Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure.  Volume III. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

 

Politics is “the third science which teaches man how to govern the city,” after natural science and ethics. By “city,” Latini means a political community, “one people gathered together to live under one law and one governor.” He is thinking most immediately of his own native city-state, Florence, but his definition also holds for France, his country of exile. He concurs with Cicero’s judgment, “that the most important science relative to governing the city is rhetoric, that is to say, the science of speaking, for if there were no speech, there would be no city, nor would there be any establishment of justice or of human company, and although speech is given to all men, Cato says wisdom is given to few.” Latini has already identified speech and reason as the distinctively human characteristics, so political life follows from human nature; as Aristotle holds, man is a political animal. At the same time, he immediately reminds his readers of the aristocratic claim to rule, that while all human beings have speech, to be well-spoken is to be wise, and wisdom is not the province of ‘the many.’ Florence’s Machiavelli will attack some of these contentions and modify others, redirecting Latini’s valorization of words, his relative downplaying of force. Machiavelli’s reconception of the political community as lo stato will put the axe to the old aristocracy, whose claim to rule centered on its possession of wisdom garnered from Aristotle and Cicero and on Church sanction.

Latini’s treatment of rhetoric in this, his “book of good speaking,” follows that of Cicero in De Interpretatione, which he had translated. That is, Cicero’s book enjoys the same status in Book III as the Nicomachean Ethics enjoyed in Book II. Unlike the Ethics, however, the Interpretatione delves into technical details of its subject, which, unlike ethics, is as much an art as a science. I shall select elements of Latini’s summary that especially illuminate his understanding of politics, recognizing that the details might prove highly instructive to a speaker, who can consult Cicero’s original work to find them.

Latini classifies speakers into four types: those “endowed with great sense and eloquence”; those “devoid of both eloquence and sense”; those “devoid of sense, but they speak too well” (“and this is a very great peril”); and those “full of sense” who nonetheless “remain silent because of the poverty of their speech” (“and so they need help”). 

Rhetoric’s purpose “is to say words in such a way that those who hear the words will believe them”; it “comes under the science of governing a city.” Rhetoric’s “material” cause is its subject, “what the speaker speaks about, just as sick people are the material of the doctor.” Rhetorical material divides into three parts: demonstration, counsel, and judgment. 

Rhetoric itself has five parts: invention, order, wording, memory, and delivery. Rhetoric can be delivered in two ways, by speech or by writing. Rhetoric is disputatious speech, and political disputes arise from four things: a fact; the name of a fact; the quality of a fact—how it is characterized, e.g., “cruel,” “reasonable,” “legal”; and the relevance of a fact to the issue or case disputed. If Aristotle’s ethics holds up the spoudaios or “serious man” as the good man, Cicero’s rhetoric would have that man speak in a serious tone, with “sense and sententious statements.” If Aristotle understands goodness as a form of beauty, of harmony, Cicero and Latini urge that a speaker’s rhetoric “contain nothing ugly.” With regard to rhetorical invention, then, “Let there be beautiful color within and without. Use the science of rhetoric as a painter uses paint, that is, to put color in verse and prose; but be careful not to color excessively, for sometimes one is colorful by avoiding color.” That painter, Winston Churchill, would surely agree.

Regarding order, there are two types: natural and artful. Natural order “goes straight down the great road and does not stray to either, side, that is, it relates and tells things the way they were from the beginning to the end,” in chronological order. “This way of speaking is without great mastery of the art; for this reason, this book does not concern itself with it at all.” The artful order of speech “does not stay on the great road; rather it goes along paths and shortcuts which take it more quickly to the place it wants to go,” rearranging the order of the events related “not in an inappropriate way, but very wisely, to strengthen its intention,” its persuasive impact. The artful speaker puts “the strongest things” at the beginning and the end, “the weakest in the middle,” where they will be obscured in the memory of the listener or reader. 

Regarding wording, “you must look at four things”: “if the material is long and obscure, you must shorten it with brief and understandable words”; if brief and obscure, “you must amplify it somewhat and make it clear in a pleasant fashion”; if long and clear, “you must shorten and strengthen it and fortify it with good words”; if brief and easy, “you must lengthen it a bit and decorate it in pleasant fashion.” He goes on to enumerate various means of elaboration, on which I shall not elaborate, along with recommendations on how to structure a narrative in speaking and in writing.

Regarding memory, he emphasizes the importance of the prologue, “the lord and prince of the whole narrative.” In it, you must “say things which will put you into the good graces of the listeners,” as “its purpose is nothing other than to prepare the heart of the person addressed to listen diligently to your words, and believe them, and in the end do what you tell them.” To make a favorable impression on the minds of listeners and readers, the rhetorician must be “well-tailored to the subject matter.” For example, when speaking on an “unpleasant topic,” conceal your intention in the prologue, as Julius Caesar does in his speech favoring leniency for Catiline and his co-conspirators, and indeed as Catiline himself did in his own defense. This will diminish the anger of your audience, soften its hardness of heart, acquire its benevolence—make it receptive and therefore more willing to retain and concur with what you have to say. Your audience will listen only if you “make him wish to listen”; for example, by arousing his curiosity, making “him want to hear what we have to say, or know it.” If the topic is “doubtful,” “adorn your prologue to capture the love and benevolence of the listeners in such a way that it seems to them that the whole matter is honest.” 

In teaching rhetoric through Cicero, Latini thus softens his usual attitude of moral rectitude. He becomes more of the fox he had earlier disparaged. In his kind of politics, rhetoric takes the place of war, as much as possible. Whereas the ‘moderns’ often substituted commercial competition and the overall project of the conquest of fortune and of nature as a substitute for warfare, particularly religious warfare, by rechanneling warlike impulses into economic and scientific pursuits, Latini would rechannel princely war-making into wars of words, consistent with the idea that man is a rational animal. Rhetorical tricks such as concealment become the equivalent of battlefield camouflage and feints.  

He gives similar advice when he comes to the other parts of the rhetorician’s narratives. The “principal matter” of the narrative, the story itself, should be told clearly, briefly, and above all plausibly, “show[ing] the reason for the matter, that is, why or how” (for example) an accused criminal could have committed the crime, how “he was of such a nature that he was able and knew well how to do it.” However, don’t state a fact when “it causes [you] harm to state the fact,” or when “there is no advantage in stating it.” In dealing with “the partition” of the narrative, by which he means your statement of the point you intend to prove, do as Cato did in his speech against Catiline, exaggerating the alleged intentions of the accused; in the second part of the partition, you can then draw a strictly logical conclusion from your dubious premise. (Like Latini, Cato had a reputation for moral rectitude, which Latini evidently regards as compromisable when rhetorical exigency made compromise useful.) 

Latini carefully unpacks the fourth part of narrative, “confirmation” or proof. “No science in the world teaches the source for proving what one says except dialectic and rhetoric”—the latter being a subdivision of the former. Proofs may pertain either to the “body” addressed by the speaker—”that person whose words or deeds give rise to the question”—or to the “thing” addressed by the speaker—that “word or deed from which the question arises.” Proofs pertaining to a person concern those “properties” or characteristics “which the speaker can use to prove that this person is disposed to do or not to do a certain thing.” Although “it is very difficult to describe the essence of nature,” a speaker can bring out the likely nature of a person by identifying the person’s sex, country, city, family, age, and “the good and the evil which one has by nature in one’s body or one’s heart”—whether the person is healthy or sick, big or small, handsome or ugly, quick or slow, inventive or unimaginative, endowed with good memory or bad, mild or harsh, patient or irascible. Along with the person’s nature, the speaker may identify the manner of his “nurture,” “how and with respect to what people and by what man a person was brought up and instructed, that is, who was his teacher, who were his friends and companions, what art he practices, what he occupies himself with, how he governs his things and his household and his friends, and how he conducts his life.” The speaker can also describe the person’s good or bad fortune, his habits (which fulfill “a permanent thing in our hearts and our bodies”), and his “study,” that is, the character of what he has learned, his philosophic leanings. And finally, the speaker can point to the person’s counselors, his habits of speech, and the circumstances surrounding, for example, an alleged crime (e.g., “you must certainly believe that this man killed this other man, because he held a bloody knife in his hand”).

Proofs pertaining to a thing, to the word or deed itself that is in dispute, should be presented with the intention of showing what the person’s intentions were. These reinforce the proofs concerning the person, such as probable cause and circumstances (that bloody knife, again). 

Logical arguments that pull these proofs together are either “necessary”—showing that the thing “cannot be otherwise,” as for example, “this argument is giving birth to a child, so she has lain with a man”—or “verisimilar” or probabilistic—as for example, “if this man is a philosopher, then he does not believe in the gods”—an argument deployed against Socrates during his trial. Whether necessary or verisimilar, all arguments come in two types: those “from far away” or “from close up.” By an argument from far away, he means an argument—typically, when interrogating a witness—which operates by analogy, “lead[ing] one’s adversary to agree and acknowledge that thing which the speaker wants to demonstrate.” For example, if you want to prove that a man doesn’t love his wife, or a wife her husband, begin with asking, “if your neighbor had a better horse than you do, which would you prefer, yours or his?” And take it from there. “Socrates used many arguments of this type”; “every time he wanted to prove something, he would put forward reasons such as these which one could not deny, and then he would make his conclusion from what was in his proposition.” To make logically necessary arguments successfully, the speaker must be careful to ensure that his initial proposition or propositions are “certain without any doubt,” that the analogies he draws really are “completely similar to what he wants to prove,” and that “the listener not know what he is leading up to,” for if he did know, “he would either remain silent or deny it or reply by its opposite.”

As for the argument from “close up,” the task is easier. The speaker need only show the verisimilitude of the claim he makes.

Speakers must master not only ‘positive’ proofs such as these but ‘negative’ ones—refutations. “You should know that refutation comes out of the same source as confirmation, for just as a thing can be confirmed by the properties of the body and of the thing it can be refuted in the same way,” by logical argument. There are four ways to refute an argument: by denying the premise; by denying the conclusion; by “say[ing] that his argument is vicious”; by “com[ing] up with another [argument] as strong or stronger than his.” The first three ways are simply matters of logic. The fourth way can be taken if you concede the truth of the adversary’s argument as far as it goes but “give an even stronger reason” for denying the conclusion, or if, when the adversary says “that a certain thing is profitable,” you concede that it is, but not an honest or honorable thing. Latini draws his example of a stronger reason again from the debate between Caesar and Cato on the Catiline conspiracy. Caesar argued for forgiving the conspirators because they were Roman citizens; Cato agreed that indeed they were, but they threatened to destroy Rome, a more cogent point than mere the sentiment of fellow-feeling aroused by shared citizenship. 

A speaker’s concluding statement should have three parts: recapitulation, disdain, and/or pity. After summarizing all the arguments you have made, especially the reasons justifying them, you should move to an expression of disdain for the character of the crimes of the one you are accusing or of your adversary in the debate. “What the speaker says through disdain, he must say with as much gravity as possible, in order to move the hearts of the listeners against his adversary; for this is a matter which is very advantageous to his cause, when the listeners are moved to anger against his adversary.” If, however, he defends an accused man, himself or another, he should appeal to pity, more specifically, to mercy. Latini’s Cicero recommends that a speaker not lean too long on his audience’s tender sentiments, however. “The speaker must be very much on his guard so that when he observes that hearts are moved to pity, then he should not tarry any longer in his complaint, but rather proceed forthwith to the end of his presentation before the listeners lose their pity; for Apollonius says: nothing dries up so quickly as tears.”

With that piece of unsentimental counsel, Latini concludes his discussion of political rhetoric and turns to “the government of cities” proper, “the highest science and the most noble office there is on earth”—evidently including Church offices. In this, he follows Aristotle. “Although politics includes generally all the arts necessary to the community of men”—as Aristotle teaches, it is the architectonic art, ruling all the other arts and artisans within the city—Latini will limit himself to the science and art of politics insofar as it “pertain[s] to the lord and his right office.” And he will consider only that kind of lordship prevailing in Florence and in cities with the same kind of regime. While it is necessary that many different kinds of regimes prevail throughout the world, given that peoples, their “dwellings,” their customs and their rights differ widely, and this is why some lords “were rightfully elected and others took power by force,” Latini will only consider “the lordship of those who govern the cities for terms of a year.” Still further, such term-limited lords or monarchs might obtain their offices by purchase, as in France, or by election, as in Italy. Latini concentrates the young gentleman’s attention on the latter type.

“All lordships and all high positions are given to us by the Sovereign Father who among the holy establishments of the world wanted the government of the cities to be founded on three pillars, that is justice, reverence, and love.” Justice in a lord means “giv[ing] each person his right,” and for that to happen it must be “firmly established in [his] heart.” If justice is the virtue most characteristic of the true lord, the ruler, reverence for the lord is most characteristic of the true subject, the ruled. “For it is the only thing in the world which seeks out the merit of faith and overcomes all sacrifices; for this reason, the Apostle says: honor, says he, your lords.” Finally, “love must exist in both lord and subject”—in the lord, “with all his heart and with a clear faith,” so that he “be concerned day and night for the common profit of the city and of all men,” and in the subjects, “with a just heart and with a true intention of giving counsel and aid for the maintaining of his office, for because he is one single person among them, he could not do anything without them.”

The election of the city’s lord should proceed not democratically, by lot, but aristocratically, by deliberation and choice. Latini lists twelve qualifications for the office: prudence and experience (“a young man cannot be wise, although he can have a good capacity for knowledge”); a noble heart, honorable habits, and virtuous work, not family connections; love of justice; a good mind, so that he can “pursue the reason of things,” learn the truth of what’s occurring in the city; courage and steadfastness, not vanity and the concomitant susceptibility to flattery (“a wise man prefers being a lord to seeming one”); self-rule, neither loving money nor high office; rhetorical skills (including verbal self-restraint, being “careful not to speak too much” and thereby falling into error and losing honor); neither prodigal nor miserly; not irascible (“ire which dwells too long in a government is like lightning, which does not let the truth be known or a just judgment rendered”); possessing independent wealth and power, thus less easily corruptible; having no political responsibilities elsewhere and therefore capable of attending to the public business undistracted; and, finally, “the right faith in God and in all men.” “These virtues and others must be considered by good citizens before they elect a lord,” although, regrettably, “most people do not consider habits or virtues as much as they do strength or family or inclinations or love for the city in which he is born.” Such people are “mistaken” because “war and hatred have so increased among Italians nowadays”—leading to the exile of a man like Latini, to give an example near to hand—and “throughout the world in many lands, there is division in all the cities and enmity between the two factions of the citizens,” leading “the person who acquires the love of one group” to acquire “automatically the malevolence of the other,” regardless of his virtues. Further, “if the magistrate is not very wise, he falls into the scorn and the bad graces of the very ones who elected him.” Accordingly, the electors should be “the wise men of the city.” To protect both themselves and the prospective lord, they should specify all the duties of the office in writing. The prospective lord should not be a citizen of the city, residing in it only for his one-year term. The electors may ask the Holy Roman Emperor or the pope to send a lord to them, since the emperor and the pope may not be affiliated with any faction or family in the city. 

Having made their selection, the electors should then compose a letter offering the lordship to the nominee. Latin helpfully offers a model, which not incidentally offers a compact explanation of the reasons for all government. By nature, human beings “desire the freedom which nature first gave them” and “avoid the yoke of servitude.” But they quickly learn that “the pursuit of evil desires and the opportunity for evil deeds which went unpunished” endanger their lives and destroy “human association.” “Justice took heed of these people and a governor was chosen for the people with several duties, to promote the reputation of the good people and to confound the malice of the bad.” Nature was rightly subjected to justice, freedom made obedient to judgment. This is truer now than ever, since “people’s desires…now are more corrupt” and “perversions” are “increasing these days.” This being the case, we, the electoral college of the city of Rome have “deliberated together about a man who would lead us next year, who would come and watch over the common good, and who would maintain both outsiders and insiders, and who would respect the property and the persons of all people in such a way that justice would not decrease in our city.” We are convinced “that you have the knowledge and the desire to impose judgment in peace, justice, and moderation, and to strike with the sword of righteousness to take vengeance against evildoers.” You will receive a salary for provisions; “bring with you tend judges and twelve good and praiseworthy notaries, and come, stay, and depart with the whole company at our expense and at the risk of yourself and your property.” 

The lordship offered is primarily a judgeship; the lord will be the supreme judges among the judges he brings. This explains the emphasis on forensic rhetoric in the previous chapters. If he refuses, he should do so graciously, citing duties in his own country or city. If he accepts, he should reply in the spirit of the invitation letter: “It is true that nature has made all men equal, but, it has happened, not through a defect of nature but through the maliciousness of men, that to restrain iniquity men should have rulers, not because of their nature, but their vices,” and, “because the capability of Jesus Christ alone makes a man capable of these duties, we, through the faith we have only in Him, not through the goodness we might have in us, in the name of the Sovereign Father and through the counsel of all our friends, take and receive the honor and the post of governor according to the descriptions in your letters,” confident that “the wisdom and knowledge of the knights and the people, and the faith and the loyalty of all the citizens, will help us to bear a part of our burden and lighten it through good obedience.” In unmistakable contrast, Machiavelli will emphasize the role of the prince not as judge but as ‘executive.’

Having chosen his retinue, the lord should observe the city and “the nature of the people” as he makes his way to his office. In the city, he should have someone ride between himself and his predecessor, “to remove all suspicion” of collusion between the two of them, “go straight to the principal church,” and “pray to God humbly with all his heart and with all his faith,” not failing to “put some money on the altar in honorable fashion.” His oath of office should restate the principles set down in the letter of invitation and in his reply. Throughout his tenure, he “must be very careful not to incur the hatred or suspicion of his people.”

His inaugural address should include a promise to abide by local customs, reference to the circumstances of the city (specifically, whether it at peace or at war), compliments to his predecessor, the city’s “noble leaders,” and its people, and invocations of Jesus, the pope, the Church, and the Empire. He should assure the citizens that “I have not come out of desire for financial gain, but to win praise and esteem and honor for myself and my people.” The path to praise, esteem, and honor is “the course of law and justice.” If the city is at war, say “I shall say little about it here, for it requires more deeds than words, but if there is anything in this world of ours in which one can display one’s force and power and acquire high esteem for one’s virtue, I say that war surmounts all enterprises, for it makes a man brave with weapons and noble of heart, vigorous and full of virtue, strong in physical difficulties and watchful in traps, clever and enterprising in all things.” Express confidence that the justice of the city’s cause will be rewarded with victory. 

Meanwhile, he should admonish his judges and notaries to “watch over and maintain his and the common honor,” and “not become angry at the people or go to taverns or to any man’s house to eat or to drink,” taking care “not to be corrupted by money, or by women, or by anything else,” on pain of punish meted out by himself. He also needs to select and assemble a council of the city to advise him, and then “listen to what they have to say.” When proposing a policy, resolve to “be brief,” for “a large number of things gives rise to obstacles and confusion in the hearts, and weakens the best minds, for the mind which thinks of many things is less effective in each one.” He should be especially attentive to the Council when deliberating on foreign policy, both with respect to requests and demands from foreign ambassadors and to ambassadorial appointments to foreign states. 

These preliminaries concluded, he can now settle down to his principal duties as a judge, always “hold[ing] his subjects within the bounds of the law” of the city. “It is a beautiful and honest thing for the lord, when he sits at court, to listen willingly and quietly to all, especially the lawyers and the sponsors of the cases, for they reveal the strength of the complaint and point out the substance of the questions.” That is why Latini esteems lawyers. “Their profession is extremely good and necessary to the life of men, as much as or more than if they fought with sword and knife for their parents or their country.” As always, Latini seeks to lead men away from depending on force alone in their dealings. “For this reason, the lord must use his office to make sure that if some poor person or other is involved in a case before him, and is not able to procure the services of a lawyer, either through his weakness or through the strength of his adversary, a good lawyer will be appointed for his aid, to give him counsel and instruct him concerning his rights.”

Justice isn’t only a matter of words, however. In cases involving “great crimes” when “the matter cannot be known or proven with certainty” but “strong arguments for suspicion” have been adduced, the defendant “can certainly be tortured to make him confess his guilt; otherwise not.” Latini adds, “during the torture the question must not be if John committed the murder, but in a general way he must be asked who did it.” Latini does not address the question of what to do if the accused answers, ‘I don’t know.’ Such readily begged questions may have contributed to the unpopularity of torture in civilized countries, later on. Once guilt has been determined, the lord’s sentence should hit the Aristotelian mean between harshness and pity, as befits “the nature of the matter.” It isn’t clear if torture counts towards measuring the penalty he hands down.

Dependent as he is upon the good conduct of his subordinates, “the wise magistrate must often and carefully, especially on feast days and at night and in the wintertime, gather them together in his chamber or elsewhere, and speak to them about things which pertain to their duties, and learn what they are doing and what disputes have come before them, and inquire concerning the nature of their complaints, and take counsel about the things they must do. “He must love and honor all the members of his household, and laugh and have fun with them sometimes.”

Latini recurs to Cicero’s theme of “the discord between those who want to be feared and those who want to be loved,” taken up by his fellow Florentine, Machiavelli, several generations later. Latini repeats his argument from Part II: It is better to be loved than feared because the one who is feared without being loved provokes hatred, and “the person who is hated by all the people will perish, for no wealth can stand up to the hatred of many.” Therefore, “long fear is a poor guardian; cruelty is the enemy of nature,” consisting of “nothing more than pride in great punishments.” Machiavelli, too, will caution against inducing popular hatred, but will advise the prince to use religion, by which he means the show, but only the show, of piety. Latini follows Cicero’s preventative for cruelty and the hatred toward the one whose cruelty makes him feared but not loved. “Be careful not to do anything for which you cannot give a reason.” “What is the difference between a king and a tyrant?” ‘None,’ Machiavelli and Hobbes will answer, tyrants being but monarchs misliked. Latini disagrees, in advance: “They are similar in good fortune and in power, but the tyrant performs works of cruelty gladly, a king only by necessity,” out of “love of one’s citizens,” a love that “gives you the most beautiful thing in the world, which is that each person wants you to live.” The king understands that “it is just as cruel to forgive all as it is not to forgive anybody, but it is a work of the greatest clemency to confound evil deeds by forgiving them.” “Behave in such a way that you seem terrible to evil people and pleasant to good ones.”

To achieve this, follow the law, God, and the saints, honor the priests, protect widows and orphans, observe justice, and maintain the city’s infrastructure. Additionally, “let him avoid entertainers who praise him to his face.” He should exercise caution when considering any alliances, acting only in consultation with the Council and “the common assent of the people,” and only “if it is necessary” to find foreign allies. Internally, “let him avoid levying during his term a tax, or making a bill of sale or debt, or any binding commitment for the commune unless it is for the manifest profit of the city and by the common consent of the council.”

If, having enjoyed the success likely after following Latini’s advice, the citizens “want to keep you as lord for the following year, I suggest that you not accept it, for the second term can be brought to a successful close only with difficulty”—a precept the truth of which American presidents have had occasion to illustrate. At the end of your term, review your conduct in office before you leave it, making any corrections before removing yourself from the city. Answer any complaints against your conduct. “Then, if it please God, you will be honorably absolved, and you will take leave of the council and of the commune of the city, and you will go home in glory and in honor”—your aim in taking the office in the first place.

To read Latini’s Book of the Treasure is to see with unmatched clarity the abrupt departure Machiavelli, Bacon, and the rest of the ‘moderns’ made from the philosophy and the religion of their predecessors. The natural philosophy of Book I will be dismissed not only in its content but in its approach to philosophizing, as the new natural philosophers undertake the task of torturing Nature (now reconceived as non-teleological) to compel her to reveal her secrets. The moral philosophy of Book II, combining Aristotelian ethics with Christian precepts, an ethics emphasizing the ‘middle way’ of moderation and, more the understanding of all virtues as ‘middles’ between extremes, will give way to calls for attending to, and amending, physical necessities, and to calls for moral ‘extremism,’ the choice between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ The political philosophy of Book III, which understands the mode of politics to be speech primarily, and the role of the statesman to be that of a judge, and the best regime to be aristocratic, will give way to a mode of politics in which force takes the prominent role, the prince takes the place of the judge, and the aristocratic regime question reduces to the question of principality versus republic. ‘Moderns’ who want the center still to hold—Locke, Montesquieu—must now recalibrate what ‘the center’ is, and what it will take to hold it.  

Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book II. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

 

The non-theoretical “branches in the body of philosophy” are “the practical and the logical, which teach man what he must do and what he must not do, and why he must do some things and not others.” Because these branches “are so intertwined that they can hardly be separated,” Latini will “present [them] together” in both Book II and Book III. In Book II he addresses morality, “vices and virtues.” Consistent with his book’s title, the Treasure, he compares the four “active virtues” to “precious stones,” “each of which is valuable for the life of men, for beauty, for delight and for virtue” as a whole. Prudence is “represented by the ruby, which lights up the night and shines brighter than all other precious stones”; temperance is “represented by the sapphire, which is of a celestial color,” the stone “most filled with grace of all the precious stones of the world”; courage is “represented by the diamond, which is so strong that it breaks and pierces all stones and metals,” fearing nothing; justice is “represented by the emerald, which is the greenest and most beautiful thing human eyes can behold.”

Although these are the virtues enumerated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Latini devotes the first fifty chapters of Book II to a summary of Aristotle’s more complex account of the virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics. Whether it is an art, an inquiry, an action, or a choice, “what all things seek is some good.” “Each art,” for example, has “a final goal,” a telos, which guides its works.” The master art is politics, “the art which teaches how to govern a city,” the “most important and the sovereign and the mistress of all arts, because under it re contained many honorable arts, such as rhetoric and military science and governing one’s household.” The art of politics “is noble because it gives order and direction to all those arts which are under it and which bring about its fulfilment, and its end is also the end and fulfillment of the others; therefore, the good produced by this science is man’s good, because it constrains him to do good and to avoid evil.” The sections on human history in Part I have already confirmed the necessity of such constraint. Latini does not, however, remark Aristotle’s argument that the political community produces a certain energeia or ‘being-at-work’ which brings out the humanness of the citizens. He does not follow Aristotle in calling man the political animal, perhaps because Christianity revises or qualifies that claim. 

He does follow Aristotle in saying that “the science of protecting and governing a city is not for a child or for a man who follows his inclinations, because both are unfamiliar with the things of the world; for this art requires a wise man, and it does not require a man’s knowledge, but rather that he turn to goodness,” to have “a soul suitably attuned to this science,” having made “use of things which are just, good, and honest.” Making use of such things habituates the soul to them, and such activity teaches the soul to become virtuous by means of that rightly-directed activity. “He who does not know anything on his own and who cannot learn what he is taught is altogether unsuitable” for political life.

If politics aims ultimately at all the goods aimed at by action, and if the sovereign good is eudaimonia or happiness—Latini calls it “beatitude”— what is happiness? The answer men give to that question lead them into one of three principal ways of life: the life of sensual pleasure, what Latini calls “concupiscence and covetousness,” an animal-like way; the “civic life” of common sense, prowess, and honor; or the life of contemplation. There are three powers of the soul: vegetative (seen in plants, animals, and human beings), sensitive (seen in animals and human beings), and reasonable (seen in human beings only). This distinctively human, “reasonable power is sometimes in deed and sometimes in potential, but beatitude is when it is in deed and not when it is potential alone, for if one does not do it, it is not good.” (As Aristotle puts it, the distinctively human energeia is the “life that puts into action that in us that has articulate speech,” speech involving reason, the power that enables us to ‘articulate,’ to make distinctions, to identify kinds or species of things [NE 1098a5].) The reasonable way of life is the genuinely human way, found in both the civic and the contemplative way; the way of sensual pleasure is the way of an animal, the “sensitive” or sensual way.

Which way or ways achieve the good? There are three types of good: that of the soul, that of the body, that of things outside the body. “The beatitude which is on earth needs good things from the outside, for it is a difficult thing to perform good deeds if one does not partake of what befits a good life, abundance of wealth and friends and relatives and the blessings of fortune, and for this reason wisdom needs something which reveals its worth and its honors.” As a Christian, Latini adds God to Aristotle’s list of necessary goods outside of ourselves. “We must revere and magnify and glorify God above all things, and we must believe that in Him are all good things and all felicities, for He is the beginning and end of all good things.” This again, is why Latini does not emphasize the political character of the good life to the extent Aristotle does. Latini needs to leave room for the ‘city’ of God.

Since “happiness is thing which comes from the virtue of the soul, not of the body,” Latini again enumerates the powers of the soul, but this time the powers of the human soul, only. The human soul possesses vegetative powers (we might call them ‘autonomic’ powers); it has the intellectual or reasoning power and also the “concuscible” power, whereby the body obeys the commands of the intellect. Rightly exercised, these powers generate two kinds of virtue: understanding, consisting of wisdom, knowledge, and common sense, and morality, exemplified by generosity, chastity, and the several other virtues ‘of the heart.’ “The virtue of understanding is born and increases in men through doctrine and instruction, and for this long experience is needed. The virtue of morality is born and increases by good and honest use, for it is not in us naturally, because a natural thing cannot be changed in its order by contrary usage.” So, for example, by nature fire burns upward; that is its nature. It cannot be taught or habituated to burn in that direction. As Aristotle puts it, “we are predisposed by nature, but we do not become good or bad by nature” (NE 1106b). What human beings do have by nature isn’t virtue but “the power to learn” it. That “is why I say that these virtues are not at all in us without nature and not at all according to nature, but the root and the beginning of receiving these virtues are in us by nature, and its perfection is in us by usage.” As Aristotle teaches, one ‘works’ to achieve virtue, which is why he says that “lawmakers make the citizens good by habituating them, and since this is the intention of every lawmaker, those that do not do it well are failures, and one regime differs from another in this respect as a good one from a worthless one” (NE 1103b). Deploying Christian language, Latini writes, “A man is good through doing good and evil through doing evil.” Considering the three things human beings desire—the profitable, the delightful, and the good—and given the fact that “delight is a part of us from the time we are born,” that it is a thing naturally ‘given’ and not by itself inclined toward “moderation or justice,” ethics concerns the government of delight, and “the whole purpose of the governor of cities is to bring delight to its citizens in the appropriate things and at any appropriate time and place.” How can this be done? After all, as Latini warns his young gentleman, “Good can only be done in one way, but man does evil in many ways; for this reason, it is a hard and painful thing to be good and an easy thing to be bad, and this is why it happens that more people are bad than good.” How can the knowledge of virtue be made consistent with the practice of it, that is, with virtue itself? If virtue is, as Latini calls it, a state of character, what is the character of that state?

Here Aristotle introduces his celebrated definition of virtue as the middle or “mean” between two extremes. Latini cuts through Aristotle’s complex and subtle discussion of virtue as a mean with respect to a thing, the soul’s holding a position equally apart from either extreme of excess and deficiency, and a mean with respect to an individual, arising from the soul’s awareness of the fact that for Milo the wrestler, a few pounds of meat is not too much, and it might be too little. Nor does he trouble his young gentleman with Aristotle’s formal, philosophic definition of virtue as “an active condition that makes one apt at choosing, consisting in a mean condition in relation to us, which is determined by a proportion and by the means by which a person with practical judgement would determine it” (NE 1107a). Latini does follow Aristotle in saying that there are some actions and feelings that do not admit of the middling condition, such as adultery, stealing, and murder. They are wrong, simply. Generally, Latini for the most part ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of circumstance in making right choices, his insistence on considering who is acting, what the act is, what the is affected by the act, with hat the act is done, what it’s done for, and the manner in which it’s done. “No one could be ignorant of all these things without being insane” (NE 1111a), Aristotle insists, but Latini confines himself to a simplified version, distinguishing intentional acts from natural ones, and both from acts combining intention and natural necessity, such as obeying the command of a tyrant. He highlights moral responsibility: “If every man is responsible for his state of mind and for his imagination, there must necessarily be, and it does not have to be tested, a natural beginning and awareness of good and evil which makes him desire good and avoid evil.” This parallels Aristotle’s observation that “the targeting of the end [of an action] is not self-chosen; instead, one needs to be born having something like vision, by which to discern rightly and choose what is truly good” (NE 1114b). But for Aristotle, this is only true for a person who has “a fortunate nature,” one “born with” “such a condition.” And even then, aiming at the “mean” or middle between extremes, moral energeia, with mindfulness of circumstances, determines a right choice more than the natural blessings of character. That is, in Latini the Christian conscience to some degree anchors prudential reasoning or deliberation, aiding in the Aristotelian task of finding “the middle ground” in character and in actions. Whereas Aristotle calls the beautiful “the end that belongs to virtue” (NE 1115b), the mean only the apparent aim, Latini describes the “beautiful and good and deserving of merit” as a description of the mean, not as its purpose.

Latini follows Aristotle closely in describing the virtues which arise in finding that ground between the extremes of deficiency and excess—courage being the mean between fear and rashness, temperance or moderation respecting pleasure and pain being the mean between insensibility and dissipation, generosity or liberality being the mean between stinginess and wastefulness, and so on. (He adds an occasional aperςu of his own, for example, “there are some men who are cowards in battle and bold in spending money.”) Unlike many Christians, Latini does not hesitate to classify magnanimity or greatness of soul with the virtues, giving as an example of it “serving our Sovereign Father” (he does not specify whether this means God or the pope), from which “great honor arises,” the kind of honor worthy of the magnanimous man. And again, now aligning Aristotle with Jesus’ central command: “Magnanimity is the crown and the beacon of all virtues, for it exists through virtue alone, and for this reason it is not an easy thing to be magnanimous, but rather it is a very difficult thing, for one has to be good for oneself and for one’s neighbor.” 

Accordingly, Latini regards justice as “the noblest of virtues and the strongest.” Indeed, closely paraphrasing Aristotle, “justice is not just a part of virtue, rather it is all virtues, and wrongdoing is not a part of vice, rather it is all vices.” Both men consider justice as a preeminently political virtue, aiming at “someone else’s good” (NE 1130a), being “good to oneself and to one’s friends” (Latini). Both associate justice with equity, with equalizing things in terms of desert or merit, since the person who is rightly rewarded more money than another because he does better work is being rewarded ‘equally’ or proportionately, evaluated according to the same standard. (This is why “money was first invented, because it brought equality to unequal things; money is like justice without a soul, because it is a middle ground through which unequal things become unequal.”) In addition to such distributive justice, there is also corrective justice, in which the innocent and the guilty are treated differently because they are judged ‘equitably,’ i.e., by the same standard. Latini leaves no doubt that corrective justice may be harsh. Because “the lord of justice tries to bring equity to unequal things, it is therefore necessary to kill some, wound others, chase some into exile, until satisfaction is given to the one who has been wronged.” But whereas Aristotle notes that “not all people mean the same thing by merit but those who favor democracy mean freedom, those who favor oligarchy mean wealth, others mean being well born and those who favor aristocracy mean virtue” (1131a), Latini simply points to the Ruler of all: “True justice is not the one which is in the law; rather it is God our Lord, and it is given to man, and through justice man resembles God.” Whereas Aristotle calls the human judge as a person “meant to be a sort of ensouled justice,” the ruler who “evens things up” (1132a) when the letter of the law fails fully to deliver justice, Latini has recourse to the infallibly just and equitable Judge.  

In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to turn from ethical to intellectual virtue, toward sophia instead of phronēsis. Later, he will introduce the theme of friendship, which registers several types of friendship, some of them consonant with the philosophic life, others to political life. Latini will treat the intellectual virtues differently than Aristotle does (again, his young gentleman is no potential philosopher), concentrating more of his attention on friendship and happiness. He does follow Aristotle in concluding with a transition from ethics to politics.

Preparatory to his discussion of friendship, Aristotle revisits moderation or temperance and introduces the virtue of “standing firm” or constancy—both virtues without which true friendship would be impossible. Latini follows Aristotle on this. As Aristotle classifies self-restraint as the mean between unrestraint and insensibility Latini puts temperance between unrestraint and abstinence. Latini identifies constant man as one “who is steadfast in goodness but changeable with respect to evil”; this is the mean between stubbornness (exhibited by a man who is “steadfast and firm in all his opinions, whether they are true or false”) and inconstancy, “when there is no firmness or constancy” at all.

Aristotle and Latini identify three kinds of friendship; friendship based on pleasure, characteristic of the young, who “live according to feeling” (NE 1156a), friendship based utility or profit, and friendship based on alikeness in virtue, goodness. The last sort of friendships “are likely to be rare,” observes, “for such people are few” (NE 1156b). Latini concurs, saying that “men who are well chosen and virtuous and who do good are few in number, but those who seek profit and pleasure are many in number.” Latini writes that “those who love one another for profit or pleasure do not love truly; rather, they love the things on which the friendship is based, that is, pleasure and profit, and for this reason their friendship lasts only as long as the pleasure and the profit do.” By contrast, “true friendship which is good and full exists between two good men who are similar in virtue and who love one another and care for one another because of the similarity of the virtues they possess.” Indeed, a certain equality must prevail for true friendship to exist, as friendship among husbands and wives, fathers and children, kings and subjects, gods and men, must differ from that among equals, even when the unequal persons are both virtuous.

If one were to aim at adding to the number of true friendships, education is needed. “People educate the young by steering them by means of pleasure and pain”; “what is most conducive to virtue of character is to enjoy what one ought and hate what one ought” (NE 1172a). As Latini puts it, “delight is born and nourished with us from the moment we are born, and for this reason we should teach children to be pleased and angered appropriately,” as “this is the basis of moral virtue, and afterwards the increase in time increases the goodness of the child’s life, for each one takes what pleases him and avoids what saddens him.” Both Aristotle and Latini distinguish pleasure from happiness; we choose both pleasure and happiness for themselves, not as instruments to some other good, but “not every pleasure is choiceworthy” (NE 1174a), whereas happiness is always choiceworthy. Choiceworthy pleasure “brings the activities to completion and hence brings living to completion, which is what they [i.e., the activities] all strive for” (1175a), but, as readers have seen, some lives are more choiceworthy than others because they are more fully human. “The measure of each thing is virtue” (NE 1175b). And this leads to the consideration of happiness, “the end at which human things aim” (NE 1176a). 

Aristotle defines happiness as “being-at-work [energeia] according to virtue,” the most power virtue being contemplation, “since the intellect is the most powerful of the things in us” (NE 1177a). Latini writes, “happiness is the firmness, and constancy of the works of virtues themselves, and we have been told”—by Aristotle—that “the rule of this power is continual, because the work of the intellect goes on continually.” Therefore, “the most perfect and most pleasurable work of all is happiness, but the very best pleasures are found in philosophy because of the quest for eternity and the subtleties of truth found in its works.” Among citizens, the happiness resulting in the exercise of “moral and civic virtues” is “more difficult” to achieve than happiness resulting from the intellectual virtues because the latter are self-sufficient, whereas “the great and liberal man must have wealth so that he can perform works of generosity.” As a Christian, however, Latini adds another telos to human life: “beatitude.” Agreeing with Aristotle that “the full and perfect work of speculative intellect is the goal of life,” he considers happiness “an example of the real beatitude,” seen in “God and his angels.” We have a portion of this “noblest work of all, that is, the life of the intellect,” because “we are similar to God and his angels” in exercising intellect. “Those who most resemble God,” the ones who most nearly live up to man’s creation in His image, “are the ones who have this beatific life most completely, God being truly beatific,” understanding “continually without any effort.” God’s “concern is greater for the man who strives to be similar to Him, and He bestows a better reward upon him, and delights in him as one friend does in another.” And in fact, Aristotle himself calls the one who lives the contemplative life as having “something divine present in him” (NE 1177b). “This is the life in accord with the intellect, if that most of all is a human being” (NE 1177b).

For both, this is a way of life, not something to be acknowledged ‘in principle.’ “It is not sufficient to know about virtue, but one must tr to have it and use it, unless there is some other way that we become good” (NE 1178a). And Latini, more emphatically: “It is not enough for the one who wishes to be happy to know what is written in this book; he must practice all the things described above, because with respect to things which must be done through deeds it is not enough for a person tow know about them or tell about them, but rather he must perform them; in this way the goodness of man is fulfilled, that is through knowledge and through deeds. The knowledge of virtue guides a man, and that man performs virtuous deeds, I say, who is well-born and truly loves goodness.” He adds, as a matter of course, that “it is by the grace of God” that those who are “good by nature” are “truly blessed.” 

Since most men are not born with such good natures, what Aristotle calls “rearing and exercising by laws” aiming at habituating such men to good behavior are necessary (NE 1179b). In Latini’s words, “one must not stop this training instruction once childhood is past.” “Some men can be governed by instruction with words, and there are others who are taught not with words but with threats and torments; but there are some men who cannot be instructed in either way, and such men must be expelled so that they do not dwell with the others.” This leads to “the government of the city,” wherein “a noble government…makes the citizens noble, and it makes them do good works and abide by the law and oppose those who do not.” In so saying, he omits Aristotle’s cautionary observation, “among human beings, those who oppose the people’s impulses are hated, even when they do rightly, but the law is not hated when it orders what is decent” (NE 1180a). Latini does, nonetheless, remark the importance of “the master of the law,” who understands “all human matters on the basis of philosophy” while “first of all call[ing] upon the sayings of the wise men of old,” the “good customs of the cities and how good ways uphold them.” By contrast, Aristotle relates the philosophic standard to the political standard, the regime, which then uses “laws and customs” (NE 1181b). 

Calling upon the sayings of the wise men of old is of course exactly what Latini does in this compendium. Ending his tracing of the Nicomachean Ethics, he thus embarks on a more wide-ranging survey of moral wisdom, confirming and supplementing what he has presented from the Ethics with teachings from Scripture and the writings of other classical philosophers.

Restating the distinctions between soul, body, and fortune, Latini further distinguishes the soul’s reason from its will, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, who says, “virtue is the exercise of will, according to the judgment of reason,” which implies that “virtue proceeds from nature.” Nature proceeds from God and human nature has been marred by sin, which is why “Jesus Christ sent his disciples to suffer great perils after his passion, before the diminution of their virtue” could occur, as it would have done had they delayed their missions. Sin (Augustine remarks) enables “evil men to have all the beautiful things,” although they themselves are ugly; over time, this alone will tempt even a good man, well-instructed. Accordingly, “Jesus Christ came to show humility and charity,” and “because virtue had such a good instructor and because its fruits are profitable…all wise men say” that “the soul which is filled with [virtue] is completely in the joy of the earthly paradise,” having the means to resist “the desires of the flesh.” The human soul is “the house of God,” a place of brightness, illuminating the right path, and of happiness, “as Solomon says.

Why are all wise men so confident that virtue can triumph in this life? For one thing, “the conscience of the evildoer is always in pain, because the works of virtue are moderate things, and nature itself takes comfort in moderation and becomes upset at excess and lack, just as sight takes comfort in the color green which is midway between white and black.” Indeed, “just as the good woman rejoices when she gives birth to a good-looking son and would be distressed if it were a cat or something else against nature, so too does the soul rejoice in the works of virtue, as if it were its own fruit, and is dismayed at the vices which are against it.”

Regarding the reasoning part of the soul, “I say that the contemplative virtue prepares thee soul for the highest end, that is, the supreme good, but moral virtue prepares the heart for contemplative virtue”; it is “the material by means of which we reach the contemplative virtue.” Therefore, the cultivation of moral virtue precedes the cultivation of contemplative virtue in time if not in rank. “Each of us must choose the active life which is acquired by moral truth in order to govern oneself among corporeal things, for afterwards he is inclined and prepared to love God and to follow his divinity,” the being-at-work of Christian contemplation. The virtues of such contemplation are faith, hope, and charity, whereas the moral virtues consist primarily of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice, with prudence being “the foundation of all others.”

According to Cicero, prudence is “knowledge of good and evil,” which suggests that the first sinful act of man also gave him the means of counteracting sin in the post-lapsarian world. As the prolific theologian Alain de Lille writes, “we need the knowledge of good to protect ourselves, for no one can know good except through the knowledge of evil, and each person avoids evil through knowledge of good.” Prudence enables us not only to distinguish between good and evil but to reason about the better course of action; “the nature of a wise man is to take thoughtful counsel before running after a false thing on a sudden whim.” Latini advises his young gentleman, “Do not give any judgment on things which are doubtful; withhold your judgment and do not take a firm decision, because all things which seem true are not true, and each thing which does not seem believable is not false.” To avoid deceiving others and being deceived yourself, don’t talk too much, confusing things with verbiage. “Let your opinions be like proverbial statements,” Latini writes, taking his own advice. “If you are a wise man, you must dispose your heart according to three times, as follows: organize those things which are present, prepare yourself for those things which are to come, and recall those which are past, for the one who does not think of things gone by and past loses his life, like an unwise person, and the one who does not prepare himself for future things fails in all things like an unwise person and like a man who is not on his guard.” When listening instead of speaking, follow the Scriptural advice to be no respecter of persons: “pay attention to what he has said, not to the one who is talking.” 

The four components of prudence are preparation, caution, awareness, and instruction. Boethius writes that “prudence measures the outcome of things.” (The fact that he was executed demonstrates that this is hard to do.) To prepare for “all that can happen,” one first sees and considers present things, “guard[ing] himself against false words and flattery which deceive through gentleness, like the sweet sound of the flute which tricks the bird until it is caught.” Caution puts us “on guard against the contrary vices”—the opposing extremes of excess and deficiency—its “duty” being “to pursue moderation in all things.” This moderation includes moderation in preparation, as preparedness consists neither in ignorance nor in the vain desire to know everything.

Before moving to the next components of prudence, Latini adds several chapters on preparation and caution in speech—which, as will become evident in Part III, he considers central to political life. Before speaking, he advises, consider six things: who you are; who you want to be; for whom you want to be it; how you will achieve that purpose; and at what time. So, “before you say a word, consider in your heart who you are who wish to speak, and be careful first of all to see if the thing pertains to you or to someone else”; in a word, mind your own business. “Solomon says: the person who gets involved with another’s conflicts is like the one who takes a dog by the ears.” As Latini himself puts it, “the person who does not know how to be quiet does not know how to speak,” as “no harm comes to a silent man, but bad things happen to one who talks a lot.” 

When it comes to who you want to be, be a truth-teller. “If it is necessary for you to redeem the truth through a lie, do not lie, but rather withdraw when the proper occasion presents itself, for a good man does not conceal his secrets: he withholds what should not be said and says what is appropriate,” speaking truths, to be sure, but only such truths as are believable. Do not be a habitual critic or mocker; “Solomon says, the man who is accustomed to words of reproach will not get better in all the days of his life,” and “the Apostle says, let your speech always be seasoned with the salt of grace, so that you might know how you must reply to each person” with words (Latini adds) that are not “obscure, but rather understandable.” This consideration requires the third piece of advice to a speaker: knowing “to whom you are speaking.” “As long as you keep your secret, it is as if you kept it in prison, but when you reveal it, it keeps you in its prison, for in this world it is a safer thing to be silent than to ask another to be silent.” Never trust a former enemy, as his resentment is likely to be lasting, or a complainer, or a fool, or “a drunk man or a wicked woman.” The audience for the speech forms part of “the circumstances in which you speak”—the conditions under which the action you urge will be performed, the material with which the act will be performed, how it will be done, and the purpose for which it will be done. 

As a speaker, how will you speak in order to convince? “You should shape and temper your voice and your spirit and all the movements of your body and tongue,” changing “all these things” as the circumstances warrant. Finally, be careful about the time to speak and how long you take. “The fool pays no attention to the time.” 

Returning to the components of prudence, Latini next addresses awareness, knowledge. Call things by their right names in your own mind. “As Seneca says, vices enter under the guise of virtue,” “mad boldness…under the guise of courage,” evil under that of temperance, cowardice under that of wisdom. Recall that the Trojan Horse “fooled the people of Troy” because it was said to be a propitiatory offering to Athena, goddess of wisdom. This leads to the final component of prudence, teaching, which aims first to “give instruction to oneself,” only then “to the ignorant.” In so instructing yourself, “it causes you no harm to pass over knowledge which you do not need, and which does not bring you profit”—a ruling principle of the Treasure. As for teaching others, do it “without reproaching, in such a way that the person is pleased with your criticism.”

Latini proceeds to review and restate Aristotle’s list of the virtues, with temperance preceding courage because “temperance gives strength to the heart for things which are with us, that is, the good things which help the body,” whereas “courage gives strength for contrary things”; moreover, “through temperance man governs himself, and through courage and justice he governs others, and it is better to govern oneself than others.” Temperance, “the control we have over luxuriousness and other evil inclinations,” has five dimensions, each governing the five senses, which produce pleasure. Of these, moderation is the overseer of all “our drives and all our affairs” respecting the body. For example, “one should reduce the amount of physical work for the old and increase the intellectual work, either by teaching or guiding or serving God.” (One may recall Aristotle’s recommendation that priesthood be reserved for the elderly.) Decency means honor in word and deed, avoiding “things which bring shame afterwards.” “Nature itself, when she created man, wanted to keep him honest” by making “his face clearly visible” and by “conceal[ing] the parts which are given to man for his needs, because they were ugly to behold.”

Temperance narrowly defined “consists in overcoming the pleasures of the sense of touch by the restraints of reason”—touch, along with taste, being “more powerful in man than in any other animal,” even as our senses of seeing, hearing, and smelling are weaker. “A wise and strong man always remembers how much man’s nature surpasses that of beasts, for they love nothing except pleasure, and they direct all their energies to this; but a man’s heart aspires to something else, that is, to thinking or understanding.” “Luxuriousness and wine,” stimulants of touch and taste, “trouble man’s ability to reason and make him stray from the faith.” The pleasure lust aims at is the other “great danger to a good life if it is not practiced chastely,” by which Latini means that “the union should be of a man with a woman,” not “with a relative,” within a lawful marriage, intended to “produce children,” and “done according to human nature.” Lust or sexual desire gratified under these conditions “is pleasing to God and to men,” as the Bible teaches and because it benefits “the soul and the body” alike. 

Sobriety governs “the pleasures of taste and of the mouth through the temperance of reason.” Nature “gave us a small mouth for such a large body” for a reason, namely, to “restrain the mad desire to eat.” Indeed, “it is a more honorable thing for you to complain of thirst than of drunkenness.” “Refrain therefore from going to taverns and from all great preparation in food, except for your wedding or for your friends or to increase your honor, according to the instructions of magnificence.” Finally, restraint “limit[s] the pleasures of the other three senses”—seeing, hearing, smelling—in “all areas of vice.”

Latini is now ready to discuss courage. Twelve things “give us strength in virtue”: “the true faith in Jesus Christ,” in whom we know we shall be brought to salvation, not matter what happens to us in this life; “the admonishment of important people and our elders,” a point Latini evidently expects not to be lost on his young gentleman; “the memory of valiant men and their works,” which furnish our souls with noble examples; “inclination and usage,” as Latini has shown in his summary of the Nicomachean Ethics; reward; fear; hope; good company, especially friendship, again as taught by Aristotle; truth and justice; good sense; “the weakness of your enemy; and “the strength itself,” virtue meaning strength of soul. Fear of future or present harm and “a cowardly heart”—inborn timidity—are the “sources of cowardice.” Cowardice can be counteracted, even in “weak hearts,” by the “six parts” of courage: magnificence, trust, safety, magnanimity, patience, and constancy.

Magnificence forms part of courage in the sense that it is “called courage,” although it is really a separate virtue and more, the crown of the virtues. The great-souled man scorns the petty; fear appeals to smallness of soul, and so earns his contempt. “Trust is a virtue which has to do with the hope of the heart, that it can carry to conclusion what it undertakes.” Self-assurance is the opposite side of the same coin, fearing neither “the harm which might come, or the result of actions undertaken.” “Fear says to man: you will die, and self-assurance says: this is human nature, not pain. I came into the world with this understanding, that I would leave it. The law orders that we repay what we have borrowed.” Being a “reasonable animal,” I know that I must die, and do not sorrow over the prospect, as death is “the end of evils.” “Fear says: you will die young; self-assurance says: death comes to a young man as it comes to an old one; it makes no distinction, but I can state with certainty that it is best to die when it is a pleasure to live, and very good to die before you desire death.” Fear also says, “you will be chased into exile,” but self-assurance replies, “the country is not forbidden to me, but rather the place, for everything under the sky is my country, “all lands ae his country to the good man, as the sea is for the fish.” “Fear says: you will be poor; self-assurance replies: vices are not in poverty but in poor people; he is poor because he believes he is. Fear says: I am not powerful; self-assurance replies; be happy; you will be.” You have lost your children? “God did not remove them, he received them.” In fact, even “God died,” after the agonizing night at Gethsemane and the ordeal of the Cross. Thus fear “never gave good counsel” but self-assurance, if guided by prudence, does.

Magnificence contributes to courage, as well, this virtue “makes us accomplish difficult and noble things of great importance. In peace, it defends the interests of citizens rather than one’s own interest by providing necessities for the people and maintaining justice with a generous hand. In war, magnificence contributes to thorough preparation, preparation without false economies. In general, courage in war also entails beginning the war with the intention of achieving peace, making war without greed, “fearing weak cowardice more than death,” since “it is better to die than live in disgrace,” proceeding with diligence and justice, reinforcing weakened troops, sustaining wavering or fleeing troops, clemency in victory for “those who were not cruel enemies,” and, finally, establishing peace and maintaining it. Latini teaches “that peace and the affairs of the city are maintained by sense and by counsel of courage, but most people have done battle because of greed. But to tell the truth, armor is of little value outside when there is no sense inside,” and it is “more just to seek glory through intelligence than through force.”

Constancy forms part of courage because the heart “holds firm in its resolution.” “How can I hold Proteus to anything when he is always changing expression?” Patience is “a virtue which makes our heart withstand the assaults of adversity and wrongdoing,” although only (again) if governed by prudence, as “some things are suffered willingly and others not, and suffering undertaken willingly is laudable and worthy of merit,” as supremely exemplified by Jesus Christ. 

Justice is the virtue Latini considers after temperance and courage as governed by prudence. “Temperance and courage put man in the seat of justice, and they hold him so strongly that he does not become proud through prosperity, or fearful through adversity.” Justice is the virtue which “gives each person his due.” “Justice comes after all the other virtues, and indeed justice could do nothing if it ignored the other virtues,” considering that “at the beginning of the world,” when “the people lived according to the law of bests,” “without laws and without communities”—like the cyclops, as Aristotle puts it—they “would not have submitted their necks to the yoke of servitude if it were not for the fact that evil deeds multiplied dangerously and the evildoers went unpunished.” Only because “a few good sensible men”—men of temperance and courage—banded together and “ordered the people to live together and to keep human company” did justice become established, the virtue that “overcomes harsh things” to “protect and defend the communal life.” As Aristotle also remarks, even “thieves who steal together want justice among them, and likewise if their master does not divide up what they have stolen justly, their companions either kill them or abandon them.” This sense of justice, which shines however dimly even in darkened souls, manifests itself “because almost everything which pertains to justice is written in our hearts as if by nature.” It is even fundamental to nature itself, as “all other animals keep justice and love and pity among themselves.”

Thus, “justice is joined to nature”; what later thinkers called the ‘state of nature’ isn’t natural for human beings, does not conduce to their flourishing. Justice “is not an arrangement of men,” even if men are its proximate arrangers; “rather it is the law of God and the bond of human company.” “If you truly want to follow justice, love and fear the Lord Our God so that you will be loved by him; and this is the way you can love him: do good to every person and harm to no one, and then they will call you just, and will follow you and revere you and honor you.” Latini’s young gentleman is thereby invited to suppose that God loves human beings in exchange for their love, and that human beings obey, revere, and honor other human beings in exchange justice. This is a rather ‘transactional’ version of the command to love God and neighbor. 

Justice has two parts, rigor and clemency, which Latini understands as liberality in meting out justice.  Rigor is “a virtue which restrains wrongdoing by a suitable punishment.” Its three “precepts” are: do not harm others if you have not previously been wronged; you communal things in common, private things “as if” they are your own (“as if,” perhaps, because God is their real owner); and remove evil from the community of men, as “wounds for which no medicine can effect a cure should be cut out with iron, and likewise one should not forgive such men.” Although lawyers sometimes do not “follow the truth,” a rigorous judge always will. 

Liberality is “a virtue which gives and creates benefits.” When in the will, it is kindness, exhibited by rulers in their clemency; when in fact and deed, it is generosity. Latini discusses seven parts of liberality: giving, rewarding, religiosity, pity, charity, reverence, and mercy. All of these parts of liberality show liberality as a part of justice because each “contributes what it owes,” gives what is due. With respect to giving, Latini advises his young gentleman to “be careful not to delay your gift, for you are mistaken if you think you will get a reward for something delayed and long awaited”; it is noteworthy that, here again, Latini encourages one to expect reward for reward, punishment for punishment, staying within the confines of justice even in areas where one might expect a statement of Christian grace. “Be careful not to be reproached about what you give, for you must forget it” but “it is the one who receives it who must remember.” When giving money, give it “temperately”: “there is no greater madness than to do so much that you cannot continue to do what you willingly do,” being forced thereby into a life of crime. Somewhat more, well, generously, Latini teaches, “In liberality we must follow the gods, who are lords of all things: they give to those who are not grateful, and they do not stop giving”; “the sun shines on excommunicated people,” too. And “virtue consists in giving without waiting for something in return; I would rather not receive than not give.” But lest one think Latini too otherworldly, he continues, when it comes to rewarding, “be careful not to forget the good things which somebody has done for you: all hate the one who forgets the good others have done for him, for this they think that he would also forget the good if they did it.” If you receive, you are obliged to give back, “will for will, and things for things, and words for words.” 

Religiosity is “that virtue which makes us want to know God and render service to him; this virtue is called the faith of Jesus Christ, that is, the belief in God.” It has four requirements: to repent of all one’s misdeeds; to “give little value to the bad aspects of temporal things”; to “commit one’s life completely to God,” and to “keep truth and loyalty,” particularly in fulfilling promises. This might be termed Christian liberality, generosity with oneself or selflessness. It is related to pity, “a virtue which makes us love and serve diligently our relatives and our country, and this comes to us through nature, for first of all we are born for God and then for our parents and our country.” Latini’s Christianity thus leaves room for patriotism. Civil concord is “a virtue which links in one law and one dwelling place those who are in the same city and country,” and “does much good,” even as “war destroys” good.

Latini now introduces an unlisted part of liberality, which is innocence—pureness of heart “which hates all wrongdoing.” It helps many, harms no one, and refrains from taking vengeance. It therefore goes a bit beyond justice, strictly defined. In this, it comports with the listed virtue of charity, which is more than a virtue but also “the goal of virtue,” encouraged by the Church, by nature (we are all of the same species), kinship (“we are all children of Adam and Eve”), kinship of spirit (sons of our “mother,” the Holy Church), born in the image of God. Charity also brings the profit that “comes out of live and companionship,” avoiding the injuries inflicted by war and hatred. Latini then returns to the topic of friendship, seen in the Nicomachean Ethics, and considers how Christian charity inflects it. “There are many things which help us to be loved,” to be befriended. These are moderation in speech, “virtue and goodness,” humility, loyalty, loving (“Seneca says: love if you want to be loved”), and “serving wisely, for wisdom is the mother of good love.” Quoting Seneca again, Latini writes, “the person who puts his faith only in his own services is dangerously deceived; there is no more perilous evil than for a person to think that people he does not love are his friends.” They may be taking unjust advantage of your liberality, a point that keeps Latini’s understanding of liberality, even of Christian liberality, within the bounds of justice. He elaborates on “true friendship,” which is animated through faith and true benevolence, “good will directed towards people for their own sake.” Such friends reprimand in private, praise in public; they don’t try to find out what their friends want to keep hidden; they do not waver from friendship in misfortune; they establish a community of possession; they “maintain equality”; they keep their friendship going; they do not reveal the secret of a friend; they “do what he asks quickly”; and they tell him “what will be of profit for him rather than what is pleasing” to him. In contrast, “the person who loves you for his profit is like the crow and the vulture which always follow carrion; he loves you as long as he can get something that belongs to you, and therefore he loves your belongings, not you.” As for the friend who is a companion in pleasures, he resembles “the tercel with his mate who, once he has satisfied his carnal desires, flies away as fast as he can and loves her no more.” Such persons, ruled by passion not prudence, receive a sort of rough justice when “they abandon themselves body and soul to the love of a woman; in this way they lose their sense, so that they become blind, as happened to Adam with his wife, for which reason the whole human race is in peril and always will be so.”

By reverence, Latini means the honor given to noble persons, rulers, and elders. “The man who serves must indeed serve and obey willingly,” laudably obeying even “hard commandments.” “One must serve gladly,” as “God loves the one who gives gladly.” Reverence is liberality with respect to obedience, as when Peter “immediately left his nets and followed Jesus Christ.” 

Latini concludes his account of liberality/clemency with the virtue of mercy. Through it, “the heart is moved by those who suffer and by the poverty of the tormented.” That is, mercy remains within the confines of justice because it responds to those in desperate condition by giving them their due, supplying their just needs, the things which they lack, whether goods or services.

By contrast, wrongdoing or injustice consists of cruelty and/or negligence. “Hands which are dedicated to selling alone believe that justice lies where there is more money,” and their cruelty extends beyond the marketplace to the king’s court, “the mother and nurse of evil deeds” (writes the exile from the Florentine court), “for it receives men who are bad as well as just, and honest as well as dishonest.” There are two types of cruelty; “one is strength, the other is deception.” Taking up metaphors his fellow Florentine, Machiavelli, would ‘borrow’ in the act of breaking with classical and Christian virtue, Latini writes that “strength is like that of a lion; deception is like that of a fox.” While “each is a terrible and inhuman thing,” deception “should be hated more, for in all disloyalty there is no greater pestilence than that of those persons who seem good when they receive; no trap is as perilous as the one which is concealed under the guise of service.” Therefore, young gentleman, “beware of the smooth water, and go into the rapids with confidence.” 

As for negligence, it consists either of “not preventing wrongdoing” (“there are some who do not want to suffer hatred or trouble or expense in defending”) or of excess busy-ness, or hatred towards those who deserve defense. “It is better to be negligent towards the rich than towards the poor and afflicted.” Insofar as justice can be understood as a mean between extremes, it is the middle ground between excessive kindness and cruelty.

Summarizing his account of the virtues, Latini reminds his reader that prudence “must always go before the other works, and that the other three virtues are for doing the works.” This puts a limit on the best life, the contemplative way of life, the life devoted to philosophizing. “If someone is very desirous of knowing the nature of things, and he puts all his sense into this knowledge”—putting prudence at the service of contemplation—and if “another person comes to him and suddenly brings him news that his city and his country are in  peril if he does not help them, and that he has the power of helping, it is a more honest thing that he abandon his study and go defend his country.” 

After prudence comes temperance; “it is better for a man to have control himself than over another,” for, as Seneca advises, “if you want to submit all things to yourself, submit yourself first of all to reason for if reason governs you, you will be governor of many, but nothing is good for a man if he is not first good.” Having fortified his prudence and temperance with courage, one has readied himself for doing justice, owing duty first to God, then to his country, then to his parents, and then to all others. 

If the virtues are blessings of the soul, what are the blessings of the body and the blessings of fortune, things external to soul and body? The bodily blessings—beauty, nobility of bearing, agility, strength, stature, and health—find their limit in “the darkness of death,” which “shows what human bodies are like and how they are perishable.” The blessings of fortune—wealth, lordship, glory—must be understood as meted out unreasonably, as fortune’s course “is neither just nor reasonable,” even though controlled by God. Perhaps the arbitrary acts of fortune may be permitted by God to test the fidelity of human beings, even as evil exists as a necessary contrast to the good. As Latini himself writes, subsequently, “I would say as Augustine says, that God wishes it, so that the good things bad people have might not be too desired, and that the evils which happen to the good people not be too scorned.” And again, “for this reason God gives beauty to bad people, so that the good people will not believe that this is a great blessing.”

Although we cannot govern fortune itself (as Machiavelli would later claim), we can govern ourselves in relation to its blessings. Wealth, for example, is a substantial blessing, but remember that the “black death attacks equally the small houses of poor people and the great towers of kings.” If you are wealthy, while you are, do not lord it over your servants. “You must live…with the one who is lower than you, as you would want a superior to live with you; every time that you remember how much power you have over your servant, remember that your lord has a similar power over you.” When it comes to wealth in money, remain mindful that covetousness “destroys virtue.” “If someone asked me what moderation in wealth is, I would say that the first thing is what necessity requires; the second is that you be satisfied with what is sufficient.” 

Respecting lordship, the worthiest of this kind of blessing “is that of kings and of governing cities, and peoples,” the “worthiest profession there can be in the world.” Latini confines himself to “tell what is appropriate to lordship and the government of a city, according to what is required by the customs of the country and the law of Rome”—state and Church. As with wealth, “one must temper the desire for lordship,” as “great things fall of themselves, and it is the point up to which the gods allow happiness to increase; they give great things easily, but they hardly guarantee them.” Once again anticipating the temptation to be offered by Machiavelli, the desire for lordship “reveals pretense and hypocrisy.” The true “duty of lordship is to lead people to their profit,” broadly defined, and Latini sides with Cicero against Machiavelli in teaching that “there is nothing which is more appropriate to lordship than to be loved, and nothing more inappropriate than to be feared.” Machiavelli will say that the prince should take care to be feared more than to be loved, but not to be hated. Latini replies in advance, with Seneca, that “oppressed people hate those they fear, and people want the one they hate to perish.” Tyrants die young. “Alexander, when he wanted to sleep with his wife, first ordered servants to search her chests and her clothing to see if there was not a knife hidden there; this is a bad thing, to trust a servant more than he did his wife; and in spite of this he was not betrayed by is wife but by one of his servants,” not by one who loved him but by one who feared him.

Finally, as to glory, a “good reputation, known in many lands, of men who have accomplished great things, or know their art well,” ranks as genuine glory. Glory based on appearance or fraud is as vain as lordship based on force aimed at inspiring fear. And “if you want to compare the blessings of fortune with one another, I say that glory is worth more than wealth”—a blessing to the honor-loving part of the soul, not to the appetites—that sanctity is also “better than wealth”—Latini is a son of the Church—that, among kinds of wealth, “income from cities is worth more than that which comes from fields”—Latini being a man of civil and commercial life, an urbane man—and that “wealth is worth more than strength of the body,” being the more wide-ranging form of strength. Against Machiavelli’s future valorization of men’s desire to acquire, Latini insists that “honesty is so profitable that nothing can be profitable if it is not honest,” as “nothing is profitable which does not harmonize with virtue.” “If someone asked me if some wise man is dying of hunger, should he not take the food of another who is worthless”—after all, he outranks him in virtue—I say “no, because life is not more worthwhile to me than my will, through which I refrain from doing harm to another for my profit.” “When a man loses his life, his body is corrupted by death; but if I forsook my will I would fall into vices of the heart,” which being “more serious than [vices] of the body,” would be far more damaging to lose. “Similarly, the good of the heart is better than that of the body, for virtue is worth more than life.” 

How does Christianity affect the philosophic way of life, the life of contemplation? Whereas “the active life is in the innocence of good works,” the “contemplative life is in thinking of celestial things,” “taking delight in God alone.” The “saintly man” must “occasionally turn towards the active life because it is necessary to man,” in that sense the more important of the two. Indeed, “the two eyes of a man signify these two lives, and therefore, when God orders that the right eye which is causing scandal be removed and thrown out, he refers to the contemplative life, if it should be corrupted by error”; contrary to Scripture, Latini claims that a contemplatively blind man might “through his works achieve everlasting life, rather than go to the fire of hell because of error in the contemplative life.” There is of course no suggestion in Scripture that one can achieve salvation through works. If Latini had written that a faithful if the not contemplative Christian may achieve salvation, and that such a Christian would likely pursue good works, he would have guided the young gentleman better, and he begins to do so almost immediately. 

Faith, hope, and charity, he writes, are the three contemplative virtues. “No man can reach beatitude except through faith,” as “God is praised and glorified when he is truly believed.” God knows when He is truly believed because he “looks at the faith within the heart.” Not wanting his reader to rest content with that, he adds that “faith is empty which is without works.” He refers to the second of Christ’s commandments, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, since even as faith without works is empty, so works without charity will bring no salvation to the worker, even if his works are good and his beliefs are correct. “The virtue of charity” is “mistress and queen of all virtues and the bond of perfection, for it binds the other virtues.” This corrects his earlier claim that salvation is available through works, inasmuch as two contemplative virtues are necessary to give good works merit in the eyes of God. As for hope, Latini is most concerned that one not misunderstand and therefore misuse it. True, a Christian “must have hope in God, so that he will forgive our sins, but we must take care that because of the assurance we have in God’s promise of forgiveness we do not persevere in sin.” 

What in us receives Christ’s Great Commandment to love God and neighbor? “The commandment of God is not written in us with letters of ink; rather it is set in our hearts by the divine spirit,” as “the notion of what is good and evil comes into us in which a way that we know naturally that we have to do good and avoid evil.” Conscience serves as the judge of a man inside himself. We reinforce conscience when we “follow three tracks of the best people and do what they do, for just as the wax receives the form of the seal, so too the morality of men is formed by a model.” Ultimately, the best model is Christ, Latini may imply, but he has provided many lesser but still good models serviceable for one’s efforts at moral formation.

 

 

 

Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book I: “The Origin of All Things.” Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

 

The Florentine diplomat Brunetto Latini spent his life entirely within the thirteenth century. A Guelph not a Ghibelline (Dante didn’t save a place for him in Paradise), he fled to Paris for seven years in the 1260s after his party was defeated, returning and eventually serving briefly as Chancellor of his city. He wrote The Book of the Treasure during those years of exile to provide a compendium of theoretical and practical wisdom for the edification of a young aspirant to political office in Florence. The Book was popular for decades, its authority eclipsed only by the ‘new science’ of the Renaissance. As an encyclopedia before the modern encyclopedias, it provides a look at what learned men knew before the criteria for useful knowledge were changed for the sake of ‘modernity.’ “I do not say that the book is based on my own wisdom which is indeed meager, but rather it is like a honeycomb collected from different flowers, for this book is compiled exclusively from, the marvelous sayings of the authors who before our time have dealt with philosophy, each one in accordance with his own particular knowledge, for no earthly man can know everything.”

“This book is called the Treasure,” he begins, “for just as the lord who wishes to mass things of great value, not only for his own pleasure but to increase his power and elevate his social status in war and in peace puts into his treasure the most precious jewels he can gather together according to his intention, in a similar manner the body of this book is compiled out of wisdom, like the one which is extracted from all branches of philosophy in a brief summary.” He divides it into the three parts of philosophy, addressing theory, and the two practical topics of ethics and logic respectively. He compares theory to “cash money; no mind without it can invest in practical wisdom or rational thought.” He compares ethical wisdom to “precious stones” that give “delight and worth” to a man by showing him “the things one should do and not do,” along with “the reasons why” one should or should not do those things. He compares logic to “fine gold,” a metal that “surpasses all metals.” The science of logic includes both rhetoric or “the science of speaking well” and politics or the science of “governing a people more noble than any other in the world”—namely, the Florentines. That is, Latini’s advice is not only regime-specific but city-specific; he does not ignore other regimes and other cities, introducing them for purposes of illustration, but he has his own city and his own immediate reader in mind. “I give it to you, handsome gentle friend, for you are indeed worthy of it in my judgment.” Anticipating the movement away from books written in Latin to books written in the vernacular, he writes in French; “even though we are Italian,” French is “more pleasant and has more in common with all other languages.” Not incidentally, it was also the language of diplomacy. He writes to give his reader something might actually read and use, not to impress scholars.

“Philosophy is the root from which grows all of the knowledge man man can have.” It is “the true inquiry into things, natural, divine, and human, insofar as man is capable of understanding.” Theory, knowledge of “the nature of all things celestial and terrestrial,” ranges from “things without corporeal existence and unrelated to corporeal things” (the topic of theology) to things with corporeal existence as they relate relate to other corporeal things (the topic of physics), and finally to incorporeal things and their relations with corporeal things (the topic of mathematics, which includes arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). 

Ethics, the second branch of philosophy and the first of the two practical branches, consists of three parts: self-government, household governance or economics, and politics (“govern[ing] peoples or kingdoms or a city, in war or in peace”). Politics is “the highest wisdom and most noble profession there is among men,” requiring knowledge of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric (“that noble science which teaches us to compose and organize and say good and beautiful words, full of meaning, in keeping with the nature of the utterance,” as seen first and foremost in Holy Scripture and as taught best by Cicero). Here, Latini reclassifies politics under ethics.

Logic, the third branch of philosophy and the second of the two practical branches, means the discipline “which teaches how to prove and demonstrate why one should do some things and not others.” It does so in three ways: by dialectic, by demonstration, and by sophistry. Dialectic teaches “how to debate and contend and dispute” with other people; demonstration teaches how “to prove that the words we have said are true and that the thing is as we say, with good reasons and true arguments”; sophistry teaches to prove what we say is true “through bad tricks and false reasons and  by sophisms, that is, by arguments which have the appearance and outward cover of truth but contain only falsehood.” An honest man will need to know those techniques, not to use them but to recognize and counteract them.

The First Book addresses theory and begins at the Beginning, with what “sages say”: that God “made and created the world and all other things” in four ways. First, He imagined the “World Archetype” or “semblance of the world”; then, “out of nothing,” he made a “great mass of matter,” the “hyle,” with “no figure and no shape”; he then made the particular things themselves, also out of nothing, “heaven and earth and water, day and light and angels,” separating the light from darkness. Human souls were made out of nothing, as well. Finally, he “ordained the nature of all things individually, and gave the way in which they should be born and die, and the strength and characteristics and nature of each one.” Although “each thing is subject to its nature,” nature is subject to God, who “can adjust and change the course” of the nature of each thing “by divine miracle.” He does so, when he so chooses, over time, ‘providentially,’ but since God “knows all things past and present and future,” “everything he has made is to him as if present.” Time concerns those creatures below heaven, not those above it: “Before the beginning of the world there was no time.” God’s creation was “in his mind eternally,” His will being “eternal and changeless.” Evil arose from beings which diverted from His will, as “there is nothing bad by nature,” only things (including ourselves) which are badly used. 

God “allows bad things to happen…so that the goodness of good nature should be known by its opposite, for two opposite things, when they are together side by side, show up better.” Men do evil either in thought (iniquity) or in deed (sin). Evil in thought has three types: temptation, pleasure, and consent. Evil in deed also has three types: in words, in deeds, or in perseverance. Latini at first maintains that Lucifer’s evil met with no divine forgiveness because, in his pride, he never repented, whereas Adam was forgiven because he did repent, “recogniz[ing] that he was the subject of God.” But Latini immediately revises this account. “I say to you that Man was forgiven because the weakness of sin in him is in his body, which is made of mud and wet earth, and the angels sinned, and they were not afflicted with any carnal malady.” This is a Platonizing claim, not a Biblical teaching; Latini occasionally places such contradictions in his book, perhaps as a test of his reader’s mind. Thus “the soul has many fine qualities by nature, but these are obscured by the union with the body, which is corruptible.”

As for the nature of Man, he was made in the image of God whereas Woman was made in the image of Man, which accounts for the fact that “Women are subject to men by law of nature.” Among all the things under heaven, only “Man was made for himself,” Woman “made to help him.” Insofar as he sins, contradicting the nature God gave him, Man “was turned over to the Devil,” who, in the form of the serpent, was commanded to “eat the earth, that is to say, bad men.” Although made in God’s image, Man’s soul “is not made of divine substance or of divine nature.” God is not immanent in Man, whose soul is “created at the very moment when it enters the body.” Reason or “accurate judgment” is the quality of the soul that distinguishes human beings from animals, but the soul “has many roles”—giving life to the human body, desiring things (the will), inspiring (spirit), sensing (sensitivity), and having knowledge (understanding). “Understanding is the highest quality of the soul, through which we receive reason and knowledge, and because of which man is called the image of God, and reason is a movement of the soul which heightens the awareness of understanding and separates truth from falsehood.” At this point, Latini leaves “understanding” undefined, although it may be what Plato calls noēsis. In terms of the body, the head is “the dwelling place of the soul” and it has three “cells”—one in the front of the head for learning, one in the middle of the head for recognizing, the third in the back of the head for remembering. If future, present, and past are united in God, they are separate but related in the soul of Man; further, futurity in Man’s soul comes into being through learning, but God is all-knowing. Memory, registering the past, is “the treasure chest of all things and guardian of everything that one discovers through ingenuity or learns through others.” This treasure-book, then, consists primarily of things remembered, set down, however, for learning and recognizing. Beasts remember, too, but they do not reason, “follow[ing] only their will, without any regard for reason.”

Given Man’s departure from nature into sin, divine and human law needed to be established. Initially, only the Hebrews had divine law; all other sets of laws were invented by human lawgivers, although Mercury, who gave laws to the Egyptians, was called divine. “Divine law is by nature,” by which Latini probably means that nature is its conduit, through human beings. God’s law as delivered by Moses differs from God’s law delivered by Jesus Christ and His disciples because “God in his great foresight gave to each era what was appropriate,” fitting His law to prevailing human circumstances in both instances. The law delivered by Christ is stricter than the law delivered by Moses because Christ Himself, the embodiment of the truth, delivered it, showing men the truth in His Person and thus giving them fewer excuses not to know the truth. This notwithstanding, kings and lords were established and maintained because “commanding or establishing law is of little value among men unless there is someone who can make them obey the law, in order to promote justice and punish wrong.” Rulers enforce the divine law, seen in human nature insofar as it is not misused for iniquity or for sin. 

This begins a lengthy digression on the course of human events, whereby the nature of Man and his evil thoughts and deeds played out in a succession of rulers, eventually mitigated by the Catholic empire. The first two kingdoms on earth “which in rank and lordship and power and nobility surpassed all the others” were those of the Assyrians and the Romans, one from the east and the other from the west. “Both ruled the entire world” in their time. Alongside this succession of monarchic empires there have been six “ages of the world” in Biblical terms: from Adam to Noah, culminating in God’s destruction of the surface of the world; from Noah to Abraham, culminating in the founding of the Israelite nation; from Abraham to David, the apex of Israel; from David to “the time of the Pharaohs, when God destroyed Jerusalem and held the Jews captive” in Babylon; from the Babylonian Captivity to the birth of Jesus Christ; and finally the current age, which will last from the birth of Christ to the end of the world. Drawing from the Old Testament, Latini summarizes the principal events of each age. The greatest Assyrian king, Ninus, “was the first man to assemble an army for war,” becoming the “head of the first kings,” ruling “all of Asia except India.” The worst of all the kings in the Assyrian empire (Babylonia “is included in the Egyptian and Assyrian” kingdoms, according to Latini) was Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Jerusalem, seized the Israelites, and “committed many other perverse actions in his time.” 

The Roman empire began in the time of King David, when Aeneas, fleeing ruined Troy, entered Italy with his people and met King Latinus, at first cordially but eventually in battle. Romulus and Remus were his progeny, born of the daughter of Latinus’ daughter, Lavinia. Latini disparages the story that the brothers were abandoned and raised by a she-wolf. They were indeed thrown into a river, but they were discovered by a prostitute; “such women are called lues in Latin,” which Latini, in his rather imaginative etymology, associates with lupus, the Latin word for wolf. Be this as it may, “Romulus was very proud and of great courage,” gathering a cohort around him, warring with local tribal chiefs, and founding Rome 313 years after the destruction of Troy. Jesus was born in the Roman Empire, when it was at its apex; the name of his mother, Mary, means star of the sea “and lady, and brightness, and light”—all very much in contrast with the she-wolf stepmother of the founder of Rome. The empire of war thus began to be replaced by the empire of the Prince of Peace. His designated the apostle Peter as “his vicar, on the earth in his place, and he gave him the power to bind and to unbind on earth all people”—that is, to bring them into Jesus’ Assembly or Church and to expel them from it. Peter preached “the New Law of Jesus Christ” in Rome, “and there he was master and bishop of all the Christians for 25 years and seven months and eight days, until the time of Nero, who was then emperor in Rome, and who was their most cruel and evil lord ever, of all who came before or after him,” the tyrant who had Peter crucified and Paul decapitated. From time to time, after that, the emperors of old Rome occasionally made their peace with the new Rome, one of them “aveng[ing] the death of Our Lord,” which had been urged by Jewish priests, 42 years after Jesus’ death, by destroying Jerusalem and “caus[ing] great harm to the Jews.”

After the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, he ended persecution of Christians, “endowed Holy Church and gave it all the imperial dignity you see.” Nonetheless, schisms within the Roman Church caused “many an emperor and many a king of Lombardy” to be “corrupted by wrong belief.” Two centuries elapsed before the emperor Justinian, “a very wise and astute man,” in collaboration with Pope Agapetus, consolidated imperial law in a way in which “the Christian law was confirmed and the false belief of the heretics condemned.” “Thenceforward, the strength of the Holy Church grew near and far, on this side of the [Mediterranean] sea and the other,” as the new Rome acquired a spiritual and political empire similar to the empire of the old Rome. The eastern part of the new Roman Empire was ruined by the forces of “the evil preacher Mohammed,” who led its inhabitants “away from the good faith and into error.” 

In the west, the new Rome was threatened by the Emperor Leo. Pope Stephen’s excommunication of Leo didn’t diminish his military power, however, and when the pope “saw that he could not withstand” Leo and his ally, the king of the Lombards, “he went to France to Pepin the good,” consecrating him and his sons “to always be kings of France.” With that alliance in hand, he defeated Lombardy, ensuring the safety of the Church, but the new Lombard King and the son of Leo revived their fortunes, threatened the Church again, prompting the new pope, Hadrian, to enlist the aid of Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, whose military prowess made him master of both enemies of the Church. Entering Rome “in great triumph,” he was “crowned Emperor of the Romans, and he held the dignity of the empire for his whole life,” additionally subjecting Germany and Spain to his rule and defeating many other enemies of the Church, including Muslim forces before his death in 814. After that, the French kings became weaker, eventually returning “the dignity of the empire” to the Italians. As a result, the western empire split in two, one in Italy, the other in Germany. 

The Italians called upon the German king, Otto of Saxony, to defeat an old enemy, now renewed in power. The Lombards, ruled by Berengar (“an evil tyrant and cruel to God and to the world”) and his son Albert [a.k.a. Adelbert] (“who did all the evil that he could”) collaborated with Albert’s brother John, the pope, to become “masters and lords of both Holy Church and the world,” causing “an increase of evil upon evil and cruelty upon cruelty.” Otto eventually defeated the Lombards and was crowned king and emperor of Rome in 955. What became known as the Holy Roman Empire was subsequently ruled by a succession of German kings elected by German princes and archbishops. [1]

These included Frederick II, who “had a heart greater than all other men’s,” a “wise and articulate man,” “very learned,” especially in languages. “His heart’s only desire was to be lord of the world,” and his imperial rule began in 1220. He took full advantage of it: “Even though he had several wives and children in lawful marriage, nevertheless he took delight in the noble women of his kingdom, with the result that he had sons and daughters in abundance.” He expected to continue his rule with the assistance of his sons, “but we think one thing, and God thinks a completely different thing, for when he wants to trouble someone, he takes away his vision first of all, that is, his sense and his good foresight.” Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick for failing to carry out a promised crusade in the Holy Land. Frederick didn’t take that well, “turn[ing] against Holy Church and against the right,” causing “great harm and persecution to the pope and to all his clerics,” laying siege to Rome. The pope’s speech to the people of Rome turned them against Frederick, who withdrew his army to a more secure location but effectively making the pope a prisoner within the Vatican, where he died, years later. A later pope, Innocent IV, escaped and fled to Lyon, “a location where he did not fear the emperor or his power,” from which vantage “he assembled all the general council” of the Church “and proclaimed a perpetual sentence” against the emperor and his men, “deposing him from the empire and all his high possessions” in spirit if not in flesh. “What more could I say? No one could find words to say or put down in writing the evils and the wars which lasted for a long time between the emperor and Holy Church, between him and the Lombards who defended the Holy Church.” 

After one of Frederick’s sons, Manfred, suffocated him and poisoned a rival son, Manfred himself died in battle with the papal forces. Eventually, the whole line of Fredrick II was exterminated. “But now the narrative will cease telling of this, and it will return to its subject matter, from which it has gone astray.”

Indeed, why has Latini inserted this digression of human history? It follows from his account of the way in which men corrupt their good nature by iniquity and sin. He needs to show the young gentleman not only what nature is, but what corruption is, lest the youth remain naïve, on the one extreme, or disillusioned on the other. If God allows evil to exist in order to highlight the goodness of the good, beginning with Himself and His creation, Latini illustrates this lesson by first describing the goodness of nature and then showing the consequences of its corruption in the hearts and hands of men. He shows that both emperors and popes can sink into evil or rise to good works, that they can choose either way but frequently choose the wrong way.

Having described the purposes of God working through nature and sometimes overriding it, Latini turns to analysis of the parts of nature, its material causes. He names the four elements—fire, water, air, earth—and their corresponding “complexions”—hot and dry, cold and wet, hot and moist, cold and dry—seasons—summer, winter, spring, autumn—and blood types—choler, phlegm, “good nature” or sanguine, melancholy. It is noteworthy that good nature corresponds to air, the closest material element to the spirit, hot and moist, the climate of Italy, and spring, the season of rebirth. There are also four corresponding “forces” that sustain animal life: appetite (fire), expulsive (water), digestive (air), and retentive (earth).”It is the function of nature to harmonize discordant matters and make unequal things equal in such a way that all diversity returns to unity, and it adjusts them and assembles them in one body and substance or into something else which is continually reborn in the world,” either by seeds or by birth. “Nature is to God as a hammer is to a blacksmith, who at one time forms a spear, at another a helmet, or a nail, or a needle, or one thing or another according to what the blacksmith wishes.” The behavior of God’s creatures, owing to their lightness or heaviness, quickness or slowness, depends “upon the mixture of the elements in them.”

All of these elements change, coming into being and passing away. There is a fifth element, “distinct from the others,” one “so noble that it cannot be changed or corrupted.” This is “ether” and it comprises “a round heaven which surrounds and encloses within itself all the other elements and the other things which do not partake of divinity; and it is to the world as the shell is to the egg.” If the bodies and the elements ether protects were themselves made of ether, they would need no such protection; Aristotle teaches that “if nature had formed his body of this element…he would be guaranteed against death.” The world, then, is round, the shape most “suited for movement,” as seen in the perpetual cycling of “heaven and firmament.” “If it happened that the world had a long or square shape, it could not be completely full”; there would be corners or pockets where no substance would collect or, perhaps, where too much substance would collect, congeal, and close off that space from motion. Within the world as a whole, the earth is also round. Not knowing about gravity, Latini follows Aristotelian physics in locating the earth in the middle of the universe, contending that its greater density makes it heavier; being made of earth, the heaviest element, the earth “draw[s] itself to the middle and the center of the surrounding ones, that is, to a place from which it can neither go up nor down, nor move from side to side.” This is also why the second-heaviest element, water, clings to the surface of the earth. The lightest element, fire, composes “a very beautiful and radiant sky of he color of crystal,” which exists above the firmament. “It is from this place that the bad angels fell.” Above it, “there is still another sky,” colored purple—the empyrean, which is “of such great light and such great splendor that human understanding is incapable of knowing even the smallest thing about it, and in this heaven is the highest glorious majesty of God,” along with “His angels and His secrets,” which Latini discreetly leaves to “masters in divinity and to the lords of Holy Church” to describe. That is, philosophic noēsis takes one only so far. The rest is left to divine revelation, the province of theologians and priests.

In the firmament, one sees the planets and stars, whose movements can be measured and predicted mathematically because they move in the “pure air”—air devoid of dust and water—the element nearest to the pure abstraction mathematics describes. There are seven planets and 1,200 stars in the firmament. Each planet exerts a moral influence on human beings: Saturn “is cruel and evil and of a cold nature”; Jupiter “mild and merciful and filled with goodness”; Mars warlike; centrally, the Sun reigns as king of all planets thanks to its “great light” and “the good it does”; Venus is “beautiful and kind”; Mercury is small and easily influenced by whatever planet orbits nearest to it; and the Moon is changeable. In its daily revolutions around the earth, the Sun balances light and darkness on the Earth; it is the planet that maintains balance on Earth. The Moon, much smaller than the Sun but closer, “affects the things which are here below more clearly than the others,” decreasing “all things” on Earth when it wanes, increasing them when it waxes. Similarly, the stars exert their influence from their positions among the twelve regions of the Zodiac. Both planets and stars “have such great power over terrestrial things that they have to come and go according to their course”; “to tell the truth, if the firmament did not always turn around the earth as it does, there is no creature in the world which could move for anything in the world,” and “if the firmament ceased turning one instant, all thing would be destroyed and annihilated.” “For this reason we must love and fear Our Lord God, who is Lord of all this, without whom no good and no power can exist,” as “nature is that through which all things move or rest by themselves” and God not only created nature but wields the power to bring it to an end. 

Turning his attention to the nature of Earth itself, Latini describes it as “girded and surrounded by the sea,” with three parts (Asia, Africa, Europe). Latini of course knows nothing of the Americas, and regarding Asia he knows about India but not China. He leaves philosophic room for such discoveries, however, although always within certain limits. “You should know, good people, that Our Lord God created many marvels on land and sea that we cannot know clearly because he reserved them for Himself.” The pope rightly “teaches us in this way to understand what he says: do not try to know more than you need to know, but rather strive to know soberly, which is neither too much nor too little”—far from foolish advice for a young gentleman, and even for a young philosopher in the sense that “those who said that the world had a soul did not learn sobriety, but they went beyond it, which is excess.” Indeed, “the wise men of old said many beautiful things about the world and truth, and they said many things which do not show the truth because they were incapable of knowing it, for it remained in our Lord, and it always remains in Him.” It is easy to go “astray through misunderstanding the true knowledge of Jesus Christ and his apostles, in whom we must firmly believe, more than all the other wise men who live or who will ever live.” While leaving room for the increase of human knowledge, Latini carefully limits it to the things which do not contradict Scripture.

Staying within those capacious limits, then, Latini discusses how to choose land for cultivation (avoid excesses of heat and cold, dampness and dryness) and how to build a house on the land (first of all taking care “to know the nature of the water” you will use, then positioning each room in the house facing or facing away from the sun, depending on the room’s intended use). Houses should be built not only in accordance with surrounding nature but in accordance with the way of life of the political regime and the state that prevails in the country. Since the Italians “often quarrel among themselves,” they prudently “take pleasure in making towers and other stone houses,” whereas the more peaceful French “build large and luxurious houses, painted, with large rooms to give pleasure and delight without war and without disturbance.” Wealth counts, too: “The lord should have a large mastiff for the protection of his house, and hunting dogs and hounds and birds for hunting when he wants to enjoy himself by doing these things.” The head of the household must manage it, in his oikonomia seeing to it that “those who work in the household be well instructed and directed as to what they have to do, such that each one has his duties inside and out, in such a way that the lord is sovereign and master of all.” 

Having once again digressed into human things, albeit human things as prudently governed within nature, Latini next devotes 69 sections to the description of animals, moving from water creatures to those that crawl on the earth, to those that fly in the air, and finally to those which walk on the earth, which are closest in this aspect of their nature to Man. In this compendium of bookish knowledge, Latini here depends heavily on the recorded observations and claims of other writers. He begins with the fish, which, following Pliny, he classifies as any of the 164 kinds of creatures which live primarily in water, including whales and dolphins. He rules out one purported species of fish as fake. The sirens described by Homer were only “three prostitutes who tricked all passers-by and brought them to ruin,” associated with water “because lust is made of moisture.” They are figments of the imagination of waterlogged sailors.

He does accept the existence of a number of other dubious creatures, however, including a white serpent called a siren, an animal so poisonous that “if it bites a man, he will die before feeling the pain.” Regarding land animals, he is convinced of the existence of basilisks (“the king of the serpents,” whose mere gaze will kill, according to chroniclers of conquering Alexander), dragons (the largest serpent of all,” a denizen of India and Ethiopia, where the summer lasts forever”), and unicorns (“a fierce animal” with a body resembling a horse, feet like an element and the tail of a deer, whose “voice is tremendously scary,” an animal “so tough and so wild that no one can overtake it or capture it with any snare in the world”).

Animals that move in the air include the eagle, the peacock, and the vulture. “The eagle sees better than any bird in the world, and it flies so high that it is lot to the sight of man, but it sees so clearly that it distinguishes even the smallest creatures on earth and the fish in the water, and it takes them a it swoops down.” Despite its acuity of vision, it can look “at the rays of the sun, and its eyes do not flinch”; so much so that it tests its hatchlings by holding them up to the sun, discarding those which look away in the “just judgment” that they cannot be eagles. He repeats the legend (“many say”) that the eagle renews its own life by flying so close to the sun “that its feathers burn, along with the darkness in its eyes, and then it lets itself fall into a spring of water and bathes itself three times, and right away it recovers the youth it had previously.” The peacock, ” a simple bird of great beauty, with a serpentine head and a devil’s voice,” “takes delight in its tail because it is so beautiful.” “But nature has given it an ugly thing to do, for when it sees men admiring its beauty, it raises its tail up to have people’s praise and reveals its ugly backside, and shows it to them in vile fashion.” If the eagle is a creature that sees, the peacock one to be seen—the one teaching a lesson in justice, the other a lesson in the way beauty can mix with vileness— the vulture is the bird that smells. It “can smell things from further away than any animal in the world; even from across the sea it can smell carrion.” It therefore “follows men’s armies where there will be an abundance of carrion, and thus they can predict that in that army there will be much killing of men or animals.” Although they feed off the dead, they themselves live long, usually not “less than 100 years or more.” 

Among the creatures that fly, honeybees exhibit not only industry but good government. Although Latini in one respect confuses them with flies, claiming that they are “born from the decaying carcass of a cow,” he admires their production of honey and the “extreme ingeniousness” with which they build their “houses,” with “different levels, where each one has its proper place to which it returns every day.” Their regime is a monarchy; their “king” is elected, “not randomly” (that is, by what Aristotle calls the most democratic method, a lottery), “in which there enters more luck than good judgement,” but by selecting “the one to whom nature has given a sign of nobility, who is larger and better looking and of better life.” This notwithstanding, the king bee is no tyrant but rather “more humble and of greater pity” than the others, whom he leaves “free and independent.” For their part, his subjects remain “amiable and obedient toward their lord, so that none leaves the hive before the king does and takes the lead in flying where he pleases.” Honeybees “love their king very much, and they have such faith and courage that they throw themselves into the period of death to protect their king and to rescue him.” And “even though each one strives to do its best to the limit of its abilities, nevertheless there is no envy among them and no hatred,” although they readily “get vengeance on those who cause them harm.” In sum, honeybees provide men a model of the best regime. The one flaw in their regime is the king’s vulnerability. “When he dies or is lost, they lose their faith and judgment in such a way that they lose and destroy their honey, and destroy their hives.”

The ostrich, the lion, and the horse provide the best lessons among the creatures that move on the earth. The ostrich combines laziness, stupidity, and cruelty. “Its disposition is so sluggish that it makes it so terribly forgetful that it cannot remember things,” especially its own eggs, which it covers with sand, “goes off on its business and forgets,” leaving the sun to keep them warm until they hatch. “When the parent find the chicks, instead of feeding and instructing them as they should, they torment them and do s many cruel things as they can to them.” The lion, by contrast, deservedly bears the title, “king of beasts.” He is, as a monarch, more tyrant than king, however; “when he roars, all animals flee as if pursued by death, and where he draws a circle with his tail no animal dares cross it.” At the same time, the lion “fears the white rooster,” “the tumult of wheels,” and fire. God, “who did not allow anything to exist without its opposites decided that the lion, who is prouder and stronger than all other creatures, and through his great fierceness pursues prey always, should have impediments to his cruelty against which he is incapable of defending himself.” The horse may be the most intelligent of the land creatures, “an animal of great knowledge, for since it always goes to live with men, this gives it some sense, so that it knows its master and it often changes customs and habits when it changes masters,” readily and as it were prudently adapting to a new regime. Horses are also fit human companions in war, “happy when they are victorious and sad when they lose, and one can easily observe when the battle will be won or not by whether the horse’s appearance is one of joy or sadness.” Above all, they are loyal. “It is a proven fact about many horses that they weep and shed tears because of the death of their lord, and there is no other animal that does this.”

The moralism of Latini’s bestiary bespeaks the transition from the Treasure‘s first part to the second, which leaves “the theoretical branch of knowledge,” the “first science of the body of philosophy,” in order to enter the second part, which in which he addresses “the practical” branch of knowledge, ethics. 

 

 

 

 

Note

1. Latini has given his young gentleman an understandably simplified but also somewhat garbled account. Pope John XII had no blood relationship to Adelbert; he was his “brother” only in being comrades in arms against Otto I and also fellow evildoers, as John was notorious for his debauchery and cruelty.