http://www.cambridge.org/9780521869898

This page intentionally left blank

ROMAN MONARCHY ANDTHE RENAISSANCE PRINCE

Beginning with a sustained analysis of Seneca’s theory of monarchy inthe treatise De clementia, Peter Stacey traces the formative impact ofancient Roman political philosophy upon medieval and Renaissancethinking about princely government on the Italian peninsula fromthe time of Frederick II to the early-modern period. Roman Monarchyand the Renaissance Prince offers a systematic reconstruction of thepre-humanist and humanist history of the genre of political reflectionknown as the mirror-for-princes tradition – a tradition which, asStacey shows, is indebted to Seneca’s speculum above all other classicalaccounts of the virtuous prince – and culminates with a comprehen-sive and controversial reading of the greatest work of Renaissancemonarchical political theory, Machiavelli’s The Prince. Peter Staceybrings to light a story which has been lost from view in recentaccounts of the Renaissance debt to classical antiquity, providing aradically revisionist account of the history of the Renaissance prince.

P E T E R S T A C E Y is College Lecturer and Osborn Fellow in MedievalHistory at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

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 ofrelated new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were gene-rated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporaryframeworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution ofsuch traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that anew picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. Bythis means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the varioussciences, 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 PressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

First published in print format

ISBN-13 978-0-521-86989-8

ISBN-13 978-0-511-27412-1

© Peter Stacey 2007

2007

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521869898

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision ofrelevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take placewithout the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

ISBN-10 0-511-27412-2

ISBN-10 0-521-86989-7

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urlsfor external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does notguarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

hardback

eBook (EBL)

eBook (EBL)

hardback

Contents

Acknowledgements page viii

Introduction 1

P A R T I T H E R O M A N P R I N C E P S 21

1 The Roman theory of monarchy 23

P A R T I I T H E R O M A N T H E O R Y A N D T H E F O R M A T I O N

O F T H E R E N A I S S A N C E P R I N C E P S 73

2 The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 75

P A R T I I I T H E H U M A N I S T P R I N C E P S I N T H E T R E C E N T O 117

3 Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 119

4 Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 145

P A R T I V T H E H U M A N I S T P R I N C E P S F R O M T H E

Q U A T T R O C E N T O T O T H E H I G H R E N A I S S A N C E 171

5 Princeps, rex, imperator 173

P A R T V T H E M A C H I A V E L L I A N A T T A C K 205

6 The strategy 207

7 The battle 260

Conclusion 312

Bibliography 317

Index 332

vii

Acknowledgements

A number of institutions have lent crucial support to this book. I need tothank in particular the Director and staff of the British School at Rome; theDirector and Fellows of the Institute of Historical Research, University ofLondon; and above all the Master and Fellows of Gonville and CaiusCollege, Cambridge, who have sustained this project with immense gen-erosity from its inception as a doctoral dissertation to its completion afterfour invaluable years as a Research Fellow.

I next have to thank Cambridge University Press, and in particularRichard Fisher, whose superb advice, support and enthusiasm have beenextremely important to me. I must thank Chris Jackson, too, for his fineeditorial work on the text. And I should also like to thank the anonymousreaders who provided the Press with extraordinarily helpful comments andcriticisms on an earlier draft.

I am very grateful to various friends for their warm hospitality in Romeand in Lecce during the writing of this book: Henriette Sacchetti, PatrickCoppola, Luigi del Prete, Luisa Montecchi, Therese Boespflug, Gianfrancoand Maria Lucia Rima, Pierfrancesco and Alessandra Chirizzi, Nando andHilda Coppola and family.

I must mention Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and Alison Brown: their com-ments on my work and ideas and their support at various stages have beenindispensable. Paul Botley, John Chalcraft, Christopher Kelly, MartinRuehl, Angus Gowland and Geoff Baldwin have been the very greatest offriends, tirelessly reading and discussing my work, sharing with me theirscholarship and insights with unflagging generosity and correcting me withconsiderable patience. It remains a great privilege as well as a great pleasureto be around them. In addition, I am profoundly grateful to Rich Sever,Ingrid Schroder, 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 verydeep indeed. He introduced me as an undergraduate at Caius to the

viii

Renaissance, and taught me to be, among other things, endlessly wary ofall forms of provincialism when writing its history. He has been a modelsupervisor, fostering my commitment to the history of the Mezzogiorno inparticular with boundless energy and placing at my disposal his immenselearning and wisdom at every stage of my career. I cannot thank himenough for his help and friendship over the years, but I hope at least tocontinue to pay testimony to its formative effect in books to come.

I am indebted most of all to Quentin Skinner. The scholarly andintellectual debts are evident on virtually every page of the book, buthere I need to record that his utterly unswerving support and unfailinggenerosity at every stage of its writing have been just as essential to itscompletion. He has also taught me what it means to be encouraging, andthat singular lesson – more than everything else that I have learnt from himover the years – has meant the most to me.

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction

The protagonist of this book is a Roman political theory which helped todefine the intellectual and ideological contours of the European early-modern state by performing an important historical and conceptual rolein the formation of the Renaissance prince. This role has gradually becomeobscured over recent centuries, and the main purpose of the followingchapters is to try to illuminate it. My explanation of the theory’s contri-bution to the history of the sovereign state consists in two basic parts. Thefirst is in terms of its conceptual character: it is a theory about the sovereignprinceps, and an argument which is explicitly concerned to delineate a seriesof relations between the princeps and the status of various entities. So, forexample, the prince is said to have the ‘state’ of those persons whom hegoverns in his hand; he is described as a tutor of ‘the public state’; and hisprincipatus is supposed to reflect the ‘state of the world’. These claims areconnected to a distinctive way of thinking about persons which considerstheir status from the point of view of the universal law of reason, ratherthan from a purely local legal perspective. The theory holds that personsshould be governed according to the same rationality which governs thecosmos. One consequence of this approach was that it introduced toRoman political discourse a novel way of looking at the question of whata free or unfree person was. These manoeuvres and their revolutionarycharacter are at the heart of my investigation of the theory and its classicalsetting in the first part of the book.

The second part of the explanation of how this conceptual apparatuscame to structure the early-modern state is the history of its use as apowerful ideological tool to a succession of Renaissance monarchicalregimes across the Italian peninsula between the thirteenth and the six-teenth centuries. Accounting for the centrality of the Roman theory of theprinceps to the development of Renaissance monarchical thinking is, on theone hand, a matter of seeing how some fundamental characteristics ofthe theory itself made it valuable to those political agents wishing to

1

identify themselves as princes. But it is also necessary to describe itshistorical role in some detail in order to observe the specificity of itsdeployment in a set of determinate and different contexts from theDuecento onwards. Its doctrines are picked up in piecemeal fashion,adapted and occasionally transformed according to local ideologicalneeds across a series of social, political and military conflicts and legitima-tion crises; and it is through its initial involvement in these polemicalcontexts that discursive regularities are stabilised and coherent ideologiesdeveloped at a local level. The structure of my argument is designed tonegotiate a path through these considerations. The classical section inwhich I examine the construction and content of the Roman theory isfollowed by five Renaissance chapters which trace out the story of how,why and to what effect, subsequent to its recovery by the medieval West, itslanguage came to inform the articulation of the person of the Renaissanceprinceps in all three types of secular monarchical settings – imperial, royaland signorial – which characterised the political geography of the Italianpeninsula between the Duecento and the High Renaissance.

Ancient Rome might seem the obvious place to start any genealogy ofthe princeps, that most Roman of persons, but my insistence on returningto the Roman theory of monarchy – to point out its existence, to say whowrote it and when, what it says and why – is related to two specificconcerns. The first of these is to try to reverse some of the effects of itsgradual, and perhaps even systematic, occlusion from the historiography ofthe Renaissance’s ideological and intellectual debt to classical antiquity.The history of that occlusion is another story. But one explanation for whythe theory remains obscured may be that we have become accustomed tothinking about the various languages which the Renaissance recoveredfrom Roman antiquity in terms which have the effect of eclipsing adefining political and ideological event in the history of ancient Romanpolitical life and literature. There is a massive caesura running down thecentre of that history caused by the Roman revolution and the establish-ment of the Roman Principate under Augustus. The figure of the princeps isa product of that revolution. But the Roman revolution rather disappears –and with it the theory of the princeps – in the analytical categories currentlydeployed to talk about the body of concepts which were drawn fromRoman literature into the various social, political, moral, literary, rhetor-ical, pedagogical and philosophical languages of the Renaissance, partic-ularly those articulated in a humanist idiom. By excavating the classicaltheory of monarchy, I aim to prise open the general categories of ‘Romanhistorians’, ‘Roman rhetorical models’, ‘Roman moralists’, ‘Roman moral

2 Introduction

philosophy’, ‘the Roman authors’, ‘the Roman tradition’ and ‘Romanism’which are now in use within Renaissance historiography.1 These descrip-tions have proved extremely important in emphasising the Romanitas ofthe Renaissance. But they are also deceptively flat and can hide as much asthey reveal when they are used to imply an homogeneity or stability ofpolitical, moral and rhetorical outlook where none exists either in Romanor in Renaissance discourse. My specific aim in searching to break into thiscompound terminology is to recuperate some precise instances of thereordering which occurs at a conceptual level in the legal, political, visualand ethical apparatus elaborated after the Roman revolution. This processproduces some of the monarchical and monological elements of Romanpolitical theory which make a distinctive contribution to the historicalformation of a post-classical European subjectivity and to the constructionof a sovereign order within early-modern states.

The Roman theory of monarchy is an extended act of conceptualredefinition which has an almost embarrassingly imperial provenance. Itsvision of a peaceful and happy principate extending across the entire worldunder the government of the virtuous princeps – humane, self-reflectingand thoroughly conscientious – reveals so frank a commitment to a globalhegemony founded upon sovereign reason that it seems scarcely straight-faced. 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 accordingto universal reason and the law of nature – enables the Roman prince toassume a strikingly absolutist position at the head of the body politic, torebut the accusation that the Roman Principate was a form of domination,and to suggest that, under his loving care, the body politic had beenactually liberated rather than enslaved at the point of the sword byCaesarian conquest. Its latinity is not to everyone’s taste, and, perhapsmost awkwardly of all, its author is not Cicero. Yet none of these character-istics prevented this Roman argument about the princeps from becomingprofoundly implicated in the constitution of monarchical political govern-ment on the Italian peninsula from the Duecento onwards. By the earlysixteenth century, it had become so fundamental to the language whicharticulated the persona of the Renaissance prince that it attracted theunwavering hostility of Machiavelli in Il Principe. Surveying a peninsulawhich had seen the steady rise to power of monarchical regimes over thecourse 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.

Introduction 3

comprises a meticulously constructed attack upon a vision of the personaof the princeps and his principatus which had come to captivate theRenaissance imagination. The concluding chapters of the book describethis assault on the Roman argument about the prince.

Machiavelli’s text furnishes the other principal reason I begin my argu-ment with a reconsideration of the classical case for the prince. My aim is tobring more sharply into focus the shattering effect of Machiavelli’s attackupon the tradition of political reflection which has in recent decadesbecome very closely identified with a humanist literature about the princeusually designated as the speculum principis, or ‘mirror-for-princes’ genre. Ireiterate the conventional wisdom that there is the closest possible relationbetween Machiavelli’s text and the ideology of the princely mirror, acontext first suggested in the pioneering work of Felix Gilbert and in thescholarship of Allan Gilbert, but subsequently elaborated, modified andrefined with unrivalled precision, and to immensely powerful effect, byQuentin Skinner in his classic interpretation of Il Principe.2 This context isnow well-observed within Machiavellian scholarship, but it is Skinner’swork 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 sametime revolutionised the genre itself ’. I also sustain a view of Machiavelli’sargument which endorses Skinner’s recent description of the great moralistas ‘essentially the exponent of a neo-classical form of humanist politicalthought’.3 And my interpretation is, in some ways, an extended corrobo-ration 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 heinherited and basically continued to endorse’.4 However, whereas bothFelix Gilbert and Skinner began a systematic reconstruction of the ideologyaround a series of princely mirrors produced in the second half of thefifteenth century, this account begins to trace out the monarchical languageof the genre in the second half of the first century. It commences with adetailed study of De clementia, the political treatise of the Stoic philosopherSeneca which lays out a vision of the Roman princeps and his principatusand which declares in its opening sentence that its argument is designed toperform the role of a mirror. The Senecan text is the earliest survivingexample of a Latin speculum principis, and the only surviving example of a

2 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.

3 Skinner 2000: Preface. 4 Skinner 2000: Preface.

4 Introduction

systematic attempt to theorise the Roman monarchy. The theory is articulatedin the demonstrative mode, that most princely of rhetorical genres; it isenvisaged as an image of a person; and, as its central conceit reveals, its fortuneswere tied to a view of the world in which both a text and a person could be saidand be seen to reflect things as they really were. The central chapters of thisbook indicate how those fortunes were gradually but firmly secured acrossnearly three centuries of Renaissance political experience. In so doing, theyprovide an explanation as to why the Senecan argument of De clementia shouldhave become the object of Machiavelli’s theoretical concerns in Il Principe.

In laying out this more extensive thesis, I hold fast to some of theunassailable elements of the Skinnerian interpretation of Il Principe andits ideological context, while at the same time introducing two mainmodifications to it. The first consists in underlining that this humanistideological tradition is considerably longer in the making than is currentlyenvisaged. Skinner himself has recently provided a more detailed view ofthe development of the mirror-for-princes literature during the Trecento,but commentators on Renaissance political thought tend to follow theearlier view proposed by Gilbert and sustained by Skinner in Foundationsthat ‘the heyday’ of humanist princely writing is largely a development ofthe second half of the Quattrocento, a phenomenon then contrasted with anearlier ‘civic’ phase of humanist political thought.5 By contrast, I analyse itsformation within a much more extensively structured political contextwhich stretches well back into the Duecento in order to embrace the reignof Frederick II in the Kingdom of Sicily and the crisis of governmentwithin the northern Italian communes which precipitates the rise to powerof the signori. I do so in order to indicate a very long ‘pre-humanist’ historyof the princely ideology of the mirror prior to its emergence in Petrarchanhumanist discourse in the 1340s.

But the fundamental change which I introduce to the Skinnerianperspective on Machiavelli’s text concerns the theoretical structure of thehumanist ideology of the princeps and its classical provenance. My basicpoint is that we may have been tracking the wrong Roman theory in ourstudy of Machiavelli’s Il Principe and its ideological context. I argue that weneed to turn away from Cicero’s De officiis and concentrate on Seneca’s Declementia and its formative place in Renaissance political thought in orderto 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 laterQuattrocento, 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.

Introduction 5

Seneca to Machiavelli in Il Principe has certainly been suggested before. Inthe late 1960s, an insightful article by Neal Wood explored what he saw asthe ‘parallels in their thought’.6 And in Philosophy and Government in theearly 1990s, Richard Tuck observed that Il Principe was ‘largely an indirectcriticism of Seneca rather than Cicero’, recalling that ‘Cicero, after all, hadnot provided a defence of princely government comparable to Seneca’s Declementia’.7 This assertion was, I think, fundamentally correct, although itmade it harder to make sense of Tuck’s elaboration of a great distinctionbetween an ‘old’ humanism which was said, somewhat contradictorily, tohave been ‘dominated by the ideas and the style of Cicero’, and a ‘new’early-modern humanism.8 It also incidentally raised the question of thedegree of intimacy with which Machiavelli engages with the Senecantheory, and it is perhaps worth confronting this issue immediately. Arethere grounds for thinking that all or any part of Machiavelli’s text isexplicitly and self-consciously engaged in reversing the contentions ofSeneca himself in De clementia? Or is Il Principe better understood as an‘indirect’ intervention, an attack upon a series of prevalent ideologicalconventions which may well have the effect of overturning crucial doctrinesof Seneca’s political theory – assuming for the moment that the Senecanargument had indeed come to inform Renaissance princely discoursesignificantly by Machiavelli’s day – but which nevertheless stops short ofan engagement with the classical text itself? I veer strongly towards theformer view at certain points of my analysis of the Machiavellian text forreasons which I hope to make clearer. But I cannot see any reason forsupposing that such an interpretation necessarily rules out the latter vieweither. A strategy in which one alternates between occasionally criticisingcontemporary beliefs on their own terms and occasionally dragging themback to some earlier and more theoretical point of their formulation is notso arcane. On the contrary, in view of Machiavelli’s famous claim in thepreface that his volume is the fruit of ‘una lunga esperienzia delle cosemoderne et una continua lezione delle antique’, it makes considerable senseto think that his text is concerned with both ancient and modern wisdomabout princely government.9 After all, Machiavelli straightforwardlynames and cites ancient authorities on occasion in his text.10 The thoughtthat he might be shown to be engaging with a particular set of classicalpolitical opinions which has not yet been clearly identified does not seemto be a particularly controversial one. And somewhere in between the two

6 Wood 1968: 11. 7 Tuck 1993: 20. 8 Tuck 1993: 5. 9 Machiavelli 1960: 13.10 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61 (Tacitus); Ch.XVIII: 69 (Virgil).

6 Introduction

poles of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ criticism, we might also need to consider theexistence of a series of literary tactics regularly used by humanists toimitate, to ironise or to mimic their classical sources without citing themexplicitly. What may look like rather oblique or veiled allusion in the workof Renaissance humanist writers on princely government is often thestudiously cultivated effect of Renaissance rhetorical art. Some carefuldecoding is sometimes necessary in order to avoid deploying the categoriesof direct and indirect criticism too bluntly.

However, the person who has most carefully and consistently drawnattention to the irrefutable place of De clementia in the ideology whichMachiavelli is subverting is, in fact, Skinner himself.11 Since each of mypoints of departure from his interpretation of Il Principe represent to aconsiderable degree the development of ideas indicated in various parts ofhis 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 dra-matic transformation in our understanding of how and why Romanclassical concepts and arguments structured humanist political discourse.The extent of his contribution is particularly discernible in the obligationnot only to recognise, in the light of his work on Machiavelli in particular,the pervasive Roman character of the classical republicanism expressed inthe Discorsi but also to acknowledge that virtually all of the categorieswhich Il Principe deploys are similarly Roman. Machiavelli is engaged incontroverting a profoundly Roman story about how the prince shouldbehave. The fact that he does so in no less profoundly Roman rhetoricalmode, as a number of scholars have been illustrating for some time – Kahn,Cox, Viroli and Hornquist most recently – only serves to underline thepoint 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 – couldsee that the work had practically nothing to do with Aristotle.13 In sum,

11 See especially Skinner 1981: 29 (for Seneca and fortuna); 36 (for Senecan magnanimitas and liberalitasin De clementia and De beneficiis); 45–6 (for crudelitas in De clementia and in Il Principe); Machiavelli1988: xvii, xxi (for the same conceptual connection); xxii (for notions of affability and accessibility inDe clementia with which Machiavelli disagrees).

12 Kahn 1994; Cox 1997; Viroli 1998: 73–113; Hornquist 2004: 4–37. For a bibliography on Machiavelli’srhetoric, see Cox 1997: 1110, n.3.

13 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 itscognate forms is used by Machiavelli in his text, see Viroli 1992: 129, esp. n. 8; for Machiavelli’sAristotelian concerns in Il Principe, see Pocock 1975: 156–82; Mansfield 1996; Hornquist 2004:211–27.

Introduction 7

Machiavelli’s argument is about the government of persons and states, itsprecepts are self-consciously articulated according to the principles ofRoman classical rhetoric, and the central concepts which structureMachiavelli’s theory – principe and principato, imperio and stato, virtuand ragione, fortuna, necessita and occasione, liberta and servitu, onore andgloria, fama and reputazione – are translations of a terminology which hadbeen almost entirely imported into Renaissance thinking about the figureof the prince from Roman literature.

Furthermore, Skinner’s analysis of Machiavelli’s ‘humanist allegiances’and ‘the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the whole tradition ofhumanist political thought’ has taken us to the core of the Machiavellianrevolution by indicating with unparalleled perspicacity a crucial conceptualrupture which occurs at the heart of Il Principe.14 As Skinner explains, thecentral theoretical contention over which Machiavelli parts company withhis humanist predecessors and their classical authorities is the fundamentalbelief that the rational course of action in every conceivable situation willnever involve a properly discerning moral agent in a conflict betweenconsiderations of what is right and honourable on the one hand, andcalculations of what is beneficial on the other.15 Machiavelli’s self-proclaimed 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 whatis deemed, in the Latin terminology in which this ethical doctrine wasdiscussed by classical and humanist authors, to be dignum or honestum –that is, honourable – and thus in accordance with what is virtuous, andwhat is, in fact, utile in view of the primary princely task of mantenere lostato which Machiavelli posits.16

The point at which these profound insights into the Machiavellianrevolution begin to lose some of their clarity occurs when the event islocated within an ideological field constituted by a speculum principisliterature which is simultaneously held to be primarily structured by thecontentions of Cicero’s De officiis. According to Skinner, Machiavelli isengaged in subverting ‘above all Cicero’s general treatise on moral duties,De officiis’, and this view is now widely shared.17 In Foundations, theconceptual core of the writings of the ‘mirror-for-princes theorists’ of the

14 Skinner 2000: 39, 44. 15 Skinner 2000: 41–3.16 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘partendomi, massime nel disputare questa materia, dalli ordini delli

altri’.17 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; JacksonBarlow 1999.

8 Introduction

later fifteenth century was said to be derived from an earlier, somewhatcollapsed Ciceronian civic tradition.18 In a more recent exploration ofTrecento material on the prince, Skinner has described the argument ofPetrarch in his famous letter to Francesco da Carrara in the 1370s in termsof the ‘overwhelming extent of his debt to Cicero, especially the doctrinesof 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 theletter.21 Both princely and civic humanist ideologies thus come to beprimarily informed by Cicero and the precepts of Cicero’s De officiis.

We need to clarify the relation between De officiis and the mirror-for-princes genre which is currently believed to be indebted to it. This belief isgenerating a series of claims peculiar to the pervasive logic of a CiceronianRenaissance. It is striking, for instance, to find it said that in Il PrincipeMachiavelli is attacking ‘the conventional Ciceronian precept that to attainglory and preserve his state the prince must be virtuous’.22 Cicero himself,of course, laid down no such precept, and De officiis is quite transparentlynot a mirror for a prince. It is the most violently anti-Caesarian andprofoundly anti-monarchical tract to come down to us from Romanantiquity, which is one reason it became a key text to the republicantradition, as Skinner points out.23 It does not give us the concept of avirtuous princeps, and it does not extend any image of either principe orprincipato to which Machiavelli can be said to be referring when hefamously declares his departure from ‘le cose circa uno principe immagin-ate’ or when he disagrees with a consensus of opinion in which, as he evenmore scathingly puts it, ‘molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principatiche 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 impos-sible to describe monarchy as anything other than tyranny. Of course, noneof these characteristics militate against the text being put to a whollydifferent use in a transformed, monarchical setting. This is, in fact, exactlywhat happened. But a very great deal needs to happen to Cicero’s accountof virtue in the Roman republic in order to make it plausibly yield the ideaof 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. Thisprocess of ideological recharacterisation is not, however, the surreptitiousachievement of Renaissance humanists who turn the text to their own

18 Skinner 1978, I: 117–19; Skinner 2002, II: 135. 19 Skinner 1988: 415; Skinner 2002, II: 124–5.20 Skinner 1988: 416. 21 Viroli 1992: 72. 22 Viroli 1998: 52.23 Skinner 2002, II: 27. 24 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65.

Introduction 9

advantage and silently step over its anti-monarchism. It occurs in the firstcentury as a consequence of the Roman revolution. A great deal of thecrucial redescription of the central concepts of Roman republican discourseis undertaken within De clementia. In performing this task, Seneca is aphilosophical participant in a wider process long observed in the formationof Roman imperial ideology: the construction of the person of the princepsupon the identity of the civis, and the creative reorganisation of somecentral republican concepts in order to represent a degree of continuityacross a revolutionary act of military conquest, after which, as Paul Veynepoints out most recently in his brilliant study of Seneca, ‘everythingchanged’.25

The series of reconfigurations performed in the Senecan text came toconstitute the theoretical groundwork of the Renaissance ideology of theprinceps to a remarkable extent. Take the topic debated in De officiis aboutwhether it is better to be loved or feared when acting in government.Seneca is easily the most rigorous of all Roman writers on monarchicalgovernment, pagan and Christian, to tackle Cicero’s allegation that Caesarhad become so feared and hated by his attempts to enslave the Romancitizens and make himself their princeps that it had ensured his overthrow.Seneca reprises the topic and reorganises it entirely. Part of his explanationas to why a virtuous prince is not a contradiction in terms involves Senecain a redefinition of tyranny. That redefinition produces a stark contrastbetween the love that exists between the perfectly rational, merciful princeand those whom he rules, and the fear and hate that his reverse imagecorrespondingly incurs as a result of his inhumane cruelty. The antithesisbetween tyrannical bestiality and princely manliness which so crisplydefines the persona of the Renaissance prince and which Machiavelli’stheory confounds is not Ciceronian – Cicero had nothing to say at allabout princely virtus in De officiis. However, as humanists from Petrarch toErasmus very clearly saw, the antithesis was absolutely pivotal to theSenecan construction of the Roman monarch in De clementia, where thefigure of the monstrously cruel tyrant is depicted at great length. Therewere undoubtedly considerable political, polemical, moral and rhetoricalbenefits to be gained from occasionally adducing Cicero’s words to acclaima loveable prince and to support his vision of libertas, iustitia and the respublica – a vision so markedly different from that of Cicero himself. Butthe 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 especiallyWallace-Hadrill 1981; Wallace-Hadrill 1982.

10 Introduction

centuries of ideological accretion. In the case of the ideological construc-tion of the loveable princeps in humanist princely writing, Seneca’s politicaltheory could hardly be said to be the only source of support for the ideawithin Roman imperial literature. Yet it was nevertheless crucial to thatconstruction, perhaps because it was the most concerted philosophicalattempt to explain why the virtuous prince is so loved. The fact that theexplanation was couched in terms of the prince’s merciful and humanebehaviour towards his subjects helped to make the Senecan text a favouriteplace to go for arguments in support of enlightened monarchy – argumentswhich attracted the deepest hostility of Machiavelli.

That the topic of love and fear was one which both Cicero and Senecahad analysed in different ways rather than the peculiar property of theCiceronian argument is a discursive fact about the classical texts which isvery apparent to writers on government in the Duecento. Humanists fromPetrarch onwards proved equally as adept in recurring both to the monar-chical and the republican theories in order to amplify their discussions ofthe matter. This characteristic of the history of the debate about love andfear in Renaissance political writing is not very apparent in the existinghistoriography. But it is arguably crucial to understanding whyMachiavelli’s own contribution to the debate occurs in a chapter which isheaded by the title De crudelitate et pietate; et an sit melius amari quamtimeri, vel e contra, and which opens with him declaring that ‘every princeshould want to be thought merciful, not cruel; nevertheless one should takecare not to be merciful in an inappropriate way’.26 Skinner is punctilious inreminding readers that Machiavelli’s treatment of crudelitas is here engag-ing with ‘the classic analysis of this evil, Seneca’s De clementia’; and he goeseven further in describing Machiavelli’s attack as one launched against ‘theaccepted image of the true prince, one mainly derived from Seneca’sfamous account’.27 But the same consideration should also extend toMachiavelli’s discussion of ‘whether it is better to be loved than feared’, adebate 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 crueltyand mercy, and love and fear, in his definition of the virtuous prince. The

26 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68 (Machiavelli 1988: 58): ‘dico che ciascuno principe debbe desiderare diesser 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.

27 Machiavelli 1988: xvii.28 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’).

Introduction 11

Senecan prince ‘is loved, defended and courted by the entire civitas’.29 Hissecurity is assured by the fact that his mercy wins him ‘one impregnablebulwark – 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 insuch a way, that, even if he does not become loved, he does not becomehated’ 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 seemshighly likely: as he points out, the topic is the subject of a dispute, and thatdispute had conventionally drawn in evidence from both classical writers.But Machiavelli is nevertheless intervening in a specifically Senecan con-struction of the debate, and not merely because he is writing – like Seneca –about the connections between cruelty, love and fear in a theory of thevirtuous prince. The shocking impact of his chapter consists in its blurringa distinction which only emerges in the Senecan division between humaneprince and bestial tyrant. The Ciceronian theory made no distinction forthe Renaissance to develop and for Machiavelli to subvert: in De officiis, thevery idea of a princeps is held to be an appallingly tyrannical prospect.

Armed with a knowledge of the Roman theory of the prince and itsRenaissance history, a similar degree of specificity about the object ofMachiavelli’s attacks can be identified throughout his text. The explanationfor this focus may be almost deceptively simple. In putting forward his owncontroversial case, Machiavelli is, I maintain, undermining a classicalargument which had come to inform humanist thinking in the ideologyof the mirror to a striking degree because it was an argument specificallyabout the princeps and princely government. Machiavelli is not indiscrim-inately wielding a Roman political, moral, philosophical and socialvocabulary in the direction of monarchy; he is moving it about within adeterminate conceptual field particularly indebted to one classical compo-sition for the way in which its terms had come to be related. Identifying thisdegree of structure to the apparatus under reconceptualisation does not

29 Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396: ‘a tota civitate amatur, defenditur, colitur’. I normally cite Cooper andProcope’s translation of De clementia (Seneca 1995), but here the translation is mine.

30 Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum estinexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’

31 Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 392–4 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Nam cum invisus sit, quia timetur, timeri vult, quiainvisus est.’

32 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70 (Machiavelli 1988: 59): ‘Debbe non di manco el principe farsi temerein modo, che, se non acquista lo amore, che fugga l’odio; perche puo molto bene stare insieme essertemuto e non odiato.’ But note how the causal connection between fear and hate in the Senecantheory continues the theme of the words of Ennius cited by Cicero in De officiis, II.7.23.

12 Introduction

mean overlooking the presence of other elements of classical writingintroduced by Machiavelli into Il Principe. Nor is it to overlook thefamously creative use to which Machiavelli puts Cicero’s De officiis in theone place where its presence is spectacularly evident: the passage of ChapterXVIII in which Machiavelli reworks the imagery of fox and lion, retrieveddirectly from the Ciceronian text, in order to illustrate his point about theneed for the prince to cultivate bestial qualities.33 Machiavelli’s recourse toDe officiis in this chapter illustrates his systematic use of material drawnfrom a considerable number of Roman texts in a highly complex rhetoricaldiscourse which weaves together examples, voices and images from aconsiderable range of classical auctores. But there is nevertheless a degreeof specificity in Machiavelli’s system of reference which occasions hisdescent into the Ciceronian imagery at this point in his argument as heworks his way through a series of allusions.34 The reason Machiavellishould turn to the textbook of classical republicanism in this passage inorder to envision a princely person equipped with precisely the qualitieswhich Cicero condemns in the De officiis is linked to the reason he shouldturn, in the very same paragraph, to recommend that his prince become a‘gran simulatore e dissimulatore’.35 For Machiavelli is here similarly advo-cating to his prince the imitation of another profoundly Roman republicanbete noire: the person of Catiline. Although there is a distinctive body ofrhetorical theory underpinning Machiavelli’s conception of the arts ofsimulation and dissimulation, his choice of words is almost certainlypointed in this passage. For Machiavelli’s humanist readers would havebeen all too aware that the man who had plotted to overthrow the Romanres publica and install himself as monarch had been memorably introducedby Sallust in his Bellum Catilinae as a simulator ac dissimulator.36 At thisparticular juncture of his argument, Machiavelli is reanimating spectresfrom Roman republican discourse in order to flesh out his vision of theprince, and the explanation for why words and images from Ciceronianand Sallustian passages come into the picture in this particular chapterrequires further comment.

Perhaps the greatest advantage in seeing how and why Machiavelli isintent upon ravaging the perspective of the Senecan mirror is that it helpsto illumine arguably the most obscure and vexing part of the Machiavellian

33 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72. For a recent assessment of this heavily annotated passage, seeJackson Barlow 1999.

34 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72. 35 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 73.36 Sallust 1921, 5.4: 8: ‘animus audax subdolus varius, cuius rei lubet simulator ac dissimulator’.

Introduction 13

revolution: the place of the relation between the princeps and fortuna.Machiavelli’s concern to set his audience straight on the proper way toview the effects of fortuna in the world is inextricably connected with hisassault on the conventional form of the belief that ‘it is always rational to bemoral’, as Skinner puts it.37 It is certainly true that an attempt to dispel thenotion that ‘a thing may be morally right without being expedient, andexpedient without being morally right’ lies ‘at the heart of Cicero’s MoralObligation’, as Skinner further indicates.38 But the idea that what is dignumis always what is utile can hardly be said to be the exclusive property of thatCiceronian theory. On the contrary, it is fundamental to Stoic ethics, asCicero himself explains in De officiis and as Renaissance humanists wellknew.39 It is certainly right to say that ‘Cicero takes for granted the Stoicdoctrine of the identity of the honourable and the beneficial’ in De officiis;but it nevertheless causes problems for the Roman statesman, who dis-cusses it so laboriously in part because he struggles throughout his theory tokeep the equation together.40 Cicero, after all, is not a Stoic and he nevermakes the Roman res publica coterminous with the Stoic cosmic civitaswithin which Stoic ethics were conceptualised. But the equation certainlyprovides the basis of the much more orthodox Stoic reasoning in Seneca’smirror. And that reasoning is effortlessly sustained in De clementia partlybecause of Seneca’s view of fortuna. Cicero obviously had nothing to sayabout the relationship between the prince and fortuna. Seneca, on the otherhand, discusses the terms of that relationship throughout his argument.Setting those terms is a crucial part of his theory. For the Stoic moralformula about the useful and the honourable which comes under such duressin the Machiavellian text demands that you take a very specific stance on theidea of contingency in the world in order to sustain the principle coher-ently. It demands that you deny that there is, in fact, anything contingentat all about the world. Seneca’s exhaustive attempts in his political andmoral philosophy to convert his Roman audience to a Stoic, providentialpoint of view about the character of fortuna helped turn him into theprincipal Roman philosopher of a phenomenon whose existence he wantedto argue was more apparent than real. Seneca wrote copiously aboutFortuna’s weaponry, her kingdom, her cruelty and her enslaving designsupon man while at the same time remaining entirely committed to a beliefin a divine and providential universe. When the classical mirror is pickedup by the medieval West, so is its depiction of the relationship between

37 Skinner 2000: 41. 38 Skinner 2000: 41. 39 Cicero 1913, III.2.7–4.20: 276–86.40 See Griffin’s comments in Cicero 1991: xxii, xxxv–xxxvi.

14 Introduction

fortuna and the princeps. And when Senecan moral philosophy travels frommedieval monasteries to Petrarchan humanist circles, so a thoroughlySenecan depiction of the war between the man of virtue and Fortuna, thetyrannical dominatrix, comes to inform the Renaissance imagination.

So if it is true that the belief that ‘expediency can never conflict withmoral rectitude’ is ‘adopted in its entirety by the writers of advice-books forRenaissance princes’, it would therefore follow that these writers must haveadopted the type of providentialist perspective on Fortuna which Senecaand the Stoics advocated – a perspective which was, besides, assimilable to aChristian moral position.41 Unless one turns Machiavelli into a providen-tialist, which is even more absurd than turning him into an Aristotelian, itseems unlikely, then, that he is ‘a typical representative of humanistattitudes’ in ‘his handling of this crucial theme’ of Fortuna in the penulti-mate chapter of Il Principe.42 On the contrary, it seems highly likely thatwhen Machiavelli parts company with these writers over the basic structureof their ethical thinking, he must also be departing from their commitmentto a specific view of Fortuna, rather than endorsing or developing analready existing conception of its place in the virtuous government ofpersons and states.43 Machiavelli’s idea of Fortuna is better understood asa crucial part of the subversive apparatus used to effect a conceptualrevolution, rather than the extension of an established Renaissance viewof 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 thatRenaissance humanists had indeed revivified a classical conception ofman’s relation to Fortuna and explored a new-found sense of liberty as aconsequence.45 On the contrary, it is an important aspect of my argumentabout the development of the Senecan ideology to agree that this isprecisely what happened. It is Machiavelli who is in violent disagreementwith this description of things. He sees that this attitude towards Fortunahas helped to bring about quite the reverse of liberty and it is the centralaim of his text to put the matter straight. The fact that he does so byreworking both the language and the imagery of the Senecan argument ofDe clementia in his famous chapter on Fortuna may yet prove to be anotherastonishing display of Machiavelli’s masterful economy of violence. Senecaas a providentialist obsessed with Fortuna? Machiavelli is merciless in hispunishment of this irony.

41 Skinner 2000: 41. 42 Skinner 2000: 32.43 For discussion of this point, see Newell 1987. 44 Skinner 2000: 31.45 For this argument, see Skinner 2000: 28–35.

Introduction 15

There are some obvious dangers of over-interpretation which accom-pany my focus in this book on the historical life of a specific set of ideas: offorcing a reading of Machiavelli’s text too exclusively in the light of theSenecan theory; or of stretching an understanding of the Florentine’slanguage to a point where his text would seem to be playing in a ratherrecondite manner with one particular classical argument above all others.In response first of all to the second type of objection – that I am turningMachiavelli into a literary erudit of a rather obsessional nature – I amcertainly insistent that Machiavelli is a quite brilliant orator. But I also seehim as one engaged in a heated battle, a campaign waged just beneath theapparent calm of his cool definitions and measured typologies. Thisinterpretation of Il Principe would shade into the merely suggestive if itremained at the level of the purely literary; but my reading of the text comesafter a sustained analysis of the Senecan content of princely humanismfrom the time of Petrarch onwards. I consider the various historical andideological reasons, in conjunction with an examination of the languageof Il Principe, for which it might have made sense for Machiavelli to havediscerned and attacked a distinctively Senecan body of doctrine aboutprincely rule. Whether this approach makes my analysis ultimatelyconvincing is another matter. But by making evident in the centralchapters the existence of ample humanist precedents for engaging withthe Senecan text, I nevertheless hope to bring some historical depth to myarguments.

As for the first type of objection, it should already be clear that I am quitecategorically not claiming that Il Principe is all about Seneca. I am, how-ever, claiming that an attack on a neo-Senecan ideology constitutes asignificant part of Machiavelli’s undertaking; and it is that part of thestory which I concentrate upon telling in this book. While Renaissanceprincely ideology in its humanist mode is manifestly made up of a consid-erable number of diverse classical voices and theoretical strands, there is arelatively stable conceptual framework which runs through its history andwhich derives from the Roman speculum principis, even though it comes toacquire significantly new meanings in a post-classical, Christian environ-ment. That framework determines the princely persona in a distinctivelySenecan manner. But it also helps to characterise the political body overwhich the prince rules as a free republic. While these two aspects of thetheory are inextricably interrelated, recognising the ideological utility ofthe second of them to the politics of the prince in the Renaissance may dothe most to shake us out of a calm complacency with regard toMachiavelli’s theoretical undertaking in Il Principe.

16 Introduction

One virtually structural characteristic of the fetish of the FlorentineRenaissance which Skinner’s work has done a great deal to demystify butwhich the more heavily invested spheres of Anglophone scholarship hasnevertheless continued to reproduce has been a reluctance to let the objectof its affections too near the rival definition of libertas and the res publicawhich had come to inform humanist thinking in monarchical quarterssince 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 ideaof libertas under a princeps which humanists outside Florence were inter-ested in elaborating in the Trecento, and to indicate how both conceptshave classical credentials which cannot be verified against a CiceronianRenaissance. The aim here is to contribute material to the reconstruction ofthe ideological and polemical context in which the Florentines advancedtheir own neo-classical and markedly Ciceronian argument in the earlyQuattrocento. The steady, and perhaps systematic, removal of the work ofBruni and the civic humanists from a framework in which their concernscan be seen as the product of an engagement with an opposing humanistpoint of view, an ideological response to a set of well-defined argumentspivoted upon a rival vision of Roman greatness, has enabled their docu-ments to be construed as the outcome of a relentlessly provincialisedFlorentine perspective, almost wholly fixated upon its own affairs, andincapable of finding, looking at, thinking about, and responding creativelyand polemically to a different interpretation of Rome’s past emanatingfrom a source beyond it. Part of reversing this tendency involves observingthe longevity of the conceptual apparatus with which the prince was armedin 1402 and the depth of the problem which republican thinkers fromBruni to Machiavelli faced. Indeed, what is most striking about theMilanese princely ideology by the time that Giangaleazzo Visconti reachesthe environs of Florence in 1402 is not so much that it has to hand a notionof libertas and the res publica which humanist monarchical discourse hasbeen articulating for over fifty years, but that it is the heir of a specificallyViscontean ideology which has been propagating a version of both of theseconcepts for over one hundred and twenty years. The Visconti virtuallyfound their regime on the claim to be saving the res publica and its libertas. Andthey have an impeccably classical argument with which to sustain their case.

Since my overriding concern has been to bring both the theory and itsRenaissance history into view, I have tried as far as possible to resistburdening or colonising its past with more recent conceptual concerns.The aim is to leave the way clear for an historical enquiry into how some ofthe theoretical elements of the mirror may have helped to structure the

Introduction 17

development of early-modern political experience at a practical and con-ceptual level in such a way that they have contributed to the definition ofthose later preoccupations. I hope that the notes which accompany myreading of the Senecan text indicate some of the extent to which myattempts to come to grips with Seneca’s philosophy have been immenselyhelped by the brilliant renaissance of Anglophone scholarship on ancientStoicism. Experts in this particular field may find that I have moved rathertoo quickly over the complexities which surround the place of Senecanthought within the history of Stoicism as a whole. These lacunae areregrettable, and where possible I have attempted in my notes to point thereader to more extended discussions. But I have decided to avoid – for themoment at least – becoming too preoccupied by such theoretical problemsin favour of a brisker narrative in view of the overall aim of the book. I havealso learnt a great deal from the French ‘revival of Seneca’ which began inthe early 1980s in a literature produced by a publishing circle aroundMichel Foucault.46 It is occasionally difficult to avoid describing thepolitical argument of De clementia in a terminology redolent of Foucault’sconcerns about the self, but this may be because those concerns weresometimes stated in almost hauntingly Senecan terms (Foucault’s immer-sion in Senecan philosophy is well known: he thought Seneca’s Epistulaemorales, for example, superb).47 I have certainly drawn some attention tothe development of one particular technology of the self (to cite the jargon)in the theory: the classical practice of conscience and its acquisition of ajuridical character at the earliest pre-Christian stages of its involvement inwestern European monarchical power. Generally, though, I have made aconcerted effort to try to let the prince speak for himself.

Bringing back this ghost from ancient Rome seems important for oneother pressing reason. His is the voice of sovereign reason itself, and tosuggest that it has been drowned out in the historical reconstruction ofRenaissance political discourse through mere inadvertence is implausible.A certain partiality in the reconstitution of Renaissance intellectual andideological preoccupations has had the almost exquisite effect of deprivingthe prince of one of the key arguments which he wielded for his assumptionof power, making it much easier for successive generations of modernscholars to tyrannise him. It is unnecessary to recall the seemingly endless

46 Foucault 1988; Foucault 2000: 93–106, 207–22; 223–51. For Foucault and Senecan philosophy, seeDavidson 1994 (repr. in Gutting 1994: 115–40); Veyne 1993: 1–2; Veyne 2003: ix–x; Hadot 1989:176–7; Hadot 1992.

47 For Foucault’s opinion of the Epistulae morales, see Veyne 1993: 1.

18 Introduction

references to Renaissance tyranny that have come to entitle books andarticles as well as to inform analyses of Renaissance political thought in thelast fifty years since Hans Baron’s decision to characterise not merely theVisconti 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 famouslyused the language of tyranny to describe the signori; but then Burckhardtalso began his account of the Renaissance with their story because heperceived, with almost Nietzschean lucidity, something of the violentand bloody origins of the rationality of the state in their activities.49 Thisunsettling insight was buried by Baron’s thesis of civic humanism, whichwas wedded to the Florentine claim that the Milanese prince was a tyrant(which he was, of course, from a Ciceronian perspective) and to a quaintattempt to medievalise Caesarism. But a propensity to lapse into a languageof tyranny or – even more inappropriately – despotism when confrontedwith the prince in humanist discourse is not restricted to those bound tothe culture of the Florentine Renaissance.50 Such statements are producedaccording to the logic of a Ciceronian Renaissance. For the theory ofmonarchy which is central to the Renaissance prince is pivoted on thecontention that it is virtue and virtue alone which makes a prince a prince.Renaissance humanists are quite insistent that the claim to princely status isa moral claim. They allege that a prince is so called by reason of his virtueand by virtue of his reason. This point of view cannot be articulated out of aCiceronian Renaissance. It belongs to a way of thinking about the govern-ment of the republic which only emerges after the Caesarian conquest. Itmay, of course, be desirable at some level to tyrannise the monarchicalrationality that brings us the princeps. It may also be a little predictable: thestate, after all, has a well-known tendency to cover its tracks. But to silencethe prince, deprive him of his weapons, and occlude his vision of the respublica and libertas arguably points the way to his triumph. Bringing himback into view may help to loosen his grip upon the writing of a Renaissancewhich is making him disappear to magnificently monarchical effect.

48 Baron 1955. For the very latest discussions of Baron’s thesis, see the essays in Hankins 2000.49 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.50 For an important statement of the need to ‘banish the term despot from the vocabulary of late

medieval Italian politics’, see Kohl 1998: xviii.

Introduction 19

P A R T I

The Roman Princeps

C H A P T E R 1

The Roman theory of monarchy

One hundred years and a revolution separate Cicero’s De officiis fromSeneca’s De clementia. That both texts share a political, moral and rhetoricallanguage to some extent indicates a degree of conceptual continuity inRoman political discourse across the Caesarian divide which is illustrativeof a relatively unexceptional fact about the history of ideologies: everypolitical experience, however novel, is rendered intelligible to some degreeby the use of pre-existing vocabularies. Both texts articulate political theoriesin distinctively Roman rhetorical mode; both are primarily concerned withlaying down moral precepts as the key to successful political conduct; andneither is particularly exercised by questions of constitutional definition orreform (Seneca in particular is explicitly dismissive of the importance of thisline of enquiry). Furthermore, both authors identify the cultivation andpractice of virtus as crucial to the welfare of the Roman res publica; both giveaccounts of the Roman body politic which delineate the relations betweenthis quality and the concepts of gloria, honor and fama in their prescriptionsof its proper exercise; and both are preoccupied with the extent and the effectof the domination represented by the person of Caesar on the politics of theirday. But the political distance which has been travelled between the two textsis most obviously revealed in the diametrically opposed positions towards thefigure of Caesar and the idea of monarchy which each of them take up.

T H E C I C E R O N I A N C R I T I Q U E O F M O N A R C H Y

The concept of a virtuous prince is rendered virtually a contradiction interms by Cicero’s theory of political virtue in De officiis, which associatedthe 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 Europeanrepublicanism, see the articles in Gelderen and Skinner 2002, I: 1–81.

23

outcome is very much the point of his text, given the historical circum-stances in which it was written. Cicero’s ‘conservative moral response to therevolution through which he was living’ was a moral response to theperceived threat of monarchy.2 An integral part of Cicero’s account ofrepublican virtue in De officiis is the unrelentingly scathing denunciation ofthe military dictatorship of Julius Caesar as the epitome of the moral andpolitical corruption facing the Roman res publica, accompanied by animpassioned defence of his assassination two years earlier in 44 as tyranni-cide. The killing of Caesar had been ‘the fairest of all splendid deeds’ whichhad gloriously spared the free people of Rome from monarchical servi-tude.3 The dictator had been ‘a man who longed to be king of the Romanpeople and master of every nation’.4 His will to be dominus was irrational,unjust and utterly dishonourable: ‘if anyone says that such a greed ishonourable, he is out of his mind: for he is approving the death of lawsand liberty; and counting their oppression – a foul and hateful thing – assomething glorious’.5 Caesar had been ‘a king who oppressed the Romanpeople themselves with the Roman people’s army, and forced a city thatwas not just free, but even the ruler of the nations, to be his slave . . . whatstains of guilt, what wounds do you think he had in his heart?’6 He hadbeen nothing other than a ‘tyrant, whom the city endured under force ofarms’.7 The vivid image of a vicious and oppressive tyrant, driven byinordinate desire to enslave the free people of Rome, is further fleshedout by Cicero when he says of Caesar that a particular verse of Euripideswas ‘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 withinRoman republican ideology, Cicero thus polemicises relentlessly around

2 Atkins 2000: 513.3 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.4 Cicero 1913, III.21.83: 356 (Cicero 1991: 131): ‘qui rex populi Romani dominusque omnium gentium

esse concupiverit idque perfecerit’.5 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 gloriosumputat.’

6 Cicero 1913, III.21.84–5: 358 (Cicero 1991: 132): ‘quanto pluris ei regi putas, qui exercitu populiRomani populum ipsum Romanum oppressisset civitatemque non modo liberam, sed etiam genti-bus imperantem servire sibi coegisset . . . quas conscientiae labes in animo censes habuisse, quaevulnera?’

7 Cicero 1913, II.7.23: 190 (Cicero 1991: 71): ‘huius tyranni solum, quem armis oppressa pertulitcivitas . . .’

8 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.’’ ’

24 The Roman Princeps

the idea that Caesar was driven by cupiditas regnandi, a desire to be rex, andso to reinstate the system of monarchy whose last representative had beencharacterised as Superbus and whose memory had been wiped out in theinterests of the Roman people.9

But this polemical onslaught, in which Cicero makes rex and princepsand tyrannus and dominus interchangeable terms for an enslaving monar-chical figure motivated by the vices of superbia and cupiditas, is groundedin a series of theoretical moves. Cicero’s text articulates a political andsocial code of conduct designed to prevent precisely this type of domina-tion recurring within the Roman res publica and to ensure its continuedexistence in a condition of liberty. When Cicero compares the situation inwhich the res publica had recently found itself under the rule of Caesar tothe condition of an enslaved person, he is referring to the condition definedby 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 statuhominis states at the start of Justinian’s Digest, free and unfree persons aredifferentiated by the fact that the latter are subject to the law and power ofsomeone else.11 According to this view, the free people of Rome had losttheir ability or power to live under their own jurisdiction during Caesar’speriod of domination and had suffered an illegitimate form of subjectionto the will of one of its citizens. This critique is firmly linked to his earlierargument in Book I, where Cicero introduces the view that monarchy is anoffence to justice, the virtue which does most of the work in Cicero’stheory. Justice is the quality which he upholds as ‘the most illustrious of thevirtues, on account of which men are called good’, and as ‘the mistress andqueen of virtues’.12 It is responsible for sustaining ‘the reasoning by whichthe fellowship of men with one another, and the communal life, are heldtogether’.13 But no sooner has Cicero concluded his treatment of justiceand the related topic of iniuria than we are presented with a condemnationof monarchy. He states that ‘men are led most of all to being overwhel-med by forgetfulness of justice when they slip into desiring positions of

9 See Cicero 1913, III.10.40: 308.10 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: 38–41.11 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’.12 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 etregina virtutum’.

13 Cicero 1913, I.7.20: 20 (Cicero 1991: 9): ‘ea ratio, qua societas hominum inter ipsos et vitae quasicommunitas continetur’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 25

command or honour or glory’, which leads him to cite and endorse fullythe maxim of Ennius that ‘to kingship belongs neither sacred fellowshipnor faith’.14 He explains that since monarchy is one of those types ofsituation in which ‘a plurality of people is unable to excel’, it will thereforegenerate ‘such contention that it is extremely difficult to maintain a sacredfellowship’.15 Unsurprisingly, he adduces as an instance of the degenerationof the ‘sacred fellowship’ the ‘temerity of Caesar, who overturned all thelaws of gods and men for the sake of that which he had imagined forhimself in his mistaken fancy: pre-eminence [principatus]’.16 The Caesarianwill to the principatus is the outcome of a personality and an imaginationdisordered by desire.

Cicero’s theory holds that the claim to pre-eminent virtue upon whichmonarchy is based is held to be not only deeply contentious but alsodestructive of the societas which it is the purpose of political rationality tosustain. Three explanations are evident in Cicero’s text as to why anyargument that moral pre-eminence justifies monarchy will evoke ‘suchcontention’. The first is the empirical observation that, even if it were oncethe case, there are no exceptionally virtuous men around today: as Cicerosays, ‘we do not live with men who are perfect and clearly wise’ but onlyamong citizens of ordinary moral character capable of moral improve-ment.17 The second is an historical point. Rome’s laws have sufficientlyinculcated its citizens with the requisite notion of justice and equality torender it implausible that any one individual could carry the day in arguingthat they have a better claim to be able to implement justice for all. But thethird and most searching reason which Cicero gives is that it is arguably amistake to think that it could ever be a part of sapientia, and therefore theattribute of a truly wise man, even to articulate such a view, let alone for theres publica to act upon it by instituting a monarchy. To do so is to dissociatebeing wise from being just: yet, as Cicero wants to define it, being wiseshould be above all a matter of cultivating the reasoning which is designed

14 Cicero 1913, I.8.26: 26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Maxime autem adducuntur plerique, ut eos iustitiae capiatoblivio, cum in imperiorum, honorum, gloriae cupiditatem inciderunt. Quod enim est apudEnnium: Nulla sancta societas/Nec fides regni est.’

15 Cicero 1913, I.8.26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Nam quicquid eius modi est, in quo non possint pluresexcellere, in eo fit plerumque tanta contentio, ut difficillimum sit servare ‘‘sanctam societatem’’.’

16 Cicero 1913, I.8.26 (Cicero 1991: 11): ‘Declaravit id modo temeritas C. Caesaris, qui omnia iura divinaet humana pervertit propter eum, quem sibi ipse opinionis errore finxerat, principatum.’

17 Cicero 1913, I.15.46: 48–50 (Cicero 1991: 20): ‘Quoniam autem vivitur non cum perfectis hominibusplaneque sapientibus, sed cum iis, in quibus praeclare agitur si sunt simulacra virtutis, etiam hocintellegendum puto, neminem omnino esse neglegendum, in quo aliqua significatio virtutisappareat, colendum autem esse ita quemque maxime, ut quisque maxime virtutibus his lenioribuserit ornatus, modestia, temperantia, hac ipsa, de qua multa iam dicta sunt, iustitia.’

26 The Roman Princeps

to preserve the fellowship and society of the republic, and under Cicero’sdescription, this reasoning cannot incorporate the type of argument neces-sary to advocate the subordination of citizens to the direction and ius of aman of pre-eminent virtue. For Cicero’s theory, as Atkins points out,‘wisdom was not wisdom without justice’, an argument which Cicerohimself upholds with reference to Plato.18 Having socialised the virtue ofsapientia, Cicero is unwilling to regard the grounds for arguing for suchsubordination as anything other than contentious, for they will always haveto be found in a type of knowledge which threatens to supplant, rather thansustain, social and political life. These types of argument are profoundlydissociative in their implications. They operate with a notion of a superiorrationality to which they make an appeal and which Cicero, as an academicsceptic, is reluctant to recognise; and they are traced firmly in his text tothose men who are regularly held to be magnanimous and wise.

Cicero’s need to clarify the value of these qualities in the republic ispronounced because, as he indicates himself, the recent threat of monarchyposed by Caesar had been remarkably ‘troubling . . . in that the desire forhonour, command, power and glory usually exist in men of the greatestspirit and most brilliant intellectual talent’.19 As problematic for Cicero asit had been for Aristotle, magnanimity is held to be a deeply ambivalentquality in a citizen in De officiis. The problem is expressed succinctly inBook I:

It is a hateful fact that loftiness and greatness of spirit all too easily give birth towilfulness and an excessive desire for pre-eminence [cupiditas principatus] . . . themore outstanding an individual is in greatness of spirit, the more he desirescomplete pre-eminence [princeps], or rather to be the sole ruler. But when youdesire to surpass all others, it is difficult to respect the fairness that is a special markof justice. Consequently, such men allow themselves to be defeated neither byargument nor by any public or legal obligation. Only too often do they emerge inpublic life as bribers and agitators, seeking to acquire as much wealth as possible,preferring violent pre-eminence to equality through justice.20

18 Atkins 2000: 513; Cicero 1913, I.19.63: 64.19 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.’20 Cicero 1913, I.19.64: 66 (Cicero 1991: 26): ‘Sed illud odiosum est, quod in hac elatione et magnitud-

ine animi facillime pertinacia et nimia cupiditas principatus innascitur . . . ut quisque animimagnitudine maxime excellet, ita maxime vult princeps omnium vel potius solus esse. Difficileautem est, cum praestare omnibus concupieris, servare aequitatem, quae est iustitiae maximepropria. 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 etsint vi potius superiores quam iustitia pares.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 27

Wanting and achieving pre-eminence – establishing oneself as princeps – isyet 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 moreeasily he is driven by desire for glory to injustice. This is slippery groundindeed . . .’21 The man of magnanimity wants to be recognised for hisgreatness in a way which threatens justice, whereas Cicero wants to main-tain that ‘a true and wise greatness of spirit judges that deeds and not gloryare the basis of the honourableness that nature most seeks. It prefers not toseem princeps but to be so.’22 What lurks behind this apparent concession isthe possibility of a true vir sapiens whose wisdom and virtue really do singlehim out as princeps. Cicero duly gives room to some arguments which laterbecome central to Seneca’s monarchical theory: the man of magnanimitydespises externals, seeks nothing other than ‘what is honourable andseemly’, and is convinced that ‘he ought not to be subject to any man orany passion or any accident of fortune’.23 He gives us a glimpse of a conceptof liberty which also comes to the fore in Seneca.24 But he clearly perceivesa sovereign tenor in these doctrines, repeating his warning that ‘the desirefor glory . . . destroys the liberty for which men of great spirit ought to be incompetition’.25

If the spectre of Caesar haunts Cicero’s critique of magnanimity, thedifficulties which magnanimitas and sapientia present are the consequenceof more than recent history. In availing himself of some of the key conceptsof Stoic ethics in order to elaborate a political morality suitable for aspecific, historically defined political community composed of agentsdescribed as men of ordinary moral capacity, Cicero repeatedly encountersa conflict which attends upon his dislocation of Stoic ethical teaching fromits metaphysical framework, and, in particular, from the type of commun-ity in which it had been envisaged and made to work by a succession ofStoic philosophers after Zeno: the cosmic city of gods and men. AsSchofield’s classic work has shown, Cicero was well aware of this doctrine,

21 Cicero 1913, I.19.65: 66 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘Facillime autem ad res iniustas impellitur, ut quisquealtissimo animo est, gloriae cupiditate; qui locus est sane lubricus’.

22 Cicero 1913, I.19.65: 66 (Cicero 1991: 26–7): ‘Vera et sapiens animi magnitudo honestum illud, quodmaxime natura sequitur, in factis positum, non in gloria iudicat principemque se esse mavult quamvideri.’

23 Cicero 1913, I.20.66: 68 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘cum persuasum est nihil hominem, nisi quod honestumdecorumque sit, aut admirari aut optare aut expetere oportere nullique neque homini nequeperturbationi animi nec fortunae succumbere’.

24 Cicero 1913, I.20.67: 68 (Cicero 1991: 27): ‘solum id, quod honestum sit, bonum iudices et ab omnianimi perturbatione liber sis’.

25 Cicero 1913, I.20.68: 70 (Cicero 1991: 28): ‘Cavenda etiam est gloriae cupiditas, ut supra dixi, pro quamagnanimis viris omnis debet esse contentio.’

28 The Roman Princeps

for he records a description of it in his account of Stoic theology in Denatura deorum:

In the first place the universe was created for the sake of gods and men, and thethings it contains were provided and contrived for the enjoyment of men. For theuniverse is, as it were, the common home of gods and men, or a city that belongs toboth. 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 ondivine providence. The Stoics held that the universe was organised andanimated purposefully and benevolently by an immanent force which theyidentified with logos or ratio. In their writings, this concept was associatedwith, and personified variously as, ‘nature’, ‘providence’, ‘fate’, ‘fortune’,‘god’, ‘the gods’ and ‘Zeus’. Reason directs the universe and the rationalbeings for which it was created, and both gods and men are able toparticipate in this divine scheme of things and live in harmony with itbecause of their rational faculty. This shared capacity to reason is under-stood to provide men and gods with the basis of a community since itsupplies them with a notion of justice and law. The law by which both menand 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 whohave 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 aresufficiently rational – who share, that is, in recta ratio, or ‘right reason’ – toadhere to its law, and thereby to a notion of justice; but the cosmic city isnot a political entity with written, positive laws, and its members are boundby an authority which is not located in any terrestrial institution, but inreason itself: the source of law is internalised, ‘making it something like thevoice of conscience’.28 The state of perfected rationality which the Stoicsidentify with virtue – and therefore wisdom – is thus attained by living inaccordance with the dictates of nature or natural law. In so acting accordingto right reason, we participate within a cosmic community. Given this

26 Cicero 1933, II.62.154: 272: ‘Principio ipse mundus deorum hominumque causa factus est, quaequein eo sunt ea parata ad fructum hominum et inventa sunt. Est enim mundus quasi communisdeorum 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 recentrecension of Schofield’s interpretation of Stoic ethics, see Schofield 2003.

27 Cicero 1928, I.7.23: 322: ‘inter quos porro est communio legis, inter eos communio iuris est; quibusautem haec sunt inter eos communia, et civitatis eiusdem habendi sunt’. For the translation anddiscussion, see Schofield 1999: 68, esp. n. 12.

28 Schofield 1999: 69.

The Roman theory of monarchy 29

providential character of the universe, Stoic ethics held that nothingbeneficial could possibly be gained from acting contrary to reason, andthat developing the capacity to live one’s life according to reason – acquiringand 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 historicallybounded political community which was not co-extensive with the cosmiccivitas. Given that Cicero’s citizen was not coterminous with the Stoic virsapiens, his obligations to his local political community occasioned conductwhich conflicted with the dictates of Stoic natural law – and therefore withhis obligations as a member of the cosmic community – in crucial areas: theinstitution of private property contravened natural law, as Cicero himselfindicates in his defence of the system, while the assassination of Caesarcould only be justified in terms of the interests of the Roman Republic.29 Inan extended tussle to uphold the Stoic rule that what is dignum is alwayswhat is utile, Cicero’s theory moves uneasily between redefining thehonourable in terms of the rationality necessary to the republic’s flourish-ing, and conceding exceptions to the Stoic understanding of the rule whenit is applied in the face of clashes between what is dignum in the Stoic moraluniverse with what is utile to the Roman res publica. The negotiation ismade all the more delicate by the fact that Cicero cuts loose his communityfrom a providential cosmology: in keeping fortuna divorced from natura,Cicero brings contingency into play in a res publica already contendingmoral and political claims on the grounds of probable justification throughargument and debate within deliberative assemblies.30

T H E S E N E C A N T H E O R Y O F T H E P R I N C E

De clementia provides an account of the necessity of the profoundly alteredpolitical state of affairs engendered by the institution of a princeps at thehead of the Roman res publica. In order to legitimate precisely whatCicero’s theory had sought to avert – the subjection of the Roman populusto the ius of a princeps – the fundamental theoretical movement pervadinghis text is Seneca’s consistent application of the monological concept ofStoic ratio to his material. His first move is to extend the Roman res publicaacross the entire globe. In describing the emperor as a universal monarch

29 For the discussion of private property, see Cicero 1913, I.7.21: 22. For Caesar’s assassination as an actbenefiting the Roman people, see Cicero 1913, III.4.19: 286.

30 For the conflict between natura and fortuna, see Cicero 1913, I.33.120: 122.

30 The Roman Princeps

from the very outset, ruling over ‘all mortals’, ‘with power of life and deathover nations’, entrusted with the duty of accounting, ‘should the godsdemand it’, for ‘the whole human race’, Seneca makes the political societyover which the princeps is entitled to rule worldwide in extent.31 By settingup his theory in this way, Seneca appears to start mapping out the Romancivitas as the Stoic cosmic city. In his ethics, Seneca refers to the doctrine ofthe 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 – inwhich gods and men are contained, in which we look not to this or that corner, butmeasure the bounds of our civitas with the sun; the other to which the particularcircumstances of birth have assigned us . . .32

In De clementia, Seneca makes Stoic ratio the governing principle of hispolitical community, which thereby comes to share the same rationality,law and justice as the cosmic city. The two res publicae begin to beidentified at a theoretical level. Although it is by no means a smooth orstable alignment, the manoeuvre enables Seneca to ground the Romanimperial ideology of virtus upon a strictly Stoic notion of reason. He canthen immediately inscribe a principle of universal law and justice upon theperson of the prince in order to justify the emperor’s lack of any formalobligation in terms of the human, positive law or agency or constitutionalrequirement at a local level. The virtue of Seneca’s princeps explains andlegitimates his absolutism: by definition, the prince is bound only to ahigher, universal moral law. Seneca proceeds to claim that, in the absenceof any constitutional or legal restraints, virtue and virtue alone is thecriterion for legitimate rule. Everything comes down to the virtuouscharacter of the ruler, argues Seneca, asserting quite explicitly that ‘noone could conceive of anything more becoming to a ruler than mercy,whatever the manner of his accession to power and whatever its legalbasis’.33 He spells out the lesson: ‘what distinguishes a tyrant from a kingare his actions, not the name’.34 And having made constitutional

31 Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–5: 356–8 (Seneca 1995: 128–9): ‘ex omnibus mortalibus . . . vitae necisque gentibusarbiter . . . qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat in mea manu positum est . . . dis immortalibus,si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum’.

32 Seneca 1932b, 4.1: 186–8: ‘Duas res publicas animo complectamur, alteram magnam et verepublicam, qua dii atque homines continentur, in qua non ad hunc angulum respicimus aut adillum, sed terminos civitatis nostrae cum sole metimur; alteram, cui nos adscripsit condicionascendi.’ The translation is from Schofield 1999: 93. For ‘the greater city’, see also De ira, II.31.7.

33 Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Excogitare nemo quicquam poterit, quod magisdecorum regenti sit quam clementia, quocumque modo is et quocumque iure praepositusceteris erit.’

34 Seneca 1928a, I.12.1: 392 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘Tyrannus autem a rege factis distat, non nomine.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 31

definitions and nomenclature unimportant, he then makes a further movewhich secures the utility of his theory to royal regimes for centuries tocome: he reintroduces the hated word rex to Roman political discourse andmakes it an equivalent term throughout his text for princeps and imperator.He never addresses Nero directly as rex, but he uses the word and itscognates repeatedly, interchangeably and with an affected indifference tothe 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 ofpublic order’.35 This consistent equivalence has two related effects. One isthat, in aligning the language of the rex to that of the princeps, Seneca’s textneutralises the negative evaluation traditionally associated with the wordrex in particular and with the vocabulary of kingship in general. The otherconsequence is that it enables Seneca to establish a conduit for Greekkingship theory into Roman imperial ideology and thereby to introducetopics found in earlier Stoic and Hellenistic treatises on autocratic king-ship, most notably in the two treatises of Isocrates, Nicocles and AdNicoclem, and in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, where the theme of the virtuousmonarch had been extensively discussed.36 The result of these innovationsis a frequently observed one: the first book of De clementia has the genericcharacter of a book on kingship.

In deriving the political authority of the Roman monarch from hismoral capacity, Seneca has to explain why one person above all otherrational 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 ofparticipating as rational beings, the structure of Seneca’s political societysuggests that only one person is fully qualified for membership; theadmission of the others seems to have been temporarily deferred. Senecaneeds to justify the principle of subordination now operative within theRoman monarchy. There are occasions in the theory where Seneca drawsanalogies between the prince’s rule of the res publica and the gods’ rule ofthe universe in such a way as to suggest a less than conventionally Stoicbasis for his theory – as if the earthly civitas were not actually confluentwith the cosmic civitas, but rather its analogue.37 Despite such variations,

35 Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘principes regesque et quocumque alio nomine sunttutores status publici’.

36 For the royal aspect of the princely ideology and for the loci drawn from Isocrates, Xenophon andothers, see Griffin 1976: 129–71, esp. 144–5.

37 The theory may exhibit a less than canonical reading of the doctrine at I.7.1–2, for instance (Seneca1928a: 374). For a discussion of the use of both Stoic and Platonic elements in monarchical theory inthe later Empire, see Schofield 1999: 84–92; for Middle Stoicism’s re-engagement with Platonism

32 The Roman Princeps

deviations and apparent unorthodoxies, Seneca must nevertheless straight-forwardly see to it that the bond of obligation between prince and thosewhom he rules cannot be overridden or ‘trumped’ in any way by the termsof an individual’s membership of the more extensively structured moralcommunity which his own Stoic philosophy predicated. Seneca’s solu-tion is to equate the princeps with the heroic figure of the Stoic vir sapiens,whose state of perfected rationality, and therefore of perfect virtus, madehim such a pivotal figure of moral reflection and emulation in Stoic andSenecan ethics. And since the prince is identifiable as just such a wiseman, he will understand that he is ‘born to assist the community andpromote the common good’.38 He will therefore always ensure thatthe bonum commune and never a partisan interest is upheld by his govern-ment. This point helps to validate Seneca’s description of the monarchyas a res publica, now extensively restructured along universal lines. Italso follows that if the prince is just such an exceptionally andperfectly rational person, his ius or lex is morally compelling in absoluteterms.

In the incomplete second book of the treatise, Seneca moves seamlesslyfrom praising the emperor to discoursing on the vir sapiens. He contendsthat the identity of the prince as a true vir sapiens is discernible in hisdemonstration of divine clementia above all of the other virtues. Clementiais conceptualised as a supra-legal quality, operating over and above existinglocal law. It is thus the quintessential virtue of absolutism, and its exercise isheld to be in conformity with universal ius. The effect of this conceptualstructure is that, in demonstrating his clementia, the emperor can beregarded not only as the embodiment of sapientia, but also as the epitomeof iustitia. The seeming contradiction is that it is in the operation of hispower beyond and above human law – in acts of clemency in the face ofinjustices caused by human moral infirmity – that Seneca’s princeps showshimself to be most in conformity with ius and lex, understood in Stoicterms as synonyms of divine ratio. One can now see the sense of Seneca’sopening claim that the prince has guaranteed not only ‘security deep andabundant’ for the Roman populus but also ‘law raised above all violations oflaw’.39 For as Seneca later says, the truly merciful prince is a supremely

from the mid-second century BC onwards, see Sedley 2003: 20–4; for Platonism and Seneca’s ideasabout 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.

38 Seneca 1928a, II.6.3: 440–2 (Seneca 1995: 163): ‘in commune auxilium natus ac bonum publicum, exquo dabit cuique partem’.

39 Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta, affluens . . . ius supra omnem iniuriampositum’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 33

rational person who knows how to judge in accordance with cosmicprinciples of law and justice: ‘clemency exercises free judgement: it judgesnot by legal formula but by what is equitable and good’.40 To be a virtuousprince is to be a person who is capable of possessing and exercising this typeof liberum arbitrium. It is to be a properly free person. Somewhat para-doxically, Seneca’s theory then binds the prince to this divine law byformulating a severe ethical regime for him. He is subjected – indeedenslaved, as one passage puts it – to the rule of universal ratio, the lexnaturae.41

While the legalistic character of Seneca’s political theory helps him tolegitimate the conquest and subjection involved in the Roman revolution,one needs to resist mentally converting its moral terminology into a purelylegal idiom. If the idea of the cosmic city ‘mediates the transition fromrepublicanism to natural law theory’, then De clementia occupies a mid-point in that transition, sharing a little in the ‘Janus-facing’ character whichSchofield identifies in earlier Stoicism.42 Many of the Stoic elementsidentifiable in Seneca’s political and moral thought were later incorporatedinto the Roman legal codes; but the effectiveness of Seneca’s theory is thatit utilises the Stoic idea of a moral law at the same time as it appropriatesestablished concepts of Roman moral and political discourse and familiarrhetorical strategies. Seneca is a sophisticated magister of the ars rhetorica.He writes in his capacity as an informal political advisor to the Romanemperor, Nero Caesar, to whom the text is addressed. De clementia wascomposed between December 55 and December 56, shortly after the youngprince’s accession to the imperial throne in 54.43 But Seneca is also Nero’sformer praeceptor in the traditional aristocratic syllabus of the studialiberalia, and his text is an argument constructed according to recognisablerhetorical rules articulated and embodied in the theory and practice ofRoman classical oratory.44 In De clementia, as elsewhere, Seneca is con-cerned to convey Stoic doctrine, often criticised for its dryness, in aconventionally Roman rhetorical mode of discourse. His exposition ofmoral precepts proceeds in particular by means of exemplification, thus

40 Seneca 1928a, II.7.3: 444 (my translation): ‘Clementia liberum arbitrium habet; non sub formula,sed ex aequo et bono iudicat.’

41 Explicit reference to the lex naturae is at Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408, but the idea is expressedthroughout the text’s arguments in various legal metaphors. The role of conscience is discussedbelow.

42 Schofield 1999: 102–3. 43 Seneca 1995: 119.44 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.

34 The Roman Princeps

accommodating itself to a method of argument preferred by Romanpolitical society.45

Seneca similarly draws upon a familiar moral vocabulary. The virtue ofclemency is one for which Cicero had fulsomely praised Julius Caesar inthe Pro Marcello and Pro Ligario, where the basic structure of the conceptwhich Seneca elaborates and refines – extra-judicial and anchored to a Stoicpsychology – had already been sketched.46 Clementia, closely accompaniedby magnanimitas, heads the distinctive typology of virtues at the core of thetheory. Seneca specifies these two qualities more than any other as the markof a true prince. The rest of the typology is constituted by a range ofrepeatedly named virtues over and above the sapientia and iustitia neces-sarily in possession of a prince modelled on the Stoic vir sapiens. Several ofthem are equally well established within Roman political vocabulary, butthey come to play a far more important role in the circumstances ofabsolute power which Seneca is theorising. In particular, Seneca insiststhat his prince be mitis, and he reiterates forcefully the need to cultivate inparticular the virtues of moderatio, temperantia, mansuetudo, lenitas,humanitas and patientia.47 Mildness, moderation, temperance, gentleness,calmness, humaneness, patience: these states of mind provide the psycho-logical conditions necessary for the successful performance of acts ofclemency and magnanimity in particular, but they are crucial in a moreextensive way for their mitigating effect on the mind of a prince uponwhose agency the res publica is now entirely dependent for its well-being.Perturbations of the psyche caused by emotional states of mind such asanger were identified in Stoic and Senecan ethics as manifestations of anirrational person and as eliminible only through the combination ofmoral education and habitual practice. But the unhelpful consequencesof those perturbations are amplified to the point of mortal danger incircumstances where the vir sapiens heads the body politic.48 Anger is themark of a demented, insane agent; and the res publica risks losing itsmind if its ruler loses his temper. But the moral typology is also part of amore controversial argument which runs throughout the text. Its elements

45 For this point, see Sedley 2001: 151.46 See especially the passages at Cicero, Pro Marcello, 8–9; 17–20; 31; Pro Ligario, 6–8; 10; 13–16.47 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; formoderatio, 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.

48 For discussions of ira in Roman intellectual history, see Harris 2001.

The Roman theory of monarchy 35

are used to construct a regime of self-mastery for the Senecan princewhich is said to guarantee not only his own but also the Roman people’sfreedom. Veyne’s observation that ‘everything changed after the Romanconquest, once liberty . . . was forced to bow before Caesarism’ extends tothe content of Seneca’s theory, where the very concept of libertas undergoesa dramatic transformation as he sets out to justify the conquest of theRoman people by making its new master a fully self-mastering Stoic homoliber.49

Yet before any of these conceptual manoeuvres can be undertaken,Seneca faces the task of coming to terms with the rhetorical genre withinwhich he is required to operate in order to proffer his theory at all. If inpractice Cicero had proved extremely adept at the laudatio – Pro Marcello isan outstanding example of the most unrepublican of virtues, that ofclemency, lauded in the most unrepublican of rhetorical modes – thegenre had been repeatedly disparaged in his rhetorical writings as puerile,ostentatious, pompous, sophistical, Greek, effeminate and alien to thepolitical practices of the Republic, entirely unsuited to the manly battlesof Roman public life.50 To consider it appropriate that speeches in regularpolitical life should be devoted to the sustained praise of the virtues of oneliving member of the political community was a categorically unrepublicanrhetorical perspective, implying an inordinate degree of importanceattached to one individual’s contribution to government. Under thePrincipate, the effective subordination of senatorial debate to the imperialwill and the displacement of the deliberative by the demonstrative genre asthe increasingly dominant mode of political address within public lifepresented a problem for Seneca. The articulation of a theoretical visionof monarchy before the Roman emperor involved a delicate negotiation ofpower which can be seen to have necessitated the entire structure of his text.Seneca faced the dilemma of possibly risking his life if his audiencedetected a discrepancy between the normative strictures of his account ofmonarchy and the present political circumstances under which it waselaborated. 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 talkingabout.

49 Veyne 2003: 152 (and 17 for Stoic self-mastery and its involvement in Roman imperial ideology viaSenecan theory).

50 See in particular Cicero, De oratore, II.341; Orator, 11.37 and 13.42.

36 The Roman Princeps

M I R R O R S , V I S I O N A N D T H E F I G U R E O F I M P E R S O N A T I O N

Seneca’s elegant and daring solution to this problem is to split Nero intotwo persons:

I have undertaken to write on the subject of clemency, Nero Caesar, in order toact, in a certain way, in place of a mirror, and hold forth you to yourself as you areon the point of attaining the very greatest pleasure of all.51

By the conclusion of his opening sentence, Seneca’s text has generated twoNeros with his promise to hold forth – ‘te tibi ostenderem’ – but his syntaxmakes 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 ofthe word speculum in this sentence that has famously marked out hisDe clementia as the earliest surviving example of a ‘mirror-for-princes’text. Seneca’s general attitude towards the use of mirrors in contemporaryethical, social and sexual practices is actually deeply negative, which is whyhe 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 textproduces, and the type of seeing required for its inspection, is, inSeneca’s opinion, of a different and superior order to that which is involvedin the use of physical mirrors. The philosopher’s text promises to offer atrue reflection. Seneca sets up a strong contrast from the very start betweentwo ways of looking at the world: through reasoned discourse, he wants tosubstitute rational reflection, and indeed self-reflection, for a view of theworld and the self which is uninformed by ratio. For Seneca, as the mostrecent translators of De clementia point out, clemency is ‘a mental con-dition’.53 There are rational principles which need to be grasped about thequality and importance of mercy – what it is, why and when you should useit, and so on. They cannot be apprehended merely by empirical observa-tion; and being merciful is never a matter of calculating outcomes. Timeand again, Seneca warns against the dangers of relying simply upon thecorporeal eye as a guide to the appropriateness of merciful action. To do so

51 Seneca 1928a, I.1.1: 356 (translation mine): ‘Scribere de clementia, Nero Caesar, institui, ut quodammodo speculi vice fungerer et te tibi ostenderem perventurum ad voluptatem maximam omnium.’

52 For their lack of effectiveness in ethical practices, see Seneca 1928b, II.36.1–3: 248; for their distortingeffects, 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).

53 Seneca 1995: 124–5. In addition to Procope and Cooper’s remarks, note also Veyne’s indication of thecrux of the matter: ‘In sum, what was essentially at stake in politics was the mental attitude of themaster. Seneca was announcing that a new era had arrived’ (Veyne 2003: 17).

The Roman theory of monarchy 37

is to run the risk of confusing mercy with pity, or misericordia, whichSeneca regards as entirely irrational. Defining misericordia as ‘the vice of apusillanimous mind that succumbs to the sight of others’ ills’, and there-fore something which ‘good men will avoid’, Seneca derides the tendencyto be moved to act on such a basis as characteristic of ‘old women’ who areso ‘moved’ by the tears of the very worst criminals that they would releasethem from prison if they could.54 To be moved to action by such anunthinking and emotional way of looking at the world is a failure of reasonwhich Seneca repeatedly connects with weak-sightedness. ‘Pity is a sicknessof the mind caused by the sight of other people’s miseries’; and ‘pity looksat Fortuna, not the causes; whereas mercy joins in with reason’.55 ForSeneca, nothing happens without a reason, and we should not be blindedby Fortuna, whose effect on the world is only apparently contingent andirrational. To react in an emotional way to adversity, to become sorrowful,to be plagued by tristitia at such sights is not conducive ‘to discerningthings, to thinking about what can usefully be done, to avoiding danger, toreckoning about justice’.56

Clear-sightedness, by contrast, is the property of someone whose visualperception is sufficiently anchored in a rational comprehension of theworld. By extension, since ‘mercy joins in with reason’, to be merciful isto be similarly clear-sighted: one sees the reasons how, why and when itmakes sense to act mercifully. The purpose of De clementia is to give thosereasons. At the same time, in line with established rhetorical theory, Senecarealises that the best way of convincing Nero of his case is to enlist a series ofrhetorical figures and tropes and assemble an ‘expression in words of agiven situation in such a way that it seems to be a matter of seeing ratherthan of hearing’ the facts of the case, thus converting his audience into aspectator.57 If the allusion to the speculum allows Seneca to begin a longmetaphor in which visual perception is characterised as an attribute of the

54 Seneca 1928a, II.5.1: 438 (Seneca 1995: 161): ‘clementiam mansuetudinemque omnes boni viripraestabunt, misericordiam autem vitabunt; est enim vitium pusilli animi ad speciem alienorummalorum succidentis. Itaque pessimo cuique familiarissima est; anus et mulierculae sunt, quaelacrimis nocentissimorum moventur, quae, si liceret, carcerem effringeret.’

55 Seneca 1928a, II.5.4: 438 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘misericordia est aegritudo animi ob alienarum miser-iarum speciem’; Seneca 1928a, II.5.1: 438 (Seneca 1995: 161): ‘misericordia non causam, sed fortunamspectat; clementia rationi accedit’.

56 Seneca 1928a, II.6.1: 440 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘tristitia inhabilis est ad dispiciendas res, utiliaexcogitanda, periculosa vitanda, aequa aestimanda’. For further discussion of the vice of tristitia,see below.

57 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.40, vol. IV: 56 (citing translation at 57): ‘quaedam forma rerum ita expressaverbis, ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri’. For an analysis of this manoeuvre as a process ofconversion – an analysis to which this reading of Seneca is indebted – see Skinner 1996: 182–8.

38 The Roman Princeps

mind, the metaphorical use of the verb ostendere simultaneously begins afigure of thought that dominates the structure of the preface. According toQuintilian, writing a generation later, ‘holding forth’ was an extremelyimportant aspect of rhetorical practice which the successful orator neededto understand and master.58 He asserts that ‘it is a great virtue to express oursubject clearly and in such a way that it seems to be actually seen’; and headds that ‘a speech does not adequately fulfill its purpose or attain the totaldomination it should have if it goes no further than the ears, and the judgefeels 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 holdforth’ is one which succeeds in affecting the minds of the audience as if theywere actually present at the occurrence under description.60 Quintilian’sinterpretation of the role and importance of holding forth has beensummarised succinctly by Quentin Skinner: ‘He argues that it may bepossible to employ figurative language with so much vividness and imme-diacy that our audience comes to ‘‘see’’ what we are trying to describe, andis thereby roused to accept and endorse our vision of events.’61 InQuintilian’s view, the orator needs to develop his capacity to fantasise, tovisualise in his mind images of things that are not present. Having pro-duced a vivid picture in his mind of what he wants to convey, theaccomplished orator will set about describing this image in a powerfulway in order to move his audience.

Seneca develops one particular figure in order to express his fantasy. Thete which he proceeds to hold forth to Nero is an imagined Nero whoappears in the prologue to make a long, eloquent speech. This image isproduced by a figure of thought known in rhetorical theory as ‘fictionespersonarum’, or the ‘figuring of persons’: the figure of impersonation.62 Sowhen 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 For ‘holding forth’, see Skinner 1996: 185–6.59 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, plenedominatur oratio, si usque ad aures valet atque ea sibi iudex, de quibus cognoscit, narrari credit, nonexprimi et oculis mentis ostendi.’

60 Quintilian 2001, VI.2.32, vol. III: 60 (my translation): ‘quae non tam dicere videtur quamostendere’. For antecedents in the Roman tradition, see Cicero, De inventione, I.54.104, and AdHerennium, IV.34.45. Of the Roman theorists, it is Quintilian who, in providing a coherent theoryof an established practice, systematically uses the verb ostendere to describe this aspect of rhetoricalperformance.

61 Skinner 1996: 183. 62 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.29, vol. IV: 50 : ‘fictiones personarum’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 39

which Seneca is about to produce through an act of impersonation. Animage of Nero does indeed ‘appear’ , addressing his audience with a speechthat dominates Seneca’s prologue. Seneca goes on to say:

For even though the true fruit of virtuous deeds is simply to have performed themand there is no more fitting reward for the virtues apart from the virtues them-selves, it is nevertheless enjoyable to inspect and to go through the good state ofone’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 foranother’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 ofthe gods? I am the judge with power of life and death over nations, and the lot andstate of everyone has been placed in my hands. All dispensations of fortune tomortals are made through pronouncements on my lips. My verdict is what givespeople and cities cause to rejoice. No region anywhere flourishes but by my willand favour. These swords in their countless thousands, sheathed through the peacethat I bring, will be drawn at my nod. The extermination or banishment ofnations, the granting or loss of their liberty, the enslavement of kings, or theircoronation, 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 punishmentby anger or youthful impulse, nor by the rashness and obstinacy of men, whichwrenches the patience, from even the calmest breasts, nor even by the glory,fearsome but common among those of high command, of parading one’s powerthrough terror. My sword has been sheathed, indeed hung away altogether. I havespared to the utmost even the meanest blood. There is no one, whatever else hemay 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 asthough 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’syouthfulness, by another’s extreme old age. I have granted pardon to one manbecause of his high position, to another because of his low estate. Whenever Icould 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 verusfructus sit fecisse nec ullum virtutum pretium dignum illis extra ipsas sit, iuvat inspicere et circumirebonam conscientiam, tum immittere oculos in hanc immensam multitudinem discordem, seditio-sam, impotentem, in perniciem alienam suamque pariter exsultaturam, si hoc iugum fregerit, et italoqui secum: ‘‘Egone ex omnibus mortalibus placui electusque sum, qui in terris deorum vicefungerer? Ego vitae necisque gentibus arbiter; qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in meamanu positum est; quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit, meo ore pronuntiat; ex nostroresponso laetitiae causas populi urbesque concipiunt; nulla pars usquam nisi volente propitioque mefloret; haec tot milia gladiorum, quae pax mea comprimit, ad nutum meum stringentur; quasnationes funditus excidi, quas transportari, quibus libertatem dari, quibus eripi, quos reges mancipiafieri quorumque capiti regium circumdari decus oporteat, quae ruant urbes, quae oriantur, mea iuris

40 The Roman Princeps

As a clarification of the character and types of political power at theemperor’s disposal, this speech is astonishingly direct. The prince is heldto act ‘in place of’ the gods as their vicegerent. He is also understood to beacting on their behalf, as a trustee of divine concerns, obliged to keep andrender an account of his administration of the world.64 As imperator, theprinceps retains supreme command of the armed forces. Full jurisdictionalpower, both executive and legislative, resides in him alone. His lips and hismouth articulate the law governing the body politic. His position inrelation to human, or ‘positive’, law is absolute: as Griffin, Cooper andProcope all indicate, the significance of the phrase ‘I watch over myself asthough the laws . . . will call me to account’ lies in Seneca’s use of ‘asthough’, which effectively transfers the custodial function of external lawsgoverning the exercise of political power to the person of the princehimself.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 entirelyunobliged. Watching over himself, the prince is self-reflexive and intro-spective: the image is figured talking to himself and looking inward.66 Theprince renders ratio to himself and to the gods alone. Conscience becomes acrucial attribute of the princeps whom Seneca holds forth. It is striking thatthe impersonated speech of the prince which provides us with the part ofthe theory delineating the prince’s relationship to the laws is imagined as adramatic soliloquy delivered by a conscientious prince reflecting upon hisself: conscientiousness is a condition of absolutism. The burden whichSeneca makes the prince carry for his clementia – the virtue of conquestexercised towards defeated enemies over whom the victor wields the powerof life and death with the force of the sword – is packed into a compellingethical regime of self-conquest, self-surveillance and self-examination.Freed from human law, the person of the prince finds himself confrontinganother type of tribunal altogether.

dictio est. In hac tanta facultate rerum non ira me ad iniqua supplicia compulit, non iuvenilisimpetus, non temeritas hominum et contumacia, quae saepe tranquillissimis quoque pectoribuspatientiam extorsit, non ipsa ostentandae per terrores potentiae dira, sed frequens magnis imperiisgloria. Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est, summa parsimonia etiam vilissimisanguinis; 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 inlucem evocavi, rationem redditurus sim. Alterius aetate prima motus sum, alterius ultima; aliumdignitati donavi, alium humilitati; quotiens nullam inveneram misericordiae causam, mihi peperci.Hodie dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’’ ’

64 For a discussion of Nero’s vicegerency, see Fears 1975: 486–96.65 Griffin 2000: 536–7. For Procope and Cooper’s comments, see Seneca 1995: 124.66 ‘loqui secum’ and ‘inspicere’. See n. 63 above.

The Roman theory of monarchy 41

T H E P R A C T I C E A N D P L E A S U R E S O F C O N S C I E N C E

By figuring the prince in the process of examining his conscience, Seneca isadvocating to the emperor the need to place himself regularly before theiudex of ratio, the judge of reason, whose seat of judgement is in themind.67 In the case of both of the interior monologues which Senecaprovides as examples of this practice – the first in De ira, where he isadvocating a regime of daily self-examination, and the second in theprologue to De clementia, where he envisages an interior monologueperformed by the person of Nero – the appeals to the internal judge ofreason are described as acts of enumerating or returning ‘ratio’, and theseaccounts are framed entirely in rhetorical speech.68 In describing con-science as a matter of ‘daily pleading my case at my own court’, Senecainextricably links the idea of rendering ratio with oratorical performance inthis interior courtroom.69 The practice of conscience is also said to havepleasant effects upon the mind. In De ira, Seneca had extolled its psycho-logical benefits, talking of the ‘calm, deep and unimpeded’ sleep whichfollowed a session of self-interrogation at the end of each day.70 In theEpistulae morales, Seneca also stresses the advantages of a good con-science.71 In De clementia, Seneca’s assertion that his graphic illustrationof the conscientious emperor will involve Nero in maxima voluptas meritssome attention: here, after all, is an avowed Stoic with a reputation forausterity seeming to embrace Epicurus, commencing his discourse onvirtue by ostensibly holding out the prospect of great pleasure and there-fore, at least from an orthodox Stoic point of view, of great vice. Senecahimself points out in one of his letters to Lucilius that ‘we Stoics believethat voluptas is a vice. It assuredly is; but we are accustomed to use the wordwhen we wish to indicate a happy state of mind.’72 Conversationally,

67 For conscientious self-reflection envisaged as advocacy in a court-room, see the extended descriptionof self-interrogation in Seneca 1928b, III.36.1–38.2: 338–44. For the idea of bringing our emotionalstates ‘before the judge’ of our conscience, see Seneca 1928b, III.36.2: 40.

68 Seneca 1928b, III.36.1: 338: ‘Omnes sensus perducendi sunt ad firmitatem; natura patientes sunt, sianimus 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.’

69 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.

70 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 secretuscognouit de moribus suis.’

71 See Seneca 1917–25, 43.4–5, vol. I: 286.72 Seneca 1917–25, 59.1, vol. I: 408–10: ‘Vitium esse voluptatem credimus. Sit sane; ponere tamen illam

solemus ad demonstrandam animi hilarem adfectionem.’

42 The Roman Princeps

Seneca explains, we often use this notion of pleasure to refer to a state ofmind 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, andgaudium 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 voluptaspins pleasure to external affairs, which may well change, so that the eventswhich produce pleasurable feelings in us one minute bring us tristitia, orsadness, the next.74 Seneca says that this cannot be the right way to thinkabout joy which ‘never ceases and never changes into its opposite’.75

Through the prologue of De clementia, the notion of voluptas is surrepti-tiously transformed from the moment of its initial and quite shockingappearance into a synonym of gaudium, as the fleeting pleasures of thematerial mirror are exchanged for rational feelings of joy for the prince as aresult 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 hismind.76 As the prince enjoys seeing his own image, so the Roman citizensare delighted to behold the image of mercy in their prince: ‘there is no-oneso satisfied at his own guiltlessness’, says Seneca, ‘as not to rejoice thatmercy should stand before his eyes, ready for human error’.77

Crucially, the speech simultaneously functions as a summary of Seneca’sentire argument. The impersonation of Nero embodies and exemplifies allthe precepts which Seneca will go on to discuss in his theory. Nero alreadyis as he should be, which is why Seneca can say in the prologue to BookI 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 aspossible with your good deeds and words so that what is now a matterof natural impulse in you may become a matter of settled judgement’.79

73 Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410: ‘voluptatem . . . rem infamem esse et gaudium nisi sapienti noncontingere’.

74 Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410: ‘Est enim animi elatio suis bonis verisque fidentis. Vulgo tamen sicloquimur magnum gaudium nos ex illius consulatu aut nuptiis aut ex partu uxoris percepisse, quaeadeo non sunt gaudia, ut saepe initia futurae tristitiae sint.’

75 Seneca 1917–25, 59.2, vol. I: 410 (411): ‘Gaudio autem iunctum est non desinere nec in contrariumverti.’

76 ‘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).

77 Seneca 1928a, I.1.9: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘nec est quisquam cui tam valde innocentia sua placeat utnon stare in conspectu clementiam paratam humanis erroribus gaudeat’.

78 Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129): ‘nemo iam divum Augustum nec Ti. Caesaris primatempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra te quaerit’.

79 Seneca 1928a, II.2.2: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘quod bene factis dictisque tuis quam familiarissimumesse te cupio, ut, quod nunc natura et impetus est, fiat iudicium’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 43

The task is not to make Nero’s present words and deeds different but toensure that they continue in the same vein. The opening of Book IIparallels that of Book I, beginning with Seneca again holding forth theprince’s vox, reporting a dictum designed to illustrate Nero’s benevolence.80

As Tacitus was to note with devastating acuity, Seneca puts words intoNero’s mouth.81 The prince’s speech is a continuous feature of Seneca’sdescription of good political rule. The impersonated discourse of Nero is,among other things, a bravura display of eloquence. Seneca makes noattempt to theorise princely eloquence – to argue, for example, that theemperor’s rhetorical ability no less than his virtue should excel that of hissubjects. But eloquence was still a crucial index of political intelligenceamong the Roman aristocracy. Seneca makes the point about the import-ance of the prince’s dicta no less than his facta quite clearly: ‘what you sayand do is seized on by rumour, and that is why none should care moreabout their reputation than those whose reputation, whatever their dessertsmay be, is going to be great’.82

The act of impersonation allows Seneca to recapture some of the groundon which his praise is to work throughout the rest of the text. If he needs toassert that Nero already is as Nero should be, Seneca ensures that theidentity of Nero is not left for Nero to establish. Nero is initially shownwhat he is through an impersonation, and is then praised for beingidentical to the person that is held out to him; but the praise is valid onlyif 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 ofNero on the basis of his virtus and ratio – is only legitimately Nero’s if hesuccessfully identifies himself with the person of Nero which Seneca figuresin his speech. The overall effect of this rhetorical strategy is to make eachoccasion on which Seneca turns from the material of his speech to praisethe emperor for embodying the principles he is explicating extraordinarilystressful for Nero if he cannot in fact live up to such standards. Perhapssensing something cruel going on in the mirror, Nero – in another briefmoment of impersonation – cries out as he struggles to incorporate theidentity which Seneca has fashioned for him: ‘But this is slavery, not

80 Seneca 1928a, II.1.1–3: 430–2.81 See his deeply sarcastic critique of the Senecan ideology and of Nero’s eloquence in Tacitus,

Annalium libri, XIII.1–5.82 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 habiturisunt’.

44 The Roman Princeps

imperium!’83 Seneca’s reply is stern: ‘What? Are you not aware that thissupreme command means noble slavery for you . . . You cannot escapeyour fortuna. It besieges you; wherever you descend, it follows you with itsmass of trappings. The slavery of being supremely great lies in the impos-sibility of ever becoming anything less.’84 To be a prince is to be in a state ofservitude, to be subject to the rule of universal reason. Seneca piles on thepressure. 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 sunof not being seen. A flood of light meets you face to face, and the eyes of allare 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 ofour deified Augustus or the early years of Tiberius Caesar; no one seeks an examplefor 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 yoursput 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’sfamous warning to Nero that ‘no one can wear a persona for long’ is astatement not only of high drama but of the deepest possible irony, for apersona is precisely what Seneca appears to have pressed upon Nerothrough the fiction of impersonation.

P E R S O N S , S T A T E S , L I B E R T Y A N D S L A V E R Y

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

83 Seneca 1928a, I.8.1: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘ ‘‘Ista,’’ inquis, ‘‘servitus est, non imperium.’’ ’84 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, magnoapparatu sequitur. Est haec summae magnitudinis servitus non posse fieri minorem.’ I havefollowed Wilamowitz’s reading of the text at I.8.1 as indicated by Cooper and Procope (Seneca1995: 136, n.21) rather than the Loeb edition, which reads at I.8.1: ‘Quid? Tu non experiris istud nobisesse, tibi servitutem?’ (Seneca 1928a: 376).

85 Seneca 1928a, I.8.4: 378 (Seneca 1995: 137): ‘tibi non magis quam soli latere contingit. Multa circa telux est, omnium in istam conversi oculi sunt.’

86 Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129–30): ‘Sed ingens tibi onus imposuisti; nemo iam divumAugustum nec Ti. Caesaris prima tempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra tequaerit; principatus tuus ad gustum exigitur. Difficile hoc fuisset, si non naturalis tibi ista bonitasesset, sed ad tempus sumpta. Nemo enim potest personam diu ferre, ficta cito in naturam suamrecidunt; quibus veritas subest quaeque, ut ita dicam, ex solido enascuntur, tempore ipso in maiusmeliusque procedunt.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 45

answer is already visible. He governs his self by ensuring the rule of ratioover his own person. And he rules a res publica which theoretically incor-porates each and every person in the world. Establishing the rule of reasonover the prince’s own person and over the res publica are identified bySeneca as similar tasks. The extensive reconfiguration of the metaphor ofthe body politic which occurs throughout Seneca’s text consists in therepeated representation of the res publica as one person. Seneca informs hisprince that ‘you are the mind of your res publica, and it is your body’.87 Thewelfare of the body is guaranteed by its princely head: ‘the gentleness ofyour mind will be transmitted to others; little by little, it will be diffusedover 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 ofthe body politic in order to redefine the libertas of the Republic in Stoicterms. It is Seneca’s claim in De clementia that the installation of a virtuousprince at its head has cured the ills which had long afflicted the Romanbody politic and, in so doing, has restored it to a state of freedom which ithad formerly lost.89 This claim clearly requires some redefinitions. In theRoman legal theory of persons, the fundamental distinction which wasused to divide human beings into free persons or slaves was that the formercategory consisted of those not subject to the ius and potestas of anotherhuman being. Yet Seneca is describing and indeed praising a state of affairsin which he is very precisely claiming that the entire world and each andevery mortal within it is now subjected to the ius and potestas of the princeps.He would therefore seem to be endorsing the establishment of thePrincipate as an event which, from a conventional point of view, causeswholesale enslavement. Seneca appears to allude to this perspective himselfright at the outset, referring to the ‘yoke’ now placed on the ‘seditious,factious, impotent multitude’ which lies far beneath the prince’s mercifulgaze and which is said to require such a restraint because it is ‘as likely torun riot for its own as for another’s downfall’.90 But Seneca then announcesthat under their prince the ‘happiest form of res publica’ has becomeevident to the Roman people, with ‘supreme libertas in want of nothing

87 Seneca 1928a, I.5.1: 370 (my translation): ‘tu animus rei publicae tuae es, illa corpus tuum’.88 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 bonavaletudo’.

89 For the general question of principatus et libertas, see Wirszubski 1960: 124–71. For De clementia asthe ‘final collapse’ of the republican concept of libertas, see the illuminating discussion at Wiszubski1960: 150–3.

90 Seneca 1928a, I.1.1: 356 (Seneca 1995: 128): ‘multitudinem discordem, seditiosam, impotentem, inperniciem alienam suamque pariter exsultaturam, si hoc iugum fregerit . . .’

46 The Roman Princeps

save the licence to ruin itself ’.91 In short, Seneca wants to continue to talkabout the libertas of the res publica, but he has to find a way of talking abouta body that is free even when it is simultaneously constrained by the ius ofanother person.

The language of the yoke is an important indication of a theoreticalposition 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 lateRepublic which had manifested itself in protracted civil discord was theoutcome of a lack of virtus in the body politic.92 Thus far, his diagnosis is ahighly conventional one, shared by almost every commentator on the civilwar. But Seneca is insinuating a specific point about the necessity of thePrincipate which gradually emerges in the course of his text. The basic shapeof his argument starts from an assumption that, prior to the acquisition of aprincely head, a situation had arisen in which the extent of the vitiation of theRoman populus – its descent into deeply divisive and irrational behaviour inthe madness of civil war – had caused it to lose its coherence as a body whichknows how to think and live properly. It had become merely a multitude. Ithad lost its virtus, its ratio, to such a degree that it appears to have becomenothing better than an irrational animal requiring forceful restraint. TheRoman populus had therefore ceased to function as a person in possession ofits freedom. Moral corruption had rendered it entirely incapable of rationalbehaviour, and it had been reduced to a state of irrationality, or – as Senecaputs it throughout his writings – slavery.

In speaking of the establishment of princely government, the storywhich Seneca wishes to tell, in other words, is of a passage from slaveryto freedom for the body politic, rather than the reverse. But in insinuatingthis movement, Seneca is playing upon a well-known distinction withinthe Roman law of persons by offering a conception of freedom and slaverywhich is not pivoted upon Roman law at all. His theory of moral person-ality involves him in a radical redefinition of the conventional legalterminology about the free and unfree status of a person. For he construesthe idea of liberty around the Stoic idea of ius, operative within a cosmiccivitas, rather than around the specific and local Roman ius civile whichgoverns the members of a territorially delimited civitas. Seneca, as we shallsee, is quite capable of explicitly denouncing an attitude of mind whichimplied an unduly strong ideological attachment to the type of equality

91 Seneca 1928, 1.1.8: 360–2 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publicae, cui adsummam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia.’

92 For Seneca on the Roman civil wars, see Canfora 2000.

The Roman theory of monarchy 47

promised by the Roman ius civile to its citizens in the face of the manifestchaos of civil war. By preferring the Stoic conception of ius and a rathergrander conception of the res publica, Seneca can hold fast to the conven-tional notion that the libertas of the civitas is upheld because everybodylives according to the same law and rationality. But he can also imply thatthe condition in which the populus found itself prior to the Principate wasone in which it had utterly lost the ability to live according to ius as itshould properly be understood. According to this reasoning, then, thedescent into irrationality effectively obliterated the Republic’s status as afree person. And since the Republic cannot be said in any meaningful wayto have been in a condition of freedom, it cannot be said to have forfeitedits liberty with the establishment of the Principate. On the contrary, Senecacan now say that it is the imposition of the prince upon a hopelesslyirrational and self-destructive multitude of persons that restores its freedomafter a period of slavery.

For the Stoics, to be free is to live according to reason and thus to be freefrom the slavery of the irrational affects.93 To be free refers to a psycho-logical disposition which is required to live one’s life successfully.94 Thisdisposition consists in the full awareness of the objective fact that events inthe world are providentially determined. Notwithstanding the ancientcriticisms levelled against Stoicism for its strict determinism, the Stoicspossessed a conception of freedom which could be coherently sustainedwithin its metaphysical system, and it is one which Seneca, like Epictetuslater, is especially given to expounding.95 Given the strong character of theStoic theory of causation, freedom in Stoic ethics amounts to the rationalacceptance 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 makechoices about their actions. The principle of logos or ratio which governsthe world is located within man as well as without. Stoic pantheism holdsthat 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 asthe distinctively human rational faculty. Man’s reason represents only atiny part of the divine, and so his powers with respect to the whole of thedetermining process of the universe are weak – so much so that ‘following’

93 For a particularly clear statement of freedom and slavery in these terms, see Seneca 1917–25, 80,vol. II: 212–18.

94 For a clear statement of this point, see Long 1996: 175.95 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.

48 The Roman Princeps

rather than ‘initiating’ events is stressed as its proper function.96 But thisdoes not mean that we are entirely deprived of our autonomy.

An insight into the sort of reconciliation effected within Stoic metaphy-sics between freedom and determinism is afforded by a passage ofChrysippus preserved by Aulus Gellius:

The various categories of things in the world and the beginnings of causes are set inmotion by the order, law and the necessity of fate. But the prompting of ourdecisions and thoughts, and our actions, are controlled by each man’s particularwill and disposition.97

There is therefore some space within the scheme of things for individuals tomake a meaningful choice about what action they should take. We canchoose not to follow the dictates of Nature, and thus throw ourselves out ofkilter with the smoothly flowing operation of the world, although this isbound to leave us unhappy at the very least.98 Thanks to Nature, we possessthe natural inclination as rational beings to comprehend and to assent tothe operation of providential reason, and our freedom, properly under-stood, consists in our so doing.99 But this natural capacity must benurtured by a careful process of character formation through the righttype of education and environment. The Stoic theory of moral agency washighly sensitive to the view, common both to Plato and to Aristotle, thatcharacter determines action, and to the even sharper observation that theprocess of character formation was itself determined by circumstances ofenvironment. For the Stoics, acting out of character was simply inconceiv-able. A sufficiently rational agent who follows right reason unerringly willsthe right moral path for himself as a consequence of his correct perceptionof the way of the world. And, furthermore, since one could be said not tohave full, or even very much, control over the process of character for-mation in one’s earliest years, the extent of an agent’s freedom in making adecision about any specific form of activity in the immediate presentbecomes further diminished in the Stoic account. The extent of theresponsibility which an agent bears for ending up in a state of unhappiness,moral corruption or slavery is unclear. But plainly, Stoic ethics did notexculpate an agent who arrives in such a state as the powerless victim of an

96 Long 1996: 179.97 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 men-tiumque nostrarum actionesque ipsas voluntas cuiusque propria et animorum ingenia moderantur’.

98 For the parallels between Stoic determinism and the Marxist theory of history, see Veyne 2003: 45.99 For an exposition of the Stoic concept of oikeiosis, see Pembroke 1996. For a recent discussion of the

idea of nature in Seneca’s philosophy, see Fedeli 2000.

The Roman theory of monarchy 49

inevitable destiny. Admittedly, once we are in a such a state of slavery,misled by affects into making false judgements about what constitutes ourown good, we may effectively have lost what power we once had todetermine differently for ourselves, to recharacterise ourselves upon ourown initiative. But it remains eminently possible for a bad man to becomegood through moral education, and the whole of Seneca’s work is, in onesense, a testimony to the Stoic belief in philosophy as a practical guide tomoral improvement which can be effected through the restructuring of thepractices of one’s life. To be free, then, is not a matter of living according toa contingent set of human laws to which we give our assent as manifest-ations of our choices, but a question of living according to the much morecompelling law of nature to which we will, if sufficiently rational, volun-tarily assent in order to experience ourselves as free.100 Our slavery, on theother hand, will be the product of a less than rational disposition towardsthe events which occur to us in our lives: we will find our minds dominatedby a series of emotions hostile to our free mental state, and we will becomecaptive to those feelings which it should be the aim of every good and wiseagent to expunge vigorously from their life.

This Stoic account of freedom informs Seneca’s claim in the De clem-entia that, under the government of the prince, the Roman body politic is afree person. Seneca is thereby able to mount a defence of the Principate asan historical necessity which brought about the restoration of the libertylost amid the corruption of the late Republic. His strongest statement onthe decline of the Republic and the necessity of the Principate was to comelater, in De beneficiis, where Brutus’ assassination of Julius Caesar iscriticised for being ‘badly wrong . . . his action was not true to Stoic teach-ing’.101 Seneca gives three possible ways of explaining Brutus’ error: ‘eitherhe feared the very word ‘‘king’’, although the optimal state of the civitas isunder a just king’; ‘or he expected civic freedom to survive when theadvantages of autocracy were so great’; ‘or else he thought that the civitascould be recalled to its former constitution when its ancient ways had beenabandoned – that an equality of civic rights and a due supremacy of lawcould be maintained’.102 But in De clementia, we find a similar reference to

100 The argument is summarised succinctly in Long 1996: 194.101 Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228): ‘in hac re videtur vehementer errasse nec ex institutione

Stoica se egisse’.102 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 magnumpraemium erat et imperandi et serviendi, aut existimavit civitatem in priorem formam posserevocari amissis pristinis moribus futuramque ibi aequalitatem civilis iuris et staturas suo loco leges.’

50 The Roman Princeps

the moral corruption characteristic of the later Republic and to the reme-dial effects of monarchy. The body politic can now look to Nero for a cure:‘the happiest form of commonwealth meets their eyes, with supremeliberty in want of nothing save the licence to ruin itself ’.103 Previouslywracked by internal dissension, the res publica is now to be constrained tobe 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 dominatesthe soul is irrational, the body is harmed: ‘if its avarice masters us, we scanthe sea for material gain. Its lust for glory has long since led us to thrust ourright hand into the flame.’104 Under the prince, the ‘vast multitude of mensurrounds one man as though he were its mind, ruled by his spirit, guidedby his reason; it would crush and shatter itself by its own strength, withoutthe support of his discernment’.105 Here, once again, the Roman people isdescribed as a ‘multitude’ which is only constituted as a coherent bodywhen headed by the prince. Adducing Virgil to support his thesis that ‘thecommonwealth needs a head’ and that the prince is ‘the bond which holdsthe commonwealth together’, Seneca cites the famous passage from theGeorgics 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 commonslive, by no divisions rent/But the great monarch’s death dissolves thegovernment’.106 And, turning to another figure, Seneca reminds us of theinseparableness of princely head and political body when he says that:‘Long ago, in fact, Caesar so assumed the mantle of the Republic thatneither could be separated without the ruin of the other. He needs thestrength, and it needs a head.’107 How exactly the head and the body hadcome to be conjoined is not made very clear. An allusion to the bloody seasof Actium is the closest we get to an explanation of the historical process.108

103 Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publica, cui adsummam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia’.

104 Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 336 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘Quemadmodum totum corpus animo deservit . . . siveavarus dominus est, mare lucri causa scrutamur, sive ambitiosus, iam dudum dextram flammisobiecimus.’

105 Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 366–8 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘Haec immensa multitudo unius animae circumdataillius spiritu regitur, illius ratione flectitur pressura se ac fractura viribus suis, nisi consiliosustineretur.’

106 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 fromVirgil, Georgics, IV. 212–13.

107 Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (my translation): ‘Olim enim ita se induit rei publicae Caesar, ut seducialterum non posset sine utriusque pernicie; nam et illi viribus opus est et huic capite.’

108 See Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 390.

The Roman theory of monarchy 51

Having merged the populus with the princeps into one body in order toexplain the structure of the res publica in such a way as to escape the pictureof a dominant person ruling separate persons in a relation of unfreesubjection, 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 forguardians of the public state’, suggesting that monarchs need to learn howto guide, govern and keep safe their community in the same way thatreason governs the world.109 Seneca’s ‘guardians of the public state’ musthave the requisite virtus in order to ensure that the lives which they governare 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’ isnever more ‘pleasing to the eye and lovelier’ than when it is serene andcalm, 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 reflectthis state of affairs.110 And in De beneficiis, Seneca contends that the Stoicview which Brutus should have adopted towards the rise of Caesar was thatthe ‘optimal state of the civitas’ is ensured by the rule of a just king.111 Thelogic of Seneca’s argument about persons, states and reasons is fullyapparent in this declaration: the civitas is in the best possible ‘state’ atprecisely the moment in which, according to the conventional definitionof free and unfree persons, it enters into a state of servitude under the ruleof a king.

There is nevertheless something awkward about the way in whichpersons are understood in the Senecan story to separate out from thetotality of the body politic. Seneca says in the prologue that the status ofevery mortal is said to be in the hands of the prince. Notwithstanding theirapparent disappearance into one political body, Seneca does assign a statusto each person whom the prince rules. In theory, since everyone forms partof one body politic ruled by reason, everyone – prince and populus alike – isfree. It would therefore appear coherent to posit the free status of eachindividual. But this would suggest a degree of individual autonomy withinthe body which is never envisaged within the theory. As the sustained

109 Seneca 1928a, I.4.3: 368 (my translation): ‘Ideo principes regesque et quocumque alio nomine sunttutores status publici.’

110 Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositummiti animo exercere imperium et cogitare, uter mundi status gratior oculis pulchriorque sit, serenoet puro die, an cum fragoribus crebris omnia quatiuntur et ignes hinc atque illinc micant! Atqui nonalia facies est quieti moratique imperii quam sereni caeli et nitentis.’ Behind the ‘mundi status’ theremay lie the Stoic understanding of the cosmos as a rational animal. For Stoic corporealism andvitalism, see White 2003 (esp. 129).

111 Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92: ‘cum optimus civitatis status sub rege iusto sit’.

52 The Roman Princeps

description of a mutual and radical dependency between the body politicand the princely head suggests, there is just one person in a state ofStoic freedom at the centre of the Senecan argument of De clementia.This person can be identified as the person of the res publica, the publicperson, the person of the civitas, and to this extent the Senecan argumentsucceeds in upholding the claim that the res publica now enjoys summalibertas. That Seneca’s political theory is elaborated upon the idea of oneperson moving through the Stoic universe is perhaps to be expected. As aStoic philosopher, Seneca is simply not interested in carving out a theo-retical space for the normative description of a person other than onemodelled – to a greater or lesser extent – on the Stoic vir sapiens. Thecure for everything is for everyone to become a Stoic. Seneca offers noadvice about the mechanics of government, about the practicalities ofadministration; nor does he prescribe for the subject constitutionallydeprived 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 themembers of the populus followed the prince’s example fully, one wouldexpect them eventually to achieve such a degree of rationality that therewould be no need for government at all: everyone would become auton-omous, self-regulating individuals within the cosmic civitas. But the termsof the theory, as well as the political, social and institutional apparatuswhich it helps to consolidate, militate against this development: thosewhom 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 therationality of another in order to ensure their liberty. It is as if theiradmission as fully participating adult members of the universal civitas isendlessly deferred.

T H E Q U A L I T Y O F M E R C Y

Of all the virtues with which the prince must be equipped, it is his ability tobe merciful which Seneca regards as essential. Seneca begins his analysis ofthe quality by pointing out that ‘of all the virtues, in truth, none befits ahuman being more, since none is more humane’.112 Stoics like Seneca thinkthat ‘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.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 53

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

113 Seneca 1928a, I.3.2: 364 (Seneca 1995: 131–2): ‘necesse est non solum inter nos, qui hominem socialeanimal communi bono genitum videri volumus, sed etiam inter illos, qui hominem voluptatidonant, 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’.

114 Seneca 1928a, I.6.3: 374 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘Peccavimus omnes, alii gravia, alii leviora, alii exdestinato, alii forte impulsi aut aliena nequitia ablati . . . nec deliquimus tantum, sed usque adextremum aevi delinquemus.’

115 I occasionally use ‘clemency’ as a synonym of ‘mercy’ primarily for reasons of stylistic variation. ButI 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 forclemency).

116 Seneca 1928a, II.3.1–2: 434 (Seneca 1995: 160): ‘(clementia est) temperantia animi in potestateulciscendi’; ‘lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis poenis’; ‘inclinatio animi adlenitatem in poena exigenda’; ‘moderationem aliquid ex merita ac debita poena remittentem’; ‘quaese flectit citra id, quod merito constitui posset’.

54 The Roman Princeps

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 overman, Seneca can say that ‘mercy becomes no one more than a king or aprince’ and that ‘it most becomes emperors, finding when among themmore 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 itsvery inception. ‘True mercy means spotlessness, it means never having sheda citizen’s blood,’ Seneca asserts.120 The merciful prince is innocent.Seneca duly criticises Augustus for having learnt this lesson rather late inhis political life. The young Augustus ‘was hot-headed, he burned withanger’; in his old age, ‘he may have shown moderation and mercy.Of course he did – after staining the sea at Actium with Romanblood.’121 Nero, by contrast, is praised for having given Rome ‘a civitasunstained by blood’.122 To exercise mercy requires a psyche which hasvigorously expunged the irrational and perturbing affects of anger, greed,sadness and pity. We are reminded that ‘savage, inexorable anger is notbecoming to a king’.123 It is all the more commendable ‘that one whoseanger has nothing to resist it, whose severest sentence commands the assentof the very people who perish by it . . . that this very man should take holdof 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 Seneca 1928a, II.4.1–3: 436 (Seneca 1995: 160–1): ‘Crudelitas, quae nihil aliud est quam atrocitasanimi in exigendis poenis’; ‘in poenis exigendis intemperantiam animi’; ‘Illos ergo crudeles vocabo,qui puniendi causam habent, modum non habent.’

118 Seneca 1928a, I.3.3: 364 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘Nullum tamen clementia ex omnibus magis quam regemaut principem decet’; Seneca 1928a, I.5.2: 370 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘clementia omnibus quidemhominibus secundum naturam, maxime tamen decora imperatoribus, quanto plus habet apudillos, quod servet, quantoque in maiore materia apparet’.

119 Seneca 1928a, I.11.2: 390 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘haec est, Caesar, clementia vera . . . in maxima potestateverissima animi temperantia et humani generis comprendens ut sui amor’.

120 Seneca 1928a, I.11.2: 390 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘haec est, Caesar, clementia vera, quam tu praestas, quaenon saevitiae paenitentia coepit, nullam habere maculam, numquam civilem sanguinem fudisse’.

121 Seneca 1928a, I.11.1–2: 390–2 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘in adulescentia caluit, arsit ira . . . fuerit moderatuset clemens, nempe post mare Actiacum Romano cruore infectum’.

122 Seneca 1928a, I.11.3: 390 (Seneca 1995, 143): ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’123 Seneca 1928a, I.5.6: 372 (Seneca 1995: 134–5): ‘Non decet regem saeva nec inexorabilis ira.’124 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 etpotestate sua in melius placidiusque uti.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 55

the prerogative of high good fortune, never more admirable than when itattains the same power as the gods’.125 Ratio – and the synonyms whichSeneca associates with it – is benevolent and merciful.126 It follows that fora human to act – and to have the power to act – in a likewise manner is thesupreme mark of virtue. ‘The gods’, Seneca reminds Nero, are ‘neitherimplacable nor unreasonable, are not given to pursuing the crimes ofpotentates immediately with their thunderbolts’; and so ‘how muchmore reasonable’, he concludes, ‘is it for a man set in authority over mento exercise his command in a gentle spirit’.127 The prince should thus bemild-mannered. For this behaviour of the gods is exemplary, ‘a model forthe prince: he should wish to be to the citizens as he would wish the gods tobe to him’.128 With reason holding sway over mankind under the directionof the prince, ‘the whole world will see the return of right morals’, thereturn of ‘piety and integrity’, and ‘good faith and modesty’ which willbring about ‘a pure and happy age’.129 The duties of the prince are alsodescribed as those of good parents, ‘whose habit it is to reproach theirchildren sometimes gently, sometimes with threats . . . no one in his rightmind, surely, would disinherit a son for a first offence . . . no one comes tothe point of inflicting punishment until he has run out of remedies. That ishow a parent, and also a prince, ought to act.’130 Seneca further explainsthat ‘we have given the ‘‘Father of the Fatherland’’ that name to remindhim that he has been granted the power of a father, the most moderate ofpowers, in caring for children and subordinating his interests to theirs’.131

125 Seneca 1928a, I.5.7: 372 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘Servare proprium est excellentis fortunae, quae num-quam magis suspici debet, quam cum illi contigit idem posse quod dis . . . Deorum itaque sibianimum adserens princeps.’

126 ‘To say of God that he is ‘‘good, provident and benevolent’’ is as true and basic in Stoic thought asthe statement that he is all-pervading pneuma’ (Long 1996: 176). For more recent discussion, seeAlgra 2003.

127 Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376 (Seneca 1995: 136): ‘Quod si di placabiles et aequi delicta potentium nonstatim fulminibus persequuntur, quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositum miti animoexercere imperium.’

128 Seneca 1928a, I.7.1: 374 (Seneca 1995: 135–6): ‘deorum feci mentionem, optime hoc exemplumprincipi constituam, ad quod formetur, ut se talem esse civibus, quales sibi deos velit’.

129 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 vitiadiuturno abusa regno dare tandem felici ac puro saeculo locum’.

130 Seneca 1928a, I.14.1–2: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Quod ergo officium eius est? Quod bonorumparentium, qui obiurgare liberos non numquam blande, non numquam minaciter solent, ali-quando admonere etiam verberibus. Numquid aliquis sanus filium a prima offensa exheredat? . . .Nemo ad supplicia exigenda pervenit, nisi qui remedia consumpsit. Hoc, quod parenti, etiamprincipi faciendum est.’

131 Seneca 1928a, I.14.2: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Patrem quidem Patriae appellavimus, ut sciret datamsibi potestatem patriam, quae est temperantissima liberis consulens suaque post illos reponens.’

56 The Roman Princeps

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

T H E P R I N C E L Y M E D I C

Seneca repeatedly compares the beneficial effects of the prince’s govern-ment upon the body politic with the successful practice of medicine by adoctor. The medical metaphor had certainly been present in Cicero’stheory of the res publica in De officiis.133 But the theme is very considerablyamplified within the Senecan text, where it is introduced as early as thesecond chapter of the first book, inextricably tied to the idea of princelyclemency. Here we are told that ‘just as medicine is of use to the sick but isalso prized by the healthy, so mercy, while invoked by those who deservepunishment, is also revered by the guiltless’.134 The idea that clemency is agentle cure and a remedy for the disease of injustice is exemplified byAugustus’ behaviour towards the treacherous Cinna. Unsure as to how heshould respond to the criminal’s act, the emperor is counselled by his wifeLivia to change his ineffectual policy of ‘severity’ in favour of one of‘mercy’. In so entirely altering the nature of the treatment he chooses tomete out to rebels, Livia says that he would only be opting to ‘do as doctorsdo’ when they find that ‘the usual remedies do no good’.135 Augustus mayhave begun a policy of clemency too late in his political life, but the storyneatly illustrates the attitude which the good prince must adopt: ‘inclinedto the milder course, even when it may be of use to punish, he reveals hisreluctance to apply harsh remedies’.136 The idea that the prince must avoidaspera remedia is reiterated in Book I, Chapter 17, where we find the mostextravagant extension of the medical analogy. Seneca contrasts the savageryand cruelty of the tyrannical habit of terrifyingly and persistently raging

132 Seneca 1928a, I.15.3: 400 (Seneca 1995: 147): ‘Hoc ipso exemplo dabo, quem compares bono patri,bonum principem.’

133 See Cicero 1913, I.24.83: 82.134 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 innocentescolunt.’

135 Seneca 1928a, I.9.6: 382–4 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘Fac, quod medici solent, qui, ubi usitata remedia nonprocedunt, temptant contraria. Severitate nihil adhuc profecisti; Salvidienum Lepidus secutus est,Lepidum Murena, Murenam Caepio, Caepionem Egnatius, ut alios taceam, quos tantum ausospudet. Nunc tempta, quomodo tibi cedat clementia.’

136 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’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 57

against malefactors with the proper princely custom of making everythingin the kingdom milder through the exercise of clemency towards wrong-doers. Seneca compares iniuria with diseases which require mollis medicinaand mollis curatio – ‘gentle medicine’ and ‘gentle treatment’, rather thanirrationally harsh outbursts:

We cure diseases – we do not lose our temper with them. Yet here, too, we have adisease, of the mind. It requires gentle medicine and a doctor with no hostility ofhis own towards the patient. To despair of making a cure is the mark of a baddoctor. Likewise, in cases where the mind is affected, the right course for the oneentrusted with everyone’s health is not to abandon hope too quickly and pro-nounce the symptoms fatal. It is, rather, to wrestle with the failings and stand up tothem, to make some ashamed of their illness while deceiving others with gentletreatment. 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 anembarrassing scar.137

Divine, fatherly, instructive and now curative, Seneca’s prince may holdthe ‘state’ of each and every person in his hands, but he is altogether akinder and more benevolent person than a dominus, or slave-master.

L O V E , F E A R A N D T Y R A N N Y

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

137 Seneca 1928a, I.17.1–2: 406 (Seneca 1995: 149): ‘Morbis medemur nec irascimur; atqui et hic morbusest animi; mollem medicinam desiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro. Mali mediciest desperare, ne curet: idem in iis, quorum animus adfectus est, facere debebit is, cui tradita salusomnium est, non cito spem proicere nec mortifera signa pronuntiare; luctetur cum vitiis, resistat,aliis morbum suum exprobret, quosdam molli curatione decipiat citius meliusque sanaturusremediis fallentibus; agat princeps curam non tantum salutis, sed etiam honestae cicatricis.’

138 Seneca 1928a, I.19.3: 410 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘rex ipse sine aculeo est; noluit illum natura nec saevumesse nec ultionem magno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit’.

58 The Roman Princeps

him will impel his subjects to ‘fly towards him, racing each other, in totalreadiness to throw themselves onto the blades of those who lie in wait forhim, to cast their own bodies to the ground if human slaughter is needed toprovide the foundation of his road to safety’.139 In short, his clemencymeans 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 tofortify hills steep to climb’.141 His ‘mercy will assure the king’s safety evenin the open’ for he has ‘one impregnable bulwark – the love of thecitizens’.142 This love means that ‘such a prince, protected by his owngood deeds, has no need of guards. He wears his armour purely fordecoration.’143

Seneca’s theory of virtuous monarchy is correspondingly accompaniedby an entirely moral conception of tyranny, rather than by any constitu-tional or legal definition of bad rule.144 Seneca says that ‘it is mercy whichcauses there to be a great distinction between king and tyrant’.145 As he asksrhetorically, ‘what difference is there between a tyrant and a king – after all,they both enjoy the same degree of licence and apparently the samefortuna – other than that tyrants act savagely for pleasure, while kings doso only with good cause and out of necessity?’146 Seneca then explains thatkings, like tyrants, certainly use their power to kill, but they do so onoccasions when ‘public utility’ counsels it, whereas ‘a tyrant’s savagery

139 Seneca 1928a, I.3.3–4: 366 (Seneca 1995: 132): ‘cuius curam excubare pro salute singulorum atqueuniversorum cottidie experientur . . . tamquam ad clarum ac beneficum sidus certatim advolant.Obicere se pro illo mucronibus insidiantium paratissimi et substernere corpora sua, si per stragemilli humanam iter ad salutem struendum sit, somnum eius nocturnis excubiis muniunt, lateraobiecti circumfusique defendunt, incurrentibus periculis se opponunt. Non est hic sine rationepopulis urbibusque consensus sic protegendi amandique reges et se suaque iactandi, quocumquedesideravit imperantis salus’.

140 Seneca 1928a, I.13.4: 396 (my translation): ‘a tota civitate amatur, defenditur, colitur’.141 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’.142 Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est

inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’143 Seneca 1928a, I.13.5: 398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nihil praesidiis eget,

arma ornamenti causa habet.’144 Illuminating comments on Seneca’s idea of tyranny and its place in De clementia are in Schiesaro

2000 (esp. 139–41).145 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 theoryof tyranny that ‘only where, as with the Roman emperor, the laws offer his subjects no guarantee oftheir rights and their wishes are of no decisive importance, does a moral quality such as clemency onthe part of the monarch become the decisive criterion’.

146 Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (my translation): ‘Quid interest inter tyrannum ac regem (species enim ipsafortunae ac licentia par est), nisi quod tyranni in voluptatem saeviunt, reges non nisi ex causa acnecessitate?’

The Roman theory of monarchy 59

comes from the heart’.147 Just as mercy and the love which it inspires markout good government, so the surest sign of tyranny is fear and hatredcaused 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 ofthe tyrant as ‘fierce and bloodthirsty’: savage, inhumane and, above all,bestial in character.148 The madness of cruel rule is ‘to kill, to rage, todelight in the noise of chains and to cut off the heads of citizens, to pourout a mass of blood wherever you go, to terrify people and send themrunning by your very appearance. Would life be any different if lions andbears ruled the kingdom, if serpents and the most noxious kind of animalwere given power over us?’149 The tyrant’s rule is characterised by theabsence of fides in his political and social relations. He cannot ‘holdthe 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 isfeared, and being hated makes him want to be feared’.152 The favoureddictum of the tyrant which is cited by Seneca on two occasions inDe clementia and once in De ira is ‘that execrable verse . . . ‘‘Let themhate, provided that they fear’’’.153 Tyrants have a distinctive rhetoric: theirlack of ratio is manifested in their oratio. And fear induces people ‘to tryanything’, as Seneca puts it, to overthrow the vicious tyrant.154

In developing this distinction between good and bad rule, Seneca is ableto revisit the topic which Cicero had discussed in De officiis – whether it isbetter for a person in government to be loved rather than feared – and toreconfigure it in order to endorse Cicero’s conclusion but entirely alter theeffect. Cicero exemplified his feared tyrant by referring to Caesar’s

147 Seneca 1928a, I.12.1: 390–2 (my translation): ‘ ‘‘Quid ergo? Non reges quoque occidere solent?’’ Sedquotiens id fieri publica utilitas persuadet; tyrannis saevitia cordi est.’

148 Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘acerbum et sanguinarium’. For the important conceptof immanitas in De clementia, see Seneca 1928a, I.26.4: 426 and II.2.3: 434.

149 Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426 (Seneca 1995: 156–7, modified): ‘occidere, saevire, delectari sono catena-rum et civium capita decidere, quocumque ventum est, multum sanguinis fundere, aspectu suoterrere ac fugare? Quae alia vita esset, si leones ursique regnarent, si serpentibus in nos acnoxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’

150 Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144–5): ‘non potest habere quisquam bonae ac fidae voluntatisministros’.

151 Seneca 1928a, I.13.3: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘non amicorum fidei credens, non pietati liberorum . . .et conscientiam suam plenam sceleribus ac tormentis adaperuit’.

152 Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 392–4 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Nam cum invisus sit, quia timetur, timeri vult, quiainvisus est.’

153 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).

154 Seneca 1928a, I.12.4: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘omnia experiri suadet’.

60 The Roman Princeps

assassination: ‘it is not only the death of that tyrant, whom the city enduredunder 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 itfamously, ‘fear is a poor guardian over any length of time’.155 Caesar washated and feared because he attempted to overthrow the constitution andinstitute monarchy – or tyranny, as Cicero sees it. But Seneca makes thevice of cruelty – an infringement of universal law and the antithesis ofclemency – rather than the violation of any human law the definingcharacteristic of tyranny. He can then hold up his Caesar as a princepswho is loved and indicate instead, and pointedly, the republican generalSulla as an outstanding example of the tyrant, framing his claim in the formof a rhetorical question: ‘why should Sulla not be called a tyrant? Hiskilling only came to an end when he ran out of enemies . . . what tyrant everdrank so greedily of human blood as he did?’156

T H E H O N O U R A B L E A N D T H E U S E F U L

Since Seneca’s political theory is articulated within a firmly Stoic meta-physics, the question of a conflict between calculations of what is dignumand what is utile never arises. To act virtuously is simply to act inaccordance with beneficent, providential reason. It would be senseless tosuggest that government according to such a moral imperative could beanything other than beneficial for members of the universal civitas. Butnotwithstanding the orthodox Stoic contention that virtue should bepursued for its own sake, Seneca nevertheless has to point out the socialand 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 tostress the need for unerring constancy in one’s moral activity regardless ofthe immediate social and political consequences of following a difficultmoral path.158 In the case of two of the great Stoic exemplars of the virsapiens, Socrates and Cato, Seneca’s own writings highlight how theirnoble conduct was greeted with less than just recognition among their

155 Cicero 1913, II.7.23: 190 (Cicero 1991: 71): ‘Nec vero huius tyranni solum, quem armis oppressapertulit civitas . . . declarat, quantum odium hominum valeat ad pestem, sed reliquorum similesexitus tyrannorum . . . malus enim est custos diuturnitatis metus.’

156 Seneca 1928a, I.12.1–2: 392 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘et L. Sullam tyrannum appellari quid prohibet, cuioccidendi finem fecit inopia hostium . . . quis tamen umquam tyrannus tam avide humanumsanguinem bibit quam ille’.

157 Cooper and Procope highlight this reliance on ‘traditional ways of recommending a course ofaction – Seneca is arguing per honestum et utile’ (Seneca 1995: 122).

158 This is the central theme of De constantia, but it is emphasised throughout Seneca’s ethical works.

The Roman theory of monarchy 61

contemporaries.159 Social and political rewards may not be immediatelyforthcoming for the Stoic man of virtue because of the insufficient ration-ality of the other agents among whom he lives. In his writings, Senecasimultaneously counsels that ‘virtue has never failed to reward a man bothduring 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 behaviouris sometimes met: in the case of Cato, ridicule and rejection initiallygreeted his displays of virtue.161 People are often blinded by invidia –envy.162 But you must neither deviate from the straight and arduous pathin order to accommodate your actions to their warped perceptions, Senecawarns, nor think that you can put on a show of virtue, for ‘pretenceaccomplishes nothing’.163 The problem is one of moral economy: if manhas the capacity for moral perfection, it is nevertheless empirically the casethat very few wise men have ever lived. The aim of Senecan ethics is tomake us into good archers. Seneca adopts the favoured metaphor of theStoics 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 isnot an art. Now wisdom is an art; it should have a definite aim, choosingonly those who will make progress.’164 But in De clementia, Seneca tendstowards the rather bleaker assessment of the moral achievements of thehuman race in order to justify the establishment of the Principate. Most ofus are bad at the art of good living: we are neither magni viri nor greatarchers, and we fall far short of the target if we take aim at all. In fact, wemay err repeatedly to the point of civil war.

The dilemma for Seneca’s theory is its need to work with two apparentlycontrasting views of the rationality of the social agents among whom it is to

159 Seneca 1917–25, 79.14, vol. II: 208: ‘Vix recepit Socraten fama. Quamdiu Catonem civitas ignoravit!’160 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): ‘Gloriaumbra virtutis est; etiam invitam comitabitur.’ Compare the last with Cicero, Tusc., I.45.109:‘gloria . . . virtutem tamquam umbra sequitur’.

161 For the ridiculing of Cato in De constantia, see Seneca 1928c, 2.1–3: 50–2; 14.3–4: 90.162 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, seeSeneca 1917–25, 79.17, vol. II: 210.

163 Seneca 1917–25, 79.18, vol. II: 210 : ‘Nihil simulatio proficit.’164 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 remediatempte.’ For Cicero’s construal of the analogy in his discussion of Stoicism, see Cicero, De finibus,III.22.

62 The Roman Princeps

be put into practice. On the one hand, the theory has to present a picture ofcorruption and disorder in order to explain the necessity of the impositionof a monarchical head. On the other hand, it tries to assure the prince thathis virtuous policies will not be pursued in an inhospitable social settingbut will, on the contrary, meet with loving approval. Mercy not only bringssafety and security, but also fame, honour and glory. Virtuous words anddeeds will not only ensure glory and honour, but also fama. And given hisfixed fortuna, the prince cannot escape fama or infamia. ‘Cruel mastershave the whole city pointing at them with hatred and loathing. So, too withkings. The wrongs which they do have a wider scope. The infamy andodium is passed on over the centuries.’165 Seneca reminds Nero that thebest way of ensuring his reputation is simply to be virtuous: ‘what you sayand do is seized on by rumour, and that is why none should care moreabout their reputation than those whose reputation, whatever their dessertsmay be, is going to be great’.166 But in order for glory, honour and fame tobe held out as the rewards of virtue, Seneca’s theory has to presuppose thatthe prince’s subjects are sufficiently rational to recognise virtuous deeds –that they have indeed been formed in his image, following his example ofperfect rationality. It is as if his subjects suddenly catch up with therationality of the prince. If they were not rational enough to practise self-government, they are now nevertheless rational enough to realise this factabout themselves and therefore love, honour and glorify the head that rulesthe body politic and guarantees their freedom.

H A P P I N E S S A N D S A D N E S S

Everyone becomes riveted to the same rationality in the theory. Seneca’ssubjects, as well as the prince himself, are held to see things clearly. Theirclarity is implicit in Seneca’s contention throughout De clementia that themembers of the res publica are happy. Seneca introduces the concept offelicitas in the proem as he is depicting the ‘fairest form of res publica’ nowplaced before the eyes of all those ruled by Nero. Under Nero’s govern-ment, he tells the prince, ‘all your citizens are now compelled to acknowl-edge that they are happy and that nothing henceforth can be added to their

165 Seneca 1928a, I.18.3: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Quemadmodum domini crudeles tota civitate com-monstrantur invisique et detestabiles sunt, ita regum et iniuria latius patet et infamia atque odiumsaeculis traditur.’

166 Seneca 1928a, I.8.1: 378 (Seneca 1995: 136–7): ‘vestra facta dictaque rumor excipit, et ideo nullismagis curandum est, qualem famam habeant, quam qui, qualemcumque meruerint, magnamhabituri sunt’.

The Roman theory of monarchy 63

blessings, provided that they last’.167 What has brought about this happi-ness is none other than Nero’s mercy: ‘whatever house it enters, mercy willmake it happy and calm’.168 Seneca explains that ‘happiness that deservesthe name lies in giving salvation to many, recalling them to life from thethroes of death and earning by mercy the civic crown’.169 The mercifulprince, then, is a happy prince:

inclined to the milder course, even when it may be of use to punish, he reveals hisreluctance to apply harsh remedies. Free in mind from all trace of enmity orwildness, he exercises his power in an indulgent and beneficial manner, eager onlyto win the approval of the citizens for his commands, abundantly happy in his owneyes if he can share his good fortune with the public. Affable in conversation,accessible and easily approached, amiable in expression (which is what wins overmost 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 withhis cruelty to such an extent that there is no turning back, ‘than to be, as henow is, obliged to be bad?’171

Seneca explicates the idea of felicitas at work in De clementia morecomprehensively in De beata vita. There he informs us that ‘true happinessis founded upon virtue’.172 Felicitas comes from aligning oneself withreason and so obtaining true liberty. It is a delusion to think that felicitascan ever be fortuitous.173 To ascribe happiness to a state of mind dependent

167 Seneca 1928a, I.1.7: 360 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘omnibus tamen nunc civibus tuis et haec confessioexprimitur esse felices et illa nihil iam his accedere bonis posse, nisi ut perpetua sint’.

168 Seneca 1928a, I.5.4: 370 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Clementia, in quamcumque domum pervenerit, eamfelicem tranquillamque praestabit.’

169 Seneca 1928a, I.26.5: 428 (Seneca 1995: 157): ‘Felicitas illa multis salutem dare et ad vitam ab ipsamorte revocare et mereri clementia civicam.’

170 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, nihilefferum est, qui potentiam suam placide ac salutariter exercet approbare imperia sua civibuscupiens, felix abunde sibi visus, si fortunam suam publicarit, sermone adfabilis, aditu accessuquefacilis, vultu, qui maxime populos demeretur, amabilis . . . a tota civitate, amatur, defenditur,colitur’.

171 Seneca 1928a, I.13.2: 396 (my translation): ‘Quid autem eo infelicius, cui iam esse malo necesse est?’172 Seneca 1932a, 16.1: 140: ‘Ergo in uirtute posita est uera felicitas.’173 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 aequadiuinis: nihil cogeris, nullo indigebis, liber eris, tutus indemnis; nihil frustra temptabis, nihilprohibeberis; omnia tibi ex sententia cedent, nihil aduersum accidet, nihil contra opinionem acuoluntatem. ‘‘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 opusest ei qui omnia sua in se collegit? Sed ei qui ad uirtutem tendit, etiam si multum processit, opus estaliqua fortunae indulgentia adhuc inter humana luctanti, dum nodum illum exsoluit et omne

64 The Roman Princeps

to any extent upon the possession of external goods is to render it toofleeting and insecure a state for Seneca: externals may come and goaccording to circumstances beyond our control. Seneca’s concept of felic-itas is an objective notion of human flourishing, and refers to a constantpsychological state connected with seeing things clearly, rationally, con-stantly. Tristitia is condemned repeatedly in De clementia as a mental defectwhich affects one’s ability to see clearly. Seneca first associates tristitia withbeing pitiful: to commiserate is ‘a sickness of the mind caused by animpression of miseries affecting other people; or a sadness induced bybad things which seem to happen to others for no good reason’.174 He addsthat ‘sadness is ill adapted for seeing how things are, for thinking out whatmight be useful, for avoiding what might be dangerous and working outwhat would be fair’.175 To be sad is to lapse into false belief and to be misledby wrong impressions about the world. A wise man always sees a goodreason for what happens. His mind is serene, happy, and his vision clear:‘He will always have the same, calm, unshaken expression, which he couldnot do if he were open to sadness . . . The wise man sees ahead and has hiscourse of action ready.’176

T H E P R I N C E A N D F O R T U N A

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

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, iamtamen pro libero.’

174 Seneca 1928a, II.5.4: 438–40 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘Misericordia est aegritudo animi ob alienarummiseriarum speciem aut tristitia ex alienis malis contracta quae accidere immerentibus credit.’

175 Seneca 1928a, II.6.1: 440 (Seneca 1995: 162): ‘Tristitia inhabilis est ad dispiciendas res, utiliaexcogitanda, periculosa vitanda, aequa aestimanda.’

176 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 inexpedito consilium habet.’

177 Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416 (my translation): ‘Principis maior est fortuna, quam ut solacio egeat.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 65

that nothing, therefore, occurs in life sine ratio, without a reason – in theface of the common objection that, as he puts it, ‘many bad things happento good people’.178 Seneca’s argument is simply that contingency in humanaffairs is apparent rather than real.179 He rehearses this fundamentalperspective in De beneficiis, saying that ‘you can call on Nature, Fate orFortune’ variously to talk about divine reason because ‘all are names of oneand the same god variously exercising his power’.180 Fortune is therecharacterised as divine, rational and male. This meaning of fortuna isintended repeatedly throughout De clementia. In the prologue, Nero tellsus that ‘all dispensations of fortuna to mortals are made through pro-nouncements on my lips’.181 As vicegerent of the gods, the prince deter-mines the fortuna of every human being.182 This function exactly parallelsthe relationship between Nero and the gods: Nero’s fortuna is affixed,alloted, divinely determined, destined. This is why Seneca reminds himthat ‘you cannot escape your fortuna: it besieges you’.183 Elsewhere, Senecarepeats that ‘a great fortuna is a great servitude’.184 The fixity of fortuna isthe fixity of providential ratio. And the prince’s great fortuna puts him insuch a conspicuous position from the point of view of the public that hecannot seek solace in retribution for any injuries which may be done tohim. Seneca warns Nero that his power is too ‘manifest’ for the prince toseek ‘a reputation for power’ through inflicting harm.185 His high fortunademands 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 aswell. He regularly talks about both bona fortuna and mala fortuna. In sodoing, he adopts the Roman notion of fortuna as a blind, irrational force inorder to describe, in conversational style, an ordinary aspect of moral life.

178 Seneca 1928d, I.1: 2: ‘Quaesisti a me, Lucili, quid ista, si providentia mundus regeretur, multa bonisviris mala acciderent.’

179 Seneca 1928d, 1.3: 4: ‘Ne illa quidem quae videntur confusa et incerta . . . sine ratione, quamvissubita sint, accidunt.’

180 Seneca 1935, IV.8.3: 220 (Seneca 1995: 279–80): ‘Sic nunc naturam voca, fatum, fortunam; omniaeiusdem dei nomina sunt varie utentis sua potestate.’

181 Seneca 1928a, I.1.2: 356 (Seneca 1995: 128): ‘quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit, meo orepronuntiat’.

182 The same idea is expressed in Seneca, De brevitate vitae, 4.4 (Seneca 1932c: 296–8).183 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 ofotium – in De brevitate vitae, 4.1–4 (Seneca 1928c: 296–8).

184 See De consolatione ad Polybium, 6.5 (Seneca 1932d: 372): ‘Magna servitus est magna fortuna; nonlicet tibi quicquam arbitrio tuo facere.’

185 Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416: ‘Principis maior est fortuna . . . manifestiorque vis, quam ut alieno maloopinionem sibi virium quaerat.’

66 The Roman Princeps

Seneca agrees that there is no question that life is full of difficulties,and we are all faced with sudden and apparently inexplicable reversalsof good and bad luck. But, in truth, such apparent adversities andinjustices have a rational cause and a rational explanation. A wise mansees that such setbacks or sudden advantages are not, in fact, implacablyopposed to the exercise of reason and virtue, but should be viewed asprovidentially furnished opportunities for demonstrations of virtue.The relationship between God, or ratio, and man is an exacting one: inDe providentia, God is said to be like a ‘magnificent parent, and nomild task-master of the virtues’.186 Moral progress must be strenuousbecause virtus needs to be tested in order to ‘flourish’. It ‘shrivels withoutan adversary’.187 The consequence of the demands made upon goodmen is that they ‘labour and sweat, ascend through toil’ to the heightsof 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 ‘doesnot indulge the good man in delights, but tests him, hardens him,prepares him for his service’.189 In other words, you can be allottedadversity for your own good. The aim is not to concede ground to whatseems 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 rationalresponse is to stay one’s course, and to view it as a useful and character-building experience.

Throughout his writing, Seneca furnishes extremely ornate depictions ofsuch experiences as belligerent engagements in which the wise man proveshimself to be invictus, morally invincible. In the same way that he turns tovarious personifications of ratio to describe its rule over the world, Senecaconsistently uses Fortuna to depict and personify an irrational and hostileagent that appears to challenge our ability to think and see clearly. The wiseman understands that ‘death, imprisonment, burning, and all the othermissiles of Fortuna . . . are not evils, but only seem to be’.190 Fortuna can

186 Seneca 1928d, 1.5: 6: ‘parens ille magnificus, uirtutum non lenis exactor, sicut seueri patres, duriuseducat’.

187 Seneca 1928d, 2.4: 8: ‘Marcet sine adversario virtus.’188 Seneca 1928d, 1.6: 6: ‘Itaque cum videris bonos viros acceptosque diis laborare, sudare, per arduum

escendere, malos autem lascivire et voluptatibus fluere.’189 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.’

190 Seneca 1917–25, 85.26, vol. II: 300 (301): ‘ ‘‘Quid ergo? . . . mortem, vincula, ignes, alia tela fortunaenon timebat?’’ Non. Scit enim illa non esse mala, sed videri.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 67

seem to be ‘waging war’ on you, but you must not be overcome andenslaved by this apparent enemy of virtue.191 The wise man is ‘unerringin judgement, unshaken, unafraid, a man who may be moved but neverperturbed by the use of force – a man whom Fortune, when she hurls athim with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze,though rarely, but never wound. For Fortune’s missiles rebound from sucha man.’192 We need Fortuna’s hostility in order to put us to the test andensure that we have a chance to win glory:

A gladiator counts it a disgrace to be matched with an inferior, and knows that towin without danger is to win without glory. The same is true of Fortuna. She seeksout the bravest men to match with her; some she passes by in disdain. Those thatare most stubborn and unbending she assails, men against whom she may exert allher 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 thatdiscovers a great exemplar.193

When reason meets resistance in the world, its opponent is characterised asfemale. Kept as a personification of adversity within Seneca’s imaginativedepiction of the virtuous man’s encounter with such resistance, Fortunaputs a succession of Roman heroes’ virtus – that quality of manliness – tothe test, forcing them to contest their constancy, their steadfastness on thepath of reason, in the face of her savage onslaughts.

Fortuna thus comes to embody the irrational elements which Senecanpolitical thought tyrannises. She is said to preside over slaves in the cruellestof kingdoms. Fortuna possesses a regnum which the wise man shoulddespise.194 She rules over it with a perverse ius. Her jurisdiction is that ofa dominus over a servus.195 She is ‘like a mistress that is changeable andpassionate and neglectful of her slaves’, and ‘she will be capricious in both

191 Seneca 1917–25, 51.8, vol. I: 340: ‘Fortuna mecum bellum gerit.’ Seneca immediately proceeds todiscuss this war of conquest in terms of freedom and slavery.

192 Seneca 1917–25, 45.9, vol. I: 296 (297, modified): ‘certus iudicii, inconcussus, intrepidus, quemaliqua vis movet, nulla perturbat, quem fortuna, cum quod habuit telum nocentissimum vi maximaintorsit, 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.’

193 Seneca 1928d, 3.4: 16 (citing translation on 17): ‘Ignominiam iudicat gladiator cum inferiorecomponi et scit eum sine gloria uinci qui sine periculo uincitur. Idem facit fortuna: fortissimossibi pares quaerit, quosdam fastidio transit. Contumacissimum quemque et rectissimum adgredi-tur, aduersus quem uim suam intendat: ignem experitur in Mucio, paupertatem in Fabricio,exilium in Rutilio, tormenta in Regulo, uenenum in Socrate, mortem in Catone. Magnumexemplum nisi mala fortuna non inuenit.’

194 For Fortune’s regnum, see, for example, De brevitate vitae, 10.4 (Seneca 1932c: 316); De vita beata,25.5 (Seneca 1932a: 168).

195 For the extent of her jurisdiction, see Seneca 1932c: 316; Seneca 1917–25, vol. I: 248.

68 The Roman Princeps

her rewards and her punishments’.196 But a wise man ‘always possesses anundiminished and stable liberty, being free and his own master andtowering above all others. For what can possibly be above him who isabove Fortuna?’197 It is only ‘when one strays away from Nature’ that ‘one iscompelled to crave, and fear, and be a slave to the things of chance. We mayreturn to the true path; we may be restored to our proper state; let ustherefore be so, in order that we may be able to endure pain, in whateverform it attacks our bodies and say to Fortuna: ‘‘You have to deal with aMan; seek someone whom you can conquer!’’’198 For Seneca, the capacityto withstand these assaults is virtus. And he constantly compares thecultivation of virtus with the idea of building an inner fortification againstouter 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 assaultedby many engines, Fortune can find no passage into it. The soul stands onunassailable ground, if it has abandoned external things, it is independent in itsown fortress, and every weapon that is hurled falls short of the mark. Fortune hasnot the long reach with which we credit her; she can seize none except him thatclings to her. Let us then recoil from her as far as we are able. This will be possiblefor us only through knowledge of self and of Nature.199

Seneca associates this ability to fend off the slings and arrows of Fortuna notwith physical fortitude, but with an inner, mental strength, and with thevirtue of magnanimity above all others. In De constantia he made magnanim-ity the crowning virtue of the vir sapiens.200 And in De ira, Seneca clearlylaid out the psychological basis of magnanimous activity:

196 Seneca 1932e, 10.6: 32 (citing translation on 33): ‘Ut varia et libidinosa mancipiorumque suorumneglegens domina et poenis et muneribus errabit.’

197 Seneca 1932c, 5.3: 300 (301): ‘numquam sapiens in tam humilem nomen procedet, numquamsemiliber erit, integrae semper libertatis et solidae, solutus et sui iuris et altior ceteris. Quid enimsupra eum potest esse, qui supra fortunam est?’

198 Seneca 1917–25, 98.14, vol. III: 126 (127): ‘Quidquid fieri potuit potest, nos modo purgemusanimum sequamurque naturam, a qua aberranti cupiendum timendumque est et fortuitis servien-dum. Licet reverti in viam, licet in integrum restitui: restituamur, ut possimus dolores quocumquemodo corpus invaserint perferre et fortunae dicere ‘‘cum viro tibi negotium est: quaere quemvincas’’.’

199 Seneca 1917–25, 82.5, vol. II: 242 (243): ‘Philosophia circumdanda est, inexpugnabilis murus, quemfortuna multis machinis lacessitum non transit. In insuperabili loco stat animus, qui externadeseruit, et arce se sua vindicat; infra illum omne telum cadit. Neminem occupat nisi haerentemsibi. Itaque quantum possumus, ab illa resiliamus; quod sola praestabit sui naturaeque cognitio.’

200 Seneca 1928c, 11.1: 80: ‘Praeterea cum magnam partem contumeliarum superbi insolentesquefaciant et male felicitatem ferentes, habet quo istum affectum inflatum respuat, pulcherrimumvirtutem omnium, magnanimitatem.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 69

Beyond any doubt, one raises oneself from the common lot to a higher level bylooking down upon those who provoke. The mark of true greatness is not to feelthe 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 beunshaken by wrong done to one; to succumb to anger is to become agitated. Buthe whom I have raised above all annoyance has embraced the supreme good andcan reply not to man alone but to Fortune herself: ‘Do all that you will, you are tooinsignificant to cloud my serenity. Reason forbids it, and I have entrusted my lifeto reason’s governance.’201

This analysis is imported into the political theory of De clementia. Senecadeclares 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 womento rave in anger, for wild beasts . . . to bite and worry the fallen’.202 HereSeneca characterises magnanimity as well as clemency – with which itbecomes 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 greateror 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, andis shown to better effect up on the magistrate’s bench than down on thefloor’, adding that ‘a great mind is an adornment to great fortuna, but itmust rise to it and stand above it, or else bring down fortuna, too, to theground’.204 The magnanimous prince looks down on apparent misfortuneand iniuria with equanimity, using ‘in a noble spirit the great gift which thegods have given him – his power to grant life and take it away’.205 Seneca

201 Seneca 1928b, III.25.3–4: 318 (Seneca 1995: 102): ‘Illud non veniet in dubium, quin se exemeritturbae et altius steterit quisque despexit lacessentis. Proprium est magnitudinis verae non sentirepercussum. Sic immanis fera ad latratum canum lenta respexit, sic irritus ingenti scopulo fluctusadsultat. Qui non irascitur, inconcussus iniuria perstitit, qui irascitur, motus est. At ille quem modoaltiorem omni incommodo posui, tenet amplexu quodam summum bonum, nec homini tantumsed ipsi fortunae respondet: ‘‘Omnia licet facias, minor es quam ut serenitatem meam obducas.Vetat hoc ratio, cui uitam regendam dedi.’’ ’

202 Seneca 1928a, I.5.5: 372 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘magni autem animi proprium est placidum essetranquillumque et iniurias atque offensiones superne despicere. Muliebre est furere in ira, ferarumvero nec generosarum quidem praemordere et urguere proiectos.’

203 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?’

204 Seneca 1928a, I.5.3–5: 370–2 (Seneca 1995: 134): ‘Haec tamen magnanimitas in bona fortunalaxiorem locum habet meliusque in tribunali quam in plano conspicitur . . . Magnam fortunammagnus animus decet, qui, nisi se ad illam extulit et altior stetit, illam quoque infra ad terramdeducit.’

205 Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘Uti itaque animose debet tanto munere deorum dandiauferendique vitam potens.’

70 The Roman Princeps

depicts the magnanimous and merciful prince as gloriously unperturbed bythe petty injustices perpetrated against his person by ordinary mortals:

I would not apply the word ‘merciful’ to one who is easy about suffering inflictedon another, but to one with goads of his own to drive him on but who still does notleap into action, who understands that the mark of a great mind is to endurewrongs done to him even where his power is supreme, and that nothing is moreglorious than a wronged prince unrequited.206

Seneca gives us a double answer in De clementia as to how the prince attainsthe lofty heights of power: he reaches the high ground in politics becauseof his great good fortune and because of his virtue. From Seneca’s point ofview, these are not rival explanations of the prince’s rise to his ‘pinnacle’ orsummit, but rather dual aspects of one and the same providentialscheme.207 Properly understood, Fortuna is merely a synonym for divineratio, in accordance with which the prince unerringly acts because of hisvirtus. The prince has been allotted his great fortuna by the gods onaccount 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 mostpublic and visible of lives, possibly confronting the greatest of difficulties:tests, burdens, insults. In a fully rational frame of mind, the prince willassent to this fortuna and secure his freedom.

A mala fortuna assails a prince who is at the same time held to owe hislofty position to bona fortuna: it is a contradiction in terms which Senecapreserves in order to dramatise the countless battles which need to bewaged in order to acquire and practise virtue. The perpetuation of thedistinctively Roman personification of an irrational force at work in theworld in the form of a female goddess certainly seems to be the perpetu-ation of something like an objectification mistake. But Fortuna was afamiliar part of the conceptual equipment of Roman political, moral andphilosophical enquiry. Notwithstanding his own adherence to a mono-theistic and providentialist philosophy, Seneca is reluctant to jettison thisway of talking. He wants to discuss the challenges facing his audience,presenting Stoic philosophy in a comprehensible way which will allow himto show how their interpretation of such forces at work in the world isirrational, one which is based upon false appearances. In order to do so, he

206 Seneca 1928a, I.20.3: 414 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘clementem vocabo non in alieno dolore facilem, sedeum, qui, cum suis stimulis exagitetur, non prosilit, qui intellegit magni animi esse iniurias insumma potentia pati nec quicquam esse gloriosius principe impune laeso’.

207 Seneca 1928a, I.8.3: 378: ‘Est haec summae magnitudinis servitus non posse fieri minorem; sed cumdis tibi communis ipsa necessitas est. Nam illos quoque caelum adligatos tenet, nec magis illisdescendere datum est quam tibi tutum: fastigio tuo adfixus es.’

The Roman theory of monarchy 71

preserves the objectification, even if it is an irrational view, in order toredescribe the proper relation one should take up to the world – how oneshould see things.

A further part of the explanation as to why Seneca gives Fortuna this dualcharacter may be related to his view that, except in the rarest case of a Stoicsage, no one’s vision of the providential scheme can be entirely perfect.There are conflicts and diseases and events in Nature’s scheme which causemishaps to individuals’ lives, and it is extremely hard for us to see the biggerpicture. This is the challenge which we face as agents, according to theStoics: to battle with an inveterate propensity to attribute to such events abad nature when their bad nature is really only a result of our failure toconquer those feelings which interfere with our reception of the correctstate of affairs in the world. The battle with Fortuna in the world is anexternalised projection of the interior struggle for self-conquest. Thestruggle for the victory of reason within the self is not envisaged bySeneca as a battle between reason and some irrational part of the soul,and his view does not belong to the psychomachic tradition – though it iseasily assimilable to it. The Stoic conception of the psyche as the hegem-onikon eliminates the notion of a conflict between warring parts of abipartite or tripartite soul. Rather, the conflict is a war over conflictingviews: one rational and right, the other irrational and wrong, one virtuousand happy and the other vice-ridden and sad. The virtuous prince, how-ever, exhibits a perfected rationality and consequently maintains his selfand every other person in peace, freedom, security and serenity. In thisway, the status of the civitas under the rule of the princeps resembles thepeaceful and tranquil status of the world as it is ruled by ratio. But everyperson depends upon the prince’s ability to master his self, to maintain thisperspective and to rule accordingly. He must not fall under the sway of anirrational mistress.

72 The Roman Princeps

P A R T I I

The Roman Theory and the Formationof the Renaissance Princeps

C H A P T E R 2

The pre-humanist formation of theRenaissance princeps

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

The ‘great blaze of Seneca’s popularity in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies’ in western Europe acquired a remarkable intensity in the pro-tracted ideological confrontation between the papacy and the Holy RomanEmperor Frederick II over the latter’s government of the Kingdom of Sicilyin the first half of the Duecento.1 In 1231, some three years after the Regnumhad been transformed into a battlefield by a papal army launched againstthe Sicilian monarch, one of the earliest instances of recourse to Senecanpolitical theory stands out amid the series of military and juridical conflictswhich helped define the development of the various monarchical centresof power on the Italian peninsula during the thirteenth century.2 AsKantorowicz and Marongiu noted, the prologue of the massive body ofroyal legislation, promulgated by Frederick in the aftermath of the invasionand entitled the Liber Augustalis, cites the preamble of De clementia, placingthe words of the Senecan princeps in the mouth of Frederick, ‘ever CaesarAugustus of the Romans, Felicitous Victor and Conqueror of Italy, Sicily,Jerusalem, Arles’.3 Part of the Senecan theory thus became inscribed upon

1 Reynolds 1983: 359.2 For events leading up to the legislation, see especially Abulafia 1992: 164–205; Kantorowicz 1931:

170–8, 197–211; van Cleve 1972: 158–233.3 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 apparatusof 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 isin Constitutiones Regni Siciliae 1992 (henceforth CRS 1992), where a bibliography and discussion ofthe printed editions of the legislation from the editio princeps of 1475 to 1992 is given in AndreaRomano’s introduction: ix–xxxix. For a history of the text, see Capasso 1871; CRS 1992: ix–xxxix; andCRSL 1999, vol. I: xiii–xliii. For an English translation, see Liber Augustalis 1971, whose version I haveregularly 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 inMarongiu 1972, Ch.X: 42; Ch.XI: 315; Ch.XIII: 297–301.

75

the constitutional document which provided the fundamental framework ofpublic law within the Kingdom of Sicily from 1231 down to the Napoleonicera:

And so, by this compelling necessity of things, and no less by the inspiration ofDivine Providence, princes of peoples were created so that through their agencyunbridled wickedness might be restrained, so that these arbiters of life anddeath for mankind might establish – as if executors, so to speak, of DivineProvidence – the fortune, lot and state of every person, and so that from theirhands, they might be able to render account perfectly of the stewardship commit-ted to them. By the king of kings and prince of princes, these things above allothers are sought: that they do not allow the sacrosanct Church, the mother of theChristian religion, to be stained by the hidden treacheries of those who disparagethe faith; that they defend her with the power of the earthly sword from theincursions of the enemies of the public; and that they conserve to the best of theirability both peace and justice – like two sisters embracing one another – for apacified people.4

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

4 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘Sicque ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nec minus divineprovisionis instinctu principes gentium sunt creati per quos posset licentia scelerum coerceri; quivite necisque arbitri gentibus qualem quisque fortunam, sortem, statumque haberet, velut executoresquodammodo divine Providentie stabilirent, de quorum manibus ut villicationis sibi commisseperfecte reddere valeant rationem. A Rege Regum e Principe Principum ista potissime requiruntur;ut Sacrosanctam Ecclesiam, Christiane Religionis Matrem, detractorum fidei maculari clandestinisperfidiis non permittant, et ut ipsam ab hostium publicorum incursibus, gladii materialis potentiatueantur, utque pacem populis eisdemque pacificatis iustitiam, que velut due sorores se ad invicemamplexantur, pro posse conservent.’

5 For explication of the ideology informing Norman royal art and architecture, see Borsook 1990

(a useful bibliography is at 87–101); Tronzo 1997.6 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 rationemrepetant, adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum’.

76 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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 hesays:

‘Have I, of all mortals, found favour and been chosen to act on earth in placeof the gods? I am the arbiter of life and death over peoples, and the lot and stateof everyone has been placed in my hands. All dispensations of fortune to mortalsare made through pronouncements on my lips.’7

Recognising that the Senecan words of Frederick’s proem express conceptswhich are attached to a theory, Marino substantiates his gloss by copyingdown an extended section of the Roman theory in order to clarify their usewithin the lawcodes. His commentary fleshes out the Senecan arbiter of theproem: his readers can see that the manual metaphor of the Senecanpassage has been carried into the Frederician theory, and that the lips ofthe prince exercise immense power in determining the ‘the lot and state’ ofeveryone placed in his hands.

A vast amount has been written about the purported Frederician con-tribution to the ideological and institutional development of the state sincethe case – firmly based upon an interpretation of the Emperor’s legislativeprogramme for the Kingdom – was first put by Burckhardt and subse-quently elaborated by Kantorowicz.8 Yet there has been no discussion ofthe place, role or meaning of the actual word status within the politicaltheory contained in the Liber, nor of its classical provenance. It is anahistorical absurdity to suggest that Frederick contributed anything at alltowards the expression or the practical or institutional embodiment of anidea that did not yet exist in the form in which he is often alleged to haveheld it. But with some attentiveness to the historicity of the concept, onecan nevertheless observe that the architects of Frederick’s programme atMelfi were evidently responsible for articulating some notion of ‘status’and its relation to the person of the princeps which they derived fromSeneca’s De clementia. As a consequence, a significant part of the Romantheory of the prince was etched onto the constitutional apparatus of royal

7 CRSL 1999, vol. I: 4, n.(h): ‘Statumque haberet. Ista verba sunt Senece, primo de clementia, adNeronem ubi dicit: Ego ne ex omnibus mortalibus placui, electusque sum, quod in terris Deorumvice fungerer? Ego vitae necisque arbiter gentibus: qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, inmanu mea positum est: quod cuique mortalium fortuna datum velit, meo ore pronunciat.’ DaCaramanico’s gloss on the Senecan citation is mentioned in Kantorowicz 1957: 116, n.85. For the dateof the gloss (1278–85), see Vallone 1985: 177–82. Da Caramanico’s proem is discussed below.

8 Burckhardt 1990: 19–22; Kantorowicz 1931: 228–98; Kantorowicz 1957: 97–107. For a guide to theimmense literature on Frederick II and ‘the state’, see CRSL 1999, vol. I: xv (Introduzione), n.5.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 77

government in Frederick’s Liber, where it was inspected, interpreted andreiterated over the course of centuries by generation after generation ofcivilian lawyers and publicists concerned to account for the origin andextent of royal power in the Kingdom subsequent to his reign.

Three outstanding features of the intellectual and ideological contourswhich defined the position of his Sicilian regime in 1231 help explainFrederick’s alignment with the Senecan princeps in the Liber. The first ofthese is identifiable in the immediate context of the legislation. There was apressing need for a clarification of royal authority which could accompanyits rigorous reimposition in the Regnum Siciliae after the military, politicaland social conflicts of the late 1220s.9 Those conflicts had massivelydisrupted the consolidation of royal power in the Kingdom undertakenin the first part of the decade.10 They had been caused by Frederick’sexcommunication, the concomitant release of his subjects from theiroaths of allegiance to him, and the papal invasion of his territories in thesouth of the peninsula. The Liber Augustalis pointedly refers its public tothis polemical background: the Regnum had been ‘very frequently assailedup to now . . . by the incursions of disturbances now past’;11 and thelegislation aimed to rectify the effects of interference within the kingdomcaused by ‘the wickedness of the invaders of our kingdom . . . not long agoin different provinces’.12

These problems were inextricably linked to a second aspect of theideological context which helped determine the recourse to Senecantheory. Frederick’s regime confronted, in acutely aggravated form, a con-flict over definitions which recurred from the inception of the Kingdom toits incorporation within the Spanish Empire. For as long as the Romanpapacy contended its claim to ultimate possession and temporal jurisdic-tion over the Kingdom, the development of the Sicilian monarchicalideology would be inflected by its need to counter, refute, incorporate,accommodate or merely pass over in silence – according to its variouspolitical exigencies at any given moment – those papal claims and thetheoretical basis on which they were constructed. The ideological terrainwithin which the Frederician account of his monarchical person had to be

9 CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxi; Abulafia 1992: 202.10 Kantorowicz 1931: 121–35; van Cleve 1972: 139–57; Abulafia 1992: 139–48.11 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 6: ‘Cum igitur Regnum Siciliae nostrae Maiestatis hereditas pretiosa

plerumque propter imbecillitatem aetatis nostrae, plerumque etiam propter absentiam nostrampraeteritarum perturbationum incursibus exstiterit hactenus lacessitum’.

12 CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.74, 134: ‘[praescripsimus, quot, et quales Baiuli, iudices, atque notarii per urbessingulas, iustitiam ministrarent, videlicet, ut his,] quos dudum invasorum Regni nostri per diversasprovincias creavit iniquitas’.

78 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

situated was marked out by a rival allocation of his position as rex. Thatallocation was effected within the papal interpretation by a series ofconcepts which circumscribed his royal person and which obliged him toaccept two connected points of view: that the Sicilian Regnum consisted inlands which belonged to a principatus of which the pope, and notFrederick, was princeps; and that, as rex of that Regnum, Frederick enjoyeda subordinate role within the economy of secular power which, whenoverstepped, entailed upon the Holy Roman Emperor (as it had uponevery other Sicilian king from Roger II onwards) the disciplinary measuresof excommunication and invasion exercised by the pope, not in hiscapacity as a feudal dominus of some local territories, but as his princeps.The primary grounds upon which the papacy defended its use of thesepowers in the Kingdom – the doctrine of the papal vicariate and theDonation of Constantine – similarly constituted the fundamental basis ofits claims to ultimate secular authority over Frederick in every otherterritory which he ruled as Holy Roman Emperor.13 Even while the papacyinsisted upon the separateness of the Regnum from the Empire, its claims toprincely rule both within and without the Kingdom were raised uponcommon ideological strata. This fact has made the historiography ofFrederick’s controversy with the papacy often bewilderingly complicated,and an attempt at some crispness here is not intended to eclipse theconsiderable conceptual complexities surrounding the constitutional posi-tion of the Regnum. On the contrary, the turn to Senecan political theory atMelfi neatly elided many of those complexities by positing a monarchicalpersona whose powers as rex within the Regnum were entirely undifferen-tiated from the powers of a princeps within a principatus. The vocabulary ofthe rex was a crucial aspect of the utility of the classical theory of the princeto a monarch promulgating legislation explicitly intended for applicationsolely within a regnum. Frederick subsequently made no attempt to assimil-ate the political, administrative, judicial and bureaucratic operations of theKingdom to an imperial superstructure. But De clementia providedFrederick with a language with which to describe his position within theRegnum in a manner which entirely blurred the distinction between rex andprinceps. They were descriptions of one and the same person in theory aswell as in practice at Melfi.

13 For an historical account of the theory of the vicariate, see Ullmann 1955: 2–8. For its development bypopes and decretalists from the later twelfth century to Innocent III, and its role in justifying theexcommunication 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.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 79

The language of rex and regnum within the classical theory was crucial.But it was also incidental upon an even more potent series of interrelatedclaims about the persona of the Senecan prince which Frederick’s Liberreformulated. In asserting the pope’s jurisdictional supremacy over thesecular princeps, papal monarchical ideology had been historically obligedto articulate its position by using elements of Roman constitutional, moraland legal thought which had begun to emerge at an early stage of theRoman Principate in the Senecan document, and which had subsequentlybecome more widely diffused within Roman imperial ideology. The resultwas a papal version of universal monarchy whose theoretical structure, incertain key areas, so closely resembled that of its imperial antagonist that itcould be penetrated and refuted by reasserting apposite elements of theRoman theory of the princeps. This manoeuvre is observable in theFrederician theory, which uses a Senecan ideology to counter the effectof the papal vicariate – the doctrine to which the ideological justificationfor Frederick’s recent excommunication and the invasion of his kingdomwas ultimately traceable.

By elaborating the princeps in Senecan terms at Melfi, the Fredericiantheory effected a profound act of dislocation. The Senecan prince cameattached to an account of the origins of monarchical power which could berearticulated in order to obviate papal mediation of secular authority. Thefundamental theoretical basis upon which the papacy claimed its plenitudopotestatis – the vicariate – was neatly sidestepped. The classical theoryindicated a monarchical person whose rule was held to be personally,directly and providentially instituted in place of the gods on earth. TheSenecan statement of the concept of the vicegerency in the proem ofDe clementia – ‘in terris deorum vice fungerer?’ – indicated the prince’sfunction with a vocabulary which had become conventional in Roman lawand in papal ideology.14 Furthermore, that vicegerent role was describedwithin the Senecan theory through a metaphor of legal accountancy: theprincipate 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’shands.15 Both the manual metaphor and the notion of accounting for atrust are reformulated within the Frederician proem. Frederick took the

14 Seneca 1928a, I.1.2: 356.15 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 statumquehabeat, in mea manu positum est . . . sic me custodio, tamquam legibus, quas ex situ ac tenebrisin lucem evocavi, rationem redditurus sim . . . Hodie dis immortalibus, si a me rationem repetant,adnumerare genus humanum paratus sum.’’ ’

80 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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 designatesrepeatedly as subjects. And it is no coincidence that the theory thenimmediately describes God as ‘the King of Kings and Prince of Princes’.The divine person whose place the monarch takes on earth is imposedwith the interchangeably royal and princely characteristics which theperson of the monarch on earth aims to deploy. The Senecan monarchwas a person possessed of royal virtues in a royal setting as much as aprincely person of distinctively princely qualities within a principality.The lack of distinction between the categories in the theory accordedwith the very particular circumstances of Frederick’s rule over theRegnum: the claim is that Frederick acts as a vicegerent as both rex of theKingdom and princeps of the Holy Roman Empire. The claim to divineand unmediated authorisation for the exercise of royal power which hadbeen depicted in the Rogerian mosaics at Palermo was now grounded in anapparatus imported from the Roman theory of the prince. From its open-ing declaration to its valedictory close, the Liber Augustalis passes over inresoundingly polemical silence the role of the papacy in the constitution ofprincely government.

A third part of the explanation for the Frederician use of the Romantheory of the prince involves considering how the terminology of theSenecan argument resonated among Christian readers. De clementia andDe beneficiis were the first Senecan texts to come back into circulation inwestern Europe, emerging in Northern Italy around 800.16 Their subse-quent dissemination throughout western Europe owes much of its impetusto the renaissance of classical studies in the twelfth century, which pro-duced a massive proliferation of manuscripts containing partial or com-plete versions of these two treatises.17 Together with Letters 1–88 of theEpistulae morales, they were easily the most popular of Seneca’s authenticworks during the twelfth-century renaissance, although the text of theletters (which initially circulated in two manuscript traditions) does notappear to have penetrated south of the Alps until the thirteenth century.18

An absolutely central role in the medieval transmission of the Senecancanon was played by the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino in theKingdom.19 The earliest extant manuscript of most of Seneca’s other moral

16 Reynolds 1983: 359. Outstanding recent scholarship on the textual tradition of De clementia (and Debeneficiis) is in Mazzoli 1978 and Mazzoli 1982. Latest additions to the history of the text areBusonero 2000 and Malaspina 2000 (with useful bibliography at 372–5).

17 Malaspina 2000: 359. 18 Reynolds 1965: 97, 112; Malaspina 2000: 359.19 Reynolds 1965: 86–7; Reynolds 1983: 359.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 81

works, including De providentia, De constantia sapientis, De beata vita, Deotio, De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae and the three books of Deira, is the product of a copyist at the monastery, and his eleventh-centurytext – the so-called codex Ambrosianus – was pored over by at least threescholars during the following century.20 The Kingdom thus enjoyed accessto these ethical treatises at an early stage in their dissemination. Indeed, thefortuna of the Senecan corpus is intimately connected to the history of theKingdom: it was a Neapolitan press which first brought De clementia to itsRenaissance public in printed form, producing in 1475 the editio princeps ofall the moral works commonly attributed to Seneca.21 But the reasons forthe sustained and yet immensely varied relation between monarchicalpower and Senecan political theory through the centuries can only befully grasped by thinking about the Christian fortuna of the persona atthe heart of De clementia.

The principal causes of the immense popularity of Seneca’s moral worksfrom the twelfth century onwards are well documented in the historio-graphy of Senecanism.22 Senecan moral philosophy exercised a peculiarlystrong authority because it was perceived to approximate to Christianity.The various loci within the writings of the Church Fathers which wereassembled in order to endorse the sense of conceptual proximity betweenSenecan and Christian ethics are fully charted.23 Seneca’s Christian cre-dentials were strengthened immeasurably from the late eleventh centuryonwards by the increasing circulation of a pseudo-Senecan correspondencewith St Paul. These letters generated the legend of the philosopher’sfriendship with the apostle and helped to sustain the later, related beliefthat Seneca had been a Christian.24 The passage of Christian writing whichwas most frequently cited to authorise these opinions was found inSt Jerome’s De viris illustribus, in which the theologian describes Seneca

20 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 PietroMonteforte on the ms. (for which, see Billanovich 1996a), the codex Ambrosianus had had at leastthree 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 thebibliography at Reynolds 1983: 366.

21 For the 1475 Neapolitan edition and other early printed editions of the moral works of Seneca, seeNiutta 1999.

22 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.

23 Momigliano 1955: 13–15; Reynolds 1965: 83–4; Meerseman 1973, esp. 43, 49; Panizza 1977: 305,324–34.

24 See Jackson Barlow’s critical edition of the letters and discussion of their fortuna in Epistolae Senecae1938. For discussion of their impact, see Momigliano 1955; Reynolds 1965: 81–9; Panizza 1977, esp.305–8, 313–36.

82 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

as ‘a man who led a life of the greatest continence and whom I would notplace within the catalogus sanctorum were I not prompted to do so by thoseletters of Paul to Seneca, and of Seneca to Paul, which are read by a greatmany people’.25 Although the inclusion of Seneca within the catalogussanctorum may have meant only adding him to a list of writers onChristian topics, the phrase was interpreted with increasing gusto asevidence of his saintliness.26 During the twelfth century, the passage servedas a preface in manuscripts containing the genuine Senecan letters andthe spurious Pauline correspondence, and was thenceforth faithfully citedin Senecan biography from the early Trecento, thereby assisting greatlyin the construction of Seneca as an auctor of essentially Christianpersuasion.27

The familiar aspects of the explanation for why Senecan ethics appearedattractive to Christian readers can also be quickly summarised.28 Senecawas a philosopher of a providential universe in whose work Nature,Reason, Fate, Necessity and Fortune were all treated as descriptions of acosmic power which was regularly personified as a deity. That person-ification, furthermore, took a singular form with enough frequency topermit the belief that Seneca’s Stoicism was monotheistic, even if heoften talked about ‘the gods’ rather than ‘god’. The Senecan attributes ofthe divine persona were similarly promising for a Christian looking forpoints of identification with the Senecan moral world. They indicated abeneficent, loving father figure, occasionally a hard task-master in allocat-ing the fortunes of man, but only out of a caring concern to test moralstrength. But two further aspects of Senecan thought arguably helped tomake his moral writings even more psychologically compelling within apost-Augustinian Christian universe.29 The first of these was that Senecasituated his moral agent in both an earthly and a cosmic civitas. Since forSeneca ‘the true city is the cosmic city’, ethical progress consisted in theemulation of the vir sapiens whose perfected rationality made him an equalof the gods and rendered him free from the slavery of material attachmentsand from all forms of irrational response to the contingencies of his

25 Jerome 1845: 629 (Ch.12): ‘Lucius Annaeus Seneca Cordubensis, Sotionis Stoici discipulus . . .continentissimae vitae fuit, quem non ponerem in catalogo sanctorum nisi me illae epistolaeprovocarent, quae leguntur a plurimis, Pauli ad Senecam, et Senecae ad Paulum.’

26 Reynolds 1965: 84, n.5.27 Reynolds 1965: 113; Panizza 1977: 306–7, 316–26; Albanese 2004.28 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).29 For Augustine and Seneca, see Gallicet 2000; for early medieval Christian Stoicism in general, see

Colish 1985.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 83

mundane life.30 This image of the vir sapiens, coupled with Seneca’sadvocacy of an austere ethical regime in the pursuit of virtue as the onlygood, was lauded by Christian apologists as a form of contemptusmundi. Seneca’s writings were hugely popular in the monasteries of theCistercians, the Benedictines and the Augustinians; he was depicted as anascetic and a monastic person; and he became the author of an anti-materialist text named De paupertate, a compilation of extracts fromletters 1–88 of the Epistulae morales which came into circulation in thetwelfth century.31 But a second reason Seneca became a gripping moralcompanion for the Christian was that the philosopher often mademan’s attempt to live the beata vita in this split site of moral activitylook very hard indeed because of his human tendency to error. BarringHercules, Socrates and Scipio, we all err, Seneca had frankly admittedin De clementia.32 On the one hand, the right thing to do was always tofollow the divine and universal law of the cosmic civitas, discerniblebecause of man’s participation in divine rationality. On the otherhand, doing the right thing frequently appeared to be extremely difficultfor an ordinary mortal. Seneca wrote about this dilemma in a languagewhich vividly represented both the divine and the errant humanperspectives.

Seneca’s Christian readers acquired a taste for his ethics in an imagina-tive and conceptual world increasingly dominated by a monarchical per-sona described not only as both a rex and a princeps but also, in the Latin ofthe Vulgate and of the theologians, as the possessor of a series of virtueswhich coincided with the qualities of the Senecan prince. In thoseChristian texts, the virtues of mansuetudo, magnanimitas and clementiaare repeatedly used to describe a perfectly benevolent, merciful and gentleperson, who is also held to be mitis, or mild.33 Within both the Stoicaccount of monarchy and the Christian story, the consequence of aprovidentially ordained interception in the hopelessly erratic affairs ofman was to render human beings simultaneously free from the dramaticconsequences of their own irrationality and absolutely dependent upon adivine paternal figure, a princeps mundi who acts as the final arbiter of life

30 Schofield 1999: 93.31 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.

32 Seneca 1928a, I.6.3: 374: ‘Peccavimus omnes.’33 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.

84 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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 itslibertas, only reacquiring its freedom through a relation of dependencyupon the princeps. But within the Christian story, the brief appearanceon earth of a perfect princely person had helped establish the belief thathis kingdom was extramundane. The possibility of the human embodi-ment of such a godlike person recedes from view as the chain which linksgods and men within the cosmic civitas – universal ratio – becomesruptured in Christian theology. Civil war is replaced by the Fall. Therupture produced a crucial re-adjustment in the moral evaluation ofmisericordia, pity, as a monarchical attribute. What had been condemnedby Seneca as the vice of the weak-minded and sentimental became positedas the virtue par excellence of a divine monarch moved to pity by thewretched plight of errant mankind. If for Seneca error was a human fact,humanitas was nevertheless an ideal attached to the concept of a personcapable of progressing to the heights of virtue. Such a hope had disap-peared entirely within the Augustinian account of what it meant to behuman.

A final point needs to be made about the citation of De clementia in theLiber. Frederick identifies with the person of the Senecan princeps at a veryprecise moment: he is about to enunciate a massive body of legislationwhich minutely observes and limits the movements and activities of hissubjects. There is a close connection between the ideology of accountabilityand the characteristic – most recently highlighted by Romano – of scru-pulous accountancy which pervades the rationality of the Fredericianlegislation.34 The identification beween the Neapolitan monarch and theSenecan 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 personof the monarch to the divine person whose place he purported to take onearth. Here one obvious theoretical difficulty presented itself. Frederick’sability to provide iura for his kingdom as a vicegerent of God needed to besituated within a broader Christian metaphysics in order to explain howthe secular legislator came to possess the ability to interpret authoritativelythe dictates of divine providence and thus perform the role of an arbiterof ius without the transforming sacramental structure of hierocratic theory.

34 For how things become ‘minuziosamente disciplinate’ and ‘minuziosamente regolamentate’ (xxv) asan effect of the laws, see Romano’s comments in CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxiv–xxvi. See also Burckhardt1990: 20–1; Kantorowicz 1931: 271–92; Liber Augustalis 1971: xxx–xxxv; Abulafia 1992: 214–25.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 85

Confronting the problem of vitiation which appeared to bind the secularruler to priestly mediation, the proem narrates the creation of the universeby ‘Divine Providence’.35 God creates man in ‘his own image and like-ness’.36 The Fall is the result of Adam and Eve’s ‘transgression’ of the lawunder which they had been placed by God, and their punishment is the lossof their immortality.37 At this juncture, God causes the world to bepopulated by their offspring, and he puts it under their direction. Thereason for this divine action is held to be ‘in order that divine clemencymight not so totally and suddenly despoil what he had formed earlier withsuch disastrous result, and so that the destruction of other creatures mightnot result from the destruction of man’s form insofar as they might thenlack a purpose and their value might not serve the needs of anothercreature’.38 Insofar as dominion springs from the ‘blemish of transgression’and society is subsequently characterised by ‘hatred’, holding ‘as propertywhat was common by natural law’,39 man is held to move from a virtuousand naturally sociable state to one of ‘disputes’.40 It is because of thisdevelopment that ‘princes of nations were created . . . through whomlicense of crimes might be corrected’.41 Political society is thus the resultof the ‘compelling necessity of things’. So far, so orthodox; but at the sametime, political society is held to be brought about ‘not less by the inspira-tion of Divine Providence’.42 The description departs from convention inits depiction of the providential plan not as a result of God’s misericordiafor man after a transgression which leaves him hopelessly vitiated, but asthe outcome of divine clementia which leaves his reason intact. God’sresponse to man’s breach of law in Paradise is represented as a classic act

35 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 1: ‘Post mundi machinam providentia divina formatam, etprimordialem materiam, naturae melioris conditionis officio.’

36 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 2: ‘hominem dignissimam creaturam ad imaginem propriam,effigiemque formatam’.

37 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, quamipsis ante contulerat, immortalitate proscripsit’.

38 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 3–4: ‘Ne tamen in totum quod ante formaverat, tam ruinose, tamsubito divina clementia deformaret; et ne hominis forma destructa sequeretur per consequensdestructio ceterorum (dum carerent subiecto proposito) et ipsorum commoditas ullius usibus nonserviret: ex amborum semine terram mortalibus foecundavit, ipsamque subiecit eisdem.’

39 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘qui paterni discriminis non ignari, sed in ipsos a patribustransgressionis vitio propagato inter se odia invicem conceperunt: rerumque dominia iure naturalicommunia distinxerunt’.

40 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘homo, quem Deus rectum et simplicem procreavit, immiscere sequaestionibus non ambegit’.

41 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4: ‘Sicque ipsa rerum necessitate cogente, nec minus divinaeprovisionis instinctu, principes gentium sunt creati, per quos posset licentia scelerum coerceri.’

42 CRSL 1999, vol. I, Prooemium: 4.

86 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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; andwhile the negotiation of the issue of vitiation is certainly awkward, politicalsociety can be subsequently held to be the product of natural reason as wellas the result of a divinely providential scheme necessitated by human error.

The concepts of natural law and natural reason recur throughout thelegislation. In Book 1, the law on tithes runs that ‘insofar as the bountifulright hand of the Saviour has placed us in charge of the temporal affairs ofprinces of other lands, we are more strictly obliged by the inspiration ofnatural law to remedies’.43 The same book states elsewhere that ‘naturalreason does not find abhorrent’ a stipulation which is held to be a part ofthe ius gentium, or law of nations.44 But the most striking use of theconcept of reason in order to explain the natural and secular origins ofgovernment emerges in the legislation’s handling of the lex regia. ThisRoman law is discussed in Chapter 31 of Book I, which states that ‘it wasnot without great forethought and well-considered planning that theQuirites conferred the ius et imperium for establishing law on the Romanprinceps by the lex regia’.45 The reason for the conferral of imperium by theRoman people is said to be so that ‘justice might originate in one and thesame 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 isthereby ceded to Caesar’s de facto position of power, attained through hisprovidentially allotted fortuna. The populus are thus held to be able toreason sufficiently – with foresight – in order to act in accordance with theprovidential force which brings Caesar to power. Through the lex regia,they rationally align their will with Providence, thereby giving their formalconsent both to the necessity and to the rationality of the establishmentof the Principate. Their act ‘can be proven to have been provided notonly 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 CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.7: 19: ‘Quanto ceteris terrae Principibus munifica dextera Salvatoris intemporalibus nos praefecit, tanto saltem iuris naturalis instinctu ad antidota strictius obligamur.’

44 CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.16: 35: ‘Iuris gentium induxit auctoritas et naturalis haec ratio non abhorret.’45 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’.46 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’.47 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 aiustitia vigor, et a vigore iustitia non abesset.’

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 87

with further means of arguing for the confluence of providence, reason andnecessity in the origins of absolutist government without jeopardising itsconcomitant claim about divine authorisation.

As Kantorowicz showed, Frederick’s sustained self-representation as anabsolute monarch embodying iustitia was facilitated by the civilians’rediscovery of a ‘non-ecclesiastical Stoicism’.48 It was characterised by atendency to deify Ratio as the personification of God and as a ‘manifes-tation of Nature equal to God’, and to exalt the ‘absolute power of legalReason’.49 But it is worth noting that Frederick’s assertion that ‘althoughour imperial majesty is free from all laws, it is nevertheless not altogetherexalted above the judgement of Reason, herself the Mother of all Law’50 is aversion, albeit differently gendered, of the Senecan idea that the princelyarbiter and promulgator of laws is self-legislating, placing his personbefore the iudex of ratio. That relation pervades Frederick’s legislativeactivity. But what makes the Liber radically aligned to a Senecan way ofthinking is its emphasis on the clemency of the ruling person. In describingthe divine direction of man’s affairs, the defining attribute of the personaof God is held to be his clementia. When taking the place of the person ofGod on earth, Frederick accordingly exercises the same defining virtue.Free from the body of laws which he inherits but bound to the terms ofdivine ratio which guides his juridical activity, Frederick repeatedly claimsthat his legislation is the product of his divinely merciful person. He‘cleaves to the footprints of imperial clemency’ when pronouncing on theredemption of captives.51 In making judicial appointments we are toldthat ‘when his imperial clemency turns the eyes of his foresight to the pathsof justice and extols the height of his government, arming the imperiousmajesty with the fortification of laws, he relieves both the oppressions andthe burdens of his subjects, who – after God – draw breath only by theleniency of the magnificent prince’.52 But Frederick also regularly exercisesthree 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 Kantorowicz 1957: 107. 49 Kantorowicz 1957: 107.50 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 commentsat Kantorowicz 1957: 105–6 (his translation cited here).

51 CRSL 1999, vol. I, II.4: 202: ‘Clementiae imperialis vestigiis inhaerentes.’52 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 imperatoriammaiestatem, et subiectorum gravamina, et oppressiones relevat, qui sola post Deum magnificentiaePrincipis lenitate respirant.’

88 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

our piety’.53 His modification of ‘the harshness of the old laws’ is sanc-tioned by his royal person who wishes to ‘soften’ them by ‘an interpreta-tion’ emanating from ‘our imperial gentleness’.54 The virtue of mansuetudois elsewhere held to ‘mitigate a hard and harsh penalty’ affixed by pre-existing laws but reckoned by Frederick to be disproportionate to theparticular offence.55

The idea of ‘status’ which is incorporated into the legislation from theSenecan argument is thus attached to a distinctive ideology of personsand their proper government pivoted on a Stoic conception of ratio.As the arbiter of the life, death, state, fortune and general lot of thesubject, the princeps is endowed with a distinctively Senecan set of virtueswhich ensure that his legislation proceeds in alignment with divine, prov-idential and natural reason. A neo-Stoic personality is thereby uneasilysuperimposed upon prince and subject, obliging both to a regime of reasonbut leaving them in a moral universe still characterised by Christianvitiation.

T H E N E A P O L I T A N J U R I S T S A N D T H E C L A S S I C A L T H E O R Y

The ideological ramifications of the Liber’s assimilation of the Sicilianmonarch to the person of the princeps exalted by Seneca’s theory wereprofound, complex and immediately problematic. The Liber Augustalishad announced itself to the world with a title so uncompromisingly Romanand imperial that it was soon effaced after the installation of the ostensiblypro-papal Angevins, and the legal codes were subsequently called theConstitutions. Yet every monarch who presided over and enforced themas law within the Regnum simultaneously perpetuated a claim about hisperson and its relation both to God and his subjects in terminology derivedfrom the Senecan speculum. The pivotal place of the legislation in thegovernment of the Kingdom assured this definition of the monarch exten-sive publicity, affixing and advancing the fortunes of the Senecan theorywithin the political life of the Regnum. Marino’s commentary quicklyacquired an authoritative status as the glossa ordinaria of the legislationand became part of the conventional apparatus which accompanied the textof the Sicilian laws both in manuscript and in print through to the editions

53 CRSL 1999, vol. I, II.8: 210: ‘pietatis nostrae lenitatis servatis’.54 CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.12: 28: ‘Asperitatem veterum legum . . . interpretatione imperialis mansuetudi-

nis lenientes praesenti legi . . . sancimus.’55 CRSL 1999, vol. I, I.48: 104: ‘Duram et diram poenam . . . minime congruentem . . . imperiali

mansuetudine mitigantes, decernimus.’

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 89

of the late eighteenth century.56 Virtually every student of the legislationwould have therefore been reminded both of the description of the mon-arch which their author, Piero della Vigna, had used in the preface and ofits Senecan provenance, which Marino had carefully glossed.57

T H E A P P L I C A T I O N S O F T H E C L A S S I C A L T H E O R Y

As the royal ideology developed over the next hundred years across thereigns of the first four Angevin monarchs, the text of De clementia wassystematically studied and its precepts assiduously adduced by a distin-guished civilian tradition deeply implicated in sustaining the monarch’sclaims to wield the powers of the princeps. Marino was employed in theMagna Curia.58 He was followed by a succession of jurists – Andrea daIsernia, Bartolomeo da Capua and Luca da Penna – who committedthemselves to defining the character and extent of royal power in theRegnum. Like Marino, both Bartolomeo and Andrea were responsible forproviding a full gloss on the Frederician Constitutions. Bartolomeo was aprofessor of civil law at the Neapolitan studium whose commentary on theConstitutions became known as the glossa aurea.59 He also held the post ofprotonotary from 1290, and of royal logothete in 1296, thereby becomingthe highest-ranking official in Angevin government until his death in1328.60 Andrea da Isernia was variously a judge, a treasury official andfinally vice-protonotary within the royal bureaucracy.61 Another distin-guished 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 duringhis lifetime, and regularly referred to the laws of Frederick II throughouthis work.63

These three jurists cited De clementia ‘over and over again’ in theirwritings.64 Kantorowicz helped to show how and why Senecan theory

56 For the centrality of Marino’s glossa ordinaria to the apparatus of the text, see Romano’s commentsat CRSL 1999, vol. I: xxxii–xxxiv. For his biography and a classic account of his work, seeCalasso 1957.

57 For Piero della Vigna, Frederick’s logothete, principal jurist and compositor of the constitutions, seede Blasiis 1861; Kantorowicz 1931: 298–307; Abulafia 1992: 203–4, 265–6.

58 Vallone 1985: 179–80.59 For Bartolomeo, see Boyer 1995; Kelly 2003: 32–4, 182–3, 251–4, 312–14.60 Boyer 1995: 193; Kelly 2003: 34.61 For Andrea da Isernia, see especially Calasso 1961; Vallone 1985: 184–90; Kelly 2003: 67, 107, 109.62 For Luca da Penna, see Ullmann 1969. 63 Ullmann 1969: 7–8.64 Kantorowicz 1957: 116, n.85.

90 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

subsequently dominated civilian discussions of the prince. Pointing outthat in their political theory ‘their philosopher was not Aristotle, butSeneca and his ideal of the ‘‘Sage’’ ’, he produced example after exampleof the uses not only of Seneca’s De clementia in their work, but also ofDe beneficiis, De ira and the Epistulae morales.65 A crucial part of theexplanation for this relationship was supplied by the civilians themselves.‘Seneca’, said Andrea da Isernia, ‘was the finest jurist, as is patently clear toanyone who reads him.’66 The classical optimus iurista supplied the lawyerswith a concept of a princely person and a body of theory so firmly centredupon the Stoic idea of ratio as a form of ius and lex that his texts proved anembarrassment of riches. His political theory was seamlessly transferredinto the juridical field, providing a powerful and fertile means of rein-forcing 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 thosein the patria, that is, his subjects’; he then immediately proceeds to developthe idea by citing Book II of De ira.67 Another striking way in which theNeapolitan jurists resorted to Seneca’s theory was their frequent citationof the Senecan description of the prince as caput and animus of thecorpus of the res publica in order to elaborate the metaphor of the bodypolitic.68 A further idea upheld by reference to the text was observedby Ullmann in the later work of Luca, who sustained the Stoic thesisof the natural sociability of man by lifting Seneca’s formulation ofthe doctrine – ‘hominem sociale animal communi bono’ – fromDe clementia.69 This aspect of Stoic social doctrine was integral to apolitical conception of the civitas which was uncompromisingly secular,monarchical and absolutist, articulated in a language derived from Romanjuridical and political theory. For both Luca and Seneca, the only way toensure good government and the common good within the civitas was toinstall a princeps as its head. As Luca puts it, ‘there is nothing more

65 Kantorowicz 1957: 473, n.56, and index s.v. ‘Seneca’.66 Isernia 1571, fol. 305v (cited from Kantorowicz 1957: 473, n.56): ‘Seneca fuit iurista optimus, ut patet

illis qui legerunt eum’.67 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.

68 See Kantorowicz 1957: 215, 440, n.405, for the repeated use by both Andrea da Isernia and Luca daPenna of De clementia, I.5.1: ‘tu animus rei publicae tuae es, illa corpus tuum’.

69 See Ullmann 1969: 166, n.2. The relevant passage is De clementia I.3.2.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 91

necessary to civitates than principates: without them it is impossible for acivitas to exist’.70

Applying these Senecan doctrines to the person of the rex as much as tothe 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 theoryitself, using its argument about moral personality: rex, princeps and imper-ator were interchangeable descriptions of a monarchical person embodyingreason and demonstrating the requisite virtues. But this argument couldtake firm hold only after the acquisition of the idea of a plurality of princelypersons operative within political life – after, that is, it became conceivableto think of extending the prerogatives of the princeps to rulers otherthan the Holy Roman Emperor. A crucial step in precisely this directionhad already been taken among the Neapolitans by Marino in his theoryof the liber rex, laid out between 1278 and 1285.71 The conflation of rexand princeps within the Frederician prologue presented Marino withthe constitutional task of separating out the Sicilian kingdom from theHoly Empire, while simultaneously attempting to preserve the identity ofthe 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 faraway from the language of the classical theory as possible – inextricablybound as it was to the figure of the Roman imperial prince – and locatedan alternative set of resources with which to legitimate the princely powersof the rex. In detaching the Kingdom from the Empire, Marino detachedthe historical identity of the rex from that of the Roman princeps, andestablished a genealogy of his person outside a Roman imperial framework.But he arrived (albeit more famously) at precisely the same point ofequivalence between regal and princely authority which the use of theclassical theory had helped effect in Frederick’s Liber. In the course ofMarino’s discussion of which of the powers traditionally accorded to theRoman princeps by Roman law belonged by right to the Sicilian king, heasserts both that ‘the king of Sicily is a prince in his kingdom’ and that ‘theking of Sicily, as we have shown above, has no superior’.72 Far from beingan attack on the moral identity of the persona of the Roman theory,

70 Penna 1597, XII, 59, 8, no. 3 (cited from Ullmann 1969: 169): ‘Nihil est tam necessarium civitatibusquam principatibus, sine quibus impossibile est esse civitas.’

71 Caramanico 1957. For Calasso’s thesis, see Pennington 1993: 31, 34–7; for further insights intoMarino’s theory, see Canning 1991: 464–6.

72 Caramanico 1957: 200: ‘Sed inde movemur, quia cum, sicut dictum est, rex Sicilie sit princeps inregno’; 201: ‘rex Sicilie, ut supra probavimus, superiorem non habet’.

92 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

Marino’s argument merely indicated that the Roman emperors had neverhistorically incorporated such a virtuous persona. Furthermore, Marinofirmly anchored within the royal ideology a terminology drawn fromRoman legal texts which served to engender a monarchy along stronglyStoic lines. The conceptual space within which a Senecan argument for theprince could be continued to be advanced by civilians consequentlyreceived further definition.

Mapping out the monarch’s persona according to a typology of distinc-tively Senecan princely virtues reinforced the royal claim to princelypower. Bartolomeo da Capua embraced the new Aristotelianism in hisdiscussions of royal virtue while continuing to draw upon the olderSenecan princely tradition.73 In 1324, he took as the text of his publicsermon ‘Ecce rex tuus, veniet tibi mansuetus’, from Matthew 21:5.74 WhileDe clementia had affixed the virtue of mansuetudo as a prerequisite of thebonus rex on no less than six occasions, the virtue had subsequently playedan important part in both the Vulgate and in the Christian ideology ofkingship to which it helped give rise. Bartolomeo begins by referring to avariety 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 themansueti shall inherit the earth.75 Turning to his classical authorities, herecalls that ‘gentleness is the moderator of angers, as is written in Book IVof the Ethics’.76 He then cites one of Seneca’s definitions of clemencyverbatim: ‘Clemency is a leniency on the part of a superior towards aninferior in imposing punishments, as Seneca says in Book II De clemen-tia.’77 He rounds off his excursus with the biblical personification of therequisite royal virtues and their role in assuring good rule, asserting that‘Pity and Truth guard the king, and his throne is strengthened throughClemency’.78 Bartolomeo’s discussion certainly reflects Thomas Aquinas’analysis in the Summa, where the enquiry into ira, crudelitas, mansuetudoand clementia is closely informed by Senecan moral philosophy, and

73 For the penetration of scholastic philosophy into the royal court, see Kelly 2003: 30–1; 34–41; 182–3.74 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: 33–4.75 Boyer 1995: 245: ‘Servum Domini non oportet litigare, sed mansuetum esse ad omnes . . . Mansueti

autem hereditabunt terram.’76 Boyer 1995: 246: ‘Quod mansuetudo est moderativa irarum, sicut scribitur IIII Etthicorum.’77 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.3.1.78 Boyer 1995: 246: ‘Misericordia et veritas custodiunt regem et roboratur clementia tronus eius’ (citing

Proverbs 20:28).

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 93

particularly by the doctrines of De clementia, which Thomas cites repeat-edly.79 But his emphasis on the importance of royal lenitas and mansuetudois also informed by his knowledge of the Senecan theory and the dangers ofanger in the absolute monarch.80 These concerns about royal anger hadsurfaced in an earlier sermon which Bartolomeo had preached on the textof ‘Render unto Caesar’ from Romans 13:7.81 He first states that it is ‘not fornothing that the king carries the sword, as the Apostle says’.82 He thenexplains 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, asSeneca says in the beginning of De clementia to Nero’, but also becauseconscience dictates that he should ‘obey God, since all power is from thelord God’.83 Bartolomeo thus recurs to the Senecan definition of theprinceps inscribed on the lawcodes which he had glossed, and applies itto his rex, gliding between rex and princeps in effortless accordance withthe Senecan argument. Bartolomeo knew from the Constitutions that the‘fortune and state’ of every subject was in the hands of the prince. If thesword were to be wielded in a fit of anger, Bartolomeo saw potentiallylethal 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 absolutismtypically took the form of confronting and attempting to reconcile tworubrics from Justinian’s lawbooks. The first of these was Princeps legibussolutus at Digest 1.3.31, the touchstone of all juridical declarations ofprincely absolutism. This was then juxtaposed with Digna vox at Codex1.14.4, which declared that ‘it is a statement worthy of the majesty of theruler for the prince to profess himself bound by the laws, to such an extentdoes our authority depend upon the authority of the law’.84 From theearliest civilian glosses on the codes, the response to these apparentlyconflicting directions of thought, as Pennington observes, had been to

79 Boyer 1995: 245, n.12; Aquinas 1964–, vol. 44, 2a2ae.q.157: 34–49. The quaestio persistently declaresits debt to De clementia.

80 Aquinas 1964–, vol. 44, 2a2ae. q.157–9: 34–81.81 The text of the sermon is given in Boyer 1998: 153–7.82 Boyer 1998: 153: ‘non sine causa gladium portat, ut dicit Apostolus in eodem capitolo’.83 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 quamhabet, quia est arbiter vite necisque et in ira sua potest occidere, ut Seneca dicit in primo Declementia ad Neronem, set propter conscientiam, ut Deo obediatur, quoniam omnis potestas adomino Deo est’.

84 Codex (1877) 1.14.4: 68: ‘Digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principem profiteri: adeode auctoritate iuris nostra pendet auctoritas. Et re vera maius imperio est submittere legibusprincipatum.’

94 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

emphasise the ‘psychological state of an emperor who binds himself to thelaw’.85 And, as Tierney says of Accursius’ gloss, ‘the emperor was ‘‘loosedfrom the laws’’ only in the sense that there existed no legal machinery forbringing him to justice if he broke them . . . Fidelity to the law which wasrequired of all men, had to be maintained in the case of the Prince alonethrough internal rather than external discipline.’86 In the writings of theNeapolitan jurists, just such a form of internal discipline – of subjection toius and iustitia – begins to be predicated of their monarch by increasingrecourse to the philosophy of the Roman Stoic who had legitimatedprincely absolutism in his political theory by positing a self-legislating,self-surveying, self-reflecting prince. In the hands of one trained lawyer inparticular, the discourse of the Senecan mirror was to be elaborately placedbefore the Neapolitan monarch. But before turning to Petrarch, one needsfirst to look north of the Regnum, where Senecan theory was acquiring asimilar prominence within a literature concerned with the government ofthe civitas.

T H E R O M A N T H E O R Y A N D T H E R I S E O F T H E S I G N O R I

For the start of the story of the most audacious appropriation of the Romantheory of the prince, one needs to turn to the crisis of communal govern-ment and the series of military takeovers which brought the signori topreside over numerous northern Italian city-states during the second half ofthe Duecento and the early Trecento. At the peak of their commercialexpansion, at the height of their economic productivity, at the ‘climax ofdemocratic . . . revolution’, there was, as Philip Jones has observed in hismagisterial 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 somany communal governments were collapsed and subjected to the rule ofsignori.87 Under these signori, ‘a wholly new feudality arose alongside or inplace of the old lines of clan and ruler. With the shift from commune tocourt and dynasty, the despots . . . began to transform their power base . . .and to assume the superior position or posture of impartial rulers person-ifying unity, order, and peace.’88 From the heart of a civic and mercantilesociety, there emerges what Jones has labelled a ‘counter-ideology’ and heacknowledged – somewhat grimly – its distinctly Roman imperial

85 Pennington 1993: 81. 86 Tierney 1963: 390, 392.87 Jones 1997: 519. For recent discussion of the signorial takeovers, see Dean 1999: 458–78.88 Jones 1997: 640.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 95

character.89 As he puts it, there were now ‘two regimes and two ideolo-gies’ in the city-states.90 Between approximately 1240 and 1400, the taskof restructuring the identity of the civitas at a political and juridicallevel from self-governing commune to monarchical principality wasinvaluably assisted by a theory which had already been implicated in asimilarly revolutionary manoeuvre and whose contentions were nowset to work in order to provide some of the essential elements of thecounter-ideology.91 A basic shift can be discerned: the signorial monar-chies turn to the wealth of Roman texts which had helped furnish therepublican regimes with the central elements of an account of their self-governing political arrangements, and begin to reiterate the other side ofthe Roman story – the story of the res publica saved from the discordanteffects of civil conflict by a princeps installed as the head of the bodypolitic.

S E N E C A N E T H I C S , T H E S O V E R E I G N P E R S O N A N D D E

C L E M E N T I A I N T H E D U E C E N T O

The impact of Senecan philosophy upon the formation of Renaissancethought in its earliest history has long been noted.92 But the presence of aspecifically Senecan strand of ethics in the so-called ‘pre-humanist’ liter-ature of the city-states during the thirteenth century has been recentlydescribed by Quentin Skinner.93 Skinner showed how a series of Duecentotexts on government proffered a vision of government within the civitaswhich manifested an overwhelming intellectual and ideological debt to themoral philosophy of ancient Rome.94 In particular, it displayed a strongreliance upon a set of well-defined Roman classical authorities: Sallust,Seneca and above all Cicero.95 Notwithstanding the increasing circulationof the first translations of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics in the 1250s and1260s, this secular literature remained committed to the articulation ofmoral and political precepts and aims of basically Roman provenance.96

Skinner then contrasted the primary importance attributed to the virtueof 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 Jones 1997: 644 (and for the Roman imperial character of the emerging principatus, see 522, 621).90 Jones 1997: 645.91 For the transition, Ercole 1928 is still fundamental.92 For a recent reiteration, see Kristeller 1991: 273, 279.93 See the recent redaction of Skinner’s seminal article on Lorenzetti in Skinner 2002, II: 39–92.94 Skinner 2002, II: 42, 92. 95 Skinner 2002, II: 56; 41–2. 96 Skinner 2002, II: 42.

96 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

roots’.97 Both the Epistulae morales and De clementia helped to authorise anemphasis on magnanimity, a virtue which, as Skinner rightly stresses,‘occupies an absolutely central place’ in the Senecan alternative to theCiceronian typology.98

The third text which helped sustain the pre-eminence attached to thevirtue – the Formula vitae honestae – was not actually Senecan, although itwas generally believed to have been authentic during the Duecento and forcenturies after. The Formula was the work of the Spanish abbot and bishopMartin of Braga, and was written between 570 and 579.99 Martin had usedSeneca’s De ira as the basis of his own text of the same name some timeafter 572.100 The Formula is possibly based in part upon a lost work ofSeneca, perhaps even a De officiis; it is certainly informed by Senecan moralphilosophy.101 It had also been originally addressed to a monarch, KingMiro, whom the author hails at the opening of his dedication of the tract as‘clementissime rex’, but from the twelfth century, the Formula circulatedwithout this royal preface.102 It became commonly known as De quattuorvirtutibus cardinalibus, although a mutilated form of it was combined witha long collection of sententiae excerpted from the Epistulae morales toproduce a discrete work which circulated under the title of De copiaverborum.103 The Formula helped to swell the number and content ofpseudo-Senecan texts and florilegia in circulation by the Duecento, addingto a list which included such titles as De paupertate, De remediis fortuito-rum, De moribus and Proverbia Senecae – all ‘Senecan’ works whosepopularity ensured that many of them would be printed in the early1470s under Seneca’s name, well before the Renaissance presses had pro-duced editions of any of his authentic works.104 But it also reinforced onecharacteristic of genuinely Senecan philosophy while both exaggeratingand revising it from a Christian perspective, making magnanimitas oneof the four moral attributes essential for a vir who aims to be ‘honestus acbene moratus’ and ‘perfectus’.105

97 Skinner 2002, II: 63–4. 98 Skinner 2002, II: 65.99 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 Skinner2002, II: 43, 51.

100 Braga 1950: 53; see also Meerseman 1973: 43–4. 101 Braga 1950: 206.102 Braga 1950: 208–9; Meerseman 1973: 44.103 Braga 1950: 7, 208–9. For the text, composition and history of De copia verborum, see Meerseman

1973: 92–114.104 Meerseman 1973; Niutta 1999. For Pseudo-Seneca in the volgare, see Bertolini 2004.105 Braga 1950: 237. Martin thus substitutes fortitudo, one of the four cardinal virtues, with magnani-

mitas, effectively equating the two qualities.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 97

After equating magnanimity with fortitude, the Formula claims that itspossession makes a person ‘free, fearless, lively’.106 Cicero had hinted at theidea of the magnanimus vir as a person who is above all liber in the Stoicsense of the word; but Senecan ethics had elevated the connection to one ofsingular importance. In the Formula, it is further underlined. The magna-nimous man is held to be ‘without trepidation’, facing ‘the end of thislife’ with equanimity rather than with fear and trembling.107 The Formulathen opens up the rich seam of precepts on magnanimity in both De iraand De clementia in order to extract the wisdom that the magnanimousman 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 Asone might expect of a neo-Senecan theorist of anger, this formulation isprincipally indebted to a series of connections made in De ira. But it isdeveloped in conjunction with an argument which rearticulates the reason-ing laid out in Chapters 21 to 23 of Book I of De clementia about theinappropriateness of acts of retribution by a prince looking to avengehimself against his enemy. The Formula suggests to its royal audiencethat 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 avengeyourself: know that to forgive is a great and honourable form of venge-ance’.109 This argument about power is a paraphrase of Seneca’s claim thatwhen the prince ‘looks down upon’ his enemy, now subjected to his potestasand ius, and therefore at the mercy of the monarch, ‘his vengeance isalready complete’.110 But the claim has undergone a crucial alteration asit is restated in the Formula: the idea of holding back from retaliating forinjury is rendered by the verb ignoscere. Yet ‘to forgive’ or ‘to pardon’,Seneca insists in De clementia, is a morally culpable activity, which alwaysimplicates the forgiver in not pursuing redress against someone for a series ofbad 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 Braga 1950: 241: ‘Magnanimitas vero, quae et fortitudo dicitur, si insit animo tuo, cum magnafiducia vives liber, intrepidus, alacer.’

107 Braga 1950: 241: ‘Magnum humani animi bonum est non tremere, sed constare sibi et finem huiusvitae intrepidus exspectare.’

108 Braga 1950: 241: ‘Si magnanimus fueris, numquam iudicabis tibi contumeliam fieri. De inimicodices: ‘‘Non nocuit mihi sed animum nocendi habuit’’.’ The Senecan argument about iniuriacontumelia, magnanimitas and the vir sapiens at De ira, 3.5.7–8 has been seminal here.

109 Braga 1950: 241: ‘cum illum in potestate tua videris, vindictam putabis vindicare potuisse: scito enimhonestum et magnum vindictae esse genus ignoscere’.

110 Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416: ‘Hoc dico, cum ab inferioribus petitus violatusque est; nam si, quos paresaliquando habuit, infra se videt, satis vindicatus est.’

98 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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 areminder that Martin of Braga’s text is dedicated to a Christian king andbelongs to broadly the same moral universe which had helped determine therecharacterisation of the Senecan vice of misericordia as a virtue. By the timeof the thirteenth century, Seneca’s Christian identity was already welldeveloped, and one of the texts now in circulation under his name madehim a firm advocate of a type of activity which he had actually censured.

The other important way in which the Formula constituted a modifica-tion to the body of Senecan thought available to writers from the Duecentoonwards was that it helped to turn Seneca into a theorist of prudentia. Thischaracteristic is as necessary to the type of person whom Martin wishes totrain as the other two qualities which he names – continentia and iustitia –and is treated first of all, at considerable length. The Formula’s analysis ofprudence is actually heavily derived from Cicero’s De officiis, but inrelocating the concept to a Christian and royal context, Martin of Bragacan be seen to be broadly participating in the recharacterisation of so manyof Cicero’s ideas which had typified Seneca’s own work. Prudence is drawninto a depiction of a virtuous monarch in a strongly Stoic providentialuniverse. The truly prudent man ‘can never be wrong’, it is alleged, and hetherefore never finds himself saying ‘I did not think this would happen’.112

In particular, the Formula sets up a strong antithesis between the prudentability to discern the ‘nature’ and the ‘truth’ of the things as they really arefrom the vice of succumbing to false belief.113 The injunction to the manwho wishes to be perfectly prudent is to ensure that his ‘opinions arejudgements’.114 He should aim to provide ‘stable and certain thinkingwhenever he makes deliberations, or enquiries, or engages in contempla-tion’.115 This degree of fixity in making judgements is to be attained byavoiding certain situations which imperil his ability to make calculationsabout how to ‘live correctly according to reason’.116

111 Griffin 1976: 156.112 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 estnon dicit: ‘‘Non putavi hoc fieri,’’ quia non dubitat, sed exspectat, nec suspicatur sed cavet . . .Prudens fallere non vult, falli non potest.’

113 Braga 1950: 238: ‘per rationem recte vives, si omnia prius aestimes et perpenses et dignitatem rebusnon ex opinione multorum sed ex earum natura constituas. Nam scire debes quia sunt quae nonvideantur bona esse et sunt, et sunt quae videantur et non sunt.’

114 Braga 1950: 239: ‘Opiniones tuae iudicia sint.’115 Braga 1950: 239: ‘Sed cogitatio tua stabilis et certa sive deliberet sive quaeret sive contempletur non

recedat a vero.’116 Braga 1950: 238: ‘tunc per rationem recte vives’.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 99

S E N E C A N E T H I C S A N D S O C I A L V I O L E N C E I N T H E W O R K

O F A L B E R T A N O O F B R E S C I A

The degree to which these alterations and additions to the conceptualcontent of the corpus of ethical and political texts attributed to Senecaregistered upon Duecento literature to produce a specific version of Senecanphilosophy – more compatible with Christianity and with an emphasis onprudentia – can be seen in the work of the Albertano of Brescia.117

Albertano was a causidicus and judge whose public career was interruptedupon his capture and imprisonment in Cremona by Frederick II’s forces in1238. But he subsequently resumed an active role in communal life as alawyer in Brescia.118 By the time of his death in the 1250s, Albertano hadproduced a body of literature which has generated the claim that he wasresponsible for the ‘transformation of the Senecan tradition’ of the twelfthcentury.119 According to this interpretation, Albertano drew upon hisintimate knowledge of a surprisingly large range of the available Senecantexts in order to formulate a secular and distinctively Senecan ethic, positedon the idea of a correct rule – or ‘form of life’, as Albertano put it. He wasthus responsible for transposing to a lay sphere a reading of Senecanphilosophy in terms of self-formation, reformation and transformationwhich had long found favour in monastic circles.120 Even before the date ofhis first text, written while in prison and entitled the Liber de amore etdilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vita, Albertano hadbeen ‘un lettore paziente e attento’ of the entire collection of Seneca’sEpistulae morales.121 Unsurprisingly, the letters are among the most fre-quently cited of all the Senecan texts throughout Albertano’s work; buteven in the Liber de amore, he roams widely across other Senecan andpseudo-Senecan treatises and compilations, quoting frequently fromDe clementia, De beneficiis and De ira, as well as from De moribus andthe Sententiae of Publilius Syrus, which, like most Renaissance readers upto the time of Erasmus, he attributes to Seneca.122 Albertano is remarkably

117 For Albertano of Brescia, see Powell 1992; Navone 1994; Spinelli 1996; Nuccio 1997. A crucial articleon the context and content of his Senecan studies is Villa 1969; see also Witt 2000: 58–9.

118 Powell 1992: 1–4.119 See the chapter entitled ‘Forma Vitae: The transformation of the Senecan tradition’ in Powell 1992:

37–55.120 Powell 1992: 37–55. 121 Villa 1969: 24–7.122 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 hervaluable footnotes for information on the use of the Senecan texts. For the Sententiae of PubliliusSyrus, their attribution to Seneca and their dispersal through the Senecan apocrypha and proverbia,see Meerseman 1973: 51–8.

100 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

partial to ‘the Formula of Seneca’, relying on it no less than twenty-onetimes to support his arguments in the Liber de amore, drawing upon itsanalysis of prudentia on thirteen separate occasions and upon its treatmentof magnanimity twice.

The point at which key elements of the political theory of De clementiaand the moral theory of the Formula converge within Albertano’s work iswhen he focuses his attention upon a social phenomenon which preoccu-pied many politically articulate members of the city-states: the pursuit ofvindicta, or vendetta.123 Alarm over the manifestations of discordia in thecivitas and concomitant attempts to enforce a reliance upon public mech-anisms for legal redress helped to bring the practice of seeking personalvengeance for injuries under close inspection. In Book 3, Chapter 15, of theLiber de amore, Albertano begins his discussion ‘On pursuing, omitting ortempering vengeance, and on the duties of the judge or whosoever withrespect to the matter’ by reminding his reader that: ‘Vengeance pertains toGod alone, or to the judge who has jurisdiction.’124 Albertano turns toSeneca’s Epistulae morales in order to assert that the application of ratio isessential for any judge, recalling the ‘wise’ precept that ‘ ‘‘if you want toconquer the whole world, subject yourself to reason’’ ’.125 Then a series ofcounsels 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 ‘conqueryourself when you conquer others. For as the same Seneca says, ‘‘He whoconquers 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 inAlbertano’s last work, the Liber consolationis et consilii of 1246, whichprovides an analysis of violence, vendetta and justice in the commune inthe form of a dramatic dialogue between ‘a rich and powerful man’,

123 For the Brescian context, see Powell 1992: 16–36.124 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 Deumpertinet, vel ad iudicem habentem iurisdictionem.’

125 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 quidamsapiens dixit, ‘‘Si vis vincere totum mundum, subice te rationi’’ ’ (citing Epistulae morales, 37.4).

126 Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Ut Seneca De Formula Honeste Vite dixit, ‘‘Melius est ignoscere, quam postvictorie penitere’’ ’ (citing Braga 1950: 241).

127 Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Et vincas te ipsum in victoria. Nam ut idem ait Seneca, ‘‘Bis vincit qui se invictoria vincit’’ ’ (citing Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, 77).

128 Brescia 1980, III, Ch.15: ‘Unde Seneca De Clementia Imperatoris dixit . . .’ (citing, in abbreviatedform, De clementia, I.3.3; and, in corrupt form, De clementia, 1.19.3).

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 101

Melibeus, and his aptly named wife, Prudentia. The husband is intentupon exacting revenge for an attack on his wife and daughter, whilePrudentia provides him with both the consolation and the counsel towhich the title refers.129 The work opens with Prudentia seeking to placateher distraught husband, a task which involves her, on seven separateoccasions in the second chapter alone, reciting verbatim a range ofSenecan advice from the Epistulae morales on the wise man’s properattitude 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 tofortune, pursuing vengeance myself, because fortune has favoured me upto now and will assist me in my vengeance, should God grant it.’131

Prudence gives him ‘many reasons’ for not doing any such thing, address-ing him with a series of pseudo-Senecan sententiae and with what ‘Senecasaid in his Letters’.132 He is warned, in the words of Letter 82, that to cleaveto Fortuna is a disastrous policy, for ‘she seizes the person who cleaves toher’.133 Seneca’s advice to Lucilius in this letter is never to cling to Fortunain spite of her apparent assaults and changeable charms, but to stick tovirtue and to surround one’s self with the ‘impregnable wall of philoso-phy’.134 Prudence knows her Seneca: ‘So do not cleave to her, nor confidein her in any way: she is neither stable nor lasting.’135 On the contrary, shereminds her husband: ‘Be wise and conquer fortune through virtue, forSeneca says in his Letters, ‘‘the wise man conquers fortune throughvirtue’’.’136 Nor should Melibeus imagine that Fortuna could, in fact,help him, as Prudence then explains, bringing out the meaning of fortune

129 Brescia 1873, Ch.1: 2: ‘vir potens et dives’. For the dialogue and its context, see Powell 1992: 74–89.130 See the notes accompanying Brescia 1873: 3–6.131 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’.132 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).

133 Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘Quinta ratione, quia fortuna non adjuvat, sed ‘‘occupat adhaerentem sibi’’ ’(citing Epistulae morales, 82.4).

134 Seneca 1917–25, 82.5, vol. II: 242: ‘Philosophia circumdanda est, inexpugnabilis murus, quemfortuna multis machinis lacessitum non transit. In insuperabili loco stat animus, qui externadeseruit, et arce se sua vindicat; infra illum omne telum cadit.’ Fortuna, Seneca reminds us here,does not have sufficiently ‘long hands’ to reach us.

135 Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 89: ‘Non igitur fortunae inhaeres, nec aliquo modo in illa confidas; non enimstabilis est vel perpetua.’

136 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).

102 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

in Senecan philosophy from the lengthy treatment of the subject inLetter 98 in order to assure him that ‘it is an error for people to say thatfortune brings us both good and bad’.137 This line of thought is com-pounded by a reminder of Boethius’ point that ‘there is no such thing asFortuna, except in popular opinion’, and by a reiteration of the correctbelief that ‘the Lord is fortune’: it is God who can give and take away allthings.138

Having been persuaded of the potentially calamitous social consequen-ces of his desire for vengeance, Melibeus is gradually prevailed upon toaccept that reconciliation and concord are the way forward: he should, ingood Christian fashion, make the first step towards peace, and he should,in good Senecan fashion, remember that ‘we must forget injuries’.139 Forthe sake of peace, he is urged to the same act of Senecan self-conquestwhich Albertano had described in his earlier work, and by reference to thesame 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 injunctionswhich Albertano had prescribed in his Liber de amore: to powerful forgive-ness in accordance with the Formula; to the emulation of the king beewho lacks an angry sting; and to the imitation of the merciful king of theDe clementia.142 Prudence wins the day; and Melibeus duly shows therequisite mercy and pity and piety towards his malefactors, after theyhave prostrated themselves at his feet, begged his forgiveness and declared

137 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).

138 Brescia 1873, Ch.40: 90–1: ‘Et hoc intelligas de illa, quam homines simplices fortunam appellant; aitenim Boetius in libro secundo De Consolatione: Nihil enim est fortuna, nisi secundum opinionemvulgi . . . Si autem crederes, Dominum esse fortunam, recte putares, illum mala posse auferre etbona cuncta tribuere valere.’

139 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 theprecept in Epistulae morales, 81.7).

140 Brescia 1873, Ch.50: 122–3: ‘In hoc itaque negotio te taliter regas, ut in hac victoria per eos tibiconcessa te vincas; et sic bis vincere poteris. Ait enim Seneca: ‘‘Bis vincit qui se in victoria vincit’’ ’(citing Publilius Syrus, Sententia, 64).

141 Brescia 1873, Ch.51: 123, where the title reads: ‘De Clementia et Pietate et Misericordia’.142 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 clementiaImperatoris, dixit: ‘‘Nullum clementia magis decet quam regem’’; et iterum: ‘‘Iracundissimae etparvi corporis sunt apes, rex tamen earum sine aculeo est’’ . . . Quare consulo tibi, ut sensumSenecae sequaris, qui dixit: ‘‘Si forte inimicum tuum in potestate tua videris, vindictam putabisvindicare potuisse. Scito enim honestum et magnum vindictae genus, ignoscere’’ ’ (citing Declementia, I.3.3; I.19.2; Braga 1950: 241).

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 103

themselves the unworthy ‘subjects’ of the person whom they call ‘yourlordship’.143

S E N E C A N P O L I T I C A L T H E O R Y A N D T H E F O R M A T I O N

O F T H E P O D E S T A

A fuller rendition of the Senecan theory of monarchy was worked into anaccount of the duties and function of the civic podesta or rector supplied byGiovanni da Viterbo in his Liber de regimine civitatum.144 Giovanni beginsto justify a preference for Senecan moral theory in his section ‘On thedefinition of law and justice’, where he promises to be brief because thesetwo concepts are amply defined under the same heading in the Digest andthe Institutes.145 But he adds: ‘however, as regards justice, I am going to adda different approach, following Seneca’.146 This commitment helps explainwhy, when defining the qualities of the person of the rector, Giovanni is ledto reiterate Senecan precepts throughout his book, and why, on severalnotable occasions, he transcribes very extensive passages of Senecan moraland political philosophy in his argument. When, for example, the authorargues on the need to avoid anger, he repeatedly turns both to De clementiaand De ira for guidance.147 All three books of De ira are scoured for relevantadvice for a ruler in whom, for Giovanni as for Seneca, ratio must rulesupreme:

Reason gives time to either side, and then demands a further adjournment to giveitself room to tease out the truth: anger is in a hurry. Reason wishes to pass a fairjudgement: anger wishes the judgement which it has already passed to seem fair.148

143 Brescia 1873, Ch.51: 125: ‘praedicti adversarii . . . flexisque genibus suis fusisque lacrimis ad pedesdicti domini ac dominae Prudentiae prostrati dixerunt: ‘‘Ecce venimus huc parati in omnibus et peromnia vestris obedire praeceptis. Verumtamen, licet indigni, vestram dominationem, quatenus,erga nos non exercentes vindictam, sed potius placabilitatem, clementiam et pietatem, nobissubditis vestris donare dignenimi indulgentiam.’’’

144 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.

145 Viterbo 1901, Ch.10: 220 (‘De diffinitione iuris et iustitiae’): ‘Iuris vero et iustitiae non est necesseapponi, quoniam satis plene in Digestis et Institutionibus de iustitia e iure, de hiis est diffinitumlicet de iustitia diverso modo secundum Senecam sim in hoc opusculo adnexurus’ (referring to thetitles ‘De iustitia et iure’ at Digest I. 1 and Institutes I. 1).

146 Viterbo 1901, Ch.10: 220: ‘licet de iustitia diverso modo secundum Senecam sim in hoc opusculoadnexurus’.

147 Viterbo 1901, Ch.62: 238–9.148 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 equumvideri sibi vult quod iudicavit.’

104 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

Giovanni also transcribes the ‘Senecan’ Formula, entirely copying out itstreatment of the four virtues over the course of ten chapters, before closingwith 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 authenticSenecan princely theory. The first comes in the course of a discussion ofthe 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 andSeneca had contributed; and he duly goes on to support the contentionthat it is better to be loved by first citing the relevant parts of De officiisand then turning to extract line after line of Senecan wisdom fromDe clementia. So he reports that ‘mercy is not the name I would giveto exhausted cruelty’, and then repeats the idea of mercy as the great‘ornament’ of the prince: ‘mercy enhances not only a ruler’s honourbut his safety. The ornamentum of emperors, it is at the same time itssurest light.’151 Giovanni comes to the seminal passage on the differencebetween a prince and a tyrant: ‘what difference is there between a kingand a tyrant? – after all, their show of fortune and their licence isthe same. It is simply that tyrants act savagely . . . kings do so only fora reason and out of necessity.’152 We are reminded of the Senecandefinition of monarchy – that ‘it is mercy which causes there to be agreat distinction between king and tyrant’, and that while both havearmed 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 Giovannilays out the Senecan logic that a merciful ruler is ‘loved by the wholecivitas, protected and courted’ and that ‘such a prince, protected byhis own good deeds, has no need of guards. He wears his armour purely

149 See Viterbo 1901: 252–5, where the text of the Formula closes on 255 with the dictum: ‘Vis honoremhabere? Dabo tibi magnum imperium: impera tibi.’

150 See Viterbo 1901: Ch.124: 262.151 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’ (citingDe clementia, 1.11.2; and a version of 1.11.4, where the text reads: ‘Clementia ergo non tantumhonestiores sed tutiores praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus’). Thecorruption of salus into lux in Giovanni’s text is notable; it is also comprehensible in view of a theorywhich insists on the enlightening effects of the clement prince.

152 Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘Quid enim interest inter tirannum et regem? Species ipsa fortune aclicentia par est, nisi quod tiranni, in voluptatem seviunt, reges non nisi ex causa ac necessitate’(citing De clementia, 1.11.4).

153 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).

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 105

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 aparent, and also a prince should act. If we call him ‘‘Father of theFatherland’’, it is not empty flattery that has led us to do so.’155

Giovanni finds further material for his own argument in Seneca’sjustification of the title of Pater patriae for his prince: ‘we have calledhim ‘‘Father of the Fatherland’’ to remind him that he has been grantedpaternal power’ – for Seneca, the most moderate of powers.156 Hecontinues to course through various parts of the Roman theory, under-lining how a king ‘has one unassailable fortress: the love of hiscitizens’.157

Giovanni’s appropriation of the Senecan case for thinking aboutdefence and security in terms of the prince’s virtuously ornamentedperson – the argument that the prince is armed by his virtue alone andthat he consequently has no need of weapons – is linked to the othernotable place in which his own advice consists in simply copying outwhole passages of De clementia. In Chapter 136, Giovanni considers whata podesta should do in the event of military activity.158 His concern for thewelfare of the person of the podesta leads him to the Senecan descriptionof the relation of princely head to the body of the res publica, recallingthat the monarch’s person ‘is the bond which holds the res publicatogether’; 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 tobe withdrawn’.159 De clementia’s definition of magnanimity as the pre-eminent virtue for those who sit in judgement is then recalled; butGiovanni also sets out in virtually unabridged form the Senecananalogy of the king bee, unarmed by nature, in order to claim that ‘it isnot fitting that the podesta of the civitas and the army should fight’ and to

154 Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 263: ‘a tota civitate amatur et colitur ac defenditur . . . hic princeps suobeneficio tutus nil presidiis eget, arma ornamenti causa habet’ (citing Seneca, De clementia, 1.13.4).

155 Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Hoc quod parenti, et principi est faciendum, quem appellavimus patrempatriae non adulatione vana adducti’ (citing De clementia, 1.14.2).

156 Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Patrem quidem patriae appellavimus, ut sciret sibi datam potestatempatriam’ (citing De clementia, 1.14.2).

157 Viterbo 1901, Ch.125: 264: ‘Salvum regem clementia in aperto prestabit; unum est inexpugnabilemunimentum’ (citing De clementia, 1.19.6).

158 See Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 273–4 (entitled ‘Quid faciendum sit potestati tempore extrahendiexercitum’).

159 Viterbo 1901, Ch.136: 274: ‘ipse est vinculum, per quod res publica civitatis coheret, ipse spiritusvitalis, [per] quem [haec] tot milia trahunt, nichil ipsa per se futura nisi honus et preda, si mens illaimperii subtrahatur’ (citing De clementia, I.4.1).

106 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

adjoin this pacific sentiment to the idea that the ruler is a shepherd of hisflock.160

Perhaps the most creative reprisal of the doctrines of De clementia is to befound in the third book of Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou tresor, where theyare subjected to a strikingly satirical treatment. Latini shows little hostilityto Senecan ethics per se – he repeatedly draws on a considerable number ofSenecan texts in order to expand his teaching on the virtues and vices fromChapter 50 onwards in Book 2.161 But when he turns to discuss the qualitiesnecessary for a podesta in Book 3, his tone changes. The first point to note isthat his attack occurs in a chapter entitled ‘The discord between those whowant to be feared and those who want to be loved’, in which Latini picksout 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 distinctionbetween the handling of the topic in their respective theories. He does thisby 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 befeared rather than loved, and others prefer to be loved rather than feared. Thosewho prefer to be feared rather than loved wish to have the reputation of beingharsh, and because they wish to have the reputation of being harsh, and becausethey wish to seem harsh and cruel, they impose harsh punishments and bittertorments, and through this they believe that they will be feared more and that thecity will be more peaceful. They prove this through the sayings of Seneca, who saysthat infrequent punishment corrupts a city, and that an abundance of sinnersbrings about sinful habits, and that a person loses the desire for malice when he isharshly tormented, and that a lenient prince reinforces vice, and the mildness ofthe lord removes the shame of the evildoer, and the punishment which isestablished 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 cannotexist without fear, but fear can easily exist without love. Cicero says that in theworld there is no surer thing than to be loved, and no more terrible one than to befeared, for each one hates the one he fears . . . Long fear is a poor guardian; cruelty

160 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).

161 See Latini 1948: 224–314. For Pseudo-Seneca in Latini, see Bertolini 2004: 357–8.162 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, seeespecially Skinner 2002, II: 10–38; 39–92; for a consideration of Latini’s debt to Aristotle as well as toCicero, see Viroli 1992: 26–30.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 107

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

Put thus, the whole sense of the Senecan advice of De clementia is entirelyreversed, making it discontinuous with the Ciceronian argument which themonarchical theory had sought to appropriate and reapply within a civitasnow led by a princeps. What Latini appears to be attacking, by way ofparody, is not exactly the theory (although it is arguable that his hostilitydoes extend to the theory itself), but an ideology in which the Senecantheory of monarchy is becoming implicated as a justification for thebehaviour of persons who are ‘harsh and cruel’ and who come to presidein a partial manner over the judicial system of the civitas in a way whichLatini contrasts with ‘le bien dou commun’. Latini develops his satire of theSenecan ideology with considerable dexterity. He is translating Seneca’srhetorical question in De clementia when he asks, ‘what difference is therebetween a king and a tyrant? They are similar in good fortune and inpower, but the tyrant performs works of cruelty gladly, a king only bynecessity. The one is loved, the other is feared’; and he is similarly followingthe 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 figurewhom Seneca had described as the model for the good prince.164 But byaccurately recalling these distinctions between Senecan prince and bestialtyrant, Latini is helping to confound the contemporary version of theSenecan argument, for he has begun his analysis by reporting how the

163 Latini 1948, III.96: 414–15 (citing translation in Latini 1993: 373): ‘entre les governeours des viles siutavoir une tele difference, que li un aiment miex estre cremus ke ames, et li autre desirent plus a estreames ke cremus. Et cil ki ayment mieus a estre cremus que ames desirent a avoir renomee de grantfierte; et, por cou k’il welent sambler fiers et crueus, metent tres fieres paines et aspres tormens, et dece quident que l’en les redoute plus et que la vile en soit mieus apaisie. Et ce pruevent il par les disSeneque, ki dist k’escharsete de poine corront les cites, et ke l’abondance des pecheours amainent lesusages de pecchier, et ke cil pert le hardement de sa malice ki est fierement tormentes, et que liprince soufrant conferme les visces, et la doucour dou signor oste la vergoigne dou maufetour, etplus est redoutee la paine ki est establie de par son signor ke de par son ami, et de tant comme litorment sont plus apert proufitent il plus par example . . . Contre ce dist li autres ke mieus vaut aestre ames que cremus, por cou c’amours ne puet estre sans cremour, mais cremours si puet bienestre sans amour: Tuilles dit que au monde n’a plus seure chose a deffendre ses choses ke d’iestreames, ne nule plus espoentable ke d’iestre cremus; car chascuns het celui k’il crient . . . Longue paourest male garde, cruaute est enemie de nature. Il covient que chacuns crieme celui ou ciaus de que ilwet estre cremus, et force ki est par paour n’aura ja longue duree, et toute paine doit estre mise sanstort, non mie par le signor, mais por le bien dou commun.’

164 Latini 1948, III.96: 415 (Latini 1993: 374): ‘Quele difference a il entre roi et tirant? Il sont pareil defortune et de pooir, mais li tirans fet oevres de crualte par son gre, ce ne fet pas li rois sans necessite: liuns est ames et li autres est cremus. Et cil est tenus a mauvais peres ki tozjors bat et fiert son enfantasprement.’

108 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

words of Seneca have become a counsel to the prince to instil fear throughsevere 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 isopposed 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 somany people that to cure the evils of each person it is necessary that some be healedby anger and others by exile and by pilgrimages, and others by sorrow, and othersby poverty and others by the sword.165

Latini’s recollection of the Senecan point of view refers the reader to thetheory of punishment which Seneca had prescribed for the wise magistratein De ira and which Latini is here partially translating.166 In the Senecantext, the rational vir sapiens in government is indeed commended for using,in medicinal fashion, the penalties which Latini cites; but only in cases ofincurable recidivism where Seneca sees it as hopeless to seek to expungeinveterate vice. It is certainly possible that Latini is seeking to clarify aproperly Senecan perspective and so reveal its distortion by contempora-ries; but the manner in which the moralist’s advice is excerpted andjuxtaposed within Latini’s argument seems to damn the classical argumentsby association with their more recent restatement. Rather than wielding hismedicinal powers in order to eliminate divisions, and resorting to harshremedies only when reason prescribes them as necessary, the Senecanarbiter of Latini’s text appears to resort all too quickly to practices whichembody the great vices of anger and cruelty, and which result in sufferingand exile. Cicero, meanwhile, emerges as the purveyor of the preferablearguments about clemency and pity, a move which involves Latini in aredistribution of emphasis, to say the least.

Latini’s attack on these Senecan arguments and their proponents amongcontemporary governors of cities points to an ideological conflict accom-panying the political turbulence within the northern communes, several of

165 Latini 1948, III.96: 415 (Latini 1993: 374, modified): ‘Par ceste parole puet on bien entendre cestequerele; car clemence ki est contre cruaute est uns atempremens de corage sor la paine ki li puetestablir. Tuilles dist que la plus bele chose ki est en signorie si est clemence et pities, s’ele est jointeavec droit, sans coi la cite ne puet pas estre governee. Seneques dist, quand je suis a curer la cite, je itruis tant de visces entre tant de gens, ke pour garir les maus de chascun il couvient que li uns soitsanes par ire et li autres par essil et par pelerinage, et li autres par dolour et li autres par poverte et liautres par fier.’

166 See De ira, I.16.4.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 109

which were already beginning to be subjected to the rule of permanentsignori by the time of Li livres dou tresor. Latini was an articulate defender ofthe liberties of the communes, and his polemic may have been directedsquarely at a way of thinking which was threatening to bring abouttheir destruction with the assistance of a theory which Latini knew well.He may also perhaps be obliquely passing comment on the recent politicsof another object of his considerable sarcasm in Li livres dou tresor:Frederick II.167 Pages of Book I are given over to a condemnation of thepolitics of Frederick and of his erstwhile successors over the previous threedecades.168 The extent to which these later Hohenstaufen interventions inthe northern city-states were accompanied by the same type of Senecanclaims which had been used to underpin Frederick II’s princely authorityremains to be seen.169 But Latini’s attack on the Senecan ideology may beaimed at making evident a monarchical threat to the self-governing com-mune which had far from passed, and which was now beginning to assertitself aggressively within the civitas itself.

T H E S I G N O R I A L I D E O L O G Y

In order to furnish a full explanation of how these arguments of the Romantheory of monarchy come to inform the ideology of the signori, it is worthrecapitulating some of its characteristics. De clementia described the insti-tution of a prince at the head of a formerly self-governing res publica as ajust, rational, necessary and providentially determined act. It explainedhow the princeps had solved the problems faced by a civitas caught inendemic civil conflict. It depicted a person whose claim to wield the powersof the prince derived from his demonstrable possession of certain distinc-tive qualities which promised to ensure the civitas peace, tranquillity,security and happiness after the divisions of the past. It argued that theprince was legitimate whatever the manner of his accession and whateverhis legal status. And it underlined the need for a rational head for a bodywhich had become liable to the irrational and destructive effects of avaritiaand the causa lucri. The terms of this analysis were eminently adaptable toan explanation of monarchy as the necessary consequence of a mercantilesociety too dominated by libidinous affects to conduct its own govern-ment. And since it promised the benefit of securing libertas for the res

167 See Latini 1948, I.95: 75. 168 See Latini 1948, I.95–8: 75–81.169 For the particular importance of clemency and magnanimity in the representation of the

Hohenstaufen by Nicolai de Jamsilla, see Tateo 1990: 33.

110 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

publica, the Roman theory of the prince offered the signori a way ofvaunting themselves as protectors rather than as destroyers of cherishedpolitical values. Indeed, the signorial ideology begins very quickly toadvance claims not only about its unique ability to guarantee true paxand tranquillitas for the civitas under the rule of a princely head, but alsoabout its success in guaranteeing true libertas for the res publica. Theemerging signorial regimes insist that ‘liberty was now union under aruler; tyranny disunion under a commune’, as Jones observes. They hada thoroughly respectable classical argument with which to sustain theirpoint of view – an argument whose doctrines had already been widelyreiterated in a literature ostensibly aimed at the moral formation of bothcitizen and political governor.170 Finally, the Senecan theory of monarchyoffered a moral definition of the prince which enabled them to rebut thedamaging accusation that they were tyranni. By identifying themselveswith the characteristics of the person described in De clementia – themagnanimous and clement prince, the divinely rational and supremelyjust vir sapiens, the loving and benevolent Pater patriae – they alignedthemselves with a way of thinking which held that virtue alone defined aprincely person.

If the signori had been content merely to vindicate a claim to be vicariousrepresentatives of either the pope or the emperor, they would have beenobliged to display the suitable moral characteristics of the person in whose‘place’ such a claim positioned them in their rule over the civitas. And thatmonarchical personality was well defined within both papal and imperialideology by a moral and constitutional language which posited a mercifuland mild prince acting as a divine trustee. But the structure of the newmonarchies was not merely a local, internalised form of an established,external order of political obligation. On the contrary, it is important notto overlook the revolutionary aspect of signorial ideology, which increas-ingly discarded the notion that the new monarchs were simply wielding, ina vicarious capacity on behalf of either the pope or the emperor, the powersusually reserved to the princeps, and alleged instead the much more radicalidea that they were exercising these powers on account of their owndemonstrable possession of the requisite princely virtue.

Signorial domination of civic political life entailed the recharacterisationof the existing administrative, bureaucratic and political structures in orderto make them responsive to the directive will of the person at the head ofgovernment. The new regimes accordingly presided over alterations to the

170 Jones 1997: 644.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 111

constitutional definitions of political arrangements within various city-states. The general council of the city of Mantua decreed in 1299, in favourof its Bonacolsi signore, that ‘we order and decree that the distinguishedLord Guido should and ought to be captain general of the city ofMantua . . . and should rule and govern the city and district and communewith his undiluted, pure and free will, as shall best and most usefully seemagreeable to him, with council or without council, and he shall haveundiluted and pure power and jurisdiction, decision, lordship, and freedetermination 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 ofruling and governing over all in all things’.172 The document conferringsignoria on Obizzo d’Este in Ferrara in 1264 was especially punctilious.173 In1267, one hostile contemporary chronicler described the transfer of powerto Obizzo II in Ferrara as conferring ‘the fullest dominion’ on a boy ofseventeen in such a way ‘that he may do everything, just or unjust, by thepower of his will. The new ruler’, he laments, ‘has more power than Godeternal, who is not able to do unjust things.’174

These instances of constitutional redefinition required some juridicalclarification if the signori were to validate their de facto exercise of imperiumwithin the civitas against the charge that they had been involved in nothingother than the usurpation of imperial sovereignty within the terraeimperii.175 That such theoretical challenges were both met and resolvedwithin the post-glossatorial tradition of jurists in the Trecento is wellestablished.176 But to remain fixated upon the juridical basis of the newmonarchies is to remain enthralled to a way of thinking about legitimacywhich threatens to overlook the essential point which the literatureacclaiming 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 newrulers. 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 andmagnanimous lord’, who was loved by all of his people.177 In Milan, thefounder of the Visconti dynasty, Ottone Visconti, was memorialised on histombstone as the ‘intrepid shepherd’ of the Milanese and as an almost

171 Cited from Larner 1980: 143.172 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’.173 For the text, see Larner 1980: 169. 174 Cited from Larner 1980: 138.175 Canning 1987: 119. 176 See Canning 1987: 221–7. 177 Jones 1997: 632.

112 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

Herculean type of ruler undaunted by the hardest of trials.178 This invin-cible quality in the face of difficulty was matched with a propensity toforgiveness: he was ‘a bestower of pardon’, a ‘pious prince’, the ‘father ofhis country’, ‘a repository of wisdom’ and a ‘beloved leader’ throughwhose rule the ‘highest splendour of the virtues’ had illuminatedMilan and ‘quiet’ had been established.179 The tombstone was part of aconcerted effort undertaken by Matteo Visconti in the early Trecento tocelebrate the Visconti Pater patriae, a project which included the commis-sion of a fresco cycle in the hall of the Rocca of Anjera illustrating the Liberde gestis in civitate Mediolani, an epic poem written by the Dominicanintimate of the Visconti, Stefanardo da Vimercate.180 It depicts the tri-umph in 1277 of Ottone Visconti over rival forces in his fight to installhimself as the city’s archbishop, and the narrative scheme has beendescribed by Evelyn Welch: ‘the surviving paintings tell primarily of thearchbishop’s clemency and magnanimity. He is shown forgiving his ene-mies, instructing his soldiers to spare the city and entering Milan as anepiscopal leader.’181

This programmatic elaboration of the image of Visconti developed anideological trajectory which is already evident in the account of the estab-lishment of Visconti rule provided by Stefanardo da Vimercate in hisLiber.182 The genre of the Liber is telling. A Latin epic fittingly composedin ‘heroic’ hexameters, as the poet explains at the outset, it is indebted toVirgil, Lucan and Statius.183 The use of Roman imperial epic to tell thestory of the foundation of a new principate is observable in the DeScaligerorum origine, another contribution to the genre which was writtenby the Paduan humanist and notary Ferreto de’ Ferreti shortly afterCangrande della Scala had become signore in his city in 1328.184 The

178 Forcella 1889–93, I: 4 , where the text is recorded as: ‘INCLYTUS ILLE PATER PATRIAE LUXGL’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. PRESULAMABIL IN QUEM. ALTUS VIRTUTUM. SPLENDOR VENERAT OMNIS. QUOMEDIOLANUM RADIABAS LAMPADE TANTA. TOTAQUE FULGEBAT’. See Welch1995: 15.

179 See note above. 180 Welch 1995: 15. 181 Welch 1995: 12.182 Vimercate 1910–12. For the fullest treatment of his life and works, see Cremaschi 1950; recent

discussion is in Witt 2000: 69–71, 75–8.183 Vimercate 1910–12: 7: ‘Heroycis cedant elegi . . .’ Calligaris’ footnotes pick out the allusions and

debts to the Roman epic writers throughout the poem.184 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 accompanyingthe signori, see Skinner 2002, II: 120.

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 113

fact that the della Scala were now the masters of Verona, Vicenza andPadua – the three northern Italian centres in which it is conventional tolook for the beginnings of pre-Petrarchan humanism – is embellished alittle by Ferreto. Having begun with the intention of singing the praises ofthe ‘magnanimous Cangrande’, he closes his poem with a celebration of thefact that ‘the whole earth’ has now been ‘subjected’ to various members ofthe family, ‘new princes’ of a world which obeys and indeed ‘rejoices inbeing in their power and possession’.185 In Milan, the daunting task whichis said to have faced Ottone Visconti in the epic of da Vimercate is no lesspowerfully accomplished. A much-celebrated and fecund felix urbs, thehome of heroes and once the closest observer of the law, Milan is now aplace of ‘civil strife’, which is ‘savaged’ by a ‘voracious envy’.186 Its inhabit-ants 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 iusticiuminfelix, a dreadful cessation in the public administration of justice throughthe 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 aususMagnanimum refer, alma, Canem . . .’(for Virgil’s similarly early introduction of ‘magnanimusAeneas’, see Aeneid, I.260);

100:

‘Omnis enim tellus patruo subiecta sibiqueParet, et ipsorum gaudet ditione potiri;Equalique fide se supposuere novellisPrincipibus . . .’

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; sevitNuper livor edax . . .’

187 Vimercate 1910–12: 10:

‘tractant privata coloni,Et neglecta perit res publica: iura tribuniEsse putant facinus . . .. . . cedes viget atque rapina.’

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

114 The Roman Theory and the Renaissance Princeps

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

189 Vimercate 1910–12: 10–11:

‘Diripit ambitio immeritos temeraria fasces.Gurges avaritie nullo saciabilis haustuFundamenta quatit . . .’

190 Vimercate 1910–12: 10–11:

‘exlex regnatque voluntas.Soccombit ratio . . .. . . suus est dementia princeps.’

191 For the wounds, see Vimercate 1910–12: 16–17; for the resumption of the res publica and its regainedgaudium and libertas, see 92.

192 Vimercate 1910–12: 92–3:

‘Sic Urbs, prolixi langoris pressa dolore,Crimine purgato, dive relevata vigoreVirtutis, 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 orbesConditio! 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.’

The pre-humanist formation of the Renaissance princeps 115

P A R T I I I

The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

C H A P T E R 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 toconstitute the first recognisably humanist community in the history of theKingdom has been captured in a metaphor of conquest by GiuseppeBillanovich.1 There is little room to doubt the galvanising character ofPetrarch’s engagement in the intellectual milieu of Angevin Naples. Histwo visits to the capital in 1341 and 1343, his relationship with King Robertand his correspondence over two decades with various members of theloose coalition of scholars and readers with whom he sustained friendshipshelped to secure the commitment of certain personnel associated with royalgovernment to the studia humanitatis.2 The Petrarchan allegiances of thefirst generation of Neapolitan humanists clearly show their conversion to a‘nuovo stile di cultura’.3 Much of the extant Neapolitan correspondence islocated within Petrarch’s Epistolae Familiares, collected and edited into adefinitive redaction by Petrarch himself in 1366.4 The Neapolitan lettersinclude Petrarch’s writings on monarchy. They mark the inception of thelong history of European royal humanism. But some of the groundworkfor a ready reception of his account of the virtuous prince and the status ofthose whom he ruled had already been prepared.

P E T R A R C H A N D S E N E C A

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

1 Billanovich 1996a: 459: ‘Il Petrarca convertı gli intellettuali con una conquista cosı rapida e cosıbrillante . . .’ For Trecento Neapolitan humanism, see Altamura 1952. For the Neapolitan humanistsin 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 Kelly2003: 41–9, 62–3.

2 Wilkins 1955a: 213–21; Wilkins 1955b; Billanovich 1996a; Kelly 2003: 45–7.3 Billanovich 1996a: 459. 4 Mann 1984: 24.

119

observation that ‘si potrebbe tranquillamente affermare che Seneca rap-presenta per il Petrarca l’auctor maximus, il filosofo per eccellenza, certo ilsostegno di tutta la sua dottrina morale’.5 Petrarch’s use of the Epistulaemorales in his writing shows him to be ‘a careful and sensitive reader ofSeneca’ and during the early 1350s, as he worked on the edition of his ownEpistolae, Nicholas Mann explains how ‘Petrarch came to favour a twenty-book model based on Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius’ before finally opting fortwenty-four.6 Even a cursory glance at his text reveals the extent to whichthe Senecan epistles constituted a voice and a substantial source of wisdomfor Petrarch. Consoling, advising, instructing and exhorting his readerswith repeated injunctions to withstand the blows of fortune by cleaving tovirtue and by overcoming libidinous attachments to worldly goods, Petrarch’spersona in his correspondence and in his consolatio literature is deeplyimpressed with the teachings of the Stoic. Berthold Ullman highlightedthat Petrarch’s list of ‘specially prized books’ itemised in particular detailthe manuscripts of Seneca and Cicero, and that pride of place withinPetrarch’s ordering of the Senecan corpus was given to the Epistulae morales.7

The correspondence was thus ranked even higher than De clementia – listedsecond 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 allegian-ces find ample expression in the correspondence which Petrarch pennedto Tommaso da Messina, a Sicilian civilian whom he had known inBologna.10 It is to Tommaso that Petrarch addresses his well-knowndiscourse on rhetorical invention in which he urges that one should followSeneca’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: 11.6 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) bymajor Italian humanist figures from Petrarch onwards, see Appendix I of Mazzoli 1982: 211–13.

8 Ullman 1955: 124. 9 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 Tommasodiscussed here, see Petrarca 1933–42, I: 14–21, 39–48. For Tommaso da Messina, see Bernardo’scomments 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 consiliihuius auctorem [sc. Senecam]. Cuius summa est: apes in inventionibus imitandas, que flores, nonquales acceperint, referunt, sed ceras ac mella mirifica quadam permixtione conficiunt.’ Seneca’sdiscussion is at Epistulae morales, 84, 3–4.

120 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

affirms that we need to ‘produce in our own words thoughts borrowedfrom others’, to ‘write neither in the style of one or another writer, but in astyle uniquely ours, although gathered from a variety of sources’.12 Seneca’steaching on imitation and invention in Letter 84 of Epistulae morales – onhow to read writers and come away with ‘the choicest flowers’ – was laterdeveloped by the greatest exponent of Senecan moral philosophy of theearly Renaissance, Gasparino Barzizza.13 Seneca’s authority as a moral andpolitical praeceptor was accompanied by close attention to his rhetoricalteaching well into the High Renaissance, where Erasmus ‘brackets Senecaand Jerome together, as the two great masters of eloquence – pagan andChristian’.14

S E N E C A N P O L I T I C A L T H E O R Y A N D T H E V I R T U E S

O F T H E R E X

In Petrarch’s letters on princely rule, the doctrines of Seneca’s De clementiaare reiterated in a rhetorical style characterised by a subtle form of imitatio.Petrarch’s correspondence with Tommaso da Messina was either com-posed or at least amended in the 1350s as Petrarch was compiling his editionof Epistolae Familiares, then backdated by the humanist. Its position at thehead of the collection is a means of introducing the reader to a body ofmoral and rhetorical doctrines which Petrarch follows in the subsequentletters.15 In Petrarch’s letter to Dionigi da San Sepolcro, an Augustinianwhom he had first met in Avignon, the imitative mode is used to rehearsethe precepts of Seneca himself.16 During Petrarch’s first visit to Naples in1341, the poet had famously submitted himself to the ‘high and profoundjudgement’ of the Angevin monarch Robert, who had examined andapproved his worthiness to be crowned Poet Laureate in Rome.17 Thepoet’s reception in the city had been prepared in advance by Dionigi, whohad been installed as professor of theology at the University of Naples in1338–9, and who appears to have become a close confidant of Robert.18

Petrarch’s letter congratulates Dionigi for his admission to an intimate

12 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 40: ‘elegantioris esse solertie, ut, apium imitatores, nostris verbis quamvisaliorum hominum sententias proferamus. Rursus nec huius stilum aut illius, sed unum nostrumconflatum ex pluribus habeamus.’

13 Pigman 1982; Moss 1996: 52–3. 14 Jardine 1994: 30.15 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: 25.16 See Fam. IV.2 (Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161–7). 17 Petrarca 1955: 313.18 Billanovich 1996a: 459; Kelly 2003: 39–40, 51, 60, 65.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 121

position of familiaritas with Europe’s most outstanding monarch.19 Beforearriving at his discussion of the king, Petrarch charts the moral progresswhich Dionigi had made from the cradle to the royal court according to adistinctly Senecan topography.

He starts by ridiculing Dionigi’s mother, whose vain and irrationalhopes for her son merely pertained to the ‘one law that applies for allfeeble little women: they wish for absurd trifles, they dread the ridicu-lous’.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 ofliberty; and beauty of the human body, so often a cause of deformity ofsoul’.21 Dionigi’s father is mocked more gently. Petrarch accepts thepossibility that ‘his hopes were more elevated’, perhaps wishing forhis son ‘what the great satirist says: ‘‘the fame and eloquence of aDemosthenes or a Cicero’’’.22 But Petrarch points out that ‘the deathof both’ of these classical orators ‘bears testimony’ to the manner inwhich desire for worldly fame propels us towards a perilous existencein public life.23 This is clearly not a rejection of the duties of public lifeper se, nor a rejection of the value of fama. It is a warning to be wary of themotivation for engagement within public life. Petrarch is looking for adegree of clear-sightedness about moral endeavour which vain hopesjeopardise.

For Petrarch, fama is guaranteed by never deviating from true virtus.Moral excellence, he concedes, may not encounter anything but hostilityfrom members of one’s particular, mundane civitas. But he insists that suchlocal opinion is not the measure of true fama. In his correspondence withTommaso, he had asked in rhetorical fashion: ‘How many rivals didAugustine, Jerome or Gregory have until such time as their respected virtueand their divine and astonishing abundance of writings overcame envy?Hardly any one of these enjoyed any public fame until the day of his

19 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘nichil eque adiuvat ac nobilium ingeniorum familiaritas et clarorumvirorum conversatio’.

20 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘muliercularum omnium una lex est: inepta cupiunt, ridenda formidant’.21 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘Optavit aliquando tibi genetrix longitudinem dierum, innumerabilibus

periculis et calamitatibus obiectam; aliquando divitias, humanarum mentium non mediocremlaqueum ac funestam sarcinam libertatis; aliquando formam corporis, deformitatis anime plerunquemateriam.’

22 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).

23 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161: ‘que quanti sepe periculi plena sint, utriusque exitus est testis’.

122 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

death.’24 The Petrarchan injunction is always ‘to cultivate virtue while youare alive and you will find fame after your death’.25 Virgil ‘had disdained ina manly fashion the words of his detractors’, relying instead upon ‘the faithand judgement that Augustus had for his talent’.26 Petrarch’s own fama, soroundly honoured in this world by Dionigi’s royal master, was validbecause it was the verdict of the new Augustus. When Petrarch demandsto know ‘where will you find an Augustus as a judge, who we knowprotected the talents of his day most strenuously and in every possibleway . . . 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 kingof Sicily.’27 The great fortuna of Naples, beloved city of Virgil, had beenrestored by Robert: ‘O Fortunate Naples, you have been allotted theincomparable happiness of having the only ornament of our age.’28

Naples is felix, for under ‘the foremost judge of talent and learning’, ithas become the ‘most venerable home of letters’.29 Under Robert’s rule, itssors and fortuna are declared to be ‘happy’.

In Petrarch’s disparagement of worldly fame in favour of an immortalreputation guaranteed by the recognition of a few virtuous men – truearbiters undeflected by the ebb and flow of vulgar evaluation – his argu-ment is that those who think otherwise about fama become hostages tofortuna. He draws out a contrast between two types of fama – one as trueand as lasting as the constant judge who pronounces it, the other as fleetingand as false as the common crowd which misapplies the term – by resortingto the antinomy of fortuna and virtus which was central to Senecan moraltheory. In so doing, he gives his views in a language which shows Seneca tobe not only the principal classical authority informing his precepts, but thesource of many of his metaphors too:

Let Fortuna dispose of the destiny of your talent and of your name as it does withall other things. Did you think that her power extended only over the wealthy?

24 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 invidiamvicere! Vix horum quisquam integrum fame preconium, nisi ab ipso die mortis, accepit.’

25 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 21: ‘virtutem cole dum vivis, famam invenies in sepulcro’.26 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.’27 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 iudicemqueremus? Unum habet Italia, imo vero terrarum orbis; unum habet, Robertum siculum regem.’

28 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘Fortunata Neapolis, que unicum seculi nostri decus incomparabili felicitatesortita es; fortunata, inquam’.

29 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 16: ‘Neapolis, literarum domus augustissima’; I: 16: ‘ubi ingeniorum ac studiorumequissimus extimator habitat!’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 123

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

The injunction to Senecan constancy underpins Petrarch’s description ofDionigi’s liberating journey from the slavery of vain desires for his welfaretowards the good which Petrarch, Robert and God were holding out forhim. Petrarch reminds him that while ‘the good that I wish for you as muchas for me is the blessed life which many long for but few attain’, it involves aperilous voyage towards a better, saner place.31 The ‘way is a health-givingone which is both difficult and narrow, with alluring detours lying allaround’.32 The analogy which Petrarch then applies to the task of ethicalformation 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 goastray is extremely easy. To hit the target, this is the end of the artist; and this iswhy it is more difficult, because there is only one way to it, but countless ways toerror. Indeed, what I call the ‘blessed life’ (although it may have seemed otherwiseto extremely learned and clever men) human labor might hope for and evenmerit in some way, yet in this prison house of a body it cannot embrace and holdon to it.33

30 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 estlevius, facile rotat ac ventosis suffragiis circumvolit, a dignis eam transferens ad indignos. Nichilquidem 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.’

31 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161 (Fam. IV.2): ‘Illud bonum tibi cupio quod michi, beatam vitam, ad quammulti suspirant, pauci perveniunt.’

32 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 161–2: ‘Est enim salebrosum iter atque angustum et difficile, et amena ac pronacircum devia.’

33 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 unatantummodo, ad errorem innumerabiles sunt vie. Hanc sane quam dico beatam vitam, quanquamingeniosissimis atque doctissimis viris forte aliter visum sit, in hoc corporis ergastulo mereri quidemutcunque potest labor humanus et sperare, amplecti autem ac tenere non potest.’

124 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

The unerring path of Stoic toil and sweat promises to bring the beata vitawithin human reach, but our imprisoning natures then appear to frustrateour actually securing it. Yet Petrarch faces down the presumptious futilitywhich such heroic moral strivings seem to represent from a strictlyAugustinian perspective by beginning to assimilate the notion of thebeata vita to the concept of felicitas. He continues:

However, this mortal life has in the meantime something very similar in commonwith that of eternity: although it can never be blessed – for the blessed is too muchfor anyone to have the strength to approach – yet it may look down on humanmiseries far beneath it and, even while situated well below it, still gleam in the lightof supernal felicity. Riches, certainly, do not provide this, nor the approbation ofthe insane multitude, nor power, nor pleasure, but the companionship of thevirtues 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: thepresence of the royal person in Naples, that shining ‘ornament’ underwhose rule the kingdom now enjoyed ‘incomparable happiness’. ForRobert has understood the great Senecan lesson that virtue and virtuealone must be the constant companion of the true monarch; his exemplaryqualities mean that Naples flourishes in true felicity; and it is into anunparalleled celebration of Senecan monarchical rule that Petrarch nowleads us, a fitting conclusion to his account of Dionigi’s journey to theheights of moral virtue:

Who in Italy – indeed, who in the whole of Europe – is more distinguished thanRobert? For in him, I am often accustomed to reflect, what is so admirable is not somuch 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 alsohis own self, who exercises imperium over his passions – those rebels of the mindwho would oppress him if he gave way. But just as there is certainly no victorymore distinguished than the conquest of oneself, so there is no kingdom ruled withhigher authority than the rule over oneself.35

34 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘Habet tamen interdum illi eterne quiddam hec mortalis vita simillimum, utetsi beata nondum sit – id enim beatum est duntaxat cui nichil valet accedere – iam tamen humanasmiserias longe infra se videat et in imo stans adhuc superne felicitatis luce resplendeat. Hoc sane nondivitiae prestant, non insanientis vulgi plausus, non potentia, non voluptas, sed virtutum comitatusatque animi tranquillitas’.

35 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘ ‘‘Quis in Italia, imo vero quis in Europa clarior Roberto?’’ in quo sepecogitans soleo non tam dyadema quam mores, neque tam regnum quam animum admirari. Illumego vere regem dixerim, qui non subditos modo, sed se ipsum regit ac frenat; qui exercet in passionessuas imperium, que sunt animo rebelles, illum, si cesserit, oppressure. Ut nulla est quidem clariorvictoria quam se ipsum vincere, sic nullum regnum altius quam se ipsum regere.’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 125

Robert’s moral invincibility and his heroic self-rule mark him out as theself-conquering vir sapiens of Senecan moral philosophy who had beenrepeatedly lauded in the literature of the Duecento. Unconquered bypassion, a model of self-mastery, he is invictus, a quality as rare as the virsapiens himself. Ulysses, Hercules and Cato had all been regarded bySeneca as outstanding examples of Stoic wise men who had truly walked‘the virile path’ and ‘the hard and rugged road’ to the ‘lofty summit’ whichrises ‘high above all fortune’.36 They had reached that place because theywere men of great constancy, ‘unconquered by struggles, and were despis-ers of pleasures, and victors over every fear’.37 But King Robert is clearlyidentified as the protagonist of the Roman theory of the prince. Petrarchadvances the basic premise of the theory in his acclamation of Robert’smores and in his dismissal of the importance of the external marks ofmonarchy. The virtuous state of the monarchical mind, free from thedisturbances of the affects, becomes the only ground for consideringwhether the exercise of imperium over the kingdom is legitimate. If theroyal psyche, in its post-Augustinian state, is incapable of expungingentirely the affects, it has clearly engaged in an internal war of subjectionfrom which it emerges victorious, invincible and thereby fully entitled towield imperium externally over persons as subjects. In Petrarch’s hands, theSenecan goal of self-formation and self-government is pictured in terms oftwo persons in a war of conquest, one rational and the other a passionaterebel subject. Notwithstanding their enthusiasm for Stoic conceptions ofvirtus and ratio, few humanists shared the same degree of optimism aboutthe possibilities for a unified hegemon which classical Stoicism had nur-tured, and their arguments tended to impose a Stoic moral schema upon apartitioned psyche in which there was an ineradicable deposit of badness asa result of the Fall. Consequently, the Senecan idea of self-mastery wastransplanted to a Christianised psychomachic tradition.

Petrarch proceeds to expand the fundamental Senecan point that virtueis the only basis of monarchical rule:

It is therefore an astonishing, albeit public, form of madness to call someone a kingwho 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 iscommonly supposed by people; it is not, in fact, a common title at all. Sceptres

36 Seneca 1928c, I.1–2: 48: ‘virilem ingressi viam . . . in illum editum verticem . . . supra fortunam. ‘‘Atardua per quae vocamur et confragosa sunt.’’ ’

37 Seneca 1928c, II.1: 50: ‘Catonem autem certius exemplar sapientis viri nobis deos immortalis dedissequam Ulixen et Herculen prioribus saeculis. Hos enim Stoici nostri sapientes pronuntiaverunt,invictos laboribus et contemptores voluptatis et victores omnium terrorum.’

126 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

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

Titulature, regalia, constitutional definitions: all are dismissed as irrelevantin Petrarch’s embrace of the doctrine that the possession of virtus is the solecriterion for distinguishing a true from a false monarch. But Petrarch alsoconnects true virtus with true libertas, upholding the Stoic reasoning whichhad 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 thequality of virtus in such a way that it ensures that you are free from theenslaving effects of the passions and all forms of desiring attachment toexternal worldly goods. For Petrarch, Robert’s ability to free himself fromthe affects and rule the regnum according to virtue seems hardly compro-mised at all by original sin.

Petrarch makes clear that the king needs precisely those virtues whichSeneca 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 beinvincible, if adversity lays him low? And how will he be serene, if grief clouds overhim? How can he be magnanimous, if fear of even the slightest thing frightens himout of his mind? And – let us pass over in silence the shining names of all thevirtues – who will be able to say to me that he is free when he is weighed down bythe manifold yoke of the various desires?39

Invincible, free and now magnanimous, the monarch accumulates a suc-cession of Senecan princely qualities which secure his release from theiugum of desire. In so doing, he successfully banishes from his mind thevice of ambitio. A dominus ambitiosus, Seneca had warned, would leadthe 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 becomeseven more apparent in his juxtaposition of magnanimitas with the

38 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘Mira ergo, licet publica, dementia regem eum dicere, qui nec rex nec liber etsepe ne homo quidem sit. Magnum est regem esse, perexiguum regem dici; rariores sunt reges quamvulgus existimat; non est titulus iste vulgaris. Minus gemmarum atque eboris sceptra consumerent, sisoli reges illa portarent. Veri reges intra se gerunt quod eos venerabiles facit: semotis licet satellitibuset abiectis insignibus reges sunt; ceteros cultus exterior facit horribiles.’

39 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 162: ‘Quomodo ille michi rex erit, in quem regnat ambitio? quomodo invictusquem sternit adversitas? quomodus serenus quem meror obnubilat? quomodo magnanimus quemminimarum etiam rerum pavor exanimat? et ut fulgida virtutum nomina taceamus, quis michiliberum dicet eum qui cupidinum variarum iugo premitur multiplici?’

40 Seneca 1928a, I.3.5: 366: ‘cum ille imperavit, sive avarus dominus est, mare lucri causa scrutamur, siveambitiosus, iam dudum dextram flammis obiecimus aut voluntarii terram subsiluimus’.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 127

quality of serenitas and in his description of the clouding effects of vice.De clementia had taken up the definition of magnanimity which Senecahad earlier given in De ira:

The mark of true greatness is not to feel the blow . . . not to be angry is to beunshaken by wrong done to one; to succumb to anger is to become agitated. Buthe whom I have raised above all annoyance has embraced the supreme good andcan reply not to man alone but to Fortune herself: ‘Do all that you will, you are tooinsignificant to cloud my serenity. Reason forbids it, and I have entrusted my lifeto reason’s governance.’41

In running magnanimity so closely together with serenitas, Petrarch was onfirmly Senecan terrain: by helping to ensure the serenity of the man of pre-eminent virtue, magnanimity guaranteed cloudless skies over the civitas ofthe truly virtuous. Petrarch uses a distinctive metereological imagery in hisdepiction of the vices which cause the mind to lose its serenity and growcloudy. He is carefully reworking a passage from Book II, Chapter 5, ofDe clementia. Seneca had repeatedly contrasted the happy state of the bodypolitic under virtuous princely direction with the baleful state of affairsproduced by a person under the distorting influence of unhealthy affects, liketristitia 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’smiseries, or a sadness contracted from other people’s troubles which happen toothers without, so it thinks, their deserving them’. But no sickness befalls the wiseman. His mind is serene and nothing can occur to cloud it over. Again, nothingmore befits a man than a great mind. But a mind cannot both be great and alsogrieving, since grief blunts the wits, debases and shrivels them. And this is some-thing that will not happen to a wise man even in his own misfortunes.42

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

41 Seneca 1928b, III.25.3–4: 318 (Seneca 1995: 102): ‘Proprium est magnitudinis verae non sentirepercussum . . . Qui non irascitur, inconcussus iniuria perstitit, qui irascitur, motus est. At illequem modo altiorem omni incommodo posui tenet amplexu quodam summum bonum, nechomini tantum sed ipsi fortunae respondet: ‘‘omnia licet facias, minor es quam ut serenitatemmeam obducas. Vetat hoc ratio, cui uitam regendam dedi.’’ ’

42 Seneca 1928b, II.5.4–5: 438–40 (Seneca 1995: 162, modified): ‘Misericordia est aegritudo animi obalienarum miseriarum speciem aut tristitia ex alienis malis contracta, quae accidere immerentibuscredit; aegritudo autem in sapientem virum non cadit; serena eius mens est, nec quicquam inciderepotest, quod illam obducat. Nihilque aeque hominem quam magnus animus decet; non potestautem magnus esse idem ac maestus. Maeror contundit mentes, abicit, contrahit; hoc sapienti ne insuis quidem accidet calamitatibus.’

43 See also Seneca 1928b, III.25.4: 318.

128 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

De clementia, the virtuous prince governs those whose ‘state’ was placed ‘inmy hand’ according to the same divine rationality which governed ‘thestate of the world’; and Seneca had gone on to say that the state of the worldunder the rule of reason is never more ‘pleasing to the eye and lovelier’ thanon a ‘day serene and bright’.44 Seneca had drawn out the analogies betweenthis serene ‘state of the world’, the state of the prince and the state of thosewhom he rules by saying that ‘the look of a calm and well-ordered empire islike that of the sky serene and shining’.45 This state of affairs was thencontrasted with a ‘reign that is cruel’, and ‘troubled and overcast’.46

Petrarch thus follows Seneca in contrasting vicious weather conditionswith serenitas. In tracking down the clouding effects of vice, he entersinto the distinctive metaphorical language of De clementia. Even the vicewhich Petrarch names as the cause of the cloudiness – meror – is specifiedby Seneca in his description of the gloomy threats to princely magnanimityand serenity.47

These clouds reappear in a later Petrarchan document. He instructs hisfriend Giovanni Barrili, a soldier and magistrate from Capua, ‘to subjectyour mind to reason – or to put it another way – to subject you toyourself ’.48 The rational persona’s task of self-subjection is thus announcedas the key to moral progress. Amplifying his theme, Petrarch first turns toCicero’s account of Platonic ethics in the Tusculan Disputations, in order toassert that Plato ‘imitated nature itself’ in proposing a tripartite structureto the soul.49 But if Petrarch briefly recurs to the Greek through Romansources to secure his authority, the subsequent development of the import-ance of ratio draws on a much more familiar, and recognisably Stoic,vocabulary:

any attempt at describing anger here would be superfluous, since its sad resultsare known even to the common man and fill entire volumes by philosophers,especially Plutarch and Seneca. I think you should be briefly reminded of whatevery learned person knows: where passions dwell, so too do hideous clouds

44 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 exercereimperium et cogitare, uter mundi status gratior oculis pulchriorque sit, sereno et puro die’.

45 Seneca 1928a, I.7.2: 376: ‘Atqui non alia facies est quieti moratique imperii quam sereni caeli etnitentis.’

46 Seneca 1928a, I.7.3: 376: ‘Crudele regnum turbidum tenebrisque obscurum est.’47 Seneca 1928a, II.5.5: 440: ‘Maeror contundit mentes, abicit, contrahit.’48 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.1.49 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 39: ‘Plato naturam ipsam studio imitatus tripartitam anime sedem comperit.’

The allusion is to Cicero, Tusc. I.10.20.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 129

and horrendous shadows of the soul – the eclipse of reason, I should properlysay. And what I think applies to all of these passions applies very closelyindeed, I think, to anger. For there is nothing else which so disturbs peace andserenity, nothing which gives clearer testimony of a troubled man: a pallidface, confused speech, shaking limbs, an overcast aspect, eyebrows raised, eyesburning, rapid breath. When anger inhabits the mind, these symptoms drag it tothe light of day, like Cacus brought forth from hiding, and render it visible toonlookers.50

The figures used to paint this picture of the physiognomy of rage are drawnprimarily from De ira, the Senecan text to which Petrarch is obviouslyreferring Barrili.51 Now Petrarch links the clouds to the two great Senecanvices of ira and tristitia. He recalls the states of mind which are within thereach of the man who cultivates reason:

By contrast, when the mind is subjected to the rule of reason and is free from thepassions, therein resides unshakeable tranquillity, pleasant serenity, human hap-piness. It follows, therefore, that if we want to be happy (that happiness whichpertains to mortal life, that is, although of course we aspire to another type) it mustbe the loftiest participant of the divine mind, so that – as is said about the highestpeak of Olympus – no such cloud of the passions can reach it.52

An Olympian feat of self-subjection is thus required to attain felicitas andlibertas.

Petrarch holds Robert to have performed just such a feat. Robert’s self-conquering capacity is further manifest in two other qualities. He is ‘trulyrenowned, truly a king; while he exercises an imperious command overhimself, he is marked out by examples of unrivalled patience and moder-ation’.53 Once again, the Senecan typology of monarchical virtues is

50 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 39: ‘et supervacuum fuerit iram tibi velle describere, cuius tristes exitus vulgoetiam notos quidam philosophorum integris voluminibus sunt amplexi, precipue Plutarchus etSeneca. 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 equetranquillitatem 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 lucemtrahunt ac spectantibus visibilem representant.’

51 See especially De ira, II.35.3–6.52 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, sifelices 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 diciturOlimpi iugo, nulla eam passionum nubes possit attingere.’

53 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163 (Fam. IV.2): ‘Robertus vere inclitus et vere rex est; qui quam sit imperiosus inse ipsum exempla inaudite patientie et moderationis indicant.’

130 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

expanded. Seneca had stressed the importance of princely moderatio inno less than six separate places; as for patientia, the claim that the ‘princewill establish good morals in the civitas and cleanse it of its vices bypatience’ had underlined that the virtue was fundamental to the health ofthe monarchy.54 But Petrarch’s moral arguments reach their Senecanclimax in the development of his assertion that virtue can have nothingto do with ‘cultivation of what is on the surface’.55 Virtus must be integral tothe nature of the prince. Seneca had expressed this commitment in hisfamous 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 awayfrom the explicitly dramatic metaphor of Seneca to reformulate thedoctrine:

With what effrontery do we call someone a man whom we know to retain nothingthat truly belongs to man except the bare outline, deformed by the morals of beastsand 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 amere effigy, devoid of true moral quality on the inside. It is virtus whichmakes a man; and it is a quality located internally, and not manifested onthe exterior form of the body. Moral descriptions must pick out true menand true monarchs by remaining focused upon their internal qualities.The risk of doing otherwise is to provide evaluations which are superficialand empty of moral worth, thus revealing our own moral character.Petrarch draws an extreme contrast between inside and outside, perhapsa ramification of an Augustinian anti-materialism, but perhaps, too, arhetorical strategy to fix the eyes of the reader to the point which he isemphatically making about monarchy – that it has nothing to do withexternals and everything to do with the secure possession of virtus inside theperson of the prince.

Having virtually completed his discussion of royal virtue in this subtlyimitative way, Petrarch then abruptly names the classical authority sustain-ing his beliefs about monarchy:

54 Seneca 1928a, I.22.3: 418 (Seneca 1995: 154): ‘Constituit bonos mores civitati princeps et vitia eluit, sipatiens eorum est.’

55 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘ceteros cultus exterior facit horribiles’.56 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, temporeipso in maius meliusque procedunt.’

57 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 163: ‘Qua fronte hominem dicimus, quem scimus ex homine nichil preternudam effigiem retinere, beluarum moribus deformem et sevorem animantium feritate terribilem?’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 131

In a certain tragedy of his, your Seneca summarised superbly what a king ought orought not to do in these verses:

‘Wealth does not make a king,Nor purple vestmentsNor a royal aspectNor royal quarters of gold.A king is a man who lays aside fearAnd the evils of a dire heart.’

And then a little later:

‘A good mind possesses the kingdomThere is no need for horsesNor arms . . .A king is he who fears nothing.’

These are the words of Seneca. And it is to this king that you have proceeded uponbeing summoned – a suitable ending, given our point of departure.58

The story of Robert as a Senecan monarch is explicitly underlined, and yetbrought 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 apiece with the theory of princely virtus in De clementia which he has beenarticulating up to this point. But it is striking that he should decide to referhis reader to the Thyestes, rather than to the far more famous document onroyal 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, egregierecollegit his versibus:

Regem non faciunt opes,Non vestis tyrie color,Non frontis nota regie,Non auro nitide trabes;Rex est qui posuit metusEt diri mala pectoris.

Nec longe post:

Mens regnum bona possidetNil ullis opus est equisNi 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 praisedby Petrarch, it was a major exponent of that intellectual current, Lovato Lovati, whom he laudedmost. For a recent discussion, see Villa 2000. For Petrarch’s praise of the Paduans, see the commentsof 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 theGenealogia; Martellotti 1972: 152–60. See also Mayer 1994.

132 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

of De clementia in his own words; why now the explicit reference to hisclassical authority, and to a different text? The answer may be because hecame to hold the outstandingly unconventional – though entirely correct –belief that Seneca the tragedian was one and the same person as Seneca themoral philosopher.60 Petrarch’s suspicions about the traditional distinc-tion between Seneca the moralist and the author of the tragedies onlyemerged in public form in 1365, when it immediately generated a humanistdispute.61 The controversy was pursued through the correspondence of theNeapolitan 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 corpusand well after the date of the letter to Dionigi.63 Given the juxtaposition ofhis rhetorical rearticulation of Senecan precepts on royal rule with thepassage on kingship from the Thyestes, the belief may have been implicit inthe argument that he was making about ‘your Seneca’ to Dionigi. PerhapsPetrarch was even confronting his readers with the evidence for his beliefabout Seneca’s identity. Alternatively, Petrarch’s editorial work on thecollection in the 1350s and 1360s might have involved him in insertingthe passage and framing the implicit claim retrospectively; in which case,Dionigi, who died in 1342, would not have seen it. Regardless of thispossible explanation, Petrarch’s letter pointed to ways of using materialfrom an extended Senecan corpus with which to embellish the monarchicalstory of De clementia. Using the tragedies as well as the other moral treatisesto develop the depth and copiousness of the Senecan monarchical languagewas not a practice which necessarily demanded agreement with Petrarch’sargument about the identity of their author.

S E N E C A N T Y R A N N Y

When Robert dies in 1343, Petrarch is inconsolable, lamenting the unstablefortunes of the city in a language which draws as deeply as ever upon theRoman theory of monarchy. Deprived of Robert’s virtuous presence,Naples is plunged into darkness as Petrarch relentlessly reverses his depic-tion of a happy, free and enlightened monarchy in the hands of Robert byturning to the utterly contrasting language of bestiality, of cruelty and ofmonstrosity which Seneca had used in De clementia to characterise tyran-nical rule. In the last two chapters of Book I, he had bequeathed a highly

60 Martellotti 1972; Billanovich 1996a.61 Billanovich 1996a: 471. The letter is Fam. XXIV.5.62 Billanovich 1996a. For Pietro’s ownership and scholarly correction of the famous Montecassino

codex Ambrosianus, see Reynolds 1983: 366.63 For some indications of the chronology of these thoughts, see Martellotti 1972: 150–5.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 133

wrought picture of the tyrant whose ‘bestial madness’ and ‘ferocity’ makeshim nothing better than ‘an animal of the forest . . . its jaws yawningwide’.64 The tyrant’s inhumane ‘savagery’ is a disease of the mind, his‘cruelty’ a pleasure. Whereas such vice in private individuals had far lesspotential to cause widespread damage, the same type of mental affliction inthe case of princes, Seneca had warned, had extraordinary consequences forthe health of the body politic. Seneca had expressed the contrast in theimpact caused by the ‘private’ madness of cruelty and the public devastationcaused by princely bestiality through an imagery which fared well afterthe Fall: ‘tiny snakes go unnoticed. There is no public hunt for them. Butwhen a serpent has exceeded the normal size and grown into a monster,poisoning the wells with its spittle, scorching whatever it breathes on . . .’, itrequires ‘the engines of war’ to stop it.65 Princely vice was a monster on therampage, 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 amassive public conflagration.67 Leave it to run riot, warns Seneca, and itsmoral character begins to inform the tyrant’s ‘closest friends’ and the‘entertainments’, ‘parties’ and ‘public shows’ within the civitas.68 Wouldlife be any different, he exclaims, ‘if lions and bears had the kingdom, ifserpents and the most noxious kind of animal were given power over us?’69

Petrarch draws upon the full repertoire of Senecan imagery in order toconvey the terrible, tyrannical state of affairs which now pertained in theNeapolitan kingdom. He mentions his concerns to Barbato da Sulmona,but they were laid out in much greater detail to Cardinal Giovanni

64 Seneca 1928a, I.25.2: 422–4 (Seneca 1995: 155): ‘saevitia . . . animi morbus ad insaniem pervenitultimam, cum crudelitas versa est in voluptatem et iam occidere hominem iuvat’.

65 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 nonnumquam consiliis, alias vero consternatione publica circumvenitur. Levis enim et privata perniciesnon totas urbes movet; quod late furere coepit et omnes appetit, undique configitur. Serpentesparvulae fallunt nec publice conquiruntur; ubi aliqua solitam mensuram transit et in monstrumexcrevit, ubi fontes sputu inficit et, si adflavit, deurit obteritque, quacumque incessit, ballistispetitur.’

66 Seneca 1928a, I.25.5: 424 (Seneca 1995: 156): ‘at ubi crebris mortibus pestilentiam esse apparuit,conclamatio civitatis ac fuga est’.

67 Seneca 1928a, I.25.5: 424 (Seneca 1995: 156): ‘Sub uno aliquo tecto flamma apparuit: familia viciniqueaquam 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’.

68 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 incarcere iuvent?’

69 Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426 (Seneca 1995: 156–7): ‘Quae alia vita esset, si leones ursique regnarent, siserpentibus in nos ac noxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’

134 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

Colonna in a letter about his second visit to Naples in late 1343. The newroyal council, Petrarch reported, was ‘a monster’ and a ‘plague’.70 The poetis moved to pity by the sight of ‘my noble Parthenope’, so reduced andremade in the image of her new advisors.71 In the place of Robert had arisenan ‘horrendous triped of a beast’, a monster that had nothing in commonwith its illustrious predecessor, but shamefully bore the ‘sacred name ofRobert’.72 All the vices of the royal replacement are pictured by Petrarch onthe body, a hollow effigy of royal authority which has nothing of the maninside.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 fromthe bones of a buried man, given that this stupid viper has sprung up fromthe royal tomb’.74

In Petrarch’s distress – angry, inconsolable, pitiful – he blames Fortunafor this turn of events, bitterly exclaiming that ‘this is the fidelity ofFortuna: she turns and overturns alike human affairs . . . it was not enoughfor her to have stolen the sun from the world, nor to have cast dark shadowsover it; no, she snatched away our unparalleled king and replaced him withanother – 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. Thedominatrix brings to power a beast which is immitis. It embodies, that is,the opposite of the princely quality of mildness. A demented Petrarch railsagainst God: ‘is this how you look upon us, Rector of the Stars, is this theideal successor to such a king?’76 Petrarch then recalls a ‘Sicilian hall’ ofinfamy to remind us that this kind of tyranny has horribly distingui-shed precedents – Agathocles, Phalaris, the Dionysii.77 Yet the present

70 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7 (Fam. V.3): ‘Neapolim veni, reginas adii et reginarum consilio interfui. Prohpudor, quale monstrum! Auferat ab italico celo Deus genus hoc pestis.’ For Petrarch, GiovanniColonna and this visit, see Wilkins 1955b: 5–6. For the letter to Sulmona, see Fam. V.1 in Petrarca1933–42, 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 theregency council, see Leonard 1954: 343–4.

71 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7: ‘compatior tibi, mea nobilis Parthenope; vere tu harum quelibet facta es;nulla pietas, nulla veritas, nulla fides’.

72 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7: ‘Ac ne sacrum nomen ignores, Robertus dicitur. In illius Roberti serenissiminuper regis locum, quod unum decus etatis nostre fuerat, eternum dedecus Robertus iste surrexit.’

73 See Petrarca 1933–42, II: 7 for the graphic depiction.74 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.’75 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.’

76 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘Siccine nos aspicis, astrorum rector? Hic tanto regi successor ydoneus?’77 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘Hic, post Dyonisios Agathoclemque et Phalaridem – cunctis obscenior et,

clam licet, immanior – fato debitus restabat aule sicule.’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 135

incarnation ‘is more obscene, more inhumane’ than all of them.78 Petrarchturns to Macrobius for words: the noxious tyrant who has taken Robert’splace is an ‘inclementissimus incubator’, a most unmerciful oppressor.79

The established order of the universe is so shattered in Petrarch’s disturbedvision that it is making him feel sick with anger, and he needs to calmhimself: ‘In truth, while I am trying to relieve my indignant stomach, I fearI may stir up the bile in you, too.’80 Searching for language to describe thegravity of the situation was futile. It only succeeded in imperillingPetrarch’s ‘tranquillity of mind’.81 He concludes: ‘it is advisable to bringmy words to an end’.82

Still, Petrarch returned to the subject again, in another letter toColonna, now recounting a Naples that looked even more Neronic thanAugustan.83 The monstrousness of the situation has grown to utterlySenecan proportions. First he tells of his lack of success to date in discharg-ing the task which had been assigned to him by the Cardinal and whichconsisted in Petrarch presenting an appeal for the release of three brothersin prison in Naples.84 He had already grimly warned Colonna that, underthe prevailing political circumstances, ‘if they expect the clemency of theCouncil, 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 engulfingthe kingdom, referring to the ‘corrosively poisonous snake’ which hadwound itself around the minds of the judges upon whom he had soughtto impress the plea of clemency.86 When the council adjourns, everyonehurries 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 nightbecause armed noble youths roam them. There is no ‘paternal discipline’,

78 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8.79 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 8: ‘ut Macrobii verbo utar, ‘‘inclementissimus incubator’’’. The Macrobius

citation is from Commentariorum in Somnium Scipionis, I.10.16.80 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 9: ‘Verum ego, dum verborum spumis indignantem stomacum relevare studeo,

vereor ne tibi quoque bilem moverim.’81 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 scelerumimpunitas sontibus auferatur?’

82 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 9: ‘Itaque finem verbis imponere consilium est.’83 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20–1 (Fam. V.6).84 For the context of the letter, see Wilkins 1955b: 11.85 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 10 (Fam. V.3): ‘si enim consilii clementiam expectant, actum est: squalore

carceris consumentur’.86 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘nisi constrictos pietate animos seps ille tabificus resolvisset . . . lethale

malum sit’.87 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘immedicabilis egritudo huius urbis’.88 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘unum hoc obscurum habet et obscenum et inveteratum malum’.

136 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

no ‘authority of judges’, no ‘royal majesty’ to ‘restrain their licence’.89 YetPetrarch thinks the nocturnal perils hardly surprising in view of whathappens in broad daylight.90 For the city has become enthralled to infa-mous gladiatorial games, ‘kings and people alike spectators’ to the ‘barbaricferocity’ of ‘human blood flowing as if it were the blood of cattle’.91 Abestialised people engage in an orgy of self-slaughter amidst the ‘applauseof the insane’.92 And the place of this perverse and infamous spectacle? It iscalled ‘the Furnace’, and it is described as a ‘sooty workshop of inhumanesavagery’ which ‘blackens the bloody blacksmiths at the anvil of death’.93

Petrarch’s picture of a sickness snaking its way through minds and streetsculminates in the description of a site of burning intensity, a great con-flagration of entire persons – the minds and bodies of the civitas –consumed with the vices of cruelty and avarice. This is no place for thestudia humanitatis. The city which Virgil called the ‘sweetest of all’ hasbecome ‘the stuff of tragedy’, and Petrarch leaves his reader with a poignantline from the great Augustan epic in order to make abundantly clear thevicious effect of Senecan tyranny upon the once happy state of Parthenope:‘alas, flee these cruel lands, flee the mean shore’.94

T H E E D U C A T I O N O F T H E P R I N C E

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

89 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘nocturnum iter . . . anceps ac periculis plenum est, obsidentibus viasnobilibus adolescentulis armatis, quorum licentiam nulla umquam vel patrum disciplina velmagistratuum auctoritas vel regum maiestas atque imperium frenare quivit’.

90 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘Quid autem miri est, siquid per umbram noctis nullo teste petulantiusaudeant, cum luce media.’

91 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘inspectantibus regibus ac populo, infamis ille gladiatorius ludus in urbeitala celebretur, plusquam barbarica feritate? Ubi more pecudum sanguis humanus funditur.’

92 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 20: ‘et sepe, plaudentibus insanorum’.93 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 fuliginosasevetie officina’.

94 Petrarca 1933–42, II: 21: ‘nam et tragicum opus est et multa super his inter obstinatos cives verba iamperdidi. 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 litusavarum.’’’ For the citation, see Virgil, Aeneid, III.44.

95 For a summary of the political context, see Abulafia 1997: 162–6. For Petrarch’s relations with theNeapolitan court in the early 1350s, see Wilkins 1955d: 58–62.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 137

thereby securing the Crown a source of military power, and the Hungarianchallenge was gradually repelled.96 Louis was crowned king in May 1352.97

The new Angevin government appointed his mentor, the Florentinebusinessman Nicola Acciaiuoli, as Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom.Petrarch took it upon himself to outline to the new power behind thethrone 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 mostsophisticated form in the work of Erasmus.99 It was ‘immediately famous’,its fortuna ‘immense’: it was annotated and circulated with a commentaryby Barbato, the Neapolitan humanist and dedicated cultivator ofPetrarchan teaching.100

It was, predictably, a programme of instruction designed to instil thecentral precepts of the Senecan royal ideology which had informedPetrarch’s Neapolitan writing. For an outstanding model of virtue toimitate, and for the young king to ‘have before his eyes’, Petrarch says heneed look no further than the ‘ideal example’ of ‘his illustrious and divineuncle 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 theSenecan precepts of De clementia. So let the young king gaze on that divineimage, Petrarch states, ‘let him form himself according to the rule ofthat man, let him contemplate himself in that flawless mirror’.103 ThePetrarchan Institutio conveys its messages by means of an imagery asstrikingly Senecan as ever. We are reminded that the king enjoys the titleof ‘his Serenity’ for as long as ‘no cloud of grief, no icy fear, no mist ofearthly 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 inputting it thus, Petrarch reminds us that the rex whom he is addressingis indistinguishable from a princeps: the Senecan argument about the

96 Abulafia 1997: 164. 97 Abulafia 1997: 164.98 Wilkins 1955d: 61; Abulafia 1997: 165.99 The text is Fam. XII.2 (Petrarca 1933–42, III: 5–17).

100 Wilkins 1955a: 251; Billanovich 1996a: 460–1 (for the ‘fortuna enorme’ of the Institutio).101 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘habet ante oculus rex tuus . . . recens ac domesticum virtutum omnium,

exemplar ydoneum: illustrem ac divinum eius patruum Robertum’.102 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘ille sapiens, ille magnanimus, ille mitis, ille rex regum erat’.103 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 16: ‘Illum intueatur; ad illius regulam se conformet; in illo se nitidissimo

speculo contempletur.’104 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 merorisnebula, nullus flatus letitie gestientis, nulla pavoris glacies, nullus libidinum terrenarum fumuspossit ascendere.’

138 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

inconsequentiality of titles and names holds strong in this ideology ofvirtus.105 The connection between princely anger and cruelty is continuedin the progression of Petrarch’s discourse: ‘even to use the word cruelty is awickedness’, he asserts.106 And Petrarch follows almost to the letterSeneca’s reasoning about cruelty in a monarch, recalling that ‘it is all themore fatal in a man who has to hand so many instruments to causeharm’.107 Furthermore, the Senecan theory is applied within an entityvariously described as a kingdom, a principate and a republic. Petrarchtells 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 apivotal place in the Senecan theory. Petrarch affirms the indispensiblequality of magnanimitas, which he defines, in straightforwardly Senecanterms, as ‘the peculiar virtue of kings, without which they are neitherworthy of the kingdom nor of the royal name’.110 Therein lies the massiveutility of the Senecan ideology to persons claiming to be princes: if theyshow they have magnanimitas in particular, they may argue that the nomenof rex, or princeps, or imperator is truly applicable to them. The secondessential virtue is said to be humanitas. Again, Petrarch rehearses theSenecan case, saying that ‘this is not merely a virtue of man but his verynature, and if it is lacking, it is more monstrous than corrupt; a king oughtto have it all the more, in as much as he who holds first place among menmust duly excel them’.111 But both magnanimitas and humanitas comeafter the virtue which makes the prince ‘extremely similar to God’: miser-icordia.112 Petrarch immediately rebukes ‘those philosophers who con-demned pity’ for ‘having erred deeply’, and it seems clear that he meansSeneca.113 Sharing in divine pity for man is firmly stamped with the mark ofprincely virtue. While this alteration to the Senecan typology was neces-sitated by the Augustinianism that surfaces within Petrarchan humanism,

105 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘Iram in principe turpissimam non ignoret.’106 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 12: ‘crudelitatem vero nominari etiam nefas esse’.107 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 magisreliquos 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’.

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 139

it hardly involved a diminution of the importance of clementia, whichPetrarch continues to praise for its mitigating effects.114

As other Senecan doctrines become more prominent, the humanistideology begins to participate in some of De clementia’s most characteristicformulations. Most notably, Petrarch forcefully expresses the importanceof bearing in mind the Senecan doctrine of kingship as an onerous andhighly conspicuous form of servitude. He begins by reminding Acciaiuolithat he has been instrumental in leading the king to the ‘highest pinnacle ofthe human state’.115 Acciaiuoli must accordingly show the young monarchthe steps by which he has arrived at this elevated ‘state’, this ‘peak offortune’.116 These steps are described as ‘arts’, and the art of the ascentmust consist in the cultivation of virtue, for the king must show that hemerits his lofty position ‘no less on account of his virtue than on account ofhis blood’.117 This duty is all the more imperative because ‘a principate doesnot make a man but exposes him’ and in his exposed state, all the honorificattributes which accrue to the prince as a monarch do not ‘change his mindand his morals’ but rather ‘put them on display’.118 The consequences areobvious: ‘the higher he is, the more clearly he is seen and the less possible itis for him to hide what he has done’, and ‘the more power he has, the lesslicence he enjoys’.119 Petrarch then develops the idea that the lofty ‘state’ ofthe prince is an exposed, difficult place to occupy by stressing the import-ance of impressing upon the king that ‘he is weighed down by a burden-some honour and an honourable burden’.120 This is because ‘while beforehe may have been unimpeded and free, he who becomes king thenceforthundertakes an honourable but laborious and solicitous servitude, so thatunder this servitude, there may be public liberty’.121 He immediatelycontinues the Senecan moral, saying that ‘he must henceforth live anexemplary 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 See Petrarca 1933–42, III: 13.115 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘regem . . . in summum status humani fastigium perduxisti’.116 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Ostende illi quibus gradibus in hunc fortune vertice sit evectus.’117 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 hereditariumsceptrum non magis sanguini debitum quam virtuti’.

118 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Non facit virum sed detegit principatus, et honores non mutant moresatque animum sed ostendunt.’

119 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 9: ‘Cogitet quo altior est eo se clarius videri eoque minus occultari posse quegesserit, et quo potentie plus est eo minus esse licentie.’

120 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘Denique honeroso honore et honorato se pressum honere fateatur.’121 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’.

140 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

crowd is usually demanded from the hands of those who preside overthem’.122

Petrarch’s description of the passage to the ‘highest pinnacle of thehuman state’ thus depicts the movement of a person whose feet are freeto a position in which they are encumbered. The lofty ‘state’ is a form ofservitude in which one appears to relinquish a footloose condition andbecome restricted by the burden which one is carrying. A prince is nolonger in a position of ‘expediency’. On the contrary, his obligationsheavily impede him. Yet in terms of the favoured Senecan metaphor formoral progress which runs through Petrarch’s arguments, the virtuousprince always walks the hardest path to the highest human state, arrivingat a place of libertas and felicitas which is then said to be guaranteed forthe whole monarchical body. This moral person, then, becomes free atprecisely the moment that his feet appear to end up losing their freedom tothe lowest state of all, the state of servitude. The prince is both in servitudeand in liberty. He is subject to a higher sovereign who moves his body, andat the same time in total control of his free persona by means of hiscultivation of reason.

These contradictions may have been resolvable through a materialistStoic metaphysics. The prince of perfect virtue had no dominus other thanreason itself. But ratio did have a determining effect upon the movement ofbodies, and Seneca had regularly personified this motivating force. WhenPetrarch develops the Senecan doctrine of kingship as noble servitude, hisprince 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 arriveat the heights of divine virtue, he is nevertheless subject to the domination ofa higher sovereign person, whom he describes as ‘the lord of virtue and theking of glory’.123 From the time of Petrarch onwards, humanist princelydiscourse cultivated both princely freedom and princely servitude.

But the tension between liberty and servitude which the Roman theoryof monarchy helped to transmit to the humanist ideology was accompa-nied by another, related dichotomy running through the Senecan textwhich similarly begins to characterise princely discourse. This seconddichotomy prevails in the treatment of the character of Fortuna.Petrarch’s letter to Acciaiuoli develops Fortuna according to a dual

122 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 14: ‘vivendumque sibi deinceps exemplariter: exemplo enim regum regnacomponi et requiri solere de manibus presidentium quicquid vulgus erraverit’.

123 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Illi qui est dominus virtutum et rex glorie.’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 141

perspective. He begins with a series of references to conquest: ‘over thecourse of time, faith defeats perfidy, bountifulness avarice, humilitypride’.124 He then links these conquests to the military triumphs whichAcciaiuoli 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 whoseleadership the worst side in this present struggle has been conquered, thebest side triumphs – so contrary to what we often see.’125 God as dux anddominus has led the virtuous Angevin to victory over the depraved foreigninvader. In this providential light, the king’s fortuna becomes equated withfate. Petrarch now instructs Acciaiuoli to ensure that his king now learnshow to walk to the point at which he has already arrived:

You have a king . . . whom you have led through many dangers, under fate’scompulsion, to the highest pinnacle of the human state. Show him by what stepshe 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 thathe is worthy of his ascent . . .126

The prince has played a somewhat passive role in the dangerous physicaljourney to the lofty pinnacle of fortune. Compelled by fate and assisted byAcciaiuoli, he is carried there in the first instance. Petrarch identifies theagency of fate with God, the dominus of virtue under whose leadership the‘best side’ had prospered. So it would follow that the dominus has com-pelled the prince’s bodily movement, through bloodlines and battlefields,to the highest and most fortunate state. God, fate and fortune are all inalignment from this perspective. The prince now has to take steps to makehimself into the image of the person who is held to be his master and thearbiter of his fate and fortune, so making good the claim that his rule enjoysthe blessings of divine providence.

But Petrarch warns the royal official that, in fact, ‘nothing has beenachieved’ when one surveys the moral battle that lies ahead.127 For ‘now is

124 Petrarca 1933–42, III:5: ‘Iantandem, vir clarissime, perfidiam fides avaritiam largitias superbiam vicithumilitas.’

125 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Immortale bellum est inter invidiam et gloriam, inter nequitiam etvirtutem, gratias Illi qui est dominus virtutum et rex glorie, quod eo duce in presenti certaminevicta parte deterrima, cuius sepe contrarium videmus, optima pars triumphat.’

126 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Habes regem . . . cum quo terra marique iactatus es, quem per multaprecipitia cogente fato in summum status humani fastigium perduxisti. Ostende illi quibusgradibus in hunc fortune verticem sit evectus, quibus artibus consistendum sit, neque tam deincepsenitendum ut ascendat altius quam ut ascensu se se approbet non indignum.’

127 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘nichil est actum’.

142 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

in fact the time for you to summon up all your strength of mind, to armyourself for vast undertakings . . . if you have any of the moral qualitiesof a Caesar’.128 He asserts that ‘we saw you fight back so magnificentlyagainst adverse Fortuna; now we see you as the conqueror, but lo andbehold, 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 theopen’ the opponent whom he had defeated at close quarters.130 Historyshows how ‘peace time has often been more dangerous than war’.131

The mind is constantly under siege, constantly fighting.132 The virtuousman needs an adversary, or else he grows languid in his leisure, dissipatedrather 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 everydistinguished man right up to the last breath, against enemies eithervisible or invisible’.134 He urges immediate action, for ‘at no other timewas there such a need for you to raise yourself up with such force, and foryour mind to overcome itself’.135 Acciaiuoli has arrived at the greatestchallenge of all, ‘in which the whole world may learn what sort and howmuch of a man you are when confronted with each of the two kinds ofFortuna’.136

This exhortation to engage in warfare with all the mental powers at one’sdisposal is conceptually related to the lengthier treatment of the two typesof fortuna in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortune, also written during

128 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 6: ‘Nunc siquidem tempus est ut omnes animi tui vires colligas atqueingentibus negotiis accingaris . . . siquid Cesarei moris habes.’

129 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘Vidimus te adverse fortune magnificentissime reluctantem; iam cernimuste victorem; sed en totiens victa revertitur aspectu mitior et aurate cassidis, ut ita dixerim, fulgoresuavior. Vicisti adversam; prospera redit in prelium.’

130 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘mutata sunt arma, non hostis, et tibi quoque novo armorum genere estopus . . . In arcto quidem egregie rem gessesti; qualem te in aperto exhibeas expectamus.’

131 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘sepe pax periculosior bello fuit’.132 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 7: ‘nulla homini pertinacior lis quam cum animo moribusque suis; nusquam

minus indutiarum; intra murum pugna est’.133 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 paxtranquilla perdomuit.’

134 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘si me audire volueris, scies unum esse laboris et vite finem tibique etomnibus claris viris usque ad extremum spiritum vel cum visibili vel cum invisibili hoste luctandumfore’.

135 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Nullo unquam tempore tam magno conamine consurgendum tibi tamquesupra se ipsum attollendus animus fuit.’

136 Petrarca 1933–42, III: 8: ‘Ad summa certamina ventum est ut universus orbis intelligat in utraquefortuna qualis quantusque vir fueris.’

Royal humanism in the Regnum Siciliae 143

the 1350s,137 in which the role of Ratio in overcoming Fortuna is dramat-ically personified in the 253 dialogues.138 But Fortune’s duality is as perva-sive in humanist princely ideology as it had been in the Senecan theory.From Petrarch onwards, the Senecan injunction to conquer or simplymagnanimously rise above Fortuna in an attitude of lofty disdain towardsher enslaving power becomes the princely way of ensuring libertas. Whilethe wise monarch owes nothing to the inconstant caprices of the domina-trix because of his virtue, he yet owes everything to his great fortuneaffixing him to his pinnacle, as if there were one fortuna dominating thephysical body, and quite another which he dominates by the force of hismoral personality. In arriving at the highest ‘human state’, the monarchescapes a form of slavery threatened by Fortuna for liberty under thedominus of divine reason, only to be told that this is a form of nobleservitude. He is instructed that he must constantly labour under a heavyweight, that his movement is now impeded, and that everyone is lookingat him. The felix princeps of royal humanist discourse found himself –mid-Trecento – affixed to a profoundly Senecan state.

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

138 Mann 1984: 76.

144 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

C H A P T E R 4

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas

In view of the conceptual character of the Senecan ideology which Petrarchhad developed in his writings about the Neapolitan rex, it is unsurprisingthat he resorted to the same language when describing and prescribing theprinciples of good monarchical government to the signori. The Petrarchandevelopment of the Senecan argument was clear: if a ruler possessed therequisite virtues, thereby ensuring that reason reigned supreme over hisown person and over the political body which he ruled, then he could beduly named as princeps, or rex, or imperator irrespective of any externalapparatus which might be adduced to support such a claim. In fact,Petrarch had openly denigrated the reliance on dynastic entitlement andthe physical symbolism of monarchical power in his discussions of theidentity of the true prince. This line of argument was of immense utility tosignorial regimes looking to consolidate their princely claims. ThroughPetrarch’s association with the signori, a political language already indebtedto the texts of Roman imperial ideology in general and to the contentionsof De clementia in particular developed a fully humanist character.

Before settling in Milan in 1353 for eight years, Petrarch had corre-sponded with its ruler, Luchino Visconti, and with Visconti’s podesta inParma, Paganino da Milano.1 Writing to Paganino during the 1340s,Petrarch declared that he was well aware of the argument that theRoman Empire had increased in size far more before the establishmentof the Principate, but that it was nevertheless the opinion of many greatmen 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 Senecahad held out in De clementia, where he had declared that, thanks to the rule

1 For Petrarch’s Milanese period, see Wilkins 1958.2 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 felicissimumreipublice statum esse sub uno eodemque iusto principe.’

145

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 donot merely paraphrase these claims: they form part of an argument whichrestates Seneca’s justification for monarchy. Seneca had argued that it hadbeen mistaken to wish to restore the res publica to its former shape, inview of the moral degeneration which had led to civil war, and in view ofthe manifest benefits to be had from autocracy under such conditions.5

In similar vein, Petrarch explains to Paganino that in view of ‘the presentstate of our affairs, amid such an implacable discord of minds, there isabsolutely no doubt remaining for us that monarchy is the best way ofrestoring and repairing Italy’s strength, which the madness of civil wars haslong dissipated’.6 Petrarch ‘has come to realise this, and to acknowledgethat a royal hand is needed for our diseases’; and he has no doubt thatPaganino 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’ isLuchino Visconti. For ‘if it is justice alone which distinguishes a tyrantfrom a king, then our king is a true king’.8 This is a version of the Senecanargument which substitutes the virtue of iustitia for the virtue of clementiain determining the moral difference between rex and tyrannus. It is, more-over, a version which is fully consonant with the argument of De clementia,where the merciful prince was very clearly held to be the embodiment ofiustitia, of ius raised above all iniuria. And Petrarch’s claims about the beststate of the res publica recall these Senecan statements even more strongly atthe point where he insists that ‘our king is a true king, however much thosewho are the truest tyrants of all – men who want to call themselves fathersof their countries – call him a tyrant’.9 Visconti’s critics are the true tyrants,

3 Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta, adfluens, ius supra omnem iniuriampositum; obversatur oculis laetissima forma rei publica’.

4 Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228–9): ‘cum optimus civitatis status sub rege iusto sit’.5 See Seneca 1935, II.20.2: 92 (Seneca 1995: 228–9).6 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 relegendisreparandisque viribus italis, quas longus bellorum civilium sparsit furor.’

7 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘Hec ut ego novi, fateorque regiam manum nostris morbis necessariam, sic teillud credere non dubito nullum me regem malle quam hunc nostrum, cuius sub ditione vivimusadeo suaviter ac tranquille.’

8 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘Et profecto si regem a tyranno sola iustitia discernit, iste rex verus est.’9 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘iste rex verus est, quamlibet tyrannum vocent verissimi omnium tyranni, qui

se patres patrie dici volunt’.

146 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

outdoing ‘Phalaris . . . Agathocles . . . Dionysius . . . Gaius . . . Nero . . .Heliogabalus’ in their shamelessness and bestial ferocity.10 The refutationof the accusation of tyranny levelled against Visconti makes clear that thetitle of true prince brings with it the identity of Pater patriae. Petrarch’smock incredulity is reserved for an act of inappropriate nomination, for theappropriation of a title that truly belongs to the iustus rex of the classicaltheory, and, by implication, to the iustus rex of Milan.

But the most systematic exposition of the Petrarchan argument aboutmonarchical virtue in a signorial context dates to the 1370s, some twodecades after the humanist had decided to take his work, his ideas, hislibrary and his skills as a government official to Milan. Petrarch’s letter of1373 to Francesco da Carrara, the ruler of Padua, expends considerableenergy in its proem preparing the ground for a long disquisition onmonarchical virtue.11 It explains why Petrarch needs to write on princelygovernment to a person who already embodies the qualities he is about toextol. Petrarch knows that no one is beyond criticism, although Francescois virtually faultless. He goes on to say that a person can be called ‘perfectand excellent’ when they are only very minimally ‘liable’.12 The word whichPetrarch uses here is obnoxius, the term used in classical writing to describea slavish condition of indebtedness or addiction when a person is depend-ent upon, at the mercy of or in the power of someone else.13 Petrarch thusconnects the ‘perfect and excellent’ person whom he associates withFrancesco to someone who is free. He next exhorts his correspondent to‘give thanks to God’ for ‘having made you as you are’.14 Francesco’svirtuous character is by no means explicable solely in terms of divinebeneficence. Petrarch is quick to attribute it to the formative educationwhich the monarch had enjoyed as a youth, when ‘you were able to learnboth by instruction and by example’ a series of magnificent and noblelessons ‘under your glorious and magnanimous father’.15 Francesco’s youth

10 Petrarca 1933–42, I: 117: ‘verissimi omnium tyranni . . . cum quibus nullus Phalaris, nullusAgathocles, nullus Dyonisius, nullus denique Gaius aut Nero omniumque fedissimus Eliogabaluspossit de impudicitia et feritate contendere’.

11 I cite the Latin text of the letter from the collection Rerum senilium libri (XIV.1) provided in Petrarca1978: 760–836. A translation (which I have consulted as a basis for my own) is in Petrarca 1992, II:521–52.

12 Petrarca 1978: 764: ‘Est, fateor, conditio ista mortalium, ut nullus omnino sit irreprehensibilis. Illeperfectus atque optimus dici potest, qui parvis ac paucis obnoxius est.’

13 Skinner 1998: 42–4.14 Petrarca 1978: 764: ‘Age ergo gratias deo, qui te talem fecit.’15 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 etexemplo’.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 147

had proved no obstacle to his successful rule of the res publica upon thedeath of his father. On the contrary, Petrarch salutes the fact that ‘you haveruled with such maturity, with all the judgement of an older person’.16

Francesco has thus demonstrated that, like Seneca’s prince, even at the startof his reign he has not been moved by ‘juvenile impulse’ in his governmentbut by ‘senile consilium’ – the counsel of maturer years.17 Francesco hasgrown up quickly. Indeed he has subsequently shown himself to be ‘anexample to rulers of other cities’.18 Petrarch has even heard that ‘neigh-bouring peoples long to be subject to you’ and that ‘they envy yoursubjects’.19

Francesco’s qualifications as a free man are then further developed. Hisrule is said to be beneficial because he is morally invincible, ‘addictedneither to presumptious insolence nor to idle pleasure’.20 The martialmetaphor used to express the idea of unfreedom here is that of ‘surrender’to an enemy. But Petrarch explains that Francesco avoids this condition ofbeing defeated by such hostile vices because he exhibits an ‘extremelyvigilant’ form of engagement in the business of governing.21 The result isthat he is acknowledged to be ‘tranquil, but not inactive’ and ‘gloriosus’, orillustrious, but not arrogant: Francesco’s ‘modesty rivals his magnanim-ity’.22 He shows ‘unbelievable humaneness’ even to ‘the most humble’ ofhis people.23 Under his command, the civitas has acquired extensivedefences 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 hasbeen shed’, thus moving Francesco even closer to the fulfilment of the idealof 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 keptthe fatherland flourishing in serene tranquillity and constant peace’ for

16 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ad regimen omnium conscendisti, commissamque tibi rem publicam, imma-turos superante annos industria, tanta maturitate tamque senili consilio rexisti’.

17 For the elimination of ‘juvenile impulse’ in the Senecan prince, see De clementia, I.1.3.18 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘te . . . exemplar aliarum urbium rectoribus exhiberes’.19 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ita ut sepe ego finitimos populos tibi subesse votis optantes audierim et tibi

subditis invidentes’.20 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut tu interim, nec tumide insolentie nec inerti deditus voluptati’.21 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘in hoc unum vigilantissimo studio incubueris’.22 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut te omnes agnoscerent sine desidia tranquillum, sine superbia gloriosum,

utque in te modestia cum magnanimitate contenderet’.23 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘cum te pene ex equo etiam minimis adeundum incredibili humanitate prestares’.24 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 infinibus oportunis locis arces multas ac validas erexisti’.

148 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

years.25 And Petrarch can safely hail Francesco as gloriosus without jeo-pardising his claim about modestia because he reiterates the line of thoughtthat ‘true virtue does not reject deserved glory, and is accustomed to followit – even against its wishes – as a shadow follows the body’.26

Petrarch has already confronted his audience with a picture of a glori-ously virtuous person who rules both subditi and the res publica in thecivitas of Padua: a man who is neither obnoxius nor deditus but liber; a rulerof incredible humanitas, magnanimitas and modestia; almost preternatur-ally mature, endlessly vigilant, always industrious, and pre-eminentlycapable of securing libertas, pax and tranquillitas for his people. Thisapproach not merely entails a markedly Senecan description of the ruler,it replicates the structure of De clementia. From the outset, we are presentedwith a picture of the persona whom Petrarch is about to construct as theprincely ideal in his letter. Its recipient is reassuringly identified from theoutset with that person. Petrarch announces to the Paduan monarch thathis intention is:

to show what the ruler of a country should be, so that, by looking at this as thoughlooking at yourself in the mirror, whenever you see yourself as the sort of personwhom I am describing – as you will very often – you may experience joy andmay become even more devoted and obedient in days to come to the dispenser ofall virtues and goods, and so rise up with a huge effort through all the difficultbarriers to that level where you cannot rise any higher. If you should ever feel thatyou are lacking anything, rub your face, so to speak, wipe clean your brow . . . seeto it that you become more handsome, or at any rate at least more brilliant, thanyourself.27

Petrarch’s exploration of the Senecan imagery of the mirror is combinedwith a political and moral message no less indebted to the classical spec-ulum. The principal task which Francesco must undertake is to ensure thathe always reflects the picture of the divinely virtuous prince which Petrarchis about to extend to him. Since the monarch’s natural goodness and hiseducation have already ensured his correct formation, his glancing back at

25 Petrarca 1978: 766: ‘ut et cives te duce liberi fuerint ac securi . . . totque iam per annos florentempatriam serena tranquillitate et constanti pace tenueris’.

26 Petrarca 1978: 762–4: ‘etsi vera virtus dignam gloriam non recuset, eamque vel invitam ut corpusumbra sequi soleat’.

27 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 omniumlargitori devotior fias atque in dies obsequentior, et ingenti nisu per difficultatum obices assurgasusque 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 formosiorvel certe nitidior fieri cures’.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 149

Petrarch’s speculum is merely a corroborative exercise. And as for Seneca, sofor Petrarch, this task of moral self-examination promises the additionalbenefit of gaudium.

Introducing his precepts on the qualities of the ruler in this mannerobliges Petrarch to confront another problem encountered in the Senecanspeculum and in imperial rhetoric more generally: how to deflect theaccusation of adulatio which invariably attended upon panegyric. WhenSeneca had declared that the aim of his speculum was to make the prince ‘asfamiliar as possible with’ his own ‘good words and deeds so that what isnow a matter of natural impulse may become a matter of settled judge-ment’, 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 ratheroffend you with the truth than please you with flattery.’28 And so we findPetrarch following suit as he establishes his moral credentials as a purveyorof true representations in his practice of the ‘custom of praising princes’.29

Petrarch assures his correspondent that he will eschew such blandishmentsand ‘comply with the truth rather than with the favour of the personpraised’.30 Declaring that adulation is offensive, he describes his commit-ment to truth-telling in terms of the Stoic language of constancy.31 For awriter committed to the rationality of the Senecan speculum, the task ofgrounding one’s praise and blame in the truth is a question of establishingone’s self as a point of fixity, an unwavering reflector of the way thingsreally are insofar as one’s words, like one’s deeds, can be seen to be inalignment with the external world. The virtue of constancy becomes a keytool in the establishment of a rhetorical ethos. For Petrarch, the vice offlattery is exacerbated by the vice of ‘inconstancy’, which he finds ‘highlyoffensive’ and which he attributes not to those who ‘praise unworthy men’but to those who ‘later go on – with amazing flightiness of mind – to attackthose whom they have earlier praised’.32 Petrarch says that ‘there is nothingbaser, or less honorable’ than this type of behaviour, which he regards as a

28 Seneca 1928a, II.2.2: 432 (Seneca 1995: 159): ‘Diutius me morari hic patere, non ut blandum auribustuis (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 naturaet impetus est, fiat iudicium.’

29 Petrarca 1978: 760: ‘Nam et hic quoque mos est principes laudare . . .’30 Petrarca 1978: 760: ‘. . . quod et ipse nonnunquam feci, non tam laudati gratie quam veritati

obsequens’.31 Petrarca 1978: 760–2: ‘Qua in re hinc laudantis adulatio, hinc vel maxime inconstantia me offendit.’32 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.’

150 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

mental sickness and which, he proclaims, could never lead him to ‘censurewhat I had earlier praised’.33

For Petrarch the greatest culprit of such despicable inconstancy isCicero, who changed his mind about Caesar. So Petrarch declares that‘in this respect, I rate Cicero the worst’ and ‘in this one matter I almosthate him’ – judgements which apparently pain the humanist, given hishuge admiration and affection for the statesman, but which he is forcedto make because ‘the truth is greater and more precious’.34 Petrarchviews the contradictory evaluations of Caesar in the Ciceronian corpusas a sign of intolerable moral instability: if you ‘read his orationsaddressed either to Caesar or to the Senate in his presence’, you findthat ‘the praises of Caesar are so great that they seem undeserved by anymortal’, but if you ‘go on’ to De officiis and the Philippics, ‘you will findhatred’ and ‘invective’ in equal measure.35 Petrarch finds these variantopinions ‘all the more dishonourable’ in the case of writings likeDe officiis, because Cicero poured out ‘all the vituperation on himwhen he was dead’, having lavished Caesar with praise while he wasalive.36 Fortunately, Petrarch points out, Caesar ‘has his destiny tocomfort him’, that is, Augustus, an adoptive son, successor and ‘com-panion greater than anyone else’.37

After these carefully crafted opening comments, Francesco is instructedby 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 thefatherland’.38 Petrarch knows from Seneca’s mirror not only that ‘Augustuswas called father of the fatherland’ but that ‘Nero was called father of thefatherland’ too; and that while the former had shown himself to be a truefather, the latter had proved to be greatest enemy of both pietas and the

33 Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘quo nichil inhonestius, nichil est turpius’; ‘Id michi nequaquam eventurum reorut morbo animi laudata vituperem.’

34 Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘In quo quidem maxime Ciceronem noto usque adeo ut quem inter omnesscriptores gentium miror ac diligo, in hoc uno pene oderim . . . Invitus de delicto michi viro maximehec loquor, sed dilectior et maior est veritas.’

35 Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘Lege ipsius orationes quas vel ad ipsum Cesarem vel eo presente ad senatumhabuit: 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 neclaudibus inferiora convitia.’

36 Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘utque sit indignior hec tanta varietas, viventi laus et defuncto vituperatio omnisattribuitur’.

37 Petrarca 1978: 762: ‘Habet tamen, sortem suam quo soletur, Cesar unum ex omnibus magnumcomitem nepotem filiumque suum adoptivum Cesarum Augustum.’

38 Petrarca 1978: 776: ‘Ex quo utique magnum tibi et honestum gaudium nasci debet, qui te tuis itacarum sentias, quasi non civium dominus sed patrie pater sis.’

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 151

patria.39 He also picks up the Senecan corporal imagery, urging that ‘youmust love your citizens as though they were limbs of your body, or parts ofyour soul: for the republic is one body and you are its head’.40 And hefollows Seneca’s identification of the res publica as an entity which is likethe person of the princeps. For when he says that the monarch must notonly 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 youlove yourself ’.41

When Petrarch enumerates the duties of the ruler he outlines thedimensions of the Renaissance prince’s commitment to public works indistinctly Herculean terms, encouraging Francesco ‘to undertake withspecial care the project of draining the marshes’ around the city.42 Thiswill secure the ‘serenity’ and ‘salubriousness’ of the atmosphere.43 Themonarch’s care for the body politic must extend to the quality of the airwhich his subjects breathe. In the development of Petrarchan discourse onmonarchy, Olympian acts of self-overcoming begin to be regularly com-bined with displays of heroic, almost super-human ability to eliminate thebad elements of the natural order surrounding the monarchy and thecivitas. Both types of conquest are linked by Petrarch to magnanimity.When he urges these acts upon Francesco, he apostrophises him as virmagnanimus.44 Petrarch stresses the superlative connotations of Senecanmagnanimitas once again, pointing out that ‘it is usually magnanimityrather than humility which is praised in a prince’.45 However, he wants toclarify that to be magnanimous is also to be self-abasing. He shows howmodesty is an essential part of the effortless superiority associated withmagnanimity by reminding Francesco of Augustus – ‘the best and greatestof princes’ – who never insisted on divine honours and who even sought toevade the title of ‘dominus’ at all costs.46 In like fashion, Petrarch knows

39 Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘Pater patrie dictus est Augustus Cesar, pater patrie dictus est Nero. Ille veruspater, iste vero hostis et patrie et pietatis.’

40 Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘Amandi tibi sunt igitur cives tui ut filii, imo, ut sic dixerim, tanquam corporistui membra sive anime tue partes: unum enim corpus est res publica cuius tu caput es.’

41 Petrarca 1978: 778: ‘universamque rem publicam non quantum filium modo vel parentes, sedquantum temet ipsum amare debes’.

42 Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘Unum subinde nunc aliud ex his oritur, ut, viis publicis intra et circa urbemreformatis, paludum in circuitu siccandarum proxime.’ For the full discussion of beneficence, see784–94.

43 Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘studium sollicita pietate suscipias . . . Tibi tam pio in opere Deus aderit . . . quoet presentibus terre uber et locorum forma et celi serenitas salubritasque proveniat.’

44 Petrarca 1978: 792: ‘Aggredere tandem, vir magnanime.’45 Petrarca 1978: 818: ‘Scio quidem non humilitatem in principe, sed magnanimitatem solere laudari.’46 Petrarca 1978: 820: ‘Cesar Augustus, principum maximus atque optimus, non modo divinos honores

non optavit seque adorari noluit, sed ne dominum quidem dici voluit.’

152 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

that Francesco merely ‘bears patiently’ rather than revels in the ‘title ofdominus’; he knows that Francesco is prone to confessing that he wouldforeswear all the responsibility which he presently carries were he not sofearful that someone else might ‘invade the republic’ and that it wouldconsequently become ‘oppressed by an even heavier yoke’; and he knows,furthermore, that Francesco ‘would much rather be free than a lord’, sothat he could enjoy ‘an unimpeded and tranquil youth’, a footloose timewithout ‘so many cares’ for the republic.47 Having qualified Francesco as afree man, Petrarch faithfully brings his reader back to the doctrine ofprincely rule as a form of servitude.

Petrarch roams widely in his search for material with which to embellishhis case. Many of the points made in the Roman theory of the prince whichhe reiterates are illustrated by dicta and facta drawn from a set of Romanimperial texts which this Petrarchan document in particular helps to makecanonical within the ideology: the Lives of Suetonius, the panegyrics ofClaudian, and, most frequently of all, the imperial biographies of theHistoria Augusta. When he turns his attention to discussing the questionof the prince’s accountability, he upholds his view that the ‘republic’ hasbeen ‘committed’ to ‘the care’ of the monarch as its administrator, and notas its dominus, or owner.48 When he says that the monarch ‘should doeverything as someone who will be giving an account of everything’, headds that ‘at any rate, he has an account to give to God, if not to men’.49 Insetting out this precept, he can find a dictum of Hadrian in the HistoriaAugusta 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 canpoint to De officiis to support the idea that the capacity to be able to ‘renderan account’ for one’s behaviour, even when not formally obliged to do so, ispractically the definition of moral duty.50 But the specific point whichPetrarch wants to draw out is a Senecan one, applicable within a type of respublica which is recognisably absolutist: ‘what does it matter’, he says, ‘that

47 Petrarca 1978: 822: ‘Audivi amplius quam semel dum tu diceres et iureiurando interposito affirmaresnon te dominio delectari paratumque illud sponte dimittere, ni timeres ne rem publicam alterinvaderet 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 sinetot curis expeditam et tranquillam agere iuventam . . .’

48 Petrarca 1978: 794: ‘ei cui reipublice cura commissa est summo opere providendum . . . Nichil igitureffundat, nil omnino faciat, nisi quod ad decus aut commodum pertineat civitatis, cui presidet; autregni sic ad summam agat omnia ut administrator non ut dominus.’

49 Petrarca 1978: 794: ‘Ita, inquam, agat omnia, ut rationem de omnibus redditurus, utique enimrationem reddere habet, etsi non hominibus, at Deo.’

50 See Petrarca 1978: 794–6.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 153

someone is not to be held accountable to another person? For the soul isbeholden to itself and its conscience, which, when unassuaged, makes lifesad and anxious.’51 The monarch gives an account of his rule to his self andto his god alone. Petrarch can barely summon up sufficient emphasis toinsist that Francesco must rule alone and advance no one in his governmentso much that ‘someone other than you is master’.52 Such a situation,Petrarch warns, would excite the greatest contempt among those whomhe ruled.

Burckhardt’s view that ‘the purely modern fiction of the omnipotence ofthe state’ was ‘worked out in detail’ in this Petrarchan document may beworth re-examining.53 A formerly undisclosed theme now becomes dis-cernible in his opening chapter, where his assessment of this Petrarchanletter follows closely on from an analysis of Frederick II’s Constitutions ofMelfi. In both cases, Burckhardt was tracking, albeit inadvertently, thepresence of the self-reflecting Senecan princely person in a political litera-ture deeply informed by the ideology of the mirror. Correspondingly, theextent of Petrarch’s debt to Cicero which more recent historiography haspurported to find requires some redefinition. The idea that the text issomehow indebted to the Somnium Scipionis merely snatches at the pres-ence of one vox among many in Petrarch’s rhetorical discourse.54 ButSkinner’s point about the importance of De officiis requires attention.55

Petrarch’s whole argument runs counter to the anti-monarchism and anti-Caesarism of the Ciceronian text which he criticises so heavily at the start ofhis speech. The place where Petrarch’s Ciceronianism is thought to be mostevident is in his discussion of justice, where it is announced that ‘thefunction of justice is to give each his due, to harm no one withoutdue cause, and even in circumstances where good cause has been estab-lished, to incline towards pity, imitating the behaviour of the celestialjudge and eternal king’.56 The first two parts of the definition arecertainly central to Cicero’s conception of justice, but they are alsobasic elements of Roman law. They are coupled to the last part – about

51 Petrarca 1978: 796: ‘Quid autem refert alteri non teneri, cum sibi ipsi sueque conscientie animusteneatur, cui nisi satisfaciet, tristis et anxia vita sit?’

52 Petrarca 1978: 810: ‘Hac parte unum hoc monere satis atque hortari vix sufficio, ne quem talium siccommisse tibi patrie preficias, ut alius dominus sit quam tu.’

53 Burckhardt 1990: 23.54 For this claim, see Viroli 1992: 72.55 Skinner 1988: 415; Skinner 2002, II: 124–5.56 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 misericordiaminclinare, imitantem celestis iudicis eternique regis morem.’

154 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

the need to imitate the divine and royal morality of pity – becausePetrarch wants his monarchical ruler to know that ‘pity and justice areinseparably conjoined’.57 He then recurs to St Ambrose’s writing on theEmperor Theodosius in order to extract the Christian wisdom that ‘pityis justice, and justice pity’.58 What Petrarch is counselling here is thatFrancesco should follow the example of the Christian king of kings, sothat he ‘does not deny forgiveness’ to people who lapse ‘into error’ whenit is safe to do so without running the risk of setting a dangerousprecedent.59 The monarch needs to balance these acts of forgivenessagainst the need not to lapse himself into ‘too much pity’ or ‘too muchleniency’ in the exercise of justice, since these excesses can be tantamountto ‘great cruelty’.60 These comments do echo Ciceronian strictures aboutthe need to balance clementia against severitas, but those strictures hadbeen reiterated by Seneca in a monarchical context; and here they appearto be part of an attempt to transpose Seneca’s teaching about the properexercise of the royal, princely and imperial virtue of clementia onto theChristian quality of misericordia.

When the humanist turns to discuss how the monarchical ruler shouldmake himself ‘loveable’, he begins by saying that ‘the stability of theprincipate’ depends upon not wanting to be feared by everyone.61 Hethen immediately proceeds to associate the cultivation of fear in particularwith the great vice of crudelitas, citing as an example the barbaric attitude ofthe Emperor Maximinus which is reported in the Historia Augusta.62

Petrarch goes to the Saturnalia of Macrobius to retrieve the saying: ‘Hewho is feared by many must fear many.’63 But he asks his audience to ‘listento Cicero, or rather the truth speaking through Cicero’s mouth’ when hecites from De officiis the opinion that ‘nothing is more more conducive tosecuring power and retaining it than to be loved, nothing more alien than

57 Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘Quamvis ergo misericordia et iustitia prima fronte contrarie videantur, rectoiudicio inseparabiliter sunt coniuncte.’

58 Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘imo quidem ‘‘liquet iustitiam esse misericordiam et misericordiam esse iusti-tiam’’, quod preclare in libro De obitu Theodosii imperatoris sacer ait Ambrosius’. The reference isto Ambrose, De obitu Theodosius, 26.

59 Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘ut levitate lapsis atque errore, si sine exempli periculo fieri potest, misericordianon negetur’.

60 Petrarca 1978: 784: ‘Alioquin fieri potest ut nimia misericordia et indiscreta lenitas sit magnacrudelitas.’

61 Petrarca 1978: 772: ‘Sit ergo hic rector in primis amabilis nec bonis formidabilis . . . nichil est enimstultius, nichil a principatus stabilitate remotius quam velle ab omnibus formidari.’

62 Petrarca 1978: 772, citing Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Maximini, VIII.8.63 Petrarca 1978: 772: ‘ ‘‘Necesse esset multos timeat quem multi timent’’ ’, citing Macrobius,

Saturnalia, II.7.4.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 155

to be feared’ and that ‘fear is a bad guardian of longevity’.64 Petrarch thenpoints out that Cicero’s understanding of the importance of love is derivedfrom Ennius, whose warning that ‘whomsoever they fear they hate’ is citedin De officiis.65 Continuing to weave a complicated path through numerousplaces in Roman literature in which the question has been posed, Petrarchthen focuses upon the grim dictum: ‘Let them hate, provided that theyfear’ – which had been picked out twice by Seneca in De clementia and oncein De ira as the favoured verse of the tyrant, and which Suetonius hadattributed to Caligula in his biography.66 At this point, Petrarch launchesinto a defence of Caesar as someone who ‘did everything to be loved ratherthan feared’ through a notable degree of ‘gentleness and clemency’ and‘munificence and liberality’ in his actions.67 Yet to adopt this view is toreverse the entire thrust of Cicero’s argument in De officiis, where theassassination of the tyrant Caesar is used to exemplify how fear can neverhelp a person to retain authority for long. Petrarch is exploiting Ciceroniandoctrine in order to make a case for clement Caesarism, exactly as Senecahad done in De clementia. In Petrarch’s text, the irony is more apparent inview of his opening comments about Cicero’s inconstant varietas. Petrarchclearly identified in Pro Ligario and Pro Marcello the line of thought aboutclemency and conquest which the Senecan theory had gone on to develop.For when the humanist states that ‘to spare someone is a noble kind ofrevenge, and to forget is extremely noble’, he adds that ‘Cicero himselfwrites’ that Caesar ‘used to forget nothing except past injuries’.68

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

Between the 1360s and the end of the century, the writings of the genera-tion of humanists after Petrarch continued to elaborate this Senecanprincely ideology, using the language in both a distinctively ‘rexist’, orroyal, mode and in signorial contexts to entitle rulers in Naples, Padua,

64 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, necalienius quam timeri’’, nec multo post: ‘‘Malus enim’’ inquit, ‘‘custos diuturnitatis metus contraquebenivolentia fidelis vel ad perpetuitatem’’ ’, citing Cicero, De officiis, II.7.23.

65 Petrarca 1978: 774, citing Cicero’s use of Ennius at De officiis, II.7.23.66 Petrarca 1978: 774, citing the dictum found at De clementia, I.12.4; II.2.2; De ira, I.20.4; Suetonius,

Caligula, 30, 1.67 Petrarca 1978: 774: ‘omnia fecit quibus esset amabilis potius quam timendus, quadam hinc

mansuetudine atque clementia, hinc munificentia et liberalitate mirabili’.68 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’, recallingCicero, Pro Ligario, 12.34.

156 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

Ferrara and Milan as princes. The effect of deploying this language of theprinceps to talk about the monarchical rule of both regnum and civitas wasthe reinforcement of both of these entities as forms of principatus. At thesame time, the language continued to provide a description of a res publicaruled by a princeps, and a political body ruled by a virtuous head whoguaranteed its unity, its peace and its liberty. The ideology acquires agreater degree of ornateness and copiousness in part as the result ofincreasing rhetorical sophistication, in part as the consequence of anexpanding and increasingly varied set of Roman texts which were drawnupon in order to embellish the precepts of princely government laid out byhumanist educators, politicians and moralists. The person of the monarchalso acquires the degree of interiority which the Senecan princely theoryhad envisaged for him; and it develops a more composite Senecan char-acter, to some degree because humanists continued to transpose Senecanethics onto a Senecan monarchical ideology in order to write about theprince. Like Petrarch, humanists such as Coluccio Salutati, who was anotary, and Pier Paolo Vergerio, who was a trained canonist, had aconsiderable knowledge of Roman law. Their articulation of the princebrings out some of the legalistic characteristics of the Stoic political theorywhich had pervaded Roman legal thought, especially the idea that ratio is aform of lex and the associated notion that, as the embodiment of ratio, theprince is the embodiment of iustitia.

S A L U T A T I

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

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

70 Witt 1983: 64.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 157

‘raging, now enticing’, prevailing upon him persistently in ‘endeavours todestroy his control over the emotions’.71 There were few Stoics who sawFortuna 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, hewas also able to write an account of a providential universe in De fato etfortuna in 1396, in which – as Witt forcefully reminds us – his ‘view offortuna was that he became accustomed to conceiving it as an equivalent toGod’s Providence’.72 The declared argument of the text was that the orderof the universe ‘proceeds by fixed and immutable reason’ emanating fromthe person of God.73 Salutati similarly affixed fate and necessity to the axisof ratio, defining the former as ‘necessity flowing from God’s Providencedirecting and governing all things which exist and are produced in theuniverse’.74 This vision of things created for Salutati the problem of findinga place in his theory for a meaningful account of human freedom, and heresorted to an Augustinian theology in order to salvage a version of freewill.75 Even here, Witt observes, ‘so eager is Salutati to stress the predomi-nant role played by God in the human act, that it is difficult to see what isleft for the free will’.76

In De fato et fortuna, Salutati announces the principal source of hisunderstanding of Stoicism by declaring that ‘our Seneca’ is ‘without doubtthe princeps of all the Stoics who wrote in Latin’.77 Three years later, inDe nobilitate legum et medicine, he states that Seneca was an ‘incomparablepreceptor of morals’, one of the many glowing epithets which he applied tothe philosopher throughout his writings.78 Salutati was an assiduousSenecan scholar. Of the four major manuscripts containing opera of‘Seneca moralis’ which are known to have belonged to him, two of themare heavily annotated in his own hand.79 Both of these contained Declementia; they also included De beneficiis, De ira and the Epistulaemorales. 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 Witt 1983: 63. 72 Witt 1983: 323–4. 73 Witt 1983: 319.74 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 hisnext chapter ( 24–5).

75 Witt 1983: 329–30. 76 Witt 1983: 323.77 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’).78 Salutati 1947: 294: ‘incomparabilis morum preceptor Seneca’; for the other descriptions, see Ullman

1963: 251.79 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.

158 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

well as a complete copy of De beata vita. Salutati also possessed a copy ofthe Pauline correspondence: his belief in the friendship between St Pauland 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 completeTragedies which had been copied by Salutati himself at some point afterthe 1350s, along with Mussato’s Ecerinis. It has extensive marginalia andinterlinear variants.81 Salutati’s engagement with Seneca Tragicus emergedmost conspicuously in his De laboribus Herculis, in which he was deeplyconcerned with Seneca’s depiction of the Stoic hero in the Herculesfurens and Hercules Oeteus.82 Salutati maintained the traditional distinctionbetween their author and the philosopher, but his admiration for thetragedies remained high: he cited them ‘several hundred times through-out his work’.83 Salutati’s almost inordinate esteem for Senecan moralphilosophy, on the other hand, was based to a considerable degreeupon his extraordinarily attentive reading of the Epistulae morales, whichled to his involvement in the intense humanist critical discussionssurrounding the text and meaning of a passage of Seneca’s first letter toLucilius.84

In De fato et fortuna, Salutati explains why Seneca constituted such animportant moral guide. Rather than placing a limit upon man’s capacity toascend to the highest grounds of moral attainment – a limitation which hesees as inherent in assuming an Aristotelian ethical stance based on thedoctrine of the mean (‘peripatetic mediocrity’) – Seneca’s ‘divine letters’urge us to the ‘sublimity of a superheroic state’, and they aspire ‘to theheight of Christian perfection’.85 Salutati understood Seneca’s moral teach-ing to be extraordinarily close to Christian truth: to follow in the footstepsof the vir sapiens of Seneca was to walk an essentially Christian path inimitation of Christ. Salutati is known to have tempered his Stoicism duringthe course of his intellectual development, acknowledging that while therigidity of its doctrines approximated very nearly to Christian teaching, itsexhortations to moral perfection delineated such a steep incline to the

80 Witt 1983: 214. 81 Witt 1983: 55.82 For Salutati and Senecan tragedy, see Witt 1983: 212–19; Ullman 1963: 23–4.83 Ullman 1963: 250.84 For Salutati’s intervention in the dispute, see Witt 1983: 234.85 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 quevirtutibus ex humane participationis possibilitate modum ponit, sed ad superheroici status sub-limitatem extollit divinis illis Epistolis, quibus doctrina mirabili <est> et que multotiens adaltitudinem christiane perfectionis ascendat.’

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 159

‘superheroic state’ that arguably only Jesus Christ had possessed this degreeof virtue.86 Salutati’s answer was to begin to advocate Aristotelian ethics asa more serviceable guide for ordinary mortals, even if he continued toespouse Stoicism and the Senecan letters as the finest philosophical treat-ment of the nature of true virtue.

But Salutati’s writings about princely virtue show no sign of binding themonarch to a mediocre state. One text was addressed to the Angevinmonarch of the Regnum, Charles of Durazzo. A cousin of Giovanna I,Charles had successfully pursued his claim to the throne of the Regnumwith the support of the Roman pope Urban VI, who had excommunicatedand formally deposed Giovanna in 1379 for her support of the French anti-pope Clement VII.87 Conquering southern Italy with an army composedlargely of Hungarian mercenaries, Charles was crowned king of Sicily inRome in June 1381. At some point in mid-September 1381, news reachedFlorence of his military victory over Otto of Brunswick, the Germanhusband of Queen Giovanna I.88 The deposed queen had been arrested,imprisoned and, by the summer of the following year, smothered; but notbefore Salutati had set about composing an extended panegyric of the newking in which he urged the full set of Senecan virtues of moderation,magnanimity and self-restraint. Salutati spent considerable time workingon the oration, although in the event it was neither finished nor deliveredto the king.89 A version of it appears to have been copied in a manuscript ofone Dominus Honofrius, whom Witt identifies as one of the twoFlorentine ambassadors to the Neapolitan court of Charles in 1384.90

Witt’s inference is that Salutati’s text was ‘probably copied in the chanceryfor the ambassador and was designed as a basis for his speeches to theking’.91

Salutati’s opening words hail the conqueror as ‘gloriossime rex, duxinclite, princeps victoriose’.92 The new rex is next acclaimed as the ‘mostgentle of princes’: both the interchangeability of rex with princeps and theimmediate attribution of the virtue of mansuetudo to the military con-queror open the way to the steady application of the language of Senecanmonarchy throughout the oration.93 Charles is held up as a brilliant

86 Excellent clarification of these points is in Witt 1983: 359–60.87 Abulafia 1997: 166–71. 88 Witt 1983: 209.89 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: 209–11.90 Witt 1983: 210, n.3. 91 Witt 1983: 210, n.3.92 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 11. 93 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 12.

160 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

monarch, whose virtues help him ‘to glisten with a wonderful light ofsplendour above the regal peak’.94 This sublime position moves Salutati toadmire the ‘astonishing felicity’ which stems from ‘your fortuna’, althoughhe quietly announces that, having arrived at ‘the peak of your highness’ bymeans of ‘the happiest of courses’, the king should be aware of ‘how muchmoderation’ needs to be cultivated in view of the immense power which hisnew rule brings him.95 Charles is next praised for his ‘humaneness’, aquality which Salutati observes on display in the king’s willingness tohave shown himself ‘to be always agreeable and easy to inferiors’.96

When he comes to give advice to Charles, Salutati begins by drawing outan analogy which was fast becoming a convention of humanist princelydiscourse:

So you are king: before taking command over others, start commanding your-self. Rule over yourself; in your keenness to rule subjects, do not abandon thegoverning 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, bluntyour longings. And, when you sense that you are this person, then commandothers.97

The royal rule of reason is to be established within the sovereign kingdomof the person of the king. Subjecting himself to reason within, the kingemerges – as Petrarch had similarly contended – fully entitled to princelyrule over subjects in his exterior kingdom. Only when he has demonstratedhis superior virtue in this manner may the monarch authoritatively wieldpower over his kingdom:

Let it be more disgraceful for you to be surpassed in virtue by your subjects than bythe arms of others. It is both base and ridiculous for a morally inferior man topreside over his betters: you should excel your subjects not only in rank but invirtue. You should endeavour not only to be a king, but also to be judged worthy

94 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 12: ‘licet tuis virtutibus, quibus supra regale fastigium mira splendoris lucerefulges’.

95 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 13: ‘tue fortune mirabili felicitate permotum’; 13: ‘in tanto successuum tuorumfelicissimo cursu et in tanti potentatus regimine quanta sit moderatio culmini tue celsitudinisadhibenda’.

96 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 14: ‘spem etiam dedit humanitas tua, qui te minoribus semper placidum etfacilem prebuisti’.

97 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 32: ‘Rex igitur es: incipe prius tibi quam aliis imperare; rege te ipsum, noliregendorum subditorum studio tuimet derelinquere moderamen. Unus homo maximum regnumest; imperet et sceptrum teneat in te ratio; regulet voluntatem, contineat primos motus, comprimatiram, extinguat libidinem, obtundat cupiditates et, cum te talem senseris, tunc aliis imperato.’

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 161

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

Salutati then reveals how deeply indebted he is to the Roman theory ofmonarchy:

For a true king is a man whom reason places in authority, not a person producedby birth, or marked out by sheer power, or made by election. Yet the person whois pre-eminent in reason is one whom virtue so brings to perfection over all theothers that, by comparison with him, they always appear to be lackingsomething.99

Salutati thus makes virtue a state of perfected rationality, combines it witha definition of monarchy in which virtue – and therefore reason – is theonly criterion of the true prince, and immediately follows up this formu-lation by reverting to the same Senecan contention which sustained thePetrarchan discourse on monarchy: ‘there is no difference between a tyrantand a king, except that the latter is good, the former bad.’100 He furtherreiterates this definition in words closer to the Petrarchan rehearsal of theSenecan eschewal of the trappings of monarchy, saying that: ‘virtue alone –and not title, nor anointing, nor crown, nor consecration – produces theroyal name’.101

In urging the monarch to subject his person to the government ofreason, Salutati develops two key aspects of the Roman theory of theprince. 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 aname that derives from ruling, and not from reigning, and signifies a sense ofburden no less than of splendour. To rule is certainly a thing of great dignity; but italso 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 easyresponsibility. So it was not without good reason that Tiberius, who went on tocorrupt the laudable principle he enunciated through the cruelty and extravaganceof his rule, is said to have groaned in response to those friends of his who urgedhim to take up his dominion without delay: ‘you have no idea how much of a

98 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 32: ‘Sit tibi fedius tuorum superari virtutibus, quam aliorum armis. Turpequidem est atque ridiculum minus bonum melioribus presidere: non tantum dignitate tuis, sedvirtutibus antecellas. Conare quod non solum rex sis, sed dignus regali culmine iudiceris. Infirmumquidem regnum est, quod delatum creditur ad indignum.’

99 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, quodin eius comparationem aliquid non videatur aliis non deesse.’

100 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 33: ‘nichil inter tyrannum et regem interest, nisi quia hic bonus, ille malus est’.101 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 33: ‘sola virtus, non titulus, non unctio, non diadema, non consecratio regium

nomen gignit’.

162 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

monster imperium is!’, before he finally, as if under coercion and all the whiledeeply lamenting the wretched and burdensome servitude to which he was to beyoked, 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 ampli-fying the notion of servitude with a description of yokes, burdens andcoercion. Nero protests; Tiberius groans. But this servitude brings out theheroic character of the prince. Salutati’s comparison of Charles ofDurazzo’s triumph with that of the founder of the Angevin dynasty inthe Kingdom, Charles of Anjou, leads him to apostrophise the imago of thelatter, hailing his conquest over the Ghibelline Manfred in Herculeanterms: ‘you acquired for your successors such a great kingdom with yoursweat and your labours’.103 A little later, as the figure of apostrophe iscontinued and varied, Salutati points out to the ‘magnanimous prince’ thathe has a ‘distinguished heir to his labours’.104 When he turns to address thepresent king, however, he is somewhat reticent about applying this heroiclanguage. 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 magna-nimous breast of yours with strength for this deed’.105 In Salutati’s vision ofthe conquest, there is a person moving the monarch:

He directed you with his own hand . . . he raised you to the lofty peak of such agreat kingdom . . . He himself, omnipotent God, moves the entire foundations ofthe earth, he himself anointed you, he himself led you into the kingdom by hisown hand, and he himself has been your constant ally, so that you never becamethe prey of your enemies, he inclined the mind of the leaders of the kingdom andthe people themselves to favour you, he opened the gates of the city of Naples to

102 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 31–2: ‘volo quod primo cogites te regem esse, quod quidem nomen, a regendoveniens, non a regnando, non minus oneris significat quam splendoris. Regere quidem dignitatisest, est etiam et laboris, ut si hunc deseras, illam perdas. Non est ociosum nomen regis, non est facilemunus aliis imperare, ut non immerito Tiberius, qui laudabile principium sui imperii crudelitateluxuriaque corrupit, persuadentibus amicis quod inire non cunctaretur dominium, tradatur incre-pans respondisse: nescitis quanta bellua sit imperium; et tandem, quasi coactus, conquerensmiseram et onerosam sibi iniungi servitutem, rerum moderamina suscepisse.’ The citation isfrom Suetonius, Tiberius, 24.

103 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 21: ‘patiare, fortissime principum, qui tuis posteris tantum regnum tuo sudoretuisque laboribus paravisti’.

104 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 23: ‘Nec pudeat, magnanime princeps . . . te talem et tam claram habuissetuorum laborum heredem.’

105 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 tammagnanimi pectoris robur infudit.’

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 163

you, he rendered its populace friendly to you . . . he himself delivered the enemywith 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 thisscenario. The physical involvement of the king in his military conquest isrendered 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 thekingdom with his own hands. At the moment of military conquest, he isconstituted as the passive object of a movement exercised upon his personby 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, thelegitimate extent of the prince’s claim to glory seems to be his ability toboast that his magnanimity is a gift from God. The heroic labour has beenalmost entirely divine, and the prince has not had to shed a drop of sweat.Where, then, does Salutati identify a more promising arena for Herculeanlabour, for Stoic sweat and toil? In the moral conquests which the princemust make, in making reason rule his mind, in assuming the burden ofroyal servitude, in wrestling with the ‘monster’ of imperium and withthe ‘race of vipers’ in the anti-pope’s camp, and, above all, in extirpatinginvidia from his government.108 Invidia comes to life in Salutati’s text: itis the ‘plague of courtiers’ and a ‘lethal beast’, which works ‘like a deathlyvenom’ upon the minds of men.109 The great ‘labour’ or ‘task’ performedby ‘blessed kings and happy princes’ lies in their recognition of Invidia’sweapons, in seeing through her ‘fictions’, and in slaying the vices thatcreep into the mind and cause infection in the body politic.110

The other means by which Salutati seeks to submit his monarch to thedictates of ratio is by advocating to him, through the figure of imperso-nation, the practice of conscientious self-examination:

106 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 25: ‘sua manu direxit . . . ad tanti regni celsitudinem sublimavit. Ipse, ipsequidem omnipotens Deus movit omnia fundamenta terre; ipse te regem unxit; ipse te in regnumsua manu perduxit; ipse te, ne hostium tuorum predam fieres, continue sociavit; ipse procerumregni mentem in tuum favorem et ipsos populos inclinavit . . . ipse tibi Neapolitane civitatis portasaperuit; ipse tibi populum illum reddidit obsequentem . . . ipse hostem cum exercitu suo sinesudore et sanguine in manibus tuis dedit.’

107 See notes 105 and 106 above.108 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 27: ‘genus illud viperarum’.109 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 35: ‘quasi venenum pestiferum mentes inficiens . . . nulla curialium pestis

maior . . . pestis mortifera’.110 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 sagittisinnocuos conservare’.

164 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

Lodge in yourself a most diligent account (ratio) of all your thoughts and deeds: donot 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: theseare the good things I have neglected, these the wrongs I have done, in this I haveoffended the spirit of the divine majesty . . .111

Elsewhere Salutati brings out the legalistic aspects of this practice of self-reflection, describing how conscience is an infallible eye-witness of all ourdeeds and alleging that we cannot possibly evade its accusatory and judge-mental gaze into the innermost recesses of our soul.112 Conscience offers astructure of permanent surveillance within which to locate a prince whoseactivities are legally uncircumscribable.

S A L U T A T I , V E R G E R I O A N D T H E S I G N O R E A S P R I N C E P S

Salutati’s correspondence with signori also follows the logic of the Senecanargument that virtue is the only criterion of monarchical rule. Writing tothe ‘illustrious and distinguished prince’ Alberto d’Este in order to urgehim to exercise clemency towards a member of government personnelinvolved in a popular rebellion in Ferrara, he strategically begins his pleaby acclaiming the princely humanitas of the house of Este before going onto describe Alberto himself as ‘most humane of princes’.113 But humanistprincely discourse was taken up with perhaps the greatest energy within thesignorial contexts of Milan and Padua, where Petrarch had already led theway in praising the Carrara and the Visconti. One notable proponent ofSenecan philosophy was Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna, a civil servant atthe court of the Carrara whose writings illustrate his profound immersionin Seneca’s ethics and in the political theory of De clementia.114 An evenmore distinguished proponent in Padua was Pier Paolo Vergerio, who

111 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 27: ‘pone tecum omnium cogitationum tuarum atque factorum diligentissi-mam rationem; noli, si quid per te erratum est, post terga proicere. Pone te ante te; dic tibi etconscientie tue: hec bona neglexi, hec mala feci, in hoc divine maiestatis numen offendi.’

112 Salutati, 1947: 334–6: ‘Nos ipsi possumus nobis tam esse Cato quam Lelius. Conscientiam enimnostram effugere non valemus. Infallibilis testis est, non possumus illam decipere. Non possumusipsam, sicut illos coram quibus peccaverimus, evitare. Alii de nobis loquuntur ad alios. Illanobiscum de nobis loquitur. Illa nos accusat, nos convincit, nos iudicat.’

113 For the letter to Marchese Alberto d’Este, see Salutati 1891–1911, II: 176–80. It opens: ‘Illustris etinclite princeps, singularissime domine mi. Non dedignetur illa clarissima domus Estensis human-itas in tuis progenitoribus semper emicuit’; and continues (178): ‘tu, princeps humanissime, huncvirum honestissimum . . . non dignaberis in tuam gratiam et statum pristinum revocare?’

114 See Ravenna 1980; Ravenna 1989. For biography, bibliography and discussions of his work and itscontext, see Sabbadini 1924; Kohl 1975; Kohl’s comments in Ravenna 1980: 13–46; Kohl 1983; Witt1996; Witt 2000: 339–43. For Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna and Vergerio, see McManamon1996: 10, 37–9. For the Paduan political context in these years, see Kohl 1998.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 165

came to regard Conversini as a mentor but whose formation as aPetrarchan humanist had been partly assured through his associationwith Salutati during his youth.115 According to McManamon, Vergerio,as a student and professor at Bologna, was ‘galvanised by the idealism thatCicero and Seneca had embodied’.116 Like Petrarch and Salutati, Vergeriowas committed to an austere form of Stoicism. McManamon points to hisattempts ‘to conceive of his poverty as the nurturing companion of a truesage’, an attitude ‘in keeping with Stoic ideals’ and related to his admira-tion for the ascetic aspects of the experience of St Jerome.117 Vergerio issimilarly said to have ‘gravitated towards the Stoic doctrine of impassivity,inspired by his reading of the Roman philosopher, Seneca’, although hemay not yet have been in possession of the two manuscripts of Seneca’swritings which he is known to have acquired and glossed.118 Indeed, in‘repeatedly emphasising his recourse to authors such as Seneca’, Vergeriowas ‘engaged in a therapeutic quest to convince himself and others of hishappiness’, although, like Salutati, the humanist’s commitment to therigours of Stoic and Senecan ethics relaxed as he matured.119

Vergerio’s writings on monarchy are fully informed by the Romantheory of the prince. His oratory at the court of Francesco Novello daCarrara depicted a Padua restored to freedom after a period of Viscontidomination by a virtuous act of liberation that had ushered in peace.120 Theplea which he lodged with Francesco Novello in the early 1390s to showclemency to Bartolomeo Cermisone after his defection to the Visconti wasa classic appeal to the prince to exercise the great Roman imperial virtuewhich was reckoned to have ‘reconciled Roman society after the traumaticexperience of civil war’.121 Opening with the salutation ‘mildest of princes’,Vergerio takes Francesco to be ‘merciful and gentle’ both by nature and byreason of his moral formation.122 Nothing, he alleges, offers a morememorable demonstration of the benevolence of princes than Francesco’srecent display of ‘a superabundance of clemency’ in the wake of civil war;

115 For Vergerio’s Petrarchism, see McManamon 1996: 51–70. For Vergerio and Salutati, seeRobey 1973; McManamon 1996: 14–16, 36. For Vergerio’s contribution and its context, see Robey1980 and Robey 1983.

116 McManamon 1996: 18, 22.117 McManamon 1996: 20. For Vergerio’s lifelong admiration of Jerome, see McManamon 1999.118 McManamon 1996: 20. For the mss. of Seneca, see McManamon 1999: 260–1. For the autograph

glosses of his Senecan writings, see McManamon 1996: 158.119 McManamon 1996: 21. 120 McManamon 1996: 39–49. 121 See McManamon 1996: 47.122 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, clementemmansuetumque cognoscerem.’

166 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

no misdeed, it seems, is so ‘atrocious or savage that you could not overcomeit with your gentleness’ – so much so that Vergerio is led to refer toFrancesco’s ‘innate clemency’.123 Vergerio was aware that this ideologyyielded a specific version of the concept of liberty, as the surviving fragmentof his theoretical work De monarchia shows.124 Here Vergerio states thatmonarchy – or ‘the principatus of one man’ – is preferable to the rule of themany, and is modelled on the divine rule of God, the summus imperatorwho governs everything by his judgement alone as the supreme arbiter.125

The closest thing to God’s heavenly regime is ‘a good princeps and awell-ordered civitas’.126 The distinction between princeps and rex thendisappears, and the conflation of categories of rex, princeps and imperatorwithin this way of thinking about the prince emerges once again asVergerio continues: ‘if, therefore, a king is good, if he is just, if he isclement, and if the more power he has over the laws, the more he submitshimself to them, there is certain peace, there is true liberty.’127 The perfectlyvirtuous, self-subjecting figure of the just and clement king promises veralibertas.

The question of how to produce a virtuous monarch capable of bringingpeace and liberty to the civitas is partly addressed in Vergerio’s immenselyinfluential treatise De ingenuis moribus, where an education in the liberalarts or the ‘liberal disciplines’ is held to be essential to the political health ofa monarchy.128 These studies, Vergerio explains, are so called because ‘theyare worthy of a free man’.129 They are the means by which ‘virtue andwisdom are either practised or sought’.130 As such, they should be theconcern of everyone. But he stresses that a liberal education is especially

123 Vergerio 1934: 433: ‘sed nulla utique maiora, nulla magis memoranda se offerunt quam que tu exabundantissima clementia perfecisti . . . nullumque unquam tam atrox tamque truculentum nefascontra te conceptum est quod mansuetudine tua non vinceres . . . quapropter innatam tibiclementiam, que etiam ad perfidos et parricidas attigit, redde viro forti et fideli insontique prolieius’.

124 The extant text is at Vergerio 1934: 447–50. See the discussion in Robey 1973.125 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.’

126 Vergerio 1934: 447: ‘Quid enim esse potest similius Deo et illi perpetuo celorum consensui quamprinceps bonus et bene composita civitas?’

127 Vergerio 1934: 447: ‘Si sit itaque rex bonus, si iustus, si clemens, et, quo plus legibus potest, eo magislegibus subsit, ibi certa pax, ibi vera libertas est.’

128 Vergerio 2002: 4.129 Vergerio 2002: 28: ‘Liberalia igitur studia vocamus, quae sunt homine libero digna.’130 Vergerio 2002: 28: ‘ea sunt quibus virtus ac sapientia aut exercetur aut quaeritur’.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 167

crucial to those ‘of lofty rank’.131 Paraphrasing De clementia, he explainsthat these men are particularly obliged to ensure they have been educatedproperly, for they ‘cannot do or say anything in secret’.132 Rather, they haveto 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 consideredremarkable and renowned’ either ‘because it is rare amidst good fortune,and therefore most greatly admired, or because it gleams more brightlyfrom fortune’s splendor’.134 To be a ruler is to be highly conspicuous: ‘evildeeds cannot remain hidden, even secret ones’.135 Fortunately for Padua,Ubertino da Carrara – to whom Vergerio addresses his text – has been bornin ‘an ancient and royal city’ which ‘flourishes in the study of all the liberalarts’.136 He is the son of ‘a prince under whose leadership the happy state ofthe city . . . increases daily’.137 He is also committed to the type of syllabusthat 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? Whatperson 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, butto advise others of this age through you’.139 Vergerio goes on to discuss indetail the pedagogical utility of persons as mirrors: living images of virtueswhom the young can usefully reflect upon and aim to imitate.140 But hevery explicitly connects the study of the liberal arts with the conditionof being free. When discussing the syllabus, he declares that ‘to the trulynoble mind, and to those who are obliged to involve themselves inpublic affairs and human communities, knowledge of history and moral

131 Vergerio 2002: 4: ‘praecipue tamen qui excelsiore loco sunt’.132 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 simodica 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 commendarequam te ipsum?’

139 Vergerio 2002: 6–8: ‘Tuo igitur nomine breve hoc opus suscepi et de liberalibus adulescentiaestudiis 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.

168 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

philosophy are the more suitable subjects’.141 For ‘the rest of the arts arecalled ‘‘liberal’’ because they befit free men, but philosophy is liberalbecause its study makes men free.’142 Here Vergerio is rehearsing Seneca’swords.143 Certainly, eloquence is a crucial part of the curriculum, andhistory is vital in supplying us with examples, but moral philosophy givesus the necessary precepts to make us virtuous, wise and free. Vergerio’scommitment to libertas has been observed by McManamon, who pointsout how ‘Vergerio tended to emphasise the moral dimension of the freeperson’ and ‘reflected upon his own interior freedom and what inhibitedthat freedom. When human beings succumbed to physical urges, theysacrificed that freedom. To fill one’s stomach or acquire riches or satisfyone’s lust all comprised enslavement . . .’144

The outlines of a distinctive picture of how a Renaissance humanisteducation could be said to produce free men within free republics thusbegin to emerge. Republics could be held to enjoy true liberty insofar as theprince who ruled them was such a free person. The prince is free because heis wise, living in accordance with reason, carefully nurtured by the studialiberalia which ensure his correct moral formation as a free person: freefrom the effects of libido, irrational affects and mala Fortuna. As the head ofthe res publica, the free prince governs the body politic virtuously, thusguaranteeing its happy, peaceful and free state. He thereby constitutes anexample for those whom he rules – a mirror of virtue. But it is not just thata humanist pedagogical ideology played out to monarchical effect wheninstitutionalised within the political structures of a princely regime. Thepedagogical writing itself was inflected by the monarchical ideology whichhelped to legitimate and reproduce the political structures in which it wascomposed.

Vergerio could see that there was another story to be told about libertyand freedom within the republic, and it was one which he placed in themouth of Cicero in his celebrated defence of the Roman statesman againstthe criticisms of Petrarch. According to this Ciceronian perspective, ‘in afree city, the very name of cruelty is hated’, but equally, ‘so is that ofclemency invidious; nor are we easily accustomed to call a man clement,

141 Vergerio 2002: 49: ‘Nam liberalibus quidem ingeniis et his qui in publicis rebus et hominumcommunitate versari debent, convenientiora sunt historiae notitia et moralis philosophiae studium.’

142 Vergerio 2002: 49: ‘Ceterae quidem enim artium ‘‘liberales’’ dicuntur quia liberos homines deceant;philosophia vero idcirco est liberalis quod eius studium liberos homines efficit.’

143 Seneca 1917–25, 88.2, vol. II: 348: ‘Quare liberalia studia dicta sint, vides; quia homine libero dignasunt. Ceterum unum studium vere liberale est, quod liberum facit.’

144 McManamon 1996: 91.

Princely humanism in the Italian civitas 169

unless he can also be cruel with impunity’.145 The fact that Caesarianclemency was construed within the Ciceronian republican tradition astyrannical absolutism was exactly the problem which Seneca had tried tosee off in De clementia. The marshalling of Ciceronian arguments againstmonarchy was to reach its climax in the Florentine conflict with theMilanese at the turn of the century; but the contrast between liberty andmonarchy 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 Ciceroand the Roman civil wars was helping to clarify his thoughts on the meansby which Rome was reduced ‘from popular liberty to monarchical servi-tude’.147 Salutati was also able to draw upon De officiis to claim that Caesarwas the ‘parricide of the fatherland’; and a Ciceronian thesis correspond-ingly underpinned his assertion in 1394 that Caesar and Augustus markedthe ‘beginning of perpetual servitude’ for the Roman populus.148

145 Vergerio 1934: 441: ‘ut in libera civitate nomen ipsum crudelitatis odiosum est, ita et clementieinvidiosum, 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.

146 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 republicanliberty as opposed to a government of a lord no matter how beneficent his role’.

147 Salutati 1891–1911, II: 389: ‘vidi tuo munere bellorum civilium fundamenta et quid caput illud orbisterrarum de libertate populica in monarchie detruderit servitutem’. Indicated in Robey 1973: 23.

148 For Caesar as a parricide, see Salutati’s comments to Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna in Salutati1891–1911, II: 409: ‘et cum iure patricida patrie vocaretur’. For the reference to the ‘servitude ofmonarchy’, see Salutati’s letter to Pasquino cited in the note above, and also Witt 1969: 464–5; forthe ‘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 inRobey 1973: 23).

170 The Humanist Princeps in the Trecento

P A R T I V

The Humanist Princeps from theQuattrocento to the High Renaissance

C H A P T E R 5

Princeps, rex, imperator

The Senecan ideology was hardly the only means by which the Renaissancemonarch articulated his claims to embody the person and authority of theprinceps. In addition to an array of legal arguments, an impressive mobi-lisation of ideological resources drawn from a considerable range of Romanimperial texts and monuments can be observed in the formation of theprincely person and in the description of his principatus. And during theQuattrocento, elements of Platonic political theory were also steadily intro-duced into humanist discourse on the prince, grafted onto a pre-existingtradition of considerable longevity.1 But there was a limit to the extentto which Platonic ideals could transform either the content or the characterof a mode of political reflection within a culture so fervently committed tothe articulation of its thinking in Roman rhetorical style, and so indebtedalready for a great deal of its basic conceptual structure to a markedlyRoman literature on the ideals of monarchical rule. From Petrarch toErasmus, humanist mirrors generally spend little time introducing theprince to Plato’s theory of forms.2

Notwithstanding the multiplicity of classical texts and genres uponwhich humanists drew in princely discourse, one can discern a coherentand fairly continuous conceptual basis underpinning their account of thevirtuous prince. That structure is traceable to a remarkable extent to theone classical speculum with which almost every writer on monarchy washighly familiar: De clementia. Indeed, from the turn of the Quattrocentothrough to the High Renaissance, the centrality of the classical theory ofthe prince to monarchical ideology on the Italian peninsula was securedby a complex series of causes which can be very basically abbreviated.

1 Hankins 1990; Vegetti and Pissavino 2005.2 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 theTrattato politico-morale of the Florentine moralist Giovanni Cavalcanti during the 1440s).

173

Humanist princely discourse in both its royal and signorial mode hadalready acquired a fundamental set of conventions from the Senecanspeculum which held in place the person purported by the theory throughmyriad modifications during the Quattrocento. But if continuity wasguaranteed in part by the establishment of regularities at a discursivelevel, and in part by the increasingly sophisticated exploration of Senecanphilosophy, it was also assured by the ongoing political utility of theideology to which it had given rise. The theory constituted a vital ideo-logical resource across the period because it furnished a language withwhich to explain and legitimate military conquest and the establishmentand consolidation of princely rule as right, rational and enlightened. Thischapter is designed to illustrate some of the diversity, utility and complex-ity of the theory’s relation to the princely ideology by examining thatrelation in a signorial, royal and imperial setting.

T H E S E N E C A N P R I N C E P S I N V I S C O N T E A N M I L A N

One of the many insights into the history of Renaissance Senecanismwhich Letizia Panizza provided in her seminal article on GasparinoBarzizza, the leading exponent of Senecan moral philosophy during theearly Quattrocento, was her observation about the eclipsing effect ofEnlightenment silences in the historiography of her subject.3 In his ‘deter-mination to present Barzizza as the fitting successor to Petrarch, anotherCicero who brought the revival of eloquence to its peak’, the eighteenth-century editor of Barzizza’s letters had heralded the humanist’s achieve-ments primarily in terms of his work, from 1421 onwards, on the newlydiscovered orations of Cicero, while omitting to mention at all Barzizza’swork on Seneca’s letters in the form of commentaries for which he becamefamous in his day.4 Pronouncing it ‘astonishing’ that within this histor-iography such achievements ‘slip into the background’ and ‘disappearaltogether’, Panizza recovered an episode in the development of Senecanstudies by laying out a systematic account of the context, chronology andcontent of Barzizza’s exposition of Seneca’s moral philosophy.5 As a con-sequence, a distinctive intellectual trajectory became evident within themovement of humanist thought from the early Trecento to the earlyQuattrocento, which made Barzizza’s regard for Seneca’s Epistulae morales

3 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.

4 Panizza 1977: 301, commenting on Furietti’s preface in Barzizza 1723a. 5 Panizza 1977: 301.

174 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

as ‘the product of the greatest moral philosopher in antiquity’ appear farfrom idiosyncratic.6

Barzizza was a graduate of the University of Pavia, an important centreof Milanese humanism under the Visconti. He may have been the‘Gasparinus’ who worked as a notary at the Visconti curia during theyears 1384–92. It is also possible that he obtained a position at court duringthe 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 certainlyhelped to define his work. In 1407, Barzizza took up residence in Paduaas a university lecturer in rhetoric and moral philosophy, later returning toPavia upon his appointment to the chair of rhetoric in 1421 and remainingthere until his death.8 During his early years in Padua, he produced hiscommentaries on the Senecan correspondence while lecturing on thetexts.9 He conscientiously reworked his notes for a course of public lectureson the Epistulae morales in 1411, but his commentaries also circulatedinformally among friends and admirers.10 His commitment to Senecanphilosophy was defined by a range of conventional humanist beliefs andscholarly activities. His engagement in the dispute over the text and mean-ing of Letter 1 of the Epistulae morales links Barzizza to an establishedhumanist debate.11 His interest in Seneca’s tragedies could be traced backthrough Salutati, Boccaccio and Petrarch to Albertino Mussato in earlyTrecento Padua, as could his work on Seneca’s biography.12 The vitae ofSeneca written by Barzizza and by the Chancellor of Padua, SiccoPolenton, drew particularly upon Boccaccio in order to embroider theclaim that Seneca had been, as Mussato had put it, a ‘philosopher ofChristian dogma and a tacit supporter of Christians’.13 Polenton’s Senecaembodies his own ideal of the vir sapiens refracted through a Christianperspective: ascetic, poor, chaste, vegetarian.14 Barzizza went further: Seneca

6 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 thedeclamations of Seneca the Elder, see Mercer 1979: 113–14. For Barzizza’s Senecanism as thecontinuation of twelfth-century trends, see Panizza 1977: 304. For earlier scholarly commentarieson the Senecan and pseudo-Senecan correspondence, see Panizza 1977: 307–8; Marcucci 1999.

7 Martellotti 1965: 35; Mercer 1979: 25. 8 Panizza 1977: 298–9; Mercer 1979: 29.9 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: 15–24.10 Panizza 1977: 299–301; Mercer 1979: 43 (106–17 for Barzizza’s school). 11 Panizza 1983.12 For Barzizza’s glosses on Seneca’s tragedies, see Mercer 1979: 78.13 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 Panizza1977: 304–32.

14 Panizza 1977: 325.

Princeps, rex, imperator 175

was a friend of St Paul who had actually embraced Christianity at his deathin a secret form of baptism, securing his salvation after a life of dissembledfaith which made him comparable to Nicodemus.15 Barzizza’s successor inthe chair of rhetoric at Pavia, Lorenzo Valla, was to reject as spurious thePauline correspondence, thus beginning the process of chipping away atSeneca’s increasingly complicated Christian credentials. But Valla’s doubtsremained 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’scourt poet and a teacher of rhetoric at Pavia from 1429 to 1434. He wasprobably a former student of Barzizza; his opinion of the man was at anyrate extremely high.18 Panormita also subscribed to a Christian Seneca,asking rhetorically, in a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, ‘who doubts thatAnnaeus Seneca knew Christ and was a friend of the apostle Paul and hasa place in the catalogue of the saints?’19

Barzizza held that the most important part of philosophy ‘impels men tolive the good and blessed life with a certain type of reasoning’.20 Whileadmitting their importance, Barzizza alleged that the Platonic andAristotelian traditions were too bound to a contemplative form of philo-sophy.21 He criticised Aristotelianism for being especially liable to stiflinglyabstract enquiries. Barzizza singled out Seneca as an unparalleled source ofethical wisdom – ‘easily the princeps of all the Greeks and Latins’ – becausehis rhetorical writings effectively engendered changes in moral behaviour.22

The humanist had ‘no hesitation in placing this man before Plato andAristotle’ because ‘the latter are praised for their disputations, the formerfor his advice and his activities. Whereas they taught men how to under-stand and to talk, he placed every fruitful outcome of philosophy in

15 Panizza 1977: 319–25. 16 Panizza 1977: 336; Jardine 1994: 31–2.17 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, 160–8.18 Resta 1965: 400; Mercer 1979: 133, 136. For Gasparino as ‘a sort of Delphic oracle’ for Panormita, see

Sabbadini and Catalano-Tirrito 1910: 119–20.19 Beccadelli 1553, IV: 81: ‘Quis ambigit Anneum Senecam Christum novisse et Apostoli Pauli amicum

fuisse, et in catalogo sanctorum positum?’20 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 partemnostro studio aut nostra admiratione dignam quam illam quae homines ad bene beateque vivendumcum ratione quadam impellat.’

21 Barzizza 1977c: 351–2.22 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 principemfuisse in hac ipsa philosophia arbitror magis faciendo quam dicendo quantum prodesset hominibusphilosophia ostendit.’

176 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

action.’23 Seneca was a Latin Socrates; his rhetorical writings were essentialto ‘the welfare of the soul’, providing the basis of a ‘vivere oneste’ in a bodyof moral doctrine which demonstrated an exemplary concern to linkphilosophy to practice.24 For these reasons, Barzizza asserted, Seneca ‘isquite rightly called the greatest teacher of life by everyone in our time’.25

Barzizza engaged in one regular practice of self-formation in which herepeatedly enrolled the Senecan texts: he developed the habit of copyingphilosophical mottos onto his manuscripts. So, for example, the dictum‘vincit malos pertinax bonitas’ from Seneca’s De beneficiis is inscribed onthe fogli di guardia of six of his codices, thus constituting a stimulatinginjunction to constancy.26 But Barzizza regarded the Epistulae morales asthe finest source of instruction on how to achieve the ‘perfect state of lifeand that felicity which the Stoics attributed to virtue alone’.27 Barzizza’scommitment to Senecan ethics pervades his political writings. TheVisconti in Milan and the Carrara in Padua had been characterised fordecades by a Petrarchan ideology of virtue indebted to the Roman theory ofmonarchy. From approximately 1412 to 1435 both Gasparino and his son,Guiniforte, produced orations addressed to Filippo Maria Visconti whichwere deeply Senecan in their depiction of monarchy.28

In 1412, Filippo Maria Visconti had embarked upon a sustained projectof reconstituting the Milanese domains which had become severely dissi-pated during the previous decade.29 His first success was in regainingcontrol of Milan itself in June 1412, and one Barzizza speech, probablywritten later that year, begins with a celebration of the virtuous achieve-ments and the felicitas of his ‘most illustrious duke and outstanding

23 Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Nos vero . . . habemus Scenecam quem ego minime Socrate inferiorem nequevita neque morte iudico. Platoni vero et Aristoteli non dubitabo hunc hominem anteferre. Illorumenim disputationes, huius vero consilia et facta laudantur. Cum enim illi intelligere et loquidocuissent, iste omnium philosophiae fructum in actionem constituit.’

24 Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Ego vero de hoc homine ita iudico ut ei difficile sit honeste vivere qui huiusadhortationes 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.’

25 Barzizza 1977c: 352: ‘Non itaque immerito dictus est optimus magister vitae ab omnibus nostraeaetatis hominibus.’

26 Rosa 1997: 15. For the motto, see Seneca, De beneficiis, VII.31.1.27 Barzizza 1977a: 342: ‘causa finalis huius libri est perfectus vitae status et ea felicitas quam Stoici

posuerunt in sola virtute’.28 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 divineprince’, see Beccadelli 1553, I: 1b–7a; III: 48a. For mss. containing De clementia in the Pavian libraryunder the Visconti and Sforza, see Mazzoli 1982: 212. For the humanist milieu under the Visconti, seeGarin 1955; Rabil Jr 1991. For the court of Filippo Maria Visconti, see Cognasso 1966: 345–57.

29 Cognasso 1966: 357–424.

Princeps, rex, imperator 177

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

30 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; tamenres visa est, et aetate mea, et studiis maxima digna, ea ad te scribere, quae vel ad fidem meam, vel adperpetuam gloriam tuam pertineant.’ For its date, see note at Cognasso 1966: 37.

31 Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Cum enim morte Serenissime Ducis patris tui omnia fere cum eo sepultavideremus, neque iam ullum speraremus exitum tot nostris calamitatibus posse inveniri . . . Nonenim propositi mei est commemorare, a quibus hominibus gravissimas iniurias perpessus fueris, autquibus auctoribus de toto tuo Principatu, ac fratis iam pene actum esset . . . qui omni scelere, acimpietate universum statum tuum labefactare, ac funditus evertere, et lacerare conati sunt.’

32 Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Tantam enim spem, Dux optime, non solum his, qui tibi serviunt, sed pene totiItaliae hoc tempore attulisti.’

33 Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘in cunabulis tuis’.34 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.’35 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 ignoscendoclementia?’

36 Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Certe quisquis ad te accedit, non iam se mortalem hominem intueri, sed quasi exipso Coelo ad nos missum putat.’

37 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.’

38 Barzizza 1723a: 36: ‘Ducale nomen’.

178 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

Visconti rule, but he points out to Filippo Maria that it was ‘inconceivable,after having raised yourself up from so many dangers and labours, youshould be content with that dignity which the most famous Duke himselffirst brought to your house’.39 The ideology which Barzizza’s text extendshad long offered a far more potent language with which to assert theprincely character of signorial rule.

Capable of conquering Fortuna, Filippo Maria is then assured byBarzizza that ‘fortune rules the greatest of your affairs by divine counseland through the great power of the stars, and you will ascend higher thanmany men – especially your own – expect’.40 If ‘it is the virtue of princesnot merely to attain the glory of his ancestors but to outstrip it’, FilippoMaria’s precocious attainment of the princely heights has nevertheless beenachieved divinitus – by means of divine providence.41 Barzizza then digsdeeper into the Senecan text. Having already reached ‘such great happi-ness’, the ‘most clement Duke’, he says, need only self-reflect.42 Barzizza‘can find no one among the ancients whom you should rather follow thanyou yourself ’.43 The Visconti prince is his own best example. Barzizza thuscounsels him to ‘learn from yourself’ before acting.44 Above all, FilippoMaria is urged to look after himself for the same reasons that Seneca hadgiven: ‘your health is our health, certainly, and if you look after yourself,you attend to the common dignity and welfare of your people and thegoods of everyone’.45 This care would bring Filippo Maria the advantagewhich Seneca had pointed out and which Barzizza reiterates: ‘there willbe many people who, if need be, would willingly and readily place theirphysical strength and their bodies in every kind of danger on yourbehalf ’.46

39 Barzizza 1723a: 38: ‘Non enim credibile est, te ex tot periculis, ac laboribus emersisse, ut ea dignitatecontentus sis, quam Dux ille clarissimus primus in domum tuam attulit.’

40 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.’

41 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.’

42 Barzizza 1723a: 38–9: ‘Merito ergo huic tuae tantae felicitati maxime gratulor, Dux clementissime, ette plurimum adhortor, ut sicut facis omnia saepe tecum mediteris, quae te summum Principemefficiant.’

43 Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘non invenio, quem antiquorum potius sequaris, quam te ipsum’.44 Barzizza 1723a: 39: ‘Tu a te ipso disces, quid agendum sit.’45 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.’46 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, acdiligunt. Nec dubito multos esse, qui, si opus erit, ipsa latera sua, ac corpora omnibus periculislibenter, et impigre pro te opponent.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 179

Barzizza’s son, Guiniforte, similarly expounded Senecan doctrine toFilippo Maria nineteen years later, extolling clementia as ‘that greatest ofall the virtues which are called royal’, and announcing that he is compelledto think of Filippo Maria’s clemency as if it were ‘a limb of his soul, a partof his essence’, so deeply did it inform his person.47 This was a truly heroicaccomplishment, since, as Barzizza underlines, ‘there is nothing moredifficult for a man than self-conquest’.48 Guiniforte proceeds to exemplifythe precepts of the theory by reference to Visconti’s government. Hehighlights Filippo Maria’s merciful treatment of even the ‘most terribleenemies’ who had dedicated themselves to ‘subverting your state’ but whohad been conquered in war and now reduced utterly ‘into your power’.49

His self-restraint in sparing the lives of opponents and those of theirfamilies was remarkable, restoring them to their possessions and theirlibertas.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 Barzizzabarely rephrases the idea of the prince as arbiter, reminding Visconti that ‘thepower of life and death over us has been placed in your hand by GodAlmighty’, congratulating him for never misusing his liberrimum arbitriumout of anger.52 Guiniforte then points to the ‘force and splendour of clemencywhich extends far and wide’.53 But clemency is also fertile, bearing great fruitfor the prince.54 The imagery of De clementia is well exploited.55 Turning to

47 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 ampliusveluti habitus quidam accedat animo, sed quasi membrum animae, et essentiae tuae pars meritoiudicari possit.’ The date of the text is given at 15. For Guiniforte, see the bibliography in Albanese1999: 47, n.53.

48 Barzizza 1723b: 10: ‘Quod si, et argumento, et exemplo tenemus, nihil homini difficilius esse, quamseipsum vincere.’

49 Barzizza 1723b: 10–11: ‘Saepe enim, cum atrocissimos hostes in tui potestatem eventus belli rede-gisset, et quidem eos, qui susceptorum ex domo tua beneficiorum, non tam, immemores, quamingrati suam omnem operam in tuo Statu subvertendo quandoque adhibuissent.’

50 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’.

51 Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘Quo uno facto ipsam quoque victoriam natura insolentem, ac superbamplacabilitate vicisse, et lenitudine tua domuisse videris.’

52 Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘Iracundiam autem consilii, et modestiae inimicam ita comprimis: ut, cum asummo Deo vitae, ac necis nostrae potestas in manu tua posita sit, numquam tamen liberrimo hoctuo arbitrio ad supplicia contumacibus infligenda, ira commotus abutaris.’

53 Barzizza 1723b: 11: ‘longe enim, ac late clementiae vis, ac splendor patet’.54 Barzizza 1723b: 12: ‘Audeo, Princeps humanissime, affirmare uberrimum te ex hac ipsa clementia,

quam ita studiose in omni sui parte excoluisti, fructum reportasse.’55 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 clementiaI.19.8. For the healthy body politic as thriving vegetation which never wilts while its head is fit, see Declementia II.2.1.

180 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

another metaphor favoured in the theory, Barzizza reminds Filippo Mariathat clemency is florid and his a ‘most flourishing kingdom’.56 Finally, thehumanist 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 toRenaissance princely regimes seeking to assert their rulers’ claims to pre-eminence. Seneca had provided clear guidance on how the prince shouldtreat monarchs whom he had conquered. The Roman prince’s claim to bethe sole princeps mundi could be amply validated, according to Seneca, byhis clement behaviour towards captured rulers. Clemency meant nothaving either a superior or an equal. For one can easily ‘take the life ofeven a superior; one cannot grant it to anyone except an inferior’.58 And ‘noone has ever saved anyone without being superior to the person saved’.59

Military conquest might put a prince physically in possession of anothermonarch, but such potestas did not in itself indicate any form of meaningfulsuperiority on the terms of the Senecan theory. Superiority comes to theruler from using ‘in a noble spirit the great gift which the gods have givenhim’.60 The loftiest demonstration of such magnanimity involves sparing‘those whom he knows to have been on the same royal pinnacle as he’, sincethe mere fact of having gained control over them suffices as punishment forformer monarchs.61 Seneca had summarised the dilemma of the fallenmonarch memorably: ‘to owe one’s life is to have lost it’.62 In this positionof 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 Barzizza 1723b: 14: ‘in tuo florentissimo Regno’. For things flourishing under the clement prince ofthe 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 quoopulenta civitas copia bonorum omnium abundat?’).

57 Barzizza 1723b: 13–14: ‘In te, Princeps potentissime, omnia et vitae nostrae ornamenta, et salutisadminicula posita sunt: tu nos paternae virtutis imitatores succurrendo . . . tu, Pater piissime.’

58 Seneca 1928a, I.5.6: 372 (Seneca 1995: 135): ‘vita enim etiam superiori eripitur, numquam nisi inferioridatur’.

59 Seneca 1928a, I.21.1: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘servavit quidem nemo nisi maior eo, quem servabat’.60 Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 152): ‘Uti itaque animose debet tanto munere deorum dandi

auferendique vitam potens.’61 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.’62 Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘perdidit enim vitam, qui debet’.63 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 confertincolumis, quam si ex oculis ablatus esset. Adsiduum enim spectaculum alienae virtutis est; intriumpho cito transisset.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 181

kingdom can safely be left in his charge’, it is wise to restore the ruler to theheights ‘from which he fell’, since a monarch left in situ through an act ofclemency will redound to the triumphant prince’s credit.64 Acting thusmeans ‘to triumph over one’s own victory’, ensuring that ‘the praise will behugely increased’.65

A chance for the Milanese regime to deploy this distinctive set of claimswas presented by the political events of 1435, when King Alfonso of Aragonwas captured by a Genoese fleet near the island of Ponza during the longwar of conquest waged in pursuit of his claim to the Neapolitan throne.66

The Genoese delivered their captive to their overlord, Filippo MariaVisconti, who became Alfonso’s jailer. This encounter famously trans-formed the political complexion of Quattrocento Italy. Alfonso was unex-pectedly set free by Filippo Maria, who immediately became his mostpowerful – and at that stage his only – political ally. The Milanese did notoverlook the opportunity to exploit the ideological advantages of Visconti’sactions. In the Duomo of Milan on the festival of Corpus Christi in 1446,Francesco Filelfo, one of Barzizza’s former pupils, produced a panegyricof the Milanese prince’s virtues which culminated in a description ofAlfonso’s imprisonment.67 Alfonso is at the mercy of Filippo Maria,transformed ‘from a king into merely a private individual, from a masterinto a captive, from a free man into a slave’.68 All his territories areeffectively ‘in the power and control of Filippo Maria alone’.69 ButVisconti liberates Alfonso, and Filelfo can exclaim, ‘the admirable magna-nimity of our prince! The kindness of this the most munificent man of alltime!’70 To the Visconti prince, ‘nothing was more abhorrent than cruelty,nothing more ingrained in him than clemency, nothing more habitual thanhumaneness and beneficence’.71

64 Seneca 1928a, I.21.3: 416–18 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘Si vero regnum quoque suum tuto relinqui apud eumpotuit reponique eo, unde deciderat, ingenti incremento surgit laus eius, qui contentus fuit ex regevicto nihil praeter gloriam sumere. Hoc est etiam ex victoria sua triumphare testarique nihil se, quoddignum esset victore, apud victos invenisse.’

65 Seneca 1928a, I.21.3: 416–18 (Seneca 1995: 153).66 For the battle and its consequences, see Cognasso 1966: 439–49; Ryder 1990: 200–9.67 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 1986.68 Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘privatum e rege, e domino captivum, e libero servum’.69 Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘in unius Philippi Mariae Angli potestatem ac ditionem’.70 Filelfo 1898: 19: ‘O mirabilem principis nostri magnitudinem animi! O in omne saeculorum

omnium munificentissimi viri benignitatem!’71 Filelfo 1898: 21: ‘Primum omnium ostendit Philippus nihil a suis moribus abhorrere magis crude-

litate, nihil esse clementia sibi antiquius, nihil humanitate et beneficentia usitatius.’

182 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

From Aragonese Naples, the view of the king’s capture was somewhatdifferent, but no less artfully brought into focus by the same concepts of theRoman theory of monarchy. Looking back at the events some twenty yearslater, Panormita, now in Aragonese employment, made his king’s capturethe setting for a mighty display of magnanimity in the face of injury andadversity. Alfonso simply rises above his misfortune:

They say that when they led him to Filippo, the captured king so invariablyretained the authority and majesty of a free man that he appeared to his victors notas someone vanquished, but rather as a vanquisher. For he gave instructions dailyto the sailors who brought him . . . and they carried them out with reverence andcompliance. Moreover, it is not for nothing that some said that whatever fortunebefell him, Alfonso seemed and was deservedly thought a king.72

Both prisoner and captor are thus able to demonstrate their princelycharacter on the terms of the Senecan theory. Within both accounts, thefact of Alfonso’s physical captivity is immaterial. Visconti’s superiority isestablished over the king when he magnanimously sets him free, not whenhe captures him in war; while in the Alfonsine account, the king is said tohave never really lost his libertas in the first place. Alfonso can be held to bea vir liber notwithstanding his chains. He constantly maintains his libertyin the face of ill-fortune. Prison becomes an ideal setting for a princelydisplay of virtue, a place where monarchical qualities can really shinethrough.

T H E S E N E C A N P R I N C E P S I N A R A G O N E S E N A P L E S

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

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

73 Ryder 1990: 248.

Princeps, rex, imperator 183

and theological virtues, each personification bearing identifying symbols inits hands.74 The figure of a Roman Caesar followed them in an ornatecarriage, a globe of the world at his feet. According to one tradition, hehailed Alfonso as ‘Eccelso re o Cesare novello’ in a clunking pun, urging theking to cultivate justice and to spurn Fortuna, and beseeching almightyGod to keep the king in prosperity and ‘Florence in liberty’.75 In theelegant account of Alfonso’s triumphus later provided by Panormita,Caesar warned Alfonso about the deceptions of domina Fortuna at thehead of the procession, seen stroking her golden hair: ‘on no accountshould you trust in her: she is unstable and fickle. And behold the change-able world. Everything is uncertain except virtue.’76 As the retinue pro-gressed, an altogether more princely set of moral qualities – Magnanimity,Constancy, Liberality and Clemency – were mobilised by the Catalancontingent, and each apostrophised the king from its float.77 The mostextravagant claim was reserved for the figure of Clementia, who virtuallysteps out of the Senecan speculum and goes to greet her own image in theperson of the Aragonese king:

Then Clemency, her face more exhilarated than all the others, gazed at herreflection in the king as if in a mirror. ‘O King, these other sisters of mine renderyou outstanding among mortals, certainly’ she said. ‘But I make you the equal notof 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 Alfonsineideology: divine clemency and princely self-conquest.79 A letter of 1443

from Panormita to Alfonso exemplifies the political language that was toinform the humanist narrative of Alfonso’s victory:

74 Ryder 1990: 250.75 Croce 1889: 563: ‘Eccelso Re, o Cesare novello . . .

Alfonso Re di paceIddio te esalti e dia prosperitate,Salvando al mio Firenze libertate.’

76 Beccadelli 1589: 108–9: ‘Sequebatur hos rerum domina fortuna super tabulato pictis tapetibusinstrato . . . ‘‘Sed fortunae quae tibi paulo ante crinem aureum porrigere videbatur, nequaquamconfidas, fluxa et instabilis est. Ecce et mundus volubilis, et praeter virtutem omnia incerta.’’’

77 Panormita’s account of the procession of virtues is found at Beccadelli 1589: 108–10.78 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 prestantissimumreddunt. Ego vero te non hominibus sed diis immortalibus facio aequalem. Ille quidem vincere egote victis parcere eosdem tibi conciliari monstravi.’

79 Important interpretations of the political character and function of Neapolitan humanism under theAlfonsine regime are: Gothein 1915; Altamura 1941; Resta’s preface in Beccadelli 1968: 5–58; Tateo1971; Santoro 1974; Bentley 1987; Santoro 1990; Ferrau 2001.

184 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

Everyone deservedly rejoices because you are victorious, but I rejoice both becauseyou are victorious and because you practise clemency and moderation in victory.Your virtus has rightly obtained victory for you, but this much you have incommon with many others. For there have always been, and there are today,those who have conquered, triumphed, ruled: they are innumerable and includeamong them those who are unjust and wholly unworthy; but those who havevanquished and have also spared the vanquished, never acting intemperately,avariciously, cruelly – there are extremely few examples of such men either inour own time or throughout the whole of history . . . Your Cato used to say thatthe worst ruler was one who did not know how to rule over himself, andconsequently, as I recall, that it seemed absurd that a man who could not conquerhimself should be the conqueror of many others. That great Macedonian is praisedfor being undefeated in feats of arms, but he is censured because he was van-quished 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 winsvictory for you: for whatever happens in war redounds to Fortune’s praise, but if inconquering you conduct yourself with benevolence, pity, chastity, mildness, andfirmness, you will defraud Fortune of her praise . . . you will serve for the whole ofposterity as an example of clemency and humaneness.80

The extent to which Panormita here deploys the language of Cicero’spanegyric of Julius Caesar in Pro Marcello to hail the clemency of hisown prince shows how Renaissance princely ideology recognised thetheoretical relation between Cicero’s treatment of clemency in hisCaesarian speeches and the Senecan development of the theme.81 Butthere was a polemical edge to this recruitment of Cicero to the Aragonesecause.

The Alfonsine ideology took up and reinvigorated the TrecentoPetrarchan arguments about the Neapolitan rex, forwarding them fromthe humanist heart of royal government. Alfonso emerges fully equippedwith the requisite Senecan princely virtues long held to ensure the propergovernment of a body politic plagued by division. Yet the Alfonsine version

80 Beccadelli 1746: 313–14: ‘Quod vincis, merito omnes gaudent; ego vero, et quod vincis gaudeo, etquod victoria clementer, et moderate uteris, recte quidem virtus tibi victoriam peperit: verum hocipsum commune cum multis: nam et qui fuerunt, et qui sunt, vicerunt, triumphaverunt, imperar-unt: hique innumerabiles, et interdum etiam iniusti, ac penitus indigni, qui vero, et vicerint, et victispepercerint, nihil intemperanter, nihil avare, nihil crudeliter agentes, hi nostro, atque omni temporeperpauci, 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, quise unum ipse non vinceret. Macedo ille magnus armis invictus laudatur, ira victus vituperatur.Annibalis gloriae multum crudelitas detrahit. Equidem malo tibi victoria laudem inveniat, quamfortuna victoriam, quicquid in bello accidit, fortunae laus est: verum si vincendo, benigne, miser-icorditer, caste, mansuete, constanter te gesseris, fortunam sua laude fraudabis . . . erisque posterisomnibus clementiae, et humanitatis exemplum.’

81 See especially Cicero, Pro Marcello, 4–13.

Princeps, rex, imperator 185

was much more than a restatement of Petrarchan royal humanism. In thefirst place, the language had passed through an important stage of develop-ment in the Milanese nexus. The production of the Alfonsine ideology wasenriched by a flow of ideas, materials, manuscripts and personnel fromLombardy. The earliest humanists to be recruited to the Aragonese causehad passed formative years in Viscontean Milan. The first to arrive atAlfonso’s side in 1432 was Guiniforte Barzizza.82 In a letter to the king inJune 1440, Guiniforte informs Alfonso that he is finally in a position tosend a copy of his father’s commentaries on the letters of Seneca which theking has ‘so greatly demanded’.83 Guiniforte was shortly followed toNaples by Valla and Panormita.84

The definition of the king’s image was further determined by a set ofpolitical and ideological considerations which the language of Alfonso’scritics illuminates. If the Crown’s military domination was largely achievedby 1443, opposition to Aragonese rule materialised in sporadic moments ofrebellion and fully re-emerged upon the death of Alfonso in 1458 in theform of seven years of civil war, which recurred again during the 1480s,under his successor Ferrante.85 One of the ideological causes of thesebaronial wars – a little hard to locate in modern accounts – was royalabsolutism. Alfonso’s rule was regularly designated as solutus a legibus andthe category of potestas absoluta was invoked time and again in the chanceryregisters of his reign.86 To construe Alfonso’s politics of clemency asconciliatory is to remain locked into the ideological construction of thatpolitics. Sporadic rebellion and then civil war indicate a rather differentperception of what was occurring. In 1446, Borso d’Este warned Alfonsothat in his kingdom ‘he is not loved at all; on the contrary, he is hatedinstead’, mainly because his patronage of ‘Catalans’ had alienated segmentsof the nobility who felt their ancient rights had been infringed.87

82 Ryder 1976b: 221; Albanese 1999: 47.83 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 ofBarzizza’s commentary on Seneca’s letters (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 8555), see Albanese1999: 14, 25–37. For the history of the transfer to Naples of the mss. belonging to his father,Gasparino, see Rosa 1997.

84 For Panormita’s move, see Ryder 1976a: 124–5; for Valla’s, Bentley 1987: 108–10.85 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 economicconflicts between the Crown and its subjects, see del Treppo 1987.

86 Ryder 1976b: 31–2. For analysis of the judicial material relating to the administration of justice underAlfonso, see also Ryder 1976b: 136–68.

87 Proposta 1879: 714: ‘non e amata per niente: anci, e plu tosto odiata’.

186 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

This anti-Catalan sentiment formed part of a wider polemic against theAragonese regime. The most stinging attack issued from Florence. Alfonso’sabortive Tuscan campaign in 1447–8, ostensibly in pursuit of a claim to theMilanese territories after Filippo Maria Visconti’s death, provoked a fierceresponse from the Republic.88 Florentine commercial interests in theMediterranean had long conflicted with those of Aragon–Catalonia; afterthe conquest of the Regnum, their economic concerns were further threat-ened. When Alfonso laid siege to the Tuscan port of Piombino in June 1448,all the rhetorical reserves of classical republicanism were marshalled in orderto denounce the military intervention. At the core of this invective was theidentification of Alfonso as a beast, a plague, a marauding Hannibal. In thewords of Cosimo de’ Medici, Alfonso was ‘la peste catalana’.89 Addressingthe Sienese in 1448 as the representative of a Florentine embassy sent to drumup resistance to Alfonso’s encroachments in Tuscany, Giannozzo Manettiurged resistance to the ‘king who so ardently pants with desire to pervert allthe 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 moreeasily – 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 Butif no action were taken, Alfonso ‘would overthrow and ravage everything elsethat you Sienese have left with a steady campaign of plundering, devastationand wrecking’.93 Manetti’s assault reached its climax in his appropriation of

88 For the circumstances surrounding the Milanese claim and the campaign of 1447–8, see Ryder 1990:272–81.

89 Pontieri 1975: 285; Ryder 1990: 278.90 Manetti 1968: 155: ‘Cum Florentini amici ac finitimi vestri, quorum legati et oratores sumus,

prestantissimi huius incliti consistorii presides vosque alii clarissimi cives, Alfonsum celeberrimumAragonum regem magnis et infestis exercitibus ex Tiburtinis regionibus, ubi anteacta hiemehibernaverat, in mediam pene Etruriam adventasse cognovissent, confestim ad celerem quandamvirium suarum preparationem atque ad variam et copiosam peregrinorum militum conductionemse se ceteris posthabitis converterunt, ut commemorato regi singulas quasque Italorum populorumlibertates pervertere et occupare cupienti atque anhelanti viriliter et animose (admodum ut cupie-bant) repugnare ac resistere valerent.’ The similar ‘Oratio ad Venetos’, penned during the crisis, is inManetti 1968: 165–75. These orations are discussed in Bentley 1987: 123–4, who describes Manetti’sotherwise close relations with the Alfonsine government at 122–7. For Manetti’s biography andpolitical career, see Manetti 2003: vii–xix, and the bibliography at 319–22.

91 Manetti 1968: 155: ‘ne Alfonsus opido capto oportunissima et accomodatissima futurorum tammaritimorum quam terrestrium bellorum sede potiretur, unde universam Italiam (nedum Etruriamsolam) facilius postea diripere ac vexare posset’.

92 Manetti 1968: 157–8: ‘Balnea namque – ut pauca e multis leviter attingamus – suapte natura liberaet cunctis tendentibus pervia et expedita variis suorum militum direptionibus ita impedivit, utegrotantes in egrotantibus suis persistere quam in sevas et inhumanas Catalanorum et Hispanorumhostium manus venire maluerint.’

93 Manetti 1968: 158: ‘reliqua omnia vestra partim direptionibus partim populationibus partim vast-ationibus perverterit ac vastaverit’.

Princeps, rex, imperator 187

Cicero’s damning indictment of Caesar in order to condemn the Aragonesemonarch:

For so great and so violent is his ambition, so great and unbridled his desire togovern and dominate, and so great and so immense his lust and passion to rule andreign, that he lets it be known that he is allowed to do and say anything, no matterhow base or wrong, in pursuit of the extension of his empire. Thus he does notthink that for a king to lie and be deceitful for the sake of his throne is senseless andalien 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 andactions: he shows no fear in recalling and alleging that every human and divine lawwas overthrown daily by Gaius Caesar on behalf of the object of his desire – theprincipate. And he shows no shame in openly adducing and distorting anotherthing about the same Caesar – forgetting that it was said in quite another way byhim – namely that Caesar was accustomed to render into Latin that execrableprecept of a certain Greek poet in the following words: ‘If justice must be violatedfor sovereignty’s sake, it must be violated: you may indulge your scruples else-where.’ Alfonso does not hesitate to proffer this opinion of Caesar very frequentlywithout any qualification and broadcast and interpret it in such a way that it giveslicence to Christians (not to mention infidels) to violate any laws whatever for thesake of reigning supreme.94

There was nothing new about this use of De officiis as the source of the anti-princely arguments of Florentine republicanism, still glimmering in itsforeign policy notwithstanding the increasingly obnoxious effects of theMedicean ascendancy at home. The thesis that monarchy was a form ofslavery had resurfaced in the debate between Poggio Bracciolini andGuarino da Verona in the famous controversy over the relative merits ofScipio and Caesar.95 According to Poggio, the very name of Caesar wasdishonourable, so closely was it associated with his crimes, so stained was

94 Manetti 1968: 163–4: ‘tanta est enim et tam vehemens eius ambitio, tanto quoque et tam effrenatapresidendi ac dominandi cupiditas, tanta denique et tam immensa regnandi et imperandi aviditas etardor, ut omnia sibi quamvis turpia et nefaria pro amplificatione imperii dicere ac facere licere pre seferat. Quocirca regem mentiri et fallere regnandi gratia non modo non absurdum et a regiis moribusalienum, sed et regium et regale esse putat; quod quidem verbis et operibus sepenumero ita plane etaperte declaravit, ut a C. Cesare propter eum quem sibi ipse in mente sua finxerat principatumomnia iura divina et humana perversa fuisse quotidie allegare et commemorare non extimescat; etillud alterum eiusdem Cesaris non oblitus, aliter tamen quam ab eo diceretur, in medium adducereac depravare non erubescit: ille enim hanc execrandam cuiusdam Greci poete auctoritatem inLatinum sermonem talibus verbis convertere solebat: ‘‘Si violandum est ius, regni gratia violandumest. Aliis in rebus pietatem colas.’’ Alfonsus vero hanc Cesaris sententiam sine aliqua conditioneplerumque proferre et promulgare et ita interpretari non dubitat, ut Christianis (nedum infidelibushominibus) quecunque iura regnandi gratia violare liceat.’ This passage grafts together De officiisI.8.26 and De officiis III.21.82.

95 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.

188 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

his reputation by the blood of civil war.96 His mores were characterised byrapacity, cupidity and ambition.97 Those who defended Caesar by appeal-ing to his liberalitas were being disingenous: for how could it be calledliberality to extort and seize property in order to redistribute it to one’ssupporters? This was robbery, not liberality.98 And his apparent clemencywas, in truth, a sham.99 Cicero’s praise of the clemency of Caesar in ProMarcello was forced upon him by circumstances rather than by any com-mitment to veritas.100 There was nothing, Poggio concluded, ‘in the life ofCaesar which could deservedly be regarded as praiseworthy, except for hismilitary achievements’.101 He had murdered eloquence, undermined thefoundations of the Republic and reduced the Roman people ‘to utterlywretched servitude’.102

The Neapolitan ideology was finely attuned to such attacking voices.The two humanist documents whose eloquence did most to secureAlfonso’s fama as an outstandingly virtuous princeps issued from theheart of the royal court after the Peace of Lodi in 1454. Both presentedthe Alfonsine conquest as the triumph of princely virtue; both involvedthe authorship of Panormita; and both depicted the Aragonese princein strikingly complementary imagery. The first of these was Alfonso’s

96 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 364: ‘Caesaris nomen flagitia plurima dehonestant, rapinae, furta, intestinaedissensiones, civilis sanguis, libido immoderata dominandi, stupra, adulteria, studium lacerandaepatriae, atque animus ad omne facinus promptus.’

97 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Mores eius multifariae interpretantur. Quidam enim commendant,alii secus tradunt. Nam prona ad principatum natura vitam multis flagitiis inquinavit. Ambitioet damnandi [¼ dominandi?] cupido nil ex legibus, nil ex utilitate publica agere permisit.Facinorosos, audaces, raptores, egestate perditos, turpi iudicio damnatos in suam familiaritatemrecipiens sublevabat, alebatque veluti suarum cupiditatum ministros. Libidine fuisse immoderataSuetonius tradit, stupra eius et adulteria referens permulta. Rapacem etiam constat fuisse et alienisappetentem . . .’

98 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Liberalitatem quidam laudando efferunt. Sed quae est liberalitas, alteriper vim eripere, extorquere, furari ut aliis largiaris? Rapina haec, non liberalitas est appellanda.’

99 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?’

100 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Laudat noster Cicero Caesarem restituto Marco Marcello, multisqueverbis commendat suam clementiam in civibus conservandis. Laudat item cum Q. Ligarium,regemque Deiotarum defendit, at vero eas laudes non protulit veritas, sed temporum necessitasextorsit.’

101 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 360: ‘Nihil ergo reperiamus in Caesaris vita quod digne laudari mereatur,praeter res bello gestas.’

102 Bracciolini 1964–9, I: 363: ‘Caesar sua aetate florente republica nilque adversi formidante, largitio-nibus, ambitu, seditiosorum suffragio, factione Principum assecutus est Consulatum, in quo iecitfundamenta reipub. vertandae’; 365: ‘Scipio oblatam repulit Dictaturam, Caesar extorsit. Alterlibertatem sui populi conservavit, alter redegit in miserrimam servitutem . . . Adde quod nomenCaesaris docti omnes viri execrari et odio habere deberent, non enim magis patriae quam latinaelinguae et bonarum artium extitit parricida. Una enim cum libertate corruit latina eloquentia etstudia literarum, quae in ipso flore prius fere quam inciperent extincta sunt.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 189

triumphal arch, under construction from 1455, which formed the gatewayto the royal residence in the Castel Nuovo.103 Here the narrative of theconquest is constructed from the ground upwards. The account ofAlfonso’s victory is framed by scenes of Hercules’ labours which ascendfrom the lower arch up the facade, introducing the viewer to a depictionof the events of the triumphal procession of 1443 in an attic frieze.104 Onthe middle architrave, the inscription reads: ALFONSUS REGUMPRINCEPS HANC CONDIDIT ARCEM; below the frieze, the wordsof the arch proclaim: ALFONSUS REX HISPANUS SICULUSITALICUS, and, underneath: PIUS CLEMENS INVICTUS.105 Somekey terms of the royal ideology were thus set in stone.106

In 1455, Panormita published De dictis et factis Alfonsi regis, a literarydepiction of Alfonso and a text whose rhetorical ingenuity guaranteed itsuch diffusion, admiration and translation that it has succeeded in definingthe content of Alfonsine biography for centuries.107 Panormita’s outstandingstudent, Gianvito Resta, has argued that the text was the most celebrated andwidely diffused ‘libello propagandistico’ of its era.108 Panormita’s collectionof exempla virtutis opens with Alfonso’s counsellors advising him not tosuccumb to the entreaties of a desperate Queen Giovanna in the early 1420sto intervene in her disordered kingdom. The war would be hard, the womanwas ‘of changing and inconstant mind’.109 The king, in his infinite wisdom,overrides them by reverting to an heroic example: ‘Hercules’, he recalls, ‘usedto bring help to people in great difficulties even when not called upon. Arewe 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 acknowl-edge, 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 virtuousconquest is brought to a close with an equally triumphant demonstration of

103 For recent scholarship on the arch, see Driscoll 1964; Hersey 1973; Pane 1975; Bologna 1994.104 For the Herculean imagery, see Hersey 1973:. 30, 37, 39, 40, 55, 94, n.26.105 Hersey 1973: 3.106 For Panormita’s authorship of at least some of the epigraphy, see Filangieri di Candida 1937: 267;

Hersey 1973: 16.107 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 thebiography of Alfonso, see the use of the source in Ryder 1990: 306–57.

108 Beccadelli 1968: 35. For manuscript copies, see de Marinis 1947–53, I: 26–7, n.21; II: 25–6.109 Beccadelli 1589, I.1: 21: ‘mulierem ingenio mobili et inconstanti’.110 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 opemferre dubitamus? Grave quippe bellum susceptum esse fateor, verum eo praeclarius futurum. Sinelabore et periculo nemo adhuc gloriam consecutus est.’

190 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

the king’s Stoic qualities. In the last exemplum of Book 4, royal constancy isreiterated through a familiar allegory. Here we learn of Alfonso’s targetpractice:

Alfonso sometimes used to throw four arrows of a balista from forty paces, andthen throwing them again he would slot them into the same holes, and then hewould 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 hiscapacities as a vir sapiens.

Both the arch and the handbook carve out an impeccably Spanishclassical identity for their Senecan monarch. Such a manoeuvre had alreadybeen performed from the Trajanic era onwards in the texts and imagesproduced under a succession of Spanish Roman emperors. The lausHispaniae had become a convention of Roman imperial rhetoric.112 Theretrieval of these elements from Roman imperial ideology is a characteristicof the Aragonese ideology. Alfonso becomes situated within a genealogyelaborated upon a basic scheme lifted from Claudian:113

Each of the provinces across the sea was accustomed to supply Rome and Italy withits own produce. Sicily, the most famous of its islands, supplied wheat and sugar;Sardinia leather and cheese; Corsica wine; Ibiza salt; and other provinces othergoods. Only Spain used to give Rome and Italy emperors and kings. And whatkind of emperors and kings? Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius, Arcadius, Honorius,Theodosius II. Finally Alfonso, the living image of all the virtues, who stands forthas equal to those mentioned above in every form of commendation . . .114

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

111 Beccadelli 1589, IV.46: 103: ‘Iaciebat interdum Alphonsus manu balistae sagittas quatuor, passibusquadraginta, refixas in suum quamque foramen iterum iaciens singillatim in postremam partemferiendo distinguebat.’

112 See, for instance, Pacatus 1994: 451–2; Claudian 1956, I: 243–5.113 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.

114 Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, IV: 92: ‘Consueverunt transmarinae provinciae sua quaeque RomaeItaliaeque sufficere. Sicilia insularum celeberrima, frumentum, zaccarumque: Sardinia, coria accaseum: vinum Corsica, Ebusus salem: atque aliae, alia. Sola Hispania Romae atque ItaliaeImperatores ac reges dare solitus est. At quales imperatores aut quales reges? Traianum,Adrianum, Theodosium, Arcadium, Honorium, Theodosium alterum. Postremo Alphonsumvirtutum omnium vivam imaginem, qui cum superioribus iis nullo laudationis genere inferiorextet.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 191

Spanish emperor by Giovanni Aurispa, who shared his find at the Council ofBasle.115 It was instantly seized upon, its language worked into humanistrhetoric addressed to the Aragonese king.116 The Alfonsine arch includedsculptural citations of Trajan’s triumphal arch at Benevento, the location ofthe king’s first parliament.117 Trajanic artefacts transmitted another impor-tant element to the Aragonese ideology: they repeatedly marked outHercules as a divine moral archetype of princely rule who was intimatelyassociated with Spain.118 Hercules Invictus was also Hercules Gaditanus,Hercules of Cadiz. Since the thirteenth century, the Hispanic character ofHercules had helped chroniclers elaborate a classical ethnology for theSpanish monarchy.119 Spanish humanism further developed these character-istics 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 favouritephilosopher. In 1450, Manetti had dedicated his Vita Socratis et Senecae toAlfonso, furnished with a new preface:

Most Serene and Glorious Prince: The illustrious life of the Spanish philosopherSeneca which I wrote in Latin some time ago I should have already sent to yourmajesty had I not thought its sending unworthy of your exceptional and out-standing 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 For Aurispa’s discovery of the Panegyrici Latini and their immediate diffusion, see Suster 1888;Sabbadini 1995; Reeve 1996: 26.

116 Biondo 1927: 150.117 Driscoll 1964: 87–96; Rotili 1972: 8–12. For the parliament of 1442 at Benevento, see Ryder 1990:

242, 248.118 Mattingly 1966–76, vol. III: lxvii–lxviii: ‘With A.D. 100 comes in a new type – Hercules with lion-

skin and club standing on a low base . . . Hercules, the great servant of the human race, the man whoby his ‘‘virtus’’ wins immortality – an inevitable type then, of the Roman Emperor – was adopted aspattern by Trajan in a new and special way. The Hercules whom Rome knew best was the Herculeswho came to Italy, driving the oxen of Geryon from the island by Gades – and it was therefore easyfor Trajan, a native of South Spain, where Hercules Gaditanus enjoyed the highest honours, thus tolink the Roman cult to that of his native land’. For the identification of Hercules with Trajan byPliny in his Panegyric, see Pliny 1969, II, 14.5: 356.

119 Tate 1954: 3, 18. 120 Seneca 1935, I.13. 2–3: 40–2 (Seneca 1995: 208–9).121 See, for instance, the comments in Valla 1984: 259: ‘Senecam, Lucanumque quos tu summo, ut

debes, in honore habes, et conterraneus concivisque.’122 Manetti 2003: 164–5: ‘Illustrem Senece Hispaniensis philosophi vitam, serenissime ac gloriosissime

princeps, quondam a me latinis litteris perscriptam, maiestati tue iam pridem mississem, nisitransmissionem indignam tua eximia prestantique excellentia fore existimassem.’ For Manetti’spossession of two mss. containing De clementia, see Mazzoli 1982: 212.

192 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

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

Royal requests to Guiniforte Barzizza for his father’s exegesis of theEpistulae morales are matched by repetitious references in Neapolitantexts to the king’s immersion in the Cordoban’s works.124 The mostassiduous portrayal of Alfonso as a student of the Spanish philosopher isfound in De dictis et factis. Alfonso discourses on the nature of the soul aftera session of reading Seneca, ‘whom the king especially revered and learntthoroughly’.125 Another such session of ‘reading the letters of Seneca’ isinterrupted by Franco Sacchetti, who joins the debate as the king holdsforth 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 hisSpanish contemporaries because they translated the letters of Seneca fromLatin into their mother tongue, so that knowledge of that divine bookshould not escape the unlettered’.127

Above all, De dictis et factis rendered ‘la peste catalana’ as articulate in theclassical idiom of his humanist officials as the ideology demanded. Alfonsoemerges as a masterful orator, an inventor of winning arguments, armedwith a prodigious memory, citing not merely Seneca but here Tibullus,there Virgil, a little later Augustine.128 In short, Alfonso has all the qualitiesnecessary for ‘kings and princes managing the res publica at home and inwar’.129

123 Manetti 2003: 164: ‘Sed cum ex litteris Franci, prestantissimi oratoris nostri . . . te solum ad optimaPhilosophie Moralis studia animum convertisse nuper intellexerim; atque propterea predictamSenece vitam (quem Latinorum philosophorum principem, pace cunctorum dixerim, fuisse con-stat) ab eo ipso verbis tuis postulari et exigi plane aperteque cognoverim.’ The reference is to FrancoSacchetti, on a diplomatic mission to Naples in 1450.

124 For the ‘culto di Seneca’ at Alfonso’s court, see Albanese 1999: 14, 44–6.125 Beccadelli 1589, I.31: 31: ‘Super lectionem Annaei Senecae, quem praecipue rex coluit, atque

perdidicit, quaesitum est ab Alphonso Davalo purpuratorum humanissimo, Cur animus mortaliumita immensus atque insatiabilis foret?’

126 Beccadelli 1589, I.49: 37: ‘Legebamus fortassis Annaei Senecae epistolas, atque aderat FranciscusSachetus Florentinorum legatus, vir eloquentissimus, ac Ludoicus Cardona celebratissimi nominisTheologus, multique praeterea docti et clari viri. Quaerebatur super praecepto Hecatonis, tantoperea Seneca laudato: SI VIS AMARI, AMA’ (citing Seneca, Epistulae morales, 9.6).

127 Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, III: 68: ‘Hispanos conterraneos suos amasse et respexisse, quod epistolasSenecae ex latino in patrium sermonem verterunt, quo divini illius libri cognitio, etiam litterarumrudes non lateret.’ For Alonso de Cartegena’s hugely popular translation of the works of Seneca, seeLawrance 1986: 72.

128 See, respectively, Beccadelli 1589, I.51: 39; II.41: 61–2; I.17: 27.129 Beccadelli 1589, Proemium, I: 20: ‘Reges vero ac terrarum principes, rempublicam domi militiaeque

gerentes . . .’

Princeps, rex, imperator 193

Alfonso is especially conversant with his Senecan obligations, using hisknowledge of De clementia to refute his critics. In a passage markedclementer, Panormita states that:

Cum argueretur aliquando rex quod mitis esset ac lenis nimis, ut qui nonnum-quam etiam iis, qui vel graviter in ipsum deliquissent, ignosceret: se quidemparatum velle esse dicebat, Deo immortali, si ad calculum vocetur, oves quas intutelam ab eo suscepisset, annumerare, et si illas repetat, restituere incolumnesomnes posse.130

But the royal words reformulate the language which Seneca places inNero’s mouth in De clementia:

‘Hodie dis inmortalibus, si a me rationem repetant, adnumerare genus humanumparatus sum.’ Potes hoc, Caesar, audacter praedicare omnia, quae in fidem tute-lamque tuam venerunt, tuta haberi, nihil per te neque vi neque clam adimi reipublicae.131

The Senecan description of the princeps as merciful vicegerent has provedremarkably enduring since the Liber Augustalis. Now the impersonation isstudied, the words uttered by a conscientious Spanish king, but the basiccontinuity is nevertheless striking. Alfonso also responded to criticism thathe was ‘too lenient and mild’ by restating a Senecan argument with anironic twist, suggesting that ‘they should wait for the time when bears andlions 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 aking’ in order to interject that ‘there was nothing in life that he valued lessthan what the man seemed to place such store by’.134 By contrast, Alfonso –now re-invented as a good Petrarchan humanist – ‘frequently used to speakof his desire that he should seem a king more because of his morals and hisauthority than because of the diadem or the purple’.135 Alfonso also knows

130 Beccadelli 1589, II.47: 63. 131 Seneca 1928a, I.1.4: 358.132 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, beluarumferitatem.’ The passage from De clementia is Seneca 1928a, I.26.3: 426: ‘Quae alia vita esset, si leonesursique regnarent, si serpentibus in nos ac noxiosissimo cuique animali daretur potestas?’

133 Beccadelli 1589, II.49: 63: ‘hominis sane clementiam esse, beluarum feritatem’.134 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 invita minoris ipse duceret, quam quod ille tanti facere videretur.’

135 Beccadelli 1589, I.24: 29: ‘Illudque saepenumero usurpare consuetum, cupere se moribus et autor-itate potius regem videri, quam diademate aut purpura.’

194 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

that his virtue furnishes him with an inexpugnabile munimentum – the loveof his citizens:136

We sometimes saw Alfonso proceed alone, away from the pomp of his accom-panying 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 armedguards. But he was seen to shudder at this advice and to say that in fact he was notin the least alone when he went about, as they believed, but was accompanied byhis innocence, and that, relying on the innocence of his citizens, there was nothingof 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 sayemphatically) in that the life of princes sets an example to the populace, who areactually more inclined to vice than to virtue. Therefore, princes must abstain fromsinning not only for their own sake, but also, and far more importantly, so thattheir vices are not imparted to their citizens. The populace is turned towards theconduct 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 moreprolific than its Roman imperial ancestor. No fewer than forty-two differ-ent adverbs are used to describe the king’s virtuous activity in the rubricaccompanying Panormita’s exempla. His sexual conduct, his eating anddrinking habits, the expressivity of his face, and his way of dressing andwalking all become objects of an evaluative vocabulary that maps outand measures his activities in terms of princely continence and abstinence.The prince is acutely conscious of the effects of alcohol. Alfonso regularlycomments on the immoderate drinking of his subjects; he rarely imbibeswine and always in diluted form; he knows all about the alcoholism of

136 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 instruerein altum editas arces . . . salvum regem clementia in aperto praestabit. Unum est inexpugnabilemunimentum amor civium.’

137 Beccadelli 1589, II.43: 62: ‘Alphonsum nonnumquam solum absque comitantium pompa inceden-tem vidimus. Cum ob hoc a plerisque argueretur, suadereturque ut more aliorum principum, et ipsearmatorum manu stipatus graderetur: Exhoruisse consilium visus est, atque dixisse, se quidemminime solum, ut isti crederent, sed innocentia civium fretus, quippiam extimescat.’

138 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 proclivior-ibus. Quapropter principibus non modo sua causa a peccato abstinendum esse, sed multo etiammagis ne sua vitia infundantur in cives suos. Nam veluti ad solis motum, ita populares semper inprincipum mores verti atque formari.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 195

Alexander the Great.139 The look of an insane drunk is flushed, like theraging complexion of a cruel tyrant. Alfonso pointedly refuses to rouge upfor his victory procession into the capital.140 The Stoic princeps cannot beseen to triumph with a red face.

T H E S E N E C A N P R I N C E P S I N H A P S B U R G E U R O P E

A year after publishing his first edition of the complete works of Seneca in1515, Erasmus turned to address the future Hapsburg emperor Charles V inhis Institutio Christiani Principis and laid out, almost one by one, theprecepts of De clementia to the young prince who had appointed him asa member of his privy council earlier in 1516.141 Few knew the Senecan textbetter than Erasmus, who established a very strong claim to be regarded asthe most outstanding of all of the philosopher’s editors with the publica-tion 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 Senecanscholarship during the early-modern period.143

In Erasmus’ treatise, the Senecan ideology of the prince was applied to amonarchical figure who was soon be both rex and imperator within terri-tories even more vast and disparate than those of Frederick II, and thehighly extensible claims of that ideology were more than sufficiently gearedto the task of developing the promise of a peaceful Spanish hegemony inEurope. Erasmus’ prince had become king of Aragon in 1516; he simulta-neously assumed rule over Castile; and he was to be elected Holy RomanEmperor three years later.144 Humanist princely discourse had alreadyproduced a vision of Roman imperial rule well suited to the ideologicalrequirements of an Hispanic ruler. Spanish involvement on the Italianpeninsula was facilitated by a humanist princely ideology implicated forcenturies in the constitution of princes and subjects from Messina toMilan; but when Charles V became ruler of the southern Kingdom, he

139 See Beccadelli 1589, I.41: 35, II.7: 47, II.27: 56; I.41: 35.140 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.’

141 For the first edition of Seneca, see Trillitzsch 1965; Trillitzsch 1971, I: 221–50; Jardine 1994: 30–1. ForErasmus’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 inexisting analyses of the Institutio; but note Jardine’s description (Erasmus 1997: 62, n.104) of Senecaand Plutarch as ‘lynch-pins of Erasmus’ political and moral theory’.

142 For the second edition, see Jardine 1994: 30–3. 143 For Erasmus and Lipsius, see Papy 2002.144 Erasmus 1997: xvi.

196 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

had ready to hand a conceptual and symbolic framework within whichto articulate a distinctively Spanish version of regal, princely and imperial rule.

The articulation of Senecan precepts to princely audiences had bynow become a highly familiar and self-consciously imitative activity. So,for example, when Erasmus exclaims in his own Institutio that ‘I wouldnot want you to think to yourself at this point: ‘‘but that is serving notruling’’. . .’, he is engaged in a very conventional requirement of the genre –reminding the princeps of the Senecan doctrine of servitude – but he is alsosimultaneously drawing upon the deepest reserves of his eloquence in orderto find a sufficiently arresting way of reiterating a thoroughly orthodoxpolitical belief.145 For the self-reflexive thought imaginatively imputed toErasmus’ prince is the vox placed by Seneca into the mouth of the imaginedperson 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 toenjoin the prince to his servitude: ‘your life is open to view: you cannothide’; ‘there is no denying that being a good prince is a burden’; ‘what Godis in the universe, what the sun is to the world, and what the eye is in thebody, that must the prince be in the res publica’.146 In keeping with thetheory, the virtues of the king must be evident in his dicta, for ‘the nature ofthe prince is recognised more surely from what he says than from what hewears: anything caught from the prince’s lips is spread abroad’.147 Theprince’s fama depends on his taking ‘the greatest care that what he sayssavours of integrity and gives evidence of thinking that is worthy of a goodprince’.148 Erasmus thus assumes the role of ‘sanctissimus ille praeceptorSeneca’.149 Even for the most philologically inclined of sixteenth-centuryhumanists, Seneca’s Christian authority remained intact.

Further explanation can be given for why the Senecan lessons become soemphatic among the numerous and diverse classical voices in the Institutio.Erasmus’ pacificism had already been expressed in his distinctly Plinian

145 Erasmus 1974, 1.82: 166 (Erasmus 1997: 41): ‘nolim te sic tecum cogitare: At istud servire est, nonregnare’.

146 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 oculusin corpore, hoc oportet esse Principem in Republica.’

147 Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 186 (Erasmus 1997: 70): ‘Ex oratione certius quam ex amictu principis animuscognoscitur. Spargitur in vulgus quicquid ab ore principis fuerit exceptum.’

148 Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 186 (Erasmus 1997: 70): ‘Proinde summam oportet esse curam, ut ea quaeloquitur virtutem sapiant et mentem bono principe dignam prae se ferant.’

149 Erasmus 1974, 3.11: 169.

Princeps, rex, imperator 197

panegyric of Charles’ father, Philip of Austria.150 The escalation of militaryconflict in and around the Italian peninsula in the second decade of thesixteenth century threatened to engulf the major European powers in ascenario of almost continuous belligerence. The argument of the Institutiothat ‘a good prince will never start a war at all unless, after everything hasbeen tried, it cannot by any means be avoided’ extends into a profoundscepticism about the very notion of a just war.151 Erasmus’ pacificismexpresses itself in his insistence that the prince should be formed in a firmlyChristian image, and in his denunciation of a humanist syllabus whichveered towards the glorification of martial and pagan qualities. The pro-duction of such a Christian princely person significantly determines theextent and character of Erasmus’ reliance upon classical theory in general,which had to help authorise his basic perspective that ‘the model forgovernment is to be taken from God himself, and from Christ who isboth god and man’.152 This view was linked to the Institutio’s description ofthe vicarious position of the monarch on earth: he is ‘a prince, a Christianprince . . . the likeness of God and his vicar’.153 Christian princes, he alsorecalls a little later, ‘act in place of the Lord’.154

For nearly three hundred years, the Senecan theory of the prince had beensupplying writers with the essential linguistic, conceptual and imaginativeelements of just this type of vision of divine monarchical government.Many pre-Christian classical writers were adduced to support the idea ofthe divine government of the universe; but only Seneca had describedthe ‘function’ of the prince in terms of his position to act ‘in place’ of thedivine; only Seneca provided a description of divine government in thehands of a person who was mitis, mansuetus and magnanimus; only Senecahad been sanctified. And finally, no other classical political philosophy wasremotely as well equipped as De clementia to sustain Erasmus’ view that‘mercy is the quality particularly praised’ in a prince because no otherclassical theory could equally sustain his commitment to constituting thatmonarchical perspective by means of all the available techniques of Roman

150 For Erasmus and Pliny’s panegyric, see Rundle 1998.151 Erasmus 1974, 11.2: 213–14 (Erasmus 1997: 103): ‘Bonus princeps nunquam omnino bellum suscipiet,

nisi cum tentatis omnibus nulla ratione vitari potuit.’152 Erasmus 1974, 1.89: 169 (Erasmus 1997: 46): ‘Exemplum administrandi, potissimum ab ipso Deo

petendum, et ab Homine Deoque Christo.’153 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’.154 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 totusimitandus?’

198 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

rhetorical discourse.155 From Barzizza to Erasmus, Senecan political phi-losophy was held to be deeply engaging and profoundly geared towardspractice because of its rhetorical character. The Senecan text vividly dem-onstrated how to make the prince’s lessons stick in his mind.

The promises of the prologue to De clementia are carefully reframed inorder to recreate the view from the monarchical heights. Erasmus importsthe feature of impersonated, self-reflective discourse into the Institutio andinto the mouth of the prince, whose eyes gaze down upon a familiarpolitical landscape filled by an immense multitude:

When you visit your cities, do not think to yourself like this: ‘I am the master ofthese; they are at my disposal; I can do what I like with them.’ But if you want tothink about it as a good prince should, do so along these lines: ‘Everything here hasbeen put in my trust, and I must therefore keep a good watch over it so that I mayhand it back in better condition than I received it.’ When you survey the countlessmultitude 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. Theyhelp to constitute the self-reflecting interiority of the prince which theSenecan theory had predicated. When deciding whether to wage war ornot, the ‘pious and clement’ prince sums up the case in an act of self-examination, addressing a series of rhetorical questions to an interiorarbiter for consideration:

let him say to himself: ‘Shall I alone be the cause of so much woe? Shall so muchhuman 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 promisespleasant feelings in the form of voluptas:

155 Erasmus 1974, 1.18: 142 (Erasmus 1997: 13): ‘peculiarem huius laudem esse clementiam’.156 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. Sivero, quod bono principe dignum est cogitare voles, ad hunc cogitato modum: haec meae creditasunt fidei. Vigilandum igitur, quo meliora reddam quam acceperim. Cum innumeram tuorummultitudinem conspexeris, cave sic cogites: tam multos habeo servos, sed tot hominum milia de meapendent sollicitudine.’

157 Erasmus 1974, 11.10: 216 (Erasmus 1997: 106): ‘Movebit et hoc principem pium et clementem, quodperspiciat 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 domustot orbi senes tot indigne egentes tanta morum legum ac pietatis pernicies mihi uni imputabitur?Haec mihi luenda Christo?’

Princeps, rex, imperator 199

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

From the beginning, the Institutio embodies the rhetorical idea which hadbeen central to the function of the speculum since Seneca: Charles is takenalready to be the bonus princeps which the Institutio aims to produce.Erasmus knows that ‘his highness had no need of any man’s advice, leastof 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 ‘mighttake their example’.159

The circumstances which explain why the ‘principal hope of getting agood prince hangs on his correct education’ are carefully indicated: adduc-ing Aristotle in support of his argument, Erasmus says, acidly, that such adependency pertains in those barbaric political conditions in which aprince is not elected but hereditary.160 This situation renders the propereducation of the prince an even more pressing public concern. Minutelyporing over the contents of the princely syllabus went some way towardscompensating for negligible constitutional power. No one would havebeen quite so riveted by the details of what the prince did in his nurseryor with his spare time had he not also been the arbiter of their lives anddeaths. The overall aim of the Institutio is to educate the head of the bodypolitic properly. For ‘the prince’s imperium over the populus is the same asthat of the mind over the body’.161 When Erasmus repeatedly refers to thestatus reipublicae, he is positing the status of a single person whose head andheart is that of the prince.162 Erasmus contends that the princely mensdominates the body because of its greater sapientia, and that a properlyinstructed mind will bring the body felicitas. The basic condition of such a

158 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 niingentem animo sentis voluptatem. Atque ea demum voluptas Christiano digna est principe.’

159 Erasmus 1974, Prologue: 134 (Erasmus 1997: 3): ‘Itaque cum non ignorem tuae celsitudini nihil opusesse cuiusquam monitis, nedum meis, tamen visum est optimi principis simulacrum in communeproponere, sed tuo sub nomine, ut qui magnis imperiis educantur, per te rationem accipiantadministrandi, abs te exemplum.’

160 Erasmus 1974, 1.5: 136 (Erasmus 1997: 5): ‘Caeterum ubi nascitur princeps, non eligitur, quod etolim apud barbaras aliquot nationes fieri solitum testatur Aristoteles et nostris temporibus ubiquefere receptum est: ibi praecipua boni Principis spes a recta pendet institutione.’

161 Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39): ‘non aliud esse imperium principis in populum, quamquale est animi in corpus’.

162 Note, for instance, Erasmus 1974, 1.72: 162 (Erasmus 1997: 36): ‘At quoties Reipublicae status intyrannidem degenerauit, toties in exitium properasse compertum est’; 1.75: 162 (37): ‘Quod si secusfuerit, pessimus Reipublicae status sit oportet, ut qui pugnet cum eo qui est optimus.’

200 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

successful reign is that ratio must rule the body.163 Making reason rule inthe princely mind is a matter of eliminating the disease of affectus, for ‘ifthere 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 contagiousdiseases which enslave. They are tyrannical. In contrasting the prince withthe tyrant, Erasmus declares the former praiseworthy if he is, variously, ‘afather, mild, placid, lenient, provident, equitable, humane, magnanimous,free, a spurner of money, not enslaved to his affects, in total command ofhimself, dominating his desires, someone who uses his reason’.165 A tyrant,by contrast, is ‘a slave of his desires, intemperate, immoderate, inconsid-erate, inhumane . . . surrendered to his affects’.166 Erasmus is of the opinionthat the ‘most pitiable and dishonorable form of slavery is to be a slave tovice and shameful desires. For what is more abject and disgraceful, I askyou, than for him who claims dominion over free men to be himself a slaveto lust, anger, greed, ambition and all the rest of that band of unseemlymasters?’167

Part of the moral regime of the Institutio involves making the prince aconscientious reader. When Erasmus names the classical authors to whomthe prince should turn for moral and political guidance, the doctrines of Declementia which Erasmus is busily enunciating are given as one of theprincipal reasons for the pertinence of Senecan philosophy to the princeps.Having insisted first of all upon the primacy of Scripture, Erasmus thenrecommends that his prince read Plutarch, but ‘easily assigns the next placeto Seneca’, whose ‘writings admirably excite and inspire the study of whatis honourable, and carry the soul of the reader away from sordid cares to asublime height, especially in their repeated denunciation of tyranny’.168 Aprince schooled in the Erasmian doctrines of the Institutio would have little

163 Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39): ‘Ut in homine quod praestantius est imperat, nimirumanimus, rursum in animo quae pars est optima, ea praesidet, nempe ratio. Et quod dominatur inuniverso, id omnium est optimum nempe deus.’

164 Erasmus 1974, 1.80: 164 (Erasmus 1997: 39, modified): ‘Si quid inest animo mali, id a corporiscontagio proficiscitur, quod affectibus est obnoxium.’

165 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.’

166 Erasmus 1974, 1.71: 162 (Erasmus 1997: 36): ‘voluptatum servus, intemperans, immoderatus,inconsyderatus, inhumanus . . . affectibus deditus’.

167 Erasmus 1974, 1.52: 152 (Erasmus 1997: 24): ‘Quid, queso, turpius aut abiectius quam libidiniiracundiae avariciae ambitioni aliisque id genus insolentissimis dominis servire eum, qui sibivindicat imperium in homines liberos.’

168 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 sordiduscuribus in sublime subvehit peculiariter ubique dedocens tyrannidem.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 201

difficulty recognising in the Senecan mirror the colourful imagery oftyranny which Erasmus deploys throughout the Institutio. In followinghis advice to study De clementia, the prince incorporates the key role whichErasmus 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 ofthe prince’s praeceptor to ‘thrust before his pupil’s eyes a terrible, loathsomebeast’, a composition of ‘a dragon, wolf, lion, viper, bear and similarmonsters’ with ‘a hunger that is never satisfied, fattened on human entrailsand intoxicated with human blood, incapable of being removed withoutgreat destruction to the whole world’ in order to dissuade him fromtyrannical vice.169 Yet the prince who reads De clementia will find practi-cally the same picture of tyranny before his eyes. The text will do the workof the praeceptor in the prince’s solitary moments of self-formation.

The Institutio systematically ransacks the Roman theory of monarchy forits descriptions of the ruler. The prince is the medicus reipublicae and thePater patriae; but he is also described by Erasmus as the ‘the king bee’, andhere, too, Erasmus openly refers his reader to the arguments of De clementiain order to explain why ‘the king alone has no sting’ and why Nature hasdeprived him of ‘a weapon, leaving his anger ineffective’.170 But whenErasmus cites the moral definition of monarchy from De clementia, saying‘Seneca was certainly right to say ‘‘the difference between a tyrant and aking is in their actions and not their name’’ ’, he is not simply advancing astrategic argument.171 As far as he is concerned, the moral theory ofmonarchy is the only rational justification for monarchy at all. Erasmusputs the same argument in another way when he announces to his audiencethat ‘you will not be able to be a king unless reason is king over you’.172

169 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 similibus-que conflatam portentis . . . ventre insatiabili, humanis saginatam visceribus, humano sanguinetemulentam, quae pervigil omnium fortunis vitaeque immineat . . . quae nec ferri possit obimmanitatem nec tolli sine magna orbis ruina ob praesidiis et opibus armatam maliciam.’

170 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 patrispatriae, qui magis propriae quadraret in bonum principem’; 1.62: 156–7 (29): ‘Apum regi amplissi-mum cubile est, sed id in medio, veluti tutissimo regi loco. Atque ipse quidem onere vacat, verumexactor est alienorum operum. Hoc amisso totum examen dilabitur. Praeterea insignis regi formaest dissimilisque caeteris distinguitur, quod cum apibus plurimum sit iracundiae, adeo ut aculeos invulnere relinquant. Solus ipse rex aculeo caret. Noluit illum natura nec saevum esse nec ultionemmagno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit. Exemplar hoc magnisregibus ingens est.’

171 Erasmus 1974, 1.54: 153 (Erasmus 1997: 25, modified): ‘Vere siquidem a Seneca dictum est tyrannuma rege distare factis, non nomine.’

172 Erasmus 1974, 1.95: 173 (Erasmus 1997: 52): ‘Regem agere non potes, nisi te ratio rexerit.’

202 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

From Petrarch to Erasmus, virtue ‘nominates’ the monarch in an ideolog-ical tradition which culminates in as stridently Senecan a tone as it hadbegun. Erasmus asserts that ‘a Christian prince should be especially alert towhat Seneca wrote’ about the fact that ‘among those who are called kings’one can find examples who are so abominable that ‘they do not evendeserve to be called tyrants’.173 Official appellations, birthrights, genealo-gies: the criteria are enumerated in order to be dismissed as of no conse-quence. The ideology which could raise a man from humble mercenary toprincely status could equally level down a king with centuries of royalblood coursing through his veins to nothing better than a tyrant. ButErasmus restates the Petrarchan point amid a dense series of figures closelyderived from De clementia:

If all that makes a king is a chain, a sceptre, robes of royal purple and a train ofattendants, what after all is to prevent the actors in a drama who come on the stagedecked with all the pomp of state from being regarded as real kings? Do you wantto know what distinguishes a real king from an actor? It is the spirit that is right fora prince: being like a father to the res publica.174

Both of Erasmus’ rhetorical questions imaginatively expand Seneca’s claimthat ‘no one can wear a persona for long – fictions soon fall back into theirtrue nature’. They develop the dramatic metaphor at work in the Senecantext 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 publicafrom someone who merely acquires the trappings in order to impersonatethe prince upon the stage. Erasmus warns his prince that his clemency mustbe real and not, like that of Julius Caesar, simulated.175 In fact, he isdoggedly insistent that it is much easier to be a true prince than to be adissimulating tyrant. Even though his treatise details the onerous dutieswhich involve the prince in complete visibility, servitude, sleepless nightsand sustained self-reflection; even though it specifies that the prince must

173 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 quibussi conferas Phalaridem Dionysium Polycratem, quorum et ipsa vocabula in omnium saeculorumabominationem abierunt, indigni sint, qui tyranni vocentur.’

174 Erasmus 1974, 1.27: 146 (Erasmus 1997: 17): ‘Si torques, si sceptrum, si purpura, si satellitium regemfaciunt, quid tandem vetat pro regibus haberi tragoediarum histriones, qui iisdem ornati prodeuntin scenam? Vis scire, quid principem ab histrione secernit? Nempe animus principe dignus, hoc estin rempublicam paternus.’

175 Erasmus 1974, 2.18: 181 (Erasmus 1997: 63): ‘C. Caesaris industriam et animi sublimitatem, quamille male praestitit ambitioni, tu bene impende patriae commodis. Clementiam, quam ille simulavitad parandam fulciendamque tyrannidem, tu ex animo adhibe ad conciliandam civium tuorum in techaritatem.’

Princeps, rex, imperator 203

always be a loveable king bee with no weapon, and a doctor and father tothe entire res publica; even though it forcefully underlines Seneca’s accountof the slavery of the prince by warning that ‘after you dedicate yourself tothe res publica, you are no longer at liberty to live in your own way: youmust sustain and cultivate the persona you have taken on’176 – even thoughit makes all this really quite punishing regime abundantly clear, Erasmusnevertheless maintains that while ‘being a good prince is a burden’, it isassuredly ‘much more of a burden to be a bad one’, since ‘following natureand reason is far less trouble than resorting to artifice and deceptions’.177

Nothing short of a chasm separates the moral world of Erasmus’ princefrom that of Machiavelli’s ruler in Il Principe.178

176 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.’

177 Erasmus 1974, 1.90: 170 (Erasmus 1997: 47 – translation modified): ‘Ut negari non potest operosamesse rem bonum agere principem, ita multo est operosius malum agere principem. Longe minushabent negocii, quae naturam et honesti rationem sequuntur, quam quae fucis et arte constant.’

178 Although the Institutio was written three years after Il Principe, there is no evidence that Erasmuswas 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 followSkinner (Skinner 1978: 443–5, where he points out the innovations of this northern tradition) inbroadly regarding it as a typical, though sophisticated, contribution to the humanist literature onthe prince which I have traced from Petrarch onwards. Jardine (Erasmus 1997: vi–vii) also opens herdiscussion of Erasmus’ work by placing the two treatises side by side. In making the Institutio part ofthe wider ideological context within which to locate Machiavelli’s work, I am thus to some extentfollowing a well-defined approach.

204 The Humanist Princeps from the Quattrocento

P A R T V

The Machiavellian Attack

C H A P T E R 6

The strategy

Since the Senecan princely ideology which I have been so far examiningwas by no means the only classical vocabulary available to Renaissancemonarchical regimes wishing to couch their claims to political authority ina humanist idiom, I am not about to suggest that a deconstruction of thetheory 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 XVIin his comments on the evils of princely liberality. We might do better,as Skinner indicates, to turn instead to the seven books of Seneca’sDe beneficiis for further illumination of conventional thinking on thissubject, since the treatise had for centuries provided pre-humanist andhumanist writers with an incomparably sustained philosophical treatmentof the quality.1 Nor does De clementia really focus on the dilemma offlattery at court, the subject of Chapter XXIII of Il Principe, although evenhere, as Skinner also notes, Machiavelli is certainly involved in reversingat least one of the more usual pieces of advice proffered to princes on aSenecan basis.2 Although my concluding section will concentrate on theways in which Machiavelli is engaged in controverting a specifically neo-Senecan political and moral argument in his theory, its aim is not tominimise the importance of his engagement with a host of other Romanclassical writers, from Sallust to Tacitus.

Nevertheless, an attack on the image of the prince and his principateto which the Roman theory of monarchy had given rise certainly does lieat the heart of Machiavelli’s work. Notwithstanding the multiplicity ofclassical texts from which humanists excerpted, one can nevertheless recog-nise a coherent, distinctive and fairly continuous conceptual basis under-pinning their account of the virtuous prince. That conceptual basis istraceable to a remarkable extent to the one classical speculum with which

1 Skinner 1981: 36. 2 Machiavelli 1960: xxii.

207

almost every writer on monarchy had been highly familiar since at least thefirst half of the Duecento: Seneca’s De clementia. It has long been observedthat Machiavelli’s text is both a continuation and a subversion of thehumanist speculum principis genre. What I hope to have shown by now isthe very considerable extent to which that genre was indebted, from thetime of Petrarch onwards, to the earliest surviving Roman classical exampleof that genre – a debt, moreover, which can be partly explained by theequally considerable extent to which pre-humanist political discourse haddrawn upon the same theory. While Machiavelli is immersed, like almostevery other humanist writer of speculum principis treatises, in the work ofnumerous classical writers, he is quite manifestly concerned – again, like hishumanist predecessors and contemporaries – about one classical argumentin particular.

Evidence of this characteristic concern begins to come into view assoon as one recalls some of the arguments found in existing scholarshipon the place of Seneca’s theory of the prince in Machiavelli’s treatise.Skinner has already indicated that, in Chapter XVII, Machiavelli is con-troverting Seneca’s teaching in De clementia on the need for the trulyvirtuous prince to be always merciful and to be extremely reluctantto punish wrongdoing.3 As Skinner puts it, ‘faced with this orthodoxy,Machiavelli insists once more that it represents a complete misunderstand-ing of the virtue involved’.4 But the crucial part of Skinner’s insight – aninsight which contends with the greatest accuracy, as we have now seen,that Machiavelli is indeed confronting a Senecan body of opinion atthis point – arguably consists in his words ‘once more’. For ChapterXVII can hardly be said to be the earliest point at which Machiavelliconcentrates upon overturning this orthodoxy on cruelty and clemency.Indeed, as we shall see, the acts of moral redescription which occurfrom Chapter XV onwards are the necessary theoretical consequencesof Machiavelli’s analysis in the first half of his book of principalities andthe means by which they are acquired. And that analysis is consistentlyshocking, in its inimitably nonchalant way, because of Machiavelli’s advo-cacy of policies quite clearly regarded traditionally as cruel, brutal andinhumane. As early as Chapter III, we encounter Machiavelli urging aprince intent upon successfully annexing a newly acquired principality to‘wipe out the family of the ruler’ who had previously held sway over the

3 Skinner 1981:45–6.4 Skinner 1981: 46. For the idea that Machiavelli here ‘retorts’ to precepts in De clementia, see Skinner’s

comments in Machiavelli 1988: xvii.

208 The Machiavellian Attack

state.5 But this advice contrasts in the strongest possible way with that ofSeneca and his Renaissance enthusiasts, who had rigorously lauded the actof sparing conquered royalty on the grounds that it brought the conqueringprince unparalleled glory.6 In the same chapter, we find Machiavellidiscussing the viability of medicine forti, ‘strong medicine’; whereasSeneca had urged his prince to use mollis medicina – ‘gentle medicine’ –and to avoid ‘harsh remedies’.7 And elsewhere in Chapter III, Machiavelliadvocates a policy of moving as quickly as possible to apply this strongmedicine in the form of armed intervention and punishment; whereasSeneca had insisted that the prince should move as slowly as possible tounsheathe 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 ofIl Principe, as Machiavelli begins to rework the conception of the princelymedic which had been transmitted from De clementia to humanist princelyideology.

One should bear in mind that Machiavelli himself regularly referred tohis treatise as De principatibus, On Principalities, and that the book becameknown as Il Principe somewhat later. Machiavelli is at least as concerned tocorrect contemporary perceptions of the qualities of principalities and themodes in which they are acquired or come into existence as he is to correctcontemporary perceptions of the qualities necessary for a prince to rulethem successfully. His own description of its contents in his famous letterof December 1513 to Francesco Vettori represents this focus clearly, statingthat 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 aprincipality is, what species there are, how they are acquired, how they aremaintained, why they are lost’.8 And if he is engaging in a dispute aboutwhat a principality is, the explanation why Machiavelli should be involved,in the course of this same dispute, in repeatedly attacking a specificallySenecan image of the prince and his principatus now needs to be expanded.The previous chapters have helped to constitute an historical part ofthe explanation by charting the popularity of that image during the

5 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18 (Machiavelli 1988: 8): ‘E chi le acquista, volendole tenere, debbe averedua respetti: l’uno, che il sangue del loro principe antiquo si spenga . . .’

6 Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153).7 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; atquiet hic morbus est animi; mollem medicinam desiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro.’

8 Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 426: ‘composto uno opuscolo De principatibus; dove io mi profondoquanto io posso nelle cogitazioni di questo subietto, disputando che cosa e principato, di qualespezie sono, come e’ si acquistono, come e’ si mantengono, perche e’ si perdono’.

The strategy 209

Renaissance. But a further reason is that the Senecan monarchical ideologymasks very carefully those very elements which Machiavelli wants to exposeand underline in his analysis of principalities: namely, the bloodshed,injury, domination and the degree of contingency involved in their crea-tion and maintenance. Clementia, humanitas, innocentia: the string ofqualities which define the Senecan image of the prince make the work ofsubjection and the maintenance of a relation of domination between rulerand ruled disappear in a form of bloodless conquest. Machiavelli is unwa-veringly committed to reversing this effect by rendering visible once morethe violence involved in establishing and perpetuating monarchical rule.

Although the case advanced in Il Principe contains a continuous andsavage assault on the person at the centre of the Roman theory of mon-archy, the attack is nevertheless a deeply creative one. Machiavelli’s theoryis often wrought from the wreckage of the very same classical argumentwhich it relentlessly subverts. In Chapter III, Machiavelli may be in disputewith Seneca about the character of the medical treatment which a princemust dispense; but he does not for a moment doubt that the prince mustact like a medic. The production of a rival vision of princely rule takes theform of a systematic plundering of conceptual and rhetorical resourcesfrom the enemy camp. Startling, shocking and winning, the Florentine’streatise arrests and transports his audience’s view of things by steadilyreworking familiar imagery. It redescribes and reconnects some of theprimary relations at the heart of the humanist ideology of the princewhile simultaneously transforming the entire basis upon which they hadbeen elaborated. Even the weather changes, as Machiavelli ushers in amarkedly less clement climate for his prince. And the figurative meanswhich he uses to redesign or reconstruct the ideology are often drawn outfrom the same classical argument as its terminology – which is preciselywhy he uses them. Machiavelli deconstructs with devastating precision,appropriating and sharpening the tropes and figures of the Roman theoryof monarchy into weapons which he then deploys against it. In short, heholds forth a new persona for the prince through a sustained campaign ofreversals and inversions of the Senecan story. If ever a revolutionary couldbe said to have grasped the necessity of marching backward into battle, itis Machiavelli. A more bravura example of the conception and execution ofa polemical strategy which assumes and turns to its own advantage theobligation to operate upon a given rhetorical terrain is hard to summon tomind.

Machiavelli embraces that obligation with the greatest enthusiasm,making it pivotal to his account of persons, states and their rationality in

210 The Machiavellian Attack

Il Principe. His attack exploits a crucial fact about the way in which theprince had been articulated in De clementia in particular and perpetuatedin the humanist ideology in general. That is to say, it forces both the theoryand the mode of political reflection to which it had helped to give riseto confront the implications, and indeed the irony, of having articulatedin Roman rhetorical mode an argument based upon a monological andunivocal conception of ratio. It pounces, that is, upon something of thesame conceptual paradox that Hobbes was later to confront: a theory ofmonarchical absolutism articulated according to the canons of classicalrhetoric can never secure itself absolutely against rhetorical redescriptionfor as long as it remains wedded to a type of discourse whose ratiocinativemethod ultimately instructs and indeed requires its users to become adeptat arguing a case in utramque partem. For Hobbes, one possible wayforward was to jettison his humanist inheritance in search of more secureground upon which to construct the rationality of the state and to close offthe possibility of its refutation.9 Machiavelli’s approach, by way of the moststriking contrast, is to transform the terrain which he captures from hisopponent by penetrating even more deeply into the resources of classicalrhetoric, embracing the epistemological scepticism which its ratiocinativeprocedure always implied, if occasionally to the deep discomfort of anumber of classical writers themselves. Those resources had multipliedduring the Quattrocento. The humanist discoveries of 1416 and 1421 hadbrought back into circulation, in complete form, a handful of Roman textsof rhetorical theory which had immeasurably increased the complexity andsophistication of Renaissance rhetoric. Among them were complete ver-sions of Cicero’s De oratore, Orator and Brutus.10 But almost from themoment of its recovery, one work in particular had become implicated in aseries of attacks upon various intellectual and ideological orthodoxies inRenaissance Italy, and its unsettling, even disturbing, impact in differentspheres generated controversies across the peninsula. Il Principe partici-pates in the most spectacular way in this current of thought. Machiavelli’sprince is unimaginable without Quintilian.11 The closing section of thisbook is accordingly committed to outlining not one but two inextricablylinked movements at work in Il Principe: an attack on a Senecan con-struction of the princely persona which is planned and executed by means

9 This development is apparent in The Elements of Law and De Cive, though the humanist Hobbesreturns for Leviathan (for the reasons, see Skinner 1996: 426–37).

10 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.

11 For the recovery of a complete Quintilian by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416, see Reynolds 1983: 333–4.

The strategy 211

of a series of conceptual resources drawn in particular from Quintilian’sInstitutio oratoria.

Q U I N T I L I A N I S M I N T H E H I G H R E N A I S S A N C E

Machiavelli’s Quintilianism has illustrious humanist precedents.12 Theimportance of Institutio oratoria to the philosophical and polemical workof Valla, for instance, has long been acknowledged.13 Although a fullhistory of Quintilian in the Renaissance ‘waits to be written’, an importantoutline of the trajectory of Quattrocento Quintilianism and the controver-sies which it engendered among rhetorical theorists, philosophers andhumanists throughout the peninsula from the time of Valla onwards hasbeen provided by Monfasani, and by Grafton and Jardine.14 The reasonsfor the hostility towards this new Quintilianism are fascinating. Someopposition appears to have been provoked by the sheer grandeur of theaspirations which Quintilian lays out for the orator and which weredeveloped by Valla and his followers. But one should also note the degreeto which Quintilianic doctrine had penetrated the Florentine humanistmilieu by Machiavelli’s day. It had been a Florentine, Poggio Bracciolini,who had famously retrieved the complete text of Institutio oratoria fromSt Gall earlier in the century; and it had been Poggio himself, particularlyscandalised by Valla’s Comparatio, who had fired off ‘inflammatory’polemics against the outspoken philologist by way of response.15 Valla, inturn, denied claiming that Quintilian was superior to Cicero, insisting thatto be a Quintilianist meant committing oneself to the doctrines of arhetorical authority whose supreme model was none other than Cicerohimself.16 For Valla no less than for Quintilian, Cicero was ‘by far thegreatest of Latin authors’, as he noted in the margins of his copy ofInstitutio oratoria.17 Valla, in other words, asserted ‘the interdependenceof the oratorical works of Quintilian and Cicero’.18 And in Florence, thisapproach was unequivocally adopted by Angelo Poliziano, whose ‘unac-knowledged master’ in matters of historical philology was Valla.19 Some

12 For a guide to the literature on Quintilian in the Renaissance, see Ward 1983: 158–9, n.83; Ward 1995;Monfasani 1992: 119–38.

13 For Valla and Quintilian, see Grafton and Jardine 1986: 77–82; Martinelli 1986; Lorch 1991; Mack1993; Camporeale 1995.

14 Monfasani 1992: 119; Grafton and Jardine 1986: 66–82.15 Godman 1998: 39. 16 Godman 1998: 39. 17 Citing Godman 1998: 39. 18 Godman 1998: 39.19 Godman 1998: 39 (esp. n.52 for Poliziano’s regular use of Valla’s Elegantiae). For Poliziano’s scholar-

ship as an important context within which to locate Machiavelli’s humanism, see Dionisotti 1980.

212 The Machiavellian Attack

three years after the humanist Matteo Collazio had attacked theQuintilianists in Venice, Poliziano opened his course on rhetoric in 1480

at the Studio fiorentino on a decidedly controversial note: he delivered anoration on Quintilian and Statius, devoting the greater part of his attentionto the Roman rhetorical theorist in whose work he had been immersed foryears.20 In a preface to Institutio oratoria (later printed in the Paris 1542

edition), Poliziano explained his position on Quintilian in terms whichfaithfully reflected the view of Valla:

Indeed we do not, as it were, prefer Quintilian to Cicero, but we judge hisInstitutio oratoria to be fuller and more fecund than the rhetorical books ofCicero . . . we prefer to interpret Quintilian rather than Cicero, not indeed inorder to detract from that sacrosanct glory of Cicero but that we might serve yourinterests as you hasten towards Cicero . . .21

As Godman summarises, Poliziano’s preference for Quintilian was not amatter of arguing for ‘canonical priority’ for him, but of arguing that hisrhetorical theory was ‘simply fuller, richer, more complete and consistentthan Cicero’s’.22 Notwithstanding a degree of resistance in some of themore conservative quarters of Renaissance intellectual life, the view thatQuintilian was an incomparably more systematic and detailed analyst ofthe rhetorical art than any other Roman theorist was not a very hardproposition to sustain, given the monumental scale of Institutio oratoriawhen compared with the other extant classical treatises on rhetoric. Thatview was certainly shared well beyond Florence. In England, Thomas Elyotsuggested that one could learn the entire rhetorical art simply by studyingQuintilian.23 Indeed, Skinner has concluded, in his analysis of the pursuitof eloquence in the English Renaissance, that humanists generally citedInstitutio oratoria with ‘even greater reverence’ than when referring to theworks of Cicero.24 Juan Luis Vives, for example, ‘continually citesQuintilian as his own principal authority’.25 As for elsewhere in northernEurope, Quintilian’s latest editor, Donald Russell, has observed that ‘oneonly has to look through the various educational works’ of Erasmus toappreciate ‘how pervasive the Quintilianic ingredient is in all of them’.26

Poliziano’s interest in the work of both Quintilian and Valla during histime at the Studio ensured that Quintilianism gained a secure foothold in

20 For Collazio and the Venetian controversies over Quintilian, see Monfasani 1992: 128–34. ForPoliziano’s inaugural lecture, see Godman 1998: 38–40; Grafton and Jardine 1986: 94–5.

21 Cited from Ward 1983: 161. 22 Godman 1998: 43. 23 Skinner 1996: 34.24 Skinner 1996: 34. 25 Skinner 1996: 34.26 Quintilian 2001, vol. I: 23–4. Also underlined in Fumaroli 1980: 462.

The strategy 213

Florence in the decades prior to Machiavelli’s composition of Il Principe. Itis certainly true that Marcello Virgilio Adriani, Poliziano’s successor in thechair of rhetoric after his death in 1494, was ambivalent about the directionof his predecessor’s work.27 After the expulsion of the Medici, MarcelloVirgilio needed to distance himself from the legacy of Poliziano, who wasclosely identified with the old regime.28 Having been something of aMedicean protege himself, Marcello Virgilio trimmed his sails, promisingto usher in a new era at the university after sixty years during which, healleged, the study of rhetoric had suffered as a result of the unfreedom ofthe city under the Medici.29 In so doing, he reasserted the connectionbetween the flourishing of rhetoric and republican liberty which had beenstressed by the earlier generations of civic humanists. But the disjunctionbetween the interests of the two professors was by no means as sharp asMarcello Virgilio claimed. One of the many aspects of Quintilian’s workwhich Poliziano had especially cultivated was the elevated conception ofthe role which the Romans had assigned to the grammaticus in laying ‘theorator’s foundations’.30 Marcello Virgilio drew deeply upon this aspectof Poliziano’s work.31 And during his tenure, scholarship on Quintilianproceeded. His colleague at the university, Niccolo Angeli, produced a newedition 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 February1498. That meant not only that he was at the very heart of the city, asGodman underlines, but that he was also Machiavelli’s immediate superiorin the bureaucracy of the Republic for almost fifteen years, up to the timeof Machiavelli’s dismissal as Second Chancellor after the return of theMedici in 1512.33 There can be little doubt that the daily contact betweenthe two humanists over the years would have made Machiavelli well-attuned to the currents of thought which informed the work of theChancellor in particular, and the wider rhetorical culture of Florence inthe High Renaissance in general, thus ensuring the type of exposure to theideas of Quintilian to which Il Principe amply testifies.

27 For Virgilio, see Godman 1998: 144–291. 28 Godman 1998: 147–8. 29 Godman 1998: 157.30 Godman 1998: 81; Quintilian 2001, I.4.5, vol.I: 104: ‘oratoris futuri fundamenta’ (the importance of

what Quintilian terms grammatice, a subject which is much more extensive than a more modernnotion of grammar, is laid out in detail in I.4–9).

31 See Godman 1998: 160–2. 32 Godman 1998: 211.33 Godman 1998: 149; and for the relationship between the two, see 145–50, 239–41, 255–6, 261, 272–3,

293–5.

214 The Machiavellian Attack

T H E Q U I N T I L I A N I S M O F I L P R I N C I P E

To single out Machiavelli’s debts to Quintilian in Il Principe is emphati-cally not to argue for his exclusive reliance upon a single body of rhetoricalthought. On the contrary, a common theme of Renaissance Quintilianistsis their insistence on the need to harness Quintilian’s teaching to estab-lished doctrine, particularly that of Cicero. Various scholars have indeeddetected traces of Ciceronian and pseudo-Ciceronian rhetorical theory atwork in the text of Il Principe. Virginia Cox, for example, has laid out anintriguing case for why we should think that Il Principe is informed by theprecepts of the treatise Rhetorica ad Herennium in particular.34 It seemslikely that Machiavelli knew this work: Ad Herennium was the most basictextbook for beginners in rhetoric throughout the Renaissance, and a copyof it appears to have been available at least for some period of time at hisfamily home.35 Echoes of it may well be present, as Cox suggests, inChapters XV to XVIII. An alternative approach has been to explicate therhetorical codes of Machiavelli’s text in terms of a number of texts believedto have been commonly used for the purposes of rhetorical instruction inRenaissance schools and universities. In order to illustrate Machiavelli’s‘diligent application of the rules of deliberative rhetoric . . . from the veryfirst page’, Maurizio Viroli gives an account of the construction ofMachiavelli’s text by reference to various precepts drawn from the worksof Cicero, Quintilian and the author of Ad Herennium.36 Again, this seemsa fairly plausible interpretative strategy. But one nevertheless needs to heedthe ‘important caution’ stressed by James Murphy, to the effect that ‘it isnot yet possible to generalize about Renaissance rhetoric’.37 The availabilityof rhetorical texts varied, as did the syllabus from school to school and fromteacher to teacher. In the absence of strong evidence, it is misleading towork with the assumption that a writer’s eloquence could have been learntfrom any number of works of classical, medieval and Renaissance rhetoricall too often supposed to have been generally available and equallyendorsed within any given rhetorical culture. While specific aspects ofMachiavelli’s thinking can be related to elements of rhetorical learningwhich are exclusively Quintilianic, various other rhetorical strategies whichMachiavelli employs in his treatise are harder to trace to any one particulartext or school, and it may not be even desirable to try to do so. I drawattention 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.

The strategy 215

way of reference to Institutio oratoria in particular, even on occasions whereQuintilian’s teaching is merely representative of a wider consensus ofopinion among, say, the Roman rhetoricians. This is not in order tosuggest that Institutio oratoria is the only source of his thinking inIl Principe – it manifestly is not – but in order to remain on somethingapproximating to firm historical ground, relating Machiavelli’s rhetoricalapproach to a body of thought which can be shown to have been at least amajor source of some of his and his contemporaries’ thinking, rather thanrelating it to a group of texts whose presence and use is not yet so securelyattested. In the case of Institutio oratoria, not only do we know that therewas a very strong preference for Quintilian expressed within Florentineintellectual and political circles which accompanied ongoing scholarshipon his writings from the time of Poliziano, there is also a great deal ofincontrovertible textual evidence in Il Principe itself for the formativeimpact of Quintilianic doctrine on the construction of Machiavelli’s work.

Once again, it is Skinner who has led the way in beginning to demon-strate the effect of Quintilianic rhetoric on Il Principe. Skinner’s sustainedanalysis of the classical and Renaissance history of the rhetorical figure ofparadiastole, a technique of redescribing a given action or situation in sucha way as to alter its moral character to the advantage of the orator, places thework of Quintilian very squarely at the centre of his narrative.38 Skinnerfirst observes that ‘of all the ancient rhetoricians, it was undoubtedlyQuintilian who gave the fullest and most authoritative survey of the figuresand tropes of speech’ in Books VIII and IX of his Institutio, adding thatupon Poggio’s recovery of the complete text, a much more refined expli-cation of a wider and more exotic range of rhetorical schemata becameavailable to students of rhetoric in the course of the Quattrocento.39 Onesuch student was Antonio Mancinelli, whose Carmen de Figuris was firstprinted in 1493, and whose analysis of the figure of paradiastole is drawnentirely from Book IX of the Institutio.40 While the practice of rhetoricalredescription was well known to a wide range of classical writers and wasanalysed by other rhetorical theorists such as the author of Ad Herennium,it is nevertheless Quintilian who gives ‘the fullest and most influentialaccount of this technique’.41 Skinner duly proceeds to illustrate exactlywhat he means by ‘influential’ by showing how a considerable number of

38 For the various instalments of the account, see Skinner 2002, I: 175–87; II: 264–85; III: 87–141.39 Skinner 2002, III: 98. 40 Skinner 2002, III: 98–9.41 Skinner 2002, III: 92–3 (for discussion of the technique in Ad Herennium); II: 271 (for emphasis on

Quintilian).

216 The Machiavellian Attack

Tudor rhetoricians take up specifically Quintilian’s analysis and his termi-nology.42 It is with the spread of explicitly Quintilianic allegiances that thetechnique became more common and began to excite considerable anxietybecause of its capacity to destabilise conventional moral assumptions.

Furthermore, Skinner has extended his reconstruction of the early-modern history of rhetorical redescription to Machiavelli’s Il Principe,in which ‘paradiastole is assigned a crucial role’.43 ExaminingMachiavelli’s notorious use of the figure in Chapters XVI to XVIII, henotes how Chapter XVIII reveals the debt to Quintilian quite explicitly.44

For when Quintilian exemplifies the process ‘by which similar ideas aredistinguished’, he says it is ‘when you call yourself wise instead of astute,brave instead of over-confident, careful instead of mean’.45 Quintilian’sexample was noted by Mancinelli, who acknowledges that ‘according to thetestimony of Quintilian in Book IX, it is an example of paradiastole whenyou call yourself wise rather than astute or courageous rather than over-confident’.46 That the quality of astutia might be manipulated in order todescribe a virtue rather than a vice is a Quintilianic lesson not lost onMachiavelli, in whose text astuzia seems to be repeatedly recommended asthe quality of a prudente signore and a principe savio.47

Yet Machiavelli’s Quintilianic allegiances are on display from the veryfirst line of Il Principe. Before laying out an analysis of the exordium ofMachiavelli’s work in order to highlight them, it may be helpful to see howthis first section fits into the general structure of the text. To take seriouslythe proposition that Machiavelli’s treatise is constructed according to thecanons of classical rhetoric requires us to accept that it is in all likelihoodconceived according to a scheme consisting of at least five sections. Theparts of the basic five-part scheme which underpins most classical rhetor-ical theory are: exordium (also called the prooemium), narratio, confirmatio,refutatio, peroratio (also called the conclusio).48 Quintilian stresses his

42 Skinner 2002, II: 271–4. 43 Skinner 2002, III: 107. 44 Skinner 2002, III: 108–9.45 Quintilian 2001, IX.3.65, vol.IV: 138: ‘cui dant nomen paqadiarsokgm, qua similia discernuntur:

‘‘cum te pro astuto sapientem appelles, pro confidente fortem, pro inliberali diligentem’’’.46 Skinner 2002, III: 99.47 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’ nostritempi, quelli principi avere fatto gran cose che della fede hanno tenuto poco conto, e che hannosaputo con l’astuzia aggirare e cervelli delli uomini; et alla fine hanno superato quelli che si sonofondati 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, neseguiti maggiore sua grandezza’.

48 See the comments and references of Russell at Quintilian 2001, vol.II: 6.

The strategy 217

adherence to this fundamental five-part scheme.49 But Quintilian, likeboth Cicero and the author of the Ad Herennium before him, extends thestructure. In De inventione, Cicero had laid down six parts for a speech,adding a separate section entitled partitio between the narratio and theconfirmatio.50 The author of Ad Herennium had done likewise, callingthe sixth part divisio, rather than partitio.51 Quintilian goes a step further:he both posits and analyses two further elements – the propositio and thepartitio.52

Although there are good reasons for believing that Machiavelli isfollowing one of the more extended versions, at least the five fundamentalparts of Machiavelli’s work can be identified with reasonable ease andanalysed in terms of their function.53 The first of those sections isMachiavelli’s dedicatory letter to the Medici prince, obviously identifi-able as the exordium or prooemium of his oration. The primary function ofthe proem is generally agreed among the Roman rhetoricians: it is, saysCicero, to bring ‘the mind of the auditor into a proper condition toreceive the rest of the speech’, which ‘will be accomplished if he becomeswell-disposed, attentive and receptive’.54 Some of the self-consciouslyQuintilianic procedures which Machiavelli adopts here will require care-ful observation. Machiavelli’s prooemium is followed by the narratio inChapter I of his text. All the Roman theorists similarly agree that thenarratio comes immediately after the work of the introduction. It is wherean orator ‘points out the facts on which the judge is to pronounce as soonas he has been prepared for it’ by means of the prooemium.55 Thejuxtaposition is explained by Quintilian: ‘the purpose of the prooemiumis to make the judge better disposed, more receptive, and more attentivein taking in the facts’, but we can hardly proceed to produce proof of our

49 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 ‘thefourth place’ according to this five-part scheme); VI.1.1, vol.III: 16 (peroratio). For his reiteration ofthe 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.

50 Cicero 1949, I.14.19: 40.51 Ad Herennium 1954, I.2.3: 8.52 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: 47.53 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: 76–80.54 Cicero 1949, I.15.20: 40 (translation at 41): ‘Exordium est oratio animum auditoris idonee com-

parans ad reliquam dictionem; quod eveniet si eum benivolum, attentum, docilem confecerit.’ SeeAd Herennium I.IV.6 for an almost identical definition.

55 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.1, vol.II: 218: ‘Maxime naturale est . . . ut praeparato . . . iudice res de quapronuntiaturus est indicetur: ea est narratio.’

218 The Machiavellian Attack

case, he points out, ‘unless the Cause is duly known’. So it is almostalways essential that ‘the judge ought to be provided with knowledge ofthe facts at the outset’.56 A narrative, he explains, is an exposition of anaction or an alleged action, or a ‘speech instructing the hearer on what isin 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 inChapter II to substantiate the argument about principalities which heoutlines in Chapter I, he emphasises that he has just finished setting outthe basic elements of his case by means of a metaphor: he declares that histask henceforth will consist in his ‘weaving together the warps men-tioned above’.59 Everything that it is fundamentally controversial aboutMachiavelli’s argument is stated in a calmly devastating manner inChapter I. Machiavelli’s subversion of the conventions of the princelyideology does not begin in Chapter XV when he turns to consider thequalities of the prince. It begins at the beginning, when he presents asummary of his case.

That summary is achieved in a series of statements exemplifying thethree finest qualities which Cicero, the author of Ad Herennium andQuintilian all underline as necessary for a successful narratio: brevity,lucidity, credibility.60 Machiavelli’s brevity is self-evident.61 The lucidquality 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 ofeverything that we shall be treating in the Proof: person, motive, place,time, means, occasion’.62 Its clarity is enhanced by the unobtrusive but

56 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.24, vol.II: 230: ‘Nam cum prohoemium idcirco comparatum sit ut iudex adrem accipiendam fiat conciliator docilior intentior, et probatio nisi causa prius cognita non possitadhiberi, protinus iudex notitia rerum instruendus videtur.’

57 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.31, vol.II: 234: ‘Narratio est rei factae aut ut factae utilis ad persuadendumexpositio, vel . . . oratio docens auditorem quid in controversia sit.’

58 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.21, vol.II: 228: ‘Neque enim narratio in hoc reperta est, ut tantum cognoscatiudex, sed aliquanto magis ut consentiat.’

59 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘et andro tessendo li orditi soprascritti’.60 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, utdilucida, ut veri similis sit’; Quintilian 2001, IV.2.31, vol.II: 234: ‘Eam [sc. narrationem] pleriquescriptores maximeque qui sunt ab Isocrate volunt esse lucidam brevem veri similem. Neque enimreferet an pro lucida perspicuam, pro veri simili probabilem credibilemve dicamus.’

61 For Quintilian’s specifications about brevity in the narratio, see Quintilian 2001, IV.2.40–52, vol.II:240–4.

62 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.36, vol.II: 236–8: ‘Erit autem narratio aperta ac dilucida si fuerit primumexposita verbis propriis et significantibus . . . tum distincta rebus personis temporibus locis causis’;

The strategy 219

nevertheless highly effective tropes and figures.63 He makes quick andimaginative use of a simile – the trope of similitudo described byQuintilian as excellent for ‘shedding light on facts’ and often useful ‘tomake an image of things’ – when he says that some new states are ‘likelimbs attached to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them’.64

As for the credibility of Machiavelli’s argument, he nods towards hisdependency upon exemplification when he says of states that ‘they areeither wholly new, as Milan was to Francesco Sforza’.65 He thereby gesturesat some of the more typical forms of proof to come.66

It is also important to note that the argument outlined in Machiavelli’snarratio consists in a highly controversial definition of the type of statewhich he calls a principality. Machiavelli insists that his argument takes theform of a dispute. No sooner has he laid down his basic line of thoughtabout principatus in Chapter I than he announces, at the beginning ofChapter II, that ‘I will dispute how these principalities can be governed andmaintained’.67 In Chapter XV, he restates the controversial nature ofhis argument, declaring that although ‘many have written’ on how a princeshould govern, his treatise marks a departure ‘in disputing this subject-matter’.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 aprincipality is, what species there are, how they are acquired, how they aremaintained, why they are lost’.69

Machiavelli begins to corroborate the facts of his case in Chapter II, atthe point where he settles down to talk about the first type of principalitywhich he has mentioned in his narratio. The point of the confirmatiois, as its name suggests, straightforwardly to prove one’s case. Cicero, for

IV.2.56, vol.II: 246: ‘Omnia denique quae probatione tractaturi sumus, personam causam locumtempus instrumentum occasionem, narratione delibabimus.’ For the virtues of luciditas and propriaverba, see his comments at VIII.2.22, vol.III: 338.

63 For unobtrusive ornatus in the narratio, see Quintilian 2001, IV.2.116–18, vol.II: 276. ForQuintilian’s theory of ornatus, see further discussion below.

64 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.72, vol.III: 380: ‘Praeclare vero ad inferendam rebus lucem repertae suntsimilitudines: quarum aliae sunt quae probationis gratia inter argumenta ponuntur, aliae adexprimendam rerum imaginem compositae’; Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘o sono come membriaggiunti allo stato ereditario del principe che li acquista’.

65 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘o sono nuovi tutti, come fu Milano a Francesco Sforza’.66 For further analysis of the narratio, see discussion in Chapter 7 here.67 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘disputero come questi principati si possino governare e mantenere’.68 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘molti di questo hanno scritto . . . partendomi, massime nel disputare

questa materia, dalli ordini delli altri’.69 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 qualespezie sono, come e’ si acquistono, come e’ si mantengono, perche e’ si perdono’.

220 The Machiavellian Attack

instance, says that ‘by marshalling arguments’ in this third section of ourspeech, we ‘lend credit, authority to our case’.70 Machiavelli’s long con-firmatio then runs until the point where he begins the fourth distinctivepart of his work, the refutatio, in Chapter XXV. Quintilian understandsthat the process of refuting an opponent’s case is highly complex, but likeother Roman authorities he treats confirmatio and refutatio as theoreticallyseparable activities, since ‘proof is meant to establish something, andrefutation to pull something down’.71 Refutation involves considerationsof how and when to engage with the opposition, whether to isolate andattack individual points, or whether to attack them en masse, and so on.72

Patently false or unsustainable statements are easily controverted, but inQuintilian’s opinion, ‘it takes a real orator to make the opponent’s argu-ment appear contradictory, irrelevant, unbelievable, superfluous or favour-able to our side’.73

Chapter XXV sees Machiavelli explicitly engaging in a formal act ofrefutatio, as his opening sentence makes clear. He begins by announcing:‘I am not unaware that many people have held and hold today the opinionthat things in the world are governed by fortuna and by God in such a waythat men have no power to correct them with their prudence, and that, onthe contrary, they have no remedy at all; and for this reason they couldjudge that there is no point in sweating too much over things: better toleave oneself to be governed by fate.’74 Machiavelli’s way of restating theopposition’s case is savagely polemical. He has been ‘not unaware’ of theopinion to which he refers for the entire duration of his text. He has beenmocking 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 twiststhe knife deep into its heart by means of an ironic act of ‘simulated

70 Cicero 1949, I.24.34: 68 (translation at 69): ‘Confirmatio est per quam argumentando nostrae causaefidem et auctoritatem et firmamentum adiungit oratio.’

71 Quintilian 2001, III.9.5, vol.II: 150: ‘[Tamen nec iis adsentior qui detrahunt refutationem tamquamprobationi subiectam, ut Aristoteles.] Haec enim est quae constituat, illa quae destruat.’ For refutatioas a distinctive section of a speech, see Quintilian 2001, V.13.1, vol.II: 466. Compare, for example,Cicero 1949, I.42.78: 122.

72 Quintilian 2001, V.13.11–15, vol.II: 472–4.73 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 esseconiunctum.’

74 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98: ‘E non mi e incognito come molti hanno avuto et hanno opinioneche le cose del mondo sieno in modo governate dalla fortuna e da Dio, che li uomini con laprudenzia loro non possino correggerle, anzi non vi abbino remedio alcuno; e per questo, potreb-bero iudicare che non fussi da insudare molto nelle cose, ma lasciarsi governare alla sorte.’

75 E.g. Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17: ‘per non potere tu usare contro di loro medicine forti’. For thesignificance of this ‘strong medicine’, see my discussion in the following chapter.

The strategy 221

agreement’, as Quintilian calls it. This act of simulation is a figure ofthought called concessio, ‘in which we seem to allow something damaging,just to show our confidence in the cause’.76 Machiavelli duly appears toconcede ground to his opponents’ view of a providential universe: ‘WhenI 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 passivelyto the sway of an argument about divinely determined things: ‘So that ourfree judgement is not entirely extinguished’, he goes on to say, drily,‘I nonetheless judge that it may possibly be the truth that fortuna is thearbiter of half of our actions, but that even she leaves the government ofhalf of them – or thereabouts – to us.’78 The defence of his position interms of his desire not to imply the elimination of what Machiavelli callslibero arbitrio forms part of a stinging attack on the princely arbiter of thecase which he is refuting. For the princely arbiter who determines the sors,fortuna and status of his subjects in accordance with the government of aprovidential universe was a judge whose exercise of clementia was said, inthe Roman theory, to ensure him ‘liberum arbitrium’.79 Machiavelli is hereengaged in refuting that argument on its own terms. He will continue torefute it for the rest of the chapter by appropriating not only Senecanlanguage but also Senecan imagery. As Quintilian says, in responding tothe question of ‘how figures ought to be countered’, ‘the right course onmost occasions’ is that ‘they should always be exposed by the opponent, ashidden sores are opened’.80 Machiavelli’s most lethal attacks on the ration-ality of the Roman theory of monarchy are conducted in this manner.

In Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli concludes his argument with a rousingperoration in which he exhorts his audience to liberate Italia. There iscertainly a sense in which, as Viroli indicates, he has been in conclusivemode since Chapter XXIV, although one should recognise that, as his is a

76 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.51, vol.IV: 62: ‘Non procul autem absunt ab hac simulatione res inter sesimiles . . . 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 simulataadsensione’.

77 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 98–9: ‘A che pensando io qualche volta, mi sono in qualche parteinclinato nella opinione loro.’

78 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 nelasci governare l’altra meta, o presso, a noi.’

79 Seneca 1928a, II.7.3: 444: ‘Clementia liberum arbitrium habet; non sub formula, sed ex aequo etbono iudicat.’

80 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.93, vol.IV: 88: ‘Quaesitum etiam est quo modo responderi contra figurasoporteret. Et quidam semper ex diverso aperiendas putaverunt, sicut latentia vitia rescinduntur.Idque sane frequentissime faciendum est.’

222 The Machiavellian Attack

complex causa, Machiavelli takes pains to recapitulate and conclude partsof his argument at various stages of its development.81 But, as Viroli alsopoints out, the exhortatio bears all the formal marks of a final peroratio, andit is found, as one might expect, in the closing chapter.82 Quintilian insistson 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 inorder 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’’ ’ inorder to avoid the criminal vice of boring our audience.85 Machiavelliproves himself to be as inventive in restating his own case as he had beenin refuting that of his opponent. He rapidly summarises the points ofChapter VI: ‘as I said, it was necessary for the people of Israel to be enslavedin Egypt . . . for the Persians to be oppressed by the Medes . . . for theAthenians to be in disarray’.86 His peroration is all the more Quintilianic inthat it is ‘enlivened by apt sententiae’ and ‘diversified by figures’. Accordingto Quintilian, these rhetorical devices should be used when concludingbecause ‘nothing is more off-putting than the straightforward repetitionof facts’.87 Machiavelli accordingly inserts a sententia from Livy and citesverses from Petrarch in order to embellish his reiterations.88 But he also

81 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 thelast, see, for example, the instances in Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 77: ‘concludo, per tanto, che unoprincipe debbe tenere delle congiure poco conto’; 78: ‘di nuovo concludo che uno principe debbestimare e’ grandi’; 83: ‘ma verro alla conclusione di questo discorso’.

82 Viroli 1998: 79–80.83 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.1, vol.III: 16: ‘Eius duplex ratio est, posita aut in rebus aut in adfectibus.’84 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 totamsimul causam ponit ante oculos.’

85 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.2, vol.III: 18: ‘In hac quae repetemus quam brevissime dicenda sunt, et, quodGraeco verba patet, decurrendum per capita.’

86 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.’

87 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.2, vol.III: 18: ‘Quae autem enumeranda videntur, cum pondere aliquo dicendasunt et aptis excitanda sententiis et figuris utique varianda: alioqui nihil est odiosius recta illarepetitione velut memoriae iudicum diffidentis.’

88 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘Qui e iustizia grande: iustum enim est bellum quibus necessa-rium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est’ (citing Livy, 9.1); 105: ‘e sotto li sua auspizii siverifichi quel detto del Petrarca:

Virtu contro a furoreprendera l’arme; e fia el combatter corto:che l’antico valorenelli italici cor non e ancor morto’

(citing Petrarch, Italia mia, verses 93–6).

The strategy 223

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, piudispersa che li Ateniensi, sanza capo, sanza ordine; battuta, spogliata,lacera, corsa’.89 In putting it thus, Machiavelli relates her plight by recur-ring repeatedly to a figure of speech which Quintilian classifies under thegeneral 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 greateffect and urgency’ or close with the same repetitive pattern.91 Machiavellicombines this figure with another, one which is at work when ‘words withthe same meaning are also massed together’, and which Quintilian illustratesby reference to Cicero in the Catiline orations: ‘he went off, he departed, hebroke out, he got away.’92 Machiavelli’s Italia is both stiava and serva, butthere is very little – if anything – to distinguish her servile condition from thatof a slave.93 When used properly, the effect of the figure, as Quintilianobserves, is not so much superfluity of sense as an intense impact upon theaffects of the audience.94 Machiavelli closes the sentence by threading analmost textbook instance of asyndeton (listed under the Latin name of dissolutioby Quintilian) through these other varieties of the figure of addition as theyrise to a climax. The technique of omitting conjunctions is useful when we are‘particularly insistent on something’ so that ‘our points are thus driven homeone at a time and also, as it were, made more numerous’.95 Machiavelli’sconcluding 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 oflaunching highly charged appeals in an attempt to sway his audience’sopinion in the closing moments of the book, thereby enabling him toperform the second of the principal functions which Quintilian specifies asthe purpose of an epilogue. Quintilian admits that using one’s rhetoricalresources in order to manipulate affects in this concerted way poses ethical

89 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘piu stiava che li Ebrei, piu serva che’e’ Persi’.90 For the varieties of the figure of addition, see Quintilian 2001, IX.3.28–54, vol.IV: 114–30.91 Quintilian 2001, IX.3.30, vol.IV: 116: ‘Et ab isdem verbis plura acriter et instanter incipiunt . . . et in

isdem desinunt.’92 Quintilian 2001, IX.3.45–6, vol.IV: 126: ‘Congregantur quoque verba idem significantia . . . ‘‘abiit,

excessit; erupit, evasit’’.’93 See n.89 above.94 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’.95 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 Greeknomination of this figure as asyndeton, see the comments at IX.3.50–1, vol.IV: 130.

224 The Machiavellian Attack

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 andanger’, but the ‘chief way for the prosecution to arouse emotion is to makethe 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 beproduced by dwelling on the qualities of the victim and on the ‘worthlessand despicable character’ of their assailant.100 A prosecutor can elicit pity‘by complaining of the misfortune of the victim whom he seeks toavenge’.101 Quintilian suggests that a really vivid imago of the futuremight be expressed – pointing to the potential dangers of leaving justiceundone, for example.102 But most of all, a pitiful imago of the victim shouldbe presented to the judge – effectively, but briefly, so as not to exhaust thepatience or pity of the audience.103 One way of achieving this is to bringin appropriate evidence in order to make a massive visual impact: a bloodysword, unbandaged wounds, tortured bodies.104 The rhetorical equivalentsof these methods revolve around the imaginative representation of thevictim’s plight.105 Another way is through an act of impersonation, sothat ‘the judge no longer thinks that he is listening to a lament for some-body else’s troubles, but that he is hearing the feelings and the voice ofthe afflicted, whose silent appearance alone moves him to tears’.106 Such

96 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.7, vol.III: 20: ‘Necessarios tamen adfectus fatebuntur si aliter optineri vera etiusta et in commune profutura non possint.’

97 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.9, vol.III: 20: ‘huic [i.e. accusatori] concitare iudices . . . convenit’.98 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.9, vol.III: 20: ‘accusator habet interim lacrimas ex miseratione eius quem

ulciscitur’.99 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 quodobiecit aut quam atrocissimum aut etiam, si fieri potest, quam maxime miserabile esse videatur.’

100 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.16, vol.III: 24: ‘etiam si percussus sit [i.e. is quem accusator ulciscitur] a vilialiquo contemptoque’.

101 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.18, vol.III: 26: ‘Utitur frequenter accusator et miseratione, cum aut eius casumquem ulciscitur aut liberorum ac parentium solitudinem conqueritur.’

102 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.19, vol.III: 26: ‘Etiam futuri temporis imagine iudices movet.’103 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.28, vol.III: 33: ‘Nam cum etiam veros dolores mitiget tempus, citius evanescat

necesse est illa quam dicendo effinximus imago.’104 See Quintilian 2001, VI.1.30, vol.III: 32.105 See Quintilian 2001, VI.1.25–7, vol.III: 30.106 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 trahituradfectus. Non enim iudex videtur aliena mala deflentis, sed sensum ac vocem auribus acciperemiserorum, quorum etiam mutus aspectus lacrimas movet.’

The strategy 225

methods are likened by Quintilian to those of an actor, who speaks behinda persona, or mask.107

Italia begins to come alive in the opening sentence of Machiavelli’speroratio when he tells us that he has been wondering ‘if at the moment inItalia the time was coming to honour a new prince, and if there was materiain it that might provide an occasion for someone prudent and virtuous tointroduce forma which might bring honour to him and good to the men ingeneral who live there’.108 This sentence is frequently taken to refer to theprince’s creative abilities – and it does – but it is Machiavelli, the princelypreceptor, who presently ‘introduces’ forma in Italia. That is, he proceeds‘to introduce’ or ‘to bring into’ Italia the forma of a persona. To createformae is to engage in the rhetorical figure of personification. As Quintilianexplains, ‘we often fabricate formae’, pointing out how ‘Virgil inventedRumour, Prodicus Pleasure and Virtue, and Ennius Death and Life’.109

Machiavelli exchanges impersonation for personification in fulfilling thetask of evoking pity in the audience, but the crucial effect – a vivid pictureof a pitiable victim – is produced all the same. Italia has become fullyanimated by the next sentence – alive enough to have been enslaved andstripped bare.

Machiavelli’s use of forma and materia does not necessarily pointtowards a reliance upon Aristotle; it may rather confirm his dependenceupon Quintilian.110 As early as the second book of Institutio oratoria,Quintilian settles down to the closest explanation of what he consistentlyrefers to as materia throughout his treatise. Here he reports the view that‘the materia of rhetoric is ‘‘speech’’ ’, and quickly goes on to incorporateinto his discussion the analogy of a sculptor working with materia onthe grounds that a speech, like a statue, is a work of art.111 After someadjudication about various definitions, Quintilian concludes that ‘themateria 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 plusad movendos adfectus sub persona valet’.

108 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 101–2: ‘Considerato, adunque, tutte le cose di sopra discorse, epensando 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 facessionore 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, utVoluptatem 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, utstatuarii statua; nam est oratio efficitur arte sicut statua.’

226 The Machiavellian Attack

to extend his treatment of the concept even further into the realm ofaesthetics for the rest of the chapter.112 But his discussion of aesthetics hasalready included a debate over whether the making of a good orator residesmore in the raw nature of the student than in the art with which he ismoulded into shape: Quintilian has concluded that you need both natureand art to produce the perfect specimen. As he puts it, ‘nature is the materiaof teaching; the one forms, the other is formed. Without materia, art cando nothing; materia has a value apart from art; the highest art is better thanthe best materia.’113

In Chapter XXVI, Machiavelli is pursuing a line of questioning whichmust confront any artist, whether sculptor, rhetorical praeceptor, or orator,or statesman: do I have at my disposal the necessary raw materia whichI can shape, fashion, transform by means of my art? Machiavelli usesthis aesthetic terminology because he insists that the government ofthe state is indeed an art – the art of the state.114 The prince must be anartist. 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 bringforma to a state is to produce a person: founders of states ‘personify’ in aliteral sense. As Machiavelli makes abundantly clear in his treatise, states arebest thought of as persons. And to make a state – or to father a state, as wemight say in line with Machiavelli’s thinking about the activity of thevirtuous founder – is one of the most profoundly creative endeavours thatanyone can undertake. But here Machiavelli performs the princely task ofpersonification at a textual level, bringing the persona of Italia to life out ofhis verbal materia.

Italia is then said to have suffered so much that she remains ‘almostlifeless’, waiting for ‘someone with the power to heal her wounds, and toput an end to the ravaging of Lombardy, to the extortions in the Kingdomand in Tuscany, and to cure the sores which have already been festering forso long’.115 The utterly wretched Italia practically parades her cuts andabrasions to the audience in order to expose the vile character of her

112 See Quintilian 2001, II.21.4–5, vol.I: 408.113 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 materiaoptima melior.’

114 Importantly emphasised in Viroli 1998: 42–72.115 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 guariscadi quelle sue piaghe gia per lungo tempo infistolite.’

The strategy 227

attacker: ‘Look how she prays to God that He send someone to redeemher of this cruelty and barbaric insolence.’116 Machiavelli produces thispathetic image in accordance with Quintilian’s strictures about the pero-ratio. In so doing, he simultaneously develops another characteristic of asuccessful conclusion. Quintilian states that ‘the most satisfactory thing isif you are in a position to derive an argument from your opponent’.117 It iscertainly true that by this stage, the medical pretensions of the protagonistof the Roman theory of monarchy have been exposed and analysed, hissalvific capacities questioned and his humanitas closely examined; butMachiavelli’s prince is still a medic – and to whom is Italia here appealingif not to a humane doctor who will heal her wounds and deliver her fromcruel mistreatment?

In addition to the five parts into which Machiavelli’s text has so far beendivided, Quintilian adds the propositio and the partitio.118 Both of these aresaid to form part of the confirmatio, and Quintilian develops a distinctiverole for each of them as means of ‘signposting or preparing the way forwhat is to come’ in the proof.119 The identity of propositio is somewhatblurred by Quintilian’s tendency to talk about things ‘proposed’ in thenarratio, which he describes as ‘a sustained proposition of the proof ’.120

But he distinguishes it more clearly by explaining that it is ‘the initial stageof any confirmatio’.121 In straightforward cases, it may not be necessary. Itsutility resides in more complex arguments.122 It usually comes after thenarratio, in order to clarify what is primarily at stake.123 Occasionallyinserting a short statement as soon as you have finished your narratio willlend the text the force of a propositio, as if to say ‘these are the matters onwhich you are to give judgement’.124 This can serve ‘as a reminder to thejudge to give closer attention to the question’ now that ‘the narrative is over

116 Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XXVI: 102: ‘Vedesi come la prega Dio che le mandi qualcuno che la redimada queste crudelta e insolenzie barbare.’

117 Quintilian 2001, VI.1.4, vol.III: 18: ‘Illa vero iucundissima, si contingat aliquod ex adversario ducereargumentum.’

118 See Skinner 1996: 52–3.119 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: 174–5.120 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.79, vol.II: 258: ‘narratio est probationis continua propositio’.121 Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292: ‘Mihi autem propositio videtur omnis confirmationis initium.’122 See Quintilian 2001, IV.4.2–4, vol.II: 292–4.123 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’.124 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’’.’

228 The Machiavellian Attack

and the proof is beginning’.125 Alternatively, a propositio may be located‘in the individual arguments’,126 with the individual proofs following, inwhich case there is more than one proposition.127

As soon as Machiavelli finishes the narratio of Chapter I, he inserts areminder to his reader that he is engaged in a specific type of reasoning inDe principatibus which he explicitly contrasts with his work elsewhere.He prefaces his proof by announcing that he is going to be addressinghimself ‘solely to the principality’.128 Strong grounds for thinking thatMachiavelli has very deliberately paused to underline this point to hisaudience immediately after he has concluded his narratio – just whereQuintilian envisages a principal propositio – will emerge in due course. But itis arguably Machiavelli’s use of the Quintilianic idea of partitio which lendshis text some of its most distinctive stylistic characteristics. He constantlytells us in the body of the text where he is going with his argument. Theintricacies of his path are demarcated in a language which resonates with thepoints about partition raised in the Institutio. To partition, Quintilianreports, is to provide an ‘orderly enumeration of our propositions’ in orderto make ‘the cause clearer, and the judge more attentive and receptive’ sothat he will always know ‘what we are presently speaking about and whatwe are going to speak about later on’.129 A well-partitioned speech isparticularly ‘useful and agreeable’ if ‘we have to advance or refute a numberof points’ rather than a single one, so that ‘the order in which we propose tospeak 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 gooddeal relieved by reading the distance on the milestones’.131 It is ‘pleasant to

125 Quintilian 2001, IV.4.9, vol.II: 296–8: ‘Ut sit haec commonitio iudicis, quo se ad quaestionemacrius intendat et velut quodam tactu excitatus finem esse narrationis et initium probationisintellegat, et nobis confirmationem ingredientibus ipse quoque quodam modo novum audiendisumat exordium.’

126 Quintilian 2001, IV.4.1, vol.II: 292: ‘sed nonnumquam etiam in singulis argumentis poni solet’.127 See Quintilian 2001, IV.4.6–7, vol.II: 296.128 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero indrieto el ragionare delle republiche, perche altra volta

ne ragionai a lungo. Volterommi solo al principato.’129 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 fiatcausa lucidior et iudex intentior ac docilior si scierit et de quo dicimus et de quo dicturi posteasumus.’

130 Quintilian 2001, IV.5.8, vol.II: 302: ‘Itaque, si plura vel obicienda sunt vel diluenda, et utilis etiucunda partitio est, ut quo quaque de re dicturi simus ordine appareat.’

131 Quintilian 2001, IV.5.22, vol.II: 308: ‘sed partitio reficit quoque audientem certo singularumpartium fine, non aliter quam facientibus iter multum detrahunt fatigationis notata inscriptislapidibus spatia’.

The strategy 229

know how much of our work has been done’ and a relief for the audience toknow ‘how much remains’.132

Machiavelli is almost unnervingly solicitous in the steps which he takesnot to lose us in his proofs. As he sets off in Chapter II, he reminds usexactly what materia he is leaving behind and where he is going.133 His earlychapters proceed to treat the various types of principalities and the meansby which they are acquired in close accordance with the sequence laid outin the narratio. Even in Chapters VIII and IX, where Machiavelli drawsattention to examples of acquisitions of principalities which do not fitnicely into the scheme of his narratio, he pairs them in order to partitionthem and then proceeds from one to the other: as he opens the secondexample in Chapter IX, he introduces it with the words, ‘But coming on tothe other part . . .’.134 In Chapter XII, we have reached a certain stage inhis argument: Machiavelli has now ‘discussed in particular’ a number ofthings about the qualities and conditions of principalities, and so ‘nowthere remains’ for him ‘to discuss in general terms the means that can beused in attacking and defending them’.135 Just as Quintilian envisages,Machiavelli uses partition not only to steer the audience over the courseof his whole argument but also to give guidance within its more complexparts.136 In Chapter VII, the partition and enumeration of four modi, orcourses of action, followed by Cesare Borgia are counted off.137 During hisanalysis of both occasions on which the king of France lost Milan inChapter III, Machiavelli takes a characteristically Quintilianic rest, whenhe recalls that ‘the general reasons for the first loss have been discussed; itremains now to discuss the reasons for the second’.138

132 Quintilian 2001, IV.5.23, vol.II: 308: ‘Nam et exhausti laboris nosse mensuram voluptati est, ethortatur ad reliqua fortius exequenda scire quantum supersit.’

133 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero indrieto el ragionare delle republiche . . . Volterommisolo al principato.’

134 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘Ma perche di privato si diventa principe ancora in dua modi, il chenon 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 . . .’

135 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 53: ‘Avendo discorso particularmente tutte le qualita di quelli principatide’ quali nel principio proposi di ragionare, e considerato in qualche parte le cagioni del bene e maleessere loro . . . mi resta ora a discorrere generalmente le offese e difese che in ciascuno de’prenominati possono accadere.’

136 Quintilian 2001, III.9.3, vol.II: 150: ‘ideoque eam non orationis totius partem unam esse credendumest, sed quaestionum etiam singularum’.

137 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 38: ‘e penso di farlo in quattro modi: prima . . . secondo . . . terzio . . .quarto . . .’

138 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘Le cagioni universali della prima si sono discorse: resta ora a direquelle della seconda . . .’

230 The Machiavellian Attack

S T A T U S T H E O R Y A N D T H E T H E O R Y O F T H E S T A T E

Mapping out these sections of Il Principe helps to indicate some of theterrain upon which Machiavelli repeatedly engages with the Senecantheory of the prince as his argument courses through its various points.It does so in accordance with a precise rhetorical methodology. Machiavelliproduces his theory of the stato called a principato by running his keyconcept through a body of rhetorical instruction which is known as statustheory.139 Machiavelli’s investigation is aligned to a ratiocinative systemwhich is founded upon a strong belief in its own capacity to examine anysubject by setting up its enquiry in terms of three basic questions.Quintilian states that ‘we must . . . accept the view of those whose authorityCicero follows, namely that there are three things which are subjects ofenquiry in every dispute: Does it exist? What is it? What kind of thing isit?’140 In the end, Quintilian insists, every dispute is reducible to thesethree fundamental questions of conjecture, definition and quality. In anydispute, we shall first of all need to ask whether the thing in dispute exists ornot. Once it is clear that it does exist, we may then need to say what thething is. We may further develop our sense of its identity by saying what sortof 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 manyof them there are and what they are’, he is putting the concept through hisown 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 con-cludes that there are thus ‘three rational states’ or ‘general states’ in rhetoricaldiscourse – conjecture, definition and quality – and they correspond to thethree 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’ mayturn upon a consideration of ‘whether I did it’.144 The question arising

139 For Quintilian’s theory of status and for a bibliography on the subject, see Russell’s discussion atQuintilian 2001, vol.II: 3–4.

140 Quintilian 2001, III.6.80, vol.II: 88: ‘Credendum est igitur iis quorum auctoritatem secutus estCicero, tria esse quae in omni disputatione quaerantur: an sit, quid sit, quale sit.’

141 The full theory is laid out in Quintilian 2001, III.6, vol.II: 48–94; for the heart of the matter, seeIII.6.1–8, vol.II: 48–52.

142 Quintilian 2001, III.6.1, vol.II: 48: ‘quid sit status et unde ducatur et quot et qui sint intuendumputo . . . quod nos statum, id quidam constitutionem vocant, alii quaestionem, alii quod exquaestione appareat’. The rest of the chapter makes it clear that Quintilian sides with those whothink of status as a type of question.

143 See Quintilian 2001, III.6.56, vol.II: 76–8.144 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.

The strategy 231

from this conflict is conjectural. If the dispute takes the form ‘That is whatyou did’, ‘I didn’t do that’, what is questionable is not whether somethingoccurred, but what occurred: it is a matter of definition. A question ofquality, however, emerges when a dispute turns upon the sort of thingunder consideration. We may establish that someone was killed; but wemay 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, honour-able, useful, committed in ignorance or insanity, and so on. Questionsabout ‘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 underquality’.146 So the whole gamut of questions about quantity, time, place,modality, instrumentality and cause which may be asked about someperson or thing do not have a separate fundamental basis but are insteadtopics of argument applicable to the subject matter under investigationin order to clarify, as appropriate, one or more of these three types ofquestion.147 Finally, disputes about the qualities of a person or action maylead to a change in the way we define them.148 Conversely, questions aboutdefinitions can easily become questions about qualities. As he points out,‘the most powerful element in a definition’ is, in fact, qualitas.149 The bestway of defining something is to enquire into its qualities: ‘Is love mad-ness?’, asks Quintilian, by way of example.150 The centrality of the ‘qualisest’ question to the rhetorical art in his eyes means that ‘quality gives themost scope for the orator’s craft’.151 He explains that ‘to demonstrate thequality of things is work for pure eloquence; this is where it reigns, this iswhere it rules, this is where it wins the day all on its own’.152

In De principatibus, the most insistent type of consideration whichMachiavelli takes to his materia is the interrogatory ‘qualis est’. The

145 Quintilian 2001, VII.4.2, vol.III: 236: ‘Eidem qualitati succedunt facienda ac non facienda,adpetenda vitanda.’

146 Quintilian 2001, VII.4.41, vol.III: 260: ‘Quantitas quoque, ut dixi, etiam si non semper, plerumquetamen eidem [sc qualitati] subiacet, seu modi est seu numeri.’ For the subsumption, see also hiscomments at VII.4.2 and VII.4.16, vol.III: 236, 244.

147 See Quintilian 2001, III.6.24, vol.II: 60.148 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.2, vol.III: 216–18: ‘Interim a qualitate ad finitionem descenditur . . .’149 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.28, vol.III: 232: ‘[id enim agimus, ut sit causae nostrae conveniens finitio].

Potentissima est autem in ea qualitas.’150 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.28, vol.III: 232: ‘an amor insania’.151 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.’152 Quintilian 2001, VII.4.24, vol.III: 248–50: ‘Quale quidque videatur, eloquentiae est opus: hic

regnat, hic imperat, hic sola vincit.’

232 The Machiavellian Attack

frequent assumption that the treatise is primarily about the qualities ofthe prince overlooks the basic fact that this specific enquiry is openedup only in Chapter XV, when Machiavelli proceeds to list at length ‘someof these qualities’ by which men and princes are conventionally praisedand blamed.153 Similarly, in Chapter XVI he opens by declaring: ‘Tobegin, then, with the first qualities mentioned above . . .’154 ChapterXVII also commences with Machiavelli turning to consider the ‘otherpreviously mentioned qualities’ of cruelty and mercy.155 Issues of qualityare announced again in the first sentence of Chapter XIX, in whichMachiavelli promises that he ‘will discuss the qualities of certainemperors’, while the debate of Chapter XX is said to be about ‘whetherbuilding fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do,are useful or not’; it therefore turns on an issue of quality.156 Yet questionsof quality dominate Machiavelli’s thinking from the beginning. The firstsentence of Chapter XII summarises what he has been doing sinceChapter II with its declaration of ‘having discussed in particular all thequalities of those principates about which I proposed to reason at theoutset’.157 Even while Machiavelli conducts these discussions, he makesclear the status of his enquiry by saying that ‘in examining the qualitiesof these principalities, one should consider another thing: whether aprince has tanto stato’ – sufficient ‘state’, in the sense of ‘sufficientpower and territory, to defend himself when this is necessary’.158 Hethus narrows his general enquiry about the qualities of principalitiesinto a single question of quantity in Chapter X. As for Quintilian, sofor Machiavelli, considerations of quantity are subsumed under questionsabout quality.

To attend to the structure of Machiavelli’s discourse in this way offersmore than an insight into its rhetorical procedures. The move from adetailed consideration of the qualities of principalities to a detailed con-sideration of the qualities of the prince is the very crux of Machiavelli’s

153 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘alcune di queste qualita che arrecano loro o biasimo o laude’.154 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVI: 66: ‘Cominciandomi adunque alle prime soprascritte qualita . . .’155 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68: ‘Scendendo appresso alle altre preallegate qualita . . .’156 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: ‘Anarces et multa alia quae cotidie a principibus fiunt utilia an inutilia sint’ (translation from Machiavelli1988: 72).

157 Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XII: 53: ‘Avendo discorso particularmente tutte le qualita di quelli principatide’ quali nel principio proposi di ragionare . . .’

158 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48 (Machiavelli 1988: 37–8): ‘Conviene avere, nello esaminare le qualita diquesti principati, un altra’considerazione: cioe, se uno principe ha tanto stato che possa, bisog-nando, per se medesimo reggersi.’

The strategy 233

theory. In order to explain why this is so, one has to recall the case for theopposition. The core of Machiavelli’s theory is a systematic reworkingof the interrelations of princeps, status, fortuna and virtus which had beenestablished in the Senecan ideology. Machiavelli agrees that, as a result ofthe acquisition of his principatus, the prince holds the ‘state’ of his subjects‘in his hand’; but his reconfiguration of the moral persona which the princeneeds to cultivate in order to keep it in his hand – to perform, that is, thecentral task of mantenere lo stato – can only come after he has first shatteredand then painstakingly reconstructed, from Chapter I onwards, a conven-tional description of what, precisely, the ‘state’ of a principality is and howthe prince comes to lay his hand on it in the first place. Machiavelli sees thathe cannot begin to address the question of what qualities a princeps musthave without first questioning and countering the conventional under-standing of the qualities of the principatus which he must govern andmaintain.

The organisation of Machiavelli’s materia in De principatibus is thus aninseparable part of his theory. The structure of his text constitutes a full-frontal assault on the configuration of the head and body in the corporalmetaphor of the Roman theory of monarchy. Machiavelli sees that thetraditional interpretation of the virtues of the prince derives from a con-sideration of the relation of principatus to princeps. But that relation hadbeen captured in the theory and subsequently rehearsed for centuries bymeans of a version of the metaphor of the body politic. At the centre of theSenecan explanation of the institution of Roman monarchy is the descrip-tion of an act of fusion between head and body envisaged as the formationof a single body animated by a single persona. Machiavelli identifies thegeneration of this single body as a central point which he must refute.He therefore undoes the central theoretical manoeuvre upon which theentire ideology of the virtuous princeps has been raised and sustained bypulling apart and re-examining in minute detail what happens to bodieswhen they are subjected to princely conquest. Only through his unflinch-ing redescription of how principatus are acquired and in what conditionthey are held can Machiavelli destroy the analogy and so begin to recon-struct the theory of moral personality which lies at the heart of the classicaland humanist arguments about their proper maintenance. His detaileddissection of the type of activities in which princely virtu must properlyconsist is theoretically pinned to his view of the stato upon which the princemust retain his hold. Machiavellian princely virtu is as controversial, andonly as controversial, as the Machiavellian definition of the ‘state’ of aprincipality.

234 The Machiavellian Attack

P R O V I N G A N D R E F U T I N G

Every controversy requires proof. For Quintilian, refuting and provingare profoundly related as ratiocinative procedures.159 In the first place,‘the methods are similar in either case’ since ‘the principle governingarguments in this part cannot be sought in any Places which are not usedfor the confirmation’.160 Here Quintilian is merely reiterating an argumentwhich can be found in Cicero’s De inventione.161 Both refuting andproving involve identifying ‘topics, sententiae, words and figures’, seeingwhere the opposition has drawn its arguments and revisiting the sameplaces, sometimes to pull out different conclusions, at other times toturn the evidence against the opposition, occasionally to show up inter-nal inconsistencies in the rival argument.162 Furthermore, statementsdesigned to strengthen or prove one’s own case often consist of animplicit act of refutation, an attack on a contrary definition. Quintilianinsists that ‘we must both establish our own definition and destroy ouropponent’s’.163 Proof will be most effective when it is self-consciouslypolemical. He envisages an almost ceaselessly combative approach: awinning orator will encroach upon his opponent’s material from proemto peroration.

‘Inartificial’ or ‘non-technical’ forms of proof are so called because theyare 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 ‘onepresent-day ruler, whom it is as well not to name, preaches nothing otherthan peace and trust, and yet he is extremely hostile to both’.165 But mostof his case exhaustively exploits the complex of ‘artificial proofs’ whichQuintilian 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 Quintilian 2001, V.13.56, vol.II: 496: ‘In his probandi refutandique ratio est.’160 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’.161 See Cicero 1949, I.42.78: 122.162 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: 466–96.163 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.’164 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 contentio-num forensium consistit. Sed ut ipsa per se carent arte . . .’

165 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.’

The strategy 235

which by far the most important to Quintilian are arguments andexamples.166 Quintilian’s discussion of arguments is largely a systematicanalysis of the ‘common places’ where an orator may find his proofs.167

Here Quintilian makes two basic points. The first is that there is noquestion under investigation in rhetorical discourse which ‘is not basedeither on things or on persons’.168 Actions – things that happen – areclassed within the category of things.169 The second is that there canbe no ‘Topics of Arguments not based on the accidents of things orpersons’.170

The orator needs to know where to go to fetch his arguments, and thereis considerable overlap between the lists of rhetorical theorists when itcomes to specifying the so-called ‘common places’. The ‘seats’ or places ofargument are not only where arguments live: they are also where argumentsare ‘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 shalleasily see the argument in it’.172 If we are talking about a person, forinstance, Quintilian suggests that we can talk about their genus, or birth;their nationality or their patria; their sex or age; their education or theirphysique; their good or bad fortuna and their differing conditions – arethey 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, theiroccupation, or their past actions and utterances.174 Even their name can bea source of an argument to be used for or against them.175 If we talk aboutthings like actions, on the other hand, Quintilian suggests five principalquestions: ‘why or where or when or how or by what means’ an action is

166 Quintilian 2001, V.9.1, vol.II: 358: ‘Omnis igitur probatio artificialis constat aut signis aut argu-mentis aut exemplis.’

167 See Quintilian 2001, V.10.20–54, vol.II: 374–92.168 Quintilian 2001, V.8.4, vol.II: 356: ‘Nam neque ulla quaestio est quae non sit aut in re aut in

persona.’169 For this point, see Quintilian 2001, V.10.32, vol.II: 382.170 Quintilian 2001, V.8.4, vol.II: 356: ‘neque esse argumentorum loci possunt nisi in iis quae rebus aut

personis accidunt’.171 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.’

172 Quintilian 2001, V.10.22, vol.II: 376: ‘At si scierimus ubi quodque nascatur, cum ad locum ventumerit facile quod in eo est pervidebimus.’ For the language of generation, see the previous note.

173 Quintilian 2001, V.10.24–7, vol.II: 376–8: ‘genus . . . natio . . . patria . . . sexus . . . educatio etdisciplina . . . habitus corporis . . . fortuna . . . in divite ac paupere . . . clarus an obscurus . . . liber anservus, maritus an caelebs’.

174 Quintilian 2001, V.10.27–8, vol.II: 378: ‘animi natura . . . studia quoque . . . Spectantur ante actadictaque.’

175 Quintilian 2001, V.10.30, vol.II: 380: ‘Ponunt in persona et nomen.’

236 The Machiavellian Attack

performed.176 These questions correspond to five categories which he listsas motive, place, time, mode and instrument.177 Quintilian occasionallyexpands these five considerations into six, adding the category of occasio, oropportunity. These categories, it must be stressed, are by no means specificto Quintilian’s series. Occasio, to single out only one example, is listed insimilar 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 ofthe agent under consideration (and so shift the orator into the parallel seriesof loci about persons); of where any particular action takes place, sincedifferent places sometimes call for different actions; of the timing of anaction, since there may be a time, as well as a place, for all kinds of actionsnot normally considered honourable or dishonourable; of the ‘mode’ ormanner in which something is done; and, lastly, whether a person has thenecessary ‘faculties’ or ‘instruments’, ‘resources’ or means to perform anaction, since the question at stake is ‘per quae’, literally, ‘through which anaction is completed’.179 Quintilian’s sixth category of occasio fits into thisfive-fold scheme under the category of time, where its cognate form casus isdiscussed at length. Here Quintilian admits that although he has includedit under the heading of tempus, the idea of chance, or casus, ‘itself providesa 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 anaction, as if it provided the starting point or initial context in which anaction is performed.181

The self-conscious generation of Machiavelli’s argument about actionsby way of these places is partly advertised in the Latin capita of his chapters.In Chapter IV, he explains ‘why the kingdom of Darius, conqueredby Alexander, did not rebel against his successors after Alexander’sdeath’, while Chapter XXIV relays ‘why the rulers of Italy have lost their

176 Quintilian 2001, V.10.32–3, vol.II: 382: ‘In omnibus porro quae fiunt quaeritur aut quare aut ubi autquando aut quo modo aut per quae facta sunt.’

177 See the discussion of each topic at Quintilian 2001, V.10.33–52, vol.II: 382–90.178 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.

179 I summarise the points raised at Quintilian 2001, V.10.33–52, vol.II: 382–90.180 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.’181 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) translatesthe Greek as ‘starting points of action’.

The strategy 237

states’.182 Chapter I supplies an answer to the question ‘quibus modis’ or‘by what means’ principalities are acquired.183 Chapter V explores ‘in whatway’ cities which used to be self-governing should be administered by theprince.184 The title of Chapter XVIII asks ‘in what way fides should bekept by princes’.185 Quomodo also appears in the heading of Chapters Xand XXV.186 Analysing action in terms of instrumentality – the means‘through which’ something is performed – is evident in Machiavelli’sdiscussion in Chapter VIII of cases where a principality is acquired‘through’ neither fortune nor virtue: the chapter is headed ‘De his qui perscelera ad principatum pervenere’.187 In Chapter XI, Machiavelli explainshow Pope Alexander VI acted ‘con lo instrumento del duca Valentino’.188

Machiavelli’s thoughts about the way in which considerations of place alterthe scope and types of action are observable in Chapter III.189 His frequentuse of the idea of occasio as a conceptual tool with which to analyse actionfurther 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 Romulusas exemplary rulers: Machiavelli says that ‘in examining their actions andtheir lives, one can see that they had nothing from fortuna other than theoccasione’.191 This component of Machiavelli’s explanations about eventsand their occasional contingency helps him to introduce considerablesubtlety into his account of how those who, ‘through their virtue and notthrough their fortuna, have become princes’.192 He goes on to explain that,‘without that occasione’ from fortuna, their virtue would have been able toachieve nothing; but that ‘without that virtue, the occasione would have passedin vain’.193 Sometimes virtuous actions commence in sheer contingency.

182 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25 (Machiavelli 1988: 15): ‘Cur Darii regnum quod Alexander occupaverat asuccessoribus suis post Alexandri mortem non defecit’; Ch. XXIV: 97 (Machiavelli 1988: 83): ‘Cur Italiaeprincipes regnum amiserunt.’

183 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Quot sint genera principatuum et quibus modis acquirantur.’184 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 28: ‘Quomodo administrandae sunt civitates vel principatus, qui antequam

occuparentur, suis legibus vivebant.’185 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVIII: 72: ‘Quomodo fides a principibus sit servanda.’186 See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48; Ch.XXV: 98. 187 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40.188 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 52 (referring to Cesare Borgia).189 See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 16–25. 190 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XI: 52.191 Machiavelli 1960, Ch. VI: 31: ‘Et esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino

altro dalla fortuna che la occasione.’192 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 30: ‘quelli che per propria virtu e non per fortuna sono diventati principi’.193 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’.

238 The Machiavellian Attack

Quintilian’s account of how to further an argument by means ofdefinition is vital to Machiavelli’s work. Definition is ‘an accurate, lucidand brief expression of a fact’.194 It often comprises four elements: ‘Genus,Species, Difference, and Property’.195 Their utility varies according to thesort of questioning which an orator wants to pursue and the degree ofspecificity which he might want to introduce. In this respect, proper-ties and differentiae are often vital to the success of a definition. AsQuintilian puts it, ‘a definition is confirmed by Properties, destroyed byDifferentiae’.196 A defining property of man, for instance, is speech: healone has this property, so an object which speaks will necessarily be aman.197 But often properties are shared between several objects. Heat, forinstance, is a property of a fire, but of many other things besides.Consequently, to assert the presence of heat in an object doesn’t helpnail down its definition very helpfully as ‘a fire’.198 Being more specificrequires 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 thegenus is divided into species and the species itself is then discerned’.200

So, in the case of defining ‘man’, ‘ ‘‘Animal’’ is the Genus, ‘‘mortal’’ theSpecies, ‘‘terrestrial’’ or ‘‘biped’’ the differentia’. Here the qualities of‘terrestrial’ or ‘biped’ do not mark out properties of ‘man’ yet; but theydo help to differentiate him from the species of mortals which are ‘marine’or ‘quadruped’. ‘Man is rational’ gets you to the final species, according toQuintilian’s classification.201 Quintilian puts ‘horse’ through the samescheme: ‘the Genus is ‘‘animal’’, the Species ‘‘mortal’’, the Differentia‘‘non rational’’ . . . the Property ‘‘neighing’’’.202 The differential helps ruleout man, who shares with a horse the property of being mortal.

These discussions lead Quintilian to Cicero’s conception of definitionin 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 brevitercomprensa verbis enuntiatio.’

195 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.3, vol.III: 218: ‘Constat maxime, sicut est dictum, genere specie differentibuspropriis.’ See also V.10.55, vol.II: 392: ‘Finitioni subiecta maxime videntur genus species differensproprium.’

196 Quintilian 2001, V.10.58, vol.II: 394 (translation at 395): ‘Propriis confirmatur finitio, differentibussolvitur.’

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.

The strategy 239

Other (for if you deny the applicability of a name, you always have topropose a better one)’.203 But Quintilian thinks it is more complicatedthan that. Sometimes, as an orator, you simply ask whether a word is theright one for the thing under description.204 That is, you just affirm ordeny the applicability of the description, without proffering an alternativedescription. Sometimes, however, an orator does discuss whether one oftwo terms is applicable, often because it is highly useful to the cause tospecify what else it might be.205 In a case about a killing, for instance, onemight want to say that what is alleged to be a case of murder is in fact betterdescribed as an instance of manslaughter. A third and final approachmight 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 comeunder the same description, even though each is currently classed differ-ently.206 The argument thus involves you in extending a definition to covera thing under discussion by analysing it in relation to another thing whichis uncontroversially described by the terminology you wish to appro-priate.207 These last two approaches engage the orator who is giving adefinition either in acts of distinction or in acts of extension. Quintiliangoes on to name the process of distinction as paradiastole, which heclassifies 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 Figureat all’.208

But paradiastole is just one of the argumentative techniques usefulfor defining things which Machiavelli acquires from the Roman theorist.Another extraordinarily prominent procedure in Machiavelli’s text isdescribed by Quintilian as ‘division’. Again reiterating a Ciceronian doc-trine, Quintilian repeats that ‘division is an aid to definition’.209 To dividematerial in an argument involves allocating it across differentia, and it

203 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.8, vol.III: 220: ‘Quamquam autem dissentire vix audeo a Cicerone, quimultos secutus auctores dicit finitionem esse de eodem et de altero (semper enim neganti aliquodesse nomen dicendum quod sit potius)’ (referring to Cicero, Topica, 84).

204 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘Nam interim convenit unum quaerere an hoc sit.’205 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).’206 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 generislitibus quaeritur an etiam hoc, quia nomen de quo ambigitur utique in alia re certum est.’

207 Quintilian 2001, VII.3.9, vol.III: 222: ‘In omnibus autem huius generis litibus quaeritur an etiamhoc, quia nomen de quo ambigitur utique in alia re certum est.’

208 Quintilian 2001, IX.3.65, vol.IV: 138: ‘Huic diversam volunt distinctionem, cui dant nomenpaqadiarskgm, qui similia discernuntur . . . Quod totum pendet ex finitione, ideoque an figurasit dubito.’

209 Quintilian 2001, V.10.63, vol.II: 396: ‘Divisione autem adiuvari finitionem docet.’

240 The Machiavellian Attack

sometimes involves dividing a genre into various forms or species.210 Onother occasions, we use division in order to establish just one point in aproof: ‘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 isto make one of those two criteria apply to him. You do not need both. Youmerely need to use the division to make your proof valid. A refutation ofthe same point, however, has to prove that the man is not a citizen becausehe was neither born one nor been made one: both sides of the divisionneed eliminating in the refutation.212 Here, too, you need to bring out thedivision to make your refutation complete. But sometimes the scenario isnot just about a basic division. It can get much more complex than one oftwo specified alternatives, and you need to eliminate all of them, or all butone of them, in order to leave only one remaining possibility that you wishto isolate and underline. Quintilian’s example is illuminating: ‘This slavewhom you are claiming is either your homeborn slave, or was bought, orgiven to you, or left to you as a legacy, or captured from the enemy, orbelongs to someone else.’213 If you eliminate all but the last possibilityin this case, you successfully destroy the claim. Another way of using theprocedure is to offer your opponent one of two propositions, the choice ofeither of which will damage their case.214 Or else you can put forward twocontrary propositions, either of which will help you make your point.215

Division is highly effective under tight oratorical control, and Quintilianregards Cicero as a master of it.216

The most obvious place in Machiavelli’s text where almost all of theseargumentative techniques associated with definition are put into practice isChapter I. But they are also deployed to great effect in Chapters XII andXIII. Here, he is proving the point which he reiterates at the close ofChapter XIII, declaring: ‘I conclude, then, that without its own army, noprincipality is secure.’217 He opens his proof at the beginning of ChapterXII – which is partially entitled ‘how many genera of army there are’, with

210 See Quintilian 2001, V.10.63, vol.II: 396.211 Quintilian 2001, V.10.65, vol.II: 398: ‘ut sit civis, aut natus sit oportet aut factus’.212 Quintilian 2001, V.10.65, vol.II: 398: ‘utrumque tollendum est: nec natus nec factus’.213 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’.214 Quintilian 2001, V.10.68, vol.II: 400: ‘vel cum duo ponentur inter se contraria, quorum tenuisse

utrumlibet sufficiet’.215 Quintilian 2001, V.10.70, vol.II: 400: ‘Interim duo ita proponuntur ut utrumlibet electum idem

efficiat.’216 See the citations at Quintilian 2001, V.10.68–70, vol.II: 400.217 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61: ‘Concludo, adunque, che, sanza avere arme proprie, nessuno

principato e sicuro.’

The strategy 241

the claim that ‘the arms with which a prince defends his state are either hisown, 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 thebipartite ‘Same and Other’ principle.219 Machiavelli still wants to arguethat principalities should be maintained only with one’s own arms, but ashe does so, he now divides the category of ‘others’, naming the alternatives.He then systematically eliminates them from consideration, leaving ‘one’sown arms’ as the only type worth considering. Machiavelli divides withinthe divisions. Mercenary generals are ‘either excellent men, or not’, hepronounces, and proceeds to show how the truth of either of these twopropositions proves his point about their uselessness.220 If they are excellent,‘you cannot trust them’ on account of their ambition; ‘if the general is notvirtuous, he ruins you through his ordinariness’.221 Machiavelli’s rhetoricalperformance is commanding and its satirical touch so effective in part becausehe relishes these ways of dividing and conquering opposing arguments.

Aside from these ‘arguments’, Machiavelli relies on two further types ofartificial proof discussed by Quintilian. The most prominent is the exam-ple. Examples constitute proofs which ‘are adduced extrinsically’ by theorator, meaning that they are brought to bear on one’s argument fromoutside the materia of the case itself.222 Quintilian uses the Latin wordexemplum to translate the Greek notion of paradeigma, which is employed‘both generally of any matching of similar things, and especially withreference to things which rest on the authority of history’.223 An exemplumthus embodies the idea of similitude. But Quintilian also rates the author-ity of history highly, describing the historical example as ‘the mention ofan event which either took place or is treated as having taken place, in orderto make your point convincing’.224 In a speech, we should assess whether

218 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XII: 53: ‘Quot sint genera militiae et de mercenariis militibus’; ‘l’arme con lequali uno principe defende el suo stato, o le sono proprie, o le sono mercenarie, o ausiliarie o miste.’

219 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15.220 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, tirovina per lo ordinario.’

221 Machiavelli 1960, Ch. XII: 54.222 Quintilian 2001, V.11.1, vol.II: 430: ‘Tertium genus, ex iis quae extrinsecus adducuntur in causam,

Graeci vocant paqa! deicla . . . . ipsi appellemus exemplum.’223 Quintilian 2001, V.11.1, vol.II: 430: ‘generaliter usi sunt in omni similium adpositione et specialiter

in iis quae rerum gestarum auctoritate nituntur’.224 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 quodintenderis commemoratio.’

242 The Machiavellian Attack

the example is wholly or partly similar to the point we want to prove, ‘sothat we can take either all of its features into use or only the potenti-ally useful ones’.225 Sometimes we want to exemplify a straightforwardlikeness; sometimes we use examples to bring out contrary points. Othermeans of working these historical proofs are moving ‘from greater tolesser’ or ‘from lesser to greater’ examples rather than between strictlyparallel situations.226 Quintilian repeatedly uses Cicero to illustrate thesemethods. One could as easily turn to Machiavelli. No less varied isMachiavelli’s use of all the types of ‘authority’ which Quintilian cata-logues as forms of ‘extrinsic’ proof ‘adduced to support a cause’.227

Among the dicta and sententiae of De principatibus which are attributableto ‘wise men’, Machiavelli approvingly refers in Chapter XIII to Tacitus,reporting that ‘wise men have always thought and held ‘‘quod nihil sittam 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 ‘uncertainauthorship’ which have become ‘vulgar’, Machiavelli mentions the ‘triteproverb’ that ‘he who builds upon the people, builds upon mud’.230

Among those attributable to ‘distinguished citizens’, Machiavelli’s refer-ence in Chapter XII to the ‘sins’ of Italy is believed to be an appropri-ation of an opinion of Savonarola.231 Quintilian also sees how you canundermine your opponent’s authority by using him as an ‘authority’ foryour own case: you can take ‘some remark or action of the judge or youropponent or your opponent’s advocate in order to strengthen your

225 Quintilian 2001, V.11.6, vol.II: 432: ‘Intuendum igitur est totum simile sit an ex parte, ut aut omniaex eo sumamus aut quae utilia erunt.’

226 For these variants, see Quintilian 2001, V.11.9–17, vol.II: 434–8.227 Quintilian 2001, V.11.36, vol.II: 450: ‘Adhibebitur extrinsecus in causam et auctoritas.’228 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 esentenzia delli uomini savi ‘‘quod nihil sit tam infirmum aut instabile quam fama potentiae non suavi nixa’’’ (citing Tacitus, Annals, XIII, 19).

229 For Virgil, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 69; for Petrarch, Ch.XXVI: 105.230 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 receptasunt hoc ipso, quod incertum auctorem habent, velut omnium fiunt . . .’ The point is exemplified atMachiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 47: ‘quello proverbio trito, che chi fonda in sul populo, fonda in sulfango’.

231 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.

The strategy 243

point’.232 Machiavelli’s comment about liberum arbitrium in his refutatiois merely one instance of his considerable expertise in this field.

T H E T H E O R Y O F O R N A T U S

But undoubtedly the most dramatic effect of Quintilianic doctrine uponthe constitution of Machiavelli’s arguments is observable in his use ofimagery. Books 8 and 9 of Institutio oratoria lay out Quintilian’s theoryof ornatus. They provided the Renaissance with a systematic classificationand analysis of the various tropes and figures of speech and of thoughtwhich primarily constitute the ornamenta of rhetorical discourse.233 Ashumanists like Machiavelli saw very clearly, these two books underlinethe utter indispensability of figurative language to the eloquent orator.Quintilian is adamant that you can have all the rhetorical training in theworld and yet, if you do not know how to deliver your speech ornate, youhave no hope of qualifying as truly eloquent. Quintilian shows how speechcan be made illuminating and brilliant by the inventive use of singlewords.234 He also maintains that the apposite use of sententiae is crucialboth to proof and to ornamentation.235 He calls sententiae the ‘highlights ofan oration’ and the ‘eyes of eloquence’.236 But most of the theory consists inexplaining how to create verbal ornatus through the use of a combinationof words in tropes and figures. Although an essential function of orna-menting speech is making expressions of thoughts ‘shinier’, there is farmore at stake than stylistic polish to ensuring that you are ornatus.237 ForQuintilian explains that eloquence means ‘to bring out and communicateto an audience the thoughts you have formed in your mind’; and thisinvolves 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 Quintilian 2001, V.11.43, vol.II: 454: ‘Nonnumquam contingit iudicis quoque aut adversarii aut eiusqui ex diverso agit dictum aliquod aut factum adsumere qui ex diverso agit dictum aliquod autfactum adsumere ad eorum quae intendimus fidem.’

233 For a magisterial explication of the theory and its significance to Renaissance readers, see Skinner1996: 181–98.

234 See Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.15–40, vol.III: 346–62.235 See Quintilian 2001, VIII.5.1–35, vol. III: 406–24.236 Quintilian 2001, VIII.5.34, vol.III: 422–4: ‘Ego vero haec lumina orationis velut oculos quosdam

esse eloquentiae credo.’237 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, quodproprie dixeris cultum.’

238 Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem.15, vol.III: 316: ‘Eloqui enim est omnia quae mente conceperispromere atque ad audientis perferre’; VIII.3.62, vol.III: 374: ‘Magna virtus res de quibus loquimurclare atque ut cerni videantur enuntiare.’

244 The Machiavellian Attack

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 ofyour imagination. This is the fundamental function of ornamenta. Theyenable the orator to engage in a form of vivid ‘representation.’239 If you arenot equipped with this communicative capacity as an orator, Quintilianwarns, the rest of his instruction ‘is useless, like a sword that is put upand will not come out of its scabbard’.240 To be ornatus means to be armedfor battle. The orator must ‘commend himself’ by showing through‘elegance and ornatus’ that he is ‘fighting with weapons which are notonly effective but polished and gleaming’.241 The frequency and complex-ity of Machiavelli’s deployment of the tropes and figures at the outsetmake it evident that he is going into battle armed to the teeth.

Machiavelli’s attack on the doctrines of the speculum principis is drawnup in terms closely derived from this Quintilianic theory of rhetoricalrepresentation inasmuch as it is explicitly directed at immagini.242 InChapter XV, Machiavelli turns from principalities and arms to considerthe qualities of the prince. He opens by declaring that ‘it now remains tosee what sort of ways and means of government a prince must use withsubjects and with friends’.243 Machiavelli is committed to making us ‘see’those ways and means. Before he does so, he admits that many have writtenabout this very issue. Yet ‘in disputing this subject’, he has found itnecessary ‘to depart very greatly’ from the ‘ordini’ of the others.244 Hegoes on to describe his approach:

239 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.61–4, vol.III: 374–6: ‘qui plus est evidentia vel, ut alii dicunt, repraesentatioquam perspicuitas, et illud patet, hoc se quodam modo ostendit, inter ornamenta ponamus’. Forthe representation of the ‘tota rerum imago’ in pictorial terms, see VIII.3.63, vol.III: 376; forCicero’s mastery in ‘conceiving images’, see VIII.3.64, vol.III: 376.

240 Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem.15, vol.III: 316: ‘sine quo supervacua sunt priora et similia gladiocondito atque intra vaginam suam haerenti’.

241 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.2, vol.III: 340: ‘Cultu vero atque ornatu se quoque commendat ipse quidicit . . . nec fortibus modo sed etiam fulgentibus armis proeliatur.’

242 For the language of representation and images in the Quintilianic theory of ornatus, see Quintilian2001, VIII.3.61–4, vol.III: 374–6: ‘quia plus est evidentia vel, ut alii dicunt, repraesentatio quamperspicuitas, et illud patet, hoc se quodam modo ostendit, inter ornamenta ponamus . . . Est igiturunum genus, quo tota rerum imago quodam modo verbis depingitur . . . Plurimum in hoc generesicut 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 tunicaquetalari muliercula nixus in litore’’, non solum ipsos intueri videatur et locum et habitum, sedquaedam etiam ex iis quae dicta non sunt sibi ipse adstruat?’

243 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 64: ‘Resta ora a vedere quali debbano essere e’ modi e governi di unoprincipe con sudditi o con li amici.’

244 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘partendomi, massime nel disputare questa materia, dalli ordini dellialtri’.

The strategy 245

It has seemed to me more conveniente to concentrate on the actual truth of thematter rather than on its image. For many have imagined republics and princi-palities 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 whichmainly derive from his concerns about correct partitioning, he is highlyattentive to the tenses which he employs to say what he has done, what he isdoing and what he is about to do. He has just spent fourteen chapterssystematically examining various principalities and the way in whichthey are acquired. This is his departure from the conventional ordini.Machiavelli’s text is extraordinary because it does not start with the virtuesof the prince. It starts with the entity which he calls the principality. Andhis account of it now necessitates a radically different image of the personof 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 aconsequence of the first part of his argument.246 His argument is aboutcause and effect. His claim is that his prince is fit to govern what princi-palities are actually like, rather than some superimposed and false image ofthem.

In abusing the opposition’s view as ‘imagined’ and contrasting it withthe truth of things, Machiavelli is exploiting the sense of the fantastical inthe process of imagining things. Yet he can hardly be said to have turned hisback on the power of imagery in his own theory. There are few texts morememorable than Machiavelli’s precisely because it is immensely imagina-tive, spectacularly controversial. It lays down a rival account of the thing, orres, under forensic investigation in his text by re-representing it accordingto all the techniques of ornatus at his disposal. This practice cruciallyensures the powerful visibility of his own case. In so doing, he is indebtedto the account of the role of imagery in the production of belief and therepresentation of things in classical rhetorical procedure.

T H E V I S I B I L I T Y O F O R N A M E N T S

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

245 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 65: ‘mi e parso piu conveniente andare drieto alla verita effetuale dellacosa, che alla immaginazione di essa. E molti si sono immaginati repubbliche e principati che non sisono mai visti ne conosciuti essere in vero’.

246 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XV: 64: ‘quali debbano essere e’ modi e governi di uno principe con sudditi ocon li amici’.

246 The Machiavellian Attack

exordium with a sentence which carefully directs the eyes of his audiencetowards the concept of ornamenta:

Those who desire to win favour with a prince usually approach him with thingsfrom among their possessions that are very dear to them, or with things that theysee 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 theirgrand position.247

Having delineated the brilliant and belligerent characteristics of physicalornamenta, Machiavelli starts to ‘turn’ the vision of his audience bycommencing an extensive metaphor – the ‘commonest and by far themost beautiful’ trope, according to Quintilian – in his second sentence:248

Wishing to offer myself to Your Magnificence with some proof of my servitudeto you, I have not found among my belongings anything which I hold dearer orvalue more greatly than my knowledge of the actions of great men, learnedthrough long experience of modern matters and a continual reading of ancientaffairs: having examined and thought through these things at length and with greatdiligence, I have summarised them in a small volume which I now send to YourMagnificence.249

A mass of figures of addition and amplification bring this lengthysentence to its climax. But at its heart lies the idea of mental furniture,the notion that knowledge can form part of one’s suppellettile. AsMachiavelli’s trope makes clear, that knowledge is already proving to beas ornamented as the physical objects normally proffered to princes. Themetaphor is part of an allegory about rhetorical invention. Machiavellihas ‘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

247 Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Sogliono el piu delle volte coloro che desiderano acquistare grazia appressouno Principe, farseli incontro con quelle cose che infra le loro abbino piu care, o delle qualivegghino 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.’

248 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.4, vol.III: 426: ‘frequentissimus est tum longe pulcherrimus, tralationedico, quae lesauoqa! Graece vocatur’.

249 Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Desiderando io adunque offerirmi alla vostra Magnificenza con qualchetestimone della servitu mia verso di quella, non ho trovato intra la mia suppellettile cosa, quale ioabbia piu cara o tanto esistimi, quanto la cognizione delle azioni delle uomini grandi, imparata conuna lunga esperienza delle cose moderne et una continua lezione delle antique: le quali avendo iocon gran diligenzia lungamente escogitate et esaminate et ora in uno piccolo volume ridotte, mandoalla Magnificenzia vostra.’

The strategy 247

invention of proofs. In underlining the extent of his reading, Machiavellisimultaneously indicates one of its effects. Reading is vital to theeloquent orator because it lends copiousness to style; it yields a ‘stockof ideas and a stock of words’. Think of the cultivation of copiousness,says Quintilian, as the accumulation of riches.250 The richness ofMachiavelli’s style becomes immediately evident in his ‘belongings’.The word that Machiavelli chooses here – suppellettile – is a translationof the Latin substantive supellex, which means household furniture.Machiavelli exploits the fact that suppellettile is a compound derivationfrom super and lego. So when he says that the dearest thing among hissuppellettile is a knowledge derived from ‘continual reading’, he is perhapsmaking a gently punning allusion, by way of ‘oratorical urbanity’, to theliteral meaning of a word which had come to be used metaphorically.251

This is a very Quintilianic thing to do: ‘an opportune urbanity’ deployedduring the orator’s attempts to insinuate himself into his audience’sgoodwill can help refresh the judge, secure his attention and relievetedium.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 classicalconcern about the way in which supellex indicates moral character. OneRoman moralist extremely concerned about what houses and their decorsay about us is Seneca in his letters.253 But Machiavelli’s punning use of theword supellex is closer to another context. Among the classical rhetoricians,supellex belongs to a way of talking figuratively about well-furnishedspeech. The idea at work here is that one’s speech is a construction, andits decor is revealing of its architect and its inhabitant. For these theorists,the question is less a matter of austere decor and more one of acquiringappropriate furnishings.

The distinction of being a well-furnished orator is acclaimed withespecial vividness by Cicero in De oratore. A great speaker, alleges Cicero,should strive to enrich his work with so broad a knowledge of ethical andphilosophical matters that it justifies the observation that one has ‘never

250 Quintilian 2001, X.1.5, vol.IV: 254: ‘Num ergo dubium est quin ei velut opes sint quaedamparandae, 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.

251 Quintilian 2001, VI.3.14, vol.III: 68: ‘oratoria urbanitas rara’.252 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.49, vol.II: 208: ‘Et urbanitas oportuna reficit animos et undecumque petita

iudicis voluptas levat taedium.’253 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.

248 The Machiavellian Attack

observed furniture so sumptuous in the outfit of an orator’.254 The sameimage is taken up by Quintilian at the beginning of Book 8 – the bookwhich lays out his theory of ornatus – where he exploits the literal meaningof the word in order to stress how a properly educated orator will have‘furnished himself with copious verbal resources by extensive and appro-priate reading’.255 Machiavelli is very closely adhering to this precept, as heis more generally to the Quintilianic theory of ornatus. For when he saysthat the most precious item of his suppellettile has been ‘imparata’ by a‘continua lezione’ of the ancients, his phrasing of this apparently modestboast is subtly imitative of Quintilian’s own words – ‘tum lectione multaet idonea copiosam sibi verborum supellectilem compararit’.256 Further-more, as Godman suggests, those words of Quintilian had almost certainlyacquired a currency in Florentine humanist circles thanks to Poliziano.257

Machiavelli’s furnishings as an orator are supplied from his immersionin this same literature. But his allusion is also a proof of the boast.In reformulating this precept, Machiavelli is inventively drawing upon adoctrine from Quintilian as testimony of his own diligence and enrichmentas a student of classical antiquity. And he is also brilliantly ornamenting hisspeech.

Machiavelli then starts to advance his moral credentials as a personequipped ‘to discuss the rules of government by princes’, notwithstandingthe fact that he is ‘a man of low and infirm state’.258 His act of self-abasement is informed by a specifically Quintilianic precept about thecreation of rhetorical ethos. Quintilian says that the benevolence of thosewho judge our arguments can be won in the proem by appealing eitherto personal qualities – those of the speaker, those of the judge, even thoseof our opponent – or to qualities of the subject-matter, or to both.259 Hisinsistence that his students can exert a ‘decisive influence’ on the outcomeof their cause if they are believed to be good people is hardly novel to

254 Cicero 1942, I.161–5, vol I: 110–114: ‘et tamquam in aliquam locupletem ac refertam domumvenerim, 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 Crassidivitias atque ornamenta eius ingenii per quaedam involucra atque integumenta perspexi . . . inoratoris vero instrumento tam lautam supellectilem numquam videram.’

255 Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 28, vol.III: 320: ‘tum lectione multa et idonea copiosam sibiverborum supellectilem compararit’.

256 Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 28, vol.III: 320.257 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: 277.258 Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Ne voglio sia reputata presunzione, se uno uomo di basso et infimo stato

ardisce discorrere e regolare e’ governi de’ principi.’259 See Quintilian 2001, IV.1.6–50, vol.II: 182–204.

The strategy 249

rhetorical theory.260 But Quintilian makes one peculiar point: orators canwin themselves ‘tacit approval’ if they declare themselves ‘infirm, unpre-pared, no match for the talents of the opposing party’.261 And Quintilianregularly practises what he preaches. In his proem to the treatise, he dulyannounces his intention to describe the ideal orator’s persona ‘as well as myinfirmitas will allow’.262

Why does it help to stress our infirmity as orators? Quintilian observesthat people are generally favourable towards others experiencing difficul-ties.263 An orator who appears to be labouring under any such difficultywill thus be bound to excite some sympathy in his audience. But thisapproach, he adds, is particularly tactical when coming before a judge forthe first time. If a judge does not feel intimidated about his own ability todeliver a just verdict by an advocate who immediately bristles with clever-ness and confidence, he is likely to be better disposed to listen kindly andattentively to what is about to be said.264 Quintilian refers approvinglyto ‘the ancient orators’ trick of concealing their eloquence’.265 The wordthat he uses to describe the art of concealing one’s own oratorical skill issimulatio. His general advice is that ‘artifices and stratagems . . . should bekept hidden’.266 He warns, however, that this is the sum of the secrecythat true eloquence can enjoy, since it will be invariably evident in ourchoice of words, in the profundity of the sententiae which we express, inthe elegance of our figures.267 Quintilian’s basic but subtle point is thatwhile true eloquence seems effortless only as a result of great artistry, itneed never be ostentatious. And he is adamant that ‘nowhere else is it morenecessary to be careful to avoid suspicion’ than in the prologue, whichis ‘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

260 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.7, vol.II: 182: ‘plurimum tamen ad omnia momenti est in hoc positum, si virbonus creditur’. For the establishing of ethos among a wider range of Roman theorists, see Skinner1996: 127–31.

261 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.8, vol.II: 182: ‘ita quaedam in his quoque commendatio tacita, si nos infirmosinparatos inpares agentium contra ingeniis dixerimus’.

262 Quintilian 2001, 1.Proem.22, vol.I: 62: ‘quantum nostra valebit infirmitas dissereremus’.263 See Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184.264 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184: ‘et iudex religiosus libentissime patronum audit quem iustitiae

suae minime timet’.265 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.9, vol.II: 184: ‘Inde illa veterum circa occultandam eloquentiam simulatio.’266 Quintilian 2001, XII.9.5, vol.V: 272: ‘Quare artes quidem et consilia lateant et quidquid si

deprenditur perit.’267 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 hocipsum ostentanda non sunt, quod apparent.’

250 The Machiavellian Attack

judge’.268 Indeed, the very task of avoiding the impression that one is usingone’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 high-sounding words or fine phrases, or with any other sort of allurement or externalornament (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, onlythe 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 orderto let the materia of the case speak for itself, and so following a well-definedrhetorical path through the exordium by stressing the virtues of the caseitself. But in performing this task, the orator does not abandon hiseloquence; on the contrary, it requires the greatest dissimulating art.And Machiavelli, upon closer inspection, is engaged in the densest ofQuintilianic 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 aresubjected’ to it.271 Quintilian insists that you must use the gratia varietatis –the charm of variety – to relieve monotony.272 An oration without varietasis the ‘surest sign of a style which is without art’. It causes an unrelentingsense of tedium which is ‘most graceless’ in its artlessness.273 ThenMachiavelli switches to repetition: he uses the verb ornare twice as well asits cognate ornamenta in the very sentence in which he seems to beeschewing the benefits which ornamenta bring. No orator worth his salt

268 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.56, vol.II: 206–8: ‘Nec magis diligenter ne suspecti simus ulla parte vitandumest, propter quod minime ostentari debet in principiis cura, quia videtur ars omnis dicentis contraiudicem adhiberi.’

269 Quintilian 2001, IV.1.56, vol.II: 208: ‘Sed ipsum istud evitare summae artis.’270 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 moltisogliono le loro cose descrivere et ornare; perche io ho voluto, o che veruna cosa la onori, o chesolamente la varieta della materia e la gravita del subietto la facci grata.’

271 Quintilian 2001, II.21.4–5, vol.I: 408: ‘Ego (neque id sine auctoribus) materiam esse rhetoricesiudico omnes res quaecumque ei ad dicendum subiectae erunt . . . Et Cicero quodam loco materiamrhetorices vocat res quae subiectae sint ei, sed certas demum putat esse subiectas’ (citing Cicero, Deinventione, 1.7).

272 Quintilian 2001, IX.4.43, vol.IV: 184: ‘cum virtutes etiam ipsae taedium pariant nisi gratiavarietatis’.

273 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.52, vol.III: 368: ‘Peior hac o! loei! deia; quae nulla varietatis gratia levattaedium atque est tota coloris unius.’

The strategy 251

indulges carelessly in such repetitious patterns. Knowing ‘how to fix somepoints in the mind by repetition’ is a basic lesson.274 Machiavelli isemphatically amplifying the theme of ornatus in his proclamation to bedoing no such thing. He does so amid some glaring ornamenta. His prose isstudded with flashy vocabulary. Take his claim that his own work is freeof ‘qualunque altro lenocinio o ornamento estrinseco’. The category ofextrinseco is profoundly Quintilianic. Having introduced it as a conceptualtool in Book 2, the Roman theorist uses the notion of things ‘extrinsic’throughout the Institutio.275 Similarly, the idea that an orator might seek toseduce his audience by embellishing his discourse with meretricious leno-cinia is peculiarly Quintilianic. In Book 4 of the Institutio, Quintilian saysthat the narratio should be adorned only with figures which enable thespeaker to introduce a modicum of variety in a place where ‘other lenociniaare absent’.276 Elsewhere he derides the stylistic decadence of his contem-poraries – ‘we who seek not ornamenta but lenocinia’ – which manifestsitself in their reliance upon obscure, overblown figures.277 And in hisconcluding book he contends that ‘good men will never lack for honour-able words’ because ‘even if their matter lacks lenocinia, its own nature willbe ornament enough’.278 Quintilian contrasts the unconvincing and super-ficial benefits of resorting to lenocinia with the ‘proper’ ornamentation ofa discourse in a manner appropriate to the nature of the case in hand. Heimagines speech as a body which needs to be made beautiful. The wholebody has to be properly tended: you have to bring out its natural qualities,rather than submerge them under an erratic and effeminate regime ofdepilation, nail-polishing and extravagant dressing.279

No sooner has Machiavelli made these rhetorical protestations thanwe 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 anerudite pun:

274 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.4, vol.IV: 36: ‘Quae delectatio aut quod mediocriter saltem docti hominisindicium nisi alia repetitione, alia commoratione infigere, digredi a re et redire ad propositumsuum scierit.’

275 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.

276 Quintilian 2001, IV.2.118, vol.II: 276: ‘Caret enim ceteris lenociniis expositio et, nisi commendeturhac venustate, iaceat necesse est.’

277 Quintilian 2001, VIII.Proem.26, vol.III: 320: ‘qui non ornamenta quaerimus sed lenocinia, quasivero sit ulla verborum nisi rei cohaerentium virtus’.

278 Quintilian 2001, XII.1.31, vol.V: 212: ‘quae etiam si lenociniis destituta sit, satis tamen natura suaornatur’.

279 For this image, see Quintilian 2001, VIII. Proem. 18–22, vol.III: 316–18.

252 The Machiavellian Attack

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

Quintilian classifies the anticipation of ‘possible objections’ as a figure ofthought 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 ‘particularlyappropriate in the prooemium’.282 Not only does Machiavelli follow theseinstructions; he slyly tells us that he is doing so. For the name whichQuintilian gives to this figure of thought is praesumptio.283 So whenMachiavelli 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 therhetorical theorist whose precepts he is following. Of course he wants it tobe thought a presumption: the anticipation of possible objections is whatpresumption is. Machiavelli carefully advertises his own figured speech ashe conveys his low and infirm state.

The inflection of his own rhetorical practice with the terminology ofrhetorical theory is a continuous feature of Machiavelli’s exordium. Heonly barely stops short of naming the rhetorical device which he employswhen forestalling his own ‘presumption’:

just as those who draw maps place themselves low on the plain in order to considerthe nature of the mountains and other high places, and place themselves high upon the mountains in order to understand the nature of the lowlands, so similarlyin order to understand well the nature of the people, one needs to be prince, andin order to understand well the nature of princes, one needs to be one of thepeople.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 aproof 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 Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Ne voglio sia reputata presunzione se un uomo di basso ed infimo statoardisce discorrere e regolare e’ governi de’ principi.’

281 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Mire vero in causis valet praesumptio, quae pqokglwi&dicitur, cum id quod obici potest occupamus.’

282 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Id neque in aliis partibus rarum est et praecipue prohoemioconvenit.’

283 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.16, vol.IV: 42: ‘Mire vero in causis valet praesumptio, quae pqokglwi&dicitur.’

284 Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘cosı come coloro che disegnono e’ paesi si pongano bassi nel piano aconsiderare la natura de’ monti e de’ luoghi alti, e per considerare quella de’ bassi si ponganoalto sopra monti, similmente a conoscere bene la natura de’ populi bisogna esser principe, et aconoscere bene quella de’ principi bisogna esser populare’.

285 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.72, vol.III: 380: ‘ad exprimendam rerum imaginem’.

The strategy 253

admirable’.286 But they should be founded upon the great rhetorical virtueof ‘bringing the object before our eyes not only plainly but concisely andrapidly’.287 The basic rule which Quintilian lays down is that ‘what isselected to illustrate something else needs to be clearer than the thing itillustrates’.288 This is one reason he prefers his orator to strive to connectthe simile ‘with the object of which it is an image, with a correspondencebetween the two halves of the comparison’, in order to produce an effectcalled ‘antapodosis’.289 Machiavelli’s simile accordingly lulls the audienceinto a sense of virtually exact correspondence by the repetition of wordsand syntax in each half of the comparison. It begins to look a little less thanstraightforward only when one sees that to follow the simile through withsuch exactitude leaves the audience orientated in a slightly unexpected way.For it would appear that the princely position is one of looking up to theheights to observe the nature of the people, while the act of looking downon the low land, correspondingly, is to assume the popular perspective onprinces. Quite apart from broaching the thought that there are two verydifferent points of view about princely government rather than a single,unilinear and ‘natural’ perspective shared by everyone within a single bodypolitic, the effect of this simile is to leave the audience momentarilyuncertain about Machiavelli’s own position.

One might conclude that Machiavelli’s eschewal of ornamento extrinsecois simply Quintilianic dissimulation. But his disclaimers are configured in apeculiarly overt way. To stress one’s infirmitas and deny one’s praesumptiomay pass for subtle attempts at concealing eloquence while silently declar-ing it. But to protest the absence of ‘extrinsic ornamentation’ at preciselythe moment that one is heavily ornamenting an already densely figuredproem with the very language of rhetorical theory about ornatus is tostretch things a little. Machiavelli turns his reader towards the formalqualities of his prose to the extent of actually naming its rhetorical ele-ments. Why is he making his armoury so visible? Why does he break cover?

286 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.74, vol.III: 382: ‘Sed illud quoque de quo in argumentis diximus similitu-dinis genus ornat orationem, facitque sublimem floridam iucundam mirabilem.’

287 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.82, vol.III: 386: ‘Huic subiacet virtus non solum aperte ponendi rem anteoculos, sed circumcise atque velociter.’

288 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.73, vol.III: 380: ‘Quo in genere id est praecipue custodiendum, ne id quodsimilitudinis gratia adscivimus aut obscurum sit aut ignotum: debet enim quod inlustrandaealterius rei gratia adsumitur ipsum clarius eo quod inluminat.’

289 Quintilian 2001, VIII.3.77–78, vol.III: 382: ‘Sed interim libera et separata est, interim, quod longeoptimum est, cum re cuius est imago conectitur, conlatione invicem respondente, quod facitredditio contraria, quae antapodosis dicitur.’

254 The Machiavellian Attack

It may already be evident that by far the sharpest weapon whichMachiavelli wields throughout his exordium is irony. Once again, hisinstructor in its proper use is Quintilian. Quintilian treats irony first ofall as a ‘contrary’ trope which comes under the general heading of alle-gory.290 As a form of allegory, it consists in an act of inversion in which thesense of what we are saying is not merely different from, but virtuallyentirely contrary to, what we actually say.291 The trope of irony is disclosedwhen 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 effectwhich Quintilian describes in terms of simulatio. So, for instance, he saysthat one can ‘blame with a pretence of praise’ and ‘praise with a pretence ofblame’ through the use of irony.293 One feature of irony as a trope is thatwhat 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’ asusually instances of deep sarcasm, and he links them to the mocking tropesof sarcasm, asteismos, antiphrasis, paraimia and mykterismos.295 Thesetropes similarly involve the speaker in contrariety and concealment inspeech acts, although to varying degrees.

Turning his attention to irony as a figure of thought, Quintilian indi-cates that although he prefers the Latinised form ironia, there are author-itative grounds for translating the Greek eironeia as dissimulatio.296 In Deoratore, Cicero had described dissimulatio as ‘saying one thing and meaninganother’ 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 invol-ves the orator in an extensive, complex and more submerged type of

290 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.54, vol.III: 456: ‘In eo vero genere quo contraria ostenduntur ironia est(inlusione vocant).’

291 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.44, vol.III: 450: ‘Allegoria, quam inversionem interpretantur, aut aliudverbis, aliud sensu ostendit, aut etiam interim contrarium’; see also VIII.6.54, vol.III: 456 (text inprevious note). For further discussion of Renaissance irony, see Knox 1989, ad indicem s.v.Quintilian.

292 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 456: ‘quae aut pronuntiatione intelligitur aut persona aut reinatura; nam si qua earum verbis dissentit, apparet diversam esse orationi voluntatem’.

293 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 455: ‘Et laudis autem simulatione detrahere et vituperationislaudare concessum est.’

294 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.55, vol.III: 456: ‘Quamquam in plurimis id tropis accidit, ut intersit de quoquidque dicatur, quia quod dicitur alibi verum est.’

295 Quintilian 2001, VIII.6.56, vol.III: 456: ‘Aliquando cum inrisu quodam contraria dicuntur iis quaeintellegi volunt.’ For the mocking tropes, see 8.6.57–9, vol.III: 458.

296 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.44, vol.IV: 58: ‘Ei0 qxmei! a inveni qui dissimulationem vocaret.’297 Cicero 1942, III.203, vol.II: 162: ‘tum illa quae maxime quasi irrepit in homines mentes, alia dicentis

ac significantis dissimulatio’.

The strategy 255

simulation.298 Sometimes it ‘can cover whole passages and sometimes theentire shape of a Cause’; sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, ‘a whole lifemay be held to illustrate Irony’.299 The figure is often produced by thesustained use of the trope, but of the other distinct types, the primary kindis called antiphrasis, an act of negation in which you deny what you are infact clearly doing.300 But to ‘pretend to be giving orders or permissions’ isanother form of irony, as is to ‘concede that our opponents have qualitieswhich we do not want them to seem to have’.301 Quintilian repeatedlydescribes ironic acts in terms of fiction, simulation and dissimulation; butthey are also ludicrous and powerful forms of ridicule. Even at its mostsevere, 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 toone’s cause, since ‘laughter possesses perhaps the most commanding andirresistible force of all’.304 Any orator seriously concerned with power has toreckon with it.305

Quintilian distinguishes irony from a range of related figures. The figureof emphasis is used ‘to drop a hint to show that what we want to beunderstood is not what we are saying’, helping to indicate ‘not necessarilythe opposite’ of what we are saying, ‘as in irony’, but nevertheless some-thing ‘hidden and left to the hearer to find’.306 Quintilian reports that thisway of coding one’s oratory is commonly practised by his contemporaries,recounting how some people now identify the habit of using figures of

298 See Quintilian 2001, IX.2.45–6, vol.IV: 58–60.299 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.46, vol.IV: 60: ‘et tota interim causae conformatio, cum etiam vita universa

ironiam habere videatur, qualis est visa Socratis’.300 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 anegando, quam nonnulli amsi! Uqarim vocant.’

301 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.48, vol.IV: 62: ‘Ei0 qxmei! a est et cum similes imperantibus vel permittentibussumus . . . et cum ea quae nolumus videri in adversariis esse concedimus eis.’

302 Quintilian 2001, VI.3.68, vol.III: 98: ‘Quid ironia? Nonne etiam quae severissime fit ioci paenegenus est?’

303 Quintilian 2001, VI.3.85, vol.III: 106–8: ‘Plurimus autem circa simulationem et dissimulationemrisus est, quae sunt vicina et prope eadem, sed simulatio est certam opinionem animi sui imitantis,dissimulatio aliena se parum intellegere fingentis.’

304 Quintilian 2001, VI.3.8, vol.III: 66: ‘habet vim nescio an imperiosissimam et cui repugnari minimepotest’.

305 For the power of laughter in the history of rhetorical theory, see Skinner 1996: 198–211; Skinner2002, III: 142–76.

306 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.64–5, vol.IV: 72: ‘Est emphasis etiam inter figuras . . . Iam enim ad id genusquod et frequentissimus est et expectari maxime credo veniendum est, in quo per quandamsuspicionem quod non dicimus accipi, non utique contrarium . . . sed aliud latens et auditoriquasi inveniendum.’

256 The Machiavellian Attack

thought in one’s oratory with these so-called ‘figured controversies’.307 Hethus furnishes his reader with an insight into the discursive practices of theRoman Principate under Domitian.308 Heavily figured forms of oratoryhave three principal uses: they can be pleasurable and elegant ways ofvarying one’s speech; but they can also be used either ‘if it is unsafe tospeak openly’ or else ‘if it is unseemly to do so’.309 Sometimes ‘powerfulpersonages present an obstruction’ so that your case cannot openly ‘bemaintained without blaming them’, so you need to speak figuratively.310 Ifyou want to avoid being detected, your use of figures should not be‘manifest’ but sparing and circumspect.311 Quintilian warns that ‘howevergood our figures, they must not be frequent. For they reveal themselveswhen 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 hisown eloquence. The man of low and infirm state is extremely well equip-ped. He stresses the unadorned nature of his prose by adorning it withwords, tropes and figures according to a theory of ornatus. Machiavelliconstantly negates what is occurring at a discursive level with a degree ofantiphrastic contrariness which is textbook irony. And yet he ends hisexordium as he begins it: on the subject of the visible. Like the personwhom he is about to hold forth, Machiavelli knows how and when tomodulate his dissimulations. The point of his proem is about seeingornamentation, not about concealing it. Machiavelli makes visible hisown figured speech. He arms the audience with the means of decipheringhis disarming, dissembling strategies. He breaks all the rules of the unos-tentatiously eloquent Quintilianic orator.

The movement between dissimulation and self-disclosure is visible inthe concluding paragraph. It begins with a conventional example of onetype of ironic statement. The man of ‘low and infirm state’ imperiouslyissues an order to his prince:

307 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.65, vol.IV: 72: ‘unde controversiae figuratae dicuntur’.308 For this theme, see especially Bartsch 1994: 93–7.309 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 magisquam si relatio sit recta delectat.’

310 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.68, vol.IV: 74: ‘cum personae potentes obstant sine quarum reprensioneteneri causa non possit’.

311 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.69, vol.IV: 74: ‘Ideoque hoc parcius et circumspectius faciendum est, quianihil interest quo modo offendas, et aperta figura perdit hoc ipsum quod figura est . . . in primis nesint manifestae.’

312 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.72, vol.IV: 76: ‘Sed ne si optimae quidem sint esse debent frequentes. Namdensitate ipsa figurae aperiuntur.’

The strategy 257

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

Here Machiavelli is only apparently rehearsing the convention of reassur-ing the prince that he already has the necessary virtues to ensure goodprincely rule. In fact, he says nothing about princely virtue. He sticks to‘qualities’ and ‘fortuna’. The diligent reading which he makes the emphaticcondition of the prince’s future understanding of Machiavelli’s ‘extremedesire’ will reveal to him that here, as elsewhere, Machiavelli is being deeplyironic. Complimenting a prince for his fortuna will turn out to be nocompliment at all; making it coterminous with Machiavelli’s own appal-ling misfortune is perhaps an early sign of one of his deepest aspirations forhis text. His apparent praise of the distinctively princely qualities of theperson before him – in his declaration that sua umanita will constrain himto accept Machiavelli’s gift – may be seen to be similarly implicated in thetrope of irony.314 For Machiavelli thereby attributes to his prince a qualitywhich, as he proceeds to show, fatally obliges him and often helps to ensurehis destruction rather than his greatness.

As Machiavelli closes, some of the familiar imagery of the speculumprincipis genre starts to shift. For the view of the fortunate prince wholooks down ‘dalla apice della sua altezza’ upon an indignant Machiavelli isa perspective constructed out of eyes turned downwards to the low places:‘volgera gli occhi in questi luoghi bassi’. The descriptions of places throughthe use of spectacular imagery is much commended by Quintilian, whotells 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 carriedby 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 Machiavelli 1960: 14: ‘Pigli adunque vostra Magnificenzia questo piccolo dono con quello animoche io lo mando; il quale se da quella fia diligentemente considerato e letto, vi conoscera drento unoestremo mio desiderio, che Lei pervenga a quella grandezza che la fortuna e le altre sua qualita lipromettano. E, se vostra Magnificenzia dallo apice della sua altezza qualche volta volgera li occhi inquesti luoghi bassi, conoscera quanto io indegnamente sopporti una grande e continua malignita difortuna.’

314 Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘confido assai che per sua umanita li debba essere accetta’.315 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.44, vol.IV: 58: ‘Locorum quoque dilucida et significans descriptio eidem

virtuti adsignatur a quibus, alii sopocqaUi! am dicunt.’316 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.’

258 The Machiavellian Attack

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

317 Seneca 1928a, I.1.1–2: 356: ‘immittere oculos in hanc immensam multitudinem . . . qualem quisquesortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est; quid cuique mortalium Fortuna datum velit’.

318 Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 360–2: ‘Multa illos cogunt ad hanc confessionem, qua nulla in homine tardiorest: securitas alta, adfluens, ius supra omnem iniuriam positum; obversatur oculis laetissima formarei publicae, cui ad summam libertatem nihil deest nisi pereundi licentia.’

The strategy 259

C H A P T E R 7

The battle

Machiavelli brings over one and a half millennia of monarchical encroach-ment upon republican territory to a categorical halt in the opening sen-tence of his first chapter:

All the states, all the dominions that have held and hold command over men havebeen, and are, either republics or principalities.1

Machiavelli divides, and his division demolishes the cherished claim of theRoman theory of monarchy that the Roman res publica had been saved bythe institution of a prince at its head. The single most potent ideologicalweapon which monarchies had wielded since the thirteenth century inadvancing the argument for princely rule on the Italian peninsula is therebysnapped in two. As far as Machiavelli’s theory in De principatibus isconcerned, whatever else a prince may rule, it is never said to be a republicand whatever else a prince may be, he is certainly not its mind. A pivotalpart of the case which had been put forward for hundreds of years againstneo-classical republicanism has been dismissed by means of a definition.Machiavelli has begun to generate a controversial typology of states whichwill usher in a new political grammar.

The definition proceeds, but Machiavelli delays revealing the differentiawhich he has used to divide states which are called republics from thosewhich he is naming as principalities. Instead he starts to subdivide the statescalled principalities. In so doing he begins to clarify the defining propertyof the principality:

And principalities are either hereditary – where their master’s blood has been theirprince for a long time – or they are new.2

1 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘Tutti li stati, tutti e’ dominii che hanno avuto et hanno imperio sopra liuomini, sono stati e sono o republiche o principati.’

2 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘E’ principati sono o ereditarii, de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne siasuto lungo tempo principe, o e’ sono nuovi.’

260

Machiavelli’s driving contempt for the hereditary principality will becomefully apparent in Chapter II. Here his definition of it looks viciouslydisfigured by the barbarisms of pleonasm and prolixity. The jarring,repetitive ‘de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne sia suto lungo tempoprincipe’ amply exemplifies the misuse of the figure of addition whichQuintilian highlights as one of the four most prominent types of solecismmarring good language.3 But these linguistic vices actually help Machiavellimake his point about the property of a principality. Quintilianic definitionsare about genus, species, difference and property. While the title of thechapter suggests an enquiry into how many genera of principalities thereare, Machiavelli explains in his letter to Vettori that his work is rather anenquiry into the different species of state called a principality.4 He similarlyenquires into the number of spezie of republics in the Discorsi.5 Thisvariation may be significant; in the meantime, it is sufficient to note thatMachiavelli is using a language of genus and species to define principalitiesand republics. According to him, there is something which distinguishesthe two types of state other than just the name. Their names pick outdifferent characteristics in an apposite way. For Machiavelli, the principalproperty 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 distinctionbetween something which is ‘hereditary’ and something ‘new’; but this is toimply a very specific class of things. To describe things as hereditary as wellas new – and therefore to ‘discern’ them in this way – is to indicate that theyare possessions. The differential between the two kinds of principalitywould thus appear to be predicated on the fact of ownership; the questionis whether they are a newly acquired possession or an hereditary one.Furthermore, the terminology which Machiavelli uses to describe theperson who acquires the principality is already moving between signoreand principe in an ostentatiously interchangeable way. It looks very much asif the principality is acquiring a prince who is its dominus, or its owner.

3 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 analysednext to prolixity – at VIII.3.53, vol.III: 370: ‘Vitanda etiam macrologia, id est longior quam oportetsermo, ut apud T. Livium: ‘‘legati non impetrata pace retro domum, unde venerant, abierant’’ . . . Estet pleonasmos vitium, cum supervacuis verbis ornatio oneratur: ‘‘ego oculis meis vidi (sat est enimvidi)’’.’

4 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15, where the title reads: ‘Quot sint genera principatuum . . .’; Machiavelli1984–99, III: 426: ‘di quale spezie sono’.

5 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’.

The battle 261

In order to corroborate the proposition – as Machiavelli himself does –that a newly acquired state may be considered as much the possession of itsprince as an hereditary one, one can turn to Chapter III, where he begins totalk about new principalities. Here Machiavelli discusses new states whichare annexed to pre-existing ones and which he terms ‘mixed principal-ities’.6 New states which are acquired in the same ‘province’ and share thesame language as an established state are ‘very easy to hold onto’, he pointsout, especially when they were formerly ruled by a prince: ‘to possess themsecurely, it is enough to have extinguished the line of the prince who usedto dominate them’.7 If, on the other hand, the new state is acquired in aprovince that differs in language, customs and institutions, one solution isfor ‘the person who acquires it to go and live there’, since ‘this would makethat possession more secure, more durable’.8 Louis XII of France exempli-fies how not to behave in such circumstances: although he ‘retained hispossessions in Italy for longer’, he still lost them.9 As Machiavelli says veryclearly indeed, a prince who possesses a principality ‘dominates’ it: he is itsdominus, or owner, and the state is his possession. Contrastingly, he warnsin Chapter V that in the case of republics, ‘in truth, there is no sure wayof possessing them, other than by destroying them’. Republics cannot bepossessed; whoever wants to dominate them as their prince must ‘undothem, or else expect to be undone by them’.10

The equivalence of principe with signore is evident throughoutMachiavelli’s argument. His historical diversion into an explanation of‘why the Kingdom of Darius, conquered by Alexander, did not rebelagainst his successors after Alexander’s death’ is a highly strategic momentin the exposition of his case.11 It begins by announcing that Alexander theGreat ‘became signore of Asia’.12 The verb that Machiavelli later uses to

6 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 16–17: ‘se non e tutto nuovo, ma come membro, che si puo chiamare tuttoinsieme quasi misto’.

7 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 lineadel principe che li dominava.’

8 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘Ma quando si acquista stati in una provincia disforme di lingua, dicostumi e di ordini . . . uno de’ maggiori remedii e piu vivi sarebbe che la persona di chi acquista viandassi 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 disfattoda quella.’

11 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25: ‘Cur Darii regnum quod Alexander occupaverat a successoribus suis postAlexandri mortem non defecit.’

12 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 25: ‘potrebbe alcuno maravigliarsi donde nacque che Alessandro Magnodivento signore della Asia in pochi anni’.

262 The Machiavellian Attack

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 itnecessary ‘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 inChapter XIX, the Roman emperor Severus confronts two major difficultiesin 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 arelike limbs adjoined to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as is theKingdom of Naples to the King of Spain. And these dominions acquired in thisway . . .15

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

13 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 35: ‘Era adunque necessario si turbassino quelli ordini, e disordinare li statidi coloro, per potersi insignorire securamente di parte di quelli.’

14 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 81: ‘A Severo dua difficulta, volendosi insignorire di tutto lo stato.’15 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 alre di Spagna. Sono, questi dominii cosi! acquistati . . .’

The battle 263

In other words, it is wholly new in the sense of being newly born.Machiavelli’s discussion of ‘principati tutti nuovi, dove sia uno nuovoprincipe’ embraces this very specific sense in Chapter VI – a chapter inwhich neither Sforza nor the Spanish king is mentioned. Instead – andsurely not without some relish in the contrariness which it brings tothe structure of the chapter – Machiavelli illustrates this type of whollynew principality by referring solely to emphatically ancient examples.Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus are all held up as examples of newprinces who have produced patria. They are founders of states who act likefathers, and the state which they generate cannot be snugly fitted intoMachiavelli’s classificatory definition of principalities as it has beenunfolded in Chapter I. They are examples of states whose relationshipto their prince is not described in terms of possession and domination.Machiavelli uses some rhetorical artistry to leave the newly founded statesubmerged beneath the category of ‘wholly new states’ in his narratio.There is a very compelling theoretical reason for this arrangement whichwill become more evident. But there is also a highly polemical one.

As Machiavelli starts to differentiate among the new principalities, hequietly makes a devastating distinction which helps to explain everythinghe has so far been saying:

And these dominions acquired in this manner are either accustomed to livingunder a prince, or used to being free . . .16

Definitions are indeed destroyed by differentiae. Herein lies the differ-ence between the state called a principality and a state called a republicwhich Machiavelli has employed in the first sentence of the book. Onereason some people in Renaissance monarchies did not look longinglybeyond their own borders to the free republic of the civic humanists isbecause they thought they were already living in one. Machiavelli is makingit clear that this is categorically not the case. At a stroke, he guts the Romantheory of monarchy of the very essence of its moral argument about therationality of the form of government which it envisages. The claim thattrue libertas is best sustained by monarchy had informed the Renaissanceideology of the prince and underpinned its polemical attacks on thedisorderly vices of the republic since the thirteenth century. That claimnow becomes a contradiction in terms. Machiavelli’s contrast leaves hisreader 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 unoprincipe, o usi ad essere liberi.’

264 The Machiavellian Attack

and that the dominion which is ruled by a prince is an unfree state. Theentire thrust of the classical theory’s redescriptive manoeuvres is haltedby an act of reappropriation of the republic’s most prized property. Thetransition from repubblica to principato does not ensure the preservation oflibertas. It guarantees its elimination.

The ingenuity in Machiavelli’s development of the definition nowbegins to emerge. States, he says, are either republics or principalities.The difference between them is that the former are free and the latter notfree. But by the time we arrive at the differential, the property of the statecalled a principality – the property of being unfree – has already beendescribed. Machiavelli has been subtly working the terms of the definitioninto his account from the very beginning. For he has already begun to makethe term principe synonymous with signore, and has already implied thatthe principato is either an hereditary or a new possession. Yet to be in thepossession 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 themain reason why the name of this state is not ‘res publica’. To live ‘under’ aprince is to live subject to his ius and potestas. As Machiavelli will remind uson no fewer than thirty-three occasions, those whom the prince rules arecalled sudditi – subjects. Subjects do not live in free states. They live in adominion 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 toMachiavelli’s theory as they had to Seneca’s. They are all examples of aprince who is the signore, or dominus, of his state. The same logic applies tothe descriptions of the Roman Empire, the Milanese duchy, and the Regnoof Naples and Sicily as principalities. These are all principalities becausethey are unfree states. As Machiavelli tells us in the Discorsi, ‘nothing thatbefell Milan or Naples . . . could ever bring them freedom, since theirmembers were wholly corrupt. This is apparent after the death of FilippoVisconti, for, though it was proposed to introduce freedom in Milan, itcould 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 illustratethe wholly new state in Chapter I. It cleverly obscures the one type of statewhose 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, potrebberidurre mai Milano o Napoli liberi, per essere quelle membra tutte corrotte. Il che si vide dopo lamorte di Filippo Visconti, che volendosi ridurre Milano alla liberta, non potette e non seppemantenerla.’

The battle 265

contrast, comes to rule over a state which had failed to become a republicafter centuries of unfreedom. The following sentence says: ‘dominionsacquired 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 newlyproduced states. They had a past life: either they are accustomed tounfreedom – in which case, their unfreedom is merely continued under anew master – or they are used to freedom. Machiavelli is organising hisdefinition with extraordinary care.

The identity of the unfree state is fleshed out by means of the locicommunes which Machiavelli uses to furnish his description. The firsttime he retrieves an argument about principalities – to distinguish betweenhereditary and new principalities – he comes back with a quality whichhe applies to discriminate the age of a thing as a possession. His secondargument is about whole or parts, and Machiavelli proceeds to apply itwithin the category of new states by means of a similitudo. Similitudo isboth an argument and an ornament: in saying that new states attached toold states are ‘like limbs’, Machiavelli suggests that he is talking aboutwhole and partial bodies. But the differentia between republics and princi-palities – liberty – is derived from a place which can only generate anargument about persons. According to the Machiavellian definition, there-fore, the principato would appear to be both a type of person – an unfreeperson – and a thing, a possession which is the property of someone else.

There is a reason for this apparent contradiction in defining the identityof 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 Digestmakes it clear that the difference between free and unfree persons consistsin the fact that ‘some persons are in their own power, some are subject tothe law of another.’19 As the rubric De statu hominis states at the start ofthe Digest, the state of servitude is an institution by which ‘someone issubjected to the dominion of another’.20 Slaves are persons who are ‘inthe power of their masters’.21 They are classifiable as items of property.They are things. Machiavelli’s definition of states separates the republic

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

19 Digest 1985, vol. 1, I.6.1: 17: ‘quaedam personae sui iuris sunt, quaedam alieno iuri subiectae sunt . . .in potestate sunt servi dominorum’.

20 Digest 1985, vol. 1, I.5.4: 15: ‘Servitus est constitutio iuris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contranaturam subicitur.’

21 See n.19 above.

266 The Machiavellian Attack

from the principality according to this understanding of what it means fora person to live in the dominion of another. That is to say, he displacesentirely the Stoic conception of liberty which had been imported intoRoman political theory by Seneca in De clementia and which had come toinform the ideology of the princeps, reverting instead to a pristine Romandefinition of what it means to be free and unfree.22 Another massiveconceptual imposition is rolled back. Machiavelli makes clear that theprincipato 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, astate in the state of servitude. Its opening chapter defines the principality inthese terms, and the following chapters proceed to corroborate this pro-position. And this is precisely what Machiavelli says his work is about inthe prologue, when he declares to his audience – in startlingly direct, ifdrivingly 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 offree and unfree states which must be observed in Machiavelli’s theory in IlPrincipe.24 Here, as in the Discorsi, he needs to incorporate a particular typeof trajectory of state development into his conceptual framework. He hasto be able to explain how states initially formed and ruled by monarchs canbecome free states. The most obvious and most pertinent example of thisphenomenon 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 statewhich 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 kingthen develops into a republic creates a special problem for the use of theterminology of genus and species when defining the two states. It becomesimpossible to make a strictly generic distinction between them. To talkof genus is to talk of births, and yet a state born to a princeps like Romulusmay become a res publica. A free state, in other words, may have princelyorigins. Indeed, there are strong indications in the Discorsi that this is ahighly preferable scenario for the formation of a republic.26 So a generic

22 Although the Digest was compiled considerably later than De clementia, it preserves an idea aboutfreedom and servitude which dates to the time of the Roman Republic.

23 Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘Desiderando io adunque offerirmi alla vostra Magnificenzia con qualchetestimone della servitu mia.’

24 Note, too, the refinement at I Discorsi I.2 (Machiavelli 1960: 133), as Machiavelli introduces theparticular species of res publica, exemplified by Sparta, which has elective kings as a component ofits mixed constitution.

25 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31: ‘re di Roma e fondatore di quella patria’.26 See, for example, Machiavelli 1960, I.2: 129–30; 1.9: 153–5.

The battle 267

distinction between states based on the quality of servitude and freedom isnot valid in this case. The differentiation in state identity on this basis mustbegin at a specific level below the generic. But this fact is entirely coherentwith another feature of Machiavelli’s endorsement of a Roman juridicalunderstanding of free and unfree states: namely, that while slaves can beborn in servitude, servitude is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. InRoman law, the state of slavery is an institution of the ius gentium.

Machiavelli organises his definition by initially positing a clear distinc-tion between republic and principality for crucial theoretical and rhetoricalconsiderations. The impact of his definition is only strengthened whenhe reveals the basis of the distinction. But the distinction – as Machiavellisees very clearly – is not an absolute one. He therefore uses considerablerhetorical and theoretical skill in order to retain the distinction withoutjeopardising the validity of his definitions. The language which he useswhen he introduces the differential is carefully considered: states are ‘eitheraccustomed to living under a prince or used to being free’. Servitude isnot instantaneously generated at the birth of a state: it comes over time.Machiavelli is extraordinarily unwilling to think of the formation of awholly new state by a person as anything other than the most profoundlycreative of activities.27 Nor is his typology less than comprehensive.He finds a way of including the sort of state which Rome exemplifiesboth in the main body of his theory and in its outline: it comes underthe description of wholly new principality, as Chapter VI makes clear.Machiavelli merely foxes the reader a little when he introduces the cate-gory, developing an argument about whole and partial newness withreference to Milan and Naples while omitting the notion of foundationfrom his descriptive language. Knowing how to marshall one’s case in thenarratio in such a way that weaker or more concessive points do not marone’s opening gambit is very much part of the orator’s training. ForMachiavelli to introduce the idea of the generation of a new state in themidst 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 differentia-tions; while to reorganise the definition would ruin the polemical effectwhich he is clearly aiming for.

One might pause to consider how Machiavelli attempts to resolve thisissue of how a state which starts life under a prince then becomes a free respublica. The most important part of the pause, however, is to note thatDe 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).

268 The Machiavellian Attack

beginning of the confirmatio in Chapter II, it looks likely that Machiavellihas found the rhetorical idea of a propositio highly useful in underlining hiscontroversial distinction:

I will leave behind reasoning about republics because I have reasoned about themat length elsewhere. I will address myself solely to the principality.28

Machiavelli insists that if you want to know about his thinking aboutrepublics – that is, about states which are used to being free – you haveto go elsewhere. This claim is as ironic as ever, since he proceeds to referrepeatedly to the free state throughout the work, and to very great effect: hisreferences cast a huge shadow across the unfreedom of the principality.This is not because Machiavelli does not see a way in which a prince’sactions as the founder of a state can be highly conducive to establishing afree way of life. His account of the development of free states in the Discorsidescribes clearly how a prince can found a state as a primo progenitore; howa prince can guarantee it a birth free from ‘external servitude’; and how aprince can act like a Roman father towards his creation, giving birth toa ‘daughter’ and providing her with a good ‘education’, setting a goodexample and abiding by the same laws which he institutes for his off-spring.29 There a prince is said to be able to give a ‘principio libero’ to astate and guide it towards a ‘vivere civile’, laying down its first ‘ordini’ insuch a way as to conform it to a ‘vivere civile e libero’.30 But all of thistheoretical material is conspicuously deferred from Il Principe, whereMachiavelli’s thesis is not designed to explicate free states. It is almostexclusively about states which are, by his own definition, unfree.

The state of the principality can be brought into greater focus byreturning to see how the other elements laid out in Chapter I helpMachiavelli to reconstitute the unfree person which De clementia hadmade disappear. Machiavelli’s dismissal of the idea that the prince rulesa free state, together with his reprisal of a language of domination and

28 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 15–16: ‘Io lascero indrieto el ragionare delle republiche, perche altra volta neragionai a lungo. Volterommi solo al principato.’

29 Machiavelli 1960, I.1: 128: ‘Chi esaminera, adunque, la edificazione di Roma, se si prendera Eneaper suo primo progenitore, sara di quelle cittadi edificate da’ forestieri; se Romolo di quelleedificate dagli uomini natii del luogo’; I.2: 129: ‘parlero di quelle che hanno avuto il principiolontano da ogni servitu esterna, ma si sono subito governate per loro arbitrio o come republiche ocome principato’; I.11: 160: ‘il primo suo ordinatore Romolo, e che da quello abbi a riconoscerecome figliuola il nascimento e la educazione sua’.

30 Machiavelli 1960, I.1: 128: ‘Chi esaminera, adunque, la edificazione di Roma . . . la vedra avereprincipio libero, sanza dependere da alcuno’; I.9: 153: ‘uno fondatore d’un vivere civile, quale fuRomolo’; I.9: 153: ‘tutti gli ordini primi di quella citta essere stati piu conformi a uno vivere civile elibero’.

The battle 269

servitude which the classical theory and the Renaissance ideology of theprince had sought so hard to evade, is intimately connected to his rejectionof the notion that the prince and his principality are conjoined in one body.For the Senecan configuration had helped avert the allegation that the respublica had become enslaved, instead forming the basis of a vision of it as afree person ruling according to a universal rationality. The Roman theoryhad 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 Romanrevolution had also evacuated the universe of contingency. The greatfortuna which carried the prince to the pinnacle of his power in theSenecan 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 heldto originate in the same rational principle which governed nature, theworld, the gods and the cosmos. The prince’s unerring and constant virtuedemonstrated a ‘law raised above every injury’.31 With Actium now a faintmemory, Seneca’s innocent monarch ruled peacefully over a ‘civitasunstained by blood’.32

Machiavelli undoes these conceptual manoeuvres in a very systematicway, separating out the res publica from the princeps, prising apart thetotalised body of the Senecan account, and rendering visible all the desire,violence, bloodshed and injury involved in subjecting a person to a state ofunfreedom which the Roman theory had sought to make invisible. But firsthe has to strip back the imposition of the Stoic providentialist schemewhich had held the whole theory together and which had continued toprosper in a post-classical, Christian intellectual environment. He does thisby driving his fist very hard and very precisely at the surface of the princelymirror, producing one long, shattering fracture which he reveals in the lastsentence of his first chapter:

And these dominions . . . either used to living under a prince, or used to beingfree . . . are acquired either with the arms of others or with one’s own, eitherthrough fortuna or through virtu.33

This seemingly innocuous differentiation of fortuna from virtus has momen-tous consequences. All of the unities and fixities of the Roman theory

31 Seneca 1928a, I.1.8: 362 (Seneca 1995: 130): ‘securitas alta . . . ius supra omnem iniuriam positum’.32 Seneca 1928a, I.11.3 (Seneca 1995:143): ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’33 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.’

270 The Machiavellian Attack

begin to dissolve under the force of this single blow to the picture of aprovidential universe in which the ethical absolutism of the humanistideology had made sense. Machiavelli’s text is a relentless reversal of theSenecan view of the relation between the prince and Fortuna. It liberatesthe classical goddess from the petrifying effects of the Stoic mirror and itsprovidential philosophy in which she had been reduced to little more thana metaphor for mental aberration. Machiavelli, in other words, makes herreal rather than imaginary. Plenty of Renaissance humanists – like Senecahimself – had depicted Fortuna in the world; plenty had delineated herrelation 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 samematerials according to a rationality which really reanimates her. Hiscapacity to do so is indubitably connected to the fact that he is the earliestRenaissance thinker who also commits himself to despising Christianprovidentialism, to jettisoning its universalism and mocking its pieties, toreminding his audience that to have a signore is to be a slave, and to makingit abundantly clear that if he wishes to maintain his state, the prince mustfollow a set of precepts which depart so dramatically from those of thefigure whom Machiavelli sarcastically labels the ‘gran precettore’ that theysecured their author a devilish notoriety for centuries.34 Machiavelli’srevivification 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 alonewhich defines or ‘nominates’ a prince. Machiavelli’s opening definitionsimply that what gives the prince his name is his domination, as a signore, ofan unfree state called a principato, and what gives the unfree state calleda principality its name is that it belongs to a dominus, or signore, called aprincipe. That relation, he proceeds to underline, may have nothing at all todo with virtue. Some princes are given their state ‘either for money or byfavour of the giver’; while some inherit them by sheer accident of birth.35

Principalities can be purveyed like slaves, in fact. But these explanationshave a notably disorientating effect upon the Senecan ideology’s estab-lished topography. Suddenly it becomes possible to ‘ascend to the princi-pality by some wicked and nefarious route’.36 And as early as Chapter II, wefind him casually asserting that it is quite ‘reasonable’ that an hereditary

34 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31: ‘Moise, che ebbe si! gran precettore . . .’35 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.’36 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘o per qualche via scellerata e nefaria si ascende al principato’.

The battle 271

prince should ‘naturally’ become the object of his subjects’ affections so longas ‘extraordinary vices do not make him hated’.37 These caustic remarksmark the start of a satirical reworking of the standard depiction of the lovingrelations between prince and his populus. But they also scandalously contra-dict the logic of the Senecan ideology. Conventionally speaking, a princewith vices is not to be considered a prince at all, but a tyrant. Yet Machiavellicalmly refers to bad, vice-ridden princes and to principalities gained bywickedness. He does not mention tyrants or tyranny once in his text.

Machiavelli’s redescription of the relation between Fortuna and theprince is inextricably related to his redescription of princely virtue. Hesees that the task of acquiring, governing and maintaining a principatusdemands a persona in possession of precisely the qualities excised from theprince by the theory of the speculum principis. First and foremost, it fatallydisarms the prince. It converts his weapons into mere decorations and itarms him with nothing more than his virtue. It packs all the violence ofconquest and military domination into an extended metaphor, an allegory.The sword of the Senecan prince ‘has been sheathed, indeed hung awayaltogether’;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 ‘ornamentof empires’.40 The prince is ‘protected by his own good deeds’, inspiringa love among his people which constitutes the prince’s one ‘unassailablefortress’.41 Consequently, ‘there is no need for him to raise aloft highcitadels or to fortify hills steep to climb, nor to cut off the mountain-sideand fence himself in with a multitude of walls and towers’ since ‘mercy willassure 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 ofthe swarm, the monarch is ‘unarmed’, ‘without a sting’.43 ‘Nature took

37 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘se estraordinarii vizii non lo fanno odiare, e ragionevole che natural-mente sia benevoluto da’ sua’.

38 Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358 (Seneca 1995: 129): ‘Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est.’39 Seneca 1928a, I.13.5:398 (Seneca 1995: 146): ‘Hic princeps suo beneficio tutus nihil praesidiis eget,

arma ornamenti causa habet.’40 Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (my translation): ‘Clementia ergo non tantum honestiores sed tutiores

praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus.’41 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. Unumest inexpugnabile munimentum amor civium.’

42 Seneca 1928a, I.19.6: 412 (Seneca 1995: 151): ‘Non opus est instruere in altum editas arces nec inadscensum arduos colles emunire nec latera montium abscidere’; I.19.6: 412 (151): ‘salvum regemclementia in aperto praestabit’.

43 Seneca 1928a, I.19.3: 410 (Seneca 1995:150): ‘rex ipse sine aculeo est; noluit illum natura nec saevumesse nec ultionem magno constaturam petere telumque detraxit et iram eius inermem reliquit.Exemplar hoc magnis regibus ingens.’

272 The Machiavellian Attack

away his weapon’, says Seneca approvingly, drawing out the moral: thevirtuous prince – that great Pater patriae – should only use his ‘power inaccordance with the law of nature’.44

If no Roman writer had been more preoccupied with the place of Fortunain human affairs than Seneca, then no Renaissance writer is more convincedof the insanity of the view that the battle to overcome Fortuna can be won bymerely mental exertion than Machiavelli. His theory violently turns backthe tropes of the Senecan account. Machiavelli’s prince is not armed withhis virtue. His virtue is to be armed. Machiavelli is adamant that you haveno claim to be a virtuous prince at all if you are not armed. When heexplains 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 extolthem as ‘grandissimi esempli’ of persons who have become princes ‘throughtheir own virtue and not through fortuna’.45 These ancient examples illus-trate the generation of a principality by a founding father whose ‘innova-tions’ are introduced into his patria by force of arms. Its generation may owesomething to Fortuna, but the occasion which she provides is made preg-nant with possibilities only because it is seized upon by an outstandinglyvirtuous man who is armed. This is why the conjunction is so fertile. If they‘had been unarmed, their constitutions would not have been observed forvery long’, Machiavelli points out.46 As he memorably puts it, ‘all armedprophets succeed whereas unarmed ones fail’.47 Since ‘being proficientin this art is what enables one to gain power’, it is not just the foundationof new principalities that requires arms.48 Acquiring pre-existing statesthrough conquest also demands that the prince be a warrior. And evenafter establishing himself, ‘a wise prince . . . should never remain idle inpeaceful 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 Seneca 1928a, I.19.1: 408 (Seneca 1995: 150): ‘Eo scilicet formosius id esse magnificentiusque fate-bimur, quo in maiore praestabitur potestate, quam non oportet noxiam esse, si ad naturae legemcomponitur.’

45 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 30: ‘io addurro grandissimi esempli . . . per venire a quelli che per propriavirtu e non per fortuna sono diventati principi, dico che li piu eccellenti sono Moise, Ciro, Romulo,Teseo, e simili’.

46 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 32: ‘non arebbono possuto fare osservare loro lungamente le loroconstituzioni, se fussino stati disarmati’.

47 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 32: ‘Di qui nacque che tutt’i profeti armati vinsono, e li disarmatiruinorono.’

48 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e la cagione che te lo fa acquistare, e lo essere professo di queste arte’.49 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, accioche, quando si muta la fortuna, lo truovi parato a resisterle.’

The battle 273

virtue of putting away one’s sword altogether is, for Machiavelli, moralblindness. The prince must apply himself above all else to military matters ifhe wishes to maintain his state: Machiavelli warns him that ‘the main reasonthat causes you to lose it is to neglect this art’.50 So ‘a prince should have noother objective nor other thought, nor take anything else as his art, exceptwar, its organisation and its disciplines’.51

Machiavelli is hardly the first humanist to stress the importance ofmilitary training to the prince. One can turn back to Vergerio, for example,to find military exercises underlined as a significant part of the education ofa young prince.52 But Machiavelli’s point is markedly different, and notjust because he states it so emphatically. That emphasis is the consequenceof his opposition to a specific rationality which had ostentatiously pro-fessed its pacifism and evacuated the violence of conquest after – and onlyafter – a bloody and momentous act of subjection. It had disowned its ownaggression. Machiavelli is constituting a radical counterpoint to that argu-ment. His provocative insistence at this juncture is part of a battle with atype of rationality for governing persons and states which he despises asimpotent, unmanly and catastrophically misguided. His redescription andremilitarisation of the rationality of governing states take the form ofdeconstructing specifically Senecan advice.

Consider the development of his case in Chapter XIV, where he is layingout his position on the prince and the art of war:

For being unarmed results, among other things, in your being despised. This isone of those infamies which the prince must always guard against, as will beexplained later. For between someone armed and someone unarmed there is noproporzione.53

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

50 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘E la prima cagione che ti fa perdere quello, e negligere questa arte.’51 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.’52 See, for example, Vergerio 2002: 67–83.53 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 disotto si dira. Perche da uno armato a uno disarmato non e proporzione alcuna.’

54 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.’

55 Quintilian 2001, I.6.3–4, vol.I: 162: ‘Eius haec vis est, ut id quod dubium est ad aliquid simile de quonon quaeritur referat, et incerta certis probet.’

274 The Machiavellian Attack

words, a type of argument based upon the idea of similitude. InChapter XIV Machiavelli is exposing the weakness of the Senecan anal-ogy between the unarmed prince and the king bee which had been citedapprovingly since the Duecento in political literature on good rule. Hecontinues:

It is not rational that someone who is armed should willingly obey someone who isunarmed, and that an unarmed person is safe among armed servants. Since onewill be contemptuous and the other suspicious, they cannot possibly work welltogether . . . a prince who does not understand military affairs cannot be esteemedby his soldiers, nor trust in them.56

This is a densely worked refutation of Seneca’s argument. The ‘trust-worthy 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 allhappily surrounded a prince whom they loved precisely because he wasunarmed. Machiavelli is not merely retorting that to be unarmed amidone’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. TheSenecan argument had sought corroboration in an analogy that rested onthe Stoic view that the rationality of government must be similar to theratio of nature. Machiavelli concentrates on rendering the analogy irra-tional. He shows that the argument for an unarmed prince which isunderpinned by the analogy produces a disastrous lack of correspondenceelsewhere. The dissimilitude which it engenders in the relation betweenprince and his servitori is shown to be totally counterproductive. For itbrings about contempt, diffidence and insecurity instead of love, trust andsafety.

In systematically rendering literal the allegorical language of war whichpervades the Senecan account of the virtus of the princeps and the virsapiens, Machiavelli externalises a process which had been packed into aconscientious regime of self-surveillance, self-examination, self-conquest;

56 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e non e ragionevole che chi e armato obedisca volentieri a chie disarmato, e che il disarmato stia sicuro intra servitori armati. Perche, sendo nell’uno sdegno enell’altro sospetto, non e possibile operino bene insieme. E pero uno principe che della milizia non siintenda, oltre alle altre infelicita, come e detto, non puo essere stimato da’ sua soldati ne fidarsi diloro.’

57 Seneca 1928a, I.13.1: 394 (Seneca 1995: 144): ‘Placido tranquilloque regi fida sunt auxilia sua, utquibus ad communem salutem utatur, gloriosusque miles (publicae enim securitati se dare operamvidet) omnem laborem libens patitur ut parentis custos.’

The battle 275

everything, in short, that deprives the prince of impetus, that keeps himdisastrously respectful and out of real warfare – all backward glances andtimidita, frightened of his own, powerful self.58 This elimination of affectrobs the prince of the very aspects of a persona which serve him best. SoMachiavelli turns the prince inside out: the self-subjection and self-overcoming of the mirror’s interior regime slide from view as the con-quered subject comes back into focus. Freed from his introspection andinformed by a Roman, pre-Christian, non-Stoic, anti-providential, fullyrhetorical and explicitly belligerent rationality, the prince finally gets tolook on a different person hidden from him for centuries. Machiavelli iseffectively 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 motionat work in the Senecan ideology. The arbiter of life and death declares inDe clementia that the status of those whom he rules ‘has been placed’ in hishand.59 Machiavelli’s redescription of the quality of princely virtus is areaction against the passivity discernible in that act of deposition. He seesthat for the principatus to have come into being at all, there must have beena huge exertion of power, of force, of violence, which he refuses to ascribeto a cause over and above human agency and which he wishes instead toembody within his theory. The fact of military conquest had been arguedaway in the Roman theory – and with it all the elements necessary toexplain the impulses of a conquering body – by a theoretical manoeuvrewhich effectively traps the princeps in a position as passive as that of hissubjects. That passivity is held in place by a deterministic moral theorywhich subjects him to the movement of a rationality frequently envisagedas a higher dominus. Machiavelli sweeps aside this metaphysics, barelypausing to dismiss the metaphors of divine trust and accountabilitywhich had become so prominent in explanations of conquest and princelygovernment since Seneca. Machiavelli’s prince is no one’s lieutenant, noone’s trustee. Machiavelli frees him from all such obligations. The state isnot placed in his hands by a providential deity, and Machiavelli never poresover 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 theshattering impact of Chapter I. Chapter III is the first of many instances

58 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’.

59 Seneca 1928a, 1.1.2: 356: ‘qualem quisque sortem statumque habeat, in mea manu positum est’.

276 The Machiavellian Attack

which reminds us of the ‘natural and ordinary necessity’ that ‘anyone whobecomes a new ruler is always forced to injure his new subjects, boththrough his troops and through the infinite number of other injurieswhich are the consequence of the new acquisition’.60 As Machiavelliamplifies the injuries, he buries beneath the facts of military conquest theidea of a new law of reason ‘raised above every injury’, greeted by the sightof a happy, free and willing populus. With the recovery of injury comes therecovery of desire: the new lesson to learn is that ‘it is something really verynatural and ordinary to desire to acquire’.61 And with the recovery ofboth comes bloodshed, as Machiavelli unleashes the first of a series ofrefutations of the injunction to be merciful, to spare captives, to preserveone’s monarchical innocence for the benefits of security. The blood beginsto flow as Machiavelli sets about the Senecan precepts on how a princeshould treat captured royalty. A captured monarch survives ‘to the glory ofhis saviour’ and should be kept alive in a position of indebtedness ratherthan ‘snatched from sight’, since the debtor ‘offers a lasting spectacle of theother’s excellence’.62 For ‘to owe one’s life is to have lost it’.63 No, saysMachiavelli, you must ensure that the conquest of another monarch’s stateincludes ‘extinguishing the bloodline’ of the former prince.64 He uses anotorious construction here and elsewhere: he talks of the elimination ofenemies in terms of spegnere. The idea is one of extinguishing, of snuffingout the light of life. But this reverses one of the most dominant metaphorsat work in the Senecan theory in its portrayal of an enlightened andenlightening monarch. ‘A great light surrounds you’, proclaims Seneca ofhis monarch, who is said to ‘rise’ like the sun, and stand no more chancethan the sun of ‘not being seen’.65 More specifically, his clementia – thatlustrous ‘ornament of empire’ – will always keep a conquered monarchalive and in sight as testimony to his power.66 The wisdom of Machiavelli’s

60 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 17: ‘un’altra necessita naturale et ordinaria, quale fa che sempre bisognioffendere quelli di chi si diventa nuovo principe, e con gente d’arme, e con infinite altre iniurie che sitira dietro el nuovo acquisto’.

61 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 23: ‘E cosa veramente molto naturale et ordinaria desiderare di acquistare.’62 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 confertincolumis, quam si ex oculis ablatus esset. Adsiduum enim spectaculum alienae virtutis est; intriumpho cito transisset.’

63 Seneca 1928a, I.21.2: 416 (Seneca 1995: 153): ‘perdidit enim vitam, qui debet’.64 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 . . .’65 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.’66 Seneca 1928a, I.11.4: 390 (Seneca 1995: 143): ‘Clementia ergo non tantum honestiores sed tutiores

praestat ornamentumque imperiorum est simul et certissima salus.’

The battle 277

prince consists in knowing how and when to have the opposite of such anilluminating effect. But his new monarch is also in the business of cancel-ling obligations rather than of contracting new debts. The danger offollowing the advice to turn a captured king into a debtor is that he mayhave some credit remaining among his former subjects. As Machiavelliexplains in Chapter IV, developing further the idea of spegnere, if the ‘bloodof the prince’ in a state which has the same structure as that of the TurkishSultan is ‘spento, no one else remains to be feared, since the others do nothave any credito with the people’.67 In modern Italian juridical parlance,one still talks of ‘extinguishing’ debts in the law of obligations, regularlyusing the verb estinguere to denote their cancellation.68

Machiavelli retains the vision which Seneca provides in De clementia ofthe prince’s treatment of the body politic as one of a doctor applyingremedies. The reordering of the medical metaphor is underway early inChapter III as Machiavelli begins to show the cause and effects of princelyconquest. When he points out that in new principalities, ‘you cannot usestrong medicine’ against those inhabitants who have helped you but whobecome quickly disillusioned with your inability to satisfy them, he is alreadythinking about the possible cures available to his principe savio in terms ofmedicine forti rather than the milder mollis medicina envisaged by the theoristof 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 looksmuch more like Machiavelli’s idea of strong medicine.70 The one remedywhich he never prescribes is mercy, the great Senecan cure for sick and healthyalike. Machiavelli’s ‘wise princes’ practise preventive medicine: they act likethe ancient Romans, prudently dealing ‘not only with existing troubles, butalso with future ones’ since, in the early stages of an illness, cure is eminentlypossible, but when left to develop, the malady may well become incurable.71

67 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 27: ‘non si ha a dubitare d’altro che del sangue del principe; il qualespento, non resta alcuno di chi si abbia a temere, non avendo li altri credito con li populi’.

68 For a typical example, see the discussion of l’estinzione dell’obbligazione in Talamanca 1990: 634–9.69 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 (Seneca1995: 149): ‘Morbis medemur nec irascimur; atqui et hic morbus est animi; mollem medicinamdesiderat ipsumque medentem minime infestum aegro.’ For the aversion to aspera remedia, seeI.13.4: 396 (Seneca 1995: 145): ‘inclinatus ad mitiora, etiam si ex usu est animadvertere, ostendensquam invitus aspero remedio manus admoveat’.

70 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.’

71 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Perche e Romani feciono in questi casi quello che tutti e principii saviidebbono fare: li quali non solamente hanno ad avere riguardo alli scandoli presenti, ma a’ futuri, et aquelli 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.’

278 The Machiavellian Attack

This is the moral of the ‘physicians of the etico’, says Machiavelli, perhapsexploiting the thought that doctors who treat consumptives are moreskilled in ethics than the kind of Stoic doctor who constantly counselsthe use of ‘gentle medicine’ and who refuses to think of cruelty – or the‘dire disease of the mind’ – as a potential cure.72 Machiavelli apparentlylikes this pun: in Chapter XIII, he refers again to his argument about‘ethical fevers’ as he is condemning the lack of prudence of those whoseprojects proceed on the basis of a misconceived idea of what is good andoverlook the ‘poison’ that lies concealed in their activities.73 What he findsmost objectionable is the timing and pace of the Senecan princely doctor,who ‘reveals his reluctance to apply harsh remedies’ and who hesitates touse the knife out of his concern to leave only ‘an honourable scar’.74 ForMachiavelli, to indulge in some early blood-letting might well be essentialto the eventual health of the state. The fantasy which constrains theSenecan medic to move so gingerly – the belief that it is his own bodyover which he extends his medical treatment – is completely absent fromMachiavelli’s vision of the prince’s state.

Machiavelli pulls out the guts of the Roman theory of monarchy withalmost surgical precision. Seneca’s prince never draws his sword once. Hekeeps it ‘hidden away’ and ‘sheathed’.75 Even though ‘no one ever hadthe sword entrusted to him at an earlier age’, he is able to boast that he hasnot been moved by any iuvenilis impetus – any youthful impulse – to useit cruelly, angrily, irrationally.76 His civitas is incruenta: unstained byblood.77 He knows that mercy cannot be ‘exhausted cruelty’, but that itmust be a constant feature of his reign, since it ‘means never having sheda citizen’s blood’.78 And so Seneca congratulated his prince, pointing out

72 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Et interviene di questa come dicono e’ fisici dello etico, che nelprincipio del suo male, e facile a curare e difficile a conoscere, ma, nel progresso del tempo, nonl’avendo in principio conosciuta ne medicata, diventa facile a conoscere e difficile a curare.’ Forcruelty as the dire disease, see Seneca 1928a, I.25.2: 424: ‘illi [sc.crudeli homini] dirus animi morbusad insaniam pervenit ultimam, cum crudelitas versa est in voluptatem et iam occidere hominemiuvat’.

73 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIII: 61: ‘Ma la poca prudenzia delli uomini comincia una cosa, che, per sapereallora di buono, non si accorge del veleno che vi e sotto: come io dissi di sopra delle febbre etiche.’

74 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; agatprinceps curam non tantum salutis, sed etiam honestae cicatricis’.

75 Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358: ‘Conditum, immo constrictum apud me ferrum est.’76 Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358: ‘non ira me ad iniqua supplicia compulit, non iuvenilis impetus . . .’77 Seneca 1928a, I.11.3: 390: ‘Praestitisti, Caesar, civitatem incruentam.’78 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 sanguinemfudisse.’

The battle 279

that ‘your principatus is being judged by the taste which we have had ofit’.79 This unsimulated goodness had been contrasted with the bestialcruelty 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 ofcitizens, to pour out a mass of blood . . . to terrify people and send themrunning 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 bebad?’81 When Machiavelli comes to discussing the qualities of the prince inChapter XV, he entirely reformulates this wisdom, claiming that ‘it isnecessary 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 willfurther go on to refute the Senecan point by claiming that happinessdepends upon this very ability to vary one’s conduct. But these lessonsare laid out after an attentive description of the circumstances in which newprincipalities 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 treach-erousness and cruelty, could live securely’ when ‘many others have not beenable 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 bydistinguishing between ‘cruel deeds committed well or badly’. ‘Good’ crueldeeds are those which are ‘committed all at once’ because they are ‘necessaryfor establishing oneself, and are not afterwards persisted in’, while bad onesare those ‘which are at first few in number, but increase with time ratherthan diminish’.84 Quite apart from the fact that this economy of violencethrows the absolute morality of the Senecan theory into total disarray, it is

79 Seneca 1928a, I.1.6: 360 (Seneca 1995: 129–30): ‘principatus tuus ad gustum exigitur’.80 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?’

81 Seneca 1928a, I.13.2: 396: ‘Quid autem eo infelicius, cui iam esse malo necesse est?’82 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.’83 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 edefendersi dalli inimici esterni, e da’ sua cittadini non li fu mai cospirato contro: con cio sia chemolti altri, mediante la crudelta non abbino, etiam ne’ tempi pacifici, possuto mantenere lo stato,non che ne’ tempi dubbiosi di guerra.’

84 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, pernecessita 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 coltempo crescono che le si spenghino.’

280 The Machiavellian Attack

predicated upon the single fact that was made to disappear in the vision of aprince bringing a law raised ‘above all injury’. When Machiavelli reinstatesthe injuries of conquest, he unsheathes the hidden sword. The person whoseizes a state and occupies it ‘must decide about all the injuries which itis necessary to commit, and do them all at once, so as not to have torepeatedly commit them every day’.85 This means that a prince’s subjectsmay well get a taste at the start of the prince’s reign of something verydifferent from clemency. Machiavelli reconfigures the Senecan imagery:‘injuries should be done altogether so that, being tasted less, they will causeless offence; and benefits should be given out very gradually, so that theyare tasted better’.86 The irony of insisting upon just one taste is that, farfrom being able to keep his sword permanently sheathed, the prince ‘willalways be forced to stand with sword in hand’.87

Cesare Borgia’s conduct in the Romagna exemplifies these lessons. Thegreat 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 thecommand of impotent signori who had been quicker to despoil theirsubjects than rule them correctly’.89 Without the guiding hand of a goodartist like Borgia, Romagna had provided ‘material for disorder rather thanorder’, and had become ‘full of thefts, quarrels and outrages of everykind’.90 In order to pacify it, make it ‘obedient to the royal arm’ andestablish good government over it, Borgia makes great use of Remirro deOrco, a ‘cruel man’ who succeeds in the task of pacification in no time at allbut who incurs the hatred of its inhabitants.91 Wishing to distance himselfpersonally from his minister’s brutality, Borgia enters into the theatreof cruelty, prudently seizing a suitable occasion to have Remirro ‘placed inthe piazza at Cesena, cut in two’, along with ‘a wooden block and a bloody

85 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Onde e da notare che, nel pigliare uno stato, debbe l’occupatore diesso discorrere tutte quelle offese che li e necessario fare, e tutte farle a un tratto, per non le avere arinnovare ogni dı.’

86 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Perche le iniurie si debbono fare tutte insieme, accio che, assapor-andosi meno, offendino meno: e’ benefizii si debbono fare a poco a poco, accio che si assaporinomeglio.’

87 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 44: ‘Chi fa altrimenti . . . e sempre necessitato tenere el coltello in mano.’88 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 36: ‘aversi acquistata amica la Romagna e guadagnatosi tutti quelli popoli,

per avere cominciato a gustare el bene essere loro’.89 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘trovandola suta comandata da signori impotenti, li quali piu presto

avevano spogliato e’ loro sudditi che corretti’.90 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’.91 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.’

The battle 281

knife’.92 Machiavelli notes that ‘the ferocity of such a spectacle left thatpopulace satisfied and dumbstruck’.93 Borgia has unsheathed the knife,bloodied it and made a terrifying public spectacle of the fact. He killssavagely; he leaves blood all over the public square; and the block of woodwould 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 veryactivities described by Seneca as those of a ferocious tyrant. But Borgiaknows that there is a time and a place for these activities. He knows howto start and stop. When Machiavelli returns to appraise his activities inChapter XVII, he concedes that Borgia was ‘held to be cruel’; and yet hepoints out that his cruelty united and pacified Romagna.94 A new princecannot possibly avoid the ‘nome di crudele’.95 Being so ‘nominated’ maynot be fatal for the prince. On the contrary, a prince who follows this pathon occasion ‘will really be acting more mercifully than those who, out ofexcessive piety, let disorders develop’, and so harm the entire community.So anxious were the Florentines to escape the ‘nome del crudele’ in theirtreatment of Pistoia that they let it be destroyed altogether.96 Machiavellisees another way of holding – and of ‘holding forth’ – the person of Borgia,and of consequently renaming his vice as a virtue. In so doing, Machiavelliutterly confounds Seneca’s theory of tyranny. He can endorse the half-beast Chiron as an exemplary precettore because his own precepts constitutea rationality which has eliminated entirely the dichotomy so prized bythe classical praeceptor of princely humanitas. Machiavelli maintains thata prince who behaves cruelly, bestially and inhumanely may very well bebehaving virtuously. There is nothing remotely ironic about these acts oftransvaluation. They indicate a new moral calculus suitable for the task ofmantenere lo stato which applies to republics as well as to principalities.

The most maddening characteristic of the Senecan prince from aMachiavellian point of view is that he is entirely undone by a providentialconception of time and, indeed, the times. He is unprepared to reactsuddenly to unforeseen changes in circumstances or in the weather, unable

92 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.’

93 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 37: ‘La ferocita del quale spettaculo fece quelli populi in uno temporimanere satisfatti e stupidi.’

94 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68: ‘Era tenuto Cesare Borgia crudele; non di manco quella sua crudeltaaveva racconcia la Romagna, unitola, ridottola in pace et in fede.’

95 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 69: ‘Et infra tutti e’ principi, al principe nuovo e impossibile fuggire elnome di crudele.’

96 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 68–9: ‘Il che se si considerra bene, si vedra quello essere stato molto piupietoso che il populo fiorentino, il quale, per fuggire el nome del crudele, lascio destruggere Pistoia.’

282 The Machiavellian Attack

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 Deinfelicitate principum of 1441 – is constitutionally incapable of grasping theMachiavellian concept of prudence.97 His moral regime rivets his persona toa leaden form of absolute constancy ultimately grounded in the benevolenceof god, nature, time. Seneca had summed it up for his prince when he haddepicted the ‘state’ of the world under the benevolence of divine rule: sereneand bright, pleasant and lovely, sunny and cloudless. Machiavelli’s perspec-tive in Il Principe is that this way of looking at the world is insane. What if theweather changes? What if your luck changes? Machiavelli has no patiencewith laments about the cruel inconstancies of the dominatrix Fortuna utteredat moments when the providential order suddenly becomes less than evident.To indulge in this behaviour is merely to swing violently from the mistakenbelief in one’s total domination of the world to a position of abject sub-mission. Fortuna may be powerful, but it is shameful – the very opposite ofvirtus – to allow oneself to be completely dominated by her. So he sharplypoints out:

These princes of ours who had been settled for years in their principalities and thenlost them should not blame fortuna but their own ignavia. For in quiet times theynever thought that things could change (it is a common defect of men not toreckon on storms when the weather is fine). When adverse times came, theythought of fleeing and not of defending themselves.98

For Machiavelli, the Senecan view of Fortuna so widely endorsed is theheight of imprudence, a psychological debility inextricably caught up inthe doctrine of princely servitude. As Machiavelli points out, the error isone of counting so heavily upon a benign rationality that you effectivelycommit yourself to a slavish dependency upon an illusory master. Andthis attitude threatens to make you a dependant of others in a very literalsense:

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; sucha defence is weak and cowardly and does not depend upon you. Only those

97 For this point, see Viroli 1992: 109.98 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, nonavendo mai ne’ tempi quieti pensato che possono mutarsi, (il che e comune defetto delli uomini, nonfare conto nella bonaccia della tempesta), quando poi vennono i tempi avversi, pensorono a fuggirsie non a defendersi.’

The battle 283

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 ispointed. In the midst of a polemic about changing times, weather con-ditions and fortunes, Machiavelli can once again refute the Stoic andChristian position on its own terms because he has totally redesignedthe relationship between Fortuna and virtus in a non-providential world.The simple irony which he indicates is that the prince who cleaves to theconventional conception of virtue in order to free himself from Fortunarisks ending up her hostage.

Machiavelli’s response to the reality of a cruel, capricious Fortuna is toreconstruct the princely persona. He begins to broach the key principle ofhis moral theory in Chapter II, when he casually notes that if an hereditaryprince wishes to hold on to his state, he need only preserve the establishedorder and ‘temporise in the event of anything untoward happening’.100 Butthe idea of temporeggiare strikes at the very basis of the Senecan persona ofthe prince.101 Seneca had posited the fundamental principle that ‘no onecan wear a mask for long’ since ‘fictions soon fall back into their truenature’.102 The virtuous prince is praised because his ‘natural goodness’ isnever just put on ad tempus, to suit the moment. But Machiavelli’s treatisewelcomes drama: it produces an actor and an argument about the need toact. Above all, Machiavelli’s actor needs to be as good as his preceptor atconsiderations of quality. Specifically, he must be good at discerning ‘ogniqualita 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 mindcompletely as the winds of fortune and variations in circumstances dic-tate’.104 Machiavelli insists that to cultivate this persona is the only way to behappy and avoid unhappiness. Prudence is the key to this task. As he putsit in Chapter XXI, ‘prudence consists in knowing how to recognise the

99 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIV: 98: ‘perche non si vorrebbe mai cadere, per credere di trovare chi tiricolga. Il che, o non avviene, o, s’elli avviene non e con tua sicurta, per essere quella difesa suta vile enon dependere da te. E quelle difese solamente sono buone, sono certe, sono durabili, chedependono da te proprio e dalla virtu tua.’

100 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.II: 16: ‘e di poi temporeggiare con li accidenti’.101 For the merits of temporising in the Discorsi, see Machiavelli 1960, 1.33: 206–9.102 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 suamrecidunt; quibus veritas subest quaeque, ut ita dicam, ex solido enascuntur, tempore ipso in maiusmeliusque procedunt.’

103 See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 48; Ch.XXV: 99.104 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.’

284 The Machiavellian Attack

qualities of inconvenienti’.105 Discerning the sort of dangerous difficultieswhich surround you at any one time is a prerequisite for re-evaluating,where necessary, bad things as good, or, to cite Machiavelli, ‘knowing howto pick the least bad one as good’.106

In Chapter IX, Machiavelli ridicules the image advanced in De clementiaof 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 liein wait for him, to cast their own bodies to the ground . . . to provide thefoundation of his road to safety’.107 Seneca had claimed that ‘for one manthey lead ten legions into battle, rushing at the front line and bearing theirbreasts to the wounds’.108 Machiavelli sneers back that this may well holdgood for peaceful times: ‘then everyone comes running, everyone promises,every person is willing to die for him, when death is far off ’.109 But thishelpful disposition tends to vanish in more testing times when ‘few are tobe found’ to help the state.110 Machiavelli’s subjects are no longer con-strained to be happy, either. The virtuous prince who brings felicitas andlibertas to his adoring public in the Roman theory of monarchy was said tohave been ‘the vinculum which holds the res publica together’.111 In ChapterXVII, Machiavelli is perhaps mocking the sententious style as well as theStoic doctrines of the Roman theory when he pithily declares that ‘love issustained by a vinculum of obligation which, since men are bad, is brokenon every occasion that suits them’.112 Fear, by way of equally pithy contrast,

105 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXI: 92: ‘la prudenzia consiste in sapere conoscere le qualita delliinconvenienti’.

106 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 stragemilli humanam iter ad salutem struendum sit, somnum eius nocturnis excubiis muniunt, lateraobiecti circumfusique defendunt, incurrentibus periculis se opponunt. Non est hic sine rationepopulis urbibusque consensus sic protegendi amandique reges et se suaque iactandi, quocumquedesideravit imperantis salus.’

108 Seneca 1928a, I.4.1: 368 (Seneca 1995: 133): ‘Suam itaque incolumitatem amant, cum pro unohomine denas legiones in aciem deducunt, cum in primam frontem procurrunt et adversavolneribus 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, ognunopromette, 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, allorase 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’.

The battle 285

‘is preserved by a dread of punishment that never leaves you’.113 TheSenecan themes which Machiavelli raises in this chapter have alreadybeen observed, but his attacks on the Roman theory have now acquiredconsiderable depth. When he points out that ‘men are less hesitant aboutoffending a prince who makes himself loved than one who makes himselffeared’, the rationality upon which the conventional discussion is raised hasundergone a seismic shift: the assumption is now that men may be disposedto act offensively towards their prince regardless of how he behaves.114

The effect of the shift ramifies elsewhere. A theory which repeatedly enjoinsits chief protagonist to avoid ‘being hated’ and to guard against ‘beingdespised’ may be said to be one well-acquainted with the ways of irony.115

Yet Machiavelli draws attention to the existence of hostility and conflict-ing rationalities in the principality not on the view that a theory shouldnecessarily eliminate such differences, but as a response to a theory whichpromises to have done so. Look at the target of Machiavelli’s irony: Senecahad promised his unarmed prince an ‘unassailable fortress’ in the ‘love ofhis citizens’; but in Chapter XX, Machiavelli stays within the figurativelanguage of Seneca just long enough to remind his prince that ‘the bestfortress is not to be hated by the people’.116 Machiavelli may belong to atradition of theorists of liberty for whom a major preoccupation is not somuch that enslaved persons love their masters per se, but that they do so inthe belief that they are free.

Machiavelli’s sustained refutatio of the key doctrines of the Romantheory of monarchy culminates in Chapter XXV. Machiavelli commencesby rehearsing the case for the opposition:

I am not unaware that many people have held and hold today the opinion thatthings of the world are governed by fortuna and by God in such a way that menhave no power to correct them with their prudence, and that, on the contrary, theyhave no remedy at all; and for this reason they could judge that there is no point insweating much over things: better to leave oneself to be governed by fate.117

113 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70: ‘ma il timore e tenuto da una paura di pena che non abbandonamai’.

114 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XVII: 70: ‘E li uomini hanno meno respetto a offendere uno che si facciamare, che uno che si facci temere.’

115 For the densest concentration of these injunctions, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 75–84.116 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.’117 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 laprudenzia loro non possino correggerle, anzi non vi abbino remedio alcuno; e per questo, potreb-bero iudicare che non fussi da insudare molto nelle cose, ma lasciarsi governare alla sorte.’

286 The Machiavellian Attack

This is a devastating way of restating the Senecan argument. In particular,Machiavelli draws attention to a central feature of the Stoic philosophywhich underpins the theory – its determinism – and which has beencriticised for millennia on grounds still known today as the ‘lazy argu-ment’.118 One can see this characteristic of Stoicism at work in the turnwhich Marcello Virgilio’s philosophy took a year earlier, in November 1512,after the Medici’s return and Machiavelli’s dismissal. Drawing uponelements of Seneca’s De ira in the course of a professorial praelusio, theFirst Chancellor began to endorse the Stoic view that ‘everyone, from theslave to the king, should accept his fate and refrain from striving for higherthings’.119 And, as Najemy has pointed out, Vettori rehearsed Seneca’s viewon the deterministic nature of the universe in a letter to Machiavelli inNovember 1513, referring to Letter 107 of Seneca’s Epistulae morales in orderto remind Machiavelli ‘Sed fatis trahimur’ – ‘but we are dragged along bythe Fates’. Najemy is surely right to conclude that this piece of wisdomwould have provoked rather than consoled his friend.120 In rehearsing thisview, Machiavelli goes for the jugular. For his fundamental argument isthat principalities are not republics, that they are not free states, and thatthey are acquired either by means of virtue or through fortune. That is thecase laid out in Chapter I. It contests the theoretical basis of a dominantideology which had persistently drawn upon the Senecan account in orderto sustain the claim that installing a prince at the head of a republic was thebest way of guaranteeing liberty. Underpinning this classical theory wasa Stoic thesis about reason and freedom. Machiavelli now drags out themetaphysics which holds these claims in place in order to mock the theory’sconception of liberty. He proceeds by way of ironic concession, momen-tarily ‘inclined towards’ the opposition’s opinion before discarding itentirely with the declaration that ‘in order that our free judgement is notentirely extinguished, I nonetheless judge that it may possibly be the truththat fortuna is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that even she leaves thegovernment of half of them – or thereabouts – to us’.121 Abiding by a theorypredicated on the Senecan view of fortuna does not so much guaranteeliberum arbitrium as extinguish it. So much for its divinely enlightening

118 For the ‘lazy argument’, or a0 qco& koco& (also called the ‘argument for inaction’ in Sandbach 1975:104), see Long 1996: 173; Frede 2003: 201–5.

119 Godman 1998: 198. 120 Najemy 1993: 220.121 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, iudicopotere esser vero che la fortuna sia arbitra della meta delle azione nostre, ma che etiam lei ne lascigovernare l’altra meta, o presso, a noi.’

The battle 287

quality. For Machiavelli, the act of conflating fortuna with an omnipotentdivine figure produces a moral theory which negates the possibility offreedom. His argument smartly deprives the heroic moral struggles of theStoic and Senecan vir sapiens of all their sense. In a world as overgovernedas his, what exactly is the point of all that uphill struggling, all thatHerculean sweat? The claims of Senecan philosophy and his princelymedic are made to look very hollow indeed: notwithstanding their pro-testations to the contrary, they point towards an eclipse of liberty, thefutility of moral labour and a lack of ‘any remedy’ at all for someonelooking to put things right in the world.

Machiavelli’s performance is now perhaps aspiring to live up toQuintilian’s judgement that ‘it takes a real orator to make the opponent’sargument appear contradictory, irrelevant, unbelievable, superfluous orfavourable to our side’.122 He continues by showing that the real remedyconsists 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 anddeposit it in another. Everyone flees before them, everyone gives way to theirimpetus, without being able to halt them in any way.123

But this picture of nature is drawn from a markedly different perspectivethan that of the Roman theory of monarchy. For a start, the imagery offiumi rovinosi which ruinano illustrates nature’s highly destructive capaci-ties as much as its benign effects in the world. To cultivate a rationality inthe government of states which adheres to the lex naturae is thus to inviteruin as much as peace upon them when the weather changes. But it iscrucial to note the element which now animates this violent picture ofnature’s impetus: the Machiavellian addition of ira. The ruinous rivers‘s’adirano’, Machiavelli says, they become enraged, angry. Natura therebyacquires a characteristic assiduously cut out of the Senecan picture of theprince’s world and his person. Seneca had transposed the vice of anger ontothe tyrant in his monarchical theory and onto tyrannical Fortuna in hisethics in order to hold up both as personifications of the irrational and theunnatural. But even though he depicted her in detail, he insisted that it is as

122 Quintilian 2001, V.13.17, vol.II: 476: ‘Sed tamen interim oratoris est efficere ut quid aut contrariumesse aut a causa diversum aut incredibile aut supervacuum aut nostrae potius causae videatur esseconiunctum.’

123 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 99: ‘Et assomiglio quella a uno di questi fiumi rovinosi, che, quandos’adirano, allagano e’ piani, ruinano li arberi e li edifizii, lievono da questa parte terreno, pongono daquell’altra: ciascuno fugge loro dinanzi, ognuno cede allo impeto loro, sanza potervi in alcuna parteobstare.’

288 The Machiavellian Attack

irrational to think that Fortuna really exists as it is to get angry in a universeruled by reason. ‘No one in his right mind is angry with nature’, Seneca haddeclared.124 In Machiavelli’s vision, Fortuna is sometimes good to us,sometimes bad. She is like nature, as Seneca said, but the basis of thesimilitude is that both are variable and liable to angry outbreaks. It is a nicetouch that Machiavelli conveys this decidely un-Senecan idea of naturesuddenly wracked by a great Senecan vice through imagery preferredby Seneca. In De clementia, he had repeatedly insisted on the eliminationof anger from the prince’s person, but De ira – continually cited in theliterature on good government from the Duecento onwards (and certainlywell regarded in the humanist circles of Machiavelli’s Florence, as MarcelloVirgilio’s use of it attests) – prescribed comprehensive cures for the burningimpetus of anger which threatens to move a body to great harm.125 Senecahad likened the affect of anger to a fire and a fever, but he had also likened itto stormy weather.126 Part of the task of knowing how to excise or at leastrestrain its impetuous motion requires observing how fresh and strong anoutburst we face as agents. Sometimes, says Seneca, it is best to cede someground to it ‘until the first storm is over, in case it sweeps our remediesalong with it’.127 On the other hand, if it is left to swell, a person can beswept away altogether, rendering futile ‘his effort to sink what cannotbe 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’, toanticipate a torrential downpour, because ‘storm and rain have signs thatcome before them’.129

124 Seneca 1928b, II.10.6: 186 (Seneca 1995: 50): ‘nemo autem naturae sanus irascitur’.125 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.’

126 For Seneca’s use of the metaphor of a river in flood to describe affective disturbance, see the brilliantexposition in Veyne 2003: 56.

127 Seneca 1928b, III.1.1: 252 (Seneca 1995: 76): ‘refert quantas uires quamque integras habeat, utrumreverberanda et agenda retro sit an cedere ei debeamus dum tempestas prima desaevit, ne remediaipsa secum ferat’.

128 Seneca 1928b, III.3.2–3: 258 (Seneca 1995: 79): ‘Necessarium est itaque foeditatem eius ac feritatemcoarguere et ante oculis ponere quantum monstri sit homo in hominem furens quantoque impeturuat 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 maloservit.’

129 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 ipsasnotae veniunt, ita irae . . .’

The battle 289

For Machiavelli, Senecan ethics eliminate the most essential elementsof a human personality which might make it better prepared for suddenchanges 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 acapacity to see that nature does sometimes get angry, that our fortune doeschange, and that observing the unpredictability of the world is not adisordered vision but the precondition of felicitas. As Machiavelli rehearseshis moral position, he entirely reverses the Stoic prescriptions of constancyas the basis of real happiness:

One sees how a prince is happy today, ruined tomorrow, without his havingchanged his nature or any of his qualities. I believe that this occurs first of all forthe reasons which have now been discussed at length, namely that a prince whorelies on fortuna is ruined when she varies. Moreover, I believe that a happyperson is one who alters their way of behaving in accordance with the quality ofthe times; correspondingly an unhappy person is one whose way of behaving isdiscordant with the times.130

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

130 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 sisono 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 procederesuo con le qualita de’ tempi; e similmente sia infelice quello che con il procedere suo si discordano e’tempi.’

131 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘se non dalla qualita de’ tempi che si conformano o no colprocedere loro’.

132 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘Ne si truova uomo sı prudente, che si sappi accomodare a questo;sı perche non si puo deviare da quello a che la natura l’inclina; sı etiam perche, avendo sempre unoprosperato camminando per una via, non si puo persuadere partirsi da quella . . . che, se si mutassi dinatura con li tempi e con le cose, non si muterebbe fortuna.’

133 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100. 134 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100.

290 The Machiavellian Attack

Having run the Stoic wisdom ragged, Machiavelli closes his assaults bycontrasting two types of protagonist. One is respettivo. Machiavelli insiststhat a man who is ‘respectful’ has no idea how to act ‘when it is time forhim to act forcefully’, and so he is ruined.135 The other is impetuoso. He isexemplified by Pope Julius II, who ‘always acted impetuously in his affairs,and found that times and circumstances so conform to this way of acting ofhis that he always came to a happy end’.136 Machiavelli carefully describesthe motivation of Julius in his expedition against Bologna and in hisbehaviour 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 hisimpetuosity.137 But the person of Julius is said to be ‘moved’ by his ferocityand impetus. Machiavelli goes on: ‘this movement brought the Spanish andthe Venetians to a halt . . .’, helping Julius to impose upon his enemies in atypical example of how he always managed to secure ‘happy’ outcomes.138

And he repeats that Julius’ achievements were due to his ‘impetuousmovement’.139 To be a happy and virtuous prince, you must be able toimpose yourself impetuously upon the times and circumstances. Leavingthe wreckage of the Roman theory of monarchy behind him, Machiavelliturns to sum up: ‘I conclude that since fortuna varies, and men areobstinately stuck in their ways, they are happy when concord prevailsbetween them, and unhappy when there is discord.’140 When Fortunarecovers her freedom of movement, Stoic constancy becomes sheer obsti-nacy and a sure path to unhappiness sooner or later. All things considered,Machiavelli judges, ‘it is better to be impetuous than respectful, becausefortuna is a woman’.141 So if you want to keep her submissive or ‘hold herdown’ it is necessary to beat her, harm her, hurt her.142 Fortuna ‘lets her selfbe conquered more readily’ by men who treat her roughly than by ‘thosewho act coldly’. This is because ‘as a woman, she is a friend of young men,

135 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘pero lo uomo respettivo, quando elli e tempo di venire alloimpeto, non lo sa fare; donde rovina’.

136 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘Papa Iulio II procede in ogni sua cosa impetuosamente; e trovotanto e tempi e le cose conforme a quello suo modo di procedere, che sempre sortı felice fine.’

137 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100.138 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 100: ‘La quale mossa fece stare sospesi e fermi Spagna e Viniziani.’139 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.’140 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.’141 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.’142 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101.

The battle 291

because they are less respectful, more ferocious and command her withgreater boldness’.143

A more systematic inversion of the lessons of the Senecan mirror wouldbe hard to imagine. After centuries of conscientious self-examination, ofcontinually 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, theprince is suddenly confronted with the thought that such behaviourrenders him impotent. Machiavelli’s claim is that the rationality of thefatherly Senecan prince makes him preternaturally senile. The innocent,humane image of virtue who has hung up his weapon altogether hadindeed boasted in the mirror that ‘anger has not compelled me to unjustpunishment, nor juvenile impetus, nor the temerity of men, nor defiancewhich often wrenches patience from even the calmest of breasts’.144 Noanger, no youthful impetuosity, no temerity, no weapons: the only thingthat moves the prince of the speculum is reason. That is what is said to makehim 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 offriends, already plotted to assassinate the consul Mark Anthony, alreadybeen a partner in the prescriptions’.145 Augustus becomes a fitting examplefor Seneca ‘in his old age or just on the verge of it’, because ‘in his youth hewas hot-tempered, he burned with anger, he did many things which he didnot like to look back on’.146 Among those many things of his youth whichAugustus was so unwilling to ‘look back on’ was the Roman revolution.Augustus established the Roman Principate on distinctly un-Senecanterms. He ‘may have shown moderation and mercy. Of course he did –after staining the sea at Actium with Roman blood.’147 Machiavelli gathersup the remains of the impetuous youth discarded by Seneca’s theory, and

143 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXV: 101: ‘E si vede che la si lascia piu vincere da questi, che da quelli chefreddamente procedano. E pero sempre, come donna, e amica de’ giovani, perche sono menorespettivi, piu feroci e con piu audacia la comandano.’

144 Seneca 1928a, I.1.3: 358 (Seneca 1995: 128–9): ‘In hac tanta facultate rerum non ira me ad iniquasupplicia compulit, non iuvenilis impetus, non temeritas hominum et contumacia, quae saepetranquillissimis quoque pectoribus patientiam extorsit.’

145 Seneca 1928a, I.9.1: 380 (Seneca 1995: 138): ‘Divus Augustus fuit mitis princeps, si quis illum aprincipatu suo aestimare incipiat . . . Cum hoc aetatis esset, quod tu nunc es, duodevicensimumegressus annum, iam pugiones in sinum amicorum absconderat, iam insidiis M. Antonii consulislatus petierat, iam fuerat collega proscriptionis.’

146 Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 388 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘Haec Augustus senex aut iam in senectutem annisvergentibus; in adulescentia caluit, arsit ira, multa fecit, ad quae invitus oculos retorquebat.’

147 Seneca 1928a, I.11.1: 388–90 (Seneca 1995: 142): ‘Comparare nemo mansuetudini tuae audebit divumAugustum, etiam si in certamen iuvenilium annorum deduxerit senectutem plus quam maturam;fuerit moderatus et clemens, nempe post mare Actiacum Romano cruore infectum, nempe postfractas in Sicilia classes et suas et alienas, nempe post Perusinas aras et proscriptiones.’

292 The Machiavellian Attack

he re-embodies him with his eyes fixed firmly forward. Healing theSenecan excisions, Machiavelli restores to his prince not just his weaponsbut the impetus of bestial ferocity, fiery ardour and bare-faced temerity.Had not Seneca himself declared that the task of the magnanimous princewas to ‘beat back bad Fortuna’ and that a truly ‘great mind’ must ‘raise itselfup above Fortuna, and stand above her’?148 Yet his theory had almostdelighted in depriving the prince of the capacity for such a manly conquest.Machiavelli re-equips the prince with the means of properly taking onFortuna. Young, armed and capable of great cruelty – and with some ofthe heat of Actium about him once more – Machiavelli’s prince becomesan agent with the power of bringing about a principato which, on theFlorentine’s view, the Roman theory of monarchy had appeared to makea causal impossibility in its attempt to redescribe it as a historicalnecessity.

F R E E A N D U N F R E E S T A T E S

Machiavelli brings out this young man from the depths of a constructionwhich had posited, in the wake of the establishment of the RomanPrincipate, a post-revolutionary merger between prince and subject. Hisattack on that construction is immensely productive, dissolving theuniversal fixities of the Senecan theory and reversing its universalisingmotions. It also simultaneously constitutes a new rationality for the state,a new vision replete with a system of proofs and arguments retrieved fromclassical antiquity and now implemented with unparalleled rigour. But asit deconstructs and reconstructs the prince, it also brings back the unfreeperson whom the mirror had sought to eclipse at all costs, while giving theunfree subject an entirely new exemplum to contemplate.

When Machiavelli reprises the theme of monarchy as a form of servi-tude, he restates it in a manner which distinguishes his approach fromthat of several generations of Florentine civic humanists from Salutationwards who had stated the same belief throughout the Quattrocento. InMachiavelli’s day, a highly prominent proponent of the contrast betweenthe liberty of the popular republic and the former servitude of theFlorentine people under the Medici had been none other than MarcelloVirgilio, 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 quoqueinfra ad terram deducit.’

The battle 293

to power and thereby clung to his job in government.149 Machiavelli wasnot so lucky. By the time that he dedicates his treatise to the Mediceanprince, he has lost his job, and has been both imprisoned and tortured bythe new regime. Machiavelli’s personal history, he reminds his audience inthe exordium, is one of disagi and periculi.150 Nevertheless, he appears tohave relinquished neither the conventional republican belief about mon-archy and servitude nor his desire to prove it. On the contrary, he anno-unces energetically that he is full of ‘extreme desire’, conveying howindignantly he is putting up with his appalling misfortune, and presumingto explain how ‘un uomo di basso ed infimo stato ardisce discorrere eregolare e’ governi de’ principi’.151 In expressing his servitude, Machiavellicombines the cunning of the Plautine slave with the eloquence of theQuintilianic orator. But he is also at his most masterful in such moments.Machiavelli ardisce: he is proceeding in strict accordance with the advicewhich his precepts enshrine for his prince in his crucial engagement withFortuna – not freddamente, but stimulated by a certain ardour. Torture canmake people heated, and there is an intensity about Machiavelli’s wordsright from the start. Florentine humanists from Poggio to MarcelloVirgilio were sensitive to the idea of rhetorical style as an index of liberty;and Machiavelli has perhaps already started to offer proof of his servitudeby drawing attention to the heavily figured character of his speech. For, asQuintilian says, in the course of his discussion of the figured controversiesof his own day under the Roman Principate, ‘what could be less figuredthan true liberty?’152

It is worth remembering, too, that although few Renaissance or moderncommentators have doubted the significance of the events of 1512 for theway in which Florence was subsequently governed, there was no formaldissolution of the republic, no clear proclamation of a Medicean princi-pality. On the contrary, as Jacopo Nardi was to observe in his history of theperiod of rule by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici somewhat later, there hadnever been a ‘greater appearance of civility and liberty, a greater dissim-ulation of princely authority’ than under their government.153 Like allRenaissance princes, the Medici did not come promising an end to therepublic. But if they had wanted to continue to dissemble as simple citizens

149 Godman 1998: 175–6.150 Machiavelli 1960: 13: ‘in tanti anni e con tanti mia disagi e periculi ho conosciuto’.151 Machiavelli 1960: 14.152 Quintilian 2001, IX.2.27, vol.IV: 48: ‘Quid enim minus figuratum quam vera libertas?’153 Nardi 1858, II: 64: ‘ne con maggiore apparenza di civilta e di liberta, ne con maggiore dissimulazione

di principato’.

294 The Machiavellian Attack

of the Republic, Machiavelli had other plans in mind for them. Already hehad 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 whichhe refers in his dedicatory letter.154 Indeed, that dedication so clearly asso-ciates the Medici with princely rule that it somewhat scotches any furtherdissimulation of their position. Machiavelli was under no illusions aboutthe character of Medicean government. As Colish recalls, Machiavelli con-sistently associates the Medicean ascendancy of the Quattrocento with theRepublic’s loss of liberty: he notes in the Discorsi how Piero Soderini,renowned for his love of liberty, refused to support Medici rule on thegrounds that it would destroy liberty; and he states in the Istorie fiorentinethat the Pazzi conspiracy had failed to free Florence from the rule of Lorenzode’ Medici in 1478 because his regime had deafened her ears to the cry offreedom, and liberty was no longer known there.155

But if this point of view is presented with the greatest care and thegreatest irony in the exordium, Machiavelli presses his central thesisthroughout the rest of the treatise in far more explicit terms. One way inwhich he does so is by constantly reminding his reader of the first elementof his opening definition. That is, he keeps repeating that a principality isnot a republic. The elements of Chapter I unpicked an argument in whichboth the name of the republic and the notion of liberty had been stitchedtogether for centuries. After underlining his distinction between principal-ity and republic at the opening of Chapter II, Machiavelli proceeds toensure, almost chapter by chapter, that the prince can never resort to suchmaterial again. He does so by exhaustively contrasting liberty and the freerepublic on the one hand, and the prince and his state on the other. InChapter III, annexing new states is said to be easier in cases where they havebeen previously ‘dominated’ by a prince, harder when they are ‘used to afree way of life’.156 Machiavelli devotes the whole of Chapter V to under-lining the almost insurmountable problems which he identifies in the taskof trying to rule newly acquired states which ‘are accustomed to liveaccording to their own laws and in liberty’.157 The prospects are grim

154 Machiavelli 1984–99, III: 428: ‘questi signori Medici’. For Machiavelli’s fears in August 1513 aboutimpending servitude – also expressed to Vettori – see Dotti 2003: 251.

155 Colish 1993: 193. For the relevant passages, see Machiavelli 1960, I.52: 247; Machiavelli 1971, VIII.8:822.

156 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 21: ‘Quando e’ sieno, e facilita grande a tenerli, massime quando nonsieno usi a vivere liberi; et a possederli securamente basta avere spenta la linea del principe che lidominava.’

157 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 28: ‘Quando quelli stati che s’acquistano, come e detto, sono consueti avivere con le loro legge e in liberta, a volerli tenere, ci sono tre modi . . .’

The battle 295

‘because in truth there is no secure way of possessing them’ other than bydestroying them.158 Machiavelli is led to believe that ‘whoever becomes themaster of a city accustomed to a free way of life and does not destroy it mayexpect to be destroyed by it himself ’.159 He points out that to ‘destroy’ freecities frequently involves utterly ‘unmaking’ or ‘undoing’ them to the pointof having, in fact, ‘to ruin them’ or ‘to extinguish them’ completely.160 Thisproblem hardly arises in cities or provinces which ‘are used to living undera prince’ because ‘they are used to obeying’ and ‘they do not know how tolive 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 theirancient institutions’ which ‘they never forget’.162 The Pisans may haveendured their ‘servitude’ to the Florentines for a hundred years, but theynevertheless rebelled, Machiavelli reminds us.163 This is because ‘in repub-lics there is greater life, greater hatred, more desire for revenge’, andnotwithstanding attempts to subject them, free republics nurture some-thing which Machiavelli’s text both embodies and verifies, over and overagain, in the most productive manner possible: namely, ‘the memory ofancient liberty’.164

Machiavelli uses historical examples to press the contrast betweenrepublican liberty and monarchical servitude. Chapters VIII and IX arepaired: in them, Machiavelli departs from the fundamental scheme ofvirtue and fortune established in Chapter I in order to explain the acquis-ition of principalities in slightly different terms. In Chapter VIII he citestwo examples of princes who come to rule principalities by wicked, ratherthan virtuous, means. The first is Agathocles the Sicilian, who rises throughthe ranks to the position of praetor, but who thenceforth ‘resolved tobecome prince and to hold with violence and without any obligation to

158 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘Perche, in verita, non ci e modo sicuro a possederle, altro che la ruina.’159 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’.160 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘la piu sicura via e spegnerle o abitarvi’. For the notion of ‘undoing’, see

previous note.161 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 pigliarel’arme, e con piu facilita se li puo uno principe guadagnare, et assicurarsi di loro’.

162 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘perche sempre ha per refugio, nella rebellione, el nome della liberta e liordini antichi sua; li quali ne per la lunghezza de’ tempi ne per benefizii mai si dimenticano’.

163 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘come fe’ Pisa dopo cento anni che ella era posta in servitu da’Fiorentini’.

164 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.V: 29: ‘Ma nelle repubbliche e maggiore vita, maggiore odio, piu desiderio divendetta; ne li lascia, ne puo lasciare riposare la memoria della antiqua liberta.’

296 The Machiavellian Attack

others for what had been formally conceded to him by agreement’.165 Hismeans involved convoking ‘the people and the Senate of Syracuse as if todiscuss matters concerning the republic’, and then proceeding ‘to massacrehis fellow-citizens’, as Machiavelli underlines in his moral assessment of thecase.166 The other example, Oliverotto of Fermo, similarly resorts to massslaughter in a republic. Again, Oliverotto rises through the ranks, andagain, he rejects the republican ethic, reckoning it a ‘cosa servile stare congli altri’ – ‘a servile thing to be on the same footing as the others’.167 So hetoo uses false pretences with the leading citizens of Fermo before slaugh-tering them at a banquet. The difference between them is that whileAgathocles behaves wickedly with the help of the outsider Hamilcar theCarthaginian, Oliverotto’s nefarious rise is achieved ‘with the help of somecitizens of Fermo, to whom the servitude of their native city was preferableto its liberty’.168 Both Agathocles and Oliverotto ignore their obligations,engage in acts of gross dissimilation and indulge in merciless killing. Assuch, they are hardly distinguishable from that exemplar of princely virtue,Cesare Borgia. Yet in the case of Agathocles and Oliverotto, Machiavelli’smoral evaluation completely changes because of the setting in which theiractions occur. It does so in a manner which is entirely coherent with thetheory he is setting out. Machiavelli can hardly be said to have been lessthan frank about the fact that a different form of reasoning applies to statescalled republics. He begins his confirmatio in Chapter II by emphasisingthis 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 rationalityand beliefs of the particular state you happen to be talking about. Onething Machiavelli insists that you can never hope to do virtuously is toreduce a republic to a principality. The outstanding cases of immoralbehaviour in Chapter VIII lead citizens of a republic from a state of libertyinto a state of servitude. They are acts of enslavement perpetrated bycitizens of free states. This type of activity – slaughtering citizens in order

165 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 41: ‘e avendo deliberato diventare principe e tenere con violenzia e sanzaobligo d’altri quello che d’accordo li era suto concesso’.

166 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 41–2: ‘rauno una mattina el populo et il senato di Siracusa, come se elliavessi avuto a deliberare cose pertinenti alla repubblica; et ad uno cenno ordinato, fece da’ suasoldati uccidere tutti li senatori e li piu ricchi del popolo. Li quali morti, occupo e tenne elprincipato di quella citta sanza alcuna controversia civile . . . non si puo ancora chiamare virtuammazzare li sua cittadini.’

167 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 42.168 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’.

The battle 297

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 intheir ears, Machiavelli’s readers are then led into the other half of the pairedchapters, Chapter IX, where Machiavelli explains how a prince comes torule over a former republic by rather more passive means. When a privatecitizen does not use or misuse arms either of his own or of others in virtuousor vicious behaviour to become prince, but is instead placed in a position todominate the rest by ‘the favour of his other citizens’, then ‘neither virtuealone nor simply good fortune is necessary’ but rather a hybrid versionof the two which Machiavelli calls ‘a sort of fortunate astuteness’.170 For heis 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 atthe command of the grandi, or oppressed by them, and the desire of thegrandi to command and oppress the popolo’.171 There are three possibleoutcomes which Machiavelli identifies: ‘either a principality, or liberty, oranarchy’.172 The type of state which he calls a ‘civil principality’ occurswhen either one of the two groups of citizens favours one of their own asa prince in order to avoid domination, only to secure a situation in whichnone of them lives in liberty any longer. It may be the case, then, that thename ‘civil principality’ is an example of Machiavelli’s use of irony, sincethe vita civile which it entails upon its citizens is one of servitude, and thevery opposite of the civic humanist ideal so lauded by the QuattrocentoFlorentine humanists. The category of principato civile plays no part inMachiavelli’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 doessay that one may well be able to ‘reason at greater length’, in the case of oneof the two instances, ‘where republics are discussed’.173 So it is worthrecalling that when he settles down to a full analysis of republics in theDiscorsi, he identifies the attempt to resolve the tension between two

169 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 42: ‘non si puo ancora chiamare virtu ammazzare li sua cittadini’.170 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 45: ‘quando uno privato cittadino, non per scelleratezza o altra intoller-

abile violenzia, ma con il favore delli altri sua cittadini diventa principe della sua patria, il quale sipuo chiamare principato civile (ne a pervenirvi e necessario o tutta virtu o tutta fortuna, ma piupresto una astuzia fortunata)’.

171 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 desideranocomandare et opprimere el populo’.

172 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IX: 45: ‘e da questi dua appetiti diversi nasce nelle citta uno de’ tre effetti, oprincipato o liberta o licenzia’.

173 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VIII: 40: ‘ancora che dell’uno si possa piu diffusamente ragionare dove sitrattassi delle repubbliche’.

298 The Machiavellian Attack

humours in the body politic as an utterly mistaken approach, observingthat it is precisely the institutionalisation of this conflict which ensures therepublic its liberty.174 One can now better observe the historical, ideolog-ical and conceptual reasons why Machiavelli should have insisted on thispoint in his analysis of free states. The attempt to resolve these differenceshad consistently played into the hands of a theoretical case for monarchysince the later thirteenth century. Machiavelli’s free state has to be a bodybig enough to incorporate difference. Seeking a cure for conflicting desireshad tended to hand power to a princely medic.

Since Machiavelli avoids monotony at all costs, he sometimes usessubtler ways to make his case. One is to resort to imagery. In ChapterIII, for instance, he says that a prince who already has a state and who wantsto annex a newly acquired one located in the same province should nothave too many difficulties in ensuring that ‘in a very short space of time’ thenew state ‘becomes one single body with his old state’.175 A little later, thisfigurative language reappears, this time as Machiavelli turns his attentionto advising on the problems of retaining possession of a state in a differentprovince. In such cases, the prince might like to think about establishingcolonies 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. ButMachiavelli uses a diversionary egressio in Chapter IV to convey his pointof view about the character of the unfree state in Chapter IV.177 The driv-ingly polemical point of this diversion lies in its explanation as to whyAlexander’s successors encountered such little local resistance in maintain-ing Asia. His argument consists in illuminating the structure of the state.‘All principalities known to history’, says Machiavelli, summoning up allof his rhetorical resources, ‘have been governed in one of two differentways.’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 thekingdom’.179 Or else, says Machiavelli, they are governed ‘by means of aprince and barons’.180 Barons participate in government by sheer fact of

174 See Machiavelli 1960, 1.4: 136–8; Skinner 2002, II: 153–4.175 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 18: ‘in brevissimo tempo diventa, con loro principato antiquo, tutto uno

corpo’.176 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.III: 19: ‘che sieno quasi compedi di quello stato’.177 For egressio, see Quintilian 2001, III.9.4, vol.II: 150; IV.3.12–14, vol.II: 288–90.178 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 pergrazia 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 hannostati e sudditi proprii, li quali ricognoscono per signori et hanno in loro naturale affezione.’

179 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26. 180 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26.

The battle 299

their bloodline, rather than because they enjoy the grace and favour of theprince. Such barons ‘have states and subjects of their own, who hold themin their natural affection’.181 This type of situation means that a state ineffect contains an ‘antiquated multitude of signori . . . recognised and lovedby their own subjects’.182 By contrast, states which are governed ‘by meansof one prince and servi’ (and Machiavelli insists upon reiterating this viewof their servile character) are said to ‘hold their prince with greater author-ity because throughout the country there is no one who is recognised as asuperior other than him’.183

Machiavelli exemplifies his point in a manner which further demon-strates his expertise at handling the concept of alterity. As a skilled orator,he is adept in the powerful manipulation of ‘same’ and ‘other’ because thespecification of identity and difference is fundamental to rhetorical defi-nition. 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 ofgovernment 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 isobservable in his equally solemn declaration – in a chapter entitled ‘Howhatred and contempt should be avoided’ – that the state of the Sultan ofEgypt ‘is like the papal pontificate’.185 Machiavelli does not leave it to hisreaders to guess which of the two ways of governing a principality had beenadopted by virtually every monarchical ruler on the Italian peninsula forcenturies. Those readers may have been well aware that the nomination ofministers by kings and signori to their governing councils had been com-mon practice since the Duecento. But the likeness is nevertheless drivenhome unsparingly, as Machiavelli assimilates the Turk to these monarchs:

The whole of the Turkish monarchy is governed by a single signore; the others arehis servi, and he divides his regno into sanjaks, and sends out various administratorswhom he changes and alters as he pleases.186

181 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26.182 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘d’una moltitudine antiquata di signori, in quello stato riconosciuti

da’ loro sudditi et amati da quelli’.183 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 superiorese non lui; e se obediscano alcuno altro, lo fanno come ministro et offiziale.’

184 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 26: ‘Li esempli di queste dua diversita di governi sono, ne’ nostri tempi, elTurco e il re di Francia.’

185 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIX: 84: ‘questo stato del Soldano . . . e simile al pontificato cristiano’.186 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 evaria come pare a lui.’

300 The Machiavellian Attack

Machiavelli has almost entirely eliminated the discriminating rhetoricwhich had been consistently used by humanists, particularly since the fallof Constantinople and the rise of a humanist crusading literature, todemonise, bestialise and tyrannise the Turk, and to disparage his militaryachievements as acts of enslavement of Christian holy places.187 Instead, hedescribes the Turkish ruler in terms of a rather more familiar story of asignore who rules over a principato, now also called a regno, with the helpof ministers and administrators appointed at his will. The Turk is bydefinition a prince. Machiavelli can now map out the similitude to devas-tating effect. Ministers in this type of principality – not the type that onefinds 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 ‘allenslaved and obliged’ to their prince, which makes it harder for a newprince to corrupt them.188 Lest there should be any doubt remaining aboutwhat servi are, Machiavelli removes it. Servi are stiavi: they are slaves in astate of servitude. The utility of Quintilianic procedure – of how to argueabout ‘same’ and ‘other’ – emerges once again. While differentiae maydestroy definitions, properties help to confirm them.

The idea that the ministers of a signore, or prince, are effectively his serviis fully developed in Chapters XXII and XXIII as Machiavelli considershow a prince should select them. He enunciates an infallible rule:

when you see that the minister is thinking more about himself than about you, andthat in all his actions, he is looking after what is useful to him – this sort of personwill never make a good minister, and you will never be able to trust him. For a manwho has the state of someone in hand must never think about himself, but alwaysabout the prince, and must never concern himself with what does not belong tohim.189

Price and Skinner point out that in this passage the state is ‘spoken ofalmost 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 For the humanist language of barbarism, slavery, inhumanity, cruelty and captivity to describeTurkish military success, see the texts in Hankins 1993, esp. at 122 (for the construction of the Turksas the immane genus), 134, and the material at 147–207.

188 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.IV: 27: ‘Perche sendoli tutti stiavi et obbligati, si possono con piu difficultacorrompere.’

189 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘Ma come uno principe possa conoscere el ministro, ci e questomodo che non falla mai. Quando tu vedi el ministro pensare piu a se che a te, e che in tutte le azionivi ricerca dentro l’utile suo, questo tale cosı 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.’

190 Machiavelli 1988: 80, n.[c].

The battle 301

what is being said: the government of the principality must be conductedaccording to a rationality which will ensure that it remains in the prince’shands irrespective of whether this is, in fact, utile to the subject. Machiavelliproceeds to explain how the prince can secure the participation of theministro in this type of seemingly self-negating behaviour: ‘in order to keephim faithful, the prince must look after the minister by honouring him,making him rich, making him obliged to him, conferring honours andoffices 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 andoffices will be sated, and his dependency upon the unfree status quosecured.192

Similarly satirical elements continue in the following chapter, where thetask which faces the prince consists ‘in choosing within his state wise men’as ministers.193 Here he encounters the problem that ‘courts are full offlatterers’.194 On the one hand, the only way to avoid being flattered is toinsist 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 rever-ence’.196 His solution is to insist that a minister’s ability to speak the truthshould be strictly curtailed by the prince. Having given them ‘free judge-ment to tell him the truth’, the prince must then ensure that his ministersdo so ‘only when he asks them, and not otherwise’.197 A ruler shouldcertainly seek advice but ‘only when he wants it, not when others wantto give it’.198 Their position is thus one of utter passivity. Moreover, ifhe suspects that someone is not being entirely candid for some reason, theprince should ‘get angry’.199 This is advice which counters centuries ofSenecan warnings in political writing on monarchy about the dangers ofprincely ira. Further perturbing possibilities then emerge: of conflicting

191 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘E dall’altro canto, el principe, per mantenerlo buono, debbapensare al ministro, onorandolo, facendolo ricco, obligandoselo, participandoli li onori e carichi;accio che vegga che non puo stare sanza lui.’

192 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXII: 94: ‘e che li assai onori non li faccino desiderare piu onori, le assairicchezze non li faccino desiderare piu ricchezze, li assai carichi li faccino temere le mutazioni’.

193 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘eleggendo nel suo stato uomini savi’.194 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘li adulatori, delli quali le corti sono piene’.195 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’.196 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 95: ‘ma, quando ciascuno puo dirti el vero, ti manca la reverenzia’.197 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’.198 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘Uno principe, per tanto, debbe consigliarsi sempre, ma quando

lui vuole, e non quando vuole altri.’199 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘anzi, intendendo che alcuno per alcuno respetto non gnene dica,

turbarsene’.

302 The Machiavellian Attack

advice from courtiers; of disunity among his ministers; of the perils of anadvisor who is cleverer than the prince and who might deprive him of hisstate; of a situation at the heart of government in which every advisor willalways be considering ‘his own affairs’ unless corrupted into a form ofservile loyalty.200 By identifying those tendencies and suggesting prudentremedies, Machiavelli corroborates his overall argument: the principality isnot a republic, and it is not free. There is no trace of the bonum communehere. 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. Acomplementary development is Machiavelli’s description of the soldiers ofthe principality which the prince must arm as ‘armed servitori’.202 There isa coherence about these descriptions. Machiavelli’s unfree state is governedwith the help of servi and servitori who are as unfree as the state in whichthey live. Machiavelli needs to explain how one person manages to main-tain every other single person whom he rules in a state of unfreedom. Itwas easy for republican ideology to assert that the Roman Republic had beenenslaved by Caesar, but Machiavelli sees that he needs to give an account ofthe complex means by which one person subjects a body of people to hiswill 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 bodilycapacities. The second is that it requires the prince, by force if necessarybut by persuasion if possible, to make the body of people over whom herules acquire a set of beliefs which, if not exactly formulated according tohis own perspective, at least ensure that his perspective is maintained. Theprince must be concerned both with the strengths of the state as a body – itsvires, 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 theunfree state is that the person of the prince is not a part of it. States or

200 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIII: 96: ‘se gia a sorte non si rimettessi in uno solo che al tutto logovernassi, che fussi uomo prudentissimo. In questo caso, potria bene essere, ma durerebbepoco, perche quello governatore in breve tempo li torrebbe lo stato; ma, consigliandosi con piud’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.’

201 Machiavelli 1960, II.2: 280: ‘E senza dubbio, questo bene comune non e osservato se non nellerepubliche.’

202 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XIV: 62: ‘e non e ragionevole . . . il disarmato stia sicuro intra servitoriarmati’.

203 For vires, see Machiavelli 1960, Ch.X: 48, where the chapter heading reads: ‘Quomodo omniumprincipatuum vires perpendi debeant’. For the importance of considering and creating opinioni, see,for example, Ch.XIX: 75; Ch.XX: 87; Ch.XXIII: 96.

The battle 303

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 hasruled them can be said to have ‘dominated them’.205 As a body of personsliving an unfree life, a principality can have compedes put on its feet; it canbe adjoined to a pre-existing state in order to form ‘all one body’; its healthcan be treated by a prince who sometimes ‘intervenes in the affairs of astate’ like a doctor curing a body, tending it with remedies.206 The total-ising fiction of one body has gone entirely. In Chapter IV, Machiavelliconsiders the conditions under which a ‘state might rebel’ upon the deathof its prince; in Chapter V, he argues that when a prince establishes a stateand entrusts its government to a few trustworthy friends in his absence, thestate ‘knows that it cannot exist without his friendship and power’; inChapter IX, Machiavelli thinks not only about those times when ‘citizensneed the state’ but also about those adverse situations when ‘a state needsthe citizens’.207 Though Hexter was right to draw attention to its markedpassivity, the state which is called a principality is by no means inani-mate.208 On the contrary, it is crucial for the prince who wishes to maintainit to recognise that his state does have a life of its own – thoughts, beliefs,customs, needs – which requires careful controlling and ordering preciselyso that its activity does not ‘come to much’.209

Machiavelli’s principality is not directly analogous to an individualperson. Machiavelli is generally quite wary about positing liberty or servi-tude as the properties of single persons. For him, free persons are those wholive in free states; unfree persons in unfree states.210 Like the republic, theprincipality is a larger, mixed body. It is certainly true for Machiavelli thatthe state – like any body – must be considered to possess natural qualities.As he remarks in Chapter VII, ‘states which come about rapidly, like allother things in nature which are born and grow quickly, cannot sufficiently

204 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.I: 15: ‘consueti a vivere sotto uno principe’.205 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’.206 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 loroprincipato antiquo, tutto uno corpo’; Ch.III: 21: ‘E interviene di questa come dicono e fisici delloetico . . . Cosı interviene nelle cose di stato.’

207 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 epotenzia sua . . .’; Ch.IX: 48: ‘quando lo stato ha bisogno de’ cittadini’.

208 Hexter 1973: 159. For the Renaissance history of the concept, see Skinner 1989; Skinner 2002, II:368–413. For recent work, see Skinner and Strath 2003.

209 Hexter 1973: 159.210 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.

304 The Machiavellian Attack

develop their roots, branches and trunks’ and will consequently ‘bedestroyed by the first chill winds of adversity’.211 But this is precisely whythe body needs to be tended with great art, and not just left to developnaturally. 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 bedescribed in terms of architecture or tending plants does not so muchcontradict as complement the imagery of the state as a body. To talk ofpersonal development in terms of character-building or cultivation isto use a conventional metaphorical language. The important thing aboutMachiavelli’s theory of the art of the state is that it must negotiate a pathbetween nature and artifice. Machiavelli’s theory of the state comes toresemble Quintilian’s aesthetics: the art of governing the state involvesworking with the intrinsic materia of a natural body while bringing to it thetransforming benefits of an extrinsic art.212

Machiavelli repeatedly refers to materia when discussing state forma-tion. The virtuous founders of Chapter VI are said to receive from Fortunathe raw materia into which ‘to be able to introduce’ the forma of theirstate.213 But, as we have seen, in the Quintilianic rhetorical language withwhich Machiavelli is familiar, to introduce forma is to engage in person-ification. Princes who make states out of such materia personify: they seizeupon an occasion provided by Fortuna to produce a person, and they needtheir 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 producea new principality but will ‘adorn it and strengthen it’ with ‘good lawsand good arms, good friends and good examples’.214 And if he wants tokeep the state as his ‘possession’, says Machiavelli, a prince must ‘not fearto adorn’ it.215 Machiavelli’s prince acts like an orator inventing, disposingand embellishing materia. Indeed, his prince needs to be an orator.Machiavelli agrees with the Senecan view that a new prince is highly

211 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VII: 34 (Machiavelli 1988: 23): ‘li stati che vengano subito, come tutte l’altrecose della natura che nascono e crescono presto, non possono avere le barbe e corrispondenzie loro;in modo, che ’l primo tempo avverso le spenge’.

212 For Quintilian’s ‘Art, Artist, Work’ scheme, see Quintilian 2001, II.14, vol.I: 346–50 (and Russell’sintroductory comments at 8); for the text as a body needing artful attention, see the seminal passageat VIII. Proem. 18–22, vol.III: 316–18.

213 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.VI: 31:‘Et esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino altrodalla fortuna che la occasione; la quale dette loro materia a potere introdurvi drento quella formaparse loro.’

214 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXIV: 97: ‘E cosı ara duplicata gloria, di avere dato principio a unoprincipato nuovo, e ornatolo e corroboratolo di buone legge di buone arme, di buoni amici e dibuoni esempli.’

215 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXI: 93: ‘non tema di ornare le sua possessione per timore che le li sieno tolte’.

The battle 305

conspicuous and that his fama can be won or lost through dicta as much asthrough facta. Machiavelli counsels him to take ‘great care that nothingcomes out of his mouth which is not full’ of the requisite five qualitieswhich he lists.216 The fact that there may be a disjunction between theprince’s attempts to represent his persona or anything else in the mostvirtuous light possible in order to maintain his state and his ‘real’ self or theactual facts of the matter is not considered by Machiavelli to constitute anytype of moral dilemma per se. To object to such behaviour on these groundsalone would be entirely inconsistent with Machiavelli’s ethics. His statesare predicated on persons with their affects intact, existing in a place wherethere can be no absolute certainty or final agreement about things. WhenMachiavelli uses the resources of classical rhetoric to constitute for histheory a rigorous ratiocinative basis, he is fully prepared to concede that, inthe final analysis, one must use all the power at one’s disposal in order todefeat opposing arguments. The art of the state must comprise the classicalart of oratory. And since the art of oratory is also conceived in terms ofthe art of war, it forms a wholly complementary aspect of the art of thestate which Machiavelli defines as nothing other than the art of war.Machiavelli’s text is the embodiment of this principle. The questionwhich one might now ask is which state his text is fighting for.

There is good reason to think that Machiavelli’s descent to the battlefieldto offer testimony of his servitude produces a considerable victory for thecause of the free state. This is not just because his theory separates free fromunfree states, although as an extended act of definition, his text is a valuablerepublican acquisition. With consummate art, he has, after all, annihilateda rival conception of liberty, put an end to the prince’s claims to presideover a republic, and mocked the notion that the institution of a principatois the best way to ensure the common good. Yet Machiavelli’s greatestconquest is his seizure of the concept of the prince itself in the pursuit of thefree state.

For it is not the lack of trust, nor the use of arms, nor the occasions ofcruelty, nor the turning of heads, nor the manipulation of fear, nor thepractices of simulation or dissimulation which cast a shadow over the artof the state in Machiavelli’s treatise. All of these activities can and mustbe 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 maidi bocca una cosa che non sia piena delle soprascritte cinque qualita, e paia, a vederlo e udirlo, tuttopieta, tutto fede, tutto integrita, tutto religione. E non e cosa piu necessaria a parere di avere chequesta ultima qualita. E li uomini in universali iudicano piu alli occhi che alle mani; perche tocca avedere a ognuno, a sentire a pochi. Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu sei.’

306 The Machiavellian Attack

principality. Certainly, he codes his rhetoric to recall Catiline when refer-ring to the prince’s need to be a simulator ac dissimulator; and he does so ina 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 noprerogative of kings to break fides or resort to the arts of dissimulation. Oneonly has to recall that it is Brutus, the father of Roman liberty himself,whom Machiavelli lauds in the Discorsi as the very greatest example ofhow to dissemble in the pursuit of the state.218 Nor is it the infliction ofinjury or the imposition of subjection and domination which unsettles hisvision: 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 maintenanceof a state of unfreedom. There is no trace of liberty in any of Machiavelli’sprincipalities, and the single occasion on which Machiavelli predicates thecondition of freedom of a principe in Il Principe is surely ironic. It occurs inChapter XIX, as Machiavelli admires the constitution of France becauseit keeps the king – rather than the kingdom or its inhabitants – in ‘libertae sicurta’.219 If one turns to the Discorsi, where France’s constitution issimilarly held to be praiseworthy because it manages to give the peoplesecurity and to oblige the king to some extent to honour its prescriptions,the irony is better illuminated. There, France’s constitution is regarded asexemplary because it provides a measure of security and contentment whileheading off any ‘popular demand’ for the ‘restoration of freedom’: thisdemand, says Machiavelli simply, ‘the prince is unable to satisfy’.220

Machiavelli is actually remarkably consistent on this point. As early as1510–11 in his Ritratto di cose di Francia, we find him providing an accountof French political arrangements in which, as Elena Fasano Guarini hasmade abundantly clear, ‘liberta and civilta have no place’.221

217 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 inimperiorum, honorum, gloriae cupiditatem inciderunt. Quod enim est apud Ennium: Nulla sanctasocietas/Nec fides regni est’; Sallust 1921, 5.4: 8: ‘animus audax subdolus varius, cuius rei lubetsimulator ac dissimulator’. For the figure of Catiline as a precursor of Caesarian tyranny, seeMachiavelli’s comments (and note the idea of unfreedom of speech under a prince) in Machiavelli1960, I.10: 157; for Machiavelli’s comments on Sallust’s account of the conspiracy, see III.6: 409.

218 Machiavelli 1960, III.2: 384–5.219 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.’220 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 peraltro che per esserci quelli re obligati a infinite leggi, nelle quali si comprende la sicurta di tutti i suoipopoli.’

221 Guarini 1990: 25.

The battle 307

The art of the state consists not only in its creation but also in itsmaintenance by persons in government. In a republic, those persons arefree citizens drawn from the larger citizen-body which constitutes the freestate. In a principality, however, the prince needs to govern his state withthe help of unfree subjects drawn from the unfree subject-body which is theunfree state. He needs, in the words of Machiavelli, servi and servitori.Machiavelli gestures – in only apparently parodic tone – towards the ideathat the unfree state is an inverted version of a republic. In a republic, freecitizens remain free through being able to participate in the government ofthe state, thereby ensuring that its administration does not fall under thedomination of any one person or group of persons. In a principality, unfreesubjects participate in the government of a state which is subject to the willof one person alone, and thereby help to ensure their own servitude. Nofeature of the art of the state necessary to offset the inevitable conflicts,tensions and differences within it produces free bodies. If founding a stateis the height of princely creativity, then the rationality of its maintenance asa principality is almost invariably bound to the production of unfreedom.

Machiavelli is only seemingly implicated in the cool inculcation of thissterile 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 heatabout him – while simultaneously giving instructions upon the govern-ment 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 itsgovernment is repeatedly – if obliquely – described in terms of its servility.However much moral redescription might successfully occur within aprincipality, and however coercive its mechanisms for the production ofbelief, Machiavelli has made it impossible for any such activity to be saidto be undertaken in the name of the republic. The prince may be wise,prudent and armed. His subjects may enjoy some protection, the possibil-ity of going about their business quietly, and the consolation that a goodprince will not seize their property or, in the case of adult males, theirwives.222 And as we have seen, the prince may even arm his servitori in orderto help him maintain his possessione. Yet in so putting it, Machiavelli againconfronts the reader with the thought that the end to which the art is beingpursued 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 thatthese minimal restrictions amount to aspirations: whether the prince intervenes or not, his subjectsare still unfree. See the points in Skinner 1996: 81–99.

308 The Machiavellian Attack

This thought may not be of great concern to people who want to beprinces. And it may not impinge much upon those who are generallyunconcerned about a free way of life. In fact, it may not even register atall. Machiavelli is aware that some people have been dominated for so longthat they are neither capable of recognising their own slavery nor the extentof their own involvement in it. But Machiavelli’s text is not designed toconvert the world. To engage in the type of rhetoric which Il Principeembodies is to commit oneself to structuring one’s argument in the light ofthe beliefs of a definite audience. There is no reason to suppose thatMachiavelli had an exclusively Florentine readership in mind when hewrote. But, equally, there is no reason to think that a Florentine audiencewas anything other than important to him. And there is certainly noreason to accuse Machiavelli himself of being equivocal about the meritsof liberty and servitude. To maintain that Machiavelli’s studied exclusionof the terminology of liberty, the republic and the common good fromhis description of the art of the state, and his inclusion of a language ofservitude instead, is part of a dispassionate act of analysis is not merely toturn one’s back on his republican commitments and the language in whichthey and those of his associates were historically expressed.223 It is to ignorecenturies of discourse about the benefits of princely rule to whichMachiavelli’s treatise is highly attuned.

But Machiavelli’s account of the virtuoso prince in De principatibusis not an example of irony extended to embrace an entire text. ForMachiavelli knows the power of concession. It may indeed be time for anew prince. It cannot possibly be out of the question, and it might just bethe answer to unfreedom. Machiavelli is hardly squeamish elsewhere aboutprescribing a period of princely domination – and therefore unfreedom –in the early years of a young state’s life. But Machiavelli – like a virtuousprince, in fact – is also a master of his materia. However one interprets hisexhortation to liberty in Chapter XXVI, it indisputably points to disposi-zione grandissima (or ‘the marshalling of affairs in the best possible ordine’,as Quintilian defines it).224 For it countenances a new prince under thespecific conditions of wretched slavery. Machiavelli’s concluding consid-erations of the appropriateness of the tempi and materia for a new princeproduce a personification of Italia as a woman utterly reduced to, and in

223 For the view that Il Principe is ‘not a work of ideology’ and ‘cannot be identified as expressing theoutlook of a group’ but ‘is rather an analytic study’, see Pocock 1975: 156.

224 See Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103: ‘Qui e disposizione grandissima’; Quintilian 2001, III.3.8,vol.II: 26: ‘dispositio . . . rerum ordine quam optimo conlocatio’.

The battle 309

desperate need of, liberation from external servitude. She would indeedseem to be promising materia for a productive monarch as good atintroducing forma as Machiavelli and the ancient heroes of Chapter VI.But a person who is seriously interested in abiding by the description ofillustrious and princely state formation in De principatibus needs to be surethat he is working to liberate this type of abject materia, and that he is notinstead implicated in the altogether more wicked art of producing it.

He needs, in short, to have been following Machiavelli’s argument aboutstates from the beginning. For if Chapter XXVI really is the conclusion ofhis text, rather than a sudden aberration from an argument which has beenconducted to that point in close conformity with the canons of classicalrhetoric, 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 allalong about states of servitude. The fact that he now ends by broaching thethought that a prince may be required to liberate a person reduced to sucha state is only apparently contradictory. It points to exactly the type ofsituation which Machiavelli has been working since Chapter I to isolateand 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 creativeand liberating force which he describes in greater detail in the Discorsi.These princes have not overthrown republics, thereby enslaving freepersons; nor have they inherited principalities, thereby taking possessionof unfree persons; nor have they acquired someone else’s principality – andtherefore unfree persons – either by money or by conquest. These princesare rare and marvellous, Machiavelli reminds us in his conclusion.225 Andalthough he has not pointed to any comparable example of their typein recent millennia – not even Cesare Borgia occupies the same theoreticalspace as they do – he now feels sure that the Medici prince may be ablenot merely to rival but even to surpass their achievements. Suddenly –almost miraculously – it becomes ‘not hard’ for the Medici to followthe greatest examples of Chapter VI, provided they ‘take up the ordini ofthose that I have proposed as a target to aim for’.226 Now Machiavelli feelsobliged to point out that these ‘rare and marvellous’ men were ‘nonethelessmen’.227 To the cause of the Medici, on the other hand, God is a greater

225 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘quelli uomini sieno rari e maravigliosi’.226 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’.227 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 102: ‘non di manco furono uomini’.

310 The Machiavellian Attack

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

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

229 Machiavelli 1960, Ch.XXVI: 103.

The battle 311

Conclusion

Seneca’s theory of the prince continued to captivate the early modernimagination in western Europe. A few years after the Institutio ofErasmus, Guillaume Bude’s De l’institution du prince drew heavily on aSenecan ideology of clemency to reinforce a bracing defence of monarchi-cal absolutism. In that treatise, the Persian king Artaxerxes is held to havebeen so full of ‘great clemency, infinite goodness, and wonderful humane-ness’ 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 precededhim’, he ‘also wanted to exercise the virtue of clemency’ in ‘order to temperthe ordinance’s rigour and harshness with equity and gentle royal humane-ness’.1 Julius Caesar was similarly ‘so clement and humane’ that after thesuicide of Cato (‘so envious of my clemency and kindness’, says Caesar,reproachfully), the dictator chose to spare the diehard republican’s sonbecause he was ‘more mindful of his own moral standards than of his angeror of the enormous power that he had acquired’.2 Caesar ‘thereby displayedthe unsurpassed, praiseworthy force of his humaneness, which stemmedfrom his great magnanimity’.3 In the 1530s, the Senecan argument aboutthe mercy of the mighty received further attention among French human-ists at the hands of the young lawyer Jean Calvin, whose first completepublished work was a commentary on De clementia.4 And in Spain, thespeculum principis genre continued to draw on Seneca’s political

1 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 accompaignee d’aultresvertuz Royales . . . voulant garder l’authorite de iustice, & ne revocquer les ordonnances des Roys sespredecesseurs, desirant neantmoins user de sa vertu de clemence: Pour temperer la rigueur & acerbitede l’ordonnance, par equite & doulceur de l’humanite Royale . . .’

2 Bude 1966, Ch.33: 141–2 (Bude 1997: 271): ‘Il estoit si plein de clemence & d’humanite . . . Car tu as euenvie sur moy de ma clemence & benignite . . . memoratif de ses propres mœurs plus, que de son ireou grande puissance qu’il avoit acquise.’

3 Bude 1966, Ch.33: 142 (Bude 1997: 271): ‘il monstra singuliere & recommendable vertu de sonhumanite, procedant de grande magnanimite qui estoit en luy’.

4 Calvin 1969. For Calvin’s ongoing use of Senecan ethics, see Battles 1965; Moreau 1994.

312

theory: towards the end of the century, the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyrarefers repeatedly to De clementia throughout Book II of his Princepschristianus adversus Nicalaum Machiavellum, reiterating its contentionsabout the merits of clemency and the security that it brings, and referringto its warning about the dangers of assuming masks.5 Perhaps some sense ofhow well worn the process of plucking Senecan preceptive wisdom from Declementia had become by the close of the Cinquecento is detectable in thetone of Justus Lipsius as he recalled to a friend the visit of the Hapsburgarchduke to the University of Louvain in 1599:

I had to perform in the School of Theology . . . after an extemporaneous intro-duction I explained a short text from Seneca’s De clementia, beginning: ‘Theprince’s greatness is firmly founded if all know that he is at once above them andon their side etc.’ I explained the text from Seneca, I say, and in it the task ofprinces, and finally I added a reflection on the happy result that would stem fromthis, that is that we Belgians would feel towards them the benevolence and theloyalty we had always felt for our rulers.6

Machiavelli’s Il Principe intervenes upon the historical rise to pre-eminenceof this Senecan vision of monarchy. Machiavelli entirely transforms theratiocinative basis of the Roman case for the princeps. He never gets trappedin an immanent critique. He generates a new way of thinking altogether.His dethronement of universal reason is a profound act of liberation. Thisis arguably what makes his text such a significant event, a new departureand a revolutionary episode in the history of the concept of the state. Itskips free of the monological bind so magisterially that the reader occa-sionally glimpses a quite different order of experience from the one whichcharacterises states addicted to universal reason. There is, for one thing, amarkedly altered sense of tempo in the theory. For at least one reader in themid-Cinquecento, Machiavelli’s variations were music to his ears. ‘Truly,’said the Tudor gentleman William Thomas, ‘as the musician useth some-time a flat, and sometime a sharp note, sometime a short, and sometime along, to make his song perfect; so, saith Macchiaveghi, ought man to framehis procedings unto his time.’7

It is true that, of all the different responses which have greetedMachiavelli’s work, my argument helps to explain and in part – but onlyin part – validate one particular way of thinking about Il Principe which has

5 See Ribadeneyra 1604, Book II, Chs.2, 18 and 19: 273–4, 380–6, 391. I must thank Geoff Baldwin forbringing this fact to my attention.

6 Cited from Grafton 1991: 9 (who gives reference as Justus Lipsius, Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (Antwerp,1637), vol. II: 454).

7 Cited from Raab 1964: 43.

Conclusion 313

persisted since his own century. This interpretation has generally insistednot merely on the satirical and ironic elements of the work, but also on thefact that it is profoundly concerned with liberty. The main proponents ofthe view that Machiavelli’s treatise was seeking to enlighten its public aboutfreedom and domination are well known.8 An early spokesperson for theview 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’ andthat ‘the purpose of this shrewdest of men was to instruct the nations underpretext of instructing the prince’.9 By that time, the belief that Il Principewas written by a man ‘who burned inwardly with hatred for the prince towhom he wrote, and hoped for nothing else from his book than that, bywriting to a tyrant what would please a tyrant, he might bring about thetyrant’s speedy overthrow by his own act’ had already been in circulationfor nearly fifty years, since Cardinal Pole’s Apologia ad Carolum Quintum(1539).10 In English republican quarters in the following century, theFlorentine was acclaimed, not without some irony, as ‘the divineMachiavelli’ and the ‘prince of politicians’.11 J. Warr joined the ranks ofreaders who enlisted the treatise in the name of liberty after the execution ofCharles I, announcing in a pamphlet entitled The Priviledges of the Peoplethat ‘Kings and Princes . . . walk in a distinct way of opposition to the Rightsand Freedomes of the People; all of which you may see in Machiavils Prince’.12

Spinoza famously detected much the same story in Il Principe, suspect-ing that Machiavelli had wanted ‘to show how cautious a free multitudeshould be of entrusting its welfare absolutely to one man’.13 This readingendured well into the Enlightenment. Rousseau wrote in Du contrat socialthat ‘while appearing to instruct kings he has done much to educate thepeople. 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 courtof the Medicis, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his

8 See Gilbert 1977b: 166–8. For the reception of Machiavelli’s work in the sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, see now Anglo 2005.

9 Gentile 1924, II: 156 (cited from Kahn 1994: 285, n.64 – see also her discussion at 124–31).10 Donaldson 1988: 87–8.11 See, respectively, Harrington 1924: 135; Neville 1681: 21, 46, 124.12 Raab 1964: 124.13 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.

314 Conclusion

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

Bayle’s Dictionnaire had endorsed this view of Machiavelli as a misunder-stood republican.15 And Diderot accused Machiavelli’s critics of somethingmuch more serious than simply failing to find his text funny. The work hadaimed to be instructive: ‘it is as if he said to his fellow citizens: read thiswork carefully. Should you ever accept a master, he will be such as I depicthim for you.’ It was very much the fault of the reader, and not ofMachiavelli, that they mistook ‘a satire for a eulogy’.16

Even within this community, the complexities of Machiavelli’s argu-ment have tended to become ironed out. There is a carefully defined placewithin Machiavelli’s political thinking for the properly virtuous prince, asthe Discorsi underline. What makes Il Principe so Machiavellian is thatwhile simultaneously laying down a completely new set of moral principlesfor governing states – a task which is clearly crucial to Machiavelli’spolitical theory in all its forms – it also makes categorically clear thecondition in which a state ruled by prince is maintained, and for whosegood. Of course, free states are not for everyone: Machiavelli’s theory issupple enough to acknowledge the advantages of life in a well-ordered andunified state even if it is unfree. But it is nevertheless unfree for as long as itremains in princely hands, Machiavelli insists, and his quietly devastatingexplication of this point, so long alleged by civic humanists as the funda-mental characteristic of monarchical life, may have made his text ratherhotter to the touch than has been sufficiently acknowledged in recenttimes.

By way of conclusion, it might be worth asking (again) whether, in theirutter repudiation of a moral absolutism based upon a notion of universalreason and universal law, Machiavelli’s ethics make his closest modern allyin the war against unfreedom in its various forms as much Nietzsche asMarx. When the former suggests in his thesis on slave morality that wemight at least consider the possibility that ‘this world has really never quitelost a certain odour of blood and torture (not even with old Kant: thecategorical imperative smells of cruelty . . .)’, he may have been closer to aMachiavellian position than ever.17 But far from remaining so pleased with

14 Rousseau 1997, Book III, Ch.6: 95.15 Bayle 1702, article ‘Machiavelli’, note ‘o’ (citing Viroli 1998: 209, n.4).16 Diderot’s point is underlined by Gilbert 1977b: 168.17 Nietzsche 1994: 45.

Conclusion 315

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 toliberty which princely domination posed. His response was sustained by avision of the free state of unparalleled theoretical brilliance. That vision ispredicated upon the existence of difference and contingency in the life ofstates, and it offered a clear alternative to the monarchical body at aparticular historical juncture. But the practicability of the free statewhich Machiavelli advocated depended to some extent upon reversing adominant ethic, and part of that work involved him in a heated campaignagainst the redescription of subjection and infinite injury in terms of libertyand happiness. There is perhaps something exemplary about this approach.Becoming unfree remained explicable to Machiavelli, who evidently appre-ciated that domination remains at its most annihilating when it lackstestimony, not when it receives it.

316 Conclusion

Bibliography

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

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

P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S

Ad Herennium (1954). Ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, London.Aquinas, St Thomas (1964–). Summa Theologiae, London.Aulus Gellius (1961–3). The Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols., London.Barzizza, Gasparino (1723a). Opera (pars prima), ed. G. A. Furiettus, Rome.

(1977a). Commentaria super Epistolas Senece, ed. Letizia A. Panizza, in‘Gasparino Barzizza’s Commentaries on Seneca’s Letters’, Traditio 33: 341–2.

(1977b). Vita Senecae, ed. Letizia A. Panizza, in ‘Gasparino Barzizza’sCommentaries on Seneca’s Letters’, Traditio 33: 342–50 (Appendix II).

(1977c). Prohemium, Comentarii in Epistolas Senece, ed. Letizia A. Panizza, in‘Gasparino Barzizza’s Commentaries on Seneca’s Letters’, Traditio 33: 350–7

(Appendix III).Barzizza, Guiniforte (1723b). Opera (pars secunda), ed. G. A. Furiettus, Rome.Bayle, Pierre (1702). Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3 vols., 2

nd edn, Rotterdam.Beccadelli, Antonio (1553). Epistolarum libri V, Venice.

(1589). De dictis et factis Alphonsi Regis Aragonum et Neapolis libri quatuor,Rostock.

(1746). Epistolarum Gallicarum libri quattuor. Accedit etiam eiusdemEpistolarum Campanarum Liber, Naples.

(1968). Liber rerum gestarum Ferdinandi regis, ed. Gianvito Resta, Palermo.Biondo, Flavio (1927). Scritti inediti e rari, ed. Bartolomeo Nogara, Rome.Bracciolini, Poggio (1964–9). Opera omnia, ed. Riccardo Fubini, 4 vols., Turin.Braga, Martin of (1950). Opera omnia, ed. Claude W. Barlow, New Haven,

Conn.Brescia, Albertano of (1873). Liber consolationis et consilii, ed. Johannes Thor

Sundby, London.(1980). ‘De amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma

vitae’, ed. Sharon Hiltz, Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania,

317

Philadelphia, Penn. (online at http://freespace.virgin.net/angus.graham/Albertano.htm).

Bude, Guillaume (1966). De l’institution du prince, Farnborough.(1997). On the Education of the Prince: Selections, trans. Neil Kenny, in

The Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, ed. Jill Kraye,2 vols., Cambridge, vol. II, pp. 258–73.

Calvin, Jean (1969). Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, ed. and trans.Ford Lewis Battles and Andre Malan Hugo, Leiden.

Caramanico, Marino da (1957). Prooemium glossatoris in Constitutiones RegniSiciliae, ed. Francesco Calasso, in Calasso, I glossatori e la teoria della sovranita,3rd edn, Milan, pp. 179–205.

Cicero (1913). De officiis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, London.(1928). De legibus, ed. and trans. Clinton Waller Keyes, London.(1933). De natura deorum, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, London.(1942). De oratore, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, 2 vols., London.(1949). De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, London, pp. 1–346.(1962). Orator, ed. and trans. H. M. Hubbell, revised edn, London, pp. 306–508.(1991). On Duties, eds. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, Cambridge.

Claudian (1956). Ed. and trans. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols., London.Codex Iustinianus (1877). Ed. Paul Krueger, Berlin.Constitutionum Regni Siciliarum libri III (1999). Ed. Andrea Romano, 2 vols.,

Soveria Manelli.Constitutiones Regni Siciliae (1992). Ed. Andrea Romano, Sicily.Digest of Justinian, The (1985). Eds. Theodore Mommsen and Paul Krueger, trans.

Alan Watson, 4 vols., Philadelphia, Penn.Epistolae Senecae ad Paulum et Pauli ad Senecam (1938). Ed. Claude W. Barlow,

Horn.Erasmus (1974). Institutio Principis Christiani, ed. O. Herding, in Opera omnia

Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (1969–), Amsterdam, vol. 4.1, pp. 97–130.(1997). The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. and trans. Lisa Jardine,

Cambridge.Ferreto de’ Ferreti (1908–20). Opera, ed. Carlo Cipolla, 3 vols., Rome.Filelfo, Francesco (1898). Orazione di Francesco Filelfo in lode di Filippo Maria

Visconti duca di Milano, ed. Giovanni Benadduci, Tolentino.Gentile, Alberico (1924). De legationibus libri tres, trans. Gordon L. Laing, 2 vols.,

New York.Guarini, Guarino (1915–19). Epistolario, ed. Remigio Sabbadini, 3 vols., Venice.Harrington, James (1924). Oceana, ed. S. B. Liljegren, Heidelberg.Historia Diplomatica Friderici II (1852–61). Ed. Jean L. A. Huillard-Breholles,

6 vols., Paris.Isernia, Andrea da (1571). Commentaria in usus feudorum, Naples.Jerome, St (1845). Liber de viris illustribus, ed. Jean Martianay, in Patrologiae cursus

completus, series latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 222 vols. (1844–1904), Paris, vol. XXIII,pp. 602–719.

Latini, Brunetto (1948). Li livres dou tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody, Berkeley, Calif.

318 Bibliography

(1993). The Book of the Treasure, trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin, N.Y.Liber Augustalis (1971). Ed. James M. Powell, New York.Machiavelli, Bernardo (1954). Libro di ricordi, ed. Cesare Olschski, Florence.Machiavelli, Niccolo (1960). Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli, Milan.

(1971). Istorie fiorentine in Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli, Florence.(1988). The Prince, ed. Russell Price and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge.(1984–99). Tutte le opere, eds. Franco Gaeta and Rinaldo Rinaldi, 3 vols., Turin.

Manetti, Giannozzo (1611). ‘Oratio ad Alfonsum Aragonum’ in De regibus Siciliaeet Apuliae, ed. Felix Sandeo, Hanau, pp. 169–75.

(1968). ‘Oratio ad Senenses’ in Giannozzo Manetti: Das Corpus der Orationes,ed. Heinz Willi Wittschier, Cologne, pp. 155–65.

(2003). Biographical Writings, ed. and trans. Stefano U. Baldassarri and RolfBagemihl, Cambridge, Mass.

Nardi, Jacopo (1858). Istorie di Firenze, ed. I Gelli, 2 vols., Florence.Neville, Henry (1681). Plato redivivus: or, a dialogue concerning government, London.Pacatus (1994). Panegyric of Theodosius in In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The

Panegyrici Latini, eds. C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, Berkeley,Calif., pp. 448–519.

Penna, Luca da (1597). Commentaria in tres libros codicis, Lyons.Petrarca, Francesco (1933–42). Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi, 4 vols., Florence.

(1955). ‘Petrarch’s Coronation Oration’, trans. Ernest Wilkins, in Wilkins,Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, pp. 300–13.

(1975–85). Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols., Albany,N.Y.

(1978). Epistole, ed. Ugo Dotti, Turin.(1992). Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo et al., 2 vols., Baltimore, Md.

Pliny (1969). Panegyricus in Letters and Panegyricus, ed. and trans. Betty Radice,2 vols., London, vol. II, pp. 332–546.

Proposta fatta dalla corte Estense ad Alfonso I re di Napoli (1445), ed. C. Foucard(1879), in Archivio storico per le province napoletane, vol. IV (1879), pp. 689–741.

Quintilian (2001). The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell,5 vols., London.

Ravenna, Giovanni Conversini da (1980). Dragmalogia de eligibili vite genere, ed.and trans. Helen Lanneau Eaker, Lewisburg, Pa.

(1989). Dialogue between Giovanni and a Letter, ed. and trans. Helen LanneauEaker, Binghampton, N.Y.

Ribadeneyra, Pedro de (1604). Princeps christianus adversus NicalaumMachiavellum, Mainz.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1997). The Social Contract and Other Later PoliticalWritings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge.

Sallust (1921). Bellum Catilinae in Sallust, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe, London,pp. 2–129.

Salutati, Coluccio (1891–1911). Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. FrancescoNovati, 4 vols., Rome.

(1947). De nobilitate legum et medicinae, ed. Eugenio Garin, Florence.

Bibliography 319

(1985). De fato et fortuna, ed. Concetta Bianca, Florence.Seneca (1917–25). Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, ed. and trans. Richard M. Gummere,

3 vols., London.(1928a). De clementia in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London,

vol. I, pp. 356–449.(1928b). De ira in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London, vol. I,

pp. 106–355.(1928c). De constantia in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London,

vol. I, pp. 48–105.(1928d). De providentia in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London,

vol. I, pp. 2–47.(1932a). De beata vita in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London,

vol. II, pp. 98–179.(1932b). De otio in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore, London, vol. II,

pp. 180–201.(1932c). De brevitate vitae in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore,

London, vol. II, pp. 286–355.(1932d). De consolatione ad Polybium in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore,

London, vol. II, pp. 356–415.(1932e). De consolatione ad Marciam in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore,

London, vol. II, pp. 2–97.(1935). De beneficiis in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John. W. Basore, London, vol. III.(1971). Natural Questions Books I–III, ed. and trans. Thomas H. Corcoran, London.(1995). Moral and Political Essays, ed. and trans. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procope,

Cambridge.Spinoza, Benedetto (1979). Tractatus politicus, ed. P.-F. Moreau, Paris.Valla, Lorenzo (1984). Laurentii Valle Epistole, eds. Ottavio Besomi and Mariangela

Regoliosi, Padua.Vergerio, Pier Paolo (1934). Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. Leonard Smith,

Rome.(2002). ‘The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth Dedicated to

Ubertino da Carrara’ in Humanist Educational Treatises, ed. and trans. CraigW. Kallendorf, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 2–91.

Vimercate, Stefanardo da (1910–12). Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani, ed.G. Calligaris, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, n.s. 9.1, Citta di Castello.

Viterbo, Giovanni da (1901). Liber de regimine civitatum, ed. Gaetano Salvemini,in Bibliotheca iuridica medii aevi, 3 vols., ed. Augusto Guadenzi, Bologna,vol. III, pp. 215–80.

S E C O N D A R Y S O U R C E S

Abulafia, David (1992). Frederick II, London.(1997). The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms 1200–1500, London.

320 Bibliography

Albanese, Gabriella (1999). ‘Tra Domenico da Peccioli e Gasparino Barzizza. Unnuovo codice del commento alle ‘‘Epistulae ad Lucilium’’ di Seneca’ inGasparino Barzizza e la rinascita degli studi classici: fra continuita e rinnova-mento, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa, Naples, pp. 9–83.

(2004). ‘La Vita Senecae’ in Seneca: una vicenda testuale, eds. Teresa De Robertisand Gianvito Resta, Florence, pp. 47–54.

Algra, Keimpe (2003). ‘Stoic Theology’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics,ed. Brad Inwood, Cambridge, pp. 153–78.

Altamura, Antonio (1941). L’umanesimo nel mezzogiorno d’Italia: storia, bibliografiee testi inediti, Florence.

Altamura, Antonio (1952). La letteratura dell’eta angioina: tradizione medievale epremesse umanistiche, Naples.

Althusser, Louis (1999). Machiavelli and Us, ed. Francois Matheron and trans.Gregory Elliot, London.

Anglo, Sydney (2005). Machiavelli – The First Century, London.Atkins, E. M. (2000). ‘Cicero’ in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman

Political Thought, eds. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield,Cambridge, pp. 477–516.

Avesani, Rino et al. (eds.) (1986). Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario della morte:atti del XVII convegno di studi maceratesi, Padua.

Baron, Hans (1955). The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism andRepublican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols., Princeton, N.J.

Bartsch, Shadi (1994). Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak fromNero to Hadrian, London.

Battles, Ford Lewis (1965). ‘Against Luxury and Licence in Geneva, A ForgottenFragment of Calvin’, Interpretation 19: 182–202.

Bentley, Jerry H. (1987). Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples, Princeton, N.J.Bertolini, Lucia (2004). ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani degli apocrifi (sec. xiii–xv): un

sondaggio’ in Seneca: una vicenda testuale, eds. Teresa De Robertis andGianvito Resta, Florence, pp. 357–403.

Billanovich, Giuseppe (1947). Petrarca letterato. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca, Rome.(1996a). ‘Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte. Tra Il Petrarca e il Boccaccio’ in

Billanovich, Petrarca e il primo umanesimo, Padua, pp. 459–524.(1996b). ‘I primi umanisti e le tradizioni dei classici latini’ in Billanovich,

Petrarca e il primo umanesimo, Padua, pp. 117–41.Blasiis, Giuseppe de (1861). Della vita e delle opere di Pietro della Vigna, Naples.Bobzien, Suzanne (1998). Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford.Bologna, Ferdinando (1994). ‘Un passo del Libro de Architectura di Antonio Filarete

e l’arco trionfale di Alfonso di Aragona a Napoli’, Rivista dell’Istituto Nazionaledi Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte 17: 191–221.

Borsook, Eve (1990). Messages in Mosaic: The Royal Programmes of Norman Sicily(1130–1197), Oxford.

Boyer, Jean-Paul (1995). ‘Parler du roi et pour le roi: Deux ‘‘sermons’’ deBarthelemy de Capoue, logothete du royaume de Sicile’, Revue des sciencesphilosophiques et theologiques 79, 2: 193–248.

Bibliography 321

(1998). ‘Predication et Etat Napolitain dans la premiere moitie du XIVe siecle’in L’Etat angevin: pouvoir, culture, et societe entre XIIIe et XIVe siecle, Rome,pp. 127–57.

Bueno de Mesquita, D. M. (1941). Giangaleazzo Visconti, Cambridge.Burckhardt, Jacob (1990). The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.

S. G. C. Middlemore, London.Burns, J. H. (ed.) (1991). The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700,

Cambridge.Busonero, Paola (2000). ‘Un caso esemplare di antigrafo e apografo nella tradi-

zione di Seneca: Il Pal. Lat. 1547 e il Reg. Lat. 1529’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed.Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 295–337.

Calasso, Francesco (1957). I glossatori e la teoria della sovranita, 3rd edn, Milan.

(1961). ‘Andrea d’Isernia’ in DBI, III, pp. 100–3.Campana, Augusto (1964). ‘Barbato da Sulmona’ in DBI, VI, pp. 130–4.Camporeale, Salvatore I. (1972). Lorenzo Valla: umanesimo e teologia, Florence.

(1995). ‘Institutio oratoria, lib. I. cap. 6,3 e le variazioni su tema di Lorenzo Valla:sermo e interpretatio’, Rhetorica 13: 285–300.

Canfora, Luciano (2000). ‘Seneca e le guerre civili’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed.Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 161–77.

Canning, Joseph P. (1987). The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis, Cambridge.(1991). ‘Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory, 1300–1450’ in The Cambridge

History of Medieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns, pbk edition,Cambridge, pp. 454–76.

Capasso, Bartolomeo (1871). ‘Sulla storia esterna delle Costituzioni di Federico II’,Atti della Accademia Pontaniana 9 (1871): 1–129.

Cognasso, Francesco (1966). I Visconti, Milan.Colish, Marcia L. (1978). ‘Cicero’s De Officiis and Machiavelli’s Prince’, Sixteenth-

Century Journal 9: 81–94.(1985). The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols.,

Leiden.(1993). ‘The Idea of Liberty in Machiavelli’ in Renaissance Essays II, ed. William

J. Connell, Rochester, pp. 180–207.Cox, Virginia (1997). ‘Machiavelli and the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Deliberative

Rhetoric in The Prince’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 28: 1109–41.Cremaschi, G. (1950). Stefanardo da Vimercate: Contributo per la storia della

cultura in Lombardia nel sec. XIII, Milan.Croce, Benedetto (1889). ‘I teatri di Napoli del secolo XV–XVIII’, Archivio storico

per le province napoletane 14: 556–684.Davidson, Arnold (1994). ‘Ethics as Aesthetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics,

and Ancient Thought’ in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. JanGoldstein, Oxford, pp. 63–80.

Dean, Trevor (1999). ‘The Rise of the Signori’ in The New Cambridge MedievalHistory, vol. V, ed. David Abulafia, Cambridge, pp. 458–78.

De Robertis, Teresa and Resta, Gianvito (eds.) (2004). Seneca: una vicendatestuale, Florence.

322 Bibliography

Del Lucchese, Filippo (2004). Tumulti e indignatio, Milan.Dell’Orto, Luisa Franchi (1999). ‘Sull’iconografia di Seneca’ in Seneca: mostra

bibliografica e iconografica, eds. Francesca Niutta and Carmel Santucci,Rome, pp. 27–41.

Del Treppo, Mario (1987). ‘L’anima, l’oro e il boia. Fisiologia di una crescita:Napoli nel Quattrocento’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane 105: 7–25.

Dionisotti, Carlo (1980). ‘Machiavelli letterato’ in Dionisotti, Machiavellerie,Turin, pp. 227–66.

Donaldson, Peter S. (1988). Machiavelli and Mystery of State, Cambridge.Donini, P. L. (1979). ‘L’eclettismo impossibile: Seneca e il platonismo medio’ in

Modelli filosofici e letterari: Lucrezio, Orazio, Seneca, eds. P. L. Donini andG. G. Gianotti, Bologna, pp. 151–274.

Dotti, Ugo (2003). Machiavelli rivoluzionario, Rome.Driscoll, Eileen (1964). ‘Alfonso of Aragon as a Patron of Art’ in Essays in Memory

of Karl Lehmann, ed. Lucy Freeman Sandler, New York, pp. 87–96.Ercole, Francesco (1928). Dal comune al principato: saggi sulla storia del diritto

pubblico del rinascimento italiano, Florence.Faraglia, N. F. (1889). ‘Barbato da Sulmona e gli uomini di lettere alla corte di

Roberto d’Angio’, Archivio storico italiano (5th ser.), 3: 313–60.Fears, J. Rufus (1975). ‘Nero as the Vicegerent of the Gods in Seneca’s De

clementia’, Hermes 103: 486–96.Fedeli, Paolo (2000). ‘Seneca e la natura’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed. Piergiorgio

Parroni, Rome, pp. 25–45.Ferrau, Giacomo (2001). Il tessitore di Antequera. Storiografia umanistica meridio-

nale, Rome.Filangieri di Candida, Riccardo (1937). ‘Rassegna critica delle fonti per la storia di

Castel Nuovo’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane 62: 267–333.Forcella, Vincenzo (1889–93). Iscrizioni delle chiese e degli altri edifici di Milano dal

secolo VIII ai giorni nostri, 12 vols., Milan.Foucault, Michel (1988). The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley, N.Y.

(2000). Ethics, vol. I., ed. Paul Rabinow, London.Frede, Dorothea (2003). ‘Stoic Determinism’ in The Cambridge Companion to the

Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood, Cambridge, pp. 179–205.Fumaroli, Marc (1980). L’Age de l’eloquence, Geneva.Gallicet, Ezio (2000). ‘Seneca nel De civitate dei di Agostino’ in Seneca e il suo

tempo, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 445–67.Garin, Eugenio (1955). ‘La cultura milanese nella prima meta del XV secolo’ in

Storia di Milano, 16 vols. (1953–66), Milan, vol. VI, pp. 546–608.Gauthier, Rene Antoine (1951). Magnanimite: l’ideal de la grandeur dans la philo-

sophie paıenne et dans la theologie chretienne, Paris.Gelderen, Martin van and Skinner, Quentin (2002). Republicanism: A Shared

European Heritage, 2 vols., Cambridge.Giancotti, F. (1953). ‘Il posto della biografia nella problematica senechiana, I: Da

quando e in che senso Seneca fu maestro di Nerone?’, Rendiconti della Classedi Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche dell’Accademia dei Lincei 8: 102–18.

Bibliography 323

Gilbert, Allan H. (1938). Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ and Its Forerunners: ‘The Prince’ as aTypical Book de Regimine Principum, Durham, N.C.

Gilbert, Felix (1977a). ‘The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince ofMachiavelli’ in Gilbert, History: Choice and Commitment, Cambridge, Mass.,pp. 91–114.

(1977b). ‘Machiavellism’ in Gilbert, History: Choice and Commitment,Cambridge, Mass., pp. 155–76.

Godman, Peter (1998). From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in theHigh Renaissance, Princeton, N.J.

Gothein, Eberhard (1915). Il Rinascimento nell’Italia meridionale, trans. TommasoPersico, Florence.

Grafton, Anthony (1991). ‘Humanism and Political Theory’ in The CambridgeHistory of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns, Cambridge, pp. 9–29.

Grafton, Anthony and Jardine, Lisa (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities:Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe,London.

Griffin, Miriam (1976). Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics, Oxford.(2000). ‘Seneca and Pliny’ in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman

Political Thought, eds. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, Cambridge,pp. 532–58.

Guarini, Elena Fasano (1990). ‘Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Italian Republics’ inMachiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock et al., Cambridge, pp. 17–40.

Gutting, Gary (ed.) (1994). The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge.Hadot, Pierre (1989). ‘Le Sage et le monde’, Le temps de la reflexion 10: 175–88.

(1992). ‘Reflections on the Notion of ‘the Cultivation of the Self’ in MichelFoucault Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong, New York, pp. 225–31.

Hankins, James (1990). Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Leiden.(1993). ‘Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of

Mehmed II’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49: 111–207.(ed.) (2000). Renaissance Civic Humanism, Cambridge.

Harris, William V. (2001). Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control inClassical Antiquity, Cambridge, Mass.

Heller, Erich (1971). ‘Burckhardt and Nietszche’ in Heller, The Disinherited Mind:Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought, 3

rd edn, London,pp. 67–88.

Henderson, John (2004). Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell,Cambridge.

Hersey, George L. (1973). The Aragonese Arch at Naples, 1443–1475, New Haven,Conn.

Hexter, J. H. (1973). ‘Il Principe and lo stato’ in Hexter, The Vision of Politics on theEve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel, N.Y., pp. 150–78.

Hornquist, Mikael (2004). Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge.Inwood, Brad (2003). The Cambridge Companion to The Stoics, Cambridge.Jackson Barlow, J. (1999). ‘The Fox and the Lion: Machiavelli Replies to Cicero’,

History of Political Thought 20: 627–45.

324 Bibliography

Jardine, Lisa (1994). ‘Ghosting the Reform of Dialectic: Erasmus and AgricolaAgain’, in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack, pp. 27–45.

Jones, Philip (1997). The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria, Oxford.Kahn, Victoria (1994). Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to

Milton, Princeton, N.J.Kantorowicz, Ernst (1931). Frederick the Second 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer, London.

(1957). The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton, N.J.Kelly, Samantha (2003). The New Solomon: Robert of Naples (1309–1343) and

Fourteenth-Century Kingship, Leiden.Knox, Dilwyn (1989). Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony, Leiden.Kohl, Benjamin (1975). ‘The Works of Giovanni di Conversini da Ravenna:

A Catalogue of Manuscripts and Editions’, Traditio 31: 349–67.(1983). ‘Conversini, Giovanni’ in DBI, XXVIII, pp. 574–8.(1998). Padua under the Carrara, 1318–1405, Baltimore, Md.

Kristeller, P. O. (1991). ‘Humanism and Moral Philosophy’ in Renaissance Humanism,ed. Albert Rabil, Jr., pbk edition, 3 vols., Philadelphia, Pa., vol. III, pp. 271–309.

Larner, John (1980). Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch, London.Lawrance, J. N. H. (1986). ‘On Fifteenth-Century Spanish Humanism’ in Medieval

and Renaissance Studies in Honour of Robert Brian Tate, eds. I. Michael andR. Cardwell, Oxford, pp. 63–87.

Leonard, Emile. (1954). Les Angevins de Naples, Paris.Long, A. A. (1996). ‘Freedom and Determinism in the Stoic Theory of Human

Action’ in Problems in Stoicism, ed. A. A. Long, London, pp. 173–99.Lorch, Maristella (1991). ‘Lorenzo Valla’ in Renaissance Humanism, ed. Albert

Rabil, Jr., pbk edition, 3 vols., Philadelphia, Pa., vol. I, pp. 332–49.Luiso, Francesco Paolo (1980). Studi su l’epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, Rome.Mack, Peter (1993). Renaissance Argument, Leiden.Malaspina, Ermanno (2000). ‘Una nuova collazione del codice Nazariano’ in

Seneca e il suo tempo, ed. Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 339–75.Mann, Nicholas (1984). Petrarch, Oxford.Mansfield, Harvey C. (1996). Machiavelli’s Virtue, Chicago, Ill.Marcucci, Silvia (1999). ‘La ‘‘Lectura Epistularum Seneca’’ di Domenico da

Peccioli’ in Gasparino Barzizza e la rinascita degli studi classici: fra continuitae rinnovamento, ed. Lucia Gualdo Rosa, Naples, pp. 85–151.

Marinis, Tammaro de (1947–53). La biblioteca napoletana dei re d’Aragona, 4 vols.,Milan.

Marongiu, Antonio (1972). Byzantine, Norman, Swabian and Later Institutions inSouthern Italy, London.

Martellotti, Guido (1965). ‘Gasparino Barzizza’ in DBI, VII, pp. 34–9.(1972). ‘La questione dei due Seneca da Petrarca a Benvenuto da Imola’, Italia

medioevale e umanistica 15: 149–69.Martin, Alfred von (1947). Nietzsche und Burckhardt: zwei geistige Welten im

Dialog, 4th edn, Munich.Martinelli, Lucia Cesarini (1986). ‘Le Postille di Lorenzo Valla all’ ‘‘Institutio

oratoria’’ di Quintiliano’ in Lorenzo Valla e l’umanesimo italiano: atti del

Bibliography 325

convegno internazionale di studi umanistici, ed. Ottavio Besomi and MariangelaRegoliosi, Padua, pp. 21–50.

Mattingly, Harold (1966–76). Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum,5 vols., London.

Mayer, R. (1994). ‘Personata Stoa: Neostoicism and Senecan Tragedy’, Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57: 151–74.

Mazzoli, Giancarlo (1978). ‘Ricerche sulla tradizione medievale del ‘‘De beneficiis’’e del ‘‘De clementia’’ di Seneca, 1’, Bollettino dei classici 26: 85–109.

(1982). ‘Ricerche sulla tradizione medievale del ‘‘De beneficiis’’ e del ‘‘Declementia’’ di Seneca, 3’, Bollettino dei classici s.3, 3: 165–223.

Mazzuconi, Daniela (1977). ‘Per una sistemazione dell’epistolario di GasparinoBarzizza’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 20: 183–261.

McManamon, John M. (1996). Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder: The Humanist asOrator, Tempe.

(1999). Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder and Saint Jerome, Tempe.Meerseman, Gilles Gerard (1973). ‘Seneca maestro di spiritualita nei suoi opuscoli

apocrifi dal XII al XV secolo’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 16: 43–135.Mercer, R. G. G. (1979). The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza, with Special

Reference to his Place in Paduan Humanism, London.Momigliano, Arnaldo (1955). ‘Note sulla leggenda del cristianesimo di Seneca’ in

Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Rome, pp. 13–32.Monfasani, John (1992). ‘Episodes of Anti-Quintilianism in the Italian Renaissance:

Quarrels on the Orator as a Vir Bonus and Rhetoric as the Scientia BeneDicendi ’, Rhetorica 10: 119–38.

Montinari, Mazzino (1981). ‘Il ‘‘grande, grandissimo maestro’’ ’ in Montinari, SuNietzsche, Rome, pp. 30–4.

Moreau, P.-F. (1994). ‘Calvin et le stoıcisme’ in Le Stoıcisme aux XVIe et XVIIesiecles, ed. P.-F. Moreau, Paris, pp. 11–23.

Moss, Ann (1996). Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of RenaissanceThought, Oxford.

Murphy, James J. (1983). ‘One Thousand Neglected Authors’ in RenaissanceEloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed.Murphy, Berkeley, Calif., pp. 20–36.

Najemy, John (1993). Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in theMachiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515, Princeton, N.J.

Navone, Paola (1994). ‘La ‘‘Doctrina loquendi et tacendi’’ di Albertano da Brescia.Censimento dei manoscritti’, Studi medievali 35, 2: 895–930.

Newell, W. R. (1987). ‘How Original is Machiavelli? A Consideration of Skinner’sInterpretation of Virtue and Fortune’, Political Theory 15: 612–34.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994). On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearsonand trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge.

Niutta, Francesca (1999). ‘Seneca morale: dalle prime edizioni a stampa a Marc-Antoine Muret’ in Seneca: mostra bibliografica e iconografica, eds. FrancescaNiutta and Carmel Santucci, Rome, pp. 71–97.

Nolhac, Pierre de (1907). Petrarque e l’humanisme, new edn, Paris.

326 Bibliography

Nuccio, Oscar (1997). Albertano da Brescia: razionalismo economico ed epistemolo-gia dell’ « azione umana » nel ’200 italiano, Rome.

Oppel, John W. (1974). ‘Peace vs. Liberty in the Quattrocento: Poggio, Guarino,and the Scipio–Caesar Controversy’, Journal of Medieval and RenaissanceStudies 4: 221–65.

Pane, Roberto (1975). ‘L’arco trionfale di Castel Nuovo e l’incontro tra tardogotico e Rinascimento’ in Il Rinascimento nell’Italia meridionale, 2 vols.,Milan, vol. I, pp. 165–201.

Panizza, Letizia A. (1977). ‘Gasparino Barzizza’s Commentaries on Seneca’sLetters’, Traditio 33, pp. 297–358.

(1983). ‘Textual interpretation in Italy, 1350–1450: Seneca’s Letter I to Lucilius’,Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46: 40–62.

(1984). ‘Biography in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: Seneca,Pagan or Christian?’, Nouvelles de la republique des lettres 2: 47–98.

Papy, Jan (2002). ‘Erasmus’s and Lipsius’s Editions of Seneca: A ‘‘ComplementaryProject’’?’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 22: 10–36.

Parker, E. J. (1946). ‘Education of Heirs in the Julio-Claudian Family’, AmericanJournal of Philology 67: 29–50.

Pembroke, S. G. (1996). ‘Oikeiosis’ in Problems in Stoicism, ed. A. A. Long,London, pp. 114–49.

Pennington, Kenneth (1991). ‘Law, Legislative Authority and Theories ofGovernment, 1150–1300’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval PoliticalThought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns, pbk edition, Cambridge, pp. 424–53.

(1993). The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600, Berkeley, Calif.Perez, Patrizio Pensabene (2000). ‘I marmi in Seneca’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed.

Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 91–109.Pigman, G. W. (1981). ‘Barzizza’s Studies of Cicero’, Rinascimento 21: 123–63.

(1982). ‘Barzizza’s Treatise on Imitation’, Bibliotheque d’humanisme etrenaissance 44: 341–52.

Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton, N.J.Pontieri, Ernesto (1962). ‘La Calabria del secolo XV e la rivolta di Antonio

Centeglia’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane n.s. 10: 5–154.(1975). Alfonso il Magnanimo re di Napoli, Naples.

Powell, James M. (1992). Albertanus of Brescia, Philadelphia, Pa.Raab, Felix (1964). The English Face of Machiavelli, London.Rabil Jr, Albert (1991). ‘Humanism in Milan’ in Renaissance Humanism, ed. Albert

Rabil Jr, pbk edition, 3 vols., Philadelphia, Pa., vol. I, pp. 235–63.Reeve, Michael (1996). ‘Classical Scholarship’ in The Cambridge Companion to

Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye, Cambridge, pp. 20–46.Rehm, Walter (1928). ‘Burckhardt und Nietzsche’, Zeitwende 4: 566–9.Resta, Gianvito (1954). L’epistolario del Panormita: studi per una edizione critica,

Messina.(1965). ‘Antonio Beccadelli’ in DBI, VII, pp. 400–6.(1990). ‘Un antico progetto editoriale dell’epistolario del Panormita’, Studi

umanistici 1: 7–67.

Bibliography 327

Reynolds, L. D. (1965). The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters, Oxford.(ed.) (1983). Texts and Transmission, Oxford.

Robey, David (1973). ‘P. P. Vergerio the Elder: Republicanism and Civic Values inthe Work of an Early Humanist’, Past and Present 58: 3–37.

(1980). ‘Humanism and Education in the Early Quattrocento: The De ingenuismoribus of P. P. Vergerio’, Bibliotheque d’humanisme et renaissance 42: 27–58.

(1983). ‘Aspetti dell’umanesimo vergeriano’ in L’umanesimo in Istria, eds.Vittore Branca and Sante Graciotti, Florence, pp. 7–18.

Robin, Diana (1991). Filelfo in Milan: Writings, 1451–1477, Princeton, N. J.Robinson, I. S. (1991). ‘Church and Papacy’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval

Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns, pbk edition, Cambridge,pp. 252–305.

Rosa, Lucia Gualdo et al. (eds.) (1997). Molto piu preziosi dell’oro: codici di casaBarzizza alla Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Naples.

(ed.) (1999). Gasparino Barzizza e la rinascita degli studi classici: fra continuita erinnovamento, Naples.

Rotili, Mario (1972). L’arco di Traiano a Benevento, Rome.Rowe, Christopher and Schofield, Malcolm (eds.) (2000). The Cambridge History

of Greek and Roman Political Thought, Cambridge.Rubinstein, Nicolai (1991). ‘Italian Political Thought, 1450–1530’ in The

Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns, pbkedition, Cambridge, pp. 30–65.

Rundle, David (1998). ‘ ‘‘Not so much praise as precept’’: Erasmus, Panegyric, andthe Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes’ in Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics ofClassical Learning, ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, Cambridge,pp. 148–69.

Ryder, Alan (1976a). ‘Antonio Beccadelli: A Humanist in Government’ inCultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul OskarKristeller, ed. Cecil H. Clough, Manchester, pp. 123–40.

(1976b). The Kingdom of Naples under Alfonso the Magnanimous, Oxford.(1990). Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily, 1396–1458,

Oxford.Sabbadini, Remigio and Catalano-Tirrito, M. (1910). Ottanta lettere inedite del

Panormita: nuovi documenti sul Panormita, Catania.Sabbadini, Remigio (1924). Giovanni da Ravenna insigne figura d’umanista

(1343–1408), Como.(1995). ‘Panegyrici Veteres’ in Opere minori, ed. Tino Foffano, Padua,

pp. 100–4.Sandbach, F. H. (1975). The Stoics, London.Santoro, Mario (1974?). ‘La cultura umanistica’ in Storia di Napoli, 11 vols., Naples

(1967–78), vol. IV.2, pp. 317–498.(1990). ‘Humanism in Naples’ in Renaissance Humanism, ed. Albert Rabil Jr,

pbk edition, 3 vols., Philadelphia, Pa., vol. III, pp. 296–331.Schiesaro, Alessandro (2000). ‘Estetica della tirannia’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed.

Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 135–59.

328 Bibliography

Schofield, Malcolm (1999). The Stoic Idea of the City, Chicago, Ill.(2003). ‘Stoic Ethics’ in The Cambridge Companion to The Stoics, ed. Brad

Inwood, Cambridge, pp. 233–56.Sedley, David (2001). ‘The Stoic-Platonist Debate on kathekonta’ in Topics in

Stoic Philosophy, ed. Katerina Ierodiakonou, pbk edition, Oxford, pp. 128–52.(2003). ‘The School, from Zeno to Arius Didymus’ in The Cambridge

Companion to The Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood, Cambridge, pp. 7–32.Shoeck, R. J. (1993). Erasmus of Europe: The Prince of Humanists, 1501–1536,

Edinburgh.Skinner, Quentin and Strath, Bo (eds.) (2003). States and Citizens, Cambridge.Skinner, Quentin (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols.,

Cambridge.(1981). Machiavelli, Oxford.(1988). ‘Political Philosophy’ in The Cambridge History of Renaissance

Philosophy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt et al., Cambridge, pp. 389–452.(1989). ‘The State’ in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence

Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson, Cambridge, pp. 90–131.(1996). Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge.(1998). Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge.(2000). Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford.(2002). Visions of Politics, 3 vols., Cambridge.

Soria, Andres (1956). Los humanistas de la corte de Alfonso el Magnanimo, Granada,pp. 113–14.

Spinelli, Francesco (ed.) (1996). Albertano da Brescia: alle origini del razionalismoeconomico, dell’Umanesimo civile, della grande Europa, Brescia.

Suster, Guido (1888). ‘Notizia e classificazione dei codici contenenti il Panegiricodi Plinio a Traiano’, Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica 16: 504–51.

Talamanca, Mario (1990). Istituzioni di diritto romano, Milan.Tate, Robert. B. (1954). ‘Mythology in Spanish Historiography of the Middle

Ages and the Renaissance’, Hispanic Review 22: 1–18.Tateo, Francesco (1971). L’umanesimo meridionale, Bari.

(1990). I miti della storiografia umanistica, Rome.Tierney, Brian (1963). ‘ ‘‘The Prince is Not Bound by the Laws’’: Accursius and the

Origins of the Modern State’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:378–400.

Torraca, Francesco (1914). ‘Giovanni Boccaccio a Napoli (1326–1339)’, Archiviostorico per le province napoletane 39: 25–80, 229–67, 409–58, 605–96.

Trillitzsch, W. (1965). ‘Erasmus und Seneca’, Philologus 109: 270–92.(1971). Seneca im literarischen Urteil der Antike: Darstellung und Sammlung der

Zeugnisse, 2 vols., Amsterdam.Tronzo, William (1997). The Cultures of His Kingdom, Princeton, N. J.Tuck, Richard (1993). Philosophy and Government 1572–1651, Cambridge.Ullman, Berthold L. (1955). ‘Petrarch’s Favourite Books’ in Berthold Ullman,

Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Rome, pp. 117–37.(1963). The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, Padua.

Bibliography 329

Ullmann, Walter (1955). The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages,London.

(1969). The Medieval Idea of Law, New York.Vallone, Giancarlo (1985). Iurisdictio domini: introduzione a Matteo d’Afflitto ed

alla cultura giuridica meridionale tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Lecce.Van Cleve, Thomas Curtis (1972). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen,

Oxford.Vegetti, M. and Pissavino, P. (eds.) (2005). I Decembrio e la tradizione della

Repubblica di Platone tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Naples.Veyne, Paul (1993). ‘The Final Foucault and His Ethics’, Critical Inquiry 20: 1–10.

(2003). Seneca, trans. David Sullivan, New York.Villa, Claudia (1969). ‘La tradizione delle ‘‘Ad Lucilium’’ e la cultura di Brescia

dall’eta carolingia ad Albertano’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 12: 9–51.(2000). ‘Le tragedie di Seneca nel Trecento’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed.

Piergiorgio Parroni, Rome, pp. 469–80.Viroli, Maurizio (1992). From Politics to Reason of State, Cambridge.

(1998). Machiavelli, Oxford.Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew (1981). ‘The Emperor and His Virtues’, Historia 30:

298–323.(1982). ‘Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King’, Journal of Roman Studies

72: 32–48.Walter, I. (1964). ‘Barrili, Giovanni’ in DBI, VI, pp. 529–30.Ward, John O. (1983). ‘Commentators on Ciceronian Rhetoric’ in Renaissance

Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. JamesJ. Murphy, Berkeley, Calif., pp. 126–87.

(1995). ‘Quintilian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages’,Rhetorica 13: 231–84.

Watt, J. A. (1991). ‘Spiritual and temporal powers’ in The Cambridge History ofMedieval Political Thought c.350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns, pbk edition,Cambridge, pp. 367–423.

Welch, Evelyn (1995). Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan, New Haven, Conn.White, Michael J. (2003). ‘Stoic Natural Philosophy’ in The Cambridge

Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood, Cambridge, pp. 124–52.Wilkins, Ernest (1955a). ‘The Correspondence of Petrarch and Barbato da

Sulmona’ in Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, Cambridge,Mass., pp. 213–53.

(1955b). ‘Petrarch’s Ecclesiastical Career’ in Wilkins, Studies in the Life andWorks of Petrarch, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 3–32.

(1955c). ‘Petrarch in Provence’ in Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Works ofPetrarch, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 81–181.

(1955d). ‘Petrarch’s Seventh Eclogue’ in Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Works ofPetrarch, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 48–62.

(1958). Petrarch’s Eight Years in Milan, Cambridge, Mass.Wilks, Michael (1963). The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages,

Cambridge.

330 Bibliography

Wirszubski, Ch. (1960). Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republicand Early Principate, Cambridge.

Witt, Ronald G. (1969). ‘The De Tyranno and Coluccio Salutati’s View of Politicsand Roman History’, Nuova rivista storica 53: 434–74.

(1983). Hercules at the Crossroads, Durham, N.C.(1996). ‘Still the Matter of the Two Giovannis: A Note on Malpaghini and

Conversino’, Rinascimento 35: 179–99.(2000). ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to

Bruni, Leiden.Wood, Neal (1968). ‘Some Common Aspects of the Thought of Seneca and

Machiavelli’, Renaissance Quarterly 21: 11–23.Zanker, Paul (2000). ‘I ritratti di Seneca’ in Seneca e il suo tempo, ed. Piergiorgio

Parroni, Rome, pp. 47–58.

Bibliography 331

Index

absolutism, see De clementia; princeAbulafia, 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 ofSicily 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

Angeli, Niccolo, 214

anger, 35, 55, 93, 94, 109, 114, 129–30, 138, 139, 161,180, 185, 225, 279, 288–9, 302

see also De iraAngevins

in Kingdom of Sicily, 89

and Neapolitan civilians, 90

Aquinas, St Thomas, 93–4

archeryas 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 lifeBeccadelli, 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

beesand 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 VulgateBillanovich, 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

Braga, Martin of, 97, 99

see also Formula vitae honestaeBrescia, 100

Brescia, Albertano of, 100–4

see also Liber consolationis et consilii; Liberde 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 MancinelliCarrara, da, dynasty of, 165, 177

Francesco I, 9, 147–56

Francesco Novello, 166–7

Ubertino, 168

Catiline, 13, 307

see also SallustCato (the Younger), 61, 62, 126, 185

Charles III of Naples (Durazzo), 160–5

Charles V, Emperor, 196

see also Institutio Christiani PrincipisCharles 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 officiisCinna, Gnaeus Cornelius, 57

civitas, cosmic, see StoicismClaudian, 153, 191

clemency, see mercy

Clement VII, Pope, 160

Codex, 94

codex Ambrosianus, 82, 133n.Colish, Marcia, 295

Collazio, Matteo, 213

Colonnafamily, 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 peroratioconfirmatio, 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

Index 333

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 BeccadelliDe fato et fortuna, see Salutatidefinition, rhetorical, 231–3, 235, 239–42

see also paradiastoleDe ingenuis moribus, see VergerioDe 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 VergerioDemosthenes, 122

De nobilitate legum et medicine, see SalutatiDe 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 Formulavitae 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

334 Index

disposition, 309

divisio, 218

Domitian, 257

Donation of Constantine, 79

Dotti, Ugo, 119

Ecerinis, see Mussatoeloquence, 44, 121, 122, 192

see also rhetoricElyot, 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 PrincipisEste, dynasty

Alberto d’, 165

Azzo VIII d’, 112

Borso d’, 186

Obizzo d’, 112

ethosestablishment of, 150

Euripides, 24

exemplification, 242–3

exordium (prooemium), 217, 218

faith, 60

fame, 23, 63, 122–4, 197

fantasia, see imaginationfate, 29, 49, 66, 83, 142

see also providence; StoicismFather 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, ‘holdingforth’, impersonation, irony, ornatus,paradiastole, personification,praesumptio, topographia

Filelfo, Francesco, 182

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; SenecaFoucault, 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 StoicismHeliogabalus, 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

Hornquist, Mikael, 7

humaneness, 11, 35, 54, 85, 139, 148, 149, 161, 165,182, 185, 201, 210, 228, 258, 312

humanismin Milan, 165 , 175, 177, 186

Index 335

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.

336 Index

Kahn, Victoria, 7

Kantorowicz, Ernst, 75, 77, 85n.,88, 90–1

kingin Hellenistic theory, 32

in humanist writing, see humanismas princeps, 32, 79, 81, 92–3, 138–9, 160, 167

see also princeKristeller, Paul Oskar, 96

laudatio, see genus demonstrativumlaus Hispaniae, see genus demonstrativumLatini, Brunetto, 107–10

see also Li Livres dou tresorlaw

lex regia, 87–8

of nations (ius gentium), 87

of nature, 86, 87, 273

see also reason; Stoicism; virtueleniency (lenitas), 35, 54, 88–9, 94, 99, 107, 155,

180, 201

lenocinia, 252

lex regia, see lawliberality, 7n., 184, 189, 207

liberal studies, 34, 167–9

Liber Augustalis, see Constitutions of MelfiLiber consolationis et consilii (Albertano of

Brescia), 101–4

Liber de amore (Albertano of Brescia), 100,101, 103

Liber de gestis in civitate Mediolani (Stefanardo daVimercate), 113–15

Liber de regimine civitatum (Giovanni daViterbo), 104–7

libertyErasmus 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 tresor (Brunetto Latini),107–10

Lipsius, Justus, 196, 313

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 PrincipeMacrobius, 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 princeMedici, 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 clementiaMessina, Tommaso da, 120–1, 122–3

Milan, 114, 145, 147, 157, 165, 263–4, 265

see also ViscontiMilano, Paganino da, 145–6

mildness (quality of mitis), 35, 56, 84, 88–9, 111,135, 166, 201

mirrorspersons 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

Index 337

monarchyRoman theory of, see De clementiaas slavery, 23–8, 169–70, 188–9, 293–311

see also princeMonfasani, 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; QuintilianOliverotto of Fermo, 297

Orco, Remirro de, 281, 282

ornamentation, see ornatus, theory ofornatus, theory of, 244–5

Orsini, family, 263

Otto of Brunswick, 160

Padua, 132n., 147, 156, 165, 166–7, 168, 175

see also CarraraPanizza, Letizia, 83n., 174

Panormita, see Beccadellipapacy

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; princeParma, 145

partitio, 218, 229–30

Pater patriae, see Father of the Fatherlandpatience, 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 YoungerPanegyricus, 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

princeas 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

338 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 exordiumproofs, rhetorical, 235–44

commonplaces (loci communes, topics), 235,236–8, 266

definition, 235, 239–41

examples, 220, 236, 242–4

inartificial, 235

proportio, see analogypropositio, 218

providence, 29, 49, 65, 76, 86, 87, 88, 142, 158, 164,179, 201

see also fate, Stoicismprudence, 99, 101, 102–3, 221, 284–5, 286

Pseudo-SenecaDe 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 honestaePublilius 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

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; Stoicismredescription, rhetorical, see paradiastolerefutatio, 217, 221–2, 286

remedy, see medicineRenaissance (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; inventiongenera, see genus demonstrativumin 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 ornatusand 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

Index 339

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 wisdomSaturnalia (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 slaverySforza, 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, Viscontisimile (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 Macrobiusspeculum, see mirrorSpinoza, Benedict, 314

Statius, 113

stato, see Il Principe; Machiavellistatus

in Constitutions of Melfi, 76–8, 81, 89

in Petrarch, 142, 144, 145

Seneca on, 1, 47, 52–3, 76

status theory, see QuintilianStoicism, 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

oikeiosis, 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

340 Index

studia liberalia, see liberal studiesSuetonius, 153, 156, 163

Sulla, 61

Sulmona, Barbato da, 134, 138

superbia, see haughtinesssuppellettile, 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; simileTuck, 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

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

Viscontidynasty, 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 ManetttiViterbo, Giovanni da, 104–7

see also Liber de regimine civitatumVives, 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

Index 341

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

1 RICHARD RORTY, J . B. SCHNEEWIND AND QUENTIN SKINNER (EDS.)Philosophy in HistoryEssays in the historiography of philosophypb: 0 521 27330 7

2 J . G. A. POCOCK

Virtue, Commerce and HistoryEssays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth centurypb: 0 521 27660 8

3 M. M. GOLDSMITH

Private Vices, Public BenefitsBernard Mandeville’s social and political thoughthb: 0 521 30036 3

4 ANTHONY PAGDEN (ED.)The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europepb: 0 521 38666 7

5 DAVID SUMMERS

The Judgment of SenseRenaissance nationalism and the rise of aestheticspb: 0 521 38631 4

6 LAURENCE DICKEY

Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807

pb: 0 521 38912 7

7 MARGO TODD

Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Orderpb: 0 521 89228 7

8 LYNN SUMIDA JOY

Gassendi the AtomistAdvocate of history in an age of sciencepb: 0 521 52239 0

9 EDMUND LEITES (ED.)Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europepb: 0 521 52020 7

10 WOLF LEPENIES

Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociologypb: 0 521 33810 7

11 TERENCE BALL, JAMES FARR AND RUSSELL L. HANSON (EDS.)Political Innovation and Conceptual Changepb: 0 521 35978 3

12 GERD GIGERENZER ET AL .The Empire of ChanceHow probability changed science and everyday lifepb: 0 521 39838 X

13 PETER NOVICK

That Noble DreamThe ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical professionhb: 0 521 34328 3 pb: 0 521 35745 4

14 DAVID LIEBERMAN

The Province of Legislation DeterminedLegal theory in eighteenth-century Britainhb: 0 521 24592 3 pb: 0 521 52854 2

15 DANIEL PICK

Faces of DegenerationA European disorder, c.1848–c.1918pb: 0 521 45753 X

16 KEITH BAKER

Inventing the French RevolutionEssays on French political culture in the eighteenth centurypb: 0 521 38578 4

17 IAN HACKING

The Taming of Chancehb: 0 521 38014 6 pb: 0 521 38884 8

18 GISELA BOCK, QUENTIN SKINNER AND MAURIZIO VIROLI (EDS.)Machiavelli and Republicanismpb: 0 521 43589 7

19 DOROTHY ROSS

The Origins of American Social Sciencepb: 0 521 42836 X

20 KLAUS CHRISTIAN KOHNKE

The Rise of Neo-KantianismGerman Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivismhb: 0 521 37336 0

21 IAN MACLEAN

Interpretation and Meaning in the RenaissanceThe Case of Lawhb: 0 521 41546 2

22 MAURIZIO VIROLI

From Politics to Reason of StateThe Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600hb: 0 521 41493 8

23 MARTIN VAN GELDEREN

The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590

hb: 0 521 39204 7 pb: 0 521 89163 9

24 NICHOLAS PHILLIPSON AND QUENTIN SKINNER (EDS.)Political Discourse in Early Modern Britainhb: 0 521 39242 X

25 JAMES TULLY

An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contextshb: 0 521 43060 7 pb: 0 521 43638 9

26 RICHARD TUCK

Philosophy and Government 1572–1651

pb: 0 521 43885 3

27 RICHARD R. YEO

Defining ScienceWilliam Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britainhb: 0 521 43182 4 pb: 0 521 54116 6

28 MARTIN WARNKE

The Court ArtistThe Ancestry of the Modern Artisthb: 0 521 36375 6

29 PETER N. MILLER

Defining the Common GoodEmpire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britainhb: 0 521 44259 1

30 CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY

The Idea of LuxuryA Conceptual and Historical Investigationpb: 0 521 46691 1

31 E. J. HUNDERT

The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Societyhb: 0 521 46082 4

32 JULIA STAPLETON

Englishness and the Study of PoliticsThe Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barkerhb: 0 521 46125 1

33 KEITH TRIBE

Strategies of Economic OrderGerman Economic Discourse, 1750–1950hb: 0 521 46291 6

34 SACHIKO KUSUKAWA

The Transformation of Natural PhilosophyThe Case of Philip Melancthonhb: 0 521 47347 0

35 DAVID ARMITAGE, ARMAND HIMY AND QUENTIN SKINNER (EDS.)Milton and Republicanismhb: 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 RussellThe Development of an Aristocratic Liberalismhb: 0 521 47383 7

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

Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politicshb: 0 521 45174 4

39 DONALD WINCH

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

40 JENNIFER PLATT

A History of Sociological Research Methods in Americahb: 0 521 44173 0 pb: 0 521 64649 9

41 KNUD HAAKONSSEN (ED.)Enlightenment and ReligionRational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britainhb: 0 521 56060 8

42 G. E. R. LLOYD

Adversaries and AuthoritiesInvestigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Sciencehb: 0 521 55331 8 pb: 0 521 55695 3

43 ROLF LINDNER

The Reportage of Urban CultureRobert Park and the Chicago Schoolhb: 0 521 44052 1

44 ANNABEL BRETT

Liberty, Right and NatureIndividual Rights in Later Scholastic Thoughthb: 0 521 56239 2 pb: 0 521 54340 1

45 STEWART J. BROWN (ED.)William Robertson and the Expansion of Empirehb: 0 521 57083 2

46 HELENA ROSENBLATT

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

47 DAVID RUNCIMAN

Pluralism and the Personality of the Statehb: 0 521 55191 9

48 ANNABEL PATTERSON

Early Modern Liberalismhb: 0 521 59260 7

49 DAVID WEINSTEIN

Equal Freedom and UtilityHerbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianismhb: 0 521 62264 6

50 YUN LEE TOO AND NIALL LIVINGSTONE (EDS.)Pedagogy and PowerRhetorics of Classical Learninghb: 0 521 59435 9

51 REVIEL NETZ

The Shaping of Deduction in Greek MathematicsA Study in Cognitive Historyhb: 0 521 62279 4 pb: 0 521 54120 4

52 MARY MORGAN AND MARGARET MORRISON (EDS.)Models as Mediatorshb: 0 521 65097 6 pb: 0 521 655714

53 JOEL MICHELL

Measurement in PsychologyA Critical History of a Methodological Concepthb: 0 521 62120 8

54 RICHARD A. PRIMUS

The American Language of Rightshb: 0 521 65250 2

55 ROBERT ALUN JONES

The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realismhb: 0 521 65045 3

56 ANNE MCLAREN

Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth IQueen and Commonwealth 1558–1585hb: 0 521 65144 1

57 JAMES HANKINS (ED.)Renaissance Civic HumanismReappraisals and Reflectionshb: 0 521 78090 X pb: 0 521 54807 1

58 T. J. HOCHSTRASSER

Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenmenthb: 0 521 66193 5

59 DAVID ARMITAGE

The Ideological Origins of the British Empirehb: 0 521 59081 7 pb: 0 521 78978 8

60 IAN HUNTER

Rival EnlightenmentsCivil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germanyhb: 0 521 79265 7

61 DARIO CASTIGLIONE AND IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK (EDS.)The History of Political Thought in National Contexthb: 0 521 78234 1

62 IAN MACLEAN

Logic, Signs and Nature in the RenaissanceThe Case of Learned Medicinehb: 0 521 80648 8

63 PETER MACK

Elizabethan RhetoricTheory and Practicehb: 0 521 81292 5

64 GEOFFREY LLOYD

The Ambitions of CuriosityUnderstanding the World in Ancient Greece and Chinahb: 0 521 81542 8 pb: 0 521 89461 1

65 MARKKU PELTONEN

The Duel in Early Modern EnglandCivility, Politeness and Honourhb: 0 521 82062 6

66 ADAM SUTCLIFFE

Judaism and Enlightenmenthb: 0 521 82015 4

67 ANDREW FITZMAURICE

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

68 PIERRE FORCE

Self-Interest before Adam SmithA Genealogy of Economic Sciencehb: 0 521 83060 5

69 ERIC NELSON

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thoughthb: 0 521 83545 3

70 HARRO HOPFL

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

71 MIKAEL HORNQVIST

Machiavelli and Empirehb: 0 521 83945 9

72 DAVID COLCLOUGH

Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart Englandhb: 0 521 84748 6

73 JOHN ROBERTSON

The Case for the EnlightenmentScotland and Naples 1680–1760hb: 0 521 84787 7

74 DANIEL CAREY

Locke, Shaftesbury, and HutchesonContesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyondhb: 0 521 84502 5

75 ALAN CROMARTIE

The Constitutionalist Revolution in EnglandCommonwealth, Common Law and Reformationhb: 0 521 78269 4

76 HANNAH DAWSON

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

77 CONAL CONDREN, STEPHEN GAUKROGER AND IAN HUNTER (EDS.)The Philosopher in Early Modern EuropeThe Nature of a Contested Identityhb: 0 521 86646 4

78 ANGUS GOWLAND

The Worlds of Renaissance MelancholyRobert Burton in Contexthb: 0 521 86768 1

79 PETER STACEY

Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Princehb: 0 521 86989 7