering figures, 220–1 definition, 239–41 difference, 239–41 exemplification, 242–4 forma and materia, 226–7 ‘holding forth’, 39, 245 irony, 255–7 liberty, 294 occasio, 237 ornatus, 244–5 paradiastole, 216, 217, 240 parts of oration, 217–30 proofs, 235–44 rhetorical imagination, 39 simile, 220 solecism, 261 status theory, 231–2 and Machiavelli, 211–12, 215–59, 288, 305 and Poliziano, 212–13 see also Il Principe Ravenna, Giovanni Conversini da, 165, 166, 170n. reason, 56, 61, 71, 83, 85, 86, 87–9, 99, 115, 129, 141 and conscience, 41, 42, 164–5

339

and happiness, 130 in prince, 10, 45, 46, 51, 56, 63, 92, 111, 115, 145, 157, 161, 164–5, 169, 201 in Stoic sage, 33 as universal law, 1, 29–30, 45, 50, 87–9, 91, 157 see also De clementia; Stoicism redescription, rhetorical, see paradiastole refutatio, 217, 221–2, 286 remedy, see medicine Renaissance (Italian) Ciceronian, 17, 19 Florentine, 17 influence of Seneca on, 11 romanitas of political thought in, 2–3, 7–8, 96, 173 Resta, Gianvito, 190 revolution, Roman, 2, 3, 10, 23, 34 Reynolds, L. D., 75n., 82n. rhetoric (ars rhetorica) in De clementia, 36–45 elements of, see disposition; invention genera, see genus demonstrativum in Il Principe, 7, 210–12, 215–59 imagination (fantasia), 39 parts of, 217–18 see also confirmatio; divisio; exordium (prooemium); narratio; partitio; peroratio; refutatio and persuasion, see definition; eloquence; ethos; figures; proofs; redescription; sententiae; tropes style, see ornatus and tyranny, 60 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 313 Robert, King of Naples, 119, 123, 124, 125–6, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141 Romagna, 281–2 Romano, Andrea, 75n., 85n. Romulus, 238, 264, 267 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 314–15 Russell, Donald, 213 Sacchetti, Franco, 193 sadness (tristitia), 38, 43, 55, 63–5, 102, 115, 128, 130 Sallust, 96, 207 Bellum Catilinae, 13 Salutati, Coluccio, 157–65, 166, 175, 293 and Cicero, 170 on conscience, 164–5 and De clementia, 158, 160–5 De fato et fortuna, 158, 164 De laboribus Herculis, 159 De nobilitate legum et medicine, 158 and Epistulae morales, 159

340

Index

Salutati, Coluccio (cont.) on fortune, 157–8, 161, 164 impersonation in, 164 on liberty, 158, 170 on monarchy as slavery, 170 panegyric of Charles III of Naples, 160–5 and Petrarch, 157 on princely servitude, 162 on providence, 158, 164 on reason, 157, 158, 161, 164–5 and Seneca, 158–60 and Senecan tragedy, 159 on self-conquest, 161 Stoicism of, 157–8, 159–60 on tyranny, 162 San Sepolcro, Dionigi da, 121–33 sapientia, see wisdom Saturnalia (Macrobius), 155 Savonarola, Girolamo, 243 Schofield, Malcolm, 28, 29, 34 Sedley, David, 33n. self-conquest, 35–6, 41, 101, 103, 105, 125–6, 129, 152, 161, 180, 184–5 Seneca, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 18, 31, 34, 36, 91, 94, 96 and archery, 62 and Augustine, 83 and Christianity, 82–5 depictions of, 84 disputes over identity of, 133 early printed editions of, 82, 97 eloquence of, 121 on envy, 62 on fortune, 7n., 14–15, 38, 65–72, 83, 102–3, 126, 128 on imitation, 120–1 on invention, 120–1 on magnanimity, 69–71 on mirrors, 37 on nature, 66, 69, 83 on sadness, 63–5 on serenity, 128–9 on Stoic sage (vir sapiens), 61–2, 83, 84, 91, 109, 126, 283 tragedies of, 159, 175 transmission of moral works of, 81–2 De beata vita, 64–5, 68n., 82n., 159 De brevitate vitae, 66n., 68n., 82 De consolatione ad Helviam, 82n. De consolatione ad Marciam, 82n. De consolatione ad Polybium, 66n., 82n. De constantia, 61n., 69, 82 De otio, 31, 82 De providentia, 65–6, 67, 82 De tranquillitate animi, 82 Hercules furens, 159

Hercules Oeteus, 159 Quaestiones naturales, 37n. Thyestes, 132–3 see also De beneficiis; De clementia; De ira; Epistulae morales; Pseudo-Seneca sententiae, 223, 235, 244, 250 serenity, 128–9, 130 servitude, see slavery Sforza, Francesco, 263–4, 265 Sicily, Kingdom of, 5, 75–95, 183 and transmission of Seneca, 81–2 Siena, 187 signori, 95–6 constitutional status of, 111–12 Senecan ideology of, 110–11, 112–15, 145–69 see also Carrara, Este, Visconti simile (similitudo), 220, 253–4, 266, 275 Skinner, Quentin, 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 14, 15n., 17, 23n., 25n., 38n., 39, 96–7, 107n., 113n., 154, 207, 208, 211n., 213, 216–17, 301 slavery, 147, 148, 182–3 Machiavelli on, 264–70, 293–311 monarchy as, 23–8, 170, 188–9 of prince, 44–5, 66, 140, 141, 144, 153, 162, 197 Roman law definition of, 25, 46, 266–7 Seneca on, 46–8 Stoic idea of, 50 Vergerio on, 169 Socrates, 61 Somnium Scipionis, 154 see also Macrobius speculum, see mirror Spinoza, Benedict, 314 Statius, 113 stato, see Il Principe; Machiavelli status in Constitutions of Melfi, 76–8, 81, 89 in Petrarch, 142, 144, 145 Seneca on, 1, 47, 52–3, 76 status theory, see Quintilian Stoicism, 14, 18, 88, 177 common good, 53 cosmic civitas, 14, 28–30, 31, 32, 34, 61, 83–4, 85 determinism, 48–50, 144 divine providence, 29, 49, 65 ethics, 28–30, 49–50 liberty, 48–50 natural law, 29–30, 33–4, 50 nature, 49 oikeio¯sis, 49n. reason, 29–30, 31, 48–9, 56, 89, 126 sage (vir sapiens), 33, 35–6, 53, 61–2, 83, 84, 191 slavery, 50 soul as hegemonikon, 72, 126

Index studia liberalia, see liberal studies Suetonius, 153, 156, 163 Sulla, 61 Sulmona, Barbato da, 134, 138 superbia, see haughtiness suppellettile, 247–9 Tacitus, 6n., 44, 207, 243 Tateo, Francesco, 110n. temperance, 35, 54 Theodosius I, 155, 191 Theseus, 238, 264 Tiberius, 162, 163 Tibullus, 193 Tierney, Brian, 95 topographia, 258 Trajan, 191–2 arch of, 192 tropes, 220 Quintilian on, 216 see also irony; ornatus; simile Tuck, Richard, 6 tyranny, 18–19, 111, 196, 272 Cicero on, 12, 24–6, 60–1 Erasmus on, 201, 202–3 Petrarch on, 133–7, 146–7, 156 Salutati on, 162 Seneca on, 10–12, 31, 59–61, 64, 105, 108, 133–4, 280 Ullman, Berthold, 120, 157 Ullmann, Walter, 79n., 91 Ulysses, 126 Urban VI, Pope, 160 Valla, Lorenzo, 176, 186, 212 varietas, 251 vendetta, 101–4 Venice, 213 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 157, 165–70, 274 and Cicero, 169–70 and De clementia, 166–9 De ingenuis moribus, 167–9 De monarchia, 167 on fortune, 168 and Francesco Novello da Carrara, 166–7 and happiness, 166 on liberty, 167, 168–70 on monarchy as slavery, 169–70 and Petrarch, 166 and Salutati, 166 and Seneca, 166

341

on slavery, 169 and Stoicism, 166 on studia liberalia, 167–9 Verona, 112 Verona, Guarino da, 188 Vettori, Francesco, 209, 220, 261, 295 Veyne, Paul, 10, 36, 37n., 42n., 43n., 49n. vice, see ambition; anger; avarice; cruelty; envy; greed; haughtiness; inhumanity; pity; sadness Vimercate, Stefanardo da, 113–15 Virgil, 6n., 51, 113, 114n., 123, 137, 193, 226, 243 Viroli, Maurizio, 7, 9n., 107n., 215, 222–3 virtue, 23–30, 47, 115, 126, 127, 142, 149, 185, 233, 270–2, 283–4 as defining quality of prince, 10, 19, 44, 71, 111, 125, 127, 131, 139, 145, 162, 165, 178, 194, 202–3 and fame, 122–4 and fortune, 123–4, 184 Stoic idea of, 33, 177 see also affability; calmness; constancy; continence; fortitude; gentleness; humaneness; innocence; justice; leniency; liberality; magnanimity; mercy; mildness; moderation; patience; pity; prudence; temperance; wisdom Visconti dynasty, 14, 17, 165, 175 Filippo Maria, 176, 177–82, 183, 187, 265 Giangaleazzo, 17, 19 ideology of, 17, 112–15, 177 Luschino, 145, 146–7 Matteo, 113 Ottone, 112–13, 114–15 Vita Socratis et Senecae, see Manettti Viterbo, Giovanni da, 104–7 see also Liber de regimine civitatum Vives, Juan Luis, 213 Vulgate, 84, 93 Welch, Evelyn, 113 Wilks, Michael, 79n. Wirszubski, C., 46n. wisdom (sapientia), 26–7, 35, 113, 169, 178 and astuteness, 217 Witt, Ronald, 113n., 157–8, 160, 170n. Wood, Neal, 6 Xenophon, 32 Zeno, 28

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

1

RICHARD RORTY, J. B. SCHNEEWIND AND QUENTIN SKINNER

( E D S .)

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ANTHONY PAGDEN

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Strategies of Economic Order German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950 hb: 0 521 46291 6 34

SACHIKO KUSUKAWA

The Transformation of Natural Philosophy The Case of Philip Melancthon hb: 0 521 47347 0 35

DAVID ARMITAGE, ARMAND HIMY AND QUENTIN SKINNER

( E D S .)

Milton and Republicanism hb: 0 521 55178 1 pb: 0 521 64648 0 36

MARKKU PELTONEN

Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 hb: 0 521 49695 0 37

PHILIP IRONSIDE

The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism hb: 0 521 47383 7 38

NANCY CARTWRIGHT, JORDI CAT, LOLA FLECK AND THOMAS E. UEBEL

Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics hb: 0 521 45174 4 39

DONALD WINCH

Riches and Poverty An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 pb: 0 521 55920 0 40

JENNIFER PLATT

A History of Sociological Research Methods in America hb: 0 521 44173 0 pb: 0 521 64649 9 ( E D .) Enlightenment and Religion Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain hb: 0 521 56060 8

41

KNUD HAAKONSSEN

42

G. E. R. LLOYD

Adversaries and Authorities Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science hb: 0 521 55331 8 pb: 0 521 55695 3 43

ROLF LINDNER

The Reportage of Urban Culture Robert Park and the Chicago School hb: 0 521 44052 1

44

ANNABEL BRETT

Liberty, Right and Nature Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought hb: 0 521 56239 2 pb: 0 521 54340 1 45

STEWART J. BROWN

( E D .) William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire hb: 0 521 57083 2

46

HELENA ROSENBLATT

Rousseau and Geneva From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 hb: 0 521 57004 2 47

DAVID RUNCIMAN

Pluralism and the Personality of the State hb: 0 521 55191 9 48

ANNABEL PATTERSON

Early Modern Liberalism hb: 0 521 59260 7 49

DAVID WEINSTEIN

Equal Freedom and Utility Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism hb: 0 521 62264 6 50

YUN LEE TOO AND NIALL LIVINGSTONE

( E D S .)

Pedagogy and Power Rhetorics of Classical Learning hb: 0 521 59435 9 51

REVIEL NETZ

The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics A Study in Cognitive History hb: 0 521 62279 4 pb: 0 521 54120 4 52

MARY MORGAN AND MARGARET MORRISON

Models as Mediators hb: 0 521 65097 6 pb: 0 521 655714 53

JOEL MICHELL

Measurement in Psychology A Critical History of a Methodological Concept hb: 0 521 62120 8 54

RICHARD A. PRIMUS

The American Language of Rights hb: 0 521 65250 2

( E D S .)

55

ROBERT ALUN JONES

The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism hb: 0 521 65045 3 56

ANNE MCLAREN

Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 hb: 0 521 65144 1 ( E D .) Renaissance Civic Humanism Reappraisals and Reflections hb: 0 521 78090 X pb: 0 521 54807 1

57

JAMES HANKINS

58

T. J. HOCHSTRASSER

Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment hb: 0 521 66193 5 59

DAVID ARMITAGE

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire hb: 0 521 59081 7 pb: 0 521 78978 8 60

IAN HUNTER

Rival Enlightenments Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany hb: 0 521 79265 7 61

DARIO CASTIGLIONE AND IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK

( E D S .) The History of Political Thought in National Context hb: 0 521 78234 1

62

IAN MACLEAN

Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance The Case of Learned Medicine hb: 0 521 80648 8 63

PETER MACK

Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice hb: 0 521 81292 5 64

GEOFFREY LLOYD

The Ambitions of Curiosity Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China hb: 0 521 81542 8 pb: 0 521 89461 1 65

MARKKU PELTONEN

The Duel in Early Modern England Civility, Politeness and Honour hb: 0 521 82062 6

66

ADAM SUTCLIFFE

Judaism and Enlightenment hb: 0 521 82015 4 67

ANDREW FITZMAURICE

Humanism and America An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 hb: 0 521 82225 4 68

PIERRE FORCE

Self-Interest before Adam Smith A Genealogy of Economic Science hb: 0 521 83060 5 69

ERIC NELSON

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought hb: 0 521 83545 3 70

HARRO HOPFL

Jesuit Political Thought The Society of Jesus and the state, c.1540–1640 hb: 0 521 83779 0 71

MIKAEL HORNQVIST

Machiavelli and Empire hb: 0 521 83945 9 72

DAVID COLCLOUGH

Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England hb: 0 521 84748 6 73

JOHN ROBERTSON

The Case for the Enlightenment Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 hb: 0 521 84787 7 74

DANIEL CAREY

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond hb: 0 521 84502 5 75

ALAN CROMARTIE

The Constitutionalist Revolution in England Commonwealth, Common Law and Reformation hb: 0 521 78269 4 76

HANNAH DAWSON

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy hb: 0 521 85271 4

77

CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER

The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe The Nature of a Contested Identity hb: 0 521 86646 4 78

ANGUS GOWLAND

The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy Robert Burton in Context hb: 0 521 86768 1 79

PETER STACEY

Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince hb: 0 521 86989 7

( E D S .)