CHAPTER
10
John P. McCormick
Introduction
This chapter explores Niccolò Machiavelli’s use of historical figures to impart political lessons imperfectly or only partially conveyed by the general rules that the Florentine so (in)famously sets out throughout The Prince and the Discourses.1 I suggest that Machiavelli deploys a particular example, Agathocles the Sicilian, to establish across his major works an elaborate cross-comparative web of individuals situated in similar political circumstances; specifically, circumstances in which a prince or magistrate finds himself positioned between “the insolence of the aristocrats and the rage of the people” (D I.16). I demonstrate that this web of comparisons and contrasts, at the center of which Machiavelli places Agathocles, convey—at different textual moments, in multiple registers and at varying intensities—political advice regarding cruelty, criminality, faith-keeping, class allegiance and civic–military organization.
In general, I show how Machiavelli presents specific political actions and particular historical circumstances in ways that often affirm and extend, but sometimes qualify and even contravene, Machiavelli’s own political precepts and his own evaluations of many individual actors discussed throughout his political writings. These cross-comparisons, I argue, enable Machiavelli to challenge conventional assessments of such individuals offered by previous writers, and, concomitantly, to redefine traditional notions of virtue, glory, liberty and justice. Machiavelli often relies upon historical details provided by previous writers when discussing the political actors that he places in conceptual proximity to Agathocles (sometimes he even subtly implores his audience to re-consult such sources, especially, when Machiavelli indicates that he has omitted pertinent details). But Machiavelli almost always winds up contradicting, either directly or by implication, the moral–political assessments offered by these rival authors—and very often his own initially ventured moral–political assessments.
At the simplest level, in chapter 8 of The Prince, Machiavelli presents Agathocles as a criminal; a morally reprehensible example to be condemned and not emulated. Machiavelli places the Sicilian in a chapter explicitly devoted to individuals who gain power through “crimes” and “violence” (P 8, P 9). Agathocles, generally considered a “tyrant” by ancient authors,2 seems to be a prince who achieved significant political success at the severe cost of forfeiting the opportunity to be considered excellent, virtuous or glorious by posterity. Yet, besides explicitly accentuating Agathocles’ “virtue” at crucial junctures, Machiavelli concludes the chapter by dramatically altering his evaluation of the Syracusan prince. After qualifying his remarks with the curious proviso, “if it may be permitted to speak well of evil,” Machiavelli proceeds to uphold Agathocles, without equivocation, as a master of the practice he calls “cruelty well-used” (crudeltà bene usate), a tenet of central, perhaps even preeminent, importance within The Prince.
Why does Machiavelli initially present Agathocles as a criminal example deserving of blame, only to praise him subsequently as a princely example worthy of notice and, even, imitation?3 Moreover, what precise role does “evil” play in Machiavelli’s political lessons that enlist Agathocles, and to what extent does the Florentine’s mode of writing make it permissible for his audience to learn to begin thinking well of evil—if perhaps evil reconstructed in Machiavellian terms?
To address these questions, I examine the rhetorical and literary techniques through which Machiavelli invites readers to evaluate various political actors in light of his account of Agathocles (and, conversely, those through which he invites readers to consistently re-evaluate his initial depiction of the Sicilian). Prominent among such figures are Cesare Borgia, Liverotto of Fermo, Scipio Africanus, Nabis the Spartan, and Machiavelli himself. These rhetorical techniques include linguistic cues, intellectual tropes and literary (often Biblical) allegories; constant recurrences of similar circumstances confronted by princes and magistrates throughout history; and consistent re-presentations of comparable actions undertaken (or avoided) by such diverse figures.
Sometimes Machiavelli more or less directly invites readers to consider the behavior of other political actors in light of Agathocles’ example, such as Liverotto, whom Machiavelli places in the same chapter of The Prince as the Sicilian. In other instances, Machiavelli induces comparative considerations on the part of his audience through more distant, but still close, textual proximity: for example, Machiavelli implicitly asks readers to consider why he deems Agathocles, who appears in a chapter situated between those devoted to Borgia and Nabis, a criminal when he fails to overtly condemn as criminals the last two figures, who behave in ways quite similar to Agathocles. On other occasions, Machiavelli elicits comparative reflections more indirectly, as in the case (set forth in both The Prince and the Discourses) of Scipio, who, like Agathocles, invaded Africa to free his patria from a grievous Carthaginian threat; but who, unlike Agathocles, succumbed to domestic “controversies” and “conspiracies” initiated by envious senatorial elites that cut short his illustrious political career. At other junctures, Machiavelli applies similar words or phrases to figures appearing in disparate places throughout his works, such that readers are prompted to ponder the conceptual–political relationship between them. For instance, Machiavelli refers to the “hardships and dangers” that both he, himself, and Agathocles incurred in public service performed on behalf of their cities. While Agathocles’s arduous efforts on behalf of his patria enabled him to successfully outmaneuver aristocratic opposition to his policies and to fend off foreign domination, Machiavelli had to stand by helplessly while an aristocratic coup and foreign invasion put an end to the Florentine Republic that he served so diligently; a coup and an invasion that, as we know, also resulted in Machiavelli being sacked, imprisoned and tortured.
I argue that a thorough examination of these other political actors with whom Machiavelli links Agathocles suggests the following: in Machiavelli’s estimation, Agathocles is much more than a criminal deserving disapprobation; rather, he serves as Machiavelli’s chief exemplum of precisely the appropriate political action necessary to establish a long-lasting principality and, perhaps more remarkably, to reform a corrupt republic. According to Machiavelli, inevitable conflicts arise in every polity between the great, the grandi, and the people, the popolo; respectively, between those who wish to dominate and those who desire not to be dominated (P 9, D I.2–4). Therefore, both would-be tyrants aspiring to usurp republics and sitting civic magistrates committed to maintaining them will, Machiavelli insists, almost invariably find themselves situated in volatile circumstances where aristocratic aggression provokes popular indignation. Machiavelli advises individual political actors to favor the people and to check the nobility whenever possible in such situations; but precisely how should would-be princes and civic leaders carry out such tasks? Machiavelli’s answer seems to be that the political actor most likely to overcome such circumstances successfully must be part tyrannical prince and part civic reformer.
Agathocles is the first prince to whom Machiavelli attributes a particular action that intellectual authorities, both traditional and recent, would unequivocally consider tyrannical: Agathocles usurps a republic by slaughtering his city’s senators and wealthiest citizens (P 8). In full accord with established writers, Machiavelli at first condemns Agathocles’ actions but then, as noted above, seems to condone them as necessary and appropriate exhibitions of cruelty well-used.4 How can readers determine with any confidence which assessment of Agathocles is most fully Machiavelli’s own? Machiavelli’s ultimately positive endorsement of Agathocles’s behavior, I demonstrate, is borne out through, among other things, his overt praise of other individuals, previously and subsequently discussed, who act similarly when confronted with the competing, irreconcilable claims of oppression-driven nobles and freedom-seeking peoples; as well as by his sometimes explicit, sometimes barely concealed condemnation of individuals who failed to take Agathoclean measures in such circumstances.
Slaughtering rich and prominent citizens is clearly useful to aspiring tyrants: Machiavelli coldly remarks that every new prince must eliminate potential rivals among the elite, and that he ought to gain favor with the common people (P 6, P 9). More curiously, however, Machiavelli also intimates that similar recourse may be necessary for the preservation and reformation of republics (D I.9, DI.16). In fact, he often affiliates such behavior with the recurrent need for republics to punish or eliminate “the sons of Brutus” (i.e. nobles who are driven by an insatiable appetite to oppress (P 9, D I.2–4), who exacerbate socio-economic inequality in their cities (D I.17–18, I.55, III.24), and who bitterly resent the liberty enjoyed by the common people within democratic as opposed to oligarchic republics (D I.16, III.3)).5
Machiavelli’s discussion of Agathocles, and the cross-comparative web within which he situates him, suggests that the appropriate and necessary action that a prince or magistrate must take vis-à-vis the nobles and the people is, in fact, “evil” political action as conceived by traditional writers. In other words, the Agathoclean exemplum permits Machiavelli to transform evil into good. By elaborating and amplifying his account of Agathocles through similar examples (such as other successful Greek tyrants), and through counter-examples (such as failed Roman reformers) that Machiavelli discusses, and that I will examine at length below, the Florentine redefines the model of a good prince in ways that contravene the political preferences and moral injunctions of previous writers. As we will observe, not only does the “good” princely founder or tyrannical reformer crush or exterminate a city’s leading citizens (action that, unsurprisingly, always alarms nobles, as well as their principal clients, writers); he also extensively arms or rearms his common citizen subjects; and he uses fraud and force to fight back or vanquish often superiorly numbered foreign powers.
Machiavelli’s politics of exemplarity
Machiavelli communicates the political lessons described above—political lessons guaranteed to provoke aristocratic outrage and scholarly disapproval—through the literary practice of exemplarity. The best way to understand a particular example like Agathocles, Machiavelli seems to suggest, is not only or even primarily through what the Florentine initially and explicitly writes about that figure (say, in either a chapter heading or in a seemingly definitive normative evaluation). Rather, Machiavelli invites, but does not necessarily direct, readers also—and perhaps preeminently—to evaluate Agathocles through careful consideration of other similarly situated political actors and the measures they took or refrained from taking in such circumstances. For instance, Machiavelli never instructs us to directly compare Agathocles and Scipio Africanus. But prominent similarities and differences in their respective behaviors subtly entice us to do so: both invade Africa to free their cities of an existential Carthaginian military threat; but one figure is willing to permit the preferences of senators and writers to dictate how he conducts himself publicly, while the other one, as we will observe, most certainly does not.
To be sure, the individuals with whom Machiavelli compares and contrasts Agathocles in the process of constructing his Agathoclean exemplum do not exclusively serve this particular purpose; these other individual cases themselves inevitably exhibit complexities of their own that both problematize the very exemplary model that I am delineating here (and they also play important roles in other important pedagogical strands that comprise Machiavelli’s political oeuvre). As the editors of this volume, Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lüdemann, have indicated,6 this corresponds with the very essence of “exemplarity”: although it may appear, at first, as though one example should suffice to convey an author’s political and moral lessons, multiple examples and counter-examples prove to be imbricated in a network of associations that impart more profound, but also admittedly more potentially tenuous and elusive political conclusions.
Nevertheless, Machiavelli, I will attempt to show, differs profoundly from previous (and later) theoreticians who enlist exemplarity in the course of imparting their political lessons; most profoundly, because the Florentine unequivocally declares an intention that his advice conform with “utility” (D II, Preface); that it prove “useful” to those who “understand it” (P 15). After all, Machiavelli separates himself from previous writers most emphatically when he professes an unprecedented concern with “effectual truth” (P 15). But what does “unequivocal” and “emphatic” mean within a literary-rhetorical framework that often deploys exemplarity in the indirect and implicit manner that I just outlined? Ultimately, will it be possible to reconcile Machiavelli’s obvious recourse to exemplarity, a practice that always complicates as much as clarifies the relationship between theory and practice, with his explicit motivation to put theory more directly into practice than ever before?7
One initial point of contrast between Machiavelli and the writers may be illustrative in this regard. Machiavelli states explicitly in the Discourses, his intention is to present as models of “imitation” and not merely “admiration” the following: “the most virtuous deeds illustrated by histories that were performed within monarchies and republics by kings, captains, citizens, lawgivers and others on behalf of their fatherlands” (D I, Preface). Whereas Livy, in the preface to his history of Rome (which serves as Machiavelli ostensible model) declared his intention to highlight “good examples” from Rome’s past to be imitated and the “abominable ones” to be avoided,8 Machiavelli’s emphasis on “virtuous” examples—unfolding from the example of Agathocles, as we will observe—combines what is conventionally considered morally good and reprehensible. Exempla that combine good and evil, it would seem, are more useful than those that accentuate the differences between those qualities.
Between Borgia and Nabis, virtue and criminality
Machiavelli places his account of Agathocles’ career in a chapter of The Prince (chap. 8) bookended by those in which the Florentine endorses, explicitly, the crimes of Cesare Borgia (chap. 7), and, implicitly, those of Nabis the Spartan (chap. 9); yet, in the intervening chapter, Machiavelli condemns Agathocles’ crimes, despite the fact that the latter earned the Sicilian greater political success than either Borgia or Nabis ever achieved (far greater, in fact, than Borgia).9 There is virtually no difference between the crimes of Borgia and those of Agathocles. Each betrays friends and allies. Borgia spectacularly eliminates his problematically effective lieutenant, Remirro de’Orco; he dissimulates himself out of having to supply military support to his patron, the French King, without whose help he would never have come to power. Agathocles betrays the Syracusan senate that consented to his assuming supreme command, and defies the Carthaginians who aided his coup against the former. Each commits large-scale murder: Borgia strangles en masse unfaithful co-condottieri at Senigallia;10 and Agathocles massacres the senate and richest citizens of Syracuse.
The one crime that Agathocles commits, which Borgia apparently does not—the murder of “fellow citizens”—is implicitly absolved by the example of Nabis. Machiavelli implies that Nabis came to the principality of Sparta with the “support of fellow citizens,” and without perpetrating “intolerable violence,” but he provides no specific details of Nabis’s policies in chapter 9. If readers consult the historical sources for such details—as they most certainly ought to do whenever Machiavelli extravagantly swears off specifics—they will find that Nabis murdered and despoiled the elite citizens of Sparta in a much more vicious and protracted fashion than did Agathocles who did so, with Machiavelli’s explicit commendation, “at a stroke.”
Scipio Africanus and “worldly glory”
Machiavelli emphasizes the fact that Agathocles successfully invaded Africa to compel the Carthaginians to abandon their siege of his native city, Syracuse—a feat that immediately calls to mind the later actions of Publius Cornelius Scipio, actions that attained for the Roman commander both the glorious title “Africanus,” and the eternally exalted status of consummate citizen/statesman/captain.11 Machiavelli’s criticisms of Scipio’s affability in subsequent chapters of The Prince suggest that, as far as Machiavelli is concerned, the much crueler Agathocles was more genuinely virtuous than Scipio, despite the fact that the latter won “glory” in the estimation of traditional and recent writers and the former did not. Because Scipio lived “under the government of the Senate,” Machiavelli suggests that he bought time to hone military skills that came more instinctively to Agathocles, thus earning the latter greater credit for conquering Carthage, even though he never wins the title “Africanus,” from senators and writers.12
This remark that Scipio operated “under the government of the Senate” resonates in the Discourses, as Machiavelli describes how Scipio defers to senatorial authority, permitting prominent senators to drive him into exile for exerting too much authority within the domestic politics of Rome. Even if Agathocles eliminated the very senators who might have bestowed a glorious title like “Africanus” on him, and incurred the wrath of aristocratically subservient writers who would have celebrated that title through history, Agathocles ruled Syracuse for the length of his long life, without incurring “controversies” and “conspiracies” like those ignited and launched against Scipio, and Agathocles did so more generally “for the benefit of his patria.” Agathocles leaves Syracuse socio-economically and militarily more vibrant than when he usurped it; Scipio’s exit from the Roman political stage would signal, for Machiavelli, the beginning of the socio-economic/military crisis that would end with the collapse of the republic.
Liverotto, aristocratic homicide, and papal “parricide”
By pairing Agathocles and Liverotto in a chapter devoted to criminality (P 8), Machiavelli seems to be offering merely ancient and modern examples of violent usurpers of republics.13 But the subtle details of his contrasting accounts of Agathocles’ impressive long-term success and Liverotto’s fairly rapid demise insinuate, but do not openly display, something more profound: Machiavelli demonstrates, without explicit comment at this juncture of The Prince, just how pernicious he considers the influence of the Roman Catholic Church to be in contemporary Italy. The prevalence of mercenary arms and the duplicitous political relations of dependence that they engender, both fostered by the Church, prevent a petty criminal like Liverotto from ever rising to the rank of a founder, conqueror, or liberator comparable to that of (the otherwise also criminal) Agathocles.
Machiavelli describes how Agathocles, in the midst of a formal, public gathering of the Syracusan Senate and people, murders all the senators and richest citizens in the full light of day. By contrast, Liverotto, with the aid of foreign mercenaries and half of Fermo’s elite, duplicitously lures the rest of Fermo’s first citizens to a “secret room,” during a celebratory banquet, and murders them in the shadows of the night. (Machiavelli’s imagery here recalls the “upper room” that hosted a somewhat different “Last Supper.”) Agathocles, triumphant over all adversaries, domestic and foreign, extends Syracusan rule over the entirety of Sicily. Liverotto, still largely dependent on papal mercenaries, is betrayed and murdered by the same before extending his principality much beyond the boundaries of Fermo, leaving his patria in the nefarious clutches of the Church. Agathocles, Machiavelli implies, dies in his bed, a benefactor of his patria, while Liverotto winds up strangled by the Pope’s “instrument,” Cesare Borgia, no better, in the end, than a civic “parricide.”
Successful Greek tyrants and failed Roman reformers
By way of the example of Agathocles, Machiavelli, throughout The Prince and the Discourses, implicitly groups the Sicilian with other Greek “tyrants.”14 Most of such figures—Hiero, Nabis, Clearchus and Cleomenes—eliminate their cities’ nobilities, restore relative socio-economic equality to their patria, end their dependence on foreign mercenaries and/or expand the ranks of their armed citizenries (often by liberating slaves to do so). By establishing this ideal type, which Machiavelli ever more explicitly commends throughout his writings, the Florentine subtly indicts Roman figures such as Scipio, the Gracchi, Gaius Marius, and Julius Caesar, for failing to successfully enact similar socio-economic and civic–military reforms in their republic. Unlike their Greek counterparts, the ideal typical Roman reformer never comprehensively (that is, through violence, criminality and cruelty well-used) overcomes senatorial opposition to his attempted populist, socio-economic and civic–military reforms. The deference to the “senatorial order” of their republic exhibited by the aspiring Roman tyrants cum reformers, but vigorously eschewed by their more successful Greek counterparts, Machiavelli intimates, insured the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.
Throughout the Discourses, Machiavelli embeds his discussion of Greek tyrants and Roman reformers within a broader account of the unavoidable corruption to which all republics must succumb. Republics, Machiavelli repeatedly insists, inevitably experience rising inequality over the course of time (D I.17–20, I.55). At first, Machiavelli describes this pernicious inequality in purely civil terms—all republics, even Rome, are destined to suffer a serious decline in equality before the law (D I.18). But, much more subtly, Machiavelli also intimates that this rise in civil inequality can be traced to an underlying expansion of economic inequality (D I.17–18, I.55, and III.24).
As Machiavelli ultimately demonstrates in his chapter on Rome’s Agrarian Laws (D I.37), economic inequality is a republican disease not readily amenable to a strictly republican cure. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus exhibited good “intentions,” Machiavelli claims, when they sought to address the economic inequality that was corrupting Rome’s civic–military virtue in the wake of the Punic Wars. But, he concludes, they exhibited mortally woeful “prudence” when they expected the Roman Senate to sit by idly while they passed legislation aimed at stemming this economic inequality. The Gracchi basically asked the Senate’s permission to legally redistribute to the increasingly impoverished and proletarianized Roman plebs the vast wealth controlled by Roman senators. The Senate, of course, responded by murdering one Gracchus brother and, a decade later, by compelling the suicide of the other.15
Elsewhere in the Discourses, Machiavelli recounts how the Greek prince, Agis, suffered a fate similar to that of the Gracchi: at the behest of the Spartan nobility, the republic’s chief magistrates, the Ephors, killed Agis before he could reinstitute Lycurgus’s laws, and so restore Sparta’s famously foundational economic equality (D I.9). Cognizant of this fact, a subsequent, more prudent Spartan prince, Cleomenes—“using his authority well,” Machiavelli writes—took the initiative in murdering the Ephors, along with other members of the senatorial opposition, rather than, like his imprudent predecessor, waiting to be eliminated by them (D I.19). Through such actions, which Machiavelli deems “worthy of praise and conforming to justice,” Cleomenes, now unimpeded by aristocratic obstruction, set about reestablishing socio-economic equality in Sparta.16
Of course, Plutarch provided the classic juxtaposition of the Gracchi and Agis/Cleomenes; Roman versus Spartan statesmen who attempted to reinstitute socio-economic equality in their republics.17 But Machiavelli expands this contrast by making central to his ideal–typical Greek versus Roman reformers, respectively, the examples of Agathocles and Julius Caesar. By the time we assimilate the Greek examples of Clearchus and Cleomenes in the Discourses to those of Agathocles, Hiero and Nabis in The Prince, it becomes fairly clear that Machiavelli favors Greek tyrannical action over Gracchan imprudent inaction. But Machiavelli is much more circumspect when enlisting the example of Julius Caesar into his negative exemplum of the ideal–typical, failed Roman reformer.
In the Discourses, Machiavelli frequently rehearses and pays homage to traditional civic–humanist criticisms of Gaius Marius and Julius Caesar for seeking to exert undue, even tyrannical, influence over the Roman Republic. Machiavelli often closely follows classical republican and especially Florentine humanist tropes by praising Scipio as the Roman republic’s consummate hero, and by criticizing Caesar as her consummate usurper. Machiavelli declares that individuals should wish to be praised, as Scipio Africanus is, for defending and maintaining republics rather than be denounced, as Julius Caesar is for corrupting or usurping them (D I.10).18 However, in light of the Agathoclean exemplum formed by the amalgamation of Machiavelli’s discussions of various Greek tyrants, Machiavelli seems to indicate that what ultimately interests him most about the examples of Scipio and Caesar is how remarkably similar they turn out to be.
In this light, perhaps more important than the conventionally republican assessment of Caesar, which appears early in the Discourses, that distinguishes him from Scipio is this declaration by Machiavelli, which appears much later in the text: “Whoever establishes a tyranny and does not kill Brutus, and whoever establishes a free state and does not kill the sons of Brutus, maintains himself only for a very short time” (D III.3). Of course, Lucius Junius Brutus originally established the Roman Republic by expelling the Tarquin royal family from the city; then assured its survival by overseeing the execution of his own sons, who conspired with other young nobles to overthrow the Republic, because they resented the common people’s newly won liberty. Marcus Junius Brutus—ostensibly the direct descendant of Lucius, but by some accounts the natural born son of Julius Caesar—led the band of young senators who assassinated Caesar, claiming that the latter was a tyrant who aspired to be king. In view of this account, pace the opinions of traditional republicans, Caesar neither fully usurped the Roman Republic nor definitively ruined the Roman nobility; the latter, or rather a notable portion of them, in fact, ruined Caesar.19 After all, Caesar had pardoned members of the senatorial party, most notably young Brutus, who supported Pompey and fought against him during the Civil Wars. Several of the other young nobles to whom Caesar granted clemency along with Brutus, would also demonstrate their gratitude by participating in his assassination.
Caesar, then, much like Scipio, the Gracchi and Marius before him, most certainly did not seek the elimination of the Roman Senate. They merely wished to reapportion to the Roman people a substantive share of the massive wealth and political power that the nobility had been amassing as a result of Rome’s imperial expansion during and after the Punic Wars. Caesar, Scipio, the Gracchi and Marius each hoped to diminish, but not destroy, the power of the Roman nobility; they simultaneously wished to maintain for themselves the esteem of the Roman Senate and people. In short, like his predecessors among the populares, Caesar sought the adoration of both the Senate and the people of Rome.
As a result of these divided loyalties, seldom exhibited by the Greek tyrants, whom Machiavelli discusses, Scipio was exiled, Marius wound up ruined, the Gracchi and Caesar wound up dead, and the Republic remained desperately unreformed. Rome’s senators, by either exiling or murdering each of these would-be “tyrants,” effectively scuttled every popularis attempt to reform the Roman Republic. The only tyrannies countenanced by the Roman Senate during the life span of the Republic were those of Appius Claudius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla; tyrannies that facilitated rather than constrained aristocratic oppression of the people. Like the Medici, they fall under the category of deficient civil princes in chapter 9 of The Prince who ultimately found their authority on the nobles rather than the people.
We will never know if Caesar, as he claimed, in truth intended to use his dictatorial authority to institute long-lasting civic, economic and military reforms that would have reinvigorated the Roman Republic. We will never know if he aspired to be a genuine rector rei publicae. Nevertheless, according to Machiavelli, if Caesar did intend to become a tyrant, conventionally understood, he should have killed Brutus, the living symbol of republican liberty in Rome. If, on the contrary, Caesar intended to be a republican reformer—a civil prince, like Nabis, Cleomenes, Clearchus and, of course, Agathocles—then Machiavelli insists that he should have killed “the sons of Brutus”; in this case, the distant descendant of Brutus and his young noble collaborators, both of whom who resisted reforms aimed at improving the lot of the Roman people and who desired to restore and entrench senatorial ascendance in Rome.
In the ambiguity of Caesar’s motivations here, we see the indeterminacy of both Machiavelli’s invocation of “the sons of Brutus,” as an exemple of oppression-craving nobles, and his criticisms of Caesar as a usurper of the Roman Republic.20 If Caesar intended to become king, then young Brutus acted appropriately—in the manner of his family forebear who so illustriously ended the Tarquin monarchy—by assassinating the dictator. If Caesar had intended to reform and restore the Roman Republic, then young Brutus becomes, rather than the second coming of the elder Brutus, instead the instantiation of the second coming of his treasonous and ambitious sons; the leader of a clique of aristocratic obstructers to popular reforms, whom Caesar, in the manner of Agathocles, Nabis, Cleomenes and Clearchus, should have eliminated rather than pardoned.21
Because Caesar killed neither “Brutus” nor his figurative “sons,” the dictator and his reforms lasted “only a very short time,” and Rome’s disastrous Civil Wars soon recommenced. Caesar’s failure to practice Agathoclean cruelty well-used vis-à-vis the Roman Senate, Machiavelli suggests, wrought longer-term turmoil and misery for all of Rome’s citizens. Caesar bequeathed to Rome the following patrimonies: intensification of civil war, the permanent collapse of the republic, and the political emasculation of both the nobles and the people by his nephew Octavian, who would become the Emperor Augustus. These are the consequences for which Machiavelli sarcastically claims that Rome, Italy and the whole world “owe” such great thanks to Caesar (D I.10). Traditional writers, therefore, were correct to criticize Caesar, Machiavelli seems to suggest; they were mistaken, however, for having done so on erroneous grounds.
After all, the pernicious outcomes resulting from Caesar’s so-called tyranny were generated as much or more so by sins of omission as by any sins of commission on the dictator’s part. Caesar was, in effect, a deeply deficient Caesarist. After all, Caesar, unlike Cosimo de Medici, for instance, does not rise to the principate through popular support only, ultimately, to disarm the people militarily.22 He does not, like Walter Brienne (the Duke of Athens), Louis XI of France or the Roman Emperors, according to Machiavelli, separate the people, as a whole, from his military forces.23 He does not, like Augustus, expand the numbers and increase the authority of a personal coterie of bodyguards, the praetorian guard. Caesar’s great nephew would set the precedent for subsequent emperors who act in the manner of tyrants that Machiavelli unhesitatingly despises: those who separate the soldiers from the people (P 19), those who resort to extensive proscriptions (D I.52) and those who maintain “satellites” (i.e. personal bodyguards) (D I.40 twice). The emperors retain “the name” Caesar, but they effectively act the part of Octavian not Julius.
Like so many of the Greek tyrants discussed and often praised by Machiavelli, Caesar does not behave very tyrannically at all, certainly as far as his citizen–soldiers are concerned. However, his failure to commit the one act that cause writers to call Agathocles, Nabis, Cleomenes and Clearchus “tyrants”—eliminating their cities’ nobilities—is the chief cause of his failure as a princely reformer. Thus, the distinction between Scipio and Caesar traditionally set forth by the humanists proves to be no distinction at all, for Machiavelli’s ultimate purposes. Each, in the end, allowed themselves to be undone by the Roman Senate rather than vigorously endeavoring to crush the latter so as to reform and revitalize the Roman Republic, and thus insure for it greater longevity than it would, in fact, enjoy in historical reality. From this perspective, both Scipio and Caesar deserve to be listed among the failed civil princes whom Machiavelli names in chapter 9 of The Prince, Giorgio Scali and the Gracchi: they prove to be would-be reformers who, rather than mobilize an armed citizenry against their republic’s corrupt senatorial orders, are themselves consequently crushed by the latter—to the ultimate detriment of the entire polity.
But in what sense are the Greek reformers who comprise Machiavelli’s composite exemplum of the successful tyrant cum reformer any more “successful,” long term, than the failed Roman ones, whom, I suggest, Machiavelli is criticizing as failures here? None of the Greek tyrants—including those who enjoy considerable short-term military successes against superiorly numbered foreign enemies, like Agathocles and Nabis—establishes modes and orders that last as long as those of Romulus, whom Machiavelli explicitly celebrates or those of Augustus, whom he implicitly derides. Machiavelli demonstrates quite clearly how imperial expansion by Macedonia, Carthage, and, most decisively, Rome eventually (and, to Machiavelli’s mind, unfortunately) extinguished the considerable political and military achievements of these Greek tyrants and the civic–military orders that they reinvigorated in Syracuse, Sparta and Heraclea (P 6, P 8, P 9; D I.9, D I.16).
Machiavelli also, most certainly suggests, if more subtly, that the failure of Rome’s reformers, after the Punic Wars, to imitate the actions of precisely these Greek tyrants insured that a different, more pernicious model of tyranny, that of the Roman emperors, would smother civic liberty in Rome and, more or less, throughout the world for centuries to come (indeed, perhaps forever, unless trends established across millennia were corrected by radical civic–military measures in the present). Thus, it is the qualitative substance of the Greek princes’ socio-economic and civic–military policies—including eliminating the “sons of Brutus”—rather than the quantitative measure of longevity that matters most in Machiavelli’s moral–political assessments here. This is borne out by Machiavelli’s implicit comparison of the Agathoclean exemplum with the great founder-prophets discussed in chapter 6 of The Prince.
The legendary founder–prophets
Via the invocation of Hiero in chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli invites comparisons of his Greek tyrants, including Agathocles, with the great founders whom he so famously exalts in this chapter—Moses, Romulus, Theseus, and Cyrus.24 Machiavelli seems to suggest that had the “new modes and orders” established by the last been extinguished earlier in their polities’ lifespans by more powerful empires, as those of the Greek tyrants were (by the Macedonians, the Carthaginians and, especially, the Romans), their actions in all likelihood would have gone unvenerated and even perhaps would have been entirely condemned by posterity. To whatever extent they may have been remembered at all, Moses, Romulus, Theseus, and Cyrus, in all probability, would have been vilified posthumously as criminal, petty tyrants by historians—in precisely the same way that such writers went on to treat Hiero, Nabis, Clearchus, Cleomenes and Agathocles, simply because the last did not establish political orders that endured for centuries.
In other words, the success and longevity of the cities, peoples and empires that the great founder–prophets established served to whitewash the full extent of their criminality; most traditional writers, beholden to these long-lived orders, downplayed the crimes of the successful founders and attributed to them great (often supernatural) acts that they may never have actually performed. Conversely, eventual political decline—not remotely or directly attributable to the actions of these Greek petty tyrants—permitted historians to accentuate their crimes, or, in Machiavelli’s estimation, to overlook the necessary political actions that they, like all proto-founders or would-be reformers, must undertake—whether they come to be viewed by posterity as immortal prophets or lowly usurpers.
Machiavelli’s “hardships and dangers”
Finally, through the words, “hardships and dangers,” which Machiavelli uses to describe his own endeavors in the dedication of The Prince and those of Agathocles in chapter 8, Machiavelli signals how desperately he wishes that his arduous efforts in political, military and diplomatic service to Florence might have benefitted the latter as much as Agathocles’s efforts benefitted his “patria,” Syracuse: the many “hardships and dangers” endured by Agathocles bore fruit through the establishment of the kind of principality that Machiavelli hoped would arise out of central Italy; a principality that sharply curbed the ambitions of local nobles (and clerics!), and that more expansively armed common citizens; a principality that might have unified the Italian peninsula, and cast out foreign oppressors, just as Agathocles’ principality did, so decisively, in ancient Sicily.
Machiavelli, as mentioned above, attempted to advance his own republic’s security against foreign threats through diplomatic and military means: he served as Florence’s emissary to the empires that threatened his republic, those of France, Germany and the Holy See; as mentioned above, he sought to recruit and train a large-scale Florentine civic military.25 However, the Florentine aristocracy consistently scuttled Machiavelli’s efforts to better serve his patria. Florence’s nobles—the ottimati, the grandi—blocked Machiavelli’s appointment as the republic’s ambassador, and they undermined his efforts to establish a full-scale citizen army within the city. Machiavelli often attributed to his own relatively humble origins the fact that he received so little cooperation, recognition and reward from his fellow citizens for his difficult and dangerous service to the fatherland.26
Obviously, the hardships and dangers that, in Machiavelli’s own words, link him with Agathocles, produced greater results for the Sicilian: after rising from low station to high office through Syracuse’s civic military and then by vigorously removing any aristocratic obstruction to his plans, Agathocles greatly expanded his army’s ranks. By contrast, the thoroughly civilian Machiavelli acceded to the objections of his city’s nobles, and settled for the establishment of a small militia comprised of peasants from Florence’s countryside.27 Agathocles led the heavily armed Syracusans against fearsome Carthage to secure his city’s independence on his own terms; the poorly armed Florentines sent emissaries like Machiavelli, for all intents and purposes, to beg the great powers who besieged them to, pretty please, leave them alone. Agathocles died in his bed, king of all Sicily, with dreams of re-invading Carthage and adding parts of Africa to his dominion. Machiavelli watched defenselessly as a Spanish army invaded Florentine territory, abolished the democratic republic headed by his patron, Piero Soderini, and reinstalled a pro-aristocratic Medici principality in his patria.
Conclusion
Machiavelli is the most (in)famous expositor of political prescriptions in the history of political thought. The Prince is, after all, the most frequently cited “how-to” book on politics ever written. This is, at best, a partial characterization of the means by which Machiavelli imparts political advice. In order to apprehend the full meaning of Machiavelli’s political thought, I have shown that an alert reader must pay attention not only to his explicit statements of judgment and injunctions to action, but also, just as closely, to the complex web of analogies that he constructs through a peculiar manner of story telling; a narrative approach that highlights slightly different choices made and actions taken by various political actors and their concomitant outcomes in myriad historical circumstances.
Machiavelli, arguably at his most pedagogical, espouses examples, and proceeds from particular case to case without himself always subsuming those particular examples under a general rule or category. Rather, the Florentine invites readers themselves to engage in judicious comparisons/contrasts and reach moral–political conclusions concerning the relationship of these particular examples to each other without consistent recourse to definitive statements on his part (or at least without recourse to political precepts appearing in the immediate textual vicinity). In this sense, Machiavelli is an instructor who guides without always prescribing. This serves as a sketch of Machiavelli’s formal method of exemplarity, but what of its content?
Machiavelli’s use of exemplarity often turns traditions for which exempla are central against themselves; Machiavelli prods readers to draw conclusions often diametrically opposed to standard ideologies, whether those pertaining to traditional republicanism, civic humanism, or orthodox Christianity. Machiavelli’s exemplary method allows him a comparatively safe space from and within which (at least temporarily) he can forward political ideas that might be overtly rejected had they been expressed more directly. For instance, from the standpoint of classical philosophy, Roman republicanism, Christian dogma, and Italian humanism, Agathocles was an evil tyrant, a criminal unworthy of being considered virtuous, excellent or glorious.
As far as the Florentine is concerned, however, Agathocles—and the various “tyrants” with whom Machiavelli associates him—cares not a whit for the preferences and predilections of the generators and expounders of traditional morality, who constitute and perpetuate such schools of thought, namely, nobles and writers. Princes who followed the exemplum Machiavelli makes of Agathocles would care only for their own, ever more widely and heavily armed, popolo; and they would undertake the task of eliminating enemies whom they share in common with the people, that is, aristocratic oppressors at home and potential conquerors abroad. Machiavelli’s ultimate lesson is that these concerns, and no others, meet the demands of virtue, excellence and, even, justice. Such are the exemplary qualities of a good prince as redefined by Machiavelli.
Endnotes
Author’s note: I thank Michèle Lowrie and Yuna Blajer de la Garza for their comments and criticisms on earlier drafts. This essay is part of a book project titled The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership and Liberty.
1Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (De Principatibus), composed circa 1513 and published in 1532, ed. G. Inglese (Turin 1995), abbreviated as “P,” cited with chapter numbers within the text. I will also cite Machiavelli, Discorsi [1513–19], C. Vivanti, ed. (Turin 1997); hereafter “D” within the text.
2The most prominent negative accounts of Agathocles’s career include: Diodorus, The Library of History: Diodorus of Sicily; and Polyaenus, Stratagems of War, trans. R. Shepherd (Chicago 1974) 194–195. More amenable evaluations are offered by Justin, Epitome of the Phillipic History of Pompeius Trogus, ed. R. Develin, trans. J. C. Yardley (Oxford 1994), Book XXII, and Book XXIII, chaps. 1–2, pp. 172–182; and Polybius, who reproves the unavailable history of Timaeus for exaggerating Agathocles’s faults. See Polybius, Histories, XII.15 (Oxford 2010) 426. Matthew Stukus offers a valuable compilation and analysis of the extant classical sources on Agathocles in “The Monstrous Agathocles” (http://lovesexandthermonuclearwar.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/the-monstrous-agathocles/).
3On this question, see the paradigm setting piece by Kahn (1993); and, with further qualification, Kahn (2013).
4For intriguing accounts of the many ways that Machiavelli ignores, eschews and flaunts traditional notions of “tyranny,” especially, the one most relevant to the late medieval Italian context, Bartolo di Sassoferrato, see: Barthas (2007), and Pedullà (2013), especially, xl–xliv.
5See McCormick (2011a).
6Lowrie and Lüdemann, introduction to this volume.
7Rebecca Langlands emphasizes the situational quality of late republican/early imperial Roman engagements with exempla; specifically, the idea that circumstances largely dictate the appropriateness of actions performed by a political actor. See Langlands (2011) 100–122. In contrast, Machiavelli seems to endorse a more narrow range of actions for individuals who confront circumstances that, in Machiavelli’s rendering, are likewise more conceptually constrained.
8See Livy Preface.
9For my more fully elaborated discussion of Agathocles and Borgia, see: McCormick (2011b) and (2014b).
10See also Machiavelli (1989) vol. I, 163–170.
11I more intensively compare Machiavelli’s accounts of Agathocles and Scipio in McCormick, (forthcoming 2014c).
12Lowrie (2009) 183–84, 196–99 identifies the power to immortalize as a form of revenge that emasculated citizens cum writers perpetuated on imperial elites in the Augustan period.
13For more fully elaborated considerations on the Agathocles-Liverotto relationship, see McCormick (2014b)
14This section is a condensed version of McCormick (2012) and (2014a).
15I discuss Machiavelli’s analysis of the Gracchi at greater length in McCormick (2009) and (2013).
16Cleomenes, however, proves less adept than Agathocles or Nabis in both pursuing redistribution at home and exerting military power abroad, as Machiavelli notes how he was eventually overcome by Macedonia.
17Plutarch (1988).
18Oppel (1974); also Jurdjevic (1999).
19Indeed, Machiavelli plainly states that the Roman Republic fell back into the hands of “the party of the aristocrats,” after Caesar’s assassination (D I.52)—that is, until Cicero convinced the Senate to lend Octavian Caesar excessive authority to move against Mark Antony leading to their own “destruction.”
20Chaplin (2001) 78, 82, 201 argues that misreadings of exemplary figures and episodes are as central to the Roman tradition of exemplarity as are ostensibly “accurate” readings.
21Lowrie (work in progress) analyzes the role of repetition and reversibility in Roman discourses that posit the Gracchi, Marius, Caesar and Cicero (among others) as exempla.
22This is, of course, one of the prevailing narratives of Machiavelli (1962) (first published 1525).
23See Machiavelli (1962) II.34–38; P 13; P 19.
24I explore this comparison more extensively in McCormick (2014d).
25See Raimondi (2013) and Najemy (2007) 75–108.
26See, e.g., de Grazia (1989) 251. Some interpreters consider Agathocles’s poor and abject origin to be the very reason that he has not been more celebrated historically (e.g., P XIV, D I.10). Lefort (1972) 380 and Coby (1999) 234–235 suggest that Agathocles’s low birth is what ultimately separates him from figures who act in a similar manner and yet nevertheless attain glory, such as Scipio, Moses, Romulus, and Borgia. But, as I have explained in the foregoing, this is only part of the story.
27See Raimondi (2013) and Najemy (2007).
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