Nietzsche, the philosopher of the will to power, whose admiration for Machiavelli comes as no surprise, complained how difficult it was to capture the Italian’s style in German. “How could the German language [...] imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Prince allows us to breathe in the fine, dry air of Florence and cannot hold back from presenting the most serious affairs in an unrestrained allegrissimo, not perhaps without a malicious artistic sense of the contradiction he is risking – thoughts that are long, heavy, hard and dangerous, conveyed at the tempo of a gallop and with the most mischievous sense of humour” (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 28).
Nietzsche loved the Italian language, to which he remained, in practical terms, a relative outsider. He strewed his own writings with Italian tags, and tried to capture for German something of the brio of the southern language as he perceived it. This was quite a challenge given that, even more than the French of his beloved moralistes and Stendhal, Italian was for him the anti-Teutonic language par excellence. German is heavy, contorted, pedestrian, lumbering, serious, Hegelian; Italian is light, direct, skipping, dancing, mocking – Machiavellian.
His observations here have as much to do with his penchant for berating his fellow Germans as with the inherent qualities of Machiavelli’s prose. Whether in The Prince, or the Discourses, or the Florentine Histories, or even the short Life of Castruccio Castracani, it is doubtful whether “allegrissimo” is the right word for Machiavelli’s tempo. His Italian is concise, epigrammatic and dry, but it cannot be read quickly. The sentence structures can be as involved and hypotactic as in much German writing; the plethora of vowels slows the voice (or the inner voice) down to something closer to an andante moderato; the exposition is (apart from flights of passion such as the appeal for Italian unification at the end of The Prince) couched in the calm tones of precise analysis. Through the divisions and subdivisions of regime classification in The Prince, or the insistence on causal chains in the career of Castruccio (“seeing that”, “because of”, “in order that”, “for fear of”), one can hear the pad of an alert, wary, gleaming-eyed feline. Italian can sound both airy and orotund, deliberate and ironic, passionate (grand opera: “Nessun dorma!”) and mouth-wateringly sensuous (mascarpone, fettuccine, zabaglione). In his theoretical and historical works, Machiavelli employs all these registers, except perhaps the last (as Nietzsche says, he is “dry”), but he also imposes a Latinate rhetoric – a love of balance and antithesis, the use of chiasmus, a reliance on the personification of abstractions such as Fortune – onto his sentences.
The stylistic “dryness” may at times result in a perceived disjunction between the (to his contemporaries) often hair-raising subversiveness of what he was doing – namely, attempting to undermine a millennium and a half of Christian teaching on the nature of moral life, especially in so far as it relates to politics – and the debonair way he put his message forward. Machiavelli is not to be read quickly (and it is worth remembering that Nietzsche was a great advocate of slow reading, in any language). He believed his Prince, or any political leader, should wait for the right moment for action, and not be overhasty or impulsive; his style, too, has, for all the provocation of the subject matter, a cautious disposition, arranging its words with the care of a military tactician. (This can be captured only approximately in English, which conducts its syntactic campaigns in accordance with different rules.) And it is not just a matter of word order. Machiavelli was convinced that, wherever we go, we need to be on our guard against false friends. Castruccio, his warlord hero, was exemplary in his awareness of the prevalence of treachery in public affairs. He shows no compunction at breaking his word; if he does not, others will, and he will be eliminated – hence the need for a pre-emptive strike. Words change (“stato” – state, or status?… the word was mutating), and so do human affairs; so, be adaptable. Politics is full of false friends; so, too, is language. Machiavelli himself focuses on how people use lofty language to conceal self-serving ends – this is a skill which his Prince must deliberately adopt. And Machiavelli himself tests to breaking-point the terms of ethical discourse he has inherited, most notoriously the word which, more than most, lies at the very foundation of all moral discourse: the word virtù (virtue).
If we look at some of the dozen or more examples of Machiavelli’s use of this word in The Life of Castruccio Castracani, we gain a sense of the constellation of meanings that it comprises. The young Castruccio, good at athletics and all the arts that would make him a successful warrior, shows virtù of mind and body. Messer Francesco of Pisa is exemplary in wealth, grace and virtù. It is soon obvious that virtù does not denote Christian virtue, or, if it does, the term is being used with an elasticity that is exhilarating and perplexing, even if we accept that any definition of virtue is going to be fuzzy, problematic, endlessly revisable (that, after all, is what moral philosophy is all about). For Machiavelli, the notion of virtù draws on the Latin virtus – it refers to the qualities of a man (vir). Its etymology need not as such condemn it to an exclusively masculinist fate; still, virtù in Machiavelli is often the quality that needs to be shown by a soldier. At one point in the Life, Castruccio’s enemies flee without having been able to show their virtù. Later on, we are told that certain men in battle resist their opponents not out of virtù but out of mere tenacity. So virtù cannot be mere unthinking bravery: it involves a certain intelligence, too – the ability to seize the way things are going and take advantage of them. (Sometimes Machiavelli uses the word industria to denote a quality that can help virtù along: industria is industry and diligence, but also astuteness, alertness, cunning.)
Virtù is to some extent context-dependent – it covers actions and dispositions that are “spirited”, especially “public-spirited”, “showing initiative”, “skilful”, “astute”, “manly”, “brave” (physically and morally). It can be a magic word, converting deeds that are “bad” by traditional moral standards (breaking one’s word) into “good” deeds (those which preserve your state or your status). It occurs in extraordinary conjunctions: Cesare Borgia, in The Prince, shows “tanta ferocia e tanta virtù”. Even though the word “ferocia” here may also be employed idiosyncratically, implying something more like “independence”, there is a sense in which Machiavelli’s provocation is best captured by a straightforward translation so that Borgia becomes an example of “ferocity and virtue”. Why not? (As Nietzsche put it: “Cesare Borgia for Pope!”) A Machiavellian translator may seem to be falling prey to the wiles of linguistic false friends, but sometimes he is only pretending to have been duped.
And yet there are limits to the semantic range covered by virtù: it is not quite what the French writer Roland Barthes called a “mot-mana”, a “mana word” or floating signifier, a stellar cluster of diffuse but numinous meanings. Discussing (again in The Prince) the tyrant of Syracuse, Agathocles (361–289 BC), Machiavelli catalogues his meteoric rise to power and the violent and cruel acts he committed in holding on to it. A fine exemplar of Machiavellian virtù? No: Machiavelli comments laconically that it cannot be called virtù “to slaughter your citizens, to betray your friends, to be without faith, without pity [or piety: pietà], without religion”. And yet, even after this disavowal, Machiavelli still refers to the virtù of Agathocles, one of the greatest captains and most spirited of leaders, and a source of some of the anecdotes Machiavelli attributes to Castruccio – he merely comments that the cruelties of Agathocles debar him from the very highest rank.
Occasionally Machiavelli seems to be systematizing virtù. He does this by setting it in a binary opposition with Fortune. Castruccio’s career, for instance, is dominated by virtù and Fortune; we know from Machiavelli’s other writings that he viewed the first of these as more virile, the second as feminine (i.e. capricious). But this bit of stereotyping at least led to the possibility of a kind of amorous tussle between the two; a man could use his virtù to seduce Fortune – impose his will, albeit never definitively, on a recalcitrant and ultimately inscrutable goddess, so that she would shower him with her favours. Castruccio slyly comments (quite apocryphally – most of the aphorisms and adages attributed to him by Machiavelli at the end of the Life are in fact taken wholesale from Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers) that God loves the strong, since He uses them to punish the weak. (This is not so very subversive: in the Old Testament, God uses strong kings to punish an Israel enfeebled because of its sins.) Machiavelli certainly suggested that Fortune favours the bold – or, at least, that she likes a man who can master her. But although Castruccio himself enjoys her favours for a while, he loses them – ironically enough, thanks to the very same Florentine climate Nietzsche found so bracing. On his deathbed, he confesses that he has not been clever enough to understand Fortune’s vagaries, and she has left him with insufficient time to remedy that deficiency with a show of virtù.
So, how should virtù be translated? It covers so many Machiavellian meanings while also drawing on, and not entirely annulling, the many meanings of “virtue” in the medieval Thomist-Aristotelian tradition. It is noteworthy that the word “virtue” does not appear at all frequently in the Bible itself. This is partly because its semantic range is covered by other words, such as “goodness”. But it could also be because, as Machiavelli at times suggests, there may not, in fact, be a specifically Christian doctrine of virtue at all. Christianity may be a religion that enjoins us to be “good”, or even perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect, but this does not mean “virtuous”. It is as difficult to find an English equivalent for virtù as it is to translate, say, arete in the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, or the Confucian concept of ren (roughly, “humanity” or “kindness”). I was tempted to leave it untranslated, as virtù, to preserve some of the strangeness: but it is even more estranging to be reminded that “virtue” is not necessarily at home in any language, and so, wherever Machiavelli writes “virtù”, I have put “virtue”. I leave it to Fortune to decide whether this fiat (rather minor, after all, and not particularly princely) will have the moral effect that Machiavelli’s terminology certainly does: making us reflect critically on our (and his) ethical vocabulary.
The Life of Castruccio Castracani is indeed best seen as an altogether experimental piece of work. It was composed, in fact, as a dry run for the Florentine Histories, the section of which relating to Castruccio is included in the present translation (and which paints a rather different portrait of the warrior hero, at times in flat contradiction with the Life). Its dedicatees were friends of Machiavelli’s (they all met in the gardens of the Rucellai family to discuss contemporary affairs and political philosophy), and they seem to have been a little perplexed at the gift. For one thing, the Life gives an account of Castruccio’s itinerary that is so different from the historical realities as to constitute a fiction. The story of Castruccio being found, almost like Moses, in a clump of bushes, seems to be pure invention; we hear nothing of the real Castruccio’s mercantile career and his travels to, among other places, England; and the account of his death – according to Machiavelli a result of the exhaustion of battle and the cold breezes of the Arno – is largely made up. The deathbed oration and the “adages” attributed to Castruccio are likewise apocryphal, the first being a set-piece example of classical-Renaissance rhetoric, the second being lifted from much earlier sources. Machiavelli stated that his Prince should read and imitate the Greats: Alexander imitated Achilles and was in turn imitated by Caesar, so that the chain of emulation begins with a character from myth. And Machiavelli’s heroes, as set out in Chapter 6 of The Prince, include Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and Theseus – all of them (with the exception of Cyrus) characters of doubtful historicity. Perhaps the “Prince” is a regulatory fiction: he must ideally be someone who creates fictions in order to achieve very real ends; he must be a great “simulatore e dissimulatore” (The Prince, Chapter 18), able to pretend to be what he is not. (Some have seen an interesting, if teasing, theological parallel here: the Prince is a creator, beyond good and evil, who exists in a state of permanent irony with his creation, the State, in which he is made manifest, but behind which he conceals himself, so as never to be exhausted by his acts of self-disclosure…) Although Castruccio has many princely qualities for Machiavelli, he is made to recognize his limits: on his deathbed he points out how he made too many mistakes, and is leaving his heir with an overextended and weakened state. But he has been a good dissimulator, and Machiavelli, who has seen through the dissimulations, has in turn made of him a good fiction. What do we make of him, now, in the age of the charming, thuggish mafiosi of Scorsese and Coppola, or the warlords locked in quasi-Renaissance power struggles in so many parts of the world? A fiction such as The Life of Castruccio Castracani is as good a place as any to explore our conflicting moral feelings about the good things in life and how to rank them in some sort of hierarchy. The extract chosen from the Florentine Histories ends, fortuitously but tellingly, with the haunting image of Giotto’s campanile for Santa Reparata (the cathedral of Florence, rebuilt as Santa Maria del Fiore), floating serenely, as it were, above the great flood of 1333 and the carnage of the everlasting internecine wars that plagued medieval and Renaissance Italy. It is sobering to consider how the beauty of the tower on the one hand, and the civic strife that bloodied the streets below it on the other, are related.
Is Machiavelli still radical? In some ways, he has become the victim of his own success. Far from being subversive, he seems obvious – the self-evident theorist of realpolitik, and thus the predictable bedtime reading of the last century’s worst tyrants. This success is attributable to his sheer skill, no doubt, as well as to the (for him) lucky fact that many of his tenets have become enshrined in modernity, albeit in disguise – Nietzschean, or Darwinian, or even Freudian. But which is the real Prince – the embattled ego, struggling to impose itself on a slippery world, or the unconscious that is working behind the scenes for its own ends?
Machiavelli’s success, in other words, is due to the operations of virtù and Fortune, which together have given him his elevated status as a “Prince” of political theory, and the commonsensical spokesman of an age (his and our own) in which a pre-emptive strike can seem a tactical necessity. But surely more challenging (to the point of seeming quite unfeasible?) would be the qualified pacificism of that arch-moderate (and anti-Machiavellian par excellence), Erasmus. Dulce bellum inexpertis, ran one of Erasmus’s adages: “War Is Sweet to Those Who Know It Not”. Erasmus, too, denied some aspects of traditional Christian teaching, such as the Augustinian theory of the “just war” – he even claimed that a prince who cannot defend his realm without violating justice should simply give it up, as it is better to be a just man than an unjust prince. Machiavelli would have retorted that a prince who abandons “his” country is not acting out of virtù – and in one sense, Erasmus is merely reverting to Christian other-worldliness (or anticipating Kantian moral purism): “my kingdom is not of this world”. Might it be Erasmus who is “radical” here, not his diabolical Italian cousin, always prepared to compromise with “the way men really are” rather than what they might be? But any outright rejection of Machiavelli runs the risk of ignoring those imperfections of the world as it is: imperfections which, when ignored, remain intractable. And Machiavelli’s writings show clearly how all politics must pay wary respect to at least one particular prince, the figure recognized by an earlier, equally ironical and equally shrewd observer of human life (see John 16:11) as “the prince of this world”.
– Andrew Brown, 2020