Joseph Addison: Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, eds. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.

 

Legend has it that General George Washington had Addison’s Cato performed for his soldiers at Valley Forge. This should be true, whether it is or not. Addison’s portrayal of Cato depicts the soul of a great Stoic with all its austere nobility but also its limitations and the errors that follow from them. Cato’s gravest error is his suicide when his cause seems hopeless. By presenting the play to his men at the nadir of America’s hopes in the War for Independence, Washington was telling them, ‘I shall not desert you.’ And, by implication, ‘Do not desert me, or your country.’ The play’s epigraph, from Seneca’s On Divine Providence, suggests as much: “A brave man, standing erect amid the ruins of the res publica.” British troops under the command George III and his generals seemed likely to ruin the American republics, to bring the rebellious ‘Whigs’ to heel. Souls steeled for Stoic self-rule informed by a sense of divine providence, which seldom announces its moves in advance, can yet emerge victorious from trials of fire.

Addison wrote the Cato in 1712, and it enjoyed immediate success on the London stage. In Britain’s North American colonies, it had been performed frequently since 1730s and it would remain popular for another generation after the Revolution. Addison was a Whig, a partisan of the Hanoverian succession seen in the person of Queen Anne and her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, whom the Whigs compared to Cato. The Tories, loyal to the Hanoverian line of English monarchs, regarded Marlborough as a usurping Julius Caesar. By asking the great Tory poet, Alexander Pope, to write the Prologue, Addison made an overture across the parties, asking both sides in Britain’s factitious politics to consider human greatness in a Christian light.

Cato is Cato the Younger, grandson of the eminent Cato the Elder—both courageous opponents of tyranny and defenders of the Roman republic. The younger Cato had allied with Pompey against Julius Caesar. The republican forces lost the Battle of Pharsalus and fled to north Africa, where Pompey was assassinated. Cato now heads the Roman forces, along with the remnant of the Senate. Now exiled in Utica, he has formed an alliance with King Juba I of Numidia. Pope, too, admires Cato, finding in him a fit hero for the tragic stage, which from the first has been intended “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, / To raise the genius and to mend the heart, / To make mankind in conscious virtue bold, / Live oe’er each scene and be what they behold.” Not only in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans but “through every age,” even “tyrants no more their savage nature kept, / And foes to virtue wonder’d how they wept” at such dramas. Neither weak and pitying love nor “wild ambition” finds favor in the tragedies: “Here tears shall flow from a more gen’rous cause, / Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws,” as “ancient ardor” rises in modern, British hearts. “What Plato thought” “godlike Cato was,” namely “a brave man struggling in the storms of fate, / And greatly falling with a falling state!”  but finally honored more than triumphant Caesar. 

Pope would never overlook the literary dimension of the struggle, concluding with an evocation not only of Cato the Younger but of his grandfather. “Britons, attend”: “With honest scorn the first fam’d Cato view’d / Rome learning arts from Greece, whom she subdu’ed; / Our scene precariously subsists too long / On French translation and Italian song.” Have we not defeated the French and their absolute monarch, Louis XIV? Instead, “Dare to have sense yourselves; assert the stage, / Be justly warm’d with your own native rage. / Such plays alone should please a British ear, / As Cato’s self had not disdain’d to hear.” Not Racine or Petrarch so much as Shakespeare and Marlowe. And surely Mr. Addison’s Roman Cato, seen through English eyes for English men.

At the Governor’s Palace at Utica, Cato’s sons, Portius and Marcus, deplore Caesar’s military triumphs. “Ye Gods, what havoc does ambition make / Among your works!” Portius exclaims (I.11-12). Yet Marcus finds him too calm, too ‘Stoic’: “Thy steady temper, Portius, / Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar, / In the calm lights of mild philosophy,” but “I’m tortured” by the image of “Th’insulting tyrant prancing o’er the field” at Pharsalia, “his horse’s hoofs wet with patrician blood,” the blood of Roman senators hurled from their positions of rightful authority (I.12-19). To Marcus’ hope that Heaven will punish the insolent victor, Portius points instead to their father—a man “greatly unfortunate” but still fighting for “the cause / Of honor, virtue, liberty, and Rome” with a sword unstained with any but the blood of the guilty, of tyrannical usurpers (I.30-31). The thumotic brother relies on the gods; the philosophic brother relies on a man who embodies the best of Rome and of human nature understood as ethical and political nature.

Marcus is having none of it. “What can Cato do / Against a world, a base, degenerate world / That courts the yoke and bows the neck to Caesar?” (I.i.36-38). Trapped at Utica, guarded by Numidians, his own army feeble and the Senate ruined, he presents “a poor epitome of Roman greatness”—so much so that my soul is distracted, tempted “to renounce his precepts” (I.i.40-45). Portius adjures him to “remember what our father oft has told us,” that “the ways of heav’n are dark and intricate” and “our understanding traces ’em in vain” (I.i.46-49). Marcus admits that more than their father’s circumstance torments him. He is in love with Lucia, the daughter of one of the exiled Roman senators, but his passion is “unpity’d” by her, his love “successless” (I.i.56). He does not know that Portius shares his passion for the girl but, knowing his temper, dares not reveal himself as a rival, contenting himself with advising his brother to “call up all thy father in thy soul: / to quell the tyrant love”—the soul’s equivalent to political injustice—and “guard thy heart / On this weak side, where most our nature fails” ((I.74-77). [1] Such Stoic self-rule is not for the impassioned soul of Marcus, who determines instead to throw himself into the quest for honor in war, “to rush on certain death” (I.i.81); “Love is not to be reason’d down, or lost / In high ambition and a thirst of greatness” (I.i.84). Not thought but action can redirect his thumoerotic nature from despair. 

Prince Juba appears, and Portius reflects on “how much he forms himself to glory / And breaks the fierceness of his native temper / To copy my father’s bright example” (I.i.79-82). He too is an exile, his father having been killed by Caesar at the Battle of Thepsur. The prince, in contrast to the Roman usurper, exhibits a virtue that is Roman but not merely Roman, a virtue unconfined to any particular nation, the virtue of human nature itself. And he stands as an example for brother Marcus in another way: He loves Cato’s daughter, Marcia, but, “no sport of passions,” his “sense of honor and desire for fame” bridle his love for the sake of the nobler aim of political liberty (I.i.86). 

Juba too has a rival in love, the Roman senator Sempronius, a traitor in their midst. Before Portius heads for the meeting of the Senate-in-exile, he promises to “animate the soldiers’ drooping courage, / With love of freedom and contempt of life,” telling Sempronius that although we cannot “command success,” “we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.” Sempronius fumes, “Curse on the stripling! how he apes his sire! / Ambitiously sententious!” (I.ii.40-47). Sempronius plans to betray Cato and seize his daughter after Caesar rewards him for handing Cato over.

There is a traitor among the Numidians, too: Syphax, who is preparing a revolt among his people—who, he claims, “Complain aloud of Cato’s discipline” (I.iii.4). Sempronius wishes that he could turn Juba against Cato, as well, at which urging Syphax laments that the young man is “lost,” his thoughts “full of Cato’s virtues” (I.iii.22). “Of faith, of honor, and I know not what, / That have corrupted his Numidian temper, / And struck th’ infection into all his soul” (I.iii.25-27). Nonetheless, Syphax promises to make another attempt. As for Sempronius, he heads for the Senate as well, scheming to “conceal my thoughts in passion” by “bellow[ing] out for Rome and my country” even as he schemes to ruin the men he will address.

True to his word, Syphax tries Juba again, appealing to his national pride, his Numidian patriotism, which might be turned to rebellion against Roman rule. Juba will have none of it. He esteems the “Roman soul,” which aims to civilize the world, “lay it under the restraint of laws,” and “make man mild and sociable to man” by means of “wisdom, discipline, and lib’ral arts” (I.iv.30-35). Only “virtues like these” will “make human nature shine, reform the soul, / And break our fierce barbarians into men” (I.iv.37-38). No, Juba, Syphax counters, “this Roman polish” only “render[s] man…tractable and time,” covering over natural passion, “set[ting] our looks at variance with our thoughts” and thereby “chang[ing] us into other creatures / Than the Gods design’d us” (I.iv.41-43, 46-47). Any Numidian better practices Cato’s “boasted virtues” (I.iv.62). Juba has his answer ready: the Numidian hunter’s virtues do not grow from choice, as Cato’s do, from “steadiness of mind,” not ignorance and necessity (I.iv.77). This is why Cato can endure suffering without resentment and even “thank the Gods that throw the weight upon him” (I.iv.80). The foundation of Roman civility is the rule of reason, innate to human beings as such, the right criterion for judging national customs and laws.

Syphax insists that Cato’s “rank pride” and “haughtiness of soul” mesmerized Juba’s father, leading him to an inglorious death at the hands of a slave (I.iv.81-85). You should “abandon Cato” (I.iv.89). You don’t really esteem him at all, nor do you honor your father; you merely wish to marry his daughter. You are not man of honor, only a boy in love. Yes, I do love her, the young man admits, but for honorable reasons and indeed for her honorableness: “The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex” in her “inward greatness,” her “unaffected wisdom,” and her “sanctity of manners” (I.iv.150-151). That is, he loves her for her natural virtues, as these have been cultivated by her family and her country.

We soon see Marcia and Lucia for ourselves. Of her two suitors, Lucia prefers Portius, the philosophic brother, to Marcus. As for Marcia, she of course prefers Juba to Semponius, but she remains very much Cato’s worthy daughter, telling her beloved Juba to go off to the war in support of her father and advising Lucia to wait until after the war to confer her love on Portius, lest she spread disarray in Cato’s household by openly favoring one brother over the other. “Let us not, Lucia, aggravate our sorrows, / But to the Gods permit th’ event of things,” as “the pure limpid stream, when foul with stains / Of rushing torrents and descending rains, / Works itself clear, and as it runs, refines” (I.vi.78-79, 82-84). 

Act II begins with Cato before the Utican Senate, warning of Caesar’s advancing army. Sempronius makes his calculatedly fiery speech, only to have Cato reprove him. “Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal / Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason,” as “true fortitude is seen in great exploits, / That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides; / All else is tow’ring frenzy and distraction” (II.i.43-47). Lucius then makes a pacific speech, claiming that the gods oppose us, that Caesar is only their chosen scourge, than no more Roman blood should be shed. Cato positions himself as the virtuous mean between the extremes of Sempronius’ apparent “immodest valor” and Lucius’ “fear” (II.81-82). His moderation should not be mistaken for mediocrity, however. “A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty / Is worth a whole eternity in bondage” (II.i.100)—a judgment said to have inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” And in answer to a peace overture from Caesar himself, Cato replies to his ambassador, “My life is grafted on the fate of Rome”; if Caesar would save Cato, “bid him spare his country” (II.ii.8-9). As for himself, I “disdain a life” that “your dictator” “has pow’r to offer” me (II.ii.8-10). Asked what terms he will accept, Cato accordingly replies, “Bid him disband his legions, / Restore the commonwealth to liberty, / submit his actions to the public censure, / And stand the judgment of a Roman senate. Bid him do this, and Cato is his friend.” (II.ii.29-33). But for now, I am no friend of Caesar but “a friend to virtue”—the truly Roman characteristic that Romans share with human nature itself, bringing their civilizing empire of liberty to those they conquer (II.ii.41). Caesar’s conquests have only “made Rome’s senate little”—the Senate, lynchpin and moderating balance wheel of the republic (II.ii.47). “By the Gods I swear, millions of worlds / Should never buy me to be like that Caesar” (II.ii.57).

To Juba, Cato confides his understanding of divine providence. The “misfortune and affliction” the gods impose “are not ills; else would they never fall / On heav’n’s first fav’rites, and the best of men” II.iv.51-53). No, “The Gods, in bounty, work up storms about us, / That give mankind occasion to exert / Their hidden strength, and throw out into practice / Virtues that shun the day, and lie conceal’d / In the smooth seasons and the calms of life” (II.iv.54-58). He disappoints his young ally by refusing his daughter’s hand in marriage; Roman, all-too-Roman, he does not think a Numidian a worthy suitor, despite Juba’s evident ‘Romanness,’ which is really humanitas. Syphax swoops in, attempting once again to turn the prince against Cato, urging him to eschew honor as a “fine imaginary notion” and to kidnap the girl, even as the early Romans seized the Sabine women (II.v. 89). But Juba calls him “a false old traitor,” intending to redeem the Carthaginians’ reputation for faithlessness and to vindicate his honor in the eyes of Cato (II.v.61). Furious at the insult, perhaps because it is true, Syphax returns to Sempronius, who assures his that factious Roman troops “will bear no more / This medley of philosophy and war,” Stoicism and Achilles, from Cato. Syphax vows to rally his Numidian troops to aid the revolt.

The third Act begins where the play began, with the sons of Cato in dialogue. Portius knows that Marcus loves his beloved, Lucia, but Marcus does not know of Portius’ love for her. He asks Portius to plead his cause to her, “With all the strength and heats of eloquence / Fraternal love and friendship can inspire” (III.i.34-35). When he leaves and Lucia arrives, he does just that (“Oh, Lucia, language is to faint to show / His rage of love; it preys upon his life; / He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies,” his “noble soul” ravaged (III.ii.3-5, 10). Kind Lucia, who knows of Portius’ love for her, and who requites it, worries that if Marcus knew of their love it “might perhaps destroy” him (III.29). For his part, Portius counsels her not to reject Marcus’ suit outright but “hold him up in life, and cheer his soul / With the faint glimm’ring of a doubtful hope” (III.ii.24-25). Lucia refuses. She vows to the gods to refuse them both, denying her own love to prevent “thy sister’s tears, / Thy father’s anguish, and thy brother’s death” (III.ii.28-29). She offers him the faint glimmering of a doubtful hope, saying that she will hold fast in her decision “while such a cloud of mischiefs hangs about us” (III.ii.34). Understandably “thunderstruck” at first, philosophic Portius then sees her virtue, her prudential foresight of the evils his suit would have incurred, had it succeeded (III.ii.37). That does little to console him, but Lucia holds firm in her vow. When she leaves and Marcus returns, Portius tells him that she “compassionates your pains, and pities you”—no comfort to the passionate brother, who regrets what a “fool that I was to choose so cold a friend / To urge my cause!” (III.iii.13-17). 

The noise of Sempronius’ mutiny interrupt them. He has decided to carry Marcia off and join Caesar, frustrated at the continued loyalty of Juba and his Numidians—Romans in the core of their nature, after all. But Cato overawes the Roman rebels, shaming them, reminding them of his virtue, and telling to go join Caesar, if that is what they desire. [2] Ever-perfidious Sempronius recommends the death penalty for the rebels, which Cato, changing his mind, mistakenly agrees to inflict, never suspecting his colleague’s treachery. Sempronius immediately has them executed, irate at their uselessness to his scheme. He continues to desire Sempronius, and when Syphax cannot understand how he could “turn a woman’s slave” (III.vii. 11), he assures her that he only intends to kidnap and rape her (“bend her stubborn virtue to my passion”), then “cast her off” (III.vii.15-16). This reassures his henchman: “Well said! that’s spoken like thyself, Sempronius.” (III.vii.17). Syphax recommends that he dress himself as Juba to get past the Numidians who guard her. In his own way, Sempronius emulates the gods—specifically, Pluto, who seized Proserpine and carried “to hell’s tremendous gloom the affrighted maid, / There grimly smiled, pleas’d with the beauteous prize, / Nor envy’d Jove his sunshine and his skies” (III.vii.31-34).

Not suspecting this vile scheme, Marcia fears rather that her father will give her in marriage to Sempronius. She too is a Stoic, however: “While Cato lives, his daughter has no right / To love or hate, but as his choice directs” (IV.i.20-21). She refuses to trust her passions, telling Lucia, “When love once pleads admission to our hearts, / (In spite of all the virtue we can boast) / The woman who deliberates is lost” (IV.i.29-31). Her own reason will not suffice in that circumstance, so her father’s reason ought to prevail. When Sempronius arrives, deceiving the guards, and prepares to play out his sinister version of the rape of the Sabine women, a deus ex machina in the person of Juba discovers him and kills the “proud, barbarous man” (IV.ii.19), who dies in fury “by a boy’s hand,” attired in “a vile / Numidian dress, and for a worthless woman,” one he desired chiefly to spite Cato and Juba (IV.ii.21-22). He is the real barbarian, the false Roman, Juba the true one. 

Marcia remains steadfast in her civic Stoicism. When she and Juba discover their love for one another, she nonetheless continues to insist that Juba “prosper in the paths of honor” (IViii.88)—go off to fight Caesar at her father’s side. But Cato himself has begun to despair, telling Lucius, “The torrent bears too hard upon me: / Justice gives way to force: the conquer’d world / Is Caesar’s: Cato has no business in it.” (IV.iv.22-24). On the contrary, his friend insists, “While pride, oppression, and injustice reign, / The world will still demand her Cato’s presence” (IV.25-26). To Cato’s objection, that he will never submit to be ruled by a tyrant, however, Lucius can only respond that Caesar will not impose “ungen’rous terms” upon the defeated rival, as “the virtues of humanity are Caesar’s” (IV.33-34). This earns him the riposte, “Such popular humanity is treason” (IV.iv.33-36). Cato’s Stoic willingness to suffer draws the line at submission to tyranny. That is, the clementia of Caesar, whether sincere or feigned, bespeaks the superiority of a man who acts like a god toward a fellow man and citizen. Cato is, finally, a citizen-Stoic, not a philosopher-Stoic. The problem will turn out to be not so much Cato’s morality but his misunderstanding of providence. He expects defeat because precisely because he does not foresee the providential plan. He does not foresee the providential plan because it is given to no one to see that.

Juba arrives, confessing his shame at being a Numidian—that is, a prince of a nation whose soldiers were ready to desert their ally. No matter, Cato assures him: “Thou hast a Roman soul” (IV.iv.43). What is more, “Falsehood and fraud shoot up in every soil, / The produce of all climes–Rome has its Caesars” (IV.iv.45-46). Juba “has stood the test of fortune” (IV.iv.49).

Learning next that his son Marcus has died in battle, though not before killing Syphax, Cato pronounces himself “satisfied,” as “my boy has done his duty” (IV.iv.70). Upon seeing the corpse, he simply remarks, “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue” and “what pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!” (IV.iv.80-83). The first aphorism is Stoic, the second Roman. He turns to his surviving son, the philosophic one, telling him to remember that “thy life is not thy own, when Rome demands it” (IV.iv.87). It is Rome, “not a private loss,” that “requires our tears” (IV.iv.89-90). Rome had subdued the world thanks to her virtue, but with her virtue gone, having submitted tamely to its rapist, Caesar—who has reversed one of the original founding acts of Rome, the so-called rape which in fact brought wives to young Roman men—the Empire has fallen, “fall’n into Caesar’s hands” (IV.iv.105). He calmly grants Lucius the right to sue for peace from ‘humane’ Julius and advises his son to retire to “thy paternal seat, the Sabine field,” where he may live virtuously in a private life, which is “the post of honor” under a tyrannical regime (IV.iv.135, 142). If the kidnapping of the Sabine women enabled the earliest Romans to sustain themselves as a civil society, perhaps a retreat to the family, a retreat to the Sabine field, will form the foundation of a new Rome, if such can be restored after the barbarous tyrant, the criminal rapist, has had his day.

But Cato has a different plan for himself. Having satisfied himself that he foresees the intention of Providence, he reads the Phaedo, what Addison in his stage direction calls “Plato’s book on the immortality of the soul”; “Plato,” Cato says, “thou reason’st well!” (V.i.1). Plato’s Socrates had reasoned that the prospect of the soul’s immortal life on the Isles of the Blessed removes the sting of death. Given what he takes to be the equally certain prospect of Caesar’s tyranny in this world, a “world made for Caesar,” Cato pronounces himself “weary of conjecture,” weary of philosophizing, ready to the action of suicide, which will end conjecture (V.i.19-20). “Let guilt or fear / Disturb man’s rest. Cato knows neither of ’em, / Indifferent in his choice to sleep or die,” given Plato’s proof that we awaken from death as surely as we awaken from sleep (V.i.38-40). Addison’s Christian audience might well think the same thing, under similar circumstances. If God’s Providence ordains life in Paradise after death, why prolong life in this world, known to be a vail of tears? This would become Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity, that it loves an imagined life and therefore real death more than real life. By Addison’s time, Machiavelli had already anticipated that thought.

Portius joins his father, who assures him that all is well, as “I’m master of myself,” never to be mastered by Caesar (V.ii.13). Having convinced his son that he won’t commit suicide, having allowed Portius, Lucia, and Lucius that he retires to sleep—what he must regard as an instance of the noble lie—Cato prepares to execute himself, even as Lucius assures the women, “While Cato lives—his presence will protect us” (V.iv.38). His presence is needed, as Juba brings news of an impending battle with Caesar’s forces. Portius joins them with the news that Pompey’s son has unexpectedly brought reinforcements from Spain. “Call[ing] out for vengeance on his father’s death”—the very filial piety that Cato understands to be the foundation of Roman civil order—he “rouses the whole nation up to arms” (V.iv.55-57). “Were Cato at their head, once more might Rome / Assert her rights and claim her liberty” (V.iv.58-59). 

There will be no human version of a deus ex machina, this time. They hear the death-cry of Cato in the next room. Mortally wounded, he blesses his friend, Lucius, his son and his son’s future wife, Marcus and Lucia, and his daughter and her future husband, Marcia and Juba. Of Juba, he says, “A senator of Rome, while Rome surviv’d, / Would not have match’d his daughter with a king,” were the king a foreigner, “but Caesar’s arms have thrown down all distinction,” all conventional distinction: “Whoe’er is brave and virtuous, is a Roman.” (V.iv.88-91). In his civic despair, he has made two philosophic discoveries, the first a distinction, the distinction between convention and nature, the second the uncovering of a just filial and political order in light of a criterion set by nature, the criterion of virtue, of human nature undisfigured by passion. “Methinks a beam of light breaks in / On my departing soul” (V.iv.94-95). Dying, what he cannot do is to act in accordance with that beam of light. His ascent from the cave of convention isn’t comic, as it is in Plato’s Republic, but tragic. “Alas, I fear / I’ve been too hasty” (V.iv.95-96), he admits, with Stoic understatement. He can only ask forgiveness. Forgiveness, above all, for his failure to do what he wanted most to do, to save Rome from a regime of tyranny. Forgiveness also, perhaps, for his failure to heed his own advice to his sons, which Portius had remarked in the play’s first scene: We do not know what heaven has traced out for us; the ways of heaven are dark and intricate.

It is left to the ranking surviving Roman in his camp, his friend Lucius, to set the new policy. With Cato, they might have won. Without him, no one believes they can. 

“Let us bear this awful corpse to Caesar,

And lay it in his sight, that it may stand

A fence betwixt us and the victor’s wrath; 

Cato, though dead, shall still protect his friends.” (V.iv.103-106).

And Lucius adds a properly Stoic, sententious final thought, saying that these events show the malign effects of “civil discord” not only to Romans but “to all nations,” namely, “fraud, and cruelty, and strife,” along with what is not the least evil, “rob[bing] the guilty world of Cato’s life,” the life of one of the best in the world, one of the best examples of human nature his countrymen had ever seen (V.iv.108, 111-112). 

 

Notes

1. George Washington will counsel his niece in exactly the same way. See his letter to letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 1, 1795.
2. In facing down the rebellious officers at Newburgh, New York, Washington was enacting a similar scene in real life, supremely imitating Addison’s art in his life. See his Speech to the Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783.

 

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.