Chapter Six
Among those who have deserved most praise for such a constitution is Lycurgus, who so prepared his laws in Sparta that, giving their shares to the king, to the aristocrats, and to the people, he made a state that lasted more than eight hundred years, with the highest reputation for himself and peace for the city. The opposite happened to Solon, who prepared the laws in Athens, because, organizing there a state governed only by the people, he made it of such short life that before he died he saw arise the tyranny of Peisistratus.
—Machiavelli, Discourses
MODERN SCHOLARS are likely to smile at Plutarch’s wistful exposition of the difficulties of doing research in little Chaeronea, far from the library resources available in a big city (Demosthenes 2.1). His lament rings all too true. It is impossible to know what Plutarch would have made of today’s classical scholars sitting at their computers patiently plugging away at their TLG databases. It is not difficult, however, to imagine the horror and bewilderment he would have felt at the prospect of an era when the knowledge of Greek would evaporate in the Western empire and the death of Greco-Roman paganism would bring with it loss of interest in the classical system of civic values that unified his intellectual universe.1
LOOKING TOWARD ANTIQUITY
When Augustine’s pupil Orosius of Spain (or perhaps modern Portugal) wrote his Seven Books of History against the Pagans early in the fourth century, his purpose was not to offer cautionary exempla of civic virtue. Rather, he sought to extend beyond the confines of Roman history the thesis of Augustine that as many calamities had attended on humankind before the advent of Christianity as after, thus rebutting the pagans who ascribed the sorry state of late antiquity to the Christians’ dereliction of civic and sacral duty. Though Orosius admires the Athenians’ resilience under the stress of constant warfare (3.15.4–5) and praises them for learning from their mistakes (2.17.17), he attributes their expedition against Sicily to selfish motives (2.14.7), and though he is somewhat harder on the Spartans’ “wicked lust for domination” (3.2.9–10), he ascribes the failure of the oligarchic revolution of 411/10 at Athens to the “inbred pride and rampant passions” of the race (2.16.1–2; whether of Greeks in general or of Athenians in particular is not clear). All in all, he concludes, Greece, Asia, Persia, Egypt, and Libya carried on such indiscriminate warfare that even were he to list the wars one by one he could not keep track of the thousands of people slaughtered (3.2.10).
Although familiarity with the sufferings of the Greek city-states might be useful to Christian apologists, interest in Greek history faded in the Western empire as knowledge of the Greek language declined precipitously during the fifth and sixth centuries.2 Even in Byzantium the political history of ancient Greece was reduced to short notices such as that found of Athens in the work of Theodore Metoikites, and the word demokratia came to mean a street riot; in the West, interest in the doings of the Greeks focused primarily on the Trojan War.3 In the twelfth-century Chronicle of the Two Cities, Otto the Bishop of Freising gave Greek political history fairly short shrift, incorporating various misreadings of his principal source, Orosius, and eking out his account with a surprising number of quotations from, of all places, Cicero’s De Officiis.4
Ignorance of Greek history would seem to rule out Athenian democracy as an inspiration for the popular communes of thirteenth-century Italy, and though the stirrings of the Italian yearning for antiquity began to be felt in the fourteenth century, generally they moved people only as far as Latin would take them, and Petrarch was known for asking, “What is history but the study of Rome?” Petrarch did, however, encourage his contemporary Boccaccio to learn Greek, and Boccaccio seems to have familiarized himself with some of Aristotle’s works. Toward the end of the century, two young Florentines, Roberto Rossi and Jacopo d’Angelo da Scarperia, went to Venice to study with the renowned Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, and it was in large part due to the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati that Chrysoloras was persuaded to come to Florence in 1397 and take up a chair at the University. Though Salutati never managed to learn Greek, Chrysoloras nonetheless educated the first generation of Florentine humanists, the most prominent being Leonardo Bruni, born in Arezzo in 1370, who proclaimed that at Chrysoloras’s hands Greek had been resurrected after seven centuries in which no Italian knew the language; as Sandys points out in his history of classical scholarship, Bruni’s chronology here is borne out by the date of 690 assigned by Martin Crusius in his Swiss Annals to the extinction of Greek in medieval Italy.5 From Florence and Venice the study of Greek language and civilization spread throughout northern Italy; classical education as a whole began to be put forward as the point of departure for efficacy in public life, and ancient history came to be praised for the models it could provide of behavior to be imitated or avoided.6
Classical exempla play an important role, for instance, in the two rambling discourses on government composed by the Sienese Francisco Patrizi, Bishop of Gaeta, one around 1460 and another in the 1480s.7 Assembled from a wide variety of classical sources, Patrizi’s discourses were arranged topically for the easy reference of statesmen whose tastes did not run to particularly demanding texts. Their style is chatty and anecdotal; Patrizi especially enjoyed rehearsing the contrast between Nicias’s fatally superstitious fear of eclipses and Pericles’ matter-of-fact dismissal of such simple phenomena of nature.8 Though in the earlier De Institutione Reipublicae Patrizi recorded with evident approval the strictures of the ancients (Aristotle, Socrates, and the Romans) against artisans and merchants participating in politics, he treats popular government more fully in the later De Regno.9 There he takes over from antiquity the division of government into three good forms and three degenerate ones, and echoes the Greek concern that the popular state can fall into tyranny if the people get “free of the reins” and reject men of outstanding virtue. Significantly, he labels the demos plebs, not populus. Already in De Institutione Reipublicae Patrizi had warned his fellow Sienese against the dangers of envy and had reminded them that many celebrated Athenians had stayed for long periods outside Attica precisely to avoid it. What but envy, Patrizi asks, destroyed Athens?10 The notion that the fall of Athens was brought about by envy is developed more fully in De Regno, where Patrizi rehearses the usual catalog of Athenian martyrs (Socrates, Themistocles, Aristides).11 It was through envy and ambition, he claims, that Athens fell to the Spartans. Though at first the state was administered by illustrious men, subsequently, as envy and ambition grew, the plebs took over by sedition, demanding an accounting from commanders for wartime conduct. It was as a result of this behavior, he asserts, that the Athenians were conquered by Lysander and the Spartans, and in their defeat Patrizi also sees the predictable punishment for their imperialism.12
Patrizi’s two treatises were designed to offer his readers improving exempla in the arts of government. It was in Florence, however, that the relevance of classical history to contemporary Italian politics and diplomacy received its most elaborate articulation. Beginning already with the last generation of the fourteenth century, Florence and Athens were frequently linked together by Florentine writers, sometimes for glory but more frequently in obloquy. While Florence basked in her role as the cultural capital of Italy and vaunted herself the successor to the quondam school of Hellas, the similarities between Florentine government and that of the Athenians became a source of embarrassment and reproach.
ATHENS ON THE ARNO
Undercut by three successive waves of the Black Death and jostled by the Ciompi rebellion of 1378, the Florentine state lived on to face its greatest challenge at the turn of the century, when Gian Galeazzo Visconti, having purchased the title of Duke of Milan in 1395, began his irrepressible march through Umbria and Tuscany. By June of 1402 the chilling news came to Florence that Bologna itself had fallen, and Florentines turned in alarm to Pope Boniface IX as Gian Galeazzo ordered preparations to be made for his coronation in Florence as King of Italy. In September, however, came the astonishing report that Gian Galeazzo had died of a fever. A funeral in Milan replaced the coronation at Florence, and the combined army of Boniface and the Florentines succeeded in driving Gian Galeazzo’s widow Caterina back from both Bologna and Umbria.
The terror had passed, but somewhere in the crucible of the Visconti peril was forged the civic humanism associated with the Florentine quattrocento, and around the turn of the century Florentine writers begin to put forward their city politically as the bastion of republican liberty in Italy and culturally as the school of the entire peninsula. It is not likely that the Florentines had any finer definitions of libertà than had the Greeks of autonomia (autonomy) or eleutheria (freedom) or the Romans of libertas.13 A lack of precise definition, however, has never inhibited any catchword from sparking extraordinary passions in the human soul; indeed, a certain vagueness often serves to add fuel to the flames. The Florentines came to see the defeat of the Visconti not simply as a fortuitous deliverance from impending doom but rather as the validation of their form of government, which, however narrow it may seem to twentieth-century democrats, struck the Florentines as quite broadly based. The limited role their own efforts had played in pushing the Visconti out of Tuscany and Umbria, moreover, raised Florence’s status in Italy as a whole. The obvious parallel with Athens after Salamis did not pass unnoticed.14
Already in 1397 Cino Rinuccini capped his procession of distinguished Florentines with the observation that nothing filled him with more joy than watching there grow up before his eyes “a brigade of magnificent character … that would be appropriate in that most literate of cities, Athens.”15 It was probably shortly afterward that Leonardo Bruni produced his Praise of the City of Florence, a panegyric based on the Panathenaicus of Aelius Aristides.16 Here Bruni taps the Athenian parallel at a variety of points—in his discussions, for example, of Florence’s geographical location, her leadership in the struggle against foreign autocrats, the superior nature of her political institutions, and her cultural primacy. Special emphasis, moreover, is placed on the fact that Florence’s Tuscan dialect is a model for the whole peninsula. Like Aristides, Bruni uses both the simile of the moon surrounded by the stars and that of the concentric rings on a buckler to illustrate his city’s central geographical location. In a digression on the thirteenth century, Bruni likens the Florentines who left the city after the defeat at Montaperto to the Athenians who fled to preserve their liberty during the Persian War. Patrizi was to suggest that Sparta was the school of Greece, but several echoes of Thucydides’ Periclean funeral oration in Bruni’s eulogy for Nanni degli Strozzi suggest that Bruni was thinking of Athens. Like Pericles, Bruni took the occasion of a funerary speech to eulogize his city as a whole; like Pericles too, Bruni stressed the liberty and equality of citizens under the exemplary government of a city in which the doors of opportunity—or so he claimed—were open to all men of merit. In a burst of democratic fervor Bruni describes the government of Florence here as a forma popularis, though in both the Praise of the City of Florence and in his Greek essay On the Government of the Florentines he calls the government mixed, an appellation far closer to the truth.17 It was probably around the same time as Bruni’s funeral oration that Gherardi da Prato composed his paean to “that most learned Athens” in the Paradise of the Alberti, and the stress Gherardi placed on the Athenians’ successful resistance against foreign domination suggests Florentine echoes here.18
A sentimental attachment persisted as time wore on. Strong echoes of Pericles’ funeral oration appear in Alamanno Rinuccini’s 1479 essay On Liberty, and early in the sixteenth century Giovanni Corsi is found praising the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a second Athens.19 The comparison stuck: by later in the century Lorenzo’s position was compared to Pericles’ in Athens, and both the Periclean and the broader analogy have persisted down to our own time.20 Whether any solid infrastructure underlay the Florentine affinity for the city of Pericles, however, is another story. The extant writings of the fifteenth century offer little serious discussion of the Athenian political system; even a book with as promising a title as Matteo Palmieri’s treatise On Civic Life contains few references to Athens to match those to Rome and to Sparta.21 Early in the sixteenth century came a new wave of interest in antiquity, somewhat less sentimental and contrived than what had been apparent a hundred years before. Political issues began to be discussed analytically and in depth, particularly by the Florentine intellectuals who gathered in the Orti Oricellari to discuss the problems that beset their city and to seek solutions grounded in a proper understanding of antiquity. For all the fascination with liberty and representative government, however, Athens is given fairly short shrift. One Florentine historian, indeed, though singing the praises of libertà and lauding the grandeur Athens attained following the expulsion of the Peisistratids, nonetheless manages to get the names of Peisistratus’s sons wrong, calling Hippias’s brother and fellow-tyrant Diocles rather than Hipparchus.22 In this he shows reliance on Justin rather than on Thucydides or Herodotus—not a good sign in someone who purports to be a serious student of antiquity.
That historian’s name was Niccolò Machiavelli. For him, the Greek poleis were of secondary interest to the Roman republic. Where he turns his attention to the Greek world at all it is mostly to princes of the Hellenistic era after the Macedonian conquest or to the great lawgivers—ordinatori and riordinatori—of earlier days, Theseus, Solon, Romulus, Lycurgus, and Moses, all of whom he treats as fully historical figures.23 But Solon, Machiavelli observes in his Discourses, was less successful in his work than Lycurgus: the mixed government created by Lycurgus lasted eight hundred years without the slightest disturbance, whereas the government of Solon, being merely a democratic state, toppled almost at once.24 So short-lived was the Solonic state that even in his own lifetime Solon saw the beginnings of the Peisistratid tyranny, and even after the Peisistratids were expelled and the Solonic system revived, still this government lasted less than a hundred years, despite the fact that “a number of laws that had been overlooked by Solon were adopted, to maintain the government against the insolence of the nobles and the license of the populace.”25
Because of his rejection of contemporary Christian morality, Machiavelli has often been perceived as a dispassionate and objective observer of the drama of history. In fact, Machiavelli (like Thucydides) was a man of painful passions whose emotions were intensely engaged by the political turmoil around him, and his remarks both about contemporary Florence and about ancient government reveal a profound and searing ambivalence.26 At one moment the people is exalted as the repository of a wide spectrum of virtues, while at another he scorns the volatility and vain ambition of the lower classes. Not surprisingly, classical Athens sparked mixed emotions in Machiavelli.
In the Discourses Machiavelli shows some enthusiasm for early Athens, adducing the flourishing of Athens after the expulsion of Peisistratus as evidence of the superiority of popular to monarchic government.27 In demonstrating the superiority of republics in keeping alliances, he tells how the Athenians rejected the advice of Themistocles to seize or destroy the united Greek fleet: when Aristides maintained that Themistocles’ proposal was “highly advantageous but most dishonest,” the people “absolutely rejected it; which would not have been done by Philip of Macedon, nor many other princes, who would only have looked to the advantages, and who have gained more by their perfidy than by any other means.”28
On the other hand, Machiavelli cites Athens as an example in his chapter on “How by the Delusions of Seeming good the people are often misled to desire their own ruin; and how they are Frequently Influenced by Great Hopes and Brave Promises” (1.53). Having offered various examples of this from the Roman republic, he then moves on to Athens, where he pairs Nicias’s inability to dissuade the Athenian people from attacking Sicily with an example from Florentine history: “Messer Ercole Bentivogli,” he writes, “commander of the Florentine troops, and Antonio Giacomini, after having defeated Bartolommeo d’Alviano at San Vincenti, went to lay siege to Pisa, which enterprise was resolved upon by the people in consequence of the brave promises made by Messer Ercole, although many of the most prudent citizens objected, but could not prevent it.” I say then, Machiavelli concludes, “that there is no easier way to ruin a republic, where the people have power, than to involve them in daring enterprises.”29
Machiavelli’s determination to illumine the present by the lights of the past is undermined by his failure adequately to temper his parallels by making appropriate distinctions between one culture and another: what else could explain his bizarre attribution of the short duration of Athenian democracy to the error Solon “had committed in not tempering the power of the people and that of the prince and his nobles”?30 J.G.A. Pocock has emphasized the way in which Machiavelli and his contemporaries were compelled to wrestle with medieval and Renaissance frameworks that opposed the eternal hierarchies of monarchy and empire with the transitory essence of republics. To affirm the republic, Pocock contends, “was to break up the timeless continuity of the hierarchic universe into particular moments: those periods of history at which republics had existed and which were worthy of attention, and those at which they had not and which consequently afforded nothing of value or authority to the present.” Where “affiliation with monarchy … was affiliation with the timeless,” the republic, on the contrary, “was not timeless, because it did not reflect by simple correspondence the eternal order of nature.”31 In his attempt to distinguish adequately among the different republics that had existed, Machiavelli was frequently pulled back into a generalizing mode that undercut the value of his enterprise.32 His response to Athens was complicated as well by a haunting ambivalence about the value of popular government. In the words of Mark Hulliung, Machiavelli saw “Athenian democracy, which lit up the skies with glory for a tragically brief moment” as a
magnificent failure and a warning to Florentine democracy. A popular regime, Athens could arm the people and boast formidable military might; a popular regime, Athens had destroyed her nobility, and in her egalitarian excesses did not permit the rise of a new ruling class. Hence hers was a politics of passion unconstrained, undirected…. Similarly, the Florentine empire, insofar as it existed, weakened the city on the Arno, because Florence, too, as the pathetic republican resurgence from 1494 to 1512 attested, was a democracy devoid of leadership. However much a Florence that was the reincarnation of Rome might be Machiavelli’s aspiration, a Florence that was the reincarnation of Athens was his reality.33
More consistently pessimistic about the capacity of common citizens to form a sound popular government, Machiavelli’s friend Guicciardini responded negatively to Athenian democracy. Guicciardini praises Pericles at several junctures but is highly critical of the substructure of Athenian government that underlay Pericles’ position as strategos; indeed on one occasion his praise of Pericles is accompanied by criticism of the slander that led to his deposition, and though he claims that Pericles used his power for the good of the state, he is disturbed by the demagogic methods he employed and maintains that rising through the senate is superior to ingratiating oneself with the people.34 His account of the demagogic fawning that brought Pericles to power (followed by genuine statesmanship once his position was secure) points to Plutarch as a source, a notion reinforced by the detailed contrast between rising by the favor of the people and rising by way of the senate. For it was Plutarch who had reconciled his pro-Periclean and anti-Periclean sources by seeing two discrete phases in Pericles’ career, and Plutarch too who imposed the scheme of the Roman republic (which pitted the senate against the popular assemblies) on states such as Athens, to which it did not in fact apply. A similar Roman bias is evident in Guicciardini’s contention in the Dialogue on the Government of Florence that in the ancient Greek and Roman republics many tumults and indeed disasters were caused by bringing matters of importance before those popular assemblies “that the ancients called conzione,” an Italian word made from the Latin contio, a notion that in turn was thoroughly alien to Greek thinking.35 Though Cicero might voice fervid anxieties about the horrors of “Greek-style” assemblies, in fact a contio was a uniquely Roman event.
In the commentary he wrote on Machiavelli’s own Discourses on Livy, Guicciardini took issue with his friend’s contention that it was because nobody since the expulsion of the Tarquins had sought to deprive the Romans of their liberty that the Romans had been less suspicious of their leading citizens than had the Athenians. Citing the tyranny of the fifth-century decemvirs, Guicciardini argues that Machiavelli is in error. The true explanation, he maintains, may lie in the nature of the Romans, who were not given to the levity of the Athenians but rather conformed to the propriety of the other Greeks; but it is more likely to lie in the popular nature of Athenian government, which enabled ambitious citizens to rise more easily. The mixed nature of Roman government in general and the prominent role played by the Roman senate in particular gave Rome an advantage over Athens, making Roman government “more sober, more temperate, and more prudent than that of the Athenians,” which was, he states twice, “merely democratic.”36 He cites the exiles of Alcibiades and Themistocles as evidence that the people should not hear accusations.37 Nor does Guicciardini overlook what he sees as a positively pernicious parallel between Athens and Florence. It is plain, he argues in his Discourse of Logrogno, that laws that are “guided by the appetite of the multitude” are almost always either harmful or pointless, and as evidence for this he cites the “great disorder” that arose from popular input into policy in the ancient states and “most of all in Athens,” where much ruin was brought upon the state in this way. From contemporary history he goes on to cite the instance already adduced by Machiavelli in his chapter on “How by the Delusions of Seeming good the people are often misled to desire their own ruin; and how they are Frequently Influenced by Great Hopes and Brave Promises”—the unsuccessful campaign against Pisa in 1505. In his own time, he writes, we see the example of Piero Soderini’s proposal concerning the campaign against Pisa: disapproved by the aristocrats and the dieci della guerra, the expedition was approved by the people “against the advice of all the wise men in the city.” The unsuccessful expedition, Guicciardini complains, brought with it “both harm and shame.”38 It is in the same essay that Guicciardini refers admiringly to the knife with which Lycurgus surgically removed all possible decadence from his fatherland, and he goes on to revel at some length in Lycurgus’s glory; the praise of the Spartan founder also appears in the commentary on Machiavelli’s Discourses, and in the Dialogue on the Government of Florence the ordinances of Lycurgus are billed as “those holy laws.”39
A similar pattern appears in the work of Donato Giannotti, another habitué of the Orti Oricellari who takes up the question of Athenian persecution of their leaders, writing in his Discourse on the Form of the Florentine Republic that here Athens is an example to be studiously avoided by the Florentines: it was because the Athenian state was badly balanced, he maintains, that those who acquired distinction generally became overbearing and required ostracism “to bridle their insolence.” In a well-ordered state, he contends, such ambition does not pose a threat, and he cites as evidence for this Sparta and Venice, where the sole attempts at tyranny made by Pausanias and by Marino Falerio were quashed with dispatch. A pointed contrast is provided with Florence, where the disorder of the Republic gave rise to the tyranny of Cosimo de’ Medici.40 Though Giannotti mentions both Solon and Romulus as ordinatori, moreover, it is of Lycurgus that we hear the most. In a passage evocative of Machiavelli, the Spartans are praised for living for a long time with the same laws and without the slightest alteration, while off in Athens people lived “in continual travail.”41 Giannotti goes on to contend that the Roman republic [sic] while under the kings did not undergo the slightest alteration and achieved great conquests that would enable it to conquer Italy and indeed the whole world—whereas when the regal power was abolished the state fell apart because of the conflicts among ambitious citizens seeking the consulship.
OLIGARCHY, SERENITY, AND THE GOVERNO MISTO
There was, however, one government that did appeal to Giannotti: that most serene republic, Venice, to which he devoted his laudatory Book of the Republic of the Venetians.42 His enthusiasm was shared by Machiavelli, who in the Discourses coupled Venice and Sparta as stable mixed republics, and by Guicciardini, who ended his discussion of the superiority of mixed polities with a paean to Venice. A legend in its own time, Venice managed to exert an extraordinary influence on political thought in Italy and was generally held to preserve the balance of a mixed government upon the foundation of an exceptionally broad base. Though the titular executive, the Doge, was elected for life, a majority of councillors could act without him, whereas he himself could not act except in concert with at least four of them. Hedged about by a wide variety of councils and colleges, the Doge had to undergo a regular redefinition of his powers at the hands of a committee of the Grand Council. In this Council, which met several times a month, sat all male patricians whose families were listed in the Venetian Libro d’Oro—a total of 1,843, for example, in the year 1581, for which statistics exist. This Council, in the eyes of admiring contemporaries, provided the democratic element in a beautifully balanced constitution. Twentieth-century scholars have seen things differently, one contending that “with an eye on the 133,047 who had no share in the government, there would be few today who would not unhesitatingly pronounce the Venetian republic a close oligarchy.”43 Renaissance thinkers, however, had their own views: Guicciardini, Machiavelli, Giannotti—all three Florentines saw the Venetian state as the finest example of government and the distillation of what had been best in ancient polities.44
Despite the frequency with which its name was invoked by political thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the Renaissance Venice itself stood somewhat removed from the eddying currents of humanism. The very stability that drew the awe of their contemporaries militated against any desire on the part of Venetians to turn back their eyes to a time when the city on the lagoon had not yet risen from the marshes. Convinced that they enjoyed the best of all possible worlds under the best of all possible constitutions, Venetians had no reason to hanker nostalgically after the Greco-Roman past. They were, however, willing to indulge themselves in happy comparisons with classical government at its best. Both Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, himself descended from a family that could boast eight Doges, and Trajano Boccalini, whose works became quite popular in England when they were translated shortly after his death, maintained that Venice surpassed all ancient governments.45 This opinion was shared by Paolo Paruta, the renowned Venetian political theorist, who stressed the improvements Venice had made over the dangerous democratic tendencies that had brought down the ancient republics. But if Venice represented an improvement on antiquity, Florence served as a sober reminder of the dangers of democracy, and in this she was associated with classical Athens.
Although Paruta’s view of the superiority of Venice to all other governments ancient and modern is also expounded in his History of Venice, it is in his Political Discourses and his treatise On Political Perfection that he offers the strongest indictments of other states.46 To be sure, Paruta followed in the Florentines’ footsteps in admiring Sparta for her long endurance and praising Lycurgus for instituting such a well-balanced system; he also credits Sparta with protecting Greece from the immoderate ambition of the Athenians.47 But even Sparta, he complains, had become too democratic by virtue of the addition of the board of five ephors under king Theopompus, and good government was destroyed in Rome when the ambition of the Gracchi brothers led to excessive power falling into the hands of the people, or, as Paruta would have it, “a dissolute democratic license.” Likewise, he goes on, too much power was accorded to the Athenian people by Aristides and Pericles, whom he labels “too enamored of liberty—or perhaps eager to maintain their high status by means of the people’s favor.”48 This excessive democratic liberty, he suggests, was responsible for the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. Similarly he maintains that it was because Solon had made her too democratic that Athens had fallen under the power of Peisistratus.49 Solon, Paruta writes, was so severely criticized for his laws that he was compelled to flee his ungrateful country.50 He also censures the Athenians for ostracizing or impeaching so many outstanding leaders.51 Athens, he maintains, provides an ancient example of the dangerous instabilities of governments in which there is a substantial democratic element, while of modern states, Florence in her instability demonstrates this same danger, offering too easy an opportunity to men (e.g., the Medici) who wish to oppress the city and take away her liberty by ingratiating themselves with the crowd. But Venice, he reminds us, “on the contrary, by virtue of the excellent form of its government, which, though mixed, retains nonetheless very little of a democratic element and much of an aristocratic one, … has been able to retain the very same constitution for the very longest time.”52
Renaissance Italians, then, preferred the governments of Venice and Sparta to those of Florence and Athens, and the reasons they alleged were fairly consistent: Venetian and Spartan stability were preferable to the constant mutations of Florentine and Athenian government, and a mixed constitution was inherently more durable than one in which the supreme power is vested in the people. The preference for Sparta over Athens was well grounded in ancient sources. Bruni in the first flowering of civic humanism lit upon two of the only ancient texts to praise Athenian political institutions unambiguously and at length—the Thucydidean funeral oration of Pericles and the Panathenaicus of Aelius Aristides. (Concerning Aristides’ much more thoughtful discussion of Athens in his oration To Plato: On the Four, Bruni sustained the conspiracy of silence that has ignored Aristides’ analytical essay to this day.) Hostile texts were far more abundant, and among these the political philosophers held pride of place. Though they might be—and indeed were—fair game in other regards, Plato and Aristotle were revered by thinkers of the Italian Renaissance when it came to politics and political theory; it remained for Jean Bodin to approach the political ideas of these luminaries with irreverence. Pietro Vettori’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics is a case in point: after an introduction that discusses the governments of Rome, Sparta, and Carthage, makes only the most cursory reference to Athens, and includes an impassioned eulogy of Lycurgus, Vettori goes on to comment on the text without ever suggesting that Aristotle’s way of looking at political life could possibly have been improved upon in any particular. The examples could be multiplied at length. Even Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, who in 1555 produced his Treatise on the Best Governments of the Ancient and Modern Republics comparing the political theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius, contents himself with collating and contrasting the ancient authors’ views on a series of topics, refraining conspicuously from offering any opinions of his own—“leaving,” as he says, “the judgment of such things to those more intelligent and judicious than I.”53
Plato and Aristotle had both drawn tight connections between democracy and tyranny, suggesting both that the first gave rise to the second and that the two were in fact quite similar. The repeated contention that democracy in Florence had opened the door to ambitious despots demonstrates both Florentine reality and Greek theory; whether it reflects Athenian reality is another story. In truth the tyranny of Peisistratus opened the door to democracy at Athens, which subsequently was never overthrown from within; two oligarchic (not despotic) coups were quelled within months, as they had insufficient support to take root. The strongman who brought popular sovereignty to an end in Athens was nurtured not in the atmosphere of democracy but rather among Macedonian mores of monarchy and murder. Like many who would follow in their footsteps, the Florentines looked more closely at Greek political theory and at the history of their own civilization than they did at the actual course of Athenian political life.
It is important that we notice among the ordinatori praised by Machiavelli and Giannotti the name of Theseus, who appears as a fully historical figure beside Moses, Cyrus, Solon (and of course Lycurgus, to all appearances the least controversial character in all of ancient history). The cheerful acceptance of Theseus’s historicity may be ascribed in part to the generally uncritical attitude of the age toward the ancient sources and in part to the Machiavellian preoccupation with founders in general; but in part at least we are surely entitled to see here the fine hand of Plutarch. The veritable obsession with Plutarch during the Renaissance was both symptom and cause of an attitude toward Greek civilization that stressed the role of the great man in history, exalted anecdote over analysis, substituted moralizing for an honest effort to determine what happened, deployed the history of the city-states in the form of cautionary tales penned to make pithy points about human nature, and, last but not least, viewed Greece through Roman eyes.
Hungrily indeed did the civic humanists with their preoccupation with the education of the good citizen fall upon the writings of Plutarch, for in these they found precisely the attitude toward history to which they were most receptive. In this receptivity lay also the source of the virtual canonization of Lycurgus, for if ever a man was associated with the moral formation of citizens, Lycurgus was that man: though Athens might vaunt herself the school of Hellas, the nature of the Athenian paideia was less well defined than the legendary Spartan agoge that so fired the minds of the Renaissance. Bruni himself praised history as a store of moral exempla and identified it as providing to citizens and monarchs alike “lessons of incitement or of warning in the ordering of public policy.”54 Though Machiavelli was not the best audience for sententious Plutarchian moralizing, the two men shared a marked enthusiasm for the notion of glorious leaders.
It is not surprising, then, that Renaissance texts often throw off clearly audible echoes of the Plutarchian view of Athenian democracy. Guicciardini, as we have seen, followed closely Plutarch’s picture of Pericles’ conversion from “demagogue” to “statesman,” and implicitly in so doing accepted the very concept of demagogy so dear to Plutarch’s heart. Plutarch probably lurked as well behind Machiavelli’s assertion in the proem to his Florentine History that political factions in Florence were far more complicated than those in Rome and Athens, since in those two cities, Machiavelli maintains, only two political groups contended for power; for one of Plutarch’s signal weaknesses as a historian of classical Athens is his failure to distinguish her complex machinations from those of republican Rome, where a bipartite optimate-popular division did actually correspond to reality.55 Philip Ralph is particularly acute in assessing the damage done to Machiavelli’s analysis of his own society by undue reliance on simplistic Roman models. Machiavelli, he writes,
fell wide of the mark in appraising social forces. Instead of making a serious attempt to analyze the society of Florence, he fell back on formulas extracted from antiquity. While the Tuscan republic was openly and proudly proclaiming itself a city of merchants and artisans—though in fact it was in the grip of an upper bourgeois elite—Machiavelli continued to think in terms of the traditional opposition between nobles and commoners, which he equated with the struggle between patricians and plebeians in early republican Rome.56
The Plutarchian model of ancient society, in other words, seems to have distorted Machiavelli’s thinking not only about Athens but, more surprisingly, about Florence as well.
An uncritical attitude toward ancient sources, then, coupled with a hearty appetite for the moral formation of citizens and a corresponding predilection for the writings of Plutarch in particular, helped shape the Renaissance disdain for Athenian statecraft and its concomitant reverence for Sparta.57 The implications of this unimaginative approach toward the sources are broad and wideranging, for in the elitism of the ancient writers Renaissance thinkers found a mind-set that was eminently congenial to their own way of looking at the world. In the study of Greek history, no attention was paid to slavery, imperialism, and the status of women—all topics of considerable interest to later generations; in an age in which the constant rallying cry was to libertà, Renaissance writers nonetheless complained only of the excessive liberty at Athens and had not a word to say about those who were deprived of their freedom. Political alchemists seeking the magic formula for stability and immunity from foreign interference, Renaissance theorists exalted endurance at the expense of all else. Their uncritical attitude toward the sources not only blinded them to the weaknesses of the Spartan system, which was transmogrified in Renaissance mythology into the utopian governo misto, but, by leading them to accept the historicity of Lycurgus and all his works, led them to exaggerate the length of time the Spartan state endured unchanged as well. Perhaps the finest emblem of traditional classicism during the Renaissance is to be found in a passage on the first page of Giannotti’s discourse on the form of the Florentine government. A confirmed republican, Giannotti admired what he saw as the broadly based government of Venice and often reiterated that though a mixed government was best, still if a government had to incline toward the nobles or the people it was safer for it to incline toward the people. Giannotti nonetheless begins his work by announcing that the poor of Florence who make up the mass of the people need not be discussed in his treatise on the government, as they lack citizenship: “About these, lacking as they do any degree whatever of citizenship, it is unnecessary to speak further.”58
That such a notion of the body politic can be so cavalierly put forward in passing reveals much. Underneath all the ostentatious parading of the ideals of republicanism there lurked the profoundest mistrust of any real attempt to establish a government more broadly based than oligarchy. To be sure, a number of Italian city-states had flirted with democratic governments during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; some of the best known experiments in popular sovereignty were tried in Florence itself. Much of the chaos and turbulence that attended on these regimes was the product not so much of their inherent weaknesses as of the continuing competition among wealthy families, a rivalry that often took the form of overextension on the part of ambitious banking houses such as that of the Bardi; disastrous bank failures in turn threw the state into disarray. (The last of the great houses to collapse, the Bardi itself finally fell staggering in 1346.) Rabid imperialism drew Florence into increasingly unpayable debt. Larger guilds, lesser guilds, Guelphs, Ghi-bellines, wool-workers, friends and enemies of the papacy, disaffected aristocrats, artisans, farmers, magnates—the bitter and often physically violent strife among its factions that marked the bustling commercial city on the Arno might to more thoughtful minds have made Athens look like a peaceable agrarian community in comparison. Determined to hang the instability of this era on the weaknesses of popular government, however, the city-states of fifteenth-century Italy settled down by and large into oligarchies of one kind or another.
Venice was a stable aristocracy, and the many vicissitudes through which the Florentine government passed in the fifteenth and sixteenth century did not include democracy; indeed the dominance of wealthy patrician families had caused the political base to shrink considerably from what it had been in the fourteenth century before the arrival of the much-touted civic humanism. Though democracy seemed to have some prospects at Florence during the middle of the fourteenth century, by careful scrutiny of the lists of citizens eligible for office a few determined families managed to retain power in their own hands until the period of ferment had safely passed. The highest proportion of enfranchised citizens in any Italian state during the Renaissance was evidently Bologna, where 12 percent of inhabitants had the franchise—and this in the fourteenth century.59 After 1400, only states that combined pretensions of equity with realities of oligarchy could really strike a responsive chord in Renaissance Italy. The oligarchic bent of contemporaries is made plain by the promiscuous use of the term “democracy” to describe not only the thirteenth-century Florentine commune and the popular regime of the fourteenth but also the much more narrowly restricted governments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Of the ancient states, therefore, first republican Rome and then Sparta appealed; of the modern states, Venice. Zera Fink rightly calls attention to the role assigned to ancient models in the Renaissance oversimplification of class conflict and political life, pointing out that Machiavelli, for example, had those exaggerated notions of the length of time mixed states lasted without material alteration “which are a notable characteristic of the theory of mixed polities in the period. Sparta, we are told, lasted eight hundred years ‘in the most perfect tranquillity.’ By seeming to provide actual examples, notions of this sort afforded powerful support to the idea that mixed states attained a stability denied to other forms of government.”60 The rough edges have been trimmed away; the narrow oligarchy that the Roman optimates were willing to destroy the republic in order to preserve and the domination of Spartiate over helot that many twentieth-century scholars have viewed as a blight on all antiquity are lost in the Renaissance exaltation of the governo misto, and the Athenians who were to be attacked in our own day for their slave-holding and their imperialism appear in Renaissance writings only as men who allowed altogether too much freedom to the untutored masses. Behind the humanists’ cry for civil government lay principally an opposition to despotism; the government of Athens the humanists found very uncivil indeed.
Comparatively little attention was paid to the Greek city-states as a whole by the Florentines. With the exception of Bruni’s Commentary on Greek Affairs—in essence a precis of Xenophon’s Hellenica—no work of the Italian Renaissance that has come my way deals in its entirety with Greek history as so many writings did with Roman. Rather, Greek history was trotted out on an anecdotal basis to demonstrate what to choose and what to avoid.61 Never studied earnestly for its own sake or on its own terms, it fell victim to the oversimplifications of eager theorists who cried out for relevance like any hard-nosed college student, and if the Athenians could not be held up as models to emulate, at least they could be thrust forward as warnings for subversive egalitarians. The uses to which Greek history was put during the Italian Renaissance reflects an ambivalence about the past that characterizes the age as a whole. This ambivalence extended, mutatis mutandis, to other forms of history as well and has made it possible for two distinguished North American scholars to conclude within a couple of years of one another that, according to one (Paul Grendler), “the Italian reader accepted the Renaissance belief that history was useful to the active life because it taught political lessons,” and according to another (Felix Gilbert), “in the Renaissance, knowledge of the past was not believed to be of primary significance” and “history was not highly esteemed.”62 Renaissance Italians were very hungry for history, but they were not hungry for very much of it.
. . . . .
The early Italian enthusiasm for the Athenian state that manifested itself in the first sproutings of Florentine humanism was neither profound nor carefully thought through. Though Corsi in his life of Ficino labels the Florence of Lorenzo as “the other Athens,” his first observations liken the city to Rome under Augustus and Maecenas—surely a horse of a very different color. Gherardi da Prato, who waxed so eloquent about the “innumerable triumphs of the glorious Athenian people,” nonetheless climaxes his account of Greek history with paeans to Demosthenes and to Macedon in virtually a single breath—certainly not a sign of a coherent political philosophy. And even Bruni, perhaps the greatest Italian Hellenist of his day, makes errors about Greek civilization, twice indeed confusing the world of Homer with that of classical Athens. A journey through Bruni’s letters reveals a man who plainly viewed the Greeks as of far more peripheral interest than the Romans, who are—again and again—nostri.63 As C. C. Bayley has observed, Bruni in his essay De Militia ascribes a line to Homer on the relative appropriateness of taciturnitas to males and females that actually derives from line 293 of Sophocles’ Ajax. The citation presumably derives from Aristotle’s Politics, where it is cited at 1.13.1260a: gynaiki kosmon he sige pherei, “a woman’s silence adorns her.”64 Though Aristotle cites the author only as “the poet,” still the meter should have made clear to Bruni that it could not be Homer. More strikingly still, in the Praise of the City of Florence Bruni maintains that one ought not to judge the law-abidingness of the Romans too harshly because of the corruption of Verres or the bravery of the Athenians too severely on account of the cowardice of—Thersites, the crude Achaean commoner who presumes to criticize Agamemnon in book 2 of the Iliad! The errors, I would suggest, arose from a combination of simple carelessness with a sentimental presupposition that somehow Greek and Athenian culture are synonymous. That Italians should have thought along these lines should occasion no surprise; even twentieth-century English speakers generally find that the study of Roman civilization and Latin literature demands less energy than that of Greek, if for no other reason than that Greek was written in an alien alphabet, and the distinction must have been far sharper for people born on the Italian peninsula and taught to speak a language derivative of Latin at their parents’ knees. In sharing this Roman orientation, at least, Bruni continued a tradition from earlier decades, when, for example, Domenico d’Arezzo had praised the Florentine Coluccio Salutati by asking:
Who would blush to be thought inferior to you? Empedocles expressed himself in songs, Plato in dialogues, Socrates in hymns, Epicharmus in music, Xenophon in history, Xenocrates in satires. Or, if these smack too strongly of antiquity or seem to be examples taken from foreign peoples and rusty with age, listen to these later ones of Roman origin [italics mine]. Vergil was lacking in prose, and so was Ovid, while Livy, Valerius, and Cicero were destitute of poetry.65
For all the egalitarian rhetoric of the Praise of the City of Florence, moreover, it is his Florentine history that reveals Bruni’s real political orientation. There, in the well-chosen words of Eric Cochrane written from a twentieth-century perspective, Bruni “consistently defined as the government of the people what was actually oligarchy of an increasingly small number of old, established families, and he showed not the slightest interest in the vast majority of the population.”66 Bruni is particularly unimaginative in his inability to see any substantive issues at stake in the rebellion led by the guild of the wool workers known as the Ciompi, whom he regards as beneath contempt: he cautions the Florentine patriciate to take the uprising as a warning never to let the masses have arms at their disposal or to have any opportunity to make trouble: for they cannot be held back from murder and confiscation once they have gotten a taste of power—nor, he maintains, “were there any controls on the unbridled wills of poor and criminal individuals [hominum egentium et facinorosorum; italics mine].”67 The coupling of “the poor” with “criminals” is reminiscent, of course, of the Greek kakos, which, as we have seen in chapter 3, was regularly used to mean both “indigent” and “bad” in a world in which the stock figure of Thersites provided a living example of the conflation of poverty, ugliness, and warped thinking.
From the start, the Renaissance affinity for Athens—discernible primarily in Florence—was founded on sentiment and rhetoric, neither of which would withstand a sober consideration of anything that had actually transpired in the school of Hellas. When Athenian civilization was subjected to slightly more critical examination, it was found wanting; but a truly serious study of what had happened never took place. No lessons were drawn from the comparative cultural fertility of Athens and Sparta, and superficial similarities between Florence and Athens—cities of high culture, thriving commerce and imperialist proclivities—came to obscure the vital differences between the two cities and the essential stability of Athenian government. As Droysen has observed, the evidence can at best answer the questions that are put to it, and the focus of Renaissance thinkers on the stability of their own city-states led them to ask rather narrow questions of Greek history. As for Athens the school of Hellas, Patrizi maintained that the Spartans were commonly agreed in their day to be “the Preceptors of all the Greeks” as they were teachers of courage and military skills.68 That Athens should have had to defend her title even as the school of all Greece is an index of how low her stock stood in Italy at the time of the Renaissance.
With the passing of time, ways of looking at Athenian democracy would multiply. But the anxieties of the Italian Renaissance would remain an important building block in the anti-Athenian tradition, as the topos of democratic instability came to eclipse that of democratic injustice to the well-to-do. Unflattering and ahistorical parallels between Florence and Athens became frequent in the works of Jean Bodin, whose thought enjoyed enormous prestige in early modern Europe, and the classical republicans of seventeenth-century England carried forward the happy association of Venice with Sparta. Deeply disturbed by the disorder in the Italian peninsula and more sensitive to the similarities that seemed to link them with antiquity than to the differences that set them apart, Renaissance writers set the stage for much facile and unhelpful thinking about classical Athens.