Are we all Machiavellians now? It would be hard to find a Roman historian nowadays who explains the city’s success with reference to traditional virtue rather than material power and efficient political causation. Even so, Machiavelli occupies a position at the crossroads of current discussions of political virtue, freedom and power. On the one hand, he has frequently been interpreted as an admirer of ancient Roman freedom and virtue, and hence as the author of modern ‘republicanism’, a term of theory that pinpoints specific ideals such as political independence, freedom from arbitrary control and an active civic life (Honohan 2002: Chapter 2; Pettit 1997: 4–7, 19, 28–31; 2012: ‘Introduction’; Skinner 1978; 1990; Viroli 1998; Pocock 2003). Did Machiavelli take a promising theory of engaged citizenship derived from ancient Rome, Aristotle and Cicero and channel it into the modern world, where it might prove attractive even to citizens of the contemporary liberal-democratic nation state (see Chapter 22)? On the other hand, ever since his writings first became public, Machiavelli has been construed as a malign force, a manipulative deceiver, a guide to all that is unholy, untrustworthy and selfish – hardly the attributes that respectable republican theorists would want to cultivate among their citizens. Is Machiavellian modernity, then, hostile to ancient virtue precisely because of the Florentine’s concentration on utilitarian success and unconstrained projections of power (Strauss [1958] 1978; Hulliung 1983; Sullivan 1996; Mansfield 1979)? It is impossible to establish Machiavelli’s influence on the interpretation of the Roman Republic without also keeping these charged theoretical dilemmas in mind.
However that may be, we can best grasp the dimensions of Machiavelli’s project by examining his transformations of Livy. In doing so, we follow the work of those scholars who have taken Machiavelli’s relationship to Livy most seriously: among them Mark Hulliung, Victoria Kahn, Ronald T. Ridley, Leo Strauss and J.H. Whitfield (Hulliung 1983: 130 ff., 165 ff.; Kahn 2013: 98 ff., 215 n. 19; Ridley 1987: 327; Strauss [1958] 1978: 110; Whitfield 1971: 78–79, 90). While it is certain that Machiavelli was also engaged with ancient philosophy and with the humanist, Savonarolan and scholastic currents of his own day, it is to the ancient historians that Machiavelli explicitly turned in his efforts to elaborate his vision of the best regime. Accordingly, it is first of all to this tradition that we should turn when analysing Machiavelli’s Roman Republic. By transforming what we praise and what we blame when we think of Rome as the quintessentially virtuous Republic, and by reinterpreting Livy according to his novel conception of virtù, Machiavelli reveals the unusual theoretical ambitions of his own project, which go far beyond historical reconstruction.
2.2 Virtue and Origins
Few stories of the beginnings of cities are as famous as the Romans’ account of their eponymous founder Romulus (see Chapter 34). While Livy praises some of Romulus’s actions and grudgingly concedes that all of the Roman king’s unsavoury deeds were necessary for Roman freedom, he does not seem to admire Romulus’s fratricide, faithlessness, rapacity, duplicity and conspicuous lack of remorse over the death of Titus Tatius (Liv. 1.8, 1.14–16, 2.1).2 Perhaps the king’s acts can be excused by the necessity of establishing a city destined for extraordinary virtue, freedom and greatness; perhaps his behaviour was an expression of the gods’ will. Still, Livy’s Romulus did not intend to found a virtuous imperial Republic; his acts could be justified, if at all, only by pointing to their unintended consequences. Romulus helped to make the Romans ferocious and warlike, Livy asserts, and founded the order of the Senate (see Chapter 15); but he could never become a model for imitation. To admit that even the greatest cities have had troubled beginnings does not mean that one must praise those beginnings.
Machiavelli’s treatment of Romulus is, by traditional standards, thoroughly irreverent, but a serious purpose underlies his wry account. For the murders of his brother and Titus Tatius, Machiavelli writes, Romulus deserves excuse, because ‘what he did was for the common good and not for his own ambition’, a motive conspicuously absent from Livy (D 1.9.2).3 Against our expectations, Machiavelli transforms Romulus into a man of traditional civic virtue, who is committed to the common good to the detriment of his own interests – a decent man compelled to choose among undesirable options by the harshness of political life. It may be tempting, then, to say that Machiavelli aims to console those who wish to do good but hesitate to undertake necessary and distasteful acts, that he has written a manual of raison d’état for those with qualms about ‘dirty hands’ and untoward calculations. Such a sanguine interpretation, however, can hardly account for all of Machiavelli’s clever touches. So far from lamenting or regretting the deeds of Romulus, Machiavelli delights in retelling the murderous details of Romulus’s career in defiance of conventional norms. In fact, he says, another ‘most excellent man’ who formed ‘laws for the purpose of the common good’ killed ‘infinite men’ in his founding, and Machiavelli praises him, too (D 1.9.3, 3.30.1; P 6). Livy grasps the idea of tough necessity but refuses to embrace murder and injustice as appropriate political tools, whereas Machiavelli uses the excuse of patriotism to help remediate our ethical qualms. Machiavelli’s Romulus becomes an ideal worthy of imitation because he subordinates all ethics to the fundamental (if harsh and occasionally inhumane) principle of ancient republican politics: dedication to the common good. In the Livian account, Rome’s eventual prosperity partially justifies the objectionable injustices of its beginning; by mordantly implying that his murderous Romulus intended to work for the common good all along, Machiavelli both makes his Romulus more virtuous than Livy’s and teases Livy’s naïve readers for depending on such noble excuses.
Romulus is, in fact, a case study in Machiavelli’s selective reinterpretation and frequently disturbing appropriation of the ancient Roman past and the characters of Livy’s history. Transforming King Romulus into a Machiavellian prince represents the beginning of Machiavelli’s reworking of the primary texts, a reworking in which he treats revered ancient writers, above all Livy, as malleable sources of material rather than as ethical or political authorities. For, according to Machiavelli, Romulus’s crimes were a part of that king’s far-sighted vision. Machiavelli’s Romulus prudently intends to found the Republic. At first, Machiavelli’s retelling may seem to ennoble Romulus. Machiavelli explicitly claims that Romulus established the Senate – an order ‘more conformable to a civil and free way of life than to an absolute and tyrannical one’ – out of devotion to the common good rather than to his own ends (D 1.9.2; cf. D 1.25, 1.34, 1.40, 2.23.1, 2.24.2–4). Yet no sooner has Machiavelli said this than he indicates that Romulus was, fundamentally, nothing more than intelligently selfish in founding Rome as he did. Machiavelli suggests that it was in fact an immense virtù that led Romulus to understand that his true interests – eternal glory and posthumous rule – lay in establishing a republic rather than a principality, and likewise to see that by such a foundation he could colour his self-interest with the excuse of devotion to the public good. Virtù, in Machiavelli’s account, is prior to any traditional Roman virtue.
Reading backwards in time, however, Machiavelli’s