K.J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare. Oxford: George Ronald, 1953.

 

“Shakespeare’s plays seem, at first sight, to reveal a mind remarkable for its imagination than for its logic.” In Spalding’s time, academic philosophy in the Anglophone world had become dominated by logicians, most of them logical positivists. By that standard, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as a philosopher. “Shakespeare may seem at first sight to have few of the characteristics of the philosopher. Yet poets and artists may be philosophers—philosophers at times more sensitive to the truth of things than those who endeavor to express it by reason and argument.” Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Nietzsche: though rare, such philosophers yield nothing in eminence to their more prosaic counterparts. Looking only at Plato, is dialogue not a sort of play? (Plato found a rival in Aristophanes, who recognized a competitor when he saw one.) And are dialogues not arguments? If so, they lend themselves to philosophy at least as readily as a treatise.

In some respects, Spalding has in mind the idea of the ‘natural philosopher,’ particularly the physician, who seeks not only to diagnose but to cure the patient before him. By his time, what had been called natural philosophy had been in large measure divorced from philosophy, having been reclassified as ‘science’ or knowledge, distinct from ‘philosophy’ or love of wisdom. Logical positivism was in some respects a response to this narrowing of the meaning of philosophy; in that sense, it registered not only a shift in the self-understanding of philosophers but a regime change in the universities in which most philosophers were employed. That is, academic philosophers were practicing politics, some of them without knowing it.

In Spalding’s, and Shakespeare’s, more capacious understanding of philosophy, the natural philosopher or, more precisely, the political philosopher who inquires into nature, may act as a kind of physician, both diagnostician and even, in rare circumstances, caregiver to patients, although more usually this task will be attempted by a ruler. The patient might be a person or a polity: “Presenting in different plays different maladies of men and of the State, [Shakespeare] likewise presents in them some physician with the task of alleviating or healing them.” This suggests that Shakespeare might partake not only of natural but of political philosophy in the Platonic-Socratic line. “Like the scientist confronted by the Chance of Nature, Shakespeare’s…rational spirit” attempts “rather to resolve his perplexities than to remain their victim.” Spalding treats the plays as a sort of philosophic ascent whereby Shakespeare “came to himself” as a philosopher.

As in Plato’s Symposium and elsewhere, the ascent originates in a sort of erotic longing. “Love looks and longs for beauty’s immortality.” For Socrates as for Shakespeare, the ladder of ascent goes beyond the natural philosophy of the early philosophers, through the human element of opinion, subjected to logical scrutiny, toward the ideas, beyond material physis. And if “the beauty of a thing of Nature touched the heart of Shakespeare”—as it does in his early poem, Venus and Adonis—”the beauty of a human mind touched it more deeply,” setting him on the trajectory that culminated in The Tempest, in the figure of Prospero. “Mind knows itself and all things; bodies know neither themselves nor other things.” As recorded in Sonnet 69, Shakespeare became intent on “seeing farther than the eye hath shown.”

In that ascent, however, it is easy to leave the realm of human opinion behind. “Like Nature, man presents a riddle to the mind. Reason looks for the perfection of either, but experience discovers imperfections in both. In this quarrel reason wins the final word,” for “as the scientist looks for a rational order in the seeming disorder of the natural world, so the moral philosopher looks for one in the seemingly disordered and chaotic life of man.” Yet while the some of the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic seek justice and find it ‘in the abstract,’ bringing actual poleis into line with the ‘ideal’ politeia, the ‘city in speech,’ this proves unlikely or impossible. Taking Plato’s point, Aristotle recalls reformers to sobriety, proposing remedies to political problems seen in the light of practical, not theoretical, reasoning. Spalding maintains that his tension between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ gives Shakespearean drama its drama. And for Shakespeare there is an added difficulty. “An Aristotle has the privilege of writing what he thinks. But Shakespeare had need to consider at once his partners, his actors and the pleasure of the public”; he “might find it impracticable to utter truths plain to himself but strange to the multitude, and not less strange, perhaps, to a Kempe or a Burbage.” Spalding has rediscovered the necessity of exoteric writing.

He begins, therefore, with the plays that consider the question of “social man” and the immediate difficulties of his own country, with its clashes of opinion, its factions.  In his dramas on Henry VI and Richard III, Shakespeare “seems to be studying the social nature of man as revealed in the political chronicles of Halle and Holinshed,” who show “a people that had been for generations in irrational conflict with itself.” From Margaret in 1 Henry VI to the tyrant Richard, rulers love themselves more than their people and seek to bend the law to their wills. The Taming of the Shrew turns a tyrannical woman into a butt of comedy in a battle of the sexes, that primal natural duality, while The Two Gentlemen of Verona sets two friends, one a model of inconstancy, Proteus, against a model of fidelity, Valentine, subjecting the changeling to firm, comic correction. “For a moment Shakespeare seems to smile at a world restored to its reason, and to the peace and beauty natural to it.”

For a more lasting solution, Shakespeare must turn to politics, particularly to statesmanship. Spalding cites lines from The Taming of the Shrew: 

Only, good master, while we do admire

This virtue, and this moral discipline,

Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray; 

Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured.”  [I.i.25-28]  ?????

Spalding remarks, “Ovid united with Aristotle might be a medicine of a kind to keep men close to the world; while Aristotle united with Ovid might possibly keep men virtuous in it.” More, “a man of this temper might presently become a Statesman and, like Aristotle’s ‘Phronimos,’ find in his care for man the natural purpose of his existence.” At a minimum, erotic love is nature’s guarantee of the perpetuation of the human species; in politics, it guarantees the perpetuation of the polity; in the life of the mind, it guarantees the perpetuation of philosophy. Eros is not a noticeable theme among logical positivists; Spalding would recall academic philosophy to self-understanding, or possibly to a new understanding.

The need to mate Ovidian love with Aristotelian virtue forms the theme of the comic drama of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  There, “Shakespeare seems to be studying with a good deal of humor the laborings of minds capable of giving birth in their time to the politic being he is looking for,” as the king of Navarre sets himself “at war with his own affections” and those of his courtiers by proposing to turn his Court into “a little Academe”—a Platonic school or ‘republic’—consisting of men who will cloister themselves away from worldly desires for three years in an effort to make themselves, if not Philosopher-Kings, at least Scholar-Kings. The arrival of four ladies from the French Court puts a comic stop to their fantasy, and the ensuing drama issues in a reconception of love, now understood not as a fatal temptation to be countered by an austere life devoted to the liberal arts or by the frivolous eroticism for which the French Court was (in)famous, but for an Aristotelian ‘mean’ or center in the practice of love itself. Called back to the responsibilities of Court life after the death of her father, the King, the princess imposes a lighter sentence on the suitors than the Navarrian king had ordained: one year of mourning followed by marriages if the Navarrians behave themselves in the meantime. “By leaving the world these gallants of Navarre were thus to return to it men sobered, constant, of service” both to Navarre and to France. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not immediately call statesmanship to mind. But Spalding rightly argues that it should. Once again, Shakespeare presents the problem of misplaced loving among rulers—not only among humans by day but among the fairy regime which rules the countryside at night. Fairy King Oberon cures his queen, Titania, of her jealousy with an herbal remedy; among the young aristocrats, the loves of the two young couples are deranged by the same potion, misapplied by Oberon’s mischievous servant, Puck, whose work eventually gets undone by his master. Families being the foundation of polities, in both the human and the fairy regimes right order is restored, showing that it is not only the intensity of eros that can cause disaster but its direction. Moderation, hitting ‘the mean,’ is indispensable, but so the right choice of one’s beloved.

But “to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world,’ dreams must give way to sterner Reality, and a Man take the place of the King of the Fairies as the physician of human disorders.” In Richard II, “England, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’…has become “‘a drooping country’ with a ‘broken wing.'” A less rationalist version of the Navarrian king, Richard wastes his time in a world of imagination, “charming to poets and ladies” but useless in a statesman. “Divine as Heaven’s gift of a crown may be, it cannot weigh with a man’s own [practical] wisdom in the rule of a people; and a wise man without that gift is of more service to a State than a fool with it.” Such a man is Henry Bolingbroke, “an uncrowned physician of more promise than Richard,” a man ready to act “like the good gardener” who will “laboriously lop ‘superfluous’ branches ‘that bearing boughs may live'”—first of all by disposing of Richard. It remained for his son, Henry V, to exemplify “the reason-serving ‘phronimos’ of Aristotle, “Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood….” Julius Caesar is Henry’s counterpart in ancient Rome, “a man whose practical wisdom had by its sole might combined and sustained the far-flung fabric of a universal empire,” “possess[ing] the distinctive character of Plato’s ‘Philosopher-King’ and of the rational ‘Monarchos’ of Aristotle.” At the same time, his supposed divinity (he was “worshipped by the many”) was pure fantasy, as the assassins’ knives proved. “Sore for his high flight above them, [the conspirators’] eager envy sought to bring the eagle laughably to the ground,” and as they sought so did they find.

The limitations of human effort, the ungodlike character of men, appears most clearly in Twelfth Night. Here, Shakespeare “seems to be more seriously concerned with a mysterious world ruled neither by man’s wisdom nor Heaven’s Providence, but rather by untutorable Time and Fate and Fortune. The men and women that now appear on his stage are alike inclined to disallow the efficacy of the human will in the affairs of the world.” This time, there is no “resolute ‘physician’ of men,” no wise statesman to save the day, or the regime. “The best Statesmen may be in the sick world of humanity as the best of physicians in an uncontrollable pestilence of nature; and the wise man may look rather to retire from the world, like Jacques, than, like Caesar, to meddle uselessly with it.” Here Hamlet begins, with a prince who cannot decide what to do. Yet Hamlet proves himself “a rare being in the world,” as “men of ‘practical wisdom’ are more often to be found in it than ‘Kings of infinite space'”—self-divinizing, imperial rulers of Rome. 

Women too can prove themselves to be wise rulers, as seen in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that comedy, an impoverished physician’s daughter first cures a desperately ill king of his physical affliction, then cures the man the king selects for her husband of his folly in rejecting her. She does this not with a love potion devised by her late father but by means of her own smarts, tricking her wayward husband into bed with her and thereby making him see in her a worthy wife—a realization that confirms the king’s authority by vindicating his command. For Shakespeare, the real aristocracy is what Aristotle said it was: the rule of the best, not the rule of the snobs. “Such a will as Helena’s might be conceived to remedy, not alone the ills of lovers, but the wider-spreading evils of a human society, and in Measure for Measure Shakespeare accords to the Statesman the untrammeled powers of will of a Helena.” The statesman in question, the Duke of Vienna, finds himself about to be overwhelmed with the “envy, folly, and mistaken” of the people. Instead of “the swift decision of a Caesar,” Duke Vincentio practices patience, exiling himself from his corrupt city for fourteen years, allowing the corruption to “boil and bubble till it o’errun the stew.” Only then did he intervene to reform Vienna. That this can in fact be done was demonstrated by Charles de Gaulle, who retired from politics in the late 1940s, watched as the Fourth Republic foundered to the point of capsizing, then reappeared in Paris to found the Fifth Republic.

Patience conspicuously numbers among the Christian virtues, not so much among ‘the ancients,’ although moderation is its foundation. In Christianity itself, the foundation of patience is agape, “man’s forgiving love for man.” If practiced, this would indeed cleanse the foul body of the infected world. The problem is that it isn’t. “In the course of his reflections,” Shakespeare “discovered physicians of differing capacities: some able, who have helped lame men to their feet; others incompetent, who have aggravated rather than allayed their troubles.” Dovelike innocence, love, and patience must be supplemented with serpentine prudence, or all is lost but good intentions, with which the road to Hell is proverbially paved. “Human beings rarely raise themselves by their sole efforts; or become ‘devils to themselves’ without the help of other men.” “Like Socratic ‘midwives,’ such agents may bring to birth in a man beauties as unknown to himself as to his neighbors; or, like evil nurses, deforming passions subversive of the human reason natural and proper to him.” There are Vincentios among us; there are also Iagos. Spalding finds the tragedy of King Lear in his lack of self-knowledge, which issues in rage when his beloved youngest daughter tells him the truth about her love for her, without flattery. In his dying despair before her corpse, “Life showed death’s shining secrets at the last in visions unrevealed to eyes less martyred”—the flicker of life he alone claims to see in her. Insight into a life after death or pitiable illusion? Shakespeare does not tell us, perhaps because he does not know any more than we do.

Spalding chooses to read it as insight, if not exactly as Christian insight. “Men find themselves, it seems, rather in an immortal world than in the world of mankind; and learn to smile at last only as their hearts break.” “The human world, for reason’s rational foresight, must look a natural Paradise”—as Miranda sees, when she sees men other than her father for the first time. “But unreason, displanting it, may seem at times rather to have made a wild of it.” This notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the “the best of earthly Statesmen may fail of his purposes,” the “purposes of Heaven, and of the ‘mortal officers'” cited in Pericles Prince of Tyre as inspired by the “will” of Heaven, “are not finally to be thwarted.” “The fingers of the powers above do tune / The harmony of this peace.” (Cymbeline V.v.466). Shakespeare has “presented a world which, freed from human tragedy, must find, through Heaven’s directing power, the ultimate felicity Heaven destines for it.” 

“Yet the reason of the philosopher is not easily satisfied; and the best of answers may provoke at times the worst of questions. Content with his new world, Shakespeare could still continue to question it,” wondering “why its Providence had admitted an evil to cure” in the first place. Here The Tempest‘s Prospero, not Lear or any of the tragic heroes, has the last of Shakespeare’s many words. “It is for man’s ultimate benefit that Heaven has admitted evil into the world. In making ‘uneasy’ man’s attainment of his rational nature evil is destined to reinforce and invigorate it.” Or rather Spalding’s Shakespeare gives himself his last words on the matter in Sonnet 119: 

         O benefit of ill! Now I find true

That better is by evil still made better;

And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.

      So I return rebuked to my content,

      And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

By “Heaven” does Spalding mean “God”? He leaves that, too, open, following Shakespeare.

Since Spalding published his study, numerous writers have followed him in scrutinizing Shakespeare philosophically, although they have never dominated academic Shakespeare studies any more than Spalding did in his day. Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, Paul Cantor, Michael Platt, have all concurred with Seth Benardete’s conviction that Shakespeare could have written philosophic dialogues along the lines of Plato. And that he did, in his own way.

 

 

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

 

Telemachus has one virtue Minerva cannot give him: courage. Although she placed him under her aegis of protection, he doesn’t know that she has. After leaving Salente for the war, “he applied himself to gain the affection of the old commanders,” Nestor and Philoctetes (XII.198). Nestor treats him like a son, but Ulysses’ old enemy, Philoctetes has initial reservations before the young man’s moderation (another virtue Minerva can’t bestow) “at last overcame the resentment” (XII.199); he too begins to call Telemachus “my son,” explaining that “virtue, when it is gentle, genuine, modest, and unaffected, at last surmounts everything” (XII.199).

The older man ventures to explain his “violent hatred against Ulysses” (XII.199). Philoctetes had been a companion of Hercules, the monster-slayer who in turn fell victim to Cupid, lacking Telemachus’ moderation. Hercules’ wife punished him for his infidelity by laying out a tunic soaked in the poisonous blood of the Hydra of Lerna. In severe pain, he built a funeral pyre and asked Philoctetes to light it. “I saw him once more through the flames, and he appeared as calm and serene as if he had been partaking with his friends of the mirth and delicacies of a feast, crowned with flowers, and scented with perfumes” (XII.201-02). By the grace of Jupiter, his immortal soul ascended to Olympus to drink nectar and to marry the goddess of youth. In return for the favor of lighting the pyre, Hercules had given Philoctetes arrows dipped in the Hydra’s blood; when, at Troy, the allied kings were advised by the oracle of Apollo that they could not win the war without the arrows of Hercules, they sent word-savvy Ulysses to persuade Philoctetes to bring them. Accidentally poisoned by one of the arrows, Philoctetes “suffered the same excruciating pain as Hercules had undergone”; “the whole army shuddered to see me in such horrible pain, and concluded that it was a punishment inflicted on me by the just gods” (XII.203). His friend, Ulysses, “was the first to abandon me” in his concern for the soldiers’ morale, “preferr[ing] the common interests of Greece and victory to the obligations of private friendship and decorum” (XII.203). But Philoctetes didn’t know Ulysses’ motive at that time, instead taking his action as “the most horrible barbarity, and the blackest treachery” (XII.203). 

The Greeks needed those arrows. Ulysses and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, came to beg for them. Philoctetus refused until Jupiter intervened, commanding him to give them up. Philoctetus survived the poisoning, cured by two sons of Esculapius, the god of medicine. He then returned to Troy, confronting Paris, whose seduction of Helen had triggered the war. “I slew Paris like a timorous fawn,” and Troy itself “was soon lain in ashes,” but “I still retained a great antipathy to the sage Ulysses” which even “his virtue could not overcome.” However, “my acquaintance with his son, who resembles him, and whom I cannot help loving, has softened my heart for the father himself” (XIII.212). Thus Telemachus’ first achievement in a camp of war is an act of peace. At times, as he listened to the story, “he appeared very thoughtful, like one meditating deeply upon the consequences of things” (XIII.212).

The army broke camp, “marching in good order against Adrastus king of the Daunians, who despised the gods, and sought only to deceive mankind” (XIII.214). Telemachus finds it difficult to “manage so many kings who were jealous of one another,” and even his nobility, benevolence, and sincerity didn’t help, unleavened as they were by liberality, “gratitude for the kindnesses done him,” or a “desire to reward merit” (XIII.214). “His mother Penelope, in spite of Mentor, had cherished in him a haughtiness and pride that tarnished all his good qualities” (“he had been flattered by his mother from his infancy”); as a result, he “looked upon himself as of a superior nature to the rest of mankind,” whom he conceived as his divinely appointed servants (XIII.214). (It is conceivable that Fénelon as his own pupil, the future Louis XV, in mind, although the king himself had been over-indulged by his own mother, Anne of Austria, who filled him with her notions of absolutism founded upon the supposed divine right of kings.) “Full of a noble ardor,” Telemachus “could be curbed and governed by Mentor alone,” but Mentor is no longer with him (XIII.215). 

He came into conflict with the Lacedaemonian king, Phalantus, who treated his advice with contempt and ridiculed him in the war council. He fights with Phalantus’ brother, Hippias, a “quarrelsome and brutal” man; thanks to Minerva’s intervention, Telemachus wins” (XIII.216). “With victory, wisdom again took possession of the heart of Telemachus,” regretting “the fault he had committed in thus attacking a brother of one of the allied kings”; he “recollected, with shame and confusion, the sage counsels of Mentor” and “blushed for his victory,” which was undeserved (XIII.217). Accordingly, when attacked in turn by Phalantus, enraged by defeat of his brother, Telemachus “thought of nothing but repairing his fault by showing moderation” after drubbing Phalantus in turn (XIII.217). “He recognized how unjust and unreasonable he was in being carried away; he found something, vain, weak, and low in this measureless and unjust haughtiness of his,” losing “all patience with himself and roar[ing] like a furious lion” (XIII.218). He aspires to moderation but cannot attain it. 

Except in one important respect. Adrastus orders his forces to attack, his timing based on intelligence he had gathered by bribed members of the allied camp, who in their turn had overheard the two garrulous elders, Nestor and Philoctetes, as they discussed their battle plans. Having “from his infancy” habituated himself to concealing his thoughts from his mother’s importunate suitors, Telemachus “knew how to keep a secret,” and did. He warns his elders that “some knowledge of what had passed in council had spread into the camp,” but is ignored: “old age has no pliancy; chained down by inveterate habits, it has no resource against its own defects”; “youth is the only season when a man may hope to combat bad habits”—another likely glance at Bourbons old and young (XIII.218). 

The chief traitor is Eurymachus, “an adventurer who had attached himself to Nestor,” feeding information to Adrastus, from whom he “had received large sums” (XIII.222). In the battle, Adrastus’ troops rout the allies and burnt their camp; even Phalantus “was no longer able to make a stand against the enemy” (XIII.225). Armed by Minerva in the person of Mentor, who had suddenly arrived, Telemachus intervenes. Recalling Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, Fénelon describes the engravings on Telemachus’ armor: they depicted the triumph of Minerva over Neptune, who had offered the inhabitants of a newly-founded city an olive tree, “emblem of peace and plenty, much to be preferred to the devastation of war,” symbolized by the horse offered by Neptune; for this, the people named their city ‘Athens’ (XIII.225). Other images include a representation of Minerva “giving counsel to Jupiter himself” and aiding Ulysses by giving him the stratagem of the ‘Trojan horse.’ A final engraving showed the goddess Ceres teaching agriculture to savages in Sicily, converting the iron they had used for weapons into plows for tilling the soil. “Even wolves were seen playing among the sheep in their pastures, and the lion and tiger had forgot their fierceness,” frolicking with lambs—all a picture of the “happiness of the golden age” (XIII.226-27).  In this armor, Telemachus displays Minervan wisdom, launching a surprise attack on the Daunians, saving Phalantus from them. The gods allowed Adrastus to escape, since Telemachus needed to “encounter more hardships and disasters, to learn the better how to govern mankind” (XII.228). Visiting the wounded allied troops, Telemachus “could not, without shuddering, and feeling the deepest compassion, behold [them] still alive, and doomed to a lingering, painful death,” looking like sacrificial victims “whose flesh has been burnt upon the altars” (XIII.229). “‘Alas,’ said Telemachus, ‘see what horrible scenes war produces! How great is the blindness and infatuation of wretched mortals! As life is short and miserable, why will they still make it shorter?” (XIII.229). “Man alone, despite his reason, does what animals without reason never did,” preying upon their own species (XIII.229). Kings ought to be “cautious…about engaging in wars,” fighting them only when they are not only just but “necessary for the public good” (XIII230). As he visits the sick and dying, he wins the esteem of the troops for his compassion, for which (no longer the callow, arrogant man he had been) he thanks Minerva. As do his men, who credit the goddess for giving Telemachus ‘the most valuable gifts which the gods can confer upon men,” namely “wisdom, and a heart susceptible of friendship” (XIII.234). As Phalantus recovers from his wounds, he reconciles with Telemachus, who now rules the camp. Even his body has matured, hardened by the exercise of war, manly.

For all his struggles, Telemachus seems no closer to finding his father. At the camp, preoccupied by day with plans for advancing upon and defeating the Daunians, he finds himself haunted at night by dreams of Ulysses in the Elysian Fields. He determines to venture into the Underworld, which courageous mortals may do without dying, as its entrance is in a physical place, Acheruntia, not far from where he is. Minerva prevails upon Pluto “to receive him favorably,” and Jupiter himself intervenes to guarantee his safe passage (XIV.240). 

Once there, he first meets the ghost of a Babylonian king, the very type of an absolute monarch, who confesses that in life “no one dared to contradict me without being immediately punished”; “I pursued pleasures and amusements but never enjoyed tranquility” (XIV.242). “Perpetually agitated by new desires, by hope and fear,” he sought to deaden his heart “by continual dissipation and amusement,” as “the least intrusion of reason, or calm serious reflection, would have been too bitter” (XIV.243). “So saying, the Babylonian wept like a weak man debauched by prosperity, who, by never having experienced adversity, was incapable of supporting it” (XIV.243). 

Telemachus also sees many “impious hypocrites who had pretended to love religion, but in reality made use of it only as a plausible pretext to gratify their ambition, and impose upon credulous men” (XIV.245). Not even children who murdered their parents or wives who murdered their husbands, or traitors “who had betrayed their country and violated every oath” suffered so much as these (XIV.245-46). 

Having thus warned Louis XIV and Bossuet, respectively, Fénelon draws Telemachus’ attention to a good man—a “magnificent, liberal, just, and compassionate” man—who nevertheless would spend eternity in the Underworld because he “charged all [his] virtue to [his] own account and not to the gods, whose gift it was” (XIV.246). More, he practiced virtue “only for the reputation and advantage of it”; “the only divinity you adored was yourself” (XIV.247). “There is no true virtue without love and reverence for the gods, to whom all is due” (XIV.247), and in the Underworld “a divine light reveals the error of [men’s] superficial judgment; for those whom they admired are often condemned; and those whom they condemned, acquitted and justified” (XIV.247). “At these words, the philosopher was struck as with a thunderbolt, and could not support himself: the complacency with which he formerly contemplated his own moderation, fortitude, and generous inclinations, was now changed into despair” (XIV.247). “My wisdom was but folly,” he cries; he knew neither the gods, mankind, or himself (XIV.248). Only now does the philosopher come to Socrates’ understanding, knowing that he knew nothing. 

Returning to kings, Telemachus sees those “condemned for abusing their power,” in contradistinction from the Babylonian king who seems to have done very little but indulge himself (XIV.248). This is the other side of the Louis XIV coin: the man of “excessive vanity,” of hardness toward men, of insensibility to virtue, of “dread of hearing the truth,” of partiality to flatterers and other hangers-on, of pomp and magnificence “supported by oppression and the ruin of their people,” and of military ambition that purchases “a little glory by the blood of their subjects” (XIV.248). And, just as the philosopher was deemed a good man when alive, many kings consigned to the Underworld “were accounted tolerably good when on earth” (XIV.250). The reason for their punishment is their failure to rein in subordinates who committed “enormities…under the sanction of their authority” (XIV.251). Whatever the nature of their failures, bad kings are punished “much more rigorously” than “other guilty men”—so much so that Telemachus deems it “madness, to desire to be a king!” (XIV.251).

But then Telemachus ventures on to the Elysian Fields, where he hopes to find his father. That is where the souls of the few good kings are. “As in Tartarus wicked princes were doomed to a punishment infinitely more rigorous than that of other bad men in private life, so on the other hand good kings enjoyed in the elysian fields a happiness infinitely superior to that of other men who had loved virtue on earth” (XIV.251). They are rewarded with “crowns that never fade,” but “there are only a few kings who have fortitude and resolution to guard against the intoxication of power, and the flattery of so many sycophants, continually endeavoring to excite their passions” (XIV.254). The shade who tells him this is his great-grandfather, Arcesius, who assures him that Ulysses is still alive and father and son will soon be reunited in Ithaca. Arcesius guides Telemachus through the rest of his journey in the Underworld, pointing out the “wise, just, and beneficent” kings, who “are indeed heroes”: Theseus, Ajax, Hector, Agamemnon, Inachus of Argos, and the Egyptian Cecrops (XIV.257-58).

Arcesius also remarks Erycthon and Triptolemus, who give him the occasion for a final lesson, this on political economy. Erycthon invented silver money in order “to facilitate commerce among the isles of Greece” (XIV.259). It did, but it also became (as Erycthon himself foresaw and warned) “an incitement to avarice, ambition, and vanity,” vices which “soften and corrupt manners” and “make you despise agriculture, which is the support of human life, and the source of all its true riches” (XIV.259). Triptolemus, in contrast, “came with a plow in his hand, to make an offer of the gifts of the goddess [Ceres] to all those who should have resolution enough to overcome their natural sloth, and apply themselves vigorously to tillage” (XIV.259-60). In doing so, he “made the Greeks feel the pleasure of owing all their riches to their own labor,” the foundation of civilized life (XIV.260). “Even those fierce savages, that wandered through the forests of Epirus and Etolia, in quest of acorns for their food, became more civilized, and submitted to laws, after they had learned to raise crops of corn and to live on bread” (XIV.260). The preference for agriculture over mercantile commerce carries into Rousseau’s political thought and also that of Thomas Jefferson and some of the other American Founders; the recognition of the civilizing effect of agriculture carries into the political thought of George Washington and his policy respecting the Indians. “Happy would the Greeks have been,” Arcesius teaches, “had they steadfastly adhered to these maxims, so proper to render them powerful, free, happy, and worthy of being so by their genuine virtue. But alas! they begin to admire false riches, by little and little to neglect true wealth, and to degenerate from that marvelous simplicity” (XIV.26). 

Back under the light of the sun and in the allies’ camp, Telemachus learns that a city formally allied with his coalition has now in fact allied with the Daunians, their rulers having been corrupted by Adrastus. Telemachus opposes a plan to seize the city, first, because that would be a violation of their treaty, and second, because the success of the attack would depend upon a traitor in that city, who has offered to open one of its gates to the allied troops. Even if the city rulers have surreptitiously broken our treaty with them, we must not betray our side of the bargain. “If the fear of the gods and the love of virtue do not move you, at least you ought to be influenced by your own interest and reputation,” which would be irretrievably damaged by such a “violation of your oaths of faith” (XV.265). It will even through the alliance itself into question: Why should we trust one another, if we are willing to violate the terms of treaties we make? And if the alliance breaks up, Adrastus and his Daunians will win the war. Nestor concurs, the other kings agree, and the alliance remains strong.

Telemachus goes on to make some additional, equally high-minded, decisions, including his choice to turn over a would-be assassin of Adrastus to Adrastus. The tyrant “shuddered at the thoughts of the danger he had been in, and was quite amazed at the generosity of his enemies; for pure virtue is above the comprehension of bad men” (XV.270). As it happens, Adrastus has little time further to reflect upon virtue. In hand-to-hand battlefield combat with Telemachus, he attempts to kill the young hero after Telemachus had defeated him and offered him mercy. “Adrastus was no sooner dead than the Daunians, far from regretting their defeat and the loss of their chief, rejoiced at their deliverance; offering their hands to the allies, in token of peace and reconciliation” (XIV.280). Adrastus’ son, “whom his father had trained to maxims of dissimulation, injustice, and cruelty, like a coward, basely fled,” only to be stabbed in the back by one of his former slaves (XV.280). This gives Telemachus occasion to lament, “Thus it is that young princes are spoiled by prosperity; the greater their elevation and vivacity are, the farther do they recede from every virtuous principle they may have: and, perhaps, that would now have been my case, had not I thanks to the gods, by the misfortunes I have undergone from my infancy, and the instructions of Mentor, been taught moderation” (XV.280). Immediately aimed at the Bourbon father and Bourbon son, the lesson as well applies to monarchs generally.

By now, Telemachus’ reputation among the kings and soldiers alike has turned completely around. Whereas they once had deemed him gifted but arrogant, they now call him—not to his face but “to one another in private”—the “greatest hero of the age,” a “humane, benevolent…fair and affectionate friend, compassionate, liberal, beneficent, and wholly attached to those whom he is bound to love,” having “entirely shaken off his former haughtiness, indifference, and pride” (XVI.285). He’s offered the kingship by the Daunians but remains steadfast in his intention to return to Ithaca, finding them a worthy king among their own people.

Telemachus then voyages back to Salente, to be welcomed by King Idomeneus and Mentor. “I am content with you,” his governor tells him; “you have, it is true, committed great faults; but they have taught you to know yourself better, and to be more diffident than you were before,” inasmuch as failure so often teaches better than pride-swelling success (XVII.295). Prosperity exiles wisdom. And “is it not true” that your great actions during the war “were suggested and directed by something independent of yourself,” that “Minerva had, as it were, transformed you into something above yourself, to enable you to perform what you have achieved” by “suspend[ing] all your natural defects”? (XVII.295). Indeed.

Telemachus remarks the great improvement of Salente, how “well cultivated” it has become, and “how little magnificence” there remains in it (XVII.294). Like Telemachus on the battlefield and in the Underground, Idomeneus had divine help, Mentor assures him. Monarchs incline to assume “unjust and violent authority” and to introduce luxury, which “corrupts moeurs” (XVII.296). Idomeneus was dethroned at Crete for his absolutism; “it was necessary that the gods should send us hither”—to Salente, where he had fled—to “disabuse him of that blind and excessive power, for which men are altogether unqualified; a kind of miracle was required to open his eyes” (XVII.297). As for luxury, it causes every social class in the city it infects to “live above their rank and income, some from vanity and ostentation, and to display their wealth; others from a false shame, and to hide their poverty” (XVII.297). Under such conditions, “a whole nation goes to wreck; all ranks are confounded” and “wealth is the sole pursuit,” poverty “accounted scandalous” (XVII.297). A pre-revolutionary condition prevails, and its evils can only be remedied “by changing the taste and manners of [the] whole nation” by giv[ing] it new laws” (XVII.298). “But who will undertake it,” Mentor asks, Socratically, “unless it be a king who is a philosopher, and who by setting an example of moderation, may bring contempt on those who love an expensive show, and give a sanction to the manners of the wise, who will be glad to have their decent frugality supported by such authority” (XVII.298).

As for Idomeneus, he is “wise and enlightened,” Mentor allows (having made him so), but “too attentive to details” (XVII.299). In a king, this is a well-intended error. It is, nonetheless, an error. “To form great designs, the mind must be free and composed: it must meditate without restraint, wholly disengaged from the dispatch of thorny matters”; minds “engrossed” with “the affair of the day” slowly lose their ability for prudential reasoning, as they magnify the immediate at the expense of consideration of medium- and long-term consequences (XVII.299). The Idomenean-Mentorian re-founding of Salente resulted from precisely the kind of thinking a wise king needs to do: “forming a sound judgment of affairs…by comparing them all together, and ranging them in a certain order, so as to have sequence and proportion” (XVII.299). And Salente’s laws, institutions, and moeurs can be “only the shadow of what you will do one day in Ithaca, if your virtue responds to your destiny” (XVII.302). 

Telemachus is reluctant to depart, admitting that he’s fallen in love with the king’s daughter, Antiope. “It is not a blind passion like that of which you cured me in the island of Calypso,” but a love based on “taste, esteem, and regard for merit”; in addition to her piety, “what charms me is her silence, her modest reserve, her constant employment…her attention to the economy of her father’s house, since the death of her mother; her contempt of the ornaments of dress, and her forgetting, or even seeming to be ignorant of her beauty” (XVII.302-03). It is as if she were Minerva incarnate, he says to Minerva incarnate. All this notwithstanding, he remains intent on returning to Ithaca; marriage can wait. Mentor approves.

He does hesitate, however, when Idomeneus goes into mourning over the prospect of his departure. Mentor strengthens his resolve. Such compassion is good; “you were born hard and haughty,” but “at last you have become a man, and by the experience of your own misfortunes, you have learned to sympathize with those of others”—and indispensably kingly virtue, as “without such compassion, there is no good nature, virtue, nor capacity for the government of mankind” (XVII.311). Still, compassion “must not be carried to far, nor must an unmanly tenderness be indulged” (XVII.311). He insists that Telemachus tell the king of his continued resolve to return home, which he does, disclosing his intention to marry Antiope, once “I render myself worthy of her” (XVII.314).

Looking ahead not only to his return to Ithaca but to his eventual accession to kingship there, Telemachus confides that while he considers the ability to “discern well the different characters of men, and to employ them according to their talents” crucial to ruling well, “I am at a loss to know” how to acquire such discernment (XVIII.318). Mentor replies, “To know men you must not only study them, but keep their company and deal with them” in speech and action—conversing with them and “test[ing] them” in minor positions to “discover whether they are qualified for higher functions” (XVIII.318). Also, talk about them “with other wise and virtuous men, who have long studied their characters”; just as one learns to distinguish good and bad poets by “the frequent reading of them, and talking of them with those who [have] a taste for poetry, just as you become a good judge of music by “diligent attention to the performances of good musicians,” so you must learn “human nature” by living among human beings (XVIII.318). Along with this practical understanding, however, you need theoretical understanding: “to be able to form a sound judgment of men, you must begin with knowing what they ought to be,” to have a standard of judgment (XVIII.318). “As in taking the dimensions of several bodies there must be a fixed measure, so there must be certain fixed principles by which we must regulate our judgment”; that standard is the purpose of human life, “what ought to be the end proposed in governing” men (XVIII.319). The elements of that standard have already been demonstrated in the course of the novel. They are the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, practical wisdom, compassion, and magnanimity, all conducing to happiness or the fulfillment of human nature. Given the thumotic character of Telemachus, he has especially needed to practice the virtue of patience. “It is in order to teach you patience, my dear Telemachus, that the gods oblige you to practice it so much, and seem to make sport of you, by keeping you continually wandering about in suspense and uncertainty” (XVIII.330)

Here is the task of the “wise prince” (XVIII.321). “It is not enough to find good subjects in a nation; one must also form new ones”—a task Telemachus immediately sees as “a matter of great difficulty” (XVIII.321). Mentor denies it. If you, as king, exert yourself “to search for able and virtuous men, in order to prefer them, you stimulate all who have spirit and talents, so that they exert themselves to the utmost. How many languish in indolence and obscurity, who would become great men, if they were excited by emulation and the hopes of success?” (XVIII.321). In addition, if you advance your subjects “step by step from the lowest to the highest employments” you will by that practice ‘train them up’ under your observation (XVIII.322). This as it were ‘institutionalizes’ the kind of struggle the gods have caused you, Telemachus, to undergo; unlike you, most men won’t be heroes, nor will they need to be, but their virtues can be cultivated in a kingly regime that rewards virtue. Do not imitate tyrants. Do not make your subjects “miserable by your ambition, your ostentation, or imprudence; for if a nation suffers, it is owing to the maladministration of its rulers, whose duty it is to watch over it, and prevent its suffering” (XVIII.323). 

But will ruling this way not make me miserable? Telemachus asks. Under your plan, a king is “the slave of all those whom he seems to command,” devoting himself to their interests, not his own, supplying their needs, serving the state and his subjects (XVIII.323); “he is a slave who has sacrificed his liberty and repose to the happiness and liberty of the public” (XVIII.324). But why should this make unhappy? Mentor answers. In “promoting the good of such a number of people” a king “represents the gods in leading the whole human race to virtue” (XVIII.324). Is there “not glory enough in maintaining the laws,” and in not grasping for the “false glory” vanity desires? (XVIII.324). Although you should expect “the ingratitude of mankind” for your efforts, “If genuine,” virtue “will always attach them to him who will have inspired it” (XVIII.324-325).

“Mentor resolved to put the patience of Telemachus to the last, but severest trial” (XVIII.330). Before allowing him to board the ship that will return him to Ithaca and his father and mother, he proposes a ceremony of sacrifice to Minerva. Telemachus obeys, and Mentor metamorphoses into Minerva. “I am now going to leave you, son of Ulysses; but my wisdom shall never leave you, provided you always retain a due sense of your inability to do anything well without it” (XVIII.333). In regarding prudence or practical wisdom as the most important of the many virtues a good ruler needs to cultivate, Fénelon carries forward in modernity the classical line of moral thought, while inflecting it in some Christian directions.

 

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Books VII-XI. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

 

Telemachus and Mentor escape Calypso on a Phoenician vessel bound for Epirus and captained by Adoam, the brother of their friend, Narbal. Telemachus lets mentor do the talking, as “the faultiness of his conduct in the isle of Calypso had much increased his wisdom,” making him “more aware of his own weakness,” including his propensity to run his mouth (VII.98). Adoam, who recognizes Telemachus from the previous voyage to Egypt, reports that Astarbé poisoned the tyrant Pygmalion; upon being arrested, the queen poisoned herself. Pygmalion’s good son, Baleazar, inherited the throne of Phoenicia. A pious man, Baleazar regularly sacrifices to the gods, works to rebuild Phoenicia’s commercial life, “consults Narbal in all matters of importance” while not neglecting “to see everything with his own eyes” (VII.105). He retains “the best of all guards, namely the love of his people,” having left them in the enjoyment of their own property and hence neither “idle nor indolent” but “industrious” (VII.105). “Thus Phoenicia has arrived at the highest pinnacle of glory and grandeur” (VII.106).

Adoam puts on a shipboard feast, which Telemachus initially fears to enjoy. “Since the mortifying proof he had experienced in the isle of Calypso, how violent the passions of youth are, he was afraid even of the most innocent pleasures; all was now suspect to him” (VII.107). Mentor kindly remarks that “such fear may be carried too far,” and goes on to instruct him in the governance of pleasure. “The pleasures to be indulged are such as will relax the mind, yet leave you in possession of yourself; not such as will bewitch and enslave you”—pleasures that are “calm and serene, which do not take your reason from you” and do not denature you, pleasures that “do not turn a man into a savage brute” (VII.107). Unlike Fénelon’s contemporaneous Puritans, men animated by “true wisdom” avoid “all austerity and affectation,” as “all true pleasure” derives from true wisdom, which “blend[s] mirth and sport with serious and important business, amusement with application, and diversion with labor” (VII.107). As an illustration of his teaching, Mentor takes up the lyre and sings a song of the birth of Minerva from the head of Zeus, “by which is meant that is formed therein, and from which descends to illuminate docile men,” followed by the contrasting stories of self-loving, self-destroying Narcissus and of Venus’ incapacity to restore the life of her mortal lover, Adonis, torn to pieces by a wild boar (VII.108).

Telemachus does indeed now mix business with pleasure, asking Adoam to describe the country of Bétique, a little-known land of “wonders” which Adoam had visited (VII.108). The legends are true, Adoam relates: “In this country the golden age seems still to exist” (VII.109). The people of Bétique live simply, themselves wondering at why other nations corrupt themselves with “superfluities” which “enervate, intoxicate, and torment those who possess them,” leaving them no more “healthy and robust than we,” nor longer lived, no more united, enjoying no “greater liberty, tranquility, and contentment” (VII.110. “On the contrary, they must be jealous of one another; mean, spiteful, and envious; and continually harassed by avarice, fear, and ambition; incapable of true genuine pleasure, since they are enslaved by so man false necessities” (VII.110). Better look to “simple nature alone” for wisdom (VII.110). 

Nature teaches that fathers may punish their children and grandchildren for misbehavior but not before considering “the advice of the rest of the family”—a constitutional patriarchy, as it were (VII.110-111). Such punishments are rarely needed in Bétique, given its ethos of “innocence, sincerity, obedience to parents, and abhorrence of vice” (VII.111). The residents are monogamous; husbands and wives divide household management between tasks performed outdoors by the men, indoor tasks by the women. While a wife’s “whole ambition is to please” her husband, she thereby “gains his confidence, and engages his affection more by her virtue than by her beauty”—a model Rousseau follows when Emile’s governor advises Sophie. The people drink no wine, and this too may contribute to domestic peace.

The regime needs no judges, as the consciences of the people suffice. There is no property; “everything is common among them,” and “the people are so sober and easily satisfied” that the common store is enough (VII.111). With “no interests to pursue, they love one another with a brotherly affection that nothing can trouble,” “free and equal” except for the “ancient sages” who rule in light of their experience and “some young men” of “uncommon wisdom” (VII.111). They waste no blood on civil strife or foreign wars. Viewing conquerors elsewhere, they shrug, “What madness, to place one’s happiness in ruling strangers, a task so difficult and troublesome, if it is performed according to the dictates of reason and justice” (VII.111). “If a man is ambitious for glory,” they ask, “will he not find enough in ruling, with wisdom, those whom the gods have committed to his charge?” (VII.111). 

How do they defend themselves against military attack? Part of the answer lies in geopolitics. “Nature has separated them from other nations—on one side by the sea, on the other by high mountains towards the north” (VII.113). But more tellingly (again with an eye toward the Europe of Fénelon’s time, but not only then and there), the people of Bétique are respected for their virtues; their neighbors often choose them as arbitrators and as rulers of territories and cities under dispute. “As this wise nation never does any violence, no one is distrustful of them,” and indeed they “are entirely free of pride, vanity, deceit, and all desire of extending their territories” (VII.113). Ready “to submit to the loss of their lives or their country, rather than be made slaves, they are equally incapable of enslaving others, and of being enslaved themselves” (VII.114). They eschew navigation, politely rejecting Phoenicians’ offer to teach it, as “they think it a pernicious art,” one that opens a nation to desires for “more than is sufficient to satisfy their real needs” (VII.114). In sum, “by following nature and right reason,” they are “at the same time wise and happy” (VII.114). In seventeenth-century Europe, one might suspect, they resemble the Swiss.

Telemachus may think he knows all he needs to know to return to Ithaca and eventually to rule it. The gods think differently and have other plans. Venus and Neptune remain angry with him, and Venus asks her father, Jupiter, to take her side against sister Minerva. Jupiter refuses but promises to make Telemachus continue to wander for a while, since “the destinies do not admit of his perishing, or being overcome by those pleasures, with which you allure mankind” (VIII.116). Neptune agrees to deflect Adoam’s ship away from Ithaca. Mentor-Minerva breaks the news to Telemachus, telling him that “Jupiter aims not at your destruction, but only tests you; and he tests you only in order to lead you to glory,” even as he tested Hercules and your father. Therefore, “You must, by resolution and patience, tire out the cruel fortune that persecutes you” (VIII.120). They land at Salente, the city (it will be remembered) that the exiled Phoenician king Idomeneus and his friends had founded on the coast of Hesperia.

Idomeneus welcomes the son of Ulysses and recalls meeting Mentor at Troy. Mentor immediately establishes a tone of frankness, not flattery, by remarking that the king has aged considerably since then, then sympathetically adds that “kings wear faster than other men” because their peacetime pleasures and wartime stresses “hasten the approach of old age before the natural date of its arrival”—not incidentally, a word of caution to Telemachus (VIII.123). The king takes no offense, instead conducting his guests to the temple of Jupiter, where an elderly priest prophesies that these men will enable the Sarentines to win a war they have recently undertaken.

The remainder of his prophecy is obscure, suggesting but not confirming that Telemachus will see his father again. Mentor is no less frank, and no less comforting, to him. “A rash curiosity deserves to be confounded. It is an effect of the wisdom and goodness of the gods, that the destinies of weak mortals are wrapped up in impenetrable darkness. It is an advantage to foresee whatever is controllable by our will; but it is no less for our good and quiet to be ignorant of what is independent of our will, and of the fate for which we are reserved by the decrees of heaven (VIII.126). This calms Telemachus and induces Idomeneus to reflect upon his own fate. He admits “that I was not sufficiently acquainted with the art of government when I returned from the siege of Troy to Crete,” but “I may still be happy, if these heavy calamities serve as lessons to me, and teach me moderation” (VIII.126). He requests the aid of Telemachus and Mentor in the conduct of the war, promising to send them to Ithaca when it’s over. Telemachus agrees.

Mentor cautions him. Recall that your father’s practical wisdom and moderation, his “cool, deliberate valor,” not Achilles’ “headlong, blind ferocity” won the Trojan War; “Minerva surpasses Mars,” Minerva in the guise of Mentor assures him (IX.129). Mentor therefore requests that Idomeneus “first to explain to us whether the war is just; then tell us with whom it is to be carried on; and lastly, on what forces and resources your prospect of success is based” (IX.130). The king readily answers. The war is against the Mandurians, “a savage race” who roam the forests, hunting and gathering (IX.130). The Mandurians met a small hunting party of Cretans, who had inadvertently encroached upon their territory, with humaneness but then attacked the larger Cretan force that soon followed. After the initial fighting, the Mandurians offered peace, saying that they preferred it to war so long as the Cretans restricted their occupation to the coastal areas and let the Mandurians alone in the mountains. “We abhor that brutality which, under the gaudy names of ambition and glory, madly ravages whole provinces, and sheds the blood of men who are all brothers” (IX.131). That is, savages are not necessarily ‘savage’; rather, they are uncivilized, and happily so. In words that will become characteristic of Rousseau, Fénelon has the Mandurian elders say as much: “If the sciences to which the Greeks apply themselves so closely, and the politeness on which they value themselves so highly, inspire them with such a detestable injustice, we cannot but think ourselves happy in not having such advantages. We will always glory in being ignorant barbarians, but just, humane, faithful, and disinterested, satisfied with little, and despising that vanity and delicacy that cannot be gratified without wealth. We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigor of body and mind: the love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural goodness towards our neighbors, attachment to our friends, fidelity to all the world, moderation in prosperity, fortitude in adversity, courage always bold to speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery.” (IX.131). The Cretans happily agreed to peace but the war renewed the next day because a Cretan hunting party, ignorant of the treaty, violated its terms. 

This time, the Mandurians have allies, including the Locrians, themselves civilized Greeks. Although Telemachus remains eager to fight, Mentor asks how this could be. He tells the king that the gods “have not yet finished your instruction” because you have yet to learn “how to act in order to prevent a war” (IX.133). For example, “you might have exchanged hostages” with the Mandurians, sent some of your officers with them to escort the elderly envoys safely back to their people; you might have apologized for the violation of the treaty and explained that it was done out of ignorance, not malice. Idomeneus explains that “I thought it would be stooping too low, to endeavor to pacify these barbarians,” but Mentor bluntly tells him that such “pride and haughtiness give rise to the most dangerous wars” (IX.131). It was “these barbarians” who “gave you a valuable lesson,” in proposing peace: “Why did you not imitate their moderation?” (IX.134). You have stirred the fear and animosity not only of the Mandurians but of many of your neighbors, when you could have earned their confidence with a policy of “justice, moderation, [and] good faith” (IX.134).

What will you do now? Idomeneus sees that the neighboring Greek colonies, along with the other Hesperian states, fear “that we have a design upon their liberty,” that if the Salentines defeat the Mandurians we will be “ambitious of extending our conquests still further” (IX.135). Indeed so, Mentor replies. “By wanting to appear too powerful, you have ruined your power; for, while abroad, you are the object of the hatred and jealousy of your neighbors, you exhaust yourself at home in the efforts and preparations necessary to maintain a war against them” (IX.135), a lesson Mentorian Fénelon obviously intends for Bourbons old and young. Idomeneus gratefully accepts Mentor’s offer to serve as his negotiator with Nestor of Pylus, one of the Mandurians’ Greek allies. Mentor’s appeal to Nestor turns out to be a critique of war itself, and he takes as his example the carnage at Troy, which after all began as a fight over an adulterous abducted wife. Following his own advice to king, he gives Telemachus to Nestor as a hostage, “the most valuable pledge we can offer for the good faith of Idomeneus” (IX.141). Although the Mandurians remain suspicious and angry, Mentor succeeds in persuading the Greek allies by adding himself and twelve additional Salentine hostages and by offering to remove the king’s troops from his strategic forts, replacing those troops with neutrals. “It is no less your interest to prevent the native inhabitants of Hesperia from destroying Salente, a new Greek colony, like that which you yourselves have planted, than to restrain Idomeneus from usurping the territories of his neighbors. Hold the balance even between him and them.” (IX.143). If you reject this prudent and just arrangement, “Idomeneus will have the gods, whom before he had reason to fear were offended at him, on his side” (IX.144). 

Mentor concludes with a peroration on universal justice. Someday, “your several nations…will be but one, under different names and governors”; “the just gods, who formed and love the human race, would have them united in an everlasting bond of perfect amity and concord,” given the fact that “all mankind are but one family dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (IX.147). “War, it is true, is sometimes necessary,” but this fact only “reflects disgrace on human nature”; it usually occurs because kings seek glory, yet “true glory cannot exist independent of humanity”; it can be “acquired only by moderation and goodness” (IX.147). He reprises his beatus illi theme, this time as it can be applied to politics foreign and domestic: “Happy the king, who loves his people, and is beloved by them; who trusts his neighbors, and is trusted by them; who, far from making war upon them, prevents their going to war with one another, and who makes the happiness his subjects enjoy under his government, to be envied by all other nations” (IX.148). To give these fine sentiments some institutional substance, he recommends an assembly of all the kings in the region, to be held every three years, to renew the treaty and to “deliberate on their common interests” (IX.148). 

Nestor accepts the offer. But he then warns not against Idomeneus but Adrastus, the king of the Daunians, a man who “despises the gods, and thinks the whole race of mankind were born for no other purpose but to be his slaves, and to promote his glory” (IX.148). Adrastus would replace the gods with himself, as “it is not enough for him to have subjects, and to be the king and the father of his people; he will have slaves and worshipers, and actually causes divine honors to be paid him” (IX.148). The reason for the allies’ haste in laying siege to Salente was to get rid of it, the weaker enemy, first, then “afterwards turn our arms against the other and more formidable” (IX.148). If we treat with you, we want not only peace but your support against the tyrant. Mentor returns to Idomeneus for his concurrence.

Once again, he spurns flattery, prefers just rebuke. “While these kings were extolling your magnificence” at the peace conference, “I reflected within myself on the temerity of your conduct” (X.151). Idomeneus resents that, but restrains himself, allowing Mentor to continue. “Kings ought to be respected, and treated with delicacy, even when reproved. Truth is apt enough of itself to offend them, without the addition of harsh terms; but I thought I might venture to speak with the utmost plainness” because I intend “to accustom you to hear things called by their proper names” (X.151). The words addressed to kings by their advisers are crucial to the welfare of their regimes and their peoples. “Hard language” has no place in public discourse, but “it is useful that a man without interest and without importance should to speak to you in private” in exactly such terms (X.151). The king takes the point. Admitting that he has been accustomed to flattery, to being addressed in improper terms, he acknowledges that he owes to Mentor the security of his newly-founded city and accepts him as an honest counselor. Most immediately, this is Fênelon’s appeal to the Sun King, but as always it has universal application.

Thus encouraged, Mentor minces no words. “You deserve nothing but blame for that very conduct which was so highly extolled,” namely your construction of “magnificent edifices” at Salente (including the temple of Jupiter?) when you “had so many enemies [outside] your walls”; you exhausted your revenues, did nothing to encourage the industriousness of your people or the cultivation of the fertile lands you control—the “only solid foundations of your power” (X.152). “By aiming at appearing great and powerful, you have almost destroyed your real power and greatness,” as measured by “the number, submission and attachments of the inhabitants” of your realm (X.152-153). 

Idomeneus admits these charges but points to the danger of admitting them. “Shall I confess my weakness” to the other kings in Hesperia, exposing himself to “shame and dishonor”? (X153). Mentor agrees that “the interest of state requires that care be taken of your honor”; the way to save face is for Mentor to tell them that the King of the Salentines has promised to restore Ulysses, “if he is yet alive, or at least his son, on the throne of Ithaca” against the forces of Penelope’s suitors (X.153). Being preoccupied with this task, he can only send a token supply of troops against the Daunians, although Telemachus will be among them. This satisfies his alliance partners and leaves him free to reform his regime according to the advice of Mentor. It also lets Telemachus seemingly test his own “wisdom and virtue,” no longer relying on Mentor, although in fact Minerva covers the young man with her aegis and “inspir[es] him at the same time with the spirit of wisdom and foresight, intrepid valor, and calm moderation: virtues that are seldom found united” (X.155).

Mentor takes the opportunity to correct Telemachus’ too-sharp criticisms of the king, which the young man offered in “a presumptuous vein of censure” typical of “inexperienced youths” (X.159): “What philosopher,” Mentor asks, “had he been in his place, would not have been the worse for flattery” and deception? (X.157). “Alas! my dear Telemachus, you will one day be too well convinced of this” (X.157). “A private station, accompanied with a little intelligence to speak well, hides every natural defect, sets off shining talents, and makes a man appear capable and worthy of the highest employments from which he is so far removed. But it is authority which put talents to a severe trial, and brings great defects to view.” (X.158). “Grandeur is like certain glasses that magnify every object” (X.158). “Those who judge [a king] are unacquainted with his situation. They know nothing of his difficulties, they will not allow him to have any human weaknesses and failings, but expect he should be altogether perfect.” (X.158). Simply in admitting his faults without rancor Idomeneus has displayed magnanimity, “a true greatness of soul” (X.159). Indeed, “to reform mankind would require gods!” the goddess in the form of a man exclaims. She will now undertake exactly that task, in Salente. 

With Telemachus safely packed off to the war, Mentor advises Idomeneus on re-founding his regime. The first task is to gather the relevant information through a census, an economic survey, and an assessment of the military. Preparatory to the economic survey, the king will promulgate a law requiring merchants to give a thorough accounting of their property, profits, expenses, and investments, while preserving full “liberty of commerce” (X.161). He also establishes sumptuary laws, prohibiting foreign merchandise “that might introduce luxury and effeminacy” and establishing regulations of dress and diet (X.162). For example, social ranks will be denoted primarily by the color of clothing, not by gold, silver, and jewels. Rank itself will be determined by ancestry because that is the distinction “least exposed to envy” (X.162). Above all, the king himself must set an example, as no one will dare “complain of a regulation to which the king himself submitted” (X.164). In all this, the laws of Minos, Idomeneus’ ancestor and therefore the source of his own rank, are restored.

Turning next to the arts, “Mentor suppressed that oft and effeminate music that tended to corrupt the manners of the youth” as well as “that bacchanalian music which intoxicates almost as much as wine, and is productive of impudence and violent passions” (X.164). Only music in temples on festival days, in honor of the gods and heroes, shall be permitted. Architecture shall be unornamented—no columns, pediments, or porticoes—but “beautiful and simple,” consisting of “airy hous[ing] convenient for a numerous family” whereby “order and neatness might be easily preserved and the whole maintained at a small expense” (X.164). As for the artists themselves, only such youths “as have a promising genius and are likely to excel” should be schooled in the high arts; others who “are designed by nature for arts less noble…may be usefully employed by the ordinary occupations of the republic” (X.165). 

A republic: the new regime will be a mixed-regime monarchy, not an absolute monarchy. To defend itself cities ruled by the latter regime, war preparations will proceed “in the midst of a profound peace” (X.166). To strengthen republicanism, city artisans will be transferred to the countryside, in order to strengthen agriculture and rural life generally, aiming at increasing the number of “moderate industrious men” instead of prideful and luxurious urban oligarchs and courtiers who “involve so many of their fellow creatures in all the horrors of poverty” (X.168). Families that “are industrious and multiply” should be rewarded with “more lands to cultivate in proportion to their increase,” a reform which will obviate the necessity, or temptation, to send children off to the cities for employment in servile jobs (X.168). “The profession of a husbandman will no longer be despised, being no longer attended with such misery and distress” (X.168). 

Idomeneus worries that if his people become prosperous under such conditions of “peace and plenty, luxury will corrupt their manners, and they will employ against me the wealth that I have given them” (X.169). This was what happened in Phoenicia, and it poses a threat to any monarchy, absolute or not. It stands as a frequent justification for absolutism or even tyranny, at least in the minds of monarchs. Mentor assures the king that such a condition “may be easily prevented” because the farmers’ lives will remain “laborious,” “notwithstanding their abundance,” as “they will have nothing more than necessities, because we have proscribed all the arts that furnish superfluities” and because big families are unlikely to be rich families (X.169). Further, never “allow any one family, of what rank soever, to possess more land than is absolutely necessary to maintain the number of persons of which it shall consist”; this will prevent aristocrats from “aggrandiz[ing] themselves at the expense of the poor” while requiring every family to engage in true household economy, cultivating land “with great care”—not only working hard but working smart, engaging minds as well as bodies (X.169). Consistent with the sumptuary laws, growing wine grapes shall be discouraged.

The laws of Minos also provided for public education by which “the youth may be taught to fear the gods, to love their country, to respect the laws, and to prefer honor to pleasure and even to life itself” (X.170). Magistrates shall be appointed “to watch over the families and the morals of the individuals that compose them,” and you, King Idomeneus, should “share this task yourself” as “shepherd of your people” (X.170). Punish violations of the laws “with the utmost severity,” for “to make examples is an act clemency,” stopping “the progress of iniquity”; “by a little blood shed seasonably a great deal is saved” (X.170). (Rousseau will endorse this in his lapidary sentence, “pity for the wicked is a great cruelty to men.”)

At the same time, ever-moderate Mentor insists, “What a detestable maxim it is for a sovereign to think he cannot be safe without oppressing his people!” (X.170). Driving your people “to despair by terror and dismay,” putting them “under the hard necessity either of shaking off the yoke of arbitrary power or bidding adieu for ever to liberty,” are hardly “the paths that lead to glory” (X.170). On the contrary, “the countries where the power of the sovereign is most absolute are those where the sovereigns are least powerful” because by treating “the whole state [as] their property” such monarchs remove incentive to work and to reproduce; he “gradually diminishes his own power by the continual diminution of his people, from whom his wealth and influence flow” (X.170). True, “his power is absolute, his subjects by consequence…all slaves. But wait till the smallest revolution happens, and you will find that this despotic power, being over-strained, is only of short duration, as not being supported by the affections of the people…. By the first blow that is struck the idol is overturned, broken to pieces, and trodden underfoot” as “contempt, hatred, fear, resentment, distrust, in short, all the passions unite against such odious despotism” (X.171).

Idomeneus implements every one of Mentor’s recommendations. Seeing their salutary results, he “acknowledged to Mentor that he had never known joy equal to that of being loved, and making such multitudes happy” (X.172). “My heart [had] been poisoned from my earliest infancy in regard to the authority of kings. This has been the occasion of all the misfortunes of my life.” (X.172). He goes on to tell how this happened—a cautionary tale, characteristically aimed at Louis XIV in particular and kings generally. 

Years earlier, in Crete, Idomeneus had a true friend and a false friend. Pious, great-souled yet moderate, and frank in remarking the king’s faults, Philocles found an enemy in his rival, Protesilaus. Idomeneus recalls that Philocles wanted Idomeneus to imitate “my ancestor Minos” (XI.173); Protesilaus wanted no such thing, persuading the king to send Philocles on a naval expedition, getting him away from the royal court. The king went along with this, as he confesses, out of weariness in finding himself “between two men who could never agree”; “I weakly chose to risk the interest of the public in some measure to breathe in freedom” (XI. 175).  In Philocles’ absence, Protesilaus had a corrupt servant, Timocrates (which means ‘rule of the honor lovers,’ ironically enough) claim that Philocles intended to turn the fleet against the king. A complex conspiracy culminated in Timocrates unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Philocles at the behest of the traduced king. “Philocles, shocked to find so much malice in mankind, took a part that was full of moderation,” telling his loyal troops that Timocrates was innocent, a mere instrument of his monarch; he then resigned his commission and self-exiled to the island of Samos, “where he lives quietly in poverty and solitude” (XI.179). 

Even after Idomeneus “found out by degrees the artifices of Protesilaus and Timocrates” (“and the sooner by their falling out,” as “it is difficult for bad men to continue long united”), he kept them on, in fear of Protesilaus and also because he found him so “easy, obliging, attentive to gratify my passions, and zealous for my interest”; he “had never known what true virtue was,” and rather supposed it nothing more than “a beautiful phantom,” existing nowhere (XI.180). Removing one corrupt minister would only saddle him with an equally ruinous replacement, he reasoned. And he was lazy, “too averse to business, and too indolent to be able to extricate myself from his hands” (XI.180). The other members of the king’s council dared speak no truth to the king’s power, or against the influence of his false friend. “You know, my dear mentor, the false ridiculous notions of glory and grandeur in which kings are brought up: they will never be in the wrong. To cover one blunder, they must commit a hundred” (XI.181). This was what led him to embark on the siege of Troy, leaving the government of Crete “in the hands of Protesilaus, who acted with haughtiness and inhumanity during my absence,” his tyranny unreported because the people “knew I was afraid of discovering the truth” (XI.181). The revolt of the Cretans upon his return “was not occasioned so much by the death of my son,” as readers had earlier been led to think, “as the wrath of the gods, who were offended at my weak conduct, and the hatred of the people, which Protesilaus had drawn upon me” (XI.182). 

Most remarkably, to this day, at Salente, Idomeneus has kept Protesilaus and Timocrates with him. He explains: “Being used for so many years to be guided by these two men, was like a chain of iron that fastened me to them; besides, I was watched and beset by them continually” (XI.182). They are the ones who urged him on in undertaking “all those expensive projects that you know of, and have quite drained this infant settlement,” and “they too were the occasion of the war,” from which you, Mentor, have extricated me, “inspir[ing] me with the courage I lacked” (XI.183). Since Mentor’s arrival, Protesilaus has attempted to dissuade the king of the reforms he undertook. Thinking of himself, now removed from the French court, and, quite possibly, Bishop Bossuet—who had been his friend but became his determined enemy at court and a fervent defender of absolute monarchy— Fénelon has Mentor say, “You now recognize, O Idomeneus, that bold perfidious men, if suffered to be about weak, indolent princes, will gain an ascendancy over them, and mislead them; but there is another misfortune to which those princes are subject, not less than the other, which you ought also to be aware of, and that is of easily forgetting the virtue and services of one that has been obliged to be absent any time” (XI.185). 

Mentor recommends the obvious remedy: the dismissal of the blackguards, the recall of Philocles. The king hesitates, fearing “the severity of Philocles,” only to be reminded that this was precisely what he needed (XI.185). Philocles, however, has no desire to return. Here on Samos, he tells the king’s messenger, “men no longer deceive me, for I seldom see them, or hear their flattering, deluding speeches; I do not need them,” preferring the company of “my well-chosen books,” which “teach me to make good use” of my “profound tranquility and delightful liberty” (XI.191). He only unbends after “having consulted the gods” and finding “it was their pleasure that he should go along with his friend” (XI.192). Upon returning he still eschews life at court, preferring to stay in an isolated part of Salente and to make himself available for consultation.

He and Mentor agree on the importance of public education. As Mentor puts it, children “belong not so much to their parent as to the public; they are the children of the state, its hope and strength; it is too late to attempt to reform them after they have been corrupted” (XI. 194). “Vigorous bodily exercises” to “prevent idleness and effeminacy, which are the bane of the most promising geniuses,” can be encouraged with “a great variety of games and shows”; their souls should be “taught to despise hardship and death, to place honor in undervaluing riches and pleasure to account lying, ingratitude, injustice, and effeminacy infamous vices; to sing the praises of heroes who have been loved by the gods, have performed great actions for the good of their country, and demonstrated their valor in battle,” while at the same time “elevat[ing] their minds and civiliz[ing] their hearts with “the charms of music” (XI.195). They will then “be kind to their friends, faithful to their allies, just to all men, even their most inveterate enemies, and to dread death and torture less than he reproaches of their own conscience” (XI.195). Finally, “for the sake of order and decorum” you should have youth “marry early, and their parent to leave them at full liberty to choose such as were agreeable to them, in respect of both body and mind, for wives; and not to impose them upon them from interested views” (XI.195).

Philocles, “who loved war,” disagreed on Mentor’s policies of peace, which will only leave Salente vulnerable to conquest, thanks to creeping “effeminacy, luxury, and corruption of manners” (XI.195). Mentor refutes this argument, first by recalling the evils of war (“worst of all is that the best laws would be weakened, and a corruption of manners ensue”), then by explaining “how the martial spirit of a nation may be kept up in time of peace,” not only by the bodily exercises they have already instituted in Salente, not only by the celebration of heroism in story and song in the schools, and not only the advantages “of a sober, laborious life,” but also with policy (XI.196). Salente already has formed an alliance with many kingdoms in Hesperia. When future wars occur, send “the flower of youth” to it, but especially those who “reveal a military genius, and are most likely to profit by the experience” (XI.196).  Not only will your alliance be welcomed, even “courted,” but “without having a war to carry on at your own expense, or in your own country, you will have a gallant and intrepid youth” (XI.196). Attacks on Salente itself will be rare, since “the surest way to prevent war and to secure a long peace is to have your people trained to arms; to distinguish those who are eminent in the profession; to have always some officers who have served abroad and are acquainted with the forces and discipline of the neighboring nations, and their manner of waging war; to be alike incapable of making war from ambition, and of dreading it from sloth and effeminacy”—ready to fight necessary wars while deterring almost all enemies (XI.197). “In this state, should a neighboring people attack you unjustly, it will find you trained to arms and prepared; and, what is still more, it will find that you are loved and will be supported; all you neighbors will take the alarm, fully persuaded that their common safety depends upon their supporting and defending you” (XI.197)

“And thus did Minerva, in the guise of Mentor, establish the government of Salente upon the best laws and the most useful maxims of government; not so much to make the dominions of Idomeneus flourish as to show Telemachus, when he returned, by a visible example, how much a wise administration contributed to render a nation happy, and to procure a good king a lasting glory” XI.197). The new regime imports the natural virtues of the men of Bétique into Greek civilization.