Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

 

At the time Vico published his book, the phrase “new science” would have invoked Francis Bacon and his Novum Organum. As a philosopher, Bacon primary topic was commonly understood to be nature; progress in knowledge of nature would proceed by experimentation, what Bacon described as a procedure of torturing nature to force her to reveal her secrets. In the terms of ancient philosophy, Bacon was at first glance a ‘natural philosopher,’ not primarily a political philosopher, although he undeniably wrote important works of political philosophy and his natural philosophy called upon men not to contemplate nature but to conquer it.

Socrates famously turned philosophy away from the direct contemplation of nature to consideration of political opinions, laws, and customs—toward ‘political philosophy.’ He doesn’t abandon inquiry into nature but instead maintains that nature, and especially human nature, can only be understood by undertaking the dialectical testing of human conventions. 

Vico follows Socrates not in order to oppose but to supplement Bacon. In contradistinction to, but not in contradiction of, Bacon’s new science as usually understood, he offers a new science that considers “civil institutions”; in the illustration that serves as the frontispiece to his book, he has the triangle, symbol of the all-seeing eye of God—not a god like Aristotle’s, which sets the cosmos in motion, a god best understood by contemplation, but a providential God. In the old science, “Metaphysic” was considered through “the order of natural institutions/things” (E.2). [1] In the new science, Metaphysic “contemplates in God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical world, in order to show His providence in the world of human spirits, which is the civil world or world of nations” (E.2). The common nature of nations comes to light through their civil practices. It is first of all the human mind in which we find both the nature of nations and divine providence. As he puts it, the jewel of Metaphysic is convex, scattering the Sun’s rays, God’s providence, through many nations, with many sets of civil customs. 

Vico distinguishes the nations, the gentiles, from the Israelites. As our contemporaries would say, he seemingly ‘brackets’ Israel, thereby avoiding undue controversy. The one, universal God of the Bible commands His creatures to assume one set of laws—His own. The numerous gods of the nations require something like the perspectival vision seen in the artists of the early modern period, those critics of unidimensional medieval art. If we look at the zodiac, we see the prominence of Leo and Virgo, which “more than the others, appear in majesty, or, as is said, in perspective” (E.3). But Vico immediately turns his reader away from astronomy, away from the contemplation of the heavens, toward human things, gentile things. Leo “signifies that our Science in its beginnings contemplates first the Hercules that every ancient gentile nation boasts as its founder, and that it contemplates him in his greatest labor,” killing the lion and setting fire to the Nemean forest (E.3). The lion symbolizes the wildness of that forest, which Hercules brings under cultivation. Hercules, then was “the type of the political heroes who had to precede military heroes,” since military heroes require armies, and armies require civil organization (E.3). As for Virgo, “described by the poets as crowned with ears of grain,” she signifies the Golden Age, which means the age of cultivating fields of gold, grain fields (E.3). In this Golden Age, “the poets assure us faithfully, the gods consorted on earth with the heroes” (E.3). Men of “vigorous imaginations encumbered with frightful superstitions,” poets depicted a time when men “believed that they saw the gods on earth” (E.3). In his esteem for the Herculean struggle against the wilderness that is nature and the heroism it took found the first civil societies, Vico intends to reach Bacon’s destination, but along a different pathway.

This is another reason to ‘bracket’ the not only the Hebrew Bible but the Christian Bible, which provides a record of God on earth. Vico hurries to remark the link between Leo and Virgo, the founders of the nations and their establishment of agriculture: both, he writes, invoke the matter of time, of “chronology or the theory of times” (E.3). Vico’s new science, like the calculus, the geometry of the moderns which measures points in motion, timed events, not only captures modern ‘perspectivalism’ but modern conquest of nature in time. 

But again, unlike Bacon, Vico approaches the human things primarily through human thought, the human mind, human opinion. We first see “the commencement of truly human thinking among the gentiles” in Homer (E.6). But “the true Homer” has been hidden until now; the “New Science” of philology unlocks that truth (E.6). Philology is “the doctrine of all institutions that depend on human choice” (E.7). Human choice does not seem to lend itself to a scientific account, but philosophy can now reduce philology to “the form of a science by discovering in it the design of an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of all nations” (E.7). Because human choice in and between nations entails politics, “our Science may be considered a philosophy of authority” (E.7). 

Vico claims that philological investigation can show the significance of the ancient fables, as seen in Homer. This provides a theogony, but a “natural theogony,” decoding accounts of the origin of gods in terms of nature (E.7). “The two poems of Homer are found to be the great treasure houses of discoveries of the natural law of the gentes among the still barbarous Greeks,” a period that lasted until the time of the first historian, Herodotus (E.7). In the two central paragraphs of his introduction, Vico explains that the New Science can distinguish “the origins of ancient words” from “those that are unquestionably of foreign origin” (E.22) This matters because native etymologies are “histories of institutions/things signified by the words in the natural order of ideas” (E.22). They trace “the order of all progress” from the woods to “cultivated fields and huts, next to little houses and villages, thence cities, finally academies and philosophers,” nation by gentile nation (E.22). What Origen does with the Bible, Vico does with Homer. Looking backward at other philosophers, Vico finds philosophic value in ancient fables in a way that Socrates (at least initially) does not, and Locke does not, at all. (Locke in fact re-writes the ancient fables, turning them to his own purposes.) [2] Looking forward to subsequent philosophers, his recourse to philology and his interest in nationality remind one, however remotely, of Heidegger.

“Among all peoples the civil world began with religion,” which animated three human institutions: marriage, burial, and property or division of the fields (E.8). Marriage is “the seed-plot of the family,” which is “the seed-plot of the commonwealth,” as in Aristotle (E.11). Philologically, the term humanitas resembles the word humande, burying; to give special attention to the dead marks a difference between human beings and all or almost all animals. Property was the first step away from the wild and scattered existence that occurred after the repudiation of family seen in the dispersion of Ham, Japheth, and Shem after surviving the universal Flood. Three “principles” derived from these institutions: solemn matrimony; belief in the soul’s immortality; and divine providence (E.13).

Each of these principles consists of a relationship between human beings and the divine. In every nation, perhaps including the Shemites before the Abrahamic covenant with one tribe of them, founding heroes—Vico calls them “Herculeses”—subdued “the lands of the world and brought them under cultivation” (E.14). Before then, men lived in forests, their bodies hidden there, their minds also hidden by the “sacred terrors” bedeviling them (E.14). These “first founders of the gentile nations” exhibited four virtues: justice (thanks to “the supposed piety of observing the auspices which they believed divine commands of Jove,” whose name philologically considered means “law”); prudence in interpreting the auspices; moderation (seen in their establishment of marriage); and strength. “Hence new principles are given to moral philosophy, in order that the esoteric [or “recondite”] wisdom of the philosophers may conspire with the vulgar wisdom of the lawmakers” (E.14). All of these virtues “have their roots in piety and religion, by which alone the virtues are made effective in action” (E.14). 

For example, the family resulting from matrimony consists of partly of sons. Unable to understand “commonwealth and laws, they are to reverence and fear their fathers as the living images of God, so as to be naturally disposed to follow the religion of their fathers and to defend their fatherland, which preserves their families for them, and so to obey the laws ordained for the preservation of their religion and fatherland” (E.14) (emphasis added). “For divine providence ordered human institutions with this eternal counsel: that families should first be founded by means of religion, and that upon the families commonwealths should then arise by means of laws” (E.14).

As to property, it initially consisted of burnt sections of the woods. (Moses, he writes, went still farther, condemning “the woods themselves to be burned wherever the people of God extended their conquests.”) (E.16) Why? So that “those who had already arrived at humanity should not again become confounded with the wanderers who remained” in the woods, “in the nefarious promiscuity of things and women”—the latter point alluding to the critical importance of solemnized marriage (E.16). And as to the “promiscuity of things,” the woods themselves consist of just such a promiscuity—trees, bushes, animals. Man separates himself from animals by emerging from the woods.

For Vico, then, cities are good; there is no Nimrod-like figure among the gentiles. There is a strict natural hierarchy in cities. As in Aristotle, “those who use their minds should command and those who use their bodies should obey” (E.18). True, given the diminished capacity of the human mind after the Fall, even the best minds need philosophy to supplement them, but only the few can benefit from philosophy—which, moreover, did not exist at the time the cities were founded. Hierarchy brings danger and benefit, as propertyless men rebelled against their rulers and, in defeat, fled to new lands, as the Israelites fled from Egypt. This distinction between the rule of the few over the many characterizes all cities, “which had at their birth a most severe aristocratic form, in which the plebeians had no share in the civil law,” as does commerce (made possible by the laws of property), and public treasuries (E.26). 

The aristocratic or heroic regimes gave way to the first “human” regimes, regimes which were “at first popular in character” (E.29) “The people had finally come to understand that the rational nature (which is the true human nature) is equal in all men” (E.29). But after bringing the aristocrats “to civil equality in popular commonwealths,” the people could not maintain their rule because rival aristocrats ruined their regimes in civil wars (E.29). It thus “came about naturally that, obeying a natural royal law or rather natural custom of human peoples, they sought protection under monarchies, which constitute the other type of human government” (E.29).

The New Science, then, is a “metaphysic,” an account, perhaps as much artful as scientific in the ordinary sense, deploying philology to study “the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence,” discovering the origins of divine and human institutions among the gentile nations,” thereby establishing “a system of the natural law of the gentiles” through three ages: the age of the gods, in which men lived in terror in the woods; the age of heroes, rule by strongman aristocrats who “held themselves” to be naturally superior to the many; and the age of man, “in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature,” although the political exigency of factionalism among the few brought them to call for a king (as even the Israelites did) (E.31). Each “age” had its own kind of language: first, the mute language of signs, hieroglyphic; then, the symbolic language of emblems, images, metaphors (one thinks of aristocratic heraldry); and finally, the language of “the vulgar,” consisting of word consented to by all (E.32). Hence Vico writes The New Science in Italian, the vulgar tongue, not in Latin: of course, Latin itself is already a highly developed ‘vulgar’ tongue, but by Vico’s time it was associated with a sort of aristocracy, the Catholic Church.

“We find that the principle of these origins both of language and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters” (emphasis added) (E.34). And that is “the master key of this [New] Science,” since meanings extracted from poetic fables are “not philosophical but historical.” Here is a central distinction between Vico’s understanding of nature and the understanding of nature seen in most of his philosophic predecessors. This is still nature, but it is natural history, nature conceived as if the one ‘constant’ isn’t Platonic forms or Aristotelian categories but motion itself.

Vico can now outline the structure of his book. Book One elaborates the principles illustrated on the frontispiece as decoded in the Introduction, in imitation of the procedure of finding the symbolic meanings in the aristocratic language of signs. In Book Two, “Poetic Wisdom,” and Book Three, “Discovery of the True Homer,” Vico applies the New Science or art of philology to the epic poems of the quintessentially aristocratic bard. He turns to the nations, the third “era” of man, in Book Four, showing how those nations move in Book Five.

Near the beginning of Book One, Vico exclaims, “How uncertain, unseemly, defective, or vain are the beginnings of the humanity of nations” (I.43). The nations scattered around the world in the aftermath of the Flood achieved little readily noticeable advancement in civilization until the era of classical Greece, as the Egyptians made “the greatest errors in philosophy and astronomy,” “their morality was dissolute,” their theology mere superstition, magic, and witchcraft, their arts “extremely crude” (I.45). Both they and the ancient Chinese were vain, “ascribing to themselves merits they did not have” (I.48). Greece alone, “the nation of philosophers, shone with all the fine arts that human genius has ever discovered,” thanks to the artists’ attention to “the surface of the bodies they represent” (I.45). Not for them the hieratic, stiff statuary of Egypt, bodies frozen in death. But Greek achievement rested on earlier, if less glorious, foundations, and to uncover those foundations Vico has recourse to the philological study of myths.

Although “the Hebrews were the first people in our world,” and their history is accurate (I.54), the Chaldeans were “the first gentile sages,” beginning with Zoroaster (I.55). As for the “universal history” of the gentiles, it begins with the Assyrians but “must have begun to take shape among the Chaldean people,” who had passed it to the Assyrians under Ninus, himself a Chaldean who founded the kingdom with the aid of his fellow Chaldeans and with the support of the Assyrian plebeians, not the aristocrats—a pattern similar to that seen in Rome. Zoroaster had been an aristocratic and heroic personage; Ninus overthrew and killed him (I.55). This revolution was an important step away from the heroic era. The first laws were the unwritten customs of this people. The customs, and not written laws, “established” the “natural law of the gentes,” carried to Greece, the Assyrian empire’s westernmost conquest (I.67). Ninus claimed to be the son of a god, and “fabulous history acquaints us with one of the peculiarities of this age, namely that the gods consorted with men on earth” (I.69). As for the gods themselves, Vico ascribes their origin to “the natural imaginations of the Greeks on certain occasions of human need or utility, in which they felt they had received help or comfort in the early childhood of the world, when it was overwhelmed by the most frightful religions” (I.69) The “universal profane history,” the history of the nations, begins with this poetic or imaginary theogony which, though fanciful, nonetheless bespeaks a turn in the direction of humanity, of civilization, founded on the need and/or utility of getting out of the “woods,” the realm of human terror at menacing gods, perhaps suggested to their minds by sylvan darkness and tangle (I.69). It is noteworthy that whereas most philosophers up to his time had distinguished nature from convention quite sharply—even a political philosopher, Plato’s Socrates, who begins with opinion nonetheless makes much of the rational ascent from the cave of human idols—Vico seeks nature in the conventions, in words, in poems, in fables.

The mythical teacher of humanity to the Greeks was Orpheus, in whose fictitious person perhaps a thousand years of civilization-building were compressed by myth-spinning poets. While it is likely that the Assyrians brought civilization to Greece, Orpheus as founder-sage has no stated connection to Zoroaster, the Chaldean sage. 

But what was so civilized about the Greek gods, those licentious beings who could scarcely be acceptable in polite society anywhere in the world? Vico assures his readers that this is one of the false claims that barnacled onto the original myths. These “will be avoided by the principles of this Science, which will show that such fables in their beginning were all true and severe and worthy of the founders of nations, and only later (when the long passage of years had obscured their meanings, and customs had changed from austere to dissolute, and because men to console their consciences wanted to sin with the authority of the gods) came to have the obscene meanings with which they have come down to us” (I.81). The New Science of philology scrapes such ugliness away.

Vico pauses to dispose of the claim that the Greeks received their wisdom from the Jews, via Pythagoras. Jewish priests “kept such doctrine secret even from their own plebs, whence indeed it was everywhere called sacred doctrine, for sacred is as much as to say secret” (I.95) Rather, Pythagoras and Plato “exalted themselves” “by virtue of a most sublime human science,” to acquire some of the Hebrews’ knowledge of “divine truths” (emphasis added) (I.95). This, Vico adds in a glaring non sequitur, stands as “a most luminous proof of the truth of the Christian religion” (I.95). 

Despite the vaunted power of philology, a reader might be excused to find Vico relieved at telling the story of the Romans, which comes to us in large measure from historians, not poets. The figures of its heroic age, beginning with Romulus—who “founded the city of Rome within the asylum opened in the clearing,” out of the woods— are presented in the writings of men like Livy (I.114). Roman myth as recorded by historians provides a template for “the history of all the other cities of the world in times we have so far despaired of knowing,” “an instance of an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations” (I.114). Yet even Roman myths as set down by Roman historians must be vetted by scholars wielding the “scientific principles” or “elements” of philology (I.118). 

“Just as the blood does in animate in bodies, so will these elements course through our Science and animate it in all its reasonings about the common nature of nations” (I.119) First, philologists must recognize the fallibility of the human mind. The mind is “indefinite”; when it doesn’t know something, it makes itself the measure of all things (I.120). Thus the tales of rumormongers often tell you more about themselves than they do about those they’re whispering about. Second, and following from this, when we can form no idea of distant and unknown things, we “judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (I.122). This is why scholars and nations imagine grander origins for things than were actually the case. Taking a group near to hand, Vico remarks that scholars “will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (I.127) that it is “the wisdom of the ancients” (I.128). In selecting Bacon’s phrase, Vico makes explicit what Bacon prefers to conceal: that the ancients weren’t especially wise at all.

Like Bacon, and like Machiavelli before him, Vico wants philosophy to be “useful to the human race,” not an exercise in theorizing (I.129). For this, “philosophy must raise and direct weak and fallen man, not rend his nature or abandon him in his corruption” (I.129). This means that philosophy, though necessarily limited to the few, can be made supremely useful, indeed; hitherto, Christians hitherto had depended upon God alone to raise and direct them. Vico makes no mention of Christians, of course, instead calling attention to two philosophic schools. The Stoics “seek to mortify the senses”; the Epicureans “make them the criterion” of judgment (I.130). That is because “both deny providence, the former chaining themselves to fate, the latter abandoning themselves to chance” (I.130). They “should be called monastic, or solitary, philosophers” (I.130). “Monastic” is a clear hint. But what is “providence” in Vico?

Consistent with the ‘Socratic turn’ he took in the Introduction, Vico cites the political philosophers, “first of all the Platonists, who agree with all the lawgivers on these three main points: that there is divine providence, that human passions should be moderated, and made into human virtues, and that human souls are immortal” (I.130). By itself, however, “philosophy considers man as he should be and so can be of service to but a very few, those who wish to live in the Republic of Plato and not to fall back into the dregs of Romulus” (I.131). Legislation, by contrast, “considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society” (I.132). Some human beings are fierce; legislation turns them into soldiers. Some are avaricious; legislation turns them into merchants. Some are ambitious; legislation turns them into “governing classes” (I.132). “Out of these three great vices, which could certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, [legislation] makes civil happiness” (I.132). “This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind,” one wise enough to convert the passions of men, “each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness”—as Vico has described—and “made the civil institutions by which they may live in society” (I.133). (To choose the word “wilderness” may be to allude not only the Rome but to the Israelites and their lawgiver, Moses.) In this way, the many non-philosophers, “men who do not know what is true of things, take care to hold fast to what is certain”—the authority of promulgated laws—so that, “if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (scienza), their wills at least may rest on consciousness (conscienza)” (I.137). [3]

That is where philology comes in. “Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain” (I.138). These two tasks should be made complementary. Philosophers have “failed” because they have not given “certainty to their reasonings by appeal to the authority of the “philologians”; philologians have also failed by “not taking care to give their authority the sanction of truth by appeal to the reasoning of the philosophers” (I.140). That is what the New Science is for; it makes philosophy useful by availing itself of solid philological research instead of idle speculation. Philologians appear to take the place of theologians, at least with regard to gentile “customs and laws” (I.139). The New Science is a political philosophy, re-founded on what Vico takes to be solider ground.

Human beings have “needs or utilities” (I.141). These are the sources of “the natural law of the gentes”—low but solid, indeed (I.141). What makes human choice, “by its nature most uncertain,” certain is neither philosophy nor scholarship but “common sense,” which is “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race” (I.142). Philology provides a window through which philosophers can see into this long-entrenched common sense, back to “the founders of nations” who established the institutions and the ways of life that enable human beings to judge without reflection in a civilized way, freeing them from the bondage of the woods (I.143). Although “uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth” (I.144), natural law did not have one origin but “separate origins among the several peoples” (I.146) To understand these, one needs to understand those origins; the nature of institutions, customs, and laws is their origin. Their forms and purposes are secondary. The New Science is a genealogical science aimed at improving human ‘teleology’—our attempts which aim at securing our needs or utilities. [4]

Language is “a great witness to the customs of the early days of the world,” as seen in Homer’s poems (I.152). What is more, the Greeks and the French, having passed rapidly from barbarism to philosophy (rapidly, that is, in contrast with other nations), preserved the wisdom of their traditions with minimal distortions. (This is the not-so-remote ancestor of Heidegger’s claim that one can philosophize only in Greek or German.) Vico’s philology uncovers not only the separate origins of natural law among the various peoples but certain underlying, universal natural laws. He asserts that “there must be in the nature of human institutions…a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects” (I.161). We see this in many ‘sayings’ or proverbs, shared in their substance by many nations, “ancient and modern.” With philology, “linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead” (I.162). Philology is for political philosophy what experimentation is for Bacon’s natural philosophy. Indeed, Bacon has set down “the best ascertained method of philosophizing,” while the New Science carries it over from the study of nature to the study of “the institutions of mankind” (I.163).

Despite some hints to the contrary, Vico continues explicitly to separate the sacred history of the Old Testament from the “profane histories that have come down to us” (I.165). Scripture is older than they are; it provides “great detail” (I.166); it describes a period of more than eight hundred years “the state of nature under the patriarchs,” which as “the state of the families out of which, by general agreement of political theorists, the peoples and cities later arose” (I.165). Profane histories provide “nothing or little, and that little quite confused,” when it comes to this state of nature (I.165). Vico takes care to say also that “the Hebrew religion was founded by the true God on the prohibition of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose” (I.167). Is there nonetheless a common ground among all peoples, Israelites and gentiles alike? “The world of peoples began everywhere with religion” because only religion can draw human beings out of savagery (I.176). Then as now, “whenever a people has grown savage in arms so that human laws have no longer any place among it, the only powerful means of reducing it is religion” (I.177). It may be prudent to assume that “peoples” refers only to the gentiles, here, that the children of Abraham never reduced themselves to savagery, although they unquestionably did deviate from God’s regime, God’s way of life, on many occasions, and religious renewal unquestionably pulls them back to the right path. 

Vico charges that Hobbes missed the providential principle of political institutions. Instead of seeing religion as necessary to civilization, Hobbes went astray, taking the materialism of the Epicureans, with its emphasis on chance concatenations of elements, and attempting to derive political institutions from that; he also attempted to take the universalism of the Stoics and, again, make that political. “Nor would Hobbes have conceived this project if the Christian religion had not given him the inspiration for it, though what it commands is not merely justice but charity toward all mankind” (I.179). That is, even the atheist Hobbes was ‘inspired’ by a religion, a universalist religion. Religion forms the social and political substratum of politics and philosophy or, more accurately the generative cause of them. Vico rejects “the false dictum of Polybius, “that if there were philosophers in the world there would be no need of religions” (I.179). On the contrary, “without religions no commonwealths can be born, and if there were no commonwealths in the world there would be no philosophers in it” (I.179). The false doctrine of Polybius sounds also rather like that of the Enlightenment philosophes.

It is also true that human beings often misunderstand religion. Many explain causation as the continuous, direct intervention of God in the course of events. This “physics of the ignorant” simply “refer[s] the causes of things they do not know to the will of God without considering the means by which the divine will operates” (I.182). Both children and as-yet uncivilized peoples exercise their imagination, not reason. They are poetical, not rational, when they conceive of their gods and their heroes. “Poetry founded gentile humanity” (I.214). Between the subhuman wilderness ‘men’ who felt without perceiving and the fully civilized men who “reflect with a clear mind,” lived the poetic humans who “perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit” (I.218), “vent[ing] great passions by breaking into song” (I.229) and “form[ing] their first languages by singing” (I.228). Reflect: it takes time and effort for the mind to develop the capacity to look into itself. Vico cites as “the universal principle of etymology in all languages” the way “words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit” (I.237) In fact, the word “spirit” initially meant “wind.” 

Such philological inquiry has led Vico to provide an outline of human habitats, feelings, sensibilities, types, and regimes. When living in the forests, men felt the weight of sheer necessity; their sensibility was crude, their characteristic human type large and grotesque (as seen poetically in Homer’s Cyclopes). The political regime was patriarchy in an extended family. Once having secured themselves against immediate necessities, human beings began to reach out for the useful. They lived in huts; their sensibility was severe, as befits the proud and magnanimous Achilles. Politically, they were ruled by aristocrats—warrior spirits nonetheless careful about going to war, “lest they make warriors of the multitude of plebeians” (I.273). Eventually, the aristocrats began to seek comfort in addition to necessary and useful things. They moved the people into villages; their sensibility became benign, and the characteristic human type became ‘an Aristides,’ that is, valorous and just. This brought popular liberty. Villages then became cities, wherein liberty began to decline as secure comfort enabled rulers to achieve luxury, fostering either vulgarly glorious sensibilities (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) or the melancholy and reflect sensibility of a Marcus Aurelius. (“Civil servitude is clapped on with goods of fortune not essential to life.”) (I.290). The regime consonant with those kinds of souls in monarchy, and it is also in the cities where academies were first established. Whether from luxury, from academies, or some malign combination of the two, the final step is dissolution and madness, as seen in Caligula, who could go from turning a phrase to severing a head. The result of such men is the overthrow of monarchy, but the many may become tyrants, too, as “they wish to put themselves above the laws” in “anarchies, or unlimited popular commonwealths, than which there is no greater tyranny” (I.292).  Religion, or the rejection of it, has informed each one of these historical eras. Plato’s Socrates spoke, if ironically, about the rule of philosopher-kings as the solution to the troubles of the polis, but in fact, “in all nations the priests wore crowns,” not the philosophers (I.254).

Rome, the gentile nation with the clearest history, shows that once cities were founded, contestation for rule over them ensued, a contestation Rome managed to its own benefit. Early Rome saw “three public virtues”: magnanimity (originally the virtue of the aristocrats living in huts) was now seen in the plebs, who wanted “to share the civil rights and laws of the fathers; for their part, the fathers showed “strength…in keeping those rights within their own order”; finally, the jurisconsults displayed “wisdom…in interpreting the laws and extending their utility little by little as new cases demanded adjudication” (I.281). Roman history may be summarized in a sentence: “The weak want laws; the powerful withhold them; the ambitious, to win a following, advocate them; princes, to equalize the strong with the weak, protect them” (I.283). The many, who are weak and poor, were the center around which Roman regime politics revolved.

In the end, peace reigned in Rome under the rule of the Emperor Augustus, protector of the plebs by means of “the natural royal law”—natural in Vico’s sense of customs designed to secure certain fundamental necessities of human life (I.292). He quotes Tacitus: “When the world was wearied by civil strife, [Augustus] subjected it to empire under the title of Prince” (I.292). Would Bacon or Hobbes disagree?

More generally among the gentiles, philology reveals similar patterns elsewhere, insofar as ancient customs have been recorded or can be deciphered by etymology. Vico concurs with Dio Cassius’ judgment that “custom is like a king and law like a tyrant,” if this means “reasonable custom” as distinguished from “law not animated by natural reason” (I.308). Custom itself originates in the “sociable nature” of man, itself a register of his reasonableness, his ability to speak; this is why some customs are universal (I.309). Unreasonable customs register the “fallen and weak” nature of man; he is “not unjust by nature in the absolute sense,” as “created by God,” but now stands in need of “the Catholic principles of grace,” which releases the human potential for good works, otherwise “ineffectual” (I.310), “This is what Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf should have founded their systems upon before everything else, in agreement with the Roman jurisconsults who define the natural law of the gentes as having been instituted by divine providence” (I.310). It is noteworthy, however, that Vico immediately writes that the natural law of the gentiles originated in unreflecting common sense, which he then identifies with providence. A “sociable nature” may characterize man, but this only comes about after the pre-humans are induced to come out of the woods. Human nature is not inherent; it develops over time as the result of external natural necessity and the will of founders.

Vico distinguishes between the natural law of the Hebrews, the natural law of the gentiles, and the natural law of the philosophers. Unlike the others, the Hebrews “had extraordinary help from the true God” (I.313). For their part, the philosophers perfected the natural law by their practice of rigorous rational scrutiny, a practice that didn’t “appear until some two thousand years after the gentile nations were founded” (I.313). This gave Hebrews a considerable ‘early start’ on the gentiles, justifying their scrupulous self-separation from them. But if the divinely assisted Hebraic law is nonetheless natural law, does Vico mean that God, in revealing it to them, accelerated the recovery of at least some of the human virtues from human fallenness?

Laws are certain, not because they are unambiguous but because their judgments are “backed only by authority” (I.321). “We find them harsh in application yet are obliged to apply them precisely because they are certain” (I.321). To address this difficulty, we need “reason of state” or “civic equity”—prudent application of the law to the case at hand (I.322). Such judgments belong in the hands of the prudent few. Prudential wisdom is “the science of making such use of things as their nature dictates,” and impartial utility is the law of “intelligent men” (I.326). ‘Providence’ begins more and more to look like such reason of state, civic equity, prudential wisdom when it is backed by authority.

Revealed religion induces certainty. The political philosophers of classical antiquity, from Socrates to Cicero, men who didn’t confront a serious challenge from revealed religion, needed only to suggest that their conclusions were tentative, probabilistic, and more likely than tales about the gods told by priests. The modern political philosophers faced a different intellectual landscape. The Bible warns against those who are “always seeking, never finding” (Samuel l:1-27), “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7)—men who might “spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world” (Colossians 2:8). Christianity, by contrast, offers a satisfying certitude founded on truth bestowed by the Holy Spirit Himself. From Machiavelli, who advises the prince to “make sure” of other men, to the quest for self-evident truths from Descartes to Locke, the moderns have attempted to challenge religion on its own ground in a contest in which each party seeks to cast doubt on the opinions and ‘methods’ of the other. Vico joins the fray: “In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest ambiguity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (I.331). This is the basis of his version of the Socratic turn: “Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world” (I.331). It is true that this is difficult, since the mind prefers to look outward at the body, “find[ing] the effort to attend to itself too laborious,” even as “the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself” (I.331). The mirror for the human mind isn’t Cartesian introspection but historical inquiry.

What is the philosophic purpose in so proceeding? If God knows His creation better than we can ever do, then surely we can know ourselves, and especially our own minds, by examining our own ‘creations,’ namely, “this world of nations” (I.332). This raises the problem that God as Creator created not only the cosmos but the human mind itself, so He knows it better than we can know it. Vico prefers to address this problem indirectly. “Since this world of nations has been made by men, let us see in what institutions all men agree and always have agreed”; “these institutions will be able to give us the universal and eternal principles (such as every science must have) on which all nations were founded and still preserve themselves” (I.332). He identifies three “eternal and universal customs”: religion, marriage, and burial of the dead (I.333). He also identifies four “primary religions”: Judaism, Christianity, polytheism, and Islam (I.334). All of them solemnize those customs. That is, if Vico were to respond to the Apostle Paul’s ridicule, he could say that religions exhibit much of the same variation as philosophic doctrines. They induce not simple certainty but a plethora of certainties. But if we discover and examine the religio-political principles they share by considering the eternal and universal customs seen after historical inquiry, we will be able to answer the questions raised by the contradictions prevailing among national/political customs, as well as philosophic and religious doctrines.

Vico chooses as his example sexual unions “between free men and free women without solemn matrimony” (I.336). Some say that these “do not offend the law of nature,” but “all the nations of the world have branded [them] as false” by custom (I.336). That alone might not convince a philosopher that the nations are right, however. Vico then identifies a reason for the universality of the custom: “such parents, since they are held together by no necessary bond of law, will proceed to cast off their natural children,” who “must lie exposed to be devoured by dogs” or, if they survive, will have “no one to teach them religion, language or any other human customs,” thus bringing on the possibility that the world will “revert to the ancient forest through which in their nefarious feral wanderings once roamed the foul beasts of Orpheus,” the ‘pre-humans’ among whom “venery was practiced by sons with mothers and by fathers with daughters” (I.336). Human nature “forbids” incest; forbidding incest by custom was necessary to the transition from the forest to civilization, the transition of pre-human beasts to human beings. It only reappears when a nation reaches “the last stage of corruption, as among the Persians” (I.336). [5]

Here is where religion comes in. “In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial freedom there was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the powerful thought of some divinity, the fear of whom is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a liberty gone wild” (I.338). This suggests a parallel to the teaching of the Old Testament, that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom—again suggesting that Hebrews are not so different from the gentiles as they say they are. Be that as it may, without that initial, salutary fear, our ancestors would fall into “despair of all the succors of nature” (I.339). This is why they want “something superior to save” them (I.339). It is true that “man in the bestial state desires only his own welfare” and that of his family (I.341). But once he has “entered upon civil life,” he begins to desire the city’s welfare along with his own and eventually the welfare of the nations his city may come to rule in an empire. Once “nations are united by wars, treaties of peace, alliances, and commerce,” self-love extends to “the entire human race” (I.341). “Therefore, it is only by divine providence”—previously defined as common sense—that man “can be held within these institutions to practice justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind” (I.341). Here, “divine” means the power of divining—that is, the power “to understand what is hidden from men—the future—or what is hidden in them—their conscience” (I.342). 

The New Science, then is “a rational civil theology of divine providence,” which Vico then quickly asserts to be an expression of “the omnipotent, wise and beneficent will of the best and greatest God” (I.345). It is nonetheless clear that the necessities and utilities of social life constitute “the two perennial springs of the natural law of the gentes” (I.347). Moreover, this science proceeds by uncovering the “history of human ideas, on which it seems the metaphysics of the human mind must proceed”—again, on the premise that we know best what we make (I.347). “History cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them” (I.349). Now, “in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing” (I.349). If so, man is Godlike in the sphere of this world. The New Science indeed become “a philosophy of authority” (I.350), a way of philosophizing about authority but more, a way of philosophic rule that can instantiate the Socratic notion of philosopher-kings, without Socrates’ own zetetic irony.

 

 

Notes

1. “E” refers to the title of Vico’s introduction to the book, “Explanation of the Picture Placed as Frontispiece to Serve as Introduction to the Work.” The number that follows refers to the number of the paragraph; Vico numbers each paragraph.
2. See John Locke: Aesop’s Fables (London: A. and J. Churchil, 1703). For commentary, see Robert H. Horwitz and Judith B. Finn: “Locke’s Aesop’s Fables,” Locke Studies 25 (1994). 
3. Leo Strauss identifies this passage as more or less identical to a line in Descartes and goes on to say that for Vico the human mind is finite, the will infinite. Vico does differ from Descartes, as seen in his preference for philology over introspection as the source of certainty. See Leo Strauss: “Seminar in Political Philosophy: Vico.” Session 6: October 16, 1964. In Strauss Archive (online).
4. Strauss clarifies this point, saying that in Vico there is no teleology in the classical sense; there are indeed results of human action, ends achieved, but they have no independent causal status. To use Aristotelian vocabulary, there are ‘efficient’ causes (genealogical causes) and ‘material’ causes, but no ‘formal’ causes and no ‘final’ causes. As in Spinoza, the law of the gentiles depends on natural necessity and/or the human will. See ibid., Strauss’s final comment in the session. 
5. Why, specifically, does the practice incest block the founding of human settlements?  Why must it be abhorred if pre-humans are to become human? Vico does not say, beyond maintaining that it must be so because the prohibition against it is universal, or nearly universal. It may be, however, that the establishment of settlements requires a degree of sociality, a lessening of what Vico later calls “the tyranny of self-love,” of which incest might be considered a prime example, an extreme form of love of one’s own.

 

 

 

Cicero: On Obligations. P.G. Walsh translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Cicero writes to his son, Marcus, whom he sent to Athens to study with Cratippus, an Aristotelian Cicero calls “the outstanding philosopher of our day” (I.2). By philosophy Cicero means the study of both theoretical principles and practical precepts—Aristotle’s division of rational thought into theoria, the understanding of which is sophia and praxis, the understanding of which is phronēsis. As a guide to theory, one needs a teacher; as a guide to practice, one needs a city, a political community, a re publica or public thing. Each is the “supreme authority” in one area: the teacher for knowledge, the city for examples. Pay attention, then, not only to Cratippus but to Athens, which provides examples of the most eminent philosophers, beginning with Socrates. Of course, Cicero knows that philosophy cannot be authoritative in any straightforward sense; Socrates knows that he doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t know anything. But Marcus is a young man, not a philosopher, and the De officiis presents him with clear doctrines more than it engages him in dialectic.

The Latin officium translates the Greek kathekon, which (as Walsh explains in his introduction) means a service or friendly and helpful act. Cicero emphasizes service to the re publica, intent as always to turn his reader away from an exclusively private life, whether philosophic or not. He calls attention to the need to pay attention to translation, urging Marcus to study not only Greek but his native Latin and, by implication, not only Athens but his native Rome. To make progress in dicendum, learning, and judicandum, judiciousness, you need both languages. It is noteworthy that Cicero chooses judiciousness to denote practical wisdom or prudence; he will go on to speak of argumentation in law courts—a public forum for Roman citizens, and a place where one can indeed provide ‘good offices’ or friendly service to fellow citizens. And again to this purpose, he tells his son, you might read not only Aristotle but your own father’s books, while “exercis[ing] your own judgment on the content without pressure from me” while perfecting your mastery of your own language—a language for which his own writings serve as a model, Cicero rightly implies (I.2). While “I yield to many in knowledge and the practice of philosophy,” I really am a good orator (I.2), exhibiting propriety, clarity, and elegance of thought and expression. “While [my] orations exhibit a more forceful style, the equable and temperate style of my philosophic discussion is also worth imitating” (I.3). None of the major Greek philosophers and orators excelled in both genres.

Cicero’s own immediate good office or service to Marcus consists of his gift of this book. “I intend to begin with the subject most suited to both your years and my paternal authority,” the topic of officium itself. (I.4). This part of philosophy has the widest practical application, as “there is no aspect of life public or private, civic or domestic, which can be without its officium” (I.4). “Honorable conduct lies entirely in the performance of such obligations, base conduct in neglecting them” (I.5). Honestum not only contrasts with turpitudo but is also distinct from what is utile, useful. A substantial part of De Officiis consists of a defense of the claim that honorable conduct comports better with utility than base conduct does. And it is this point that Machiavelli will contest the moral ground with his great rival, centuries later. [1]

Cicero warns his son that some philosophic schools “undermine obligation in general by their theories of the supreme good and the supreme evil” (I.5). How a philosopher understands nature, what is theory of ‘the whole’ is, had considerable bearing upon his practical, ethical, teaching. For example, if a philosopher thinks that the summum bonum or supreme good “has no connection with virtue, and measures [that good] by his own interests rather than by what is honorable,” he “cannot cultivate friendship, justice, or liberality so long as he remains consistent in his views, and is not prevailed upon by his own better nature” (I.5). He will be a Cynic, an apologist for the base, one who sees no real possibility of honorable conduct in himself or in anyone else. Or a philosopher might be an Epicurean, holding pain to be “the greatest evil”; such a man “cannot possibly be brave, and he that accounts pleasure the summum bonum cannot be temperate” (I.5).

Thus, the underlying question is nature, human nature. These schools of philosophy can “say nothing about obligation,” as “no firm, stable precepts inherent in nature can be posited except by those who claim that honorable maxims are to be enacted solely or chiefly for their own sake” (I.6). The schools that do make that claim are the Stoics, Academics (Platonists), and Peripatetics (Aristotelians). Cicero tells Marcus that he shall “draw upon their wells as much as, and in whatever way, my judgment and inclination dictate” (I.6), although he shall “follow the Stoics chiefly,” perhaps in order to lean against any cynical and/or epicurean inclinations the young man might develop during his stay in Athens.

What is obligation—its end or aim—and what guidance does it give us in shaping our lives from day to day? Obligation can be either absolute—the right, simply—or measured, a matter of shaping means to an end. In considering a course of action, one should first think of whether that course is right, honorable, or whether it is reprehensible, base; second, one should think of whether it is useful, likely to enhance their wealth or power; one should also think of whether a useful course of action contradicts the right. And when choosing between courses of action, one must distinguish between an honorable course and one still more honorable, and between a useful course and one still more useful.

Cicero begins with the right, the honorable. What is right for any species of thing is the fulfillment of its nature. Man differs from beasts in his capacity to reason, which enables him to identify the causes of things and the likely consequences of the actions of things. “Without effort [Man] visualizes the course of his whole life and prepares the necessities to live it out” (I.11) In their families and cities, in which men share “a common language and life,” reason enables them to find the best way, to choose the right course of action. But “primary for man is the inquiry and investigation into the truth”; “what is true, simple, and genuine is what is most suited to man’s nature” (I.13). Bringing this desire for knowledge together with family and political life, men by nature consent to be governed only by those who issue “just and lawful commands for our benefit” (I.13). “From this attitude comes greatness of soul and contempt for merely human ways” (I.13). 

With such rational apprehension of natural right, “man alone of all animals” apprehends “the nature of order and propriety and due measure in deeds and words” (I.14). In so apprehending the natural order, Man “transfer[s] this by analogy” from “eyes to mind,” and plans his course of action as a similarly “harmonious structure” (I.14). He wants to do nothing “unsightly or degenerate,” or to contemplate anything irrational in thought or action (I.14). “These are the qualities that kindle and fashion honorable conduct,” whether or not that conduct wins praise (I.14).

The honorable has four sources: the perception and intelligent awareness of what is true (wisdom); safeguarding the community by assigning to each individual his due and by guaranteeing fidelity to contracts (justice); the greatness and strength of a loft and unconquered spirit (courage); and modestia and temperantia (moderation). Readers will recognize the four principal virtues enumerated by Plato’s Socrates in the Republic. Cicero devotes the remainder of Book I to discussing each of them.

Wisdom or “knowledge of the truth comes closest to the essentials of human nature, for” as Aristotle asserts at the beginning of the Metaphysics, “we are all impelled and attracted towards a desire for discovery and knowledge” (I.18). “In this natural and honorable activity there are two faults which we must avoid,” namely, to take unknown things as known, giving “rash credence to them,” and to waste energy and effort on “unnecessary” matters (I.18-19). On this latter point, Cicero warns against shirking one’s obligations by becoming “diverted from public service by enthusiasm for research” (I.19). Here, he has in mind some of the more recent Stoics, such as Sallust, satirized by the young man in Cicero’s De Republica who is preoccupied with trying to figure out an optical illusion caused by a meteorological phenomenon that makes it appear as if there are two suns in the sky. It is true that theoretical wisdom (sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin) is “chief of all virtues,” differing from practical wisdom (phronēsis, prudentia), the “knowledge of things to be sought and things to be avoided” (I.153). But since theoretical wisdom “embraces the sense of community between gods and man, and the relationship between man and man,” it would be enfeebled and unfulfilled “if no practical action were to flow from it” (I.153). And how could practical action be sound if it were not informed knowledge of what human beings are and “concerned with the fellowship of the human race” (I.153)?

Justice, “the brightest adornment of virtue,” ensures, first “that no one harms his neighbor unless he has himself been unjustly attacked” and, second, “communal property should serve communal interests, and private property private interests” (I.20). Nature doesn’t endow private property; one comes by it either by longstanding occupancy of empty land, victory in war, law, bargain, contract, or lot. For another person or persons to seize property so acquired is to “transgress the law of the community” (I.21). Communal or public property is also legitimate, since “our country claims a share in our origin, and our friends likewise,” doing so by nature, human beings being social and political animals. Public property betokens these claims, “binding the community and its individuals closely together by our skills, our efforts, and our talents” (I.22). Justice rests on “good faith,” that is, “truthfully abiding by our words and agreements,” by our fides making our promises fiat (I.23). 

Injustice, by contrast, usually stems from fear, greed, and/or the desire for glory. Cicero cites “the shameless conduct of Gaius Caesar” as a recent illustration: “He undermined all laws, divine and human, in order to establish that dominance which his erroneous belief had targeted for himself” in his pursuit of power and glory (I.26). Most regrettably, such ambition “is usually nursed by men of the greatest and most outstanding talent” (I.26). They often possess the abilities needed to achieve their unjust ends.

Cicero takes care to distinguish between injustice committed under sudden impulse or stress from premeditated injustice. There is also a certain moral laziness that can set in, whereby men “allow persons whom they should protect to go without their support” (I.28). And injustice can occur through sheer distraction, as we concentrate on our “personal pursuits or activities” (I.28). Cicero singles out philosophers as especially prone to this last cause of injustice. In this, he disagrees with Plato’s remark in the Theaetetus to the effect that philosophers are just because they search for the truth, eschewing more ordinary ambition. They do indeed refrain from acts of justice committed out of fear, greed, or the desire for glory, Cicero concedes—they are not Caesars—but the very often neglect acts of justice because they are distracted by philosophizing itself. Still others commit injustice because they pursue family interests too ardently, in the manner of today’s soccer moms, or they harbor “some repugnance for the human race,” cloaking their misanthropy with the claim that “they are minding their own business” (I.29). Such persons are “deserters from the life of the community” (I.29).

Having defined the two types of injustice and identified their causes, and having shown the ways by which justice is maintained, “now we shall be able readily to assess what our obligation is at any particular juncture, unless our self-absorption becomes excessive” (I.29), letting no person suffer harm and remaining mindful of the public good. This settles the question of justice within the political community, but what about justice between and among political communities?

“Rights in warfare must be scrupulously observed” (I.34). Some military disputes are settled by negotiations, others by force. “Since the first is characteristic of human beings and the second of beasts, we must have recourse to the second only if we cannot exploit the first” (I.34-35). (Machiavelli famously subverts this formula in The Prince.) As in Aristotle, “wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice; and once victory is won, those who have not indulged in cruel monstrosities in the war should be spared” (I.35). We Romans have done just that, indeed conferring citizenship upon many former enemies even as we “utterly destroyed Carthage and Numantia,” whose armies committed such monstrous acts against Romans. Not just any peace should be accepted, only those which do not “contain the seeds of future treachery” (I.35). [2]

There is also the question of civil war, usually waged when two or more factions arise within a political community which do not agree upon what the community’s regime should be. To prevent this, we should observe justice even with respect “to the lowliest of society,” the slaves (I.41). “That we treat them as hired hands is reasonable enough: make them work, but give them what is their due” (I.41).

More generally, Cicero identifies “two ways of inflicting injustice, by force or by deceit. Deceit is the way of the humble fox, force that of the lion. Both are utterly alien to human beings, but deceit is the more odious; of all kinds of injustice none is more pernicious than that shown by people who pose as good men at the moment of greatest perfidy.” (I.41). Machiavelli’s adjuration to “use” both the fox and the lion is another instance of his subversion of classical morality as seen in one of its most admired Roman exponents. Although Machiavelli is usually understood to be an enemy of Christianity, this animosity is often supposed to be part of a defense of ‘the ancients.’ Not so: Machiavelli is out to ruin both moral codes and to substitute his own for them.

Related to justice with respect to the distribution of property are beneficence and liberality. Cicero recommends that these subsidiary virtues be ruled by reason in the form of practical wisdom. Assess the character of your potential beneficiary, his affection for you, the type of association you have with him, and any obligations he may have “undertaken in [your] interest” (I.45). At the same time, since “our lives…are spent not with men who are perfect and manifestly wise, but with people who at best embody some pale reflection of virtue,” liberality should extend to anyone “as long as some glimpse of virtue is perceptible in him” (I.46). This requires you to rank your fellow human beings in terms of your obligations to them. Whether good or not so good, one should extend liberality to those “endowed with the milder virtues of moderation, self-rule, and justice”; this is prudent, since those of less mild disposition, the high-spirited ones, often become perfervid,” more likely to abuse your open-handedness (I.46). 

You should also rank possible recipients of beneficence and liberality with respect to their relation to you. The most general relationship is our shared human nature, “the fellowship of the whole human race” (I.50). As mentioned earlier, what unites human beings is reason and speech, “which more than anything separates us from the nature of the beasts” and binds us “in a kind of natural alliance” (I.50). True, some animals may be said to have courage, but not justice, equity, or goodness in the sense of being fully cognizant of the rational order of nature. Within this bond, there is also “the common ownership of all things which nature has brought forth for men’s joint use”—air and water, for example (I.51). These “must be preserved” with the help of laws governing private and public property (I.51). Other levels of human relationship include nationality (including race and language), the political community, close friends, kin, and marriage. Following Aristotle, when it comes to friendship, no friendship “is more pre-eminent of enduring than the friendship forged between good men of like character” (I.55). 

How to rank these relationships? Here, Cicero provides a challenging contrast to the rank order ‘we moderns’ incline to make. “None of these affinities has more weight and induces more affection than the allegiance which we each have to the re publica” (I.57). True, “our parents are dear to us, and so are our children and relatives and friends; but our native land alone subsumes all the affections which we entertain” (I.57). But since we feel the competing attractions of all these relations, Cicero ranks country and parents first, since “the debts we owe to the benefits which they bestow are the greatest” (I.58). Next come children and the rest of the household, “for we are their sole resource, and they can have no other refuge”; following them come “those relatives whom we find congenial and with whom our future prospects also are often shared” (I.58). Nonetheless, in terms of our life within the re publica and outside of our families, all persons “flourish best in friendships; and the most satisfying friendship is that cemented by similarity of moral outlook” and character (I.58).

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the compendium of all the virtues, rightly ordered. It is especially associated with the spirited element of the soul, the part which takes risks, regrets that it has but one life to give for its country. If a spirited soul lacks any of the virtues it can become dangerous to itself and to others. Lacking justice, it will fight “not for the safety of all but for personal interests,” descending from civility to barbarism (I.62). True courage defends the right. Similarly, an intelligent and knowledgeable soul “divorced from justice [is] to be called cunning,” not wise (I.63). Spirited souls lacking one or more of the virtues become tyrannical. “Such men do not allow themselves to be overruled by argument”—reason”—or by any political or lawful sanction”—by civility (I.64). Demagogues who rely “on the false assumptions of the ignorant mob” cannot be classified among the men of magnanimity, either (I.65). “The loftier a man’s spirit, the more easily in his desire for fame he is drawn to unjust deeds; this is a slippery slope on which he is poised” (I.65). The desire for wealth is equally deleterious, “for we must consider it characteristic of the brave and noble spirit to think little of the things which most men reckon special and glorious, and to despise them with the steady and unflinching eye of reason”; “it is the mark of the mature spirit and the great resolution it shows to endure [the numerous and varied occasions which affect the human condition throughout life] in such a way as not to abandon either the life of nature or the dignity of the philosopher” (I.67).

The mention of philosophers spurs Cicero to relent a bit on his previous strictures regarding their inclination to the private life. Some of these are “austere and serious men unable to stomach the conduct of the people or its leaders”—Stoics, not Epicureans (I.69). Let us “perhaps allow abstention from public affairs both to individuals of outstanding talent who have devoted themselves to learning, and to men hindered by ill-health or some other cogent reason who have renounced politics and yielded to others the power and praise for administering the re publica” (I.71). But if a man’s only excuse is that he “despise[s] the military and civil offices which most men admire,” this is not to be condoned, given our obligations to the re publica as our protector (I.71). Men “whom nature has endowed with the resources for conducting public business should renounce all hesitation, seek entry to public office, and administer the re publica,” as “in no other way can it be governed, or greatness of soul be made manifest” (I.72). Both statesmen and philosophers should cultivate such greatness of soul, and philosophers will find this easier to do, as they are less vulnerable to reversals of fortune, need fewer material resources, and endure less humiliation in reversals of fortune than the public men do. 

The political man therefore needs a different kind of preparation than a philosopher does. He should consider not only the honor political work brings but whether he has the capacity to perform it. “Careful preparation must be made” (I.73). Many politically ambitious men take military achievement as crucial to such preparation. Cicero demurs. In truth, “there have been many civic issues of greater importance and renown than operations in war” (I.74). Let arms, then yield to the toga. Although war should not be avoided by inventing ‘rationalizations’ for evading it, “establishing the rationale for making war is more desirable than courage in battle” (I.80). A war should be undertaken for some purpose that justly serves the re publica, not as an opportunity to win glory.

In considering civil rule, a man should follow two precepts articulated in the Platonic dialogues: to “protect the interests of the citizens in such a way that all they do should be directed towards that end without thought of personal advantage” and that “the whole rei publicae be their concern, so that they do not protect one section at the expense of the rest” (I.85). Otherwise, he will only exacerbate factionalism, that is to say, contradiction or disharmony in the city, which is unreasonable and immoral, as seen in the political histories of both Athens and Rome. One should not engage in “scrambling for offices,” either—an “utterly wretched business” (I.86). Nor should we “lend an ear to those who will have it that we should show bitter anger towards adversaries”; rather, “nothing is more praiseworthy or more worthy of a noble an exemplary man than to be conciliatory and forgiving,” as “those of us who live with free peoples in communities where there is equality before the law should make a habit of affability and reserve,” not allowing ourselves to become irritated by demanding and annoying requests (I.88). At the same time, “such gentleness and magnanimity are praiseworthy only if we are stern when the state demands it, for otherwise the civitas cannot be well administered” (I.88). Be governed by the laws, “which when imposing punishment are guided by fairness and not by anger” (I.89). 

The virtue of moderation comports with the honorable because what is truly honorable precedes from what is well-measured, fitting. ‘Fittingness’ or decorum applies to all the virtues. In exercising practical wisdom, for example, one should fit words to the circumstances and “recognize and maintain the truth in all matters”—true statements being words that fit the nature of the matter considered (I.95). With courage, “what is performed in a manly and lofty spirit is seen to be worthy of a man and to be fitting, whereas the opposite is unfitting and because it is despicable” (I.95) In general, the fitting is whatever action is reasonable in a given circumstance; “the fitting is what is consistent with man’s excellence in the respect in which his nature differs from all other living creatures” (I.96). Nature is ‘what is’; decorum is consistent with nature, does not contradict it, and indeed burnishes it.

Many poets understand this, but apply it more broadly, showing us what is fitting in a villain as well as what is fitting in a hero. “But nature has endowed us with the role of constancy, moderation, self-government, and consideration of others” (I.98). Poets show us what is fitting to human nature and what is fitting to men who have ruined their nature. They know the difference, and so do we, since “just as physical beauty attracts the eye because of the apt harmony of the bodily parts, and our pleasure lies in the fact that all those parts are as one in sharing a native grace, so this notion of the fitting, of decorum, which shines in our lives, wins the applause of our contemporary through the order, moderation, and constancy reflected in every word and action” (I.98). “The obligation which stems from this advances first on the path which leads to harmony with nature and to the preservation of its law. If we take nature as our guide, we shall never go astray”; just as “we win approval by our physical movements which accord with nature,” so much more do we win it “with the movements of the soul which are likewise consonant with nature” (I.100).

By nature, the soul’s appetites should obey the commands of the soul’s reasoning capacity. “Nature has not fashioned us to behave as if we have been generated for play and jest” but for “more serious and important pursuits” (I.103). Play and jest should be treated as we treat sleep and relaxation generally, as restoratives after “we have done justice to serious and weighty business” (I.103). As for play itself, it can be “ill-bred, rude, scandalous, indecent” or “refine, urbane, clever, and witty,” as seen in the plays of Plautus and “the books of Socratic philosophy” (I.104). Cicero commends the second form, preferring that his son not turn into a frat boy.

Cicero understands that individuals have different natures within the overall framework of human nature. He does not, impossibly, expect everyone to be the same. “We should each of us hold resolutely to the characteristics peculiar to us as long as they are not flawed,” following “our natural bent insofar as it befits the law of nature” (I.110). Nothing is fitting if it flies in the face of Minerva, of reason, and that includes never aiming at “something we cannot achieve” (I.110). The boy puts aside his dreams of athletic ‘stardom’ when he learns that he can’t hit a curveball. Instead, “work hardest at the things for which we are best suited,” unless circumstances require otherwise (I.114). But above all, Marcus, “we must establish what kind of person we wish to be, and what way of life we wish to follow” (I.117). This is the hardest decision to make, and we make it when we are young, “at a time when our powers of deliberation are at their weakest,” when we are more likely to follow our desires than our reason (I.117). “The person who has harmonized his entire plan of life with the sort of nature which is free of faults should hold a steadfast course, for this is supremely fitting, unless perhaps he realizes that he has made a mistake in his choice of a way of life,” in which case he should never be so vain as to fail to change course (I.120). Many times, the example of a father is helpful in such deliberations, provided one doesn’t imitate his vices.

Decorum should be observed also in relation to one’s age—a young man should concentrate especially on developing habits of moderation, an old man on avoiding laziness and shameless luxury—and to one’s role in relation to the political community—a magistrate is not an ordinary citizen and neither is the same as a resident foreigner. Decorum also manifests itself in personal conduct: modesty regarding the body, never “fall[ing] into a habit of listless sauntering in our gait” or of “hurrying too fast” (I.131). Decorum of soul consists of “keeping our mental operations in harmony with nature,” never succumbing against perturbation or depression” (I.131). Our appetites should obey reason whether we are intent upon discovering the truth or in determining a course of action. Decorum of speech, whether in an oration or in ordinary conversation, requires a similar reasoned measure. 

“In all of life,” then, “the right precept is to avoid exhibitions of passion, that is, mental excitement that is excessive and untempered by reason” (I.136). Even in rebuking someone, “show clearly that event that very harshness which goes with our reproof is designed for the good of the person reproved” (I.137). 

Turning from speech to action, Cicero identifies three principles to be followed. “First, impulse should obey reason”; “second, we should assess the importance of a project we seek to achieve, to ensure that neither more nor less attention and labor is expended than the case justifies”; “third, we must take pains to safeguard all that pertains to the dignity and moderation of a gentleman” (I.141). The political community’s civil institutions will serve as guides for many actions, whatever criticisms may have been leveled against them by philosophers. With respect to foreigners, “in sum, not to go into details, we should respect, defend, and preserve the common bonds of union and fellowship subsisting between all humanity” (I.149).

A gentleman will select a fitting means of livelihood, excluding tax gathering, usury, manual labor, wholesale merchandizing, mechanical trades (“for no workshop can have anything liberal about it”), and all trades which “serve sensual pleasures,” such food preparation, and entertainment (I.150). Honorable trades require “more prudence” than these, and include medicine, architecture, and “teaching honorable things” (I.151). “But of all profit-making activities none is better, more fruitful, more delightful, more worthy of a free man than agriculture” (I.151). Such Virginia gentlemen as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison took due note.

Having established that “obligations derive from what is honorable, and from each type of virtue” (II.1), in Book II Cicero addresses the second main element of ethics, utility, which involves “the kinds of obligation which impinge upon our mode of living, and on the availability of the things which men put to use, their wealth and their resources” (II.1). However high-minded he may be, a gentleman still must attend to ‘low’ necessities.

There have been some who have charged Cicero with failing to observe this obvious point. He offers an apologia. “From time to time I fear that mention of philosophy is abhorrent to men of integrity, and that they are surprised that I devote so much time to it” (II.2). But he does so only because public life is no longer possible in Rome, now that Rome is “wholly in thrall to one man,” Julius Caesar (II.2). Had the re publica remained a mixed-regime republic, had its regime not changed, I no longer had any public role to maintain. Here, Cicero illustrates an earlier teaching: That moral conduct or obligation changes with circumstances. “Should anyone pour scorn on such study” as philosophy, “I cannot possibly imagine what such a person thinks worth praising” (II.5). 

Others criticize not his philosophizing but his way of philosophizing, charging that he contradicts himself when “I maintain that we can grasp nothing for certain” while “pursuing the rules for obligation” (II.7). But I have never claimed that there are some things certain, other things uncertain, only that “some things are probable and others improbable” (II.7). Ethical reasoning depends not upon certainty but upon convictions tested by logic, by dialectic, “the clash of arguments from the two sides” (II.8). Such rational testing, whereby one can identify and discard improbabilities, suffices for firm moral conduct. Cicero proceeds to do just that with respect to utility and possible conflicts between it and the honorable.

“Nothing more destructive can be imposed on human life” than the claim that “the honorable is detached from the useful” (II.9). And both the honorable and the useful should be related to justice. “Those who fail to see this are people who often venerate only tricksters and mistake perversity for wisdom” (I.10).

There are several kinds of useful things: inanimate (gold, silver), animate but non-rational (farm animals), and animate and rational (the gods, other men). Of the last group, “the gods are not thought to inflict harm” but men often do, presenting “the greatest stumbling-block to their fellow-men” (II.12). Inanimate and animate but non-rational things require human labor or at least rule to be useful. As for human beings, they can scarcely be useful to one another if they do not live in political communities, preferably ones with sound regimes. As a result of political life, “men developed a peaceable outlook and a sense of restraint; human life thus became more secure, and by giving and receiving, by interchange and application of talents we came to want for nothing” (II.15). Conversely, “there is likewise no plague so abominable that it is not visited by one man on another” (II.16). Cicero agrees with the opinion of Dicaearchus, who wrote that “many more men…have been wiped out by attacks of other men in wars or civil commotions than by all other disasters” (II.16).

Given this crucial dichotomy, “I regard it as the peculiar function of virtue to win over men’s minds, and to harness them to its purposes” (II.17). In this way, morality is supremely useful as well as good ‘in principle.’ All virtue centers on three things: “in detecting what is true and genuine in any instance, what is consistent with it, and what are its consequences, origins and causes”; in restraining “those mental disturbances which the Greeks call pathe (’emotions’)” and “subject[ing] impulses (the Greek for which is hormai) to the control of reason”; and, finally, in “treat[ing] our associates in a restrained and expert way, so that with their support we may have our natual needs supplied in full and abundant measure” while “wreak[ing] vengeance on those who have sought to harm us, and inflict[ing] such punishment as justice and decency allow” (II.18).

In diametric opposition to Machiavelli, Cicero argues that “of all these possibilities none is more calculated to secure and retain influence than winning affection, and none is more repugnant than being feared,” which leads to being hated (II.23). Tyrants like Julius Caesar are killed for this reason, as “no amount of influence”—meaning bribes—can “withstand the hatred of the many” (II.23). Even if the laws have been trashed by such a man, and “even if liberty has been intimidated,” eventually the laws will surface again, ready to prescribe just punishment (II.24). More, “liberty which has been suppressed has a fiercer bite than when it has been maintained” (II.24). Those who rule by fear often die in fear. The same goes for factitious men who foment civil wars. As a result of such men, “we have lost our republic” (II.29). “We have plunged into this disaster through choosing to be feared rather than to be cherished as the object of affection” (II.29).

Glory, which military commanders seek, works the same way, depending upon the affection and trust of the people and their opinion that a man is worthy of admiration and honor. These sentiments in turn depend upon the intent to serve the people and, better still, success in doing so, actions which manifest the virtues of “liberality, beneficence, justice, good faith, and all the virtues associated with civilized and affable manners” (II.32). It is human nature itself which induces us to “feel affection for those in whom we think these virtues reside” (II.32). Beyond affection, we also trust those whom we think have practical wisdom conjoined with justice, the ability to foresee events and to prepare for emergencies when they arise. Justice inspires trust still more because we place more trust in a just man with lesser prudence than a prudent man with little justice. “Justice without prudence will be able to do much; prudence without justice will have little effect at all” (II.34). In the philosophic sense, prudence with little or no justice is mere craftiness, not true prudence, but Cicero stipulates that he here describes the sentiments of ‘the many’ on these matters, not a precise moral teaching. 

Along with beneficence and the combination of prudence and justice, the man who wins glory enjoys the admiration and honor of his fellow-citizens. A man known for self-indulgence, unscrupulousness, backbiting, and baseness generally will be viewed with contempt, whereas the one who maintain their self-possession regardless of circumstances, good or bad, earn respect.

Above all, “justice fulfills all three prerequisites for gaining glory: benevolence, because it seeks to benefit the greatest number; trust for the same reason; and admiration because it despises those things which fire most men with greed, and possesses them” (II.38). A reputation for justice is necessary to gain the help of others, but “if people imagine that they can obtain glory by deceit and empty show and hypocrisy, in word and look”—the mere appearance of justice—they “very much mistaken” (II.43). Even thieves need to practice justice among themselves. Therefore, “justice must be cultivated and maintained by every means, both for its own sake (otherwise it would not be justice) and to enhance our honor and glory” (II.42). “We should be as we wish to be regarded” (II.43). To win this worthy reputation, one may conduct oneself well in war, exhibit modesty, devotion to parents and household, associate with men with the reputation for wisdom and justice, and demonstrate the ability to speak well, in friendly and affable conversation but also in public oratory, especially in courtrooms and especially as a defender of the accused, not their prosecutor. To defend the accused, especially those accused by government officers, can put a just limit on rule by fear even as it wins the esteem of the people, who are often the victims of such unjust intimidation. Cicero refers his son to an oration of this sort that he made when he was a young man. It is reasonable to consider the De Officiis not only as an example of a father’s advice to his son, not only as a model of advice fathers generally should give to their sons, but as his own version of Plato’s Apology of Socrates, that is, the speech of a man punished unjustly for living a just life—in his case, however, a life devoted mostly to civic activity, less to the more exclusively philosophic way of life defended by Socrates.

Beneficence or kindness—seen in what we now call charitable giving but even more charitable work—and liberality (the mean between the extremes of extravagance and miserliness) will earn you many friends. Direct your acts of beneficence toward men of integrity, lest your efforts be wasted; this keeps your efforts within the limits of justice. Some such acts should be directed to individuals, others to the re publica. Care must be taken to give moderately because gifts of money erode the wealth that makes such gifts possible; it can also corrupt the recipients. Cicero censure the practice of providing not so much bread as ‘circuses’—civic feasts, gladiatorial shows, public games, and “wild-beast chases” in the arenas (II.55). Liberality hits the middle between extravagance and miserliness. 

Beneficence is for men in their private capacity. As public officials, their “chief preoccupation…must be to ensure that the individual keeps what is his; there should be no public confiscation of the possessions of private persons” (II.73). Sulla began, and Julius Caesar expanded, the policy of proscribing their enemies and then giving their property to others; such largesse with others’ possessions is an instrument of tyranny. Similarly, Marcius Philippus’ “agrarian law,” whereby property would be transferred from the wealthy few to the many poor, aimed at “the equalization of property; what could be more baneful than that?” (II.73). “The chief motivation behind the establishment of res publicae civitatesque was to ensure the maintenance of private property; for although nature guided men to form communities, it was in the hope of guarding their possessions that they sought protection in cities” (II.73). Cicero singles out the property tax as particularly unjust for that reason; needed revenues may be supplied by tariffs. In all, “there is no vice more squalid than greed” (II.77), whether it is seen in private or public men, leading as it does to injustice and thus to factionalism. Rather, “the supreme demonstration of reason and wisdom as manifested by a good citizen, not dividing the interests of the citizens but uniting all on the basis of equity” (II.83).

At the same time, and as a corollary to property rights, rulers must take care that the many who are poor do not fall into debt. This only leads to resentment when the few who are rich attempt to collect what they’ve lent. To guard private property, prevent exploitation of the poor by the rich and rebellion by the poor against the rich; to “employ all possible means both in war and at home to enhance the power, territories, and revenues of the re publica while observing justice: “these are the tasks for great men,” tasks “regularly achieved in the days of our forebears” and still achievable today “for those who will carry them through,” thereby winning glory for themselves and proving useful to the re publica.

Book III continues the theme of usefulness, now with respect to describing and ranking the several kinds of useful things and actions. Cicero begins by contrasting his own enforced leisure, with the overthrow of the republican regime and the rule of Mark Antony, with that of Publius Scipio, whose intentionally extracted his moments of leisure from a life of military and political activity. Scipio said that “he was never less at leisure than in his leisure-time, and was never less lonely than when he was on his own,” thinking of public business or communing with himself (III.1). Leisure and solitude lend themselves to sloth in others; they stimulated the soul of Scipio. As for himself, Cicero wishes he could say the same, as “my leisure has been imposed on me from want of public business rather than through desire for rest” (III.2). But he can imitate Scipio as best he can, if imperfectly. Scipio’s leisure and solitude were superior to my own because he, like Socrates, wrote nothing while at leisure, concentrating his mind entirely upon political and philosophic meditations undiluted by the act of writing. Lacking “the strength of mind” that enabled Scipio to ignore his solitude, Cicero writes, an act of sociality—in this instance, one directed toward the care of his son. Cicero is ‘making himself useful,’ as our phrase puts it.

This returns Cicero’s thoughts to the relationship between the honorable and the useful. “Socrates used to pronounce a curse upon those who first separated these two things which are inseparable by nature” (III.11). In this, the Stoics concurred, arguing that nothing truly useful can be dishonorable and that the honorable is always useful—in sharp contrast to those who claim that what is honorable should serve the useful. Things said to be useful very often conflict with the useful.

Cicero cautions that for the Stoics the identity of the honorable and the useful can only coincide perfectly among the wise. Most of us are not wise. We esteem as honorable what is not truly honorable and esteem as useful what is not truly useful. We are human but imperfectly so; we strive to fulfill our true nature but have yet to do so. For us, what the Stoics call “the honorable at a secondary level” must suffice (III.16), cultivating and admiring the virtues as imperfectly understood—thinking of justice simply as repaying debts and refraining from lying or cheating, for example. Such virtue is not to be discouraged. It readily distinguishes between the honorable as conceived imperfectly from, for example, greed for financial gain. But it does lead to doubts in the moral realm, a realm where we typically seek certitude. For example, murder is rightly deemed evil, murdering a friend especially heinous. “But if a man murders a tyrant even if he is a friend, has he thereby implicated himself in a criminal act? the Roman people in fact do not think so, for they regard this as the most noble of illustrious deeds. So in this instance has the useful prevailed over the honorable? On the contrary, the honorable has allied with the useful.” (III.19). The criterion for judging these moral dilemmas we unwise folk must consider is human nature, which is social and political. Ordinarily, murder and theft and other acts of injustice undermine the natural sociability of human beings, although in the exception given such an act might affirm that sociality by killing an enemy of that very humanity. Thus, “though nature does not object to our opting to obtain for ourselves individually rather than for another what is need for life’s necessities, she does not permit us to increase our own resources, wealth, and possessions by plundering those of other people” (III.22). The “aim and purpose of laws [is] too keep intact the unifying bonds between citizens” (III.23). This goes not only for those who live as fellow-citizens but for nations as they deal with other nations.

As he had discussed in the Laws, nature as a whole holds together, consists of a unity of many forces and things, a harmony. There is a law of nature; nature isn’t chaotic. So too with the human soul, which is part of nature: “a lofty and noble spirit, and attitudes of courtesy, justice, and generosity, are much more in harmony with nature than are pleasure, mere life, and riches.” [3] “It is the mark of that noble and lofty spirit to despise these last, and to account them as nothing compared with the common good,” the good of the re publica (III.24). For ‘we unwise,’ we imperfect human beings, to emulate Hercules, who undertook “the greatest toils and privations so as to save or aid each and every nation, rather than to live apart from men, enjoying not only freedom from all troubles but also the greatest pleasures,” as Epicureans recommend (III.25). In engaging in military and especially political life, however, the one who “conforms with nature can inflict no harm on his fellow-man,” although he will unhesitatingly inflict harm on men who act as if they were beasts (III.25). “We do not share fellowship with tyrants” (III.32). In this sense “we must all adhere to the principle that what is useful to the individual is identical with what is useful to the community” (III.25). As Aristotle argues, we must attend to the circumstances, adjusting our conduct to them in order to achieve the honorable with the useful.

“What is good is certainly useful, and so whatever is honorable”—by definition good—is “useful” (III.35). The circumstances which “perplex our minds” occur because some things appear to be useful when they are not (III.40). So, for example, “the good man will never promote a friend’s interests to the detriment of the re publica or in defiance of his oath or pledged word, even if he is sitting in court over him, for he then quits the role of friends to undertake that of judge” (III.44). It might seem useful to promote your friends interests in expectation of some quid pro quo down the line, but this would injure the bonds of the re publica within which your friendship is framed. On the contrary, “the good man is one who benefits all those whom he can, and who harms none unless he has been the victim of injustice” (III.76). “Is it not shameful for philosophers to have doubts about this, when even plain country folk would have no doubts?” (III.77). Even if the prize is consulship, even if the intended end is, Caesar-like, lordship “of all the world,” it remains “a monstrous error” to perform what seem to be useful but unjust acts, to “lose the luster and repute of a good man” (III.83). “Nothing is more useless to the man who has gained that eminence unjustly,” as he “fears by day and night” for his own safety, knowing that the victims of his crimes seek just revenge, and will not stop until they have it (III.84).

In contrast to the likes of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, Cicero holds up the example of Marcus Atilius Regulus, a consul captured by during a war with Carthage. The Carthaginian monarch sent Regulus back to the Roman senate to ask for the return of some prisoners of war; Regulus swore an oath that if the senate refused to release them he would return to Carthage to face death by torture. Instead, Regulus recommended a supremely un-useful course for himself and his family, recommending to the senators that they not release the prisoners and then returning to Carthage to face execution. In doing so, Regulus “maintain[ed] the dignity of his consular standing,” exhibited “greatness of soul and courage,” serving the re publica instead of himself (III.99). How did this serve Rome? Regulus was old, “spent with age,” whereas the Carthaginian prisoners were young, brave officers; it was more useful to Rome for Regulus to sacrifice himself than to have such men released (III.100). Cicero’s title, De Officiis, suggests the intimate relation between the ‘good offices’ of the individual man and the political office he holds. Ciceronian ethics are political to the core, yet with no suggestion of modern ‘totalitarian’ servility towards ‘the state’ or ‘the party.’

“When men detach the useful from the honorable, they undermine the very foundations of nature” (III.101), which support the harmony of all elements not their contradiction and consequent destruction. “Nothing is useful which is not also honorable; and it is not honorable because it is useful, but useful because it is honorable” (III.110). That is, one must always ask, ‘Useful for what?’ To join pleasure with the honorable, for example, “is like mating an animal with a human” (III.118). It is Machiavelli who will commend the Centaur as a model for the prince.

 

 

 

Notes

1. As Walsh mildly puts it, “Machiavelli in his celebrated Il Principe (1513) diverges from the Ciceronian tradition.”
2. Walsh suggests that Cicero alludes to the Great Civil War of 49 BC, when Julius Caesar was allowed to retain the means by which he could violate the peace agreement he had reached with the Senate.
3. Hobbes and other materialists often put self-preservation, the maintenance of mere life on whatever terms, at the head of moral aims. Cicero is thinking more of such pleasure-seeking philosophers as the Epicureans, who argue “that all good lies in pleasure, and have maintained that virtue is praiseworthy merely because it is productive of pleasure” (III.116). This notion is “at war with the honorable,” contradicting the principal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice—all now reduced to the status of instruments of pleasure (III.117).

 

Michael Platt: Mighty Opposites: Machiavelli and Shakespeare Match Wits. Privately published, 2021. First published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy (Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2022).

 

What if playwrights Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and William Shakespeare (1564-161) had met, corresponded, even conversed, thanks to the Florentine’s acquisition of the Makropulos Elixir, mixed by the court alchemist of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II—a potion imagined by still another playwright, Karel Capek (1890-1938), granting those who drink it a long-extended life? And what if Shakespeare wrote an unfinished dialogue based on the encounter, completed by his fellow player and trusted friend Nicholas Tooley? (After all, did not a promising young Plato scholar named Seth Benardete once muse, “Shakespeare could have written dialogues,” to the delight of his teacher, Leo Strauss?) Michael Platt has imagined it so, bringing together “the founder of modern political philosophy” with “the greatest modern poet” in a book animated by the question, can there be a Christian prince?”

The year is 1598. Machiavelli is secretary of state for the “Right, Re-Risen, Roman Republic,” having inspired the unification of northern Italy under a regime that has built itself into a naval power in the Mediterranean. He is on a diplomatic mission in England, perhaps to counter Spain, which still controls the Kingdom of Naples. Always looking to enlist “new captains in his unarmed army,” he also seeks an alliance with Shakespeare, whose writings surpass Machiavelli’s own works (Machiavelli admits to himself) in beauty. “In spiritual warfare nothing is more effectual,” and in his declared war on the regnant form of spirituality, Christianity, “the greatest calumny on life,” Machiavelli can use all the allies he can get. Having read Shakespeare’s Roman plays, he detects, or supposes he detects, a potential officer.

This is to say that Platt indicates the partial fulfillment of Machiavelli’s intention in a sort of afterlife made possible not by God but by medicine, an intention suggested in his books: in place of the risen Christ, the Galilean who defeated the Roman emperors, the Roman res publica will be resurrected, transfigured by the spirit of ‘the prince’—that is to say, the spirit of Machiavelli himself, who is no Cicero, no ‘ancient’ Roman.

Shakespeare replies to Machiavelli’s self-written letter of introduction, pleased with the Florentine’s flattering but true observation that Shakespeare writes both tragedy and comedy. He invites Machiavelli to attend performances of his Richard III and his three plays on Henry VI. He also recommends that Machiavelli read and reread them.

In due course, Machiavelli replies, observing that the English plays complement the Roman plays, with their shared themes of honor and calumny, the violence of political founding, and civil disorder. He is quick to spot a new source of controversy in modern England, “the new division of Christianity” between Catholics and Protestants. He criticizes monarchic regimes because they are dynastic: since “most families are awful to grow up in,” “why give rule of public things to a family,” which only “magnifies vices more than virtues”? It may be that he brings these themes together, with an eye on the ‘family’ seen in the Trinity. “I do see, howbeit faintly, the coming of a better regime,” as the English people exhibit the capacity to discern virtue in their rulers and demand justice when those rulers commit crimes. “Would that their common sense were instituted in a stronger Commons, and if a ruling circle sprang up in it.”

Shakespeare concurs with some of this. “How could I not study disorder? After all, there is so much of it. And it is always waiting to rush in. All it takes is one generation to lose the good times, and then slide on to worse,” although “in the worst of times, when all seems lost, a rebound occurs,” often beginning, as Machiavelli hopes, “with the people” As to Shakespeare’s downplaying of Parliament, he calls Machiavelli’s attention to the theater in which he puts on his plays. It “give[s] the audience the experience of an ideal Parliament in eternal session, in which all the important features of a political situation, together with their connection to everything above and below politics are brought into speech, so that deliberation about the nation, sometimes even about the world, goes on in the mind of the audience, as it should in Parliament, in the Privy Council, in the Monarch, and in the soul of every English man facing his public choices”—more than only a Parliament but a mixed regime, consisting of both aristocrats and commoners, “all drawn together in our Theatre, and by my theatre, all made into one audience, all laughing, weeping, trembling, cheering together, and accordingly understanding,” in what is now nearly a modern commercial ‘nation-state.’ He concludes by wondering if, even with a commercial way of life, men “can live together who do not worship together, as Jew and Christian do not, or at least look up to something beautiful and loft together?” Where Machiavelli envied the beauty of Shakespeare’s literary style, his art, Shakespeare himself considers beauty in nature, and perhaps in God.

In their next exchange of letters, Machiavelli begins by condemning the conspicuously Christian Henry VI, who “wishes to be loved not feared” and is rewarded only with contempt. Indeed, on further consideration, Machiavelli concludes that Henry wants to be loved only by God, remaining indifferent to the love, the hate, and even the contempt of his fellow men, a ruler who “puts himself above politics” even to the extent of restoring titles and estates to his dynastic enemy, Richard Plantagenet. Unfitted for war, Henry never played sports, practiced with weapons, or learned horsemanship; for Machiavelli, ‘horse’ means warfare and, given Richard’s famous battlefield cry, “My kingdom for a horse!”—a line that will reappear for further discussion later—Machiavelli is rehearsing his theme from The Prince that princes of war must replace princes of peace. With “reviling relish,” Machiavelli lists Henry’s many “sins of political omission,” from his failure to defend his (few) political friends (especially his failure to protect his Lord Protector, Duke Humphrey) to his failure as a royal husband to punish his foreign-born queen for her infidelity. “All these omissions add up to omitting to rule,” to leaving rule of human things to the wisdom and power of God and His providence.

Shakespeare largely concurs with this analysis, while cautioning against taking it too far. “I have qualified our contempt” for Henry. He may not know horses, “but surprise, he knows hawking,” a sport that figures in his comedy the Taming of the Shrew, in which “my hawker Petruchio gentles a mature wild female, named Kate, and with the same means” a falconer would use, “deprivation of sleep and meat.” Moreover, Henry “never had the benefit of a father,” only “the image of his great father,” Henry V—in “everyone’s mind for comparison”—and a “nefarious uncle,” the Duke of Bedford, as his tutor. The “ever-widening span” between young Henry’s “sight and his might makes him something like a Fool in court,” seeing and saying things impermissible to others but unable to act, “or even to take care of himself.” Rulers do need toughness, since “not all the anointment in Christendom can change a soul never born to rule.” But Henry does have compassion for his people, and this is what leads to his “one political success,” his quelling of a popular rebellion “through clemency and through the recollection of his father.” Shakespeare adds, tellingly, “No wonder you missed it; clemency is not a trick of the fox.” More, we see that while Machiavelli blames Henry’s incapacity on Christianity, Shakespeare attributes that incapacity to the king’s nature. This allows Shakespeare to judge him with clemency, as Machiavelli does not and will not.

That last rapier thrust induces Machiavelli to pull back, offering a qualification of his own. “Not that too much vice is virtuous,” he cautions, criticizing Henry’s queen, Margaret, for her excessive “spirit of revenge.” After all, “murder must have a purpose,” a political purpose; “she is all fury, no cunning.” But here, too, Shakespeare points to a certain subtlety Machiavelli overlooks. Margaret is “not all revenge.” When Henry banishes her lover, “we see some tenderness in her, however adulterous,” and when her son is stabbed in front of her, “we feel as she feels,” never having “expected to suffer with her.” “Often that happens in my works. Suddenly someone who could have hardened into a profile, even a cartoon, shows another side or feature, or a downright about-face. As you get to know human beings that happens. As you get to know yourself, that happens.” Platt follows Shakespeare’s lead here, even as he has Shakespeare deliver that lesson; just when it seemed that the exchange between the two men might turn into a simple battle of wits, he has Shakespeare offer the childless older man some fatherly advice.

There is a larger moral and political problem that Machiavelli also does not see. If Duke Humphrey attempted to overthrow Henry, “as his wife and you urge,” he would no longer be himself, no longer “the man we rightly…think most fit of all the magnates to be a king.” That is, “he would lose his eligibility in our eyes, and as important, his worthiness in his own eyes.” As Plato’s Socrates argues, “the same virtue that makes a man best for an office excludes him”; the one “most worthy to rule, the philosopher, is least interested in doing so.” A ruler by the apparently natural but actually conventional right of heredity may therefore be preferable to the ruler by the natural right of virtue. After all, so many persons suppose themselves naturally fitter to rule than whoever it is that wears the crown. To make partly invisible, counterfeitable virtue the criterion for ruling in practice would be to invite endless civil disorder. Better that the wise man advise the king, serve as Lord Protector, guarding him against such enemies as Humphrey’s ambitious wife and the ever-conniving Cardinal Winchester. “It is ambition within bound and in service of the good that is to be lauded, not the over-reaching acquisitiveness you urge in recommending Humphrey seize the Crown, or the infinity you desire. That way madness in the soul lies, and chaos in the state.”

After Richard Plantagenet’s son Edward kills Henry’s capable son, also named Edward, on the battlefield, and his ally Gloucester murders Henry (by then Edward’s prisoner in the Tower of London), England is left with a king whose sexual desires lead him into an injudicious marriage. Machiavelli sniffs, “The lust of Edward IV unfitted him to be a prince.” More politic choices had been available. Upon reading this, Shakespeare thinks, “Though in your Prince you warn not to touch the women, in your plays you teach every man to ‘touch’ all he can.” For you, Machiavelli, “neither fortune nor woman can resist man,” but in the world you envision there can be no stable families to uphold the city. “Families start with sight, not touch, with the ardent looks of the young, of Romeo and Juliet.” “Machiavelli in love, impossible.” And so Machiavelli makes the first genuinely political relationship, the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, also impossible. If Machiavelli were ever to watch Romeo and Juliet, “I’m afraid he’d set himself to teach one lover to murder the other, and thus effectually prove that love does no, cannot exist, just as he would prove ideal republics are no guides to better states, and even no measure of extant ones.”

Shakespeare keeps most of these thoughts to himself. In his answering letter, he contents himself with making a different remark, one aimed at moderating his correspondent’s claims. “One consequence of the free will my characters manage to exercise…is that others cannot predict it; even the sagacity of the sage is limited by that reality; that’s a hard fact those who are proud of penetrating hard things do not like to acknowledge.” The news of his Lord Protector’s death first makes King Henry faint. But then his realization of his unintentional responsibility for that death “fills him, for once, with spirit,” a possibility neither his enemies nor the play’s audience anticipate. “My characters are always doing something a bit ‘out of character,’ very much like the men and women I know, like myself.” His point to Machiavelli: conscience does not invariably make cowards of us all. Sometimes it makes some of us courageous. “A sense of guilt is not always a disadvantage, and its absence not always an advantage.” Equally, the attempt to conquer fate, Fortuna, to satisfy an unlimited desire to acquire by somehow getting ‘behind’ one’s character, manipulating it, ‘using’ one’s virtues and vices, makes too much of freedom. Machiavelli, how well do you know yourself? How well do you know other men, whom you are so sure you see right through? And how well do you know Fortuna, whom you expect to master?

Shakespeare thus agrees that Henry and Edward are no fit kings, although for different reasons. What of the tyrant who succeeds them, Edward’s younger brother, Richard III? Machiavelli applauds. “In these Histories so far, I most esteem this man most,” he exclaims, with redundant emphasis. “I positively exult in Richard’s polite employment of Christian scripture and sentiments,” seen in his seduction of Lady Anne, widow of Edward’s son, “right beside her husband’s coffin,” no less. Machiavelli delights in Richard’s “witty expression” of his prideful contempt for his inferiors, phrases Shakespeare turns that are even better than his own clever formulations in The Prince.  Still, he faults Richard for being a bit too open in his blasphemies, a mistake symptomatic of an overall lack of prudence. What is more, “other than gaining the crown, he has no purpose, no plan.” In this, his anti-Christian stance apes the Christian’s inclination to gaze at the lilies of the field, which neither toil nor spin because the joys of the day suffice to him who expects still greater, permanent joys in eternity, needing no plan for that future time, already prepared for him by his Savior. By contrast, Machiavelli does have a plan. While hoping to rid the world of the ‘moderns’ or Christians while radically revising the teachings of the ‘ancients,’ Machiavelli himself would take care to salvage pieces of ancient wisdom, including prudential wisdom, even as he directs them to purposes the ancients did not understand.

Shakespeare takes up the theme of the ancients—specifically, the Romans. “Between us, I do not see Rome, either republic or empire, as wholly superior to our modern Christendom.” Because “the deepest desire of a Roman is to become a statue of himself,” Rome undertook the monumental task of world conquest. Having achieved this, Julius Caesar did indeed “achieve a statuesque immortality.” But “in becoming a god” he lost his humanity. (As Christians would add, a statue-god is an idol, no real god.) To “despise human life” leads to a reduction of the man to a slab of marble or, if still living, a beast. Caesar’s idolatrous divinity contrasts with Christ’s everlasting life, whereby God became human, died, but continued to live and even to rule. Why is this not the superior ideal?

Ideal it may be, but is it true? Machiavelli replies that the reasoning behind the Earl of Warwick’s autopsy of Duke Humphrey, proving that the Lord Protector was murdered (2 Henry VI 3.2.168ff.) should be extended to consideration of claims based on “the body of Christ allegedly crucified and allegedly risen from the dead.” Christians point to miraculous stigmata on their hands, where painters depict nails driven into Christ’s hands, attaching Him to the Cross. But “only nails through the wrists will hold a body to a cross—unless you believe in miracles. So much for all later stigmata! I and Leonardo know if anatomy were queen of the sciences there would be no theology.” Morally, too, Christianity hangs on dubious assumptions. “What a terrible idea, of a God who would punish whole innocent generations for the deeds of their grandfathers, but this God does not exist.” Fortuna, on the other hand, “hard but not interested in retribution,” shows that men “need princes not saviors,” as “men punish themselves” with their crimes of ignorance and the mental weakness induced by false religion. Shakespeare, Machiavelli confidently or perhaps wishfully asserts, rightly teaches the English to “abhor infamy, dare to reason, and be a man.”

“You say things that other men do not say, only do,” Shakespeare observes. Yet what you say is only “part of knowledge.” “Sometimes, even in politics, men do good things, and sometimes, if rarely, they aspire, even in political life, to the lofty good above them, and thus deserve to be remembered, as Good Duke Humphrey, a statesman though he failed, should be.” Your Prince amounts to “the unintended exhibition of your noble soul,” inasmuch as “you aspire to lasting glory, but you do not know yourself”; “I see all your desires in strife, the desire to know the truth, the desire to effect something, and the desire to win immortal fame, all there struggling in you.” Reread your own book and if by that “you come to understand yourself, you would soon be able to order yourself.”

As for the way you would order the world, into large, centralized states, this too will lead to self-contradiction. Before Henry VIII and his successful instantiation of your kind of state in England, a rich man gave to a poor man out of charity, a poor man felt gratitude in return. Now, “those taxed to provide will always feel it is too much, and the poor receiving it will feel it is too little”; with such “resentment in both and humiliation of the receiving poor,” will not your strong state weaken?

When Machiavelli pointedly ignores this “challenge to self-examination,” Shakespeare indignantly writes that the teacher of evil lives on, all right, but in the malign effects of his teachings. Scoundrels “will cite your authority for their low crimes, their base betrayals, and even their savage atrocities.” Exercising his own virtue of prudence, however, he decides not to send this letter and rather to wait for a better opportunity to engage Machiavelli at his core, so to speak, “perhaps face to fact, on a visit to Stratford.”

He instead more cautiously writes to “suggest that much escapes you.” In “grasping for the effectual,” you blind yourself to “noble failures, and complain of fortune, yours and Cesare Borgia’s and you do not know who to marry”—a theme of the Odyssey—”and I doubt you know how to die”—a theme of the Iliad. That is, although Machiavelli writes comedies, tragedies and epics remain beyond his reach. And even his most famous comedy, Mandragola, is “devoid of merriment,” more smutty than funny.

One of the things Machiavelli admits has escaped him is the reason why crafty Richard III lost his crown so soon after he took it. Shakespeare explains. Having murdered the two young princes in the Tower, Richard seeks an heir; hence his intention to marry Edward’s widow. He can conceive only of a father who will guard his heir, perpetuate his family on the throne, not one who might risk his son for the good of his country. But this is what his enemy, Lord Stanley, does, “risking [his] own son for the greater good of England,” as “one of those Romans you admire” would do. Richard dies in the battle that ensues.

More profoundly, Richard fails as a man. “Feared not loved you say. Well, the truth is Richard like every man wishes to be loved.” But “he finds he cannot love himself, only fear himself.” He grew up “with everyone around him, including his mother, interpreting his shape”—his hunchback—as “a mark of God and expecting evil of him, until he does too.” Despite his ridicule of Christianity, he “swears by St. Paul five or six times,” a sign of misery beneath the mockery. He “thinks himself unloved by God, brought into existence to do evil, to be God’s scourge and minister, and yet notwithstanding, damned for being so, damned from birth exactly as some Protestants hold omniscient God to providentially rule this world, electing few, damning the many.” You, Machiavelli, “share his hatred of God, but not how it began in him. He thought God hated him. He hated God for that” and came to “hate himself.” In his last battle “he was seeking death, as an end to his wretched life.” Is your life any less miserable, Machiavelli?

But to send such a letter would be to go too far, too soon. Shakespeare “sends only a trim draft of the letter he’s rushed into.”

In his reply, Machiavelli denies that he recognizes no noble failures. “I recognized Cesare Borgia.” “His failure to unite Italy, at least Northern Italy and Rome, and drive out the barbarians, was the noblest failure of modern times.” It is this failure that I now seek to expunge, as secretary of state of the Right, Re-Risen Roman Republic. As for the devotees of the Risen God, “No fools are more senseless than those who burn with Christian piety; they make no distinction between friend and foe, allow themselves to be deceived, and ignore injuries; they shudder at pleasure, actually find it in fasts, vigils, penances, scourges, and ordeals; in short, they shrink form life, and prefer death. This is insane.” I admire your works, Will, because I find “no good Christians in them,” except for Henry VI, “an utter disaster.” “He who would not hurt a fly, destroys a kingdom.” As for Richard, his pangs of conscience do indeed bring him down, and that is precisely the problem. If he hates himself, who is responsible for that other than his God? Or rather himself, for believing in that God. “Christianity is the cause of  a tyranny as never before on earth,” of tyrants who “must hate every well-formed human being and even hate human life itself. No previous tyrants, wicked as their deeds were, ever did so.” The ancients knew nature; the Christians deny it and in that denial ruin everything they touch.

Shakespeare continues to find Machiavelli’s interpretation of his plays too narrow. It is as if Machiavelli were a latter-day Xenophon, but one who never wrote Socratic dialogues. “Xenophon knew Socrates, Xenophon looked up to Socrates. You’re no Xenophon.” If you were, you would see that Richard’s restless night before his last battle, when he is visited in his dreams by the ghosts of all those he’s murdered, amounts to “a Socratic self-examination.” Machiavelli does not imagine “how a poet might oppose tyranny, working from within, getting the tyrant to confess his misery,” as I hope to do “in a play about the Scottish usurper Macbeth.” Steeling himself to murder the king, Macbeth will tell himself, “To do this deed, I must not know myself.” Do you, Machiavelli, in your intention to murder God, really know yourself? “In hating God you are in some danger of hating the good.” If you have concluded from reading Richard III that I therein prove the lethality of Christian belief, wait until you have read my second English history tetralogy, the one in which I portray Henry IV, Henry V, and Falstaff. I send you the manuscripts and I also invite you to “resume our conversation, but face to face, in Stratford.”

Upon receiving the manuscript, Machiavelli is only the more convinced that he needs to enlist “this vivacious English captain to my cause.” Had Henry V “lived only ten years more,” he writes, “his reputation would have been glorified by additional conquests, his realm enlarged, his hold on it firmer, his son better educated, and the prospect of his son’s rule fairer.” Henry’s very statements against my teachings and my disciples merely indicate his adherence to those teachings and his status among my disciples, since “those who declare themselves Machiavels have not understood the first thing about my teaching.” He is very happy to accept Shakespeare’s invitation to dine.

In their dialogue over dinner, speaking of the second Henriad, Machiavelli continues his complaints about Christianity. When Shakespeare observes that Richard II is the only king in his Histories to compare himself to Christ, Machiavelli repeats his criticism of Henry VI: that that is exactly the problem with him. He chose the wrong model. “Christ was no ruler. All he teaches is how to lose and then be pitiful, passionate, and poetical about it.” This is true of Richard, Shakespeare agrees, “but the question who should rule is not as deep or as deeply engaging as how should we die and dying, live”—the question addressed by Jesus in His crucifixion and resurrection. In his attempt to come to terms with that issue, Richard wins and deserves the audience’s sympathy. Having effectively dismissed both Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as myths, and so passionately that he never notices that the question of death remains real even if Jesus is not, Machiavelli ignores Shakespeare’s argument and continues to speak about ruling. In ruling, “only effectual truths yield benefits,” not poetic images. Richard’s belated Christian maunderings leave the English no choice but to side with Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, who replaces the Plantagenet line with his own.

He does it by what Shakespeare calls “the deliberately accidental murder of Richard,” an act “inseparable from the justice of the monarchy,” even as Elizabeth I’s beheading of Mary Queen of Scots was inseparable from the justice of her monarchy. Although Richard himself posed no threat to the new dynasty, his adherents did. There are “two goods” which must “be held together, justice and peace,” and “two principles that all rulers must keep together, and all monarchs must keep together, namely, inheritance and virtue.” Shakespeare disagrees with Machiavelli in denying that legitimacy and the authority it lends too power serve merely as covering for power, a fraud that veils force. “Some will remember the piteous and yet desirable passing of the Crown” from Richard to Henry “as an impeachment and removal, some will remember it as an abdication that left the throne unoccupied, and others will remember it as a simple gift from one cousin to another but all will remember that Richard did participate in it. And that makes it somewhat legitimate and will somewhat obstruct any later claims of wrongful usurpation. Ceremonies matter. One might even call them effectual.” As for Richard’s murder, whereas Machiavelli considers Henry responsible for it (the new king complained about the former king in front of a courtier who took the complaint as a command issued in the form of a hint), Shakespeare reminds him that Henry does not “admire himself” for his cousin’s death, “as you do him.”

This brings them to the next, great, Henry. They agree that while spirited Hotspur is a lion, sly Falstaff a fox, Prince Hal is both. By (as Shakespeare puts it, in Machiavelli’s phrase) using the lion and the fox, Hal proves himself the true prince. Yet Shakespeare sees virtues rather than virtù in this: “prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.” That “smells of Socrates,” Machiavelli sneers, the man whose imagining of republics disabled him from founding a real one. “I hope you don’t carry hemlock with you” to our dinner, Shakespeare replies, in mock alarm. Machiavelli zeroes in: Your Henry is not “quite enough of a lion and a fox, he was not cruel enough.” Had he allowed his father to be killed on the battlefield instead of rescuing him, Prince Hal could have been king five years earlier, “started for France five years earlier,” and then, having conquered and absorbed it, set out for Italy, uniting Europe and ruining the papacy for good.

No, Shakespeare says, “I can hear” Henry V replying to such a suggestion: “What, are we turned Turk, that for our advantage we would see our fathers murdered by our committing omission?” Indeed we should, Machiavelli insists (never the one to overlook a cross-cultural borrowing), “for greatness.” No, again, Shakespeare’s Henry answers: “We doubt that greatness comes without some goodness We know that it does not come from such evil.” Seeing his father in deadly peril, he defends him without hesitation, rightly winning his father’s confidence in his loyalty, at least in the aftermath of the moment. Then and subsequently, Prince Hal proves he can “wait to become king,” although his father begins to doubt it. “Son Hal knows his father better than father Henry IV knows him, his own son.” But this makes your second Henry IV play a bit boring, Machiavelli complains. Shakespeare concedes that this is so. The play is about tired old age, undramatic but natural, a condition sons must eventually deal with, as they consider their fathers. Price Hal will not force nature.

Machiavelli (and his true English captain, Francis Bacon) would. They look for physical means of prolonging physical life—Bacon with his experiments involving the refrigeration of chickens, Machiavelli with his Makropulos potion. Machiavelli tempts Shakespeare by offering him a dose, which Shakespeare declines, saying, “Life would not better without death. Truly, it would no longer be life.” Perpetual life is what would be tiresome. Machiavelli seems not to appreciate the implications of his own atheism; he denies the God Who offers eternal life while still yearning for such a life. To Machiavelli’s temptation, Shakespeare effectively offers a counter-temptation: Have the courage of your own conviction, if those really are your convictions.

The dialogue ends with a consideration of Henry V, a man who overcame temptations. Shakespeare cites Henry’s first soliloquy, which begins with the claim, “I know you all”—Falstaff, Poins, and the rest of his drinking buddies (1 Henry IV, I.2.188-209). This is “plain truth not juvenile excuses.” Henry has “learn[ed] nothing from Falstaff”; he spent time with him because he was biding his own time, waiting to enter the public realm with éclat. Indeed, the Marshall of France and Welsh Fluellen “have some inkling of what henry of England is up to.” And Henry knows something even they, even Machiavelli himself, do not: that “the spirit of the men” wins wars, a spirit animated “not so much by their fear of the prince, but their love of him.” To be sure, like founding, war means blood; there will be winners and losers, and that is not simply a matter of power but of the good in the real world, wherein “seeking some good always sacrifices some other.” If “the beautiful, the true and the good seldom coincide,” then Machiavelli’s attempted use of Shakespeare as a means of lending beauty to his ugly (half) truth amounts to a highly unlikely project, even if, perhaps especially if, Shakespeare were to play along with it.

“Yes,” Machiavelli remarks, “we need to talk of good war, not just war.” Henry, Shakespeare explains, wants to retake France not as a means of reuniting the shards of the Roman Empire but to avoid the evil of civil war in England by redirecting the thoughts and actions of England’s restive aristocrats overseas and to render his foot soldiers obedient. Machiavelli claims that, too, is Machiavellian, but Shakespeare rejoins that civil war is an evil greatly to be avoided, and that steadying troops “in the fact of a fearful adversary”—a danger he faces with them—hardly qualifies as cynicism. Neither “poetic and deluded like Richard II,” nor “malicious and deluded like Richard III,” nor “provoked by injustice like his father, nor by love of fame like Hotspur” (nor, one might add, love of sack like Falstaff), and above all not by acquisition, like you, Machiavelli, Henry’s only possible motivation is duty.

In that case, Machiavelli says, “I don’t understand him.” “Not even Socrates might,” Shakespeare suggests, because Socrates associates political life with convention, mere opinion, which potential philosophers ought to put their strength into overcoming in rational ascent from those borrowed lights. “According to Socrates there is no reason for a philosopher to rule,” and no obligation, either. “To become who you are, you had to fight all opinions.” But Henry is no ‘ancient,’ any more than he is a ‘modern’ or Machiavellian. “He is the inheritor of a potent model of nobility, one unknown to the ancients, princes and philosophers, of the highest serving the low, of an immortal who not only seeks the good of mortals, like Prometheus, but who suffers for them, even unto joining them in death.”

Machiavelli does not like the sound of that. It sounds like Christ to him, and Shakespeare readily admits it—with a proto-Nietzschean turn, at that. “Though Christ refused to rule, and even seemed to leave ruling to the Caesars, still he provided a pattern for rulers. Let them be Caesars, but Caesars with something of the soul of suffering Christ.” Ready to sacrifice themselves for the good of their people. Henry is “the greatest man of deeds I can imagine”; “though I love others more, I admire none more than him”—a “great prince, which we are not, and what is more, he was a greater man” superior to me not in writing, in wit, or in thinking but in the “single-minded active pursuit of the good.”

Shakespeare thus denies Machiavelli’s central claim about Christianity, that it unfits men for rule. Shakespeare claims instead that Christianity can make politics better and politicians more effective. Against this, Machiavelli has one last temptation up his antitheological sleeve. “Shakespeare, you are a great prince, but of shadows. You could be one of nations, peoples, and states, indeed of the world.” “No, it is not for me,” Shakespeare quickly answers. It is not my nature. Unlike Henry VI, Shakespeare can choose what to do with his lie. No royal inheritance burdens him. He bears only a natural inheritance, to which he intends to give full scope. He chosen a life of inquiry undertaken through observing men and women and writing plays about them. Many of those persons say not only rue and false things but true things at odds with one another. In this, his plays resemble the Gospel: “Everyone who arrives sure of something will find something to keep him sure,” as Machiavelli has done, but “only by being alert to contrary truths, might you ever later make your way to unity” by “wrest[ling] like Jacob with the angel.” In the Gospel, “Christ himself is responsible for his bounty and the difficulty arising from it,” with some aphorisms saying one thing—it is “harder for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle” to get into heaven—and others saying the opposite—become like a trusting child, and you will be on the way there. Jesus leaves it to His listeners to bring such things together. Jesus poses His own version of the Socratic challenge to undertake philosophizing. To pose such difficulties to his audience is Shakespeare’s vocation, his imitatio Christi.

Shakespeare has withheld something from the manuscript of Henry V he gave Machiavelli to read. It is Henry’s prayer on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, where he prays first to “the God of Battles” to “steel my soldiers’ hearts,” but then to the Lord, asking forgiveness for his father’s part in Richard II’s death (“I have built / Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul” (Henry V, 4.1.285-301). Reading this, Machiavelli storms out, “losing forever the chance not only to enjoy lofty things, but from that coign of vantage, come to know all the low things, which he thought he already knew.”