The frauds of humanism: Cicero, Machiavelli, and the rhetoric of imposture

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 215-240

  Zerba, Michelle ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949757851     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.2004.22.3.215     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. I have used the Latin text of De Oratore by K.F. Kumaniecki (M. Tulli Ciceroni scripta quae manserunt omnia, Fasc. 3, "De Oratore" [Stuttgart, 1995])
2. For De Officiis, I have used the text by C. Atzert in the same Teubner series, Fasc. 48, 1914
3. All translations from Latin are my own. For Machiavelli, I have used Opere, ed. Ezio Raimondi. 5th ed. Milan. 1971. Translations of The Prince are by Robert Adams, rev. ed. (New York, 1992) and of the Discourses by Christian E. Detmold (New York, 1950), with occasional changes of my own. See Discourses 2.13 for a fuller statement of this view in the context of the Roman state
4. Machiavelli is not always consistent in his assertion of the priority of fraud. In The Prince, Chapter 14, he claims that the art of war is "the only art which is of concern to one who commands." But the rhetorical dimension of this assertion - the importance of a prince controlling praise or blame in the pursuit of war - is integral to the chapter; see Discourses 1.10
5. J.A. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 157-58, treats this view as one of the dominant myths of Machiavelli
6. For other discussions of the Elizabethan Machiavelli, see M. Praz, "Machiavelli and the Elizabethans," Proceedings of the British Academy 13 (1928): 49-97
7. and F. Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964)
8. An influential book in this vein is J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
9. For an earlier treatment, see Z. Fink, The Classical Republicans. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1945)
10. For a discussion of the problems posed by the history of republican readings of Machiavelli, see V. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 16-43. She also shows how versions of the two opposed readings to which I refer circulated from the time The Prince was first published in 1532
11. A clarion call to "radicalizing" the republican Machiavelli came from M. Halliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)
12. See the theses of L. P. S. de Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise: A Commentary on the Prince (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999)
13. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above
14. and M. McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe, in Humana Civilitas: Studies and Sources Relating to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 8 (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1983)
15. There is no known analogue in classical literature for Machiavelli's allegorical interpretation of Chiron. Recent discussions have focused on how Machiavelli's doctrine of fraud is a public revelation, a speaking out loud, of a teaching that was deliberately hidden in antiquity. See Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, pp. 75-100
16. H. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37-38
17. and Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, pp. 4-43
18. De Officiis 1.13.41 may be the locus classicus for the simile in The Prince, though Machiavelli, in keeping with a tendency of Renaissance critics not to cite their sources, does not mention Cicero. None of Machiavelli's letters, so far as I know, casts light on the question, though Machiavelli's father had a copy De Officiis in his private library
19. On Machiavelli's humanist education, in particular, see Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 31-36
20. S. de Grazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3-28
21. Q. Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4-5
22. J.H. Geercken, "Machiavelli Studies Since 1969," Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 352-54
23. F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 318-22
24. and Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 124-32
25. Marsh, The Quattrocentro Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), shows how influential Cicero's De Oratore was on Florentine humanists from Leonardo Bruni to Giovanni Pontano. A complete text of the dialogue, which circulated in fragmentary versions during the Middle Ages, was discovered in Lodi in 1421
26. See, for example, Isocrates, Antidosis 2.74
27. Aristotle, Politics 1.2
28. Dante, Inferno 11.24
29. and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2.1.31.7; 90.1
30. The "progressivist" view of human enlightenment coexists in the Middle Ages with the pessimistic Augustinian view. Though Machiavelli may be linked with Augustine in his conception of man as born bad and capable of only limited good, his passionate insistence on building a political philosophy that embraces the bestial side could not be more un-Augustinian. See Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, pp. 1-28 and 145-48
31. On this tradition see G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 196-240
32. M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 50-61
33. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, cited in n. 8 above, pp. 88-104
34. F. Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," The Journal of Modern History 11 (1939): 449-83
35. and A. H. Gilbert, Machiavelli's Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham: Duke University Press, 1938), 3-18
36. See N. Wood, "The Value of Asocial Sociability: Contributions of Machiavelli, Sidney, and Montesquieu," in M. Fleisher ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 282-307, for a succinct summary of the normative classical view of civic harmony against which Machiavelli was reacting
37. For a fuller analysis of Cicero's social and political thought and, in particular, of his ideal gentleman/statesman, see N. Wood, Cicero's Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 70-89, 100-104, 178
38. See A. R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero's De Officiis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 88-101
39. J. T. Muckle, "The Influence of Cicero in the Formation of Christian Culture," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 42 (1948): 107-25
40. and N.E. Nelson, "Cicero's De Officiis in Christian Thought: 300-1300," in Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 10 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1933), 59-160
41. A. H. Gilbert in Machiavelli's Prince and Its Forerunners
42. and F. Gilbert in "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," both cited in n. 10 above, set forth the history of Machiavelli's precursors
43. But A. H. Gilbert whitewashes The Prince as a typical book de Regimine Principum, while F. Gilbert presents The Prince as a decisive break from the Christian and humanist tradition. L. Strauss, Thoughts of Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), reasserts a basically Elizabethan view of Machiavelli as anti-Christian
44. more recently, see R. A. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed: Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory (Cranbury New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1998), 93-103
45. Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, cited in n. 4 above, pp. 3-30, discusses these views
46. For recent discussions of Machiavelli's subversion of classical models of prudence, see Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue, cited in n. 6 above
47. V. Kahn, "Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 105 (1990): 464-76
48. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, passim
49. E. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)
50. and McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe
51. A few critics have discussed this agonistic conception including M. Colish, "Cicero's De Officiis and Machiavelli's Prince," The Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 81-93
52. I. Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in I. Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1980), 25-79
53. J. H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 92-105
54. and F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, tr. W. Stark (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 25-44
55. The most sustained reading to date is by Halliung, Citizen Machiavelli
56. See especially Colish, "Cicero's De Officiis and Machiavelli's Prince." Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, p. 32, in her discussion of the utile and the honestum does not cite Colish, though she mentions in a note on p. 257 Colish's argument about Cicero as a proto-Machiavellian
57. J. F. Tinkler, "Praise and Advice: The Rhetorical Approaches in More's Utopia and Machiavelli's The Prince," The Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 187-207, relies upon the Ciceronian project of bringing honestas into alignment with utilitas and sees Machiavelli as deliberately setting the terms at odds
58. See M. Zerba, "Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero's De Oratore," Classical Philology 97 (2002): 299-321
59. Halliung's discussion of Cicero in Citizen Machiavelli, cited in n. 4 above, does not treat De Oratore
60. Twenty years later, the view of Hulliung in Citizen Machiavelli, like that of Colish in "Cicero's De Officiis and Machiavelli's Prince," has still not been fully assimilated. Wood in Cicero's Social and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 176-93, acknowledging an alternative and largely ignored Cicero who is "a hard-headed realist, well versed in the pitfalls of power, the complexities of manipulation, and the uses of violence," notes a connection to Machiavelli without developing it
61. When Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, pp. 8-59, re-establishes the value of the Renaissance Machiavel against theorists of secular republicanism who divorce rhetoric from politics, she glances at the alternative humanist tradition, but she says little of Cicero. Zerba in "Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero's De Oratore," fully develops the case for this alternative Cicero
62. For recent discussions of Cicero's vacillating and deeply compromised rhetorical stances toward Julius Caesar, see T. N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Senior Statesman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 232-325
63. and A. Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2001), 203-50
64. See K. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950; rpt. 1969), 161
65. On the fox and lion, see Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5 above, pp. 85-90
66. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence, cited in n. 12 above, pp. 86-91
67. J.B. Atkinson, tr., Machiavelli: The Prince (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 278-80
68. Mazzeo, Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies, cited in n. 2 above, pp. 101-6
69. and A. H. Gilbert, Machiavelli's Prince and Its Forerunners, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 118-39
70. W. Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli's Confidence Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Chapter 1, has a more extended thematic treatment
71. On Machiavelli's primitivism, see A. Bonadeo, Corruption, Conflict, and Power in the Works and Times of Niccolo Machiavelli, in University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 108 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)
72. and D. Waley "The Primitivist Element in Machiavelli's Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1971): 91-98
73. Treatments of Machiavellian virtù are too numerous to list here, but among the ones I have found most helpful for this study are those by Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue, cited in n. 6 above, pp. 6-52
74. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 4 above, pp. 8-43
75. M. Fleisher, "A Passion for Politics: The Vital Core of the World of Machiavelli," in M. Fleisher ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 114-47
76. and Whitfield, Machiavelli, cited in n. 13 above, pp. 92-105
77. Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue, pp. 6-52, has an excellent discussion of the paradox
78. This point is central to the theses of Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric
79. Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence
80. and McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe, cited in n. 5
81. Fleisher, "A Passion for Politics," cited in n. 20, has a good discussion of the relationship between inganno, fraude, and virtù
82. Tinkler, "Praise and Advice," cited in n. 14, speaks of Machiavelli's replacement of the conventionally demonstrative approach to the speculum tradition, which employs praise, with a deliberative approach, which sides with expediency against honor. I argue that Machiavelli is more extreme than that: he retains praise and couples it with often brutal expediency
83. and Alvarez, The dachiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5 above, pp. 75-79
84. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.23.4
85. Discourses 1.47, 1.51, and 3.43 are also taken up with the subject of feigning and self-deception
86. Both Adams, rev. ed., The Prince, cited at beginning of endnotes, p. 48
87. and Gilbert, Machiavelli's Prince and Its Forerunners, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 75 and 126, discuss Machiavelli's antecedents
88. My discussion is indebted to Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, pp. 49-180
89. Cicero correlates the three styles of oratory (grand, middle, plain) with the three rhetorical ends (moving, pleasing, teaching) in Orator. De Oratore hardly uses the scheme. For a discussion see D. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 14-54
90. H. Gotoff, Cicero's Elegant Style: An Analysis of the "Pro Archia" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 42-65
91. and H. M. Hubbell, "Cicero on Styles of Oratory," Yale Classical Studies 19 (1966): 171-86
92. For a fuller discussion, see M. Gellrich, "Aristotle's Rhetoric: Theory, Truth, and Metarhetoric," in M. Griffith and D. Mastronarde eds. Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 242-56
93. The argument is laid out more fully in Zerba, "Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero's De Oratore," cited in n. 15
94. For recent treatments of Cicero concerned with matters of pretense, see B. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
95. E. Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)
96. J. Hall, "Social Evasion and Aristocratic Manners in Cicero's De Oratore," American Journal of Philology 117 (1996): 95-120
97. H. Gotoff, "Oratory: the Art of Illusion," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95 (1993): 289-313
98. and N. Rudd, "Stratagems of Vanity: Cicero, Ad Familiares 5.12, and Pliny's Letters," in T. Woodman and J. Powell eds., Author and Audience in Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 18-32
99. I adopt the view of a majority of critics, which is summarized by D. A. Russell, ed., "Longinus" On the Sublime(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) in his introduction, that the Longinus who composed On the Sublime was a writer of the first century CE
100. For a recent discussion of "actorliness" in Cicero's rhetorica, with full scholarly references, see Gunderson, Staging Masculinity, cited in n. 31, pp. 111-48 and 187-221
101. Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance, cited in n. 31, develops a view of social performance and urbanitas in Cicero that has strong the-atrical elements
102. Also see E. S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973)
103. See the excellent discussion of Everitt, Cicero, cited in n. 17 above, pp. 129 and 146-77, but passim in the latter third of the book
104. The quotation is taken from Letters to Atticus 12 (XI.I) in Cicero's Letters to Atticus, ed. and tr. D.R. Shackleton-Bailey 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965-70); quoted in Everitt, p. 129
105. Crassus discusses in 1.25-27 the rhetorical seemliness of "speaking fearfully (timide)," which conveys an image of pudor and humilitas. Antonius returns to the theme of rhetorical pudor in his discussion of the "impertinent," "tactless" Greeks in 2.3-7
106. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18, developed a theory of rhetoric in which courtship has a central conceptual role; see especially pp. 208-44
107. See De Officiis 1.8.26; Republic 1.52, 68; 2.47-48; and Laws 1.32-33. Wood, Cicero's Social and Political Thought, cited in n. 10 above, pp. 179-82, has an excellent discussion
108. On hyberbole in Machiavelli, see Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, pp. 25-33
109. See the discussion of Everitt, Cicero, cited in n. 17 above, pp. 113-45
110. Colish, "Cicero's De Officiis and Machiavelli's Prince," cited in n. 13 above
111. I borrow the term "sacrificial rhetoric" from Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, cited in n. 18 above, pp. 158-66
112. See Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 36
113. This assessment, while indebted to Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5 above
114. and Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3 above, moves toward new conclusions
115. Rebhorn, Foxes and Lions, cited in n. 19 above, pp. 135-87, argues for the prince as a kind of epic Odysseus, but his discussion contains contradictions, and ultimately, the extreme self-sufficiency of Odysseus who arrives back in Ithaca with no comrades cuts the wrong profile against Machiavelli's criteria
116. Others have seen the prince as a tragic hero torn by anguish and suffering, but Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," cited in n. 13 above, effectively discredited this school of thought. N. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147-81, argues more convincingly for the prince as a picaresque hero
117. The first is the mainstream view; the second that of such rhetorically-minded critics as Alvarez, The Machiavellian Enterprise, cited in n. 5
118. and Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, cited in n. 3