Lewis E. Lehrman: Lincoln and Churchill: Statesmen at War. Guilford: Stackpole Books, 2018.

John von Heyking: Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics and Friendship. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2018.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 2, March/April 2019. Republished with permission.

 

Imitating their colleagues in the other sciences, modern social scientists often understand human life impersonally, reducing political lie to sub-political elements (‘race, class, and gender’), to institutional structures, or simply to power and ‘power relations.’ When asked about persons, modern scientists predictably point to the elements composing the human psyche: once to ‘id, ego, and superego,’ now increasingly to brain chemistry. As for the nature of scientists themselves, they too strive for impersonality, eschewing prejudice and emotion, forming their hypotheses and testing them for measurable results.

The impersonality of modern science and scientists has yielded many discoveries and will not be abandoned. It perceives reality insofar as reality really is impersonal. But not all reality is so. The real-world experiences of persons as kind or cruel, just or unjust, courageous or cowardly—more the experience of them, and oneself, as mixtures of all those qualities and more, yet also somehow wholes —never lets us for long. There was Einstein’s Theory; here was also Albert Einstein. Neither can be fully understood in terms of the other, or even as the concatenation of events connecting them.

The authors here approach politics through persons. Lehrman writes history in the Plutarchian tradition, considering Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill as parallel lives. He understands by narrating. Von Heyking writes political science in the tradition of Aristotle—who, it will be recalled, understands political regimes not only in terms of ruling structures but of rulers, and rulers not only quantitatively (the one, the few, the many) bu ‘qualitatively’ (morally good or bad). He understands by analyzing.

Lehrman’s “aim in this study is… to consider both great men in an intimate comparison of supreme command at the summit of human endurance—namely, was of national survival.” He does so by telling “a story of character and statecraft.” Lincoln and Churchill “faced a similar challenge: how to mobilized ill-prepared nations, and how to organize and lead talented teams” of ambitious and often recalcitrant subordinates. Fortunately, although the nations were ill-prepared, the statesmen were not, both having studied and practiced political life as professional devisers of arguments—Lincoln primarily as a lawyer, Churchill as a parliamentarian. They had mastered the English language, spoken and written, “develop[ing] the mental precision by which to define disputes clearly”—as Lehrman wittily and rightly adds, “Lincoln as president in few words, Churchill as prime minister in more.” They understood that the reasons for fighting a war “must be explained to the public”—a point often lost on later political figures, who seem to have concentrated their rhetorical attention on ‘sound bites’ instead of thoughts.

While Churchill had much more extensive military and executive experience, Lincoln’s extraordinary powers of intellectual concentration enabled him to learn more efficiently and, arguably, to make fewer errors. As to character, “the steely determination shared by Churchill and Lincoln was forged on the anvil of political defeat.” Both men endured conspicuous public failures in the years before their countrymen finally turned to them in crisis. Understanding those crises as threats to the regime of democratic republicanism itself, they refused compromise with the enemy “accommodation of tyrannous evil was anathema for Lincoln and Churchill.” They knew how to talk to people when things looked bad, how to overcome the spirit of pessimism which must have tempted them in their own lives, many times.

Each embodied core principles of heir republics. Lincoln served as chief executive under a written Constitution which gave him independence from the legislature. He learned from Euclid the elements of deductive logic, and he learned from the Declaration of Independence the political application of those elements. Churchill, who observed this feature of American political thought in his wartime associates, served as chief executive under an unwritten constitution, a regime in which he headed his party in Parliament, where discursive speech and inductive logic can sometimes predominate. Supremely prudent when they needed to be, they arrived at their sound decisions from opposite beginnings. And no only intellectually but morally: Lincoln’s moderate and self-governed temperament reinforced his clarity of thought, whereas Churchill’s extraordinarily wide experience, resulting from his adventurousness and generosity of spirit, tempered his passions. Within the four corners of their regimes, Lincoln proved better at managing partisanship, being “less self-centered,” thus better able “to divine and satisfy the needs of minor loyalists who sustained his party and his armies in the field,” while Churchill famously acted as if he were a bit bigger than the political parties he joined. Lincoln had habits learned in a democratic society, Churchill the habits of an aristocrat. They proved what Tocqueville had insisted, a century before: both democrats and aristocrats can and should act to defend republicanism.

They faced regime crises under circumstances that differed. Lincoln and the Union had no international allies but needed none. The United States only needed foreign countries to stay out. Alone in 1940, Churchill desperately needed “to drag the Americans in,” as he put i, leaving it to Hitler to drag the Russians in, too. Lincoln’s solitary, ‘executive’ type of character served him well in his circumstance; Churchill’s gregarious, ‘parliamentary’ type of character served him equally well. Churchill not only courted President Roosevelt out of strategic calculation, but genuinely liked the man. Lincoln never met Lord Palmerston, and didn’t need to curry his favor.

They set he highest standards for themselves. Lincoln the democrat studied George Washington’s “character and appearance—a model of composure and self-control, especially under fire”—and held up the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, as his “beau ideal of a statesman”—a model of political moderation. Churchill the aristocrat was bred for his task, growing up in the household of a prime minister and descending from the great Duke of Marlborough, whose life he studied and chronicled in his finest book. Neither man satisfied himself with understanding good men, only. Lincoln the lawyer “habitually studied the opposite side of every disputed question, of every law case, of every political issue, more exhaustively, if possible, than his own side,” and never got surprised in court or in politics. Churchill the parliamentarian said, “Facts are better than dreams,” and his quick apprehension of tyrants ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler, shows that he paid close attention to their arguments and their actions. The ability to foresee the future only seems uncanny to those who aren’t listening to what others are saying now. Both men gathered information and (often contradictory) opinions before acting. This may seem an obvious procedure, except when one notices how many people never do it.

As commanders-in-chief in wartime, Lincoln and Churchill knew that military action is an instrument for victory, but military victory itself is only an instrument for achieving a political settlement. As Lincoln’s young aides John Hay and John G. Nicolay later wrote: “Military writers love to fight over the campaigns of history exclusively by he rules of he professional chess-board, always subordinated, often totally ignoring, the elements of politics. This is a radical error. Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations…. War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and independent.” Lincoln fought a civil war to save the Union as the American Founders had conceived it, no merely to make Georgia howl and submit. Churchill ordered the firebombing of cities to effect the political reconstruction of Germany; its destruction was in his mind the indispensable preliminary, but only a preliminary, to that. Each man kept his eye on the supreme political prize: the defense of regimes of liberty against regimes that valorized slavery. They understood ‘geopolitics’ as politics, no only as an appreciation of the ways one might acquire and hold territory.

Therefore, as Lincoln “approached his second term and the likely defeat of the Confederacy, he would focus on the permanent solution to the problem of slavery, restoration of the Union, and reconstruction of the rebel South.” Similarly, Churchill “opposed emasculating Germany” economically after the war (as even a man of de Gaulle’s caliber initially wanted); he strongly endorsed the Marshall Plan, foreseeing that the Soviet Union would quickly turn from alliance with the republics to deadly opposition, exploiting a much-improved strategic position in Europe. Lincoln’s assassination prevented any attempt by him to ‘win the peace’; Lehrman faults Churchill’s aristocratic character for “fail[ing] to devise a compelling vision for postwar Britain at home,” a failure “leading to this decisive defeat in the parliamentary elections of July 1945.” Churchill didn’t see that one coming, having concentrated his Marlborough-formed mind on “battlefield maps and the global geography of the postwar world.” To this day, he is esteemed more in American than in his own country. Lincoln today is hardly noticed in England at all, but rivals Washington for the position of first in the hearts of his countrymen.

As prime minister, Churchill spoke repeatedly with a cabinet and to a parliament consisting of men he knew. As president, Lincoln “had but slight personal intimacy” with any of his cabinet officers or the congressmen. It is Churchill’s reliance on friendship that political scientist John von Heyking seeks to understand, in an original and fascinating reinterpretation not only of Churchill’s statesmanship but of political life generally.

But perhaps not quite original. As von Heyking himself emphasizes, Aristotle regards friendship as indispensable to both ethics and politics. He classifies friendships as aiming at use, pleasure, or the good, although of course friends will often combine these aims. Friendship moderates factionalism, appealing to homonomia or like-mindedness, even when political men compete in rival parties. As a young member of Parliament, Churchill joined with his friend F. E. Smith to form the “Other Club” (as distinguished from “The Club,” an exclusive bunch dating back to the eighteenth century, from which these younger men had been, indeed, excluded). They intended the Other Club as “a space of convivium and conversation above the strife of partisan debate,” its most good-humored rule being “Nothing in the rules or the intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancor or asperity of party politics.” Nor did it, but it also allowed rivals on the floor of the House the chance to lift a drink together when the public debating was done and to do some confidential business. In  von Heyking’s high-minded Aristotelian formulation, members enjoyed moments of sunaisthesis or shared perception “enhance[ing] each other’s knowledge of the world and of themselves” while swapping stories and sharing jokes.

Under such circumstances, friendships come to underlie politics, breaking the spell of ideology, the bane of modern public life. This gives political men the intellectual and emotional ‘space’ to think prudentially and even, at best, magnanimously. The rigidity of deductive rationalism, exaggerated in practice by one’s psychic investment in defending every deduction to the death, give way to conversation, to working things out. When you know and like your opponent, a touch of charity comes in; you want to defeat him, but you don’t want to ruin him. One may think this a modest accomplishment, until a glance at the corpse-strewn landscape of politics in Churchill’s century and ours persuades otherwise.

More, even the most nearly self-sufficient, great soul, one like Churchill’s “desires and needs friends.” “He needs assistance to achieve great deeds but, more than that, he needs a friend with whom to enjoy those deeds and with whom to share and recognize each other’s virtues.” The soul with music in it wants another to hear, too, bringing out the greatness in that other one. Churchill’s understanding of this reminds von Heyking of Socrates’ portrait of the “daimonic man,” the one so wise in conversation that he seems to speak with the gods. Churchill’s own example of this kind of person is Moses, the man who saw the divine in the Burning Bush, which ever after burned inside him, a “miracle of unswerving and seemingly inexhaustible determination in pursuing great purposes, and the capacities for friendship required to bring alone a people toward those purposes.” For the daimonic but ineloquent Moses, the indispensable friend was Aaron, who could share in a quest not for the useful or the pleasant but the good, a friend who could complete his work. Churchill himself saw the Duke of Marlborough as his daimonic ancestor who never wrote a book, with Churchill undertaking to complete the life-work of defending England against Continental tyrants both in words (his most brilliant book, The Life of Marlborough) and deeds (the wars against Nazism and Communism). The words and actions were governed by thoughts Mrs. Churchill noticed in her husband as he worked on the Life in the early 1930s. “The writing of Marlborough,” she recalled, “had produced a real effect on her husband’s character; he had discovered that Marlborough’s patience became the secret of his achievements,” and he henceforth cultivated that virtue in himself. He needed it, during those ‘Wilderness Years’ before the Second World War, when his warnings against Nazism brought scorn and political brush-offs from the British establishment.

In his own life, Churchill found friends in the publishing magnate Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) and U. S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Beaverbrook was eminently useful, “persuading the Americans to increase their production targets” for military hardware. But more, “Churchill wanted Beaverbrook around simply because they were good friends,” like-minded in their “contempt for the purely transient issue” and their esteem for the fundamental one: resistance to tyranny in its unprecedentedly lethal modern forms. Alluding to a sentence Aristotle writes in the Ethics, von Heyking writes, “Though the gloried or magnanimous man can make his friendships stronger because they are so rare,” Cabinet colleagues in two wars, Churchill and Beaverbrook came to share their book manuscripts—perhaps the ultimate sign of trust and mutual esteem among writers.

Although superior to Roosevelt with respect to “the depth to which he reflected upon the nature of politics in general and on the totalitarian nature of Stalin’s regime in particular,” in von Heyking’s estimation Churchill still shared what Aristotle calls a “virtue-friendship” with the president. Here, it’s not quite clear that Roosevelt lived up to the offer, insisting on sharp terms in return for lend-leasing American ships, embarrassing Churchill in front of Stalin, and undercutting the British Empire at every opportunity. Von Heyking initially settles for a somewhat muted description (“Their friendship did not dissolve their differing national interests, but it did enable them at least to manage them and to enjoy a productive working relationship”) before regaining his enthusiasm sufficiently to describe the two men’s enjoyment of a sunset in the Atlas Mountains after the Casablanca Conference of 1943 as a sunaisthesis, an “act of joint intellectual perception” of “a vision of the good and the noble”—”the capstone of friendship” for them both. This may be going a bit too far, but it is indeed a noble thought, one well worth thinking in the unexalted political atmosphere of our own day.

Social scientists will want to know how friendship might be ‘institutionalized.’ For Churchill, von Heyking writes, “the moral goods associated with liberal democracy suggest that personal and political friendship do indeed play a critical role in its constitution, because they are part of the essential art of politics.” Parliamentary democracy, “more so than other types of regime, requires moral practices like friendships… because its very working is predicated not only on laws and parliamentary procedures, but on the moral virtues of civility and of course friendship.” The moral atmosphere of English parliamentarism was precisely what enabled Churchill to form a coalition between his fellow Conservatives and the Labour Party in the wartime cabinet, something his predecessor in the prime ministership could not have done. In this he reached across the barrier of ‘class-warfare’ politics, having eschewed the aristocratic pretensions of Toryism and working toward what Aristotle would call a ‘mixed’ or ‘middling’ regime in which the ‘tale of two cities’ could become the story of one city, united against one of the vilest tyrannies.

Perhaps most profoundly, “the gift of friendship” strengthens and refines the prudence that should govern political life, beyond such pseudo-scientific superficialities as ‘class analysis’ and ‘rational choice theory.’ To befriend someone, to think and to feel with him, exercises the human capacity to think and to feel with anyone, including your enemies. Churchill saw how Marlborough could do this (as a result, on the battlefield “he was only wrong in his anticipations when the enemy made a mistake”), and learned to do it himself. There is an intelligence of empirical perception, observing and remembering details, but that only gets you to a better understanding of the surface of things. There is an intelligence of noetic perception, the philosopher’s strength, insight into the core of things. It is the intelligence of sympathy that gets you to the interior of the persons you meet. Only with that can you be said to have prepared yourself for acts of practical wisdom.

Readers will find this capacity for sympathetic intelligence as the foundation of prudence in the portraits Lehrman and von Heyking paint with such care and insight. Equipped with very different intellectual habits and manners of presentation, they nonetheless equally give their readers a glimpse of what it means to call a great statesman great.

Niccolo Machiavelli: Florentine Histories. Laura Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: “Party and Sect in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.” Chapter 6 of Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Catherine H. Zuckert: “The Failed Republic: Florentine Histories.” Chapter 7 of Machiavelli’s Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

 

Machiavelli dedicates his book to Pope Clement VII, one of the Medici family, which (Machiavelli says) reunited Italy after its centuries of turmoil following the collapse of the Roman Empire. “I was particularly charged and commanded by Your Holy Blessedness that I write about the things done by your ancestors in such a mode that it might be seen I was far from all flattery,” the pope’s modesty evidently equalled only by his family pride. Machiavelli imposes a certain sort of modesty on the pope at the very outset, attributing his rise to the papacy as having been caused by Fortune, and therefore not necessarily by the choice of the Holy Spirit. Until the actions of the Medicis, Italy too had been ruled by Fortune, but in its case victimized by it. It took Medici governance—that is, human effort—to cause Fortune’s wheel to turn. Machiavelli pronounces the effort good, or at least not to his knowledge bad: “If under those remarkable deeds of theirs was hidden an ambition contrary to the common utility, as some say, I who do not know it am not bound to write about it,” having never, “in all my narrations,” have “wished to conceal an indecent deed with a decent cause, or to obscure a praiseworthy deed as if it were done for a contrary end.”

It must be confessed that Machiavelli’s epistle dedicatory is not utterly devoid of flattery. Recalling His Holiness’s father, Giuliano, Machiavelli opines that “his deeds were sufficiently great and magnificent for having fathered Your Holiness—a deed which outweighs those of his ancestors by a great deal and which will add more centuries to his fame than his stingy fortune denied him years of life,” a life cut short by his murder by conspirators. It may be noteworthy that Machiavelli’s life in Florentine politics, if not on this earth, was also cut short, but by the Medici, who threw him out of office in 1512.

Machiavelli announces his “intent” in the Preface: to trace the Medici family’s rise to “more authority than anyone else in Florence” in “the year of the Christian religion 1434” to the death of Lorenzo di Medici in 1492. Although “two very excellent historians,” Leonardo d’Arezzo and Poggio Bracciolini, “told everything in detail” that occurred in Florence prior to the Medicis’ rise, they didn’t tell quite everything, having been “very diligent” in their account of foreign wars but “altogether silent” about “civil discords” and “so brief” as to be “of no use to readers or pleasure to anyone” regarding the city’s “internal enmities.” These cannot be small errors of omission, since “if no other lesson is useful to the citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and divisions in the city, so that when they have become wise throught the dangers of others, they may be able to maintain themselves united.” Machiavelli also will attend to foreign wars, however, as will be seen subsequently. Perhaps, then, the main difference between his book and those of the previous historians will be his interest in Florentine civil discords and their causes. These will be no mere narrative histories. Machiavelli tells stories to reveal nature.

Machiavelli underscores the importance of his attention to Florentine ‘domestic’ discords and enmities by contrasting the modern republic with the republics of antiquity. Rome, Athens, and “all the other republics flourishing in those times” saw “disunion between the nobles and the people.” In Florence, however, “the nobles were first divided among themselves; then the nobles and the people; and in the end the people and the plebs; and it happened many times that the winning party was divided in two”—divisions evidently more numerous and also more violent than those of antiquity, as in Florence they resulted in “many dead, as many exiles, and as many families destroyed as ever occurred in any city in memory.” And yet Florence thrived on these very tumults, as the city’s “power” derived from the divisions, and indeed somehow caused it to become “greater” than any other city in Italy, “so great was the virtue and of those citizens and the power of their genius and their spirit to make themselves and their fatherland great that as many remained free from so many evils were more able by their virtue to exalt it, than would the malice of those accidents that had diminished it overwhelm it.” Machiavelli’s historian predecessors must have been “showed they knew very little about the ambition of men and the desire they have to perpetuate the name of their ancestors as well as their own”—an ambition, one notes, not unknown to Machiavelli’s papal patron. This is to suggest that the history of Florence requires a thinker to know something about men as such, and not only Florentines.

More, this reflection on human nature caused Machiavelli to “change my plan.” He will begin his history not in 1434 but “from the beginning of our city,” and indeed before that, in antiquity, in describing “how Italy came to be under those powers that governed it at that time.” Book I will narrate “all the unforeseen events in Italy following upon the decline of the Roman Empire up to 1434.”

Population increases in northern Europe induced ambitious warriors to move south, preying upon the Western Roman Empire, often neglected by the “indolent” emperors in Constantinople, preoccupied with faithless ministers and foreign enemies of their own. Through the reign of Theodosius, the Visigoths were repelled, but the emperor’s two sons didn’t inherit “his virtue and fortune.” They were deceived by Stilicho, the governor of the western provinces, who sought independence from imperial rule and maneuvered to set the northern peoples against it. This time, the Visigoths sacked Rome; the Vandals seized Africa; the Alans and Visigoths took Spain; the Franks and Burgundians, Gaul; the Huns, Pannonia (“today called Hungary”). Fearing the Franks and Burgundians across the Channel, the Britons invited the Angles, a German people to aid them; almost predictably, the Angles expelled the Britons, who then settled in what’s now Brittany. ‘Britain’ became ‘Anglia.’

Conveniently located for the invasion of Italy, the Huns did just that, under the rule of Attila, although his pious respect for the pope induced him to stay out of Rome. After further disorders, the capital of the Western Empire was moved to Ravenna, which was easier to defend than Rome, which soon became a kingdom.

Machiavelli emphasizes the disorders caused by the new religion, Christianity. “In the struggle between the custom of the ancient faith,” paganism, “and the miracles of the new, the gravest tumults and discords were generated among men.” Further, Christians were themselves disunited; “the struggles among the Greek Church, the Roman Church, and the Church at Ravenna—and even more, the struggle between the heretical and the catholic sects—afflicted the world in many modes.” In Africa, for example, Arianism made the ruling Vandals even worse than “their avarice and natural cruelty did,” leading as it did not only to the ‘usual’ conquerors’ rapacity but to the persecution of the local population. “Living thus… men bore the terror of their spirit written in their eyes,” uncertain “as to which God they ought to turn to,” dying miserably, “deprived of all help and all hope.”

In Italy, it took decisive action by Emperor Justinian to drive out the Goths. He chose “a most excellent man of war,” Narses to accomplish that task. Unfortunately, Justianian’s successor angered Narses by replacing him at the ruler of Italy; Narses soon called in the Longobard king, “a savage and bold man,” to invade Italy. So he did, successfully, but he in turn died by poison administered by his wife. Such convulsions gave the pontiffs their chance. As the ‘secular’ forces declined, the ecclesiastical forces increased in Rome. With the decline and fall of the Eastern Empire, much of it taken eventually by the Turks, the pope turned for protection to the kings of France. “Hence-forward, all the wars waged by the barbarians in Italy were for the most part caused by the pontiffs,” who, having slender military forces of their own, effectively did what the weakened Roman emperors of earlier centuries had done: call in the barbarians. “This mode of proceeding continues still in our times; it is this that has kept and keeps Italy disunited and infirm.” Spiritually by themselves, militarily by foreign forces, the popes have been “terrible and awesome,” but they have “used” these powers “badly,” by now having “lost the one altogether”—they can scarcely claim spiritual purity when they dabble in Realpolitik—”and as regards the other remain at the discretion of others,” who put their own geopolitical calculations before those of Rome or of Italy.

It was such an alliance that enabled Charlemagne to become the emperor of a new, ‘holy,’ Roman empire, based on the emperor’s fealty to the pope. Popes subsequently came to dominate the alliance, at least from time to time. “The pope had more or less authority in Rome and in all Italy according to whether he had the favor of the emperors or of those who were more powerful there,” although schisms continued to dog the Papacy, with at times as many as three pretenders to the throne of St. Peter. And with uncertainties and struggles between emperors and popes, the common people of Rome and other principalities and republics also gained considerable importance. Italy became “governed partly be peoples, partly by princes, and partly by those sent by the emperor.” [1]

By the turn of the first millennium of the Christian era, “the Roman people was much at war with the pontiffs,” having first “used” the authority of the papacy “to free themselves from the emperors” but then seeing to it that popes “received many more injuries” from the people “than from any other Christian prince.” Pope Nicholas II struck back, “depriv[ing] the Romans of participation in the creation of the pope,” restricting the electors to the cardinals. He went on to force “all the officials sent by the Romans throughout their jurisdiction to render obedience to the pope, and some of them he deprived of their offices.”

This would have solved the problem of faction, had it lasted. But the Church was as schismatic as the Empire was faction-prone. After Pope Nicholas II died, the Lombard clergymen refused to recognize Alexander II, the successor chosen by the cardinals in Rome, and “created Cadalus of Parma antipope.” The weakened papacy was then struck by the Emperor Henry, “who regarded the power of the pontiffs with hatred”; when the Roman pope held a council in Rome, stripping Henry of the Empire and the kingship, “some Italian peoples followed the pope and some followed Henry; this was the seed of the Guelf [papist] and Ghibelline [imperial] humors, for the sake of which Italy, when it lacked barbarian invasions, was torn apart by internal wars.”

By the 1090s, Pope Urban II hit upon the idea of uniting kings and peoples behind an external enemy, initiating the first Crusade (as they were later called). “This enterprise was glorious in the beginning because all Asia Minor, Syria, and a part of Egypt came under the power of the Christians.” Three-quarters of the way through the next century, however, the Saracen Saladin’s “virtue and the discords of the Christians in the end took from them all the glory they had acquired in the beginning,” and they were “driven out of he place they had successfully recovered with such honor.”

Christian-Catholic ups and downs continued for centuries to come. One pope proved capable of overawing an English king and other “princes far away” from Italy, but “he could not make himself obeyed by the Romans.” “Thus are appearances feared more when they are far away than when nearby”—a jab that goes beyond the political and into the theological realm, upon reflection. Near the center of Book I the reader finds the story of the death of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Machiavelli reports that he was “deprived” of all authority by the pope, excommunicated by the Church; a man “who could not bear not making war,” Frederick launched an expedition to the Middle East, “to vent against Mohammed the ambition that he had not been able to vent against the vicars of Christ.” He died from a disorder contracted after bathing in a river. “Thus were the waters more favorable to the Mohammedans that were excommunications to the Christians, for whereas the excommunications only checked his pride, the waters quenched it.”

If none of this redounds to the credit of Machiavelli’s piety, he consistently accounts for his disapproval of Church rule, observing at one point that “the pontiffs, now for the sake of religion, now for their own ambition, never ceased calling new men into Italy and inciting new wars; and after they had made one prince powerful, they repented it and sought his ruin.” At the same time, such was their spiritual authority that the emperors seldom possible to dislodge a reigning pontiff.

Nicholas III, “a bold and ambitious man,” emerged as “the first of the popes to show his own ambition openly and to scheme, under the guise of making the Church great, to honor and benefit his own,” elevating family members to positions of power. “Henceforward the history will be full of such [pontifical family members], “so that we shall come to mention even sons; nor is there anything left for the pontiffs to try unless it be that while up to our times they have schemed to leave heir sons as princes, so for the future they may plan to leave them a hereditary papacy.”

By the time of Pope Boniface’s reign in the 1300s, “there were many travails between the Guelf and Ghibelline parties: and because Italy had been abandoned by the emperors many towns became free and many more were seized by tyrants.” With the disappearance of imperial rule and the unsteady rule of the Papacy, city-states arose, their regimes either republican or tyrannical. Machiavelli’s two regime types, republic and principality, familiar to readers of The Prince and the Discourses, now became clearly visible.

Among the Italian republics, Venice rose to preeminence. Its settlement dated to the years of Attila’s conquest of Padua, Verona, and other northern Italian cities, when people fled to the swamps of “Vinezia.” “Thus constrained by necessity, they left very pleasant and fertile places to live in places that were sterile, deformed, and devoid of any comfort.” It is a characteristic Machiavellian observation to find good fortune in straitened circumstances, as this forces people to depend upon themselves, their own virtù. “In a very short time” the settlers “made those places not only habitable but delightful,” establishing “law and orders among themselves.” Further, in such an unattractive setting the Venetians “enjoyed security” amidst “so much ruin in Italy.” Having no arable land, they turned to the sea for sustenance, becoming merchants and traders. Further still, “while they lived in this form their name became terrible on the seas and venerated within Italy, so that in all the controversies that arose, they were most often the arbiters.” Problems arose when they began to seize other city-states, frightening not only Italian princes but foreign ones, who “together conspired against them and in one day took from them that state which they had won for themselves in so many years with infinite expense.” Since that Battle of Vailà in 1509 “they have reacquired neither their reputation nor their forces, they live, as do all other Italian princes, at the discretion of others.” The perils of what we now call ‘imperial overstretch’ form another characteristic part of Machiavelli’s teaching, which encourages princes and peoples to grasp power with “their own arms” (to borrow a phrase from The Prince), but firmly not greedily.

Concluding Book I, Machiavelli describes the Italy at the time of the beginnings of Medici influence disunited and unstable. “Because arms did not befit him as a man of religion,” the regnant pope “did from necessity what others had done by bad choice.” These “others” included the Florentines “because, having eliminated their nobility by frequent divisions, the republic was left in the hands of men nurtured in trade and thus continued in the orders and fortune” of better-armed states. Overall, “the arms of Italy… were in the hands either of lesser princes or of men without a state.” Nor were these men formidable, by ancient standards, having arrived at a “vile” sort of gentleman’s agreement amongst themselves to fight in a temporizing manner. “They reduced [the art of war] to such vileness that any mediocre captain in whom only a shadow of ancient virtue had been reborn would have despised them, to the astonishment of all Italy, which, because of its lack of prudence, honored them.” “Of these lazy princes, therefore, and these very vile arms, my history will be filled.” It isn’t too much to think that such a judgment casts doubt on even the Medici themselves, the alleged heroes of the Histories.

In the introduction to their translation, Banfield and Mansfield remark that the first chapter of each book includes a discussion of the theme that pervades the book. Book II’s theme is founding, a theme Machiavelli had introduced in his discussion of Venice. “No single thing is more worthy of an excellent prince and of a well-ordered republic, nor more useful to a province, than building new towns where men can settle for the convenience of defense or cultivation.” But whereas the ancients “did this easily,” by sending colonizers to newly conquered or vacant countries, the moderns have ceased doing so. This is why provinces in modern empires are much less secure than provinces in ancient empires had been. There is no one living in modern provinces an emperor can rely on. “When the order of sending out colonies has been lacking, conquered countries are held with greater difficulty and vacant countries never fill up, while those that are too full do not relieve themselves.” As a result, the world generally and Italy especially have fewer inhabitants now than they did in antiquity. Machiavelli laments, “in princes there is no appetite for true glory and in the republics no order that deserves to be praised.” It might be thought that Christian evangelization has replaced colonization, but only if one inclines to view Machiavelli’s intentions with suspicion.

“Whatever its origin might have been,” Florence “was born under the Roman Empire and in the time of the first emperors began to be recorded by writers.” It didn’t amount to much. “Until the year of Christ 1215, it lived in the fortune under which those who commanded Italy lived”—a decidedly unsteady one, as Machiavelli has recounted. [2] The Christian sects afflicting Italy arrived late in Florence, “but just as in our bodies, where the later the infirmities come, the more dangerous and mortal they are, so with Florence: the later it was in joining the sects of Italy, by so much more was it afflicted by them.” In Florence Guelf-and-Ghibelline sectarianism combined with quarrels among powerful families, initially the Buondelmonti, the Uberti, the Amidei, and the Donati.

As Machiavelli tells it, Florentians would reorganize the offices of their city in response to some opportunity (as for example when an emperor was weak) or some crisis. Initially, the Guelfs dominated, dividing the city into six parts with two representatives per part forming the governing council, called “the Ancients.” To avoid unnecessary partisan suspicions in the law courts they appointed foreign judges; military defense was provided by ninety-six militias or “banners,” twenty in the city and the rest in the countryside. This order worked well, as Florence quickly came to dominate Tuscany, and it would have “risen to greatness if frequent and new divisions had not afflicted it.” The weaker Ghibelline forces joined with their fellow partisans of the emperor elsewhere in Italy in an attempt to destroy Florence, the strongest of the Guelf cities in Tuscany. The Ghibellines won, but preferred ruling the city to destroying it. To do so, they attempted “to win the people to their side, whom they had previously aggravated by every possible injury, by giving them some benefits; and if they had applied those remedies before necessity came, it would have been useful, but as they applied them now unwillingly, the remedies were not only not useful but hastened their ruin.” The people of the city soon overthrew the Ghibellines and recalled the Guelfs. Florentines reordered the city, making it a republic.

By the 1280s, the pope had turned against Florence (“the pontiffs always feared one whose power had become great in Italy,” even when that one was a Guelf town). Worse, the people began to turn against the Guelf nobles, who had “become insolent and did not fear the magistrates.” Facing an external threat to its independence and an internal threat to its regime, Florentines put down both the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, for a time “almost eliminat[ing]” them from the city. This set up the next factional dispute: the people versus the nobles. In this instance, “certain men of religion of good repute” placed themselves between the parties, “remind[ing] the nobles that their pride and their bad government were the cause of the honors taken from them and the laws made against them,” adding that the people were superior to them “in numbers, riches, and hatred,” whereas many on their own side were nobles in name only, men who “would not fight.” The nobility “would turn out to be, when it came to steel, an empty name.” To the people “they recalled that it was not prudent always to want the ultimate victory,” as that intention makes your enemy desperate; “he who does not hope for good does not fear evil.” The nobles had in fact done some good for the city, so to persecute them was unjust, and besides, in war one never can be entirely certain how Fortuna may distribute her favors.

This “wiser and calmer spirit” prevailed. By the year 1298, “never was our city in a greater and more prosperous state”—”replete with men, riches, and reputation.” Once again, however, “new enmities” arose, in the form of a family quarrel between the Donati and the newly-prominent Cerchi. The rest of the city chose sides, with the Donatists being called the Black party, the Cerchians the White party. Once again, republicanism was endangered; Catholics feared a resurgence of the Ghibellines, but when they appealed to Pope Boniface he sent an envoy who only confused matters further. On “the advice and prudence” of the poet Dante Alighieri, the ruling council, now called the Signori, armed the people and banished both parties. The ensuing popular government ruled peacefully for a short time, but the combination of ineffectual papal meddling and especially the ambition of the head of the Donati family stirred things up once more. In 1308, Corso Donati was finally captured and killed; “had he been of a quieter spirit, his memory would be more prosperous.”

But “it is natural to the Florentines that every state [i.e., condition] annoys them and every accident divides them.” A short-standing tyranny was ended by a foreign intervention, and this time the Florentines instituted a council of twelve citizens titled “Good Men,” “without whose advice and consent the Signori could not act on any important thing.” With more “tumults,” new reforms were instituted; “as happens in all republics, always after an unforeseen event some old laws are annulled and others are renewed.” Throughout regime changes—often forced upon the Florentines by the need to empower one man, and often a foreigner, against some foreign threat—Florence survived and occasionally thrived in the complex geopolitical circumstances of the late Middle Ages, in which Italian city-states contended with one another and with foreign powers, with interventions by popes and antipopes muddying the turbulent waters. “It rarely happens that fortune does not accompany a good or an evil with another good or evil”; as a consequence, overall “Florence changed its government so many times to its very great harm.”

Nor were the Florentines themselves blameless victims. For example, when Walter, Duke of Athens, was brought in to rule the city during yet another crisis, he favored “the plebs” over both the nobles and the people, persecuting those who had directed a failed war against the city-state of Lucca in which the Pisans swooped in to take away the would-be prize. “These executions frightened the middle classes very much; they satisfied only the great and the plebs—the latter because their nature is to rejoice in evil and the former to see themselves avenged for the many injuries received from the people.” The Signori pleaded with the Duke to desist—”amidst universal hatred one never finds any security, because you never know from whence evil may spring, and he who fears every man cannot secure himself against anyone”—but the Duke rejected their advice, claiming that “if Florence, by his ordering, should rid itself of sects, ambition, and enmities, he would be giving it liberty, not taking it away.” “The Signori agreed, seeing that they could do no further good,” although warning that a people which has lived in liberty can only be ruled tyrannically “with the greatest violence.” “He wanted the slavery and not the good will of men; and for this he desired to be feared rather than loved.” Elected Florence’s lord for life, he promptly consigned the Signori to private life, “forbade anyone to carry arms,” allied with foreigners, increased taxes and fines” in a display of “arrogance and cruelty.” “Indignation and hatred grew to such a degree that they would have inflamed not only the Florentines, who do not know how to maintain freedom and are unable to bear slavery, but any servile people to recover their freedom.”

In 1343, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Milan headed a conspiracy against the Duke. It succeeded, and his ten-months reign of terror ended in his exile. Seeing an opportunity for independence, other Tuscan towns moved to restore their freedom from Florence, but failed. Florentines reordered their ruling offices again, attempting to found a balanced, mixed regime combining “the great and the popular.” “The government having been established with this order, the city would have settled down if the great had been content to live with that modesty which is required by civil life.” They didn’t. Soon, even the Signori were removed and “the whole government” was placed “in the will of the people.” After defeating a rebellion by the great, “the people, and of these the most ignoble parts, thirsty for booty, looted and sacked all their houses, pulled down and burned their palaces and towers with such rage that the cruelest enemy of the Florentine name would have been ashamed of such ruin.” Book II ends with the people reordering the regime on a wholly popular basis, with three classes of the people or commoners (“powerful, middle, and low”) represented by a new government in which representatives of the middle and the lower classes of the people could easily outvote the representatives of the powerful. As for the nobles, their ruin “was so great and afflicted their party so much that they never again dared to take up arms against the people; indeed, they became continually more humane and abject”—a change, indeed. Only a few years later, the devastating plague that serves as the backdrop of Boccaccio’s Decameron killed 96,000 Florentines.

The repeated lessons of Book II are, first, the malignity of factionalism in republics, which destroys the efforts of founders, even if the institutions they design are sound, and second, that the smallness of city-states leaves them vulnerable to the crises that precipitate latent factional struggles. (John Adams read the Histories and took due notice of these points, and he was not likely alone among the Founders of the American republic.) In calling Italian republics badly ordered, Machiavelli means not so much their institutional structures as their social composition. In Florence, factitious quarrels between Guelfs and Ghibellines, implicating both Roman Catholic and imperial rivalries, between the people and the nobles (with the plebs waiting in the background) and, finally, between families exacerbated the irritable “nature” of the Florentines, quick to be riled even by small “accidents.”

Partisanship is the explicit theme of Book III, which begins with Machiavelli’s comparison of modern Florence with the ancient Roman republic. Modern Italy contrasted with ancient Rome fundamentally in its religion, Christianity.  The differences between Florentine and Roman republicanism are more complex. The two regimes shared one main similarity: “The grave and natural enmities that exist between the men of the people and the nobles, caused by the wish of the latter to command and the former not to obey, are the cause of all evils that arise in cities.” This resembles Aristotle’s claim that the fundamental division in cities is that between rich and poor, except that Aristotle considers the poor just as eager to rule as the rich. But although the two republics shared this conflict, “diverse effects were produced in one city and the other.” Florentine factions were more violent, with Roman factional disputes ending with the enactment of “some law,” Florentine factional disputes ending “with the exile and death of many citizens.” Roman faction-fighting “always increased military virtue, those in Florence eliminated it altogether.” Whereas Rome went from equality to inequality, Florence went from inequality to “a wonderful equality.” These differing effects resulted from the different ends pursued by the two peoples: “the people of Rome desired to enjoy the highest honors together with the nobles, while the people of Florence fought to be alone in the government without the participation of the nobles”—the Roman end being “reasonable,” since the nobles felt no need to take arms, and both sides were ready to settle matters with new laws, the Florentine end being “injurious and unjust,” since the people backed the nobles into a corner, having no desire for “the common utility.” In what we now call a ‘zero-sum game,’ the people of Florence effectively eliminated “virtue in arms and generosity of spirit” in the nobles and, never having it themselves, could not bring it back to their city. The only advantage for Florence was that in Rome, “when its virtue was converted into arrogance,” it could only turn to monarchic rule to restrain the nobles whereas Florence “could easily have been reordered in any form of government by a wise lawgiver.” No such person appeared.

Florence’s next factional dispute would set the people against the plebs. Before that, another inter-familial dispute arose, this time between the Ricci and the Albizzi. “As the citizens had already attained such equality through the ruin of the great that the magistrates were more revered than they used to be in the past,” both families intended “to prevail by the ordinary way and without private violence.” However, the head of the Ricci designed a law that enabled any person designated a “Ghibelline” to be barred from office, leading of course to many of the Albizzi being so designated. This law “was the beginning of many evils: nor can a law be made more damaging to a republic than one that looks back a long time.” [3]

Machiavelli writes a jeremiad he puts in the mouth of a delegation of patriotic citizens addressing the Signori. The patriots condemn “corruption” and factionalism. “Because religion and fear of God have been eliminated in all, an oath and faith given last only as long as they are useful; so men make use of them not to observe them but to serve as a means of being able to deceive more easily.” Deceivers win praise and honor; “by this, harmful men are praised as industrious and good men are blamed as fools.” “The young are lazy the old lascivious; both sexes at every age are full of foul customs, for which good laws, because they are spoiled by wicked use, are no remedy.” The resulting avarice and desire for false glory has resulted in “deaths, exiles, persecution of the good, exaltation of the wicked,” along with “love of parties and the power of parties,” which bad men join for gain, good men for self-defense. The “promoters and princes of parties” talk a pious game but remain “enemies of freedom” even as they “oppress it under color of defending the state.” “Hence orders and laws are made not for the public but for personal utility,” causing politics to become a struggle animated by the principle of rule or be ruined. Although they admit that good laws don’t work under such conditions, they call upon the Signori to reform Florence’s laws and institutions.

Sure enough, the reforms—consisting of appointing a committee that excluded all but members of the (renewed) Guelf party from the magistracies—recapitulated the policy of exclusion typical of the republic, leading to resentment and eventual rebellion among those excluded. (“Most men are more apt to preserve a good order than to know how to find one for themselves” by “taking away the causes” of new sects.) The Guelfs allied with “all the ancient nobles and the greater part of the most powerful men of the people” against “all the popular men of the lesser sort” in alliance with “the rest of the multitude,” which, “as always happens adhered to the side of the malcontents.” Here the Medici began to make themselves felt, starting with Salvestro de’ Medici, who became a magistrate in 1378.

Salvestro sided with the people against the great. But “no one should make a change in a city believing that he can stop it at his convenience or regulate it in his mode.” Salvestro’s less-than-salvific efforts on behalf of the people only caused renewed turmoil, as “it is not enough for men to get back their own but they want also to seize what belongs to others and get revenge.” An eloquent speech by Salvestro’s colleague, Luigi Guicciardini, asking the rioters, “What do you get out of your disunion other than servitude?” quieted passions for a time. Then the plebs became restless.

Guild members controlled the city, but the “lowest plebs” weren’t members. They hated the rich and the “princes” of the guilds. Fearing retaliation for previous disorders, they also figured that if they multiplied their evils no one among them could be blamed. Machiavelli gives a speech to one pleb to his fellow plebs, summarizing their claim to rule and urging them not to give in to the magistrates. “Strip them all naked, you will see we are alike,” as “only poverty and riches make us unequal.” The democrat would thus found his authority on the human body alone, tacitly rejecting any claims founded on differences among souls. Quite the contrary: “Neither conscience nor infamy should dismay you, because those who win, in whatever mode they win, never receive shame from it.” The one virtue the unnamed pleb does appeal to is manliness; he shames them by saying, “You are not the men I believed you to be,” if you roll over at the behest of the great. The great came into their riches by doing exactly what I urge you to do now, by deploying the powers of physical force and (with respect to minds) fraud. The great have hidden “the ugliness of acquisition” by “applying the false title of earnings to things they have usurped by deceit or by violence,” exploiting the imprudent and foolish. “Good men are always poor.” Smarten up. The citizens are now disunited; make your move or be ruined. “Now is the time not only to free ourselves from them but to become so much their superiors that they will have more to lament and fear from you than you from them.” Ruin them before they can ruin us. “From this will come honor for many of us and security for all.” This speech reanimated the passions of the plebs, and the renewed rioting by “the rabble of armed men” cowed the Signori along with the rest of the city. [4]

Machiavelli now identifies a plebeian leader, a wool carder named Michele di Lando, “a sagacious and prudent man who owed more to nature than to fortune.” He accepted lordship of the city and moved to halt the rioters. He deprived the Signori and the war council of their power, “want[ing] to show everyone that he knew how to govern Florence without their advice.” The one ‘established’ figure who benefited was Salvestro de’ Medici, on whom Michele bestowed income from some of the lucrative shops. Although the plebs remained restive, he kept them quiet, eventually stripping the lowest of them of power altogether; “in spirit, prudence, and goodness he surpassed any citizen of his time, and he deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their fatherland.” For several years, Florence saw a regime balanced between the people and the plebs, but it wasn’t a good government, as the newly-designated set of Signori included two tyrannical personalities, Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozi. Wealthy, “humane, severe,” and liberty-loving Benedetto Alberti resolved to oppose them; the malefactors having offended much of the city, Benedetto enjoyed sufficient backing to cause Tommaso to flee and Giorgio to be executed. And it wasn’t long before a coalition of  Guelfs and nobles who’d allied with the people returned to power, eventually exiling Michele; “his fatherland was scarcely grateful to him for his good works, an error into which princes and republics fall many times.” The same ingratitude befell Benedetto Alberti, whose prominence made him the target of envious and fearful Florentines. By the early 1390s, almost all of his family had been banished. The Medici remained as the prominent family with the prestige to challenge excesses committed by the Signori.

“Thus stood the city with many malcontents inside and many exiles outside.” Several attempts to overthrow the regime, including one initiated by the duke of Milan, who gathered the exiles for an assault, and another by exiles in Bologna, were thwarted. Florence was “quiet” from 1400 to 1433, aided by the fortuitous death of the powerful king of Naples. “Thus death was always more friendly to the Florentines than any other friend, and more powerful to save them than their own virtue.” Eventually, however, “the old humors,” the parties, revived.

Book IV begins with Machiavelli’s reflections on republics. Cities under this regime “frequently change their governments and their states not between liberty and servitude, as many believe, but between servitude and license,” as what’s called liberty is only license misnamed by its partisans. “It happens rarely” that “by the good fortune of a city there rises in it a wise, good, and powerful citizen by whom laws are ordered by which these humors of the nobles and men of the people are quieted or restrained.” Such a city really is free. Examples are seen in antiquity, not so much in modernity, as he has noted and explained before. As between tyrannical and licentious states, neither provides stability, “because the one state displeases good men, the other displeases the wise; the one can do evil easily, the other can do good only with difficulty; in the one, insolent men have too much authority, in the other, fools.” Both regimes require one man of “virtue and fortune” to rule it, and eventually he dies or “become[s] useless because of his travails.”

In a rare instance of speaking in the first person, Machiavelli writes, “I say, therefore, that the state that had its beginning in Florence with the death of Messer Giorgio Scali in 1381 was sustained first by the virtue of Messer Maso degli Albizzi, later by that of Niccolò da Uzzano.” The latter saw that the now-most-prominent Medici, Giovanni, was “in many parts superior” to Salvestro, and he proved it by offering sound advice (not taken by the city) to refrain from attacking the lord of Lombardy’s forces, which had just conquered the city-state of Forlì and threatened Florence. Better to wait for him to attack us, Giovanni recommended, as a defensive war will attract more allies to our side. Proven correct when Florence failed in its siege of Forlì, Giovanni gained credit with the people, who always judge by results, not by circumstances. Similarly, when ‘the great’ conspired to overthrow popular rule, Giovanni counseled restraint. Better “not to alter the accustomed orders of [the] city, there being nothing that offends men so much as changing these,” making those deprived of power enemies of the new regime, unsatisfied until they can win power back. “These things, so dealt with, were learned of outside and brought more reputation to Giovanni and hatred to the other citizens.” And Giovanni was so prudent as to “detach himself” from these admirers, who might move against the great “under the cover of his favor.” In all this he diminished sectarian passions. When the people sought to increase taxes on the rich, Giovanni dissuaded them from stirring things up. In the Florentine republic, vaunting ambitions aiming at regime change were precisely what were not needed; in such a regime, given its particular “humors,” temporizing moderation serves best. When all factions are bad, keeping them all in a condition of well-modulated discontent can be the summit of statesmanship.

Machiavelli gives Giovanni a deathbed speech, addressed to sons Cosimo and Lorenzo. “In regard to the state,” he tells them, “if you wish to live secure, accept from it as much as is given you by laws and by men. This will bring you neither envy nor danger, since it is what a man takes himself, not what is given to a man, that makes us hate him; and always you will have more than they who, wanting others’ share, lose their own, and before losing it live in continual unease.” “He died,” Machiavelli tells us, “very rich in treasure but even richer in reputation and good will.” “This inheritance of fortune’s goods as well as those of he spirit was not only maintained but increased by Cosimo.” Between the well-meaning but ineffectual patriotic citizens and the shrewd arriviste Michelle, Giovanni de’ Medici seems to have done best for himself, his family, and his city. He differs sharply from “the multitude,” which is “more ready to seize what belongs to others than to watch out for its own.” Men generally “are moved so much more by the hope of acquiring than by the fear of losing, for loss is not believed in unless it is close, while acquisition, even though distant, is hoped for.” Machiavelli thus offers his readers an atheist version of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

In 1429, the ever-ambitious Rinaldo degli Alberti urged the conquest of the city-state of Lucca. In this he was opposed by Niccolò da Uzzano. In their debate, Rinaldo “pointed out the opportunity for the campaign,” as Lucca had few ready allies, and it was ruled by a tyrant whose subjects were long dispirited. Niccolò countered that such a campaign would be unjust, dangerous, and costly, a betrayal of a longtime ally. “If one could make war on the tyrant without making it on the citizens, that would displease him less; but as this could not be, then he could not agree that a friendly citizenry should be despoiled of its goods.” Knowing that a moral argument might not suffice, he added that the attack would also lack “utility to the city” of Florence because “losses were certain and the profits doubtful.” Better to avoid the campaign and leave the tyrant in place “so that he would make as many enemies as possible within,” weakening Lucca and causing it eventually “to fall into [the Florentines’] lap.” These words failed to calm Florentine (and human) acquisitiveness; the war went badly and the Florentines brought in mercenaries, hoping that “corruption would help where force was not enough.” The defeat of Florence “saddened all our city, and because the enterprise had been undertaken by the generality of the people, the people did not know whom to turn against,” eventually settling on those who had conducted the campaigns. An inglorious peace treaty was signed in 1433.

As factions revived, Cosimo de’ Medici indeed proved himself his father’s son, “a very prudent man, of grave and pleasing appearance, quite liberal, quite humane,” who “never attempted anything against either the [ruling party] or the state, but took care to benefit everyone and with his liberality to make many citizens into his partisans.” Although at least one rival sought to banish him, suspecting Cosimo’s ambitions, Niccolò de Uzzano pointed out that this would put the conspirators in the impossible position of blaming the man for being “merciful, helpful, liberal, and loved by everyone.” And even if Cosimo were driven out, his friends would remain; kill him, and you only empower a worse man, Rinaldo. Minus Niccolò, the conspirators had Cosimo arrested and exiled, a move Rinaldo quickly came to regret for the reasons Niccolò had given. “It would have been better for them to have let things be than to have left Cosimo alive and his friends in Florence,” he told his followers, “because great men must either not be touched or, if touched, be eliminated”—caressed or killed, as Machiavelli advises his readers in The Prince. The people didn’t relent, however, fearing the tyranny of the great even more than that of the plebs.

Eventually, however, the Signori took charge, recalling Cosimo and banishing his enemies. With unconcern for the injustice to Cosimo, ancestor of his patron, an injustice now rectified, Machiavelli writes, “Thus Florence was deprived by he same accident not only of good men but of men of riches and industry.” Cosimo triumphed. He returned to Florence; “rarely does it happen that a citizen returning triumphant from a victory [in war] has been received by his fatherland by such a crowd of people and such a demonstration of good will as he received when he returned from exile.” Midway through his narrative, Machiavelli has brought his readers to the time when the Medici had risen not only to prominence but to prestige with safety. [5]

Book V begins oddly, but (as it turns out) purposefully. Reintroducing the matter of provinces—having earlier asserted that their governance shows the superiority of the ‘ancients’ to the ‘moderns’—Machiavelli says that “most of the time, in the changes they make,” they go from order to disorder to order in a perpetual cycle, “for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still.” This means that the classical image of the wheel of Fortune is really a feature of nature, but that nature may not have any stable telos. “As soon as they reach their ultimate perfection, having no further to rise, they must descend,” and once they have ‘hit bottom’ they reverse course, “always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good.” The cause of this is that virtù “gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin”; then hard times call forth virtù, as Machiavelli already noted with respect to harsh northern climates.

To invoke nature is to invoke the study of nature, philosophy. “In provinces and cities” (Machiavelli now adds cities), “captains arise before philosophers,” establishing by their virtù the leisure required if philosophers are to exist. But philosophy evidences decline. “The strength of well-armed spirits cannot be corrupted by a more honorable leisure than that of letters, nor can leisure enter into well-instituted cities with a greater and more dangerous deceit than this one.” Hence Cato’s warnings when Athens sent the philosophers Diogenes and Carneades to speak to the Roman senate. “Since he recognized the evil that could result to his fatherland from this honorable leisure, he saw to it that no philosopher could be accepted in Rome.” [6] Leisurely love of wisdom is the wrong way to gain wisdom, the most needful wisdom, practical wisdom. “Men have become wise through their afflictions,” not through peace and contentment. In all of this Machiavelli offers an atheist rendering of the Apostle Paul’s warning against the vanity of philosophers, “always seeking and never finding.”

Yet in Italy, “nothing was built upon the Roman ruins in a way that might have redeemed Italy from them, so that it might have been able to act gloriously under a virtuous principality.” A limited degree of virtù emerged in some Italian cities, such as Florence, and these cities did defend Italy from “the barbarians,” to some extent. But mediocrity prevailed overall because the peace they enjoyed (as readers have seen) was always short and not especially sweet, thanks to sectarianism, and the wars were not especially long or hard. (“They cannot be called wars in which men are not killed, cities are not sacked, principalities are not destroyed,” actions “begun without fear, carried on without danger, and ended without loss.”) Such conditions prevailed in Italy from 1434 to 1494—that is, coinciding with the rise of the Medici in Florence. [7] Considering this period will profit readers nonetheless, as it will reveal “with what deceits, with what guile and arts the princes, soldiers, and heads of republics conducted themselves so as to maintain the reputation they have not deserve.” If studying the ancients shows us exemplary instances of virtù and patriotism, “excit[ing] liberal spirits to follow them,” studying the vices of the moderns may “excite such spirits to avoid and eliminate them.” Machiavelli offers lessons he must have acquired in leisure to the leisured, as a means of exciting them to abandon leisure for action aimed at dominating fortune, which is nature. This is a new kind of philosophy, combining theoretical insight with practical wisdom (that is, with what Machiavelli takes to be wisdom).

Modern Italy has been bifurcated. When “peace arose by the concord of its princes,” military men, “wishing to live off war, turned against the Church” which promoted peace. Two “sects of arms” vied for power in Italy: the followers of Braccio de Montone (most prominently Niccolò Piccinino and Niccolò Fortebraccio) and the followers of Count Francesco Sforza. “To these sects nearly all the other Italian armies were connected. Fortebraccio especially “was moved by the ancient hostility Braccio had always had for the Church,” whereas Sforza was moved more by pure ambition. They attacked Pope Eugene; “the Romans, not wanting to have war, drove Eugene out of Rome,” and when he fled to Florence the Florentines got rid of him by giving him “lordship over the Marches”—a region due west of Florence, along the Adriatic Sea. Sforza promptly seized the Marches, demanding that he be “created gonfalonier of the Church.” “All was yielded to him, so much more did Eugene fear a dangerous war than a shameful peace.” From this base, Sforza then attacked Fortebraccio’s forces, claiming the mantle of Church authority as a sort of neo-Guelf.

Thus the first two chapters of Book V show readers the cause of Italian mediocrity, the reason nothing very impressive was built on Rome’s ruins. Catholic-Christian peacefulness—the analogue of ancient philosophy—ruins virtù ‘in principle’ and ‘in practice,’ blocking men from seeing that Fortune isn’t Providence but the ever-changing, cyclical pattern of nature and preventing them from doing enough really to reverse decline. At best, the mediocre men of action fight spiritless demi-wars resulting in petty victories and minor losses. Much of Book V chronicles such conflicts. So, for example, the Venetians, Florence’s main rival, returned some Florentine citizens to the clutches of Cosimo, who had them “basely put to death,” not “so much to benefit Cosimo as further to inflame the parties in Florence, and through bloodshed to make the division of our city more dangerous; for the Venetians saw no other opposition to their own greatness than its unity.” Such “greatness” will come not by the exercise of virtù, then, as by divide-and-distract scheming.

Other players in this Italian game included René of Anjou (claimant to the throne of Naples), King Alfonso of Aragon, and Duke Filippo Visconti of Milan, and the aforementioned Rinaldo degli Albizzi, now exiled from Florence. The latter tells Duke Filippo, “Only those wars are just that are necessary, and those arms pious where there is no hope outside them”—an unobjectionable premise, from which he concludes, however “that there can be no greater justice or piety than “that which takes our fatherland out of slavery,” a suggestion real Christians might well reject. The duke doesn’t, but demurs regarding Rinaldo’s recommendation of a war with Florence, preferring to send Piccinino to fight the Genoese, who are allied with Florence. The victorious Florentine then go off to attack the city-state of Lucca, where “one of the older and wiser men” tells his fellow-citizens “if we could, we would do the same or worse to them.”

And so it went, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Fortune doles out ups and downs, but always unremarkable ones, as men scheme against and sort-of fight each other. Less-than-leonine princes engage in vulpine maneuvering. At one point, Piccinino “plundered and destroyed everything up to three miles from Florence,” but “the Florentines, for their part, were not dismayed, and before anything else they gave attention to keeping their government steady,” thanks largely to “the good will that Cosimo enjoyed among the people and because they had restricted their chief magistracies to a few powerful men, who held firm with their severity, if indeed there should be anyone malcontent or desirous of new things.” These were rulers well-adapted to the circumstances of the Italy of their time. As for Piccinino, he wasted time besieging a relatively minor fortified place instead of putting the squeeze on Florence; eventually, Duke Filippo recalled him from Tuscany to give him help in his campaign against Brescia, where Count Sforza had broken his siege. Before leaving, Piccinino, urged on by Rinaldo, launched a quick attack on Florence, which failed. Here Machiavelli pounds home his point about the imbecility of modern war and geopolitics: “The victory was much more useful for Tuscany than harmful to the duke: for if the Florentines had lost the day, Tuscany was his; but having lost it himself, he lost nothing more than the arms and horses of his army, which he could replace with not much money. Nor were there ever times when war wages in the countries of others was less dangerous for whoever waged it than these.” In this case, “only one man died, and he not from wounds or any other virtuous blow, but, falling off his horse, he was trampled on and expired. With such security did men fight then: for they were all on horse and covered with armor, and being secure from death whenever they surrendered, there was no cause that they should die. They were defended by arms while fighting, and when they could no longer fight, they surrendered.” Misconceived philosophy, and especially misconceived theology, result in a virtù deficit. Machiavelli writes in effect to shame Christians into following his own teaching with an anti-gospel, a book of not-so-good news for modern man.

Book VI begins with a reflection on war. In this book Machiavelli, the new-philosophic prince of war, will show how war might be fought, fought in a way that will revive virtù, in opposition to popes and other princes of peace. His dilemma—that modern Italian examples of virtù scarcely exist—will be diminished if not removed by his reflection, which serves to clarify the nature of war (and thus of nature itself) in the minds of his readers. “It has always been the end of those who start a war—and it is reasonable that it should be so—to enrich themselves and impoverish the enemy. For no other cause is victory sought, nor for anyone else are acquisitions desired than to make oneself powerful and the adversary weak.” Ergo, don’t fight wars that will impoverish you if you win. “A prince or republic that eliminates enemies and takes possession of booty and ransom is enriched by victories in wars.” If you cannot eliminate your enemies, victory will impoverish you, especially since the booty and ransom will belong to your soldiers, not to you. Under those circumstances, you can only raise money by raising taxes on your own people, impoverishing and consequently angering them against you. “Ancient and well-ordered republics enriched themselves by winning wars, distributing the spoils among the people and commissioning “games and solemn festivals” for them to enjoy. “But victories in the times we are describing first emptied the treasury, then impoverished the people, and still did not secure you from your enemies” because you allowed them to live to fight another day. This is tantamount to saying that Christian mercy is bad policy. Thus the winner “enjoyed victory little” while the loser “felt loss little,” rearming for the next war.

Machiavelli’s object lesson is the career of Niccolò Piccinino, who repeatedly lost battles only to regroup and fight again. An example in miniature of the mediocre ups and downs of Fortuna in modern times, he would react to the smallest advantage with “ambition and insolence,” thereby irritating enemies and allies alike and bringing about another downfall. The stakes in war have become so small that vanity trumps even the prospect of victory, splitting alliances. He eventually put himself in the service of Pope Eugene, who, it will be recalled, should have numbered among his enemies, given the ancient hatred the Braccio held for the papacy.

Within Florence, the principal rivalry pitted Cosimo against Neri di Gino Capponi, whose influence diminished, however, when his main ally was murdered. For his part, Cosimo planted a young ally in Bologna and backed Francesco Sforza in his ambition to become duke of Milan against Neri’s fear that, so empowered, Sforza would threaten Florence. Count Sforza had allied with Duke Filippa of Milan, who died in 1447; this worried the count, but “he decided to show his face to fortune… because many times when one acts, plans reveal themselves, that, to one standing still, would always be hidden.” Sure enough, he began to see that he might play the Milanese off against the Venetians and vault himself into the dukedom of Milan. Much to their eventual regret, the Venetians surreptitiously allied with the count, calculating that the Milanese would then indignantly offer rule of their city to the Venetians in order to avoid rule by the treacherous count, their erstwhile ally turned would-be tyrant. Unrestrained “by fear or shame in breaking his faith, for great men call it shame to lose, not to acquire by deceit,” Count Sforza did indeed betray the Milanese and undertook to seize the city, which (contrary to the Venetians’ calculations) feared the Venetians’ “pride and harsh conditions” even more. The Milanese were reduced to threatening the count with God’s future justice, to which Sforza coolly replied that “Whether this was rue or not, that God upon whom they called to avenge their injuries would demonstrate at the end of the war” between them, which he soon won. Cosimo, who had argued that the Milanese citizenry and its mode of living, so “contrary to every form of civil government, could never defend themselves against a man like Sforza, and as for the threat the count might pose to Florence, a timely alliance with him would be less dangerous than a more powerful Venice. Once again, Cosimo proved correct, as the new Duke of Milan preferred an alliance with Florence to one with the perfidious Venetians.

War between Florence, allied with Milan, and Venice, allied with King Alfonso of Aragon, tipped somewhat in Florence’s favor when Florence brought France in on her side. Campaigns in Lombardy and Tuscany were “managed with neither great virtue nor with great danger” by and to any of the armies involved. By 1454 war weariness had set in on all sides, and threats from the Turkish Empire frightened the pope and the Venetians even more than it did the rest of Italy. The warring city-states concluded a peace treaty in April.

During the war years, Pope Nicholas V, who had succeeded Pope Eugene in 1447, experienced his own domestic crisis. “Living at that time was a Messer Stefano Porcari, a Roman citizen, noble by blood and by learning, but much more so by the excellence of his spirit [animo],” who wanted “to see if he could take his fatherland from the hands of prelates and restore it to its ancient way of life, hoping by this, should he succeed, to be called the new founder and second father of that city.” In this he relied on “the evil customs of the prelates and the discontent of the barons and the Roman people,” but “above all” (and foolishly) on the “higher and greater spirit (spirito)” praised by Petrarch in one of his poems, a “divine and prophetic spirit.” This second kind of spirit turned out to be vacuous; Nicholas V learned of the conspiracy, arrested Stefano and executed several of his confederates. True to his own stated notions of piety, Machiavelli writes that “the intention of his man could be praised by anyone, but his judgment will always be blamed by everyone because such undertakings, if their is some shadow of glory in thinking of them, have almost always very certain loss in their execution.” The animo may be willing but the spirito is weak.

As if to underscore the lessons of Book VI, Machiavelli takes due note of a devastating storm that struck Italy in 1456. “This whirlwind, driven by superior forces, whether they were natural or supernatural, broke on itself and fought within itself”—acting rather like Italian city-states, both within and among themselves. “From these clouds, so broken and confused, from such furious winds and frequent flashes, arose  noise never before heard from any earthquake or thunder of any kind or greatness; from it arose such fear that anyone who heard it judged that the end of the world had come and that earth, water, and the rest of the sky and the world would return mixed together to its ancient chaos.” No such thing happened, except in a small fortified town, San Casciano, near Florence. “Without doubt, God wanted to warn rather than punish Tuscany” by providing “this small example” to “refresh among men the memory of His power.” Since readers already know that Machiavelli considers Providence to be Fortune and Fortune to be nature, and nature to be ever-changing but occasionally if temporarily mastered by men who combine the courage of the lion with the prudence of the fox, they may take the warning in the spirit in which it is offered.

Throughout these wars, Cosimo and his allies in the Florentine regime had kept the city at peace with the other city-states. “But they were indeed not in repose within, as will be shown in detail in the following book.”

Machiavelli begins Book VII with an apologia. Although writing histories of Florence, and although he never “promised to write about things of Italy,” he will do so because without an account of such things “our history would be less understood and less pleasing.” Florentines “were compelled of necessity to intervene” in the affairs of other city-states because “other Italian peoples and princes” acted against Florentine interests, indeed threatening to attack Florence. For example, a war between Jean of Anjou and King Ferdinand of Aragon sparked “the hatreds and grave enmities that later ensued between Ferdinand and the Florentines, and particularly with the Medici family,” who angered the king by favoring Jean of Anjou.

But for his opening reflection or “reasoning” in the first chapter Machiavelli addresses not geopolitics but “divisions” or factions in republics. “Those who hope that a republic can be united are very much deceived in the hope.” Some divisions harm republics, some help. Harmful divisions have no “sects and partisans.” Helpful divisions have none. “Since a founder of a republic cannot provide that there be no enmities in it”—he cannot repeal human nature, which is part of changeable and occasional tempestuous nature as a whole—”he has to provide at least that there be no sects.” Human beings by their nature seek reputation. There are two “modes” of acquiring reputation: public and private. Examples of the public mode are military (“winning a battle”), imperial (“acquiring a town”), diplomatic or secretive (“carrying out a mission with care and prudence”), and advisory (if done “wisely and prosperously”). Examples of the private mode are doing favors to private individuals or groups—assistance with money, obtaining “unmerited honors” for someone, and “ingratiating oneself with the plebs with games and public gifts.” The private mode of acquiring reputation causes sects and partisans to form, and they offend those not benefited by the private favors. Helpful divisions amount to what we today call ‘a good cause,’ some group that aims at acquiring a something that contributes to “a common good.”

“The enmities in Florence were always accompanied by sects and therefore always harmful; never did a winning sect remain united except when the hostile sect was active, but as soon as the one conquered was eliminated, the ruling one, no longer having fear to restrain it or order within itself to check it, would become divided again” (emphasis added). There are no helpful divisions in Florence. Given the fact remarked by both Mansfield and Zuckert, that the term “sect” in Machiavelli is also defined as a religious grouping, this suggests that the Christian ‘atmosphere’ of Italy generally and of Florence in particular conduces to uncompromising and self-serving divisions, vengeful because it is reputation, not merely material interest, at stake; further, reputation can involve the as it were ‘ultimate’ reputation of being a saint or a sinner, an uncompromising division indeed.

Machiavelli explicitly identifies Cosimo de’ Medici’s group as a party. Cosimo wasn’t exactly a tyrant, as Zuckert asserts, because in addition to his private mode of ruling he also ruled in the “public way.” But he was undoubtedly a mixed blessing. The other prominent citizen of the time, Neri Capponi, “had acquired his reputation by public ways, so that he had many friends and few partisans.” He doesn’t form an exception to Machiavelli’s sweeping statement that no helpful divisions existed in Florence, however, because the two men “were united while they both lived,” thus making Neri’s influence less than pure. He died in 1455.

Cosimo ruled alone (albeit with many partisans and some friends) from then until his own death. Because his partisans had no rivals to fear, they began to chip away at Cosimo’s power. Cosimo could have “regain[ed] the state by force with the partisans who remained to him” or he “could let the thing go and in time have his friends learn that they were taking state and reputation not from him but from themselves.” He chose to let them learn the hard way, as he knew that his loyal supporters could rig the elections and enable him to “retake the state at his ease.” As the people and the plebs became more and more angered at the depredations of Cosimo’s renegade partisans, they the apparently powerful partisans “knew that not Cosimo but they themselves had lost the state.” They had been better off when they were allied with the low-key, prudent Medici man, and they came to him begging for rescue. Letting them twist in the wind, Cosimo did nothing himself, preferring to appoint a deputy, Luca Pitti, to act for him, “so that if [his] enterprise should incur any blame, it would be imputed to Luca and not to himself.” A ready if not cruel man, Luca called the people into the piazza “and by force and with arms made them consent to that which they had not consented to voluntarily before, namely the election of a new set of magistrates “created in accordance with the views of the few, on whose behalf the election was rigged, as per normal practice. One of Machiavelli’s ancestors, Girolamo Machiavelli, was banished and eventually recalled and executed by the new government, leaving readers to wonder whether Machiavelli has been willing to overlook this ancient punishment or writes his book partly in the spirit of revenge.

“Cosimo, now old and weary,” allowed Luca to become the de facto ruler of Florence. Under him, “violent and rapacious” citizens resumed their plunder; “thus if Florence did not have war from outside to destroy it, the city was destroyed by its own citizens,” as partisans are only united with rival partisans by some external threat. Cosimo died in 1464. His son Piero, “a good man,” was himself “too infirm and new in the state.” Evidently suffering from a form of gradually increasing paralysis, he did not improve Cosimo’s latter years in office.

Machiavelli now pauses to eulogize Cosimo, somewhat in the spirit he had addressed the Medici pope in the Epistle Dedicatory. Like many popes, Cosimo was “an unarmed man”; unlike some popes, he was Florence’s and indeed all of Italy’s “most reputed and renowned citizen.” “Above all other men, he was liberal and magnificent”; indeed, “there was no other citizen who had any quality in that city to whom Cosimo had not lent a large sum of money”—rule via the private mode, indeed. As for magnificence, he commissioned many grand buildings, but at the same time, although “he alone in Florence was prince” of the supposedly republican city, “so tempered was he by his prudence that he never overstepped civil modestly.” For that reason he excited much less envy than he otherwise would have done. And he was prudent in the Machiavellian way, a ‘fox’ who “recognized evils at a distance and therefore was in time either not to let them grow or to be prepared so that, if they did grow, they would not offend him.” This prudence extended to foreign policy. He pioneered peaceful ‘economic warfare’: “Cosimo with his own credit emptied Naples and Venice of money, so that they were constrained to accept the peace that he was willing to concede to them.” “Thus his virtue and fortune eliminated all his enemies and exalted his friends” in a time and place when the martial, ‘leonine’ virtues had nearly disappeared, giving the vulpine virtues freer reign.

Seemingly pious, not learned, but “full of natural prudence,” Cosimo “in his sayings was keen and grave.” In examining the sayings Machiavelli quotes, Zuckert rightly considers them less than pious (p. 438), although of course these sayings were delivered privately, as so many of his favors were, not in public, as his magnificent church-building projects were. Moreover, unlike good republican Cato, Cosimo patronized the arts. “A lover and exalter of literary men,” he “took into his home Marsilio Ficino, second father of Platonic philosophy, whom eh loved extremely; and that Ficino might pursue his studies of letters more comfortably and that eh might be able to use him more conveniently, Cosimo gave him a property near his own.” Neo-platonic philosophy and public Christianity enhance a ruler’s authority in Christendom, unless and until a man or men of more manly, military virtù come along. In Cosimo’s lifetime none such did.” “He died full of glory and with a very great name in the city and outside. All the citizens and all the Christian princes mourned his death with his son Piero.”

That there were limits to the Christianity of these Christian princes may be seen in the action of King Ferdinand of Aragon. Worried that Jacopo Piccinino, son of the condottieri, might threaten his city-state, Ferdinand lured him to Aragon with the promise of making him captain of his men. After fêting him there, he had him imprisoned and poisoned.

Back in Florence, Piero soon found himself betrayed by his adviser, Dietisalvi Neroni, himself betrayed by the secretary of the conspirators. He armed himself against them, and the Signori, seeing Piero armed and his adversaries unarmed, “began to think not about how they must offend Piero but about how they must become his friends.” Not long after, “the Neroni family were scattered” and some of their confederates arrested and tortured, then killed or exiled.  Dietisalvi and a few of his fellow exiled partisans went to Venice, hoping to incite them to attack Venice. They succeed in persuading the Venetians, only to witness yet another low-energy war ending in a truce that gained nothing for Cosimo’s enemies.

Like his elderly father before him, sickly Piero, evidently the victim of a progressive paralysis, knew little and did less to bridle his own partisans, who “so conducted themselves that it appeared that God and fortune had given them that city in prey.” Eventually alerted to their perfidy, he  called them before him, he lamented “how greatly I have deceived myself as one who knew little of the natural ambition of all men and less of yours.” They ignored him. There can be no doubt, Machiavelli writes, “that if he had not been interrupted by death he would have had all the exiles restored to their fatherland to check the rapacity of those within. His son Lorenzo would succeed him.

Fortune smiled on the young prince in the form of Tommaso Soderini, a man of “patience and authority” renowned in Florence and “among all the princes of Italy.” Although some Florentines urged him to take over the government of the city, he prudently told them to give their allegiance to Lorenzo, as “men never complain of doing the things they are used to doing; so quickly as new things are taken up, they are dropped; and it has always been easier to maintain a power that by length of time has eliminated envy than to raise up a new one that for very many causes could easily be eliminated,” such as for example himself, if he were to go along with the proposal. “Following after Messer Tommaso, Lorenzo, although he was young, spoke with such gravity and modesty that he gave everyone hope of being that which he later did become.”

“The citizens did not deviate from the advice of Messer Tommaso,” but Lorenzo soon did. “A new and unexpected tumult arose in Tuscany,” when the town fathers of Volterra seized an alum mine in which some Florentines had invested stirred thoughts of military intervention by Florence. Prudent Messer Tommaso counseled conciliation, worrying that the pope and other outside powers might involve themselves in an armed conflict there. “Encouraged by those who were envious of the authority of Messer Tommaso,” and intent on taking the old man down a peg, Lorenzo went ahead and undertook a campaign “to punish with arms the arrogance of the Volterrans” and also, evidently, to do a characteristically Medician private favor to the Florentine investors. The gambit worked, but Tommaso remained skeptical: “To me [Volterra] appears lost; for if you had received it by accord, you would have had advantage and security from it; but since you have to hold it by force, in adverse times it will bring you weakness and trouble and in peaceful times, loss and expense.”

Adverse times were coming. Lorenzo next intervened, this time ineffectually, on behalf of a friend who ruled the town Città di Castello, which the pope intended to bring to heal for defying his authority. Although the pope won, this was “quite enough to sow the first seeds of enmity between Sixtus and the Medici that shortly produced very evil fruits.” The Florentines, Duke Galeazzo of Milan, and the Venetians formed a league, which the pope, allied with Ferdinand of Naples, prepared to fight. The pope wanted to split the rival league by winning over the Venetians. Meanwhile, Galeazzo was assassinated by some young bravos, who themselves were captured and killed. Never one wholeheartedly to condemn manifestations of virtù, Machiavelli writes that “the undertaking of these unhappy youths was planned secretly and executed spiritedly and then they were ruined when those they had hoped would have to follow and defend them neither defended nor followed them.” One expect him to uphold the need to balance leonine spiritedness with vulpine prudence, but Machiavelli concludes rather more sententiously, “Therefore, may princes learn to live in a manner and act in a mode that will make them revered and loved, so that no one can hope, by killing him, to save himself.” The assassination was only the first of several “accidents” that followed, now in Florence, “which broke the peace that had lasted for twelve years in Italy.”

The eighth and final book begins without the usual thematic discussion. Or does it? Machiavelli writes that while it might appear proper “to reason the qualities of conspiracies and their importance,” he dismisses the topic by claiming that he’s dealt with it elsewhere. Accordingly, he shifts to the topic of “the state of the Medici after it had conquered all the enmities that had come against it openly,” remarking that “if that house wanted to take sole authority in the city and to stand out from the others by living civilly, it was necessary that it overcome those that schemed secretly against it.” This is necessary because “almost always a prince of the city, attacked by such conspiracies… rises to greater power and many times from being a good man, becomes bad,” out of fear. Fearing, he moves “to secure himself”; securing himself, he injures many, and “hence hatreds arise later, and often to his ruin.” Conspiracy aims at deception. Machiavelli has opened Book VIII with a mildly amusing bait-and-switch, a reflection that isn’t presented as one.

The conspiracy he describes begins with distrust and dislike arising between the Medici and the wealthy Pazzi family. Francesco Pazzi conspired with Count Girolamo Riario, who is married to a Sforza, to murder Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. They enlisted Pope Sixtus IV in their scheme—somewhat surprisingly, as the average pope doesn’t sign on as an accessory to murder, which was to take place in a church. Although Lorenzo came to church that day, escorted by the local cardinal, Giuliani was nowhere to be seen. Francesco and co-conspirator Bernardo Bandini “went to his house to find him and with prayers and art led him to church.” “It is a thing truly worthy of memory that so much hatred, so much thought about such an excess, could be covered up with so much heart and so much obstinacy of spirit by Francesco and Bernardo; for though they led him to church, both on the way and in church they entertained him with jests and youthful banter.” Although they Medici knew the Pazzi’s “bitter spirit” against themselves, they didn’t expect it to manifest itself in violence.

Those hired to do the actual killing proved “very inept for such a great undertaking.” They murdered Guiliani, but Lorenzo survived and the attackers were captured, killed, and dragged to the city. Others associated with the conspiracy were hanged. As for the not-so-masterful minds who designed the conspiracy, Gravely wounded, Francesco fled while Bernardo “fled unharmed.” At home, he begged Jacopo Piccinino to launch a counter-attack. Gathering “perhaps a hundred men who had been prepared for such an enterprise,” he went to the palace piazza, “calling to his aid the people and liberty.” “But because the one had been made deaf by the fortune and liberality of the Medici and the other was not known in Florence, he had no response from anyone.” The Pazzis were ruined, many of them killed.

What have we learned here? Machiavelli begins with a brief lesson on paying attention to how people write and, by extension, talk. Deception may lurk in writing and in speech, including playful badinage. Such ‘covers’ as piety and friendliness will be useful. Be “obstinate” or strong-willed in carrying out your plot, but for the actions themselves, hire experienced men if you are not experienced. If at some stage you seek public support, know the public mind better than Messer Jacopo did. As for guarding against conspiracy, the main lesson here seems to be to take nothing for granted and keep up your guard.

“Since the change of state did not occur in Florence as the pope and the king [of Naples] desired, they decided that what they had not been able to do by conspiracy they would do by war.” “And so the Florentines might feel spiritual wounds in addition to their temporal ones, the pope excommunicated and cursed them.” Unlike his enemies in Florence, Lorenzo responded first by assuring himself of the support of his citizens. Answering the implied charge that he has ruled despotically, and not incidentally implicating him in the way Florence has been ruled, he tells them, “My house could not have ruled and would not be able to rule this republic if you together with it had not rued and did not rule now.” And even if the Medici deserved ruin, “Why make league with the pope and the king against the liberty of this republic?” Unlike Jacopo’s appeal to civic liberty, Lorenzo appeals to sovereignty, the independence or liberty of Florence in an Italy not lacking in enemies of that independence. Further, why would the conspirators and the foreign enemies “break the long peace of Italy,” as “they ought to offend whoever offends them and not confound their private enmities with public injuries.” As Machiavelli well noted earlier, the Medici themselves have used private benefits as one means of rule, so one might say that private matters cannot be dismissed as irrelevant by a Medici. Perhaps recognizing this, Lorenzo finished with a more powerful appeal, a gesture of self-sacrifice. “I would willingly put out your fire with my ruin…. I am in your hands: it is for you to rule or leave me; you are my fathers, you are my defenders; and however much I am commissioned to do by you, to end this war, begun with the blood of my brother, with mine.” There wasn’t a dry eye left in the place, and they pledged loyalty to him in the war and provided him with bodyguards. This exemplifies Machiavelli’s opening teaching, that a survivor of a conspiracy may rise to greater power. Will Lorenzo also become a worse man for all of this?

“The pope had shown himself to be a wolf and not a shepherd.” The Florentines requested assistance in the war from the young Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo, and the Venetians, “showing the impiety of the pontiff and his injustice and that the pontificate that he had sized wickedly he exercised wickedly.” They forced the priests in Florence to continue performing their sacramental duties, despite the papal condemnation of the city—a small-scale reprise of the pre-Charlemagne relationship between Emperor and Church. For his part, the pope “justif[ied] his cause” by declaring that popes have a duty to “eliminate tyranny, oppress the wicked, exalt the good, and “that it was indeed not the office of secular princes to arrest cardinals, to hang bishops, to kill, dismember and drag around priests, and to slay the innocent and the guilty without distinction.”

The war began to turn in the favor of the pope’s alliance, and the citizens of Florence began to turn against the war. Avoiding contact with the pope, Lorenzo treated with the King of Naples, reasoning (at least in the way Machiavelli summarizes) that “in wars and dangers, whoever is friend of the pope will be accompanied in victories and be alone in defeats, since the pontiff is sustained and defended by spiritual power and reputation.” It may be that the king thought along these lines, too; after receiving Lorenzo and listening to him speak, he “marveled more, after he had heard him, at the greatness of his spirit, the dexterity of his genius and gravity of his judgment, than he had marveled before at his being able to sustain so great a war alone.” He “began to think he had rather have him leave as friend than hold him as enemy.” Peace treaty in hand, Lorenzo returned to Florence not just great but “very great,” as “had exposed his very life to gain peace for his fatherland” and thereby delivering on his claim to be willing to risk sacrificing himself for Florence.

The pope, allied with the king, and the Venetians, allied with Florence, reacted with “indignation,” surprised at this separate peace arrived at without consultation with themselves. The Florentines worry that “a greater war might arise,” but “God, who in such extremities has always had a particular care for [Florence], made an unhoped-for accident arise that gave the king, the pope, and the Venetians something greater to think about than
Tuscany,” namely, their own survival. The Turkish commander landed 4,000 troops at the Italian city of Oranto. At this turn of events, which Machiavelli now ascribes to “fortune,” the pope changed his tune, offering pardon to Florence in exchange for forces to help repel the Turks, among other things. The Florentine ambassador reduced some of the harsher provisions demanded; Machiavelli doesn’t say how he did that, but he does mention that this ambassador had recently returned from France, and it is conceivable that the ambassador might have hinted at the possibility of an alliance with that country. Be that as it may have been, Machiavelli observes that “force and necessity, not written documents and obligations, make princes keep faith.” In the event, factional infighting following the death of the Grand Turk Mahomet forced withdrawal of the Turkish forces.

Relieved, the pope engaged the condottieri Roberto Malatesta to drive Florentine and Milanese forces, which had encamped near Rome. “This battle was fought with more virtue than any other that had been fought for fifty years in Italy”; battle-deaths exceeded one thousand. “The outcome was glorious for the Church,” although Roberto didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. He died of a “flux” after drinking too much water on a hot day. Exhibiting a degree of Machiavellian virtù seldom seen in popes, Sixtus IV promptly attempted to seize his late protector’s city, Rimini. Once more threatened by the Florentines and the King of Milan, the pope “was forced to think about peace and the union of Italy. Hence, the pontiff, out of fear and also because he saw that the greatness of the Venetians would be the ruin of the Church and of Italy, turned to make an accord with the league.” Seeing “all Italy united against them,” the Venetians held on, thanks to disunity among the allies, who by 1484 “were wearied by the expenses” of the wars and unwilling “to make any further test of their fortune.” The pope died five days after the peace treaty was concluded in spring of 1484, leaving “in peace that Italy which he had always kept at war while he lived.” The new pope, Innocent III, with the “easy nature” of “a humane and quiet man… had arms put aside and for the time pacified Rome,” which had itself been riven with divisions.

“For the time”: the time didn’t last long. The city of l’Aquila rebelled against Naples; the pope sided with l’Aquila, hating as he did the King of Naples. The Florentines jumped in on the side of their ally, the king. Ferdinand proceeded to crush the rebellion and its papal ally; through intermediaries sent by the king of Spain “a peace was concluded, to which the pope agreed because he had been beaten by fortune and did not want to try it further.” Evidently, Innocent wasn’t entirely innocent, attributing his reversal to Fortune instead of Providence. He did learn “from the example of the war with how much promptness the Florentines keep their friendships,” and Lorenzo, seizing another opportunity, married his daughter to Innocent’s son.

Lorenzo died in 1492. Machiavelli’s eulogy will remind readers of his eulogy of Cosimo, and it includes mention of the latest Medici as a patron of arts and letters, that politically dubious inclination which nonetheless might benefit our author. However, Lorenzo had a vice Cosimo didn’t have: in private, he was a great lover of “childish games” and of women. “Thus, considering both his voluptuous [private] life and his grave [public] life, one might see in him two different persons, joined in an almost impossible conjunction.” Does Machiavelli here glance at God, Father and Son, the latter dying young, an unarmed prophet? One scholar suggests that his vices might have contributed to his early death; she also elaborates on “the very great disasters” which arose “from his death,” disasters Machiavelli mentions without enumerating, “bad seeds” that, “since the one who knew how to eliminate them was not alive, ruined and are still ruining Italy.” [8]

Unmentioned by Machiavelli, Lorenzo’s son Piero would go on to open the door of Italy to French forces two years after his father’s death. The French went on to devastate much of the area, and the Medici were expelled from Florence. This accorded with a prediction by the priest Savanarola, who had prophesied that “the sword of God” would punish Italy or its sins. This unarmed prophet founded a fairly democratic regime in Florence but was executed in 1498. As for himself, Machiavelli would find employment under the subsequent Florentine regime, only to be dismissed by the Medici in 1512, when the family was readmitted and the republic was replaced. [9]

A few pages earlier, Machiavelli had described the city of San Giorgio and its relations with Genoa, which ran itself into a war debt and borrowed from some of San Giorgio’s rich citizens. The Genoese granted their creditors income from customs until such time the debts were fully repaid. With this steady income guaranteed, the creditors “ordered among themselves a mode of government, making a council of a hundred of themselves to deliberate public affairs and a magistracy of eight citizens as head of all to execute them.” Over time (and more loans), Genoa gave the San Giorgio regime most of the towns in its empire. The citizens of Genoa began to prefer San Giorgian rule to that of the Genoese regime, which they came to regard “as something tyrannical.” Unlike Genoa, “because San Girogio has arms, money and government, and one cannot alter the laws without danger of a certain and dangerous rebellion,” the city enjoys stability unseen in party-wracked Florence. San Giorgio provides “an example truly rare, never found by the philosophers in all the republics they have imagined”—one thinks of Plato’s—”and seen”—one thinks of Aristotle’s many examples. In the San Giorgio-Genoa conjunction one sees “within the same circle, among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, civil life and corrupt life, justice and license, because that order alone keeps he city full of is ancient and venerable customs. And if it should happen—which in time it surely will—that San Giorgio should take over the whole city, that would be a republic more memorable than the Venetian.” Or the Florentine?

 

 

Notes

1.  Zuckert observes, “Charlemagne fundamentally altered the relation between the emperor and the pope” (389); instead of the emperor choosing the pope, the pope and the Roman people (decisively influenced by the pope’s spiritual authority over popular opinion) chose the emperor.
2. “In describing the founding of Florence as a colony… Machiavelli acknowledges that the dependent status of a colony was not good for it. The Florentines were not able to do anything worthy of memory for the first twelve hundred years of their city’s existence. Because the city was founded as a colony of Rome, its citizens did not learn how to rule themselves. Moreover, they acquired the destructive habit of looking to others to defend them.” (Zuckert, p. 393).
3. Mansfield makes much of this aphorism, observing that the law that looks back the longest time, among all laws, is “the law of obedience to God, in which all men are sinners because they are involved in the original sin” (p. 167). Belief in divine retribution for original sin—death and even eternal damnation—infects souls in a Christian civilization to exact “politically unmanageable” acts of revenge against their own enemies, as seen in Florentine sectarian conflict, which divides the city irremediably (at least so long as it is inflected by Christian sentiments). “Florentine partisanship feeds on the Christian spirit, as Machiavelli sees it, of absolute revenge” (p. 167), despite the countervailing Christian teaching, “Judge not that you be judged.” Whether or not Machiavelli intended to suggest this interpretation, it is clear that Machiavelli opposes Christianity, and not merely the Papacy.
4. “Machiavelli does not comment directly on what is the theoretically most interesting and radical argument about the foundations and nature of government to be found in the Florentine Histories. Instead he lets events speak for themselves.” (Zuckert, p. 410) (Insofar, one might add, as Machiavelli ever really lets events speak for themselves.)
5. Mansfield emphasizes the Christian ethos pervading Italy, in many ways exemplified by the triumph of Cosimo, who came to power not through his own arms, his own virtù, but through the intervention of the Signori. Mansfield adds that Cosimo’s descendants would become popes (pp. 143-146).
6. Zuckert very acutely recalls that “even those who ad not read Machiavelli’s Discourses would have known that Rome also fell and not, primarily, as a result of its embrace of philosophy. And, in fact, Machiavelli’s explanation of the rise and fall of order here applies better to Florence than to Rome, because the Medici were great patrons of philosophy along with the other arts” (p. 424)—as Machiavelli himself tells his readers in Book VIII.
7. “In the second half of his history Machiavelli then shows that a tyrant [Cosimo] does not necessarily arise with the use of arms or force.” To borrow a phrase from recent Chinese rhetoric, such a ‘peaceful rise’ requires a policy of “benefiting individuals and private groups” rather than the public, the city as a whole. This causes a diminution of civic spirit, leaving the city vulnerable in war—the eventual downfall of the Medici in 1494, i.e., two years after the end of Machiavelli’s narrative. (Zuckert, p. 387).
8. Zuckert, p. 451.
9. See Zuckert, pp. 24-37 for a succinct and useful biographical sketch of Machiavelli.

Sophocles: Antigone. Peter Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Sophocles: Antigone. William Blake Tyrrell translation and notes. Posted on-line by Professor Tyrrell.

William Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett: Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.

Seth Benardete: Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.

Note: Benardete’s characteristically subtle and intricate interpretation of the play resists summary, and no attempt at such will be found here. Rather, I have taken insights from his book to supplement my own (much simpler, and indeed simple-minded) interpretation, indicating them in parenthetical references to the pages on which they are found. “B” refers to Benardete, “TB” to Tyrrell and Bennett.

WM

 

In the city of Thebes, outside the gates of the royal courtyard, seeking secrecy, away from listening ears of rulers and their allies, Antigone meets with her sister, Ismene, in the semi-darkness before sunrise. Antigone appeals to their familial bond, calling her “sister,” but also intends to call her into a plot, a joint action, calling her “partner.” She appeals, too, to shared suffering, to the “evils” which have befallen them both, as a consequence of their father Oedipus’ actions or the wrath of Zeus—”your and my evils.” She is indignant at a public action. “The general,” Creon, has “laid down” an “edict” regarding their brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. After the death of King Oedipus, they had quarreled over the throne. Polyneices had recruited an
Argive army to attack Thebes; during the battle, won by the Thebans, they killed each other. “Evils proper to enemies are coming against loved ones,” Antigone says. Ismene has heard “no word” of the edict, and Antigone has suspected as much: “Outside the gates of the Courtyard, I drew you for this very reason, so that you alone might hear.” Creon has honored Eteocles, defender of Thebes, and dishonored Polyneices, refusing to allow him to be buried. Anyone who attempts to bury him will be executed by “public stoning” by the city. You, Ismene, now knowing this, “will soon show whether you are by nature of good descent or one born wicked from those who are noble.” You will show it by deciding whether or not to join my plot, a private action intended to subvert what she takes to be an unjust public action.

Antigone associates sky-god Zeus with the city, Creon also with the city, the public. The city is said to be ruled by the Olympian gods. Antigone, however, cares not for the city but for the family, for the gods of the household, gods who dwell beneath the earth in the Underworld, which is ruled by Hades, chief ground of the Underworld. She associates nature, too, with the family, with bloodlines or descent. Antigone does not say why Creon has issued his edict. Nor does she mention the war, the fact that Eteocles and Polyneices were rivals for the rule of Thebes, the fact that Polyneices was killed during the war after having attacked Thebes and that Eteocles defended Thebes. She is also silent on the fact that the brothers perished in acts of mutual fratricide. She has no interest in politics or war. Instead she speaks about how Polyneices’ body has been “left for the birds,” food they doubtless will regard as “a sweet treasure,” not as what it is for humans, a putrid corpse (B.3) Although Creon has issued his edict to the city, Antigone insists that he has meant it as a command to you, Ismene, and “to me!” “It is no business of his to keep me from my own!” Antigone loves her own, her own family and especially her own brother. Even before Ismene can say if she will join her plot to give their brother a decent burial, which will enable him to join the royal family in the Underworld, Antigone has claimed the action for herself.

Ismene demurs. Our father, she argues, died “hated and infamous,” a suicide, having killed his father and married his mother, who also committed suicide; our family is not as loveable and noble as you claim. Our brothers killed each other. Then there is the city, and its ruler: “Consider how terribly we will be destroyed, if, in defiance of the law we transgress the decree or power of tyrants.” Ismene knows or perhaps assumes that the law of the city requires obedience to the decrees or edicts of tyrants. Finally, there is a natural limit associated with the city’s threat, countervailing the natural bond of family. “We are by nature women, not combatants against men”; it is a natural fact that “we are ruled by those who are stronger.” Therefore, “Those living in authority I will obey,” hoping for “understanding” from those no longer living, those “under the earth,” no longer on it. “For to do what is beyond the bounds” of family obligation, of decrees, and of the law that she thinks supports those decrees, “is altogether mindless!”

For Ismene, then “nature” means first and foremost the difference in physical strength between the sexes. “Antigone” means anti-woman, anti-generation. Like Lady Macbeth, Anti-gone ‘unsexes’ herself, ignoring her womanliness (B.10). This puts her in a circumstance of unusual tension with the city; she is a woman who thinks and acts against her womanly nature, but at the same time defies the man-ruled city. Her denial enables her to dismiss Ismene’s last argument. “You will be whatever suits your opinion,” she ripostes. Being—meaning here a way of life— is determined by opinion, for Antigone; it is not a ‘given.’ A way of life may be noble or ignoble. For my part, “I will bury him. It is noble for me, doing this, to die. A loved one will I lie, with him, a loved one—having stopped at nothing in doing this pious deed!” Lying-with is the language of incest, one of father King Oedipus’ crimes (B.13). Antigone will perform a pious deed—honoring the gods of the Underworld—for an end that suggests the incestuous, impiousness. But she does make a rational argument, too, saying she prefers to “please” the dead because it is in the Underworld where “I lie forever.” The above-ground world where cities are is only a temporary home for human beings. The gods of the city may punish us here, but it is the gods of the Underworld who will rule us eternally.

Ismene rejoins, “I am by nature incapable of acting in violent defiance of the citizens.” Her nature, fearful or at least respectful of men’s superior bodily strength, inflects her way of life, which in turn is shaped by public opinion—itself the rule of the stronger, of the majority. Further, you, Antigone, “have a warm heart for cold things,” for a corpse, for the dead. “But you know that I am satisfying those whom I must especially please,” Antigone replies—the deathless dead. Your love is misdirected, Ismene insists, as “you are passionately in love with what is impossible”—namely, successful defiance of men’s power in the city; further, such “a hunt for what is impossible is not fitting,” not natural or legal. Antigone, however, intends precisely to defy the limits of what Ismene says is fitting. “I will suffer nothing that is so great that I will not die ignobly.” She chooses not a decent life but a noble death. Ismene calls this “mindless,” while admitting that her sister is “rightly dear to your loved ones.” They depart, separately.

The Chorus, who are the city elders, greet the Sun, a sky-god, not an Underworld god. They credit him for having driven away “the Mortal from Argos,” Capaneus, whom Polyneices had “raised up” against Thebes as an ally in his struggle for the throne. Benardete observes that Antigone is the only suffering heroine in extant Greek tragedy who has no female chorus to console her (B.19). Unlike self-unsexed Antigone, the Chorus side with the city and its gods, especially Zeus, who “detests the boasts of a great tongue,” the boasts of a failed would-be conqueror like Capaneus. Zeus rules the turning points of battles on earth; along with the war-god Ares, he causes victory (B.22). As for the lamentable deaths of the two brothers, “since great-named Victory has come with responsive joy to well-armed Thebes, of these present wars establish forgetfulness.” They would have the city celebrate with wine-god Bacchus (Dionysus), whose mother, Semele, was born in Thebes; Bacchus is well-armed for inducing forgetfulness. The Chorus calls Creon a king, not a tyrant, as Antigone had done. Seeing him, the Chorus wonders, “What plan does he come turning over”?

Creon addresses this “assembly of elders.” “Men,” he announces—appeals to manliness will prove crucial to his claim to rule—”the affairs of the city the gods have safely set right again, after having shaken them with much tossing,” by which he may mean not only the war but the travails of Oedipus and his queen-mother-wife, Jocasta. But now he must establish his own legitimacy, and this will drive his arguments and actions throughout. He knows that the elders “have always revered” the “throne of Laius,” that is, the ruling dynasty to which Oedipus was heir. In this he glosses over Oedipus’ dubious accession to power and his crimes, which may have invalidated his sons’ claims to succeed him in ruling the city (B.24). Like Antigone, then, Creon needs to derive the authority he claims from the Laius family, but like her, the authority he so derives is questionable—parricidal and incestuous, both against the family and familial-too-familial. He therefore points not to the legitimacy of Oedipus’ claim to rule but to the wisdom which made him deserving of it, seen in his solution of the riddle of the Sphinx. Despite all the troubles that followed, you elders “remained still steadfast in mind,” consenting to the rule of the house of Laius.

Now, having witnessed the deaths by fratricide of the inheriting brothers, killed “by their own polluting hands,” you surely must recognize that “it is I who hold all the might and the throne in accordance with closeness of kinship with the dead”; he is the wife of Oedipus’ surviving sister. This means that neither Creon nor the elders contemplate accession to the throne by a woman, whether his wife or either of Oedipus’ daughters. Women remain in the household, protected by the city but not ruling it. As for his wisdom and other virtues—the better claim of Oedipus to rule, and one that Creon needs to address, as well—”it is not feasible to learn, in the case of any man, the soul and mind and judgment, until he would be manifestly tested by offices and laws.” Proverbially, ‘power shows the man’; you can only find out what’s in a man if you give him the authority to rule. As a precaution, however, Creon admits that “to me whoever in directing an entire city fails to grasp the best counsels… seems now, and from of old, most evil”; he promises to share power with the elders, not to rule tyrannically. As if anticipating Antigone’s defiance, or at least defiance of he edict he has issued against the burial of Polyneices, he adds that “whoever conventionally holds a loved one as better than the land of his own fathers, I say this man is nowhere!” Creon associates fathers and brother-citizens with the land; Antigone associates fathers and brothers with their graves, with the family plots in which their remains are interred. Benardete remarks that the city is the regime, but the fatherland “persists through all changes of regime” (B.25). Creon would consolidate his regime not only or even primarily by invoking the royal line to which he is related only by marriage, nor by blood, nor so much to his virtues (which are by his own admission as yet unproven), but by linking his regime to the fatherland, to the Olympian gods who rule that fatherland. He appeals not only to the elders’ loyalty to the royal family, not only to their proffered share in political authority, but to their patriotism. To make this claim, and to assert moreover its priority over the claims of family, he calls family claims merely conventional, whereas his edict is patriotic, calling citizens to a larger brotherhood, to loyalty to the land of their fathers, not to the claims of the fathers and brothers of their own particular families.

His argument is by no means trivial. From his own time to ours, families and clans challenge the authority of political communities, at times threatening to split them apart in civil war, at times appealing to foreign rulers to strengthen their claims to rule—foreign rulers who may decide to rule the community themselves, once admitted into its gates. The defense of political rule against familial self-rule has merit. It remains to be seen whether Creon’s defense of such rule makes sense, whether his way of ruling will prove as virtuous as he promises. And there is one dimension of the circumstance that goes unmentioned by Antigone, who is apolitical and doesn’t care about it, by Creon, who is tyrannical and has no reason to mention it, and indeed by no one, now or later. Polyneices and Eteocles had a pact; they agreed to share the rule of the city, taking turns being king on an annual basis. Eteocles violated his oath and refused to step down when his year was up; in raising the Argive army against Thebes, Polyneices, it could at least be argued, prosecuted a just war—at least in the sense that he fought for a just cause. No person in Sophocles’ play mentions this, but the audience at the play might well have known it that patriotic Eteocles violated an oath witnessed by the city he defended.

Like Antigone, Creon believes that he knows the minds of the gods, and that they know his mind. “For I—may Zeus Who always sees all things know—would not be silent when I saw ruin in place of salvation coming on the townsmen.” I shall never “hold dear a man who was ill disposed to the land,” the fatherland; “for I now that this is what saves, and that when this sails upright, we make loved ones.” The land, the surface of the earth, provides protection and nourishment for those who live on it, in cities; we owe it our prime loyalty for that reason. Antigone associates love, and loveableness, with family; Creon associates it with the fatherland, as those who are loyal to it will love one another. Further, “it is with laws such as these that I make the city grow.” The ‘law’ in this case is his edict to honor Eteocles, “who in fighting on behalf of this city died,” and to dishonor Polyneices, who, while “sharing [Eteocles’] blood,” attempted “to burn down the land of his fathers and the kindred gods,” to “drink common blood and to carry [the Thebans] away as slaves.” The familial blood-tie didn’t stop Polyneices from turning against his brother, and to form the intention to ruin the city he could not rule. [1]

The argument again has merit, but it is shadowed with problems. Creon confuses his edict with the law, indeed, “mistak[ing] the laws of his soul for the laws of his country” (B.28). His edict and his justification of it he calls “my thought”; never by me shall the wicked take precedence in honor over the just, who, “in death and while living, will be honored similarly by me.” Because he cannot simply inherit rule, because he must argue for it, and because he intends a regime of one man, not many or even a few, his speech shades into a self-absorption not unlike that of Antigone. The difference is that he ‘identifies with’ the city—directs his eros towards it—not the family. It is not, as Benardete says, that Cleon fails to see the possibility of conflict between love of one’s own country and love of one’s own family, a failure that “shows how unprepared he is to confront Antigone” (B.27); on the contrary, he sees that possibility quite clearly, and argues against it. Rather, he tries to override that conflict, to defeat it as thoroughly as the Thebans have defeated the Argives in the war. But the civil life of the city may require more balance than the violent life of the battlefield, outside the city. The Chorus, who speak for respectable opinion in the city, put the responsibility for the edict squarely on Creon; they imagine he wants them to guard the corpse. But Creon has guards for that; he only wants the Chorus “not to join the side of those who lack faith in these things” that he has asserted. To this, the Chorus replies, “No man is so foolish as to love being dead!” That is, they fear Cleon’s power more than they consent freely to his rule. What will upend Creon is not them but Antigone, the anti-woman woman, who is indeed so foolish as to love being dead, for reasons she has disclosed to her sister, reasons at present unknown to Creon, the Chorus, or any of the men who are citizens.

Uneasy the head that wears the (somewhat dubious) crown: Creon suspects that hope of gain might overpower fear of death among the men of the city. A guard enters to report, reluctantly, that Polyneices’ corpse has been sprinkled with dust, that “the holy rituals” have been performed on it, contravening Creon’s edict. The guard denies that he did it; he denies any knowledge of who did it; and he denies that any of his fellow guards did it, saying that they had fallen to accusing each other of the deed. This guard was chosen by lot to tell Creon the bad news; he is the scapegoat, ‘chosen’ by Fate. When the pious, elderly Chorus suggest that the gods did it, Creon angrily denies it. The gods of these temples, the gods who accept offerings in those temples, the gods of this land, of these laws, would never honor this corpse. No, his political enemies must have bribed the guards, a theme upon which he is quick to moralize. To humans “there is no conventional thing that has grown up that is so evil as money,” which divides and ruins both cities and families, perverts hitherto “upstanding minds,” destroys morals and sets mortals to “shameful acts,” indeed to “impiety in every action.” He swears by Zeus that if you guards fail to find the criminal and “show him to my eyes, Hades alone won’t suffice for you,” as I will torture you before I kill you. That will teach you; “you shall learn that one ought not to be fond of making gain from everything!” Under his regime, “more are ruined than saved” by such “shameful takings.”

The Guard is surprisingly insouciant in the face of these threats, quite unlike the Chorus, who are already intimidated, without having been threatened. Creon had threatened actions to cut through words—lies and opinions. But the Guard is confident that his innocence will prevail and besides, he will simply not return to Creon’s presence. He had worried that Creon would have him executed merely for reporting bad news, but “having been preserved” from this, “beyond my hope and my judgment,” he “owe[s] to the gods great gratitude.” Having been chose by lot to risk himself, he has now been saved by Fate or by the gods, whichever determined the outcome of the lot. He can now take matters into his own hands by avoiding Creon in the future.

Creon and the Guard exit, leaving the Chorus to reflect upon these events. They too generalize, and moralize, from the events and characters they have seen to observations about the nature of man. “Many are the terrible things, and nothing more terrible than man!” Their immediate example is terrifying Creon, but Creon is human, and his actions are human-all-too human. Man sails the sea, powered by the winter winds; he travels on “the highest” of the gods, Earth, but despite the divinity of sea (Poseidon), wind (Boreus), and Earth, he exploits them all, uses them for his own purposes, netting the fish of the sea, capturing the birds of the air, domesticating the wild beast of the earth and hitching them to plows, ruling them, using horses and bulls as living implements with which he “tirelessly wears away the earth” from which he has seized them. More, his speech, his thought, and “the rage that gives towns laws he has taught himself” bespeak his resourcefulness in exploiting and controlling resources. The city’s laws are man-made, not god-made; the arts generally are self-taught. “Justice is sworn to in the name of the gods,” but not therefore sincerely. In the mind of man, the gods rule only nominally. The gods did not give the arts, including such political arts as rhetoric, to man; nor did man steal them from the gods, as the story of Prometheus maintains. The gods had nothing to do with the man-made arts which man made for himself. The god who limits man is Hades, the god under, not above or on, the earth, the god associated with burial, with Antigone (B.42). And even this limit can be extended by man’s art, by medicine. The Chorus see that man “is high in the city; but without any city is he with whom the ignoble consorts, on account of daring. May he never share my hearth, nor think on an equal level with me, who does these things,” such as burying the corpse of a man self-exiled from his fatherland and city, one who would rally a foreign ruler to conquer that fatherland, that city, on behalf of his own claims to rule. The hearth is the fire, the fourth, final element, the one that Prometheus is said to have stolen from the gods. Antigone reveres Hades, under the earth, who limits man; Creon upholds the city in the name of Zeus, but the city is located on the earth—Earth, whom the Chorus laud as the highest god, “imperishable,” and therefore greater than Zeus. Man is therefore “terrible,” using arts to plough the earth, making use of the highest god, but without such impiety he is ignoble.

Antigone, by contrast, justifies her action in behalf of her brother, her family, and the Underworld god as noble, condemning her sister, obedient to the city and its ruler, as ignoble, fearful of death—as is the Chorus, the Chorus has admitted. As Benardete puts it, “However unaware the Chorus are that the city can only be high at the expense of the highest of the gods, the Chorus do see that the city cannot be, as Creon assumes, unqualifiedly good” (B.41). The city rests on earth, but it establishes and maintains itself by the arts which exploit earth, air, sea, and fire. Antigone, by contrast, “has no arts” (B.52); “her morality undermines the city no less than her immorality (B.49), that is, her daring, which she opposes to manly daring. “With her hot heart for cold things, her love of death, and her antigeneration, Antigone shows thus the union of the divine and the human, which (the Chorus thought) the city harmonized, is essentially monstrous” (B.50). One need not endorse the anti-Christian animus that lurks behind that comment; nor need one endorse its anti-political character. But Benardete is right with respect to Creon‘s single-minded patriotism, the patriotism of a tyrant who will not, in the end, want to share political authority with anyone.

The Guard returns, with Antigone. The Chorus hope she isn’t the guilty one, “you wretched one, of a wretched father, Oedipus.” They ask her, “Are you the one who, in folly,” “lacked faith in the royal laws”? The Guard, not Antigone, answers that she is indeed the one. Creon emerges from the royal courtyard, thinking characteristically of himself: “With what fortune have I arrived in coordination?” The Guard is only too happy to tell him, and at considerable length, caring for his own exoneration and expecting it. To be sure, he had determined never to return to Creon’s presence, but one should never swear to anything, since “the second thoughts falsify the judgment.” Creon doubts him, still convinced that he must be corrupted by the money of his enemies in the city (enemies, it might be noticed, never come forward, and are never identified at any time during the play). The Guard triumphantly describes his own wisdom—that Oedipal and Creonian title to rule—as seen in the way he and his fellows trapped Antigone, who, upon seeing that someone had swept off the dust she had lovingly applied to Polyneices’ body, “shrieked out bitterly, with a sharp bird’s cry”—this, in ironic parallel to the birds who earlier had pecked at the corpse she had wanted to protect and honor.

Creon interrogates Antigone, who bows her head to the ground surely not in shame, Benardete suggests, but in thinking that the sacred dead are in the ground (B.58). Might she be praying to Hades? “I will not deny it,” she says of the accusation against her. “You dared to transgress these laws?” that is, his edict, Creon asks. “Yes, for it was not Zeus,” the god of the city, “Who proclaimed these things to me, nor was it She, Justice, Who dwells with the gods below, who defined these laws for human beings; nor did I think that such strength was in your proclamations, you being mortal, as to be able to prevail over the unwritten and steadfast conventions of the gods!” For the first time she appeals (if only negatively) to the authority of Zeus, her erstwhile enemy—the sky-god of the city, the god by whose authority Creon professes to act. She intends to catch Creon in a contradiction, even if it means seemingly to change her own mind. She clinches her argument by averring that the laws or conventions she obeys are not “something contemporary or of yesterday” but “everlasting,” predating even the rule of the Olympian gods and of the human regimes who make laws in their name. “No one knows from where” the laws I have obeyed “appeared.” What is more, this eternity must be on my side, not yours; more, I will die, anyway, and dying before my time is a gain, living as I do among so many evils. Not the least of which is you and your edicts, Creon, but also the laws of Zeus and the fate of my father, Oedipus, cursed as he was to pollute the ruling dynasty, the House of Laius by killing its reigning father and marrying its reigning mother. To tolerate the refusal to bury him “who is from my mother” would be painful, and as for Creon’s charge of folly, “it is about as if I were charged with folly by a fool!”

Despite her negative appeal to the authority of the city’s god, the Chorus are not persuaded. Antigone’s “savage” birth “from a savage father”—they ignore her reference to her mother—has caused her not to “know how to yield from evils.” Her birth and father are savage, that is, uncivil, incest being the most extreme example “of love of one’s own” (B.63). Civil men such as themselves, civil women such as Ismene, do yield, do respect force at least to the extent that they do not openly defy it. Antigone has no such inhibition. In her own way, she is as terrifying, as unlimited as a man, but unlimited in her defiance of the city, and especially of its ruler, those examples of the fearfulness of man as such. Her limit is not their limit. The one limit of man’s strivings, man’s arts, man’s daring, was death. Hades holds know terrors for her, making her terrifying to those who do find death terrible.

Nor is Creon impressed. “Too-hard thoughts” are like iron, hard on the outside but easily shattered. He expects the girl to break; alternatively, he will ‘break’ her the way a men break spirited horses. He charges her with hubris in transgressing “the established laws” (again, primarily his proclamation) and in boasting of that transgression. Anti-Woman, I will show you who is the real man (anēr): “Indeed, now I am not a real man, but she is rather the real man, if with these acts, she is to dominate with impunity.” He senses that a woman has challenged to a dual of manliness. Who rules, me or this girl? Even if she were my sister, “or still closer than blood,” he would prosecute her; I am the city, I am Thebes. In invoking Zeus against Creon, Antigone referred to another of Zeus’s ruling aspects, to Zeus Herkeios, “Zeus of the Boundary,” that is, to Zeus who protects the boundary of each Greek household and its possessions (TB 74).Creon will defy this Pan-Hellenic Zeus in favor of Zeus the god of his city, the city with which he effectively identifies himself as the regime of that city. And the city’s enemies are numerous. Her very conspiring to commit these acts shows that she’s not mad but a subverter of the city. And a self-righteous one at that: “I do hate it also when someone is caught in evil acts, and then wants to ennoble them!” Nobility sacrifices itself for the city, not for a traitor to the city, brother or no brother. The higher brotherhood remains the fraternity among citizens.

Antigone cuts him short. “So what are you waiting for?” Your words displease me, and my words displease you. My fame will exceed yours because I honored my brother. The Chorus would admit as much, “if fear did not close up the tongue” in the face of your tyranny. Like a man, she issues a dare to her rival. Stop talking and act.

But because Creon’s authority rests unsteadily, he must continue to talk, to justify his rule in the eyes of the elders, the Chorus, who had refrained from full-throated speech in support of his proclamation. He interrogates her, puts her on trial, although the interrogation immediately turns into a dialogue, a debate, a war of logoi. “Was he who died on the other side your own blood too?” She admits it, and it might be added that not only were her two brothers equally her brothers, but her father, who married her mother, was equally her brother, and the brother of her brothers. “How then can you honor with gratitude one who is impious to him”—Polyneices, who killed Eteocles? Because Eteocles would not “bear witness to” this charge. Oh, yes he will, Creon rejoins, “if you honor him on equal terms with the impious one!” Not so, because Eteocles knows “it wasn’t some slave; it was a brother who died!” Yes, but he died “sacking his land,” while Eteocles “stood up on its behalf!” Unqualifiedly, Antigone does not care. It is “all the same”—patriotism or treason—because “He who is Hades longs for these laws.” The god of the Underworld takes no interest in cities or fatherlands, having his own eternal kingdom to rule. “Who knows” if nobility in the eyes of the city is “free from pollution down below,” in the Underworld, in the eyes of Hades, whose laws are not the laws of the city. Creon denies that “one who is an enemy becomes a friend when he dies,” but Antigone maintains that familial love conquers all: “Not to join in hating”—in uniting a city with a shared passion against common enemies—”but to join in loving, is my nature.” (Alternatively, in Tyrrell’s translation, “It is not my nature to side with an enemy but with a philos,” that is, a beloved one. This translation nicely echoes, but in contrast with, Ismene’s earlier declaration of love.) She would not join in the city at all, but join in loving what she understands as the more natural bond, the love of her own family. My nature is to love the truly natural, which is the family, not the city. She understands the natural almost exclusively in terms of its archē, its generative beginning-point, not in terms of its telos, which Aristotle would later describe as the good life, which for citizens means life in but also beyond the family, political life. In this, Anti-Woman is quite womanly, indeed, preferring her own kin to the more extenuated brotherhood of citizenry and sisterhood of all mothers and sisters of citizens. At the same time, as Benardete observes, unlike-a-woman Antigone never weeps (B.69), never throws her arms around the tyrant’s knees to beg him for mercy. She is no suppliant, and in this manly daring, this defiance, she threatens real-man Creon’s rule.

“Go now below and, if they ought to be loved, love them!” he thunders. “But no woman will exercise rule while I am alive!” To be ruled in even one important thing by Oedipus’ daughter: Might that not entail being ruled in all things? Or by his wife, Eurydice, sister of Antigone’s mother, the late Queen Jocasta? Creon, too, will die before submitting to the proclamation of one who contradicts the good of what and who he loves— the city, the Thebans. When Ismene joins them, offering now to share Antigone’s fate, Antigone rejects her offer, telling her to remain among the living, for “my soul long ago died, so as to be a benefit to the dead.” As Benardete remarks, “Creon thought he was exposing Antigone’s unconscious premise when he bid her in death love the dead below,” but she now “answers that she had been doing that all along” (B.73). When the Chorus summarize, lamely, “It has been decided, as it seems, that she is to die,” Creon immediately says, “By you as well as by me.” He intends to exact their support because he needs it. The Antigone is ‘about’ rulers and what legitimate or lawful rule is. Creon bases his rule on legitimacy, on being the sole surviving male member of the ruling dynasty. Not only is this claim tenuous, since he is related to that family by marriage only, but the family itself is awash in illegitimacy, in patricide and incest, even if unintended. Antigone is right about one thing: Creon is indeed a tyrant. He rules the diffident Chorus by fear, and hopes to ‘break’ the two sisters by confronting them with death, cynically assuming that “even the bold fellows flee, when once they see Hades close to their lives!” They too will submit to fear of death, he supposes and hopes, so supposing because he hopes.

Torn between such fear and their reservations about Creon’s proclamation (and therefore about Creon as the ruler), the Chorus deliberate amongst themselves on the question of Zeus, the Olympian god of the city, and “the infernal gods” who rule the dead, and unfailingly seize the living, even living rulers. “Nothing in all cities”—not only Thebes, but universally—”comes to the life of mortals that is without ruin.” Human hopes, and the arts with which they are instantiated, are themselves two-edged. They bring “benefit to many among men, but to many a snare, of lightheaded erotic desires” which come “upon one who does not know, until he burns his foot against a hot fire”—Oedipus, for example, but perhaps Creon, as well. Might Creon not follow Oedipus less in rule than in ruin? The hubris he would pin on Antigone may find its mirror in his own soul.

Creon hopes to pass his rule down to his sole surviving son, Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone. His other son had died to save Thebes from Ares’ wrath (B.81); in this, he resembles Eteocles in his patriotism. What of Haemon? Marriage and wife, or father and country? He begins in obedience: “I am yours. For me no marriage will be worth more than your noble guidance,” a sentiment Creon cannot be applaud, sententiously: “Do not ever, son, cast out prudent thoughts on account of pleasure for the sake of a woman.” For “what could be a greater wound than an evil loved one,” one who can “marry someone in Hades”? “I shall kill her.” What is more, although she may try to stay my hand by appealing to the authority I acknowledge, the authority of Zeus, Zeus presides over not only the city but “over blood kinship,” over the family. To eliminate the threat to the city kinship ties pose (always and everywhere, it should be noticed), the city’s god must also be taken as the families’ god, ruling the sacred lares and not to be defied by them. “For whoever amongst his family is a noble man, will show himself just also in the city,” and whomever “the city sets up” as its ruler, families must obey. This is Creon’s central claim, or set of claims. There shall be no tension between city and family because the city rules the family; the ruler is established by the city (hence his insistence that the Chorus consent to his rule) and, moreover, such a man “would rule nobly, and be willing to be ruled well.” Ruling and being ruled is the distinctly political relationship, Aristotle will later say, not kingship or tyranny. Creon claims kingly legitimacy but also the political status citizen consent affords. Such a man will be “a just and good comrade in arms,” unlike Polyneices. Because “there is no greater evil than anarchy,” this man will not only protect citizens from foreign enemies but from the worst domestic perils. For Creon, the thing that binds the city together, that unifies it, is the same thing that binds the family together. Finally, this isn’t so much practical wisdom, love of city or of fatherland, but obedience

In the Greek, what comes across in the Ahrensdorf and Pangle translation as an unqualified statement of obedience to his father by Haemon is actually qualified in the Tyrrell translation; in the latter, Haemon says, “You would guide me aright if you have good judgment that I will follow”—hinting that he would obey his father if and only if his father exhibited fatherly wisdom. Haemon now recurs to that theme: “Father, the gods make grow for humans prudent thoughts, the highest of all possessions.” While I would not contradict you flatly, “it might be the case, however, that there is another noble view,” one I offer only because “it is natural for me to watch on your behalf whatever someone might say or do or hold in blame.” A son by nature protects his father, and if a tyrant is one’s father, a man “whose eye is terrible to a man of the people,” he may not hear the honest words of praise or blame citizens utter for and against him. But a son might: “For me it is possible to hear, undercover, these things: How the city laments for this child, as the least deserving of all women to perish miserably on account of deeds most glorious,” not allowing “her own brother, fallen amidst slaughter, to lie unburied, or by savage dogs, or by one of the birds, to be destroyed”—allowing the human to be converted into the bestial by its consumption by beasts, as Benardete remarks (B.88). It is the citizens who speak precisely in defense of the family; Antigone is not as savage as the Chorus had claimed, and the threat she poses isn’t so much to the city as to its ruler, its current regime of one-man rule. Your punishment of Antigone, Father, although intended to guard your rule and to uphold the authority of the city over families, works the opposite effect. Haemon goes so far as to suggest that his father’s regime itself is defective. “For whoever supposes that he alone can be prudent, or that he has a tongue, or a soul, such as no one else’s—these when laid open are seen to be empty.” And further, more daringly still, he adds, “For a real man”—the kind of man Creon praises himself as being, the human type who deserves to rule the less manly men—even if he be wise, learning many things and not being too stubborn is not shameful.” In terms of both wise logos and noble thumos, my Father, I ask you to reconsider your decision.

Almost needless to say, the tyrant will have none of this impudence, as he regards it. “By nature” the young man shall not teach the elder; by convention, the city is “held to belong to the one in power.” You, son, ally yourself with a woman. By “going to a court of justice against your father,” addressing him before the Chorus of elders, you commit a sort of parricide, you re-commit the crime of Oedipus. And you defy the gods, by criticizing me for “piously revering my offices.” Your character is therefore “foul, worse than a woman’s!” Haemon protests that his argument is not merely on behalf of the woman but “on your behalf, and on mine, and on behalf of the gods below!”—that is, it should be seen, on behalf of the gods of the family, not of the gods of the city. To Creon, male is to female as the Olympians are to the chthonic gods, the gods of the Underworld. He threatens to drive his claim home (that is, into his own household, into his recalcitrant son) by killing Antigone in front of him. Obedience, the of family and city, rests on fear. Haemon defeats his father’s threat by the simple expedient of running away.

What will you do with Antigone, the elders want to know? Earlier, he had threatened to have the perpetrator of the burial of Polyneices stoned to death. To show his leniency, he will spare Ismene but take Antigone outside the city, give her some food (so as to avoid the city’s pollution), and wait to see if Hades, “Whom alone among the gods she reveres,” will answer her prayers; if Hades does nothing (as he seems confident Hades will do), “she may come to know, even so late, that it is extravagant labor to revere those” in the Underworld. He may have listened to Haemon after all, in one way: getting Antigone out of the city, letting her die there, is less likely to spark a rebellion among a restive citizenry.

To understand what has happened, the Chorus continues to invoke the Olympians, the sky-gods, first of all the love-god, Eros, “invincible in battles” and all-pervasive in the world, maddening and therefore the god who “justif[ies] unjust thoughts.” “It is You who have stirred up this quarrel between men of the same blood,” father and son. “What wins the victory is the shining desire, in the eyes of the beautiful bride-to-be.” Above Eros is Aphrodite, who sets down her own “great binding laws,” but does so playfully, playing all sides (B.97). The Chorus too, elderly though they are, are “carried out of lawful bounds”—pulled away from the proclamations of Creon, even from the laws of the city proper—by the power of love “when I look upon these things, and no longer can I hold back the streams of tears, when I see Antigone here passing to the chamber where all rest.”

Antigone has already proclaimed repeatedly the object of her own love—her family, with whom she will be reunited in the Underworld: “I shall wed Acheron.” Insofar as she recognizes the authority of the Olympians at all, she recognizes Zeus “of the Boundary,” protector of household, Eros and Aphrodite as the love they inspire directs her ‘down’ below the ground, where her family is, not ‘up’ to the city, much less to Olympus. Eros impels her to Hades (B.99) When she compares herself to Niobe, daughter of the god Tantalus, punished by the goddess Leto for boasting that she had more children than Leto, the Chorus in its rather fatherly, or grandfatherly love for her cautions that Niobe was a god and we are not. Your love, having caused you to have “advanced to the extreme of daring,” has caused you to fall heavily “upon the high pedestal of Justice,” and “you are paying for” your father’s sins.

For the first time, the speech of fellow-citizens makes Antigone pause. As a lover of family, and especially of those members of her family now in the Underworld, she cannot dismiss an argument concerning her family, especially her father who now dwells there. “You have touched upon my most painful worries, the threefold pity for our whole fated doom, for the famous Labdacids.” In recalling her “ill-fated mother’s sleeping with her own child,” generating herself, Antigone reminds herself (in Benardete’s words) that “incest is love of one’s own writ large” (B.104). Her brother Polyneices, who married an Argive princess in yet another “ill-fated marriage,” have “slain me while still existing!” And of course Oedipus, her father, is also her brother, so he too has slain her while still existing.

She then begins her third and final apologia or defense before what amounts to the Theban jury of elders. She does not address them directly, however, as she remains preoccupied with family, not city. Instead, she addresses her fallen brother: “Having buried your body, such is what I reap as reward! Yet you I have honored well, in the eyes of those who think prudently”—this, with a glance at the Chorus, whom she has insisted are really on her side. She would never have buried a husband or even children who had died “in violent defiance of the citizens”; husbands and children are replaceable. Her brother is not replaceable. “By such a law indeed have I given you preeminence in honor, while to Creon I seemed to err in these things, and to dare terrible things, oh dear brother!” Therefore, “What justice of the divinities have I transgressed?” If none, then may those here “not suffer greater evils than what they do to me, unjustly?” As for Thebes, it is the “town of my fathers, and of ancestral gods”—significant to her only as the place in which her family has lived. As “the sole woman remaining of the royal line,” she abjures Thebans to see “what kind of things I am suffering, at the hands of what sorts of men, for having revered piety.” She is a threat to Creon’s rule, but he is an unjust man. This is the closest Antigone comes to a political statement, and it is even a potentially revolutionary, regime-changing one.

The fearful Chorus have reached an aporia or impasse impossible to overcome. Creon had claimed that obedience holds families and cities together—obedience, that is, to human rulers, himself in particular. The Chorus are now driven to speak not of Creon, not of Antigone and her family, not even of the gods, but of the “awesomely terrible” Fates, more “terrible” than man, rulers of men and gods alike, whom none escape. The Fates are the real rulers of all. At exactly this moment, when they are most in need of a man who can speak as a prophet, the blind prophet Teiresias appears, the man who had told Oedipus of his fate. Teiresias ‘sees’ beyond the impasse: “I shall teach; and you shall obey the prophet!” You Theban elders have feared a man; I shall remind you to fear the gods more. Once again, he tells them, as in Oedipus’ day, you Thebans balance “on the razor’s edge of Fortune.” The gods are no longer accepting the sacrifices and prayers offered at the temples. While “it is something common to all humans to err,” that only bespeaks their need for counsel. Creon and his city need it, in heart and in mind. In terms of the heart (or, as the Greeks would say, the head, the emotions), they are deficient in courage: “What is the bravery in killing again one who is dead?” In terms of the mind, “to learn from one who speaks well,” such as a blind prophet, “is most pleasing if what he says is profitable.” Like Haemon, Teiresias wants Creon and the elders to learn from him, this time about the gods, not public opinion (B.122). But although Teiresias cannot be dismissed as a presumptuous youth, Creon (perhaps attending to Teiresias’ word, “profitable”) can dismiss him as an avaricious liar in the pay of the ruler’s enemies, just as the guards were, in his mind. It would have been better for him had he recalled the fact that the guard was telling him the truth. What is more, he, Creon, is the superior theologian. Teiresias, you speak of pollution, but “I know well that no one of humans is strong enough to pollute the gods!” Even if Zeus’s eagles were to take “the carrion and take it to the throne of Zeus,” I, the real man, would not by “frightened by this pollution, into allowing that man to be buried!”

To Creon’s tyrannical daring Teiresias opposes his own charge: Creon, you are not thinking; you “are now by nature full of this disease” of mindlessness. After trading accusations of corruption with Creon, Teiresias stops reasoning and starts prophesying, saying that you will “be giving one from your loins, a corpse in exchange for dead ones.” The dead ones “are not your business,” nor even “the business of the gods above,” the Olympians, the Zeus you invoke, the city-gods. The dead ones are the business of “the Furies of Hades and of the gods,” who “lie in wait” for the likes of you. The gods of the city cannot protect you against them. To put it another way, the city is composed of families and it is located neither in the sky, on Mount Olympus, or in the Underworld, but on the ground, on the surface of the earth. The city therefore ‘needs’ not only the gods above it but the gods below it; the regime of the city needs to rule families (if it is to remain a city, a political union) but also needs the consent of families, again if it is to remain a city, and not sunder into warfare of family against family, tribe against tribe. The regime of the city that fails to recognize both of those needs will fail. Creon has made much of Thebes’ victory in the war, but his impious commands can lead to a reversal of the results of that war by the gods of the Underworld, backed by the Fates. Creon is doomed, “learn[ing] too late the difference between a decree and a law” (B.117), a human command and a divine command.

This gives the Chorus yet another thing to fear, and they communicate their fear to Creon. “The man, lord, has left, having prophesied terrible things!” More to the point, “he has never uttered a falsehood to the city!” Finally mindful, Creon admits this is true. “I am unsettled in my thoughts; for to give in is terrible, but in standing fast my spirited anger may be struck with a terrible disaster.” He is now willing to curb his thumos, to “give way,” to “renounce doing what my heart was set upon” since “one must not wage a vain war with necessity,” with the Fates who rule even the gods. In a telling irony, real-man Creon will now play the woman, lamenting the dead (TB.151) For their part, the Chorus prays to Bacchus, the patron god of Thebes, for salvation.

Too late. Too late for the Laertian dynasty, at least. Antigone has hanged herself, anticipating reunion with her beloved family. Haemon has also committed suicide, joining her in the Underworld. “Corpse lies on corpse,” a messenger reports, “like a grim mockery of a sexual embrace” (B.139). Having given Polyneices a proper burial, Creon learns of his son’s death, as does Eurydice, who rushes off to commit suicide as well, cursing Creon “as the killer of [his own] child,” as the messenger tells Creon. Haemon had been partially right in telling his father his rule would end in ruling no one, in ruling a city of one person, namely himself. For if the city is primarily the regime, and Creon has precipitated the self-destruction of the ruling dynasty, Creon (along with Ismene, who is nowhere to be seen, and a woman, one who will not rule), is the last one standing. But it is worse, as Creon no longer has the spiritedness in him to rule even a ‘city’ or regime of one. Broken, as if he were Antigone in the cave, he asks to taken away, having proved his own maxim, power shows the man. For her part, Ismene has feared that her sister’s actions would leave her alone in the world. They have. In the Ahrensdorf/Pangle translation, Sophocles gives the Chorus the last word; it is “prudence.”

This is the seventh of the Chorus’s seven major speeches. In the first they offered thanksgiving to the gods for Thebans’ victory over the Argives; in the second they spoke of the terrifying acts of man, that self-taught, wily being who masters the god, Earth. Does man owe his prosperity to the gods, and especially the gods of his own city, or to his own art? They next offered two speeches of praise of universal, Olympian gods: to Zeus, punisher of the wicked, and to Eros, who never loses a battle. The fifth speech acknowledges the Fates, who are more terrifying than man; the Fates can terrify the terrifying, men or gods. Having persuaded Creon to attempt to right his impious command to leave Polyneices’ corpse unburied, they return to Bacchus, this time not in thanksgiving but in supplication. Their final speech, on prudence, corrects the understanding of self-taught human wisdom. If the ultimate reality is the Fates, and after them the gods, then the highest form of prudence is piety, higher than the practical skills man teaches himself, higher than the technē of man.

Near the beginning of the play, Ismene was indeed prudent to respect strength, mistaken to assume that it was human strength she most needed to respect. Antigone was right to respect the gods of the Underworld, but imprudent in ending her life, as she could have both survived and seen her brother buried by Creon, her enemy. Creon may well have been prudent in suspecting that Polyneices’ alliance with the Argives made him dangerous to Thebes, despite the justice of Polyneices’ claim against his brother. Creon was imprudent, and indeed tyrannical, in assuming that the city’s defense required obedience to himself, even when he offended the gods of the Underworld, who are as universal as the Olympian gods he prefers. The right relation between the universal sky-gods of Olympus and the universal Underground gods—whose rule intersects on the surface of Earth in particular cities, and itself is overawed by the Fates—will be discovered in the souls of men who give honor to each set of gods in their own sphere, men of the right kind of piety or prudence. Fear of the gods is the beginning of wisdom.

 

Note

1. But did Polyneices intend to ruin Thebes, or only to rule it, as his pact with Eteocles entitled him to do? If so, he attacked Thebes justly, with a just and limited intention. However, it is also true that in Argos he married the daughter of the king. A Theban might worry that an Argive victory would end Theban self-government, that Polyneices might rule as his father-in-law’s subaltern.